"Yes. He's a good friend."
"There'll be a lot of trouble, you know," I said.
"From Smathers?"
"No, from the Catholics, from the Christians."
"You really think so?" Cave looked at me curiously. I believe that until that moment he had never realized the inevitable collision of his point of view with that of the established religions.
"Of course I do. They've constructed an entire ethical system upon a supernatural foundation whose main strength is the promise of a continuation of human personality after death. You are rejecting grace, heaven, hell, the Trinity…"
"I've never said anything about the Trinity or about Christianity."
"But you'll have to say something about it sooner or later. If-or rather when-the people begin to accept you, the churches will fight back and the greater the impression you make the more fierce their attack."
"I suspect John is the anti-Christ," said Iris and I saw from her expression that she was perfectly serious. "He's come to undo all the wickedness of the Christians."
"Though not, I hope, of Christ," I said. "There's some virtue in his legend, even as corrupted at Nicea three centuries after the fact."
"I'll have to think about it," said Cave. "I don't know that I've ever given it much thought before. I've spoken always what I knew was true and there's never been any opposition, at least that I've been aware of, to my face. It never occurred to me that people who like to think of themselves as Christians couldn't accept both me and Christ at the same time. I know I don't promise the kingdom of heaven but I do promise oblivion and the loss of self, of pain…"
"Gene is right," said Iris. "They'll fight you hard. You must get ready now while you still have time to think it out, before Paul puts you to work and you'll never have a moment's peace again."
"As bad as that, you think?" Cave sighed wistfully. "But how to get ready? What shall I do? I never think things out, you know. Everything occurs to me on the spot. I can never tell what may occur to me next. It happens only when I speak to people. When I'm alone, I seldom think of the… the main things; yet, when I'm in a group talking to them I hear… no, not hear, I feel voices telling me what I should say. That's why I never prepare a talk, why I don't really like to have them taken down: they're something which are meant only for the instant they are conceived… a child, if you like, made for just a moment's life by the people listening and myself speaking. I don't mean to sound touched," he added, with a sudden smile. "I'm not really hearing things but I do get something from those people, something besides the thing I tell them. I seem to become a part of them, as though what goes on in their minds also goes on in me, at the same time, two lobes to a single brain."
"We know that, John," said Iris softly. "We've felt it."
"I suppose, then, that's the key," said Cave. "Though it isn't much to write about; you can't put it across without me to say it."
"You may be wrong there," I said. "Of course in the beginning you will say the word but I think in time, properly managed, everyone will accept it on the strength of evidence and statement, responding to the chain of forces you have set in motion." Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose "truth" about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race's will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations.
But that evening we spoke only of a bright future: "To begin again is the important thing," I said. "Christianity, though strong as an organization in this country, is weak as a force because, finally, the essential doctrine is not accepted by most of the people: the idea of a man-like God dispensing merits and demerits at time's exotic end."
"We are small," said Cave. "In space, on this tiny planet, we are nothing. Death brings us back to the whole. We lose this instant of awareness, of suffering, like spray in the ocean: there it forms… there it goes, back to the sea."
"I think people will listen to you because they realize now that order, if there is any, has never been revealed, that death is the end of personality even for those passionate, self-important I's who insist upon a universal deity like themselves, carefully presented backwards in order not to give the game away."
"How dark, how fine the grave must be! only sleep and an end of days, an end of fear: the end of fear in the grave as the I goes back to nothing…"
"How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss… or dark revenge…"
"Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all…"
"And without those inhuman laws, what societies we might build! Take the morality of Christ. Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster… take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best."
"But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone…"
"If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer's hand. The only two things which hold him from his purpose are, at the worst, fear of reprisal from society and, at the best, a feeling for life, a love for all that lives… and not the wide-smiling idiot's love but a sense of the community of the living, of life's marvelous regency… even the most ignorant has felt this. Life is all while death is only the irrelevant shadow at the end, the counterpart to that instant before the seed lives."
Yes, I believed all that, all that and more too, and I felt Cave was the same as I; by removing fear with that magic of his, he would fulfill certain hopes of my own and (I flatter myself perhaps) of the long line of others, nobler than I, who had been equally engaged in attempting to use life more fully.
And so that evening it welled up suddenly: the hidden conviction behind a desultory life broke through that chill hard surface of disappointment and disgust which had formed a brittle carapace about my heart. I had, after all, my truth too, and Cave had got to it, broken the shell… and for that I shall remain grateful… until we are at last the same, both taken by dust.
Excitedly, we talked… I talked mostly, I think. Cave was the theme and I the counterpoint or so I thought. He had stated it and I built on it, built outward from what I conceived to be the luminosity of his vision. Our dialogue was one of communion, I believed and he believed too. Only Iris guessed, even then, that it was not. She saw the difference; she was conscious of the division which that moment had, unknown to either of us, separated me from Cave. Each time I said "life," he said "death." In true amity but false concord war began. Iris, more practical than we, deflated our visions by pulling the dialogue gently back to reality, to ways and dull means.
It was agreed that we had agreed on fundamentals, that the end of fear was desirable; that superstition should be exorcised from human affairs; that the ethical systems expressed by the major religious figures from Zoroaster to Mohammed all contained useful and applicable ideas of societal behavior which need not be entirely discarded.