His words dismissed the question of religion, but Judy, in her inner turmoil, could not let it drop so easily. "Then you're just leaving us without pastoral help of any sort, Father?"

"I don't think I ever did much in that line," Father Valentine said. "I wonder if any priest ever did? It goes without saying that anything I can do for anyone as a friend, I'll do--it's the least I can do; if I spent my life at it, it wouldn't begin to balance out what I did, but it's better than sitting around in sackcloth and ashes mouthing penitential prayers."

The woman said, "I can understand that, I suppose. But do you really mean there's no room for faith, or religion, Father?"

He made a dismissing gesture. "I wish you wouldn't call me 'father'. Brother, if you want to. We've all got to be brothers and sisters in misfortune here. No, I didn't say that, Doctor Lovat--I don't know your Christian name--Judith? I didn't say that, Judith. Every human being needs belief in the goodness of some power that created him, no matter what he calls it, and some religious or ethical structure. But I don't think we need sacraments or priesthoods from a world that's only a memory, and won't even be that to our children and our children's children. Ethics, yes. Art, yes. Music, crafts, knowledge, humanity--yes. But not rituals which will quickly dwindle down into superstitions. And certainly not

a social code or a set of purely arbitrary behavioral attitudes which have nothing to do with the society we're in now."

"Yet you would have worked in the Church structure at the Coronis colony?"

"I suppose so. I hadn't really thought about it. I belong to the Order of Saint Christopher of Centaurus, which was organized to carry the Reformed Catholic Church to the stars, and I simply accepted it as a worthy cause. I never really thought about it--not serious, hard, deep thought. But out here on my rock pile I've had a lot of time to think." He smiled faintly. "No wonder they used to put criminals to breaking rocks, back on Earth. It keeps your hands busy and gives you all your time for thought."

Judy said slowly, "So you don't think behavioral ethics are absolute, then? There's nothing definite or divinely ordained about them here?"

"How can there be? Judith, you know what I did. If I hadn't been brought up with the idea that certain things were in themselves, and of their very nature, enough to send me straight to hell, then when I woke up after the Wind, I could have lived with it. I might have been ashamed, or upset, or even sick at my stomach, but I wouldn't have had the conviction, deep down in my mind, that none of us deserved to live after it. In the seminary there were no shades of right and wrong, just virtue and sin, and nothing in between. The murders didn't trouble me, in my madness, because I was taught in seminary that lewdness was a mortal sin for which I could go to hell, so how could murder be any worse? You can go to hell only once, and I was already damned. A rational ethic would have told me that whatever those poor crewmen, God rest them, and I, had done during that night of madness, it had harmed only our dignity and our sense of decency, if that mattered. It was miles away, galaxies away, from murder."

Judy said, "I'm no theologian, Fa--er--Valentine, but can anyone truly commit a mortal sin in a state of complete insanity?"

"Believe me, I've been through that one and out the other side. It doesn't help to know that if I'd been able to run to my own confessor and get his forgiveness for all the things I did in my madness--ugly things by some standards, but essentially harmless I might have been able to keep from killing those poor men. There has to be something wrong with a system that means you can take guilt on and off like an overcoat. As for madness--nothing can come out in madness that wasn't there already. What I really couldn't face, I begin to realize, wasn't just the knowledge that in madness I'd done some forbidden things with other men, it was the knowledge that I'd done them gladly and willingly, that I no longer believed they were very wrong, and that forever after, any time I saw those men, I'd remember the time when our minds were completely open to one another and we knew each other's minds and bodies and hearts in the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. I knew I could never hide it again, and so I took out my little pocket knife and started trying to hide from myself." He smiled wryly, a terrible death's head grin. "Judith, Judith, forgive me, you came to ask me for help, you asked me to hear your confession, and you've ended up listening to mine."

She said very gently, "If you're right, we'll all have to be priests to each other, at least as far as listening to each other and giving what help we can." One phrase he had spoken seized on her, and she repeated it aloud. "Our minds were open to one another… the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. That seems to be what this world has done to us. In different degrees, yes--but to all of us in some way or other. That's what he said"--and slowly, searching for words, she told him about the alien, their first meeting in the wood, how he had sent for her during the Wind, and the strange things he had told her, without speech.

"He told me--our people's minds were like half-shut doors," she said. "Yet we understood each other, perhaps more so because there had been that that total sharing. But no one believes Me!" she finished with a cry of despair. "They believe I'm mad, or lying!"

"Does it matter so much what they believe?" the priest asked slowly. "By their disbelief you might even be shielding him. You told me he was afraid of us--of your people--and if his kind are gentle people, I'm not surprised. A telepathic race tuned in to us during the Ghost Wind would probably have decided we were a horrifyingly violent, frightening people, and they wouldn't have been entirely wrong,

although there's another side to us. But if they once begin believing in your--what is Fiona's phrase?--your fairy lover, they might seek out his people, and the results might not be very good." He smiled faintly. "Our race has a bad reputation when we meet other cultures we consider inferior. If you care about your child's father, Judy, I'd let them go on disbelieving in him."

"Forever?"

"As long as necessary. This planet is already changing us," Valentine said, "maybe some day our children and his will find some way of coming together without catastrophe, but we'll have to wait and see."

Judy pulled at the chain around her neck and he said, "Didn't you used to wear a cross on that?"

"Yes, I took it off, forgive me."

"Why? It doesn't mean anything here. But what is this?"

It was a blue jewel, blazing, with small silvery patterns moving within. "He said--they used these things for the training of their children; that if I could master the jewel I could reach him--let him know it was well with me and the child."

"Let me see it," Valentine said, and reached for it, but she flinched and drew away.

"What--?"

"I can't explain it I don't understand it. But when any one else touches it, now, it--it hurts, as if it was part of me," she said fumblingly. "Do you think I'm mad?"

The man shook his head. "What's madness?" he asked. "A jewel to enhance telepathy--perhaps it has some peculiar properties which resonate to the electrical signals sent of by the brain--telepathy can't just exist, it must have some natural phenomenal basis. Perhaps the jewel is attuned to whatever it is in your mind that makes you--you. In any case, it exists, and--have you reached him with it?"

"It seems so sometimes," said Judy, fumbling for words. "It's like hearing someone's voice and knowing whose it is by the sound--no, it's not quite like that either, but it does happen. I feel--very briefly, but it's quite real--as if he were standing beside me, touching me, and then it fades again. A moment of reassurance, a moment of--of love, and then it's gone. And I have the strange feeling that it's only a beginning, that a day will come when I'll know other things about it--"