The Worshippers | Page 8

cultivated fields.
It was a good site--the river for power, sanitation and transportation, the hills for a sheltered climate. He saw suddenly, in complete, sharp detail, how it would be.
"The trip is over," he wrote with sudden decision. "We will stay here, and build a city."
III
The most difficult part was the number of things that he had to learn. There was no trouble about anything he wanted done by others; he simply commanded, and that was the end of it. But the mass of knowledge about the Terranovans and their world before he came appalled him not only by its sheer bulk but by its intricacy, the unexplained gaps, the contradictions. For a long time after the founding of New Washington--later New Jerusalem--he was still bothered a little by doubt. He wanted to learn all that there was to learn about the Terranovans, so that finally he would understand them completely and the doubt would be gone.
Eventually he confessed to himself that the task was impossible. He was forty-seven years old; he had perhaps thirty years ahead of him, and it was not as if he were able to devote them solely to study. There was the written history of the Terranovans, which covered minutely a period of nine thousand years--though not completely; there were periods and places which seemed to have left no adequate records of themselves. The natives had no reasonable explanation of this phenomenon; they simply said that the keeping of histories sometimes went out of fashion.
Then there was the biology of the Terranovans and the countless other organisms of the planet--simply to catalogue them and give them English names, as he had set out to do, would have occupied him the rest of his lifetime.
There was the complex and puzzling field of social relations--here again everything seemed to be in unaccountable flux, even though the over-all pattern remained the same and seemed as rigid as any primitive people's. There was physics, which presented exasperating difficulties of translation; there was engineering, there was medicine, there was economics....
* * * * *
When he finally gave it up, it was not so much because of the simple arithmetical impossibility of the job as because he realized that it didn't matter. For a time he had been tempted away from the logical attitude toward these savages of his--a foolish weakness of the sort that had given him that ridiculous hour or two, when, he now dimly recalled, he had been afraid of the Terranovans--afraid, of all things, that they were fattening him for the sacrifice!
Whereas it was clear enough, certainly, that the former state of the Terranovans, their incomprehensible society and language and customs, simply had no practical importance. He was changing all that. When he was through, they would be what he had made them, no more and no less.
It was strange, looking back, to realize how little he had seen of his destiny, there at the beginning. Timid little man, he thought half in amusement, half contemptuously: nervous and fearful, seeing things small. Build me a house, like the one I had in Schenectady!
They had built him a palace--no, a temple--and a city; and they were building him a world. A planet that would be his to the last atom when it was done; a corner of the universe that was Algernon James Weaver.
He recalled that in the beginning he had felt almost like these creatures' servant--"public servant," he had thought, with self-righteous lukewarm, pleasure. He had seen himself as one who built for others--the more virtuous because those others were not even men.
But it was not he who built. They built, and for him.
It was strange, he thought again, that he should not have seen it from the first. For it was perfectly clear and all of a pattern.
The marriage laws. Thou shalt not live in adultery.
The dietary laws. Thou shalt not eat that which is unclean.
And the logical concomitant, the law of worship. Thou shalt have no gods before Me.
* * * * *
The apostles ... Mark, Luke and John. Later, Matthew, Philip, Peter, Simon, Andrew, James, Bartholomew and Thomas.
He had a feeling that something was wrong with the list besides the omission of Judas--unluckily, he had no Bible--but it was really an academic question. They were his apostles, not that Other's.
The pattern repeated itself, he thought, but with variations.
He understood now why he had shelved the project of Christianizing the natives, although one of his first acts had been to abolish their pagan sects. He had told himself at first that it was best to wait until he had put down from memory the salient parts of the Holy Bible--Genesis, say, the better-known Psalms, and a condensed version of the Gospels; leaving out all the begats, and the Jewish tribal history, and awkward things like the