Robert Silverberg: The Feast of St. Dionysus

—The Speaker said, “We’ll house you. We’ll feed you. We’ll love you. We’ll lead you to God. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To get closer to Him, eh? To enter into the ocean of Christ.”

—What do you want to be when you grow up, Johnny?

—An astronaut, ma’am. I want to be the first man to fly to Mars.

No. He never said any such thing.

Later in the morning he moved into Matt’s house, on the perimeter of the city, overlooking one of the mesas. The house was merely a small green box, clapboard outside, flimsy beaverboard partitions inside: a sitting room, three bedrooms, a bathroom. No kitchen or dining room. (“We take all our meals together.”) The walls were bare: no icons, no crucifixes, no religious paraphernalia of any kind. No television, no radio, hardly any personal possessions at all in evidence: a shotgun, a dozen worn books and magazines, some spare robes and extra boots in a closet, little more than that. Matt’s wife was a small quiet woman in her late thirties, soft-eyed, submissive, dwarfed by her burly husband. Her name was Jean. There were three children, a boy of about twelve and two girls, maybe nine and seven. The boy had had a room of his own; he moved uncomplainingly in with his sisters, who doubled up in one bed to provide one for him, and Oxenshuer took the boy’s room. Matt told the children their guest’s name, but it drew no response from them. Obviously they had never heard of him. Were they even aware that a spaceship from Earth had lately journeyed to Mars? Probably not. He found that refreshing: for years Oxenshuer had had to cope with children paralyzed with astonishment at finding themselves in the presence of a genuine astronaut. Here he could shed the burdens of fame.

He realized he had not been told his host’s last name. Somehow it seemed too late to ask Matt directly, now. When one of the little girls came wandering into his room he said, “What’s your name?”

“Toby,” she said, showing a gap-toothed mouth.

“Toby what?”

“Toby. Just Toby.”

No surnames in this community? All right. Why bother with surnames in a place where everyone knows everyone else? Travel light, brethren, travel light, strip away the excess baggage.

Matt walked in and said, “At council tonight I’ll officially apply to stand brother to you. It’s just a formality. They’ve never turned an application down.”

“What’s involved, actually?”

“It’s hard to explain until you know our ways better. It means I’m, well, your spokesman, your guide through our rituals.”

“A kind of sponsor?”

“Well, sponsor’s the wrong word. Will and Nick will be your sponsors. That’s a different level of brotherhood, lower, not as close. I’ll be something like your godfather, I guess; that’s as near as I can come to the idea. Unless you don’t want me to be. I never consulted you. Do you want me to stand brother to you, John?”

It was an impossible question. Oxenshuer had no way to evaluate any of this. Feeling dishonest, he said, “It would be a great honor, Matt.”

Matt said, “You got any real brothers? Flesh kin?”

“No. A sister in Ohio.” Oxenshuer thought a moment. “There once was a man who was like a brother to me. Knew him since childhood. As close as makes no difference. A brother, yes.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died. In an accident. A long way from here.”

“Terrible sorry,” Matt said. “I’ve got five brothers. Three of them outside; I haven’t heard from them in years. And two right here in the city. You’ll meet them. They’ll accept you as kin. Everyone will.

“What did you think of the Speaker?” Matt said.

“A marvelous old man. I’d like to talk with him again.”

“You’ll talk plenty with him. He’s my father, you know.”

Oxenshuer tried to imagine this huge man springing from the seed of the spare-bodied, compactly built Speaker and could not make the connection. He decided Matt must be speaking metaphorically again. “You mean, the way that boy was your nephew?”

“He’s my true father,” Matt said. “I’m flesh of his flesh.” He went to the window. It was open about eight centimeters at the bottom. “Too cold for you in here, John?”

“It’s fine.”

“Gets cold, sometimes, these winter nights.”

Matt stood silent, seemingly sizing Oxenshuer up. Then he said, “Say, you ever do any wrestling?”

“A little. In college.”

“That’s good.”

“Why do you ask?”

“One of the things brothers do here, part of the ritual. We wrestle some. Especially the day of the Feast. It’s important in the worship. I wouldn’t want to hurt you any when we do. You and me, John. We’ll do some wrestling before long, just to practice up for the Feast, okay? Okay?”

They let him go anywhere he pleased. Alone, he wandered through the city’s labyrinth, that incredible tangle of downtown streets, in early afternoon. The maze was cunningly constructed, one street winding into another so marvelously that the buildings were drawn tightly together and the bright desert sun could barely penetrate; Oxenshuer walked in shadow much of the way. The twisting mazy passages baffled him. The purpose of this part of the city seemed clearly symbolic: everyone who dwelled here was compelled to pass through these coiling interlacing streets in order to get from the commonplace residential quarter, where people lived in isolated family groupings, to the dining hall, where the entire community together took the sacrament of food, and to the church, where redemption and salvation were to be had. Only when purged of error and doubt, only when familiar with the one true way (or was there more than one way through the maze? Oxenshuer wondered.) could one attain the harmony of communality. He was still uninitiated, an outlander; wander as he would, dance tirelessly from street to cloistered street, he would never get there unaided.

He thought it would be less difficult than it had first seemed to find his way from Matt’s house to the inner plaza, but he was wrong: the narrow, meandering streets misled him, so that he sometimes moved away from the plaza when he thought he was going toward it, and, after pursuing one series of corridors and intersections for fifteen minutes, he realized that he had merely returned himself to one of the residential streets on the edge of the maze. Intently, he tried again. An astronaut trained to maneuver safely through the trackless wastes of Mars ought to be able to get about in one small city. Watch for landmarks, Johnny. Follow the pattern of the shadows. He clamped his lips, concentrated, plotted a course. As he prowled he occasionally saw faces peering briefly at him out of the upper windows of the austere warehouselike buildings that flanked the street. Were they smiling? He came to one group of streets that seemed familiar to him, and went in and in, until he entered an alleyway closed at both ends, from which the only exit was a slit barely wide enough for a man if he held his breath and slipped through sideways. Just beyond, the metal cross of the church stood outlined against the sky, encouraging him: he was nearly to the end of the maze. He went through the slit and found himself in a cul-de-sac; five minutes of close inspection revealed no way to go on. He retraced his steps and sought another route.

One of the bigger buildings in the labyrinth was evidently a school. He could hear the high, clear voices of children chanting mysterious hymns. The melodies were conventional seesaws of piety, but the words were strange: