Chapters 12 to 13.

12. RACHEL IN THE WORLD OF MEN.

I must steel myself for the fight of love, thought Eve. It’s all very well to discard my bra, but underneath its absence I must strap on a hard metal of the mind to protect myself. I must wear body armor forged of the most impenetrable wariness.

Just look what was happening to her best friend in the world of men. Rachel had fallen in love with a man, who promised her marriage. So Rachel had slept with Simon, which was admittedly against the protocols of the Bureau of Behavior Management under the Dating Contract that Rachel had signed with him.

But then, when Rachel had fallen pregnant, and it was Simon’s bounden duty to marry her, he had left her for a granddaughter of Pat Robertson, because this marriage would be advantageous to his own career as an evangelist, even though there were all those rumors about her grandfather’s penis.

Simon was a man. This gave him the right to walk away from a promise to a Female.

And now Rachel was in big trouble. She could not abort the child, because Simon knew about it – not that she would, she would never do anything as criminal as that – but now she might be reclassified from her status as a Beloved to a Scarlet, and lose all her privileges as a Beloved.

The hearing was tomorrow. Eve had volunteered (over Rachel’s protestations – “I don’t want to make trouble for you, too”) to be a character witness for Rachel in front of the Patriot Board.

It was unthinkable that her best friend could be reclassified. If she were, that would make their friendship illegal. Friendships between Beloveds and Scarlets were Non-Sanctioned.

She would never be able to talk to Rachel, her best friend, again. A big light would go out in her life.

Everything depended on tomorrow’s hearing. She would have to fight like a Joan of Arc. She would have to deliver a speech that convinced the Patriot Board that Rachel was -- despite all the evidence against her -- a veritable candidate for sainthood.

I’ll tell the Board how Rachel is as good a Christian woman as ever existed. How she dedicates her life to saving homosexuals from their evil lifestyle. How she has taught Sunday school all her adult life. How she fell in love with a poor evangelist, and paid his way through college by working two jobs, and how he cruelly betrayed her once he was qualified.

I’ll tell them. They won’t be able to reclassify Rachel after my testimony. This will be my first fight in the world of men, and I’ll win it.


13. THE TRANSGRESSOR SPEAKS.

“Dearly Beloveds,” the Transgressor began, and there was an involuntary spasm of hisses, caught by the hissers in their throats in their anxiety to hear him. He waited until they were quiet again.

“Beloveds,” he smiled, “whatever you’ve been told, where I go I do not expect to find seventy-two virgins. Nor do I expect to find scaly devils with pitchforks. I expect to find nothing. Poof, I will be gone. But my legacy will endure.

“You, however, will leave nothing. You are here because you follow. You follow blindly because you are manufactured. You are cheese out of which has been processed the original bite of cheese. You will never know the tang, the quirks, the real taste of life -- how sharp and exhilarating it is.

“You are sheep and I am a wolf. I am not a copy, like you are copies of each other. I am singular. I am authentic. I am monstrous. I am your nightmare.

“You are prey. You will always be prey, because that is the only thing that blind, helpless, dumb sheep like you are good for.

“I am happy to be a monster. I am happy that my intervention in your dumb lives has caused you such pain; that my act has forced you tighter into your own extremity; that it has made you accept harsher laws that curb the little freedom you think you have; that it has made you more of what you are: sheep.

“I am happy that my act has increased your blindness. Maybe, when your blindness is squeezed to utter darkness, you will have a chance of seeing the light.

“Not everybody lives like you. The rest of humanity outside our borders, across the ocean, does not live blindly like you do. They can see.

“You’ve chosen a way of life that is closer to sub-human than human. You’ve subjected yourself to a man-made God who is nothing but a prison for your minds. A God that makes all of you as one, and therefore controllable and dumb.

“Who can stand against that God?

“Only the wolf. The one who knows: that the only good God is a dead God.”

It was amazing that Homeland Events would allow the Transgressor to deliver this barrage of Non-Sanctioned Notions, thought Adam. They probably reasoned that he was condemning himself with his own words.

“I am a lone wolf, but there are wolves who live in gangs. Over you stands such a gang. Your elite. They program you by programming all your media, they distract you with the idea of God, they’ve chosen all your needs and desires for you.

“You think they’re your caretakers, but they are bloodsuckers. There have always been wolves to rule sheep -- priests, capitalists, warlords, aristocrats, corporate chieftains -- and they’ve always had sheep to serve them.

“However, not all of you are processed. There are exceptions like me, living inside this country, inside this city. They could be your friend, your lover, your family, your co-worker, the person sitting next to you. The wolves live among you, my pretty sheep. Beware of your neighborhood wolf.

“One day all the other wolves, the ones who are not your rulers, will band together and rise against you. An underground of wolves, as strong as your overlord gang of wolves, will overthrow your overlords. They fear us. Call us transgressors, an axis of evil, fiends and monsters, but we are the ones who will one day set you free.”

The Transgressor stopped, looked at the sky, and looked back.

“Listen, my pretty sheep. I know that each of you has the potential to become a wolf like me, instead of a wolf like those who rule you. Because I was once a sheep myself, I know that something dissatisfied lives in you. It is the small spark in you that feels unprocessed. It feels that you’ve been missing something important all your life.

“What you’re missing is the freedom of the wolf to break out of the prison you call God. What you’re missing is your inner wolf.

“If there is one among you who feels that the hissing of the Hiss Master grates your throat, you know what I am talking about.

“To you I speak. Wolf to wolf, I must warn you that it’s not easy being a wolf. But it is better than being prey.

“So let your wolf grow. Water your wolf. Answer the challenge. Do you have the power to be a wolf?”

The Transgressor chuckled. “Probably not. You prefer comfort to freedom.”

The Transgressor laughed again. “Sleep, my brave new sheep. Until the next calamity.”

One of the men flung a torch into the wood. A piece of newspaper caught fire. The Transgressor sniffed.

“Oops,” the Transgressor said. He smiled mischievously.

“Time to go. To become ashes.”

He chuckled. “Out of my ashes will rise the next disaster.”

He raised his hand and waved.

“Bye-bye, sheep. Bye from me. And say hi to your inner wolf.”

He smiled, his teeth dazzling in the flames.

“Bye-bye, suckers.”