And on the Eighth Day (6 page)

“Decent of you,” muttered Ellery-1944.

“In expiation. In community expiation.”

And suddenly it occurred to Ellery that the community might be expiating not its own sins, but those of the nation. Was it possible this “Slave” was one of those who had been freed by the Proclamation or the 13th Amendment? Or was he a survivor of the Indian slavery that persisted in the remote Southwest for a decade or so longer?

It was likelier, Ellery thought, that he represented some dark chapter in the history of Quenan.

Quenan.

What the devil did the name signify? What language had it come from?

Ellery-1944 grew tired again in the slumbering air and dimness of the building. But the other Ellery—the Elroï—said softly, chin propped in both hands, “Go on Teacher. Please.”

“Next is one whom you have already met.”

The Storesman
, to whom Ellery had lent his watch, was custodian of community property. Surrounded by the handmade things of his people, Storicai had taken childlike delight in something of alien manufacture.

The Chronicler.
He kept the history, the records, the calendar, the genealogies, and the books of the community. The books consisted mainly of prayers, and these books the Chronicler maintained and repaired.

The Carpentersmith.
In charge of all construction, maintenance, and repair of buildings, furniture, vehicles, and tools.

The Weaver.
This office was currently held by a woman, although it was open to men also. Ellery thinking of Quenan in terms of ancient patriarchal societies, was surprised to learn that women were eligible for all offices.

The Elders.
These were two, a man and a woman; each had to be at least seventy-five years old. They represented the special interests of the community’s aged.

All matters of community welfare and policy were in the hands of this Crownsil of the Twelve. In any case requiring trial, they served as jury.

“To the Twelve, and to three others—myself as the Teacher, and to the Successor, and to the Superintendent—and to no others,” said the old man, “belongs the right of entrance into this Holy Congregation House.” He and the Successor lived there, and the Superintendent—whose duties, Ellery gathered, resembled those of a steward, or sexton—acted as liaison between the Teacher and the Crownsil.

“But to two alone belongs the right of silent entrance,” said the Teacher. “These are your servant and his Successor.”

“Your servant …” The dream was multiplying. Ellery felt like seizing his head in his hands out of sheer frustration. After all,
he
had been given entrance. Who in God’s name was he supposed to be? Who was “Elroï Quenan”? To cover his confusion, Ellery repeated, “Silent entrance?”

The old hand—bone and vein and skin and sinew—gestured. “There is only one door into the holy house,” he said. “That one through which we came. It is never locked; it has no lock. For this house is the heart of the Congregation.” His voice did not rise; but it deepened with the fervor of belief.

In the language of modern anthropology, the house had
mana
, and as such it was
taboo
to the community. The only exceptions were rigidly fixed: the members of the Crownsil and the Superintendent. And even they were subject to a ritual discipline. Any of these wishing entrance must first sound the bell outside the door. Only if the Teacher himself answered might the official enter. If the Teacher was absent, or if he was engaged in prayer or meditation or study and did not reply to the bell, then he who rang had either to wait or to seek admittance at another time.

“For none but your servant—” (there it was again!
Is thy servant a dog, that he should do such a thing?
as practice slavery, for example? Was he being gently chided?) “—your servant or the Successor may be alone in this holy house,” the old man explained. “To this rule we hold most strictly, as an outward sign of obedience to our holy regimen, that none may set foot in this house when I am not in this house, save only the Successor.”

Ellery’s weariness kept him from uttering the
Why not?
in his thoughts. Probably the old man himself could not give a reason. It was the Rule, the Law; all ritual hardened into that.

Ellery’s glance wandered to the far end of the long hall, where stood the closed door with its overhanging kerosene lamp, the door to the room the youngster with the angelic face had called the “sanquetum.”

At Ellery’s glance, the Teacher said softly, “And the sanquetum. Yes. The forbidden room, as the Successor and the community commonly name it …”

Concerning this forbidden room, the old man went on to say, the rule was even stricter. Only one person in the community, the Teacher, might ever set foot in that room; not even the Successor might enter there. It was kept always locked, and the only key to the lock was held by the Teacher. (This was by contrast with the scriptorium, the Successor’s official workroom; the door to the scriptorium might be locked, but it need not be, and to this door the Successor usually kept the only key.)

“Thus you see,” the Teacher summed up, “our governance is by the fifteen elect: the Crownsil of the Twelve, and the Superintendent, and the Successor, and he who is the leader and the guide and the healer of his flock—thy servant, called the Teacher.”

In Ellery’s dream it came to him in an enormous waxing of light, like a sunburst, that he was not listening to a recital from some old and forgotten romance, but to the description of an actual community existing in the United States of America in the year 1944, apparently to the complete ignorance of county, state, and federal officials and to some 135,000,000 other Americans.

Searching his memory for a parallel, he could find only one: that tiny community, on its Appalachian mountaintop, which—isolated by a landslide that destroyed its only road to the outside world—remained forgotten for almost a generation, until communication was re-established.

But that had come about through an act of nature, and it had lasted only a short time in the scheme of things. On the other hand, no act of nature could explain Quenan; and from what Ellery had seen and heard, it had been here—isolated by choice—for a very long time. Storicai, the Storesman, had been awed by an automobile; he had apparently never seen nor even heard of a wrist watch.

How long? Ellery wondered.

And, quite mechanically, it became in his thoughts:
How long, O Lord?

“Then nobody here owns anything?” Ellery asked. He had lost track of time; inside the hall of the Holy Congregation House, the flickering yellow light; outside, from time to time a voice—the soft moan of a cow, the two-note bray of a donkey—all without urgency or clamor.

“No,” said the patriarch, “all belongs to the community.”

Someone far inside Ellery’s head remarked,
But that’s communism
. Not the savage, specious communism of Stalinist Russia, but the freely willing way of the early Christians, and of … He struggled with the name; it was a pre-Christian group he had read about years before in Josephus. But he could not recapture it.

It was not really necessary to go back so far in time, he thought, or so far away in space. The American continent had a long history of such experiments. The eighteenth-century Ephrata Cloisters—“The Woman in the Wilderness,” in Pennsylvania; the Zoarite community of east-central Ohio, which lasted forty-five years; the Amana Society—“The Community of True Inspiration”—founded near Buffalo in 1843, and still flourishing in Iowa in seven incorporated villages; the Shaker communal societies, remnants of which remained after more than a century and a half; the Oneida Community of “Perfectionists.” These groups shared at least two common denominators: they were nearly all founded on a religious base, and in them all possessions were owned by all.

So, apparently, in Quenan. Its religious origin and nature, although they eluded Ellery, were evident; and—“all belongs to the community,” as the Teacher said. As individuals its people owned nothing; whatever they grew or made, whatever service they performed, was contributed to and shared by and done for the benefit of all. In return, every Quenanite, young or old, strong or weak, received the portion of his need.

But what was “need”? And how draw the line between need and wish? Ellery saw vaguely that to hold this line it would be necessary to maintain absolute isolation from the world outside. A man could not covet something the very existence of which was unknown to him. And to guard against the nomadic nature of the human mind, which knew no boundaries, a system of indoctrination had to be basic to the community’s way of life.

Pursuing this thought with the Teacher, Ellery learned that membership in the community came automatically with birth into it. There were no proselytes in Quenan, to spread the taint of civilization. Nor was there a period of probation, for if a probationer were to fail, what would become of him?—he could not be permitted to leave Quenan even under an oath of silence; suppose he were to break his oath and bring the world down upon them? So it was better not to admit the possibility of exclusion to begin with. As soon as the child in Quenan was old enough to enter the school, the Teacher exacted in the most solemn ceremony the child’s vow of utter consent to the ways and laws of the community, with its primitive life, its isolation, its customs and hard labor and equal opportunities—and the sharing of all by all.

But this was merely the ritual that sealed the practice. “Give us the child for eight years,” Lenin had said to the Commissars of Education in Moscow, “and it will be a Bolshevist forever.” Hitler was proving the same thing with his parent-spying youth organizations.
Train up a child in the way he should go
—the scribes of Proverbs had noted twenty-three hundred years ago—
and when he is old he will not depart from it
. A Quenanite would no more question the nature of the community in which he had been rigidly reared and indoctrinated than a fish would question the nature of the sea in which it swam.

And it was of corollary interest to note that while there was the Weaver in this council, and the Herdsman, and the Carpentersmith, and the rest, there was no minister of war or defense, there were no police …

“I beg your pardon,” Ellery said, “I’m afraid I did not quite catch that. How many did you say was the number of your people?”

“There are two hundred and three,” the Teacher said. “The Potter’s father ceased a week ago, but an elder sister of the Successor gave light to a girl-child three days since, so the number stands.”

The sun sets, but the sun also rises.

In Quenan the sun rose on a communal dining hall, on even a communal bath, open at different hours for men and for women. Bathing, it appeared, was of more than mere hygienic importance here, although bodily cleanliness was a strict rule. In Quenan, as in primitive societies throughout time, bathing was also a ritual act, since what was bathed was the divine image which is man. When the Quenanites washed, they prayed; when they prayed, they washed. The washing of the body was an act of worship; worship, an act of cleansing.

“You prayed, too, I noticed, while we were eating,” Ellery said.

“So do we all. For from our bread and wine we draw the strength to do the will of the Wor’d, and it is fitting that we bless the Wor’d as we eat. And we bless the Wor’d also for holy days and fast days, for festal days and for work days, for sunrise and sunset, for the phases of the moon and the seasons, for the rain and for the dry, for the sowing of the seed and the harvest of the crops—for all beginnings, for all endings. Blessed is the Wor’d.”

Each male Quenanite was expected to marry by the age of twenty. If he failed to do so, the Crownsil, with the consent of all concerned, chose a wife for him; and the system seemed to work. Dr. Johnson, Ellery reflected, would have been pleased. The Great Cham had remarked once that he thought marriages would work out just as well if they were made by the Lord Chancellor.

One fact of life in Quenan, said the Teacher, made necessary a departure from the marriage-at-twenty rule. Because there was a slight preponderance of women in the community, females were granted an extra four years. If they were not married by the age of twenty-four, they became the wives of the Teacher. The Teacher explained this calmly.

“Men may sometimes be ill content if another man has more than they,” he observed. “But in Quenan the Teacher is not as other men. This all believe, so all are content.”

Ellery nodded. The Teacher, he supposed, was primarily a spiritual authority; the sacred office would transcend the man. As for the women who became his wives, they would be held in special esteem by the community, and probably they considered themselves fortunate—wasn’t it Bernard Shaw who said that any intelligent woman would rather have a share in a superior man than the whole of an inferior one?

Ellery could not help wondering if, at his advanced age, the Teacher was still virile, like Abraham. Or did his young wives serve as mere bed-warmers against the chill of the night, as in the case of old King David? For that matter, how was it that so healthy a community remained so small in numbers? Continence? Control? Contraception? He wanted to ask, but he did not.

“You teach,” he said instead. “What kind of textbooks do you use?”

“There is—” The old man paused. Then he resumed: “There is among us in common use one book only. It is our text in the school, it is our every family’s prayer-book. The manual of understanding, some call it. The manual of knowledge, others say. Or the book of light, or the book of purity—of unity—of wisdom. Many are the names, one is the Book. It is the Book copied by the Successor in his scriptorium and kept repaired by the Chronicler in his library. It is the Book I have always with me.”

He reached into his robe.

“Why, it’s a scroll!” Ellery exclaimed.

“It is the Book.” Carefully the Teacher unrolled a section of it.

Ellery recognized the Successor’s handwriting. It was an odd script—odd as the local accent was odd. It was unlike any standard American penmanship—assuming such a thing to exist—that Ellery had ever seen. Was there a resemblance to the obsolete “Chancery hand” once used in certain English legal documents? He could not be sure. He also thought he detected the influence of some non-Western alphabet. Like so much else in Quenan, it was half revealed, half concealed.