Maelstrom by Paul Preuss Page B

the carnies would be taken by any interrogator as convenient lapses of memory.
    Blake sat through two weeks of these discussions, playing his role with as much skill as he could muster, watching the others play theirs, observing the techniques of Jean and Jacques and Catherine. Group leaders have their agendas, and Blake was impressed by the united purpose of these three, their skill in shaping the eclectic talents and temperaments of the guests toward acknowledgement of a common goal–the goal Jack Noble had expressed to Blake a year ago as “service.”
    Each night after supper there were classes. Three nights a week these involved the entire group, and one of the leaders would talk about the aims and methods of the Athanasians. The language was mild, the message as radical as it had been for centuries: humans were perfectible, sin did not exist, the just society–“or Utopia, or Paradise as we sometimes call it”–was a matter of inspiration and will. Hunger would be eradicated, war was a fading nightmare. What was needed was Inspiration. Will. Service. The reward was Freedom, Ecstasy, Unity. Light. These principles were embodied in the ancient wisdom of many cultures, but one source was most ancient. . . .
    Other nights of the week there were private instructions, held in the guests’ own cubicles or in one of the empty offices of Editions Lequeu upstairs. During Blake’s second week, Lequeu himself reappeared and casually offered to teach Blake to read hieroglyphics. An offer that may have been made out of idle curiosity quickly turned serious when Lequeu discovered a ready and gifted pupil.
    They worked in a small conference room, spreading out the beautiful hand-colored codexes and the holo reproductions of wall carvings on a well-worn table. Lequeu not only knew the sounds, the syllables, the idiograms–he spoke the language. But he cautioned Blake that no one knew how it really sounded. “The last native speakers of ancient Egyptian were the Copts, the Christians of Egypt,” he told Blake. “I am very much afraid that by the end of the 19th century they all had died. Who can say what transformations their language had already undergone?”
Under Lequeu’s tutelage Blake quickly learned to sound out texts in hieroglyphs, in the corresponding hieratic script, and in the later, bastard-Greek demotic. “Guy, you have a gift,” he said, smiling, “and perhaps you will soon find in the texts the secrets you have mystically divined must be there.”
    Lequeu disappointed him in only one matter: “I regret that there is no connection whatever between the Egyptians and the Basques–your ancestors were living in the Pyrenees ten thousand years, maybe more, before the first pyramid rose beside the Nile.”
    Thus the Athanasians tangled Guy and the others in a net of dependencies: food, clothing, shelter, friendship, cooperative labor, the gentle stripping away of ego defenses, the subtle substitution of a common goal. They neglected nothing. Before Lequeu began his lessons in hieroglyphics, Blake’s evenings had been administered by Catherine; he’d been there only a week when she announced that the night’s lesson would be held in his cubicle. She brought no books.
    The yellow reading lamp beside the bunk emphasized the pitted blocks of raw limestone that were the basement’s outer wall. Catherine’s hair was liquid in the light; her clinging dress molded her bold figure, until she began to pull the dress away.
    Blake could not pretend aversion or even surprise. But as Catherine’s gray eyes and swollen lips descended toward him, as her cool and expert body joined his, Blake felt a passing shiver of anger, dissolving into sadness. There was another woman he loved, who cared deeply for him, but who had never allowed him more than a child’s kiss.
After Guy had spent three weeks as a guest of the Athanasians, Catherine told him he had been chosen to learn the deeper mysteries.
VI
    Suddenly “Guy” was on