Lost in the Cosmos

allowed to sulk outside.
    Candace refills his glass and, giving him a backward glance, takes a step toward her cave. “Could we? That is to say, when?” she asks and adds: “We have an hour before group.”
    “Oh, very well.” He rises stiffly, closing the book on Mistress Quickly and Prince Hal but picking up the Mozart. Rima’s fingers tighten angrily on his trapezius muscle. He winces. “But not without Rima,” he tells Candace.
    Group is a daily exercise, in assemblages of ten, of self-criticism and honest appraisal of others. The only rule is honesty, absolute honesty. No more lies, no more self-deception, no more secrecy, no more guilt, no more shame. From Aristarchus’s own Little Green Book, the aphorism: “The new race will spring from the corpse of the old guilt.”
    The Captain sighs. He alone of the colonists of the new Ionia is somewhat ironical. Getting rid of guilt is one thing. But he doesn’t look forward to the mea culpas and denunciations of the group. It reminds him too much of an AA meeting.
    He takes another swig of kelp wine and another look at Candace’s behind. Some things don’t change.
    “Very well,” he says again, taking each girl by the hand, the recorder under his arm still playing Mozart.
    The three go inside his cave, which is filled with the orange light of Jupiter like a Halloween pumpkin.
    (2) You’re the Captain.
    You choose to go to Tennessee with Abbot Leibowitz. The colony settles in a pleasant mountain valley. You also sleep in a cave, Lost Cove cave, to reduce exposure to radiation, which is still considerable. Sperm counts vary.
    Yet the children seem happy and grow strong. Even the misbegotten do well, ramble up and down mountainsides where in fact they are not much different from the local inbred covites.
    You grow wild maize, collards, and trap rabbits, wild pigs, and quail, eat grits and sausage and side meat. Every day you watch ironically yet not without affection as the old abbot and his two black priests, black faces and black robes, the blackest blacks in the South, sing the Divine Office in a quavering chant which sounds more Jewish than Latin, and celebrate Mass with corn bread and scuppernong wine, raise a golden chalice, the abbot’s only souvenir of Utah. The altar is a slab of limestone, as rough as Stonehenge, fallen across the mouth of the cave, which had no doubt served as a table for the survivors of the last war.
    Years pass. The Captain, now sixty-five, sits outside the entrance of Lost Cove cave, where Confederates holed up and made gunpowder some six hundred years earlier.
    It is October. The sourwood and sassafras are turning, the leaves speckled in scarlet.
    The colony has grown to some two hundred souls, both from successful pregnancies—Dr. Jane had been delivered of two more offspring, two boys, Robert E. Lee Schuyler and John Wesley Schuyler—and from an admixture of locals, strays, wanderers, refugees from the old Northeast. Mostly they are Southerners, white Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, and blacks, with a sprinkling of Hispanics, Jews, and Northern ethnics.
    The Captain has formed the habit of sitting on the hillside above the cave, a warm place fragrant with rabbit tobacco and scuppemong and the pine-winey light. It is a favorite meeting place on Sunday mornings of the unbelievers—non-churchgoers and dissidents of one sort and another—while the tiny congregations of Catholics and Protestants hold services. There is even talk of a temple, but the five Jews, one orthodox, one reformed, one conservative, one humanist, and one Yemenite Israeli, cannot get together.
    The Captain, two covites (mountain men still wearing bib overalls in the old style), two ex-Atlantans (middle-management types from high-tech industries), three fem-libbers (including Kimberly) who are sick and tired of both the male-dominated space age and the male-dominated clergy, a few twenty-sixth-century hippies, vagabonds from God knows where—gather companionably while the old abbot celebrates Mass below with his two young servers. They, the servers, are white, none other than Siddhartha and Carl Jung, each of whom has already received minor orders. The two black monks are gone. Amos died. Andy discovered his roots in nearby Alabama, resigned his priesthood, and joined the Shiloh Baptist church, a tiny black Baptist community.
    “Why don’t you come to Mass?” asked Dr. Jane Smith.
    “My cathedral is the blue sky. My communion is with my good friends,”