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else. You know why you want to be at ringside? So you can be with
them.
”
    “Who?”
    “The big boys. Hubris. Vainglory. Man saw God and he said to himself, Gee whiz, how come He gets to be God and I’m stuck with—”
    “And I’m doing this now.”
    Lurine said, “Learn to be what Christ called ‘meek.’ I bet you don’t know what that means. Remember those supermarkets before the war; when someone pushed a cart into line ahead of you, and you accepted it—that’s your faulty idea of ‘meek.’ Actually meek means ‘tamed,’ as in a tamed animal.”
    Startled, he said, “Really?”
    “Then it got to mean humble, or even merciful, or long-suffering, or even bad things like weak and soft. But originally it meant to lose the quality of violence. In the Bible it means specifically to be free from resentment regarding injuries done to you.” She laughed with delight. “You stupid fool,” she said, then. “You prattle but you don’t know a thing, really.”
    He said stiffly, “Hanging around that pedant Father Handy has hardly made you meek. In any of the senses of the word.”
    At that, Lurine laughed until she choked. “Oh god.” She breathed. “We can have a ferocious argument, now: Which of us is the meeker? Hell, I’m a
lot
meeker than you!” She rocked with amusement.
    He ignored her. Because of the stew of pills which he had taken; they had begun to work on him.
    He saw a figure, suddenly, with laughing eyes, whom he supposed to be Jesus. It had to be. The man, with white-thatched hair, wore a toga and Greek greaves. He was young, with brawny shoulders, and he grinned in a gentle, happy way as he stood clutching to his chest an enormous and heavy clasp-bound book. Except for the classic greaves, he might—from the wild cut of his hair—have been Saxon.
    Jesus Christ! Pete thought.
    The white-haired brawny youth—my god, he was built like a blacksmith!—unbuckled the book and opened it to display two wide pages. Pete saw writing in a foreign language, held forward for him to read:
    KAI THEOS EIN HO LOGOS
    Pete couldn’t make it out, nor the jumble of other words which, although neatly inscribed, swam before him in this vision, snatches meaningless to him, such as
koimeitheisometha
…
keoiesis
…
titheimi
… he just could not even tell if it was a genuine language or not: communication or the nonsense phantoms of a dream.
    The flaxen-haired youth shut the great book which he held and then, abruptly, was gone. It was like, his coming and going, an old wartime laser hologram, but without sound.
    “You shouldn’t listen to that anyhow,” a voice said within Pete’s head, as if his own thought processes had passed from his control. “All that mumbo-jumbo was to impress you. Did he tell you his name, that man? No, he did not.”
    Turning, Pete made out the bobbing, floating image of a small clay pot, a modest object, fired but without glaze; merely hardened. A utilitarian object, from the soil of the ground. It waslecturing him against being awed—which he had been—and he appreciated it.
    “I’ll tell you my name,” the pot said. “I’m Oh Ho.”
    To himself, Pete thought, Chinese.
    “I’m from the earth and not superior to mortals,” the pot Oh Ho continued, in a conversational way. “I’m not above identifying myself. Always beware of manifestations too lofty to identify themselves. You are Peter Sands; I am Oh Ho. What you saw, that figure holding that large ancient volume, that was an entity of the noosphere, from the Seas of Knowledge, who come down here all the way from Sumerian times. As Therapeutae they assisted the Greek healer Asclepiades; as spirits or plasmic lifeforms of wisdom they called themselves ‘Thoth’ to the Egyptians, and when they built—they are excellent artificers—they were ‘Ptath’ to the Egyptians and ‘Hephaestus’ to the Greeks. They actually have no names at all, being a composite mind. But I have a name, just as you have. Oh Ho. Can