“You missed great days.”
“I’m sure of that. Yet I feel the best days were before, when I was in New York and each week there would be a new revelation of his wisdom.”
“You are quite right,” said Jessup, pouring himself more gin. “Yours was the finer time even though those of us who feel drawn to the mother must declare that later days possessed some virtue too, on her account.”
“Mother?” I knew of course before he answered what had happened.
“As Cave was the father of our knowledge, so Iris is its mother,” said Jessup. He looked at Butler with a half-smile. “Of course there are some, the majority in fact, of the Communicators who deprecate our allegiance to the mother, not realizing that it enhances rather than detracts from Cave. After all, the Word and the Way are entirely his.”
Butler chuckled. “There’s been a little family dispute,” he said. “We keep it out of the press because it really isn’t the concern of anybody but us, Cave’s servants. Don’t mind talking to you about it since you’ll be dead soon anyway and up here we’re all in the same boat, all Cavites. Anyway, some of the younger fellows, the bright ones like Jessup, have got attached to Iris ... not that we don’t all love her equally. It’s just that they’ve got in the habit of talking about death being the womb again, all that kind of stuff without any real basis in Cave.”
“It runs all through his work, Bill. It’s implicit in all that he said.” Jessup was amiable but I sensed a hardness in his tone. It had come to this, I thought.
“Well, we won’t argue about it,” said Butler, turning to me with a smile. “You should see what these Irisians can do with a Cavite text. By the time they finish you don’t know whether you’re coming or going.”
“Were you at all active in the Mission?” asked Jessup, abruptly changing the subject.
I shook my head. “I was one of the early admirers of Cave but I’m afraid I had very little contact with any of his people. I tried once or twice to get in to see him ... when they were in the yellow tower, but it was impossible. Only the Residents and people like that ever got to see him personally.”