ists on joining you and who will also agree to everything
you teach him and then still worship at the other service? Supposedly
driven underground, the Church counted almost every Landsman among its
supporters from the Kings down.

Every now and then a priest would forget to wear his Skin out-of-doors
and be arrested, then released later in an official jail-break. Those
who refused to cooperate were forcibly kidnapped, taken to another
town and there let loose. Nor did it do the priest any good to
proclaim boldly who he was. Everybody pretended not to know he was a
fugitive from justice. They insisted on calling him by his official
pseudonym.

However, few priests were such martyrs. Generations of Skin-wearing
had sapped the ecclesiastical vigor.

The thing that puzzled Rastignac about Father Jules was the sacrament
wine. Neither he nor anybody else in L'Bawpfey, as far as he knew, had
ever tasted the liquid outside of the ceremony. Indeed, except for
certain of the priests, nobody even knew how to make wine.

He shook the priest awake, said, "What's the matter, Father?"

Father Jules burst into tears. "Ah, my boy, you have caught me in my
sin. I am a drunkard."

Everybody looked blank. "What does that word _drunkard_ mean?"

"It means a man who's damned enough to fill his Skin with alcohol, my
boy, fill it until he's no longer a man but a beast."

"Alcohol? What is that?"

"The stuff that's in the wine, my boy. You don't know what I'm talking
about because the knowledge was long ago forbidden except to us of the
cloth. Cloth, he says! Bah! We go around like everybody, naked except
for these extradermal monstrosities which reveal rather than conceal,
which not only serve us as clothing but as mentors, parents, censors,
interpreters, and, yes, even as priests. Where's a bottle that's not
empty? I'm thirsty."

Rastignac stuck to the subject "Why was the making of this alcohol
forbidden?"

"How should I know?" said Father Jules. "I'm old, but not so ancient
that I came with the Six Flying Stars.... Where is that bottle?"

Rastignac was not offended by his crossness. Priests were notorious
for being the most ill-tempered, obstreperous, and unstable of men.
They were not at all like the clerics of Earth, whom everybody knew
from legend had been sweet-tempered, meek, humble, and obedient to
authority. But on L'Bawpfey these men of the Church had reason to be
out of sorts. Everybody attended Mass, paid their tit