Near the end of the war, while trying to flee the Russians, he was taken into custody by an Army lieutenant, ironically, a Jew. During his trial at Nuremberg, he defended himself but with a lack of conviction. Despite what Hitler had done, he defended him, too, loyal to the end.
The verdict was inevitable. He was sentenced to be hanged. The day before his execution, October 15, 1946, he swallowed one of the cyanide capsules he had hidden in his cell and died. He was cremated, and the ashes were, according to one story, flung onto a refuse heap in Dachau. Another, with more authority, says that the ashes were dropped onto a muddy country road outside Munich.
That should have been the end. Göring was glad to die, glad to be rid of his sicknesses of body and soul, of the consciousness of his great failure, and of the stigma as a Nazi war criminal. The only thing he regretted about dying was that his Emma and little Edda would be left unprotected.
But it was not the end. Like it or not, he had been resurrected on this planet. He was young in body again, a slender youth. How or why, he did not know. He was rid of his rheumatism, his swollen lymph glands, and the dependency on paracodeine.
He resolved to set out to look for Emma and Edda. Also, to find Karin. How he would be able to have both his wives was something he did not care to contemplate. The search would be long enough for thinking about this.
He never found them.
The old Hermann Göring, the highly ambitious and unscrupulous opportunist, still lived in him. He did many things of which he became deeply ashamed and remorseful when, after many adventures and much wandering,
1
he was converted to the Church of the Second Chance. This happened suddenly and dramatically, much like the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, and it took place in the small and sovereign state of Tamoancan. This was composed chiefly of tenth-century Nahuatl-speaking Mexicans and twentieth-century Navahos. Hermann lived in the newcomers’ hall until he was thoroughly grounded in the tenets and disciplines of the Church.
He moved out then into a recently abandoned hut. After a while, a woman named Chopilotl was living with him. She, too, was a Chancer, but she insisted that they keep in their hut a soapstone idol. It was a hideous figure about thirty centimeters high, addressed as Xochiquetzal, the divine patroness of sexual love and childbirth. Chopilotl’s adoration of the goddess signified her passion for passion. She demanded that Hermann and she make love in front of the idol in the light of torches flanking it. Hermann did not mind that, but he did tire of the frequency of her insistence.
Also, it seemed to him that she shouldn’t be allowed to worship a pagan divinity. He went to his bishop, a Navaho who had been a Mormon on Earth.
“Yes, I know she has that statue,” Bishop Ch’agii said. “The Church doesn’t countenance idolatry or polytheism, Hermann. You know that. But it does permit its members to keep idols, provided that the owner fully realizes that it is only a symbol. Admittedly, this is dangerous, since the worshipper too easily takes the symbol for the reality. This failing wasn’t confined to the primitives, you know. Even the so-called civilized peoples were sucked into this psychological trap.
“Chopilotl is rather literal-minded, but she’s a good person. If we got too stubborn about her idiosyncrasy and demanded that she cast the idol out, she might backslide into a genuine polytheism. What we are doing might be called theological weaning. You have seen how many idols there are around here, haven’t you? Most of them at one time had a multitude of worshippers. But we have gradually detached the religionists from them, achieving this through a patient and gentle instruction. Now the stone gods have become only
objets d’art
to most of their former worshippers.
“In time, Chopilotl will come to regard her goddess as such. I’m banking on you to assist her to get over her present regrettable attitude.”
“You mean, give her a theological goose?” Hermann said.
The bishop looked surprised, then he laughed. “I had my PhD at the University of Chicago,” he said. “I do sound stuffy, don’t I? Have a drink, my son, and tell me more about yourself.”
At the end of a year, Hermann was baptized with many other naked shivering teeth-chattering neophytes. Afterwards, he toweled off a woman while she dried him. Then all donned body-covering cloths, and the bishop hung around the neck of each a cord from which was suspended the spiral vertebra bone of a hornfish. They were not titled priests; each was simply called
Instruisto,
Teacher.
Hermann felt as if he were a fraud. Who was he to be instructing others, and acting, in effect, as a priest? He was not even sure that his belief in God or in the Church was sincere. No, that was not right. He was sincere—most of the time.
“The doubts are about yourself,” the bishop said. “You think you can’t live up to the ideals. You think you aren’t worthy. You have to get over that, Hermann. Everybody has the potentiality of being worthy, which leads to salvation. You have it; I have it; all God’s children have it,” and he laughed.
“Watch two tendencies in yourself, son. Sometimes you are arrogant, thinking you are better than others. More often you are humble. Too humble. I might even say, sickeningly humble. That is another form of arrogance. True humility is knowing your true place in the cosmic scale.
“I’m still learning. And I pray that I may live long enough to be rid of all self-deceit. Meanwhile, you and I can’t spend all our time in exploring ourselves. We must also work among the people. Monasticism, retreat from the world, reclusivism, that’s a lot of crap. So where would you like to go? UpRiver or down?”
“I really hate to leave this place,” Hermann said. “I’ve been happy here. For the first time in a long time, I feel as if I’m part of a family.”
“Your family lives from one end of The River to the other,” Ch’agii said. “It contains many unpleasant relatives, true. But what family doesn’t? It’s your job to aid them to become right-thinking. And that is the second stage. The first is getting people to admit that they are wrong-thinking.”
“That’s the trouble,” Hermann said. “I don’t think I’m beyond the first stage myself.”
“If I believed that, I would not have permitted you to graduate. Which is it? Up or down?”
“Down,” Hermann said.
Ch’agii raised his eyebrows. “Good. But the neophyte usually chooses to go upRiver. They’ve heard that La Viro is somewhere in that direction. And they thirst to visit him, to walk and talk with him.”
“That is why I choose the other direction,” Hermann said. “I am not worthy.”
The bishop sighed, and he said, “Sometimes I regret we are forbidden any violence whatsoever. Right now, I would like to kick you in the ass.
“Very well, go down, my pale Moses. But I charge that you give a message to the bishop of whatever area you settle down in. Tell him or her that Bishop Ch’agii sends his love. And also tell the bishop this.
Some birds think they are worms.
”
“What does that mean?”
“I hope you find out some day,” Ch’agii said. He waved his right hand, three fingers extended, blessing. Then he hugged Hermann and kissed him on the lips. “Go, my son, and may your
ka
become an
akh.
”
“May our
akhs
fly side by side,” Hermann said formally. He left the hut with tears running down his cheeks. He had always been a sentimentalist. But he told himself that he was weeping because he loved the little dark sententious man. The distinction between sentiment and love had been drilled into him in the seminary. So, this was love he felt. Or was it?
As the bishop had said in a lecture, his students would not really know the difference between the two until they had much practice dealing with them. Even then, if they didn’t have intelligence, they wouldn’t be able to separate one from the other.
The raft on which he was to travel had been built by himself and the seven who were to accompany him. One of these was Chopilotl. Hermann stopped at the hut to pick up her and his few belongings. She was outside with two neighbor women, hoisting the idol onto a wooden sled.
“You’re not thinking about taking that thing along?” he said to her.
“Of course I am,” she said. “It would be like leaving my
ka
behind if I did not take her. And she is not just a
thing.
She is Xochiquetzal.”
“She’s just a symbol, need I remind you for the hundredth time,” he said, scowling.
“Then I need my symbol. It would be bad luck to abandon her. She would be very angry.”
He was frustrated and anxious. This was the first day of his mission, and he was confronted with a situation he wasn’t sure he could handle properly.
“Consider thy latter end, my son, and be wise,”
the bishop had said in a lecture, quoting Ecclesiastes.
He had to act so that the final result of this particular event would be the right one.
“It’s that way, Chopilotl,” he said. “It’s all right, at least, not bad, keeping this idol in this country. The people here understand. But people elsewhere won’t. We’re missionaries, dedicated to converting others to what we believe to be the true religion. We have authority behind us, the teachings of La Viro, who received his revelations from one of the makers of this world.
“But how can we convince anybody if one of us is an idolater? A worshipper of a stone statue? Not a very pretty one, I might add, though that is really irrelevant.
“People will mock us. They’ll say we’re ignorant heathens, superstitious. And we’d be sinning grievously because we’d give people an entirely wrong picture of the Church.”
“Tell them that she is just a symbol,” Chopilotl said, sullenly.
His voice rose. “I told you they wouldn’t understand! Besides, it’d be a lie. It’s obvious that this thing is much more to you than just a symbol.”
“Would you throw away your spiral bone?”
“That’s different. It’s a sign of my belief, a badge of my membership. I don’t worship it.”
She flashed white teeth in a sardonic dark face.
“You throw it away, and I’ll abandon my beloved.”
“Nonsense!” he said. “You know I can’t do that! You’re being unreasonable, you bitch.”
“Your face is getting red,” she said. “Where is your loving understanding?”
He breathed deeply and said, “Very well. Bring that
thing
along.”
He walked away.
She said, “Aren’t you going to help me drag it?”
He stopped and turned. “And be an accessory to blasphemy?”
“If you’ve agreed that it can come with us, then you’re already an accessory.”
She wasn’t stupid—except in that one respect and that was emotional stupidity. Smiling a little, he resumed walking away. On reaching the raft, he told the others what to expect.
“Why do you allow this, brother?” Fleiskaz said. He was a huge red-haired man whose native language was primitive Germanic. This was one of the tongues of central Europe of the second millennium
B.C.
From it had originated twentieth-century Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, and English. His nickname had been Wulfaz, meaning Wolf, because he was such a fear-inspiring warrior.
But on the Riverworld, when he’d converted to the Church, he’d renamed himself Fleiskaz. This, in his natal language, meant “a piece of torn flesh.” No one knew why he’d adopted that, but it might have been because he thought of himself as a piece of good flesh living in an evil body. This piece, torn from the old body, had the potentiality to grow into a complete new body, spiritually speaking, a thoroughly good body.
“Just bear with me,” Hermann said to Fleiskaz. “The whole matter will be settled before we have put fifty meters between us and the shore.”
They sat around, smoking and talking, watching Chopilotl pull the sled with its stone burden. By the time she had crossed the wide plain, she was scarlet-faced, sweating, and panting. She swore at Hermann, finished by telling him that he would be sleeping by himself for a long time.
“This woman doesn’t set a good example, brother,” Fleiskaz said.
“Be patient, brother,” Hermann said quietly.
The raft was butting into the bank, held from drifting by an anchor, a small boulder at the end of a fish-leather cable. Chopilotl asked those aboard the raft to help her haul the sled onto it. They smiled but did not move. Cursing under her breath, she got it onto the raft. Hermann surprised everybody by helping her scoot it off and rolling it to the middle of the raft.
They up-anchored and shoved off then, waving at the crowd assembled on the bank to wish them bon voyage. A single mast was set forward. The square sail was hoisted, and the braces slanted to drive them toward the middle of The River. Here the current and the wind speeded them, and they set the sail to get the full benefit of the breeze. Brother Fleiskaz was at the rudder.
Chopilotl retired to the tent close to the mast to sulk.
Hermann gently rolled the idol to the starboard edge of the raft. The others looked at him questioningly. Grinning, he held his finger to his lips. Chopilotl was not aware of what was going on, but when the idol was at the edge, its weight tipped the raft slightly. Feeling the tilt, she looked out from the tent. And she screamed.
By then Hermann had the statue upright.
“I am doing this for your good and for the good of the Church!” he shouted at her.
He pushed on the monstrous head as Chopilotl, shrieking, ran toward him. The idol toppled over into the water and sank beneath the surface.
Later, his companions told him that she had hit him on the side of the head with her grail.
He did regain enough of his senses to see her, buoyed by her grail, swimming toward the shore. Bessa, Fleiskaz’s woman, was swimming after Hermann’s grail, which Chopilotl had tossed overboard.
“Violence begets violence,” Bessa said as she handed him the cylinder.
“Thanks for rescuing it,” he said. He sat down again to nurse a painful head and aching conscience. It was obvious what her remark implied. By dumping the idol, he had committed violence. He had no right to deprive Chopilotl of it. Even if he had had the right, he should not have exercised it.
She had to be shown her error and then the example had to ferment in her mind until it boiled over onto her spirit. All he had done was to anger her so much that she became violent. And she would probably get somebody to carve another idol for her.
He certainly had not started out well.
That led to other thoughts of her. Why had he wooed her? She was pretty; she exuded sexuality. But she was an Indian, and he had felt a certain repugnance about coupling with a colored woman. Had he made her his woman because he wanted to prove to himself that he was not prejudiced against coloreds? Was it this unworthy motive that had compelled him?
If she had been a black, a kinky-haired blubber-lipped African, would he have even considered mating? To be truthful, no. And now that he remembered it, he had looked for a Jewish woman. But there were only two in the area that he knew of, and these were already taken. Besides, they had lived in the times of Ahab and Augustus and were as dark as Yemenite Arabs, squat, big-nosed, superstitious, and violence-prone. Anyway, they had not been Chancers. But, come to think of it, Chopilotl was also superstitious and violence-prone.