On the table beside him lay some old books and diagrams. “Look at this,” he continued, picking up a yellowed sheet. “In my grandfather’s time, a scientist estimated the surface temperature of risen Paradise at 978 degrees. And this.” He pulled out a photograph of a small bright planet passing over a dark larger one. “It is heresy even to think of these things, but look. This was taken through the telescope at Mt.

Despane. Look. It is a photograph of Paradise in orbit around Planet Seven. That’s the next planet to capture it when we have thrown it off. Look at this enlargement of the surface. Burning gas. What must it be like, I wonder, for our poor souls in such a furnace? Do you understand now when I say that salvation is a chemical process? What can it possibly mean, except that evil must be purged with fire?”

His voice had risen excitedly. But then he calmed himself and rubbed the ridge above his eye. “When I chose her for my bishop,” he said, softly and sadly, “it was because I could imagine nothing purer, nothing more innocent than a young girl. The Crystal Spark, I called her. Was I a fool? I tell you, at the beginning I was full of faith.”

The music behind them had progressed into a description of the first protozoa, exquisitely articulated on the hammer dulcimer. Lord Chrism took one of his books into his hands. “Look at this,” he said, caressing the binding. “Calf’s skin. Two years old. For a long time, I was afraid to touch it. This writer lived before the days of cameras and telescopes. Yet he observed certain phases in the coloring of Paradise, and he concluded that the seasons must change there with incredible rapidity—two hundred, three hundred times in a single lifetime. He writes that all the differences between Paradise and Earth stem from this fact. What would it be like, he asks, if winter didn’t last more than a hundred days? What would it be like if the church had no obligation to control men’s labor? People could breathe free. They don’t understand. If we let go our grip, every winter they would starve. Every spring.”

“They’re starving now.”

“More of them would starve. They would have starved months ago. Have you read the accounts from heathen times, when men farmed their own land? It’s terrifying. Think—why should a man store up food for hard times he’ll never live to see? Not one man lived out of a hundred. People complain now. What was the difference then between rich and poor?”

Lord Chrism opened up the book and lifted it to within an inch of his blind eyes. He read for a moment in silence, and then he put it down. “In Paradise,” he said, “men share the same experiences. Grandfather, father, son, there must be such harmony. But here, a winter mother has perhaps one child. What can she have in common with her granddaughter who has thirty or more? What does a man have in common with his father? . . . What was that?”