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across tantalizing information about the Ranters.
    Under the rule of Cromwell, according to one distraught observer, “heresies come thronging upon us in swarms, as the Caterpillers of Aegypt.” Especially noxious were the Ranters, concentrated in London, infamous for their rioting, carousing, and shouting of obscenities–as well as of slogans that seemed innocent but had some special meaning to initiates, such as “all is well.” Ranters disdained traditional forms of religion and professed loudly and ecstatically that God was in every creature and that every creature was God. Like their contemporaries the Diggers, the Ranters believed that all people had an equal claim to land and property, and that there ought to be a “community of goods.” Not only goods and real estate were shared. “We are pure, say they, and so all things are pure to us, adultery, fornication, etc. . . .”
    The authorities cracked down. Some Ranters died in prison. Some Ranters repented; many converted and became gentle Quakers. Some, driven into hiding, adopted secret languages and clandestinely continued to propagandize and recruit. Some, evidently, had made their way to the New World.
    Theirs was the legacy of a savagely suppressed heresy which had persisted in Europe since the first millennium, known at its height as the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, whose adepts called themselves prophetae. The great themes of this hopeful heresy were love, freedom, the power of humanity; explicit expressions of their dreams could be found in the prophetic books of the Bible, written eight centuries before Christ, and repeated in the Book of Daniel, in the Book of Revelation, and in many other more obscure texts. These apocalyptic visions foretold the coming of a superhuman savior who would elevate human beings to the power and freedom of God and establish Paradise on Earth.
    But the Free Spirit were impatient with visions; they wanted Paradise now. In northern Europe they repeatedly rose in armed revolt against their feudal masters and the authorities of the church. The movement was crushed in 1580 but not eradicated. Later scholars could trace its connections–by influence, if not as a living cult–to Nietzsche, to Lenin, to Hitler.
    From what he knew of the Tappers, Blake suspected that the Free Spirit was still alive, not only as an idea but as an organization, perhaps many organizations. The Tappers were in touch with others like themselves on other continents of Earth, on other planets, on the space stations and moons and asteroids.
To what purpose?
    SPARTA had had something to do with that purpose. The woman who called herself Ellen Troy had had something to do with that purpose. But Blake’s attempts to learn more through ordinary methods of research had encountered a blank wall.
In Paris there was a philanthropic society known as the Athanasians, whose business was to feed the hungry, or at least a select few of them. The same Paris address housed a small publishing company that specialized in archaeology books, everything from scholarly works to coffee-table tomes full of color holos of ruins, a list running heavily to the glories of ancient Egypt. One of the Tappers was on the board of the company, known as Editions Lequeu.
    Blake sniffed a further connection: the name Athanasius meant “immortal” in Greek, but it had also been the first name of a famous early scholar of hieroglyphs, the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher. When business for Sotheby’s took Blake to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he used the excellent cover of the occasion for a bit of on-the-spot private investigation. . . .
    Blake strolled the broad sidewalks of the Boul Mich. The broad green leaves of the chestnuts spread out like five-fingered hands over his head; bright sunlight filtered into the deep shadows beneath the trees. The light had a greenish cast. As he walked, he pondered his options.
    Urban universities are great attractors of the homeless, and