“Eventually we reached our destination, a clearing in the forest, where five white conical structures, like American Indian tepees, were arranged in a circle around a large, continuous fire that seemed to be rising out of the ground. The snowman and the ribbon then departed.”
Yasin stopped and took a drink of his tea. Johann and Sister Beatrice were both listening attentively.
“Two of the five tepees were obviously meant to be toilets. They had nothing inside except deep holes in the middle. The other three tepees each contained three mats, with very little room between any of them. There were also three—I guess ‘boxes’ would be the best descriptive word—in the tepees. They were little rectangular solids, with tops, in which we could store our personal effects.”
Yasin laughed. “You would not have believed all the fuss that ensued. How were we going to divide ourselves up into three groups to share the tepees? We argued the issue for about an hour, standing in the dark around the fire. There was no split that pleased everybody. Finally your friend Sister Vivien, who was exasperated by the whole discussion, went in to one of the conical structures and dragged out a sleeping mat. ‘I’ll sleep out here,’ she said. ‘That ought to make it easier to come to some kind of an arrangement.’
“I followed her lead, pulling a mat out of one of the other tepees. Fernando and Satoko then occupied one of the two mat houses, Anna and Sister Nuba the other. That left the two male Michaelite priests and Kwame Hassan to share the third tepee.”
Yasin now shook his head. “During that first week we must have looked absurd to the aliens who were watching us. We were hopelessly disorganized. It was apparent to me immediately that we had been placed in a more or less permanent living situation. When our first daylight came, and we began to explore, we found a stream of running water, another group of conical houses stuffed with supplies, and plenty of things to eat in the immediate vicinity. Our ‘village,’ as we called it, was near the center of a twenty-five-square-kilometer area that was bounded on three sides by the lake, and on the fourth by a deep chasm, or canyon, the bottom of which was in total darkness.”
“Was there any gravity where you were?” Johann asked. “Or were you still weightless?”
“Good question, Ace,” Yasin replied. “Yes, a little, about one tenth of a g, I would guess… Hassan and I both noticed it first after we crossed the lake.”
“So our sphere must be spinning,” Johann said.
Yasin shrugged and grinned. “Not necessarily. Who knows what kind of technological magic these guys may have developed. They may even have local gravity machines. Anyway, we don’t want to bore Sister Beatrice with our engineering talk.”
“It might surprise you to know, Mr. al-Kharif,” she said, “that I took a full year of physics at the university.”
“Good for you, Sister,” Yasin said, in a condescending tone. “Ace and I will call on you if we need any help distinguishing leptons from muons… Going back to the story, it was not long before the group decided that we needed some better method of organizing ourselves. We elected Kwame Hassan as our chief, with Sister Vivien as his deputy. That was the first of our many mistakes.
“Hassan took his election very seriously. He thought it gave him authority to tell everybody what to do. On the second day after he was elected, he allocated the community responsibilities among the group. I didn’t mind that so much, even though most of my tasks involved working with Ravi and José… No offense, Sister, but neither of those two have had an original idea since puberty. However, Hassan’s attitude really pissed me off. He began monitoring everyone’s tasks and behavior, and giving us performance evaluations. Really. Can you believe it? He became really angry when I told him I didn’t give a shit what he thought.”
Yasin stopped abruptly, his brow furrowed. “This is too much detail,” he said, after thinking for several seconds. “I’m going to quickly summarize the next hundred days… Hassan and Sister Vivien became lovers and anointed themselves as our king and queen. Ravi and José moved out of their tepee so that the royal pair could use it as their castle. All kinds of unnecessary rules were established, with stupid punishments for breaking them. I was placed in solitary confinement in one of the toilet tepees, for example, and guarded by that Mexican thug Gomez for an entire day for refusing an order from Sister Vivien and calling her a bitch.
“Hassan did none of the ordinary work, nor did he or his queen help when Ravi, José, and I built a large and comfortable house that could accommodate everyone. Meanwhile Satoko’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, as much from the possessiveness of Gomez as anything… I tried to be her friend, and to help her, but Fernando warned me to stay away from her.”
A look of strong, unidentifiable emotion passed over Yasin’s face. “Satoko had been excused from all regular duties,” he said. “That often left her alone during the day in the village. For some time she had been signaling to me that she needed to see me in private. One morning, while everyone was out doing his allocated task, I doubled back to the village to talk to her.
“Satoko was delighted to see me. She greeted me with a long passionate kiss and asked me if I would come inside her tepee and have sex with her. When I declined, saying that I had only come back to see if I could help her in any way, Satoko thanked me effusively and began telling me about the red demons that flew out of the canyon to rape her whenever she was in the village alone. When I expressed some doubt about her tale, she insisted that I accompany her, that very minute, to the meadow beside the wall of the canyon.
“As we walked down the path toward the canyon, Satoko started tearing her clothes off, saying that she wanted to be ready for the demons. She then bolted into the meadow, naked and screaming at the top of her lungs. I was afraid she was going to jump into the canyon. I tackled her and held her on the ground. She continued to scream.
“Hassan and Gomez burst into the meadow from another direction, took one look at the scene, and set upon me without asking any questions. I tried to defend myself, but they were much too large for me. They struck me over and over with their fists, until I was nearly unconscious. Then Gomez picked me up and hurled me into the canyon.
“It seemed as if I were falling forever. Somewhere during the fall I lost consciousness. The next thing I remember was hearing your soothing voice, Sister Beatrice.”
She had tears on her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Yasin,” she said. She touched his hands. “I had no idea it was so terrible.”
Johann was in a gigantic turmoil. As soon as he was certain that Yasin was asleep, he crawled quietly across the cave to where Sister Beatrice was sleeping.
“Wake up,” he whispered in her ear several times. When she finally stirred and opened her eyes, he said softly, “I must talk to you,” and put his finger to his lips.
She followed him out of the cave and down the path to the beach. “What is it, Brother Johann?” she said. “What’s the matter?”
Johann could not contain himself. “That story Yasin told before dinner,” he said, “is almost certainly the biggest pile of bullshit you have ever heard in your entire life. And you fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.”
Sister Beatrice eyed him curiously. “Calm down, Brother Johann,” she said. “You are very upset… And I don’t understand why.”
“Yasin al-Kharif is a pathological liar,” Johann shouted. “And a sexual sociopath as well. You should see his record. He was convicted of sexual assault five times on Earth and Mars. He even attacked a member of my staff at Valhalla. It’s virtually certain, knowing Kwame Hassan and Fernando Gomez as I do, that Yasin was trying to rape Satoko when they caught him.”
For several seconds Beatrice said nothing. “Brother Johann,” she finally said, “Yasin has gone through a traumatic experience, whatever the reason. Do you doubt that he was beaten and thrown over the cliff, in more or less the way that he described?”
“That part was probably true,” Johann said. “It may have been the only truth in his sto
ry. But he probably deserved his fate. I don’t believe for a minute—”
“You believe there are justifiable. reasons, Brother Johann,” she interrupted, “for one human being to kill another? Did I hear you correctly?”
“No, no… not except under very unusual circumstances,” Johann said. “But I also don’t think that a rapist deserves much sympathy.”
Again Sister Beatrice was quiet. “Is that why you’re so upset, Brother Johann?” she said at length. “Because I showed some sympathy for Yasin?”
“Yes… yes, I guess so,” Johann said slowly.
“Brother Johann,” Sister Beatrice then said, “it is my duty as a priestess of the Order of St. Michael to have compassion for all my fellow human beings, no matter what terrible deeds they may have committed. I don’t know if it makes you feel any better, but my sympathy for Yasin has nothing to do with whether or not I believe his story. Can you understand that?”
Johann stared at her in silence. “Is there anything else, Brother Johann?” she asked.
Yes, there is, he thought without saying anything. But I’m not certain I can tell you yet.
“Then can I go back to bed now?” Sister Beatrice said at length. “I am very tired.”
She turned to walk back to the cave. “There is something else,” Johann said, feeling suddenly uncertain.
“What is it?” Beatrice asked. She had turned around.
“I’m convinced that Yasin was purposely sent here by the aliens or angels,” Johann said. “Because we did nothing in response to the sexual apparition in the cave.”
Sister Beatrice stared at him for a long time. “I thought we had finished with that topic,” she said wearily. “I seem to recall an agreement not to—”
“But that was before Yasin showed up,” he interrupted. “Can’t you see?” he said earnestly. “It can’t be just coincidence that he arrived so soon after the apparition… If we were meant to mate, and couldn’t or wouldn’t follow their explicit instructions, then the appearance of another man might catalyze our behavior, or perhaps he even—” Johann stopped.
Sister Beatrice frowned and her eyes showed anger. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting at all, Brother Johann. God’s angels would certainly not be that interested in our sexual behavior… I am going to terminate this conversation now and return to my mat, before I become any angrier.”
That won‘t change my opinion, Johann said to himself as he watched her walk away. Or the fact that it was not a coincidence.
12
Yasin’s leg was slow to heal. Even a month later it was too early to remove the makeshift splint. But his facial bruises and his ribs had mended by that time, and he was generally in good spirits.
The three of them were still living on the opposite side of the island. They ate dinner around the fire in the plaza not far from their cave. Often after their meal they would talk until it was time for bed. Yasin would dominate these conversations with his assertive personality and his lightning-quick intelligence.
Yasin had not developed his own personal explanation for either the gigantic sphere in which they were living or the hatbox spacecraft that had rescued them from Mars. When he suggested that the two vehicles might have unrelated origins, and that different alien species, with no knowledge of one another, might be responsible for them, Johann and Sister Beatrice looked at each other in astonishment.
“Why do you think there must necessarily be some coordinated plan or purpose behind all this, Ace?” Yasin said with his characteristic grin. “Just because all the bizarre creatures we have seen share this red-and-white motif? Your attitude is decidedly unenlightened. Look at what we have now learned about nature. Chaos is the governing principle, not the orderly design of some careful master planner. Even the simplest phenomena, like the weather, defy our attempts to dominate them with our mathematical models. Why would you think that our puny minds could possibly comprehend these creatures…?”
Yasin was not concerned about whether their hosts were aliens or angels, or if they were friendly or hostile. In fact, after their second conversation on the subject, he told Johann and Sister Beatrice that he considered discussions about their spacecraft and its creators as nothing more than “intellectual masturbation.” He preferred to talk about other things.
Yasin was a natural storyteller. Johann doubted if all the tales he told of his youth were true, but he agreed with Sister Beatrice that Yasin’s images of life in the teeming Egyptian city of Alexandria and the sterile, fundamentalist Islamic stronghold of Medina were both provocative and fascinating.
Yasin was surprisingly candid about his childhood and adolescence. He had lived in Alexandria until he was thirteen. During that period Yasin’s father, a native of Saudi Arabia, was a professor of Islamic history at the University of Alexandria. His mother’s older brother had been one of Professor AL-Kharifss first graduate students.
Yasin’s mother, as intelligent as she was beautiful, had married the handsome professor when she was only seventeen. She had immediately become pregnant with Yasin, and three other children had quickly followed. Yasin’s early years were as full of the daily prayers, the quotations from the Koran, and the other manifestations of Islamic religious devotion as if he had been raised in one of the cities of Saudi Arabia. Outside his Islamic enclave, however, cosmopolitan Alexandria offered many distractions to the young and curious boy. Whenever he could, he escaped into the excitement of the city, obtaining a diverse street education to complement his outstanding academic record at the Islamic school.
When he was almost twelve, Yasin heard for the first time his mother’s protests about the restrictions placed upon her by both her husband and his fundamentalist interpretation of their religion. The resulting divorce was inevitable. One evening soon after his thirteenth birthday, Yasin’s father told him to gather up his belongings and to help his siblings pack all their things. With Yasin’s mother softly weeping in the living room of their Alexandrian home, Professor al-Kharif took his property, including the four children, and departed for Medina, in his native land of Saudi Arabia. Neither Yasin nor any of his brothers or sisters ever saw their mother again.
Yasin definitely took his father’s point of view in this story. He didn’t mourn for his lost mother. In fact, he spoke as if she had transgressed against the marriage, and his father’s actions had been justified by her inappropriate behavior.
“It is impossible for us,” Sister Beatrice said to Johann one morning when they met on the beach after his swim and her meditation, “to comprehend the cultural gulf that separates us from Yasin. Our lives have been so fundamentally different. He has no regard for women because he has been taught since birth that women exist only to serve men. His father and his strict religious training have brainwashed him.”
“e No regard’ is not strong enough to describe Yasin’s attitude toward women,” Johann said. “‘Disdain’ would be a better word… You don’t know him as I do. Remember, I worked with Yasin for eighteen months. He considers women useful only as sexual partners, or as mothers for the children of men.”
“But how could he feel otherwise, Brother Johann?” Sister Beatrice said. “His mother disappeared from his life at a crucial time in his development, and in Yasin’s opinion it was her fault that he lost both the security of his family and the rich, exciting Alexandrian life that he loved. It’s only natural—”
“I’m sorry, Sister Beatrice,” Johann interrupted gently, “but I can’t accept that either Yasin’s attitude, or his antisocial behavior, can somehow be justified by the emotional deprivation of his childhood and adolescence. I have heard similar arguments explaining criminal behavior many times and I’ve never been able to swallow them.
“Perhaps when he was still a young man, Yasin’s background should have been a consideration in judging his actions. But not now. Has his adult experience meant nothing? He has lived in England, and even briefly in the United States. Was this obviously brilliant man not able to see
that the rest of the world, including most of his Arab and Muslim colleagues, has a much more humane attitude toward women?
“No, Sister Beatrice, I have no sympathy for Yasin. Millions of others have been raised in identical backgrounds and have never been guilty of a single incident of sexual assault. My problem with Yasin is not that he is an Arab. What makes him a pariah to me is that he is an unrepentant rapist. From my point of view he is a confirmed sociopath, and we would be wise to be wary of him.”
Sister Beatrice stared at Johann for a long time. “It saddens me, Brother Johann,” she said finally, “to realize that you harbor such uncharitable opinions about another human being. Don’t you believe that individuals are capable of change, even later in their lives? And if they are not, then doesn’t that mean that the human species is itself doomed?”
Johann gazed out at the lake before replying. “Most of the time I am an optimist, Sister Beatrice,” he said. “Nothing thrills me more than the human potential for goodness and growth. I have even met some people—and I would put you in that category—that actually live up to that potential. Most, however, do not. Why doesn’t each individual human being realize his or her potential? That’s the puzzling question.
“I suspect that each of us is indelibly imprinted by our experiences during our development from an embryo to an adult. Much of this imprinting is permanently stored in what might be called ‘firmware,’ and can only be overwritten in a few rare cases. As we age, this firmware limits us, and prevents the personality changes necessary for us to realize our full potential.
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