Fr. Xris shook himself again. His thoughts kept turning to unpleasant subjects. Perhaps it’s time to stop being awake, he thought. He commended all things to God’s care, and went to sleep.
Chapter 4
Fr Xris awoke in the morning feeling better than he had the night before. When he arrived at Kennedy space station for his apprentice engineering job, he found it annoying to make the transition from the ground time schedule to a completely unrelated schedule, but the space station was active 24 hours a day, and the various shift crews rarely interacted with each other, so there wasn’t that much to adapt to. It didn’t matter whether you woke up right before your duty period or went to sleep right after it. While the cargo ship was active 24 hours a day, it certainly had a primary activity period and was manned by a skeleton crew during the secondary activity period, making it more necessary to adapt. Consequently, his first day had been a long day, made longer by the excitement of it all keeping him from feeling how tired he was until his head hit the pillow.
While it would take several days for people to completely sync up, he nevertheless expected everyone else to be more themselves today. This applied more to the passengers than to the crew, though he hadn’t inquired how many of the crew had been on the ship before. Being a commercial endeavor, cargo ships rarely had the same crews for two consecutive trips.
Fr. Xris as a rule made breakfast the largest meal of the day since it was the most reliable. In parish life, it was impossible to predict what emergencies he might be called forth for. Emergency is of course a relative term, but where spiritual needs count as much as physical needs, it is possible even for comfortable people to need your time without warning. On a cargo ship with so far only one confirmed Christian beside himself, he was not likely to be called on at a moment’s notice, though even there you could never tell. It still surprised him how often pagans and atheists would go to Christian priests when the chips were down. Whatever the future might hold, habits were habits, and his body expected to be fed.
Accordingly, Fr. Xris went to the cafeteria. On the Hopeful there was only one scheduled meal per day, but the vending machines were always available and it was possibly to buy special meals from Madeline (the robot chef). Fr. Xris went to the korn vending machine and got a large helping.
Korn was a balanced nutritional food which was neither flavorful nor bland, though generally dispensed in an extruded tube shape, which had slowed its early adoption until former associations with toothpaste faded. It was sufficiently appetizing that one could eat it indefinitely without growing to hate it, but it was also impossible to look forward to it. It had only two virtues, but they were very virtuous virtues. The first was that it was nutritionally complete, not in the minor sense that you wouldn’t starve to death on it, but in the sense that you could live quite healthily on it. The second virtue it had was price: korn was provided by the government for free.
As one might surmise with widespread use of competent robots, unemployment was rampant. In the year 2462, a 64% unemployment rate was not nearly as big a problem as it would have been in 1962 since the same robots who put most people out of work also made the things that they wanted extremely cheap. So cheap, in fact, that one could comfortably live off of the savings from a low-paying job for many years. A work schedule of one year out of every seven was gaining popularity, and was achievable for most people.
When, in 2194, copyright periods were dropped by international agreements to 100 years from the date of publication, it created a large pool of entertainment which no longer needed to be paid for. With storage and distribution being virtually without cost, this made adequate entertainment available, essentially, for free. It was found that with shelter being extraordinarily cheap (since robots mined the materials, transported them, formed them, and then built the buildings), it was easier for governments to simply fund the production of long-term viable foodstuffs than to try to manipulate economic systems to ensure that people could get the forty five minutes of work every month necessary to afford food. The robots grew the food, transported it, and stocked the free vending machines which the food was available in. Korn was not fashionable, and many people would find work so that they could afford to buy better tasting food, but it turned out that the majority of the population didn’t really care what its food tasted like so long as it was easy and palatable. To a factory worker in the 1900s this might appear lazy, but laziness actually consists in not being willing to do necessary work. Prior to the invention of korn, people found variety in food necessary because their food was only accidentally food, and wasn’t designed to be a balanced diet; korn really was engineered well enough for a human being to thrive on it, and so it was satisfying.
Fr. Xris did enjoy variety in food, and had a reasonably discriminating, though not well trained, palate. But while he was not a member of a religious order and thus did not take any vows of poverty, he liked to live meagerly where possible. It was good spiritual training, and often he could make better use of money by giving it away at opportune moments.
He had gotten through most of his meal when somebody else entered the cafeteria. When he glanced up he saw Katie looking at him with mild surprise. In general, on earth, breakfast was commonly a very small meal, typically small enough that people would keep small shelf-stable foods in their rooms rather than go out to eat it.
Katie went directly to the robot chef and said, “Good morning, Maddy.”
“Good morning, Katie” it said in a far more human voice than its featureless metallic face suggested it would have.
“Bacon and eggs.”
“Very good,” the robot said without emotion.
Katie walked towards the table to wait for her meal. She paused a moment, as if deciding whether to sit with Fr. Xris or as far away as she could get from him, then made up her mind and sat opposite him.
“Good morning, Katie,” Fr. Xris said.
“Good morning, Xris,” she replied.
Consciously not using the title “Father” was a tip-off. People who didn’t care would generally use it out of the sort of casual and non-committal respect that was more not wanting trouble than anything else. When someone avoided using a title that others used, they cared. They might mean disrespect, but that’s a form of caring.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked.
“Very well,” Fr. Xris said. “thank you. Yourself?”
“I always sleep well in space,” she said.
After a moment, she added, “So I heard that Freia showed you the engines.”
“Yes. She kindly offered, and though engineering isn’t my life any more, I was quite curious.”
“Did she show you her bed, too?”
“No,” Fr. Xris said. “if that’s kept in the engine rooms, I missed it.”
“The last three men Freia showed the engines to ended up there,” Katie said.
She said this in an ambiguous tone. She clearly wasn’t saying it in disapproval of Freia. It was entirely possible that the last three men Katie showed the engines to ended up in her bed. Fr. Xris would not have been surprised if it was the case, and if it wasn’t, it certainly wasn’t because Katie had any scruples against it. Katie was obviously too modern for that. No, she was either trying to scandalize him, or accusing him of lying, but he couldn’t tell which. So he asked.
“Are you hinting that you don’t believe me, or are you trying to shock me?”
“Maybe a bit of both,” Katie said.
“Both would be difficult,” Fr. Xris said, “since the shock depends upon ignorance, and had I just fornicated with Freia last night, I could hardly be ignorant of the fact that people fornicate.”
“Either one, I should have said.”
“If you don’t believe me that Freia and I did nothing physical, you can ask her as easily as you can ask me, and I doubt she could even imagine what shyness is.”
Katie laughed. “I don’t think that she can,” she said.
“And as for shocking me, plea
se believe me that at this point in my life, I’m pretty much out of the reach of surprise. You may have heard that Christians confess their sins to priests?”
“I did hear something like that.”
“They do. And that means that priests hear people’s sins. Trust me, we hear everything. I’m sure I’ve heard people confess things that you never even thought that people did. I had one penitent who had been in the cult of Balor for twenty years. The things they did to the people they sacrificed to their dark god were almost artistic in their cruelty, in the sense that they were immensely creative.
“I’ve had penitents confess hundreds of sexual partners. One claimed over two thousand, and he was neither bragging nor trying to indulge the sort of vanity that, if it can’t be approved of as the best, wants to be marveled at as the worst. I actually had to work out the math for him, and he was surprised at the result, but stood by it.”
Katie looked at him in surprise.
“You look so innocent,” she said.
Fr. Xris shook his head.
“No,” he said, “Innocent, I am not.”
“And yet you still preach simple answers?”
“Yes,” he said, “though possibly not in the way that you mean. But, ultimately, the answer to life is simple.”
“No it isn’t,” Katie said firmly.
“Why not? Surely you’re not one of the people who believes that every mistake that everyone makes must be right so the answer to how to be happy is as insanely twisted as all the ways that people have figured out how to screw up?”
“No,” Katie said. “Lots of people are just wrong.”
“Then why is the answer complicated?”
“Because it is...” Katie said. She moved her hands around as if she could find the words to explain why by groping with them, but in the end left it at that.
“I’m guessing that you’ve had experience with Christianity before,” he said.
She didn’t reply, and he looked at her intently. The most common way would be a family member or a co-worker, but Katie was too young to have had a co-worker influence her this deeply. It had to be while she was growing up. A close relative, then? Probably not parents, though, since she spoke of Christianity like it was something foreign.
“Your grandparents?” he asked.
“On my mother’s side,” Katie said.
He looked at her again, as if trying to peer into her soul. Actually, he was just lost in thought, and didn’t realize how it appeared, or he would have looked away. He disliked even risking the appearance of pretending to gifts he didn’t have.
“At a guess,” he said, “they converted after your parents were adults but before you were born, and hectored your parents to baptize you?”
Katie nodded.
He sighed.
“And they tried to pester you into acting like a Christian, largely through guilt tripping and complaining?”
“Got it in one,” she replied. “Is that common?”
“It’s far more common than it should be,” Fr. Xris said. “You usually see the worst fruits of it when the older relatives are more intuitive people and the younger relatives are analytical, though the reverse can be a disaster too. Did one of your parents die, and your maternal grandparents drove you crazy by talking about heaven instead of being sad?”
Katie was silent, which was close enough to “yes”.
“That never goes over well,” Fr. Xris said. “And I’m sorry about your loss, by the way. Losing a parent at such a young age is very painful.”
“She died in a car crash,” Katie said. “A software glitch caused by out of date anti-virus software.”
They were silent for a moment.
“If I ever meet a virus writer,” Katie said, “I’d give those people in the cult of Balor a run for their money.”
“If you ever do meet a virus writer, I hope for your sake you don’t succeed. Most people in the cult of Balor end by suicide. They stop sleeping because they can’t face the nightmares.”
“So how can you say that there are simple answers?”
“Not all answers are simple,” Fr. Xris said. “It depends on the question.”
“Why is there suffering in the world,” Katie snapped.
“At that level of generality,” Fr. Xris answered, “because God can bring about greater good in a world where suffering is possible than one where it’s not, and the free-willed beings who were given free will to be good to each other instead choose to hurt each other.”
“But how can letting people write viruses possibly help anyone?”
“The same freedom that lets people write viruses allows other people to write the software which drives the car.”
“But how is it worth it?” Katie said. “And if God existed, why not let the firmware writer publish the firmware but stop the virus writer from publishing the virus?”
“If you mean that as a general question, because that would mean that our powers would only work when we’re using them correctly, which is the same thing as not having free will. And you can say that, well, OK, maybe some free will is good, but there’s too much. People shouldn’t be allowed to be as evil as they are.
“But where we are is one point on a continuum. People could, in theory, be much worse to each other. There could exist a world where it was possible to make someone burst into flames with a word, or to erase somebody’s existence with a mere thought. We don’t live in that world. And we could live in a world where a bunch of invincible supermen were free to bump into each other, but couldn’t harm each other. But the only way that could happen is if they couldn’t interact with each other. I mean, in such a way that the other would know it.”
“Why,” Katie interjected. “They could interact with each other but just not be able to hurt each other.”
“It depends on whether you want a consistent set of physical rules. If you do, then the same thing which lets materials bend must allow them to break. You can’t have both an irresistible force and an immovable object; if I can bend your eardrum with sound, I can break it with too much sound.
“As an aside, the Christian answer is that the world wasn’t meant to have consistent physical rules, only typical behaviors. By constant reliance on God, nature is supposed to be alive, and thus inconsistent but completely convenient. There could be no death because the matter which made up our bodies would obey intelligence, rather than follow blind rules. And the problem is that we turned away from God, and chose to try to manipulate the world through the blind rules rather than through his intelligent power. The result was a world where we can die, and in fact by those very laws we so cherish, must.
“But anyway, if you have consistent physical rules, then to be invincible you need everyone to be made up of immovable objects; at least immovable within a body, and so such bodies would neither be able to do anything, nor receive communication. That would be an intensely boring world.
“I’ll grant you that part,” Katie said.
“So you have two points which would obviously be bad, and we’re somewhere in between. Arguing that God got it wrong, and the point should be a little over to the left or right on that continuum—it’s possible. I mean, it’s not logically contradictory to hold that it would be a better world if people had more or less power to influence each other. People who have been hurt generally say that people have too much power, and people in love generally say that people have too little power. Myself, I don’t have sufficient information to form a judgment.”
“You’re pretty slick at answering that question,” Katie said.
“I’ve been asked it a lot.”
“I imagine that you have.”
“And besides, it’s hardly a new question. If you think that the modern world has some special insight into suffering, just think for a moment about the fact that the founder of Christianity was tortured to death in a world that had neither novocaine nor morphine.”
Katie was silent for a few moments.
“It’s a slick answer, but it still doesn’t answer the question,” she said.
“If you’re trying to ask, specifically, why was this suffering allowed to happen, or why was that suffering allowed to happen, then there is no answer. Or, rather, the answer is too big.”
“What do you mean, ‘too big’?”
“Look, when I ask you, ‘why did you put on that shirt’, you’ll have a simple answer, like ‘because I like it’, or ‘it’s comfortable’, or ‘I like to try to manipulate men by showing off my breasts’. You’ll have a simple answer because you have no idea whatsoever what will result from putting on that shirt versus some other shirt, and only a mild idea of what will result versus putting on no shirt. And that, only in the immediate future, too.
“There’s a standard illustration of chaos theory, that a butterfly flapping its wings in New York could cause a hurricane in India. You can’t blame the butterfly, because it has no idea what it’s doing. But it nonetheless caused the hurricane. You and I are like that butterfly. We have no idea what we’re doing.”
Fr. Xris took a piece of korn, picked it up, then dropped it on his plate. It made a quiet thud.
“What are all the repercussions of that?”
“A noise,” Katie said.
“And what else?”
“Nothing else,” Katie said. “I mean, I guess technically it might have heated up the room a trillionth of a degree or something.”
A Stitch In Space Page 5