A Stitch In Space

by Christopher Lansdown

  She wished Fr. Xris a good night and went back to her room.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Fr. Xris went to check in on Freia. She had drifted off to sleep after Katie left, but woke at the sound of Fr. Xris opening the door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said, “I expected to find you asleep, and just wanted to check to make sure you were still breathing and that your pulse was strong.”

  “Don’t worry,” Freia said, “I’m made of tougher stuff than that.”

  Fr. Xris smiled. “I didn’t doubt it. Still, it’s nice to see things with your own eyes.”

  “That’s the whole problem with your religion, isn’t it? I mean, why you have trouble with winning converts?”

  “In a sense, yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but basically you’re right. The real problem is that people want things to be intelligible to them on their own terms. You could almost say that the fall of man was primarily an epistemological mistake. Man redefined knowledge away from true knowledge, which is having your mind conform to something outside of itself, and turned it into a mockery of that, which is essentially imagining things within your own head and calling that knowledge. It works for small things, but even there it fails quite often, and it fails entirely for big things. It’s a little much to expect God to fit inside your head. And that’s the problem with modern man. He lives trapped within his own head, and then wonders why he’s lonely.

  “But I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to discuss things which must necessarily bore you since you don’t believe in the premises.”

  “No worries,” she said. “Right now, I’m happy listening to your voice no matter what you say. I’m just kind of high on life, having come so close to being dead, and you being around makes me bubble up with a kind of gratitude that makes me feel happy rather than guilty.”

  Fr Xris smiled at her.

  “That does suit you,” he said. “All people are made for being happy, but for some reason it’s more obvious in you than in most people. But in any event, I’m done with that subject, so what would you like to talk about?”

  “Has Katie admitted to you that she’s hot for you?”

  Fr. Xris laughed. “Even being shot won’t stop you talking about sex,” he said.

  Freia laughed.

  “But I’m not talking about sex,” she said. “I’m talking about attraction. She’s realized that she’s never going to have you. So, by the way, have I.”

  “I thought that you realized that a long time ago,” he said.

  “I did,” she replied, “but it took me a while to really believe it. Anyway, I do now, so don’t worry about that.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “Though I didn’t before, either.”

  “You should have,” Freia said. She shrugged her shoulders. “Now you know for next time.”

  He was silent.

  “Anyway,” Freia said, “We were talking about Katie. And I was saying that I didn’t mean she’s trying to get you into her bed. I’m just saying that she’s realized that on an instinctual level, she wants you there.”

  “Is that an improvement?” Fr. Xris asked.

  “It is,” Freia said. “Know yourself. Isn’t that the philosopher’s motto?”

  “One of them,” Fr. Xris said, though he meant that it was the motto of one philosopher (Socrates), while Freia took it to mean that the philosophers have many mottoes, of which that was one.

  “Anyway,” Freia said, “now that she understands where her impulses are coming from, they’re less likely to control her, and she’ll be better able to relate to you. She thinks that she regards you as a human being now because she’s worked with you and found out that you were a normal person and not some monster from her childhood. She should have figured that out in ten minutes of talking with you. One minute if she wasn’t being slow about it. What actually happened was she became aware of her impulses, and so she became their master rather than their servant. Once she admitted them, she could set them aside.”

  “I’m sure you’re onto something,” Fr. Xris said, “though something sounds wrong about that, too. It is possible to have principles which override your feelings even if you haven’t cataloged your feelings in detail.”

  “As you are walking proof,” Freia said. “But because something is possible for one man, it doesn’t follow that it’s possible for all men.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “So what is new?” Freia asked. “Katie stopped by and filled me in on our dire situation. Is anything else going on?”

  “Not much,” Fr. Xris said. “Jack seems ready to explode. The captain seems to be bearing the strain pretty well.”

  “She has to,” Freia said, “She’s the one who decided to leave the slipstream. Losing her cool would mean admitting that she was wrong.”

  “True,” Fr. Xris said, “though she’s also one of the toughest people I’ve ever met.”

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t,” Freia said, “only that it doesn’t matter, we wouldn’t see her worry anyway. How are the other passengers holding up?”

  “Xiao seems quite stoical about it, and Shaka is praying a lot. Hannah is quite nervous. She asked me to baptize her a few minutes ago.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t mistrust that?” Freia asked. “I mean, asking for baptism because she was panicking?”

  “That’s a really complicated question,” Fr. Xris said. “It’s come up in a lot of different forms. Through the millennia people have noticed that desperate people, especially the desperately poor, tend to be Christians more often than people who live more comfortable lives. Plenty of non-Christians have said this was because Christianity is a fairy tale told to comfort people when things go bad.

  “But Christ himself observed this phenomenon when he said that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. That statement has often been taken the wrong way, I think. Because there are two ways to take the word ‘rich’. The one people love to use is the relative one. If I have twice as much money as you, then I’m rich and you’re not.

  “But there’s another meaning of the word rich which has nothing to do with how much money anyone else has. The real definition of being a rich man is how much you can control your circumstances. How many things are there that thwart your will? If you can bend the world to your desires, then you’re rich. If you can’t, then you’re poor.

  “In the times of Christ, the two largely went together. They had little technology, so the only way to bend the world to your whims was by having servants to do it for you, which meant being relatively, as well as absolutely, rich. These days, with all of our technology, everybody is absolutely rich, though roughly the same proportion of people are relatively rich. Only one percent of people can be the top one percent.

  “But that relative definition doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether you can spend all of your life convincing yourself that you suit the world since you’ve made the world suit you. Is everything entertaining? Is everything comfortable? If so, then it must all be all right, and there’s no need to conform yourself to anything. ‘I have goods stored up for many years. Eat, drink, and be merry.’

  “So that’s the thing. When things are going badly—when we need God—is when we can’t ignore the fact that everything is wrong all the time and we need God all the time. So how genuine are conversions in crises? In the end, it depends on the man and the crisis. Some people will realize when it all goes wrong that their whole life has been a lie, and they needed God just as much when everything was going well as now. Some will just cling to God as if he were a pagan god, for nothing more than what he can give right now.

  “That latter one often manifests itself in bargains. ‘God, if you get me through this, I’ll never touch drugs again.’ ‘God, if I live through this, I’ll become a priest.’ Even if the person means
it completely and even if he follows through with it, he’s utterly missed the point. God is the point of the world, he isn’t a safety net for when the world doesn’t work.

  “But that’s the thing. You can realize that in a disaster. In fact, there’s nothing like a disaster to clarify your thinking and show you that the lies you’ve been telling yourself are lies.

  “One of the great conversion stories of all time is the thief on the cross. When the other thief being crucified was mocking Jesus, the good thief said to him, loosely, ‘Shut up. You and I deserve to be here, but this man has done nothing. Jesus, when you enter your kingdom, remember me.’

  “Jesus didn’t say anything about emotionally charged decisions. He said, ‘this night you will dine with me in paradise.’ So clearly deathbed conversions can be real. They are, of course, the easiest things in the world to doubt. But the proof is found in what follows. That’s the proof of all conversions. You can tell a tree by its fruits. A good tree does not produce bad fruit, nor a bad tree produce good fruit.’”

  Freia considered this for a while. Fr. Xris had almost thought that she fell asleep by the time she finally spoke.

  “That is very interesting,” she said. “There are many things in this world you can only know by how they end up. Like Belle’s decision. Was it wise or foolish? We won’t know until we arrive or die.”

  “It ain’t over till it’s over, as a wise man once said,” Fr. Xris replied.

  They sat in a comfortable silence for a minute.

  “I’m enjoying your conversation,” Freia said with a smile. “Unfortunately, I’ve grown tired. Say a prayer for me and let me sleep. But come talk with me tomorrow, if you would. I’ll enjoy your company.”

  He made the sign of the cross, then said aloud, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.”

  “Is that a prayer for me?” Freia asked.

  “If you get better, it will certainly be part of God’s glory,” Fr. Xris said, enigmatically, and left.

  Freia pondered that as she fell asleep.

  Chapter 12

  In the morning, Fr. Xris awoke to the alarm which Captain West had set for the crew. She had apparently taken his honorary crew member status seriously enough to include him in waking up early.

  He was the first person to get to the command room. In order to maximize the amount of sleep everyone got, Captain West had set the alarm for only ten minutes before they were supposed to meet. After so much stress and so little sleep, the real crew was having trouble getting up and forgoing bathing and eating. Fr. Xris had once done a ten day retreat with the recently formed ascetic order, “The New Desert Fathers”, where he only slept for three hours a night (on a cave floor with no pillow), never bathed, and only ate once every other day. It was an incredibly difficult ten days, but it had served him well ever after. Compared with that, six hours on a real bed followed by a bar of korn felt like luxury. Which was the point of the retreat.

  Captain West was the next to arrive, followed by Kari and Biff. Jack came next, and everyone had to wait four minutes until Katie arrived. Since she was the most important person, the captain decided it was wisest not to complain.

  “Did you think of anything in the shower?” Kari asked Katie.

  “What shower?” Katie snapped.

  “I was just kidding,” Kari said.

  “But have you thought of anything?” Belle asked.

  “No, Captain,” Katie said. “I was sleeping, and no answers came to me in a dream.”

  “I dreamed that we were all going to die in deep space,” Jack said. “No, wait. That’s what’s actually going to happen.”

  “The next person who makes a joke, I’ll throw out of an airlock,” Belle said, with a very sharp edge in her voice. It didn’t sound like a joke, and may not have been an exaggeration.

  Fr. Xris jumped in just to deflect things.

  “Katie, do we have any other sensors on the ship that we can use to figure out what our actual acceleration was? I mean, anything? Like cameras that we can compare images from to see how much the stars moved?”

  Katie, who had been getting ready for a fight, visibly calmed. Ask an engineer an engineering question and they’ll drop everything. Fortunately, seeing Katie working helped to calm the others down too.

  “That’s an interesting idea,” Katie said, “but I can’t think of how we’d calibrate it accurately. I don’t think that we’d want to fire the engines up again to take samples.”

  “Could we calculate our motion from parallax? I mean, we know which stars are where and how far away they are, so their relative motion should tell us ours, shouldn’t it?”

  “Not that accurately. I mean, for many of the stars, the significant figures are in the exponent, not the digits. That’s not going to give us the sort of accuracy that we need.”

  Fr. Xris worried what silence might bring.

  “Is there anything else?” he asked. “What other sources of data do we have?”

  “I can’t think of any useful ones.”

  “Could temperature sensors tell us anything?”

  “Nothing useful that I can think of.”

  In the silence that followed, Fr. Xris saw Jack getting ready to say something.

  “The gas in the slipstream is more dense than interstellar gas, right? So that means that we can tell when we’re in it and when we’re not, right?”

  “Yes,” Belle cut in, “but like we said before, the sensors we have that can tell the difference only work to a kilometer or two. If they worked this far out, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Fr. Xris said. “What I mean is that we’d have in our logs where we were relative to the edge of the slipstream, and when we crossed it, right? So couldn’t we compute our acceleration from that?”

  Katie thought about it.

  “I don’t think that the edge is well defined enough to make that work, but I don’t know that. It’s worth taking a look at. But Belle, what I need isn’t more ideas, what I need is more time. I’ll run the numbers on Fr. Xris’s idea about when we left the slipstream, but I really need to spend more time with the accelerometer data to see if I can coax more precision out of it now that I’ve gotten some sleep. Talking in a group like this doesn’t help, it only keeps me from figuring out how to get us back into the slipstream.”

  “OK,” Belle said. “Let’s take a break, everyone, and go get some food. Do you want to work here or in engineering, Katie?”

  “I’ll be in engineering,” Katie said.

  “Would you like someone to bring you something to eat?” Fr. Xris asked.

  “Yeah, actually,” Katie said. “I’d love my usual omelet. Madeline knows it.”

  When they got to the cafeteria, Fr. Xris ordered the omelette for Katie. He planned to take it to her as he didn’t trust anyone else to just give it to her and leave.

  Breakfast was very tense.

  “Waiting is one of the hardest jobs there is,” Fr. Xris observed to the room. “Once I bring Katie her omelette, would anyone like to play some Quake XIV with me? If you all join in, we can do team mode. I love playing people versus computers.”

  “I’m in,” Jack said.

  “I love all the Quake games, so count me in too,” Biff said.

  “What the hell,” Belle said. “I’ve got nothing better to do right now, I’ll play.”

  Once the captain decided to play, Kari basically had no choice.

  “Jack, would you set things up? I shouldn’t take too long,” Fr. Xris said.

  A few minutes later, he brought Katie her omelette.

  “Thanks,” she said as he set it down, “and thanks for keeping the others off of my back. Are they planning to murder me if I don’t come up with something soon?”

  “Actually,” Fr. Xris said, “we’re going to play Quake XIV in team mode. I brought it with me.”
/>   “Belle said that was OK?”

  “She’s playing too.”

  Katie whistled.

  “You’re slicker than I thought.”

  “Knowing people is my job,” he said, and smiled. He turned to leave.

  “Wish me luck?” Katie said.

  “There’s no such thing,” Fr. Xris said.

  “Say a prayer for me, then?”

  “I already have.”

  “Say another one.”

  “I will. Prayers are never wasted. But don’t be afraid. If you’re supposed to save us, you’ll have all the tools needed to do it. And if it’s our time to die, it will not be your fault that you couldn’t prevent it.”

  “That’s not very reassuring.”

  “It should be, if you think about it. And anything more than that would just be blowing sunshine up your ass, and I try to avoid lying to people where I can. The upside to always telling the truth is that people often believe you. The downside is that you can say no more than is the truth. But for what it’s worth, I have faith in you that you’ll do a good job. Whether the best that you can do is enough to get us back into the slipstream isn’t in your hands, so whatever happens, I’ll blame you for nothing and be grateful to you for trying.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” Katie said.

  “And more practically, I’ll keep everyone off your back for as long as I can,” Fr. Xris said. “Now eat your eggs before they get cold.”

  “The plate keeps them warm,” Katie said. “Inductively charged heating coil, remember?”

  “I know,” Fr. Xris said. “Technology does sometimes get in the way of art. All I meant was that you shouldn’t waste your energy talking with me.”

  “Oh,” Katie said. “Well, thanks for the omelette.”

  She was about to turn to her work, then smirked.

  “Wish me luck!”

  Fr. Xris chuckled and left the room.

  He had spent longer than he meant to delivering the omelette, but he figured that he could still spare a minute for checking in on Freia. When he peeked inside her room, she was awake and smiled at him.