“OK, got it!” she said. “And get this. We’re four kilometers off. Four point four nine kilometers, actually, but I’m counting that as four.”
Fr. Xris smiled. He always did think that God had a great sense of humor.
“There’s no reason you need to do it, but would you like to take us in, Katie?”
“Thanks,” Katie said. “I’m taking us in gently, so we don’t need a major correction once we’re inside.”
“Sounds good,” Belle said.
“Oh, and I’m engaging the cruising engine,” Katie said.
“Sounds even better,” Belle said.
“We’ll be underway in three minutes.”
Everyone waited, all but holding their breath, but it was excitement, not tension.
“All right, we’re underway,” Katie said. “I’m going in at 5 degrees. That makes our sideways acceleration .05 meters per second. We’ll maintain that for three minutes, then eight minutes of cruising, then three minutes of killing our sideways vector.”
“Sounds good,” Belle said.
Six minutes in, Kari exclaimed, “Captain, I just got a notification that we’ve detected the slipstream!”
“Were you surprised?” Katie asked, but playfully.
“No,” Kari said unconvincingly.
“It’s still nice to hear,” Fr. Xris said.
Four and a half minutes later, Katie said, “Re-orienting to kill our sideway acceleration.”
Three minutes later she said, “and we’re in! Re-orienting... And we’re good! Turning it over to the autopilot to keep us in the slipstream!”
Everyone cheered, and there was a lot of hugging all around.
“I’m ordering a feast,” Belle said.
Chapter 13
Once the initial celebration died down, Belle took a few minutes to confirm that the autopilot was working properly and keeping them in the slipstream, then she ordered the feast from the kitchen which she had promised the crew and passengers. They even brought Freia in, who took part, if weakly, from a comfortable chair.
Several hours later, when the party had finally wound down, the normalcy of their situation now sunk in, and it became time to go back to their regular duties.
When Katie finally read Stan’s report about the repairs to Spark, she discovered that while he was now functional, one of his legs was not reparable with the parts available on the ship. They should be able to get the necessary parts on Xanadu, but until then Spark was barely mobile. This made him useless for complex repairs which involved climbing and both hands. Katie therefore asked Fr. Xris to assist her with repairing the second main engine, and he willingly assented.
On their way to the engine room, Katie had discussed their plan for fixing the engine. When she got there, she changed the subject.
“You’d never have known it from the start we had,” Katie said, “but we actually make a pretty good team. Are you sure you didn’t miss your calling?”
“How’s that?” Fr. Xris asked.
“As an engineer, I mean.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “It is pleasant to do it again, but I’m quite sure that my life is for other things.”
“Better things?” she asked.
“Maybe lesser things, for all I know,” he said. “All I know is that they’re as good as I’m capable of doing a good job at. How good that is isn’t something to worry about, because that’s who I am. And who wants to be someone else?”
“A lot of people, actually,” Katie said. “I’m a misanthrope, and even I know that.”
“OK, let me rephrase that. Who could justly wish to be someone else? I mean, who could, without being imperfect, want to be someone else?”
“I’m not really very familiar with perfection.”
“Oh stop it. You know what excellence is. True excellence. You even do it sometimes. So don’t give me that relativist all-we-can-hope-for-is-good-enough crap. You know that the world should be perfect, and the fact that it isn’t is a big part of why you’re so unhappy when you’re not distracted by video games or interesting problems to work on.”
She was silent for a few moments.
“If you’re going to see through me all the time, this is going to be a very annoying friendship.”
“Just be honest all the time, and I’ll never see through you.”
“Will you do the same?”
“Be honest?”
“Yes.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’d do that even if you don’t.”
“Then tell me something,” she said. “Do you find me attractive?”
“Very,” he said.
“And you’re just keeping your promise when you became a priest? It’s not that I repulse you?”
“Before I answer, a word of caution. Other people’s opinions of us can be useful as a sanity check for our own evaluations of ourselves, and as data for helping to form those evaluations, but our worth comes from God loving us, and not from either us or some other human being thinking that we’re worthwhile. I’m not sure how to translate that into atheist-speak, but there’s probably some way. Either way, be careful of having an attachment to anyone’s opinion, including mine. Down that way lies misery.
“But to answer your question, yes I’m dedicated to keeping my promise. I once heard it somewhere, I think it was in a play; in this way we can best the gods: we can keep our promises.
“If you’ll forgive me for quoting the bible, Jesus said, ‘you say, If you swear by the temple, you are not bound, but if you swear by the gold of the temple, you are bound. Which is more valuable, the gold in the temple, or the temple that makes the gold holy? But I say to you, do not swear at all. Neither by heaven, for that is God’s throne, nor by the earth, for that is his footstool, nor by Jerusalem, for that is the city of the great king. Do not swear by your own head either, for you can’t make one hair of it white or black by saying so. Instead, let your yes mean yes, and your no mean no. Any more than this comes from the evil one.’
“It’s a rather interesting point, that if you need to swear to get people to believe you, it’s a very good sign that you’ve been going horribly wrong before now, and having to swear an oath is just the signpost letting you know you’ve gone wrong.
“And in the end, the truth is the most important thing there is. I know it’s real popular to say that we can’t get at the truth, but that’s crap. We can’t have Cartesian certainty, but Cartesian certainty is nonsense. There’s no such thing, and there can’t be such a thing. But Cartesian certainty isn’t the truth. It’s an attempt to comfort yourself when you don’t have the truth. (Descartes was a sixteenth century mathematician who famously produced a mathematical proof for the existence of God; less famous was the fact that it was just a lemma in his mathematical proof for the existence of chairs and tables and the whole material world we perceive and no one doubts.)
“But life isn’t about comfort. It’s about courage. And every human being’s highest duty is to the truth. To always tell it, and to always seek it.
“And keeping your promises is part of that. You can’t be an honest man and break your promises.”
Katie was silent for a while, then smiled at him.
“What a waste,” she said.
“Thanks, I guess,” he replied, unenthusiastically.
Katie looked at him for a moment.
“I have a feeling that a lot of people are better off for having known you, but not in the way they expected,” she said.
“That’s beyond my knowledge,” he said. “And in the end, outside of my job description. My job is to figure out what I can do for people now, not to figure out what I’ve already done for them.”
They worked for a while in silence except for the occasional question or request having to do with the work at hand.
“Hey,” Katie said, “I’m sorry for asking you to sleep with me, and flashing you, and all that.”
“No worries,” Fr. Xris said. “I already knew back then that you
didn’t realize what you were doing.”
“Oh, I knew what I was doing,” Katie said. “But I didn’t know you back then. I thought that you were someone else.”
“I know,” he said, “but isn’t who you’re doing it to part of what you’re doing?”
“I suppose, if you want to look at it that way.”
“What I mean is, I knew you didn’t intend evil. You thought me a hypocrite, and were trying to prove it. Though based on a mistaken premise, in its own way that was a commitment to the truth, and looked at from that perspective, you were trying to do me a favor, even if the immediate effect would be emotional pain.”
“That’s a very generous way of saying that I was doing my best to hurt you,” she said.
“The truth—the full truth—is always the most generous way of saying anything,” he said. “But in any event, when the most generous way of saying something is the truth, then that’s the best way to say it.”
Epilogue
Shortly after Katie and Fr. Xris fixed the second propulsion engine, Stan discovered the parts necessary to fix Spark in one of the terminators which he had not previously gotten a chance to inventory. With Spark mobile again, Fr. Xris returned to being an ordinary passenger.
It took several weeks to get to the Xan system, and several more weeks from the entry point on Xan’s southern slipstream to Xanadu, where the Hopeful docked to deliver its passengers and some of its cargo. Freia was back to duty by that time, and having dropped her reserve, she and Fr. Xris became good friends.
Katie and Fr. Xris also developed a real friendship during the remainder of the trip, though her new regard for him did not grant her the social skills which she had lacked, and she still spent most of her time absorbed in video games. When he disembarked the ship she made Fr. Xris promise that he would come meet her at the space station on their way back from New Mars.
Xiao went on to start his trail guide businesses. Shaka became a very successful businessman and was well known for his generosity to the poor. Hannah bought a small ranch, and worked for a while on a neighboring ranch to earn some foals to start with. She regularly attended church and even started an amateur film making group.
Six months later, when Fr. Xris met the crew of the Hopeful on their way back, they had several new passengers. To everyone’s surprise, Freia was one of them, as she had given notice and came to join the Christian community of which Fr. Xris was the pastor. She was to be a postulant in the very small convent which had been set up on Xanadu to do missionary work.
The parting of Katie and Fr. Xris, when it was time for the Hopeful to leave for Earth, was sad on both sides. Katie actually cried in public, perhaps for the first time in her life, and Fr. Xris gave her a standing invitation to come back and visit, since as pastor he was stuck on Xanadu until we was reassigned, if ever.
As of the time of this writing, it is unknown whether Katie ever took Fr. Xris up on his invitation.
Author’s Note
If, gentle reader, you are like me, the ending of every book—good or bad—has a certain sadness attaching to it. Whether we leave the characters well or badly off, we leave them off. Due to our different natures—we real, they fictional—this parting has about it something of the finality of death. And if you are like me still more, then if you liked the book it is only natural to blame the author for not making the book longer, giving the characters you love more life. I certainly blame the authors of the books I love for making their books so short. Now that I’m on the other side of it, I can say that such blame is richly deserved. Had I more strength, I might have written both a longer and better book. Not having done a better job than I have done on this book is not defensible. But to be indefensible is not necessarily to be unpardonable. The more a reader likes a book, the more he suffers from the writer’s faults, so of anyone who did enjoy this book I ask pardon. It is my fault that I have not done better, but at least I regret that I have not done better.
(Perhaps paradoxically, if someone did not at all enjoy a book, it is likely because the person and the book were simply a bad match. If such a poor soul has trudged as far as this note without any enjoyment of the book, it’s not me but rather the one who forced him to read this far who most needs to ask his pardon. But if there is such a creature, he does have my sympathy.)
If anyone is curious about whether Fr. Xris was based on any real person, the answer is no. My original idea for him might be best described as a tall Father Brown who could find his umbrella, between murders. He developed on his own from there.
There were a few themes which appeared in this story which I would like to briefly comment upon. This may perhaps sound strange coming from the man who wrote the story, as I might be supposed to have already have ample time to comment upon the story during the writing of it. I have, however, tried to write the story in a manner as true to the characters as I could make it, and the upshot is that, at least to my ear, the voices of the characters in this story blot out mine. There are things even Fr. Xris and I disagree about.
One theme, or at least one idea which frequently recurs throughout the book, is the return to paganism. We are in modern times seeing some advances of paganism in the form of Wicca and “neopaganism”. These do not, in my opinion, amount to much, and we’re seeing more of the belief properly called Materialism, but more often called “the new atheism,” growing. I think, however, this trend is likely to be short-lived (on the timescales of centuries). Materialism is even in our time a relic; the eternal universe and simple, deterministic physics which underpinned it which were so firmly believed in during the 19th century were exploded in the twentieth. There are still some attempts at reanimating the corpse, such as the infinite multiverse hypothesis, but though scientific knowledge moves slowly through the population, yet it does move, and eventually the seeds planted in the 19th century will stop germinating.
The other main source of vitality for the “new atheism” is the rapid progress of technology. Though technology will undoubtedly continue to progress, I believe it far more likely to follow an S-curve rather than an exponential curve. There is such thing as “good enough”; physics and Ahmdal’s law impose many constraints on efficiency improvements, and backwards compatibility is often more important than higher quality. Moreover, as people increasingly grow up in a highly technological world, they will not regard technology as the same sort of magical golden-egg-laying goose. There is nothing that human beings cannot take for granted.
I’m fond of the definition of paganism as, “the recurrent suspicion that something worthwhile is true”. Atheism, by contrast, might be defined as the supposition that nothing worthwhile is true. And as as a wise man once observed, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
I believe, therefore, that with the general abandoning of Christianity we are likely to see in the long run not the rise of atheism, but the rise of paganism. It is likely that in the scientific age people will not take their gods completely seriously, but then we know very little about ancient paganism. It’s quite possible that the ancients didn’t take their gods completely seriously either. This is especially true outside of the context of festivals. We have some idea, however tenuous, of how the ancients regarded their gods during celebrations. We have next to no idea of how they regarded their gods during the other 300+ days of the year. I think that both that aspect of paganism, as well as its neglect, are very interesting. And suggestive.
* * *
The subject of conversions in times of stress comes up in the book, and it’s a remarkably complex topic. On the one hand, the easiest thing in the world is to doubt them because they smell like an attempt at bargaining. On the other hand, I suspect that for a man who isn’t a complete fool, contemplating death brings with it a great deal of clarity. For a dying man, or even a man in great peril, there isn’t time to tell yourself comforting lies. There’s no way to tell what’s going on in another man’s soul, and also nothing you can say in general about every man�
�s soul, yet I expect that deathbed conversions will be genuine far more often than they aren’t. Moreover, I think that when men survive what they thought was going to kill them and revert to their previous behavior, it’s not a question of their conversion not being real, but of them being addicts. Once the clarity of crisis has past, they will tend to make the same decisions because they see the same distorted picture.
In the movie Interview with a Vampire, the vampire Armand asks a much younger vampire, who was surprised at how few old vampires there were, “do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality?” It’s a very striking moment in an excellent movie, but a very little reflection should make this observation seem obvious. Few people have the stamina for our three score and ten years. Indeed, it can often tax us beyond our limits to be virtuous for even an hour. I think that this, rather than a lack of sincerity, is what accounts for reversions after a conversions-in-crisis. The problem is that after a truth is revealed, we must actively hold onto it. The same thing happens when we get physically hurt, such as cutting ourselves through carelessly mishandling a knife. At first the importance of always being careful is obvious to us, and proper care is easy. Over time, our caution will fade unless we’re careful to preserve it. And as it goes with physical truths, it often goes with spiritual truths.
Author’s Note to Christians
Though the main character in this work does a fair amount of what might be called evangelization, this novel is in no way intended to be a manual for evangelization. Evangelization must always be tailored to the individual, and Fr. Xris’s interactions with each person are meant for that person alone.
If one does want to draw lessons, I suggest that they be the general lessons which are probably obvious before reading this work: Become very familiar not only with the faith but also with the questions people tend to have about the faith. Be extremely patient. Be as good as you can possibly be in everything that you do.
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