Memories might be all I had from now on. It had not been a comfortable life, living in that little place. But it had been a life of purpose. I vowed to myself that if ever I made it back, I would rebuild.
CHAPTER 42
Interstellar space, 2155 A.D.
WE DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT LONG. WITHIN TWO EARTH WEEKS, our ship—Chaplain Tom’s and mine—was part of a twenty-five-vessel flotilla bound for a world I could not name, nor could I readily identify it on a 3D star map.
Over half the ship’s complement were marines. The kind of men and women I’d done a bit of training alongside during my final phase at the Chaplain’s Assistant school. And since Chaplain Thomas was technically detailed to the infantry for this trip, we spent way more time tending to the needs of the ground forces than we did to anyone else.
Which meant I spent almost as much time as the marines doing weapons drills, close combat rush and support actions, assault carrier egress training, and so on and so forth. I was, after all, going to be carrying an R77A5 right alongside them—in defense of the chaplain, who would carry no weaponry at all.
The marines were initially standoffish with me.
Not jerks per se, as I’d seen them treat some of the enlisted who were explicitly assigned to the ship proper. But not friendly, either. I was every bit the oddball to them as I’d been to some of my compatriots back at Armstrong Field. But because everybody liked Chaplain Tom, and I was Thomas’s gofer, that good will slowly began to slop over onto to me as well.
One day I happened to be hanging around in the ship’s gargantuan staging hangar—large enough to hold four assault carriers!—when I noticed a cluster of marines standing off on their own, and examining the contents of a small book.
I walked up to them.
“Mornin’,” I said.
A few of them nodded at me.
“May I ask what’s got your interest today?”
They exchanged glances, then the one holding the book closed it and showed me the cover. There was a silhouette in gold leaf on the front that looked a bit like a man in a Greek robe holding a clarion to his mouth.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You’re the Chaplain’s Assistant, you ought to know.”
I let the speaker’s annoyance pass, and asked if I could see the book.
They gave it to me willingly.
“Someone was handing these out at mess,” the book’s original owner said over her shoulder. “We were going to make fun of it. But it’s actually better for you to have it. Your job, and all that.”
I took the book immediately to Chaplain Thomas.
“Mormons,” he said matter-of-fact, handling the book.
“Ah,” I said.
“See?” he said, pointing to the spine. “It says it right there.”
“Sorry, I should have checked. It’s just so rare to see an actual Paper book, especially one out here in space.”
“Where did you say they said they got this?” he asked.
“Galley.”
“Hmmm, I wasn’t aware we had a missionary onboard.”
“We do?” I asked.
“All of the Mormons consider themselves to be missionaries, all of the time. God bless ’em. I wish I knew more Christians who were like that.”
“So what makes Mormons different from Christians?”
Chaplain Thomas set the book lightly on the tiny desk in his quarters and rubbed a finger along his brow, thinking.
“You know the basic concept of the Trinity.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, the Mormons don’t believe in the Trinity. They think God and Jesus are separate people.”
“Aren’t they?” I asked.
Chaplain Thomas raised an eyebrow at me.
“Sir,” I said.
He laughed at me.
“No, it’s not that, Specialist. See, a few hundred years ago there was this kid—not much younger than you are—named Joseph Smith. He thought he could talk to God, and he thought God told him to go start a new church. Which he did. The poor fool. He got killed for it. But the church is what we now call the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It’s outlived its founder by centuries.”
“If that’s their name, sir,” I said, “then how come they’re not Christian?”
“It’s complicated, son,” he said.
From my standpoint, the only complication appeared to exist in Chaplain Thomas’s mind. But I let it pass. The man was old enough to be my father, and I’d already learned from cross-examining some of his statements that if I pushed too hard on any given point, he got frustrated with me and sent me away to work on something for him.
“Are they a good church?” I asked.
Chaplain Tom just stared at me.
“How do you define ‘good’ in this context, Specialist?”
“Oh, I dunno, what do you think of them?”
“Absolutely fine men and women,” he said, slapping a hand on his thigh. “Whatever their doctrinal differences are with true Christianity, I can’t fault the folk. Leastways not the ones I know. They work hard, they tithe, they tend to be honest, and they do seem to love the Lord.”
“So what’s the issue, if you don’t mind my asking, sir? The marines down in the hangar, they said they were going to make fun of the book.”
“And that I can’t countenance,” he said with a sour frown. “Mormons have been getting run off and run out of everywhere for a long time. Some of it maybe they deserved, but most of it? Hell no. Excuse my language. That’s no way to treat people, even if they do have some odd ideas about things. I’ll say this, they stick to their guns. Find me a devout Mormon and I will show you a man who has absolute faith in his doctrine. Enough to outlast most arguers. Even me.”
His face had flushed, but just slightly.
I gathered that in his civilian ministry days, he’d gone around the barn a time or two with his Mormon peers.
“Anyway,” Chaplain Tom said, handing the book back to me, “if you want to know what makes a Mormon tick, it’s all in there. Like I said, I wasn’t aware we had any aboard, but then we’ve got so many people crammed together from all over creation, I’ve not had time to work with the ship’s chaplaincy to figure out percentages and statistics. Like everyone else in the world, the Mormons are signing up with Fleet to defend the human race. As is proper. And the Jews, and the Hindus, and the Muslims too. Now, those Muslims, they’re a double-edged sword. Many of them joined Fleet to kill mantes, only because some mullah or other told them that the only thing God loves more than a dead Jew or a dead Christian is a dead mantis. Seems the more militant Muslims have decided to call a truce with the rest of us. At least until we’ve beat off the mantis horde, and can go back to hating each other like men again.”
Chaplain Thomas’s words sounded gradually more frustrated and tired as he said the last part.
I’d not thought much about the state of affairs back on Earth when I’d joined the Fleet. But I realized that for men older and more experienced than I was, the state of affairs now was perhaps very odd, compared to the state of affairs as it had been when they were young.
“Are the Muslims dangerous?”
“Oh goodness, Specialist, no, not all of them. A few extremists here and there. Fleet tries hard to screen for them so that we don’t have really dangerous people getting their hands on Fleet weaponry that might be turned against Earth. Most Muslims in the Fleet have no love for Jews or Israelis, I can tell you that much. But then this is the way it’s always been. And you’re going to find, the longer you do your job, that it’s not necessarily your place to try to enlighten some of these folks—Jew or Muslim or Mormon—to what you think is the proper attitude. As long as they can salute and march and execute to standard, that’s all Fleet asks. Everything else is . . . details.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, flipping pages in the book with the trumpet-playing silhouette on the front. The pages were amazingly thin, and the print very small. I
t was obviously a compact version, for service member use. Much like the standard twenty-second-century edition Bibles that Chaplain Thomas had me keep in boxes—for those few troops who actually came to Sunday service.
I thought it odd that the Mormons needed their own scripture, apart from that which seemed to suffice for all the other Christian denominations. But then the Buddhists and the Hindus and the Muslims all had their own books too. Some of them overlapping in content with each other, but not always. And I figured as long as nobody was trying to beat anyone else up for it, those differences ought to be harmless.
CHAPTER 43
I AWOKE TO FIND A TRAY SITTING ON A TABLE AT THE SIDE OF the bed.
When I leaned over to see what was on it, my nose was assaulted by a most unpleasant smell.
“Oh boy,” I said.
Though my stomach was a gnawing pit, I wasn’t sure I could hold my nose for whatever it was the mantes had concocted for me. It was a solid square of . . . something. Roughly ten centimeters on a side and two centimeters thick. I couldn’t tell if it was raw, nor could I tell if it was cooked, nor could I even be sure if it was animal or vegetable—or both.
I stared at it for the longest time.
After using the toilet and refreshing myself at the wash basin, I sat back down on the edge of the bed, my disgust with the square’s smell competing with my body’s demand for fuel. It had easily been forty-eight hours since I’d put any food in my face, and though this didn’t seem the least bit appetizing, I wasn’t sure I had anything better to work with—besides one or two half-eaten ration bars that may or may not have been squirreled at the bottom of the packs.
There were utensils in the pack’s unused mess kit. I fished them out. Steeling myself, I stabbed into the square and forked up a sizeable hunk of what appeared to be pureed dog shit. I stuffed it into my mouth. And promptly gagged the contents back up onto the tray. At which time I retched repeatedly.
I took the tray to the toilet and upended the contents. Then I washed it, as well as my mouth, and went to the packs. I tossed out everything I could—until the packs were empty—and upended them vigorously.
A single, lonely, mostly-eaten ration bar tumbled out. Sans wrapper.
I fetched it up and plopped it into my mouth—ignoring the gritty dust that covered it as I chewed several times, then swallowed.
The door to my compartment opened, and the Queen Mother floated in. I noticed that she no longer rode the small emergency disc. This time she had a full carriage identical to the one I’d originally seen her use when I’d come to meet her aboard the Calysta. It was polished and sparkled in the overhead lights, though the Queen Mother’s body posture indicated she was not particularly pleased.
“Good morning,” I said.
“By your internal time keeping, perhaps,” she said. “But not by ours. Was the meal satisfactory?”
“It was not,” I admitted. “I managed just a mouthful before I threw it up. Whatever your ship’s refectory thought it was creating for me, I found it entirely inedible.”
“It contained all of the calories and nutrients you might need,” she said. “What was the problem?”
“As I explained to the younger mantes who helped me set up this compartment with amenities comfortable for humans, there is more to human food than raw nutrients such as proteins and sugars.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It’s the way in which those raw nutrients and proteins are put together. And especially the way in which the raw food is prepared. Consider a sirloin steak.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a choice cut of meat from a human livestock animal called a cow. Most humans would never eat a sirloin steak when raw. Even if rubbed with herbs and salt, most humans would never touch it. But take the steak and prepare it with sea salt and ground peppercorn, then broil it over the bare coals of a fire made with pine and mesquite wood, then serve it with a baked potato, fresh corn on the cob, butter, sour cream, bacon bits, chives—”
“I believe I have the idea,” she said. “My refectory examined your ration bar at length and attempted to reproduce it in quantity. Perhaps they took the task too literally?”
“Yes, perhaps. What was offered to me on the tray looked very little like something I’d want to put in my mouth twice. Rather, it seemed to have more in common with what comes out the other end.”
Her wings did not flutter at my joke. Was I being a bad guest?
“You are bothered,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I am sorry if I am being too blunt in my appraisal of the food.”
“I care not for your appraisal. My technicians and the refectory have been instructed to appease your every desire, where eating and comfort are concerned. Instruct them as you will. Throw away what you do not like.”
“Then what is the issue?” I asked.
“I am bothered because . . . because . . .”
Her forelimbs were tapping on the new disc she rode, while her mouth opened halfway and her tractor teeth began to vibrate in annoyance.
“Are there problems with the carriage?” I asked.
“No. The carriage is perfect. It is I who am the problem.”
“Was the Professor right? Can you not be wholly reintegrated with a new disc, as he suspected when you were pulled out of the old one?”
“No, the issue is not physiological. Assistant-to-the-chaplain, my world has become . . . flat.”
“Flat?”
“Yes, that is the best way I can put it in your language. Flat. I perceive in full the ship around me, and everyone in it, and my senses have regained the crisp articulation and range afforded by carriages for many generations of our people. And yet, the experience is . . . flat. There is a quality that is missing which I cannot precisely put into words. I have struggled with this for several of your hours, believing it was merely the new carriage’s software and interfaces having to adapt to my particular biological signature. When the newly-born adult emerges from the chrysalis, it takes time for the carriage to learn its master, while the master must learn her carriage.”
“So give it a few days,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “I detect not even a subtle change. Not in the specific way I would expect. The essence of what I saw and heard and felt while apart from my original carriage . . . it is lost. I cannot account for this, save for the fact that some kind of permanent damage may have been done to me during the hasty egress from my ruined carriage.”
I sat on the bed and thought for a moment.
“Captain Adanaho told me she suspected that life without the carriage was a significant revelation for you.”
“It was.”
“Then why are you surprised that upon returning to disc-integrated life, those revelations—the quality you spoke of—is gone? For many days you were forced to rely only on your own eyes, your own ears, your own nose—”
“Mantes do not have ears or a nose as you call them—”
“I know that, but consider: while you relied solely on your biological senses, your entire range of perception was significantly altered.”
She still showed annoyance. So I tried a different approach.
“Consider this,” I said. “It has long been noted among humans that if one of us loses a major sense—say, sight, for instance—that the other senses become more acute. Sometimes, dramatically so. Therefore the blind man may suddenly find himself tasting more subtly than ever before, his ability to perceive through touch will improve, along with his hearing, and so forth. They all become accentuated. It is the natural way in which the human body and mind compensate for the loss of a very important faculty.”
“But I was not made blind, nor deaf,” she said. “I could see and hear just as well without the disc, as with it.”
“I would wager not,” I said. “Otherwise you’d not be so perturbed now that you’ve regained your biomechanical augmentation. By reintegrating with a carriage you have most
probably muffled your raw, instinctive senses by a significant percentage. You just never noticed before because you’ve never, ever lived without a disc. You said it yourself: the adult mantis never lives without a carriage.”
The shape of her antennae told me I’d intrigued her, but her vibrating teeth told me she was still vexed.
“There must be a way to compensate,” she said. “I cannot believe that the carriage is a limiter. We cannot survive without them. They are the foundation of our civilization.”
“That may be true,” I said. “But does this change the ‘flatness’ you perceive now? Does believing in the absolute necessity of the carriage make it any less bothersome?”
She paused a long time, then said, “No.”
“Then I am afraid I don’t have an answer for you,” I said. “Other than to do voluntarily what you did originally out of necessity. Separate yourself from your disc. See if the depth you’re missing returns. Perform this experiment as many times as it takes to be satisfied with an answer. Or . . . learn to live as you once did. In a ‘flat’ world of technologically purified perception.”
Her mouth opened all the way and she almost frightened me with how much her unhappiness manifested.
She fled the room without a word.
Swallowing hard, I let the door slide shut and decided there was no sense chasing after her. She’d have to figure it out on her own one way or another. Best for me to just stay put, inventory and organize what little human equipment I still had with me, and hope that I’d get a chance to talk to the technicians about additional improvements to my quarters.
They arrived thirty minutes later.
I explained the problem with the food, and I also explained to them my desire for soap. Both for bathing, and also for washing my clothes, not to mention the sleeping bag.
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