by John Ringo
"This is good," Guano said through his AS. "But you have won, Father. The clan lord, Tulo'stenaloor, has directed his people to become Catholic."
"That's something I wanted to talk to you about, too, Guano. You see, while Tulo may order them to join my faith, only you have shown any ability to persuade them to adopt Christianity in any form."
"They will still follow orders," Guano said.
"That's true, I'm sure," the priest agreed, reaching once again for the bottle, then shaking it suspiciously and casting a glare at al Rashid. "But following orders may or may not save their souls. That's where you come in, Reverend Doctor Guanamarioch.
"By the way," the priest asked, "have I never discussed with you the concept of 'Big Tent Catholicism'?"
Chapter Thirty-nine
And so the People feasted on Finba'anaga, who had done his best.
—The Tuloriad, Na'agastenalooren
Anno Domini 2028
Posleen Prime
"The years are upon me, old friend," said Tulo'stenaloor. "I fear that this goodbye is goodbye."
"Oh, stuff and nonsense," answered Goloswin. "You'll still be here keeping every cosslain in sight sore from excess rubbing long after I've returned."
"Must you go?"
The tinkerer sighed. "It isn't a question of must; it's a question of should. And, yes, for the good of the People and the good of your memory, I think I should go to Aradeen, and study the other religions, the ones you rejected. Sally says she can get me an appointment with the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. And al Rashid insists that the Grand Mufti of the same city is a first cousin. We need to know about these things, Tulo, for the good of the people you have brought here. Besides, since I learned how to replicate the Himmit metal and figured out how to test for cosslain and kessentai in the egg, I feel like retiring undefeated."
Slowly, the clan lord nodded his great head. "I know. I even understand. It's just . . . I'm going to miss you, Golo." The clan lord pushed sorrow away and drew himself up to his full height. "You're right, of course. So go now, before I make a spectacle of myself."
Goloswin started to turn away, then turned back and flung both arms about his clan lord. "I'll miss you, too, you old bastard."
Golo had to push through crowds now to get through the city. Where once a few thousand of the People had sheltered, now there were nearer to fifty thousand.
And in three years it will be twice that, despite Tulo's limits on normals. In fifty years, we'll have outgrown this planet. And then we will have to deal with humans en masse. Best we know as much as we can learn by then.
Golo stopped briefly at the three figure statue. "Do you have an image of this stored in your memory, AS?" he asked.
"As I suggested when we first met, Lord," the AS answered, "I am not an idiot. Of course I do."
"Good fellow."
Golo continued on his way through the packed city pathways, through the gates of the walls and out toward where the human pinnace sat that would take him to the starship Salem and thence to Earth. He saw, in an open field by the pinnace, a sight that once would have seemed quite impossible, a small human child, a girl he thought, by the length of the creature's hair, riding on the back of a fully grown kessentai, one with a cosslain walking by either side of him. From the way her shoulders shook, Goloswin thought the girl might be crying.
"Can't you come with us, Uncle Frederico?" Sally's daughter Querida asked, her voice breaking with tears. "I'm going to miss you so."
Still walking, the Posleen turned his head and torso one hundred and eighty degrees to look the child in the face. One claw reached up to gently brush a tear from the girl's cheek. One of the flanking cosslain reached over to pat the girl's back in sympathy, as well.
"No more than I'm going to miss you, Honey," Frederico answered. "You've been my best friend since you were born." That was no less than the truth; the Posleen had taken to the child as soon as he seen it and rarely let her from his sight in all the years since.
"Then come home with me," she pleaded.
"My home is here now," he answered. "Here, continuing my father's work, while he returns to Earth for a while. But you'll come back and when you do I'll be waiting."
"I asked my mother if I could stay here with you but she said 'no,' that I had to go back and go to school."
"She's right," Frederico said. "Humans do have to go to school. And even we Posleen are beginning to open some schools."
"Then why can't I go to school here, and live with you and your cosslain?"
"Because we don't know how to teach human children," he answered. "Though at least one of us once did."
Snifling, Querida put her head down onto the Posleen's broad chest and repeated, "I don't want to go. When I'm big enough, this will be home for me, too."
"Will you miss it while you're gone, Guano?" Dwyer asked, as the two of them watched Frederico and his own child say their painful goodbyes.
"I'll miss my son," the Posleen answered. "I'll miss the grave of my Querida, even though I know I can talk to her anywhere if I can talk to her here. I'll miss seeing my grandchildren come out of the egg. But, what must be, must be. There are still things to work out with the Mother Church. And I'll need some teachers for the seminary we will need here. I'll have to recruit for those."
"I'll help if you need," Dwyer said. "The Order has a very long reach."
"I know, and I will," Guanamarioch answered. "There's another reason I need to go back."
"Hmmm?"
"I need to talk to His Holiness . . . about those reliefs we found on Hemaleen V. I need him to tell me if that was a Messiah, come to my people first and spurned."
"I understand. But . . . Guano . . . some things are meant to be mysteries."
USS Salem
"There are still some mysteries I'd like you to clear up, before we have to go," Sally said to the turnip in the privacy of the O' Club.
"I've already told you everything I know about the Aldenata," the turnip answered.
"It isn't about the Aldenata," Sally said. "It's about that virus that brought you and the rest of the People of the Ships here. I've got some of it stored behind a firewall and, the thing is, it's not Indowy. Or at least not mostly Indowy. Whose virus is it?"
The virtual turnip looked pensive for a moment. It then answered, "I don't know, not for certain. But I do know this. I've extensive records on Aldenata, Indowy, Darhel, Tchpth, and humans. And it doesn't match any of their ways of programming. Who else do we know of in the galaxy, who would have an interest in Posleen, and who are technologically quite advanced?"
Disbelief slowly took over Sally's virtual face. "No way. The Himmit?"
The turnip and the virtual woman suddenly became aware of another presence in the O Club. Sally saw mottled green, bullfrog skin, four eyes, two on each shoulder, and a large, fearsome mouth mounted below the creature's chest.
"Oh, puhleeze," the creature said. "Do I look like any Himmit you've ever heard of?"
Posleen Prime
Wachtmeister von Altishofen, along with Mrs. von Altifhofen (nee Duvall), Mrs. von Altishofen (nee Schneider), Mrs. von Altishofen (nee Smith) and Mrs. von Altishofen (nee Papadopoulous), the few remaining Guardsmen and their wives, and Deacon Koresnagi and his five cosslain stood in front of a rather larger than life statue of an idealized Swiss Guardsman and a kessentai locked in battle with halberd and boma blade over the corpse of another Posleen, a cosslain. In front of the statue were more than a score of shallow mounds, marking the final resting place of the fallen. The faces of both standing figures looked determined and dedicated, rather than angry or hate-filled. This was by design.
"All holy together," Tulo'stenaloor had said, and apparently meant it.
While the Swizter's image was idealized, that of the kessentai was based on Borasmena. Of those present, only Koresnagi has known that kessentai well enough to recognize it, however. They all knew that the cosslain represented and resembled Guano's wife, Querida.
&n
bsp; "He was a good friend," Koresnagi said, "a good kessentai and a fine being."
Von Altishofen, who knew who Borasmena had been, knew that he had deliberately sacrificed himself to the pikes, nodded, seriously. "No Switzer in battle ever did better," he agreed.
The Wachtmeister's eyes turned to the plaque, inscribed in pure gold in Latin and High Posleen. He read aloud:
"Here lie the mortal remains of those Posleen and Humans who, in defense of the old Posleen order and in advancement of the new, met in honorable battle and let the Lord of Hosts decide."
Afterword:
Where was Secular Humanism at Lepanto?
The moral of this story, this afterword, is "Never bring a knife to a gunfight." Keep that in mind as you read.
In any case, religious fanatics? Us? We don't think so.
We're not going to sit here and lecture you on the value and validity of atheism versus faith. We'll leave that to Hitchens and Dawkins or D'Souza or the Pope or anyone else who cares to make the leap. One way or the other. Hearty shrugs, all around. A defense of the existence of God was never the purpose of the book, anyway, though we would be unsurprised to see any number of claims, after publication, that it is such a defense.
Sorry, it ain't, either in defense of Revelations or in defense of Hitchen's revelation that there was no God when Hitchens was nine years old. (Besides, Dinesh D'Souza does a much better job of thrashing Hitchens in public than we could, even if we cared to.)
Moreover, nope, we don't think it's unethical to be an atheist. We don't think it's impossible, or really any more difficult or unlikely, to be an atheist and still be a highly ethical human being.
The same, sadly, cannot be said for governments. Thus, consider, say, the retail horrors of the Spanish Inquisition which, from 1481 to 1834 killed—shudder—not more than five thousand people, few or none of them atheists, and possibly closer to two thousand. Compare that to expressly atheistic regimes—the Soviet Union, for example, in which a thousand people a day, twenty-five hundred a day by Robert Conquest's tally—were put to death in 1937 and 38. And that's not even counting starved Ukrainians by the millions. The death toll in Maoist China is said to have been much, much greater. Twenty million? Thirty million? A hundred million? Who knows?
Personally, we'd take our chances with the Inquisition before we would take them with a militantly communist, which is to say, atheist regime. The Inquisition, after all, was a complete stranger neither to humanity nor to the concept of mercy.
But that's still not the point of this book or this afterword. Go back to the afterword's title. Ever heard of Lepanto? Everyone knows about the Three Hundred Spartans now, at least in some form or another, from the movies. Not enough people know about the battle of Lepanto.
Lepanto (7 October, 1571, 17 October, by our calendar), near the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth and the site of several battles from Naupactus on, was a naval battle, the last really great battle of oar-powered ships, between the fleet of the Moslem Ottoman Empire and the combined, individually much inferior, fleets of the Papacy, Christian Venice, Spain, plus tiny contingents from various places like Malta and Genoa. The combined Christian fleet was outnumbered, both in terms of ships and in terms of soldiers—"Marines," we would say today—who made those ships effective. Yes, they had half a dozen "super-weapons" in the form of what were called "galleasses"—bigger galleys (but much slower, they had to be towed into line by others, and one third of those could not even be towed into position), mounting more and larger guns, and carrying more Marines—but still the odds lay fairly heavily with the Ottomans.
Those odds ran about two hundred and eighty-six warships, some of them smaller (Turk), to two hundred and twelve (Christian), six of them larger. In soldiery the odds were similar. The Christians had a better than two to one advantage in artillery, yet this means less than we would think today, since the bulk of artillery on a galley was intended to be fired once, generally without careful aim, and then promptly forgotten as the ship-borne infantry took over the fight.
Worse for the Christians, the Ottomans had a much greater degree of unity of command. Indeed, for most of the larger individual sections of the Christian fleet, there were long-term, serious advantages to letting the other sections be crushed. It wasn't, after all, as if Spain and Venice were great friends.
Nor were the stakes notably small. The last jewel of the Byzantine Empire, its capital, Constantinople, had fallen the century prior (after, be it noted, having been badly weakened by being sacked by "Christians" two and a half centuries before that). Since then, the Ottomans had exploded across the known world. The Levant was theirs, as were Egypt and Mesopotamia, along with most of North Africa. The Balkans, too, had fallen to the crescent. Thousands in Italy had been killed or enslaved by Ottoman sea raiders. An almanac of Venice, for the year 1545, showed half a dozen Ottoman galleys, raiders, close offshore.
Times looked bleak, indeed, for Western Christendom. And yet, when the smoke cleared, the Ottoman fleet, despite exemplary bravery on the part of the men, was crushed, never really fully to recover. Christian losses in men had been severe, yet were only about equal to the number of Christian slaves liberated from Ottoman galleys.
It was a victory even an atheist might be inclined to call miraculous, with the Ottomans losing about fifteen ships for each Christian loss; over one hundred and eighty Moslem galleys to twelve.
Now let's suppose, just for the moment and just arguendo, that God doesn't exist, that He's a pure figment of the imagination. What then won the battle of Lepanto? No, back off. What got the Christian fleet together even to fight the battle, for without getting together to fight it it could never have been won?
The answer is, of course, faith, the faith of the Pope, Pius V, who did the political maneuvering and much of the financing, and also the faith of the kings, doges, nobles and perhaps especially the common folk who manned the fleet. And that answer does not depend on the validity of faith, only upon its sincere existence. Faith is, in short, a weapon, the gun you bring to a certain kind of gunfight.
They've taken to calling themselves "brights," of late, those who disparage and attack faith. At least, some of them have. One can't help but note the prior but parallel usurpation of the word "gay" by homosexuals. And, just as gays do not appear notably happier than anyone else, one may well doubt whether "brights" are any smarter . . . or even as smart.
Example: The religious impulse is as near to universal a human phenomenon as one might imagine. Not that every human being has it, of course, but it has been present, and almost invariably prevalent, in every human society which did not actively suppress it (and some that did).
Now imagine you're a human being of broadly liberal sentiment, much opposed to religion and also much opposed to the oppression of women and gays, equally much against sexual repression, which, by you, and not without some reason on your part, religion is generally held responsible for. You are, in other words, a "bright." Let's say, moreover, that you're a European "bright."
What has been the effect of your, the collective "your," attacks on and disparagement of Christianity? Did you get rid of religion? Yes . . . ummm . . . well, no. You got rid of Christianity for the most part. And left a spiritual vacuum for Islam. So, in lieu of one religion, a religion, be it noted, that has become a fairly live and let live phenomenon, you've managed to set things up nicely for a religion which is by no means live and let live. You've arranged to replace a religion that hasn't really done much to oppress women and gays in, oh, a very long time, with one firmly dedicated to the oppression on the one and the extinction of the other.
And you'll insist on calling this "bright," wont you? Because it so cleverly advances your long term goals, right?
Christopher Hitchens even subtitled his recent book on the subject, "How Religion Poisons Everything." Odd, isn't it, that the subtitle fails to note that with poison toxicity is in the dose? Or that some doses are worse than others. Or that, given that near universal r
eligious impulse, to get rid of the non-poisonous dose sets things up for a poisonous one? Yet this is "bright."
Ahem.
Did religion poison those Christian sailors, rowers, and Marines at Lepanto? No; it was not poison to them, but the elixir of strength that gathered them and enabled them to prevail against a religion that was poisonous to them and their way of life. And isn't that odd, too? That such a bright man as Hitchens should claim religion poisons "everything," when the plain historical record, just limiting ourselves for the moment to Lepanto—something a bright man ought to know about—shows that this is not the case?
Hmmm. Perhaps "bright" doesn't mean, after all, what "brights" want it to mean.
Theft of the word "bright," while it doesn't quite rise to the level of linguistic matricide (the malicious murder of one's mother tongue), so common in PC circles, is still an exercise in intellectual dishonesty. It's hardly the only one. For example, it is often claimed that there's not a shred of evidence for the existence of God. This is simple nonsense; there's lots of evidence, some of it weaker and some of it stronger. Some of it is highly questionable and other portions very hard to explain away. (And one of our favorite bits revolves around just when and how Pius V knew that the battle of Lepanto had been won, at the time it had been won, and in the absence of long range communications. Look it up. Really.)