My superior officer didn’t appear convinced.
“Look,” I said, figuring it was time to put all my cards on the table, “I’ve never been a great one for protocol and going along with orders at all costs. In some ways, the absence of Fleet rules and regulations from Purgatory life was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it made me realize what kind of man I am. I’m not a very good soldier. I don’t like being told what to do. And if I’d had a choice in the matter I’d have thrown my non-standard commission back in Fleet’s face.
“The Chaplain gave me a job once, and I did all I could to carry it out. For his sake. Now I have a new job, and until that job’s been done—the resumption of peace between the mantes race and our own—I won’t rest.”
The captain considered at great length, her eyes evaluating my expression while her mind evaluated the wisdom of my plea. It hadn’t been a very persuasive one, but it was the only one I had to make. Either she went with it, or I’d be forced to mutiny. Definitely not something I’d prefer doing. But I’d do it just the same. And I think she knew it too.
Adanaho drew in a long, gradual breath through her nostrils, then let it out just as gradually, tilting her head to one side.
“You’re right,” she said. “You’re not a very good soldier. You’ve been two steps from dereliction ever since I met you. But you’ve got guts, padre. And I respect that. Okay, just so things are official, I am ordering us to escort the Professor and the Queen mother until we can make contact with mantis forces, at which time we will parlay for a cease-fire, and pray that things get rolling positively from there.”
“And if the Fleet finds us before the mantes do?”
“Then let me do the talking, while you do the praying.”
There was a noise behind us. We turned to see the Professor slowly levitating upward, out of the lifeboat’s hatch. He had the Queen Mother balanced on the front of his disc—his forelimbs wrapped under her insect-like shoulder joints while the rest of her body rested on the front of the disc proper. Her lower thorax was pale and shone with dampness, its chitin looking soft, and mantis blood trailing from several holes.
Adanaho and I rushed over to them.
“Does she need first aid?” I asked.
“What can be done, I have done,” said the Professor, who seemed visibly shaken by what had just transpired inside. “She will heal. In time. The Queen Mother is severed from her carriage, and I do not know if she can ever be mated to another—such things being almost unheard of among adults of her great age. Her pain is terrible, but she is conscious, and she bade me tell you that we are in your care now. I have no weapons—as you well know—and would not use them to coerce you, even if I did. The Queen Mother rides with me, and I will follow wherever you choose to go. I can signal for mantis help with my own carriage—for several of your months, depending on how long my carriage’s fuel cells last.”
“May fortune favor the foolish,” I said.
The Professor’s antennae made a questioning expression.
“Old Earth literature,” the captain said, in reply. “Come on, let’s go. Padre? Since this is your idea, you’re on point.”
“Roger that, ma’am,” I said, tugging down on the straps of my pack to tighten them into my shoulders.
Chapter 6
We walked.
On rock, when we could find it. The sand and pebbles proving to be a lot of work despite our best efforts. I envied the Professor with his disc—floating effortlessly above the ground. Occasionally I dropped back to talk to him as he kept the Queen Mother securely held.
“Will you be able to sense it?” I asked. “If we get near any other mantis troops or equipment?”
“Yes,” said the Professor. “Though I must warn you that my connection to my people has been non-existent since our landing. I am beginning not to trust my own machinery. Perhaps there has been damage I cannot ascertain? Or perhaps your military has devised some way of blanketing or cloaking mantis com-munications—such a thing would prove very useful against us, in a pitched battle. Our coordination is our greatest strength. Forced to fight singly, we might not be nearly as effective.”
“If we did have such a weapon,” the Captain said, overhearing, “I am sure I’d have known about it.”
“I think we’ll have to trust that your readings are accurate,” I said to the Professor. “Meanwhile, we will go south, and hope that both terrain and climate are favorable.”
It seemed like a vain hope. All I could see on the horizon were rocks, more stony, broken bluffs, and sand dunes. Not a tree nor a bush in any direction. Nothing running, flying, squirming, or jumping. It occurred to me that when we’d entered orbit, the seas of the planet had appeared small, and tinted green. Local evolution might not have gotten much beyond the microscopic level, and then only in the shallow oceans.
Enough photosynthesis to turn the sky a pale blue.
Which was both good, and bad.
Stranded for too long without rescue, we’d starve. Or die of thirst.
We plodded, and I stretched out the distance between myself and our little group. I scanned relentlessly for gullies or creek beds—any sign of fresh water. Adanaho and I only had enough for a few days, even with rationing.
A wind began to whip.
The captain jogged to catch up with me.
“I do not like this,” she said. “I feel a sandstorm is coming.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I grew up part of the time in North Africa,” she said. “I can tell.”
“Look!” said the Professor, his speaker grill yelling the word.
We stopped and turned. An ominous, dark wall of billowing dust was moving rapidly upon us from the rear. It seemed to stretch into the sky for a kilometer or more. I swallowed hard, then began to frantically search for shelter. The captain pointed, and we ran for a nearby hill with a small overhang. When we got there we discovered a water-worn hollow at the hill’s base. We pushed ourselves into it, huddling together, emergency jackets pulled tightly over our heads. The Professor landed his disc and used both the disc and his body to shield the Queen Mother.
If it was possible for a mantis to look more pathetic, I wasn’t sure how. Her limbs were curled tightly against her body and dried blood dribbled away from the fresh scabs where her lower thorax had formerly interfaced with her disc. Her lower limbs were small and feeble looking, compared to the impressive forelimbs, and I wondered just how long it had been since any mantis had walked under its own power?
Without her carriage, the Queen Mother had been made small.
I experienced a moment of unexpected pity.
Then the rushing cloud of detritus swept over us. I closed my jacket across my face as tightly as I could make it, listening to the muffled howling of the wind as it broke across the top of the hill.
Chapter 7
Something nudged me awake.
I slowly pulled the jacket off of my head. There was a sensation of fine grit in every pore and crevice of my skin. My lips were dry and my throat parched.
It was dusk, or getting on towards it. The storm had passed, and the air was clear. So clear in fact I could see the stars. Sharp and precise in the purpling sky.
I saw the captain’s pack in front of me, but no Adanaho.
The Professor hovered nearby.
“Is everyone okay?” I asked, my tongue rubbery. Saliva flowed into my mouth, and I spit several times to get the dust out—though I still felt it on my teeth. My eyes were crusted and I wiped at them with hands that felt caked in powder.
“Yes,” said the professor.
I slowly stood up, yawning, and stretching my back. There were wind storms on Purgatory too, but in the valley where my chapel was built, things had been more or less protected.
Not so, here. Though the hill had done us good. I couldn’t begin to guess what might have happened if we’d been caught out in the open with nowhere t
o run and nothing to hide behind. There weren’t any mountains on this world, from what I could see. No recent or ongoing geologic activity. Everything had been slowly worn flat by wind and occasional water. It was probable we’d see several more sandstorms before our journey was over.
My bowels suddenly told me it was time to do God’s work.
“Excuse me,” I said. And began walking away from our hill, looking for something farther and smaller—just big enough to crouch behind, and relieve myself.
When I was done I made my way back. The far horizon still glowed with the setting sun. I stopped short, seeing two silhouettes at the top of our hill: one human, distinctly female, and the other mantis. I observed them for a time. They were both facing into the setting sun, their heads erect and their eyes forward. I thought I could just barely hear the sound of Adanaho’s voice.
Coming back to the makeshift camp in the hollow at the base of the hill, I quietly spoke to the Professor.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“When the storm lifted, your Captain was the first to rouse. She checked the status of myself and the Queen Mother, then she shed her equipment and went to the top of the hill to survey the surround. When we heard her voice coming softly down to us, the Queen Mother asked me what your Captain was saying. I told the Queen Mother that it sounded like prayer.”
Prayer.
I was surprised, though I don’t know why. I’d not known the captain long enough to inquire as to her upbringing or spiritual affiliation. If any. Was she Muslim? She had mentioned North Africa.
“So how did the Queen Mother get up there?”
“I carried her,” said the Professor. “She was curious. She’d never seen a human engaged in religious rite. Of any sort. Your Captain did not seem to mind. The Queen Mother asked that she be left alone with your Captain, and I have done this. I suggest you do it too.”
“It sounds to me like Adanaho is still talking,” I said. “She has to know that the Queen Mother isn’t able to understand.”
“Perhaps her words are not for the Queen Mother?” the Professor said.
Yes, perhaps.
I sat down in the hollow and retrieved some water and a concentrated food bar from my pack, drinking and eating in slow, deliberate portions. The Professor softly landed his disc next to me, and I felt his alien eyes studying me as I stared at the gravel in front of my toes.
“You are a curiosity,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, assistant-to-the-chaplain. In all the time we have known each other—through all of the work that you have performed in my presence, as a religious human—I have never known you to be overt about your feelings in the way other humans are overt.”
I felt my face get warm.
He was treading in uncomfortable territory.
“I don’t believe it’s my place to be showy,” I said. “It might make some of the chapel’s attendees think I was playing favorites. In terms of which ‘flavor’ I subscribe to.”
“But we are not in your chapel,” said the Professor. “And there are no other humans around us to see you, save your Captain. Who is now occupied. Our circumstances are dire. I know from studying the human history of belief that this is the ideal time for supplication. Harry, why do you not pray?”
The warm feeling in my face grew more intense.
“I don’t know,” I said. He was asking me questions I didn’t dare ask myself.
“You built a holy house with your own hands, and you maintain this house for use by any human who comes through your door. You do this out of loyalty to your deceased Chaplain. Yet, you do not perform services in your chapel. Never have you offered a sermon. You do not pray, nor have I ever known you to habitually carry out any religious ritual of any sort—save for demonstration purposes, for the educational benefit of myself and my students.”
“Stop,” I said. Though perhaps too quietly. It was a plea, not a command. My eyes were closed, but that didn’t prevent the tears.
“My apologies,” said the Professor, when he noticed the muddy streaks on my cheeks. “It was not my intent to cause you grief. I was merely curious. It seems to me a very large irony that you of all humans should be a non-believer. Yet this has been my slow, hesitant conclusion. After spending many years away from you, during which I was able to further digest our mutual experiences. You support and feed the belief of others. You have made it your mission in life. Yet you cannot partake of that which you give.”
“I’m…I’m not sure what I goddamned believe,” I said, though perhaps too loudly. The gentle, whispery sound of Adanaho’s voice had ceased. And suddenly the clicky-clacky speech of the Queen Mother replaced it. The Professor listened intently for a few moments, then looked down at me—his body and disc just faint outlines in the near darkness.
“I must go. The Queen Mother wishes me to translate.”
He left me there, feeling embarrassed and miserable.
I put away my food and water and re-wrapped myself in my jacket. Nights in the desert—any desert—tend to be cold. Though I didn’t think the chill was entirely physical.
Chapter 8
Captain Adanaho woke me.
“Chief,” she said in a whisper.
“Hmmm?”
“Sun’s coming up. We need to get moving.”
I slowly uncurled—stiff and cold.
At least on Purgatory there had been something akin to trees from which we’d harvested firewood. On this nameless sphere there wasn’t so much as a tumbleweed to burn. I shakily fished some food and water from my pack, the captain and I ate in silence while the mantes watched dispassionately, then we began trudging into the brightening dawn.
The labor of the march warmed me up soon enough, and before long I felt myself sweating as the bright, alien star climbed steadily into the sky.
This time it was the Professor who led. He claimed to have felt the ghost of a flicker of a mantis signal due roughly southwest, and he stretched out a large distance between himself—with the Queen Mother riding on the front of his disc—and Adanaho and I as we walked side by side in their wake.
“Is it true?” she said to me as I put one boot stubbornly in front of the other—we were going too fast; there’d be blisters at this rate.
I yelled for the Professor to slow it up, then asked, “Is what true?”
“That you’re not really a religious person.”
“That was a private conversation,” I snapped.
“The mantis voice system doesn’t do whispers. I heard everything the Professor said.”
I didn’t respond right away. Just kept walking.
“Let me put it this way,” I said, letting my words roll around in my brain a few moments before they came off my tongue, “in my time as an assistant in the Chaplains Corps I’ve been exposed to virtually every systematized form of human religion in existence, and a great many examples of non-systematized faith—either the do-it-yourself smorgasbord variety, or the deeply personalized, individual one-of-a-kind variety.
“Almost everyone claims to have discovered some unique or otherwise ‘true’ path to God, or the Goddess, or at least to a deep connection with the Cosmic. The more I saw all of it, together, and heard all the insights and the prejudices and could observe the blind eyes being turned to this or that inconsistency or hypocrisy, the more convinced I became that we’re probably just fooling ourselves.”
“So if it’s all a load of shit,” she said, “why didn’t you quit and do something else?”
“I never said it’s a load of shit,” I replied, my eyes still on the gravel two meters in front of me. “I told you before: I like people. And many people on Purgatory would have withered and died if they’d not had their beliefs to hold on to. Just because I don’t necessarily believe in any of it doesn’t mean I have to doubt or deride its value for other people. That’s one of the problems with our modern society. General Sakumora had it in his eyes and
in his voice: obvious contempt.”
“You noticed, huh?”
“How could I not?” I said, throwing my arms out in exasper-ation. “It practically oozed off the man. He thought I was nuts.”
“And yet you are closer to his view than he ever suspected,” she said, a tiny smirk on her lips.
“No,” I corrected her. “Disbelieving and being openly scornful of belief are not the same thing. I don’t begrudge those with faith. In fact, I admire it. I admire it a great deal. All those people who walked into my chapel all of those years while we were imprisoned? I thought they were impressive. I think one of the reasons why I stuck with my job was because I wanted to find out what made those people tick—how did they manage it?”
The captain didn’t say anything after that, for several minutes.
“So,” I said, clearing my throat and spitting the grit from my tongue, “what conversation did you and the Queen Mother have? Any groundbreaking heart-to-hearts?”
“I don’t think she understood a word I said,” Adanaho replied.
“The Professor told me it sounded like you were praying. I didn’t ask before, but I want to ask now: are you a Muslim?”
“No,” she said. “Copt.”
I stopped short.
After the purges in Africa in the 21st and early 22nd centuries, many religious scholars doubted that the Coptic Christian religion had survived at all—that any modern Copts extant were “revivalists” trying to re-invent the faith following its literal extinction.
As if reading my thoughts, the captain chuckled.
“Oh, we managed,” she said. “On the down-low, of course. Family legend has it that my ancestors fled North Africa, and went to Australia. Succeeding generations then went to Southeast Asia, then South America, then North America, and finally back to North Africa as part of the resettlement agreement with the Brotherhood. Once the war with the mantes began, our enemies among the Muslims had a new devil to hate, so they left us alone. For a change.”
The Chaplain’s Legacy Page 4