by Greg Bear
“Are the planets inhabited?” Paola asked.
“No signs of habitation, but that is expected. We presume they are,” Hakim said, averting his eyes. “For now, there is not really much more to say.”
“All right,” Rex said, standing again, arms folded. “Comments? Anything for me to take to Hans?”
“We’re tired of wrestling,” Jack Sand said.
“I’ll let him know,” Rex said, smiling broadly.
Harpal came to Martin’s quarters an hour after the meeting, Ariel following. “I’m going to resign as Christopher Robin,” he said, stalking through the door, arms swinging loosely, fists clenched.
“I suppose I don’t need to ask why,” Martin said. Ariel sat with hands between her knees, lost in thought.
“I hope not. You’re too smart,” Harpal said. “He picks me, then he lights on Rex, and Rex does everything I should be doing…and I do nothing. Does that make sense?”
“He’s feeling his way,” Ariel said. Harpal turned on her.
“And where do you stand, Mademoiselle Critical?”
Ariel lifted her hands.
“Jesus,” Harpal said. “When Martin was Pan, you were so full of bolsh we could grow mushrooms in your mouth!”
“Harpal,” Martin said.
“I mean it! What’s with the sudden quiet?”
“I trusted Martin,” Ariel said. “He wouldn’t hold things against me. Not enough to hurt me. I’m not an idiot.”
This stopped Harpal cold. He simply stared at her, then at Martin, and threw his hands up in the air. “None of this makes sense.”
Martin gestured with his fingers to her: Come on, let it out.
“Martin was sincere. He didn’t calculate for effect.”
“Thank you very much,” Martin said with some bite.
“I mean it. You didn’t measure everybody for his coffin. Hans hasn’t changed…he’s just grown into the job. Everything is weighed according to political advantage.”
“Even when he blew up after the neutrino storm?” Harpal asked.
“That was genuine,” she admitted, “but it put people in their place. Where he wanted them to be—a little afraid of him. He’s big. He hits when he’s angry. He’s not exactly predictable. So people are more wary and they don’t speak up. Big, smart bully. Or didn’t you notice?” She looked at Harpal accusingly.
“I don’t see how he could plan such outbursts,” Martin said.
“You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed his skills,” she said, eyes glittering. Martin saw the former Ariel again, saw she was keeping her anger and dismay tightly wrapped, and felt a fresh surge of concern.
“He’s a better Pan than I was.”
“Maybe better at manipulating. He knows what he wants.”
“He pulled us out of a pit,” Martin said, realizing his Devil’s advocacy. He wanted to see how much Ariel’s views coincided with his—all unvoiced, even unconfirmed in his own mind.
“He put us there in the first place,” she countered.
Harpal sat and crossed his legs. Martin and Ariel both looked to him for comment. “Good Pan, bad Pan,” he said softly, in wonder.
“The crew puts a lot of faith in the Pan. Martin was good—if a little gullible—because everybody knew they could talk to him, and he wouldn’t hurt them—wouldn’t even think of it,” Ariel said. “I spoke up because I thought I could argue him into seeing certain important things…”
“You went at it pretty forcefully,” Martin said.
“I’ve never claimed to be subtle. When will you resign?”
Harpal squinted. “When the time’s right,” he said. “Can anybody tell me why he’s courting Rosa?”
“He’s doing more than courting her,” Ariel said. “Rosa’s still in his room. You know she hasn’t had a real friend for years?”
Martin nodded. “He thinks she’s on to something.”
“What?” Harpal asked.
“Something we need,” Martin said, and Ariel nodded.
“What?” Harpal asked again, genuinely puzzled.
“Faith,” Martin said.
Harpal drew back as if bitten. “You’re kidding.”
“Not at all,” Martin said. “She’s getting closer and closer to the mark. I’ve felt it myself.” He tapped his chest.
“I’m completely lost now,” Harpal said. “I don’t deserve to be second. I’m out of touch.”
“Things are going to get a lot more complicated very soon,” Martin said. “Let’s see how he handles the situation.”
Ariel surprised him by agreeing completely. “He’s made mistakes…But he’s still in charge, and we’re still ready to do the Job.”
Harpal stood in the door. “If he accepts my resignation, that’s fine by me,” he said. “But why did he pick Rex? Rex is not the smartest person on the ship. He knows nothing about leadership.”
Martin held back the most obvious and the darkest answer he could think of: Rex won’t say no.
Hans kept to the back of the cafeteria, smiling benignly. Rosa stood on a table; sixty-three of the crew listened intently.
“In two days,” she said, “we’ll meet our new colleagues…What will they be like? What will they think and believe? How can we accommodate them? Interact with them? What are we, to them?”
The crew did not answer. Martin sat a few meters from Hans, beside Harpal and Ariel. Hans winked at Martin.
Rosa looked radiant; the beauty of intense compassion, of selflessness. Awkward Rosa had melted finally, giving way to a new woman; had the defining moment occurred in Hans’ arms? Hans revealed nothing.
“In the scale of things, we are the very smallest of intelligences, the very dimmest of lights. Yet like plankton in Earth’s seas, we lay the foundations for all the complex glory above us. We are the food and eggs and seed of all intelligence, up to and including that radiant center beyond all understanding. A disturbance in the sea of little thinking creatures can move up the spiritual food column with disastrous consequences, though it may take an age; and so the highest regards the lowest with more than just disinterested love, for we are ultimately them, part of their flesh, if they have flesh, part of their histories, and their futures…
“The colleagues joining us have undoubtedly suffered as we have. They have lost their home world, have wandered for centuries in foreign shells, and have fought and lost loved ones, all to vanquish the poison, the death of the Planet Killers. We join with them now, and the little intelligences merge…And it is noticed by those high above us, those in attendance on the Most High, the galaxies of bright spirituality that rotate around the unimaginably vast center…And that notice is not just a kind of love, it is love, compared to which the love we feel for the parts of our own body, for our own flesh, is a cheap imitation.
“Our success or failure has a larger meaning. When we die, we are not just lost; I have felt the cradle of the Most High coming for our dead, to embrace their memories, their essence, and draw them to the center, where there is eternal motion and eternal rest, peace and the center of all action.”
“She hasn’t read her Aquinas,” Ariel whispered to Martin.
But what Rosa said sounded good to him. Martin needed to know that Theresa and William were happy, that they had found rest; that sardonic and razor-sharp Theodore and all the others were appreciated somewhere, that perhaps they floated in a sea of painless interaction, showing their highest qualities to something that might finally appreciate them…
“When our ships join, we join purpose as well. All our goals must mesh. We are here not to satisfy the moms, but to clean the seas of a poison that could reach to the center itself. Call it evil, call it senseless greed, call it maladaptation…It is separate from the Most High, and the Most High does not cherish it.
“The cup-bearers of planetary death are not among the lights in attendance to the Most High; they are caught in a vicious cycle of pain and fear. We have felt their fear. It killed our home planet and it has ki
lled our friends; the time has come for us to apply the burning iron to that fear, and to send the Killers back to where they can again become part of the column, rise in usefulness again to the Most High.
“But we will not receive divine aid. Though there are things repugnant to the highest intelligences, the greatest spirits, they do not give us their powers and insights, when we fight the repugnant things. That would be a kind of interference even more evil than senseless murder; a confusion of scales, the Most High stifling the potential of the low, where all creativity, all creation begins. We are on our own, but our struggle is not senseless.”
“What do the moms think of this?” Harpal asked Martin in a low voice.
Martin shook his head.
“The story I tell this evening is of war. Nothing gentle, nothing soothing, it reminds us of what we face still, and may face for centuries more, before we can lay down our weapons and take up the duties of living for ourselves.”
“Why can’t I feel the touch and see what you’ve seen?” Nguyen Mountain Lily asked.
Rosa looked puzzled for an instant, then smiled again and raised her hands, sweeping all around. “The Most High is never not touching us. But it does not tell us what to do, and it does not speak to us in words; its presence is the conviction we all feel, that there must be a loving observer to whom we are very important, and who loves us.
“The love the Most High feels is not the love of sexuality and reproduction—it is the love of one of us for our own bodies, our own cells, a constant love made of care and nourishment. But we do not interfere with our own cells.”
Martin could poke holes in this like ripping a finger through rotten cloth, but he did not want to; he found himself explaining away the inconsistencies, the poor metaphors, as weaknesses in Rosa’s perceptions, not in her message.
“I don’t think anything watches me, or cares about me,” Thorkild Lax said. “I watch out for myself and for my crewmates.”
“I felt that way. I felt lost,” Rosa said. “I thought no one cared—not my crewmates, certainly. I was slovenly, out of touch. I didn’t really belong. No one was more lost than I was. But there was this final loving in me, this urge to reach out.” She folded her hands in front of her, then swept them out and up like two parting doves, fingers spread. “I reached out in the middle of my pain—“
“Enough of this shit,” a masculine voice called out. “Tell the story.”
The crowd turned and Martin saw George Dempsey, blushing at the accumulated stares. He got up, started to leave, but Alexis Baikal reached up and held on to his hand, pulled him gently down, and he sat.
Martin felt a warmth, and then a tremor of unease. The group spirit, the bonding again—the wish for strong answers, for transcending love. The special time.
He thought of his father and mother, and the touch his father could give, and the warmth of his mother, large and all-encompassing, the way she wore full dresses to cover her ample figure, the sweetness of her round face wrapped in dark silken hair, the complex and giving love of both; and he thought of that love writ large, the beginning place for that sort of love.
“How do I reach up and out?” Terry Loblolly asked, voice small in the cafeteria.
“When you need to, you will do it as a hungry flower blooms beneath the sun,” Rosa said. “If you do not need enough, you will not; your time is not yet.”
“If we don’t love, does the Most High blame us? Does he hate us?”
“The Most High is neither male nor female. It does not blame, it does not judge. It loves, and it gathers.” She curled her arms as if to gather unseen children to her breast and hug them.
“I need that touch badly,” Drusilla Norway said. “But I don’t feel it. Is that my fault?”
“You have no faults except in your own eyes. All fault is human judgment.”
“Then who will punish us for our sins?” Alexis Baikal asked, voice distorted with sorrow.
“Only ourselves. Punishment is our way of training ourselves for this level of life. The Most High does not acknowledge a court of law, a court of judgment. We are forgiven before we die, every moment of every day, whether we seek forgiveness or not.”
Martin thought of Theresa waiting at the end of this long journey to explain these things to him, part of the all-enveloping warmth; he put Theresa’s face over Rosa’s, and wanted to sleep in the comfort of this thought, hoped it would not go away.
“Is Jesus Christ the son of the Most High?” Michael Vineyard asked.
“Yes,” Rosa said, her smile broadening. “We are all its children. Christ must have felt the warmth like a fusion fire, even more strongly than I do. It glows from his words and deeds. The Buddha also felt the warmth, as did Muhammad…”
Hakim seemed displeased to hear the Prophet’s name in Rosa’s mouth.
“…And the many prophets and sages of Earth. They were mirrors to the sun.”
“All of them?” Michael persisted.
“All knew part of the truth.”
“Do you know only part?” Michael asked.
“A small part. You must explain the rest to me,” Rosa said. “Tell me what you find in yourselves.”
In murmurs, in challenges and questions, in Rosa’s parables and explanations, give and take, for the next two hours the crew spoke and confessed. A current went through the room as something palpable, as if she were a tree, and the wind of feeling passed around her, through her. When others in the crew cried, Martin found tears in his own eyes; when others laughed with a revelation of joy, he laughed also.
“I am not a prophet,” Rosa said. “I am simply a voice, no better than yours.”
“How can we hate our enemies, when they are just like us?” someone asked.
“We do not hate them; but they are not just like us, they are desperately wrong and we fight them with all our strength, for that is how we correct the imbalances. We must never be cruel, and we must never hate, for that damages us; but we must never forget our duties.”
Martin felt the Job fall into place in his thoughts; nothing holy about death and destruction, but a necessary part of their existence, their duty. A natural act, action to reaction.
Nothing they did was sanctioned; nothing they did was judged except by themselves, and by the standards that flooded them from the light of the Most High. The passion of revenge had no place here; it was an abomination. But the duty of correcting the balance, that was as essential as the breath in his lungs and the blood in his veins.
Groups pushed in close around Rosa, hands linked. Together they sang hymns, the wordless Hum, Christmas carols, ballads, whatever they remembered, while others searched the libraries for more songs. All their musical instruments had been absorbed in the emergency, but their voices remained.
The singing lasted an hour. Some were hoarse and weary, and some fell asleep on the floor, but still Rosa ministered to them. Jeanette Snap Dragon brought her a chair and she sat in it atop the table, her red hair standing out in radiant frizz around her head. Jeanette and others sat around her, on the table, at her feet. Jeanette placed her head on Rosa’s knees and seemed to sleep.
Others came, until almost all the crew filled the cafeteria. Some looked bewildered, feeling the current, but not letting it pass through them yet; hopeful but confused, resistant but needy.
The special time. Ariel came close to him and he hugged her as a sister. She looked up at him, head against his shoulder, and he smiled, loving all his fellows.
At Rosa’s request, the floor softened. The crew lay together on the floor, around the table, as the other tables and chairs lowered and were absorbed. Jeanette’s wand projected light behind Rosa and the room fell dark.
“Sleep,” Rosa said, her hair an indistinct shadow in the rosy glow. “Soon we begin our duties again. Sleep in peace, for there is work to do. Sleep, and reach into your dreams to find the truth. When you sleep you are most open to the wishes of your friends, and to the love of the Most High. Sleep.”
Martin closed his eyes.
Someone tapped his shoulder. Hans kneeled beside him. He shook Martin, whispered into his ear, “Cut it out. Come with me.”
Martin rose, a shock like electricity tingling through him. He seemed stuck between two worlds, shame and exaltation. Hans’ grim expression and tense marching posture seemed a reproof. Ariel followed, and at first it seemed Hans might send her back, but he said, “All right. Both of you.”
Rex Live Oak stood in the corridor, smiling wolfishly.
“Fantastic,” Hans said, shaking his head. “She’s so good. She’s got them all now.”
Martin’s head cleared as if with a dash of ice water.
“She just needed a little help and encouragement,” Hans said. Rex chuckled. “I damn near felt it myself. Didn’t you? I think we have this situation under control now.”
Ariel touched Martin’s shoulder but he shrugged away the touch.
“All she needed was a little reason to live, something just for herself,” Hans said.
“Don’t slick her too much,” Rex said. “Keep her lean and hungry.”
Hans shook his head ruefully. “Got to ration my blessings,” he said. “I only have so much to be generous with.”
Rex and Hans walked along the corridor. Ariel watched Martin for a moment and saw the anger on his face. “You didn’t know?” she asked, astonished. “He coached her, Martin. He’s been whispering in her ear for days.”
His eyes filled and he wiped them. He turned to stamp into another corridor, away from the cafeteria.
Ariel followed. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I assumed you knew! It was so obvious…”
“What was obvious?” Martin asked, still fleeing.
“He was turning Rosa, directing her to shore up the Job. Otherwise she could tear us apart. He thinks—“
“Thinks what?” Martin asked, stopping at the join to the neck. A ladder field appeared and he gripped it with his hand, preparing to descend.
Ariel caught up with him, still astonished by his naivete. She dropped her voice, murmuring as if embarrassed. “Hans is very smart. He sees that this vision can help him control the crew. He told us so. Remember?”