Lights in the Deep

by Brad R Torgersen

  “I have visited every religious structure in the valley,” said the professor. “Each one seems to serve a different flavor of spirit. Tonight I visited the Mormons. You do not like the Mormons?”

  “I don’t not like the Mormons, let’s put it that way,” I said. The Chaplain had been a fierce Baptist. Didn’t think much of the whole Joseph Smith thing, or so he’d told me a few times in confidence. Loved the people, near as I could tell, but the so-called Prophet…hogwash. My dealings with the Mormons were few. They had their church, I had mine, and we operated at opposite ends of the valley. Seemed like a good fit. So what was the professor doing bringing Mormons here?

  “We’d better go,” said the man, sensing my vibe.

  I showed them out, and returned to the lamp-lit altar.

  “I have learned much,” said the professor. He pointed at the altar. “Here I see multiple symbols for your flavors. The star is for Jews. The cross is used by many different subdivisions of Christianity. The smaller star with the eclipsed disc is for Muslims. The fat human who laughs is the God of the Buddhists.”

  “Buddhists don’t really have a God like Christians or Muslims or Jews.”

  “But in the confines of this structure, you act as official for all of these, yes?”

  “The Chaplain did,” I said. “I just keep the building clean and make sure everyone knows that they can come in here during daylight. It’s what’s called multidenominational.”

  “The Mormons do not come here?”

  “Not usually.”

  “Do you compete with them? For followers?”

  “What?”

  “The avians and amphibians, it was a major part of their society, to compete for and hold adherents to a particular flavor of belief.”

  I thought of the internecine religious struggles which plagued Earth, right up to the present. I wondered if the mantes hadn’t already “cleansed” humanity’s homeworld in the same manner as had been done previously.

  “Some places that happens,” I said. “But not here. There aren’t enough of us that it’s worth fighting.”

  “The Muslims, at their mosque, they told me I was the devil.”

  I smiled a little bit. “Some Muslims are like that. They think everyone who isn’t Muslim is evil. Even, sometimes, other Muslims.”

  “Then why do you have their symbol on your religious furniture?”

  “Not all Muslims go to the mosque. Some of them—the open ones—they come here sometimes.”

  “But never Mormons.”

  “Look, I don’t really know what the beliefs are of the people who come to the chapel. I don’t put a sign out advertising for specific faiths. Once someone keeps coming for awhile I usually talk to them and figure out what they believe, but sometimes people don’t say anything at all. They come in, they sit, and whatever else they do inside their hearts and heads, well, it’s not my business.”

  “Then how does one join your church?”

  “I don’t have a church to join. The building…It’s separate from belief. My chapel just happens to service multiple religions. The others—the mosque, the synagogue—are for one ‘flavor’ only.”

  “Fascinating,” said the professor.

  “What’s so urgent,” I said, “that you needed to drag a couple of Mormons across the valley to talk to me in the middle of the night?”

  “Tomorrow I am bringing my students. I already have permission from Mormons for my students to attend their church. The Buddhists as well. Since the mosque is closed to us, I ask that my students be allowed to come to you to learn Islam. And Judaism. And any other flavor you can show to them.”

  “What about Hinduism?” I said.

  “There was no building for this Hinduism.”

  “They’re around, though not many.”

  “Then yes, that too.”

  Dammit, where was the Chaplain when I needed him? He’d have loved an opportunity like this. A chance to illuminate the enemy—to preach the gospel among the alien heathen. But the Chaplain was dead, and I was stuck in his place. I knew just enough about the major Earth religions to get by, but that was all. I felt it was a serious mistake to attempt to teach any of the mantes about religions which I myself didn’t understand beyond their basic precepts.

  But first, I needed an answer of my own.

  “Why should I do this for you, when your people plan to destroy my people?”

  The professor considered.

  “That is a fair question, assistant-to-the-Chaplain.”

  “Well?”

  “The logical answer is, you should not.”

  “What if I tell you that I won’t cooperate at all, unless you promise me that you’re going to go to the mantes—to this Quorum you talked about—and convince them to spare the valley. In fact, convince them to hold off on the Fourth Expansion, period.”

  The professor’s forelimbs made an expression of being taken aback.

  “I am a scholar, not a politician,” he said. “You ask me for things which I cannot promise, and may not even be able to attempt.”

  “You told me that enough mantes wanted to avoid the ‘mistake’ of killing humans before you understood us. What if you talked to and convinced them? How much influence does that body have?”

  “Again, you ask for that which I cannot deliver.”

  “But you and your ‘school’ mates obviously have enough leverage to at least get the Quorum to think twice?”

  The professor’s forelimbs rattled on his dish—agitation.

  “No, assistant-to-the-chaplain, I cannot do it.”

  “Then I won’t help you. In fact, I will go to the other churches and I will tell all of them what I know—about the genocide that is to come—and we will all promise together to not reveal even a single additional piece of information.”

  “This is the second time you have pretended to antagonize me,” he said.

  “And this is the second time I have had to remind you that I’ve got nothing to lose. Can you say the same?”

  The mantis stared at me, his beak opening ever so slightly. A flush of blue along the semi-soft portions of his carapace told me that I’d flustered him badly. He’d not expected me to bargain, only to obey.

  “It will take time, human,” he said.

  “Take all the time you want. Just stop your people from killing us.”

  The professor stared at me, then turned his head and stared long and hard at the altar, gleaming slightly in the wane light from the dimming oil lamps.

  “The difficulty is great,” he said hesitantly. “If I return with my students, you will know your answer.”

  “And if you don’t return at all?” I said.

  “Then that too will be an answer.”

  He left as the last lamp flickered out, leaving me in cold darkness.

  • • •

  Another week passed. Then a month. Purgatory’s axial tilt wasn’t as pronounced as Earth’s, so the seasons weren’t so well defined. There was no spring, summer, winter, or fall, just a warmer season and a colder season, with reflective growth and decay of alpine vegetation in the valley.

  The former officers came and quizzed me again, as did some self-designated representatives from a couple of the other faiths, all of whom wanted to know what the professor had talked to me about. I told them what I could—omitting the one, big piece of information I dared not reveal—and life went on.

  Two months. Three months. My dread of the inevitable began to deepen. The professor had never specified when the end might come, so I had no way of knowing if this was a delay in the course of events, or merely the running out of the proverbial sand into the bottom of the proverbial hourglass. Since he’d not come back I suspected that any hope I might kindle—and this happened more than once—was a false hope. So I stuffed it down and tried to be resigned to whatever happened.

  If nothing else, the professor’s visits got the word out among the valley’s inhabitants, and my flock grew substantially. I wasn’
t sure what to think about that, other than being grateful for the increased donations of goods at my drop box by the front door. I still didn’t preach—would not have had the foggiest idea what to say to any of them—but I kept the chapel clean, I made sure the altar and all the objects on it were tidy and arranged according to pattern, and I welcomed in everyone who felt the need to come.

  When an entire Purgatorial year passed—perhaps one and a half Earth standard—I began to wonder if the professor hadn’t been an eccentric. A nutball. Such people existed among humans, why not the mantes? He had been chasing religion, after all, and I had nothing to corroborate what he’d said. Perhaps he’d been a millennial—someone attracted to and fascinated by ‘end times’ myth. Enough to spin me a story?

  The first sign of the inevitable came when the hill farmers reported that The Wall was beginning to close in. Slowly, at first. A few centimeters a day. But then the rate of shrinkage got to the point where you could literally watch it happen. I went up to the valley rim myself, and saw the curtain slowly drifting across the ground, noiseless and lethal as it’d always been.

  The mood in the valley promptly shifted to panic.

  My mood became eerily serene. The others didn’t know what I knew, but somehow I felt better at least getting a solid answer. Whether he’d been legit or not, the professor had been unable to change the minds of the other mantes, and now I would witness the end of human life on this dried-up world at the edge of the known galaxy.

  Attendance in the chapel went through the roof.

  I was forced to allow people to begin spending the night.

  Who was I to keep banker’s hours, at a time like this? As long as people didn’t leave a mess—excremental or otherwise—I let them stay as long as they wanted.

  By the time The Wall was in the valley floor, and closing at well over a meter per day, I had more people in the chapel than could possibly fit. I began to fear that the combination of fear and crowding might cause a riot. But my flock was like me, for the most part—calm and resigned, maybe attempting to make some sort of final peace with the universe before ultimate doom came upon them. Perhaps, also, we were each of us eager for escape. It had been years since we’d walked freely on a human world, masters of our own universe. Life in the valley, controlled utterly by the mantes, had been like a living coffin. But now, it would end.

  • • •

  When The Wall was visible from the doorway of the chapel, people were giving themselves up to it on a regular basis. My parishioners, others from around the valley, anybody who’d just gotten tired of the waiting, and decided to end it. I began to be able to tell who those people were. The pews would be packed, and someone would just stand up and slowly walk out, a look of remarkable calm on his or her face. They’d keep going like that—calm, quiet, no running, right up and into the wall. Flash. One moment, a human being. The next, a cloud of carbon, decaying to sub-molecular nothingness.

  I heard that the other churches began railing against this practice. Suicide was sin, and for those who walked into the wall, it was said, there would be damnation.

  I wasn’t so sure about that. I couldn’t believe in any God that would curse a soul who picked freedom from this place, especially since we were all going to die anyway. I even considered it a few times myself, just getting up and walking out and ending it. The only thing that stopped me was my flock. They needed the chapel, and the chapel needed me, so I stayed where I was, and watched the wall creep towards us, and dreamt odd dreams at night of flying away from Purgatory on a gust of warm ether, floating to another world far, far from anywhere I’d ever been before.

  • • •

  I was out of bed early, getting ready to light the altar lamps in the pre-dawn darkness, when I heard the shriek at the foyer. Jumping over a few people who had curled up asleep in the central aisle, I found a woman leaning against the doorway and pointing into the distance. I peered out and saw nothing. Just the black shapes of the mountains, and the almost imperceptible lightening of the sky in the east.

  Then, like a physical thunderclap, it hit me.

  I was seeing nothing but mountains!

  Other shouts, from inside the church, had roused my flock to their feet.

  I stumbled out onto the packed earth in front of the chapel, and looked to the scattering of other nearby buildings where others had also come out to see.

  The Wall. It was…gone.

  • • •

  The professor and his students showed up later that day. Eighty young mantes, each riding an unarmored and unarmed disc, their carapaces green whereas the professor’s was a dingier brown. Very young. And eager. They congregated at the chapel, observing the mass of hundreds of people who can come to crowd the inside and the outside of my church, giving thanks to various versions of the Lord for their salvation. I squeezed my way out of the building and went out to greet the professor, waving my arms and smiling genuinely for probably the first time in almost two years.

  “You were successful,” I said matter-of-factly.

  “For the moment,” said the professor, wings fluttering slightly. “It took a great deal of argument and debate through the university system, but together we pressed the Quorum, and they agreed to stay your communal execution.”

  “What of the Fourth Expansion?”

  “That too has been stayed, until my students and I can complete our research here. We are to observe and learn all we can about humans: religion, culture, all of it in as natural an environment as possible.”

  “Is that why The Wall is gone?” I asked.

  “Yes. I had to fight hardest to get that done, but my colleagues and I believe it is impossible to conduct accurate research so long as humans are trapped in a test tube. You’re free to travel as far as you wish, though I would warn you that not all the mantes in this hemisphere will take kindly to seeing humans roaming free through land that they still consider theirs. I would advise caution.”

  “And when your research is complete?”

  “That will be many of your years from now, assistant-to-the-Chaplain. Many things can happen in that time. Many minds can be changed.”

  “Mantis minds?” I said.

  “Perhaps human too,” said the professor.

  His wings fluttered again. And that’s when I felt it start to bubble out of me. Laughter. Clean, peeling, exuberant laughter. So much that I had to bend over and drop to all fours, gasping. I finally recovered and, wiping my eyes, got back to my feet.

  “Come on,” I told him. “You kept your part of the bargain. I have to keep mine. You should come watch this.”

  I led the professor back towards my chapel, and my flock.

  ▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

  “The Chaplain’s Assistant” was written as a submission to an imaginary anthology which would have been titled A Planet Too Far, had it ever reached publication. The assignment—from the Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith short story workshop, as attended by editor Denise Little—was to come up with short fiction focusing on planets or colonies on the bleeding edge. Worlds in peril. People who’d taken one too many steps into the galaxy, and who might now be hanging on the very edge.

  At that particular time (in early 2010) I’d been toying with an altogether different idea: what was it about religious faith that allowed many former Prisoners of War to fare better in captivity than those POWs who were not necessarily religious, or who didn’t have much faith to speak of?

  It instantly occurred to me that I should blend the conceits: planet on the edge, with POWs struggling for survival, and how or why religion might play a role.

  It seemed a somewhat risky endeavor. Science fiction is, after all, the home of many a staunch atheist and secular humanist. There are some who might even say that it’s the “job” of science fiction to point out what’s very wrong with religion. I had no idea how my instructors (Dean, Denise, and Kris) would react to a story that smiled on faith, and I certainly had no idea how a potential major ma
rket like Analog magazine might react. Probably poorly, was my initial thought. Though once the conceits melded in my brain, I decided the story was too good not to write, and I proceeded despite my misgivings.

  I knew I’d done well when a classmate I respect (and who’d read the story) gave it high marks. Thank you, Professor West! Also, Dean Wesley Smith said he liked the story despite his specific personal aversion to the subject matter. So I knew going out of the class that if the story had won Dean over—he of the potentially jaundiced religious sensibilities—perhaps the story might win other people over as well?

  I got my answer later in the year when Stan Schmidt picked up “The Chaplain’s Assistant” for Analog. Like Dean, the subject matter wasn’t precisely to Stan’s liking, but I’d executed the material professionally enough and with sufficient impact to win over both Dean and Stan alike.

  I won readers over too, as “The Chaplain’s Assistant” figured large on the AnLab readers’ poll the next year, for its category.

  I then took that reader response, and wrote a much larger sequel.

  Which in turn generated still more appreciative editorial and reader response.

  As well as a full-blown novelization. Which I am proud to say has been picked up by Baen Books, for a targeted publication some time in 2014.

  Which just goes to show that you never know what kind of fruit you might get from a tiny little seed of a story. There’s certainly a lot of me in this tale, and in all that’s come afterward. A lot of deep thought and pondering, you might say. I am glad that (so far at least) most people who’ve read the stories and the novel, have found them worth the effort. Whether they agreed with some of the premises I put forth, or not.

  ***

  The Chaplain’s Legacy

  Chapter 1

  Chief Barlow,” said the female voice through the wooden door.

  Lost in thought, I didn’t answer right away.

  She cleared her throat, and tried again. “Warrant Officer Harrison Barlow?”

  I sighed, and slowly got up from my seat at my desk in the tiny pastor’s quarters of my chapel.