The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction

by Damien Broderick

  ‘Father, I have to be honest. I chose Catholicism because right now it seems to me to be valid. It’s the sole branch of Christianity which can trace its roots directly to Jesus and the apostles. But I’m a scientist. To me, understanding is always provisional. I’m still tormented by doubts.’

  ‘Ten thousand difficulties do not make a single doubt, my son. A keen awareness of difficulties is the occupational hazard of Christian intellectuals. Sometimes I think how much easier it would have been to live in the twelfth century, but then I remember their sewerage. Look, let’s wrap this up with a general declaration, and we’ll go up and have some coffee.’

  ‘Yes. Lord. I have offended against Your commandments, and I am truly sorry.’

  ‘For penance I’d like you to make a novena of Masses to Our Lady during the next nine days. Express your sorrow to God, now, and I’ll give you absolution.’

  ‘Father, I have sinned against You and am not worthy to be called Your son. Be merciful to me, a sinner.’

  ‘God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good.’

  ‘His mercy endures forever.’

  ‘The Lord has freed you from your sins. Go in peace.’

  ‘Uh, Father, one final thing. I believe I have a vocation as a Jesuit.’

  ‘Hmmm. Let’s take a rain check on that one.’

  ~ * ~

  V

  I used in imagination to see the bridges collapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. Its inhabitants began to seem like hallucinations, and I would wonder whether the world in which I thought I had lived was a mere product of my own febrile nightmares.

  Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

  ~ * ~

  Shriven, buoyant with the promise of the City, Father Raphael Silverman dons amice, alb, chasuble and stole, his vestments blood red in honor of St Agatha, Virgin and Martyr, and says Mass in the Lady Chapel behind the great altar reserved for the Father-General. With so many priests aboard the Monastery, the listing of chapels is orchestrated in a timetable by the computers. Even so, Silverman concelebrates the Mystery with the two priests who will go down to the planet with him this afternoon. Brother Kohler, his team’s electronics specialist, serves the Mass, burly in white surplice.

  It is a cause of some irritation that Cardinal Madrazo has insisted on the inclusion of an Eclectic. Silverman cannot feel at ease in the presence of radically lateral insight. The Father-General discerns the private roots of his disquiet and resistance.

  ‘Eclectics are a jumpy breed,’ Silverman has argued.

  The Cardinal smiled. ‘Father Chan is made of sterner stuff. Raphael, you were a little skittish yesterday. Tsung-Dao is a discreet fellow. Besides—if that thing down there is as peculiar as you suggest, you really ought to have a co-ordinating synthesist with you.’

  Silverman introduces Father Chan to the other Jesuits during descent. The Chinese priest knows their work, of course, and they have seen him at Mass this very day, but incredibly he has never spoken to them before. Even in the closed environment of the Monastery, Eclectics tend to relate to others chiefly through the cybersystem. It is a mark of ‘singularity’, that vice most swiftly extirpated under the Common Rule, but their special gifts and training make it permissible.

  Deliberately, Silverman gives them no warning of what they might expect. Coronal effect flares about their vessel. The survey boat, far better equipped with instruments than yesterday’s skiff, plummets through the City’s screen, trailed by a mild magneto-hydrodynamic storm. They bypass the scarp, falling to rest amid the wet green fields which spread on every side around the City.

  Not one of them moves a muscle.

  The tiers rise like the airy battlements of a castle of crystal, a tracery of translucent marble and quicksilver. Dew-wet grass is a carpet of gems, unmuted, glistening in the morning sunlight. The City humbles them. They simply sit.

  If Silverman has half-feared the penetrating insight of an Eclectic at this naked moment, that trepidation is gone. The sheer ontological impact of the City is scored in the small silent movements (a hand half-lifted, a foot drawn back), the pent breath, the trapped gaze of his colleagues.

  Yet grandeur is not indefinitely paralyzing. Slowly the scientists come to themselves. In continued silence, they begin to gather their instruments for the trip across to the City. Henry Walson slides a cassette roll expertly into a camera. For a moment, after his hands have completed their automatic task, he stands helplessly before the viewpod. But the imposed discipline which has shaped them all is finally no less automatic. Bending his tonsured head over the camera, the xenologist shoots a rapid series of holograms.

  Brother Kohler piles the gravity polarizer with field equipment. By the time Walson has finished his cassette, Kohler is looking to Silverman for permission to cycle open the latch. Chan, unused to expeditions beyond the Monastery, is once more checking the seals on his filter-skin. The camera beeps and disgorges the first windows. Silverman plucks them from the slot. His face drains of blood. The world moves away from him.

  ‘Wait,’ he says. His own voice resonates strangely within his head, like a cry heard underwater. The engineer lifts his stubby hand from the hatch control. Walson halts in the process of inserting a fresh cartridge of holotape.

  ‘Let me have them, Father,’ comes Tsung-Dao Chan’s cool voice. Like all of them, he speaks in Latin. From Silverman’s numb grasp he takes the vivid colored prints. Surprised, the others peer over his shoulder, and their mouths loosen.

  Each of the hologram windows is technically perfect. Grass sparkles lustrously, with here and there a clump of merry wildflowers, and the cloudless daybreak sky shines in true dimensional depth. And where the City itself lifts like a cantata outside the survey boat’s clear viewpod, the windows show only three enormous pieces of statuary, dwarfed and foreshortened by distance, alien and powerful and each of the most blazing and absolute malevolence.

  Silverman finds his mind cringing into stupidity and denial. He stares from one man to another, stares in repeated incredulous darts back to the curved transparency of the hullpod. A kilometre away at most, the City reaches up to the bowl of heaven. If it is not real, nothing is real. If the City is not as palpable as his trembling hand, as the titanium body of the spacecraft, as the soil and rock and magma of the planet they stand on, then all of that too is no more than whimsical illusion. Dr Johnson kicks his stone. The City has gripped the minds and bowels of four men in a rapture of the ultimate truth it embodies. The holopics say it is not there. And the grotesque filthiness they put in its place is a paralyzing blow to Silverman’s fragile, breaking sense of decency. He is plunged once more and without reprieve into the abstract and bestial madness of Southern Cross.

  At a remove, he hears Kohler’s challenge.

  ‘Why didn’t the sensors show us this from orbit?” The lay brother’s voice has a thwarted, ugly note. That in itself is an appalling thing. Horst Kohler is the most hardheaded of empiricists. Yet some part of this moment’s monstrous nausea has transmitted itself to his armoured sensibilities.

  Wearily, bile in his mouth, Father Silverman finds his seat. ‘The sensors were fooled by the City’s shields, Brother. That’s why the computers allowed me down here alone in the first place. The fact of it is, I was astonished to find anything this large and complex.’

  A rasping, perhaps laughter, works at his throat.

  ~ * ~

  VI

  Or to put it another way, they can become alienated from Being, although they have received their being from the letting-be of Being; and having become alienated from Being, they let themselves slip back from f
uller being to less being, and toward nothing. This in turn frustrates the letting-be of Being, for the beings that Being has let be fail to fulfill their potentialities for being, and slip back from them.

  Dr John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology

  In meditation on invisible things … consider that my soul is imprisoned in this corruptible body, and my whole self in this vale of misery, as it were in exile among brute beasts; I say my whole self, that is, soul and body.

  ~ * ~

  Imprisoned in a quite literal sense in the closeted sanctuary of the Collegio di San Roberto Bellarmino on the Via de Seminario, launched on the fearsome thirty-day catenary of the Long Retreat which would conclude his novitiate, Thomas, born Raphael, composed his spirit to the mournful contemplation of the First of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. If under the waters of baptism he had adopted the name Thomas, on that trembling day six years earlier, it had not been from any transparent impulse of pride. Father Morris Hertz had chided him mildly, surmising that Raphael was placing himself under the particular protection of St Thomas Aquinas, that prodigious intellect known to his contemporaries as the Ox and to Mother Church as the Angelic Doctor. Raphael had smiled; his devotion was to Thomas the Apostle, the Doubter, the empiricist brought to faith in the risen Redeemer only by the gross insertion of his fingers into the Lord’s palpable wounds.

  Now that same obdurate hankering for proof, for logic, for a place to stand where his mind as well as soul might own its sense of integrity, that inevitable flaw faced a massive battering which would either anneal its lesions or shatter it. So the Retreat had been designed. Raphael knelt upright, a penitential exercitant embarking on a profound harrowing which had fetched men during nearly half a millennium abruptly up against the hard edge of mystery.

  ‘You must call most strenuously upon every faculty,’ the Director of the Retreat had urged the novices. He was a stern Japanese, with a lined face. ‘St Ignatius stresses the “three powers of the soul.” The first is memory, which is the storehouse of truth: the life of our Lord and the teachings of the Church. The second is understanding, by which we bring that knowledge fully within heart and mind. And the third is will, our active compliance in that knowledge under the free grace of God.’

  Each step presented an abyss, waiting for Raphael’s stumbling feet. He forced himself to heed the advice of the author of the Exercises, though his mind revolted: It is not abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, so much as the interior understanding and savouring of the truth.

  ~ * ~

  Bring to mind the sin of the angels, how they were created in grace, yet, not willing to help themselves by the means of their liberty in the work of paying reverence and obedience to their Creator and Lord, falling into pride, they were changed from grace into malice, and hurled from Heaven to Hell …

  ~ * ~

  ‘You may treat the angelic revolt as metaphor,’ the Director told them blandly. ‘Scholars tend today to view them as intrusions into the early Hebrew oral teachings, derived by assimilation from the messengers and demiurges of their pagan neighbors.’

  Instantly Raphael was in trouble. His three years of neo-scholastic philosphy still lay ahead, but he had read sufficient of his non-namesake Aquinas to grasp that, in the hierarchy of being, purely spiritual creatures were a logical order standing between God and humankind. Beyond logic, the indubitable fact of angels was attested by Scriptures common to Jewish and Christian faiths (and Islamic, for that matter). Nor was there anything in the idea of angels remotely offensive to a man with a doctorate in unitive physics. Now that the unitary scholium was effectively proven, with all spacetime a skein of multi-dimensional strings, or preons, it was plain that immaterial being was precisely as intelligible as the single dimensionless constant of the preonic Planck mass.

  No, the difficulty looming like a lion was the nature of sin, the subject of this meditation. For the oldest opinion of the Fathers of the Church insisted that humanity’s very genesis lay exactly in those fallen stars, plunging to damnation in the wake of their brilliant leader Lucifer. The doctrine lacked popularity these days, yet by tradition mankind was a kind of surrogate for those first demonic criminals; their places in Heaven—reserved, so to speak, on their behalf and now vacant—were to be made up in the numbers of the elect. Just as the original sin of our proto-parents had at once cursed us and occasioned the coming of God in human form for our salvation, the lapse of the fiends was the ‘happy fault’ which first opened the way to our felicity. Myth, undoubtedly, but myth inspired at the Divine Source.

  Raphael stirred minutely, keeping his eyes modestly lowered. Cramp twinged his left leg; he ignored it, seeking fiercely to crystalize his problem. It was this: angels, according to the most profound of metaphysics, were simple in nature, not divisible into parts, unmingled with matter, perceiving and understanding by intuition, seizing essences direct, without the limitations which oblige men to infer principles from sense data and consequences from principles. Their apprehension was non-deductive, free of hypothesis and test, free indeed of time itself. No emotion could blur their reason, nor was reason prey to logical error or inaccuracy.

  How, then, could such sublime beings sin? It was madness. It defied precisely that rationality which angels possessed in superabundance. Loyola, in harmony with tradition, indicated pride as the source and nature of angelic revolt. Yet wasn’t this ludicrous anthropomorphism ?

  Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven? For an earthly potentate, or an arrogant scientist, no motive was easier to comprehend. Yet the beatitude of Heaven lay centrally in the witness of God’s unshielded Face, in subservience to the logic, as it were, of necessity: the triumph of will governed by reason. It was not merely a matter of self-interest, though it was certainly that also, at a crass level; the self-damnation of the fallen host was utterly at odds with their defining essence.

  ~ * ~

  The sin of Adam and Eve: bring before the memory how, for that sin, they did such long penance, and how much corruption came upon the human race, so many men being put on the way to Hell.

  ~ * ~

  When the Director softly announced the second point of contemplation, Raphael was startled by the degree to which his cassock adhered to his chest and upper arms. He sniffed carefully: his own flesh stank with sweat. Now the novices stood with their arms crossed, while the Director redoubled his advice to treat the point as a praiseworthy metaphor, an archetypal figure which must not occasion scruples of conscience in those for whom original sin was an existential truth rather than a fundamentalist event in history.

  Again, Raphael was plunged at once into his struggle with pythons. The Hassidim among whom his father had worked would have been scandalized to hear the words of Torah reinterpreted so unblushingly. Not that the notion of original sin as primal hereditary fault had any place in Raphael’s Judaic heritage: it had been with some astonishment that he had found it at the core of his new faith. Of course, Orthodox and Reform rabbinical opinion had long understood that evolution left no role for an historical special creation of proto-parents for the race.

  Pinning the problem down as well as he might, Raphael saw it as the relationship between creation, knowledge, will and sin. ‘Corruption came upon the human race.’ Yes, men were scarred by a proclivity to sin, to disobedience, to every kind of vice and corruption. It could hardly be due to the limitations inherent in their mode of creation, spirit and matter conjoined, for that would impute blame to the Master of the Universe. Origen Adamantius and other early Christian heretics had proclaimed creation itself evil, a doctrine so perverted that its principal proponent betrayed its source by hacking off his genitals. Still, creation was at root tragic. It groaned in travail.

  Raphael was fetched back to the putative sin of the angels. It was the risk of God’s creation that unbounded Being, the dynamic Triune force which the Apostle’s Creed affirmed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, would ‘let be’ a
prodigious universe teeming with particular beings. Risk, yes, since each of these contingent created beings would then view itself as centre and goal, chafing under its dependence on the Source of Being, striving in the heart of its idolatrous consciousness to usurp the rightful position and power of God.

  It was, in short, sin against the first of the Ten Commandments. An angel might intuit at some horizon of clarity the primordial Father, the expressive Son and the unitive Spirit as that transcendent dialectic which supported its own secondary existence, and still crave the apotheosis of its individuality. How much more so might human beings tumble into this trap, with each individual consciousness clamouring for supremacy within each skull?

  And sustaining that lust for power, Raphael realized, were the multiple impulses printed in DNA, each creature inheriting four billion years of evolutionary strife: the yearning not only for individual survival but for corporate destiny, with its dire counterpart to altruism, a ruthless directive to obliterate all that stood in the path of the extended self.

  Raphael blinked. Beads of perspiration crept stingingly from his forehead into the corners of his eyes. Even so, he felt dissociated, adrift. Perhaps he was succeeding with memory and understanding, but the application of this knowledge to an act of will seemed farther away than ever. His stubborn will cried out, in fury, that the arguments he had rehearsed were specious, a tangle of linguistic fallacies adorning a dung heap of savage superstitions, no whit better than the faith he had renounced. Desolation moved on him like the Angel of Death.