by Arthur C.
Even after all these years Johann could not mention Yasin’s name to himself without a surge of antipathy. Pushing these negative feelings aside, he recalled an evening a few months earlier when Maria had asked if the real St. Michael had had curly hair like the carved image of the young man on the amulet on her necklace. Johann had answered that although he had not personally known St. Michael, other people, Maria’s mother among them, had assured him that St. Michael’s hair had indeed been very curly. Johann had then explained the rest of the imagery on the amulet, including the nuclear fireball behind St. Michael’s head, and had taken advantage of the opportunity to remind Maria once again of her mother’s priesthood and her devotion to both Jesus and St. Michael. For once, the girl had not peppered him with questions. In fact, she had been so quiet that Johann had worried that something might be bothering her. During a particularly long pause in what had essentially been a monologue, Johann had looked across at Maria and in the reflected torchlight she had appeared far older than her years.
“You always tell me,” the girl had then said, “what my mother believed, and how important her religion was to her. But you have never told me what you believe, Johann. Are you a Michaelite too, like my mother? Or something else altogether?”
Johann had turned away for a second, astonished by the directness of the question. “I was raised a Lutheran, like most Northern Germans,” he had said after some reflection. “It’s a slightly different religion from your mother’s, but it is Christian and accepts the concept that Jesus Christ was the divine son of the one true God and appeared on Earth both to show us how to live and to save us from our sins.”
Johann had smiled. “If your mother were here, Maria,” he had continued, “she would justifiably have claimed that what I just said was a gross oversimplification. But it will suffice for now… Anyway, what do I believe? I believe there is a magnificent order in nature that may be the result of a master designer. I believe human beings are an in-credible miracle, a collection of chemicals manufactured in stars that have somehow evolved into consciousness and awareness… But, as far as I can tell, none of these beliefs has anything to do with the divinity of Jesus Christ or the personal Gods of Christianity and Islam…”
Standing in the lake deep inside the spherical extraterrestrial spaceship of unknown origin and purpose, Johann could remember vividly the puzzled, almost bewildered look on the girl’s face after their discussion about religion had concluded. It’s not enough that I force her to learn about a planet she has never seen, he thought, criticizing himself. I even confuse her with the illogic of the religions of our species. Of what possible importance is the concept of God here, in this alien world of ours? Of what significance are the lives of Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Saint Michael? If I had not made that promise to Beatrice, I doubt If I ever would have mentioned the subject of religion to Maria.
Johann’s contemplation was broken by the sound of splashing in the water. He turned to his left and saw Maria cavorting with her aquatic friends, Hansel and Gretel, a mated pair of creatures whose physical appearance and behavior both suggested a cross between sea lions and dolphins. Most afternoons, before the artificial daylight disappeared, the pair would approach the shore and squeal for their human playmate to join them. Maria loved to wrestle with Hansel and Gretel. She also rode on their backs, or tossed a light wooden ball back and forth with them. The sea creatures were Maria’s only real friends other than Johann.
Johann smiled as he listened to her laughter. I’m virtually certain, he thought, that this lake contained no life of any kind when Beatrice and I first came here. Our hosts stocked it for us while Maria and I were away. Now it would be difficult for us to live without the food it provides.
Maria was swimming a speed sprint beside Hansel. She lost, but just barely, and playfully whacked the creature’s flipperlike arm. Hansel feigned indignation and Maria laughed uninhibitedly. She needs their friendship, Johann said to himself. I am certainly not much of a playmate.
He felt a tug on his net and looked down into the clear water. Johann could not recognize what was caught in the net. He reached down and picked up something he had never seen before, a long, light blue tentacle, resembling a very thick garden hose, at the end of which was a large and powerful claw the size of a human hand. The edges of the claw were as sharp as a knife. Johann dropped the tentacle with the claw in the bucket without thinking. The water in the bucket suddenly exploded as those creatures who were still alive scrambled to move away from the new arrival.
MARIA WAS STRETCHED out on her bed a couple of meters to his left. Johann had dimmed the torches, as he always did at bedtime. He could barely see her face, but he could tell that her eyes were still open.
“Did you have a good birthday, Maria?” he asked.
“Oh yes, Johann,” she said quickly. “Dinner was great, the cake delicious and I loved the presents.” She held up Sister Nuba so that Johann could see her. “See, I’m sleeping with one of the new figurines… Tell me, what was Sister Nuba like?”
“I never knew her that well,” Johann answered. “The first time I really talked with her was when she came to Valhalla with your mother, right after Kwame Hassan and I explored those subterranean ice caverns beneath the Martian north pole. Sister Nuba was from Tunisia, if I remember correctly, and was one of the most devoted priestesses on Mars. She was quiet and shy, but had a beautiful smile. I’ll never forget how terrified she looked when that snowman-like thing wheeled into the large waiting room shortly after we entered this sphere…”
Maria had heard all Johann’s major stories several times. She knew the names and personalities of all ten of the other humans who had, along with Johann, departed from Mars in a bizarre, hatbox-shaped spacecraft that had been engulfed hours later by the gigantic sphere in which Johann and Maria were still residing. She was well aware that her mother, Beatrice, had been the first bishop assigned to Mars by the Order of St. Michael, that Johann had been the director of the Valhalla Outpost (the northernmost habitation on the red planet), and that the two of them had each separately seen, both on Earth and later on Mars, several astonishing apparitions of enigmatic, sparkling clouds of particles that had never been explained. Maria also knew that Johann and her mother had significantly different opinions about the likely origin and nature of these apparitions.
From time to time Johann reminded Maria that her mother never once wavered from her belief that the particles, whose manifestation inside the sphere had been as glowing, flying ribbons of light, were messenger angels sent from God. For his part, Johann explained his reasons for believing that the sparkling particles were some kind of extraterrestrial being, or at least an alien creation of some kind, and represented a species so advanced that to us they would seem to possess magical attributes.
Many of their late-night discussions were about the other people who had accompanied Johann into the sphere. In general, Johann told Maria the truth about everything. There were one or two exceptions to his rule of truth. The girl knew, for example, that Johann and Beatrice had been alone on the island for a long time before her father arrived, and that they had essentially lived together after her father’s death; however, Maria did not know the true nature of the relationship that had existed between Johann and her mother. She thought that they had only been the best of friends, like a brother and a sister, and that Johann had consoled Beatrice after the death of Yasin. Of course Maria knew nothing at all about the way her father actually died. She believed, because that is what Johann told her, that Yasin had fallen from one of the high cliffs on the opposite side of the island during the first trimester of her mother’s pregnancy.
On the night of Maria’s eighth-birthday celebration, after Johann finished telling his story about Sister Nuba, the girl rose from her bed and went over to the shelf where she kept all her human figurines. She pulled down three, Johann, her father, and her mother. Then she turned around and looked at Johann.
“What is it, Maria?” Jo
hann asked.
For a moment she was silent. “You know, Johann,” she then said matter-of-factly, “I really don’t have a very clear picture in my mind of my father. But it doesn’t really bother me. Would you like to know why?” She skipped across the cave until she was beside him. “My father couldn’t possibly have told me any more about my mother than you have, or, for that matter, cared about her any more than you did” Maria grinned. “And even if he had lived, my father couldn’t have been any nicer to me than you have been.”
She kissed him on the forehead and returned to her mat. Johann did not fight the tears that came into his eyes. “Good night, Maria,” he said. “And Happy Birthday again.”
TWO
JOHANN LAY AWAKE on his mat a few meters away from the sleeping girl. Despite the fact that he was tired, his mind would not let him sleep. It kept jumping from one topic to another. For a while he thought mostly about Maria, worrying about the kind of future she would have. Then the focus of his anxiety changed and Johann found himself asking the overwhelming questions for the umpteenth time since they had returned to the island. Why are we here? Who are our hosts? What is going to happen to us?
Unable to sleep, at length Johann rose quietly pulled on the new trousers that Maria and he had made the previous month, and walked to the front of the cave. He stood beside one of the two torches on either side of the entrance, idly staring out at the rocks, the plants, and the dirt pathways surrounding the cave. It seemed to Johann that he had been in this place forever. His childhood and university days in Germany, his years on Mars at Valhalla, and even the six months Maria and he had spent, just after her birth, in that strange place Johann called Whiteland, all seemed to be part of another lifetime.
As his eyes searched the darkness beyond the areas illuminated by the torches, memories of his first days on the island flooded into Johann’s consciousness. Again he could see Beatrice’s lovely face and hear her incredible voice, soaring majestically while singing one of her favorite songs. He had a vivid recollection also of the intensity of his love for her, and how happy he had been during those first hundred days, before Johann and his angel Beatrice lost the paradise offered to them by their unknown hosts. That was all here, Johann thought, in this same cave. He was unable to quell his feelings of sorrow.
Thoughts of Beatrice always pulled him toward her grave. He glanced back at the sleeping child before trudging up the pathway. Along the way he stopped to gather a bouquet of the red and white flowers that she had liked so much. Beatrice had always told him that those particular flowers reminded her of the amaryllis, one of the Earth’s most beautiful creations.
When Johann turned the corner in the path next to her gravesite, he looked up into the darkened interior of their mammoth alien spaceship and invoked Beatrice’s name. He asked her to give him a sign that Maria and he had not been abandoned by her altogether. For just a moment he thought he saw a light in the far distance. But the surge of hope quickly waned. There was nothing unusual in the sky
He laid the bouquet of flowers beside Beatrice’s grave. Eight years ago you died, Johann thought. You gave me your daughter to raise. He leaned back and stared at the exact place above the gravesite that had been filled with glowing ribbons on the night he had buried Beatrice. Or did you really die? he asked himself Maybe transformed, or transfigured, would be a better word.
On that amazing night Johann had been astonished to see Beatrice again, apparently alive, only minutes after he had covered her lifeless body with dirt. In his emotional distress, he had been certain that the glowing white figure beckoning to him from the top of the ramp that dropped out of the white hovercraft had indeed been his Beatrice. Only later, after he had carried Maria with him up the ramp and they had been transported to some other location in the starship, did the idea occur to Johann that perhaps the white being who was beside him was not really Beatrice at all, but just an amazingly accurate reproduction of her.
This person was his regular companion in Whiteland for the next six months. Slowly, surely, Johann realized that the woman nursing the child Maria was not really his Beatrice, but some other kind of creature or being altogether. She was so perfect that only someone who had studied Beatrice as closely as Johann had could possibly have noticed the subtle mistakes. A wrong gesture here or there, an occasional facial expression that was not correct, a speech pattern that she would never have used—these were the only differences between the Beatrice in white who was caring for the infant Maria and the woman who had died in Johann’s arms after childbirth.
Johann had yearned to touch this beautiful white Beatrice, not just because he wanted the comfort and pleasure, but also because he knew that if he could hold her in his arms for even a moment he would know for certain if she was really his Beatrice or simply a superb copy. She always told him gently that no physical contact between them could be permitted. The Beatrice in white explained that her body had “undergone a change” that might cause him distress if he touched her. “Maybe someday, Brother Johann,” she had said consolingly, “but not yet.”
But even a fake Beatrice was better than nothing, Johann thought. He recalled the morning when the Beatrice in white had announced, with no prior warning, that it was time for Johann and Maria to return to their island. During their flight back to the island in the hovercraft, Beatrice had explained to Johann that Maria now had enough teeth that she could eat solid food. She had then told him that Maria and he were to stay on the island until they received an unmistakable sign that it was time for them to leave. When they arrived at the island and disembarked, the white Beatrice had said only a brief good-bye and had then departed.
Suddenly she was gone, Johann recalled, somewhat surprised by the strength of his bitterness, without either explanation or preparation. It was abrupt and insensitive, both for Maria and for me. Since that time we have had no interaction with either Beatrice or the glowing ribbons.
Johann detested self-pity, especially in himself To force a change in his thoughts, he walked away from the gravesite, up the side of the mountain, and stared out toward the lake. In the total silence of the island he thought he could hear the water lapping gently on the shore. I am lonely for an adult companion, he thought to himself But it could be much worse. I have someone to love and cherish, which makes me…
His reverie was broken by Maria’s shout. Johann bolted down the pathway toward the caves, hurrying past the gravesite, and reaching Maria’s side in no more than a minute. Her beautiful blue eyes were wide open and a look of amazement was on her face.
“It was here, Johann,” she said excitedly. “Over there, against the wall… One of those ribbon things you told me about. Its light woke me up. As soon as I opened my eyes, it zoomed out the cave entrance.”
Johann pulled the girl to him. “That’s all right, Maria,” he said soothingly. “You’ve just had another of your vivid dreams.”
“It was not a dream, Johann,” Maria insisted. “I did see the glowing ribbon. Right there, in our cave. Only a few minutes ago.”
To placate her Johann toured the entire cave with the girl, searching for any evidence there had been a visitor. They found nothing. When Johann suggested that Maria should return to her mat and go back to sleep, the girl was indignant.
“Whether you believe me or not,” she said angrily, “I know what I saw.” Maria stomped over to the entrance. “It disappeared right…”
The child interrupted herself to bend down and pickup an object that was leaning against the bottom of the torch holder on the right side of the cave entrance. “See,” Maria said, turning to Johann with a satisfied smile on her face and holding up the object, “I told you so. That ribbon left me a birthday present.”
Johann was thunderstruck by what he saw in Maria’s hand. It was a doll, a perfect likeness of her mother, Beatrice, dressed in shimmering white exactly like the person or being that had accompanied them during the first six months of Maria’s life.
MARIA WAS NOT interest
ed in the geography lesson. She ignored Johann’s lecture about the Arabs and the Mediterranean. She continued to chatter about the glowing ribbon that had visited their cave. In the intervening four days, Maria had embellished the story of the ribbon’s visit with details from her hyperactive imagination.
“It did such a wonderful dance, Johann,” she said, interrupting his lecture while they were standing on top of Egypt on the flat world map that Johann had laboriously drawn on the beach sand. “Its tail bounced up and down quickly, the particles drifted back and forth, and then whoosh, it was gone.”
“You told me that night that you barely saw the ribbon at all,” Johann said crossly “And besides, Maria, we are presently in the middle of our geography lesson?”
“But it’s boring, Johann,” Maria said petulantly, switching the Beatrice doll rapidly from one hand to the other. “I don’t care about Egypt, or China, or Germany, or America. What difference do any of those places make to me?”
“Someday, Maria,” Johann said, “we may meet other human beings. Who knows, maybe you and I will even be returned to Earth. Then all this geography will be important. You may meet members of your family…”
“All right,” Maria said playfully, sensing that he was going to be stubborn. “I’ll show you what I know.” She jumped across the outline of the Atlantic Ocean that was drawn on the sand. “My mother grew up here in Minnesota, in America,” she said. “And Fernando Gomez lived here, in Mexico, until his assignment to Mars.”