Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “Maybe they are worshipping the Hern like gods.”

  He gives me a look that spells blasphemy in huge capital letters.

  Oh, right. I’m in a church. One that believes that the existence of God will be proven when they find an alien race that also believes in God. Therefore, it is in their interest to study these humanoid aliens and convert them before anyone else gets the chance.

  I glance at him, very much wanting to say, you look to me to be a more intelligent man than that.

  He meets my eyes squarely and a look passes between us I don’t know how to take, but that unsettles me deeply. I think he is more intelligent than that.

  And damn, I feel sorry for him. He’s too young, too emotionally involved, to be stuck in this hellhole.

  The food trolley chooses that moment to arrive. That, I decide, is definitely divine intervention.

  I get up and take a plate, which the serving brother dutifully fills with slop-covered cubed vegetables.

  When I rejoin the table, a number of others have taken up the seats around us, Envoy El-Armeini’s journal shoved to the middle of the table out of the way of their plates.

  The men range from middle-aged to young. They introduce themselves as Brothers Heraclides, Tycho and Ibn-al-Haytham.

  “Ancient Earth astronomers, huh?” I say, by way of getting them to talk.

  Brother Tycho raises his black-stubbled eyebrows. “Have any interest in ancient astronomy?” His voice is deep and more sensual than is comfortable for a religious brother.

  “I’m an envoy of the Solaris Agency. I have an interest in anything that involves our species’ obsession with expansion . . . and resulting conflicts.”

  The other brothers make a point of looking at their plates, but Brother Tycho laughs, not entirely comfortable. “Conflicts we are working hard to solve.” His eyes meet mine; they’re dark brown.

  I strongly suspect that underneath the uniformity of the equalitarian brown robe, he’s one of the upper cadre. Scouting me out, as it were.

  “Are you happy with your progress?” I ask.

  “We’re on track.” His gaze doesn’t waver. “We’ve isolated the Hern; they’re under control. We need funds to expand that operation to other parts of the planet. We need funds and equipment for translation and communication with the Pari. Most of that will be coming from church charity, but we need the support from Solaris for inbound transport.”

  And off-planet transport just happens to be much more costly than all the other expenditure combined; I hate it when people try emotional blackmail on us.

  And yet, damn, Brother Copernicus is right: the Pari deserve humanitarian help.

  “Have you considered that human presence contributes to the war?”

  Brother Copernicus stares at me. Is he shaking his head?

  “You mean—the church’s presence?” Brother Tycho’s voice goes cold.

  “The church or any other human involvement.”

  “Hardly likely,” Brother Tycho continues. “We only have one mission on the planet. This war is happening all over.”

  “Yes, I agree, but could it have been something human presence has triggered? For example, the Hern are jealous of the attention and help the Pari are getting.”

  “There’s an easy solution for that: if the Hern stop killing and pilfering, they’ll get the same attention.”

  “Maybe killing and pilfering is their evolutionary function.”

  His eyes shoot daggers at me. The church is not a great supporter of evolution either.

  “The Hern in the camp appear to be on a hunger strike,” I continue, perhaps foolhardy.

  “Same thing, Envoy. The hunger strike is their problem. We give them food. They refuse to eat.”

  Brother Copernicus shrinks further into the shadows.

  The discussion turns to other subjects. We eat, we chat about harmless things or relatively so. About Earth governments and who’s in charge. News gets around slowly. The beamsweep from Solaris is restricted to urgent news and it passes only every few days. There is so much these men don’t know.

  When I walk back to my room, Brother Copernicus catches up with me in the corridor.

  “I think,” he says, and then he pauses, catching his breath.

  I turn to him, and my questioning look has the effect of making him shrink. He’s sweating and pale-faced.

  “You must help,” he says. “You must understand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can’t leave the Pari to fend for themselves. We—the mission—can’t leave Bianca. The Pari will be slaughtered. You’re saying that the Hern don’t eat. They do. They eat the Pari. It’s so awful no one talks about it—”

  “Hold on—wait.” I raise my hand to stop the flow of words.

  A Brother comes into the corridor and walks past us, raising his nonexistent eyebrows.

  “Come,” Brother Copernicus says. “I’ll show you something.”

  He precedes me into a darkened room. A flick of a switch brings light in a laboratory—empty and deserted. It’s eerily quiet except for the ever-present hiss of air from the recycling vents.

  There are shelves on the walls with jars of preserved samples: huge insects, flowers as big as a dinner plate.

  “What is this place?”

  “We used to do research here,” he says. Beads of sweat glisten on his brow. “Or rather, I used to. I was a church scientist.” He walks to a shelf and pulls off a book. The pages contain dried leaves: a herbarium.

  “Look at it. There is so much to discover. Did you know that the plants here don’t work the same way they do on Earth? They use methane, ammonia and water vapor for photosynthesis, that’s why you get the cyanide concentrations in the forest. There are whole communities of mushroom-like organisms that depend on it, like this thing . . .” He leafs through another page to show a picture of some slimy-looking multi-branched semitransparent mushroom attached to a tree. “We don’t know how it works. Plants produce twice as much oxygen as they do on Earth. They recycle carbon internally. Light is important. See how all the plants angle their leaves for maximum exposure? Even the animals use light.”

  “Is that why the Hern’s skin is green?”

  He takes another book off the shelf. It contains pictures of various forms of Pari. There are sketches of their external body parts and few scans and x-rays. The internal diagrams have a lot of white space with tentative drawings of blood vessels and organs.

  “There’s not much about the Hern,” I say, leafing through the book.

  He shakes his head.

  I come to a page with a picture of a body lying on the ground. The stomach is cut open, flaps of skin folded away to reveal a large white sac inside the stomach cavity.

  “That’s Hern,” he says. “The only specimen anyone ever studied, before its fellows attacked and burned the body. It happened before I came.”

  I turn the page and come face-to-face with another picture of the white sac, cut open. The content oozes out onto the ground. It looks like caviar. Eggs? I feel sick and turn the page again; the next page is empty.

  “The scientists never had the opportunity to study the Hern. There never used to be many, and it was a long time before anyone saw them up close. They’re the top of the food chain, and they’ve multiplied like crazy since we’ve come. I know Brother Tycho will never admit it, but it has to be something we have done to allow that to happen. When we came here, there were no white tracks. The Pari lived happily in their villages. They were learning to communicate with us. And then all of a sudden . . .” He lifts his hands. “No one knows what happened, but the only thing that changed was that we were here, trying to make these creatures human.”

  “Which they’re not.”

  “Which, indeed, they’re not
.”

  “Why did the research stop?” I ask.

  “Solaris withdrew because there’s no profit, but you know all about that.” When I ignore the barb, he goes on. “There’s nothing to mine here except titanium, and there’s plenty of that in places that don’t require heavy-lift off-planet transport. So the Solaris scientists left. Then the church scientists took over the labs—”

  “In other words: you.”

  “Yes, me and others, who have all left.” He breathes in deeply and continues. “The others were never in the Order; they were only employed by the church.” He lets a further silence lapse and continues in third person. “The scientists working for the church found that neither the Hern nor the Pari are quite as human as they look. The upper cadre didn’t want to look like they’d wasted the church’s money. So they classified the Hern and Pari as animals and called in help from the Solaris Agency, much in the way as you intervene on other worlds. By then, the war had broken out.”

  Brother Copernicus slumps. His breathing is ragged and irregular. “They’re abandoning these lovely people to the Hern butchers. They’re saying these people don’t deserve the grace of God, because they don’t happen to believe in any God at all. You do know it’s the Universal Church’s first directive to go and find intelligent alien societies and prove they believe in God, and that this will prove His existence to non-believers and skeptics?”

  He buries his face in his hands. “So we find a remotely intelligent society. We come in. We wreck it so that one-half of a functioning ecosystem starts to kill off the other, and then we tell everyone that oh no, it was a mistake. These were never people and they were never intelligent. You know what that means to me, Envoy Miranda Tonkin? It proves to me there is no God. If there was, He certainly would have stopped this.” His shoulders are shaking.

  I don’t know what to say. I was born nominally religious, but have never cultivated that aspect of my life. I don’t know how it feels to have your belief, your sole reason of being, ripped out from under you. But I imagine it feels at least as bad as finding out, at sixteen, that your parents are not your real parents, and moreover, want nothing more to do with you. It feels at least as bad as being sardined onto a long-haul passenger liner to Solaris Station. It feels as bad as knocking on your grandmother’s door and having a neighbor inform you that “the old lady” died three months ago. It feels as bad as wandering the docks without money or a place to stay. Being hungry. Selling yourself in dark nooks of disreputable corridors until some bugger comes along who gives you a disease that lands you in Emergency.

  My eyes mist over.

  Out of clumsiness or fear that anything I say will be taken wrongly, I enclose him in my arms. His head rests on my ample breasts. He smells of rubber and sweat and the inside of rebreather masks.

  It’s a long time since I’ve touched anyone, and this shattered, pathetic human being fills me with guilt for all those people whose lives I’ve ruined. Not personally, but there is always a downside to peace contracts the agency negotiates. Always. Land tilled for years that has to be given up, murders of family members that must go unavenged, cultural artifacts lost that can never be retrieved.

  I run my hand over the scratchy stubble of his head. He takes my hand and wipes it over his face, wet with tears. With a shock, I realize his lips are caressing my skin. I twitch, but fall short of pulling away.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I haven’t touched anyone for years.” He lets my hand go for me to withdraw it.

  I let it rest while I deliberate on the wisdom of taking this any further, decide the heck with it and caress his shaven cheek with my thumb.

  Neither of us says anything. Neither of us wants to acknowledge that this is happening and where it is going.

  I’m sick of this job; I’m sick of my broken body. I’ve searched for years to find someone who wouldn’t be revolted at the sight of it. He is lonely, needy and desperate. Robes allow for easy access; the table makes a convenient seat at the right height. Our joining is quick, sweaty and completely silent.

  When it’s over, he hangs onto me like I’m a life buoy in a turbulent sea. Then he steps away, letting our robes drop back to their rightful places.

  “The original sin, huh?” He laughs. “Who worries about this while out there, people are dying by the millions. I tell you: the original sin was murder and it was done in the name of God. This is no Eden. There is no God. Please, Miranda, tell Solaris to send an army to control the Hern and restore balance on the planet before you order us out.”

  I go back to my room where it is dark and the air is stale, and my only company is a creaky bed, a tiny desk and a chair—no windows.

  The door shuts with a thud, enclosing me in my claustrophobic cell. I’m tired, I’m hot. I want to go back to Solaris. Brother Copernicus speaks about evolution; I believe evolution is already here. Third generation child of space-based humans, I’m no longer fit to live on the surface of a planet.

  I’ve come here to observe, not to solve everyone’s problems. How could I possibly stop this war without the massive slaughter Brother Copernicus wants me to order, or the massive slaughter that will happen when we withdraw? The Hern or the Pari? Since when does humanity have the right to determine who will live? Whatever we decide at that Solaris board meeting, we will have blood on our hands. We don’t want interference, but we’re already in too deep.

  A light flickers on my PAD that lies face-up on the desk. The beamsweep has crawled through our little section of space and delivered its payload. There is a flashing message icon on the screen. I haul the file through the descrambler to read it.

  The results from my earlier query about the white powder. It’s titanium oxide, the same stuff that’s used in paints and sun protection. It’s intensely white. I knew all of that already. Titanium makes up a surprisingly high proportion of biomass on Bianca, about 98% of it in the form of oxide. It appears to be taking part of the function of carbon as building material, since Bianca is quite low on carbon.

  I sigh with the irrelevance of it. There is so much more pressing stuff I should have asked, and the next beamsweep, damn, is not due for another three days, by which time Armageddon might have broken out, if not outside, within the mission.

  I wake up at banging on the door loud enough to rattle the walls of the room. I open my eyes and I still can’t see a thing. There is an odd rumble on the roof.

  “Who is it?”

  My voice is rough with sleep. I sit up, realizing the rumble on the roof is torrential rain. What is the time? Where is the light switch?

  I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and reach for the crutches. Can’t find them. Stumble for the door. Oh, damn, my knee.

  More banging.

  “Hello? Envoy?”

  I open the door. Brother Tycho is in the corridor.

  “It’s about Brother Copernicus,” he says.

  My mind flashes with unpleasant scenarios. Brother Tycho’s found out what happened in that deserted lab. Worse, he’s found out what Brother Copernicus said to me—

  “He’s dead. Shot himself in the head.”

  I want to protest. He’s okay; I only saw him just before going to bed, but I know it is true. The pieces of the puzzle come together. He was a broken man allowing himself one long-denied pleasure before taking his own life. After losing his faith, there was nothing left for him.

  I find the light switch and my crutches, and slip the protective robe over my head.

  Brother Tycho takes me through the dark corridors to the brothers’ sleeping quarters: row upon row of cell-like rooms, possibly even smaller than mine. What is the big deal with the rabbit cages? Apart from extruder materials, there isn’t much extra running cost, and with the level of UV, certainly none that can’t be generated locally. Give these men a pleasant living environment and they might actually
stay sane.

  Brother Copernicus lies on the bed on his back, his eyes closed. He looks asleep except his chest isn’t moving. The gun lies nestled between his neck and shoulder, the safety still off. There is little damage from the shot as I know there wouldn’t be with plasma weapons. Just an intense red patch of skin on his left temple. I imagine him lying there, holding the gun to his head and pushing the trigger. His body convulsing as the charge hits. My eyes mist over.

  Clumsy as I am, I kneel on the side of the bed and take his hand, cold and stiff. The hand that caressed me only a few hours ago. My lips twitch involuntarily.

  I rummage in my pockets. Amongst keys and data chips I find a piece of “wood” I picked up from the Pari camp. Somehow, it seems appropriate as farewell token. I place it on his robe, letting my hand linger on his unmoving chest, seeing him surrounded by the small Pari. I don’t think he understood them, but he cared. He cared too much.

  “Don’t remove it from him,” I say to Brother Tycho while I struggle to my feet.

  At Solaris, we farewell people by placing tokens with the body before incineration.

  He says nothing as I walk past him into the corridor, desperate not to let him see my face or the tears running down my cheeks.

  I’m not a few steps gone when someone yells down the corridor, “Alarm! The Hern have escaped from the compound!”

  Someone else shouts, “Everyone mobilize!”

  Within seconds, brothers are rushing into the corridor, pulling on robes and strapping on masks. In the throng of bodies, a brother hands me a plasma gun. “Safe to use at night,” he says before moving on.

  It turns out the brothers have another secret weapon: a vehicle, which they say also can only be used at night. I wonder why, but want to waste no one’s time with questions.

  We pile in. The door hisses shut; the air lock hums open. Red signs flash on the walls, “Beware Fire Danger.” The driver shifts the truck into gear, and it jerks forward. Rain pelts down on the cabin, literally as if someone is hosing the windows. I think I understand why guns and the truck are safe to use at night: nothing burns long in this downpour. One of the brothers is yelling instructions and safety precautions. No one is to take off their gloves and head protection at any time. I know. The rain is so acid it causes blisters.