Richard Russo

by Ship of Fools

  We were no longer alone in the corridor; we passed people who appeared to be even drunker than we were, as well as a few who looked as if they hadn’t touched alcohol in years—men and women with tight lips and frowns and furrowed brows, in stark and simple clothing.

  Finally Pär led the way down a short side passage and activated a door panel. Out from the doorway rolled a quiet cloud of voices and music and lights. Pär waved me inside, then followed and closed the door behind us.

  I stood just inside a large room with half a dozen chairs and settees. Light came from two hovering globes that drifted in spiral patterns about the room just beneath the ceiling. The voices stopped with our entrance, but a quiet ether jazz played in the background.

  There were five or six men and at least as many women in the room, but I could not refrain from staring at one woman in the corner, seemingly shy, and in appearance amazingly like Father Veronica, if Father Veronica were to wear a blouse and trousers instead of cassock and collar.

  The dwarf grinned. “Remind you of someone?”

  “No,” I answered, too sharply and too quickly.

  Pär’s grin widened; then he clapped his hands. “Drinks everyone!”

  I could do nothing except stare at the woman in the corner staring back at me.

  * * *

  AN hour later I walked side by side along a dark corridor with the woman, whose name was Moira. So much about her reminded me of Father Veronica, even up close: her build, the pale and almost translucent quality of the skin on her arms, the shape of her eyes, and the thin but somehow sensuous lips. Even the way the left side of her mouth turned up when she smiled. I began to wonder if she was Father Veronica’s twin.

  But I noticed differences as well: the gold-flecked green of her eyes in contrast to the dark brown of Father Veronica’s; the narrow nostrils; and especially the voice. When Moira spoke, her deep, coarse voice drove all uncertainty away, and I knew she was not Father Veronica in disguise. I wanted desperately for her not to speak at all.

  Suddenly the woman stopped, swung around, put her hands behind my neck and pulled my face to hers, kissing me deeply. I didn’t respond immediately, taken aback and tasting smoke and alcohol on her lips and tongue, tastes I hadn’t expected, for I had forgotten for a moment who she was. Or who she wasn’t.

  But then, overcome, I did respond, and kissed her deeply in return, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her tight against me.

  Then her hands were at my belt, unbuckling it and pulling at trouser buttons.

  “Not here,” I said, closing my fingers around hers, stopping her movements. “We might be seen.”

  The woman nodded, grinning. She worked one hand free and plunged it inside my pants, grabbing me. I have to admit I was already aroused.

  “My, my,” she said, “that’s not artificial.”

  “No,” I insisted. “I can’t . . . not here . . . not . . .”

  She released me, but then she took my hand in hers and led me farther along the corridor. “No sense of adventure,” she said, and once again I wished she just wouldn’t speak.

  Another two minutes and she opened the door to a small, dimly lit cabin, closed the door behind us after we entered. She kept my hand in hers and led me to the wall bed, which was rumpled and unmade. There was a faint smell of old sweat and a hint of stale perfume; on the shelf beside the bed was a worn brown Bible.

  “Now to where we left off,” she said.

  “Don’t say anything more,” I told her, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice. “Just silence.”

  Thinking she understood, but not understanding at all, the woman smiled and nodded, and pulled me onto the bed beside her.

  I had spent my life on the Argonos watching men and women fall in love, or at least make the claims of love for one another; watching pursuits and resistances both real and pretended, and other related behaviors that were often ridiculous, petty, cruel, and only occasionally touching. I had long before decided that falling in love was pointless at best. But falling in love with a priest was even worse, so absurd I could hardly believe it was happening to me. More than that, having sex with a woman because she looked like the priest I had fallen in love with was simply pathetic.

  When I saw Father Veronica the next day, my skin flushed; I could feel the heat rising up along my neck, and I wanted to walk away. We were in a small chapel off to one side of the cathedral. She smiled uncertainly at me.

  “What is it, Bartolomeo?”

  “Nothing.” My response seemed inadequate, so I added, “I think I might be ill.” Which was true in more ways than one.

  She nodded, as if that were to be expected. “It was awful, watching him die like that,” she said.

  “And being so completely helpless.”

  “You tried, Bartolomeo. You reacted more quickly than anyone, and you did everything you could.”

  “Yes and no. Maybe Nikos was right, we shouldn’t have stayed. Maybe if we hadn’t . . .”

  “Don’t, Bartolomeo. Going that way accomplishes nothing. Nothing unusual happened while we were in there. If he hadn’t done it then, he would have done it some other time. I am certain of that.”

  I knew that intellectually, but in my gut I didn’t yet believe it, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. It helped to hear it, nonetheless.

  “How well did you know him?” I asked.

  “I’d known him most of my adult life, worked with him in the Church. But to be truthful, in important ways I did not know him well at all.” She paused, and sighed. “I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t like him.”

  “Why are you ashamed?”

  She gave me a rueful smile. “It wasn’t very generous. To dislike him.”

  “No one’s perfect.”

  She almost laughed then. “Certainly not the priests.” She paused again, became serious. “Eric was mean-spirited and unpleasant, and although he claimed he wanted to become a priest, he would never have been approved. He knew he was disliked by most people, and that must have been difficult to live with.”

  I knew what that was like, and I wondered if I was as mean-spirited and unpleasant as Casterman had been. I didn’t think so, but how could I know? I also believed that I had changed over the last year, so that even if I had been that way once, I hoped I had become less so.

  “Did he ever strike you as being suicidal?” I asked.

  She hesitated before replying. “As I said, in some ways I didn’t know him very well. Does it matter?”

  “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  “You think you can?”

  “Probably not. But I have to try. I’m in charge of this . . . expedition, mission, whatever you want to call it. What happens is my responsibility.”

  “You take too much on yourself.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “No, Bartolomeo. That’s part of why Christ died on the Cross. He takes on what we can’t.”

  I really didn’t want to start down that road. There were times when I relished discussing theology with her, because although we disagreed on most things, she was thoughtful and reasoned and often insightful. But this was not one of those times. I think she sensed my feelings, because she let it go and moved on to another subject.

  “How is the old woman doing?” she asked.

  “Still alive. She’s undernourished, a little dehydrated, very weak, but the physicians think she’ll survive.”

  “It’s incredible. Has she been able to speak?”

  “Not really.” I related the conversation I’d had with Taggart.

  “So we may never know what happened to her,” she said. “One more mystery held by that alien ship. Full of mysteries, and no answers.”

  “We’ve only explored a small portion of it so far.”

  “ ‘So far?’ Do you plan to go back?”

  I was surprised by her question. “Of course.”

  “After everything that has happened?”

  “Yes. After everything
that has happened. We may have to rethink our approach, be more careful . . . I don’t know. But yes, we continue.”

  She looked at me with concern. “I wonder how many other people feel the same way.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “You?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I won’t go back into that ship, Bartolomeo. I don’t think any of us should.”

  “Have you come to believe the ship is evil?”

  “No. Just dangerous. Perhaps willfully so.”

  I couldn’t really argue with her. “Maybe,” I said, “but it’s still the most remarkable discovery ever made in the history of the Argonos. We can’t leave it behind.”

  She hesitated for a minute, then breathed deeply. “You had best prepare your arguments, Bartolomeo.”

  I cocked my head at her. “What do you know that I don’t?”

  “Bishop Soldano is going to propose we set course for another star system and leave the alien starship behind. Before we have any more casualties.”

  “Formally? Before the Executive Council?”

  She nodded.

  I didn’t respond. There was no point in making any of my arguments to Father Veronica; she was not one of the people I would need to convince. I had to think about the council members; I had to think about the case I would make.

  “Thanks for the warning,” I finally said.

  She smiled sadly at me. “I think you’ll need it.”

  36

  “TAKE me there,” the bishop demanded. “Into the belly of the beast.”

  I led the way into the alien starship, the bishop surprisingly graceful in his pressure suit, completely at home in zero g. I wondered how much of this the bishop had already seen. We worked our way slowly but steadily through the explored cabins and passages, the bishop taking it all in, asking few questions. He had insisted there be no record of our excursion, but even so we hardly spoke.

  I pointed out the cabin where Santiago had plummeted to his death; we pulled ourselves through the corkscrew passage that had killed Askan and Singer; I opened the door to the second room with gravity that had almost killed Starlin, and let the bishop look down into that long drop. We paused a long time gazing into the strangely lit depths of the huge spherical chamber pocked with its thousands of reflecting facets; the bishop seemed lost in thought, perhaps thinking, as I often did, that there was something significant to that chamber. We crawled along the tubes of glass, surrounded by the dark, mysterious fluid. Finally, after more than two hours, we reached the point where Earth-normal gravity began, and started walking. We went through the air lock leading into the pressurized section, then stopped in the circular chamber where Casterman had cut his own throat.

  We stood silent and still for a long time, the bishop’s breathing steady, calm, showing no distress. I kept thinking of Father Veronica’s warning about the bishop, and wondered if he had made this excursion to gather more evidence to bolster his proposal to abandon this ship.

  “Why here?” the bishop asked.

  “Why not?”

  He turned to me. “Are you trying to be funny? Or clever?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a valid question. You don’t think he just arbitrarily, randomly, removed his helmet and slashed his own throat, oblivious to his surroundings?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No, you don’t. Well. Perhaps there’s something in the air.” With that the bishop quickly removed his own helmet and took a deep breath.

  “Stop!” I said. “What are you doing?”

  He said something, but I couldn’t make out a word. The com systems are built into the helmets, and he was holding his down below his waist—too far away to pick up anything more than a faint tickle of speech. I turned on my exterior speaker and microphone. “What are you doing?”

  “Take it off,” he said. “Join me.”

  “Not a chance. Put yours back on, Bishop. The air could be lethal.”

  “Are you afraid?” the bishop asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s honest. You needn’t be. After all, the old woman is still alive.”

  “Yes, and she’s lost her mind.”

  The bishop took another deep breath, closing his eyes. He held it for a long time, then slowly let it out. Eventually he opened his eyes, looked at me, then reattached his helmet.

  “I wanted to know what evil smells like,” he said.

  “Evil.”

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t think you believed in evil.”

  The bishop looked confused. “Why do you say that, Bartolomeo?”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  He hesitated for a moment, taken by surprise, I think. “Of course I believe in God.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “I’m the bishop. I’m the head of the Church.”

  I shrugged. “Nevertheless.”

  He stared at me without speaking. The sound of breathing—his and mine both—seemed loud in my helmet. Then he turned away and walked past me, through the open doorway into the next chamber. I followed.

  We entered the room where the old woman had been found. Everything was undisturbed—in the back corner was the sleeping mat and the pile of filthy blankets, littered with scraps of paper and the metal bowls smeared with the remains of old, dried food; in the other corner were stacks of mismatched, ragged items of clothing set aside for disposal. The bishop walked over to the cubicle next to the clothes, and looked down into the opening of the cylinder that had served as a toilet.

  “Looks uncomfortable,” he said.

  “I doubt it was designed for human use,” I said. “Certainly not designed by humans.”

  He made something of a snorting noise, but didn’t comment further. After a brief glance at the clothes, he knelt beside the blankets and poked through them with his gloved hand. He picked up one of the larger scraps of paper, pressed it flat.

  “She wasn’t much of an artist,” the bishop said dismissively.

  He dropped the scrap and stood. “Show me where she was getting food.”

  “Out in the next corridor.”

  I led the way through the door at the far end of the room and into the long, wide passage. About ten steps into it, I stopped and gestured at an opening in the wall about chest-high.

  “You set one of the bowls on that platform,” I said, “then press one of those two squares.” The squares were colored indentations in the wall next to the opening—one green, one red. “Red, and the bowl fills with water. Green, with a thick mixture of awful-looking stuff that’s food. There are two tubes above where the bowl sits.”

  “And this still works?”

  “Yes. We tried it. Water and food have both been analyzed in the labs, and there doesn’t seem to be anything toxic in either, although no one has put it to the test. And the food is surprisingly nutritious. You’d get sick of the same thing all the time, I’m sure, but the lab techs say you could live on it forever.”

  The bishop was silent for a long time; then he turned to me and I could see a faint smile. “This would be my idea of Hell,” he said. “It’s no wonder the poor woman lost her mind.”

  We continued along the corridor in silence. When we reached the cluster of rooms, we went through each of them, but the bishop had no more questions or comments. Back in the corridor, he studied the strips of nacreous blue light that illuminated it.

  Finally he spoke again. “Let us assume, purely for the sake of this discussion, that I don’t believe in God. That does not preclude my believing in evil. This ship is evil.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Oh yes. Have you forgotten what has happened on this ship?”

  “Accidents.”

  “So many?”

  “This is an alien starship. Everything about it is alien. We don’t understand it, we don’t know anything about it. Accidents are inevitable.”

  “And how is Casterman an accident?” he asked.

  �
��He’s not. But I don’t need ‘evil’ to account for a man killing himself. It’s infrequent, but not unknown.”

  “He was a cleric,” the bishop said. “His faith was important to him. Suicide is a mortal sin.”

  “For those who believe.”

  “Yes, and Brother Casterman believed.”

  “Did he? He didn’t act like a man of faith.”

  The bishop nodded in acknowledgment. “He was a weak man in many ways. And yes, what you suspect is true: he was with the team to be my eyes and ears. So he was capable of deceit. But he believed, Bartolomeo. Suicide would have been unthinkable to him.”

  “A mortal sin, you say, but you held a Mass for him.”

  “Circumstances,” the bishop said. “I believe that, in a way, he did not kill himself. Something else did it to him.”

  I shook my head, realizing we could go back and forth like this for hours, getting nowhere.

  “And what about the others?” he added.

  “What others?” Although I knew what he meant.

  “Barry Sorrel. Sherry Winton. Starlin. Sorrel’s wife and daughter. Nazia Abouti. I can’t remember all the names. How do you account for them?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Exactly.”

  But what the hell did “exactly” mean? I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I was as disturbed by what had happened to people as the bishop was; probably more than he was. I didn’t pretend to understand it; I couldn’t even offer a reasonable explanation. But I knew that to attribute to the alien ship an abstract concept such as Evil, to somehow infuse this dead, inanimate object with that quality and blame our own psychological and emotional failings on it, was absurd. At the same time, I recognized that it was also absurd to deny that something extraordinary was occurring among those who had explored the ship, and that its effects were often devastating.

  “What does it smell like?” I asked.