She glanced quickly at the Bible before sealing the pocket; the bookmark was in Ecclesiastes. He would be reading the most depressing book in the Bible.
The voice from Control came across the outspeaker: “Sergeant Evans, Bear, I’ve got some new stuff. The Zaradin transmitted a new message to us.”
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
“Largely bad news. They’re saying that we’d better bring out our – uh, defiler of truths is how the computer is translating it – or we’ll be sorry. They said they’d demonstrate how sorry we’d be. Nothing on that yet.”
There was a brief pause before conversation resumed. Bear Corona said, “Pushy bastards, aren’t th-”
The landscape outside the window glared in a sudden wash of light.
Peaceforcer Evans said calmly, locking his gloves into place, “Control? What is it?”
“– I think – I think they just blew Europa out of the sky.”
THE LARGE AIRLOCK finished cycling. Peaceforcer Evans, Bear Corona, Sheila Moore, and Father Michael moved forward, onto the frozen ground, in slow, gliding steps. The stars above shone bright and hard. The cold sunlight glared down at them; their faceplates polarized away most of it.
In the southern portion of their sky, about ten degrees from Jupiter, hung a dim, slowly expanding cloud of debris.
Bear Corona moved next to Father Michael and sketched “C4” on Father Michael’s faceplate. Father Michael switched to the sideband.
“Father,” he said, “been wondering what your plans are.”
“I don’t really know, Bear.” Behind the polarized faceplate, drops of sweat gathered on Father Michael’s forehead. The inside of his suit stank with the smell of all old pressure suits, of ancient human sweat and metallic, recycled air.
They moved forward inexorably toward the alien ship, ground gliding away beneath their feet.
Bear Corona said patiently, “Are you going to do what they want you to do? Or are you going to tell them to go to hell again?”
Father Michael did not take his eyes from the ship. Closer still. “I don’t know. I don’t know what they want me to do. Bear –”
“Yes?”
“I suspect you of having made up some of the sins you confessed.”
Bear laughed. “This old fellow goes running into Church, ducks into a confessional, and says, ‘Father, Father, I just made love to a twenty-year-old girl, committed adultery with her twice.’ And the priest recognizes his voice, says slowly, ‘Abie ... Abie Martin? Abie, you’re not a member of my congregation – you’re not even Catholic. Why are you telling me this?’”
Father Michael joined in with him on the punch line. “Telling you – I’m telling everyone.”
“You know it.”
“If it concerns priests, I’ve heard it. Usually from another priest. Did you make up those sins?”
Even through the paired layers of partially polarized faceplates, Father Michael could see Corona hesitate a moment; then Bear’s bushy beard moving from side to side, and Corona said in a voice gone flat, “No.”
“I THOUGHT YOU said the debris was going to miss us!”
“It was when we ran the first trajectories. They nudged one of the rocks.” Adrienne Gordeau closed her eyes briefly, looked wearily around at the people waiting for her to tell them what to do, wishing that Bear, or Evans, or even the priest, were here to help her. Finally she said, “Father Michael is outside. I think we must decide who’s going to give final confession.”
THEY STOOD UNCERTAINLY before the ship, watching, waiting for the emergence of the Dalmas, a Missionary of the Zaradin Church, who had claimed to be inside.
The Dalmas did not emerge; but the ship began to glow.
It began as a discreet thing, crawling like a viscous fluid along the interstices of the hip. Then it went hazy, and flowed down into the empty vacuum, fountained down like a wave of mist towards the seven waiting humans. The haze enveloped them, in a warm, golden fog that penetrated their pressure suits, penetrated even Peaceforcer Evans armored scalesuit.
“Thy rod and thy staff,” whispered Father Michael, “they comfort me.” The warm fog embraced him. “Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.” The golden haze swirled around them, and a bulkhead broke apart before them. The Presence drew them forward, pulling them like puppets on a string. “Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.” He shook violently, the words coming harshly, without rhythm or beauty. “Surely –”
Father Michael Wellsmith screamed suddenly, “God!”
For a brief, cold second, the warm Presence was gone, and Father Michael stood straight and alone.
Then It flooded back upon him, smashed him down, and took him as It had taken the others.
Father Michael stumbled, found himself jerked back to his feet like a puppet, and he tumbled forward with the rest of them, half-falling, a clown in Ganymede’s gentle gravity. It did not bother him; nothing bothered him, not the loss of his dignity or his freedom, not the trembling beneath his feet as the remnants of a smashed moon came hurtling down to the surface of Ganymede, nor the darkness in the ship’s hold, nor the brief and improbably gentle acceleration as the alien ship lifted away from Ganymede’s surface, took him and Bear and Sheila and Peaceforcer Evans away from everything they had ever known.
He was wholly at peace with himself; after more than forty years as a Catholic, Father Michael Wellsmith was going home.
●
TRANSCRIPTION OF AN Underground background interview with Neil Corona, 2090 Gregorian:
... Jamie Wellsmith and I had both lost family in the destruction of the Ganymede colony, back in ’49; it’s how we met one another. My younger brother Bear and her older brother Michael were members of the party, sent out from St. Peter’s CityState, charged with establishing a beachhead on Ganymede.
Bear and I hadn’t spoken in better than fifteen years at the time. Bear was pretty high up in the Johnny Rebs at one point; he kept after me to join through most of the late ’20s and early ’30s, in a series of increasingly bitter arguments. In ’33 the Peaceforcers tossed me into a Detention Center for most of a year. I got the message; in ’34 I left America, left Earth.
And went to Halfway. At the time there was no PKF presence to speak of in space; there were not quite a million people living off Earth at all, and the Peaceforcers were busy consolidating the Unification on Earth; they had no time to bother with an ex-U.S. Marine who had very obligingly left the planet.
My last conversation with Bear was so bitter that it took me a couple of years to forgive him. But Bear held grudges with a vengeance. Even after I’d decided to try and patch things up, he never accepted my calls, and finally I simply stopped trying. Sometime in the mid-forties he left Earth himself – that or a firing squad, as I understood it – ended up at St. Peter’s CityState, out in the Belt. Back in the forties there were still a couple of CityStates that were, putatively, loyal to the Unification; St. Peter’s was one of them. (As I recall, it was the next-to-the-last of the CityStates to break away from the Unification, in ’54. Only the White Russians held out longer; and by ’56 even they could see that remaining as part of the Unification made no sense for any CityState.)
I don’t know who was responsible for what happened, if anyone. At the time half the experts swore it was a natural disaster, tidal stress or something equally unlikely, that destroying Europa was beyond the technical capabilities of even the Unification; and the other half swore that from the little that remained afterward, it looked as though Europa had been done in by a monster nuke, perhaps anti-matter, and that it looked like a shaped charge.
I don’t know. All I know is that on October 9, 2049, Europa blew and Ganymede caught a chunk of it.
After the colony got smashed, Jamie Wellsmith came looking for me.
I had no idea who she was. Her brother Michael had been the colony’s priest, and apparently Bear and Michael Wellsmith had grown close. In Michael’s last letter to Jamie, he had written at length about his friend Bear, the atheist Father Michael was attempting to save. Jamie had looked me up for the sake of the ending to her brother’s very last letter.
I’ve still got the hardcopy today:
– he’s come to realize how his temper has damaged the people around him, how it’s damaged his own life. I’ve been after him to come to confession, and I think he’s very near agreeing. A few nights ago while he and I drank together, Bear told me that his older brother is Neil Corona, the young man who surrendered at Yorktown. They’ve been estranged for fifteen years, and today Bear regrets their estrangement and feels that it was largely his fault. I tend to think he’s right. In dealing with Bear, I must often hold my tongue. He takes offense too easily, realizes it slowly; and as a result spends much of his time apologizing for incidents that took place a day or a week or a month prior. In his brother’s case he was deeply hurt (over what I am still not sure) and it has taken him all the years since to realize how deeply he, in turn, injured his brother. Bear is a proud man. Today he thinks that, after fifteen years, his brother must be so offended he wouldn’t appreciate Bear trying to make contact again. I understand why Bear feels this way; it’s how Bear would react in reversed circumstances. I hope he’s wrong. In any event, we will find out. When we return to St. Peter’s next August, I think I will write to Mr. Neil Corona, and see what his feelings are toward his brother, and possibly arrange a reconciliation.
At times I think my calling is a fiction, Jamie; something I’ve invented to give my life some meaning.
And other times I know it is not.
I remain, your loving brother,
Michael.
I read it silently. When I was done, Jamie Wellsmith demanded with tears in her eyes, “Well? Was my brother right? Did you want to hear from him?”
She stared at me unwaveringly through her tears, and I said as steadily as I could, “I would have given ten years of my life to talk to Bear again. He was the last family I had. He was the last person I ever really let myself love.”
EPILOG
TWENTY-FOUR DECADES later, two humans were speaking together. Who they were and what they were about is not very relevant here. It is enough to know that they were both still essentially human, and that the elder of the two, a man named William Devane, remembered the days before humanity had broken out of the Solar System, and quite a lot else besides.
William was, as Regent of United Earth, likely the most powerful single human in the known Continuing Time. He was reminiscing about an acquaintance of his from some centuries back: a “Catholic.”
The younger human, Ares November, was twenty-three years old. “A what?”
“A Catholic. One of a group of notorious drunks that went by that name,” said William. “They’re gone now, along with the Jews, and the Muslims, and all the rest. I understand there are still some Buddhists around somewhere.”
“Gone?” said Ares politely. “Why? What happened to them?”
“Why, they were religions, Ares. They ran into the Zaradin Church.” William Devane sipped at a tumbler of whiskey that was well aged, and still only a tiny fraction of his own age, and chuckled rather cynically. “It’s hard to argue with a religion that works.”
END
Interlude
2049 - 2485
WHEN THE RESCUE ships arrived at Ganymede, months too late, there was nothing left of the beachhead, and little enough left of the former surface of Ganymede itself on the hemisphere where the fragments of Europa had struck. The Zaradin ship was gone; and the Peaceforcers and scientists who swarmed in their dozens over the wreckage of the first Ganymede settlement found nothing that would lead them to guess that such beings had ever existed.
The Cathedral left through Sol’s First Gate; and four hundred and thirty-six years passed.
It is not a large span of time, in the scheme of things. Only on the human scale does it become significant … a matter of generations, even for humans who live far longer than those of the twenty-first century Gregorian: more time separates Ola Blue from 2049 than separates 2049 from the arrival of the first slaves in America.
The universe is too complex to be told of in any story, or any collection of stories, or in all stories. Everything is a summary and a lie. Perhaps I should tell you of the art of Ola Blue’s time, or the technology, or the genetics, or the politics. Perhaps I should explain the path of the Exodus, map the routes humanity has taken through the spacelace tunnels, its small tentative footholds among the stars: a few thousands of planets settled, in a galaxy where the stars number a third of a trillion, in a universe where the Milky Way is one galaxy among hundreds of billions, when the Continuing Time itself is only one timeline among the 1026th timelines that compose the Great Wheel of Existence.
We are small beyond understanding; but in the heritage of our people, in the naming of the Players whose dreams and memories live on within us, are the seeds of the only meaning we will ever find.
ACROSS THE SPAN of the years, some things stand out:
By 2485, it has been four hundred and thirty-six years since the destruction of the Ganymede colony; four hundred and twenty-three since the black day in 2062 when the United Nations Peace Keeping Force, under the command of a man named Mohammed Vance, destroyed all but two of the Castanaveras telepaths. It has been four hundred and five years since Trent the Uncatchable died, and rose again, and vanished, perhaps forever; and three hundred and eighty-five years since the Dauntless, the first tachyon starship in all of history, made its only voyage from Sol System.
It has been three hundred and fifty-six years since the beginning of the War with the Sleem, the great conflict in which humanity was nearly exterminated; it has been three hundred and thirty-nine years since the sleem empire was broken at the Battle of the Core, by an alliance of human and K’Ailla forces; and three hundred and thirty-six years since Daniel November dropped the city of Starfall onto the surface of the planet November.
It has been three hundred and five years since the Platform Rose from Earth left Sol System with the S’Pollant Caravan, and began the Exodus from Earth. Trentists – members of the Church of His Return, more commonly called the Exodus Church – followed them out among the stars not long after.
It has been two hundred and ninety-three years since Lorn November published The Protocols of Anarchy; two hundred and ninety since Lorn’s brother Richard declared himself the first Lord of the House of November, and the House of November the planet’s governing body. On November today there are courts and judges and taxes. And Anarchists. Lots of them.
It has been ninety-five years since the death of Kinderjim of November. The world he helped settle, Tin Woodman, is today, by virtue of Kinderjim’s death, the only world in the explored Continuing Time where humans and K’Aillae live together in peace.
Leftbehind
2485 - 2489
SHE WAS NOT famous then, in 2485. This was after she was taken from Eastersea, but before she met P’Rythan November, or the Destroyer of Worlds; it was even before Mister Dreadful escaped Eastersea and met Picky Jim. It was before all of that.
Ola Blue was twenty-two years old, and a night face, when Shelomin Serendip, the Director of United Earth Intelligence, sent her to Gillen.
Certainly no one in Gillen System had ever heard of her – only a few people in Gillen System had even heard of Shelomin Serendip, and she had been Director of UEI for almost fifty years. For most of
those fifty years Gillen System had not received much traffic or news from the rest of the Continuing Time. They had been at war that long.
GILLEN SYSTEM IS unusual. It has two Gates leading into the web of spacelace tunnels upon which almost all interstellar shipping depends. This is useful, but not rare. It also has two worlds that were seeded by the Zaradin, and that are as friendly as Earth itself to any species descended from Zaradin DNA. This is quite rare.
At the dawn of the Exodus from Earth, over three hundred years ago, humans settled the first world, which they named Benardine. Over the course of the century following, K’Aillae and slissi and humans settled the second, named Atango by the slissi.
Six million Benardine soldiers have died on Atango; the Benardine keep good records and they know how many of their soldiers have failed to come home since the war began. No one, including the Atangans, knows how many Atangans have died during that same fifty years of war, except that the number is a lot larger than six million.
ON MONDAY, Spring 51, 2488, Marcus Michaelson said bluntly, “Why me?”
Manfred Josefs led the briefing team. Marcus knew him slightly; a war hawk and not to be trusted. “She asked for you by name, Colonel.”
“How the hell would she ever have heard my name?”
Josefs shrugged. “An anti-war war hero? You’re well enough known inSystem. One assumes Earth did some research before they sent an Archangel.” The briefing room darkened. A holo appeared in the air above the briefing table, an ugly mirrored wedge-shaped structure, all sharp edges and weapons emplacements, orbiting Benardine. One who was not looking for it might not have noticed the tachyon wand, slapped onto the ship’s prow in what looked an afterthought. The wand would be forty meters long and five meters in diameter, Marcus knew. Mounted on a ship 1200 meters in length it managed to look delicate. “Pretty direct lift of sleem design, except for the tachyon drive,” Josefs continued.
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 3