Lights in the Deep (23 page)

“You are being deliberately cryptic,” the mantis accused.

“I mean no offense,” I continued, hating the servile tinge in my own voice as I spoke to the beast, “it’s just that I was never trained as an instructor of worship. Like I said when you asked, I am only the assistant.”

“Then what do the humans here listen to, precisely?”

“The spirit,” I said.

The mantis’s beak yawned wide, its serrated tractor teeth vibrating with visible annoyance. I stared into that mouth of death—remembering how many troops had been slaughtered in jaws like those—and felt myself go cold. The Chaplain had often called the mantes
soulless.
At the time—before the landing—I’d thought he was speaking metaphorically. But looking at the monster in front of me I remembered the Chaplain’s declaration, and found it apt.

“Spirit,” said the mantis. “Twice before has my kind encountered this perplexing concept.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Two other sapients, one of them avian and the other amphibian.”

Other aliens…
besides
the mantes? “And what could they tell you about God?”

“Gods,” my visitor corrected me. “We destroyed both species before we could collect much data on their beliefs.”

“Destroyed,” I said, hoping the alien’s ears couldn’t detect the shaking dread in my voice.

“Yes. Hundreds of your years ago, during the Great Nest’s Third Expansion into the galaxy. We thought ourselves alone, then. We had no experience with alternative intelligence. The homeworld of the avians and the homeworld of the amphibians were pleasing to the Patriarchal Quorum, so those worlds were annexed, cleansed of competitive life forms, and have since become major population centers for my people.”

I took in this information as best as I could, unsure if any human ears had ever heard anything like it. I thought of the Military Intelligence guys—all dead—who would have given their years’ pay to gain the kind of information I had just gained, standing here in the drafty, ramshackle confines of my makeshift church.

I experienced a sudden leap of intuition.

“You’re not a soldier,” I said.

The mantis’s beak snapped shut.

“Certainly not.”

“What are you then, a scientist?”

The mantis seemed to contemplate this word—however it had translated for the alien’s mind—and he waved a spiked forelimb in my direction.

“The best human term is
professor.
I research
and
I teach.”

“I see,” I said, suddenly fascinated to be meeting the first mantis I’d ever seen who was not, explicitly, trained to kill. “So you’re here to research human religion.”

“Not just human religion,” said the mantis, hovering closer. “I want to know about this…this
spirit
that you speak of. Is it God?”

“I guess so, but also kind of not. The spirit is…what you feel inside you when you know God is paying attention.”

It was a clumsy explanation, one the Chaplain would have—no doubt—chastised me for. I’d never been much good at putting these kinds of concepts into words that helped me understand, much less helped other people understand too. And trying to explain God and the spirit to this
insect
felt a lot like explaining the beauty of orchestral music to a lawnmower.

The professor’s two serrated forelimbs stroked the front of his disc thoughtfully.

“What do the mantes believe?” I asked.

The professor’s forelimbs froze. “Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“We detect neither a spirit nor a God,” said the professor, who made a second jaw-gaped show of annoyance. “The avians and the amphibians, they each built
palaces
to their Gods. Whole continents and oceans mobilized in
warfare
, to determine which God was superior. Before we came and wiped them all out, down to the last chick and tadpole. Now, their flying Gods and their swimming Gods are recorded in the Quorum Archive, and I am left to wander here—to this desert of a planet—to quiz you, who are not even trained to give me the answers I seek.”

The professor’s body language showed that his annoyance verged on anger, and I felt myself pressing my calves and the backs of my thighs into the altar, ready for the lightning blow that would sever a carotid or split my stomach open. I’d seen so many die that way, their attackers reveling in the carnage. However technologically advanced the mantes were, they still retained a degree of predatory-hindbrain joy while engaged in combat.

Noticing my alarm, the professor floated backwards half a meter.

“Forgive me,” said the alien. “I came here today seeking answers from what I had hoped would be a somewhat reliable source. It is not your fault that the eldest of the Quorum destroy things before they can learn from them. My time with you is finite, and I am impatient to learn as much as possible before the end.”

“You have to leave…?” I said, half-questioning.

The professor didn’t say anything for several seconds, letting the silence speak for him. My shoulders and back caved, if only a little.

“How many of the rest of us will die?” I asked, swallowing hard.

“All,” said the professor.

“All?” I said, at once sure of the answer, but still needing to ask again anyway.

“Yes, all,” said the professor. “When I got word that the Quorum had ordered this colony cleansed of competitive life forms—prior to the dispatching of the Fourth Expansion towards your other worlds—I knew that I had a very narrow window. I must study this
faith
that inhabits you humans. Before it is too late.”

“We’re no threat to you now,” I heard myself say with hollow shock, “all of us on Purgatory, we’ve all been disarmed and you’ve made it plain that we can’t hurt you. The Wall sees to that.”

“I will return tomorrow, to study your other visitors in their worship,” said the alien as his disc spun on its vertical axis, and he began to hover towards the exit.

“We’re not a threat—!”

But my shouting was for naught. The professor was gone.

• • •

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I kept thinking about what would happen. There were approximately six thousand of us left from the invasion, mostly men, but some women too—and now, here and there, children. All of us confined to a single, semi-arid mountain valley by what we’d come to think of as The Wall—a slightly opaque curtain of energy that ringed us on all sides, with an indefinite height that faded into the sky. Rain, wind, snow and air fell into and through The Wall, but every man or woman who had approached and touched it, had been reduced to ashes.

“Selective nuclear suppression field,” I’d heard one of the parishioners tell me one day—a man who’d been a pilot. “It’s the same thing they mask their ships in orbit with. Our missiles couldn’t ever get through. Nor the shells from the chainguns. We were smoked before we knew it.”

Now, it seemed, the mantes were going to finish the job.

When morning came, there was a stiff wind coming down off the peaks from the north, and the irregularly-shaped shutters of the chapel stuttered and flapped. Such was common. Purgatory had small oceans and large desserts, with most of the livable country up in alpine territory. Why the mantes had seen it worth defending—or why we’d seen it worth invading—was a question I often asked myself.

Only a few people wandered in after breakfast. I had the oil lamps going to light the altar, and tried to offer my flock a smile, though I am afraid I must have looked a wreck.

The professor showed up before lunch, getting the same kind of stabbing glares he’d gotten the day before. He hovered right up to the altar, turned, and looked at the parishioners as they looked at him, some of them glancing at me, as if to silently say,
what kind of goddamned sacrilege is this?

Those in prayer, ceased. One or two got up immediately and left.

“What is wrong?” the professor asked me as I nibbled at some root bread and a small bowl of stew, made from native Purgatory vegetables and varmint meat—both of which we’d learned to farm. Purgatory’s native fauna was on the diminutive side, and unfortunately for us, did
not
taste like chicken. You got used it, after hunger for protein drove you to desperation. Thank heaven Purgatory wasn’t short on salt.

I looked at the mantis, and pointed to the door that lead to my room where I slept. He followed me back, and I closed the door behind us, light leaking around the corners of the room’s shuttered, rattling window. His disc buzzed softly.

“You really don’t understand religion, do you?”

“You state the obvious,” he said.

“When people come here, they want to get
away
from you mantes. They want to get away from the anger and the rage and the despair.”

The professor just stared at me.

I sighed and rubbed my hands over my eyes, trying to figure out a way to penetrate his cold sensibilities.

“God is about warmth, and hope, and being able to see the future free of pain. Your coming here today is reminding everyone in the chapel of their pain, and they hate you for it. This is the one place where they think they can have a moment—just a moment, in the whole miserable world—of true peace. You’re denying them that.”

“I have not interfered with their activities at all,” said the professor.

“Worship is not something you do so much as it’s something you feel. Your being here…It’s driving out the feeling. The
spirit
is gone.”

Gaping maw, vibrating saw-toothed horror.

“It doesn’t help,” I said, “that you told me yesterday we were going to die. I haven’t said anything about it to anyone else—it would just upset them, and we clearly can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to—but the people who have been here today, they know I’m bothered. Makes me wonder why you mantes let any of us live at all, when you had the invasion beaten so surely.”

“Some of us were curious,” the professor said. “Humans are only the third sapient species we have found, after searching and colonizing thousands of star systems. Like I told you before, we annihilated the first two species without thinking more deeply about it. This time, we were determined to not make that same mistake.”

“So we’re good to you alive,” I said, “only as long as we’re of research interest.”

“Do not forget, human, that it was
you
who initiated hostilities.”

“Bull,” I said. “The planets Marvelous and New America were uninhabited when our colonists got there. They didn’t know about the mantes until your people showed up and blew the colonial fleets out of orbit. Sol would have been totally in the dark, except for the two picket ships that got away. Bad mistake, that. We came back hard. Showed you what we were made of.”

The vestigial wings on the professor’s back opened and fluttered—a sign of extreme amusement.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“Do you know what happened to the six colonies—
mantis
colonies—that your Sol fleets attacked, in so-called reprisal?”

“We kicked your butts,” I said, my voice rising.

“No, assistant-to-the-Chaplain.
We wiped you out.
Those worlds remain in
our
hands, as do many others you once thought of as yours.”

“Liar,” I said, feeling hot in the face.

“If you’ve been told that your attacks against us on other worlds have been successful, then it is not I who have been lying to you. Think of your own fate, here on this planet. How successful was your fleet this time? Why would it have been any different anywhere else?”

I longed for a weapon. Any weapon.

“Our science is far advanced beyond your own. Discovery of the jump system is an easy, first step towards becoming truly technological. It in no way prepared you to deal with us at our level, and fortunately we have been able to deflect your violence and will now extinguish it from the universe.”

The professor stopped, as if noticing my posture for the first time.

“You also hate me,” he said.

“Yes,” I told him.

“I can smell it on you. You would kill me, if you could.”

“Yes,” I said. Why lie now?

The professor and his disc hovered lower, his disturbingly alien eyes looking directly into my own.

“Listen to me, assistant-to-the-Chaplain. It is not I and my colleagues who orchestrate your species’ destruction. The elders of the Quorum see you as animals. A pestilence. Having become aware of you, they consider you only in as much as they wish to eradicate your existence. But a few of us—in the schools—think differently. We suspect there is more to you than the elders believe. We suspect you have…perceptions, beyond our own.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, still wishing for a weapon.

“This place,”—the mantis spread both forelimbs and wings wide—” is an utterly absurd concept to us. A house for your God. Where you come to hear Him speak to you without words. It is madness. Yet, we remember the avians and the amphibians. We remember their cultures. It is a profound scientific deficit, that we destroyed them as quickly as we did, without first penetrating their
otherness,
such that we understood their passions.”

“Our belief frightens you,” I said, feeling a small surge of pride.

“Yes,” said the professor.

“Good.”

“You would antagonize me?”

“What have I got to lose?” I said.

The professor was silent for well over a minute, then rotated his disc and opened the door with a forelimb, before gliding out of my room, and back out of the chapel, which at that point was completely empty.

• • •

A week passed, and the professor did not return. I kept his news of our impending doom to myself, still believing that if word of it leaked out, there would be more harm done, than good. We still couldn’t penetrate The Wall. We had no machines anymore with which to fly over it. Better, I thought, if the human population of Purgatory went on about its business, so that when the end did come, it came as a swift, merciful shock.

A few of the former officers came into the chapel, to quiz me about what the mantis had wanted. Most of us had stopped caring about our former rank and position, but not all. There were some stalwarts—each of them insistent that a liberation fleet was on its way, and that all we had to do was be disciplined and patient. Thankfully there weren’t enough of those types to keep us under their martial thumbs, so I told the men what I could—keeping it deliberately monosyllabic—and let them leave thinking not much important had happened.