Lights in the Deep (25 page)

Other shouts, from inside the church, had roused my flock to their feet.

I stumbled out onto the packed earth in front of the chapel, and looked to the scattering of other nearby buildings where others had also come out to see.

The Wall. It was…gone.

• • •

The professor and his students showed up later that day. Eighty young mantes, each riding an unarmored and unarmed disc, their carapaces green whereas the professor’s was a dingier brown. Very young. And eager. They congregated at the chapel, observing the mass of hundreds of people who can come to crowd the inside and the outside of my church, giving thanks to various versions of the Lord for their salvation. I squeezed my way out of the building and went out to greet the professor, waving my arms and smiling genuinely for probably the first time in almost two years.

“You were successful,” I said matter-of-factly.

“For the moment,” said the professor, wings fluttering slightly. “It took a great deal of argument and debate through the university system, but together we pressed the Quorum, and they agreed to stay your communal execution.”

“What of the Fourth Expansion?”

“That too has been stayed, until my students and I can complete our research here. We are to observe and learn all we can about humans: religion, culture, all of it in as natural an environment as possible.”

“Is that why The Wall is gone?” I asked.

“Yes. I had to fight hardest to get that done, but my colleagues and I believe it is impossible to conduct accurate research so long as humans are trapped in a test tube. You’re free to travel as far as you wish, though I would warn you that not all the mantes in this hemisphere will take kindly to seeing humans roaming free through land that they still consider theirs. I would advise caution.”

“And when your research is complete?”

“That will be many of your years from now, assistant-to-the-Chaplain. Many things can happen in that time. Many minds can be changed.”

“Mantis minds?” I said.

“Perhaps human too,” said the professor.

His wings fluttered again. And that’s when I felt it start to bubble out of me. Laughter. Clean, peeling, exuberant laughter. So much that I had to bend over and drop to all fours, gasping. I finally recovered and, wiping my eyes, got back to my feet.

“Come on,” I told him. “You kept your part of the bargain. I have to keep mine. You should come watch this.”

I led the professor back towards my chapel, and my flock.

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

“The Chaplain’s Assistant” was written as a submission to an imaginary anthology which would have been titled
A Planet Too Far
, had it ever reached publication. The assignment—from the Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith short story workshop, as attended by editor Denise Little—was to come up with short fiction focusing on planets or colonies on the bleeding edge. Worlds in peril. People who’d taken one too many steps into the galaxy, and who might now be hanging on the very edge.

At that particular time (in early 2010) I’d been toying with an altogether different idea: what was it about religious faith that allowed many former Prisoners of War to fare better in captivity than those POWs who were not necessarily religious, or who didn’t have much faith to speak of?

It instantly occurred to me that I should blend the conceits: planet on the edge, with POWs struggling for survival, and how or why religion might play a role.

It seemed a somewhat risky endeavor. Science fiction is, after all, the home of many a staunch atheist and secular humanist. There are some who might even say that it’s the “job” of science fiction to point out what’s very wrong with religion. I had no idea how my instructors (Dean, Denise, and Kris) would react to a story that smiled on faith, and I certainly had no idea how a potential major market like
Analog
magazine might react. Probably poorly, was my initial thought. Though once the conceits melded in my brain, I decided the story was too good not to write, and I proceeded despite my misgivings.

I knew I’d done well when a classmate I respect (and who’d read the story) gave it high marks. Thank you, Professor West! Also, Dean Wesley Smith said he liked the story despite his specific personal aversion to the subject matter. So I knew going out of the class that if the story had won Dean over—he of the potentially jaundiced religious sensibilities—perhaps the story might win other people over as well?

I got my answer later in the year when Stan Schmidt picked up “The Chaplain’s Assistant” for
Analog
. Like Dean, the subject matter wasn’t precisely to Stan’s liking, but I’d executed the material professionally enough and with sufficient impact to win over both Dean and Stan alike.

I won readers over too, as “The Chaplain’s Assistant” figured large on the AnLab readers’ poll the next year, for its category.

I then took that reader response, and wrote a much larger sequel.

Which in turn generated still more appreciative editorial and reader response.

As well as a full-blown novelization. Which I am proud to say has been picked up by Baen Books, for a targeted publication some time in 2014.

Which just goes to show that you never know what kind of fruit you might get from a tiny little seed of a story. There’s certainly a lot of me in this tale, and in all that’s come afterward. A lot of deep thought and pondering, you might say. I am glad that (so far at least) most people who’ve read the stories and the novel, have found them worth the effort. Whether they agreed with some of the premises I put forth, or not.

The Chaplain’s Legacy

Chapter 1

Chief Barlow,” said the female voice through the wooden door.

Lost in thought, I didn’t answer right away.

She cleared her throat, and tried again. “Warrant Officer Harrison Barlow?”

I sighed, and slowly got up from my seat at my desk in the tiny pastor’s quarters of my chapel.

She’d called me chief. I wasn’t used to the new rank. There had been a time when I’d happily watched my military days fade into memory. But the recent return of Earth ships to Purgatory orbit meant that many of us former prisoners of war had again been pressed into service—whether we wanted our old jobs back, or not.

I was a prior enlisted man. They could have just slapped my stripes back on me. But my apparently pivotal role—as interlocutor between humanity, and our former enemies, the mantes aliens—had necessitated something a bit more lofty.

Not like I needed the shiny silver bar on my collar. I commanded no one. The chapel, built with my own hands in the early days of my former captivity, had never needed any hierarchy. I’d constructed the place in the spirit intended by its original designer, Chaplain Thomas:
all are equal in God’s sight.

I’d have refused promotion if I’d thought Fleet Command was giving me a choice.

I opened the door.

She was young, with a startlingly beautiful face. I guessed Nile Egyptian heritage, but with something else mixed in. Not European. Southeast Asian, perhaps? Her fluent use of commercial English—that hoary old offshoot of British and American English which had dominated international human affairs for hundreds of years—gave me no hint of her nation of origin.

I looked at the captain’s clusters on her collar, and tipped my head.

“Ma’am, what may I do for you at this early hour?”

“General Sakumora sent me,” she said, her wide eyes staring up at me.

“And of what use may I be to the general?”

“You’re the one who brokered the original cease-fire,” she said. “The general is hoping you can do so again.”

An instant prickling of alarm went up my spine.

“Have the mantes attacked?” I asked, not blinking.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nobody told you what’s happening?”

“Ma’am, in spite of my appointment and what this starchy new uniform might indicate, I’m just a chaplain’s assistant. Nobody tells me much of anything. Certainly I don’t pretend to understand what Fleet Command worries about when it goes to bed at night. All I care about are the people still here, on this planet.”

“And the mantes converts who come to you for religious indoctrination,” she said.

“Instruction,” I corrected her. “And it’s not even anything so formal as that. You ought to know as well as anyone, if you’ve earned your commission recently, that the mantes are an utterly atheistic people. They cannot even conceive of a God, nor a soul, nor do they understand anything about Earth’s varied and flavorful religious history.”

Flavorful.
A deliberate euphemism on my part. The mantis university Professor who’d first approached me ten Purgatorial years earlier, to study Earth’s major systems of belief, had often used that word to describe our faiths. He’d considered them fascinating—a key to the utterly alien mentality of the human being. If the mantes had thoughtlessly obliterated other species, each of them also displaying the telltales of belief, the insectoids had stopped short at exterminating humanity.

Thanks to me.

In a moment of desperate inspiration, with the fate of all mankind seemingly on the line, I’d been the one to make the bargain: in exchange for the survival of humanity, I would do all I could to assist the Professor—and his students—in studying and understanding religion.

But that had been a long time ago. The Professor, and most of his students, had gone. As had many of my parishioners, once the ships from Earth returned and it became possible for humans to go home again.

I’d chosen to remain. Despite Purgatory’s hard, arid climate and the chapel’s crude rock-and-mud-walled simplicity. A part of me had become invested in this place. I looked over the lovely young officer’s shoulder to the chapel’s lone altar, where various human religious symbols and objects were carefully placed for all to see. This early in the morning I had no flock to attend to. But soon they’d begin to trickle in, a few here and a few there. Most of them human. But not all.

“It’s the mantes’ difficulty with religion that brings me here now,” she said. “It’s been a long time since the armistice. Fleet stealth missions indicate that the mantes are moving some of their own ships. Renewed battle exercises. The truce you won may not last much longer. Not unless someone can help the mantes get what they came here for. From you specifically.”

I laughed coldly.

“I labored with the Professor,” I said. “For years. He read every last line of holy text I could put in front of him. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, you name it. He soaked it up like a sponge. We engaged in various rituals, both for demonstration and also to see if he’d take to any of them. But he was as deaf to the spirit as the next mantis. They’re all like that—biologically incapable of feeling what you and I might call faith. The Professor eventually withdrew in confused futility.”

“What about the ones who still attend?”

“They are young,” I said. “Grad students. They come to the chapel for objective study, no more. Working on their equivalent of thesis papers, probably.”

“General Sakumora was adamant. You must help.”

I wanted to keep protesting, but the earnestness in her expression told me that there wouldn’t be any point. I reached a hand up and felt the non-regulation stubble on my face. I hated shaving every day. But it looked like I was going to have to start again.

“Orders are orders, ma’am?” I said, straightening my duty topcoat.

“That’s right, Chief,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. And if it’s all the same to you, nobody around here calls me that.”

“Then what do they call you?”

“Padre. One of my former parishioners hung that on me shortly after the cease-fire.”

“Father Barlow,” she said, testing it out.

“No,” I said sheepishly, “just padre.”

“Well,
padre,
I’m putting us on the next flight into orbit. The general is getting ready for a summit with his counterparts in the mantes chain of command. You and I have both been instructed to cooperate in every way—to ensure that the summit is productive.”

“Are you part of the Chaplains Corps?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Fleet Intelligence.”

I repressed the urge to scoff. If the military’s blind hurling of the original human flotillas against Purgatory’s impervious mantis defenders had been any indication, intelligence was the one thing we’d been sorely lacking.

“I don’t think it will do any good,” I admitted. “I tried to tell the Professor, when he started to give up hope. If mantis curiosity about human faith is the only thing holding back their war machine, then our fates truly do rest in God’s hands.”

Chapter 2

It had been a long time since I’d ridden a shuttle. I forgot they don’t come with gravity. I almost threw up my breakfast when we hit space. I spent the ride—to the awaiting frigate—turning several shades of green. Once onboard the mothercraft I breathed a great breath of relief, then gratefully took a small hand towel from the captain and mopped the perspiration from my face.

The young marines who’d ridden up with us, they seemed to find me funny. Until they saw my expression, and rank. They snapped to as I walked past.

I guess being the chief is good for a few things after all?

The captain—whom I’d learned to address by the last name of Adanaho—gave me 20 minutes to clean up in the frigate’s cramped guest officers’ quarters. As an enlisted man, I’d only ever gotten bay accommodations. Zero privacy. My little single-man compartment seemed palatial by comparison.

The hair on my cheeks and neck came off, and a fresh undershirt and topcoat came on. Then I used the tiny computer guide in my newly-issued PDA to walk me through the frigate’s innards—to the command deck, where I was to meet Adanaho’s boss.

Fleet was unique in the history of modern human warfare in that it blended all of the traditional branches—air, sea, land, and now space—into a unified whole, with a unified hierarchy. No more confusion over rank. A captain was a captain, a lieutenant was a lieutenant, and a sergeant was a sergeant. Admirals, commanders, and petty officers lived only in the history books.