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Either way, I saw it as prelude to the captain’s downfall, which would almost certainly mean my own downfall as well.
The captain’s position was tenuous at best, and everything was uncertain aboard the Argonos.
My exoskeleton vibrated twice in succession, and I silently cursed. It was a signal from the captain.
was the captain’s adviser. Bartolomeo Aguilera, counselor to Captain Nikos Costa; his unofficial lieutenant.
I am not an ugly man, but I am deformed. I was born with hands attached almost directly to my shoulders, on vestigial arms that are, even now, no more than a dozen centimeters in length, though my hands and fingers are almost normal in size and shape, and function quite well. Several vertebrae are missing, but the spinal cord itself is intact. I have a club foot.
He was not sleeping well. He hadn’t admitted this to me, but I knew, just as I knew about the hours he spent alone in the Wasteland; the seven-year-old downsider daughter he had with a woman not his wife; and his clandestine meetings with Arne Gronvold, who had been banished to the lower levels nearly six years earlier.
We were traveling almost at random through the galaxy, had been for decades, if not centuries, and there was no consensus of purpose or goal.
No one knew where the ship was first built, or first launched, though there was plenty of speculation. Many suggested Earth, the legendary birthplace of humankind.
But returning to Earth was not an option, either. We had already tried that once, years before I was born. All they found was a toxic, irradiated world, in ruins and abandoned.
Next to the general was Michel Tournier, the appointed representative of the First Echelon, the ruling circle of the ship’s upper levels;
Our last landfall, if we all remember, was a major disaster. I’m certain you remember, Bishop.” I could barely keep from smiling. That last landfall, nearly fifteen years ago, was the bishop’s disaster—he tried to convert people who did not want to be converted. We were driven away by angry mobs eager to rend us limb from limb. Several of us were killed before we made our escape.
Though technically an elected position, in practice the captaincy was inherited, and had resided within the Costa-Malvini clan for several generations. Also, though it might not be true any longer, Nikos had been a good captain for many years, as had his father and his great-uncle before him.
The bishop claimed the ship’s mission was to spread the word of God throughout the galaxy, even throughout the entire universe, to man and alien alike (there was no recorded contact with intelligent alien life that anyone was aware of, but the bishop continued to hope). The bishop pointed to his unshakable faith and his exalted position in the ship’s hierarchy as evidence for the religious nature of the ship’s mission, which I found unconvincing. What was convincing, however, was the existence of the cathedral.
“Crap,” Pär said with disgust. “They’d never agree to let people leave. Especially not downsiders. They need them to do the scut work—cleaning and maintenance, all the manual labor this ship needs, and needing more all the time. Not to mention providing the servants for you all.”
With few exceptions, no one wanted to allow the downsiders to leave, unless the upper-level residents were to also leave the ship, which was as unlikely as finding anyone alive in this solar system.
According to the ship’s history, as recorded by Toller and his predecessors, there had been periodic attempts by downsiders to change the way things were done. I had even heard vague stories of a massive revolt, called the Repudiation, associated with some kind of plague three or four centuries earlier.
They held out for six days. Arne Gronvold tried to restore all the lifelines for them, and when he was unsuccessful he tried to cut off all of ours. That, too, failed. When the insurrection was over, Arne was banished for life to the lower levels.
Last, Father Veronica was to go as the Church’s representative.
“The language difficulties were part of the problem,” she continued. “So strange. We spoke the same language as those people, that was clear, and yet our individual versions of it had diverged so greatly over time that often it was like two different languages.”
“We stagnate, and we have no history.” “We create our own history.” “But we don’t, actually. Most people know little or nothing about what occurred on this ship before they were born. And what little they know has no context.”
thought I saw a silver, ghostlike form drift through the central section. I stood there a long time, studying the interior, but didn’t see anything more. I told myself it was exhaustion, but I didn’t quite believe it.
No, not a hole exactly, for there was a spiral flight of stairs leading eight or nine meters down to a dimly lit floor.
Hanging bones. Skeletons rattling and clattering in the air currents; tightly woven ropes knotted on large and vicious hooks embedded in the ceiling, then noosed around the nearly fleshless necks of discolored skeletons with skulls grinning and staring at us from shadowed, empty sockets.
The air currents had died down, and the skeletons swung more slowly now; there was less clacking and clattering, quieter now, though just as disturbing. The left wall was fifteen meters and two dozen skeletons away, the right wall the same, but the far wall was beyond view—all we could see were more skeletons, stretching endlessly into the distance . . . literally hundreds, I guessed. Thousands? It was horribly possible.
On the same level, I walked into a small chapel, where a Shinto priest was quietly speaking with a dozen men and women. There were a number of smaller chapels like this scattered throughout the ship, mostly on the lower levels, with several unofficial and unsanctioned sects and alternative religious groups holding their services in defiance of the Church. The bishop was always trying to suppress them, but he received no support or cooperation from the captain
“I have known Bartolomeo all his life. I was already old when he was born. He is a strange man, as any of us would be had we been born with his deformities, then been raised and treated by others as he has been. He can be unpleasant. But that strangeness may be just what is called for now.”
“I did a lot of thinking while I was in hiding. Lots of time for it. I am sick to death of life on this ship. Look at us. You and I are a couple of freaks. But the reality is, this entire ship is filled with freaks. We don’t know how to live normal human lives anymore. Living from birth to death inside this hunk of metal is unnatural, and I think it’s done unnatural things to us.”
I was reminded of Nikos’s clandestine meetings with Arne; I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that Arne was betraying the insurrection. Probably because Nikos had been meeting with Arne for months before I was even aware of the plans myself; even so, I’d thought Arne’s sympathies were with the downsiders. I’d obviously thought wrong.
She shut the door and held herself against the wall, facing me. I’d always admired Cardenas, partly because she was a member of the crew—I admired everyone in the crew, to an extent, because they were so much their own people, staying outside of all the social and political machinations on the Argonos—but also because of the way she represented them on the Executive Council.
Cardenas made a kind of snorting noise. “This ship, this alien vessel, is nowhere near anything. You take all the possible flight paths we could have charted out from Antioch’s system, and just by chance we choose the one that takes us right to this starship.”
ship. Even so, we almost missed it; we nearly went right on by. The only reason we didn’t is because the captain had all the ship sensors on full alert, looking.” “So you think the signal was directed at the alien ship.” “What do you think, Bartolomeo?”
She hesitated. “The crew obeys most of the captain’s orders, but not in certain matters. We have open communication among ourselves. We keep no secrets from one another.”
It’s uncertain just what happened next. Starlin was never unsure, and neither were most of the rest of us, but the seeds of doubt are still there even now.
Sherry Winton pushed off
Starlin said she intentionally crashed into him, then deliberately pried his gloved fingers from the door bar.
“I can’t be sure,” she said. “I really can’t.” There was a long hesitation. “But I will admit that my impression at the time, and I want to emphasize that it wasn’t a strong impression by any means, was that . . . was that Winton tried to push him through the opening.”
“It’s a woman!” Cardenas’s voice cut through her harsh breathing—she’d been running. “Help me, Rita.”
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.”
The old man slowly shook his head. “They are incomplete. Or rather, they are complete only for the last two hundred seventy-three years. That is when they began. We have nothing before that.” “Two hundred seventy-three years?” I repeated. “That’s all?” Toller nodded.
Only a few weeks, but long enough to disable much of the ship’s infrastructure, and purge the ship’s logs and navigational records. When the crew regained control of the Argonos, most functions were restored, but the logs and other records were never recovered.”
There are, however, several references to just what you want, Bartolomeo. Star systems with populated worlds, interplanetary transportation, political and social networks. But when we encountered those systems, those worlds, we never stayed long. We were looking for isolated outposts, colonial settlements, lost missions.
started so slowly that I was barely aware of it at first—a diffuse flicker of color on the Argonos hull. I was watching Father Veronica, and only dimly sensed it in the periphery of my vision. I almost ignored it. Then I realized something unusual was occurring and I turned to look at the growing bloom of color. Just as I did, it silently, almost blindingly exploded to life. Christ on the Cross. The enormous stained glass window at the head of the cathedral, which had always been too dull, indistinct, and chaotic to reveal any concrete images, now blazed in the depths of space, burning in the
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As soon as I could, I began my studies toward that goal. Bishop Soldano was Father Bernard at that time, and I studied under him for many years.” We drifted in silence for a time; I could see the bright reflection of the stained glass in her suit helmet, but I avoided looking directly at the images. “He was ambitious even then,” she went on, “though I only recognized it in retrospect. But I am fairly certain that his faith and belief were both strong and sincere during those years.” There was another brief pause. “I don’t know what happened to him later. It could have been something similar to
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“Does God know everything that will happen? Every choice we will make? All the future laid out before him?” “No. He knows everything that is happening now, as time flows, He knows everything that has happened in the past, and
He can make very accurate assessments, I am certain, of what any of us will choose to do. But, once again, our free will would not be true free will if He knew absolutely what every choice would be. When He created us, and gave us free will, He effectively canceled out His foreknowledge of the future.”
“Yes, you will listen, Bartolomeo, even if you won’t believe.” She paused for a moment. “Prayer is a kind of communication with God. It is opening yourself to God’s presence, to His Spirit, to His essence. And when you are truly open to Him, God’s essence can provide comfort and understanding, and guidance. That is why some prayers are answered, in a way.
actively interceded in our lives, but because people have taken that comfort, and taken in the guidance and understanding that are there for us, and then they act, they live their lives and view their lives informed by that, in such a way as to essentially answer their own prayers.”
“God’s own guilt,” she said, but so quietly I wasn’t certain I’d heard her correctly. I tried to understand what she meant, but she began to speak again as if she hadn’t yet said anything, ignoring her own initial response. “He was speaking to us. God. He sacrificed His Son, Himself. Became us. Died like us. And resurrected Himself to show us the way. One final, ultimate attempt to help us in our lives to make the right choices. And to show us He will forgive us when we don’t.”
“He created us. He gave us true free will. Therefore He is in some real way ultimately responsible for the suffering we inflict upon one another. He has His own guilt. And sacrificing His Son, Himself, was a way to help expiate that guilt.”
“I know how you feel about me, Bartolomeo. I’m not naive, and I’m not oblivious.” There was a slight pause. “Unless I’ve completely misread you.”
