With Katie, Fr. Xris had mostly come to a détente. She stopped being actively angry at him, and for the most part just ignored him. Occasionally they would have a conversation about video games, but without her anger to motivate her, Katie’s anti-social tendencies found more expression.
With Freia he continued to talk, but not as frequently. Though with him she had largely dropped the air of being a care-free hedonist, he felt like she was simply being open about the fact that she was being closed off. It put something of a damper on their friendship, though he did still stop by a few times a week. He kept getting the feeling that there was some reaction from him that she wanted, but couldn’t figure out how to produce.
Fr. Xris also got to know the captain during this time. Isabella “Belle” West was an experienced captain in her mid fifties. She had a good sense of how to manage the ship as well as the people on it. She was friendly if one ran into her, but she mostly held herself aloof during the day to day operations of the ship.
Running the ship turned out to be only one of her duties. The ship had a number of reports which had to be sent out each day, and it was her job to read and sign off on all of them. Additionally, the captains of ships were tasked with off-ship personnel issues. Deep-space cargo and passenger ships paid well, and so jobs on them were highly sought-after, but few people were a good fit. Captains could earn extra money sorting through the piles of applications, and Belle West did.
She had been traveling in space since she was young, and had long ago settled into this unsettled life. She had no family to speak of. She was an only child whose parents died when she was in her twenties, and in space. Both her parents were only-children as well, but she did think that she had a second cousin somewhere or other who was still alive.
She had become a captain young, and these days her life was taken up dealing with the temporary families that assembled for deep space cargo trips.
“Sometimes you get crews where everyone is professional, but most of the time they’re a bunch of children,” she said, as she and Fr. Xris were talking over a mug of hot chocolate in the cafeteria one day.
“These deep-space voyages need people who don’t need people, if you get what I mean, and as often as you run into that, you find people who are just good at faking it. It wouldn’t be so bad if they could fake it for an entire trip then go take it out on their therapist. But they find ways of sneaking in personal conversations all the time.
“They pretend to need your help for something, then try to drag the conversation out for a half hour once you gave ‘em an answer. And then it always turns out that they can’t work when they’re alone, so you end up having to do their job for ‘em.
“That’s one reason I like taking on passengers. It gives the people who can’t handle it someone to talk to who isn’t me.”
“How’s the current crew?” Fr. Xris asked.
“Alright, I suppose,” she said. “Most of them have some experience. Kari’s new, but she’s OK. This is Jack’s fourteenth trip. Once someone has four under their belt, you know they’re OK. I’ve never seen a faker yet who could get on the ship for the fifth trip, no matter how much he needs the money.”
“What about Katie and Freia,” he asked.
“Katie’s OK,” she said. “She doesn’t have good manners, but then I think that she deals OK because she doesn’t really like people anyway. This is her fifth trip, so she doesn’t worry me.
“Freia is the one I’m suspicious about. This is her second deep space trip, and I wonder how well she’ll hold up. She’s had some short-term space experience, but that really doesn’t mean much. I mean, anyone who gets weeded out by the short space trips would never have thought about setting foot on a deep-space ship in the first place.”
“Do you get to know your crew?” he asked.
“A little,” she said. “I did that more at first. They keep changing, though, so after a decade or two there just doesn’t seem to be much point. You get good at knowing people deep but shallow, not that I expect you to know what I mean by that.”
“Do you mean that you know some parts of them very well, but you know you have a very incomplete picture?”
“Something like that,” she said.
“When you know you’re not going to see people again, it can be easy to open up to them about things you need to get off your chest. On the other hand, it’s easy to keep to yourself what you don’t want ‘em to know. Most just don’t want you to think badly of them, but there are some that want you to be impressed by ‘em. Heroes, devils, sex champions. I’ve heard it all. It’s not like I’m going to check up on ‘em when we get to port, so what people want to tell me they are, I let ‘em tell me.
“I don’t trust ‘em if they tell me they never tell a lie, and I don’t trust ‘em if they tell me they always tell lies, and I don’t sleep with ‘em, so it’s no skin off my nose if I say OK to a bunch of make-believe, and it’s a lot easier if I say OK to the truth, so I always say OK, whatever they say, so long as they get their reports in on time and I can read ‘em.”
“Ever have a couple ask you to marry them?” he said.
“Not yet,” Belle said. “But I wouldn’t be shocked. I don’t imagine that everything I’ve heard about Christians is true, but from what I’ve heard, our jobs have more in common than you might think. I’ve heard that people come to you with their troubles?”
“All the time,” he said, “often asking for prayers to help with some trouble, often in confession, and sometimes just looking for a sympathetic ear.”
“It’s funny, but I get a lot of the same. Not so much this trip, which come to think of it might be because you’re around. At first, I was surprised how many people came to get something off of their chest, but even when something doesn’t make sense, you can only be surprised for so long. People come to you to get things off their chest too?”
“It’s called confession,” he said. “God is the only one who can forgive sins, but he likes to use priests to do it. Since people are flesh and blood, it helps to say they’re sorry for their sins out loud to someone else. The things we do with our bodies as well as our minds, we do more completely.”
“I kind of get you,” she said. “I imagine that’s why they come to me. You can be sorry for cheating on your girlfriend inside your head in your own room, but then it stays inside your head in your own room. It’s different when you say it out loud where someone can hear you. It might go anywhere.”
“There’s another part, too, which isn’t so relevant to you. In my case, God has delegated his power to forgive sins out to bishops and through them to priests, so we get to take part in his action of forgiving. It helps the person confessing, because hearing somebody say, “I absolve you of your sins” can be very powerful, and that’s the important part, but it is also a pleasure to be the instrument of that forgiveness; to say the words which make someone feel better.”
“I can see where that would be nice,” she said. “I can’t forgive anything. Frankly, I don’t really want to, most of the time. I listen, but that doesn’t mean that I approve.”
“Forgiving doesn’t mean that you approve,” he said. “It just means that the person isn’t all bad. But this does depend on Christian theology. Jesus, the chosen one of God, paid the price for all men to pay for the things they did wrong. So when I forgive someone, it’s not letting it go, it’s applying that payment—the rectification—for what they did wrong. I’m not saying you have to believe it. It’s just that you need to know that in order for what we Christians do to make sense. It only makes sense if you know what we think we’re doing, I mean.”
“I get you,” she said. “Interesting idea, actually. None of my gods are very interested in forgiving, and none of them ever paid the price for anyone else. You have to pay the price to get them to do something for you, when you get down to it. And that’s fair, as far as I can see.”
* * *
Jack Standish, Belle’s first officer, was in m
any ways like her. As Belle mentioned, it was his fourteenth trip, and he seemed like a seasoned officer. He didn’t have the same air of having seen everything that Belle did, but this was her forty eighth trip, and her thirtieth as captain, so she had just about seen it all, while he hadn’t. He was a decent looking man in his mid thirties, and he looked on all the world with a sort of detached benevolence.
He was very fond of games, and tended to be the first one to start them up after dinner and was often the last one to leave. He didn’t have the captain’s workload, though since the captain included him in some of her decision making and management he did more than the other officers.
One time when Fr. Xris happened to stay later at games than usual and several of the others left earlier, he ended up in conversation with Jack while they were the last two left in the game room.
“So I’ve heard that you’ve been making a convert,” Jack said, after he had served the ball in a semi-virtual game which was something like a cross between racquetball and golf.
“You mean Hannah?” Fr. Xris said. “She’s shown great interest and has been studying. She has not yet decided to convert.”
“Are the rituals too scary?” Jack asked.
“It’s not the rituals,” Fr. Xris replied. “It’s the living afterwards that’s difficult.”
“Mutilation? You look whole.”
Fr. Xris laughed. He had forgotten that there were cults where the entrance rites involved cutting off body parts. The worst, oddly, was the atheistic cult of technology, which involved amputating your limbs and replacing them with motor-activated prosthetics. You also replaced your eyes and ears. They worked in some ways better but in some ways worse than the originals. Most people found them unsettling and a bit scary, which sat well with the cult’s disdain for “normals”.
“No,” he said. “It’s not anything like that. I mean, it’s the trying to be perfect afterwards that’s hard.”
“Strict rules?” Jack asked.
“Not in the sense of enforcement,” Fr. Xris said. “Just in the sense of what you try to hold yourself to.”
The score was even at this point. Though Jack was the better player, luck had been favoring Fr. Xris.
“You’re doing well tonight,” Jack observed.
“Don’t worry, you’ll pull ahead soon enough,” Fr. Xris replied.
“That’s not soon enough,” Jack joked.
With a straight shot into the hole, Jack scored 10,000,000 points, putting him in the lead. (The game had an inflated score. People who routinely played it, when talking about it, often dropped the last six digits as they were always zero.)
“So how did you get into deep-space cargo?” Fr. Xris asked.
“It paid well,” Jack said, “and once I tried it, it suited me. That’s how most people get into it.”
“No stories of parents eaten by circus elephants when you were 10?”
“Nope. My parents are alive and well.”
Fr. Xris managed to bank the ball off of a passing egret into the hole.
“No way!” Jack exclaimed. “Were you trying to do that?”
“No,” Fr. Xris admitted. “I didn’t even see the egret until after I hit the ball. I was aiming for the tree he flew in front of.”
Fr. Xris received 30,000,000 points for banking the ball off of a moving target plus another 5,000,000 for the dead egret, putting him ahead again.
“Teats!” Jack said.
The full expression was, “tie my mouth to a Balrog’s teats, stick a Hoover on my ass, and call me unlucky”. It was typically shortened, to the point where most people didn’t know where it came from, but the general gist was that fortune had taken a turn against one’s best interests. (The Balrog, according to those who believed in it, produce highly poisonous flaming acid from its upper four teats, and an equally poisonous flesh searingly radioactive alkaline liquid from its lower four teats. Oddly, despite the opposite pH of the two liquids, there was nothing in the myth about what happened if you mixed the milks, though one would expect it to be a highly exothermic reaction with a very salty product, perfect for making the resultant wounds hurt more. Chemistry was not generally the strong point of Balrog enthusiasts. It is not widely known whether they had any strong points.)
Jack was quiet until he had nearly evened the score by winning 30,000,000 points in three competently made shots.
“So how did you get into being a priest? Did elephants eat your parents?”
“No,” Fr. Xris laughed, “I’m afraid its as prosaic as your story.”
“It pays well?” Jack asked.
“No,” Fr. Xris said, “the pay is horrible. I just meant it wasn’t the end-point of a complex and intricate story, where each twist depended on a still more improbable turn before it. My parents are Christian, and I had a strong attraction to the priesthood most of my life. I doubted I should be a priest when I was a teenager, but finally admitted it to myself in my mid twenties.”
“So what do you do as a priest?” Jack asked.
“Mostly, I talk to people,” Fr. Xris said. “Often, I listen to them. Sometimes I do other things, like conduct rituals. Occasionally I hear disputes and help people to settle them. But you wouldn’t believe how much people need to talk.”
“I might,” Jack said. “You get used to not talking on these voyages. Then when you put into port, people talk so much! Sometimes you just want to say, ‘stop all this yammering!’”
Fr. Xris smiled.
Jack had gotten another 10,000,000 points, but then Fr. Xris got 5,000,000 for (accidentally) hitting a drink-serving robot in the leg, and they were tied again.
“I swear, this is the biggest run of luck I’ve ever seen,” Jack said.
“I’d agree with you if I believed in luck,” Fr. Xris said.
“You don’t believe in luck?” Jack asked.
“I don’t believe in uncaused actions which don’t fit into any rational plan and mean nothing,” he said. “Of course I believe that there are things which I can neither know nor control which do affect me, like an egret which I learn about only after I hit the ball.
“And I should add that though everything which happens does fit into a rational plan, I don’t begin to understand what that plan is. What I object to is not the idea that I’m doing much better at this game than my skill justifies—clearly I am. I’m doing ludicrously better than I ought to be. What I object to is the idea that there’s some sort of magical thing called randomness behind it which is operating on its own whims without caring about us.”
“I think I get you,” Jack said. “Not sure I agree with you, but I get you. I mean, it sure seems the universe has it out for you sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“In the sense that it’s a pain in the neck, or that it seems to be actively thwarting your plans, then definitely it seems like it is. I don’t mean that God orders all things to our convenience and still less to our plans. Frankly, the way things turn out often just proves that God has a sense of humor.”
And indeed that night offered no proof against God’s sense of humor, as Fr. Xris won the game by almost thirty million points.
Chapter 9
The next two months continued quite uneventfully with most things proceeding as they had been going. Games went on at night in order to have something to do, Fr. Xris had the occasional conversation with crew members, Hannah continued her studies, Shaka came to daily mass, Xiao kept to himself, Katie was aloof and unpleasant, and Freia was teasing and frustrated.
At the end of the two months they came to the crossover they were headed for, which was the last one discovered on Sol’s north slipstream. The southern slipstream was the more popular one, with more slipstreams intersecting it.
Fr. Xris thought that this might provide some excitement, but it turned out to be insignificant. Slipstream paths are very highly regulated, with designated places within it for people passing through and designated places for entry so that they went through the crossover point without w
aiting. Moreover, no one was entering or leaving the other slipstream at the time they were crossing it, so there wasn’t even the potential for worrying that they made a mistake. (Which was itself not realistically possible. Local navigation was handled entirely by computers which ran thoroughly debugged digitally signed code.)
The term crossover point is something of a misnomer, though it was the common term. Slipstreams almost never literally crossed each other, and in fact slipstreams crossing each other was purely theoretical. None had ever been observed, and there were some theories that if they did it would cause them to warp or even collapse. What the term “crossover point” with another slipstream denoted was the point in the slipstream where it came closest to the other slipstream. The closest known slipstreams were 1.7 million kilometers from crossover point to crossover point, while the furthest had 403 million kilometers between them.
Crossover point Sol-Zeta, as it was called, was eighty million kilometers away from crossover point Xan-Zeta. (The star around which Xanadu orbited had been renamed Xan, and the naming convention was that a crossover point had the same Greek letter designation as it did on the sol side; when it finally came up, this convention was extended to be the slipstream closer to Sol took priority.)
At each crossover point, there was a small space station which regulated access to the slipstream. Passenger ships would typically dock at these stations for a change of scenery, but deep-space cargo ships had no business with them, and so just passed them by. Space stations were re-supplied by, and personnel started and ended their tours of duty on, smaller ships which were sent out specifically for the purpose.
The Hopeful, accordingly, did not dock at either space station. There was a small cargo ship docked at the entry station at Xan-Zeta. Possibly because it was something mildly out of the ordinary, and there is normally nothing at all out of the ordinary on a deep space cargo ship, it was the main topic of conversation at dinner.
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