The Deacon stared at me.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew this would happen.”
“No,” I said. Which was the technical truth. The Professor had never told me the precise nature of our doom, should it come.
“You knew!”
This time she’d yelled it at me.
My cheeks reddened with shame.
“Well, okay, dammit, so maybe I did. What was I supposed to do? Go blabbing to every man, woman, and child in the valley? Who would that have helped? Would it have solved anything? It would have caused panic, that’s what it would have caused. And half of them would not have wanted to believe me in any case. I’d have been cast out as a crazy and the chapel would have been shut down.”
Tears stained the Deacon’s face.
“I’m sorry, Diane,” I said. “I really am. But I didn’t dare tell anyone. Not even you. How could I?”
She spun away from me and began marching back down the mountainside.
“Wait!” I called after her, practically running to catch up.
When I grabbed her shoulders she threw off my hands with a violent twist of her body.
“Don’t touch me,” she snarled.
“I said I was sorry.”
“Like it matters?”
“To me it does. Diane, think about it. We’ve all been trapped here for how many years now? With no sign that there will ever be any escape? People have begun families. It’s not much of a life, but it’s something. People have found ways to get by. And you and I and the rest of the religious leadership, we’ve been part of that. You know we have. Prematurely telling people what I knew about the mantes’ plans would have been a gross betrayal of our service. My job—your job too—is to give everyone a mode for hope. Not all of them use it, but enough of them do that I couldn’t in good conscience let them down by becoming a prophet of death.”
She’d stopped in her tracks. From the side I could tell that fresh tears continued to leak from her eyes. The shuddering of her back told me all I needed to know about the anguish she must be feeling. I myself merely felt a hollowness in my chest where emotion should have been. If the news had just hit Diane like a baseball bat between the eyes, I’d had to live with it on my heart like a slow corrosive. Insidious and malignant.
“Well you can’t hide the truth now,” she finally said, her voice cracking. “Word’s already getting around. Even the hardcore doubters will eventually come up here and confirm things for themselves. Just like we did. What’s going to happen, Harry? Are we going to keep blowing sunshine up their asses, or are we going to be straight with them?”
“Didn’t you once tell me you thought our incarceration was God’s way of testing us?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, snuffling. “It was easy to talk, then. The war was more or less over. The mantes seemed to have left us alone. Now? I guess this means God’s passed judgment.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Is that what you’re going to say on Sunday?”
“I don’t know yet. All I know is I want to get the hell off this mountain.”
She began walking again, which left me no choice but to follow her.
CHAPTER 7
FOR SEVERAL DAYS, HUNDREDS OF FEARFUL AND CURIOUS PEOPLE went up to the valley rim. When enough of them had returned with confirmation of the dreadful reality, the mood in the valley promptly shifted to alarm.
But for me? It was almost a relief. No more carrying around a silent burden.
I still didn’t let on that I’d had advanced warning. And the Deacon didn’t tell anyone either. Suffice to say that what others didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me or them.
Whether the Professor had been legit or not, he’d been unable to change the minds on his Quorum. Humanity’s stay on Purgatory was coming to an end.
In the weeks that followed, attendance in the chapel went through the roof. I was forced to allow people to begin spending the night. Who was I to keep banker’s hours, at a time like this? As long as people didn’t leave a mess—excremental or otherwise—I let them stay as long as they wanted. It’s what the chaplain would have preferred were he still alive and able to give direction. I could think of no better use for the place.
Occasional scout trips to the hills told us that the contraction of The Wall was accelerating.
By the time The Wall was in the valley floor, and closing at well over a meter per day, I had more people in the chapel than could possibly fit. I began to wonder if the combination of fear and crowding might cause a riot. But my flock was like me for the most part—calm and resigned. Maybe attempting to make some sort of final peace with the universe? Perhaps, also, we were each of us eager for the ultimate escape. It had been years since we’d walked freely on a human world, masters of our own universe. Life in the valley, controlled utterly by the mantes, had been like a living coffin.
Now it would end.
CHAPTER 8
CARRYING ON WITH BUSINESS AS USUAL WAS A STRANGE EXPERIENCE. Knowing what was to come left an aftertaste of dread in my mouth each morning. But there was always the same routine maintenance work on the chapel to be done. Rather than neglect my chores, I hurled myself into them with as much energy as I could muster. Keeping busy on productive tasks was just about the only sober way to take my mind off The Wall.
I suddenly found myself welcoming every little crack in the mortar, hole in the roof, or rotted slat of wood in the doors and shutters. Fixes that might have taken me only minutes before, now took hours. Not because I half-assed them. Far from it. I gave them the attention of a craftsman. Carefully patching and replacing as I went, so that for much of the day my mind was directly occupied.
A few of the regulars began helping me, and then, more people too. Before long everybody was in on the action. And quite quickly the chapel looked sharper than it ever had before. The place almost hummed with energy—everyone displacing his or her fear into the work itself. Including the grounds surrounding the chapel, as well as my garden.
We didn’t talk about it, of course. I don’t think we needed to. We could each see it in each other’s eyes. To speak our thoughts would have burst the fragile, necessary bubble of suspended disbelief that seemed to be keeping our manners and our sanity intact. So we discussed our work, and patted each other encouragingly on the back when it seemed a job had been well-done, and at night I huddled on my cot and tried to console myself with the idea that even though the end was near, at least I could say I was approaching the end with dignity.
Which was more than could be said for others.
One night I saw a bearded figure shuffle through the chapel entrance. He’d not shaved in weeks and had grain alcohol on his breath.
That was one rule I chose not to break: no drunks in my building. People who wanted to drown their sorrows in a mug or bottle were welcome to do it somewhere else. I politely approached the man and began encouraging him to go, when I stopped cold.
“Major Hoff,” I said quietly, recognizing him.
“How do you do it?” he slurred at me.
“Do what, sir?”
“How do you believe?”
“Sir?”
“God, damn you! How do you believe in God?”
I thought back to the first time the Professor had entered the chapel. I’d not had a very good answer for him then, and I didn’t have a very good answer for Hoff now. The major’s eyes squinted angrily up at me as I fumbled my way through an explanation, then he waved me off.
“Crap,” he said. “It’s all a lot of crap. Always has been.”
I looked behind me to see that a small crowd of the chapel’s inhabitants had gathered to see what all the fuss was about. Recognizing that he had an audience, Hoff drew himself up to as dignified a stance as he could muster and began holding forth.
“The damned bugs always did have us by the balls,” he said in the too-loud volume of the generally intoxicated. “If there really was a God up there, He’d have made it so that the game was fair. No advantage for
the mantes. Instead, they were so far ahead of us when the war started, we never really got our shot. Humanity, a day late and a dollar short. Or maybe a few hundred or a few thousand years late. Well, put your heads between your legs and kiss your butts goodbye. It’s been nice knowing you assholes.”
With that, Hoff turned and stepped out of the chapel.
Someone who came in later told me that the major kept walking well into the night, right up until he hit the wall.
Then, crackle-poof. He was gone.
By the time The Wall was clearly visible from the doorway of the chapel, people were giving themselves up to it on a regular basis. My parishioners, others from around the valley, anybody who’d just gotten tired of the waiting and decided to end it. I began to be able to tell who those people were. The pews would be packed, and someone would just stand up and slowly walk out, a look of remarkable calm on his or her face. Like Hoff, they’d keep going like that—calm, quiet, no running, right up and into The Wall. Flash. One moment, a human being. The next, a cloud of carbon molecules, decaying to submolecular nothingness.
I heard that the other church leaders began railing against this practice. Deacon Fulbright especially. Suicide was sin, and for those who walked into The Wall, it was said, there would be damnation.
“You know the rules as well as I do,” she told me one night as we stood outside the packed confines of the chapel. The Wall was ghostly bright in the distance—a reminder of our coming mortality.
“I serve other people besides Christians,” I reminded her. “The chaplain was very specific about his chapel being a place where everybody could come to seek spiritual solace.”
“You don’t have to be a Christian to see that throwing away what He gave you—a life—is a slap to His face.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I told her. “I can’t believe in any God that would curse a soul who picks freedom from this place, especially since we’re going to die regardless. I’ve even considered it a few times myself: just getting up, walking out, and ending it.”
“So why don’t you?” she said, her voice hard and bitter.
“The only thing that stops me is my flock,” I replied. “They need the chapel, and the chapel needs me, so I stay where I am.”
The Deacon didn’t have a response to that.
She just stared at the Wall as it rippled like a curtain.
Within a few days, she’d joined the teeming congregation already at the chapel, bringing everyone in her attenuated religious circle with her.
Every night she and I made a point of meeting outside to consider our fate—watching The Wall creep toward us.
When I could sleep I dreamt odd dreams of flying away from Purgatory on a gust of warm ether, floating to another world far, far away from anywhere I’d ever been before.
CHAPTER 9
ONE MORNING I FOUND MYSELF OUT OF BED EARLY, GETTING ready to light the altar lamps in the pre-dawn darkness, when I heard Diane shriek from the foyer.
Jumping over a few people who had curled up asleep in the central aisle, I found the Deacon leaning against the doorway and pointing into the distance. I peered out and saw nothing. Just the black shapes of the mountains, and the almost imperceptible lightening of the sky in the east.
“What?” I said, tired and puzzled.
“Look,” was all she could say, her eyes bugging out at me as if I’d gone mad or blind.
Then, like a physical thunderclap, it hit me.
I was seeing nothing but mountains!
Other shouts from inside the chapel had roused my flock to their feet.
Diane and 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.
CHAPTER 10
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. Each of them very young—and eager. They congregated at the chapel, observing the mass of hundreds of humans who had come to crowd the inside and the outside of my little church, each of them giving thanks to various versions of the Lord for their salvation.
Diane was leading a particularly raucous bunch of gospel singers who were harmonizing at the top of their lungs. I’d literally never seen her so happy before.
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 of the Select, 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 freely. I would advise caution.”
“And when your research is complete?”
“That will be several 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, pealing, 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.”
PART TWO
THE CHAPLAIN’S LEGACY
CHAPTER 11
“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 mantis 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 ma
y 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 mantis 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.
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.
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