Horizons: A collection of science fiction short stories

by Nolan Edrik

  In non-Church news, U.S. negotiators had walked out of talks aimed at allowing Japan to build a research station on the moon. The U.S. had long suspected the station would house a covert military operation and was looking for any pretext to disallow it. Iran and Turkey had called a ceasefire. The consensus was that the peace might hold, even though the consensus had proven wrong the last few times. Lastly, the Tibetan Confederation was halting water shipments to Pakistan as punishment for failing to sign onto the most recent nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The Dalai Lama had advised against turning off the spigot and was set to meet with the confederation’s Prime Minister to discuss the dispute.

  Caldwell took all of the news in stride, nodding, grunting, or furrowing his brow as the items warranted.

  “Good, good,” he said. “Anything else?”

  I had decided to mention the Pytheas probe when we were wrapping up, as if it were a piece of funny gossip rather than significant news. I’d spent all morning rehearsing my delivery into my bathroom mirror, trying to strike the right mix of amusement and disdain.

  “I almost forgot,” I said, “did you hear about that probe?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Caldwell said.

  I chuckled as sincerely as I could.

  “I wasn’t going to mention it, but if you run into any journalists, they may ask you about it. It’s no big deal, but you know how they are.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “So, NASA said yesterday that a probe they launched twenty years ago – Pytheas 35 it’s called – they said it’s been taken.”

  “Taken?” Caldwell’s face scrunched up. “What does that mean?”

  “Like, it’s been picked up.”

  “Picked up? By what? By who? By the Japanese?”

  “No, it’s too far away for that.”

  “Then who took the thing?”

  “They don’t know exactly. But they say it appears to have been taken by a ship.” I felt my throat tightening. “A non-Earth ship.”

  Caldwell leaned back in his chair and studied my face. Even though I’d prepared for this moment, the bottom of my stomach still fell out.

  “Crazy huh?” I said. “Can you believe the nonsense those NASA clowns come up with? They’re worse than the archaeologists.”

  Caldwell kept his eyes locked on me. I held my smile steady and let out a few nervous giggles. He leaned forward, tore his morning message out of his notepad, and handed it to me.

  “Thank you, Glenn,” he said. “Have a good day.”

  That’s how he always concluded our meetings, but this time his words had none of their usual warmth.

  “You too, my Shepherd.”

  I rushed out the door past Caldwell’s morning attendant, who was holding his bear claw and steaming cup of Earl Grey, and waved goodbye to Barb. I was relieved the Shepherd hadn’t fired me on the spot. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d get a curt call later in the day informing me of my termination.

  *

  I typed and sent out Caldwell’s message – this one was about faith as ballast for the soul in the turbulent waters of life – then started monitoring the news for tomorrow’s report. To my dismay, all of the feeds were dominated by conspiracy theories about Pytheas 35. Some said NASA had faked the abduction to try to generate more funding in next year’s budget. Others guessed that the Japanese had taken the probe and that they’d been operating a covert space program as far back as the late 2030s. Our church’s media stream ran the Pytheas story as a small item buried inside a larger roundup of science news, which focused more on the research our universities were conducting.

  The only outlet that wasn’t spewing conjecture about Pytheas was the Collective. They simply reported NASA’s statements and interviewed scientists on the prospects of alien life in the region where the probe was reportedly picked up. Their coverage was a little dry, but it made me think for a second that the whole story was plausible.

  Still, I had no intention of putting any Pytheas chatter in tomorrow’s report. Laura’s scan presented a major hurdle, and now was not the time to test Caldwell’s tolerance. If he pressed me about the probe, I’d say that the media was throwing its usual tantrum over a dubious news item.

  *

  As soon as I got home that night, I called Laura’s house. No one answered right away so of course I pictured the worst: her machinery beeping like mad, Hunter pressing on her chest trying to revive her, their two girls wailing in the background. I dropped the phone back in my pocket and paced around the empty living room.

  They could be busy. Or napping. Or maybe they went out for a walk. Laura had that new wheelchair that could carry all her equipment, and the weather probably was great in Maine right now.

  I sat on the floor, found a show on my phone, and flipped it up to the big screen. I’d kept the TV, my one luxury, on the theory that it saved me money by helping me avoid more expensive entertainment. So far that had worked, but maybe I could pawn it too. I could always get books from the library or spend more time praying.

  The show was a comedy-drama about life in the Prayer Corps, produced by the church’s entertainment division. Each episode had a humorous storyline involving the members’ hijinks and a serious storyline about a person they were trying to save. The episodes always ended well. The Corpsmen resolved their own little problem, got serious about their job, and went into a deep, sincere bout of prayer, their concentrated devotion saving the person they were praying for. The show always left me believing in the True Church and our mission even more. I needed that. Especially now.

  The show ended, and I looked at my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a call. I hadn’t. I pictured Hunter draped over Laura’s body, sobbing uncontrollably. Then I saw him pushing her through the forest, the sunlight and wind on her face, their girls hunting for acorns along the crushed-gravel path.

  I went to the kitchen, ate a packet of room-temperature soup and an apple and tried not to think. As soon as I finished, I called Laura again.

  “Hey Glenn,” Hunter answered. He sounded tired.

  “Hi, Hunt. How are you two doing?”

  “Good, good.”

  “Everything’s OK? I called earlier, and you didn’t answer.”

  “Oh, that was you? Yeah, sorry, we went out for a walk. Your sister’s got that new chair, and the weather was great so…” his voice trailed off as his mind wandered away. “How’s everything there? How’s the Shepherd?”

  “Great. He keeps me pretty busy. Big world, lots of news.”

  We fell silent. I wanted to ask to speak to Laura, but I figured he would’ve suggested it if she were feeling well enough to talk. I was thinking of a nice way to ask, to say I only wanted to say a quick hello, when I heard mumbling. His hand covered the phone. There was more rustling, then the hand came off the phone.

  “Hey big bruddah,” Laura said. Her voice sounded faint and wheezy, but I could tell she was smiling.

  “Hey, sistah,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  She held the phone away from her head and coughed.

  “Like a billion bucks. How are you doing? How’s Kara?”

  “Oh, good.” Kara had dumped me months ago after growing tired of my monastic lifestyle. To me, that revealed the shallowness of her devotion, so the end of our relationship didn’t bother me. But I hadn’t told Laura any of that. She didn’t need more worries.

  “Well, I won’t keep you long,” I said. “I just wanted to call and say good luck before your test. I know it’s not really your thing, but I’m praying for you. And I’ve got other people praying for you, too.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Tell them not to pray for me at night, though. I can hear them, and it keeps me awake.”

  She laughed faintly, but I knew part of her believed in what I was doing. After we lost dad in the war, she spent a year devoted to the True Church, volunteering at the free day-care centers, teaching Sunday school, interning at the church’s bank. Her zeal faded, then
returned with full force when mom died in the crash. But then she met Hunter, had kids, got busy with life, and her faith waned. For whatever reason, her illness didn’t revive it.

  “Oh, the big test isn’t tomorrow,” Laura said. “It got moved to next week. The doctors said the transplants need more time to heal.”

  That was good news. The delay meant I could get the Prayer Corps a whole extra paycheck before the test.

  “Well, rest up, OK,” I said.

  “You got it.”

  “And give me a call afterward?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I talk to Hunter again real quick?”

  She hesitated. I’d never asked to speak to him before.

  “OK.”

  “I love you, sistah.”

  “I love you too, bruddah.”

  After a few seconds, Hunter picked up the phone.

  “Hey, Glenn, what’s up?”

  “I know this isn’t exactly yours and Laura’s thing, but I have a drive set up for her with the Prayer Corps. I’m sure you guys are keeping a tight budget, but I know your parents are pretty comfortable. I also got the sense they were involved in the Church when we met that one time.”

  “Yeah,” he said, drawing out the vowel.

  “Could you just pass along the drive number? It’s their choice if they want to donate.”

  I sensed him rolling his eyes. I didn’t care.

  “OK,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Can you promise me you’ll pass it along? You’ve always taken good care of Laura, and in a situation like this, I think we agree it’s worth trying everything, right?”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “What’s the number?”

  I gave him the code, thanked him, and hung up. I guessed there was a 50 percent chance he’d pass it along. But I’d done all I could. I looked at my empty apartment and the square depressions in the carpet where the furniture used to sit. What else could I do?

  *

  The next morning I arrived at the office at 5 a.m. and checked the overnight news for anything else I needed to add to my report to Caldwell.

  All of the streams had blaring headlines about the latest development on Pytheas, and the news was not good. NASA had released photos and videos that Pytheas had sent back, and they included images of the beings that had captured the probe. Some pictures showed the aliens looking right into the craft’s camera, while others showed a group of them operating some sort of scanning device.

  The beings looked basically human: two arms, two legs, torso, neck, and head. They were thinner, paler, and less hairy than average people. Their faces had milder features than humans, as if their chins, noses, ears, and brow lines had all receded. But the differences were within the normal range of human variation. Only seeing them in a group and in the context of a NASA dispatch made them look alien.

  I didn’t know whether I believed the images. Frankly, I didn’t care enough to believe or not. While the photos could have been cooked up by any teenager with the right software, I had a hard time imagining NASA committing so heavily to a hoax for extra budget money. The chance that it would backfire on them was too great.

  None of that was important, though. What mattered was keeping my job through the end of the week, when my next paycheck hit my account. The problem was that Pytheas had gotten out of control, and now I absolutely couldn’t avoid addressing the story with Caldwell.

  The True Church’s denial of the possibility of extraterrestrial life wasn’t a main tenet of our scientific doctrine. Our dictates against cloning, non-essential neural implants, and virtual-reality sex were more prominent in recent years. Still, our theology clearly stated that humans were the only possible intelligent life in the universe, put on this particular planet by God. In order not to contradict doctrine in the presence of the Shepherd, I had to present the Pytheas news entirely as information that I did not believe.

  *

  I arrived at Caldwell’s office at 6:58 a.m. and took my place by Barb’s desk. After we greeted each other, she kept her eyes on me and opened her mouth as if she were about to ask a question. She changed her mind, shook her head, and resumed typing.

  At 7 a.m., the button lit up, and she buzzed me in.

  Caldwell was hunched over his desk, Bible open, notepad out. He motioned me to my seat and scribbled for a few seconds after I sat down. I glanced at his notepad and noticed that the daily message was only one paragraph, about a quarter of the normal length.

  He finished writing, closed the Bible, and tossed his pen on top of his notepad.

  “Go ahead,” he said, without looking at me.

  I slid my report across the desk. He stood and walked heavily over to the office’s sink to pour a glass of water.

  “You can start,” he said from across the room. “I’m listening.”

  This departure from our routine rattled me, and I needed a second to regain my composure before starting.

  The main internal Church news was that a group of Baptist parishes in Australia had reached a preliminary agreement to merge with us. Our lawyers were headed down to hash out the details, and the new members seemed amenable to the standard franchise agreement. Caldwell grunted with approval and lumbered back to the desk.

  In world news, the Turkey-Iran ceasefire had held overnight, but negotiators were having trouble agreeing on preconditions for the talks and the bombing may start again soon. Caldwell nodded and flipped the page. I was about to update him on the Tibetan water shipments, when he held up his hand.

  “Let me stop you for a second,” he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Sure.”

  “Is that probe still in the news?”

  “Yes. That was the fourth item on the list today.”

  “Really? Let’s knock that out now. What are they saying?”

  “Well, they have pictures,” I said.

  Caldwell leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes. I realized my mistake immediately. I’d tried so hard to sound casual that I’d gotten sloppy with my words.

  “They say they have pictures,” I said, conjuring up my most skeptical tone. It was too late. “I printed them out for you so you can see how—”

  “Of course you did,” he snapped. He flipped forward in the report, searching for the offending images.

  Sweat beaded up on my forehead.

  “I wanted to show you how they’re certainly forgeries,” I said. “Any kid with some cheap software could have doctored these up.”

  He huffed out a derisive laugh. I told him about the pictures and videos and what they purported to show. Readers already were poring over the images for evidence of forgery, and our scientists were examining them for inconsistencies and impossibilities. We’d have it all debunked by noon, I assured him.

  “Good,” he said, nodding. “Say, could you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Could you throw me together a special report, for my eyes only, on Pytheas? Everything you can find on it. When it launched, the scientists who worked on it, where it was headed, who made it, all of that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  Caldwell scratched his chin, mumbled, looked at the ceiling then shook his head no. He’d had a whole silent conversation with himself right in front of me.

  “Should we continue?” I asked and turned back to the Iran-Turkey page.

  “Sure,” he said and started riffling through the report.

  I started back into reading, and a few seconds in, he stopped me again.

  “You know what, I can finish this on my own. Just get me that Pytheas report first thing tomorrow.”

  “Certainly. Thank you, my Shepherd.”

  Barb gave me a strange look on the way out. Our meetings never ran so short. Caldwell’s breakfast hadn’t even arrived yet.

  *

  When I got back to my cubicle, I still didn’t know what to think. Was Caldwell angry or mere
ly distracted? Giving me an additional assignment was a vote of confidence, even if the task was like burying landmines under my own feet.

  Still, his interest in Pytheas struck me as bizarre. Of course, contact with alien life would be momentous, and the True Church would have to deal with the theological implications. Yet we’d experienced sea changes in recent years – genetic programming, electronic personhood, radical life extension – and Caldwell had never become preoccupied with any of them.

  Maybe he sensed Pytheas was different? That the cultural phenomenon would shake society harder and require a more creative response from the Church. I trusted his instincts on this front. For a man who lived such an isolated life, surrounded by advisers, assistants, and subordinates, he still had an amazing ability to gauge the psyche of great swathes of society.

  That talent had allowed him to expand the Church rapidly in the past thirty years. When Caldwell served as a pastor at his own little congregation in southern Missouri, he immediately sensed that people wanted more out of a religion than one hour of chanting and singing every week. Deep down, they craved a mission, a cause to dedicate their lives to. However, such devotion was impossible to sustain when the tempests and temptations of the world impinged on them from a million directions every day.

  So Caldwell decided to protect them, to insulate them from the turbulence, so that they could nurture their devotion without disruption. His parish first purchased a small apartment complex where its members could live and play, free from the burden of interacting with unbelievers.

  The project proved so successful that the True Church drew more members who wanted that untroubled lifestyle. So it added more parishes and snapped up more land, then businesses, then media properties, and schools. The enterprises were run with corporate efficiency, and the profits were plowed back into buying more assets: banks, law firms, grocery stores. Before long, a man could wake up in his Church-planned subdivision, take a Church-provided bus to his job at a Church-run company, work a nine-hour day, then go home and eat a Church-branded frozen dinner with the wife he met through the Church’s dating network. Never would our people have to engage with the messy world again.