Faith

by John Love

  “Commander, She’s launched something. It’s not shrouded. I’ll have a visual soon.”

  •

  It was a cone-shaped object, tumbling towards them end over end; about thirty feet long by twenty feet wide at its base, said the Bridge screen. It offered no resistance to probes, and the probes showed it to be quite empty. It was not travelling under power (though outlets at its base indicated pulse motors) and there were no guidance or homing signals, so the screen concluded it must be on a preset course. As if to confirm this, it fired its motors briefly on-off to avoid a cloud of asteroid debris, then resumed its course towards them.

  And, although the screen did not add any comment about this feature, its colour was pink; bright, nursery pink.

  Comical and conical, Foord thought; still pisstaking.

  “Stay at rest for now, please,” he said. “Joser, the screen says there are no guidance signals.”

  “That’s right, Commander: no guidance or homing signals. And ETA is ninety-nine seconds.”

  “So no guidance, and apparently—if we believe the probes—nothing inside it. So what’s it there for? What’s it mean?”

  A section of the Bridge screen became locally magnified. The usual series of schematics was generated, unasked, by the screen: ventral, dorsal, side, front and rear. They added nothing not already visible.

  “Cyr: lasers, please. I want to see inside it.”

  A single laser stabbed out, one of the ship’s shortrange crystal lasers. It hit, and a section of the cone sheared off. Inside was as pink as outside; it really did seem empty. It still came on, tumbling end over end, but now more erratically.

  “ETA fifty-nine seconds, Commander.”

  “Again, please, Cyr.”

  Two more shots, two more bits sliced off the cone, two more views of an apparently empty and featureless interior.

  Still plenty of time, Foord thought, to destroy it. So what’s it going to do to confound us at the last moment? He told Kaang to move them to port a few hundred feet and bring them to rest, which she did. The cone fired its motors, on-off, as it had done to avoid the cloud of debris, changing course so it still came at them, still tumbling end over end.

  “ETA forty-five seconds, Commander.”

  “Cyr, finish it, please. Lasers.”

  If anything’s going to happen it will be now, thought Foord. But it didn’t. The cone exploded, not very spectacularly, and was reduced to pink dust which drifted away to add itself to the map of the Belt which Foord had been so assiduously rewriting.

  Foord took a sip of inhibitor fluid—the tumbler had remained undisturbed on his chairarm during the recent flurry of activity—and settled back in his chair. He let out a long breath.

  “Joser, what’s Her position, please?”

  “Unchanged and stationary, Commander.”

  “Good… So what did She mean with that missile?”

  “Mean?”

  “Yes. It was slow, empty, had no shrouding and no flickerfields, was coloured pink, and looked silly. Right?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “And apart from the two occasions it fired its motors it wasn’t travelling under active power. Right?”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “Yet it changed course when we did. Which means, doesn’t it, that it either had an active homing system or was receiving guidance signals from Her.”

  “There were no homing or guidance signals, Commander!”

  “You mean you failed to detect them.” Foord did not say it unkindly, or accusingly. “Come on, this is the area She has most advantage over us. I just need to know how much advantage. I need to see how we failed to detect them.”

  “Detecting no homing or guidance signals is not the same as failing to detect them, Commander. I didn’t fail to detect them. There were no signals.”

  “That’s a clever answer,” Foord replied, “but not a helpful one.”

  “Commander,” Thahl said quietly, “you asked what She meant by that missile.”

  “Well?”

  “It seems to have been empty. So, suppose it really didn’t have an onboard homing system, and suppose it really wasn’t able to receive guidance signals.”

  “Well?”

  “Then its movements must have been preset by Her when She launched it. Including the move to follow our last-minute turn to port. She preset that move when She launched it. Before you gave the order to turn.”

  3

  The Charles Manson was partly alive, but not alive enough to know that it could die. Its partial life made it serene and invincible; it knew that as long as the parts which made up its whole continued not to need each other, the whole could not be destroyed. It understood that when Foord, of all people, broke down it would probably not be noisy or sudden; with Foord it was more likely to be a careful, phased collapse. So it waited for the expected confirmation. It would then simply continue, minus the discarded part.

  The ship had noted his increasingly unusual behaviour, the speech patterns and vocal nuances and repeated unanswered questions. It had prepared for his replacement by Thahl, or (if there were further contingencies) by Cyr or Smithson; Joser and Kaang were not on its list. It had noted that Thahl would normally be next, but had detected minor aberrations in him, too. It made no judgements—it wasn’t able to—but only calculated contingencies. The contingencies were programmed into the computers which served its sentience cores which, when they came together, were its Codex.

  But Foord did not break down. His reaction, when it came, was perhaps worse.

  “What is She, Thahl?” he kept asking; the one question he always said he wouldn’t ask. “What is She? How can She reach into our MT Drive and our communications and our thoughts before we think them? How is it She already knows us?” Eventually he stopped asking and fell silent, and then his reaction became clear: not breakdown, but withdrawal. He turned inwards, back to the time when the darkness came.

  •

  “Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time.” Aaron Foord was one of these, and he looked round in bewilderment. Dust motes circled in the sunbeams which slanted down into the Assembly Hall. The Principal’s voice echoed. “We know this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community, but you’ll find we particularly value new friends. We value the challenge you will give us. We look forward to making you part of something bigger than yourselves. You’ll find a community here which will seem like it’s been waiting just for you. You’ll have experiences here which will last all your lives.”

  Twenty-five years ago, when Aaron Foord was twelve, his mother was diagnosed. She died within six months, and his father, after nursing her and becoming infected, within a further six weeks. He had no other relatives still living, so he went to a State Orphanage. He went because he was literally an orphan, though the term Orphanage was also figurative: it was a place for those Orphaned from the State, which considered itself their true parent. In other words, a centre for the treatment of young criminal and political offenders. The handful of genuine orphans who also went there did not usually survive unaffected.

  It was not a stereotypical institution, at least in appearance: there was no forbidding architecture, only a collection of bland functional buildings with curtains and walls and furniture in beige and orange and brown. It was reasonably clean, and not immediately threatening. Aaron Foord noticed, with a sense of novelty, that things like teapots and saucepans and cooking vessels were all industrial size. All the things he had been used to doing alone, or as one of a family of three—eating, sleeping, going to the bathroom, reading and working and playing—he now did among dozens, or hundreds.

  His parents had stayed together through his childhood. He couldn’t define or recognise love, either then or later, but he noted carefully the details of their companionship, their ease with each other. He rem
embered summers on beaches, the murmur of voices. He always liked voices murmured and nuanced, and would try later to recreate them on his ship. His mother and father had given him a solitary childhood, but not an unhappy one. They were quiet and orderly people, and he grew up liking quietness and order.

  He knew the Morning Assembly welcome was ambiguous. He knew there were unspoken words behind the spoken ones, and soon found out what they were: corporatist psychobabble. No room for optouts. No room for outsiders. You’re Us or the Enemy. Community, Greater Good, One Of Us, There Is No I In Team. Most heavy gravity planets supplied Special Forces and mercenaries to other parts of the Commonwealth, and their societies were corporatist and authoritarian. Aaron Foord’s planet was no exception.

  The orphanage was run by State officials, some of whom were civilians and some, to his surprise, priests. The priests had a particular way about them. They had open regular faces and smiled a lot. They didn’t walk but strolled. They didn’t shout but spoke quietly, something he found likeable until he started listening to them. They punctuated their speech with swingings of their rulers, those instruments of love and certainty; three feet long and made of dark heavy hardwood and even marked with calibrations, though he never once saw them used as instruments of measurement. Some of the priests, he learned, liked beating girls, some of them boys, and some of them both. Some did it out of simple cruelty, some out of complex cruelty. Others, the worst, did it out of genuine love.

  The girls wore uniforms with box-pleated skirts. He had raped one of them, the last one he should ever have forced, the one who had shown him how to make places where the priests couldn’t reach. She was a year younger than him, and came a year later. Her name was Katy Bevan.

  “Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time.” Aaron Foord noticed her among the newcomers. The others were bewildered or afraid or defiant, but not her; she was different. Dust motes circled in the sunbeams which slanted down into the Assembly Hall. The Principal’s voice echoed. “We know this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community, but you’ll find we particularly value new friends. We value the challenge you will give us. We look forward to making you part of something bigger than yourselves. You’ll find a community here which will seem like it’s been waiting just for you. You’ll have experiences here which will last all your lives.”

  Afterwards, he went up to her.

  “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?” She was unusually small and slight; blonde, with sharp features. She had a way of looking askance, as if smiling privately.

  “The place you go to escape them when they’re talking.”

  “Oh, that. It’s in my head.” She glanced at him. “You’re the first one who’s seen. I’ll show you how to do it.”

  She called it Subvocal Subversion. Where did she get that from, he thought, at twelve? Politically deviant parents? She never told him why she’d been sent there and he never asked. “You create a space where they can’t reach you, and the way you do it is by simple subvocal denial of everything they say. Even if the denials are contradictory. Actually it’s better if the denials are contradictory, because it means that what they say is too. And follow their grammar, so the denials are grammatical. But think it, don’t say it, and don’t ever ever write it. Then it stays where they can’t reach. It won’t make their institutions collapse, but it’ll give you a place they can’t reach. Everybody needs that.”

  They did it together in Assembly, stealing glances at each other.

  “Welcome to Morning Assembly, and a particular welcome to those joining us for the first time. We know (No you don’t) this must be a confusing time for you. We’ll do all we can (No you won’t) to end your confusion. To put right the events which brought you here to us. You’ll find us a close community (No we won’t), but you’ll find we particularly value new friends….”

  It was a small private act of rebellion, invented by a small private person. She did it when they were beating her, and telling her why they were beating her; and he adopted it when they were beating him. It worked, because it existed only as thought. But it was small and silent and private, and what the priests taught was large and loud and public, and supremely confident of its ability to prevail. They heard its confidence echoing in the Principal’s voice at every Assembly. Even the dust motes were scared.

  “This community we share has a mighty strength. It will not be denied. It embraces all of us and each of us, and it will not be denied. It demands to make us greater than we are, and it will not be denied. Compared to it, we are almost nothing. Like pebbles before a mountain. Like the atoms in pebbles before a mountain. Almost nothing. My reading this morning is from Job, chapter 9.

  He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength.

  He removeth the mountains, and they know not: He overturneth them in His anger.

  He shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.

  He commandeth the sun, and it riseth not: and sealeth up the stars...”

  But the Subvocal Subversion still worked for Katy Bevan and, increasingly, for Aaron Foord. It was small and private, like Katy, and perhaps that was why. Reach outwards, the priests said, become part of something bigger than you. No, she said, turn inwards. Build a private space where they can’t reach you. Then another and another. Add them together and make a universe. It’ll last you the rest of your life.

  And it did. The more they thrashed him, the vaster the private spaces he created. He always carried his private universe, then and for the rest of his life. Apart from Katy Bevan, he made few friendships. To the others around him he was always an outsider, indifferent to their shifting cliques. They learnt to leave him alone, because of his physical prowess and his strangeness.

  But don’t always turn away, she said, on another occasion. I didn’t, from you. I had to reach out to you to make you turn inwards. She laughed and said, That’s ironic. He laughed too, then quietly consulted a dictionary. He didn’t completely understand the word then, but would later.

  Two years passed. Puberty came late to him, because of his circumstances. But when it came, it mated with his obsessiveness and created a monster. He started looking at the box-pleated skirts. He liked their swing and sway, and the shape and regularity and tidiness of the pleats: inviolate, and symmetrical. He longed for them with the same fastidiousness and thoroughness which he carried into adulthood. He longed to lift them and see what was underneath. To lift them slowly and carefully, without resistance. When Katy Bevan resisted him, it all became untidy and his hands became more urgent and afterwards he couldn’t meet her gaze and he went away from her.

  She refused to tell the Principal who raped her. That was a more serious crime than the rape itself, because she was deliberately putting herself beyond the community, denying the community its absolute right to help one of its own, and they thrashed her. When Aaron Foord burst into the Principal’s study there were five of them, each one about three times her size, five massive adults thrashing a small private person who’d made a small private act of rebellion. She was bent over a desk (the second time he’d seen what was underneath her skirt) while two held her down and the other three thrashed her with their rulers, even taking turns and deferring to each other, You next, No you next. What, he screamed, do you believe in which makes this right? This is what we believe in, they said, that we love her so much we’d even do this for her, and he knew they meant it. He was one fifteen-year-old against five adults but he discovered instincts he would keep for the rest of his life (the Principal was right about that) and he killed two of them with his hands, wishing he could find a Sakhran who might teach him how to kill more of them, more efficiently.

  Days later, the Department heard of it and called for his psychological and physical and academic records, which they studied. Then they recruited him.
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br />   Years later, Katy Bevan became Director of State Orphanages, kicked out the priests, and gradually made things better; not perfect, but better. The priests were still embedded in other State institutions, but she stopped them sniffing around the classrooms and playgrounds of the orphanages. By then Foord had at last met a Sakhran and knew more about the meaning of Irony, so he was able to ask himself, Which of us has made the most of our years? Which of us has been the most use? He never asked questions to which he didn’t know the answer.

  Also years later, he had learnt enough to know that the Commonwealth was not an Evil Empire. Most of it was not corporatist or authoritarian; in twenty-nine solar systems, planets like his were a small minority. The Commonwealth was not the same as the Department, either; it sometimes needed the Department to do certain questionable but necessary things, that was all. He added all that to his private universe, under Nothing Is Simple.

  Foord only returned once to his planet and was not made welcome. He wanted to see Katy Bevan again, but didn’t; he had already intruded on her once, and knew that he’d hurt her as viciously as the priests. More viciously, because his love for her wasn’t as genuine as theirs.

  •

  Half an hour passed. Still neither ship moved.

  Foord had fallen silent and seemed, for a couple of minutes, almost to have died. The others studied him, noting details with the quiet precision they’d learnt from Foord himself, and putting a value to each of them: voice inflexions, broken sentence constructions, repetition of unanswered questions. They assessed him in the same way as his own ship assessed him, ascribing values. Perhaps they should have considered discarding him; the ship had that on its list of options, but the ship was only partly alive. And when he fell silent, none of them felt equal to filling the empty space; except, unexpectedly, one.