The Chaplain's War Read online

  “Selective nuclear suppression field,” I’d heard one of the parishioners tell me one day—a man who’d been a pilot. “It’s the same thing they mask their ships in orbit with. Our missiles couldn’t ever get through. Nor the shells from the chainguns. We were smoked before we knew it.”

  Now, it seemed, the mantes were going to finish the job.

  When morning came, there was a stiff wind coming down off the peaks from the north, and the irregularly-shaped shutters of the chapel stuttered and flapped. Such was common. Purgatory had small oceans and large deserts, with most of the livable country up in alpine territory. Why the mantes had seen it as worth defending—or why we’d seen it as worth invading—was a question I often asked myself.

  Only a few people wandered in after breakfast. I had the oil lamps going to light the altar, and tried to offer my flock a smile, though I am afraid I must have looked a wreck.

  The Professor showed up before lunch, getting the same kind of stabbing glares he’d gotten the day before. He hovered right up to the altar, turned, and looked at the parishioners as they looked at him, some of them glancing at me, as if to silently say, what kind of goddamned sacrilege is this?

  Those in prayer ceased. One or two got up immediately and left.

  “What is wrong?” the Professor asked me as I nibbled at some root bread and a small bowl of stew, made from native Purgatory vegetables and varmint meat—both of which we’d learned to farm. Purgatory’s native fauna was on the diminutive side, and unfortunately for us, did not taste like chicken. You got used to it, after hunger for protein drove you to desperation. Thank heaven Purgatory wasn’t short on salt.

  I looked at the mantis, and pointed to the door that led to my room where I slept. He followed me back, and I closed the door behind us, light leaking around the corners of the room’s shuttered, rattling window. His disc buzzed softly.

  “You really don’t understand religion, do you?”

  “You state the obvious,” he said.

  “When people come here, they want to get away from you mantes. They want to get away from the anger and the rage and the despair.”

  The Professor just stared at me.

  I sighed and rubbed my hands over my eyes, trying to figure out a way to penetrate his cold sensibilities.

  “God is about warmth, and hope, and being able to see the future free of pain. Your coming here today is reminding everyone in the chapel of their pain, and they hate you for it. This is the one place where they think they can have a moment—just a moment, in the whole miserable world—of true peace. You’re denying them that.”

  “I have not interfered with their activities at all,” said the Professor.

  “Worship is not something you do so much as it’s something you feel. Your being here . . . It’s driving out the feeling. The spirit is gone.”

  Gaping maw, vibrating saw-toothed horror.

  “It doesn’t help,” I said, “that you told me yesterday we were going to die. I haven’t said anything about it to anyone else—it would just upset them, and we clearly can’t do anything about it even if we wanted to—but the people who have been here today, they know I’m bothered. Makes me wonder why you mantes let any of us live at all.”

  “Some of us were curious,” the Professor said. “Humans are only the third sapient species we have found, after searching and colonizing thousands of star systems. Like I told you before, we annihilated the first two species without thinking more deeply about it. This time, we were determined to not make that same mistake.”

  “So we’re good to you alive,” I said, “only as long as we’re of research interest.”

  “Do not forget, human, that it was you who initiated hostilities.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “The planets Marvelous and New America were uninhabited when our colonists got there. They didn’t know about the mantes until your people showed up and blew the colonial fleets out of orbit. Sol would have been totally in the dark, except for the two picket ships that got away. Bad mistake, that. We came back hard. Showed you what we were made of.”

  The vestigial wings on the Professor’s back opened and fluttered—a sign of extreme amusement.

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “Do you know what happened to the six colonies—mantis colonies—that your Sol fleets attacked, in so-called reprisal?”

  “We kicked your butts,” I said, my voice rising.

  “No, assistant-to-the-chaplain. We wiped you out. Those worlds remain in our hands, as do many others you once thought of as yours.”

  “Liar,” I said, feeling hot in the face.

  “If you’ve been told that your attacks against us on other worlds have been successful, then it is not I who has been lying to you. Think of your own fate, here on this planet. How successful was your fleet this time? Why would it have been any different anywhere else?”

  I longed for a weapon. Any weapon.

  “Our science is far advanced beyond your own. Discovery of the jump system is an easy, first step towards becoming truly technological. It in no way prepared you to deal with us at our level, and fortunately we have been able to deflect your violence and will now extinguish it from the universe.”

  The Professor stopped, as if noticing my posture for the first time.

  “You hate me,” he said.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “I can smell it on you. You would kill me, if you could.”

  “Yes,” I said. Why lie now?

  The Professor and his disc hovered lower, his disturbingly alien eyes looking directly into my own.

  “Listen to me, assistant-to-the-chaplain. It is not I and my colleagues who orchestrate your species’ destruction. The Quorum of the Select see you as animals. A pestilence. Having become aware of you, they consider you only inasmuch as they wish to eradicate your existence. But a few of us—in the schools—think differently. We suspect there is more to you than the Select believe. We suspect you have . . . perceptions, beyond our own.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, still wishing for a weapon.

  “This place”—the mantis spread both forelimbs and wings wide—“is an utterly absurd concept to us. A house for your God. Where you come to hear Him speak to you without words. It is madness. Yet, we remember the avians and the amphibians. We remember their cultures. It is a profound scientific deficit, that we destroyed them as quickly as we did, without first penetrating their otherness, such that we understood their passions.”

  “Our belief frightens you,” I said, feeling a small surge of pride.

  “Yes,” said the Professor.

  “Good.”

  “You would antagonize me?”

  “What have I got to lose?” I said.

  The Professor was silent for well over a minute, then rotated his disc and opened the door with a forelimb, before gliding out of my room, and back out of the chapel, which at that point was completely empty.

  CHAPTER 3

  THREE DAYS PASSED, AND THE PROFESSOR DID NOT RETURN. I kept his news of our impending doom to myself, still believing that if word of it leaked out, there would be more harm done than good. We still couldn’t penetrate The Wall. We had no machines anymore with which to fly over it. Better, I thought, if the human population of Purgatory went on about its business, so that when the end did come, it came swiftly.

  It was tough. As people came and went, I longed to share the burden of what I knew, for it crushed me inside. But I also couldn’t bear to see it crush anyone else. There was nothing to be done. No defense could be raised. That part of my conscience which told me I had no right to keep the others in ignorance was in constant struggle with the other part of my conscience which couldn’t bear to see what my news would surely do to the valley—assuming anyone even believed me. It was entirely possible I’d be declared mentally ill, and ignored. Hell, lots of people had already done so anyway. Not everyone in the valley thought religion was a good thing. I’d heard through the grapevi
ne—more than once—that there were prisoners who regarded the chapel and my service as a stupid waste of time.

  So I focused on my work as best I could.

  Sweeping through the pews one day I knocked over a little clay figurine that one of the parishioners had left behind. I picked it up to discover that it was a crude, but recognizable, rendition of a mantis—including the requisite disc.

  I stared at the figurine for a long time—the straw-and-twigs broom in my other hand momentarily forgotten. There had been occasional rumors in the valley. About a small cult of people whose beliefs centered around the idea that the mantes themselves were God’s true children. Humans were merely a lower form of spiritual life whom the mantes had been sent to punish. For our weakness, decadence, and apostasy.

  I’d always doubted the existence of such a group, if only because subscribing to such a belief—and speaking it openly to anyone—would have invited violence.

  Still, what to make of the figurine?

  I tucked it into a shirt pocket and kept sweeping. When I’d finished my job, and brushed all the sand and dirt out the back door, I went to the altar and considered. Bringing out the figurine, I compared it in my line of sight to the other objects on the altar. My hand began to tremble as I felt a hot rush of anger sweep through me. I could have crushed the little clay symbol in my fist.

  But then the anger drained away as quickly as it had come. Whoever had brought the figurine had obviously not intended to leave it. In their carelessness, they’d exposed themselves to more potential harm than they knew. Besides, maybe the cult was right? All evidence since the failed invasion said the mantes really were superior. And now they intended to prove it once and for all.

  I sighed and went back to the exact spot where the figurine had been abandoned, and put it back on the floor. In the shadow of the pew. Where nobody not deliberately looking for it would find it.

  Within a day, it quietly disappeared again.

  * * *

  A week after the Professor’s last visit, a trio of former officers appeared at my chapel door.

  “Barlow,” the leader said to me. He still wore his duty jacket with the name tape over the breast pocket, and the clusters of a major on his collar.

  “What can I do for you?” I said, standing up from the small stool to the left of the altar where I ordinarily sat and observed the comings and goings of the parishioners.

  “Sir,” he said firmly.

  “Beg pardon?” I said, not quite getting him.

  “What can I do for you, sir.”

  Ah. I resisted the urge to tell him to go fuck himself. While most of us had gradually relaxed out of our former rank and position, there were still a handful of stalwarts who kept their bearing. In another time and place, the major’s approach might have worked. But not now. Not here. So far as we knew, we were cut off. Permanent residents. And almost nobody wanted to be under martial authority for life. Least of all me.

  I waited silently. Just looking at him.

  He looked back, his face getting pink.

  “Is there a problem?” I finally asked, keeping my tone deliberate and even.

  “Maybe,” one of the other men said.

  “People tell us there’s been a mantis coming in here,” the major said.

  I walked towards him a few steps so that I could get a better look. The tape on his breast read HOFF and he looked to be in his forties. Balding. Sharp eyes. The posture of someone used to giving orders and having them obeyed. I immediately wanted him off the premises, but decided I could at least entertain a few questions. If I kept my answers circumspect enough, hopefully the trio would get bored and leave.

  “It’s true,” I said. “There has been a mantis coming to the chapel.”

  “What does he want?” Hoff asked.

  “He’s just curious,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About the chapel. About churches in general. About what I do here.”

  “Why?”

  “Couldn’t begin to tell you. He’s an alien, how am I supposed to know?”

  “So what have you told him?”

  “Nothing much. I make sure the chapel stays clean, that the lamps are lit, and that people can always come and worship whenever they want during the day.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That’s the long and the short of it.”

  Hoff stared at me, while his compatriots looked around the chapel’s interior.

  “He comes in here and asks any more questions, you notify one of us immediately.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “We’re still at war, you know. The fact that we’re long-term prisoners doesn’t change anything. Though I think a whole lot of people forget this. No matter. When the Fleet returns, there’ll be a reckoning. Right now I’m mostly concerned with information. You were the chaplain’s assistant so I respect the fact that you’ve carried out the chaplain’s wishes for the construction and care of this place. Hell, I admire it. At least you’ve done something useful. Which is more than I can say for a lot of others.”

  “It seemed like a good idea,” I said.

  “Right. So keep your ears open. A mantis comes sniffing around here, it may mean something important.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Hoff replied. “You just said it yourself: they’re aliens. But that’s not your concern. I’m giving you an order to report back on whatever you learn from the mantis. Is that understood?”

  “Clearly,” I said.

  Hoff and his pals waited.

  I think maybe they were expecting a salute?

  I didn’t offer one.

  Eventually he muttered something about insubordination and wandered out the way he’d come in, his cronies giving me sidelong glances.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to my stool. I had no intention of reporting anything to those fools. Chain of command only works when everyone in it agrees to cooperate, and ours had disintegrated shortly after being captured and cordoned off behind The Wall. Since we couldn’t talk to Fleet Command, and Fleet Command had probably written us all off as casualties, what more did we owe to the service?

  Still, the major had made one good point.

  So long as I—or any of us—possessed information of interest to the mantes on any level, there was potential bargaining power.

  I dwelt on this for the rest of the day, remembering the Professor’s awful promise that the Fourth Expansion would finish humanity forever.

  CHAPTER 4

  THAT NIGHT I WAS AWAKENED BY THE SOUND OF VOICES—TWO human, and one familiarly mechanical. I slowly got up out of my cot and stepped quietly to the doorway, where I peered out. The Professor was there, and seemed to be conversing by lamplight with a man and a woman, neither of whom I recognized.

  “And what does immersion accomplish?” said the mantis.

  “It takes away the sin,” said the woman.

  “And what is sin?”

  “Bad choices,” said the man. “When you screw up.”

  “Mistakes?” said the Professor.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “All of us make mistakes. All of God’s children. Which is why we all need His forgiveness.”

  “And that’s what the immersion in the water accomplishes?” said the Professor.

  “Yes,” said the man. “It’s a clean start. Once a person becomes a member.”

  The mantis rotated his disc suddenly. He looked at the doorway.

  “Assistant-to-the-chaplain, do come out and join us.”

  I stepped into the light, feeling stiff and frigid and wondering what time it was.

  The man and woman smiled at me, then returned to talking to the mantis.

  “So you see,” she said, “nobody is cut off from His love. Not even you.”

  The Professor’s antennae made an ironic display.

  “Your human God claims to love me?”

  “He’s not just the human God,” said the ma
n. “He’s the God of all things. Ours, yours, everyone’s.”

  “I’m sorry, but the chapel is closed at night,” I said gently.

  “We know,” said the woman. “We’d have kept the Professor over at our branch house, except he practically dragged us here to talk to you.”

  “Why did you not tell me, assistant-to-the-chaplain, that your human God comes in different flavors?”

  “Flavors?” I said, yawning.

  “Yes. And shapes. One deity, many forms. These two humans, their God is made of gold and holds a trumpet to his lips.”

  “That’s not Heavenly Father,” the woman reminded the alien. “That’s the Angel Moroni.”

  Ah. I understood now. The Professor had ferreted out the Latter-Day Saints.

  “Is that where you’ve been all week,” I asked him, “over with the Mormons?”

  “I have visited every religious structure in the valley,” said the Professor. “Each one seems to serve a different flavor of spirit. Tonight I visited the Mormons. You do not like the Mormons?”

  “I don’t not like the Mormons, let’s put it that way,” I said. The chaplain himself had been a fierce Baptist. Didn’t think much of the whole Joseph Smith thing, or so he’d told me a few times in confidence. Loved the people, near as I could tell, but the so-called Prophet . . . hogwash.

  My dealings with the Mormons were few. They had their church, I had mine, and we operated at opposite ends of the valley. Seemed like a good fit. So what was the Professor doing bringing Mormons here?

  “We’d better go,” said the man, sensing my vibe.

  I showed them out, and returned to the lamp-lit altar.

  “I have learned much,” said the Professor. He pointed at the altar. “Here I see multiple symbols for your flavors. The star is for Jews. The cross is used by many different subdivisions of Christianity. The smaller star with the eclipsed disc is for Muslims. The fat human who laughs is the god of the Buddhists.”

  “Buddhists don’t really have a god like Christians or Muslims or Jews.”