The Chaplain's War - eARC Read online

  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 r
esearch 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, peeling, 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 mantes 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 may 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 mantes 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.

  I’d chosen to remain. Despite Purgatory’s hard, arid climate and the chapel’s crude rock-and-mud-walled simplicity. A part of me had become invested in this place. I looked over the lovely young officer’s shoulder to the chapel’s lone altar, where various human religious symbols and objects were carefully placed for all to see. This early in the morning I had no flock to attend to. But soon they’d begin to trickle in, a few here and a few there. Most of them human. But not all.

  “It’s the mantes’ difficulty with religion that brings me here now,” she said. “It’s been almost ten Earth years since the armistice. Fleet stealth missions indicate that the mantes are moving some of their own ships. Renewed battle exercises. The truce you won may not last much longer. Not unless someone can help the mantes get what they came here for. From you specifically.”

  I laughed coldly.

  “I labored with the Professor,” I said. “For years. He read every last line of holy text I could put in front of him. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, you name it. He soaked it up like a sponge. We engaged in various rituals, both for demonstration and also to see if he’d take to any of them. But he was as deaf to the spirit as the next mantis. They’re all like that—biologically incapable of feeling what you and I might call ‘faith.’ The Professor eventually withdrew in confused futility.”

  “What about the ones who still attend?”

  “They are young,” I said. “Grad students. They come to the chapel for objective study, no more. Working on their equivalent of thesis papers, probably.”

  “General Sakumora was adamant. You must help.”

  I wanted to keep protesting, but the earnestness in her expression told me that there wouldn’t be any point. I reached a hand up and felt the non-regulation stubble on my face. I hated shaving every day. But it looked like I was going to have to start again.

  “Orders are orders, ma’am?” I said, straightening my duty topcoat.

  “That’s right, Chief,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. And if it’s all the same to you, nobody around here calls me that.”

  “Then what do they call you?”

  “Padre. One of my former parishioners hung that on me shortly after the cease-fire.”

  “Father Barlow,” she said, testing it out.

  “No,” I said sheepishly, “just padre.”

  “Well, padre, I’m putting us on the next flight into orbit. The General is getting ready for a summit with his counterparts in the mantes chain of command. You and I have both been instructed to cooperate in every way—to ensure that the summit is productive.”

  “Are you part of the Chaplains Corps?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Fleet Intelligence.”

  I repressed the urge to scoff. If the military’s blind hurling of the original human flotillas against Purgatory’s impervious mantis defenders had been any indication, intelligence was the one thing we’d been sorely lacking.

  “I don’t think it will do any good,” I admitted. “I tried to tell the Professor, when he started to give up hope. If mantis curiosity about human faith is the only thing holding back their war machine, then our fates truly do rest in God’s hands.”

  She stared at me.

  “But,” I said, “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all anyone can ask,” she replied.

  I spent a few minutes getting word out that I would be leaving. Fleet business. The flock would have to take care of the chapel for
a change. Which was fine. Some of the regulars were people I trusted implicitly. But as I walked outside to join the captain, there was a sinking feeling in my stomach. I turned my head to look at the building which had been my home for so many years, and I wondered if I’d ever see it again.

  The sensation was unpleasantly familiar.

  On old memory swam up from the depths of my life as I trailed the captain to the four-by-four truck that would take us to the only place on Purgatory where human spacecraft were allowed to land and take off from.

  “Here we go again,” I said under my breath.

  Chapter 12

  Earth, 2153 A.D.

  The woman sat at a single table in the high school cafeteria. There was a wide, tall thinscreen behind her, and on the thinscreen there was a slowly revolving interstellar map. A bright blue point glowed cheerfully at the center, signifying Earth and Sol System. Smaller, green points were Earth’s growing number of successful colonies around other stars. One of those colonies had a harsh red halo that throbbed ominously. A computer graphic of an extremely large starship soared slowly through the scene, towing a stylized banner that said, THE FLEET WANTS YOU!

  Myself and my friends Kaffy, Ben, David, and Tia stopped short, our small trays of food momentarily forgotten. The woman in front of the star map was talking animatedly with several other students who’d come to chat her up. She wore a uniform unlike any I’d seen before. From the sound of her accent, she was from the Southeast—a bit of a drawl, worn flat by years spent living outside her home state.

  Up until very recently, she’d probably been Army or Air Force. Maybe Marine Corps? I’d been barely fourteen years old when the president went on the air to tell the whole country that by joint Senatorial and Congressional order, the whole of the armed forces of the United States were being used to form the backbone of a new multinational force that would be explicitly created for fighting in outer space.

  Small wonder. News of the aliens had been both exciting, and disquieting. We’d always suspected they might be out there. With the new colonies putting down fresh roots since the invention of the interstellar jump system some twenty years prior, many of my middle school teachers had speculated that we’d run across nonhuman intelligence eventually. Probably in the form of primitives living a stone-age existence. As homo sapiens, and its cousins on the primate family tree, had done for millions of years.