Posleen War: Sidestories The Tuloriad (11 page)

Seek a new life

Far, far from the last orna'adar

Through the vast ocean of stars . . ."

“It's an odd thing, Binastarion,” that kessentai's AS said.

“What's odd, O bucket of bolts?”

"Before my resurrection I doubt I would have thought of it; but it seems my program did not transfer perfectly. Some things I should remember I seem to have forgotten. Other things, once forgotten, I remember.

“In any case, the People do not make new music. Ever. And yet that is a song of the People, and of the People's flight and plight, in the People's language. Oh, yes, the words are old. Some are obsolete. Yet it is the language of the People of the Ships. And there are other songs, also all old, old. Who wrote it, do you suppose? Who wrote those others. And why? And why, having created music, did the People lose it . . . abandon creating it? Or, on the other claw, why was it taken from them?”

Binastarion didn't know. He shrugged his one arm and kept to the song with the others:

"Farewell, to our world.

With hearts weighted down,

Fleeing again . . ."

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:

Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

—Matthew 28:18–20, King James Version

Anno Domini 2020

Ostia, Italy

It had taken more strings being pulled than the Pope had ever let on. For one thing, the United State Navy still had an interest in Salem, the ship. Since Sally, unlike Daisy, had never been sunk and presumed lost, the Navy had only turned over to Boyd a degree of control, which control was limited by the ship's being subject to recall.

For his part, Boyd had signed off on turning his interest over to the Vatican, no problem. The Pope had had to hint at excommunication to the Chief of Naval Operations to get him to agree to the detachment and conversion. Then the church had had to go into hock to buy a moderately high level nanochit to get the permissions to create the requisite number of nanites for the conversion. And then there'd been the very involved process of cutting a deal with the Indowy to use, perhaps better said, “exhaust,” a fairly large number of Sohon masters. If it hadn't been for some substantial support from the Himmit, the whole thing might have proven impossible.

After conversion, Sally's ship body floated in the Lago di Traiano. She didn't look much like a heavy cruiser anymore. And she was just as unhappy about it as she'd expected to be.

The process of change hadn't been as painful as she had expected it to be, at least. Physically, it had not been painful at all. Yet when the Indowy Sohon masters had moved her to space and thought at her, when she'd seen and felt her beautiful turrets disappear into her hull, that hull grow fat as her rakish prow shrank to nothing, her superstructure melt away, the warship in a woman's body had wept bitterly. Even the addition of a fixed centerline KE cannon and missile tubes hadn't mollified her.

“So I have a gun,” she'd shrieked. “So what? I'm a fat freak with no turrets and a gun. And it's not even in the right place!” Then she'd retired to the cabin she shared with Dwyer, dogged the hatch, disconnected the power override, and wept hysterically for days.

The Jesuit had been unable to console her. And at some level he'd understood. How would I like to wake up with a featureless face, and not even a good bender to account for it?

And I could use a good bender now, the priest thought, as he listened to half a thousand religious scholars squabbling about everything from doctrine to dogma, preordination to prejudice, and killing to karma.

There were priests and ministers, rabbis and imams. The Buddhists had their representatives, as did the Shintoists, the Confucians (only arguably a religion, Confucianism), the Hindu, the Taoists, the Zoroastrians and the Yezidis; all were there. There were Christian Animists from Africa and Vudun followers from Haiti. Kirpan-carrying, bearded, and turbaned Sikhs were in the company, as were violence-abjuring Jain.

At least the Sikhs and Jain aren't desperately eager to kill each other, Dwyer thought. I wish the same could be said for Sunni and Shiites, let alone any Moslems and the Baha'i. And both Sally and I could live without the hair-splitting, holier-than-thou Hasidim.

I need a drink. I also need to have a long, long talk with Boyd, Joe and the Father General. Dwyer mentally sighed. But I'll do without the former if I can just have the latter.

Sally could handle setting up the conference call with the three of them—shipping magnate, Pope and the Father-General of the Jesuit order—without leaving her quarters. Dwyer simply went to the ship, asked for the call to be set up aloud, and waited until Sally said all was in readiness. The big hold up, time-wise, had been Boyd, simply because he had taken off on his small boat for a day's restful fishing.

“Make it quick,” Boyd said. “They're biting and my friend and I want to get back to sea.”

I've got the Pope, the Black Pope, and you, all in one room, to discuss something of terrible complexity, and you think I can make it quick? That's absurd.

“Well,” he said, even so, “I'll try.”

Trying to ignore Boyd's impatient glare, Dwyer began, “Holy Father, Father General, Dictator, let me, with your permission, restate what I think my mission is. I, and my wife, Sally, taking in company sundry religious missionaries, are to seek out whatever remnants of the Posleen we may be able to find, and, having found them, persuade them to one or another of the various human faiths. We are going as religious missionaries because there is a fair chance that persuading the Posleen must be a two step process, the first step being to convert them to beings we can deal with, on both a practical and a moral plain, and religion being likely to be an effective way to do this.”

“Long winded,” the Father General said, “and somewhat redundant, but accurate.”

“Not a chance, then,” Dwyer said, resignedly, shoulders slumping. "Simply none. If I go with the full company of religious 'scholars' you have inflicted upon me, I can perhaps set the Posleen to a religious civil war, but that will make it most unlikely that they'll then be of any use to us for about five hundred years or, if Moslem-Christian relations are any guide, three or four times that and without any resolution even then.

“And then there's the other problem,” Dwyer continued. "We are trying to convince the Posleen of something that requires faith far more than reason. How can we do that if we are at the same time giving them several versions of faith, few of which are compatible and none of which are particularly susceptible to reason, to decide among them?

“Lastly, I'm a Catholic priest. My business is saving souls. You simply can't ask me to be a part of something that, rather than saving souls, condemns them. Sure, I can accept—with reservations—that other Abrahamic denominations can save souls, too. But Voodoo? Confucianism? Shinto? I can possibly admire the faith of their adherents without for a minute believing that there's a shred of legitimacy behind that faith. And I cannot be a part of spreading false faith. Arguable faith? Maybe. False faith? No.”

“He's right, of course,” the Pope said. “And yet it seems to me that he's also wrong.”

“How's that, Your Holiness?” the Father-General asked.

“Well . . . we simply don't know which of Earth's religions has even a chance of suiting the Posleen,” the Pope answered. "Moreover, they didn't, so far as we know, suffer anything like the Fall of Adam. How then can we assume original sin or the need for baptism? The Moslems would grant them five wives. How do we explain to a Posleen God-king that he has to dump the three hundred and ninety-four normals and five cosslain that make up the rest of his harem? How does a Catholic say that a Posleen can only have one mate, or four under the new—temporary—rules, when their breeding pattern is such as to almost guarantee that one or four mates would be insufficient to breed even a single sentient soul?

The Pope mused, “We need someone with considerable insight into the deeper nature of the Posleen and their suitability for religion.”

Boyd's head turned to face someone off view, presumably his fishing partner. “Guano,” The ex-dictator asked, “you up for a trip?”

Turning back to the others, Boyd asked, “Where are you people, anyway?” he asked.

“Ostia,” Dwyer answered.

“Tell you what; let us finish up our fishing today. Tomorrow I'll fly him over to you. I don't know about you, but I've never gotten used to this kind of teleconferencing. And Guano doesn't have an AID.”

The Holy Father, who shared two things with Boyd, Catholicism and the fact that they were both in the armed forces in World War Two (albeit on different sides), agreed immediately. So, too, did the Father-General. Dwyer, too, thought that face to face would be a better way to interact.

“Any chance you'll want to keep him?” Boyd asked, adding, “Yes, I know about your mission. Guano's an ordained minister . . . what's that? . . . Oh. Correction: He's been ordained by two different churches. And he has a family. If you're going to need to keep him, I'm going to need to send his wife and son to Ostia, too.”

Sally's avatar, unseen since her transformation, popped up and said, “With all due respect to our guests, no fucking way.”

Somehow I just knew she was going to be difficult about this, Dwyer thought.

On the plus side, Dwyer thought, later, when he was finally readmitted to the cabin he shared with Sally, at least since she has something to fight about she's forgotten about the body change to the ship.

On the other hand . . . he ducked to avoid a hurled vase. The vase smashed against the bulkhead behind him.

“I promised to love, honor, and obey!” Sally screamed. “But I didn't promise to forgive the Posleen . . . or to let one of them inside me! Have you any idea how personal that is?” She stopped ranting for just long enough to admit, “Well, I suppose you do. But that's not the point!”

“Won't you at least meet this renegade God-king?” Dwyer asked. “How do you know you'll hate him unless you at least meet him?”

“I already hate him and everything in the universe that looks remotely like him,” Sally shot back. “I don't even like horses.”

And everyone knows there are at least twelve reasons women prefer horses to men, Dwyer thought. Of course he didn't say that; Sally had run out of knickknacks to throw and the mind shuddered at what she'd demolish next.

Dwyer sighed. He had one course of action open to him that he was pretty sure would work. But, Lord, it is so going to cost me.

Sally mouth was opening for another volley of rant when Dwyer said, “Heavy Cruiser One Thirty-nine, also known as Lieutenant, JG, Shlomit bat Bet-Lechem-Plada Kreuzer-Dwyer, USN. Attention.”

That was conditioning so deep in the very material of her hull that Sally couldn't ignore it. Dwyer was her husband. More importantly, since she was a warship, he outranked her. She shut up and snapped to attention.

Dwyer decided to keep the address more or less human. “Lieutenant Kreuzer-Dwyer, these are your orders: There is a Posleen coming aboard. There may be up to three of them sailing with us, soon. You will be polite to all three. You will cease your unsailorly objections. You will in all particulars show that 'cheerful and willing obedience to orders' to which we all aspire. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear, Captain Dwyer,” she answered. “May I be dismissed?”

Dwyer sighed. “Sally, I . . .”

“May I be dismissed, sir?”

“Fine. You're dismissed.”

Sally immediately saluted, with a precision that contained more than a touch of bitter sarcasm, walked to a chest in the quarters, and began to remove all of her clothes from that chest.

I knew this was going to be painful, Dwyer thought.

Sally didn't start really weeping until she'd reached the Junior Officer's quarters she'd decided to set up housekeeping in. Once she did, it was an opening of the floodgates; everything pouring out at once.

I'm not beautiful anymore. And I don't have any control over anything anymore. My own husband is making me do something I think is just disgusting. And he doesn't love me anymore and . . . and . . . and . . .

She said it aloud, “And I haven't been able to get pregnant yet!”

Her body fell asleep that way, sobbing into her pillow and feeling lower than the lowest rat in the ship. The AID, of course, and the gestalt that was the USS Salem, stayed awake. They also carefully kept any part of their consciousness away from the Captain's cabin, occupied, now solely, by Dan Dwyer, SJ.

The bed felt cold and empty and utterly, utterly lonely.

Before, it never would have bothered me, Dwyer thought. But before, I didn't know what I was missing. And it's not just the sex. It's the closeness, the feeling of being at one with someone. It's . . . different from the feeling of being at one with God at High Mass. But it's the same, too.

Not that Sally's a goddess . . . even if she looks like she ought to be one or has power to dwarf any goddess of old Greece or Rome. Nor even if she's as petulant as an Athena or a Hera denied Eris' apple. Nor even if I love her as much as I do God . . .

Dwyer looked at the ceiling of the cabin and said aloud, “Well, it's not like You didn't know that, after all. Or that You didn't plan it that way.”

So little of what we plan ever works out the way we intend, thought Guanamarioch, as the city of Rome, what there was of it, gave way to the sea, far below his helicopter.

I, for example, never intended that I should become a preacher of a religion alien to my birth. Oh, no, I was going to lead a band of the People on the path of fury, win vast renown, garner much edas, and finally retire as a Rememberer, a teacher of the scrolls, leaving a huge estate to my sons.

“Still,” Guano said aloud, one claw reaching up to caress the crucifix he wore on a gold chain suspended from his neck, “still, Heavenly Father, You will have Your little joke, won't You?”