The Chaplain’s Legacy (8 page)

I gauged the distance to be two hundred meters down.

Now he really did look like a bug. Smaller than my thumb.

“We are committed,” he said, his speaker grill turned up to maximum. His vocoder-voice echoed long and far, up and down the canyon.

“We can’t climb down at this point,” the captain yelled, then began coughing.

“Let us travel downriver until there is a place where you can join us,” replied the Professor.

“Agreed,” I called at the top of my lungs. Then I stood up and retrieved my load from where I’d dumped it on the ground. The captain stood up too. She trudged over to me.

“Sorry ma’am,” I said. “Looks like you’re hoofing it again.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I need to work the knots out of my muscles. Here, give me my pack, I will carry it.”

I eyed here, but decided to follow orders.

She took the pack without complaint, and off we went. Staying just close enough to the canyon edge that we could see down to the Professor and the Queen mother, but not so close as to give me and the captain vertigo. After-images of the Queen Mother’s sudden, elegant, altogether astounding flight ran across my vision as we walked. Until that time I’d still considered the mantes to be an ugly race. They were also vicious and brutal in combat. But for a minute or two, I’d seen a mantis take flight—soaring and spectacular.

“What a story you’ll have for the intel people,” I said as we walked.

“What a story,” the captain agreed. “Nobody’s going to believe this. I wish I’d had a camera or a recorder on me to get evidence. She looked as natural as can be. Free as a bird, one might say.”

“Amazing that her instincts were that good,” I said. “She jumped off that cliff purely on faith, apparently.”

“Apparently,” said the Captain.

I sensed something else from her, though she didn’t speak for several more minutes.

“Chief,” she said.

“Yes ma’am?”

“Is it true what you said?”

“About what?”

“About you not having had a woman in your arms for a dozen years?”

“You were eavesdropping again,” I chided her.

“I have good ears,” she said. “So, it’s true?”

“Uhh, yes ma’am.”

“How come?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“How come you didn’t have a lady friend on Purgatory? Someone to share your sorrows with?”

“That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. Granted, I am not the world’s most handsome fellow, but that didn’t stop a lot of the other prisoners from getting the attention of the opposite sex. I think once I built the chapel and took over where the Chaplain left off, people viewed me like I’d been set apart. The chapel and I became synonymous.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “It must have been hard.”

“Yes it was,” I admitted.

It took a couple of seconds for the unintended double entendre of my reply to sink in, then she and I both burst out laughing.

For a moment we stopped and doubled over, until our diaphragms hurt. Then we got back to walking, the laughter dying to giggles, and then spastic coughing on Adanaho’s part.

She drank water while I waited, then we started out again.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to make you gag up a lung.”

“I think it’s allergies,” she said. “Something here—in the dirt, on the dust of the wind—is rubbing me wrong. I’ll be okay. FIDO.”

“Fuck it, drive on,” I said, smirking. The motto had been around in one form or another for as long as men and women had saluted and marched. Contrary to my first impression, as an intel officer the captain didn’t seem averse to physical challenges. In fact, the longer we walked and the more I watched her, the more I came to believe she actually relished the effort. Every stride was a statement. Her back held straight and her head up, swiveling occasionally so that her eyes could take in the landscape.

“Ma’am,” I said.

“Yes Chief?”

“What have you and the Queen Mother 
really
 been discussing the last couple of nights?”

“Like I said, it’s hard to discuss anything with someone who doesn’t speak our language,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided I’m wrong. They may not be able to speak as we do, but they can hear us just fine. You don’t have to be able to speak a language to hear it, or understand what’s been said. I’m now wagering that the Queen Mother understood every word out of your mouth. Back on the 
Calysta
 she stated that our beliefs and rituals were of no interest to her. Why’s she suddenly become curious now?”

Adanaho knit her brow while she considered my words.

“I can only speculate,” she said. “

“Speculation’s better than nothing,” I replied.

“I believe the Queen Mother is in a state of flux. Pulling her out of her disc terrified her almost to the brink of insanity. But in the days since we left the escape pod, her perceptions have been pure. Unadulterated.”

“Unadulterated?” I said, somewhat incredulous. “You make it sound like her disc was an impediment, rather an advantage. Five will get you ten the Fleet would kill to replicate a functional disc. That’s a nifty piece of the mantis puzzle we’ve still been unable to unravel. Imagine that kind of advance technology adapted for human use.”

“I can,” she said, with a slightly sour expression. “But we’re already so dependent on our own technology—for what we eat, how we travel, how we live, even how we play, and for what we 
think
 and 
how
 we think it—that we forget what it was like before computers, spacecraft, faster-than-light travel—”

“Do I detect the sensibility of a Luddite?” I said archly.

“I do 
not
 hate technology,” she replied. “I simply think we’ve gotten lazy. Did you know that the bulk of our major scientific discoveries came to us without the aid of modern equipment? Hell, Chief, they built the first atomic weapons using long math and vacuum tube processing power. The first true spaceplane, the X-15? Also built using nothing but slide rules and a lot of shrewd paper-and-pencil figuring. Then came the Information Age, and suddenly anyone could know anything via Internet search engines. Why waste time memorizing or synthesizing? Click, the info’s at your fingertips. Entertainment too. The immersive games became addictive. People forget about the danger of the Virtual Reality Plague.”

“Nobody’s forgotten about that,” I said. “There are still millions of people on Earth going through therapy and rehabilitation.”

“After how many decades?” she asked, stopping in her tracks and facing me. Her eyes had begun to sparkle keenly. I could tell from her posture that we’d hit a sore point.

“There are whole generations of people addicted to VR. Why come out and face the real world when make-believe is so much nicer?”

“Plenty of people recovered when the mantes attacked,” I said.

“Sure, when we were forced to, we snapped out of it. Sort of. But if the mantes never existed and we’d been left to just toodle along the path of least resistance…I am not sure any force could have reversed the trend. We built ships in virtual bottles, then climbed in after the ships and pulled the corks tight behind us.”

I couldn’t deny the ferocity or facts of her argument. Every family had a member, or members, who’d become addicted to VR. Minds lost to imaginary spaces existing purely inside the global information networks. Each man or woman a fairy king or cyber queen, a god or goddess of his or her own private electronic realm. Wealth, luxury, power, all limitless and beyond belief.

Just sit down, plug in, turn on, and tune out.

An infinity of sweetly alluring lies.

I shuddered.

“So how does the VR Plague tie back to the Queen Mother?”

“Have you ever seen the bad cases? The ones who went into VR as kids only to come out as adults? Everything you and I take for granted, even eating and drinking and shitting, is an alien experience for them. They don’t remember the real world, and because there are no rules in VR there’s no need to bother with the mundane functions of ordinary existence. Most of those recoveries take years, and the patients hate it.

“But a very few of them delight in escaping. Like being reborn. They can’t get enough of the 
real
 around them. Every morning they wake up is a chance to feel real hot and cold water from a real tap, running through their real fingers. To hear real music played on real instruments with their own real ears. To see a really blue sky with real clouds and a real sun with real warmth on your face when you….”

She trailed off. I stared at her as she walked. Her eyes were looking straight ahead, but she was clearly lost in reverie.

Instantly, I intuited the truth.

“You were one of them, weren’t you,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me.

“Yes I was.”

“How young were you when you went in?”

“Six.”

“Jesus, your parents let you get on VR at that age?”

“It’s the world’s most amazing baby sitter.”

I swallowed hard.

“How old were you when you came out?”

“Fifteen,” she said. “The war was hurting us. The govern-ment began cutting off and rationing resources. My parents unplugged me and sent me to a state rehab school for VR kids. When I was sixteen, they said I was well enough to go stay with my mother’s sister in North Africa, since my parents were denied custody. Auntie hated VR, considered it a tool of the devil, and took me in like the daughter she never had. When I was 18 I joined the Fleet through an ROTC scholarship. When I was 22 I went to space, and never looked back.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. The captain’s revelation had turned the mood stone-cold sober.

“I think the Queen Mother is going through something similar to what I went through,” Adanaho finally said. “After living her entire life through the technological lens of her disc, she’s suddenly experiencing reality on
its
 terms. I think she’s finding the experience to be revelatory. Old instincts, long suppressed, are coming to the surface. Abilities. Perceptions. A whole new way of seeing and interpreting the world.”

“That’s a hell of a speculation,” I said, shaking my head. “No disrespect ma’am, but can you be sure you’re not just projecting?”

She was silent for a time. Then she reluctantly said, “No.”

We took a few more steps.

“But can you offer any other explanation as to why she’d suddenly leap off a cliff, relying on wings she’s never used to prevent her from falling directly to a gruesome death?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You said it yourself, Chief. It took a leap of faith.”

Again, I had no answer.

Finally we came to a crumbling break in the canyon’s edge. The canyon itself grew wider and the sides less steep. It appeared to me that we could make our way down, provided we took our time. The Professor must have seen this too, because he and the Queen Mother had stopped and were looking up at us expectantly. Waiting.

It took the captain and I the rest of the day to make our way down. When we reached the bottom, the entire canyon was in shadow and the air had begun to chill.

I wished hard for a clutch of driftwood and some matches to light a fire.

None appeared.

While Adanaho set about preparing our camp for the night, I noticed that the Queen Mother kept apart from the Professor. She stayed near the water’s edge, gazing into the swirls and eddies that marked the surface. The water was mostly clear, all the way to the bottom. If I’d thought there might be trout, I’d have rigged a pole and a line. But the Professor’s sensors and my own water test kit revealed the depressing truth: the river was as lifeless as the surface through which it had carved its course. There would be nothing fresh to eat for dinner.

I pulled the Professor aside before we all went to sleep for the night.

“I’ve been wondering,” I said, “about what you told me.”

“Specifically?” he asked.

“Sex. You said the males of your species are in a sexual stupor until they’ve mated with the female producing the pheromone.”

“That’s a close enough description, yes.”

“How in the hell do you mate when you’re still attached to the discs?”

He looked at me, unmoving.

“Very carefully,” was his only reply.

I didn’t have the heart to pester him further.

In the morning we renewed our journey. Whatever I’d thought about building a raft, we simply didn’t have the resources to do it. The emergency inflatable life preservers in our packs might have kept us face up in the river, but the water was so frigid we’d have been risking hypothermia as a result.

So we walked all day, following the river’s edge along the bottom of the canyon. More and more, the Queen Mother tested the strength of her small lower legs. Every time we stopped. She also tested her flight capabilities, flitting from rock to sand bar to the far side of the river, and back again. Whether it was instinct or learned skill, or both, she appeared to be getting distinctly comfortable in that mode.

Every night, the Queen Mother and the captain sought solitude together, while the Professor and I just sat by the water and wondered between us what was happening with our women.

Chapter 12

“We have to get up and go. Now.” It was Adanaho’s voice.

“Why?” I said, suddenly coming up off the sand, despite the aching stiffness in my joints. We were two weeks from landing, our food stores almost gone, but still no closer to finding a mantis base than we’d been before. We’d stayed in the canyon for the water supply, yes, but also to give us shelter from the sand storms that hit every third or fourth day.

I’d grown to like the canyon, despite the gnawing in my belly. Sleep came easily with the sound of the river droning in my ears.

Tonight, my rest was interrupted. Or was it morning? The faintest hint of light was growing above the canyon rim to the east.

“A craft has landed. Not far from here. The Professor says it’s not a mantis vehicle. They will be searching for us, and they will have marines with them.”

She already had her pack snuggly slung over both shoulders.

The Professor held the Queen Mother securely aboard his disc.