I have never enjoyed space travel. Like many things that seem exciting, space travel is quite boring.
We journeyed to Paschal II on a ship I renamed the Teilhard de Chardin, after a predecessor of mine. She was an ancient, unsafe faster-than-light freighter owned by one of the Vatican's labyrinthine holding companies. Rome said we could use her because the Chardin was on her way to the scrap yard. Do you understand why an unspaceworthy ship was ideal? You don't? Surely you see that I was a certified heretic, forbidden to speak but still capable of thought. I was a constant threat here on Earth. My unfortunate death in space would be a tragic loss that would be quickly forgotten. And if the Chardin did not break up in hyperspace, Rome would be pleased to see me marooned on Paschal II behind the impenetrable veil of the AMF. Ah, I can see from the slight inclination of your head that you are no neophyte in the ways of the Vatican. Perhaps you know that the planning for the second, fully-equipped expedition--the one that would be sent when ours unfortunately disappeared--was already underway.
Before we left Earth we had our universal antibody boosters, so that we could drink the water on Paschal II, so to speak. Like us, the three hules had their antibody booster together with a shot of a long-acting anti-gonadotropin to continue the suppression of their self-replicating behavior. When breeding mammalian intelligence in a vat there are some behaviors that apparently cannot be eliminated. In lieu of pharmaceuticals I had my vow of chastity and for Angstrom, well, as far as I know he was functionally asexual.
Why did we take the hules? The hules would be our porters, our bearers. Without machines we would be forced to explore Paschal like 17th century adventurers from Europe's Age of Discovery--those glorious days when scarcely a cape was rounded or a river explored without a Jesuit on board.
For two days we coasted away from Earth's gravitational field. To pass the time I took out the battered brass reflecting telescope given to me by one of my teachers when I was a young man. The stars shown as they do only when seen from space, myriad suns wheeling through the void. In time each sun would die in a brief nova or rarer supernova, spewing forth gassy clouds of star stuff. Eons later this dust would cool and condense into new suns and planets. On a tiny fraction of these planets liquid water would be squeezed from rock and the long procession of life would begin. Half-alive slime at first, then bacteria refining their cell walls and nuclei for a billion years, then another billion years of microscopic multicellular beings whose progeny, in another billion years or so, would be fish and birds and mammals and creatures like men, with souls.
Be careful. You are listening to dangerous ideas, my young friend.
Did I mention that the three hules were Rome's gift to our expedition? Another example of Rome's threadbare generosity. They were spare agricultural hules from this seminary. Spare hules are a problem: junking them is a difficult moral question. Industry quietly euthanizes them, but the Church is more principled--or more squeamish--and assigns its surplus hules, like aging nuns, to ever lighter duties. These three hules, however, were assigned to our mission to live or die, as God saw fit, marooned with me and Angstrom.
Sedated, the three slept through our five-day journey across the light-years. Sometimes I would check on them as they lay in the narrow bunks on the cargo bay. M. Jules was strong and willing while Mlle. Marie was a delicate creature often found in the company of M. Jules. M. Alain had a truculent air as if he blamed all men not only for being a manufactured mutation but also for being born a slave. Although they had no souls we always addressed them as Monsieur or Mademoiselle. They were more than animals and these honorifics eased the quiet discomfort we felt in their presence.
Asleep in the Chardin's cargo bay their shaggy faces were impassive. There was no flicker under their eyelids, no twitching, no soft moaning while they slept. Minutes before our trip through hyperspace Angstrom, hunched over a subunit of the quantum drive in the Chardin's engine-room, churlishly snapped at me, "Hules are like other animals; they only seem to dream."
Did I describe Paschal II? I think I told you that this planet was more Earthlike than others found at the time. Like Earth, Paschal even had a single airless moon. From orbit we looked down on the estuary and the clifftop temple. The river's source seemed to lie in lush upland forests which stretched to the edge of a long escarpment. The river plunged over this scarp into lowland jungles where it was a broad brown thing that wound for miles and miles until it reached the sea.
Our descent to the surface was frightful. Angstrom, figuring that a passive airfoil would not trigger the AMF, had built a glider--a mono-wing without moving control surfaces or other mechanical devices--that was designed to swoop erratically, like a leaf falling from orbit, never flying faster than 200 kilometers per hour.
"No turning back. Let's hope we can turn the damned thing off when we get there," he said. He meant the AMF of course, not the glider. He pulled the red switch to fire the explosive bolts that held us beneath the Chardin.There was a muffled thud and we dropped down below the ship. Above us we saw the Chardin's shuttlecraft hanging in its bay.
Strapped in, we sat in the darkness, listening to the rush of air and the creaking of the prestressed airframe, feeling nothing but nausea and fear. We were waiting for the sudden cold of the AMF or the crack of a fractured strut, followed by the rush of air as we fell from the shattered glider and plunged to our deaths. Behind us the hules, whom we had wakened earlier so they could stumble to their seats inside the glider, were whining piteously. A sudden stench of vomit told us that one of them had thrown up. For hours we lived with the sound of their retching and with our own fear and swooping vertigo.
It was night when we hit the ground a few miles west of the temple. As Angstrom had planned, the force of the crash tore open the fuselage. A hatch would have been useless. Hinges and latches would freeze the moment we tried to use them in the anti-machine field. The glider skidded and tumbled to a halt. Clouds of dust swirled through the torn fuselage and settled on our lips and in our noses. The dust tasted dry and somehow clean.
I clambered out and my boots crunched on sand and gravel. We were on high ground, although alarmingly close to a ravine. I could see the moonlit temple far to the east, beside the dark ocean. A black lake filled a crater down the slope below me; ill-formed mountains rose behind us. The whole landscape was elusively evocative. I breathed in the cool night air and remembered my boyhood in the Auvergne. Perhaps Paschal's spectral landscape reminded me of those gaunt hills where my father took me to hear country folk tell tales of mystical quests in which the hero returned with his Holy Grail. When I was older I realized that the hero was always subtly wounded by his quest.
The cooling glider ticked and creaked. Angstrom squeezed his bulk through the hole in the fuselage. He was wearing his old safari jacket with its many pockets for tools and gadgets. I wondered what he planned to put in his pockets here on Paschal. Always the scientist, he walked around the glider examining its mono-wing to see how his design had withstood its single swooping flight. He touched the wing's leading edge but quickly drew back his finger and sucked its tip.
He grabbed a crowbar from the darkness inside the fuselage and jammed one end underneath a rock. Putting his shoulder to the crowbar he heaved for a second. The bar snapped abruptly and Angstrom staggered into the rock. At his feet the two halves of the bar were already covered with hoar frost and the metal crumbled to an icy dust.
"So much for the lever," he said. He pulled a threaded bolt from his pocket. "Let's try the screw." He spun a nut onto the bolt but after a turn or two the nut froze to the bolt and he dropped the combination onto the sand and sucked the ice from his fingertips. "Screw's out. That means the inclined plane and the wedge won't work. This AMF's the same as all the others. Even Archimedes' simple machines malfunction, let alone anything more complicated."
Our own bodies were full of mechanical devices, muscles, tendon, joints but alien tech was not triggered by the device itself. The tech was triggered by the mind's intent to move inanimate matter and use it as a tool. A tool, you see, is a marriage of matter and spirit--the motion of the material substance of the tool and the mind's purposeful intent.
We clambered back inside the pungent darkness of the fuselage to help the hules stagger onto the sand. They mewled and chittered to one another. Were they afraid, or surprised? Who could tell? They were restless, sniffing the air and peering at their strange new surroundings. I said that as long as they were occupied they would be fine.
When our food and other supplies--clothing, ropes, my Bible and other priestly apparatus--had been stuffed into the packs, I showed the hules how to adjust the friction buckles on the shoulder-straps. I mention the buckles to show you how we had planned our expedition. Experience had shown that other AMF's had no effect on static friction. We rejected the usual buckles with its little tongue poking through a hole in the strap and chose only buckles with no moving parts.
The hules staggered off into the gray half-light. Angstrom led them and M. Jules followed. The other two shambled along behind in single file. Their shapeless coveralls made them look aimless.
I went over to the broken glider and checked to see that the remote control that would bring the shuttlecraft down from orbit was still stuffed in its pocket on the cockpit bulkhead. Satisfied, I followed the others towards the temple. By the time I caught up with them the sun was rising over the eastern ocean.
In mid-morning we were crossing a broad savanna. Herds of winged para-deer were grazing on the dry grass. (XTA's aren't interested in naming species--we just add the prefix para- to the name of whatever Earth animal fits best.) Once, in the distance, we saw a horned, striped predator bring down a bounding herbivore and tear its belly open. The hules sniffed anxiously. I suppose the scent of blood was borne to them on the wind. Angstrom stopped to watch. "Do you think we count as prey?
I picked up a stone and hefted it in my hand, thinking about the hules and how to defend them if a para-tiger should attack. The rock suddenly became as cold as ice--no, much colder--in my hand. I dropped it before my skin froze and said, "Not much we can do about if we are."
We approached the temple in mid-afternoon and faced a long climb up a curving stairway to the clifftop terrace. The height and width of each step was different, typical of alien architecture. Some scholars said the aliens valued diversity above all else but, I asked myself, how could anyone know what the aliens valued? Even the concept of value might be too human.
Cautiously Angstrom put his foot on the first step. He waited and the sweat soaked slowly through the back of his safari jacket. Nothing else seemed to happen. We pressed on and reached the top, panting, 15 minutes later. Once again we waited on the last step, monitoring ourselves for change. A worn balustrade which marked the edge of the terrace curved away in the distance at the very edge of the cliff. The wind that ruffled our hair smelled of ozone and tasted slightly salty.
We stepped onto the terrace. The first few white flagstones were tilted, cracked and worn with age, but after a few more steps the stones under our feet met perfectly. This was as we had expected; the temple was protected by a preservation field. These fields, using some mysterious stored energy, collapsed slowly--a few inches every century--and peripheral decay like this was found at many otherwise perfectly-preserved alien sites.
We headed toward the temple. The white dome shone in the sunshine, its ellipsoidal surface resting on columns that had the thin strength of wineglass stems. Most alien structures are based on this pseudo-conic geometry--ellipsoidal or parabolic surfaces, often with negative curvature--that defy conventional mathematical analysis. Angstrom and I approached slowly. The hules lagged behind, sniffing the sea breeze.
Inside the temple there was a shimmering translucent sphere, perhaps 20 meters in diameter floating two meters off the ground. The surface of the sphere trembled in the breeze as if it were alive.
We circled the sphere once but learned nothing. Angstrom put his finger out and touched it. He pulled his finger back, looked at me, and said "Try it."
I touched the sphere. The surface was cool--but there was no surface! My finger sank into the substance of the sphere and was surrounded by coolness. Ripples spread across the curvature above my head. I pulled my finger out. My finger was unharmed.
"Amazing," said Angstrom. "If only we knew... if only we knew what it was for, how it floats, had even a glimpse of how it works." But another hour spent in the temple taught us nothing. It was another alien enigma, wonderful, yet completely frustrating. We withdrew to think about what we had seen. At least we had not triggered any untoward effects.
The hules had wandered away to the balustrade looking over the ocean. I called to them. At the western edge of the terrace, away from the ocean, we found shelter from the sea breeze in a clump of trees.
Living in the Vatican, you have probably never realized that you must have tools to start a fire. In the AMF there would be no camp fires to cook our food or warm us in the night. I was not looking forward to eating our rations cold and sleeping, wrapped in our blankets, in the open, but to my surprise Angstrom gathered dry grass, leaves and twigs and piled them in a small pyramid.
"An experiment," he said. From the pocket of his safari jacket he pulled a magnifying glass. There was still some warmth in the sunlight and in two minutes he had created a tiny flame that licked at the tendrils of dry vegetation. "Passive, like the drop of dew that focuses the morning sun to start a forest fire," he said. The hules eyed the fire from a distance. They were wary, uneasy. In their secluded lives in the seminary garden I don't think they had ever seen a naked flame.
I brought water from the river for us to drink. We men ate with our hands while the hules set their bowls on the ground and lapped noisily. They seemed more comfortable with their dining arrangements than Angstrom or I.
The moon had risen and we settled down for sleep, the hules huddling close to us like dogs at a hunters' camp. I was tired after the exertion of the day and was already half-asleep when I heard one of the hules get up. It was M. Jules. He padded down to the edge of the river, to drink I thought. The moon was shining across the smooth water. He looked up at the moon and threw his head back so that the tendons in his neck stood out in taut relief. He howled. It was a mournful, lonely sound that faded away across the water, rising through the air towards the moon. There was no answer.
I had never heard a hule make a noise like this before. Picking their way quietly across the grass and rocks, Mlle. Marie and M. Alain joined him at the water's edge. Mlle. Marie threw back her head and howled with him. Their bestial song was a poignant duet, raw yet beautiful. M. Alain added his bass. The cool night wind carried their bestial fugue across the water. Were they homesick? Did they know that their quiet seminary garden was 50 light-years away, orbiting a faint star in the night sky overhead? When they had spent their crude emotions they shambled back to camp and lay down again.
Unsettled, I felt a need for solitude and prayer. I walked to the eastern edge of the terrace and leaned over the balustrade to look down on the estuary and the dark ocean. Waves crashed against the foot of the cliff and once again I tasted the salty ocean spray.
I stood there for a long time while Paschal's unfamiliar constellations rose from the eastern ocean and climbed into the sky. Filled with a sense of peace I turned to look back at the temple where the rising stars were reflected on the surface of the sphere. I was surprised to discover that I simply knew, without the slow steps of reason, that the sphere was a lens and the temple was a lighthouse that swept its invisible beam across the miles of ocean and the light-years of the starry void beyond. Thrilled, I understood that this beam had found and lured Rome's missing probe to Paschal.
Do you remember? I told you I would tell you how the probe found Paschal. Are you still comfortable? Good. Look down there on the flagstones at our feet--do you see how the sun shines through what hair I have, making a halo of light around the shadow of my head. Did you now that the word "halo" comes from the Greek? Halo means threshing floor, where the wheat is garnered and the chaff rejected. Strange, how we religious acquire useless knowledge. The evening air is not too chill? Good.
Suddenly and without any effort on my part, I knew that the temple lens was made of water because, on Paschal II, the alien tech was in the water of the world, hidden in the rivers and the rains and the salty ocean spray that caked my lips.
The next morning Angstrom asked, "If the sphere is a lighthouse, does it mark a safe harbor for travelers across the light-years or does it mark a hidden danger that will destroy us all?"
"It marks the river," I said. "Safe or dangerous, the end of our quest lies at the source of the river."
The river was wide, brown and slow. A few miles upstream we entered a densely canopied climax forest. Raucous creatures with bulbous eyes and more than four legs shrieked at us from the treetops. Thick suckers descended from the canopy and, where they touched the ground, grew roots and bark until they were indistinguishable from upthrusting trunks. The light that reached us was filtered through many translucent leafy layers 50 meters above our heads. When the gentle winds of Paschal II tousled the treetops the dappled shadows ebbed and flowed at our feet. Walking through these green shadows was like walking underwater and we walked for many days like this, with the brown river on our right and the green jungle on our left.
Building a boat was always an idea but proved impossible without tools. Even a raft of logs lashed together with the rope from our packs was beyond us. We had no way to cut down trees or trim them to size. Besides, the AMF would have destroyed the oars or poles we would need to navigate.
One morning I found the hules eating fruit from the trees. I was too late to stop them. I watched them anxiously for the rest of the day. If they sickened we could not continue upriver because Angstrom and I could carry only enough food for a few days. As the day wore on it seemed that the fruit had done them no harm.
Each day we rose at dawn, walked until mid-afternoon, and camped. On a good day we walked 20 kilometers. After a month our clothes were torn and ragged, our hair shaggy and our beards unkempt, but we were tanned and fit and Angstrom had lost perhaps 20 kilograms.
The insects, of which there were innumerable species, were more like flying reptiles than chitinous beetles. They did not bother us, nor did the larger animals that stalked their prey in that jungle. At night we sometimes heard some victim scream.
"It's as if we are invisible," said Angstrom as we lay by the fire one evening.
"We are. But is Paschal protecting or ignoring us?" I wondered.
Did I mention earlier that metaphor is the poetry of reason? I did? Good. Well, I told Angstrom a story from the life of a Jesuit priest whose biography I had read. He was a missionary in 21st century Africa who spent his life at the intersection of Christianity, Islam, and Animism. Ministering to the wounded during one of the cruel and petty wars of those times, he witnessed a young woman leading a ragtag army dressed in tattered fatigues. They were following her down a dirt road toward the enemy. The woman was naked and walked backward. She held a mirror before her face to look over her shoulder and study the road as she walked.
A young mercenary, toying with the safety catch of his automatic weapon, told the priest, "Because she is naked and does not look at the enemy with her own eyes, they cannot see her. She is invisible." The woman stepped on a land mine and there was nothing left but bloodstains in the dust.
We religious see things few others see.
For example, I have seen the Tower of Echo, a windy tower in the wall of an alien city. At the top of the tower, accessible only by a winding stair, is an open space looking over the ruined city and the lonely desert that surrounds it. There was an inconsistent echo in that windy openness where there should have been no echo.
Inconsistent? Yes. The strength of the echo varied with... well, it varied with the truth of what was said. Mathematical theorems echoed well, but some better than others, which is strange. Echoes of Mozart's music were very strong while Brahms' echoes were much quieter--I discovered that myself. Deliberate misstatement--two and two are three--would generate no returning sound at all.
We were very careful. Alien tech is dangerous. We assume that a mistake by one of the XTAs investigating Pius III collapsed the whole asteroid into a pinhole-sized black hole. The entire team was lost. For all we knew, the wrong statement in the windy Tower of Echo might turn off the tech, or worse. As always, everything we did received prior clearance from the Vatican.
I suggested to my superior that we might ask some more complex statements including some which Rome felt were untrue. I suggested, for example, that we say, "Matter slowly evolves into spirit." Unfortunately, further investigation was suspended, perhaps on orders from the Holy Father himself, and we were ordered home because, "We do not understand the workings of alien tech and have no assurance that the tower is a machine for determining the truth. Its purpose is unknown and may be only to deceive."
The night before we left I wondered if I should go back to the tower one last time and make statements from my own work, and perhaps other statements such as, "God made man in his own image." I also thought about saying, "Jesus Christ was the Son of God," just to see what happened.
The Tower of Echo--a machine that knew beauty and material truth, and perhaps spiritual truth as well--is the best example of how alien tech blends the principles of physics and metaphysics, bringing together the worlds of matter and of spirit. I must admit I was very tempted to test the dogma of Aquinas.
We walked upstream six days a week and rested on Sundays when I said Mass for Angstrom, opening the little sack of communion wafers I had brought from Earth. For wine I blessed water from the river. Canon Law requires at least one worshipper at Mass. You might wonder if Canon Law applies 50 light-years away from Earth, but the answer to that is simple. Canon Law applies wherever there are Catholics. The hules watched us idly, scratching and sniffing at one another while we prayed. Their animal behavior distracted me. Dogs sniffing at each other would not have offended me but I realized that I wanted the hules to pay attention. I found it hard to believe that matter would ever evolve into spirit when the hules licked their genitals while I was saying Mass. I told Angstrom while I was putting away the wafers, "I know this is wrong, but sometimes the hules disgust me."
"Perhaps you should teach them to pray," he replied. I don't think he was serious.
They started sleeping on the other side of the fire from Angstrom and me. I wondered if they had understood my remark, but that was impossible.
The hules did start to give us more serious trouble. M. Alain developed a nasty habit of loosening the buckles on the straps of his pack. I never caught him at it but several times a day his pack would fall from his shoulders. I was sure he was trying to quietly lose his burden so I tied the straps in place. Somehow he learned to untie the knots and would let the pack fall from his shoulders when I was least expecting it. Angrily, I would retie the straps and, with luck, he would leave them alone for a few more hours.
One evening I caught the hules eating the communion wafers from my pack. M. Alain had the sack in his hands and was munching the last wafer. The other two had crumbs on their shaggy faces. I snatched the empty bag from his hands. "Get out of here," I yelled, shaking the bag at them as if I were exorcising devils. They slunk away like chastised dogs. After a few moments I felt calmer. I had remembered that hules could be guilty of an action, but were always innocent of motive.
