Chapter 2
I didn’t sleep at all that night. I kept thinking about what would happen. There were approximately six thousand of us left from the invasion, mostly men, but some women too—and now, here and there, children. All of us confined to a single semi-arid mountain valley by what we’d come to think of as The Wall—a slightly opaque curtain of energy that ringed us on all sides, with an indefinite height that faded into the sky. Rain, wind, snow, and air fell into and through The Wall, but every man or woman who had approached and touched it had been reduced to ashes.
“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.