Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Read online

  In his fore holocams Jupiter covered most of the sky with swirling bands of scarlet orange. The rockets lay silent now, but soon they would come alive, pressing Janssen back into his webbing with savagery a street racer a hundred years past would have appreciated.

  For a brief while, submerged in the identity of his ship, Peter Janssen, one of only a dozen or so people of his time who had managed to get himself exiled from the SpaceFarer’s Collective, was as content as he would ever be in This life.

  Something beeped on his radar, almost exactly a hundred and eighty degrees away from the buoy that should have been the only large object in close. A frown passed like a ghost across Janssen’s features. He danced commands into the inskin socketed at his temple, and the slip’s rear holocams selected and telescoped in on the item causing the commotion.

  Shining and black and silver out of nowhere. Janssen had a brief fragmented impression of a spider web dropping on him from a great height –

  Every instrument in the slipship, every powered system, died.

  A beat later Janssen’s inskin died.

  Terror clawed at Janssen, vast and mortal. The muscles in his stomach clenched painfully and he thought he would be sick inside his ship. A Presence touched his awareness, shuffled through his memories. The Presence withdrew, and for the merest instant Janssen was empty.

  A wordless concept imprinted itself upon Peter Janssen’s mind. He was caught instantly in a vast joy, in a certainty of rightness that he had never known before.

  Then the aliens destroyed his ship.

  “JANSSEN? DAMN IT, Peter, are you there? Peter ... Peter?” After a long moment, Peaceforcer Evans leaned back in the chair, gazing blankly at the control panel, at the telemetry that still glowed on the screens before him.

  A spacecraft had approached Janssen’s slip at five percent of the speed of light and had come to rest relative to the slip in less than a minute….

  ... and had destroyed Janssen’s slip thirty seconds later.

  Adrienne Gordeau, one of the Ganymede colony’s two administrators, was a tall, near-cadaverously thin Frenchwoman; she could have passed for loonie. She looked at Evans. “That’s not a human ship, is it.”

  Peaceforcer Evans shook his head. “No, it’s not.”

  FROM THE DIARY of Father Michael Wellsmith, Friday October 8, 2049. The inscription on the inside cover is in his sister Jamie’s handwriting: “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. For Michael on his birthday, July 10, 2038.”

  The entry is:

  “Tomorrow the aliens will receive us aboard their ship. My Lord, if You do indeed exist, then hear me now. There is pain within me.

  “I hurt.

  “This knowledge of pain is not a new thing, but it is no less easy to bear for its familiarity.

  “I do not think the pain shows. Surely to my people I must seem tranquil; confident in my faith; serene in the knowledge of my duty. Those who know me well – Father Donnelly, my sister Jamie – would see the uncertainty that has taken me; but with the exception of Bear Corona I am close to no one here, and Bear is not the sort to whom one unburdens oneself.

  “Father Donnelly is at St. Peter’s CityState in the Belt, Jamie is on Earth, and there is nobody on Ganymede to hear my confession.

  “In three weeks, my Lord, I will observe the twentieth anniversary of my vows. And I hurt and I have always hurt.

  “But until now I had always believed.”

  THE VOICE FROM the other side of the screen said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been twenty-two years since my last confession.”

  “– Bear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I guess.” A dry chuckle came from the other side of the screen. “You’ve been after me for most of a year.”

  “I had hoped for better circumstances.”

  Silence. “Yeah. Me too.” Another chuckle, packed with cynicism. “You better get comfortable. This is gonna take a while.”

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2049:

  The colony on Ganymede, like many other colonies throughout human history, exists because of politics.

  By 2049 all but three of the Belt CityStates have declared independence from the Unification of Earth. The White Russian City-States are two of them; and St. Peter’s is the third. At the moment the Unification’s Space Force lacks the ability to prosecute a successful war against the breakaway CityStates; the CityStates have threatened to throw asteroids at Earth – and probably will if pushed to it.

  The Ganymede colony is Earth’s last attempt to contain the growing might of the Belt CityStates. Earth and its billions have not been able to prevent the establishment of free Luna, cheek by jowl with Unification Luna; have lost Mars and the Belt to the CityStates; and seem all but helpless in dealing with the anarchic SpaceFarer’s Collective.

  In February of 2048, the Unification made another bid to contain the growing strength of its enemies, to outflank their expansion: the Ganymede colony is the result.

  IN LATE 2049, Ganymede is as far as humanity has penetrated into the deep. The colony is six hundred persons, a beachhead preparing the facilities that will house and protect the first wave of true colonists. The six hundred include engineers and physicists, an even dozen computerists, a dentist, several M.D.s (and two medbots), two administrators, and one counselor.

  Of course, most of the those on Ganymede come from St. Peter’s CityState; and their “counselor,” so designated by ancient U.N. regulations, is in fact a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

  “THEY WHAT?”

  Sheila Moore lowered her voice. “Killed Janssen. That’s what I heard. Blew up his slip.”

  FROM TOPSIDE, THE beachhead is not impressive. There is a small cluster of tiny, pressurized buildings. In an octagonal arrangement at the limits of the cluster, tall monoliths generate a heavy magnetic field that helps protect the inhabitants beneath from Jupiter’s otherwise lethal radiation storms. It is only the first of an increasingly complex series of barriers designed to protect the colonists from that radiation.

  An irony, this, and not a subtle one. Once the colony at Ganymede is no more, humans will not attempt to live near a gas giant comparable to Jupiter for over a hundred years. The incidental radiation at Jupiter is inconvenient to the point of frequent fatalities for humans constrained to work with tools no better than those of the mid twenty-first century. Within another fifty years the problems will be nearing triviality; but by then the human race will have the tachyon star drive, and much better real estate than Jupiter to work with.

  The irony? The next time humans will make an attempt similar to this one is in the mid twenty-second century Gregorian, a world that orbits a barely subsolar planet named Prometheus.

  That world is November.

  THE COLONY’S SURFACE is unimpressive; but like the tip of an iceberg, like any Lunar city, the surface of the beachhead only hints at the labyrinths that stretch below. The analogy does not extend beyond that point: the Ganymede beachhead colonists are struggling against an environment that is colder and deadlier than Luna’s, much colder and deadlier than that of an iceberg.

  On that Sunday “morning” in October, the colony’s routine has been disrupted by the presence of the Zaradin ship, some three hundred meters from the central surface airlock. They know it is a ship from its behavior, because it moved through space, because their telescopes watched it approach, and because the humans have with their own eyes watched it land atop the structures they have dug into the frozen ground. The ship resembles no vehicle that has ever been constructed by humans, and when
they watch it too long it gives them headaches.

  Ares November would have recognized the vehicle – though he might not have felt it necessary to be polite to the Dalmas Missionary inside.

  That Sunday, on the door to Father Michael Wellsmith’s makeshift church, there is a note.

  The note says:

  The ten and twelve o’clock services are canceled.

  – Father Michael

  “BEAR.”

  Bear Corona looked up from his reading tablet at Father Michael’s approach. He was a super-jumbo-sized man wearing jeans and a sweater that were almost as black as his beard. The nickname he bore caused him mild amusement; at least he hadn’t been stuck with “Tiny.” He was slightly surprised to find Father Michael up and about. “Little late for you, isn’t it?” He glanced at his tablet, tapped for the time: “It’s after three.”

  Father Michael Wellsmith shook his head. A tall, spare man with clear, pale gray eyes, at that moment he looked as tired as Bear had ever seen him. The faint wrinkles that were always visible around his eyes had grown deep. “Can’t sleep. Aren’t you cold in here?”

  Bear glanced around at the dining space. About eighty meters on a side, space for six hundred people at once, it had only a few real (and therefore comfortable) chairs; the rest being made of memory plastic that withdrew into the floor when not needed. It was the closest thing to a social gathering place the colonists had available to them, though it lacked virtually every amenity such a place would have had on Earth, and most of those it would have had back at St. Peter’s. Now, late at night, the glowpaint was dimmed to twilight gray, to help bring out the holofield Bear sat watching. Across one entire wall the holo of Ganymede’s sky shone eerily real. The steady stars seemed improbably bright and numerous to a pair of men born and raised to adulthood deep inside Earth’s atmospheric blanket. Jupiter covered 15 times the size of the moon in Earth’s sky, a glowing swirl of red and orange and yellow.

  Bear shook his head. “No. Is it really any colder here than in your quarters?”

  Father Michael shivered. “It feels so.”

  Bear gestured to the large thermos resting beside his boots on the small table. “Get yourself a cup from the bar.” Father Michael did; Bear poured for him. “Got no cream or sugar, unless you want to go down to the commissary.”

  Father Michael shook his head. “Black is fine.” He seated himself in the foam chair nearest Bear, cradling the warm cup between his hands. The coffee wasn’t Earth grown, he could smell that much; but it didn’t have the acrid tang of Belt synth. Martian, probably.

  He looked up from his coffee and stared at the ship.

  It squatted there in the center of the holo. Looking at it strained his eyes. Something like it might have been formed by spinning steel spider webs, fashioning it into the general shape that was desired, and melting it until most of the surfaces had fused together. Altogether it seemed not so much constructed as grown.

  Father Michael said without looking away, “I understand our messages aren’t getting through.”

  Bear shrugged. “Just my favorite guess. We aim lasers inSystem, but we’re not getting any responses back. Not from St. Peter’s, not from any Belter city – we even tried the Krishnas at Ceres. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible if I wasn’t seeing it. I hope something’s stopping us getting through, because if not, then no one in the rest of the Belt is able to answer us….”

  Father Michael shivered. “No further word?”

  “From the aliens? Not since you told them to go to Hell.” Bear sipped at his coffee. “May not have been the wisest thing you could have done, Father.”

  Father Michael nodded wearily. “Yes ... what are you reading?”

  Bear took his time answering. He was the only avowed atheist on Ganymede – their chief engineer, and one of their two administrators, a refugee from Earth who had found status and security at St. Peter’s CityState. He had claimed on occasion, although never in front of Peaceforcer Evans, to have been prominent in the American Johnny Rebs before leaving Earth, the implication being that his very prominence among those rebels had made the leaving necessary. A thing he did not boast of, but which Father Michael knew to be true, was that he was the younger brother of Neil Corona, one of the great American heroes from the final days of the Unification War. “Uhm,” Bear said finally, “it’s a religious text.”

  Father Michael did not smile. “Indeed.”

  “An old one.”

  THE NICENE CREED of the Catholic Church:

  I believe in one God,

  the Father almighty,

  maker of heaven and earth,

  of all things visible and invisible.

  I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

  the Only Begotten Son of God,

  born of the Father before all ages.

  God from God, Light from Light,

  true God from true God,

  begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

  through him all things were made.

  For us men and for our salvation

  he came down from heaven,

  and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

  and became man.

  For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

  he suffered death and was buried,

  and rose again on the third day

  in accordance with the Scriptures.

  He ascended into heaven

  and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

  He will come again in glory

  to judge the living and the dead

  and his kingdom will have no end.

  I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

  who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

  who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,

  who has spoken through the prophets.

  I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

  I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins

  and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

  and the life of the world to come. Amen.

  AN HOUR LATER they had drunk all of Bear’s coffee. Father Michael sat quietly in his chair, arms crossed across his chest, coat drawn tightly about himself.

  “Yesterday,” Bear began.

  Father Michael nodded.

  “When they blessed us – that vicious happy shit scares me worse than anything that’s ever happened to me in my life.”

  Father Michael said quietly, “It scared me too. But it was just some form of electric ecstasy, I imagine.”

  “No. It –” Bear searched for words. “It wasn’t electric ecstasy, Father. I tried juice on an induction helmet; it scared me and I didn’t do it again, but it wasn’t anything like this. The juice is impersonal, Father. It doesn’t care about you. But that damn blessing ... could almost make a man believe in God.”

  “Most of us want to believe, Bear. In Something. God the Father, or the Goddess, Allah or Jehovah or Krishna ... you who reject faith are the true rarities.”

  “It wasn’t electric ecstasy, Mike. Whatever it was ...” Corona’s voice took on a puzzled note. “It could make a man believe.”

  Father Michael nodded. In the last twenty-four hours he’d told people who asked him, more times now than he could remember, that the alien blessing had been some sort of broadcast electric ecstasy, certainly nothing more. But he did not believe it himself. He remembered that moment, would remember it until his death, the rolling, thunderous, lasting joy that had seized them all with the invocation of the alien god Haristi.

  Only death could erase that memory of joy.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2049: The suiting
room was too small for the number of people that it held, and the ceiling glowpaint was too bright and too harsh.

  Embedded in the east wall of the suiting room, a five-meter wide window looked out across the dead, cold Ganymede surface.

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  It seemed more than a bit cliched; but there was comfort in the words, and he could not think of another Psalm that was more appropriate. He could see the Bible in which those words were printed, Father Donnelly’s cracked and faded red leather Bible; not the one which he held now, the light black plastipaper Bible that he clutched, closed, in both hands.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  “Final life support checks.” Peaceforcer Evan’s tone of voice was bored, the nothing-wrong-here drawl affected by pilots since Kittyhawk. Evans himself, United Nations Peace Keeping Force Officer though he was, was a good Catholic who regularly failed to report his colleague’s treasonable talk. Bear Corona suited up next to him, an Excalibur Series One slung across his back; Evans bore the same weapon himself. “Sheila, check Father Michael for me.”

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Standing near the rear of the suiting room, Father Michael straightened at the sound of his name, and with easy self-control tucked his Bible into an outer pocket of his pressure suit. Breaking away from the others, Sheila Moore, a plump middle-aged molecular biologist with whom Father Wellsmith often played chess in the evenings, came back to check his vitals for him. She was with the party because she had taken a course in exobiology ten years prior: such as it was, that background made her the closest thing the colony had to an expert on the aliens.

  She found the Bible in the outer pocket, and scolded, “You forgot to seal the pocket. You want to be more careful.” At Ganymede temperatures, plastipaper grew fragile and shattered. She clipped his helmet photo diode to his earlobe, and turned it on; the vampire gauge paused a moment before flickering to life.