“I—urn …”
“You can’t be cosmic any more, Captain. You, me, we all have done what we can. On the surface, we’re all very different. Our minds don’t work quite the same way, our values, morals, they’re different. But, deep down, we’re the same. Our ancestors were born on the same little ball of dirt long ago. We’re Terrans, and, on that basis we know that there are some things we have in common that culture and politics can never change. Think of me as her if you want. She wants you to.”
In the end, he couldn’t think of a reason why not. Unlike what she was thinking, he never confused love with sex, but he thought highly of them both. And, after all, he was in the end a captain in a foreign port, and she—well, she was a willing foreigner. …
Josef, when he came out of his reverie, was not amused, and he let the captain know it. Chin, for his own part, had forgotten all about their mind-link. “What is the matter, Josef? Wasn’t it good for you, too?” he asked lightly.
Josef was enraged at the comment and lunged for Chin. The captain sidestepped the bull charge neatly and Josef went sprawling, which amused him even less.
The starting fight in such close quarters brought the mind-linked Modra and Jimmy out in a hurry, with Krisha and Grysta following.
It was Modra who stepped in. “Now stop it I Now!” she snapped.
Some of Josef’s rage transferred to her. “Now, now! Look at the meek little Exchange whore try and roar all of a sudden!”
She stared at him intently, suddenly tough as nails. “You watch your filthy mouth! I know your mind, Josef! I know what a brutal animal you are! I excused it because of your upbringing, but I will not have thisl Long before you were out in your big-man warship doing guard duty I was on dozens of worlds so hostile-and brutal you can only imagine them because you can get them from my mind playing Russian roulette for pay! And I’m still here! I wonder how you’d hypno those tentacled horrors on that swamp world? You wouldn’t have lived through the others just to get to that hellhole! I was the on-site head of a private exploiter team! I hired and fired muscle and talent like yours and I fought alongside them while you were using your precious talent to push around a bunch of helpless people! Nobody owns me, least of all the likes of you, Mycohlian! I might rent myself out from time to time but you got good pay for that! Now get up and stop this shit! If we’ve got to work together it’s time you learned how to behave!”
There was a dead silence for a moment, even on the telepathic band. Gun Roh Chin, however, couldn’t suppress a smile. When nothing else seemed able to snap her out of it, he unwittingly had done so.
Finally Jimmy said, “You gonna let her talk to you like that?”
A lot of eyes cast hateful daggers at the little man, who’d successfully closed down Josef’s graceful exit from all this with a one-line comment.
“Mycohl rules, then,” Modra told him coldly. “Which means anything you can get away with. You and Jimmy against the four of us.”
McCray looked shocked. “Hey! Wait a minute! This isn’t my fight!”
“It is now,” Grysta commented acidly. “You made it yours when you opened your big mouth. I think there’s three of us here been wantin’ to beat some sense into you for along while!”
“What about it, Josef?” Gun Roh Chin asked, finding the experience quite useful. A lot of tension was being bled out here, including his own, and yet much of the very different group was thinking in team-like terms again. “Of course, she’ll know your moves as soon as you do, and nobody knows what I can do, or will do, including you.”
By this time the big man had calmed down. “It isn’t worth it!” he snapped. “She’s not worth it!” But in his mind, as Modra knew, Josef had a far different opinion of her and of many of the others. It was crazy, but somehow he liked this Modra better than the other Modra.
“You mean—?” Jimmy began, but Josef whirled on him.
“You shut up, you little psycho, or/’// break your jaw!” Josef snapped angrily.
“Shit! You mean we ain’t gonna fight?” Grysta asked wistfully. “And I was all set to plant a hoof right in Jimmy’s balls! In the old time I always wanted to do that to a lot of folks and I didn’t have no legs!”
Jimmy stared at her. “You wouldn’t! Would you?”
She shrugged. “I saved ’em. Who’s got a better right? Besides, I figured if your mind and his was kind’a together, he’d sort of feel what I did to you, right?”
Jimmy looked around and saw the slight grins on most of the other faces and turned to Krisha, who’d remained impassive and who had her shield well up as usual. “Yrfu, too? A priestess!”
“Not the kind of priestess you usually think of, am I?” she retorted. “There are no weak sisters here, McCray. They got eliminated. Now Modra, and Josef, and the captain, and even Grysta, like myself, have all come to terms with ourselves here. We’ve beaten off our personal demons. Now it’s your turn. You want to be a eunuch, nobody will stop you the next time. But if you touch us, any of us, any more, if you can’t handle it now, well, there will still be two to represent the Exchange.”
Shocked and feeling a little sick at this sudden ganging up on him, Jimmy whirled in something of a panic and ran back to the aft compartment and closed the hatch door.
For a few seconds nobody spoke, then Grysta said, “Shit! The medical stuff is back there, you know. You don’t think he’ll really do it? Do you? Maybe I should …”
“No!” Modra came back sharply. “I don’t know if he’s going that way or not because he doesn’t know. But he’s got to resolve this, and soon. We can’t stand him this way any more and he’s no good to us or to himself, either. This is one case where we can’t interfere. Either he solves it or comes to grips with it himself or he doesn’t. If he can’t, he’s no better than the ones we left back there, dead and gone. If he can’t work it out, he’ll be the weak link that brings us all down.”
Krisha sighed. “You’re right, of course. But I was at least as bad off as he was, and I couldn’t have done it without help.”
“He has foreclosed that possibility,” Gun Roh Chin said softly. “In every other crisis he’s been helped. By his God first, then his Church, then his first love, then the teams and Grysta.”
“He never took it,” Grysta noted. “He saved Molly against my advice, although now I’m kind’a glad he did.”
In the aft compartment, Jimmy McCray was thinking that it would be so much easier if he could be alone. More than anything this connection, this lack of privacy, had prevented him from any real introspection. Not that introspection really helped.
Why’d you become a priest? Well, because at least one boy and one girl from each family was expected to, that’s why; and because he’d been something of a young hellion while his two brothers had been getting straight As in aptitudes that were needed, it fell to him. The pressures on him were enormous anyway, particularly when Scan had made a tidy bundle with that repair business of his while still in public school, and once Maureen had taken her vows, the pressure on him from church, family, even local authority, had been unbearable. Besides, what could you make of a kid who stole from other kids, then turned the boodle over to the little ones in the orphanage?
Just getting out of that atmosphere to the closed and peaceful inner world of the seminary had done wonders for his peace of mind, and when he’d found all that demonol-ogy lore he’d gotten a real kick out of it. Doing battle with demons! Wow! That was a proper man’s work! And at his ordination, the whole family—hell, the whole town—had been there, looking proud as could be, with his sainted mother, God rest her soul, bawlin’ her heart out because she was seeing a priest and not a jailbird.
All in all, he’d had about as much choice in the matter as Krisha.
And it was a grand power trip for a little while, what with everybody callin’ him Father Jim and askin’ his blessin’ and all, and those plain and simple folk of that first tiny parish they’d sent him to had such grand, incredible dirty little secrets when they confessed!
But the only demons he ran into for real were within himself. Pride, of course, and envy for all the nice things money could buy that he never could, and long bouts of boredom cured not by prayer and fasting but by the bottle. Having your oldest brother inherit a half interest in a whiskey distillery was a double curse.
But the one he never could lick was pure lust. It was worse because women trusted him when they’d trust no other man. Hell, you could tell your most intimate secrets to a priest, get advice, even be good friends and social company. Priests weren’t like other men.
Only he was. They’d get real close, be the best friends, enjoy each other’s company, and then, suddenly, just like that, he was marrying them to the village idiots, and christening their children, who couldn’t be his children.
He’d prayed. God! How he’d prayed! But no answer ever came. God never answered back. The same glib seminary explanations of why bad ‘things happened to good people and why most prayers weren’t answered rang hollow when he told them to himself.
“You’ve talked to me many times. …”
Did that Being, that Executive Officer of that grand and heavenly Ship really mean that? Or was that just a sop because He needed him?
Did it matter? What did it make of everything he’d believed, even if he’d betrayed that belief? He was no saint that had ever lived in human flesh, that was for sure. Was he the Captain’s son, then? Had the Engineer, long ago, loused up the Captain’s pet project of attempting to create an idyllic, natural society by the introduction of a random factor, evil, into the experiment?
He suddenly remembered old Father McManus, dying now, listening to him wail with his own petty problems, oblivious to the old man’s pain. What was it the old boy’d said? “God knows we’re too corrupt to be like him, son. He certainly knows I’m not. Forget the hellfire and brimstone. Somebody else died for the guilt. It’s not sainthood he
seeks, lad. He tried that once. All he really wants is for us to trust Him.”
Trust . . . faith . . . That was the real problem! Not that the encounter with the Ship had cost him his faith but rather that it had reaffirmed it. The Being, addressing him, specifically … In that moment he’d gotten a glimpse behind the curtain and it said that, while he might be wrong in the particulars, for what really mattered he’d been right all along.
He’d hidden that away from himself, got into denial, rather than accept that wonderful news.
Because he was a priest, and the vows, too, were prayers. Never mind that other clergy didn’t have those vows, he’d taken them, and not with exception and not in a legal document to be filed away for lawsuits later. He’d promised God. And Judgment wasn’t just at death for him because of that. To trust God meant doing what Krisha had done, to accept what he was and would be. To accept that all this was for some purpose, that he, and the others, had been part of a master plan to face evil head-on. From the start on, the pattern seemed absurdly clear now. The roughhouse youth to toughen him; the exposure to an old man’s obsession with ancient evil because one day he alone would have that knowledge to use and to save others. Even the Fall, to get him into position, and Grysta, at just that moment, to keep him from his basest impulses. And now that knowledge was shared, it could be tapped by others, as if his mind were a vast library of incredibly obscure but essential data. Even at the moment he’d finally struck it big, could at least enjoy the luxuries riches would buy, he’d gone to Hell instead of the bank.
He’d thought too little of himself to believe that he might have such a grand function.
But he was still a man and full of his lusts, and if the thought was truly the same as the deed he’d already broken his vows, particularly every time Modra had done it. He’d actually gotten off each time; there was no way to shut it out, and the pressure on him had been enormous each time.
He thought of Marcian, an early bishop of the Church whose tireless work had helped add Paul’s letters to the Canon. He, too, had burned with lusts that had almost consumed him and knew that his holy mission to serve God which became so essential to the building of the true Church could not be fulfilled so long as it was so. His solution, which had allowed the great work, was not unique in those times.
Now why had he thought of Marcian, whom he hadn’t thought of since seminary? No, that wasn’t right. He’d thought of it once before, when he’d looked once too often into her big, green eyes and had seen the same forbidden desire reflected back in her radiant face. He’d ignored the idea then, and to what profit?
His eyes went to the medical station, and, all at once, he knew. The blackness hadn’t made him pull that knife; the blackness had released all the inhibitions hidden deep within his soul, the corruption that had caused him and others so much misery. All at once the lid had come completely off, the impulses too strong to withstand to do what he had sworn a vow never to do. He had never been released from those vows. He had walked away from the job, but he had walked away a priest and a priest he still was.
To give in, as the near compulsions insisted he do, would have been to spit upon that which he still was and loved. Mortal sin, beyond forgiveness or redemption in his mind. The Quintara, the Engineer . . . Satan would have his soul. The good, the priest that was still within him and the only part of him that truly contained things he treasured and the values he cared about, had struck back at the evil. Grysta had stopped him from saving himself, and then the mind-link had built a wall so that his soul could only express its longing in hatred and cruelty, that good side within him using that to prevent total corruption, but in blaming them instead of himself he’d made them pay a price for his weakness.
The blackness had been but a trigger, a hole poked in the dam holding back his darkest self. Suicide was denied him; it was the one sin that would give himself to them as their plaything for eternity. There was no way to put the urges back now; they’d waited too long for freedom”. He could only become a Babylonian perversion, a Nimrod-like antichrist to Kalia’s Ishtar, perversion of the Blessed Virgin, or remove all possibility of a fall now and forever. For him, at this point, there was simply no third choice.
<Jimmy, don’t!> Modra put. <I’ll stop. I already made that decision. And I don’t think Josef will be doing much, either. Even Grysta will go on the wagon so there won’t be much opportunity.>