'Wrong where?'
'You assume I wanted you to be killed, and that's wrong. It was a possibility and a risk. But as a good captain, I had to consider the possibility and make contingency plans, just in case.' She took another little step, saying, 'No, what all of this has been… in addition to everything else that it seems to have been… is what I have to call an audition.'
'An audition?' Pamir muttered, genuinely puzzled.
'You seem to be a master at disappearing,' Miocene admitted. Then she took one last step, and in a whisper, she said, 'There may come a day when I cannot protect my daughter anymore, and she'll need to vanish in some profound and eternal fashion…'
A third ripple of darkness came, followed by the full seamless black of night.
'That's your task, if you wish to take it,' she said, speaking into the darkness. 'Whoever you happen to be… are you there, can you hear me…?'
Sorrel had been walking for weeks, crossing the Indigo Desert one step at a time. She traveled alone with her supplies in a floating pack tied to her waist. It was ten years later, or ten thousand. She had some trouble remembering how much time had passed, which was a good thing. She felt better in most ways, and the old pains had become familiar enough to be ignored. She was even happy, after a fashion. And while she strolled upon the fierce landscape of fire-blasted stone and purple succulents, she would sing, sometimes human songs and occasionally tunes that were much harder to manage and infinitely more beautiful.
One afternoon, she heard notes answering her notes.
Coming over the crest of a sharp ridge, she saw something utterly unexpected-a thick luxurious stand of irrigated llano vibra.
Louder now, the vegetation sang to her.
She started to approach.
In the midst of the foliage, a shape was sitting. A human shape, perhaps. Male, by the looks of it. Sitting with his back to her, his face totally obscured by the shaggy black hair. Yet he seemed rather familiar, for some reason. Familiar in the best ways, and Sorrel stepped faster now, and smiled, and with a parched voice, she tried to sing in time with the alien weed.
A Case of Consilience
KEN MacLEOD
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) and Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)
Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com) lives in West Lothian, Scotland. He became prominent in the late 1990s with his early novels, the four politically engaged books in the Fall Revolution series, that began in the UK in 1995 with The Star Fraction, and in the U.S. in 1999 with the reprinting of The Cassini Division. His next three novels are The Engines of Light trilogy, and his latest novels are Newton's Wake (subtitled A Space Opera in the UK in 2004) and Learning the World (2005, subtitled or, The New Intelligence: A Scientific Romance). He wrote an essay on 'The New Space Opera' for Locus in 2004, and is generally regarded as central to British space opera in this generation. He has published very little short fiction.
'A Case of Consilience ' was published in Nova Scotia. It is in dialogue with James Blish's classic, 'A Case of Conscience.' The first twist is that MacLeod's Christian, Donald Maclntyre, is a Scots Presbyterian, not a Catholic priest. The second is that the intelligent alien is a vast subterranean mycoid - a fungus. Maclntyre's belief motivates him to bring the gospel to the alien. But then there is the alien point of view.
W hen you say it's Providence that brought you here,' said Qasim, 'what I hear are two things: it's bad luck, and it's not your fault.'
The Rev. Donald Maclntyre, M.A. (Div.), Ph.D., put down his beer can and nodded.
'That's how it sometimes feels,' he said. 'Easy for you to say, of course.'
Qasim snorted. 'Easy for anybody! Even a Muslim would have less difficulty here. Let alone a Buddhist or Hindu.'
'Do tell,' said Donald. 'No, what's really galling is that there are millions of Christians who would take all this in their stride. Anglicans. Liberals. Catholics. Mormons, for all I know. And my brethren in the, ah, narrower denominations could come up with a dozen different rationalizations before breakfast, all of them heretical did they but know it-which they don't, thank the Lord and their rigid little minds, so their lapses are no doubt forgiven through their sheer ignorance. So it's given to me to wrestle with. Thus a work of Providence. I think.'
'I still don't understand what your problem is, compared to these other Christians.'
Donald sighed. 'It's a bit hard to explain,' he said. 'Let's put it this way. You were brought up not to believe in God, but I expect you had quite strong views about the God you didn't believe in. Am I right?'
Qasim nodded. 'Of course. Allah was always…' He shrugged. 'Part of the background. The default.'
'Exactly. Now, how did you feel when you first learned about what Christians believe about the Son of God?' 'It was a long time ago,' said Qasim. 'I was about eight or nine. In school in Kirkuk. One of my classmates told me, in the course of… well, I am sorry to say in the course of a fight. I shall pass over the details. Enough to say I was quite shocked. It seemed preposterous and offensive. And then I laughed at myself!'
'I can laugh at myself too,' said Donald. 'But I feel the same way as you did-in my case at the suggestion that the Son was not unique, that He took on other forms, and so forth. I can hardly even say such things. I literally shudder. But I can't accept, either, that He has no meaning beyond Earth. So what are we to make of rational beings who are not men, and who may be sinners?'
'Perhaps they are left outside,' said Qasim. 'Like most people are, if I understand your doctrines.'
Donald flinched. 'That's not what they say, and in any case, such a question is not for me to decide. I'm perplexed.'
He leaned back in the seat and stared gloomily at the empty can, and then at the amused, sympathetic eyes of the friendly scoffer to whom he had found he could open up more than to the believers on the Station.
Qasim stood up. 'Well, thank God I'm an atheist, that's all I can say.'
He had said it often enough.
'God and Bush,' said Donald. This taunt, too, was not on its first outing. Attributing to the late ex-President the escalating decades-long cascade of unintended consequences that had annexed Iraq to the EU and Iran to China was probably unfair, but less so than blaming it on God. Qasim raised a mocking index finger in response.
'God and Bush! And what are you having, Donald?'
'Can of Export.'
'Narrow it down, padre. They're all export here.'
'Aren't we all,' said Donald. 'Tennent's, then. And a shot of single malt on the side, if you don't mind. Whatever's going.'
As Qasim made his way through the crowd to the bar, Donald reflected that his friend was likely no more off- duty than he was. A chaplain and an intelligence officer could both relax in identical olive T-shirts and chinos, but vigilance and habit were less readily shrugged off than dress-codes. The Kurdish colonel still now and again called his service the mukhabarat. It was one of his running gags, along with the one about electronics and electrodes. And the one about extra-terrestrial intelligence. And the one about… yes, for running gags Qasim was your man.
As I am for gloomy reflections, Donald thought. Sadness, tristia, had been one of the original seven deadly sins. Which probably meant every Scottish Presbyterian went straight to hell, or at least to a very damp purgatory, if the Catholics were right. If the Catholics were right! After three hundred and seventeen days in the Extra-Terrestrial Contact Station, this was among the least heretical of the thoughts Donald Maclntyre was willing to countenance.
Qasim came back with the passing cure, and lasting bane, of the Scottish sin; and with what might have been a more dependably cheering mood-lifter: a gripe about his own problems. Problems which, as Donald listened to them, seemed more and more to resemble his own.
'How am I supposed to tell if an underground fungoid a hundred meters across that communicates by chemical
