gradients is feeding us false information? Or if an operating system written by an ET AI is a trojan? Brussels still expects files on all of them, when we don't even know how many civs we're dealing with. Bloody hell, Donald, pardon my English, there's one of the buggers we only suspect is out there because everyone comes back from its alleged home planet with weird dreams.' Qasim cocked a black eyebrow. 'Maybe I shouldn't be telling you that one.'
'I've heard about the dreams,' said Donald. 'In a different context.' He sighed. 'It's a bit hard to explain to some people that I don't take confession.'
'Confessions are not to be relied upon,' Qasim said, looking somewhere else. 'Anyway… what I would have to confess, myself, is that the Etcetera Station is a bit out of its depth. We are applying concepts outside their context.'
'Now that,' said Donald with some bitterness, 'is a suspicion I do my best to resist.'
It was one the Church had always resisted, a temptation dangled in different forms down the ages. As soon as the faith had settled on its view of one challenge, another had come along. In the Carpenter's workshop there were many clue-sticks, and the whacks had seldom ceased for long. In the beginning, right there in the Letters, you could see the struggle against heresies spawned by Greek metaphysics and Roman mysticism. Barely had the books snapped shut on Arius when Rome had crashed. Then the Muslim invasions. The split between the Eastern and Western churches, Christendom cloven on a lemma. Then the discovery of the New World, and a new understanding of the scope and grip of the great, ancient religions of the Old. The Reformation. The racialist heresy. The age of the Earth. Biblical criticism. Darwin. The twentieth century had brought the expanding universe, the gene, the unconscious-how quaint the controversies over these now seemed! Genetic engineering, human-animal chimerae, artificial intelligence: in Donald's own lifetime he'd seen Synods, Assemblies and Curia debate them and come to a Christian near-consensus acceptable to all but the lunatic-no, he must be charitable-the fundamentalist fringe.
And then, once more, just when the dust had settled, along had come-predictable as a planet, unpredicted like a comet-another orb in God's great orrery of education, or shell in the Adversary's arsenal of error-mongery, the greatest challenge of all-alien intelligent life. It was not one that had been altogether unexpected. Scholastics had debated the plurality of worlds. The Anglican C. S. Lewis had considered it in science fiction; the agnostic Blish had treated it with a literally Jesuitical subtlety. The Christian poet Alice Meynell had speculated on alien gospels; the godless ranter MacDiarmid had hymned the Innumerable Christ. In the controversies over the new great discovery, all these literary precedents had been resurrected and dissected. They pained Donald to the quick. Well-intended, pious, sincere in their seeking they might be; or skeptical and satirical; it mattered not: they were all mockeries. There had been only one Incarnation; only one sufficient sacrifice. If the Reformation had meant anything at all, it meant that. To his ancestors Donald might have seemed heinously pliant in far too much, but like them he was not to be moved from the rock. In the matter of theological science fiction he preferred the honest warning of the secular humanist Harrison. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon…
Donald left the messroom after his next round and walked to his quarters. The corridor's topology was as weird as anything on the ETC Station. A human-built space habitat parked inside an alien-built wormhole nexus could hardly be otherwise. The station's spin didn't dislodge the wormhole mouths, which remained attached to the same points on the outside of the hull. As a side-effect, the corridor's concave curve felt and looked convex. At the near ends of stubby branch corridors, small groups of scientists and technicians toiled on their night-shift tasks. At the far ends, a few meters away, thick glass plates with embedded airlocks looked out on to planetary surfaces and sub-surfaces, ocean depths, tro-pospheric layers, habitat interiors, virtual reality interfaces, and apparently vacant spaces backdropped with distant starfields. About the last, it was an open question whether the putatively present alien minds were invisible inhabitants of the adjacent vacuum, or more disturbingly, some vast process going on in and among the stars themselves. The number of portals was uncountable. There were never more than about five hundred, but the total changed with every count. As the station had been designed and built with exactly three hundred interface corridors, this variability was not comfortable to contemplate. But that the station's structure itself had somehow become imbricated with the space-time tangle outside it had become an accepted-if not precisely an acknowledged-fact. It received a back-handed recognition in the station's nickname: the Etcetera Station.
Use of that monicker, like much else, was censored out of messages home. The Station was an EU military outpost, and little more than its existence, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, had been revealed. Donald Maclntyre, in his second year of military service as a conscript chaplain, had been as surprised to find himself here as his new parishioners were to discover his affiliation. His number had come up in the random allocation of clergy from the list of religions recognized by the EU Act of Toleration-the one that had banned Scientology, the Unification Church, the Wahabi sect and, by some drafting or translation error, Unitarian Universalism-but to a minister of the Church of Scotland, there could in all conscience be no such thing as chance. He had been sent here for a purpose.
'The man in black thinks he's on a mission from God,' said Qasim.
'What?' Major Bernstein looked up from her interface, blinking.
'Here.' Qasim tapped the desktop, transferring a file from his finger.
'What's this?'
'His private notes.'
The major frowned. She didn't like Qasim. She didn't like spying on the troops. She didn't care who knew it. Qasim knew all this. So did Brussels. She didn't know that.
'What are your grounds?' she asked.
'He spoke a little wildly in the mess last night.'
'Heaven help us all, in that case,' said the Major.
Qasim said nothing.
'All right.' Bernstein tabbed through the notes, skimming to the first passage Qasim had highlighted.
' 'Worst first,' ' she read out. ' 'The undetectable entities. No coherent communication. (Worst case: try exorcism???!) Next: colonial organisms. Mycoidal. Translations speculative. Molecular grammar. Query their concept of person-hood. Also of responsibility. If this can be established: rational nature. Fallen nature. If they have a moral code that they do not live up to? Any existing religious concepts? Next: discrete animalia. Opposite danger here: anthropomorphism. (Cf. Dominican AI mission fiasco.) Conclusion: use mycoids as test case to establish consilience.'' She blinked the script away, and stared at Qasim. 'Well? What's the harm in that?'
'He's been hanging around the team working on the my-coids. If you read on, you'll find he intends to preach Christianity to them.'
'To the scientists?'
'To the mycoids.'
'Oh!' Major Bernstein laughed. It was a sound that began and ended abruptly, like a fall of broken glass, and felt as cutting. 'If he can get any message through to them, he'll be doing better than the scientists. And unless you, my overzealous mukhabaratchik, can find any evidence that Dr. Maclntyre is sowing religious division in the ranks, practicing rituals involving animal cruelty or non-consensual sexual acts, preaching Market Maoism or New Republicanism or otherwise aiding and abetting the Chinks or the Yanks, I warn you most seriously to not waste your time or mine. Do I make myself quite clear?'
'Entirely, ma'am.'
'Dismissed.'
I do not what I wish I did.
It was a lot to read into a sequence of successive concentrations of different organic molecules. In the raw transcript it went like this:
Donald looked at the print-out and trembled. It was hard not to see it as the first evidence of an alien that knew sin. He well realized, of course, that it could just as well mean something as innocent as / couldn't help but puke. But the temptation, if it was a temptation, to read it as an instance of the spirit warring against the flesh- well, against the slime- was almost irresistible. Donald couldn't help but regard it as a case of consilience, and as no coincidence.
'Is there any way we can respond to this?'
Trepper, the mycoid project team leader, shook his head. 'It's very difficult to reproduce the gradients. For us, it's as if… Look, suppose a tree could understand human speech. It tries to respond by growing some twigs and branches so that they rub against each other just so, in the wind. And all we hear are some funny scratching and creaking sounds.'
