Prophets

“God is not merciful, Father Mallory. He is cruel.”

“Is this what St. Rajasthan teaches?”

“No. This is what life teaches.”

Mallory listened to Nickolai as he began talking of his religion, and his life. He started slow, halting, obviously uncertain about speaking to a human. Something inside the tiger had broken down, and each sentence seemed to break down his restraint a little more. He needed to open up to someone, and obviously had needed to for a long, long time.

Apparently, it was Mallory’s identification as a priest that allowed Nickolai to permit himself to talk. He said, more than once, “Even the Fallen can be servants of God.”

Nickolai had been born to the House of Rajasthan on the planet Grimalkin. House Rajasthan, in addition to tracing its descent from the founder of the primary religion on Grimalkin, was the ruling clan in the theocratic monarchy that reigned over the planet. Nickolai had been a prince, which amounted to nearly unlimited wealth and power. Since childhood, he had been trained as a warrior as a form of devotion.

When Nickolai spoke of God and his religion, Mallory was fascinated. The nonhumans that founded Grimalkin originally had no religion of their own, though many identified as Catholic as it was one of the few human faiths that allowed for the fact that even nonhumans could have an immortal soul.

The faith of St. Rajasthan had taken the Abrahamic religions, Christianity in particular, as a starting point, just as Christianity had built upon Judaism, or Islam had built upon both. The religion of St. Rajasthan grew out of the beliefs of his contemporaries. And those beliefs were predominantly Roman Catholic.

What divided Nickolai’s faith from Mallory’s was the inescapable fact that his ancestors knew their creator, humanity; a creator that was less than divine, a creator that in some senses was less capable than its creation, and a creator that rejected them and subsequently declared the processes that created them a great heresy on the level of self-replicating nanomachines or artificial intelligence.

And, while Mallory was surprised to discover that many of the books of his Bible were part of the scriptures Nickolai knew, the interpretation was very different. In the scriptures of St. Rajasthan, the Christian Bible was a tale of mankind repeatedly being granted favor then falling from God’s grace, starting with Eden, the first fall and banishment from the garden, through the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Flood, and the Israelites and the golden calf. . . .

To St. Rajasthan, the story of Christ was not one of redemption, it was another temporary reprieve until humankind made its final wicked mistake, its attempt to take God’s mantle for itself. The scriptures of St. Rajasthan told of God finally turning away from mankind for the sin of arrogance and pride, and as He did with Lucifer, casting the whole of man from His kingdom.

In this new faith, mankind became the Fallen, a new Satan. It was little wonder why the Fifteen Worlds had little contact with human space.

It also made Nickolai’s presence in the midst of the Fallen all the more remarkable. He obviously held to these scriptures, so merely being in the presence of men would be threatening to his soul.

The only ones with any hope of God’s grace were those poor instruments mankind had imperfectly molded from the clay. Untainted by man’s sin, they still had some chance to attain the Kingdom of Heaven. But mixing with the Fallen threatened to taint Nickolai as well.

Nickolai explained to Mallory that he had been damned before he had ever set foot on Bakunin. He had been young and foolish, and had thought that his family was more powerful than the priests. He had thought that he could do what he wanted without fear of retribution.

He had been wrong, and in payment for his sins the priests had burned out his eyes and severed his right arm and left him to live as a beggar on Bakunin.

“Your eyes and arm?” Mallory asked.

“Yes. This,” he said as he held out his right arm and extended his claws. Mallory could see a metallic glint from them. It was the only sign that the arm was artificial. “And my eyes are reconstructions, made for me on Bakunin. I am present here in order to repay the debt I incurred for them.”

“But why did they punish you so harshly?”

“Harsh?” Nickolai whispered. “They allowed me to live.”

Nickolai’s sin was grave in the eyes of St. Rajasthan.

Man had created many species before abandoning that kind of genetic engineering. Originally, there had been thousands. The simple act of reproduction was of grave concern. One of the first commandments of the nonhuman faith was “Mate only with your own kind.”