Prophets

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Confession

We are defined by the secrets we choose to keep.

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

Every man must get to heaven in his own way.

—FREDERICK II “the GREAT” (1712-1786)

Date: 2526.05.24 (Standard) Xi Virginis

Mallory had been confined to his cabin for nearly twenty hours, isolated from the rest of the ship, having no idea if they had tached to a new colony yet or not. During that time, his mind was divided between the enormity of what was happening in the universe around them and the enormity of what was happening aboard the Eclipse.

Someone had sabotaged the tach-comm and had done so in a very sophisticated manner. Mallory immediately suspected a Caliphate agent, but he couldn’t force that scenario to make sense. Why would the Caliphate want to destroy the tach-comm? Did they know what happened to the star that used to be here?

Why then destroy the tach-comm and not the whole ship? Mallory knew enough to realize that the same sabotage that neutralized their FTL communications could have easily wiped out their engines, stranding them or destroying the ship long before they reached Xi Virginis.

As unstable as he had appeared on the bridge, Mallory wondered if it was possible that Mosasa had done it.

He wasn’t prepared when the door to his cabin finally slid open.

He was expecting Wahid, or perhaps Mosasa himself. He wasn’t expecting Nickolai. It makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s the other half of the security detail.

The three-meter-tall tiger filled the doorway, a wall of muscle and fur. Mallory wondered what kind of interrogation techniques the tiger had been trained in.

“Your real name is Francis Xavier Mallory?” Nickolai asked.

Mallory decided that he had long passed the point where Sergeant Fitzpatrick served any use, and Mallory allowed his alias to die alone and unmourned. “Yes,” he said quietly.

“You are a priest.”

“Yes.” The next thing you’ll ask is why I blew up the tach-comm and stranded us here. The problem was, his alias made it hard to produce a credible denial. He wondered how deep the interrogation would have to go before his denials were credible—or he gave in and told them what they wanted to hear.

“May I speak with you?” Nickolai asked.

“I’m not in a position to refuse.”

Nickolai stepped into Mallory’s cabin and allowed the door to slide shut behind him. Nickolai loomed over Mallory, seeming to take up half the volume of the cabin. Mallory could feel the tiger’s breath on his face, and it took an effort of will to keep his body from reacting.

For several moments they stood on opposite sides of the cabin, Mallory staring at Nickolai, waiting for the questioning to begin. The questions, however, were not what Mallory had anticipated.

“Are you a servant of God, Father Mallory?” Nickolai asked.

The question was not rhetorical, and Nickolai used an earnest tone that was out of place in a voice that was a half-register away from a growl. Mallory nodded, “That is my calling, however weak an instrument I am. I’ve devoted my life to the service of God and the Church.”

“The Roman Catholic Church?”

“The Society of Jesus, to be precise.”

Nickolai looked away from him, as if he was considering something. After a moment he spoke. “Do you know of my faith, Father Mallory? The faith of St. Rajasthan?”

Mallory shook his head. “I studied many religions in my seminary training. But that isn’t familiar.”

“It is just as well. Rajasthan didn’t speak to the Fallen. I shouldn’t have come here.” He began an awkward turn to leave.

Something in his manner, something that came across as very human despite his origins, made Mallory reach out and touch the tiger’s shoulder. “What is troubling you?”

Nickolai pulled away and snarled at his touch. Mallory almost recoiled, but managed to restrain himself. Something serious was bothering Nickolai, and it was visible even through his predatory feline expression.

He faced Mallory, his cheeks wrinkled in apparent disgust. “Why should that concern you?”

“It’s part of my vocation.”

“I’m not human, nor part of your church.”

“My God preaches compassion,” Mallory said. “If you don’t wish to share your troubles, stay and tell me of St. Rajasthan.”

Nickolai’s expression softened slightly, and he lowered his gaze. “Do you wish to hear of your own damnation, Father Mallory? My God teaches that humanity has long ago left His grace.”

“My own faith tells me that I am a sinner in the eyes of the Lord. That we are all fallen, since the first man walked the Earth. And it is God’s mercy alone that allows us a chance at redemption.”

“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.”

The world Grimalkin was in many ways similar to the world Mallory knew. The more secular power someone had, the more they could bend the rules of the Church. Humanity might have fallen, but they had no monopoly on corruption and hypocrisy. As long as the transgressions of the royal family were kept private, the priests ignored them.

So at first, when Nickolai was involved in a dalliance with a servant, a panther-black feline who was not only a different social class but a different species, no one overtly cared as long as the affair was discreet. Young royals often bedded servants before the family chose a mate for them. Such liberties never lasted long and were of little consequence.

Both truisms proved false in Nickolai’s case. The affair lasted months, when weeks were more typical. It became obvious to everyone in House Rajasthan that things had passed beyond the venting of adolescent lust. Nickolai had entangled himself in an impossible romance, and his family had to intervene, taking his lover and sending her to an estate on the opposite end of the planet while they rushed him into a hastily arranged marriage.

Nickolai’s family had acted too late. Cross-species fertility was very low, but hybrids were possible, and by the time his family relocated his panther lover, she was already heavy with his cubs. When his children were born, the public evidence of Nickolai’s sin was too great for the priests to ignore. In the Church’s eyes, the sterile crossbreed infants were abominations.

Nickolai’s children were drowned before he knew they existed while their mother was flayed alive.

“But you, they let live?”

“I am a scion of House Rajasthan. Executing me would have been problematic, preferable as that might have been.”

That, and allowing him to live with this on his memory. That was as much punishment as taking a limb. Mallory couldn’t help but think that St. Rajasthan was correct in the near-Gnostic interpretation of his species’ creation. Man had aped God and made creatures in Man’s image, and in so doing bequeathed the creatures the worst of human nature.

God save Nickolai, and God forgive the men responsible for his existence.

“I’ll pray for you, Nickolai.”

Nickolai shook his head slowly. “Save your breath, priest. I am as damned as you are.”

“You hold no hope for forgiveness?”

“I have done worse. I’ve taken the instruments of the Devil into my own flesh. I have prostituted myself to the Fallen.”

“What comfort can I give you, then?”

“In my faith, it is a matter of honor to bear witness for your sins before a servant of God. We do this in anticipation of our final judgment. I wish to face that moment with dignity, and not as a frightened cub mewling for its mother.”

“My faith has a similar ritual. Do you wish me to consider this your confession?”

“If that is what you call it.”

“Yes, I will do so, my son. And I will still pray for your soul.”

Nickolai paused, but eventually he said, “Thank you.”

“Is there anything more that you wish to confess?”

Nickolai nodded. “Yes. And I need your forgiveness more than God’s.”

Nickolai knew that he was going to die, and it would be sooner rather than later. He knew it as soon as the Eclipse shuddered in response to the aborted tach-comm signal. Even if the ship was still functional, they were cast into the void, alone in every possible sense of the word.

All that was left was to make his testimony to the closest representative of God he had available, the falsely-accused priest. The fact that he was human might have been better than talking to his own kind. Testifying his sins to the Fallen was humbling, and damned as he was, God was still scourging him for his arrogance.

St. Rajasthan had preached that pride was first among sins, the cause of Lucifer’s fall and likewise cause of Mankind’s fall. Nickolai had been guilty of more than his share.

When he finished talking, he watched the man that until recently he had known as Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick. He still was unable to read subtle human expressions, but Nickolai could tell from the long time that it took Father Mallory to respond that he had made an impression.

“You sabotaged the tach-comm.” It wasn’t a question, or an accusation, just a flat statement.

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“I was paying a debt. Perhaps I owe too much.”

“But you don’t know why this Mr. Antonio wanted you to do this?”

“No. He told me many things, but never his own reasons.”

“What did he tell you?”

Nickolai told the priest what Mr. Antonio had told him, of how he knew that Nickolai would be selected for this mission, and what he knew of Mosasa’s nature and history. He told Mallory Mosasa’s story from the old pirate’s first life on the Nomad and his discovery of the AI cluster on the derelict Luxembourg to Mosasa’s final co-option by the AIs he kept. He told how Mosasa and the four other AIs were involved in the founding of Bakunin, and how their social engineering kept the anarchic planet stable in the face of the Confederacy, and how that same social engineering used Bakunin as a fulcrum to destabilize and ultimately destroy the old Terran Confederacy—the long deferred goal of the Race that had built the AIs, the last pyrrhic victory of the Genocide War.

He also told the priest how the single Race AI forming Mosasa’s brain was the only one of the five to survive to the present. Two had been lost during the Confederacy’s collapse, two more when Mosasa returned to the home planet of the Race.

Mallory shook his head. “This man who hired you knew all this?”

“This is what he told me.”

“Do you know if any of this is true?”

“I cannot say—” Nickolai was interrupted by static over the PA system.

Mosasa’s voice came from above. “I can.”

Mallory looked up at the ceiling even though the speakers were invisible. “Mosasa? How dare you!” Nickolai was sensitive to the scent of human emotion, and the room was suddenly ripe with the smell of rage. Mallory’s fists clenched so hard that his forearms vibrated.

“Father Mallory—”

“This was a confession, you mechanical atrocity. Do you have no respect—”

“Stop testing me, priest.”

“Mosasa!” Mallory yelled to the ceiling. Mosasa didn’t respond. “Mosasa!”

“Father Mallory?”

“Please forgive me, I didn’t realize—”

“I did,” Nickolai told him.

“You knew he would be watching?”

“He is a creature of Satan. He lives in wires, not in flesh. He sees though every camera on this ship, hears through every microphone. I knew he would hear this.”

“Why?”

“We will die soon, and I needed to make my final testimony.”