The Book of Feasts & Seasons (12 page)

“Great! What kind of stupid universe is this! I could have made it better!”

“You could have, but chose not to.”

“What?”

“Men are Sons of Adam. He is father and first and king of your kind. His is your law, and you cannot make yourself not to be his child by any power of yours.”

“So how do I get my happy ending, if you can’t absolve my sins?”

“Get thee to Simon, son of Jonas, or some other of the Eleven at this same day at evening, in the City of David, at the end of the street called Straight. Then the Lord shall appear even in their midst, and grant them his peace, and breathe on them, and with his breath they shall become living souls. Then shall he say, 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost. They do not have it yet.' Then shall he say, 'Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.' Without these words being spoken, no sins would be forgiven. For this reason was the lamb of God slain.”

“Uh, what? I thought it was to take away the sins of the world.”

“Your ears are heavy.” Angels can be very polite. He was telling me I was a moron, and that he had just said that.

“How will I find the way? This city, and that street? Which building? Is there a number?”

“Your eyes are slow,” he said, and he pointed. I looked, and, in the distance, I saw a great multitude of ghosts, dozens and scores and hundreds and then half a thousand, all walking and dancing and flying through the air. I saw more in that one moment than all the ghosts in all my cases put together. They were filled with joy, and they seemed to be clear and plain in the daylight, so that their loved ones could see them. They were all headed the same direction.

He picked up a staff that was on the ground next to him. I found, to my surprise, that I could touch and hold it. I realized I had a long journey ahead of me, and even imaginary feet can get tired.

“Thank you,” I said. “But one last question, only one–why was all this necessary? Why did he have to die? Why did I have to die?”

“Unless you die, you cannot live again. Unless the Son of Man dies and lives again, he cannot breathe a new soul into an empty soul.”

“Then the whole thing, the torture and the confusion and devil and the murder—all the pain, and the death—the whole thing was so that he could say those words? 'Whose sins you remit are remitted?' That is what Easter is?”

But the angel must have thought I meant it when I said I had only one last question, for he was gone, and did not answer my other questions. No matter. I know the answers now.

On I went, seeking forgiveness. I was dead, but it was not too late.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan that moves

To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

–
Thanatopsis
, William Cullen Bryant (1821)

The Feast of the Ascension

It may have been a coincidence that it was the Vatican Observatory which first detected the object occluding the star Eta Aquilae.

The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array buried beneath the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was the second to register an anomaly from that precise point in space, a flux of high-speed weakly interacting particles with no clear explanation for a possible source.

The name is lost to history of the graduate student at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (the largest fully-directional radiotelescope in the world) who noted the ultralow frequency anomalies issuing from the same right ascension and elevation as the Vatican's unnamed transplutonian object, and correlated it to the muon readings, taken months earlier, from the South Pole Station. He legitimately earned the right to name the heavenly body, had it been an asteroid or plutino. Since the observatory was in West Virginia and once this occluding body become the most famous in the world, for a time it was known as the Robert C. Byrd Anomaly, after the Senator responsible for funding the telescope array.

The object passed through the heliopause, which is the boundary between the thicker interstellar medium and that bubble wider than the orbit of Pluto of relatively empty medium surrounding the Sun, swept clear by the solar wind.

By the time, a year later, the Byrd Anomaly passed the orbit of Jupiter and entered the hot, brightly-lit areas of the Inner Solar System, several observatories had visual sightings of a large, regular, featureless pale sphere. At this point, more and more of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories were tracking it, as it was on a collision course with Earth.

It was thought at first to be the head of a comet, because the albedo was that of water ice, but then first one observer, and then all, confirmed the object was suffering changes of course and speed that no natural forces working on a body in free fall could explain. The sphere was decelerating.

She–for this was clearly a vessel constructed by a nonhuman and unearthly intelligence, and by a tradition too mysterious to be ignored, all ships are called 'she'–was given a fanciful name by Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists. As if in a nervous giggling fit of dread, they called her SETI, after the Search for Earthly and Terrestrial Life, but spelled it CETI after the constellation of the sea monster.

During the six seeks while she circled the globe from pole to pole in what is called a ball-of-string orbit the popular press ignored the official designation, and instead called her by various ever more panic-inducing names: The Intruder, the Alien Invasion Force, the Bug Eyed Monster Egg, the Death Star, and even Wormwood.

When she entered the atmosphere, and her outer energy envelope altered and assumed the shape of a lens or disk, everyone called her the flying saucer. And maybe there was a coincidence in that as well.

After passing rapidly over the South Atlantic and the Caribbean, the vessel entered the airspace of the United States over the Carolinas, then traveled north along the Appalachians, rapidly outdistancing the fighter jets attempting to pace her. However, the vessel was emitting light, radio noise, and microwaves, as well as being solid enough to return a blurry yet serviceable radar echo.

Air defense and antimissile defense batteries were pointed at her, including orbital-based weapons it had not been expedient to admit publicly existed, in sufficient numbers that apparently the Head of State, Uriah Thompson Vole, was confident enough in his power to destroy the intruder if need be that he, or one of his underlings, decided to let the vessel land.

It should be mentioned that this Mr. Vole had been the fourth Vice President in history to replace an impeached predecessor. For, ever since the informal abolition of the Electoral College, resulting in the recently-packed nineteen-man Supreme Court had interpreted the living, breathing Constitution to disallow national elections, Congress merely impeached every Head of State once he lost the confidence of the press and people. Without the waste, confusion and partisanship surrounding national elections interfering in the America people's business, matters in Washington were decided by a consensus reached between the leadership of the several wings of the two major political parties, the various NGO's and pressure groups, the heads of powerful bureaucracies and their private armies, various powerful corporate donors and government-run syndicates, and other interests at play in Washington. Mr. Vole's sole qualification for office was that he was a complete nonentity unlikely to offend any of the actual decision-makers.

It should also be mentioned that no official record exists stating who, if anyone, made any of the decisions in the days following, or what became of the man they arrested as a traitor.

The vessel did not land in Roswell, New Mexico, nor on the lawn of the White House, nor even at the Nuclear Power Plant in Calvert County. She came to rest hovering motionlessly at a spot above Moll's Cove, roughly halfway between Church Creek and Priest's Point, a tributary of the Chesapeake in St. Inigoes, St. Mary's County, the southernmost tip of Maryland.

The gleaming, wheel-shaped vessel, brighter than a full moon, was plainly visible across the street, where NESEA, the Naval Electronic Systems Engineering Activity, occupied Webster Field. This was a small office building and workshop, and two short runways. The modest little airfield would have been a logical place for an airborne vehicle to land. And General Electric did research and make tracking and fire control systems for the Navy, but was hardly worth flying from Mars to come see, much less from a point far outside the Solar System somewhere in the direction of the constellation Aquila. So it might have been a coincidence that the vessel came to rest here.

It was a cloudy and windy night, so the gleaming disk of ghostly, luminous substance some thousand feet in radius, was sometimes visible and sometimes not. When the cloud covered her, the vessel's shining energy envelope looked like a vast blind owl's eye peering through fogs and smokes. Aircraft from the nearby Patuxent River Naval Air Station flew in narrowing circles around the monstrous vessel, which was large as an aircraft carrier.

One of the helicopter pilots, Lt. Joseph Cupertino Tyler of Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron HS 8, was a local boy, and spoke with a trace of the distinctive 'Smith Island' accent. It was he that first noticed that the center of the immense disk was exactly above the St. Ignatius Church located on Villa Road.

Energy from the disk was jamming all radio signals within a mile of her. The aircraft, both fixed wing and rotary wing, were communicating with ground observers by heliograph. At midnight, Tyler signaled the ground crew with his spotlight, and landed his LAMPS Mk III Seahawk helicopter at the NESEA Airstrip. He reported to the deck officer that he had seen 'strange flashes' issuing from the hovering saucer, and said trouble with electrical systems required him to land. No other of the score of observers on the site at that time confirmed this report, or experienced any difficulty with their avionics.

Nonetheless, Colonel Turvold, who was in overall command of the operation at the moment, was eager to have the data from the nose-mounted infrared turret examined, and ordered the Seahawk to stay on the ground while it was examined.

There is no record of any specific order either telling Tyler to stand by while his craft was examined, nor was he off duty. He told the ground crew that he had to visit the head, and would be back shortly, and he and his copilot, Lt. Andre Adenoid Hynkel, simply walked off the runway and across the dark field.

Their figures were plainly visible to men on the ground and observers in the air due to the light coming from the alien disk.

The two young men easily leaped the waist-high wrought iron fence around the churchyard, walked through the cemetery, and entered unlocked main door of St. Ignatius at precisely a quarter past midnight, Eastern Standard Time. At the exact moment the two entered the church, the alien vessel ceased shedding its strange twilight-colored energy, restoring the darkness of night as suddenly as a blackout curtain being drawn. This might also have been a coincidence. The vessel ascended abruptly to forty thousand feet, leaving the pursuing planes far behind.

It was speculated that the vessel on approach to Sol encountered the expanding sphere of radio-energy emitted by the Earth since the 1930s and after. Between commercial and military radio, navigation signals, television, and communication satellites, and various other broadcasts, Earth gave off as much electromagnetic energy in the radio band of the spectrum as a small star. It would not be surprising that the intelligence directing the vessel calculated the shortwave and commercial wavelengths most often in use by Earthly civilization. What was surprising was that the message was in English. That was not the language used by the largest population on the globe, but it was the one used most often broadcast during the decades of radio transmissions through which the vessel passed as she approached Sol.

It was little more than a minute long, delivered by a voice that was inhumanly regular, precise, and had no pauses for breath.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Earth, your attention, please: One thousand four hundred light years, as you define this measure, have been crossed. This travel is purposeful. The purpose is not to open diplomacy or trade with your cities and villages, nor is there anything among you or your works to excite military ambition or scientific curiosity. You are not worth negotiation nor conquest nor study. You are violent, fraudulent, deceptive, pusillanimous, insubordinate, corrupt, murderous, unchaste, unclean, and hence deemed incapable of right action or right contemplation.

However, among you, there has recently arisen or soon shall arise, one happy of happiness, who is capable of right contemplation and right action, who maintains an ideal nature, which you call light, swift, subtle, impassive.

An agent representative has been selected and decreed to be the epitome of Earth. A gift is bestowed. This gift is the ideal instrumentality. The ideal instrumentality contains its own ordeal, ending upon your inevitable failure in your planetary destruction.

From that destruction a remnant may be preserved. This shall be a sign to the unseen Designers of Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy to end the bereavement of Eta Aquilae. No further messages are necessary, nor will any be sent or received.

Shortly thereafter radar contact from ground stations was lost. Satellite images show the vessel achieved escape velocity and departed the atmosphere, and resuming her spherical shape, assumed an orbit that would carry her towards the moon.