The Unearthing (30 page)

“
That the aliens have or had visual acuity is likely,” The British Minister conceded, “But not necessarily very similar to our own. A multispectral scan of the imaging system aboard the Groom Lake Bug revealed that the system was broadcasting images on several wavelengths invisible to the Human eye.”

“
In any event,” The Chairman interjected, bringing the debate back to topic, “We must plan for the contingency that they will gain access to the rest of the Ship.”

“
Indeed,” MI-6 said, “Before the World Council gets inside we must have operatives within acquiring technology for us.”

“
Why?” the Minister asked, for the first time challenging MI-6, “To what end? The World Ship Summit and the Oversight Commission will be handling the catalogue and assessment of any technologies found within.”

“
Precisely why we have to get there first,” MI-6 replied testily, unused to being questioned, “The Committee’s goal is to acquire alien technologies to the advantage of our respective governments, Minister. If the World Council is to decide who gets what from the Ship and what technology is to be restricted or utterly banned, there will be no advantage.”

“
To that end,” the Chairman said, “I propose we prepare of team of operatives to infiltrate the Ship if and when access is acquired.”

“
Will Colonel Bloom be in a position to grant us access?” the Chief of Staff asked.

“
She’s in no position to refuse,” The Chairman growled.

“
I agree and second the motion,” MI-6 said. From his offices in London, the head of MI-6 crouched in closer to his console’s camera plate. The image of his face on the Minister’s console grew perceptively. It was almost as if MI-6 was addressing him. In fact, the Minister suspected he was.

“All in favour?” MI-6 asked a fraction of a second before the Chairman could. The Minister took a moment to consider his position. He’d voiced his objections. Did he truly have enough reason to dissent here, to go against both MI-6 and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

“Aye,” The Minister said when his turn came.

♦♦♦

They were just outside of LA in a deserted park that Allison liked to frequent, sitting on the hood of her car and smoking a home-rolled joint. She blew the ash off the end of the cherry with a short puff and passed the joint to James. She held her breath as he took his hits, exhaling only as he passed it back to her. Before she took a hit, she spoke:

“Okay, James,” she said, “Seriously, I don’t know you that well. But even I can tell you’re not normally as tense and brooding as you’ve been since you moved in.”

She took a hit, held it a second and exhaled. She continued speaking.

“I know that it’s not just about Laura’s dad, because even she’s picking up the pieces better than you are. So the way I see it, the shooting triggered something else that’s burning your chip.” She took a proper toke from the joint and passed it back. He took a long haul off of it, as though it were a cigarette. He coughed it out a second later and flicked the ash off the end of the joint. Allison took it as James began talking.

“Well, it’s like you said,” he began, “I don’t know you very well and this is shit I’ve never really talked to anyone about before.” He took the spliff back and took his own hits.

“What’s the problem, James?” she asked, her tone serious and somewhat annoyed, “Laura’s worried, I don’t know you well but I like you and I’m worried. What the hell is up, James?”

“I—” he began, grasping for words, “The Prof—” He shook his head. She took the joint. It was nearly done. She threw it down the gravel roadway leading into the hillside rest stop. He looked at her. She waited patiently for him to speak.

“Do you believe in anything?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Do you believe in God? Or in life after death? Or reincarnation? Any of that?” Allison was taken aback by the question. The drugs were kicking in and it wasn’t entirely great trying to focus on such issues when she’d just been trying to get James to open up.

“Well, yeah,” She said, “I…well, I’m a Marian Pagan.”

“A what?”

“You’re going to have to give me a second James,” she replied, reaching into her purse, “I need a butt and could you get me a can of Coke from the car? My throat’s paste.”

“Sure,” He said, dropping off the hood of the car and moving to the door.

“James? What has any of this got to do with you?”

“Just tell me what you believe,” He said, “Okay?” Allison rolled her eyes. There was nothing worse having a conversation with somebody who was stoned and trying to make a point. He came back with her Coke and his ginger ale.

“So what is a…Marian Pagan?”

“I follow the Goddess worship tradition that says Maid Marian, from the Robin Hood legends, was the High Priestess of the Goddess’s cult. It’s not the same thing as Christian Marianistic Paganism, which is about making the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene into Goddess figures, but the two get confused all the time,” She told him as she finished lighting her cigarette. He took one, lit it.

“Wait. Paganism…isn’t that like witchcraft and all that?”

“No,” she replied, “Although most Pagan beliefs incorporate Magick into their ceremonies, Paganism is not strictly witchcraft. Marianism does use spellcraft and some Earth Magick, but we don’t classify ourselves as witches. We pray, we get together, we study our religion and we try our best to come to know the Goddess.”

“Okay, so then who was Robin Hood?”

“The High Priest of Hearn the Hunter, a Forest God represented by a Stag,’t t She replied, “He was consort to the Earth Goddess and his horned image was bastardized by the early Christian Church into that of the Devil and what the Hell does any of this have to do with your problems, James?”

“I was raised Catholic,” He said, “I was raised to believe that Jesus died for our sins and came back to life so that we could live forever in communion with God. The thing is, since the Ship was found…well, I’ve been having doubts. And then…when the Prof died…I was raised to believe…I kept expecting…to
feel
something; to have some
sensation
, some knowledge that his soul had passed on. The bitch of it…the bitch of it is that I didn’t feel a fucking thing when he died. Not a fucking thing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think.”

He was choking out the words at the end and when he stopped speaking he took a long, angry drag from his cigarette. The wind blew the smoke into his face and burned the tears he was trying not to shed from his eyes. He snuffed a leak back into his sinuses and took another haul off the cigarette.

“Fuck,” He rasped. Allison put an arm around his shoulders.

“James,” she said, “Gods, James, I didn’t know.”

“It’s not exactly something that comes up, is it?”

“James…” She rubbed his back in what she hoped was a supportive manner.

“I was raised to believe that God sent His only Son to Earth to die for our sins,” James said, “I was raised to believe that God made us. He loved us so much he died for us. Well if God sent the Messiah to us here on Earth, what did he do for all the other species of life that must inhabit the galaxy? For all we know there isn’t a single animal alive on this planet that didn’t evolve from something the Ship brought here! Where does God fit in to all that? Everybody always says that Constantine and the early Church bastardized history and Jesus’ teachings for their own end and now they’re saying that the Ship helps prove what a fraud the whole of Christianity is. Everything I’ve been taught to believe’s just been incredibly fucked up by the Ship. You’re supposed to know, to feel something when someone dies right in front of you. You’re supposed to witness something. Feel something, think something…I don’t fucking know. But that’s what I don’t understand. What happened to the Prof, after he died? What happens to us when we die?” Allison held him then, simply drawing him into her arms. He went gladly and for a long time she just hugged him tightly against her.

“James, this is really heavy shit you’re trying to deal with,” She said after a long silence, “I know, because I’ve been there. I don’t know if you’ll find the same answers I did or if you’ll find any answer at all. But James, you’ve got to learn to talk things out sometimes. Laura and I are your friends. That’s what we’re here for.”

“I don’t think you guys can help me with this,” he said, pulling away from her. He shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it, taking a long drag.

“It’s a rough road to go down alone James,” She turned him so he was facing her, “I don’t want to see you get lost along the way.”

“I…thanks,” He said. She kissed him lightly.

“You’re welcome.”

♦♦♦

It had been a long and tiresome day and it didn’t feel to Bloom that it was ever going to end. Aiziz and Andrews had been at the language lab until Bloom and Doctor Cole both ordered them up. Then there were the debriefings. Aiziz explaining to the SSE that the language program had shown her the key to learning the Shiplanguage and how it was now in the process of teaching her and Andrews. Then Kodo showed them the original tissue samples he’d taken from the Ship’s organic components. The outermost layer of cells in each sample had gone through a hardening process that Kodo couldn’t account for. The cells underneath still seemed to be normal; at least as normal as he could determine, relative to the Ship. Kodo was looking into the process, including a metallurgical analysis of the hardened cells, but he had nothing yet.

The general debriefing was followed by supper, in this case pizza and beer. After supper came the debriefing to the World Ship Summit. Then Doctor Cole delivered her report on the SSE to Bloom: Kodo and Paulson were bearing up well, but smoking far too many joints in their off-hours. Aiziz and Andrews might be developing an obsession with the Ship. Some of the peripheral members of the SSE, studying the Ship from the points of view of geological history, radio spectrometry, scans and other such esoterica were showing signs of strain. Two were cases of APCSD, a term long-ago coined by whatever government department had originally thought up the idea of an extraterrestrial first contact: the acronym stood for
Alien Post Contact Shock Disorder
. The three other cases of strain were from people unable to handle the workload. In all five cases, Cole recommended sending them packing. Bloom concurred and highlighted Cole’s recommendation to the World Ship Summit. After all was said and done Bloom sat in her quarters eating cold pizza. Once her appetite had been sated, she declared the day done. She showered and made for bed. Bloom had just fallen asleep when the first explosion woke her.

A universal truth of all intelligent life is that their first contact with an alien civilization is invariably cathartic. It is also universally true that all post-contact civilizations go through a period of panic. The distinction is that some civilizations survive this panic and some do not.

ELEVEN

CRISIS

“The Lord Your God calls upon you to soldier for the cause of the salvation of His Son,” Gabriel Ashe said in His hypnotic monotone. Before Him were the Chosen. Those marked by His closest disciples as being ready to fight, to die for Christ’s Son. The sun was high in the sky outside Ashe’s Church; the SSE had just breached the Second Chamber as had been foretold to Him in His visions. Ashe knew that this was the Sign He had been waiting for. He had known since waking from the Dream, the night before.

He had risen from His slumber and knew that the moment the Angel had bade Him prepare for was at hand. The knowledge filled Him as surely as His lungs filled with air when He breathed. The time of His Ascension had come at last. Ashe inhaled deeply to calm Himself. It was then that the stench of rot hit Him and He became aware of His surroundings. The charnel smell of the Sacrifices He had taken for the sake of the Angel before His last vision quest; before He was shown the path to walk. Ashe moved to the door of the suite, past the torn and broken bodies. The man had been from the military, the woman from INTERPOL. He had broken them from the start, feeding them drugs to heighten their terror and enhance their pain. They soon confessed their sins under His carefully cruel ministrations. Even after they confessed their crimes, He took much pleasure in their long brutalization and violation before He finally killed them, disembowelling the man with His bare hands and choking the woman with the still-dying soldier’s entrails. Then the rush of the Act had taken Him and He partook of their flesh, before sundering their bodies as the Angel commanded. Ashe unlocked the door of His suite and stepped through. His Apostles, as always, were there.

“The time of completion of our great work is at hand,” He told them, “Dispose of the sacrifices in the proscribed manner and prepare My bath and fast-breaking meal. Soon I will enter the Temple of My Rebirth and I want to be ready.”

♦♦♦

“The salvation of the Son can only come from the victory of the Son of the Son of God,” Ashe told His Chosen, His Knights of Christ, “For I am the Promise Kept, I am the Word made Flesh, I am the Spirit of God that will unite the Father and Son unto Me. You have been chosen from the flock to be My Knights, to soldier for Me, for My Father and My Father’s Father. You must remember death, for you may all die so that God might live. You are my Christian soldiers, Knights of Christ, of Christ’s Son. Time flies from us and the time to act, to fight…and to die…is at hand.” They began singing
Onward, Christian Soldier
; a hundred men and women, their voices raised in unison. They wore white robes, a red sash hanging down from their collars. Ashe stood over the altar, where a hundred doses of Communion had been prepared. As one, Ashe’s Knights of Christ rose and began forming a single queue, kneeling and moving toward the altar. This time Ashe had designed the drug differently. It would at first give them hours of ecstatic hallucinations and leave them highly sensualised. Then hours later, the drug’s second stage would kick in, driving them into an adrenalized madness and psychotic rage barely controlled by their conditioned rapture toward Him and the Church of the United Trinity. They would move out into the World Ship Preserve, attacking the Village, Fort Arapaho and even the town of Laguna. And around the world Ashe’s Apostles were preparing his Knights of Christ to do the same. For tonight would be the Night of Blood. And tonight Gabriel Ashe would make the Ship His.