Prophets

  “But . . .”

  “If you wish, after class I can direct you to Papal rulings on the matter, some of which are over five hundred years old.”

  Bartholomew looked crestfallen, and Mallory opened his mouth to add something about how Church doctrine upheld the sacred nature of all intelligent life when his holographic classroom abruptly vanished.

  He stared a moment at the blank white walls, frowning. After a moment, when his class didn’t reappear, he picked up the small comm unit mounted next to the holo controls set in the wall.

  “Maintenance,” Mallory told the interface as he looked at the small readout showing the status of his classroom.

  Mallory didn’t know why he looked at the display; he had no idea what the columns of numbers meant. Maintenance probably wouldn’t even ask him about the display, assuming—in his case, correctly—the technical ineptitude of the faculty.

  “University maintenance, O’Brien here.”

  “Hello, I have a problem with my classroom.”

  “Room number, please.”

  “One-oh-six-five.”

  “Father Mallory?”

  “Yes, my classroom disappeared in the middle of a lecture.”

  “I’m calling you up on my screen right now—hmm.”

  “Yes?”

  “This isn’t a technical issue.”

  “Mr. O’Brien, I have thirty-five students that just vanished—”

  “I can see that. Your class was subjected to an administrative reschedule.”

  “What? I’m in the middle of a lecture. It’s two weeks into the term. This has to be some sort of mistake.”

  “I can’t help you there. You’ll have to talk to the administration about it.”

  “Who authorized it?” Mallory felt a hot spark of anger.

  “Only the university president has that authority.”

  “Thank you.”

  Father Mallory slowly placed the comm unit back in its cradle.

  Why would the administration, the president, cancel his class assignment? Anger was giving way to serious apprehension. This kind of thing was almost always followed by leave or dismissal. In his own university days, he remembered having a mathematics instructor, Father Reynolds, disappear in the middle of the semester. The day after a new instructor appeared to teach the class, Father Reynolds’ name was dropped from the faculty directory. He never knew for certain what the gnomelike calculus professor had done, but he had read rumors of some financial indiscretions involving university funds and a gambling addiction.

  But for the life of him, Father Mallory couldn’t think of anything done on his part that merited that kind of sanction.

  “Father Mallory?”

  Mallory turned to face a dark-haired woman standing in the doorway of his classroom. She was Vice-Chancellor Marie Murphy, the highest-ranking member of the laity in the university administration.

  “Dr. Murphy?”

  “Forgive me for interrupting your class, there is a meeting you must attend.”

  “This couldn’t have waited?”

  “No, I am afraid not.”

  Dr. Murphy didn’t lead him up to the administrative offices as he had expected. Mallory followed her into, of all things, a freight elevator.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, as he followed her into the brushed-metal cube of the elevator.

  “It will be explained at the meeting.”

  Mallory shook his head, more confused than anything else now. All the meeting rooms were in the upper floors of the building, above the classroom areas. However, Dr. Murphy keyed for the third sublevel. The only thing down there would be environmental controls for the building, maybe some storage. Mallory was surprised that the keypad accepted Dr. Murphy’s input. The biometric systems in the elevator shouldn’t allow either of them access to the systems areas; they weren’t maintenance or security personnel.

  That could be overridden by the administration, too.

  Mallory became very aware of the fight-or-flight response happening in his own body. Stress and uncertainty were elevating his adrenaline levels and his old Marine implants were responding. He felt his reflexes quickening, and felt events around him slowing down.

  He wiped his palms on the legs of his pants very deliberately. Habit and training, not implants, made him contemplate escape scenarios.

  He closed his eyes and started running through the rosary in his mind to rein in the biological and technological panic impulses. He couldn’t help but remember recent history, before the overthrow of the junta. Back when the Revolutionary Council was burning monasteries and assassinating priests and nuns in the basements of churches.

  When the doors chimed and slid aside, Mallory chided himself for being surprised not to see a death squad.

  She led him down a concrete corridor. The hall was unadorned, lit by a diffuse white light that seemed to erase any character from the cold gray walls. Something made him ask, “Where were you during the revolution?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you remember the purges?”

  “My father told me stories, but I was only three when the junta fell . . .”

  “Oh.” Mallory felt too old.

  Their footsteps echoed as they passed ranks of large metal doors. Utilitarian plaques identified doors in some machine-readable code that looked more cryptic than any of the alien languages Mallory had studied.

  Dr. Murphy stopped in front of one door that, to Mallory, didn’t look any different than any of the others. She stood in front of the door, and it slid aside with a pneumatic hiss. She stepped aside and looked at Mallory.

  “He’s waiting for you.”

  “Who?”

  Dr. Murphy shook her head and started back toward the elevator, leaving Mallory standing in front of the open door. He called after her, “Who?”

  She didn’t respond.

  Mallory turned back to the open door. It was a storeroom lined with ranks of free-standing shelves. He couldn’t see too deeply into the room through the shelving, but he sensed the presence of people back there somewhere.

  “Hello?”

  “Father Mallory,” came an unfamiliar voice, “please come in.”

  Mallory squinted as he walked into the dark storeroom. He tensed when the door hissed shut behind him. It brought an ugly memory; the smell of burned flesh.

  Mallory walked slowly down the aisle between the shelves, toward an open space at one end of the storeroom. He reached the end of the aisle and turned to face the pair of men waiting for him. He said, “So what is this . . . ?”

  His voice trailed off as he realized whom he was addressing. Each of the two men wore the black-and-red cassock of a cardinal. The cardinal to the right was very familiar to Mallory; Cardinal Harris, who was normally the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church on Occisis.

  At the moment, though, he wasn’t.

  To his right was Cardinal Jacob Anderson, Bishop of Ostia, Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Secretary of State of His Holiness the Pope, arguably the highest ranking and most powerful member of the Roman Catholic Church outside of His Holiness Pope Stephen XII himself.

  Father Mallory crossed himself and genuflected. “Forgive my outburst, Your Eminence.”

  Cardinal Anderson shook his head and gestured for Father Mallory to stand.

  “You want to know why you are here. And why I am here.”

  Mallory nodded. “I didn’t know you were on this planet.”

  “My son, that is because I am not officially here. His Holiness has a favor to ask of you, Father Mallory.”

  Cardinal Jacob Anderson explained their purpose here, all the time watching Father Mallory’s reactions.

  From the man’s file, he was a perfect recruit for clandestine activity. Despite his age, he had the most sophisticated military training of all the recruits he had seen lately. And, as someone who fought against the Occisian Junta at a time when most of the Occisis Marines had backed the secularist revolution
ary movement, Mallory was someone whose loyalty to Mother Church was unquestionable.

  That would be important, because what the Church would ask of him would place him on his own, out of contact, for an extended period. There were also indications that what he would face would be spiritually threatening. Cardinal Anderson hoped that the man’s grounding as a Jesuit academic, as well at the practical training of an Occisis Marine, would help him face what might be happening by Xi Virginis, seventy-five light-years past the edge of human space.

  He looked at Mallory, who patiently waited for him to continue. He could tell the import of a direct papal request was sinking in. Physics rendered simultaneity meaningless for reference frames separated by light-years, making it impossible to interact with people across such distances. A personal envoy was required for any sort of dialogue, but that envoy didn’t have to be Cardinal Anderson.

  The fact that he had come here to personally talk to Father Mallory had made as much of an impression as if the pope himself had come here. Which was the point, as Cardinal Anderson believed that the Church sat at the cusp of a historical change that could shift the balance of power in the human universe over the course of centuries.

  “The Church has received disturbing transmissions,” he told Mallory, “originating from the vicinity of Xi Virginis.”

  Cardinal Anderson saw puzzlement cross Mallory’s face. “But, there’s nothing out toward Virgo,” he said. “There hasn’t been any human expansion past Helminth. Has there?”

  “None that has made the official histories.” Cardinal Anderson took a small handheld holo unit out of his robes. He aimed the device at Mallory and a star map about two meters in diameter unfolded between them. Centered in the display, a large and lumpy dumbbell-shaped cluster of stars was outlined in bright yellow, marking the confines of human space.

  Yellow marked the systems that humanity colonized, while red marked the systems that were home to alien species. The greatest concentration of those were clustered on the other side of human space from Beta Pictoris and the tiny airless rock named Kathiwar that orbited it.

  Kathiwar had been founded at a time when power between the political arms of the Confederacy was measured, at its base, in the number of planets controlled, giving a strong political impetus to colonize new worlds, even when the economics didn’t make sense. One of the arms of the Confederacy, the People’s Protectorate of Epsilon Indi, had been the most aggressive in spreading outward, placing colonies on planets solely as launchpads to reach farther out. Kathiwar was built to serve as one of those way stations, scanning the stars around and sending probes, and eventually, colony ships.

  Shortly after Kathiwar was established, its observation platforms found a planet orbiting Tau Puppis. The discovery, Tau Puppis IV, seemed an obvious Dolbrian remnant, as no reasonably habitable planet should have evolved around that star. Its history might have ended there, as it was close to five times the maximum distance the Indi ships could reasonably supply a new colony, over 120 light-years away.

  But when someone discovered that Tau Puppis was emitting faint EM radiation of demonstrably intelligent origin, the planet was moved to the front of Indi’s priority list. First contact with an alien race was important in and of itself, but also in the front of the mind of every Indi decision maker was the fact that the accidental contact between the Centauri arm and the delphinine natives of Paralia had resulted in the development of the first tach drives and Centauri dominance in the new Confederacy. So Indi routed money, people, and Paralian-designed tach-ships down a corridor from Beta Pictoris toward Tau Puppis.

  The aliens from Tau Puppis met them more than halfway.

  There was a lot of diplomatic dancing, as it became very clear that the birdlike aliens were the rulers of an interstellar empire as large or larger than man’s, an empire that claimed much of the 120 light-years of space between Beta Pictoris and Tau Puppis, a volume as great as the whole of the Confederacy at the time.

  The end result was to deform the yellow dumbbell of human colonization, pushing it away from the galactic center and away from the red-outlined systems of the Voleran Empire.

  None of the other red-outlined systems represented such an interstellar empire. Procyon, within the core of human space, was highlighted red. Familiar to any Occisian as the home system of the Race, the losers of mankind’s first, and so far only, interstellar war with another species.

  Two remaining systems were outlined red. One embedded in the other lobe of the dumbbell on the opposite side of Sol from the Volerans. That was Paralia, home of the aquatic creatures that designed humanity’s first tach-drives.

  The last red outline other marked Helminth, home to an enigmatic wormlike race that had cities, and a civilization, but with whom human scientists were barely able to communicate.

  Like the Volerans, Helminth marked the edge of the human expansion toward the galactic center. But for a different reason.

  The Voleran side of human space had been expanding for two centuries, and the presence of Voleran colonies simply forced the drift of mankind off in a different direction.

  Helminth marked the edge of human space by coincidence. That end of human space stopped expanding for political and economic reasons. A hundred and seventy-five years ago, when the Confederacy fell, the planets of the old Sirius-Eridani Economic Community had fared the worst. Where the other arms of the old Confederacy managed to hold on to some sort of political identity, the SEEC began a decades-long inward collapse along ancient fault lines. The dual capitals of Cynos and Khamsin were untenable without the Confederacy to support it, and what was left after the breakup didn’t have the resources to move outward.

  However, on Cardinal Anderson’s map, there were blue-outlined stars flung out beyond Helminth in a pattern that had never appeared in any publicly available chart or catalog; a pattern of half a dozen stars over a hundred light-years from Sol and over seventy light-years beyond the edge of human space.

  “A decade ago, a Jesuit observatory discovered those colonies you see there in blue.” He adjusted the display and the view zoomed in on the blue systems so names on the stars were visible.

  89 Leonis, HD 98354, HD 101534, Xi Virginis . . .

  Mallory stared at the cluster of blue-outlined systems.

  It was bizarre. Lost colonies were the stuff of tabloid holocasts. Too much time, resources, and people went into establishing a colony—especially one so distant—for the history of it to be lost in the short time that man had been traveling among the stars.

  Father Mallory looked up at Cardinal Anderson. “These are alien outposts, some new species?”

  “No,” Cardinal Anderson said quietly. “These are human colonies, at least six of them, founded as the Confederacy was collapsing. A hundred and seventy-five years ago.”

  “Six? Why hasn’t this been made public? Six established colonies . . .”

  “Possibly more,” the cardinal said. “These colonies were founded in secret. We believe by people escaping the rise of the Eridani Caliphate. Can you see why we would keep this secret?”

  Father Mallory nodded. The Eridani Caliphate, successor to something more than half of the old SEEC, had never had good relations with the Vatican. Often open warfare was only avoided by the fact that the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t a nation, as such. However, the pope had many allies in the secular world as the only part of the body of Christ with an interstellar reach. There had been dozens of proxy battles over the past century, fighting the reach of the Caliphate into the remains of the SEEC.

  However, the Caliphate currently controlled the area between the rest of human space and these newly discovered colonies. The Caliphate’s official position on the ascension of the Islamic government was that it was the rise of an oppressed people into power. The revelation of secular—or worse, Christian or Jewish—refugees from that ascension forming breakaway colonies would be a diplomatic embarrassment to the Caliphate.

  Both the location of these colonies, a
nd their possible historical ties to the planets of the Caliphate, made it almost inevitable that the Eridani Caliphate would claim them as part of their sphere of influence, growing by 50 percent almost instantly; expanding into a space that would, given the limits of current tach-drives, have very limited access to the rest of human space. From the point of view of Mother Church, that would be unacceptable.

  Father Mallory shook his head. “Forgive me, Your Eminence. I understand the Church’s interest in these worlds. What is the interest in me?”

  “These worlds were discovered by accident,” said the cardinal. “A chance interception of a tach-comm transmission. We’ve been secretly monitoring ever since. Unfortunately, these are low power signals. Over such distances they degrade. We can only obtain a few hours’ worth of comprehensible intelligence over the course of a year. And, of course, a listening post by Helminth, or anywhere near there, risks alerting the Caliphate. We’ve been using Vatican property on Cynos.”

  “You said ‘disturbing’ transmissions, Your Eminence.”

  Cardinal Anderson thumbed a control on his holoprojector, and the air was filled with an awful static whine.

  The holo’s picture became fluid and refused to stabilize. It seemed to be the view out of a tach-ship. Stars spun and blurred, and a blue orb filled the display.

  “. . . with Xi Virginis . . . bzzt . . . have lost visual contact . . .”

  Something blurred the view. The planet pixilated and reformed, and something clouded the space between the camera and the planet. At first the black specks seemed to be some digital artifact.

  Suddenly, a very different voice was speaking. “. . . bzzt . . . coming toward . . . bzzt . . . behold a great . . . bzzt . . .”

  It wasn’t an artifact. The cloud was real, the specks moving purposefully toward the planet.

  “. . . seven heads . . . bzzt . . . crowns upon . . . bzzt . . . the third part of the stars . . . cast . . . bzzt . . .”