The Second Star, page 41
“This one was there. This one understands,” Jerusha said. “I am sorry.”
“Rob,” Philip said, “can you shine a light here? I know what I think she is saying. But I don’t understand…”
“Just as she said,” Stella blurted out before Rob could answer. “I don’t think any of this was deliberate. None of this was meant to happen. Everyone—the Parada and its crew, this creature—everyone was just in the wrong place in the wrong moment of time. The instant of first contact—the first time they ‘met’ us—Rob told me, before—that was something that just went bad, too. We don’t seem to be very lucky with our encounters with the Illogon. That time, they came to us, and it could have ended a lot better than it did—but something went wrong, that explorer’s ship blew up right up there in orbit around us, it must have been quite a sight, actually, I’m surprised that we never made a record of…”
“Wait,” Philip said, and something in his voice made Stella look at him sharply. He sounded oddly strangled, as though he was trying to force words out of his throat with main force. “Wait. When did you say they were here before…? When that first—what was it—ship—when that blew up?”
“I said I couldn’t be certain,” Rob said. “Their years and ours aren’t the same. I can’t be exact. I believe it is anywhere between two and three thousand years ago, by our count.”
“A babe without a father,” Philip gasped. “A light in the sky. A star that led travelers to a child in a manger in Bethlehem…” His eyes were wide and black with pupils dilated with shock. “An angel who appeared to shepherds in the fields—and remember, remember, the way they drew the creature in those drawings the children did—the winged shape—and then the story, the story that it was the son of God.”
A laugh that he could not stop from escaping, a laugh that had an edge of madness to it, broke on his words. “Can’t you see? Look—look at us—” His arms rose, a gesture encompassing them all. “A woman, carrying a child who is incandescent, too wise too early, too… too holy… a child formed of her own body and of no human father. A woman whose very name means Star—and you led us here, Stella, you led us here like a shining light. And whom did you lead? Three men—three men who come to witness the birth…”
“Are you saying that the first lost alien was the being we all came to know as Jesus?” Joe said. “That Jesus Christ was… first alien contact?”
Philip rose and whirled away with a violence that startled Stella. “No!” he said, vehemently. “No, that can’t be true. If that is true than everything has been a lie. My whole life is a lie. God had no son. There was no redemption of sins. Nothing is true—nothing—and we have never been the children of God, made in His image, created by his hand, with souls which can earn the right to enter Paradise and be in the light of that God. And I have… I have perpetuated that lie, passing it on, making others believe it and believe in it, giving others hope for salvation, if only they believed. If only they believed!”
“Jerusha,” Joe said carefully, as though uncertain that the entity would even respond to him directly, “is this possible? Could this be what has happened?”
“I know the story,” Jerusha said. “When I was part of them. The ones in the ship. The story was there. It was inside their minds. We have no way of knowing. The link was lost. That Illogon was lost.”
“But you—here you are, finding shelter, a hope of existence, of survival, inside a human child. How did you arrive at this plan? Did you arrive at this idea… from the other story that you learned? Did you find that this was possible, from that?”
“I know the story. When there was an opportunity… it is possible I remembered.”
Philip gasped, breath exploding from him as though someone had kicked him in the stomach.
“Philip,” Stella said, seriously concerned at his reaction, getting to her feet and reaching out for him. “It was a story—a story of God—it was a path, not the ultimate truth—faith can—”
“You can’t understand,” Philip said. “You can’t. You yourself said you didn’t believe. For you, this is a step across a crack, maybe. For me… there is a chasm at my feet, Stella. And the place where I thought God was… is empty. It is who I am—who I thought I was. You can scoff at the idea, but I chose this place in the world because—because there was a call—because there was a true vocation. But what was it a call to? A call from? I listened, and I accepted, and I believed. and now I don’t even know how to describe my own form in the void. If God made us in his image—and God did not send Jesus to help save our souls, in that image made—then what is left for me to put my faith in? That some part of me belongs to a creature that may or may not have been mistaken for an angel, once, by some ill-educated sheep-herder in Judea, and because of that… because of that…”
Stella reached out for him. “Philip…”
He turned to look at her, but his eyes were unfocused and blind, not seeing her at all. “Who am I?” he asked huskily. “If I am not a man of God, if I am not a priest from the ranks of the Society of Jesus…” He laughed again, the laugh as sharp as a blade. “The Society of Jesus! The very name of my order is a mockery! I thought I was safe, and saved for God, I thought I knew God, that if I knew nothing else in this world I would always know that God loved me. And now? Now there is no God. Just a lost alien being looking for its own salvation, not our Creator bringing ours. I feel as though I thought I was standing on a bridge across a void, and now the bridge is breaking, God is lost…”
“Seriously?” Stella said, suddenly furious. She was empathetic and understanding and she understood viscerally that Philip had just had a huge part of his self—of his soul—ripped from him… but there was something in his reaction that was on the edge of self-indulgence, almost of self-pity, and it suddenly made her angry.
“In the last couple of centuries… in the middle of the great extinctions, when we lost the last lion and the last polar bear that your God gave us to live in His wild places… when the Doomsday Vault failed, and the hoarded seeds were mostly lost, and the wheat harvest failed, and we had to go back to the humblest basest grains from which to make flour and when all the millions starved… when the bees crashed, and crops failed for lack of pollination… when the oceans began to die and the reefs bleached and we watched the lonely whales who were the last of their kind wandering the empty seas calling for mates who never came… when the winters went away and parts of the planet became an anvil upon which human bodies fried, when part of this God-given world became literally unlivable for His children… after the water wars and the food wars … after all of that, you believe in a just and merciful God… but this—it’s only one way of interpreting what we know about the situation, your way—this is what destroys your faith?”
She saw him flinch at that, but she found herself unrelenting in her sudden fury.
“There have been countless theories that historically the Jesus who was called the Christ might never have existed at all,” she said, “or that he was just a perfectly ordinary creature whose higher identity was created for him in the aftermath of his life by ‘prophets’ like Paul or the Gospel writers. None of that ever mattered. But now—”
“Now,” Philip said, his sense of loss transmuting into a fury of his own, “now I am looking at evidence. At evidence that might be shown as… yes, you are right. There have always been stories, and scoffs, and unbelief—but it didn’t matter, Stella, because there was an underlying truth, an underlying mystery, something that connected with the idea of God and what He was and what He represented—but now, in the light of what I know, in the light of the facts… I feel as though I threw my support in for all of this, I did all that I did because of and in the name of God in whom I believed, because I thought that God could not be on the side of people who would lock away the Parada crew for no other sin than they had been sent out to the stars and were broken by them, because I did it in the name of Christ, and the greater glory of God as I saw it. And in the end… all I accomplished… seems to be that I killed the idea of that God.”
“Did you ever consider that this might be your Second Coming?” Stella snapped.
Philip stared at her, his eyes wide with shock. “That’s… heretical…” he said.
“But the facts would fit,” Stella said, inexorably. “If the first encounter produced Christ… and there has always been the inherent promise of the Second Coming, Christ’s return… why not this? Why not here? Why not now? I grant you, this time the mother is no graceful pale Madonna and we do lack a Joseph figure—but we have the rest. You said it yourself.”
She gestured as she spoke, at herself, at the men surrounding her. “Your Star. Your Three Wise Men. Your Immaculate Conception, a child wide awake in the womb, with who knows what kind of potential when she is actually truly born into this world. Born as a human, like you, like your God said—born in his image. There could be a story of Jerusha, just like there was a story of Jesus.”
“You can’t understand,” Philip said, looking shell shocked. “We are then… none of us saved. There is no Christian heaven. All the suffering and dying done in the name of the Christian faith—is that now—what—simply superseded? Are the saints still the saints? Is the Church still the Church? What is our catechism? Do we declare ourselves obsolete?”
He was looking directly at Lily Mae as he spoke, at the alien who lurked in her gaze, but Jerusha made no response to his impassioned question.
“Stella,” Joe said, quietly but insistently, seizing the opportunity of this uncomfortable silence to reach out to the only one of them who had seemed to be focused on leading this particular expedition, “I know I asked you once if you had a plan for the aftermath of finding the woman you were searching for… and that you said you would know it when it came to you… but I think it is time you started thinking about it. We cannot stay here. She is too close to her time, sooner or later someone else will come to the same conclusion you did and come looking for her in this place and you could lose both the woman and the child she carries… whatever its eventual significance. And this conversation… is starting to attract attention.” He gestured at the street on the far side of the rubble where the five of them stood, where a handful of curious residents had started to gather and to pay far more attention to the group than might have been safe. “We should go, at the very least back to the cabin we’ve been staying at, and away from there as soon as we can.”
“I agree,” Stella said. “Philip…”
“No,” he said. “You go. You all go. I will… I will meet you there. I need… I need time.”
“Philip—you can’t just go off and—”
She flinched at what was in the gaze he bent on her. Anger, and disappointment, and fear, and pure desperation. “Leave it,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I know where you are going to be. I’ll find you. Leave me alone.”
He turned and strode away, his steps a little unsteady, his shoulders hunched high by his ears and his head bowed, his eyes on nothing but the ground at his feet. It was as though his sudden and devastating loss of a higher plane had completely taken away his ability to look up—as though he had thrown himself from heaven, and had fallen hard, without wings, without faith to break the fall.
Stella’s immediate instinct was to run after him, to say that she was sorry, that she understood, that she was grateful for everything that his faith had made him—but Rob reached out and gripped her by the elbow.
“He would not thank you.” Rob said, “and Joe is right. We need to get Lily Mae out of here.”
“Fine,” Stella said, desperately, “fine. Come on, let’s go. We’ll wait for Philip at the cabin—we can load up the van to go, and as soon as he comes back…” She stopped, fighting tears. When he comes back. If he comes back. She was suddenly not sure of anything at all.
Rob helped Lily Mae to her feet, and Joe stepped up to assist. Stella, still staring at Philip’s retreating back, saw with a sudden clarity that what she was feeling was in a way a weak echo of Philip’s own loss. He had leaned on a pillar he had always believed had been there for him, and found that it gave beneath his hand, that it had never been more than smoke; the loss of foundation, the loss of support, was what he found so devastating. She, Stella, had never leaned on that pillar—but she had been leaning, heavily, on Philip. Philip, who had always been there for her, who had been an ally and a friend in desperate hours when she needed one. And now there was nothing where he had been except a narrow back, clad in a black cassock, only a man walking away from her, a man to whom she had said, perhaps, far too much for him to forgive.
As she looked back at Lily Mae, the pregnant woman’s eyes flickered and faded, leaving, for a moment, a completely open and vulnerable person, only Lily Mae Washington, nothing more, nothing less. And then things changed again, in the way that Stella had learned to recognize back in the habitat, and a particular fragment, a particular soul, stepped forward to take charge of the situation.
“Oh boy,” she said, her mouth twisted into a grimace, her face pure Diana, “you sure fucked up this city.”
Lily Mae seemed untethered as they gathered around her and spirited her away from what was to have been a sanctuary of her memories of shelter and personal security, a childhood memory that was long vanished from the place where she sought it. She neither resisted nor fully acquiesced, and appeared to communicate with Rob, whom she accepted as the most trusted of her new companions, in a manner which would have in other circumstances riveted Stella’s professional attention—they seemed to be in the process of evolving a fluid super-personality, one that could change without warning, with either one of them responding to whatever stimulus the other provided, with the Illogon persona, the one whom they had all heard name itself Jerusha, apparently participating in the meld as an independent entity.
When the four of them had arrived back at their lodgings—a somewhat down-at-heel hostelry consisting of a shabby central three-story motel building which had seen better days and several free-standing studio-type or two-roomed cabins on the far end of the narrow parking lot, one of which the four of them had commandeered when they had arrived. Stella had said that they should leave as soon as Philip returned; nobody had questioned that, or asked if she was sure that Philip would come back. She simply would not countenance the alternative, and that was written in every set line on her face. But then Joe, who had not stopped looking uneasy since they first encountered Lily Mae and her condition, had whisked Lily Mae away into the inner room to find out what he could about the situation, with the distinct implication that it would be his judgment on that matter that would determine the next stage of their journey. Lily Mae raised no objections to this examination, such as Joe could perform with little in terms of supplies or equipment; Rob remained with her, hovering nearby, never far from her side.
Stella, who could have simply withdrawn to the other room of the cabin while she waited for Joe to conclude his examination, found herself restless and almost claustrophobic within those four walls. If the small room had given her the space to do so, she would have paced restlessly—but between the two beds pushed into corners, and a small couch that took up most of the rest of the place with its back to the kitchenette beyond, there was barely enough clearance to sidle by with purpose, never mind prowl the place. Twice she jumped and turned to the door because she thought she heard someone approach it, or even knock lightly; twice she held her breath in vain as the door did not open and reveal Philip standing on the threshold.
Lily Mae was a problem, Rob was focused closely on Lily Mae, Joe was trying to figure out Lily Mae’s status, and Philip was… gone.
Stella had never felt more alone.
She stepped outside the cabin and took the few steps down a short path that took her down to the parking lot where the mini-van that Philip had found for them was parked. A small wooden bench stood next to the path to the cabin’s front door, and Stella subsided onto this, tense and unhappy, as the daylight began to wane and the lights began to wink on around her—no other cottages showed habitation, but the motel building became illuminated with outside lights, passageway lights, and the occasional sliver of escaping lamplight from a handful of occupied rooms. She was coatless, her arms wrapping around herself and clutching at her elbows, shivering slightly in the deepening October evening. The day had been cloudy, but dry; now she could smell rain on the way. She wondered, irrationally, if Philip would be caught in the downpour when he returned to the cabin. When he returned to the cabin…
She was staring into the shadows of the autumn twilight, completely focused on trying to rearrange them into a familiar figure in a black cassock coming towards her across the parking lot, and she literally flinched, startled, as she felt a jacket fall around her shoulders and looked up to see Joe standing beside the bench on which she was sitting. The jacket was his own, good leather, and she began to warm immediately, never having realized how cold she had been.
He gazed in the same direction as she had been looking for a moment, and then sighed and looked down at her.
“How long do we wait?” he asked quietly.
“As long as it takes,” Stella said, and then bit down on the words, because they sounded almost petulant. She closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and then opened them again. “None of this could have happened without him,” she said. “None of it. If I am honest about it, he helped give me the strength I needed, all the way back to the beginning of it all, back when we first met. He always had my back. No matter what. I need… to give him… I need to have his, now. I just can’t think about pulling out and leaving him here. Alone.”
“It may be what he wants,” Joe said.
“Well, we don’t always get what we want,” Stella retorted. And then sighed again. “I’m sorry. I sound like a virago. I don’t pretend to understand what he is feeling, but clearly it cuts deep—and it may well be that someone like me cannot possibly help with it. But I can’t just cut and run, Joe.”
