Chapter Nine

The starship Ariadne descends slowly through a veil of thin, mist-like cloud, turning slowly as her thrusters struggle against gravity. Moonlight flickers through the clouds, catching on her hull as she tears through the atmosphere. As the ship drops lower the pearly clouds become darker and darker until she is falling through a soup of thick, acrid black smoke and ash.

Within the ship's belly James turns over onto his shoulder, staring blankly into the darkness. His bare feet rest on the cold metal bar at the foot of the bed, the blanket barely long enough to cover his ankles. Above him his cabin mate stirs, the top bunk creaking softly. "You still awake, son?"

James is silent for a moment before his dry mouth manages to speak. "Yeah."

"You should sleep. We've got a long day of work tomorrow." After a few more moments of silence, the bunk creaks again. "You want to tell me what's on your mind, son?"

James licks his lips. His throat feels as if it's dried up. Finally he blurts, "How can you stand to do this?"

"You mean this job?" asks Andr. "It pays, boy. That counts for more than young folk think. When you're my age, you take what you can get. You still thinking about the bomb?"

James blinks, the hellish image of smoke and fire still fresh in his memory. He nods, then remembers himself and says, "Yeah."

The old man sighs, and there's another creak. James imagines him leaning back in his bed. "I don't like it any more than you do, son. Sometimes I wonder if the good lord can see us all the way out here, and if he could, what he would think."

"What lord?" asks James, puzzled.

"I am speaking of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, boy. Perhaps you've heard of him?"

James's eyebrows wrinkle. He recalls hearing the name before, remembers a woman dressed in robes who carried a chain with beads on it. "Are you talking about a god?" he asks.

"Yes, in a manner of speaking," replies Andre, his tone mildly amused.

"You're a … a christian, then?" asks James, the name coming back to him. "Do you come from earth?"

"Yes I am," chuckles Andre. "And yes I do."

"I was born on earth."

"You were, now? Whereabouts?"

James frowns. "Chicago, I think. In the Wastes."

"Aah," sighs Andre. "The Wastes. I remember them. It could have been yesterday. What time is it, son?"

James glances at the glowing red face of the clock. "Seventeen-hundred."

"Ten hours till we suit up. Still not sleepy?"

"No."

"Would you like to hear a story, son?"

…

The brig is a dark room that smells of moisture and neglect. Bare pipes run over one corner of the low ceiling, hissing now and again. Several quarians sit in a huddled circle, conversing in low tones while a human wrapped in cloth and armor stands watch outside the steel door.

Inside the room, in a pool of shadow away from the illumination of the single pale light strip, a quarian in a red suit sits slumped against the wall. His eyes are closed, but his breath comes quickly and unevenly. In his sleeping mind a full moon hangs over dark trees.

…

Andre begins his tale. "I was born in Detroit city. My father was a manager at some ship-building company, I do not remember the name. We lived in a highrise in a lovely, spacious apartment, three whole bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. I remember some things about Detroit, but not much. It was a nice city. There was a park near our building and my mother used to take me and my brothers there in the early morning. It's hard to believe it used to be one of the worst cities on the continent.

"And then came the day that my father's building was destroyed by a bomb and all ten thousand employees were killed. A terrorist attack, they said. Apparently not everybody was as happy as we were in the big city. I don't know what their exact motives were and I never will; all I know is that from that day onward life was different.

"We left the city; there was no way we could afford the apartment any longer. We moved to a series of lower and lower rent neighborhoods as my mother tried to find work and the bank account began to dry up. Eventually we wound up in the Wastes, just another family living under a tin roof, sleeping on mattresses stuffed with paper and trying to stay alive. By that time I would have been fifteen or sixteen years old. My older brothers became thugs, beating other for money. My family, which had always been a fairly religious one, lost their faith, my brothers actively rejecting it. For whatever reason, mine only grew stronger. I would sit under the stars at night, looking up to the heavens and praying to the lord for some sign as to why he had taken everything from us. And one day I found it.

"We live a life of comfort, my son. There are many of us who never have to ask for anything, who have our desires handed to us at every turn. I would have grown into one such man, and my eyes would have remained blinded to the truth of the world. The truth is that however high we rise on our towers of technology and wealth, it can still all be swept out from under us in the blink of an eye. We climb so high that we think we are above God, but that is not the truth. I believed I was brought down to earth so that I would be able to see how powerless we all truly are, and how little our palaces of glass and steel really mean. I still believe it."

Andre sighs wearily. "But I don't mean to give you a sermon. Those days are over. What this all leads me to is this: I became a preacher. There was not one in our little shanty town, and I had my family's bible and the stars above me and the word of God in my heart and it was all I needed. I built an alter out of scrap, and after a few years it had become a church, and I a priest with my own modest flock. People listened; I talked, and they listened. They were unused to public speech unless it concerned their money being taken away from them. I had quite an audience after a while, people coming from towns over to listen. They would gather around quietly, and when mass was over they would go quietly away. And every week there would be more. People started to know my face, began to tip their hats when they met me. They started to ask me to speak at weddings and funerals. Even if they were not all believers, I think having me there to say a few words made them feel better somehow. I never went hungry."

"What about your family?" James asks.

"My brothers threw me out of the house," says Andre flatly. "They hated me for what I believed. Perhaps it was the mere fact that I believed. One way or another, by my seventeenth birthday I was sleeping in the scrapyard church and living on charity. And I held their funerals, too: first Timothy, who died of a gunshot wound in the stomach, then Marcus, who suffered a blow to the head and died of a brain hemorrhage. And I gave mass at my mother's funeral when she went to sleep one August evening and never woke up."

"You lost your whole family?"

"In a way. And in a way, the ragged group of survivors that had become a community over the years were my family. I was content in the Wastes. I thought I would be there all my life. And then I wasn't.

"One day a group of men came to town, dressed in black with bright white collars. They told me they were from the church. I asked them politely if there was a church in the next town over and they said no, they were from the official church, which had its offices far away across the ocean. They had heard stories of my progress with my little community. They wanted me to be a missionary.

"I told them I couldn't possibly leave my flock, to which they replied that a replacement would be sent and my town would be provided with financial assistance and food in my absence. Swept up in religious fervor and concern for the material health of my people, I agreed. I was excited; I had always wanted to see the rest of the world.

"As it happened, they were not looking for missionaries to travel the world at all, and instead of an airport they packed me into their transport and took me off to the nearest spaceport. They wanted me to fly all the way out to a mission they had set up on some planet lightyears away from earth. But what could I say? I had already agreed."

The old man clears his throat before continuing. "They flew me to an alliance colony on the planet Telex, a place home to several hundred hard-faced men and women whom I was meant to convince to worship a god who created a world too far away to even see. It was not an easy job. In fact, it broke me.

"I would look at the sky at night, and the stars were all wrong, two moons, one of them green, and I couldn't hear God's voice anymore. I became depressed, barely speaking to the people I was meant to be converting, rarely leaving my house. It got to the point where I couldn't stand to look at the terrible, foreign, godless sky, with its mocking green moon. I had to get off of that planet. So one day a mining ship came to town, and when it left I left with it. I fled, from my job and my doubt and all the cold, impassive faces of the colonists.

"I travelled the galaxy for years and years and years, boy. Years and years. I've seen so many things I can't remember half of them. I've seen death, horrible, violent death. I've seen love, beautiful and true, and lust, vicious and base, and cruelty and charity and tyranny and bravery. What I saw today was terrible, but I have seen such things and they do not startle me anymore."

"Did you every go back to the colony?"

"No, I did not. Because although my faith returned to me, with it came a realization: it's mine. My faith, no-one else's. I have no right to be forcing it on other people, nor do they have any right to take it from me. Everyone has to find their own way in the universe, I think. Everyone must find their own meaning."

James is silent for a long time. "Doesn't it get lonely?" he asks at last. "Living like this?"

"It depends on how your mind works. Some are more suited to it than others. Some folks like the constant change, new people all the time."

James shakes his head. "I can't stand it," he whispers. "Being so far away from … from everyone else."

"I know that voice," says Andre playfully. "Got a girl back home, do you?"

James says nothing, an uncomfortable silence filling the room.

"Come on, son," says Andre, his voice becoming more kindly. "What's his name?"

"Kal," says James after a pause. He decides to go for broke. "He's a quarian marine," he adds.

Andre chuckles quietly to himself. "I suppose there was a time when I would have turned my nose up at that, but who am I? No, that's just fine, son. Although I imagine there's quite a story behind that."

James smiles in spite of himself. "Yeah, a pretty long one. You might not believe most of it."

"You'd be surprised, boy, what I've seen. You might have to tell it to me one day. But now it's time to put your head down and sleep, or you'll be as useless as Rogers in the morning."

James lies back, staring up at the bottom of the top bunk. The ship hums around him, the occasional roar of thrusters firing a dull whoosh through the hull. Soon, he thinks. I will see you again. That's something I can believe in. I have to.

…