Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

He was startled. “So you can speak!”

“It was time,” said the creature.

Woodward nodded. “Are you native to here, or, like us, a stranded traveler?”

“Native… No. Something of a… caretaker. There is no other way to explain in your language. Any of your languages.”

“A caretaker. For whom?”

“Someone you think you know.”

Woodward smiled. “I doubt that. I think you got here, by accident, by scouting, by curiosity, and then you got stuck here just like us. These worlds—they’re traps, I think. Traps that lure all sorts of people here from all over the galaxy, maybe beyond.”

“Possibly. I never made it to the others. Have you?”

“You know we didn’t. Just surveyed them.”

“Mostly I have been surveying you,” the creature responded. “It is nice to have company, but the mental processes of your species totally bewilder me. You can reach the stars, yet your entire organization is based upon the worship of a God that never replies and a Son of God who was tortured and murdered in your primitive past.”

“Your people have no religious beliefs?”

“We—outgrew them.”

“Ah, just as you grew into honesty but out of tact, I see. Still, I should be delighted to discuss your people’s history and belief system sometime, and mine as well. I assume, though, that what you can’t pick up mentally you have picked up from hearing my talks.”

“Essentially. Your entire belief system appears based upon resurrection. Why is this so unusual? I was able to use the genetic code of your friend to reconstruct the damage inside him and bring him back.”

“And again I thank you for it, but it’s not the same thing. You got to him before brain function had ceased. He was dead, but he was still at home, as it were. We speak of someone tortured to death, pronounced dead, put in a hillside cave and sealed, who walked out hale and hearty and better than before three full days later. Can your skills do that?”

“No more than yours can. Still, within a generation of your people, your own beliefs will be mostly irrelevant to them. You must know that intellectually.”

“I concede nothing of the sort.”

“Look at them. Naked, soft, pretty much reverting to children who don’t have to obey their parents. The way this soil and this system is set up, when you die, you are absorbed, recycled. No traces are left in very short order. They will be innocents, ignorant of good and evil, but also incapable of growth of any sort. The Eden of your myth is set up as an ideal, but it is static, boring, a kind of forever childhood with no goal or purpose of any kind. No wonder those two rebelled.”

“You misunderstand faith.”

“And you misunderstand your own people’s nature,” the creature responded. “Or, more accurately, you are in denial about it. A wager, then, for two old intellectuals who can not go romp in the fields with abandon.”

Woodward frowned. “A what?”

“A wager. Your faith in them and your god against my belief in the least common denominator. Why not? It’s going to be a very long time, if experience is any guide, before the next ship shows up. Faithful worshipers versus brainless children. Faith in God and God’s nature in you all versus my faith that the least common denominator always wins in the end.”

Woodward turned to the crackling distortion, and out of that distortion arose a figure. It, too, was transparent, with what was on the other side twisted and distorted, but it was a clear figure.

And the serpent was the most beautiful of all God’s creatures…

“You’re on,” Woodward told it. “Until the next group shows up.”

“Done. Although I can not imagine them being in any way as interesting as you.”

“Perhaps they will arrive in sufficient shape to get back. A few things have from here.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps, if they do, they won’t find anyone here worth taking back.”

Karl Woodward sighed and relaxed. He’d thought he’d chosen wrongly, but now he understood that God’s hand had been behind this all along.

Head to head, faith against unfaith, for a generation’s souls.

What could be better?