Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

Kamilah spoke from behind him. “Speedy, he just stepped off the damn stage ten minutes ago. He’s not thinking of fucking.”

“He’s a nineteen year old male, which means he can’t think of anything but fucking.” She had a wet, whispery voice, like waves washing against pebbles. “Maybe he doesn’t like girls. I like being female, but I certainly don’t have to be.” Her torso flowed beneath the fog and her legs thickened.

“Actually, I do,” said Adel. “Like girls, I mean.”

“Then forget Speedy.” Kamilah crossed the room to the bed and stuck her hand through the shape on the bed. It was all fog, and Kamilah’s hand parted it. “This is just a fetch that Speedy projects when she feels like bothering us in person.”

“I have to keep my friends company,” said the Godspeed .

“You can keep him company later.” Kamilah swiped both hands through the fetch and she disappeared. “Right now he’s going to put some clothes on and then we’re going to find Meri and Jarek,” she said.

“Wait,” said Adel. “What did you do to her? Where did she go?”

“She’s still here,” Kamilah said. “She’s always everywhere, Adel. You’ll get used to it.”

“But what did she want?”

The wall to his right shimmered and became a mirror image of the bedroom. The Godspeed was back in her nest on his bed. “To give you a preview of coming attractions, lovely boy.”

Kamilah grasped Adel by the shoulders, turned him away from the wall and aimed him at the closet. “Get changed,” she said. “I’ll be in the sitting room.”

Hanging in the closet were three identical peach-colored uniforms with blue piping at the seams. The tight pantaloons had straps that would pass under the instep of his feet. The dress blue blouse had the all-too-familiar pulsing heart patch over the left breast. The jacket had a double row of enormous silver zippers and bore two merit pins which proclaimed Adel a true believer of the Host of True Flesh.

Except that he wasn’t.

Adel had long since given up on his mother’s little religion but had never found a way to tell her. Seeing his uniforms filled him with guilt and dread. He’d come two hundred and fifty-seven light-years and he had still not escaped her. He’d expected she would pack the specs for True Flesh uniforms in his luggage transmission, but he’d thought she’d send him at least some civilian clothes as well.

—we have to lose the clown suit—

“So how long are you here for?” called Kamilah from the next room.

“A year,” replied Adel. “With a second year at my option.” Then he whispered, “Speedy, can you hear me?”

“Always. Never doubt it.” Her voice came from the tall blue frell-leather boots that were part of his uniform. “Are we going to have secrets from Kamilah? I love secrets.”

“I need something to wear,” he whispered. “Anything but this.”

“A year with an option?” Kamilah called. “Gods, Adel! Who did you murder?”

“Are we talking practical?” said the Godspeed . “Manly? Artistic? Rebellious?”

He stooped and spoke directly into left boot. “Something basic,” he said. “Scrubs like Kamilah’s will be fine for now.”

Two blobs extruded from the closet wall and formed into drab pants and a shirt.

“Adel?” called Kamilah. “Are you all right?”

“I didn’t murder anyone.” He stripped off the robe and pulled briefs from a drawer. At least the saniwear wasn’t official True Flesh. “I wrote an essay.”

Softwalks bloomed from the floor. “The hair on your legs, lovely boy, is like the wire that sings in my walls.” The Godspeed’s voice was a purr.

The closet seemed very small then. As soon as he’d shimmied into his pants, Adel grabbed the shirt and the softwalks and escaped. He didn’t bother with socks.

“So how did you get here, Kamilah?” He paused in the bedroom to pull on the shirt before entering the sitting room.

“I was sent here as a condition of my parole.”

“Really?” Adel sat on one of the chairs and snapped on his softwalks. “Who did you murder?”

“I was convicted of improper appropriation,” she said. “I misused a symbol set that was alien to my cultural background.”

—say again? —buzzed minus.

Adel nodded and smiled. “I have no idea what that means.”

“That’s all right.” Her medallion showed a fist. “It’s a long story for another time.”

We pause here to reflect on the variety of religious beliefs in the Human Continuum. In ancient times, atheists believed that humanity’s expansion into space would extinguish its historic susceptibility to superstition. And for a time, as we rode primitive torches to our cramped habitats and attempted to terraform the mostly-inhospitable worlds of our home system, this expectation seemed reasonable. But then the discovery of quantum scanning and the perfection of molecular assembly led to the building of the first MASTA systems and everything changed.

Quantum scanning is, after all, destructive. Depending on exactly what has been placed on the stage, that which is scanned is reduced to mere probabilistic wisps, an exhausted scent or perhaps just soot to be wiped off the sensors. In order to jump from one MASTA to another, we must be prepared to die. Of course, we’re only dead for a few seconds, which is the time it takes for the assembler to reconstitute us from a scan. Nevertheless, the widespread acceptance of MASTA transportation means that all of us who had come to thresholds have died and been reborn.

The experience of transitory death has led homo novo to a renewed engagement with the spiritual. But if the atheists were disappointed in their predictions of the demise of religion, the creeds of antiquity were decimated by the new realities of superluminal culture. Ten thousand new religions have risen up on the many worlds of the Continuum to comfort and sustain us in our various needs. We worship stars, sex, the vacuum of space, water, the cosmic microwave background, the Uncertainty Principle, music, old trees, cats, the weather, dead bodies, certain pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, food, stimulants, depressants, and Levia Calla. We call the deity by many names: Genius, the Bitch, Kindly One, the Trickster, the Alien, the Thumb, Sagittarius A*, the Silence, Surprise, and the Eternal Center. What is striking about this exuberant diversity, when we consider how much blood has been shed in the name of gods, is our universal tolerance of one another. But that’s because all of us who acknowledge the divine are co-religionists in one crucial regard: we affirm that the true path to spirituality must necessarily pass across the stages of a MASTA.

Which is another reason why we build thresholds and launch them to spread the Continuum. Which is why so many of our religions count it as an essential pilgrimage to travel with a threshold on some fraction of its long journey. Which is why the Host of True Flesh on the planet Harvest sponsored an essay contest opened to any communicant who had not yet died to go superluminal, the first prize being an all-expense paid pilgrimage to the Godspeed , the oldest, most distant, and therefore holiest of all the thresholds. Which is why Venetta Patience Santos had browbeaten her son Adel to enter the contest.

Adel’s reasons for writing his essay had been his own. He had no great faith in the Host and no burning zeal to make a pilgrimage. However he chafed under the rules his parents still imposed on him, and he’d just broken up with his girlfriend Gavrila over the issue of pre-marital intercourse—he being in favor, she taking a decidedly contrary position—and he’d heard steamy rumors of what passed for acceptable sexual behavior on a threshold at the farthest edge of civilization. Essay contestants were charged to express the meaning of the Host of True Flesh in five hundred words or less. Adel brought his in at four hundred and nine.