S. Swann - Prophets

He had their attention.

“Anyone see a flaw in my premise?”

One of the student holos raised his hand. A Master Bartholomew whose image showed digital pixilation and a slight jerkiness that indicated his signal was bouncing off a commsat or three.

“Master Bartholomew?”

There was a full second delay before Master Bartholomew answered. His skin was weathered, and he still wore his hair cut in military style. He had unit tattoos on his neck that left Mallory subliminally aware of his own, under his collar. Someday I should have the tats removed, he thought. The implants, too.

“Do we know they died out?”

“Exactly.” Mallory pointed at the display behind them. “This is a ruin, Mars is a ruin. For all we know this entire part of the galaxy is a ruin. But the presence of a ruin no more proves the extinction of the Dolbrians than the ruins of Athens prove the extinction of the Greeks. Just because I cannot point to some being somewhere and say, ‘This, I know, is a Dolbrian,’ does not mean they ceased to exist. Over a time-scale of millions of years we have very little certainty. It is quite possible that the race of Dolbrians evolved into something else, the Paralians, the Volerans, maybe even us . . .”

Bartholomew frowned. “Father, that seems an odd assertion from a priest.”

“How so?”

“Doesn’t evolution contradict—”

Mallory held up his hand, “Stop right there.” Inside, he sighed. This was an undergraduate elective course and generally had an even split between humanities and science majors. Sometimes the students in the humanities had strange ideas about evolution. “So we don’t get sidetracked here. Evolution is a scientific description of how species change over time, neither it, nor any other scientific theory, make assertions about faith, Church doctrine, or the nature of God.”

“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.