S. Swann - Prophets

“Hello?”

“Father Mallory,” came an unfamiliar voice, “please come in.”

Mallory squinted as he walked into the dark storeroom. He tensed when the door hissed shut behind him. It brought an ugly memory; the smell of burned flesh.

Mallory walked slowly down the aisle between the shelves, toward an open space at one end of the storeroom. He reached the end of the aisle and turned to face the pair of men waiting for him. He said, “So what is this . . . ?”

His voice trailed off as he realized whom he was addressing. Each of the two men wore the black-and-red cassock of a cardinal. The cardinal to the right was very familiar to Mallory; Cardinal Harris, who was normally the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church on Occisis.

At the moment, though, he wasn’t.

To his right was Cardinal Jacob Anderson, Bishop of Ostia, Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Secretary of State of His Holiness the Pope, arguably the highest ranking and most powerful member of the Roman Catholic Church outside of His Holiness Pope Stephen XII himself.

Father Mallory crossed himself and genuflected. “Forgive my outburst, Your Eminence.”

Cardinal Anderson shook his head and gestured for Father Mallory to stand.

“You want to know why you are here. And why I am here.”

Mallory nodded. “I didn’t know you were on this planet.”

“My son, that is because I am not officially here. His Holiness has a favor to ask of you, Father Mallory.”

Cardinal Jacob Anderson explained their purpose here, all the time watching Father Mallory’s reactions.

From the man’s file, he was a perfect recruit for clandestine activity. Despite his age, he had the most sophisticated military training of all the recruits he had seen lately. And, as someone who fought against the Occisian Junta at a time when most of the Occisis Marines had backed the secularist revolutionary movement, Mallory was someone whose loyalty to Mother Church was unquestionable.

That would be important, because what the Church would ask of him would place him on his own, out of contact, for an extended period. There were also indications that what he would face would be spiritually threatening. Cardinal Anderson hoped that the man’s grounding as a Jesuit academic, as well at the practical training of an Occisis Marine, would help him face what might be happening by Xi Virginis, seventy-five light-years past the edge of human space.

He looked at Mallory, who patiently waited for him to continue. He could tell the import of a direct papal request was sinking in. Physics rendered simultaneity meaningless for reference frames separated by light-years, making it impossible to interact with people across such distances. A personal envoy was required for any sort of dialogue, but that envoy didn’t have to be Cardinal Anderson.

The fact that he had come here to personally talk to Father Mallory had made as much of an impression as if the pope himself had come here. Which was the point, as Cardinal Anderson believed that the Church sat at the cusp of a historical change that could shift the balance of power in the human universe over the course of centuries.

“The Church has received disturbing transmissions,” he told Mallory, “originating from the vicinity of Xi Virginis.”

Cardinal Anderson saw puzzlement cross Mallory’s face. “But, there’s nothing out toward Virgo,” he said. “There hasn’t been any human expansion past Helminth. Has there?”

“None that has made the official histories.” Cardinal Anderson took a small handheld holo unit out of his robes. He aimed the device at Mallory and a star map about two meters in diameter unfolded between them. Centered in the display, a large and lumpy dumbbell-shaped cluster of stars was outlined in bright yellow, marking the confines of human space.

Yellow marked the systems that humanity colonized, while red marked the systems that were home to alien species. The greatest concentration of those were clustered on the other side of human space from Beta Pictoris and the tiny airless rock named Kathiwar that orbited it.

Kathiwar had been founded at a time when power between the political arms of the Confederacy was measured, at its base, in the number of planets controlled, giving a strong political impetus to colonize new worlds, even when the economics didn’t make sense. One of the arms of the Confederacy, the People’s Protectorate of Epsilon Indi, had been the most aggressive in spreading outward, placing colonies on planets solely as launchpads to reach farther out. Kathiwar was built to serve as one of those way stations, scanning the stars around and sending probes, and eventually, colony ships.

Shortly after Kathiwar was established, its observation platforms found a planet orbiting Tau Puppis. The discovery, Tau Puppis IV, seemed an obvious Dolbrian remnant, as no reasonably habitable planet should have evolved around that star. Its history might have ended there, as it was close to five times the maximum distance the Indi ships could reasonably supply a new colony, over 120 light-years away.

But when someone discovered that Tau Puppis was emitting faint EM radiation of demonstrably intelligent origin, the planet was moved to the front of Indi’s priority list. First contact with an alien race was important in and of itself, but also in the front of the mind of every Indi decision maker was the fact that the accidental contact between the Centauri arm and the delphinine natives of Paralia had resulted in the development of the first tach drives and Centauri dominance in the new Confederacy. So Indi routed money, people, and Paralian-designed tach-ships down a corridor from Beta Pictoris toward Tau Puppis.

The aliens from Tau Puppis met them more than halfway.

There was a lot of diplomatic dancing, as it became very clear that the birdlike aliens were the rulers of an interstellar empire as large or larger than man’s, an empire that claimed much of the 120 light-years of space between Beta Pictoris and Tau Puppis, a volume as great as the whole of the Confederacy at the time.

The end result was to deform the yellow dumbbell of human colonization, pushing it away from the galactic center and away from the red-outlined systems of the Voleran Empire.

None of the other red-outlined systems represented such an interstellar empire. Procyon, within the core of human space, was highlighted red. Familiar to any Occisian as the home system of the Race, the losers of mankind’s first, and so far only, interstellar war with another species.

Two remaining systems were outlined red. One embedded in the other lobe of the dumbbell on the opposite side of Sol from the Volerans. That was Paralia, home of the aquatic creatures that designed humanity’s first tach-drives.

The last red outline other marked Helminth, home to an enigmatic wormlike race that had cities, and a civilization, but with whom human scientists were barely able to communicate.

Like the Volerans, Helminth marked the edge of the human expansion toward the galactic center. But for a different reason.

The Voleran side of human space had been expanding for two centuries, and the presence of Voleran colonies simply forced the drift of mankind off in a different direction.

Helminth marked the edge of human space by coincidence. That end of human space stopped expanding for political and economic reasons. A hundred and seventy-five years ago, when the Confederacy fell, the planets of the old Sirius-Eridani Economic Community had fared the worst. Where the other arms of the old Confederacy managed to hold on to some sort of political identity, the SEEC began a decades-long inward collapse along ancient fault lines. The dual capitals of Cynos and Khamsin were untenable without the Confederacy to support it, and what was left after the breakup didn’t have the resources to move outward.