So I went inside, letting Q follow me and hoping she would indulge my strange outworlder’s ways.
Hunters’ chapels are gloomy, desperate places. Sky-hunting is dangerous and half the parishioners in any given church will be grieving or waiting to grieve. In the Plutonian Church, that can be an expensive business. Many a hunter has come home to find their loved ones spent so much on prayers that half their pay has gone before it was even claimed.
And if you want evidence both for the perils that await the hunter-ship and the lengths a hunter’s kin will go to in their memory, you need look no further than this. Three of the chapel’s five walls were given over to memorial plaques, all that remained of dead souls lost to the Jovian winds. Q and I both—despite our radically different contexts—found ourselves drawn to them at once; she holding her idol up before them for reasons I couldn’t understand, me scanning them for names or memories or meanings.
They were all of them small, all of them similar. One, for example, read thus:
SACRED to the MEMORY of JOHN TALBOT. Lost in the eternal storms of JOVE, now with ETERNITY in truth. This memorial is SPONSORED by AXIOM ENERGY DRINK, a product of Coradini Food and Beverages, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aphrodite Pharma State.
Most were shorter still. The Church charges by the character for immortality, and so many more ran along these lines:
S2TM; AO, LB, XH, NN, NN, FR, YK, L, TRC; Others; GBNF
I still wasn’t in a safe mood to dwell on death; although I’d committed to seeking my fate amongst the Leviathans ratherthan beneath the wheels of a groundcar, I could feel within myself that instability I knew to mistrust. Not quite sure how to tell Q any of this, I placed my hand on her shoulder and whispered to her that I needed to stay, that I needed to do something. And before she could ask me what, I took up my place at the rear of the congregation and, heart clenching in my throat, waited for the sermon to start.
Like most pulpits in most churches, at least most Plutonian churches, the pulpit in that tiny chapel was an ancient device of steel and light connected to a communications array that would, stellar conditions and planetary alignment permitting, receive broadcasts directly from the Golden City on Pluto. Since the whole of that city was given over to the glory of the Father and his Favored, there was always a service beginning somewhere and so the faithful throughout the system were certain to be able to hear the divine word as and when their schedules and bank balances permitted it.
A light blinked on in front of me, and I scanned my credit-chip across it. I was down to my last few pennies, but the Church knew the value of a large number of small donations so, with pious generosity, they offered a sliding scale of payments starting at very, very affordable levels and only requiring you to consent to your data being harvested for legitimate, godly purposes. The transaction hung a moment, then went through. Worship music began to fill the air and the pulpit began projecting the image of an immense congregation hall, a little fuzzily coming as it did from something like four and a half light-hours away.
Q leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Ividi satis.Going.”
All over again I was torn. The idolator inside me wanted to leave the chapel with her, to make divinity out of companionship and desire. But the ghost of an old faith kept me behind, made me bid her farewell and turn my eyes back to a sermon I knew in advance would have no answers for me.
CHAPTER
SIXJonah
The music died down and the camera swept over thousands of worshipers before focusing on the preacher. He was a tall man, or at least the way he was being filmed made him seem tall, and he welcomed us to the presence of the Father with a passion and an authority I knew from childhood.
“Oh, my friends,” he was saying from the screen. “Oh, my many, many friends, are you ready topraise?”
A cry ofyeswent up from the crowd on the screen, echoed from the pews in front of me. I echoed it with them, because when the call goes up, you respond. And as always, when I responded, I felt that sense of connection and isolation all at once, of belonging to something but not really knowing what my place in that something was meant to be.
Often, when I sit in a church or watch broadcast masses from the Golden City, I wonder how many of the other parishioners feel the same as me. And I can never tell which thought scares me most: that all of them do, or none of them.
“Remember, friends,” the preacher continued, “the Father teaches that whatever you give unto him, he will return unto you tenfold, and you can begin giving unto him right now at the low, low starting price of nineteen ninety-five per standard month. Friends, there is no investment better than righteousness; thereis nothing the Father cannot give, and he will give it toyoufor ten cents on the dollar.”
A record of offerings began scrolling up the screen, with names and prayers and values attached. None from our own chapel, of course, those were still winging their way across the interwell gulf at the inviolable speed limit of the universe.
Services always began with collection, and the mark of a good preacher was how well he gave the faithful the opportunity to demonstrate their faith and thereby maximize the opportunities for the Father to reward them tenfold. For what greater good could there be than giving the poor and the helpless a means to decuple their money? Which they surely would. Any minute now.
And although I speak like a bitter ex-believer, I made my contribution with the rest. Because sometimes a little hope is worth the price.
“The lesson today,” the minister said, when the offerings had slowed to a trickle, “comes from the Book of Jonah. And like always, friends, when you think of the Testament I want you to think of Old Earth, about how that ancient Eden was lost to sin and perdition, how it has now become a nest of serpents and cannibals—”
My thoughts went back to Q. I didn’tthinkshe was a cannibal. Then again I’m not sure how I’d know unless she actually tried to eat me. And it’s testimony to the hold my not-quite-former religion still had on me that I had those thoughts without my mind drifting once to oral sex.
The minister was recounting the story now. How in a place called Joppa the Father had called Jonah to go to a place called Nineveh, and how Jonah had tried to flee from the calling. How the Father had sent storms to harry him. How Jonah had been cast overboard and swallowed by a whale. And then, most bizarrely of all, how there’d been this bit with a gourd and then the whole thing had ended incredibly abruptly with no real resolution.
You might be thinking to yourself that it was a mightycoincidence, my happening to stumble upon a preacher telling the story of a man swallowed by a gigantic aquatic beast just as I was about to go hunting for Leviathans myself. Would you believe me if I said it never occurred to me at the time, even though I had voyages and monsters very much on my mind?
The truth is that I’ve always identified with Jonah, but the Leviathan was never the part of his story that spoke to me. It was always the flight, the desperate need to escape a fate he’d been told was inevitable. So it wasn’t really the creature that I thought of in that moment, but the man. Willing to run and hide and lie and cheat to get out from under the Father’s shadow.
The words of the sermon washed over me, and I tried to take comfort in the familiarity. Except not all familiar things are comforting.
“And that, friends, is the real lesson of Jonah,” the preacher concluded. “You know, people always ask me, they ask me what that last verse, the very last verse means. Because it seems like the Father leaves us and leaves Jonah—if you’ll pardon some salty language—in a heck of a funny place.”
That much was true. And I’d always liked that about the story. Life, in my experience, doesn’t end neatly. It just ends.
