Midway Station, set exactly between Mars, Earth and the precious ore of the Bartung 37 Asteroid Cluster, hangs like a child’s mobile, full of deliberate, interweaving motion. The enormous central hangar an oblong sphere set about with a broad, semi-circular halo of living quarters and public facilities. The three Earth biospheres glisten, their impermeable hypertensile shells turned iridescent, shifting greenblueyellowgold in the solar flux of light and radiation. The arkships array themselves, obeisant, like spokes about its hub, and the tiny shuttles flit between. And like any port of call, Midway does its best to accommodate the mass of immigrants and industry. The miners and engineers, the cloistered nuns and hospital staff, numbering a few hundred at best, suddenly overrun by ignorant, planetbound groundlovers! The restaurants stay open late. The bars are packed with lovers, with fighting, bribery, traffic, and quick, baldfaced games of chance.
And this time, this most unusual time, it is also the Jubilee.
Jubilee! The children stampeding down the hallway, shrieking with glee, kicking up confetti and fake rose petals, Sunday shoes clattering against the riveted metal surface, parents in clusters or singly, balancing lunch platters laden with chips and chili and soda pop, shifting under burdens of flags and backpacks, and infants in slings; teenagers exuberant or sulking, in logo t-shirts and torn jeans, peering out from behind fashionably jagged bangs … they gather in throngs, a landscape of faces, a geography of souls, the sloughs and valleys and rarefied peaks seamed with all the fractures and fault lines and tectonic pressures of lives in transformation: Devotion, dissent, passion, panic, and staring, driven certainty …
Jubilee! Fifty years, the schism healed, and Christendom stronger than ever. All debts will be forgiven tonight, an amnesty proclaimed for sinners and wandering souls, a new chance to join hands and return to the fold … street preachers battle for eyes and ears, firebrands and warm-hearted crusaders, handing out tracts and exhorting the onlookers, the amazed, the tearful, battling for the attention of the dazed, jaded, desperate masses. So far from their homes. Fleeing en masse from catastrophe. Seeking their hope in a cold and hostile place, a paradise promised, if only temporal.
So many thousands of human voices, simple and extravagant!
“Calm down, alright? Toby, don’t, don’t hit your sister Toby … ”
“.. didn’t mean it, he’s just being a spoiled brat …”
“… every day, I swear, a new proclamation, a new sermon, a new call for donations … any good Christian can see what’s happening, and I don’t care who hears me. I understand the need for a common defense, but we left Earth to get away from all the fighting. And now there’s a new tithing? To defend Mars from rebels? What rebels? We’re in the middle of space! There are no rebels here, there are no terrorists, unless the Jurists haven’t been doing their jobs, and if so well maybe we’re better off without them!”
“Angie, I don’t want another outburst like that from you! The Bible says that in the final days a few will be chosen, and carried first into Heaven, and we’ve never been closer than now … ”
“Praise Jesus! After generations of blood, of bombs, of giving up your sons, your daughters, your mothers, your fathers. Homes and happiness washed away by the tides of God’s great, unknowable plan. And now, by the grace of God, we are come unto a new land, far from the troubles of our old Earthly home … ”
“You think you can just skip town, flee God’s justice like some kind of bad debt? Satan is a coiled serpent in your hearts, and you will not be forgiven! Your fornication and gambling infests these ships like rats! Your eyes are desperate and full of doubt, I see it like I saw it once in my own eyes, gazing back from the depths of the mirror, empty and in denial of the love of Christ … ”
“… not just the weather. It’s not just the drought that killed the orchard. It’s them damn robots. Them damn nanobots. How they keeping them out? Not one of those blossoms opened before the petals all turned black and fell off. Each and every one! You can’t fight those machines. They’ll follow us like fleas all the way to Mars … ”
The celebrants arrive in droves, shuttled over from the skyscraper arkships, waving blue and gold Unity flags, walls emblazoned with the Gavel, the Dove, the Cross and the Crown of Thorns. Bellringers gather loose credits for the food banks, for the children’s hospital on Elysia. The crowds heave, sluggish and inevitable, down the broad pedestrian escalators and into Three Kings Stadium — the huge central drydock, refitted with a broad floor and stacked hypertensile seating, adorned with stages and floodlights and a booming, resonant sound system. For this night of all nights!
“There she is! I’ll be darned.”
“There who is?”
“That nun I was telling you about. There she is. Just on the left, by the stairway up to E section.”
“Which one?”
“All the way on the left. With the little black hymnal.”
Officers Deschutes and McKaye leaned out over the balustrades overlooking the stadium’s East Quad entrance. The nun in question patiently waited, stepped, waited, worked her way across the floor, heading for the women’s reserved seating, a clear line of sight straight to the stage.
“You can tell she has big hips. Child-bearing hips. Just get ‘er out of those robes.”
“Aw, she’s married to Jesus, Gibby.”
He snorted. “Whore of Jesus, more like it. Come on. They’re getting felt up by half the noncoms. Lombardo, Ravin, Tandy. All of ‘em. Have their pick of the bitches.”
“You’re an S.O.B., sergeant,” Deschutes said, genuinely cross. “She’s beautiful, that’s all. She’s the one I saw that night, on the promenade. After curfew. She didn’t have her wimple on. She’s got beautiful hair. I seen her around the ship.”
Around the ship? Everywhere. He imagined her hair, luxuriant red locks, cascading about her shoulders and down her back. He was fascinated by her dark eyes and heavy brow. He stole glimpses, she intruded on his vigils, striding past his sentry point with head bowed and nary a backward glance. He dreamed of things he’d say to her, of what she looked like when she smiled.
He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away, gritted his teeth as the lustful thoughts flared up. He visualized the play of her legs under the heavy, dark cloth, her bosom bound tightly in her restrictive garb.
Forgive me, he thought, and in that instant she turned her head sharply, looked up, locked eyes with him, face frozen in startled curiosity.
“She likes you, man,” Gibson chortled. “Looka that. You see that? She’ll do anything you say. I seen that look before. All you do is slip her a few credits. See what’s under the veil.”
Jimmy frowned then, and so did the nun, and she looked away.
“See that?” Gibbs exclaimed. “It’s in the bag, son. Tell you what, go talk to old Lombardo, he can set you up. Just a few credits and you’ll slip right up that sacred little cooch.”
“You always have to talk like that. She’s a nice girl, man. You sound like a ‘Slamist.”
Gibbs snorted. “Only reason you have any opinions at all about ‘Slamists is because of the 3V. Well, I spent some time over there. Hand to hand combat on the streets of Jerusalem, before the bomb. And before that a six-month stretch in a Gaza work camp. And you know what the difference was between that and Albany Detention & Corrections? I was a guard in one and a prisoner in the other. Otherwise, it was the same damn camp and the same damn people. Only real difference is the beards and the overseas zip code. But they pick their noses and scratch their asses and treat their women same as us. Cover their hair, wrap ‘em up in black veils, all you wind up with is a whore of Babylon in a god-damned wimple.”
Jimmy turned to stare at his partner. “You know, I could turn you in for that kind of talk.”
“You need a night or two down at Drobney’s. Show you some piety. Just be glad you’re a foot soldier, not up in the ranks. T&A is fine for you and me, but they have some twisted old fuckers upstairs. I heard stories.” He shook his head. “I don’t think Jesus has much to do with it.”
“Well then why the heck are you here at all? This is a holy war, Sarge, prophesized in the Bible. Least I got a reason to be here!”
“I got a reason too, Jimmy. It’s called a paycheck. You got a holy war. I got a job. Good thing we’re on the same side.”
And the voice of the crowd was coalescing, echoing, shattering into a million fragments of a million moments, cresting in rippling applause as the lights and laser projections cycled and pulsed through a series of primal signifiers: The white bird. The crown, thick with gore. Cheers gusted and eddied across the floor, up along the slopes and heights of the terraced stadium seating. The days leading up to this moment had been full of speakers and singers and screenings and healings, mass held five times daily and confessions and communion offered in alcoves peppered among the restrooms and snack stations. The faithful gathered in circles in the halls and corridors, eyes rolling, tongues twitching with spontaneous glossolalia, or huddled in fervent prayer, hands clutched like a circle of skydivers plunging through battering winds. The Wave had been circling the venue repeatedly throughout the day, rhythmic, sweeping. The pulse of the Jubilee, quickening as the moment approached, simulcast to Mars and Earth alike, bridging the far reaches of Christendom, united now, forever!
“There’s the guard. That one,” Leah whispered, though the constant chatter and buzz of the audience threatened to submerge her words. “On the landing, above the entrance. He was staring at me. He always does.”
Monica glanced up quickly. Tough-looking. But very young. Adam’s apple bobbing up and down a long and skinny neck, caught up in some heated discussion with an older petty officer. She grasped her rosary, bowed her head.
—Don’t worry about him, sister. Take up your position. We can’t afford distractions. He’s just a little boy.
—He saw me with the book. On the promenade. After curfew.
—That was months ago. He doesn’t know.
—He was nice to me then. (Pause.) He let me go, and looked away. I didn’t have my wimple on. Now he just stares.
Monique looked up. “It’s too late now,” she said. “We’re committed.” She embraced Leah. “C’mon. Let’s sit down. My feet are killing me.”
She turned on her heel and began hiking up the stairs. Leah watched her ascend, then followed, clambering upwards, and her breath quickened with her heartbeat, the voices of the audience seemed the hostile roar of an insect swarm. She squeezed her eyes shut as the grotesques of the last year intruded into her waking mind. Visions of bloodshed and cruelty, fantasies of vengeance brought with all her despising upon the Jurists. She dug her knuckles against her eyelids until she saw bright points of light and smudges of color. Thought of the soldier, the young boy, bashful, eyes averted in the darkened promenade, the color in his cheek as she later passed his station in the plaza, en route to mass or the children’s compound, Katie in tow, withering with embarrassment and fear beneath his certain gaze at her backside.
Her heart leapt and she hurled herself upstairs. Where was little Katie now? In the children’s compound, watched over by that hateful mother superior. Hathaway, her cramped face pierced by suspicious eyes and a tearing-down tongue. It seemed to Leah that the woman’s entire sense of purpose involved nothing less than the complete suppression of hope and imagination in her young charges. Even her readings of the Scripture, of the most passionate and sweeping verse, were delivered in a scraping monotone that somehow wrung words of hope and deliverance into dire condemnation.
So far, though, Katie had weathered it all, kept her voracious little mind, and her cool, implacable self-possession. In any other time than this, Leah realized, the girl would be at the top of the class. A leader of her fellow students. Why not? She had chills sometimes, watching Katie’s calm authority over the other children, organizing the construction of building-block fortresses, designating teammates for a game of kickball. Her pointed, unexpected questions, that startled Hathaway into silence.
“Then why did they kill my mom and dad?” the little girl had asked just last week, in the middle of a Ten Commandments story.
“Christians don’t kill other Christians,” was the reply, after a leaden pause, and Katie stared as if waiting for more. But her instructor cleared her throat and continued on to Adultery, and Katie kept to the back of the class after that, whispering to her friends and earning reprimands that she wore like merit badges.
“She’ll be due for a caning,” Mother Hathaway had said. “Disrespectful little thing.”
“They did shoot her parents, Mother. I was there.”
“And she’s better off here!” the schoolmistress snapped. “Where she can get the guidance and affection of a good Christian family.”
Leah knew better than to ask what kind of Christian family she’d find on Elysia.
Mary and Jesus, save this child, Leah prayed. She made it to the top of the stairs, and edged her way along the row of seats, bumping against knees and clambering over feet. Finally. Sank down onto the unyielding hypertensile bleachers. Listening to the lapping, murmorous tide all around, which suddenly redoubled, and cheers broke out in all directions as the huge central 3V throbbed to life, casting up the looming of figures of all the shipboard lords and luminaries gathered onstage.
Resplendent in their gray and gold cloth, festooned with epaulets, sidearms, rings and crosses, robes and bright white teeth.
The sweat and pores on their faces glistening in the stage lights, their cheeks round and red and healthy.
They stood at ease, collegial, trading jests and casual grins, fully endowed with all magnificence and gravitas of a lifetime of accomplishment.
Falling into respectful attention as a mellifluous voice rolled out across the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, to open the second Jubilee of Christendom Renewed, broadcast live, tonight, here at Midway Station, on the historic road to Mars, on the fiftieth anniversary of the schism healed, please join me in welcoming to our stage one of our greatest orators on morality, justice and the love and mercy of Christ our Lord, a member of the faculty at Cold Jordan University on Luna, and traveling with us to Mars to open the colony’s first theological seminary. Bishop Dominick — ”
The image suddenly blinked out and the wave of applause died off expectantly, and the gaping moment was filled, jarringly, by an explosion of horrible sound and image, hideous, a crying, screaming boy, and a man, stripping off his shirt, his face limned in a clear, bright, revelatory light.
Marchand! A devil now, forever!
The crowd was then noiseless as the 3V strobed overhead.
Trask and Andy looked at each other and nodded and turned and shouldered their way forward, towards the stage. They moved swiftly, activating the hypertensile gel armor stitched microns-thick into their clothing, pulling their hats down and collars up into auto-sealing combat headgear, complete with teargas filters and blast deflection.
Jurist security stood in clusters at the entrance to the Gold Circle and V.I.P. seating, staring open-mouthed up at the pirated 3V jacked into the stadium’s broadcast circuit. They dropped instantly, with gasping sighs, caressed by washes of neurodisruptive second-spectrum discharge. Trask and Andy clutched their palm-sized zap guns and raced towards the stage, there were others streaming in from every direction.
And the 3V projection field above was filled with spectacle and condemnation, relayed throughout Midway station and all the arkships, and to the interstellar transmissions hurtling towards Mars and Earth.
Abigail clasped her rosary. It was warm and vibrated slightly, presumably from the suppression field. “Don’t worry,” the Bookkeepers’ agent — a lanky, blonde nun named Laurie — had said. “Don’t worry, it’s not exactly broadcasting so much as the reverse. It works on the inverse-spectrum theory, if you’re familiar with it? A little? Well, the basic idea is that the electromagnetic spectrum — microwaves, radio, you know — has a sort of inverse that we can also manipulate. So what we’ve done is modify these rosaries so that they flatten any transmission on Judiciary frequencies, security as well as public bands. And then we can broadcast in our own. You and your girls will be scattered throughout the stadium and will create a bubble that will nullify any signal they try to send. So you need to assure me that you’ll all be there. It won’t work without you.”
“We will be,” Abigail had said.
And here they were. She watched the images, vivid, above, and for the first time in many decades there were tears coursing down her face.
The Bishop! Kelley! A collage of damnable truths! Deep in his cups, palms crossed with silver and gold, dice tumbling across his desktop blotter. His indulgences bought and sold, forgiving the worst sins of Jurists and Papists alike, the prosecutors and cardinals, all familiar, sober faces of Church & State, seen weekly on the news. The words that dripped from these men’s lips: corruption, lust, greed. Murder! Bribes and knowing smiles.
“Foul, foul!”
“All lies!”
“Strewth!”
Through the cacophony above came shouts, and the terrifying pop-pop of gunfire, screams and panic gathering among the feverish masses. The lords and governors of Christendom turned and wheeled on the stage, but at every corner the guards were struggling or falling before clusters of figures in a dull sort of gray-green body armor.
The intruders seemed minimally equipped, except for their weapons—absurdly tiny, like a handheld com—and utility belts studded with compact squares and rectangles. Their faces were obscured by oddly reflective, form-fitting masks that made them look almost like animate mannequins. The Jurist police fired their weapons repeatedly, but none of the terrorists — they must be terrorists! — paused for even an instant. The ground was covered in failed, inert bullets. Flashes of light burst from all the compass points, and the remaining security fell, heavily, motionless.
In moments the stage was overrun. The great men corralled into snap-on electroshackles. It was brutish, the commandos shoving and blunt-fingered. Faceless. The newly taken hostages were stunned and then combative, and then sent sprawling by a flickering play of light.
A new face. The terrible visions faded. A woman, beautiful, eyes pale against dark skin, no hat, gray-lustered hair pulled back. Tightly bound. Her jaw is set and her lips compact.
The silence is abrupt and nearly perfect. She is speaking and the words are difficult to grasp. They fill volumes of space like thunderheads, thrilling, imminent, glimpses of comprehension like the coy droplets before a pure and freezing deluge.
“My name is Rose Miraloma and I was born in Alexandria, the library city on the slopes of the Magic Mountain. We are a free state founded by refugees and survivors of the Earthwide Holocaust. We have founded our homes in the naked depths of space, because we must live, and the course of your world is to die. We have built our paradise on airless rock, and have given it atmosphere and rivers and flowers and trees, because we must live and the course of your world is to die. We have come today to declare ourselves to your failing world, and to declare our separation from it. We act according to the urgency of our conscience, as dictated by protocols of the General Humanitarian Declaration of 2073. We reject its overthrow, and re-assert its governance of all matters of human life and law. We claim the Midway Mining and Materiel Station in the name of the free people of Earth and the solar system, and rename it the Midway Public Branch. Hereinafter it will serve as a free university, transport hub and open library. In the next six months Midway will also house the Transplanetary Administrative Agency, overseeing all commerce in this, humanity’s second space age. This includes new powers of environmental, civic, political and economic regulation and enforcement. Executive officers of the TAA are democratically elected, and the people of Mars, Luna and Earth are welcome to participate, provided they agree to reform certain aspects of their civil governments. Until then, we will vigorously interdict all interplanetary traffic not directly related to the delivery of life support to extra-Terran colonies.”
She smiled then, a hard, slight uptick at the corners of her mouth.
“Now, as chief prosecutor of the independent city and state of Alexandria, and in service to the free peoples of the Solar System, I do hereby place the men on this stage under arrest for crimes against humanity, and order them confined to the Midway Criminal Penitentiary, to be held for a public trial commencing two months hence, on October 18. The proceedings will be broadcast live for the duration on all public bands, commencing with a formal recital of charges tomorrow morning. In the meantime, there will be no interruption of services on Midway or any of the arkships. Neither will we impede your progress to Mars. We will, however, begin accepting petitions for asylum, effective immediately. We are a free society, and welcome all who seek to escape persecution for their faith, gender, political belief or sexual preference. Emigration forms are now available at any data terminal on Midway and the arkships.
“We urge you to carry on with your business as usual. Any attempts to foment civil unrest will be considered a direct attack on the life support systems of Midway and the arkships, and will be treated in kind. Now, in lieu of your previously scheduled evening’s entertainment, we’re pleased to offer a short educational presentation on Alexandria and its origins.”
The image of the woman blinked out, and the audience roared and spat and hissed and catcalled, but also there were whistles, and applause, and knots of brawling, tangled limbs.
And the whole stadium was then plunged into darkness, and a heartbeat later filled with stars, coruscating, and a magnificent bass note that rattled the chest and teeth. The stars accelerated in a dazzling cinematic display, emanating from a central cluster of light.
The audience returned to its true form — rapt, attentive — and the light resolved into a primitive chain of habitation capsules floating in deep space. There were dozens of archaic flags on the canisters, colors and devices unseen for decades. A voice echoed across the floor, feminine, serene, for all the world sounding like the narrator of a nature documentary:
“The Prometheus Intra-System Solar Observer was one of the greatest triumphs of humankind’s First Space Age. It was completed in 2075 by an international commission, but abandoned 25 years later with the Great Collapse and the start of what we Alexandrians call Night on Earth. Five years later the first refugees began arriving, smuggled by a team of extraordinary women and men, the founders of our society, in a prototype space vehicle you can still see today at the historical Nantucket Harpooneers Drydock in the easternmost foothills of Mount Evermore. Known more widely as the Magic Mountain, this unique deep-space human habitation is founded upon a massive planetoid fragment, and is home to 47 distinct townships, subdistricts and autonomous zones, including our capital, the Library City of Alexandria …”
Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Eight
copyright (c) by Josh Wilson