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that embodied all that had come before, but was still now. Such was the state of Being.
I forbid it! Forceful sent.
Chill insisted. I asked permission to subtract by humble self-reconnection.
We need you now, Dusk said anxiously.
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I could use a time, going into the great void before ReManifestation.
Recorder said, Permission refused.
Might you approve later? Chill asked plaintively. I beg again to end myself.
Recorder said, You are needed.
Then I apologize. Allow me to do something of hazard, that I may redeem myself.
Instigator fizzed with excitement. I do have an idea, one you could aid in. Chill, you are a smaller Being.
If Crafter's arts can be brought to bear, you might be able to insert yourself into these tiny solid bodies. It
would be dangerous.
The other Beings sent cries and shimmering auras of alarm. But Chill answered, Show me how.
Burnt-yellow Fingers
Ellen had learned to spend more time alone, and the aftermath of the assault had made her retreat into
her meditations. But after time in the sliding vapor world of her Japanese garden, she knew what to do
next.
Years before, adapting to Mars, she had discovered by web browsing the melancholic poetry of A. E.
Housman, an English poet dead now well over a century. A particular piece of that man's wisdom she
and Piotr had applied:
Ah, spring was sent for lass and lad,
'Tis now the blood runs gold,
And man and maid had best be glad
Before the world is old.
Sex, after all, was the flip side of death.
Before, she and Piotr had answered a brush with danger by making love, laughing, shouting out their joy
in the moment thumbing their noses at gloomy ol' Fate. Ah! Yes.
After, they talked. The crew could keep track of the electromagnetic blizzard their plasma-net was
delivering. Tricia was flying in clean formation now, so they were using all their gossamer plasma-web
ability. And Earthside was gobbling up the broadband data feed, analyzing, theorizing, decoding the long
strings of mystery.
So they talked about mysteries, too. The discovery of life on Mars had ignited an ongoing debate
Earthside, of course. The prevailing view now emerging was not that of the chattering classes of the
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long-dead TwenCen. Back then, all the smart folk thought that the universe was a pointless cosmic joke,
on us. Now the Martian experience weirdly sentient, ornate molds had opened the plausible case that
the universe was a meaningful entity. Increasingly, it seemed to be made down at the lawmaker's level to
generate life and then minds. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably, to yield forth systems that evolution
drove to construct models of the external world. Inevitably, those models worked better if they had a
model of . . . well, models. Themselves. A sense of Self.
So if even slime molds could evolve in Martian caverns into thinking beings if, admittedly, of rather
inscrutable traits then a whole landscape of Mind opened. Perhaps the evolution of beings who could
discern truth, apprehend beauty, maybe even yearn for goodness and define evil, experience mystery and
feel love . . . well, that was a compelling possibility to just about everybody.
Piotr was, of course, ever the skeptic. "What of these things that try to disable my ship?"
Ellen grinned, suitably relaxed. "We're on their turf. Remember, when Leif Ericson landed in the new
world, the first thing that met him was a flight of arrows."
Piotr scowled. "These things, big as buildings already I see on Net that ignorant people Earthside think
these are gods or something!"
Ellen poked him and wrestled around among the bedding until she was sitting on top. "So what if they
do?"
Piotr snorted. "Is childish. People want gods who pay attention to them, is all."
She held his wrists down and demanded, "You mean, can humans claim any spiritual special status?
Compared with what?"
He gave her a broad, silent smile that said he could easily tumble her off, but wouldn't. She persisted,
"Look, we both came out of a Christian background "
"Not me! Was brought up to be proper atheist."
"Yes, another gift of the Soviets." She remembered the church her family had attended, pillars and
vaulting white as plaster, like the cast around the broken bone of faith. Still . . . "Christianity has the most
to lose from intelligent aliens, right? Jesus was our savior. Dolphins and gorillas and supersmart
aliens he didn't die for them."
"Um." Piotr sighed, resigned to a discussion. "Jesus was God's only son, yes?"
"The Bible says so."
"So unless God has the same son go around to every planet . . ."
"Or wherever these things we've found live "
"Dying at every one of them, seems cruel."
"Worse, it means part of God has to go around dying all the time."
"Am glad I'm not a theologian."
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"Me too. I looked up this stuff and there's even a quotation about Christianity and extraterrestrials from
Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary over three centuries old! He said" she glanced at her
notepad, on their side table "Lessee, 'He who thinks he believes in both has thought but little of either.'
Ouch!"
"I wonder if is right way to think of intelligence, anyway. They have consciousness but how about ethics?
Sin?"
"I'm pretty sure they'll fear death. Sin? Hell, I don't believe in that! And ethics well, sure, in the sense
of social rules."
"Social rule is like take off hat when enter room. Ethics, you need philosophy."
"Okay, any social being will need some philosophy. But "
"I am social, do not need philosophy."
She grinned. "You only think you don't. We don't know how to think about ETs, that's for sure. Can one
become a Muslim? A Jew?"
Piotr gave her a soulful look, big brown eyes liquid in the hard incandescent light. "Your meditation, the
Japanese thing it's about this?"
She sat back uncomfortably. "I suppose. The Buddhists and Hindus seem the least threatened by
advanced aliens they took the Mars mat in stride, remember?"
"Does idea of alien Jew make sense?"
"To who? Maybe not, to us. But they do have a big, open idea of God."
Piotr frowned. "Those Baptist guys who attacked the Mars mat finding . . ."
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