In the House of the Leper


© Lance Haward

"These creatures may be more alien to our eyes than giant squids or monsters of the deep, but we shouldn't pronounce on that basis alone, and in the absence of any evidence whatever, that therefore they do not have immortal souls like our own."

"Well, I'm only a military man, Father; theology wasn't included in the curriculum at St. Cyr, but I seem to remember from Sunday School days something about our being made in God"s Image?"

"Most certainly, Colonel. And what might that look like?"

"Look like? Like you and me, I suppose."

"What a monstrous supposition. Adam in 'the express image' of his Creator's Person, as Paul wonderfully puts it, is a proposition of theology, not a physical description. A thing with tentacles and a multi-faceted monocular is probably just as accurate a representation of that glory as any binocular, bi-pedal, bi-manual creature with five senses. The fact that Centaurians are believed to have seven ought to give you pause for thought, for example."

"Mmmm."

The military man sighed deeply, as though travailing with a baby whale.

"And now that we have at long last, after aeons of dreaming about it, encountered a race every bit as intelligent as ourselves, a race with language, with systems of manifestly philosophical thought, with a sense of history, with political programmes, with what seems to be a developed science of casuistry in the interactions of its members, most significantly of all, perhaps, with a sense of humour, even if the jokes that cause them to dissolve in hysterics may be impenetrable to us - I say we're not entitled to run the risk of assuming that they lie outside the scheme of Divine salvation, like dogs and monkeys on earth."

"Now there you're actually behind me rather than ahead. My Afghan Bouncer's just as necessary to the peace of my soul as my wife."

"Colonel, I'm not sure which of the two of them is in greater moral danger from your invincibly corrupt theological sense. Your dog, believe me, has no prospect whatever of the Beatific Vision in the life hereafter. I can't yet swear the same about these people. Or your wife, for that matter."

"People?"

"Yes, well - it's a convenient label, until we've extended our vocabulary and learned to redefine our premises. It's my duty to bring them the Gospel, just in case they're beings capable of receiving it, in God's Providence. That's implicit in my vows."

"And my duty to make damn sure that none of my officers sticks his head into an ambush needlessly."

"John, this is not a conquest - it's a mission. We're not in a state of hostility with these creatures."

"We don't yet know enough about them to know how they might? what was it you were saying? - define hostility. We may already have transgressed some totally unfathomable taboo without knowing it, simply by landing here."

"Somehow, I doubt that we'd have survived a couple of days, if we had."

Odysseus IX stood miraculously within a hundred yards of the plateau's precipitous edge, two thousand feet above the rain forests of Ang-dûn; its dependencies already spreading out in a sizeable, self-sustaining township. The enormous horizon of Alpha Centauri XIX 's hundred thousand mile girth afforded a seemingly limitless vista. (Ang-dûn' - "One Nine", in the local speech) Barely within the range of sight stretched the "Gulf of Hades", for want of a local name, that vast clearing in the forests where the black towers were located that the Colonial Administration had allowed the expedition's chaplains to call "New Jerusalem" - both names in their inhabitants' own dialect unachievable by the human lip and palate.

"New Jerusalem" was a piece of Jesuit whimsy lost on Colonel Freund. His security responsibilities hardly allowed him time or space for levity. Since their landing a year ago (computed in C-XIX revolutions, although the colony still observed Earth-time and calendar for all official purposes) he had effectively been on the alert without a break, except when sleeping. Alert for the unknown risks implicit in every contact with the Centaurians; alert for that which nobody could possibly predict in an environment so strange.

"If you insist on accepting this invitation, then I insist on your being accompanied by a fully equipped escort."

"That would mean: equipped with all the engines for destruction that the military can muster."

"Equipped with sufficient to protect against every foreseeable form of attack. A minimum of twenty-four men."

"No, John. Apart from anything else, as a military man you must be perfectly aware that in an environment so new and incalculable we can't possibly foresee every possible threat. Better simply to trust their good-will. Have we done anything to jeopardize it?"

"The premise of my position here has to be to act at all times as if we can foresee it. Any other assumption would be intolerable. In military terms, a species of surrender."

"Well, it's still no. To go into their city for the first time armed at all points like a porcupine - wouldn't it be likely to provoke exactly what you're afraid of?"

" 'Armed at all points'"! This is not the Fifteenth Century, Father. Our weaponry's a little more subtle a thousand years on."

"Surreptitious, you mean?"

Freund shrugged.

"Whatever."

"Whatever. And it's still no. I will go and enjoy Tzymn"s supper by myself, and since the Chaplaincy falls outside your jurisdiction you can"t prevent me."

Freund shook his head and sighed.

"I always said having half the Mission personnel directly answerable only to superiors on Earth was ridiculous and unworkable."

"But the Vatican was a more persuasive voice than poor, lone Johnny Freund, I know."

Father Thuran patted the Colonel"s shoulder sympathetically, and the victim of this allowed himself a lugubrious smile of revenge.

"Your expectation of finding anything in their supper to enjoy strikes me as the height of insane optimism."

"My risk. And now, John, I will make myself so humble as to pray for the use of a vehicle, maybe?"

"I could oblige you to walk, you know."

"You could. And how many weeks are you going to wait for me to make it through the forests before you report my disappearance to your superiors? Uncomfortable, John, losing an expensively trained Jesuit, even if not strictly your responsibility. I wouldn't like to have to explain that to Old Blue-socks."

"I will thank you to leave General Blaussicz out of this. Okay. One Junglerover, with driver. An escort of two men comes as standard with that package, I'm afraid."

The priest laughed.

"Very well. But they're to park where I tell them, and not to move from the vehicle until I return. Please give them those instructions."
"Uhuh."

The Colonel went and told the driver and escort. He didn't tell Father Thuran that he also told Marine Sergeant Amis that he was to go in and bring his passenger out by whatever means necessary, should the priest be in the slightest danger.

The other thing the Jesuit wasn't aware of was that Freund was better versed in theology than might be suspected. Having himself been schooled in a Catholic seminary for five years before transferring from Oxford to St. Cyr. While in the nature of their separate vocations he could hardly be expected to share the priest's compulsion to preach to this new species, he understood it perfectly. Had you voiced in the presence of these two men the speculation that the Incarnation was not designed by God for the salvation of every sentient and soul-bearing species, both equally would have held up their hands in horror. The "one full, perfect and sufficient Sacrifice, Oblation and Satisfaction for the sins of the whole world" (an expression coined long before the possibility of landing on other worlds had ever seriously invaded the human mind) was according to all orthodox Catholic teaching a Sacrifice sufficient for every world. That was categorical.

It was just, then, a matter of identifying - of defining - the soul-bearing. Of distinguishing that necessitous, redeemable species from the mere animal ones.

As the Junglerover erupted like a race-horse and hurled him forward into the green gloom of the rain-forest far below Odysseus IX, the thought that passed through Father Thuran's mind in this utterly new, hitherto unimaginable, environment, was: "God so loved the world - ."

Alpha Centauri XIX was a beautiful planet. Unquestionably the most beautiful of the dozen man had so far surveyed. Fleetingly, less-than-theological fantasies about the Garden of Eden danced in Thuran's mind.

Fitting, then, that this should be the one on which the Creator had decreed that a race of beings with which man could communicate should evolve.

The Creator had become incarnate to convey Himself to that species that He loved. If, then, another species were capable of sustaining that Almighty Love equally, it was necessarily a matter of faith that the chance of salvation should be extended to this no less than to man, as once, a thousand years ago, Conquistadores had felt it unavoidable to apply the Gospel, like a branding iron, to races then supposed to be less than human by reason of colour. The paradox for theology, during all these hypothesizing centuries while man had searched in vain for other forms of "intelligent life", was to formulate a coherent theory of evangelization, in which at one and the same time the redemption remained open-ended, and no putative, undiscovered species might be excluded from it; but the offer of it, to be claimed by the simple assent of faith, could be brought to those living and dying so remote from Palestine in space and evolution and the power of communication as to be beyond the reach of instruction in Latin and, practically speaking, outside all chance of the vital encounter of faith.

Practically speaking, Father Thuran reflected, this was the one academic puzzle, albeit the Church's great conundrum, that wasn't for him to resolve right now. Here (possibly) was his new species, capable of receiving the vision of God, and here the opportunity of full communication, thanks to a science more advanced than the visitors' own.

Even so, it had never been the Jesuit style to avoid such intellectual puzzles. He continued to turn it over ceaselessly in the washing-machine of his brain. How long in His Wisdom had God kept these beings waiting for him and his news? Assuming that premise, the possession of souls "capax Dei"? Waiting for this personal visitation. For him, Marcel Thuran, called by a series of accidents to be Christianity's first emissary to a new species. Aware not only of his human failings but also of the inordinate capacity that erudition and years of rigorous intellectual exercises had invested in him, he felt himself to be a piece of the latest technology, stream-lined, stress-tested to the point of destruction for high performance. In faith, he had not that conviction of unworthiness that is traditionally supposed to be the disabling element in those called to missionary service.

As the Junglerover ploughed its blind path through the virgin ecology, the ancient conjecture acted as a sedative, slipping him gently out of consciousness for most of the five hours (Earth time) that it took to reach New Jerusalem.

During those hours, waking moments were dedicated to rehearsing the memory of a much earlier time than his briefing for this expedition. Twelve years ago, in his seminary, the Theology Tutor, Dom Gilbert Lellis, had imparted by subtle, inescapable enquiry, the certainties that Thuran now preached to his own mission field.

As the vehicle briefly jerked him awake, it seemed to repeat the twelve-year-old moment: Dom Gilbert had needed to deliver his question three times on that bright winter afternoon

"So what is the price of a God?"

He recalled that he had already learned enough scholastic diplomacy (rather than pure humility) not to try unravelling the puzzle uninstructed. His answer, once awoken, had been a smile, sufficient to convey attention and an eagerness to learn. The tutor's stubbled scalp, the colour of frosted granite, blocked the low light from the windows and their distracting prospect of the Via Due Macelli .

"How many times would you say He needs to die, to equal the value of creation? Of course not. Meaningless. Hypothesize another species as yet undiscovered, but analogous to humans, if you wish - the Blood of Christ is sufficient for as many such as hypothesis or encounter can reveal to us - ."

Ten years later, in the course of his preparations for Ang-dûn, Dom Gilbert, retired from the Collegio now and soon to be dead of lung cancer, paid him a personal visit.

"Father! This is a surprise."

"It oughtn't to be, Father - as I must now call you. An imaginative student like yourself should be perfectly well aware that his particular talents are a matter of permanent interest to the C.P.F.."

He dwelt sufficiently on "imaginative" to get his point across. Unorthodox, Thuran was not, not yet - but astute enough to be tempted to it when unprecedented circumstances might introduce unprecedented factors into a theological argument not yet fully dogmatized.

"I read your piece on the Atonement in 'New Catholicism'. Penetrating. I thought it opportune to remind you of the enduring basis of the Faith before you rush off into an unpredictable universe where dialogue suddenly seems to be on the cards. And poor, vulnerable souls may be waiting for you in all their need, just waiting for you, in your desperate concern for them, to tangle up their faith with a careless idea or two."

"And you've come all this way? You could have reminded me of it over the 'phone."

Dom Gilbert had smiled, for perhaps the first time in twenty years. It had conveyed : Well, two birds with one stone - we're unlikely to meet again in the corruptible flesh.

"Remember 'the price of a God'?" he had asked.

"Of course."

"It was a serious question. The Church isn't inflexible: I'm not inflexible. Perhaps you do have something to tell me that I may have overlooked when I was teaching. The Holy Spirit moves urgently in the young - but - ."

Thuran, once again, had waited.

"Where you're going now. God alone knows. Whatever harvest-field of enormous opportunity. In the exhilaration of that, you would do well not to get carried away by the subtlest of temptations. Stay humble. And in all humility, still remember the nature of that calling - every human being's calling as evangelist. It is we, we progeny of Adam, who in the Providence of God bring those new creatures the message of hope. They can have no Revelation to offer us."

After that, the first, hesitant encounters with the Centaurians, the discovery that these things like giant vegetables in motion could read the human voice, and in due course learn the means to express thought in audible shapes comprehensible to their visitors. And the discovery that shocked even hard-boiled soldiers like Freund, that it was a civilization old and corrupt. The rumours of cursed burial-grounds and the mass-destruction of their own young, and sacrifices demanded by a pitiless deity - all this pointed to a race desperate for a new vision

"We are not entitled to assume that they lie outside the Divine scheme of salvation," he repeated aloud in the Junglerover's cabin. "A race so manifestly in need of it, whether divinely animated or not."

The escort glanced at each other, and one of them uneasily clattered the loading shuttle of his nuclear blaster.

When at last they came to the edge of the trees, Thuran jumped down, and in unconscious echo of the soldier patted the Bible in his pocket.

"That looks like your - your man, Padré."

The Interpreter was waiting for him in the open space. It was the hospitable wisdom that these creatures had learned early on: by obviously separating themselves from the surrounding vegetation, they made it easier for men to identify them. It waited for the emissary to come across, its eye in quiescent mode. (Thuran was aware that the soldiers referred to all Centaurians as "Cyclops".)

The words that shaped themselves in the air somewhere above his head said: "You have come in time."

But the Centaurians had an ability to express their exact meaning in the space between the words. There was never ambiguity or misunderstanding. It meant not: You, Father Thuran; but: the visitors from space. And not simply: without being late; but: at the precise, requisite moment.

"You are expected."

He understood, "needed".

"Come, please. If your friends are coming with you, they must leave their carriage."

This was not an instruction, but a statement of fact. The Interpreter set off rolling in a circuitous journey across the open tundra, avoiding the "pipes", those plumbline-sheer, yard-wide fissures thinly disguised by grasses, that could drop an unwary man straight to the planet's core. A dozen members of the Mission had already been "hanged", as the soldiers graphically referred to that fate.

Visibility in this world whose sun never shook free of its cloud filter was nevertheless unimpeded. Beyond the plain, where scattered geysers of gurgling, grey mud periodically spewed their whale-spouts of hissing steam tree-high into the leaden air, rose the opposite wall of the Gulf, black as obsidian, its summit out of sight. The towers of New Jerusalem clustered on a hill at the very foot of the gleaming escarpment. From that strange refracting effect of the atmosphere to which no human eye could ever quite adjust, the polished surface of the rock wall seemed to swallow, rather than mirror, the subdued light, with the result that the town seemed to lie within the wall, like a display behind dusty glass.

"I will not offer you my name: you could neither hear nor reproduce it. I am the Forerunner. In your imagery, perhaps, a baptiser. A voice in the wilderness. There are many here who will not hear me, and many who hear but will not listen."

After they had been going for some time, Thuran ventured to ask:

"Are we going inside the city?"

"They will not receive you," was the reply; and simultaneously with the reply Thuran was given to recognize the isolated house outside the principal settlement, toward which they were evidently headed.

"Do not speak from your own initiative. Do not ask questions. Do only what you seem to be told. What is taking place here is more important than any council occurring inside the city."

As the shining, black pinnacles drew nearer, he recalled that most candid and most pitiful of all the chronicles of exploration, the passage in which Bernal Diaz records the Spaniards' first sight of all the splendours of Tenochtitlan and concedes: "Of all the wonders we beheld that day, nothing now remains; all has been destroyed." Mindful as Thuran was of the nuclear weapons being carried in his retinue, those rearing, impregnable towers, the polished black façade of its great palace or temple, looked suddenly fragile, as a healthy body is vulnerable to alien disease.

As though it heard the conflict in the visitor's heart between an anthropologist's detachment and the preacher's duty to preach to those that have yet to hear his message, the Interpreter uttered again:

"Understand that whatever good news it is that you bring us, my people have capacities for the defiance of God that humanity, with its mere six senses, can never comprehend. Reflect on that. Now go in - I leave you here."

For all their express instructions, the escort, as though paralyzed, made no attempt to follow him in.

It was an elliptical hall, not exceptionally large, with murals in the same evanescent, dark panelling, that defied the focus of the human eye. A dozen of the creatures were ensconced around a pool of quicksilver-sluggish liquid from which they seemingly drew nourishment from time to time. There was conversation of alternating harmony and discord weaving in the air, out of which human words recognizably started to form upon his entry.

His host appeared to be the one draped in a floss of iridescent, sea-green strands that could as easily have been anatomy as clothing; but it was another, located a little apart from all the rest, that invited him to occupy an adjacent space. As he took his seat among these animated colossoi, he was invaded by an overwhelming power. One could not call it love, not for anything so monstrously alien as these; but an immense reverence, and gratitude to the Creator for the majesty of His work in all its myriad forms.

The simple fact that they had noted his arrival and adapted their speech made him want to weep. Would humankind have been so courteous toward the unapproachable life-form? He needed to acknowledge such hospitality. He was impelled to a gesture he had not planned. In confidence that these beings could understand more than humans could accurately express, he took the precious Bible from his pocket and placed it in front of his new companion, then moved it toward the other in a universal gesture of abandonment.
And surely, the great wave of approval that answered that action expressed not just the response of this, the recipient, but of God Himself? Approval that must necessarily leave a man, conscious as he was of his corrupt nature, physically gasping for breath, as though apprehended in the commission of some offence. Approval that seemed to register as a smile, told him not to deny his own righteousness. Righteousness and sin are equal components of Adam, it assured him. Else how could man aspire?

It felt like the opportune moment to let his curiosity out, that speculation that had haunted him since Dom Gilbert long ago had challenged it by questioning the price of God.

"And am I among children of Adam here, then?"

"No. God has many children."

"But all of them - ?"

"Yes. Made in His own Image."

Thuran said nothing further for the moment. He waited. He had been told that his presence here answered a purpose as yet undisclosed.

"Do you wish to stay?" The voice echoed Freund's warning : "There is nothing here that you could usefully ingest."

He was confused.

"I had - understood that there was something that was wanted from me."

"You have already performed the service."

But he had done nothing yet. Apart from offering the guest-gift, which could hardly have been the thing he had been summoned to do, that unpremeditated and private impulse.

The recipient of it now addressed himself once more to their host.

"Txsym"n, you see this visitor who has come to us from so great a distance? I have something to say to you."

"Speak, Master."

"Txsym'n, Txsym'n, your affliction is not in your illness, but in your heart. The illness, in coarsening the skin, has hardened the heart. If you have two debtors and release them both, which of the two will cling to you like a child?"

"The one who owed me the more?"

"You extended me none of the standard courtesies of a host today. This outsider has offered me the most precious thing he had. What sin must he have been forgiven, to express it with such openness of heart! This gift, for generations to come, will be spoken of across the world, not just here in Bethany."

A rivulet of sweat crawled icily down Thuran's spine at the familiar phrases. His trained mind had no difficulty in the instant attachment of a citation: Luke 7, 36. The recognition of them hit him with the shock of sudden vertigo.

" - What I was - sent to tell you - " he uttered at last, and he too needed not to voice the words aloud now. " - You knew it already. You knew about - Is this place also Bethany, then?"

But as the Being's monocular turned toward him, a shivering, dazzling stroboscope of every colour in the rainbow and others beside, had he had the Centurian eye to register them, he already knew the answer.

The words no longer hung audibly in the air, but reverberated within the hearer himself.

"Without the fullest possibility of rejection, there can be no love more than that of an owner for his pet. That is not the relationship which God extends to His creatures. These people too must have the chance to reject Me. The working out of the redemption of your world allows them no such opportunity. How could they have any part in the temptations and the transgression of Adam, these whose nine senses can touch, whose brains harness, concepts of pain and hatred beyond your apprehension? Understand that these other children of Mine have occasions for sin and for joy that humanity has never imagined; they must therefore have a different revelation of Me, to choose or to reject. For them, I must go up to Jerusalem again, in different Shape. Let not your heart be troubled nor afraid. It is not blasphemy for you to believe this."

Because it was the priest's mind rather than his lips that spoke, a limb less controllable, he dared to wish to understand the Divine plan.

"What if they do not reject You?"

And because the future lies within the contemplation of Omniscience no differently from today or yesterday, the Answer: "They do." contained all the Sorrow of the Knowledge of a betrayal yet to take place.

The concept of standing in the prospect of the Passion, rather than historic to it, hit Thuran with a more violent sense of panic than any temptation he had previously known. He heard himself erupt into audible speech.

"You must not go!"

"What? Will you desire to come between them and their chance of sin and glory? Will you defend them from the peril which, for glory, I have sown in their hearts? You alone, Marcel, of all created things, have heard the secret of My scheme for this cosmos of Mine. This is your unique, angelic moment. Once, in the dawn of your time, a light-bringer came from a world such as yours is now, a world that had fallen and afterward received Salvation. That Lucifer brought your species into sin. Now it is your turn to contemplate the abyss, to decide whether you will war against My Purpose by depriving these of the danger and thus denying them the hope that springs out of disaster. There are many forms in which the angelic can choose to work against Me. This is the last revelation: God, Who hates nothing that He has made - how could it be that He should not love Satan also?"

The silence lasted for an eternity in heaven.

At last, through a maelstrom of wheeling suns, infinite in space, Thuran heard:

"Your escort is growing restless. Go now, before they begin to feel they should kill something, as soldiers will. Here, in aeons to come, they will record: A stranger came in from the streets, an outcast, with a gift offered out of love. Let them remember the exotic colours of the book and overlook the rest. Be content that they will call your devotion folly, and that the memory of the gesture alone will linger for ever, like the fragrance of incense in the rafters. Be at peace, My faithful servant."

And as the Jesuit got up to leave, the Voice delivered an Afterthought, if such lies within the capacity of God Whose Thought is all eternal.

"But no need to get yourself lynched by trying to reveal all this to others. I do not tell you to tell the Congregation of the Faith that the work here is in hand, that God Himself has taken care of it. I don't send you back with a message that no one on Earth is equipped to understand. You have enough work to do among your own kind in their lesser occasions for sin."

A month later he returned to earth for a meeting with Cardinal Muëller, Secretary for the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and a private audience with the Holy Father. The following year, the Alpha Centauri XIX Mission was withdrawn and its colony closed down.

No human eye was witness to the execution of a Malefactor by the Centaurian equivalent of crucifixion.