Harpal stood in the door. "If he accepts my resignation, that's fine by me," he said. "But why did he pick Rex? Rex is not the smartest person on the ship. He knows nothing about leadership."
Martin held back the most obvious and the darkest answer he could think of: Rex won't say no.
Hans kept to the back of the cafeteria, smiling benignly. Rosa stood on a table; sixty-three of the crew listened intently.
"In two days," she said, "we'll meet our new colleagues… What will they be like? What will they think and believe? How can we accommodate them? Interact with them? What are we, to them!"
The crew did not answer. Martin sat a few meters from Hans, beside Harpal and Ariel. Hans winked at Martin.
Rosa looked radiant; the beauty of intense compassion, of selflessness. Awkward Rosa had melted finally, giving way to a new woman; had the defining moment occurred in Hans' arms? Hans revealed nothing.
"In the scale of things, we are the very smallest of intelligences, the very dimmest of lights. Yet like plankton in Earth's seas, we lay the foundations for all the complex glory above us. We are the food and eggs and seed of all intelligence, up to and including that radiant center beyond all understanding. A disturbance in the sea of little thinking creatures can move up the spiritual food column with disastrous consequences, though it may take an age; and so the highest regards the lowest with more than just disinterested love, for we are ultimately them, part of their flesh, if they have flesh, part of their histories, and their futures…
"The colleagues joining us have undoubtedly suffered as we have. They have lost their home world, have wandered for centuries in foreign shells, and have fought and lost loved ones, all to vanquish the poison, the death of the planet killers. We join with them now, and the little intelligences merge… And it is noticed by those high above us, those in attendance on the Most High, the galaxies of bright spirituality that rotate around the unimaginably vast center… And that notice is not just a kind of love, it islove, compared to which the love we feel for the parts of our own body, for our own flesh, is a cheap imitation.
"Our success or failure has a larger meaning. When we die, we are not just lost; I have felt the cradle of the Most High coming for our dead, to embrace their memories, their essence, and draw them to the center, where there is eternal motion and eternal rest, peace and the center of all action."
"She hasn't read her Aquinas," Ariel whispered to Martin.
But what Rosa said sounded good to him. Martin needed to know that Theresa and William were happy, that they had found rest; that sardonic and razor-sharp Theodore and all the others were appreciated somewhere, that perhaps they floated in a sea of painless interaction, showing their highest qualities to something that might finally appreciate them…
"When our ships join, we join purposes as well. All our goals must mesh. We are here not to satisfy the moms, but to clean the seas of a poison that could reach to the center itself. Call it evil, call it senseless greed, call it maladaptation… It is separate from the Most High, and the Most High does not cherish it.
"The cup-bearers of planetary death are not among the lights in attendance to the Most High; they are caught in a vicious cycle of pain and fear. We have felt their fear. It killed our home planet and it has killed our friends; the time has come for us to apply the burning iron to that fear, and to send the Killers back to where they can again become part of the column, rise in usefulness again to the Most High.
"But we will not receive divine aid. Though there are things repugnant to the highest intelligences, the greatest spirits, they do not give us their powers and insights when we fight the repugnant things. That would be a kind of interference even more evil than senseless murder; a confusion of scales, the Most High stifling the potential of the low, where all creativity, all creation begins. We are on our own, but our struggle is not senseless."
"What do the moms think of this?" Harpal asked Martin in a low voice.
Martin shook his head.
"The story I tell this evening is of war. Nothing gentle, nothing soothing, it reminds us of what we face still, and may face for centuries more, before we can lay down our weapons and take up the duties of living for ourselves."
"Why can't I feel the touch and see what you've seen?" Nguyen Mountain Lily asked.
Rosa looked puzzled for an instant, then smiled again and raised her hands, sweeping all around. "The Most High is never not touching us. But it does not tell us what to do, and it does not speak to us in words; its presence is the conviction we all feel, that there must be a loving observer to whom we are very important, and who loves us.
"The love the Most High feels is not the love of sexuality and reproduction—it is the love of one of us for our own bodies, our own cells, a constant love made of care and nourishment. But we do not interfere with our own cells."
Martin could poke holes in this like ripping a finger through rotten cloth, but he did not want to; he found himself explaining away the inconsistencies, the poor metaphors, as weaknesses in Rosa's perceptions, not in her message.
"I don't think anything watches me, or cares about me," Thorkild Lax said. "I watch out for myself and for my crew-mates."
"I felt that way. I felt lost," Rosa said. "I thought no one cared—not my crewmates, certainly. I was slovenly, out of touch. I didn't really belong. No one was more lost than I was. But there was this final loving in me, this urge to reach out." She folded her hands in front of her, then swept them out and up like two parting doves, fingers spread. "I reached out in the middle of my pain—"
"Enough of this shit," a masculine voice called out. "Tell the story."
The crowd turned and Martin saw George Dempsey, blushing at the accumulated stares. He got up, started to leave, but Alexis Baikal reached up and held on to his hand, pulled him gently down, and he sat.
Martin felt a warmth, and then a tremor of unease. The group spirit, the bonding again—the wish for strong answers, for transcending love. The special time.
He thought of his father and mother, and the touch his father could give, and the warmth of his mother, large and all-encompassing, the way she wore full dresses to cover her ample figure, the sweetness of her round face wrapped in dark silken hair, the complex and giving love of both; and he thought of that love writ large, the beginning place for that sort of love.
"How do I reach up and out?" Terry Loblolly asked, voice small in the cafeteria.
"When you need to, you will do it as a hungry flower blooms beneath the sun," Rosa said. "If you do not need enough, you will not; your time is not yet."
"If we don't love, does the Most High blame us? Does he hate us?"
"The Most High is neither male nor female. It does not blame, it does not judge. It loves, and it gathers." She curled her arms as if to gather unseen children to her breast and hug them.
"I need that touch badly," Drusilla Norway said. "But I don't feel it. Is that my fault?"
"You have no faults except in your own eyes. All fault is human judgment."
"Then who will punish us for our sins?" Alexis Baikal asked, voice distorted with sorrow.
"Only ourselves. Punishment is our way of training ourselves for this level of life. The Most High does not acknowledge a court of law, a court of judgment. We are forgiven before we die, every moment of every day, whether we seek forgiveness or not."