“This cannot be so,” he whispered. “All my life, I have believed that evil must flee from God’s sign, but Satan has somehow transcended even this.”
“Have you ever considered,” Jodi told him, “that maybe you’re not being confronted with something evil? Just because he’s different, he’s not necessarily the work of the devil, you know. Braddock and I are different from you, but you didn’t seem to have too much trouble accepting us.”
Hernandez shook his head, stubborn to the last. “It is not the same.”
“No,” Jodi said, “it’s not. It looks like he’s more like you than we are.”
“What does that…” His voice died as he watched Reza pull something from a black leather pouch at his waist. Looking at it carefully, as if not sure of what he was seeing, an almost-human expression – longing, perhaps – crossed his face before the inscrutable alien mask descended once more. Squatting down, Reza held out his hand to Hernandez, palm up. Something small glittered on his palm.
Slowly reaching forward, careful to avoid the rapier claws at the ends of Reza’s fingers, Hernandez came away with a chain that was attached to a small crucifix that might be worn around one’s neck. The metal of the crucifix and the chain had long since oxidized to an inky blackness, but the few spots where the original material showed through left no doubt that it was made of silver. Rubbing his fingers over the surface of the cross, he was rewarded with a dull glimmer of beauty. Holding the cross from the chain, he looked at Reza. “This is yours?”
Reza seemed to concentrate for a moment, then slowly and deliberately nodded his head.
Hernandez could not say what lay in the green eyes that were fixed upon him, but he could not honestly tell himself that he believed this stranger was lying to him, or was in any apparent way an instrument of evil.
Perhaps Jodi is right, he thought. Although Satan could choose any form he wished, why would he choose such an easily penetrated disguise? Were there not better forms in which to deceive the simple folk of Rutan? The chameleon seeks to blend in with its surroundings, he thought now, not to stand apart from them. Hernandez’s people had been segregated from the human sphere for many years, making Rutan a place where different ways of any sort were viewed with skepticism, especially since the harshness of life ruled heavily in favor of community over individuality. Just as Jesus had shown his disciples the need to seek out and touch those who were wretched in the eyes of their fellow men, so too had Hernandez striven to reach out to others. Not with his staff or a scathing tongue, but with his love and compassion. He was not yet ready to dismiss his fears that this Reza was an instrument of the Devil. But he was prepared to consider the alternative, that this was a man like any other in the eyes of God, flawed and imperfect, molded of the same clay by His hands. For Hernandez, that was still a great leap of faith, but it was a chasm he was sure – in time, at least – he could cross.
But for now, holding the tiny crucifix in his hand, he could not restrain himself from asking one more question of the stranger looming over him. “Do you believe in God?”
Reza cocked his head to one side in what Jodi now thought of as some kind of Kreelan gesture or body language, and then he looked to her and Braddock, in turn, as if for help.
“I don’t think he understands the question Father,” she said. “Sometimes, it’s almost as if he can sense your thoughts or feelings and react to them, and not the words you say. But that’s only been with very simple or obvious things. What you’re asking now, especially after what he must have lived through in the Empire, goes well beyond the simple and obvious, even if you just want a yes-or-no answer.”
Hernandez nodded, favoring Reza with a smile that was sincere, if not entirely trusting. “So true,” he said. The priest was more inclined to believe in Reza now, because he was sure that a demon under Satan’s power would have tried to deceive the priest with an answer, be it yes or no, because Hernandez wanted so badly to hear it.
Somewhat relieved, he would be content to wait for the Truth to be revealed.
As evening turned to night, the trio began to tire under Reza’s unflinching gaze. It was not long after four bedrolls were brought from the village and a fire started that all of them were ready for sleep.
All, that is, except Reza. Eschewing the bedroll and the fire’s warmth for the lonely chill of the nearby darkness, he knelt on the ground at the edge of the grove and stared into the star-filled sky.
“Do you suppose he is praying?” Father Hernandez asked. The possibility that this strange man knew of the existence of God was quickly becoming an obsession with him. Hernandez was aware that he was falling into that spider’s web, but he was powerless against the force that propelled him into it.
“He might,” Braddock said. “But it looks more to me like he’s homesick as hell… ah, sorry padre.”
Hernandez waved it off “I am used to it by now,” he sighed, gesturing at Jodi, who rolled her eyes. “But what makes you think he is homesick and not simply praying, perhaps confessing for killing those on the bridge this morning?”
Jodi frowned, not so much at Hernandez’s curiosity at Reza’s beliefs, but that he automatically seemed to equate the killing of anyone or anything – regardless of the circumstances – to some form of murder. She was not happy to have to kill anyone, either, but there were circumstances that justified, even necessitated, the taking of another being’s life. In the war against the Empire, the Kreelans had laid the ground rules: fight and have a chance or die. Even among humankind, the score was often the same. Jodi had been forced to kill a man once as he brutally assaulted and then tried to rape a woman in a suburban park on Old Terra. Jodi had not known either of them, she had only been a casual stroller-by, but her duty then had been every bit as clear as the duties she had sworn in her commissioning oath to undertake on the part of her race. She had felt terrible after the fact, was sickened by the knowledge that one human being could do something like that to another when the survival of their entire race was in jeopardy in a much larger war. But she had never, not once in all the years that had passed, regretted shooting the man when he turned with a knife to fight her off. He had been an enemy to everything Jodi believed in, perhaps even more so than the Kreelans were. To Jodi, not having tried to help the woman would have left nothing inside her but intolerable guilt. Perhaps if Father Hernandez underwent a similar experience, he might gain an appreciation for what lay beyond the idealistic cloak of his pacifism.
“Before I joined the Corps,” Braddock told them quietly, not noticing the momentary glare Jodi leveled at the priest, “I spent my whole life in a little town on Timor. I worked as a mechanic after I got out of secondary school. I did all right, but I never would have gotten rich at it.” He smiled wistfully, suddenly remembering how awful it had been, how wonderful it had been. The long hours, the hard work, the ribbing he had taken from his friends because he studied in his free time instead of playing pool at the local bar. The loves he had had, had lost. It had been his home, and he knew it always would be. “I never saw anywhere else on that whole planet, just that little town. Doing or seeing other things was something I didn’t think about much, because I didn’t really have time for it, not when you have to do all you can just to get food on the family’s table.