A Cathedral (In a Dream (of the Future))
From Julian Mintz’s memoir, Unbroken Circle , published on Heinessen 47 N.I.C., “Chapter Twenty: Undutiness , The Prodigal Son”
Since it had been obvious to everyone that Admiral Yang and Lieutenant Commander Greenhill were going to marry, I needed to quickly find an excuse to leave them to themselves on their happy honeymoon.
The war was always the forefront of Admiral Yang’s thoughts, and it was what delayed his marriage for so long. He felt guilty about his own happiness while sending other men to die. I was very glad for him to put away that hangup— there was nothing I wanted more than for Admiral Yang to be happy, and he deserved his happiness with Lieutenant Commander Greenhill.
But even if the war was first in his mind, I still ranked among his responsibilities. It would have disrupted the already chaotic course of my teenage years to suddenly find myself sharing a home with another person Admiral Yang had a familial responsibility to, rather than the responsibility he already had to dole out to the billions of people in the Alliance, drop by drop.
Whatever his real reasons were, it was after my safe return from an independent posting on Phezzan that Admiral Yang proposed to Lieutenant Commander Greenhill.
[…]
I made the decision that it would be better for all of us if I took a working vacation. With the Alliance’s surrender, and a temporary (and fragile) peace in the galaxy for the first time in more than a century, this might be my only opportunity to travel as a civilian.
If I wanted an official visa to visit the Imperial homelands, I’m sure that I could have gotten one. There were privileges that came with being Admiral Yang’s ward. The son or daughter of one of Kaiser Reinhard’s admirals would have enjoyed trading places with me to take a sightseeing tour of the Alliance, while I would be led around by the hand in the Empire.
But I had no interest in being shown potemkin villages, and I had errands to run for the Admiral. So, I boarded a merchant freighter with my name falsified on the passenger manifest.
The Earth was chosen as my destination on a whim. During my escape from Phezzan on board the Beryozka , I met another man fleeing the planet: Bishop Degsby, of the Earth Church. He didn’t have a destination in mind inside the Alliance, just a desire to get as far away from Phezzan as possible.
Over the course of our journey, Bishop Degsby stopped eating, and refused to see a doctor when he began to vomit blood. I don’t know what disease killed him, and how much of his death was suicide and how much was inevitable. The Beryozka didn’t have the diagnostic equipment to do an autopsy beyond a blood panel to check for communicable diseases, the kinds that ships would be randomly screened for when coming into Phezzan’s port, and that check came up clean.
I didn’t have much of a chance to speak with him before he died, though he said a lot, muttering to himself regardless if anyone else was in the room. He was nearly incoherent, feverish and unsure of where he was. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain, though he refused anything except alcohol for it.
When he lay in the bunks of the Beryozka and whispered to himself about Mother Earth’s ascension over the whole universe, and the revenge she would take on the infidels of Phezzan and the rest of the galaxy, it seemed to be more of a comforting prayer than a plot. But there was a surety in his voice that made me listen. And when he constantly interjected the names of key figures on Phezzan (raining invectives upon everyone from Rubinsky down), knowing and hating them on a personal level, I was curious.
He kept at it until the very end, until he could no longer form words. I think most of the other passengers were relieved when he died. His ranting alarmed them, and, worse, made it impossible to get any sleep.
I felt bad for him, even if there was nothing I could have done.
He was the first member of the Earth Church that I saw die, but he was far from the last.
“Is there anything that we can do for him, you think?” Julian asked. He and Machungo were in the dormitory bathroom of the Beryozka , both scrubbing their hands up to their elbows, running the lukewarm trickle of water that came out of the faucets as hot as it would go. They had both been on their hands and knees in the dormitory, using paper towels and borax to contain the mess of blood and bile that Bishop Degsby had vomited all over the floor.
“No man can escape his destiny,” Machungo said.
Julian gave him a sidelong glance in the mirror. “I’m not asking about if there’s anything we can do to stop him from dying— just about if there’s anything we can give him— at least for the nausea, if not to make him sleep.”
Machungo was silent for a minute as he carefully toweled off his hands, and then wiped the wet sink counter dry. “He’s not going to change his mind about accepting help,” he said. “You can’t force a man to take medicine he doesn’t want.”
“Is he lucid enough to be talked into it?”
Even through the closed bathroom door, they could hear the bishop talking to himself— this one was a prayer. The words had a funny rhythm to them, a beat of one-two-three-one-two-three. Moth-er-Earth-hear-my-prayer-have-mer-cy-for-your-child.
“Too lucid,” Machungo said. “He doesn’t want it.”
“Is it some part of his religion?”
“I don’t know about that. But—”
“What is it?”
“Look at his eyes,” Machungo said. “Look how yellow he is— it’s liver failure.”
“Then would giving him anything might make him worse if his body can’t process it? Do you think can he be treated if we get to Heinessen quickly enough— if that’s what it is?”
Machungo shook his head, not responding to what Julian said. “And the way he shakes and coughs. I’ve seen all of this before. It’s withdrawal from what started killing him a long time ago.”
“Not withdrawal from alcohol,” Julian pointed out. “He’s still drinking.”
“If I had to guess, thyoxin,” Machungo said. “A high dose.”
Julian flinched. “How do you know?”
“I’ve been in the fleet since I was sixteen. I’ve seen a lot of drafted men come and go.” Julian didn’t know how old Machungo was now— twenty-five, maybe, twenty-six.
The even delivery of his words made Julian’s spine crawl. “He’s not still— is he?”
“No.” He put his hand on the doorknob of the bathroom. “I think he wants to die sober, or as sober as he can bear.”
That was the end of the conversation. They stepped outside the bathroom together, back into the dorm.
The men’s dorm of the Belyroska was a large room, for passengers who couldn’t pay the hefty fee for a private room. Since there were so many people fleeing Phezzan, even a space on the bunks had cost a fortune, and they were jammed full. While people might have wanted to escape Bishop Degsby’s moaning, they had no place to go.
It was the middle of third shift, so the lights were off overhead, and the room was dimmed to just what illumination came in through the bathroom’s open door. The bunks creaked as people rolled over, pulling their pillows over their ears to stifle Degsby’s sudden, gurgling cry, and wet coughs that stuck in his throat. He gasped for breath, and Julian sat down on the rickety folding chair that he had stuck next to the man’s bed.
Why had he and Machungo appointed themselves caretakers of the ailing old man, he didn’t know. But it seemed that no one else was going to, so he gently shook the bishop’s shoulder and offered him a cup of water from the bedside table.
Degsby took it, though half of it he spilled on himself, too weak to prop himself up to drink easily, and too shaky to hold the cup without it knocking against his teeth violently. At least while he was drinking the water he wasn’t mumbling or yelling.
“Do you think you’ll be able to get to sleep, Bishop?” Julian asked.
The man didn’t respond, but his eyes roved across Julian’s face, searching for something and not finding it, like he expected Julian to be someone else, although Julian and Machungo had been the only ones to speak to him for days.
“Are you sure I can’t give you something for the pain?” Julian asked, again.
“I don’t want it,” he said. When the bishop spoke anything other than his feverish rants and rote prayers, his words came haltingly, without any fluency.
“Please,” Julian began, and decided to try a different tack. “I promise it wouldn’t be thyoxin— just something to help you sleep.”
At the name of the drug, the bishop’s shaking hand crumpled the paper cup, spilling the remains of the water across his bedsheets. It took him a moment to calm himself, his eyes roving across Julian’s face some more before he slumped back and closed his eyes. “None of it— no more.” He coughed again, foamy pink spit gathering at the corners of his lips. He didn’t muster the strength to wipe it away. “You think I’m weak.”
“No,” Julian protested.
“To have taken so much of it— thyoxin and—” Whatever else he was trying to say was swallowed up by his coughing. “Phezzani devils.”
This was more of a conversation than Julian had ever been able to have with the man before. “What about Phezzan?”
“Earth will have Her revenge,” the bishop said, and smiled, for the first time. His eyes twitched, and his eyelids slipped down, like he was going to fall asleep. “What they did to Her servant. Her faithful servant.”
“Someone on Phezzan did this to you?”
The bishop laughed, or tried to. “You think I’m weak,” he said again.
“I don’t.”
“You could force me like they did.”
“Who did?”
“Kesselink, Rubinsky, that devil woman, I don’t know. All of them.” His breath came in horrid gasps. “Drugged me until there was nothing I could do except want more. But I—” He lost his train of thought and lapsed into silence.
Julian glanced over at Machungo, whose expression in the dark was carefully neutral.
“Why would they do that to you?”
But Degsby had fallen asleep, or passed out in pain. The effect was the same, and probably a mercy either way.
The Earth was a poor planet, much poorer than any planet in the Alliance at the time, and more destitute than the majority of the Goldenbaum feudal lands. As with most of the planets within the Galactic Empire that had been settled prior to the Empire’s formation, it had lacked a local lord for several hundred years. Without a ruling family intent on making their lands profitable, there was little reason for anyone to invest in the planet itself. Though nominally claimed by the Empire, the planet was left without both the burdens and benefits of Imperial oversight. It was on the far outlying reaches of the Empire’s territory— the nearest settled planets were prison planets owned by the crown directly.
Interestingly, Earth was one of the few planets in the Empire to which there was a steady influx of immigration through Phezzan, where usually all travel went the other direction. The Earth Church’s ministry in the Alliance convinced a small, but growing, number of people to settle on Earth. It made things easy for us— there was a well-oiled machine of merchant ships heading that direction, carrying passengers and meager trade. The Undutiness filed transit paperwork to Earth without anyone batting an eye.
We loaded up the ship with as many necessities as we could afford. The Earth’s population was somewhere around ten million. Compared to other outlying planets in the Empire, that was a large number, but it was barely a high enough population to support agriculture, and not enough to support industry. They relied on the generosity of pilgrims to provide things like cloth, fertilizer, water filters, and antibiotics.
When we arrived with our bolts of fabric and other sundries, we were greeted with effusive thanks. I asked Konev if we had been especially generous as a bribe to get into the temple complex, or if they behaved this way towards everyone. Konev claimed that we hadn’t even brought that much. But on Earth, the poverty was so intense that anything was considered a blessing of the highest order.
We set down the Undutiness in one of the lakes at a very high altitude, tucked into the Himalaya mountain range. The air there was very thin. Heinessen’s atmosphere is thick, but has a slightly lower percentage of oxygen than Earth at sea level does, which made me foolishly believe that I would be prepared to make our mountain trek. While my body was adapted to the lower oxygen level, stepping outside nevertheless made me feel like I couldn’t get enough breath in my lungs, and I spent the first few days on the planet with a racing heartbeat that I couldn’t get to slow down. We camped on the mountains before ascending in order to adjust, and I envied the members of our group who didn’t need to go higher up, as they could sleep in the airtight and warm ship rather than shiver in a tent outside.
[…]
This was a popular landing spot for pilgrims, though the Undutiness was the only ship there when we arrived. We were able to borrow a Phezzani-made car to get up into the mountains, paying off the farmer who owned a small fleet of them with some of the fertilizer we had brought. He bowed and thanked us in a broken mangle of standard Imperial and some old Earth language, and gave us little cut-paper prayer cards for our journey up. Pilgrims and merchants heading back the other way would take the car back down when we were done with it.
Although there were signs of pilgrims everywhere, aside from the farmer at the beginning of our journey we saw no one until we reached the upper section of the mountains. The trail up to the peaks was littered with little cairns of stones, and the path was marked with an abundance of colorful little scraps of fabric tied into flags. But it was an empty road, and a vast, empty planet.
There was just one more stretch of winding dirt road to go before they reached the Earth Church’s temple complex. The monastery was situated down in the bowl of the mountain valley (still at an incredibly high elevation), and they had wound their way around a nearby peak to get to it. They could see the valley from where they stood, though not the temple itself. They were making their last camp as the sun set, pitching their tents against the crumbling rock face next to the road.
Julian stood at the edge of the road, kicking pebbles down off the side of the cliff, watching them tumble off into the abyss below. He shivered and pulled his coat closely around his shoulders. It had been warm during the day, but now that the sun was falling, the temperature was plummeting down into the negatives. He wanted to sit by the fire, but Poplan was behind him, cursing over trying to get it started. There were no trees to gather firewood from at this elevation, so they were stuck using the compressed fuel bricks they had bought at the beginning of their journey: dried manure mixed with straw— flammable, but foul smelling and difficult to light in the wind.
When Poplan refused his help one too many times, Machungo gave up on trying to take their firestarting tools away from Poplan and instead came over to stand next to Julian. They brushed elbows companionably, saying nothing for a moment and admiring the sunset.
“This is a strange place,” Julian said, breaking the silence. Machungo was a quiet type, and probably wouldn’t have said anything unless Julian made conversation.
“Is it?”
“It’s very empty,” Julian said. “It’s not like Heinessen or Phezzan at all.”
Machungo was silent for a moment. “It’s not like anywhere else.”
“Did you grow up on Heinessen?” Julian asked him.
“No,” Machungo said. “I grew up on Palas. Not even an eighth of the population of Earth.”
“Oh. I suppose this would feel normal, then.”
Machungo gave him a smile. “Normal?”
“Well— if there’s fewer people.”
Machungo sat down in the dirt, and Julian sat next to him. “Have you ever been to a colony world?”
“No,” Julian said. “Never.”
He took a moment to figure out what he wanted to say, speaking in the measured way he had. “They’re empty, but in a different way. I used to go— when I was a boy, my parents would like to go hiking— there were mountains just south of the city. Same type of rocks as these— much shorter, though. You didn’t need to acclimate to the height to climb them at all.” He picked up a pebble and tossed it down the cliff. “But you could go hiking on the trails, get up to the peak, and you’d feel like you were standing at the very top of the world. Look out in one direction, there’s the city and the farms…” He held out his hand, his thumb extended to blot out the setting sun. “You could cover it up with your finger, and that was it. You turn the other direction, look out the other way— there’s nothing. Bare rock for hundreds of kilometers, until you reach the ocean. And the ocean’s empty, too— just water. Except for that little speck behind you, that city with everything you’ve ever known— it’s an empty place. Really empty.”
He picked up a rock, not a pebble, but a larger one, held it out to Julian. “Look,” he said. There was some kind of lichen clinging to the rock, a little fragment of green that had managed to survive all the way up here. “Nothing like that anywhere where I come from.”
Julian took the rock and picked at the circular spot of lichen with his thumb. It crumbled off into a pale green powder against his fingertips, one that looked greyer and greyer as the sun set and took the light with it.
“Maybe that’s why I feel so strange,” Julian said. “This place doesn’t need us— it would go on its own way without us here.” He wiped his hand off on his pants. “We didn’t make any of it.”
Machungo nodded.
“The opposite of Iserlohn, I guess,” Julian said. He felt a sudden miserable crush of homesickness, for the little suite of rooms he had shared with Admiral Yang, for the familiarity of the endless corridors. Yang was no longer there— he wasn’t even in the house he and Julian had shared on Heinessen anymore. But it seemed somehow safer to think about Iserlohn. “Iserlohn— you can really tell that it’s a place made for you. There’s nothing extraneous about it— it all just… functions.”
“That’s true. It was made for people to live in.” But there was something in Machungo’s voice that caused Julian to turn towards him.
“But?”
“This place— weren’t we made to live in it ?”
Machungo’s words made Julian shiver, and Machungo saw his frown and just laughed.
“You don’t believe all that, do you?” Julian asked.
“In what they say?” He gestured down to the bottom of the valley, tomorrow’s destination. “No. Not the spiritual parts.”
“Just the part where man can’t escape his destiny?” Julian asked.
Machungo’s lips twitched in a stifled smile. “That’s what I believe— I don’t think they do.” He paused. “They want to tell us that man can’t escape his past.”
“But you think we can?”
Behind them, Poplan succeeded in getting the fire started, letting out a whoop loud enough to echo and bounce off the darkening stone walls around them. It interrupted their conversation, and Machungo stood up to go help boil water for tea and dinner.
Even though I had never been in a mountain or church like it before, he inside of the Earth Church’s temple felt very familiar to me. Since it was built inside a former military bunker, designed to withstand a nuclear blast, it retained the utilitarian layout and functionality of all military equipment. It reminded me, more than anything else, of Iserlohn. Being underground, there was no sense of being on a planet— just the kilometers of corridors with metal walls and poured-concrete floors.
The Alliance didn’t tend to include any unnecessary decorative elements on our ships at the time, but Iserlohn did— lots of molded whorls on the walls, and statues in the control centers. When we took over the fortress, someone made an effort to paint over the most egregious excesses with the standard #26307 Green, but bits of it shone through and remained, in the filigree door handles and the fanciful plaster at the corners of the ceilings. The Earth Church’s design philosophy arrived at the same destination from the opposite direction— what had once been a mundane and run down military complex had been decorated with hewn-stone statues and careful engravings of animals and plants on the walls.
They were similar to the point that my memories of the two places, Iserlohn and the Earth Church’s complex, have mixed in my mind, and when I picture walking towards the cafeteria, I find myself imagining Iserlohn’s mess instead. I was only there for a short time, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I’ve forgotten. I would consult photographs to describe it better, but the place is long gone, and so are its records, and so is anyone else who might recall it better than I do.
Nevertheless, I’ll try to describe what that strange place was like.
[…]
The door that was used as the main entrance to the complex must have originally been a cargo entrance, as it opened into a wide hall, wide enough for trucks to come in. Pilgrims gathered there, bringing whatever charitable goods they hauled with them. We delivered our supplies of cloth, and were in turn welcomed and given places to stay. Our fake names and ages and places of origin were all entered into a logbook. It was funny how much bureaucracy even a church needed to maintain.
There was much debate between the people doing our check-in over where there would be bunks for us— apparently the main temple complex was getting overcrowded, and we would have to be fit wherever there was room. I was lucky that there was room for Machungo and I to bunk together, a few beds away from each other in the same room.
Despite the familiarity of the environment and my lack of claustrophobia, I remember being anxious the entire time we were in the complex, from the minute we stepped inside. I think it was because we were there under false pretenses. We didn’t even necessarily have to be— if we had said that we were curious unbelievers, we might have been welcomed just the same. Everyone there was very friendly, especially our fellow pilgrims we met early on— they went out of their way to offer to share whatever they had brought from their own homeworlds, and the old woman in the bunk next to mine helped me sew up the hem of the cloak I was given, which was too long and raggedy at the edges.
No one said an unkind word to me the entire time we were there. In fact, the spirit of our fellow pilgrims was remarkably sincere, honest, and generous despite the poverty of the place. At meals, the soup was thin and watery, but if someone sitting next to me heard my stomach growl they would never hesitate to offer me their piece of coarse flatbread.
Perhaps it was precisely this spirit of generosity that made it difficult to trust or connect with anyone else there. The Earth Church’s teachings encouraged a slavish subservience of the individual to the collective there inside Mother Earth, one that went far beyond charity and brotherly love. It made it difficult to recognize the pilgrims as people when they showed so little individual will.
Only small moments made me recognize them for who they were. I caught one woman, while she was washing the walls, drawing a doodle with the white, chalky bar of soap on the wall before hastily scrubbing it off with a sponge. That woman, I would have trusted with my life, though I never saw her again after that encounter in the hallway.
Everyone else, I couldn’t have said anything about. I was glad to be with Machungo— a familiar face, and a humanity I could still see beneath the hood of his robe, when he smiled at me when we passed each other in the halls.
The strangest thing about the Earth Church temple complex was that Julian often found himself alone, in the endless, echoing, dark corridors, but he never had a single moment to himself in private. The bunks in the dorms were packed in tightly together, with just a slip of fabric covering them to keep the light out. No one had any belongings to speak of, not even clothing, so there was no place to store personal items. The showers in the bathrooms were communal, the dining rooms were communal, the prayer halls, the gardens, the library.
Although there were thousands of people in the complex, they seemed to operate independently of one another, like ants, going about their work individually and without much direction, only coming together to pray.
He rarely got to see his friends, except for Machungo, who shared his dorm. The place was just too large, and everybody had too much of their own business. The loneliness set him on edge, and made him savor the glimpses of them he got. It seemed that Machungo felt the same. He was an earlier riser than Julian was (or the sense of time in the underground complex was distorted enough that their sleep schedules had gotten offset by a little), and so every morning he would wake first. After he showered, he’d come gently shake Julian awake to offer him one of the last dry towels and chips of soap, commodities that tended to disappear quickly. This genuine kindness and friendship, and the sight of Machungo’s familiar, smiling face, steeled Julian to face the rest of the day alone. Often, by the time he got back to their dorm, most other people were already asleep, but Machungo would be sitting awake on his bed, cross-legged, waiting for Julian to return.
Already, after less than a week, the routine was familiar. The small moments chained together to form hours, and those linked to form days. There was no unit of time greater than a day, since every one was the same: wake, bathe, breakfast, chores, noonday worship, chores, dinner, sleep.
There was a huge task board in the dining hall, and in the morning everyone came up and wrote their name on a task that they would be responsible for doing. There was some level of personal choice involved, but the order in which Julian got his breakfast dictated most of what tasks were remaining for the day. He always tried to scan the list for the names of his friends and write his own next to them, but if he took too long with the stub of chalk in his hand, the people behind him in line, wanting to take their trays and sit down to eat, would get restless at the holdup. Most of the tasks were the same every day, stamped on the board in rows of permanent ink, but there were always a list of one-offs, things like repairing specific equipment or cleaning certain out of the way places, that were hotly contested. Even in this place, where monotony seemed to be the goal, any break from it was desirable.
If he couldn’t be with his friends, Julian at least tried to pick tasks that would take him to all the different parts of the complex. He liked the kitchen work the best, be it cooking the flatbreads and soups that they ate almost every day, or taking in deliveries and storing bags of rice and flour in the storehouses. The first task was pleasant, in that he was familiar and comfortable with chopping potatoes and kneading dough, and the second gave him a sense of what the scale of life in the Earth Church was, and gave him an excuse to walk around. Cleaning wasn’t bad, either. There were always floors to be mopped and toilets to be scrubbed somewhere, even down in the library complex. Julian managed to sneak a glimpse of the computers once, when he went down to the furthest level of the library basement to sweep the floors and empty the trash. But the computers were silent and turned off, and no one was working at them, so Julian had no way to guess what the machines were for.
Today, he saw Machungo’s name on the task board under laundry, with a few empty spaces beneath it. Laundry, he had heard, was an unpleasant task, but the idea of getting to spend the day with Machungo made him scrawl his own name hastily, then take his food and go sit down for breakfast.
After eating, he headed downstairs to the laundry complex. Someone saw that he was new, standing awkwardly by the front door, and came over to give him instructions. The man who came over, voice raised and hoarse over the roar of water in the room, was completely naked, and Julian could understand why: the room was sweltering. Already, steam was sticking his hair to his face, and sweat was gathering between his shoulders. Between the noise and the wet heat and the eerie half-darkness endemic to the entire Earth Church temple complex (lightbulbs could not be produced on the planet, so they were a rare and precious commodity brought in by pilgrims), and the slightly sulfurous smell, it was like walking down and entering Hell.
Inside the room, there were huge stone tubs unevenly carved into the floor, where hot water from a geothermal fault collected, diverted out of a main fresh stream at the far end of the room, and distributed between different tubs with wooden gates. Workers perched precariously on the edge of the tubs, stirring the foaming water with huge paddles, or dumping in the rough-woven robes to be washed. Once the clothes had been washed with soap, then rinsed, the garments were fished out and wrung dry in massive, hand-cranked presses.
It was grueling, hot work. The steam made figures indistinct; the water made the floors slippery. Julian accepted a stirring stick from the collection leaning against the entry wall, and stepped into the rush and chaos. The further he got into the room, the more confusing and hard to see it became. He couldn’t find Machungo through the billowing clouds, but Machungo saw him: he reached out and grabbed Julian’s arm, pulling him out of the way of a woman carrying a basket full of clothing that obstructed her vision. Julian nearly fell into the nearest tub, but Machungo held him upright.
“Thanks,” Julian said, after a moment of recovering from surprise, the sudden race of his heart as he processed how close he had come to falling into the scalding water. “I think you saved my life.”
“I don’t think it’s your destiny to drown.”
Julian couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, not if you’re here, I guess.”
Machungo’s face broke out in a wide smile, but he said nothing, just leading Julian over to the washing pit that was his station. He must have been working down in the laundry for some time before Julian arrived— he had already made the choice to strip off his clothing. Even without the thick robes, sweat dripped down his face, gathering in beads above his lip and shining in the hollow of his collarbone.
“I saw you were working down here today— I’m glad I came,” Julian said.
“It’s a difficult job.” Standing across the water from Julian, it was now necessary for him to raise his voice to be heard above the din in the room. Machungo gestured to show him how best to use his huge paddle, taller than he was, to stir the surprisingly deep basin. It felt like carving swirls in the steam, which rose in clouds around them.
“Why’d you pick it?” Julian called across the basin.
“I like being warm,” Machungo said. “I’ve been freezing in this place.”
Despite the number of people around, all doing their own tasks at the other tubs, the noise and the dimness of the room made his conversation with Machungo feel much more private than it really was. No one who was standing more than a few feet away could possibly have heard anything they were saying, and everyone’s eyes were focused on their own tasks, not wanting to risk distraction that might cause them to slip and fall. This was dangerous work, despite its mundanity.
Julian tried to keep his eyes off Machungo, too. It felt impolite to look, even though half the workers in the room had stripped down to nothing as a matter of necessity.
“If I see Poplan, I’ll have to tell him that this is a task he should avoid,” Julian said. “I don’t think he could behave himself.” A woman had just arrived at the tub next to theirs, and she was perfunctory pulling off her pilgrim’s robe and tossing it into the water, seemingly without caring who might be watching. No one but Julian was, anyway, and he looked away, back down at his own work.
Machungo laughed quietly. “I’ve already warned him off. Though he could cause just as much trouble in the dorms.” The massive bedrooms were co-ed, and so were the bathrooms. It seemed like a positive that the Earth Church was interested in the equality of men and women, though that equality meant an equal abandonment of desire and selfhood. At least, that was the message he had gotten from the noonday worship sessions, and the books of prayers that he casually thumbed through.
They were silent for a while as they stirred the soapy water until the bubbles diminished, and the water was a filthy grey-brown. Machungo and Julian had to work together to lift the heavy wooden sluice gate at the bottom of the stone tub, letting the dirty water rush out, and then another at the top to let fresh, slightly cooled, water in to rinse. They drained the rinsed clothes, and then emptied out the tub until there was just the sodden pile of garments laying strewn across the bottom. Machungo, with the steam wreathed around him, hopped down inside, the tub’s rim coming up to his shoulders. He handed the clothes up to Julian, though they were still hot enough to scald his hands if he held them for too long. In his haste to get them into the waiting wheeled cart to bring them to the people operating the drying presses, Julian held the heavy fabric in his arms and against his chest, completely soaking his own robe. Machungo got another cart of dirty clothes to wash, while Julian delivered the wet and clean ones to the other side of the room. The tub was already half filled with scalding water by the time Julian got back, Machungo having maneuvered the sluice gate open by himself.
As Julian tossed the new load of clothing in one piece at a time, he became aware of just how miserable it would be to wear his now-drenched robe for the remainder of the day in the laundry. Sweat had already been making it stick to his skin, but now it was itchy and heavy with water that had no chance of evaporating. He was so hot that he was lightheaded and dizzy, dangerous in a place like this. Machungo shaved a bar of soap into the water, carving a thin spiral like he was peeling a potato.
When Julian had tossed the rest of the dirty laundry in, he glanced up at Machungo, and then sighed and resigned himself, pulling off his wet clothing and tossing it all into the stone tub with the rest, watching the robe float like a soul in the river Styx for a moment, before being subsumed into the now-foamy water. When Machungo called him to get his help closing the gate against the force of the inrushing water, he smiled, which made Julian flush— though with the heat in the room his cheeks were already as red as they could get.
But Machungo’s smile was gentle, and as soon as they started washing the clothing again, Julian couldn’t think about anything other than the strain in his arms as they bent over the water and mashed the fabric with their oars, as difficult as if they were rowing a boat upstream.
There were moments when they both stopped to rest, leaning on their paddles. With exhaustion, the feeling of strangeness fell away, and left just the two of them, alone in the mist, with the clanging of the presses and the roar of the water isolating them from the rest of the world, or swallowing them up completely— Julian couldn’t really tell.
“What do you think about this place?” Julan asked.
Machungo took so long to answer that he almost thought that he hadn’t been heard. “I’m glad I’m not here alone.”
“Why?” Julian asked, though he thought he already knew the answer.
Machungo peered out into the fog, the yellow light, watching the vague figures move from one place to the next, the man turning the crank of the drying press indistinguishable in face and form from any of those working over the tubs. “Being here, you’re supposed to forget who you are. It’s good to have someone to remind you.”
“We shouldn’t stay here for too long,” Julian said. He shook his head. “I’m not sure I’m going to find anything I’m looking for here.”
“What are you looking for?” Machungo asked.
That was a good question, one that didn’t have a good answer. The honest one was to say that he had wanted to find something to do for himself, without being ordered or obliged, that would give him some space and time. But that was a stupid answer, and not one worth dragging Machungo all the way across the galaxy for. “A way to change destiny.”
Inside the temple complex, we had no advance warning that the Imperial Fleet was landing on the planet. The Earth Church may have had access to some basic monitoring equipment, but there hadn’t even been satellites in orbit around the planet when we landed, so there couldn’t have been much. I expect the Earth Church leadership, unless they received warning in advance by ansible and told no one, must have been as caught off guard as we were.
The entire temple was thrown into chaos as the church leadership tried to use the rudimentary defenses that dated back to the Earth-Sirius war to keep the Imperial fleet out. The vast majority of people inside were civilians who had never held a gun, more than half of them women, all of them malnourished from the paucity of the pilgrim’s diet on this poor planet.
I think most people realized very quickly that if the Imperial fleet had come to kill them, they were going to die. It was a very different mindset than I was used to as a soldier.
[…]
During the chaos, I was able to enter the computer control center of the complex. With brute force, we smashed the machines open and got the hard drives out. Those that we couldn’t carry with us, we destroyed. At the time, I didn’t know what I was hoping to find in there. Originally, I had come to Earth wondering about what connections the Church had within the galaxy, and what had caused Bishop Degsby to curse the former Phezzani government so much, and why the Earth Church had supported Job Trunicht during Heinessen’s surrender or the military coup of the previous year. None of these things felt like they were of massive import— it was a small thing, a hunch for me to run down in my free time— the kind of thing that people thought about during peace.
When I left for Earth, I hadn’t heard anything about the attempted assassination attempt on Kaiser Reinhard, and so the arrival of the Imperial Fleet to destroy them was a shock, and for a long time, I couldn’t understand why it was happening.
If the Imperial Fleet was here for a reason, I wanted to know that reason, and I wanted to stop them from getting what they came for. So, we smashed the computers and took what we could.
[…]
The Undutiness , a former Alliance military ship, was the only vessel capable of detecting the fleet before it arrived.
The Imperial Fleet had arrived with orders to martyr every believer in the Earth Church, a message of horrible warning that they broadcast as they landed. There were no unbelievers in there except for us. We didn’t look any different from them— dressed in our cloaks and unarmed.
The captain of the Undutiness made the difficult decision to radio the Imperial landing fleet. He lied to the captain in charge of the landing, told him that there were Phezzani agents inside the temple, and requested the Imperial Fleet’s assistance in rescuing us— or at least not killing us.
Without a doubt, this saved our lives. To this day, I sometimes wonder what it cost.
Given our photographs, the Imperial Fleet found us in the chaos of the temple complex. To prove that we were not Earth Church loyalists, we gave them all the information that we had about the building. I doubt it made a difference either way. They hardly needed what we told them in order to bomb the temple to rubble.
[…]
I think that the four of us— myself, Machungo, Poplan, and Konev— were the only pilgrims who survived.
I remember the logbooks when we came in, peeking at the number of beds they had registered for pilgrims. There had been eight thousand people in the temple. In the scale of war, it was nothing.
[…]
I never spoke about it with Admiral Yang.
By the time anyone in the lower depths of the temple complex realized that the Imperial Army was invading, it was far, far too late for anyone to escape. Down near the dorms, the first indication that something was wrong was the tolling of the noonday bell, the one that usually called everyone to worship. It was the middle of the night, so Julian had been initially confused as to why the distant bell was ringing— if it was a holiday where they celebrated at midnight, or if he was hallucinating the sound echoing down the stone hallways. But it was real, and it droned on and on, much longer than the usual twelve strikes of the bell. It kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing.
Most of the other pilgrims, even though they had no idea what was going on, obeyed the tolling of the bell in the only way that they knew: they made their way towards the cathedral at the top of the complex.
Julian saw them go, but he didn’t find out what happened to them until later. He didn’t learn until long after they saw the first soldiers in the hallway, long after they raided the data center and stuffed their bags full of as many harddrives as they could pull from the Earth Church’s computers, long after they overheard the crackling command come over the Imperial soldiers’ radios, ordering them to be on the lookout for and be sure to keep alive a set of five Phezzani agents roaming the complex.
They saw the signs of slaughter before they surrendered themselves to the Imperial Army, but they didn’t realize the extent until it was far too late. Down near the data center, they picked the smallest possible group of soldiers to surrender themselves to, in case something went wrong and their white flag was ignored— they had a hope of rushing in and overpowering them. These soldiers were splashed with blood, the white totenkopf helmets they wore stained red and sitting at their feet as they leaned against the walls to listen for commands and take a break. Behind them in the hallways, there were bodies laying on the floor, genderless in their robes, but some were small enough that they could only be women. Julian couldn’t see their distant faces when he held out their white flag and approached with his arms widespread, inviting fire, calling out in the Imperial language that he wished to surrender, giving his false name, the one they were looking for.
But he saw the bodies on the floor more clearly when the Imperial soldiers led their group through the hallways, towards their central command post. At first there were just a few of them, the dead, with their throats cut open, or their chests or faces evaporated with the power of close-range laser fire. The blood pooled on the floor; they stepped through it and left a bloody map of their path.
Then the bodies became more numerous. Groups of ten, or what might have been groups of ten. Their limbs were blown off, flesh torn into indistinguishable shreds, and the walls of the hallways crumbled in with explosive force from grenades. Their footprints in the blood were no longer individually distinguishable, it was now a river of it, without end.
The command post had been set up directly outside the main temple area, which was large enough to contain most, if not all, of the thousands of people within the complex. The wide doors had been ripped from their hinges, laying in huge cracked splinters on the floor. The bell that had once chimed, and had been ringing so urgently was now silenced forever, having been felled from its height at the top of the room, falling some hundred meters below to shatter, cracking open the marble tiles on the floor where it landed.
Julian remembered it as it had been, packed shoulder to shoulder with fellow pilgrims lifting their arms and singing songs to which he mumbled partially echoed words.
The pilgrims were still in there now, and the morning light was streaming in through the stained glass on the ceiling, which opened through a long skylight to the day outside. The colors of the glass flickered red, blue, yellow, across the bodies that lay on the ground, dead by the thousands. Some had tried to hide or escape, running towards the altar at the far end of the room, climbing over each other, clawing the altar cloth to the ground in their haste to scramble over the top and find some shelter on the other side. The white fabric wicked up the blood, but the embroidered words of prayer stayed visible in a thread of a different material, one that didn’t hold the red quite as well as the wide swathe of linen did. EARTH IS OUR MOTHER, EARTH IN OUR HANDS. EARTH IS OUR MOTHER, EARTH IN OUR HANDS. EARTH IS OUR MOTHER.
Julian’s eyes drifted across the words, staying there involuntarily. Though he knew he should look at the people on the floor, his eyes refused to move. They stayed there in the periphery of his vision, and when his vision blurred, his eyes burning, the dead seemed to waver and move, dancing like ghosts.
Machungo let Julian stand at the door and look for a moment, twenty seconds, then took his arm and pulled him away.
Because our presence on the planet had piqued Admiral Wahlen’s curiosity, we were given an audience with him. Of our group, Poplan and I went to meet with him, as the two of us were the most interested in seeing the inside of an Imperial flagship.
[…]
On this side of history, having now spoken to Admiral Wahlen several times, it’s very funny that we met under such circumstances, while I was using a false name. Our meeting was very short— a mutual satisfaction of curiosity.
I think Poplan and I did look like Phezzani spies, if bad ones, though we probably would have been more convincing if I had brought Konev to the meeting. I did all the talking for both of us. My broken Imperial, cobbled together from what I had learned in school, could sound passably like a heavy Phezzani accent, at least to someone who, by his own admission, had spent very little time on Phezzan.
I noticed that the admiral was missing an arm, but I didn’t realize that the wound was so fresh. He had only lost it during the campaign for Earth. If I had known how much pain he must have been in, I would have been astounded at how lucid he was, and how efficiently the campaign was conducted.
The admiral was very generous to us, and we were given an escort to Odin, from there intending to take a merchant route back to Phezzan, and from there, Heinessen. Poplan was annoyed at the change of plans, though I welcomed an opportunity to see more parts of the galaxy, figuring that we were in no rush, and that I was unlikely to get another opportunity to see the heart of the Imperial homeland.
[…]
I wouldn’t learn of what had occurred on Heinessen while we were away until we made it to Odin, and that changed our plans significantly.
“Odin— they can’t let us just go back to Phezzan?” Konev asked. “Did they give a reason for that?”
Julian, Poplan, Konev, and Machungo were all in the Undutiness ’s bridge, the screens around them now displaying the red-highlighted Imperial ships that dotted both the skies and the ground. On the main viewscreen, a column of smoke— loose rock dust kicked into the air, mostly, but also fire— rose from the ruins of the Earth Church’s temple complex. The other ships were swarming across the surface of the planet, flying low, picking out settlements to find the remaining millions of Earth’s population. Whenever one lifted off and flew overhead, Julian’s skin crawled and a sour taste filled his mouth, suddenly dry.
“I didn’t think it would have been worth arguing— not without losing our cover,” Julian said. “The admiral said that was where they were going, and so we couldn’t go elsewhere.”
“Cover?” Poplan asked. “There’s no way they don’t know who we are.”
“I don’t think they know,” Julian said. “At least not for sure. The admiral would have had us detained if he knew. Us being here— especially me— if he knew who we were, it would look like we were collaborating with the Earth Church— and that would look like breaking the terms of the surrender.”
“He’s not stupid or blind,” Poplan said. “Even if we weren’t suspicious looking, and even if he didn’t have someone running our photos through whatever database the Imperial army has, this is an Alliance military transport with a new paint job. He’d recognize it anywhere. He knows.”
Julian knew that he and Machungo, at least, had to be in the Imperial records. His posting in Phezzan’s embassy had earned him an Imperial file, one that would clearly note his association with Yang. It seemed like the best case scenario was that Admiral Wahlen was suspicious, but had no way to confirm his suspicions, so was finding a way to keep their group under Imperial control until someone could run their photographs and fingerprints. The polished table they had sat at, and the mugs that they had been offered coffee from, were sure to be dusted down.
“So, what are we going to do about it?” Julian asked. “Run?”
“No man can escape his destiny,” Machungo said. He was standing a little ways away from the rest of them, but listening to the conversation as he watched the Imperial ships fly by on the main screen.
“He’s right,” Konev said. “If we try to run, they’ll shoot us down. This is only a transport— not very fast.”
“And if we go to Odin, and then are held there?” Poplan asked. “I don’t really want to become a prisoner.”
Julian was silent for a moment, thinking it over. “Let’s not give them an excuse to make us dead men,” he said. “This is peacetime, still. They wouldn’t have an excuse to hold us hostage. Let’s not give them one.”
Poplan scowled and turned away, stalking out of the bridge. Julian took a few steps after him, then gave up.
“When will we leave?” Konev asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like to get out of this place,” he said. “It’s given me the fucking creeps since the day we arrived.”
This was not, of course, what Konev really meant, but Julian nodded and gave him the grace of not making him say it.
“Usually there’s convoys bringing the wounded out of the battlefield every few days,” Machungo said in his perpetually even voice. “I don’t think this place will be any different. We can probably take our escort to Odin with them.”
Konev looked at the large overhead screens with the Imperial ships passing to and fro, and then the silent and switched off command console of the Undutiness . He wrinkled his lip as if to spit, and then turned and headed out of the room after Poplan, brushing past Julian as he did.
Julian felt unbearably tired, but there was nowhere else on the ship for him to go, except his small quarters, and he had no desire to be there, so he sat down in one of the benches on the bridge, the one that let one operator slide between the radio and inventory control stations, propping his head on his hand and watching the Imperial ships.
Machungo was still in the room, off behind Julian, not saying anything.
He was grateful for the company, but felt the need to fill the silence.
“I should— once we get back to Heinessen— there has to be some way we can access whatever’s on those hard drives,” Julian said. “Somebody in the government must have a way of breaking open Phezzani tech. Cazerne, maybe. I’m sure he could tell me who to talk to.”
Machungo didn’t respond to that, but sat down on the bench next to Julian, shoulder to shoulder, but facing the opposite direction.
“You should get some sleep,” Machungo said.
“Later,” Julian replied. His voice came out harsher than he wanted it to, and so he tacked on, “Sorry.” He looked away from Machungo, up at the screens.
“No need to apologize.”
Machungo reached across him and hit the button that would switch the screens to their navigational display rather than the camera view. Since they were on a planet and had no route information programmed into their ship’s computer, this was just an empty grid, dark black space with pale lines running across it, flickering text in the corner displaying the ship’s status. Without the bright daylight images from the cameras, the ship’s bridge was dark, a blue glow drifting across Machungo’s face.
It was an immediate relief to no longer see the Imperial ships and the ruins of the Earth Church’s temple complex, one that Julian hadn’t known that he needed.
“I’ll be able to sleep once we’re underway,” Julian said. “Konev is right— the sooner we get out of here, the better. You don’t have to worry about me.” Julian rubbed his face, not really wiping away tiredness or tears, but a pressure to ground him in the moment. “Anyway, like you say— no man can escape his destiny. Sleep is like that. I’ll get it eventually, whenever I get tired enough.”
Machungo smiled, but said nothing.
“Are you okay?” Julian asked. Machungo had stepped in between Julian and a grenade blast. They had been far enough away from it that it hadn’t been lethal, but beneath his loose clothing, Machungo’s back was a mess of bruises, and slivers of rock had sheared across his arms and legs, leaving shallow but plentiful scratches, and a painful process of picking out the shards with tweezers when they had made it back to the ship. One of the bandages peeked out from Machungo’s sleeve.
“I’m fine.”
“Have you gotten any sleep?”
“You don’t have to look out for me,” Machungo said. “I’m afraid that’s not your responsibility.”
“It’s only fair.”
“Along with destiny and sleep, that’s another thing that you can’t escape,” Machungo said.
“What?”
“The unfairness of life.”
“Then what’s the point of doing anything, if it makes no difference?” He was tempted to reach across the console and turn the cameras back on, to look at the Imperial ships and smoking ruins once again. His hands twitched where they rested on his legs. “Why bother asking if I’m going to sleep, when you can’t make me either way?” His own petulance surprised him, and he laughed, a hard little sound with an unhappy edge to it. “I’m proving you right, acting like a stubborn kid.”
Machungo, leaning backwards against the console, had his arms crooked to support his weight on his elbows, and his hand dangled loosely in the air. Two of his fingers were taped together: a sprain in his pinky from where he had fallen hard to the ground and landed on it. Julian watched his hand, unable to look at his face.
“I don’t really know how you do anything, if you really do believe in predestination,” Julian said.
“I don’t,” Machungo said.
Julian looked up at him, and found Machungo to be silently laughing at him, his eyes crinkled up. “You sure profess it a lot, for not believing in it.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think I understand you at all.”
“That’s alright.”
Julian shook his head, and looked down at Machungo’s hand again. “Then what do you believe? I want to know.”
Machungo was quiet for a long time. “When you reach the end of your life, when you find out what your destiny is, then it’s too late to change what you’ve done to get there,” he said. “Time doesn’t go backwards— that’s all I mean.”
“And so every mistake we make is stuck with us forever,” Julian said. It was a strange counterpoint to Admiral Yang’s words, that historians writing about the past could topple dictators with a pen, could, in some small way, right injustices. Julian’s eyes strained through the darkness, looking up at the dim screens, as though he could see through the walls of the ship to the ground outside, the devastation that he had seen but not stopped, had not been able to stop. He wondered, if someone asked him to write about it, what he could possibly say. Possibly nothing at all, absolutely nothing at all.
“But so is every good thing,” Machungo said.
“So you try to live your life without regrets? That would make you sound like Poplan.”
“I do plenty of things that I’ll regret.”
“And will you regret being here?”
“No.”
Julian closed his eyes.
“I’m glad to be here for you,” Machungo said.
“With me,” Julian said.
Machungo laughed. “Maybe.”
His hand was still dangling off the console. Julian reached for it, enfolding Machungo’s uninjured fingers in his own. That was all that he had intended to do, but then, acting on an instinct that felt like destiny, leaned forward and pressed Machungo’s hand to his cheek, to the wetness at his eyes.
“No,” Machungo said, but he nevertheless pulled Julian’s shoulder forward, half embracing him on the bench in the dark. “I don’t regret the difference.”
And so we ended up going to Odin after all.
We were treated like Phezzani tourists, but with Admiral Wahlen’s thanks, we were promised free accommodation in one of the nicer hotels in the capital city.
It was a wonderful summer day when we arrived, landing our ship in the merchant freightyards outside the capital, though we had no cargo to speak of. After the mountains of Earth, the Odin air was thick with oxygen, and clean of smoke. Several hundred years of the most intense terraforming have made Odin a paradise, one that Heinessen is still trying to catch up with, though she tries. There is plenty pleasant to say about the former seat of the Imperial government— I don’t have any trouble admitting that it was even nicer than the gardens of Iserlohn, which were designed to imitate this place.
Poplan would be angry with me if I neglected to mention that the women of Odin were beautiful. He had no desire to stay in our provided hotel suite, and instead spent several days trying to worm his way into the arms of any women who would take him. I’m not sure if he succeeded at any of his amorous advances— Machungo, Konev, and I had more important things on our minds.
It turned out to have been a good thing that we didn’t proceed directly to Heinessen, since when we got there, we learned from every newspaper headline that Admiral Yang was no longer there. He had taken a hostage and fled Heinessen, presumably intending to meet back up with Admiral Merkatz’s Sherwood Forest fleet.
The chaos and rush of new military orders that Kaiser Reinhard gave to his fleet seemed to prevent anyone from paying much attention to us on Heinessen. While we might otherwise have been subjected to some kind of interview, even for our “official” story of being Phezzani agents, no one spoke to us at all.
As soon as we heard about the trouble on Heinessen, we tried to leave the planet, but there was a slight holdup. The hotel we were staying in was subject to a general breakin: all the rooms on our floor were cracked open and sacked. We came back from lunch to find our suitcases tossed to the floor, our clothing strewn halfway down the hallway, and our safe hanging open. The dozen other rooms on our floor were in the same state, so it didn’t appear to be a targeted break-in. Unfortunately, the contents of the safe, included the hard drives we had taken from the Earth Church. I had brought them with us, since it seemed likely that the Undutiness would be searched while in port, but we ended up losing track of them all the same.
All signs indicated that it was a simple break in, not a targeted theft. Konev, using his Phezzani connections, was able to find the drives for us again after getting in contact with some old friends aware of the black market on Odin, but it had been a close call.
After that, I was eager to get off of Odin quickly, even if we were just taking an educated guess at where we could find Admiral Yang, and risking a perilous journey to get there.
Julian and Machungo shared a room, and technically Konev and Poplan had the adjoining one next door, though since Poplan was never there, Konev got the room to himself. Despite how luxurious of a hotel this was, the walls were wafer thin, and when Machungo and Julian stood in their room, they could hear Konev pacing back and forth, his TV set on, playing a repeat of Kaiser Reinhard’s speech.
They would be leaving Odin in the morning, but it was nighttime now, and Julian and Machungo sat facing each other on the edges of their respective beds, both looking at the stack of harddrives, taped together haphazardly, with their torn wires all poking out from where they had ripped the drives from the Earth Church’s computers. The harddrives sat on the bedside table; the bedside lamp cast its yellow light onto the stack; the stack cast its shadow onto the floor between Julian and Machungo’s feet.
“They don’t look like they’ve been messed with,” Julian said. “They look the same as they were in the safe.” Even to himself, the words felt hollow. He couldn’t delude himself into believing that it had been mere coincidence that the harddrives had been stolen and then retrieved so easily. It felt like a setup: Wahlen knew who they were, had led them to Odin, had set them up nicely in a hotel that they chose. It was a setup.
Machungo said nothing.
“They might have just wanted to know what’s on the disks,” Julian said. “If they just read them…”
“Why bother giving them back?”
It was a miserable silence between them. “At least this guarantees our safety out of here,” Julian said. “They want us to read whatever’s on there. They won’t shoot us down on our way to Admiral Yang if we’re carrying it. They haven’t kept us prisoner on Odin.”
“Whatever they want to tell us must be very valuable to them,” Machungo said. “You would make an excellent hostage.”
“There’s no one to trade me for,” Julian said. “Lennenkampf is dead.”
And Admiral Yang would not have traded Julian for himself— that was a simple calculus. Julian wouldn’t have wanted him to, anyway. Machungo, understanding this without it needing to be said, looked at Julian steadily.
“What are you going to tell the admiral?” Machungo asked.
“That we failed. That we didn’t get any useful information from the Earth Church.” His voice came out hard and rough.
“What information were you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Julian said. “Do you?”
Machungo shook his head.
“Maybe knowing that they’ve planted something is valuable information,” Julian said. But he didn’t feel confident. “Or maybe we’re being tricked twice.”
“No man can escape his destiny,” Machungo said.
“Yeah.”
“The admiral will just be glad you’re coming home safely.”
It was scant consolation. There was silence.
“Maybe I just won’t say anything,” Julian said. “Maybe I won’t say anything at all.”
I once overheard a conversation between Machungo and Poplan. It wasn’t a conversation I was meant to hear, and I hope they would both forgive me for recounting it here.
Poplan asked Machungo why so many people were compelled to protect me, or follow me— whatever the difference was at the time. Machungo said that it was because of my virtue, which Poplan answered with a dirty joke about me having not had any opportunities to lose my virtue yet.
I never understood what he meant. At the time, I don’t think I had any meaningful qualities as a leader. I was still hanging on to Admiral Yang’s coattails. But perhaps, like Admiral Yang was purposefully blind to the reasons that people would lay down their lives for him, I was doing the same.
It’s hard for me to separate Machungo from Admiral Yang in my mind. When the admiral died, it was Machungo who was with me to find his body, and it was he who held me back, and then carried Yang out of there, because I couldn’t.
I, for the rest of my life, will regret that I wasn’t able to do more for Admiral Yang. For years, my self-appointed duty was to do whatever I could to help him, and in the end, I failed at that task.
If Machungo understood his destiny, that thing he couldn’t escape, to be protecting me, he didn’t have to die with those regrets. Nearly fifty years later, I still don’t know how I should feel about that.