Nova 4

JEFF DUNTEMANN Our Lady of the Endless Sky

An editor should not exercise his personal prejudices. At least not all of the time. I am about as religious as Alfred Bester and clasp the small kernel of fame for having sold the first SF story with an Atheist as a hero. Therefore I should bounce any story with a trace of religious orientation. But I cannot when the story is as excellent as is this one.

Under a glassy dome made invisible by the lunar night, the Mother of Cod stretched out her arms to embrace the stone horizon. Beyond the tips of her marble fingers rock and steel lay ash-gray under a waxing Earth. Above her peaceful white brow the stars stood guard to all eternity in a sky so deep it had no bottom.

In front of the native granite pedestal in the nearly finished church, Father Bensmiller knelt and prayed.

Let them see what I see now, Mother, and they would run to you.

A faint crunching vibration entered his knees from the dusty floor, newly inlaid with pastel blue tile. Bensmiller looked up. Bright light-flashes off metal dazzled his eyes. The polished aluminum boom of a crane hove into view and wobbled slowly out of sight beyond the wall which supported the transparent dome. They were driving it to the construction site, where a third of the station personnel were planting new machines in the lunar soil.

Bensmiller went back to his personal miseries at the feet of the statue. Not an hour before Monsignor Carif had spoken to him on the S-band from Houston. As twice in the past, the news was of the rising number of American churches closing their doors permanently. Not due to lack of funds; the Inter-faith Council assured each pastor a living and attempted to keep the buildings standing. It seemed pointless, however, to preach the Gospel to empty pews.

They have lost their horizons. They can't tell the sky from the concrete.

Unlimited energy had put synthetic food into even the poorest of mouths on the United Continent. Physical suffering through disease and hunger were becoming rare. Where, then, were the multitudes who should have been giving thanks?

Earth hovered permanently over Mary's white shoulder. Help them look up, Mother.

He felt another vibration through the floor. It was slower than before, and wavered in frequency. No crane boom showed itself above the walls. Bensmiller rose from his knees, curious, and climbed the first four steps of a light metal ladder which the electricians had left behind.

Beyond the reach of the station's huge blue-white night lamps the landscape was shadowy and unreal. Grinding its way down the gravel-paved road outside the dome was a huge ten-wheeled flatbed truck, its bulbous tires flattening under the weight of its large blockish load. More junk for the construction site. Bensmiller wasn't sure what they were building there. The site at the end of the makeshift road was near Cluster A of glittering Garden domes, each dome itself a cluster of warm yellow stars, each star an artificial sun above a section of a Garden. The project had something to do with the generation of power for the Garden complexes. Station Commander Kreski always demanded expansion, new construction, toward the still-distant end of total self-sufficiency for Station Grissom. Every new dome, every new corridor which snaked across the dust of Sinus Iridum came closer to cutting off the ties to the blue planet perpetually in the southern sky.

Two small beetle-like trucks were following the large flatbed toward the site. Bensmiller shook his head and climbed down the ladder. He dusted the grout from his knees at the bottom. It was more machines. On wheels,on treads, under domes and beneath the lunar soil the machines proliferated. Still, only seven new people had been added to the station staff in four months. The priest wondered why they didn't just send the men home and let the machines spread themselves solidly across the moon's surface.

Father Thomas Bensmiller picked up his clipboard and continued sketching out his report on the progress of the moon church. The main altar was almost finished. The great slab of genuine maple, the first of its kind in all history to rise above the smoky pall of Earth, would soon bear the reenactment of the Supper. It had been set on its rough-hewn moon-granite pillar, and would be consecrated within the month. The rotator for the two-sided cross had been set discreetly beneath the floor in front of the altar. A lectern of woodlike synthetic stood to the altar's right. Bensmiller mentioned them and made note of his satisfaction with them on the multiple forms.

Only a little remained unfinished: painting, some electrical work, the pews for the faithful and the large dual cross itself, Corpus on one side and bare gold on the other.

Bensmiller turned to the statue. Crafted on Earth of Italian marble, it towered more than two meters high on its pedestal of lunar rock The stars shone on her undimmed. He could not look at her and not feel a cool shiver of wonder down his spine. How many kilos of propellant brought you out of Earth's arms to this place, Lady? Kreski kept telling him, over and over, but Bensmiller had made it a point not to remember. Kreski loved to speculate on the riches of the Church spent to build a church on the moon when millions starved in the enslaved East.

But the poor will always be with you. He had said that, the Christ. And the power of the Church could not always reach past the walls of oppression. God would care for His poor when His ministers were barred from them. Yes. The Lord would care for them. Kreski would nod, and nod, and walk away, still nodding.

At those times Father Bensmiller felt very small, and false somehow. Kreski was a huge man, brilliant and cold in his understanding of machines and moon-science. Thomas Bensmiller, third son of an Indianapolis housewife, dark and short, mouse-quick and mouse-quiet in all he did, was no match for the station commander and shrank from Kreski's sharp challenges. What was a priest doing on the moon when there was work to be done on Earth? Bensmiller glanced around at the incomplete church, and thought of the machines and thrumming activity further beyond. Man was running for the stars. God's administrators, such as Monsignor Garif, had decided that the Gospel must follow. Thomas Bernberger had been the first to go. Garif assured him he would be the first of many. There were many men like Kreski on the Moon. It would be difficult.

Give us your strength, Mother. The worst obstacles here are not the rocks and vacuum.

The Mother of God smiled down at Father Bensmiller, as though to say, That is your problem, my son. HI handle my ang\e, you handle yours. Bensmiller had to grin. What a face that sculptor had given her. She had the face of a card shark.

Ten aces up each flowing sleeve, and a dozen secrets behind each ace.

Bensmiller stiffened. The Mother of God had nodded. Then he realized that the floor had shifted sharply under his feet at the same time. It had been a quick twitch, sudden, single, sharp. Moonquakes happened infrequently in that area. Moonquakes, however, were slow, languorous rearrangements of the crust that seldom effected solidly based structures. Explosion! But where was the sound?

Bensmiller glanced up at the Earth. Man had left sounds behind him. He hurried out of the almost-finished church. On the outside of the thick steel door the words were etched into a copper plate: Our Lady of the Endless Sky.

Cod have mercy on them, he prayed. The decompression sirens were already beginning their nightmare wail.

Kreski hovered like a mad vulture over Lock Six. The lock monitor screens showed men galomphing about outside, weird figures swimwalking in the ocean of one-sixth g. The silver hood of a light crane glinted for a moment under the night lamps. It crawled past the unreal gray vista of the screen and was gone. Other men followed, other machines with them. In the strange light the men and machines looked related, first cousins removed by a double layer of fiberglass and jointed stainless steel. Bensmiller's eyes drifted to the painted sign hanging above one of the monitor consoles, reading in black Roman: We are all in this together. He could never quite fathom it, never quite decide what its real portent was. Somehow it seemed to him that the machines were saying it. We are all brothers under the sheet metal. It disgusted him. For the last half of the twentieth century Man had been at war with his machines. Now, in the first half of the twenty-first, he was becoming one of them.

The oily smell of machines was very plain in his nostrils. Was this the first skirmish in a new war?

Kreski was punching buttons by the door of the lock. An embarrassed gleep announced the outer door opening. Kreski caught a glimpse of Bensmiller out of the corner of his eye and whipped around.

"Bensmiller, are you deaf? Go back to your cubbyhole and turn on the air!"

The priest noticed then that, save for the helmet, Kreski was fully suited. The sirens remained in the background, not quite real. His ears had not popped.

"But if there are injuries . . ."

"Damn!" Kreski reddened in anger. "On the moon you're alive or you're dead. I'd sooner you be alive. Mind those sirens, man!"

Bensmiller, cowed somewhat by the huge man's rage, turned and reentered the main corridor. The lock was cycling double-time emergency, air screaming protest at the furious pumps. The priest tried to shut out the noise.

Around the corner stood the Reverend Arthur Chamblen, the other half of the Interfaith Council Lunar Mission. Graying, sixtyish. He was a proud man, tall and lean, proud of the fact that he had been certified physically able to withstand the rigors of space travel, proud of the degree in astronomy, which allowed him to work on the small base telescope backing up the four hundred incher seventy kilometers away. Bensmiller, whose contribution to the station was limited to being caretaker of the numerous laboratory animals, envied Chamblen at times. The man spoke confidently about many things. He had a sharp mind and had no qualms about laying criticism where he thought it belonged.

"He's right about that, you know. Alive or dead. Not much in between." The voice was cold, unmoved. Less the voice of a minister than a physicist. The eyes were much the same, pale blue, ice blue, certain.

"Then why aren't you locked in your room like a good boy?" Bensmiller was sweating.

"I was looking for you. When the sirens began, everyone came running. But you."

"My ears haven't popped."

"The sirens are for a reason. Let's go."

With a weird whining snap the inner lock door yielded and hissed into its sheath. Both men stopped. Among the confused noises from Lock Six was the sound of a man in pain.

Bensmillers' breath left him in a short sigh. He turned and ran back around the corner to the lock. Chamblen said nothing, merely continued to walk, slowly, almost hesitantly, back toward the tiny cubicle to which the sirens called him.

Three men had been brought in. Dusty anonymous suited figures milled around them, tearing at resistant half-metal suit cloth with fingers and knives and sheet metal shears. Even as Bensmiller was about to reach them several men in clean pressure suits pushed by him pulling two surgical carts. They had the red cross on the white band around their arms. He flattened himself against the wall to let them pass, then continued to press forward.

Kreski was shrieking orders and shouting into a wireless microphone. Disembodied voices crackled reply from speakers in the walls. Father Bensmiller elbowed his way between two of the dusty-suited men and looked down on the first body.

It was in several pieces, crusted with melting blood-slush. Bensmiller glanced away, then steeled himself and looked again. The medics were roughly piling the fragments into an opaque bag. The head and shoulders and one arm were still intact, although blackened and the faceplate opaque. Bensmiller was regretfully glad of that.

Eternal rest grant unto him. . . .

The other two were at least mostly intact. Both had been brought in inside emergency pressure bags for suit-puncture accidents, and both were still alive. One, his name Monahan, the priest had met briefly at the first Mass held in his little room. Monahan's left leg below the knee was a bloody ruin, his foot nearly sheared off at the ankle. He moaned softly. The other man was not familiar to Bensmiller, and was breathing noisily and spitting up blood. His eyes were closed and he did not move his limbs.

The speakers began to shout the story for the benefit of the rest of the station. "Hydrogen leak in feed tubes to unfinished fusion plant leading to explosion Garden Four destroyed Cardens Two and Three damaged slightly H-culture team injured no atomics involved repeat no atomics involved. . . ."

That seemed to be what separated a minor disaster from a major one. Whether atomics were involved. Human life didn't seem to enter into it. Bensmiller watched the medics lift Monahan onto one of the carts, bereft of his suit and all but tatters of his blue longjohns. A tourniquet had been crudely twisted around his left leg above the knee. He continued to emit low sounds of pain and occasional muttered obscenities. Blood was everywhere, on the hands of the medics, soaking into the padding of the cart, still oozing from the ruin of his leg. Bensmiller pressed forward, reached out and put his hand on the man's forehead.

Cod; Father, Son, and Spirit, he was a good man. He came to Mass once. He worked hard. I know him. He worked . . . hard.

The Sacrament was in his cubicle. Time, time, that was all ... He started making the sign of the cross on Monahan's forehead when Kreski grabbed him by the shoulder and roughly pulled him back.

"Get that man to surgery. Bensmiller, stand back or I'll club you." The station commander held a heavy sheet-metal shears in one hand. Bensmiller stepped back while the medics pulled the muttering man away.

Kreski tossed his shears to the floor next to his discarded helmet. He faced the priest, sweat-drops dotting his thin sideburns. "What the hell's the matter with you?"

The ruddy face was furious, the man still breathing deeply and quickly. It was not an easy face to confront. Bensmiller licked his lips. "I'm a priest. These men are my spiritual responsibility. If they feel depressed, I encourage them. If they feel guilty, I hear their confession. If they're about to die, I give them the last sacraments. That's my job. This is my parish."

It did not seem the right thing to say at all, somehow, but Bensmiller could not harden before Kreski's sweating fury. Kreski turned away for a moment, wiped some of the grime from his face and turned back, his anger dampened.

"You want to make mumbo-jumbo over Odner, go ahead. He won't hear you, but it might make you feel better." Kreski pointed with a gloved hand to the other injured man, still lying on a makeshift pallet on the floor. The medics had thrown a sheet over him. Bensmiller, flushed with a sinking bottomless dread, bent down over the body and pulled the sheet back. The face was ashen, the mouth closed. Dried and drying blood discolored the cheeks and neck. The chest held no pulse. "A ten-ton heat exchanger fell on him. Slowly. His insides are smashed to pulp."

"But..." Bensmiller pulled the sheet farther back. He felt like a ghoul at an opened grave. The body was whole. It had not seemed very damaged, was not twisted or torn out of shape. But where the skin showed through the ripped material of the longjohns, the flesh was purple and black. Crushed. The priest pulled the sheet forward quickly as though to replace it over the head, then paused. He looked up at Kreski. The name was circling like a hawk in his mind. Odner . . . Odner . . . Odner. It did not seem Jewish, nor conspicuously Catholic, nor conspicuously anything. It was only a name and a pain-whitened face attached to a crushed body. "What was he?" Bensmiller asked the commander. .

Kreski glared at the question. "A human being." He pulled off his large gray gloves and tucked them under his wide pressure suit belt. "That, and a damned good farmer. That's all I know about him."

The priest dropped his eyes to the corpse. He moistened his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and made the sign of the cross on the gray forehead.

"I baptize you in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." Father, find a place for your son Odner. He was a damned good farmer.

"He can't do it."

Chamblen shifted and looked at the floor. "He can. I'm sorry, Tom, but he can."

Bensmiller leaned against the railing protecting the statue of the Mother of God, and looked angrily around the church. There were no pews, but the pews were to have come almost last. All of the statues were in place, at that moment unhidden by the discreet curtains which would at the push of a button bring the church into concordance with the Lutheran doctrine on icons. There was the lectern, stern and simple. Only the pews and the large cross still remained in the storage dome, soon to be uncrated and put in their places.

Mary looked down at the priest and minister, card-shark smile warm and strange.

"This isn't his. It was paid for out of church pockets. Your church and my church, and a lot of other churches. What about the other ministers who were to come after us when all this was finished? What gives him the right?"

The Reverend Arthur Chamblen blinked, and made a gesture of obviousness. "Clause 70. That's all he needs."

Thomas Bensmiller tightened inside, glanced up past Mary's outstretched arms to infinity. He was caught in a corner a third million kilometers deep and as high as the endless sky. He held the directive in his hand.

TO: INTERFAITH COUNCIL LUNAR MISSION,

REVS. CHAMBLEN & BENSMILLER

FROM: THE OFFICE OF THE COMMANDER

OFFICIAL: AS OF NINETEEN MAY 2029 INVOKING CLAUSE 70 REINSTATING GARDEN FOUR INDEFINITELY AT AREA EW9D. REMOVE ALL NONSTRUCTURAL ITEMS IMMEDIATELY.

"He didn't even give me my own 'Rev.' Nuts.

Chamblen took the outthrust directive, folded it neatly and tucked it away very calmly in an inside pocket. Bensmiller did not want to catch his eyes. They were, as always, too blue, too level, too at peace with the inevitable.

Bensmiller felt like fighting. "This was no minor disaster. Men were killed, Why doesn't he take the best interest of this place to heart and send home for another dome."

Chamblen grinned. "That would cost fifty million dollars out of taxpayers' pockets. It would have to be legislated. Legislation takes time. Months."

Bensmiller broke away from Chamblen's ever-logical hammerlock, strolled eyes-down toward the lectern. Halfway there he turned back. "So we'll wait. Are we going to die? They fixed the other two. Does one dome out of commission mean instant destruction? I thought they would have designed this place a little better than that."

Chamblen nodded. "They did. We're not going to die."

"Then why can't I have my church?" Bensmiller tried to sound as firm and certain as Chamblen, Kreski and all the others always did. But a ghost behind the eyes of the tall minister returned every time to haunt him and knock the sticks out from under his feeble protests. Chamblen always had an answer. Kreski always had an answer. Everyone always had an answer. All but Thomas Bensmiller, who was only a pHest.

Chamblen leaned back on the railing and brought one hand up, to place a finger lightly against one cheek, as though anticipating an itch should the itch come. "I'm sure you know more or less what goes on in those domes. They grow a certain plant there in intense light on a glut of nutrients. That plant is tailor-made, in a way, to be what I would call hyperthyroid. They grow like crazy, soak up nutrients like crazy and photo-synthesize like crazy. Their rate of C0₂/0₂ conversion is unbelievable. They're also fairly tasty." Chamblen grinned. "You know, those army-green 'bugger biscuits.' It's the same stuff."

The itch came. Chamblen scratched it. The hand returned to the railing. Bensmiller was running the process hazily through his mind, trying to recall the dynamics of a system he was hardly equipped to understand. "There are ten domes. Nine, now. Does ten percent make that much of a difference?"

"Depends, Tom, depends. We could leave things as they are now and continue on nine domes. It might get a shade stuffier and we might eat a little less. But the next time a dome goes down we'd all be in bad, bad trouble."

"This has never happened before." Bensmiller was adamant, and hoped he looked it. "I don't think it will happen again."

The minister shook his head. "Always count on the unexpected. It can kill you. You know, Tom, I'm not selling out. It's a blow, I know. But we're no worse off than we were before. Honestly, do you know why they built this church here and sent you to staff it?"

The words came easily. "To allow the Gospel to follow Man as he conquers the universe."

Chamblen clucked. "Right out of one of Monsignor Garif's pamphlets. I know Garif. He's a shrewd politician. He's the one who pushed like crazy for a church up here, and he pushed you through as Catholic chaplain. You're one of his friends, from way back."

"Yes, but still. . . ."

"And that line is pure PR. The truth is, the Catholic Church is fighting a losing battle on Earth, and Garif wants to plant a pocket of orthodoxy here as precedent for future extension of the Church once we branch out beyond the Earth-Moon system. You're as orthodox as they come, and you think highly of Garif. What would you have expected him to do?"

Bensmiller, for once, allowed himself a smile. "You're being a little cynical for a minister of the Lord."

"No. I'm adapting to the environment. This is a no-nonsense place, peopled by no-nonsense men. There's no room for the extraneous. After having thought about it quite a bit, I'm still not convinced we need a church up here at all."

"I'm surprised you don't declare yourself extraneous and jump out an airlock. You do believe in God, I hope."

"I do." Chamblen nodded. "God to me is a loving Father who once cared very carefully for His newborn sons, but now, the sons having grown out of their cradle, expects them to get along more on their own."

Bensmiller refused to look at the minister. "I'm sorry we don't see God the same way."

Chamblen stood up and began to walk toward the door. He had gotten most of the way there when he stopped in the starlight, and tugged on the lapels of his black shirt, which was opened at the collar and dampened deeper black under the arms. "Tom, see it this way. You never wanted to spend the last dime in your penny loafers, did you?"

Bensmiller ignored him.

"Well, you're asking Kreski to spend our last dime up here. I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry, but I'm on his side this time." He walked the rest of the way into shadow and grasped the door handle. "I'll remove our nonstructural items. You take it easy for a while. You've got to cope, Tom."

The door closed with solemn slowness behind him. Bensmiller and the Mother of God were alone again in the almost-church. He continued to glare at the walls, not wanting to catch her smile again and feel the pain of not knowing what it was he didn't know.

What is your ace, Mother? Play it, please.

Father Bensmiller stood to the left of the cast-wide doors, watching. He watched the men rip the pastel blue tiles from the floor, their grout barely dry. He watched them hammer ragged craters in the new concrete and draw forth from the ruin snaking cables and twisting tubes, carrying electricity and water to feed the strange sorceries he had never found need study. He watched them rip his lectern from the floor, and plant in its place a blinking, multikeyed computer terminal, which drew the same power that would have illuminated the Gospel at some future Celebration.

He kept nodding to himself. They were efficient. They worked like madmen, around the clock, never pausing. They used every sliver of space in the church. Every square inch under the dome was mapped and assigned to some subtle and necessary purpose.

It seemed to him that every time he glanced at the door beside him a forklift was rumbling in, heaped with crates and bundles of copper piping and spools of spaghetti wiring. In moments the lift was emptied and gone, only to return in a handful of minutes bearing more trash to be laid at the feet of the Mother of God.

Who is their Cod, Mary? What force drives them like this?

Even Kreski was there, his hands in the chaos up to his elbows. Often he paused to give orders, but when there were no more orders to give he was back down on his knees, brazing copper fittings to a pipeline running down what should have been the main aisle. The flame hissed softly, cleanly. Drips of molten lead hit the floor and froze. In that hard face there was a tension, an urgency almost frightening. Kreski was running ahead of something greater than himself, when every impression he had ever given Bensmiller stated in solid surety that nothing on the Moon was greater than he.

Other men were bolting together skeletal tables of perforated magnesium, upon which were being laid the hydroponic garden units. When the forklift arrived carrying one of the long, narrow, coffinlike black bins sprouting with tiny green newborn shoots, work stopped. Four men lined up along the unit, positioned their hands carefully beneath it and lifted with a machinelike precision. They carried it levelly, slowly, and when they approached, all the other workers stood back. Only when the unit was positioned on its table and firmly bolted down did the welders take up their torches and the electricians their pliers. Row after row of garden units filled the church from front to rear, separated by the pipe-tangled main aisle.

Men crawled like animals beneath the rat's nest of magnesium beams, pulling plastic tubing and multicolored wires. The clink and scratch and scrape and tap of wire and tube faded into a rushed and uneasy whisper filling the dome and echoing past Bensmiller's ears until he wanted to cry out against it. The stink of sweat and ammonium flux made tangible the blasphemy, which otherwise would only come half-clear. He would look outside the dome for solace to the calm sterile wastes, but there the crawling cranes and leaping devils in metal suits were raising the new power lines and settling a new fusion plant into its yesterday-poured foundations. Blasphemy was everywhere. They were forcing him to wallow in it, and he was drowning.

Along the walls they were hanging the narrow aluminum ducts, through which the air would soon pass, driven by pumps laid beneath the floor. It all went together so quickly, so logically. It seemed as though the men in the dome were merely throwing the beams and ducts together. Everything fit so well, so quickly the first time. There seemed to be no effort to it. And yet Bensmiller could see and smell the grimy sweat streaming from their faces. He saw the concentrating grimaces, the set jawlines.

This work ... as important to them. Bless their labors, Mary.

In time, only one space remained where a garden unit might be placed, and the tubes and wires were everywhere nearby. Bensmiller left hastily, not wanting to see the altar of God plugged into the clucking machines.

The funeral of Odner and Beckwith was held in Lock One, largest lock and single area large enough for all station personnel to gather. Monahan was there, on a surgical cart plugged into the medical monitors. Soon after, the rocket took Odner back to the arms of Earth, and Beckwith, as his wife requested, was laid beneath the lunar soil Bensmiller watched the coffin vanish beneath the dust through a port, and then fled through the iron hallways of Station Grissom, past the bulletin boards and the graffitti, around the ubiquitous machines, to the only place where he might find shelter.

They had removed the plaque from the door. Inside was nothing but the continuous mechanical purr of automatic activity; the H-culture team was lingering by the lock. Bensmiller recoiled at the sight of the completed garden, yet deftly slipped between the black coffins full of sprouting vigorous life, working his way toward the now-oddly beckoning arms of the Mother of God. Men live, and men die. The priest mediates between death and life. Life comes from God, and goes back to God. Something in him burned to think of bending that path around and feeding life with death, growth with waste, breath with suffocation. Where could God fit into such a closed circle? He touched one of the brilliant green leaves. He could not understand. If God could not fit, no priest could either, extept by selling himself, to the machines and tending their needs while the circle of life ate its own tail.

"Blessed Mother evicted by a radish patch. God help us." He wanted to look up at the Virgin, to draw strength from her, but could not.

Bensmiller bent down and sniffed directly above the carpet of close-planted leaves. The air seemed fresher there. Or was it just a memory?

Pushing himself away from the garden units, he made his way to where the lectern had been. The computer terminal made a soft thrumming sound as it monitored the pressures and pulses of the machines all around. Bensmiller chuckled bitterly. They have uprooted me and planted a machine in my place, he thought. In this place, with such a congregation, perhaps it was just as well. He laid his hands on either side of the terminal keyboard, tears coming that he refused to fight, and thumbed the love-worn pages of his memory.

"The Gospel According to St. Luke," he said, looking out at the silent rows of green. "Listen to the word of the Lord, damn you radishes!"

For two days Father Bensmiller avoided Chamblen and remained alone with his thoughts. The dilemma ran through his mind again and again while he cleaned the endless rows of rat cages and talked to the sad-eyed dogs waggling at him through the close-mesh screening. He wanted to fight, and place his banner on the side of Life; but cast about as he might, he could not distinguish the lines of battle. Men walked the empty wastes with body-function monitors tattling continually to the machines, and felt safer by it. It was hard for him to believe. The poor dogs were too stupid to comprehend the electrodes taped to their skulls and flanks. They wagged whenever he offered his hand to them. Happiness was just another plate of bugger biscuits. He watched men brag about how sensitive their monitors were, and how completely the machines guarded their welfare. He wondered without praying if men would ever again be able to live without them. Nothing in any of his books gave any hint at an answer, nor even so much as admitted the question.

Not long after B-shift dinner call on the second day, the buzzer roused Bensmiller from an uneasy sleep. He put his cot in order and shoved the door handle down. Outside the air tight portal was a man in a wheelchair, smiling.

"Sorry I can't come in, Father," Monahan said. "My wheels won't make it through your door. But I wanted to come over and thank you anyway."

Bensmiller smiled. His eyes burned a little. "Are you sure you should be up and around like that?"

Monahan laughed, and lightly thumped the blanket-covered stump that ended just above his left knee. "Takes more than a little leg missing to lay me low. People heal pretty quick in one-sixth g. I should be on crutches next week, if I'm lucky."

The smiling face peering up at him through a castwide airtight door moved him terribly for one long moment. "1 don't know why you should want to thank me."

"Kreski told me you tried to give me the last sacraments."

"I see."

"Takes guts to tangle with that old monkey wrench."

"He had your best interests in mind."

"Yeah." Monahan grinned sourly. "He's hell to get along with, but he knows his business. Like I said, thanks. Also because I think you're good luck."

"Oh?" Bensmiller was startled.

"Sure. Me and the other guys from H-culture have it figured out. Reverend Chamblen was here for six months before you were, and nobody talked much about a church. But when you get here they start building one right away, and as soon as it's finished, but not finished so that it would be all sacred and everything, that's the time when my Garden blows up. The church was ready and waiting for us to move in."

"But. . . ." Bensmiller was astonished. The man spoke as though the destruction of a church were a blessing sent by God.

"Sixty hours, from total destruction to full operation, in a dome that was never designed for life-support machinery. I call that pretty close to a miracle. It'll be something to tell my kids about."

"But I don't see why. . . ."

"It wasn't easy," Monahan said, his tone gone more serious. "Take it from me, it was a bitch."

Amen.

"No, honestly, Father, me and the guys got to thinking about it, and found you were pretty lucky to us. If they hadn't had a dome, we would have had no emergency margin. Houston wouldn't have liked that. They might have issued a Directive Five."

Directive Five. Evacuate Immediately. The end of Station Grissom. Bensmiller shook his head in wonderment. "I never knew it had been that serious."

Monahan whistled. "Not anymore, but for a while there it was really touch and go... And if it had turned out to be go, it would really have broken my heart. That trip home would have been a one-way trip for me. One-legged men aren't popular as flight or station crew. So things didn't turn out too bad. Except for you, I guess."

"Well, I. . . ."

"You probably feel like a dog that got kicked out of his doghouse so that it could be used as a chicken coop. That must hurt a little, but I figure God forgives more easily than nature. Anyway, it wasn't really fair for you to get shoved out into the cold without someplace to go, so I leaned on Kreski a little bit, and demanded the space in the storage dome where all the spare parts for the new Garden came from. There's quite a hole in there now. So the rest of the H-culture guys got together off-shift, uncrated the crucifix and a couple of pews, and we made you a church."

"Kreski let you do that." It was a statement of disbelief.

"We threatened to dye the bugger biscuits purple. They're his favorite food and that's the color he hates the most. We got our way."

"I have to say thanks. I mean. . . ."

"No. Just say Mass. For us. We want to give thanks a little. When do I tell them?"

"Tomorrow morning. 0900."

"Thanks, Father. You got some real grit, you know that?"

"No. But I'll take your word for it. Take care of yourself." The door swung closed as the man rolled away.

The Mother of God stretched out her arms to embrace the barren lands. Over her white shoulder had been thrown a sheaf of electric cables. Glued to her crown was a photoelectric sensor.

Sunlight, earthgleam. Life must have its light.

"In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. . . ."

Between shadow-cast crates and ranks of stacked barrels, seven human beings clustered around a slab of scrap synthetic. Over it had been laid a fine linen cloth. One one side of the cloth was the golden cup. On the other, a small plate of dark green biscuits.

Mary stretched out her arms. In each hand, fastened with strap-iron, was a cluster of sodium-mercury lights. Other pseudo-suns grew on stalks all around. The dome sang with light.

I saw a woman, clothed with the sun, and the Moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

Twelve stars. Twelve hundred stars. Twelve thousand stars.

Twelve trillion stars.

Mother, they are yours. We will make them yours.

"Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy."

Seven persons paused, silently, and recalled their faults. Every eight seconds each took a breath. Life was at work there, in their lungs, in their blood, in every cell. Oxygen to carbon dioxide. Energy. Life. God forgive us.

The machines hummed with their own life. About Mary's shoulders the ducts wound, throbbing their own purpose. Speaking their own language. Molecules of gas wafted over tiny shafts of green. A moment ago, a breath. The breath of a priest, of man, of woman, of Catholic and Protestant and Atheist. The breath of six dogs and three hundred white rats. The last breath of a human being. Someday the first breath of a moonborn infant.

Life from life, breath from breath. Death is only the intermediary. Mary stretches out her arms to embrace the tiny fields of green, growing in chemical baths under forty artificial suns. Tiny shoots of green taking the bad air apart with sunlit crowbars, giving back their breath, giving up their food. The new air enters the ducts once more.

The circle is unbroken.

We are all in this together.

"This is my body. . . ."

Mary stretches out her arms to embrace life. All life. Green life, animal life, life that walks on two legs and one leg. She embraces the false life, the buzzing circuits and leaping rockets.

"Give us this day our daily bread. . . ."

For these things are necessary. Man lives not by bread alone. He must have his ecosphere.

"Go, the Mass is ended." Our days are beginning, just beginning.

Thank you, Mother. Help me understand these things.

On her head a crown of twelve trillion stars.