"Take me there," the bishop demanded. "Into the belly of the beast."
I led the way into the alien starship, the bishop surprisingly graceful in his pressure suit, completely at home in zero gee. I wondered how much of this the bishop had already seen. We worked our way slowly but steadily through the explored cabins and passages, the bishop taking it all in, asking few questions. He had insisted there be no record of our excursion, but even so we hardly spoke.595Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMhr5n7IDj5
I pointed out the cabin where Helsing had plummeted to his death; we pulled ourselves through the corkscrew passage that had killed Hayes and Hamic; I opened the door to a second room with gravity that had almost killed Riker, and let the bishop look down into that long drop. We paused a long time gazing into that there was something significant to that chamber. We crawled along the tubes of glass, surrounded by the dark, mysterious fluid. At last, after more than two hours, we reached the point where Earth-normal gravity began, and started walking. We went through the airlock leading into the pressurized section, then stopped in the circular chamber where Doyle had cut his own throat.
We stood silent and still for a long time, the bishop's breathing steady, calm and showing no distress. I kept thinking of Father O'Heron's warning about the bishop, and wondered if he had made this excursion to gather more evidence to bolster his proposal to abandon this ship.
"Why here?" the bishop asked.
"Why not?"
He turned to me. "Are you trying to be funny or clever?"
"Neither."
"It's a valid question. You don't think he just arbitrarily, randomly, removed his helmet and slashed his own throat, obvious to his surroundings?"
"I have no idea."
"Obviously. Well, maybe there's something in the air." With that the bishop quickly removed his own helmet and took a deep breath.
"Stop!" I said. "What are you doing?"
He said something, but I couldn't make out a word. The com systems are built into the helmets, and he was holding his down below his waist---too far away to pick up anything more than a faint tickle of speech. I turned on my exterior speaker and microphone. "What are you doing?"
"Take it off," he said. "Join me."
"No way! Put yours back on, Bishop. The air could be lethal."
"Are you afraid?" the bishop asked.
"Yes."
"That's honest. You needn't be. After all, the old woman is still alive."
"Yes, and she's lost her mind."
The bishop took another breath, closing his eyes. He held it for a long time, then he slowly let it out. Eventually he opened his eyes, looked at me, then reattached his helmet.
"I wanted to know what evil smells like," he said.
"Evil."
He nodded.
"I didn't think you believed in evil."
The bishop looked confused. "Why do you say that, Pavel?"
"You don't believe in God."
He hesitated for a moment, taken by surprise, I think. "How dare you!" he bellowed. "Of course I believe in God!"
"Why 'of course'?"
"Because I'm the bishop. I'm the head of the Church."
I shrugged. "It makes no difference."
He stared at me without speaking. The sound of breathing---his and mine both---seemed loud in my helmet. Then he turned away and walked past me, through the open doorway into the next chamber. I followed.
We entered the room where the old woman had been found. Everything was undisturbed----in the back corner was the sleeping mat and the pile of filthy blankets, littered with scraps of paper and the metal bowls smeared with the remains of old, dried food; in the other corner were stacks of mismatched, ragged items of clothing set aside for disposal. The bishop walked over to the cubicle next to the clothes, and looked down into the opening of the cylinder that had served as a toilet.595Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmwVVTfvOpU
"It looks uncomfortable," he said.
"I doubt that it was designed for human use," I said. "Certainly not designed by humans."
He made something of a brief snorting noise, but didn't comment further. After a brief glance at the clothes, he knelt beside the blankets and poked through them with his gloved hand. He picked up one of the larger scraps of paper, pressed it flat.
"She wasn't much of an artist," the bishop said dismissively.
He dropped the scrap and stood. "Show me where she was getting food."
"Out in the next corridor."
I led the way through the door at the far end of the room and into the long, wide passage. About ten steps into it, I stopped and gestured at an opening in the wall about chest-high.
"You set one of the bowls on that platform," I said, "then press one of those two squares." The squares were colored indentations in the wall next to the opening---one green, one red. "Red, and the bowl fills with water. Green, with a thick mixture of awful-looking stuff that's food. There are two tubes above where the bowl sits.
"And this still works?"
"Yes. We tried it. Water and food have been both analyzed in the labs, and there doesn't seem to be anything toxic in either, although no one has put it to the test. And the food is surprisingly nutritious. You'd get sick of the same thing all the time, I'm sure, but the lab techs say you could live on it forever."
The bishop was silent for a long time; then he turned to me and I could see a faint smile. "This would be my idea of Hell," he said. "It's no wonder the poor woman lost her mind."
We continued along the corridor in silence. When we reached the cluster of rooms, we went through each of them, but the bishop had no more questions or comments. Back in the corridor, he studied the strips of nacreous blue light that illuminated it.
At last he spoke again. "Let's assume, purely for the sake of this discussion, that I don't believe in God. That does not preclude my belief in evil. This ship is evil."
"Do you really believe that?"
"I'm sorry, but yes, I do. Have you forgotten what's happened on this ship?"
"Accidents."
"But why so many?"
"This is an alien starship. Everything about it is alien. We don't understand it, we don't know anything about it. Accidents are inevitable."
"And how is Doyle an accident?" he asked.
"He's not. But I don't need 'evil' to account for a man committing suicide. It's infrequent, but it's not unknown."
"He was a cleric," the bishop said. "His faith was everything to him. Suicide is a mortal sin."
"For those who believe."
"Yes, and Brother Doyle believed."
"Did he? He didn't act like a man of faith."
The bishop nodded in acknowledgment. "He was a weak man in many ways. And yes, what you suspect is true: he was with the team to be my eyes and ears. So he was capable of deceit. But he believed, Pavel. Suicide would have been unthinkable to him."
"A mortal sin, you say, but you held a Mass for him."
"Circumstances," the bishop said. "I think that, in a way, he did not kill himself. Something else did it to him."
I shook my head, realizing we could talk in circles like this for hours, getting nowhere.
"And what about the others?" he added.
"What others?" Although I knew what he meant.
"Amber Faulken, Riker, Helsing, Riker's wife and daughter. Tiffany Fox. I can't remember all the names. How do you account for them?"
"I do not."
"Exactly."
But what the hell did "exactly" mean? I didn't want to talk about it anymore. I was as disturbed by what had happened to people as the bishop was; probably more than he was. I didn't pretend to understand it; I couldn't even offer a reasonable explanation. But I knew that to attribute to the alien ship an abstract concept such as Evil, to somehow infuse this dead, inanimate object with that quality and blame our own psychological and emotional failings on it, was absurd. At the same time, I recognized that it was also absurd to deny that something extraordinary was occurring among those who had explored the ship, and that its effects were often devastating.
"What does it smell like?" I asked.
"What?"
"Evil."
He gave me that faint smile again. "Like unwashed flesh and bodily wastes."
With that, he started back along the corridor, and I followed.595Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAX8Bb5twLb
