“The prayer meeting?” Anna said. “Good. And then not as good. Long. Very, very long.”
Tilly looked at her, the honesty getting her attention. “God, don’t I know it. No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.”
Their food arrived, a navy boy acting as waiter for the VIP civilians. Anna wondered what he thought of that. The UN military was all volunteer. He’d probably had a vision of what his military life would be like, and she doubted this was it. He carefully placed their food in front of them with the ease of long practice, gave them both a smile, and vanished back into the kitchen.
Galley. They called it a galley on ships.
Tilly picked halfheartedly at a farm-grown tomato and real mozzarella salad that Anna could have afforded on Europa by selling a kidney, and said, “Have you heard from Namono?”
Anna nodded while she finished chewing a piece of fried tofu. “I got another video last night. Nami gets bigger in every one. She’s getting used to the gravity, but the drugs make her cranky. We’re thinking about taking her off of them early, even if it means more physical therapy.”
“Awww,” Tilly said. It had a pro forma feel to it. Anna waited for her to change the subject.
“Robert hasn’t checked in for a week now,” Tilly said. She seemed resigned rather than sad.
“You don’t think he—”
“Cheating?” Tilly said with a laugh. “I wish. That would at least be interesting. When he locks himself away in his office at 2 a.m., you know what I catch him looking at? Business reports, stock values, spreadsheets. Robert is the least sexual creature I’ve ever met. At least until they invent a way to fuck money.”
Tilly’s casual obscenity had very quickly stopped bothering Anna. There was no anger in it. Like most of the things Tilly did, it struck her as another way to be noticed. To get people to pay attention to her. “How’s the campaign coming?” Anna said.
“Esteban? Who knows? Robert’s job is to be rich and have rich friends. I’m sure that part is coming along just fine.”
They ate in silence for a while, then without planning to, Anna said, “I don’t think I should have come.”
Tilly nodded gravely, as though Anna had just quoted gospel at her. “None of us should have.”
“We pray, and we get photographed, and we have meetings about interfaith cooperation,” Anna continued. “You know what we never talk about?”
“The Ring?”
“No. I mean yes. I mean we talk about the Ring all the time. What is it, what’s it for, why did the protomolecule make it.”
Tilly pushed her salad away and chewed another lozenge. “Then what?”
“What I thought we came here to do. To talk about what it means. Nearly a hundred spiritual leaders and theologians on this ship. And none of us is talking about what the Ring means.”
“For God?”
“Well, at least about God. Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.”
Tilly waved at the waiter and ordered a cocktail Anna had never heard of. The waiter seemed to know, though, and darted off to get it. “This seems like the kind of thing I’ll need a drink for,” she said. “Go on.”
“But how does the protomolecule fit into that? Is it alive? It murders us, but it also builds amazing structures that are astonishingly advanced. Is it a tool used by someone more like us, only smarter? And if so, are they creatures with a sense of the divine? Do they have faith? What does that look like?”
“If they’re even from the same God,” Tilly said, using a short straw to mix her drink, then taking a sip.
“Well, for some of us there’s only one,” Anna replied, then asked the waiter for tea. When he’d left again, she said, “It calls into question the entire concept of Grace. Well, not entirely, but it complicates it at the very least. The things that made the protomolecule are intelligent. Does that mean they have souls? They invade our solar system, kill us indiscriminately, steal our resources. All things we would consider sins if we were doing them. Does that mean they’re fallen? Did Christ die for them too? Or are they intelligent but soulless, and everything the protomolecule’s done is just like a virus doing what it’s programmed for?”
A group of workers in civilian jumpsuits came into the dining area and sat down. They ordered food from the waiter and talked noisily among themselves. Anna let them distract her while her mind chewed over the worries she hadn’t let herself articulate before today.
“And, really, it’s all pretty theoretical, even to me,” she continued. “Maybe none of that should matter to our faith at all, except that I have this feeling it will. That to most people, it will matter.”
Tilly was sipping her drink, which Anna knew from experience meant she was taking the conversation seriously. “Have you mentioned this to anyone?” Tilly said, prompting her to continue.
“Cortez acts like he’s in charge,” Anna replied. Her tea arrived and she blew on it for a while to cool it. “I guess I should talk to him.”
“Cortez is a politician,” Tilly said with a condescending smirk. “Don’t let his folksy Father Hank bullshit snow you. He’s here because as long as Esteban is in office, Cortez is a powerful man. This dog and pony show? This is all about votes.”
“I hate that,” Anna said. “I believe you. You understand this all better than I do. But I hate that you’re right. What a waste.”
“What would you ask Cortez for?”
“I’d like to organize some groups. Have the conversation.”
“Do you need his permission?” Tilly asked.
Anna thought of her last conversation with Nono and laughed. When she spoke, her voice sounded thoughtful even to her.
“No,” she said. “I guess I don’t.”
That night Anna was awakened from a dream about taking Nami to Earth and watching her bones break as the gravity crushed her, to a blaring alarm. It lasted only a few seconds, then stopped. A voice from her comm panel said, “All hands to action stations.”
Anna assumed this didn’t mean her, as she had no idea what an action station was. There were no more alarms, and the voice from the comm panel didn’t return with more dire pronouncements, but being startled out of her nightmare left her feeling wide awake and jumpy. She climbed out of her bunk, sent a short video message to Nono and Nami, and then put on some clothes.
There was very little traffic in the corridor and lifts. The military people she did see looked tense, though to her relief, not particularly frightened. Just aware. Vigilant.
Having nowhere else to go, she wandered into the officers’ mess and ordered a glass of milk. When it arrived, she was stunned to discover it was actual milk that had at some point come out of a cow. How much was the UN spending on this civilian “dog and pony show”?
The only other people in the mess hall were a few military people with officers’ uniforms, and a small knot of the civilian contractors drinking coffee and slumping in their seats like workers in the middle of an all-nighter. A dozen metal tables were bolted to the floor with magnetic chairs at their sides. Wall displays scrolled information for the ship’s officers, all of it gibberish to her. A row of cutouts opened into the galley, letting through plates of food and the sounds of industrial dishwashers and the smell of floor cleaner. It was like sitting too near the kitchen in a very, very clean restaurant.
Anna drank her milk slowly, savoring the rich texture and ridiculous luxury of it. A bell chimed on someone’s hand terminal, and two of the civilian workers got up and left. One stayed, a beautiful but sad-faced woman who looked down at a terminal on the table with a vacant, thousand-yard stare.