Identity Theft and Other Stories Read online

  And it’s here again, in this short story, which was written for my dear friend Julie E. Czerneda’s Space Inc., an anthology about off-Earth jobs.

  “Damned social engineers,” said Boothby, frowning his freckled face. He looked at me, as if expecting an objection to the profanity, and seemed disappointed that I didn’t rise to the bait.

  “As you said earlier,” I replied calmly, “it doesn’t make any practical difference.”

  He tried to get me again: “Damn straight. Whether Jody and I just live together or are legally married shouldn’t matter one whit to anyone but us.”

  I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of telling him it mattered to God; I just let him go on. “Anyway,” he said, spreading hands that were also freckled, “since we have to be married before the Company will give us a license to have a baby, Jody’s decided she wants the whole shebang: the cake, the fancy reception, the big service.”

  I nodded. “And that’s where I come in.”

  “That’s right, Padre.” It seemed to tickle him to call me that. “Only you and Judge Hiromi can perform ceremonies here, and, well…”

  “Her honor’s office doesn’t have room for a real ceremony, with a lot of attendees,” I offered.

  “That’s it!” crowed Boothby, as if I’d put my finger on a heinous conspiracy. “That’s exactly it. So, you see my predicament, Padre.”

  I nodded. “You’re an atheist. You don’t hold with any religious mumbo-jumbo. But, to please your bride-to-be, you’re willing to have the ceremony here at Saint Teresa’s.”

  “Right. But don’t get the wrong idea about Jody. She’s not…”

  He trailed off. Anywhere else on Mars, declaring someone wasn’t religious, wasn’t a practicing Christian or Muslim or Jew, would be perfectly acceptable—indeed, would be the expected thing. Scientists, after all, looked askance at anyone who professed religion; it was as socially unacceptable as farting in an airlock.

  But now Boothby was unsure about giving voice to what in all other circumstances would have been an easy disclaimer. He’d stopped in here at Saint Teresa’s over his lunch hour to see if I would perform the service, but was afraid now that I’d turn him down if he revealed that I was being asked to unite two nonbelievers in the most holy of institutions.

  He didn’t understand why I was here—why the Archdiocese of New York had put up the money to bring a priest to Mars, despite the worldwide shortage of Catholic clergy. The Roman Catholic Church would always rather see two people married by clergy than living in sin—and so, since touching down at Utopia Planitia, I’d united putative Protestants, secular Jews, and more. And I’d gladly marry Boothby and his fiancée. “Not to worry,” I said. “I’d be honored if you had your ceremony here.”

  Boothby looked relieved. “Thank you,” he replied. “Just, you know, not too many prayers.”

  I forced a smile. “Only the bare minimum.”

  Boothby wasn’t alone. Almost everyone here thought having me on Mars was a waste of oxygen. But the New York Diocese was rich, and they knew that if the church didn’t have a presence early on in Bradbury Colony, room would never be made for it.

  There had been several priests who had wanted this job, many with much better theological credentials than I had. But two things were in my favor. First, I had low food requirements, doing fine on just 1200 calories a day. And second, I have a Ph.D. in astronomy, and had spent four years with the Vatican observatory.

  The stars had been my first love; it was only later that I’d wondered who put them there. Ironically, taking the priest job here on Mars had meant giving up my celestial research, although being an astronomer meant that I could double for one of the “more important” colonists, if he or she happened to get sick. That fact appeased some of those who had tried to prevent my traveling here.

  It had been a no-brainer for me: studying space from the ground, or actually going into space. Still, it seemed as though I was the only person on all of Mars who was really happy that I was here.

  Hatch ’em, match ’em, and dispatch ’em—that was the usual lot for clergy. Well, we hadn’t had any births yet, although we would soon. And no one had died since I’d arrived. That left marriages.

  Of course, I did perform mass every Sunday, and people did come out. But it wasn’t like a mass on Earth. Oh, we had a choir—but the people who had joined it all made a point of letting each other know that they weren’t religious; they simply liked to sing. And, yes, there were some bodies warming the pews, but they seemed just to be looking for something to do; leisure-time activities were mighty scarce on Mars.

  Perhaps that’s why there were so few troubled consciences: there was nothing to get into mischief with. Certainly, no one had yet come for confession. And when we did communion, people always took the wine—of which there wasn’t much available elsewhere—but I usually had a bunch of wafers left at the end.

  Ah, well. I would do a bang-up job for Boothby and Jody on the wedding—so good that maybe they’d let me perform a baptism later.

  “Father Bailey?” said a voice.

  I turned around. Someone else needing me for something, and on a Thursday? Well, well, well…

  “Yes?” I said, looking at the young woman.

  “I’m Loni Sinclair,” she said. “From the Communications Center.”

  “What can I do for you, my child?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “But a message came in from Earth for you—scrambled.” She held out her hand, proffering a thin white wafer. I took it, thanked her, and waited for her to depart. Then I slipped it into my computer, typed my access code, and watched in astonishment as the message played.

  “Greetings, Father Bailey,” said the voice that had identified itself as Cardinal Pirandello of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. “I hope all is well with you. The Holy Father sends his special apostolic blessing.” Pirandello paused, as if perhaps reluctant to go on, then: “I know that Earth news gets little play at Bradbury Colony, so perhaps you haven’t seen the reports of the supposed miracle at Cydonia.”

  My heart jumped. Pirandello was right about us mostly ignoring the mother planet: it was supposed to make living permanently on another world easier. But Cydonia—why, that was here, on Mars…

  The Cardinal went on: “A televangelist based in New Zealand has claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary while viewing Cydonia through a telescope. These new ground-based scopes with their adaptive optics have astonishing resolving power, I’m told—but I guess I don’t have to tell you that, after all your time at Castel Gandolfo. Anyway, ordinarily, of course, we’d give no credence to such a claim—putative miracles have a way of working themselves out, after all. But the televangelist in question is Jurgen Emat, who was at seminary fifty years ago with the Holy Father, and is watched by hundreds of millions of Roman Catholics. Emat claims that his vision has relevance to the Third Secret of Fatima. As you know, Fatima is much on the Holy Father’s mind these days, since he intends to canonize Lucia dos Santos next month. Both the postulator and the reinstated advocatus diaboli feel this needs to be clarified before Leo XIV visits Portugal for this ceremony.”

  I shifted in my chair, trying to absorb it all.

  “It would, of course,” continued the recorded voice, “take a minimum of two years for a properly trained cardinal to travel from the Vatican to Mars. We know you have no special expertise in the area of miracles, but, as the highest-ranking Catholic official on Mars, his Holiness requests that you visit Cydonia, and prepare a report. Full details of the putative miracle follow…”

  It took some doing—my mere presence was an act of forbearance, I knew—but I managed to finagle the use of one of Bradbury Colony’s ground-effect shuttles to go from Utopia Planitia to Cydonia. Of course, I couldn’t pilot such a vehicle myself; Elizabeth Chen was at the controls, leaving me most of a day to study.

  Rome didn’t commit itself easily to miracles, I knew. After all, there were charlatans who faked
such things, and there was always the possibility of us getting egg on our collective faces. Also, the dogma was that all revelations required for faith were in the scriptures; there was no need for further miracles.

  I looked out the shuttle’s windows. The sun—tiny and dim compared with how it appeared from Earth—was touching the western horizon. I watched it set.

  The shuttle sped on, into the darkness.

  “We speak today of the Third Secret of Fatima,” said Jurgen Emat, robust and red of face at almost eighty, as he looked out at his flock. I was watching a playback of his broadcast on my datapad. “The Third Secret, and the miracle I myself have observed.

  “As all of those who are pure of heart know, on May 13, 1917, and again every month of that year until October, three little peasant children saw visions of our Blessed Lady. The children were Lucia dos Santos, then aged 10, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, ages eight and seven.

  “Three prophecies were revealed to the children. The third was known only to a succession of Popes until 2000, when, while beatifying the two younger visionaries, who had died in childhood, John Paul II ordered the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith to make that secret public, accompanied by what he called ‘an appropriate commentary.’

  “Well, the secret is indeed public, and has been for almost seventy years, but that commentary was anything but appropriate, twisting the events in the prophecy to relate to the 1981 attempt on John Paul II’s life by Mehmet Ali Agca. No, that interpretation is incorrect—for I myself have had a vision of the true meaning of Fatima.”

  Puh-leeze, I thought. But I continued to watch.

  “Why did I, alone, see this?” asked Emat. “Because unlike modern astronomers, who don’t bother with eyepieces anymore, I looked upon Mars directly through a telescope, rather than on a computer monitor. Holy Visions are revealed only to those who gaze directly upon them.”

  An odd thing for a televangelist to say, I thought, as the recording played on.

  “You have to remember, brethren,” said Jurgen, “that the 1917 visions at Fatima were witnessed by children, and that the only one who survived childhood spent her life a cloistered nun—the same woman Pope Leo XIV intends to consecrate in a few weeks’ time. Although she didn’t write down the Third Secret until 1944, she’d seen little of the world in the intervening years. So, everything she says has to be re-interpreted in light of that. As Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano said upon on the occasion of the Third Secret’s release, ‘The text must be interpreted in a symbolic key.’”

  Jurgen turned around briefly, and holographic words floated behind him: We saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire…

  “Clearly,” said Jurgen, indicating the words with his hand, “this is a rocket launch.”

  I shook my head in wonder. The words changed: And we saw in an immense light that is God—something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it—a Bishop dressed in white…

  Jurgen spread his arms now, appealing for common sense. “Well, how do you recognize a bishop? By his miter—his liturgical headdress. And what sort of headdress do we associate with odd reflections? The visors on space helmets! And what color are spacesuits? White—always white, to reflect the heat of the sun! Here, the children doubtless saw an astronaut. But where? Where?”

  New words replacing old: …passed through a big city…half in ruins…

  “And that,” said Jurgen, “is our first clue that the vision was specifically of Mars, of the Cydonia region, where, since the days of Viking, mystics have thought they could detect the ruins of a city, just west of the so-called Face on Mars.”

  Gracious Christ, I thought. Surely the Vatican can’t have sent me off to investigate that? The so-called “Face” had, when photographed later, turned out to be nothing but a series of buttes with chasms running through them.

  Again, the words floating behind Jurgen changed: Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels…

  “Ah!” said Jurgen, as if he himself were surprised by the revealed text, although doubtless he’d studied it minutely, working up this ridiculous story.

  “The famed Northern Cross,” continued Jurgen, “part of the constellation of Cygnus, is as clearly visible from Mars’ surface as it is from Earth’s. And Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, depending on their phases, might appear as two angels beneath the cross…”

  Might, I thought. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

  But Jurgen’s audience was taking it all in. He was an old-fashioned preacher—flamboyant, mesmerizing, long on rhetoric and short on logic, the kind that, regrettably, had become all too common in Catholicism since Vatican III.

  The floating words morphed yet again:…two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand…

  “An aspersorium,” said Jurgen, his tone begging indulgence from all those who must already know, “is a vessel for holding holy water. And where, brethren, is water more holy than on desiccated Mars?” He beamed at his flock. I shook my head.

  “And what,” said Jurgen, “did the angels Phobos and Deimos do with their aspersoria?” More words from the Third Secret appeared behind him in answer: They gathered up the blood of the Martyrs.

  “Blood?” said Jurgen, raising his bushy white eyebrows in mock surprise. “Ah, but again, we have only blessed Sister Lucia’s interpretation. Surely what she saw was simply red liquid—or liquid that appeared to be red. And, on Mars, with its oxide soil and butterscotch sky, everything appears to be red, even water!”

  Well, he had a point there. The people of Mars dressed in fashions those of Earth would find gaudy in the extreme, just to inject some color other than red into their lives.

  “And, when I gazed upon Cydonia, my brethren, on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first appearance of Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima, I saw her in all her glory: the Blessed Virgin.

  “How did I know to look at Cydonia, you might ask? Because the words of Our Lady had come to me, telling me to turn my telescope onto Mars. I heard the words in my head late one night, and I knew at once they were from blessed Mary. I went to my telescope and looked where she had told me to. And nine minutes later, I saw her, pure and white, a dot of perfection moving about Cydonia. Hear me, my children! Nine minutes later! Our Lady’s thoughts had come to me instantaneously, but even her most holy radiance had to travel at the speed of light, and Mars that evening was 160 million kilometers from Earth—nine light minutes!”

  I must have dozed off. Elizabeth Chen was standing over me, speaking softly. “Father Bailey? Father Bailey? Time to get up…”

  I opened my eyes. Liz Chen was plenty fine to look at—hey, I’m celibate; not dead!—but I was unnerved to see her standing here, in the passenger cabin, instead of sitting up front at the controls. It was obvious from the panorama flashing by outside my window that we were still speeding along a few meters above the Martian surface. I’ll gladly put my faith in God, but autopilots give me the willies.

  “Hmm?” I said.

  “We’re approaching Cydonia. Rise and shine.”

  And give God the glory, glory…“All right,” I said. I always slept well on Mars—better than I ever did on Earth. Something to do with the 37% gravity, I suppose.

  She went back into the cabin. I looked out the window. There, off in the distance, was a side view of the famous Face. From this angle, I never would have given it a second glance if I hadn’t known its history among crackpots.

  Well, if we were passing the Face, that meant the so-called cityscape was just 20 kilometers southwest of here. We’d already discussed our travel plans: she’d take us in between the “pyramid” and the “fortress,” setting down just outside the “city square.”

  I started suiting up.

  The original names had stuck: The pyramid, the fortress, the city square. Of course, up close, they seemed no
t in the least artificial. I was bent over now, looking out a window.

  “Kind of sad, isn’t it?” said Liz, standing behind me, still in her coveralls. “People are willing to believe the most outlandish things on the scantest of evidence.”

  There was just a hint of condescension in her tone. Like almost everyone else on Mars, she thought me a fool—and not just for coming out here to Cydonia, but for the things I’d built my whole life around.

  I straightened up, faced her. “You’re not coming out?”

  She shook her head. “You had your nap on the way here. Now it’s my turn. Holler if you need anything.” She touched a control, and the inner door of the cylindrical airlock chamber rolled aside, like the stone covering Jesus’ sepulcher.

  What, I wondered, would the Mother of our Lord be doing here, on this ancient, desolate world? Of course, apparitions of her were famous for occurring in out-of-the-way places: Lourdes, France; La’Vang, Vietnam; Fatima, Portugal; Guadalupe, Mexico. All of them were off the beaten track.

  And yet, people did come to these obscure places in their millions after the fact. It had been a century and a half since the apparitions at Fatima, and that village still attracted five million pilgrims annually.

  Annually. I mean Earth annually, of course. Only the anal retentive worry about the piddling difference between a terrestrial day and a Martian sol, but the Martian year was twice as long as Earth’s. So, Fatima, I guess, gets ten million visitors per Martian year…

  I felt cold as I looked at the landscape of rusty sand and towering rock faces. It was psychosomatic, I knew: my surface suit—indeed white, as Jurgen Emat had noted—provided perfect temperature control.

  The city square was really just an open area, defined by wind-sculpted sandstone mounds. Although in the earliest photos, it had perhaps resembled a piazza, it didn’t look special from within it. I walked a few dozen meters then turned around, the lamp from my helmet piercing the darkness.