Philippine Speculative Fiction 9 Page 9

  After a week of heavy rain, it was time for Oscar to shed again; and this was done by him with much discomfort as it required of him to shed limbs. He would shed at the break of dawn, and the women of the house would harvest at breakfast: too early and the money would crumble into soil. Somehow it felt different this time, and there was no sharp pain of his leaves drying up and falling, no: this time there was a sweet tingling between his leaves and boughs and soon they grew heavy with a new borne weight. Before light, his daughter who had managed to sneak out and visit him, found the strangest little fruit on the plant by the window, all in different stages of growth: some minute and edged with pleasantly green petals, some as large as grapes. She took one to put in her mouth, crush with her teeth, and the sweetness of it led to another, and another until all traces of the fruit Oscar bore was no more.

  Soon he would remember nothing but the dawns in which he bore it; the rest of the time it would feel like a deep sleep stirred by faint dreams of faraway movements and voices. The deeper he slept, the less money he shed, the more fruit he bore. It did not take long for Oscar’s wife to notice, blaming it on the expensive brand of pesticide or the lack of sunlight and later, the maid of stealing, and the child of eating the bills until there was no one left to blame, eventually persuading her to return to selling beauty projects and to forego the renovations to a further date. Little did anyone notice however, the fruit that grew in place of the money, for it grew in the dark, in the middle of the night, whenever the daughter would cosme. And every time, whenever she visited him, her speech grew more constant, her fingers quicker. She would now dare to wait until the fruit ripened before picking, and if she caught a stirring in one of the rooms she would hide them to eat later in the day. They loosened the joints, put strength into her bones, and over the course of a month her eyes began to harbor signs of life, darting from one object to another, her stares a little less vacant every day.

  At times, she would speak quietly to him about plants. Oscar could not understand a word, but the feel of her breath comforted him. Everything was a dream now, vacant, distant dreams that meant nothing to the great deep slumber of plants, where there were no memories, or thoughts of the future. But she would speak to him still, turn the soil until it was moist and pleasant and soft.

  One morning—barely morning, as it was dark still—as a slight fog hung over the city, Oscar felt his daughter climb onto the windowsill; an uneven shudder, and a warm, faint breeze that was her breath as she spoke to him again, from so far away it might have been the wind passing through the leaves of another tree. With the last that remained of Oscar—the man, the worker, the father—held rapt, as she told him stories of men that turned into plants, feeling his soil turned again and again by the knowing warmth of small hands. Slowly, he drifted farther and farther away, settling forever into a blissful sleep, into a netherworld of only the permanence of plants, their faintness of being.

  Alexander Osias

  Stations of the Apostate

  Alexander M. Osias is frequent visitor to the worlds of science fiction and fantasy as a reader and a writer. His work has been published in the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and several Philippine Speculative Fiction volumes. He’s lived all over the world, including places like Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and the U.S.A. Now based in the Philippines, he resides in a secret headquarters located in the bustling Ortigas Center area where he enjoys spending time with his lovely wife and rambunctious son.

  CLERIC FILEMON MARTINEZ’S tired eyes scanned the schematics of space station Regulus Three, searching for any infestation-prone loci that might have been missed by the inquisitorial scholars—the meticulous, yet often unimaginative, curiosi—of the Universal Church of The Most High. His thick, calloused fingers traced the bamboo-tiled keys on his slim keyboard, swiped across his screen to enlarge this detail and that annotation to comfortable visual scrutiny, and occasionally smoothed his chest-length beard, whose hairs were often tempted to disobedience by the barely perceptible fluctuations in his shuttle cabin’s artificial gravity.

  Frustrated at his inability to find fault in the curiosi’s recommendations for the reconsecration of Regulus Three, he swept his fingers across the touchscreen, sending the various open files tumbling into their respective folders, leaving only the looping animated image of Regulus Three onscreen, spinning lazily in virtual space.

  Regulus One and Regulus Two had both been standard space stations in the O’Neill cylinder configuration—eight kilometers long, with a trifecta of evenly-spaced, radiation-shielded windows running the length of the cylinder, allowing the blessed light of system’s star into their forests, gardens, homegrids and workspaces.

  But Regulus Three had been designed by Aziz Martillo.

  Martillo, the void-touched genius who had designed the blasphemous Matthyssen Cathedral on ice-covered Pangarion; Martillo, who had inscribed the mandala of Qliphothaic emanations on the walls of the Shrine of the Triune Martyrs, infesting the unsuspecting pilgrims that frequented the once-holy place with hordes of demons, profaning the very soil where the relics had been buried; Martillo, who had secretly pioneered research into artificial fellstars—

  But, Cleric Filemon reminded himself, the dutiful shepherds of the flock did not know about Martillo the Hypocrite, the Apostate, the Betrayer, the Liar, the Murderer of Faith beyond derogatory appellations. The faithful did not sully their minds, hearts, and spirits with knowledge of his transgressions against the Holy Name of Names.

  And so once again, Cleric Filemon forced himself to trace the lines of the breathtakingly intricate patterns on the slyly glittering space station.

  Instead of a single solid cylinder, Mad Martillo had convinced Overking Shapur del Cimmar to fund the creation of three habitat cylinders of equal length, each one circumscribed by beautiful scripts and symbols of unknown provenance and origin. Martillo had had them bracketed with rotational spindles, all joined by a stationary 8.5 km spine that ran the length of the station. The cylinders, all possessed of the same diameter, somehow spun at different rates. Drones that had been sent to scan the space station had revealed an intricate arrangement of nano-constructed gears governing the rotational speeds, but the drones had succumbed to infestation before deeper scans could be returned—the positioning of the space station’s broad spine had apparently cast a deep enough shadow to allow the lesser dark intelligences to work their chaotic will on unconsecrated machinery.

  Which brought Cleric Filemon to the wisdom of the curiosi’s recommended first phase: to rotate the station 180 degrees along its spinal axis, to maximize exposure to the blessed rays of the system’s star. More than mere standard procedure for station reconsecration, the shadowy effect of the station’s spine had to be countered to allow future phases to proceed.

  Out of habit, Cleric Filemon quickly accessed the solar system records, reconfirmed that the star had already been reclaimed through blessed relics by the Astrologos Corps (who were not all of the Universal Faith, it had to be admitted, but who were clearly guided by God’s merciful hand through lesser faiths), and returned to the committee’s checklist.

  The second phase was the trickiest: eight clerics trained in reconsecration simultaneously deployed across eight separate insertion vectors into the space station. In the past, a single cleric would have been deployed, with fatal results. But the lessons of Space Station Tavora had shown the short-sighted arrogance of that approach—a single reconsecrant, then-Cleric Edinha Theldane, had been sent to take on the Hypocrite’s earliest known creation.

  At other times, when safely recuperating at the rectory on Mempin’s Hollow, Cleric Filemon allowed that the early Church’s curiosi had had little exposure to techniques and traps that had since become common knowledge among the consecration teams. But at times like this, hurtling in-system using skip-engines toward a desecrated space station in a solar system that had bathed in the darkened fire of a fellstar for nearly half a century, the well of his forgiveness ran low. She ha
d been his favorite teacher at the seminary; compassionate in the confessional, patient during religious instruction, but fierce when facing down foul infestations of her flock.

  All members of her reconsecrant team—spacers, engineers, deacons, and crusaders—were lost. Only her litany of faith, transmitted over a frequency occasionally blanketed by bursts of static, had given the waiting extraction teams hope that she had somehow survived. But without any other reconsecrants, exfiltration attempts were deemed a suicidal endeavor. Three weeks later, when a Thrones-class frigate jumped into the system from the Homeworld with eight reconsecrant teams, any hope that she had survived had long faded. Her unceasing prayers over the comms channel were listened to with distrust and calculated infrequency; untutored in the intricacies of infestation, the crews of the ships had reverted to caution and superstition.

  Eight teams converged on Space Station Tavora; trapped the erupting fiends of darkness and shadow with reflected starlight and prayer; claimed entryways and corridors with holy water, loops of prayer beads, bandoliers of scapulars, and short but fervent rites of Holy Reclamation; and sanctified key locations of the space station with relics taken from the Universal Church’s dwindling supply.

  When then-Cleric Edinha Theldane had been found in Tavora’s cathedral, the prayers over her comm channel ceased. High Cleric Suzanne Jones, who performed the lengthy and strenuous rites to purify and spiritually reclaim the cathedral swore twice that her efforts were unnecessary—that Edinha had somehow managed to sanctify the cathedral at the cost of her life. This miracle, vouched for by all eight of the attending reconsecrants and their teams, started the wheels rolling rather rapidly on her inevitable sainthood. The staggering number of conversions of faithless members in extraction teams present only added to her mystique.

  Just then, a gentle but insistent alarm—children’s voices raised in song—sounded in Cleric Filemon’s chambers. In an hour, he would lead all eight teams, including his own, in a preparatory High Mass invoking the authority of the Most High Name of Names over their endeavor, and requesting the intercession of St. Edinha, patron saint of consecrants and reconsecrants, for success in their efforts. His fingers strayed absently to a relic of the saint, a sliver of her fingerbone suspended in a solution of holy water and sacred salt, a wordless appeal for inspiration from an old friend. And with that, he turned his attention once more to Regulus Three.

  The last phase would be the redemptive High Mass celebrated at the control room of the station’s fusion reactors. This would only be performed once the station’s sectors had been completely cleared of infestation, when all danger had been eradicated from the space station—a textbook capstone to all their exertions.

  An overwhelming show of the Church’s power, he’d been told by High Cardinal Feng. The Church’s mind, muscle and machinery had bent its attentions and thought to the consecration of the Apostate’s last—and some would say greatest—creation. It had been his seat of his power when his blasphemous sect had spread its insidious infection into Thandara, Kleinsfeld, and Roiland, the nearest outposts of the Universal Church. The names on the briefing documents, the seals and signatures on the imprimaturs were a list of the highest and brightest in the halls of the Sancta Sedes.

  Did he, an aging Cleric, worn down by decades in the field, think he would see something in the whirling patterns of the cylinders that the more learned masters of his Church had not? After all these years, and all his mistakes, the virtue of humility still eluded him.

  Cleric Filemon’s dogged gaze wandered across the small, ill-appointed cabin he’d been given for the duration of the voyage for a time, until it finally rested on the icon of St. Edinha. Her face was clearly visible, but her body was wrapped in thick holy robes to symbolize the spiritual protection and purity she’d been given by the Maker of All, despite the tortures she’d endured.

  She’d been found in ill-fitting marriage garments common to the Martillo cult, either an attempt to break her will or an obscene effort to transform her into one of the brides of the long-dead Apostate. The bruises on her body indicated she’d been beaten, and missing strips of flesh from her back indicated that the torture had escalated far beyond that—brandings with hot metal, jagged cuts and tears into her arms and legs. It seemed that she’d still managed to retain her virtue; clearly, they were after consent or capitulation of some kind, something that St. Edinha knew would be tantamount to the desecration of her soul. Faith held that God’s Mercy would have granted her some moments of consolation during her darkest hours.

  And there was something there, a whisper of intuition, a glimmer of thought, a hint of an elusive notion that threatened to fade from half-memory. He closed his eyes and uttered an appeal to God and to his old mentor for aid, but in doing so, lost that fragile train of thought.

  Frustrated at what he felt were the effects of age and lack of sleep, he let his eyes rest on the image of Space Station Regulus Three, and its trinity of spinning cylinders. Desecration was at the core of Martillo’s convoluted ramblings and cult rituals, but none of the known symbols or cabbalistic scrawls or blasphemous scripts could be found on the visible surfaces. Despite the prominence of the number three—a common attempt to blaspheme against the Holy Trinity—no symbols, not even the Qliphothaic markings on the walls of the Shrine of the Triune Martyrs, suggested a blasphemous incantation against the Most High set into the most massive prayer wheels ever created.

  Unless Martillo’s obsession with three did not stem from the Trinity but from something else.

  Cleric Filemon’s fingers clacked rapidly across his keyboard, calling up the story of the Triune Martyrs of Nestaria: St. Andas, St. Gabandas and St. Kaz. The following words appeared on the screen:

  St. Andas was a noble and mayor of one of the districts of Nestaria who was revealed to be a secret follower of the Universal Church. In accordance with the beliefs of the Nestarian Heresy, she was stripped of all honor and position and consigned to death in the district incinerators. But the executionary incinerators lost power and grew immediately cold when she made the Sign of the Cross and called out to the Mercy of the Most High.

  St. Gabandas and St. Kaz, son and daughter of Nestaria’s governor, were among many witnesses of this miracle, and converted instantly to the Faith. Both were immediately arrested and tortured; but the next day an angel appeared and healed all their wounds, convincing many more to join the Universal Church.

  When all three were at last put to death, the people of Nestaria revolted, overthrew the rule of the planetary governor, and welcomed the Universal Church into their system.

  Cleric Filemon tapped at the screen absently, already certain that Nestaria was the key to the machinations of the Martillo. Idea after idea slid through his mind like long strings of beads and artifacts that had become entangled in one another: officials who’d fled Nestaria had been granted asylum on Pangarion, where Martillo’s works and proto-sect had first appeared; guards who’d been fooled by Martillo had commented on his fluency in the local dialects; the similarity in implements and months of torture between Edinha’s martyrdom and those of the Triune Martyrs had been a factor in the review of her Sainthood; Qliphothaic Realms were a dark mirror of Creation, a reversal and desecration of the work of the Lord of All That Is Seen and Unseen.

  In the process of his mental untangling of these convoluted threads of thought, a different context settled on the problem, like a darkened forest pierced by the rays of dawning sun. Martillo’s appellation as Murderer of the Faith had been more accurate than the others; his formation of a self-perpetuating cult and his greatest creations had been direct attacks aimed at the Universal Church itself—its followers, its believers, its clergy, and its faith. His actions had not been those of a heretical zealot bent on luring the faithful from the arms of the Sancta Sedes, which he had confidentially been seen as, despite the standard demonization of heretical movements by the inquisitorial boards.

  Returning to his files afresh, Cleric Filemon Ma
rtinez revisited images and schematics, assessments and recommendations in a burst of newfound agitation. Here was an enemy who had been brilliant and cunning and utterly familiar with the foundations of the Faith’s catechism and dogma, who had been unafraid to tease out proscribed knowledge in dusty tomes and visit terrible temples of knowledge in darkened systems far from the comforting light of consecrated suns. Here was an enemy who knew his foe, and had laid traps of physical danger, philosophical confusion, and spiritual terror—and the splintered, elusive remnants of his doomed congregation had pledged unholy devotion to his methods and causes.

  But where did the trap lie? The third phase, the High Mass, was still sound—unless all the celebrants and concelebrants were somehow tainted by sin—which they could not be, in order for the prior phases to be successful. The second phase would normally be the trickiest, but with eight reconsecration teams (seven experienced clerics and one exorcist armed with a Seal of the Inquisition, each supported by eight teams complete with battle-hardened deacons), that outcome had already been addressed with the best that the Universal Church could afford to bring to bear. Which meant that the trap had to be somewhere in the execution of the first phase—the realignment of the shadow-shrouded space station.