Redemption, Drawing Near

There were armed soldiers in Father Joshua's church again.

As he went through the familiar, almost unconscious movements of the morning Mass, Joshua McDowell did his best to ignore them. The four soldiers were nearly invisible anyway, thanks to their nano-fiber camouflage fatigues. Taking a deep breath, Joshua continued with that day's reading: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come. Look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."

As if on cue, the lead soldier stepped forward out of the shadows in front of the security arch, her black pulse gun the same color as the hull of the ships that came crashing to Earth barely a month earlier.

Joshua hoped the soldiers hadn't come for him.

At the end of Mass, he watched the slow departure of his meager congregation, the same dozen elderly men and women he saw daily, all of them lifelong Chicago residents. In January, this Mass would have been packed with parishioners. But that was before the ships, the riots, and the bands of cultists.

Joshua shed his robes as soon as he was back in the rectory. His hands shaking, he arranged his gray hair in an attempt to hide his bald spot, feeling his fifty-eight years mostly in his sore chest. His heart attack had been less than three months ago, and the now-familiar ache worsened on cold days.

"They don't know about the colonel," he told his reflection. "If they did, they would've taken you in right away. Have faith, McDowell."

Picking up his Bible, Joshua returned to the church. His shoes echoed down the main aisle and kicked up dust lit by the stained-glass windows reinforced with safety glass. A bittersweet mix of ozone and gun oil filled the air at the back of the church.

"So," he said to the young woman standing in the alcove, after a glance at her name tag, "Sergeant Murphy. What brings you here? It's not every church that has an armed guard, you know."

The female soldier looked at Joshua from behind a pair of wide, gray-lensed glasses. Above the three stripes affixed to her helmet was a blue badge decorated with an old-fashioned rifle and a silver wreath. By the time Joshua looked back at her face, her glasses had turned transparent. Light blue eyes now looked out at him, slightly magnified.

"We've gotten more reports about some recent sightings of... ah, undesirable groups in the area, sir. Anti-military protesters, possible new-religion types, and the like."

Joshua stifled a bitter smile at the soldier's description of the cults. Calling what they practiced a new religion was as close to a slap in the face to his work as a person could get without raising a hand.

"With the criminal activity that's taken place here recently, we were ordered to check in on you. Just trying to prevent a repeat of things like the fire from down the street. It's not every street that's had such a run of bad luck as yours," the soldier added.

Joshua winced at the memory of the firebombing of the apartment complex down the street from the church, followed by the riots only a few weeks ago that had resulted in the destruction of the church's organ and the installation of the new security system. The police and the soldiers with their pulse guns had arrived just in time that night, stopping the band of wild-eyed cultists on their way to the altar.

"Sorry," Sergeant Murphy said a moment later. "That came out wrong, sir."

Joshua nodded, looking away from her at the white metal of the security arch in front of the outer door. The soldiers had turned it off, silencing its low hum. The soldier moved closer and put two fingers in front of the tiny mike attached to her cheek.

"World's been different since January, sir," she whispered. "Everything's changed. We gotta stick together, y'know?"

Joshua looked at the female soldier with her black cheek mike and ear buds, her tiny blue forehead sensors, her color-shifting camouflage uniform, her blue-black pulse rifle, and her gray glasses.

"Yes," he said after Sergeant Murphy had removed her hand from her mike. "The world has changed. Too much."

"We'd best be going, sir. Unless you have anything suspicious to report?"

Shaking his head, Father Joshua forced a smile her way. He wondered how hard it would have been for Sergeant Murphy to call him "Father."

"Okay, then, Mister McDowell. Be careful."

The four of them turned and walked through the security arch without a sound. Joshua stepped through the arch himself and grabbed the outer door.

"Thanks," he called as a blast of cold air peppered with snow slammed into him. After pulling the door closed, Joshua activated the security arch again. Even through the thick doors and walls of his hundred-year-old church, he could hear the distant whine of a siren, accompanied by what sounded like the rattle of gunfire.

Father Joshua closed his eyes and prayed that his meeting this afternoon would somehow begin the process of recovering the peace his church, his street, his city, and the rest of his world had lost. Contrary to what most cultists thought, it was a peace that had been lost long before the ships ever arrived.




On a train headed north, classical music swept over Joshua's body as the sensory nodes on his wrists responded to the symphony by Mahler. He stared out his window at the buildings blurring past him and tried not to think too much about his upcoming meeting with the colonel. Outside, the landscape of Chicago, like most cities its size, looked like a series of construction sites in reverse. If it wasn't a terrorist car bomb shattering a storefront, it was a militia-backed "cleansing" fire of a Muslim prayer house. Every street showed the signs of some form of violence, like a missing tooth in a nervous, yellowed smile.

As if attempting to distract him from the dismal view outside the elevated train, the nodes filled Joshua's nose with the scent of mint, while his mouth tasted chilled champagne. He pulled his coat sleeves lower to cover the nodes, slightly ashamed of the gadgets he'd bought from a Netstream ad a year ago. His gaze returned to the streets of northeast Chicago.

It was a different world, he and the soldier had agreed, now that there were twenty-nine ships scattered across the plains like litter from outer space.
He gazed at the digital map superimposed on the back of the seat in front of him and wondered what the colonel had in store for him at the site. Would I be able to talk to one of them, and if so, what would we talk about? What sort of beliefs would aliens have? Would we even be able to talk about such things?

The small blinking dot of their train was moving steadily to the northeast, out of the city, the landscape opening up around him. The congested buildings gave way to squat two-story houses, stores, parking lots, and narrow roads, and the train picked up even more speed. Few of the buildings he was passing bore the scars of the urban warfare that had been plaguing his city for years. Joshua closed his eyes and let the sensory buds overwhelm all his thoughts and concerns about the colonel and the ships, if only for a short while.

Half an hour later, he was met at the Waukegan train station by a young soldier driving a boxy blue sedan with black-tinted windows. Private Petersheim was a thin white man of barely twenty years, with a spattering of acne peeking out on his cheeks from under his oversized, opaqued glasses.

"Sorry I'm late, padre," Petersheim said as he stepped out of the car. He ran a pencil-shaped scanner over Joshua's ID card, and the scanner beeped once. With a wink, the soldier returned the ID and shook Joshua's hand.

"Not a problem," Joshua said on his way into the warmth of the sedan. He sank into the torn vinyl seat. "Are we ready?"

"Yep," the private said once he was behind the wheel. He handed Joshua a bundle of slick fabric from the seat between them. "If you would, sir -- Father -- put these on over your clothes, at least until we get you inside the site. You sort of stand out a bit right now, with your black duds and all."

Joshua ran his hand down the nano-fiber camouflage suit, smiling in spite of his own nervousness. The smart-fabric shimmered with his touch, trying to match the color of his hand from the brief contact. He was still grinning when slipped the suit on over his clothes.

"Okay then," Petersheim said. "Hold on, Father. We're running a bit late."

They blasted out of the train station and quickly left town. Joshua held onto the dashboard as they rocketed over washboard-like gravel roads and zipped through rural intersections without stopping. Short minutes later, Petersheim skidded the ten-cylinder sedan to a halt outside the fenced-off site of the fallen ship.

Joshua pried his hands from the dashboard and squinted through the black-tinted windshield. The bumper of the big car was less than two feet away from a man stretched across the road wearing a rubber Creature from the Black Lagoon mask with glowing red eyes, his thin arms crossed over his chest like a corpse at a wake. He wore a bath robe and ski boots. Three dozen other similarly dressed people carried banners that read "Free Them Now!" or "Let Them Out or Let Us IN!" or other such messages. The masked crowd pushed up to the sedan, all of them reaching the index fingers of their right hand toward the vehicle
without touching it.

"One second," the private said, putting his hand to his cheek mike. He whispered something, and three helmeted soldiers wearing black body armor emerged from a gap in the chain-link gate. The first soldier pulled the Black Lagoon man out of the way, while the others used handheld stunners to push back the silent, pointing crowd.

"ET freaks," Petersheim said, giving Joshua an incredulous smile. "Phone home, and all that, y'know, padre?"

"Unbelievable," Joshua said as they were let inside the razor-wire-tipped fence surrounding the site. He wondered if the robed and booted protestors spent all their time outside the site waiting for something to happen, masks on and ready.
Joshua tried to get a glimpse of the ship, hidden under the biggest of the bubble-tents, but the tent was sealed up tightly.

"Father?"

Joshua gave a start when he felt someone touch him. He looked down and saw Petersheim's pale hand on his upper arm. The camouflage suit had turned a whitish-pink color around the spot where the private's skin touched it.

"Right this way, Father," the private said, aiming Joshua toward the tallest tent. "It's okay. Everything's safe. We've checked it all a million times."

They walked up to the wall of bubble-like plastic that rose up almost five stories high, like a circus tent. From inside the tent, voices shouted as if from a great distance.

Petersheim threw back the flap. "The colonel's in there."

Joshua nodded and forced his body into action. He took two steps inside into the antiseptic-smelling tent, and in doing so, Father Joshua McDowell became the first person not affiliated with the military to see a crash-landed Wannoshay ship up close.




His first reaction was to lean as far backwards as he could without falling so he could get a good look at the black ship.

Crumpled and broken in many places, the outer hull of the tall, angular ship was made up of a flat metal that didn't reflect any light. Lit by a ring of lights embedded in the ground, aiming upwards, the ship itself was at least fifty feet high, but it looked somehow fragile with its delicate lines. At first Joshua thought the ship was cubical in shape, but as his eyes adjusted, he could see more and more angles making up the exterior of the hull as he walked closer. The ship had at least six vertical faces that bent at the top to form a sort of peak. The unfamiliar angles of the dented ship made Joshua's eyes ache.

"Good Lord," he whispered. The depth of what he was doing suddenly hit him. He wondered what he'd gotten himself into when he agreed to the colonel's invitation.

As they walked closer, he could see grayish foam clustered around the many rents and tears in the hull, while power leads, cables, and thick wires of human design wrapped around the exterior like spider webs. Scaffolding encircled the perimeter of the octagonal ship, and eight crooked spires sprouted from the top of the ship. Most of the spires stretched out far enough to touch the plastic bubble-tent surrounding the ship. Men and women in dark green uniforms walked across the scaffolding, and their shouts died away when they saw Joshua.

Petersheim moved toward an open hatch just below the middle-most projection of the ship. The spires made Joshua think, for some reason, of the points on the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

As soon as he stepped inside the flat black metal walls of the ship, his breath was taken away by the cold. Instead of the institutional odor outside the ship, he could now smell something tangy and earthy, as if a handful of heavy-duty rock salt had been thrown into a fresh puddle of mud after a rain. The odor made the air of the ship feel too close.

Petersheim pulled out a hand light and popped it on. The light flickered red, and then glowed orange, illuminating an irregularly-shaped alcove and the doorways on either side of them.

"They're down there waiting for you, padre," the private said, pointing at the door on their left. "I'll take your camos, sir. They want you to meet him with your priest suit on, for full effect, I guess."

Joshua slipped off the camouflage coveralls with a pang of regret; he'd left his coat in the car, and he was enjoying the sensation of nano-fiber covering him, making him feel almost invisible. The private took the suit and handed him the light.

"I'm not authorized to go any further," Petersheim said. "Don't worry -- you'll see better once your eyes adjust. The smell doesn't ever really go away, though. Good luck, Father."

Joshua thanked the private as the young man walked out of the ship. Inhaling the strange, loamy odor, he left the alcove and entered the cold hallway. After a walking for over a hundred feet, he turned into a room bathed in blue-gray light.
Inside the room was Colonel Cossa, along with three other armed people in uniform. The soldiers stood, weapons lowered, in a loose circle about ten feet away from a tall being wrapped in bandages. This fifth being was not a human.
The mummified being was leaning on a twisted piece of black metal, and the dull metal seemed to have been pulled up from the floor of the ship. The rest of the room was bare, just flat black walls, black floor, and black ceiling, all absorbing the light instead of reflecting it.

Not a human, Joshua thought again, looking at the being's too-short legs and the short, twitching cords on the being's head that slipped out of their wrappings like snakes or fingers.

Colonel Cossa stepped forward with a smile. "Glad you could make it today, Father," he said, shaking Joshua's trembling hand. "We would've invited you here sooner, but the red tape was significant. Plus we had to keep you shielded from the media and other... elements."

"I think I know what you're talking about," Joshua said, thinking about the Creature from the Black Lagoon as he tried to smile. His lips stuck to his teeth, making him feel like he was grimacing, and he forced his lips together again.
The colonel nodded at that and turned to the creature leaning on the black metal structure. The long-armed, short-legged being was bouncing slightly, giving off the salty smell Joshua had smelled the instant he entered the ship. Salt, and something else, underneath that familiar odor.

"But now, at last," Cossa said, "I want you to meet the Wannoshay we've named Johndo, as in John-space-Doe."

Joshua nodded at the tall being whose face was almost hidden in bandages. "Johndo's" wrappings only covered the exposed skin of his face, hands, and feet. A grayish-white robe covered his torso. Joshua thought of the protestors -- or were they cultists? -- waiting outside once again, and then he thought of the bandaged lepers from the Bible. He wondered if the creature had been checked for all types of disease.

"Their skin is extremely susceptible to heat and sunlight," Cossa said. "The wrappings protect him from the air and sun while he adjusts to our environment. We've been supervising the work on drugs that will help him and the rest of the Wannoshay adapt."

Joshua felt a sudden urge to run from the black-walled ship, away from the soldiers and the tall alien -- the Wannoshay -- with its musky, salty smell.

"In any case," Cossa said, "Johndo has let us know that he and his, ah, people need to talk to someone affiliated with religion. He and some of the other have a decent grasp of English, now that the linguists have been working with them, but I guess they just distrust us, even our chaplains. Don't ask me why. We're hoping you can help."

Joshua tried to swallow. When it became obvious that all eyes on the room were trained on him, he cleared his throat.

"How can I help?"

"Talk to him," the colonel said. "Get him to tell us all he can about his people. Why they're here. What they want. If more of them are coming."

Joshua nodded. "So where do we begin?"

Before the colonel could answer, Johndo straightened up to his full height with a series of cracking sounds. The musky tones of his odor had gone away, replaced by a sweeter smell, like vanilla, though the smell of salt remained. Once he was standing upright, nearly seven feet tall, Johndo made a high-pitched humming sound.

"Wannoshay," the alien said a moment later, his voice lilting and high-pitched, almost whistling from his lipless mouth. He reached a wrapped hand behind him until he found the twisted piece of metal again. Leaning on it again, as if standing upright left him unbalanced, he raised his bandaged hands toward Joshua. Four stubby fingers peeked out of the bandages.

Joshua swallowed, blinking rapidly. His could feel his heart beating too fast, but he managed to nod at the alien and lift his lips into the semblance of a smile.

"Wannoshay ha' weagh shun," Johndo said, and Joshua realized the alien was speaking English, talking about what must have been the weak sun of his home planet. "Ha' cyguls of longh..." ("darkness" was symbolized by a four-fingered hand held over the gap in the bandages where Joshua assumed the alien's eyes were, the hand dropping slowly like a sun sinking against the horizon).

"Cyguls of shun shorden" (the bandaged hand moved down his face faster and faster), "coldh cyguls more, more." Johndo's arms spread wide as he spoke of the cold nights, his four-fingered hands reaching out to the dark metal walls, almost brushing the soldier next to the colonel. "Wannoshay shun, dhyingh..."

Johndo continued his story, and Joshua was able to piece most of his story together, though the effort was tiring. Something about the way Johndo spoke made something inside Joshua's brain itch. But he found it easier to understand the alien when Johndo used a combination of gestures, intonations, and the occasional spoken word to get his point across. Sometimes he could have sworn he heard Johndo's low, warbling voice in his head, even when the Wannoshay's mouth didn't move.

Joshua saw the story of the alien people take shape in his eyes, in his ears, and in his mind. With the cooling of their planet, the People (from the forceful way Johndo said it, Joshua felt the word needed capitalization) moved to the caves, turning their backs on the upper world. They dug deeper and deeper into the earth with their tools, and sometimes with their hands. They built new homes underground, close to the warm, fresh-water springs protected from the cold above.

And there they stayed, until they encountered... someone...

Johndo paused and lowered his head, as if he'd run out of words.

Joshua was leaning forward, on the verge of losing his balance, when the

Wannoshay stopped talking. He thought the alien had said some sort of name. Something like "my light." Or "twilight."

"Who?" he whispered. "Who did you find? What about twilight?"

A shiver passed over Johndo's long body, starting at his bare gray feet and rippling up through his bony torso and stopping at his lipless mouth, which was almost hidden in his face. His sweet smell had turned salty.

"Johndo?" Joshua said, stepping closer.

"Easy, father," the colonel said, and the sound of his voice cooled Joshua's curiosity. He'd forgotten about the colonel and the three other soldiers in the room with their pulse weapons now resting in their arms.

"Now," Johndo said in a slow, deliberate voice that Joshua heard inside his head more than with his ears. "Now we live here." The itching sensation in Joshua's brain intensified for a second, and then disappeared. "I am glad, grateful you came to us. We needed to talk, but only with your people's Elders. Not a warrior, not a student of battle. Only an Elder like you, for you are aware of the soul of a people. Think not of twilight, but think now of the dawn. For only an Elder knows what must be taken on faith."

Inhaling Johndo's shifting scents of vanilla and salt, Joshua realized Johndo was no longer talking aloud in his graceful mix of words, gestures, and intonations. Johndo was talking directly to him, inside his head, and the priest felt both violated and awed.

"Know a people's true history, know their soul," Johndo said with another shudder. His voice was fading, growing weaker while his short-fingered, bandaged hands began to quiver at his sides.

"Tell me more," Joshua whispered. "Please."

But the alien was no longer talking. His shoulders sagged, and the skin Joshua could see under the layers of bandages was gray mixed with traces of pink, like scar tissue.

Putting all of his weight against the flexible black metal behind him as if exhausted, Johndo the alien let out a hissing breath and inclined his head toward Joshua.

Your turn, that look said to Joshua. The smell of vanilla had disappeared, and the alien's four-fingered hands had stopped shaking.

Looking over at the colonel and his three fellow soldiers, one of whom, Joshua now noticed, had been recording the entire conversation with a small lapel camera, he took a deep breath. He held the cold air in his lungs and let the salty odor of the alien fill his nose. Then he exhaled and began talking.

"The world was created in six days," he began. "And on the seventh day, God" -- Joshua pointed up, his face warming -- "rested. After that, things became interesting."

Stopping for breath half an hour later, Joshua had covered most of Genesis mixed in with some Darwin, and he was now following that with a condensed version of the New Testament. Johndo listened intently, and Joshua did his best to not lose the thread of his narrative whenever the tall alien's body rippled with more of his convulsive movements. There was so much Joshua could have told Johndo, and he felt inadequate for the task. Surely there were historians better suited for this sort of task.

Before Joshua could continue with his abridged history of humanity, the Wannoshay made a fist and punched the metal structure on which he was resting. The metal dented, then slowly oozed back into shape, and the indentation disappeared.

Colonel Cossa, standing just a few feet away, stepped forward as if he'd been waiting for such an action.

"That's enough for today, Father," he said. "Good work. We'll leave Johndo here, and I'll get you back to your church. But first I'd like to show you something."
Joshua looked back at Johndo, whose hands were still clenched into fists, and saw that two of the other three soldiers in the room had managed to slip some sort of restraints onto his bandaged wrists. The restraints were made of the same dull, oozing metal as the alien's chair, with a narrow band of steel in the middle that didn't yield to the alien's sudden thrashing. He could smell something burning now instead of the comforting, familiar scents of salt or vanilla.

"It's for his own good," the colonel said, touching Joshua's arm to lead him out of the room. "Otherwise he'd injure himself. We think it's some sort of reaction to the warmth of our planet, plus they have a low stimulation threshold, and I think he probably passed it about ten minutes ago. But he's never communicated so much in one day with us before. Nice work. Now, come with me, please, Father."

They turned away from the sight of Johndo's exposed gray skin, mottled now with purplish-red splotches. Joshua shuddered as he was led down a sloping passage away from the meeting room.

At the bottom of the hall stood three more soldiers, wearing full body armor and armed with pulse rifles. At their feet was a thick, ugly hatch made of a bluish metal so unlike the smooth, unshining black metal of the alien ship that it had to have been made by human hands.

Two of the soldiers turned the wheel at the top of the hatch and lifted it while the third squatted down in front of the opening. Her gun was aimed straight into the widening gap. A sharper smell of mud mixed with salt drifted out from the other side of the hatch, and Joshua felt his heart drop. In the back of his mind he'd been wondering this about the aliens all afternoon, even as Johndo told him about their dying sun, their rejuvenated ships, and their rushed departure from their dying planet.

"What is this?" he said, his voice a croak.

"Just take a look," the colonel murmured from beside Joshua. "So you know what we're dealing with here, Father."

Barely breathing, Joshua leaned closer to the dark opening in the floor of the ship. A soft humming came from below, but the sound was not caused by any sort of machine. This humming came from something alive. This was where the rest of the Wannoshay had been hidden. The rest of the People.

"A light, Private," Cossa said, and the young woman on Joshua's right popped a hand light. Orange light filled the small room and the hole at their feet.
Feeling slightly light-headed, Father Joshua looked down and saw that a cave had been dug underneath the alien ship. Tunnels extended away from a main rounded area easily fifty feet wide, its walls made up of black, hard-packed Illinois dirt. Bitter cold rose up from the cave and its tunnels like a wintry wind.

Did they dig all these tunnels in the past two months? Joshua wanted to ask Cossa, but his mouth wouldn't cooperate. Aliens from space, digging in the hard Illinois dirt? Hundreds of aliens, hundreds of the People.

Their skin was an uneven, pale gray color, as if they'd never been in the sun, and there was something wrong with the long, oval shape of their heads. Other than those on their hands, they had no bandages covering their bodies. They flinched away from the soldier's light, and a handful of the aliens swung their long arms, striking those closest to them and causing a ripple of movement that was quickly quieted.

Too many, he thought, moving away from the hole as he felt the world lurch around him. He stared dumbly at the strange vertical growth on their foreheads and their writhing hair, until his eyes lost focus. There were too many of them to have all fit in this ship.

His next thought, to his lasting shame every time he thought about that first sighting later, was one of fear: fear of getting too close and contracting some sickness that these beings may have carried with them from another world.
Leprosy, he thought, reeling slightly. Contagion. Like the sick and the dying come to visit Jesus and his disciples, hoping for a miracle by the touch of his hand.

As Joshua stared, wrestling with his own fears, the aliens below him stopped pushing closer. They looked up at him with their oval faces and black eyes. And then, at the same time, as if choreographed, the vertical growths in the middle of each of their foreheads quivered and opened, exposing a black, sideways eye.

"Close it," Joshua whispered, hands in front of his mouth and nose. "Please turn off that light and close the hatch. Please."

The colonel pulled him gently back from the edge of the hole, and the three soldiers let the hatch drop back to the floor, sealing the hole again. The black, nearly liquid metal of the floor shook from the impact, buckling, and then flattening again. The slam of the closing hatch reverberated in Father Joshua's ears all the way back to his church, and it would continue to echo in his mind and thoughts for many weeks to come.




Spring was quickly approaching, bringing with it a premature heat that sucked the air out of Father Joshua's small tent. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he glanced from one of the three flat screens on his desk to another. Joshua loved his new job.

The leftmost screen was running a recreation of the estimated landing trajectories of the alien ships, twenty-nine streaks running east to west. The middle screen was filled with windows of various Bible passages that he was supposed to be reviewing for Sunday's sermon. The third was connected to a split CNNBC Netstream, the left half streaming a story about a protest in northern Iowa by HETA, Humans for the Ethical Treatment of Aliens, while the right half ran a report covering the first day of work for a dozen Wannoshay at a construction site in St. Paul.
 
"Enter Secure mode," Joshua said into the mike attached to the side of his face like a growth. "Password only, my voice only, active now."

He peeled off the mike, set it down, and stepped away from the desk. As he stretched out the bunched muscles of his shoulders, he thought about the sudden changes in the past few weeks. After his visit to this landing site last month, the governments of America and Canada and the aliens had come to an agreement: the People (as Joshua now couldn't help but call the Wannoshay) would share the technology from their battered ships if they could leave the landing sites and live above-ground. Through the use of human pharmaceuticals and derm patches, the gray skin of the Wannoshay had been sufficiently toughened against Earth's sun, and the slow process of integration had begun.

And, as the only human Johndo would talk to on the Waukegan landing site, Joshua had become an ad-hoc ambassador for the People. He'd been given a temporary office in a tent filled with the best Netstream and computer equipment government funds could purchase. Joshua found himself in a techie-junkie's heaven, though all the gadgets surrounding him couldn't dispel his Catholic guilt: every second spent away from his congregation pulled at him like dead weight.

Dabbing at his wet forehead with his handkerchief, Joshua checked the time on one of his screens. He was due in Colonel Cossa's tent in ten minutes for a briefing. He grabbed his Bible and his Army-issue glasses and walked outside. The sky was cloudless, a beautiful afternoon in late May marred only by the occasional shouts of the protestors and other groups massed outside the landing site. The people on the other side of the fence never seemed to leave, much less sleep.

Inhaling the country air, Joshua made his way to the colonel's tent, trying to decide how to start his sermon for tomorrow's Mass. As a challenge to himself, he was determined to talk about something other than the People, but he kept drawing a blank every time he tried to come up with something more relevant.
The colonel wasn't in, but there was a note inside the tent door for Joshua. The note was attached to a long, rectangular package made of black metal that was bent in two, like an old-fashioned notebook computer. The two ends of the outer piece of metal were held together by a black wire.

When he saw the thin sheets of metal inside the thicker, bent piece, Joshua realized it looked like an actual notebook, from back when people used paper all the time. He picked up the piece of slick black metal, his fingers wanting to pull away from the icy feel of the thin slices of stacked metal inside.

The colonel's careful block letters on the piece of temporary paper read: "Father: What do you make of this? Just found this today along with a dozen others inside flooring of ship. Keep it for a while before our linguists get it. We'll talk then."

With sunshine warming his face, Joshua sat down on the front step of the colonel's tent and unwrapped the wire that held the outer piece of metal together and kept the thin sheaves of flat black metal inside. The colonel's note had already dissolved and dripped onto the ground next to him when Joshua unbent the cold metal, the bend disappearing without a seam once the metal was laid flat across his lap. Before he could marvel at the behavior of the outer metal "cover," the sheaves spilled out, sliding off the now-smooth surface and onto the ground. One of the thin pieces of metal nicked the back of Joshua's right hand as it fell.

"Nice work, McDowell," he muttered, looking at all the loose pieces of metal surrounding him like fallen leaves. He ignored the tiny cut on his hand and carefully gathered up the pieces, avoiding the razor-sharp edges. Some of the pieces were square, others circular, some oval, and a dozen were octagonal in shape. Arranging them by shape on the two steps next to him, Joshua soon had four separate piles.

The original piece of thick metal that had held the thinner pieces together now lay limply on his lap like a heavy blanket. Joshua thought about Johndo's chair inside the ship, and the restraints of black metal the colonel occasionally wrapped around Johndo's wrists. This material seemed to be the same stuff.

Glancing off to his left and then his right, wondering what he must look like, sitting there, Joshua took the thick piece of metal and rolled it up from one end like a bedroll. The metal cooperated, and he set the thick tube of metal on the step behind him as a back rest.

"Unbelievable," he whispered, the cold of the metal against his lower back seeping through his shirt in a not unpleasant way, cooling him off.

Finally, he picked up an octagonal piece of thin metal from the biggest pile and held it up to his face. He'd left his reading glasses back in his tent, but he didn't want to waste time to go back and get them. Squinting and holding it about two feet from his face with his head turned to one side, he saw that the black metal was covered in spiraling gray and white designs that were made up of raised icons and rounded mandalas. He found an occasional symbol that made him think of Greek characters, while the other symbols reminded him of Aramaic.

At first he was overwhelmed by all the meaningless slash marks and jagged scribbles, but when he considered the markings as a whole, he saw that there was some sort of organization. It helped when he put himself in the mindset of Johndo's manner of speaking, a combination of spoken word, motions, and intonations. The symbols couldn't be deciphered from left to right, or right to left, he decided. But every time he started to feel something start to make sense, he'd hear the chanting of the protestors outside the fence drifting over to him.

"Let them all free!" one group shouted, only to be answered by "Lock them all up!" Joshua tried to focus in spite of the battling voices. Usually the people outside were fairly peaceful and quiet, but today was going to be one of those off-kilter days, he could tell.

Joshua's head began to ache, but he continued examining the book, turning it slowly and running his hands softly over the raised icons and designs. Everything on the page seemed to have some sort of circular nature; if something wasn't a spiral, then it was a circle or oval, crisscrossed with slashes and wavy lines.
Something about those shapes and designs made him think about Johndo's hands. Stubby fingers that were almost always hooked into a clawing shape, like four fat Cs on the ends of his hands. Joshua glanced at the thin line of drying blood on the back of his own hand, a simple, mundane design when compared to Johndo's.

A pair of Humvees suddenly roared to life three tents down from where Joshua was sitting, making him forget about his and Johndo's hands. Feeling foolish for leaving the remaining pages of this book of the People out in the sun and dust, Joshua carefully gathered up all the pages and unrolled the thick metal covering from the step. While the Hummers hurried past, no doubt on their way to the protestors at the front gate, Joshua made sure not to touch the razor-sharp sides as he placed the pages into the cover.

Joshua winced at the sounds of gunshots outside the fence, and he prayed for rubber bullets. He looked off in the direction of the gate and listened, but all he could hear was the flap of the tents in the breeze. He turned back to the sheets of metal, hoping the silence would continue.

Fifteen minutes slipped past as he paged through the metals sheets, and the heat of the day was forgotten. He didn't dare to think that he was lucky enough to hold a piece of the People's true history, but he could always hope. And he could always ask Johndo. Tomorrow. Tonight, Joshua had to get back home to see if he still had a congregation left for Sunday's sermon.




Early the next day, wearing his short-sleeved black shirt and white collar, Joshua held his hand up to Johndo, trying to remember the proper word.

"Iwolo," he said at last. His voice fell flat in the black-metal confines of the ship. He ran his forefinger over the dark red slash on the back of his hand, hoping he'd pronounced the word correctly. "A scratch," he added. "That's all. Iwolo."

In the past month, with the help of a team of three linguists and his own skills with language, Joshua had been understanding more and more of the language of the People. Joshua had decided that Wannoshay was a much more fun language to learn than Latin had ever been. He liked the lilting way it flowed off his tongue, with few hard consonants to get in the way.

Leaning forward in his chair of smooth, almost-liquid metal, Johndo the Wannoshay blinked all three of his eyes as he stared at the wound Joshua had gotten from the book yesterday.

"Iwolo?" Johndo said, his lipless mouth barely moving. His middle eye closed for a moment. "'Gratch?"

Joshua had forgotten all about the scratch until he'd walked into Johndo's small room aboard the ship. Lit by a single orb next to the open doorway, the black walls were bare, and the only furniture was the metal chair Johndo was resting on, a second chair that was wider and shorter, a mat on the floor, and a low black shelf at Joshua's eye level that ran the entire width of the room. The shelf in Johndo's room had always been empty, and this fact had always for some reason saddened Joshua.

"Yes," Joshua said. "From this." He held up the book he'd spent most of the night studying back in the rectory of Our Lady.

Johndo flinched, pulling his oval-shaped head back, as if the sight of the book bothered him. A bitter smell similar to burnt coffee filled the room for an instant. Joshua glanced at the doorway to his right, where he saw the armored shoulder of the young soldier who'd escorted him into the ship. The priest had never forgotten Johndo's fists from his first visit, punching his chair until the colonel restrained him.

"Is it a book?" Joshua said. "A... neowo? To read?"

A few thick strands of Johndo's short, tentacle-like hair plucked at the last three bandages covering the slowly-healing scars on his mottled gray face. Joshua knew the pink derm patch on the back of Johndo's neck was finally doing its work, but as one of the first of the People to risk Earth's atmosphere unprotected, Johndo's burns had been deep.

"No," Johndo said at last. "Not neowo, Yotchooa."

Joshua sighed. He went over to the second chair and rested his back against it. The chair molded itself to his body, taking most of his weight.

"If it's not a book," he muttered, "what in the world is it?"

Johndo took the book from Joshua's hands and carried it to his mat, holding it away from his long torso with his short, curved fingers. Joshua couldn't tell if Johndo was being extra careful with it, or if he simply didn't want to touch it. He had so much to learn about the People, and he felt incredibly tired at the prospect.

Letting Johndo busy himself with the book, Joshua closed his eyes and bounced slightly on the cold metal of the chair. He thought about the three new complaints he'd found on his Netstream when he'd returned home to the rectory last night. One of them had contacted the archbishop about Joshua being gone so much. He hadn't taken a confession in over a month. Joshua never felt like he had enough time, and his congregation was paying for it.

Just before opening his eyes again, Joshua thought of the words of Johndo from their first discussion, the words that Johndo had spoken directly to Joshua's mind: "Know a people's true history, know their soul."

When he opened his eyes, Johndo had taken the book apart and spread the pieces around the room.

"Johndo," Joshua whispered, pulling himself free of the metal grip of the chair.
On the shelf that circled the room, Johndo had placed the thin sheaves of metal that Joshua had come to think of as pages of a book. They didn't appear to be leaning on the wall so much as stuck to it, in some sort of pattern according to shape: octagon, rectangle, circle, oval. But none of the shapes were arranged in a way that Joshua could see as meaningful.

Bent over and running with his hands on the floor, Johndo ran over to his mat and grabbed the final sheet of metal, an octagon-shaped piece, and took it to the last empty space on the shelf on the other side of the room. While the shelf and its new contents were at eye-level for Joshua, when Johndo reared up on his feet, the shelf only reached up to his wide chest. The soldier peeked into the room for a second at the sound of Johndo's footsteps, and Joshua waved him away.

"Not neowo, Yotchooa," Johndo said again, holding the sheet a foot away from the wall. He hadn't put it in place yet. His mouth opened in what could have been a Wannoshay grin, the four rows of his sharpened teeth glistening in the light of the room's orb.

Joshua took one final glance at the ring of pages encircling him -- only the gray and white symbols were visible now, the metal blending into that of the wall -- and then returned his attention to Johndo. Not knowing what else to do, Joshua nodded.

"True history," Johndo said in a clear voice inside Joshua's head. He placed the final metal page into the wall of his room.

White light shot straight out from each of the sheets, cutting the room in half, top to bottom. Joshua choked on his own breath, thinking he'd been blinded at first. When he blinked and inhaled, smelling Johndo's comforting odor of salt and mud instead of the bitter burnt-coffee smell, he saw that he was in a darkened cave filled with the People.

The darkness was staved off by a greenish glow coming from strands of lichen attached to the rough angle formed where the cave wall met the cave ceiling. The walls were ridged and irregular, as if carved out by hand. Over two dozen gray-skinned, shuddering People stood on all fours, huddled around a trio of lighter-skinned People, males with long bluish-black hair tentacles and scars crisscrossing the length of their bare chests. Joshua's eyes adjusted immediately to the gloom, and then he saw the same scene sideways, from a slightly higher vantage point. Too shocked to move or speak, Joshua could only watch as the People pushed forward, reaching out to the three males, who inched backwards until they were up against the cave wall. High-pitched voices sang a Wannoshay word that Joshua couldn't translate at first, a word of too many vowels and not enough hard consonants. The singing became loud as a scream, yet somehow it never lost its strange beauty. Twitching arms and squirming tentacle-hairs filled Joshua's split perceptions, and the light from the lichen began to fade. Before a scream of his own could escape Joshua's lips, the vision ended.

Joshua lay on his side on the floor of Johndo's room, hands over his ears and gasping for air. He couldn't smell anything now except his own sweat. All he could hear was the People's word that they'd been screaming over and over again like a curse. He recognized it: Twilight.

A tentative hand touched the front of his shirt, and the scream that Joshua had swallowed nearly rose to the surface again.

"Yotchooa?"

Joshua pulled free of the hand before he realized who it was in front of him.

"Johndo," he gasped. "What happened?"

Johndo had left his side. He rushed around the room on all fours, collecting the metal sheets from the shelf, pulling the sheets roughly off the wall, oblivious to the sharp edges even as they cut into his fingers. His breath whistled in and out of his lipless mouth, and his wide shoulders twitched.

"Johndo?" Joshua said, looking at the fresh scratches on Johndo's fingers, dripping reddish-purple blood. Many, many iwolo.

Joshua touched the scratch on the back of his own hand as Johndo gathered the sheets in what appeared to be a haphazard manner and closed the cover. He saw the strange designs carved like tattoo or scars on the back of each of Johndo's gray hands, two intersecting ovals inside an octagon. The room now smelled like salt, and something deeper, more pungent, like rotting fruit.

Joshua slid across the cold floor, closer to the where Johndo paused above the book and the mat, panting. Some of the pages sat behind Johndo, pages Joshua hadn't seen on the wall before the vision overtook all his senses. He looked back at Johndo, whose wide shoulders were quivering as his fingers dripped blood onto the black floor. The blood dissipated as soon as it hit, as if being absorbed. Looking at the expanse of Johndo's elongated spine through his thin T-shirt, Joshua heard a warning in the back of his mind that he did his best to ignore.

"Johndo? Were those People..." Joshua knew he shouldn't say the word, but he couldn't stop himself. "Were they twilight?"

The soldier standing guard outside the room, having seen something different in the way Johndo was acting, had taken two steps into the room. In the days that followed, Joshua would convince himself that the soldier's presence was the only thing that saved his life that morning.

As soon as Joshua uttered the word, Johndo turned on Joshua, and the soldier couldn't prevent Johndo from lashing out with thick arm, hitting Joshua on the right side of the face. The last thing Joshua thought before the impact of the bloody fingers of Johndo's clawed hand was another word of the People: Iwolo.

As his world spun from the blow and bright white light once again flashed into his vision, Joshua saw the soldier grab something on his belt and press a button. Joshua fell to his knees, and Johndo followed suit almost immediately, dropping like dead weight to the metal floor. Johndo's derm patch gave off a trickle of smoke, like a tiny, extinguished campfire.

Not a book, his reeling mind repeated as he struggled to sit up. He thought the words first in English, then in bastardized Wannoshay. With one hand held over the bloody, stinging scratches Johndo had left on his face, the other hand pressed to his chest, Joshua wondered if he would ever get the chance to ask Johndo to explain that statement and answer his original question, or any of the questions that came after it.

Joshua stared at the motionless Wannoshay just a few feet away from him and felt something hopeful and good inside of him begin to die.




As time passed and the bruise and scratches on his right cheek had almost completely faded, Joshua knew he was going to have to return the book of the People back to Colonel Cossa. He was in his tent, sweating, with the metal pages spread out in front of him. Joshua he realized he was getting nowhere. If I do recreate the pattern, he thought, do I really want to experience a vision like the one in Johndo's room?

Joshua realized the answer to that question was Yes.

He would have been happy to see Johndo again, but the colonel had had declared Johndo off-limits to all visitors after attacking Joshua. While Joshua thought the incident had been mostly a big misunderstanding, he couldn't argue too much with the colonel -- Johndo's glancing blow had nearly knocked him out.

But let's just forget about that for now, Joshua told himself. I have to try and remember the pattern. Surely there was a method to how Johndo had arranged the pages.

After sitting, eyes closed, for almost five minutes, Joshua thought he had it. He picked up the book, carefully pulled the pages free, and held the first page, an oval shape, up to his tent wall. With a little pressure, the page adhered itself to the wooden frame of the tent. Almost afraid to breathe, Joshua arranged the four dozen metal pages against the walls of his small tent. With each page in place the air seemed to grow a tiny bit warmer.

Joshua stopped with a start when he came to the final eight pages. These sheets were all blank, and he couldn't remember where or how they fit into Johndo's pattern.

"Give me strength, Father," he said, looking from the pages in his hand to those resting side-by-side on his tent wall. After a moment he began placing individual sheets into the remaining gaps. "And please don't let me blow this place up."
When Joshua pressed the final blank page against the wall, each page erupted with a beam of pure white light, and he had time to take one quick breath before he was immersed in not just one vision, but a series of them.

The first of the new visions began where the last one ended, in the cave filled with alien singing that bordered on shrieking. Joshua tried without any success to find the three light-skinned People that had been surrounded by the darker-skinned People -- Johndo's People, he assumed. Joshua felt himself pulled along with the convulsing flow of gray bodies reaching forward, almost melting into one another. The wild singing stopped, replaced by anguished screaming and the sounds of flesh meeting flesh. Bits of long, bluish-black hair filled the air, landing in the glowing lichen above him and dousing the cave with darkness.

A brilliant light flashed in the darkness, and the violence against the three aliens was interrupted a quaking sensation that knocked most of the People off-balance. A heartbeat later they were all running through greenish light of the rough-hewn caves, toward the source of the ongoing tremor.

With another flash of white light they arrived in a massive cave where a black ship was roaring to life. The angular ship shook off what looked to be years of accumulated dust and mold and glowing lichen as it began to work its way up through the cave. The spires at its top blasted through the rock with small bursts of controlled explosions.

In a flash Joshua saw more ships emerging from the massive caves, and all of them were filled with gray-skinned People.

In another flash he was onboard one of the ships, looking back at the caves that had been the People's home for many generations ("many cycles," Johndo would have called them). More of the People were rushing into the ship, and now Joshua could see that they were being pursued. Through the dual perspective of his two eyes mixed with the sideways Wannoshay eye, Joshua saw a mass of lighter-skinned People rush the ship, pounding on its flat black walls even as the ships pushed away from the cave floor.

"Twilight. The People of Twilight." The voice sounded like Johndo's, when he would speak directly inside Joshua's head.

With another flash, Joshua saw the ships break through the surface of a desolate planet rimmed in blue ice, and in another flash they were a mile above it. The flashes came faster now, almost too fast for Joshua to comprehend: aliens packed into black casks for the long journey, a gray claw burning symbols into an octagonal metal sheet, a lone figure threading its way among the stacked casks, its long back bent as if with a great weight.

And with a final blinding flash, the vision ended, releasing Joshua.

A cold wind whipped into his tent, knocking the sheets of metal from his tent walls. It was only through a miracle of luck that he avoided getting cut by sharp edges of the falling pages. He lay on the hard floor, stunned, thinking that he must have arranged the pages in the wrong manner, and now he was paying for it. Too late he remembered Johndo's small pile of blank pages.

"Johndo," he murmured, picking up the pieces of the book. He put the pages back in place inside their metal holder, his chest aching almost as badly as it had the day of his heart attack.

He set the book on his desk and slid its sharp sides away from the edge of his desk before he walked out of his tent. Joshua was resting outside on the front step of his tent, wondering if the soldiers were still keeping Johndo in restraints somewhere in the encampment, when his glasses began beeping. With shaking hands he slipped on his military-grade glasses and blinked at a flashing Netstream icon. Along with the four messages he'd missed while he was working with the book, Joshua saw that there were a flood of news stories scrolling across the inside of his glasses.

When he saw the initial reports, he knew he wasn't going to get a chance to chat about the book with the colonel. The events of the world had once again changed his plans and his life forever.




The news report were focused on an explosion at a brewery in Milwaukee, only a few hours' drive from where Joshua sat right now. Watching the news feed loop past his glasses for the fifth time, Joshua reached a trembling hand up to his mouth, and then his fingers slid over to the healing scars on his cheek.

From the tone of the 'Stream reporters and various message boards, the explosion did not appear to be accidental. Joshua had heard those words together all too many times in the past decade.

He spent the next hour behind his glasses, constantly wiping sweat from his forehead to keep his spectacles clean. Terrorism had been everyone's initial knee-jerk reaction, either from the various enemies of the unending war overseas or suicide cultists.

And then the word got out on the 'Streams that somehow some of the People had been inside the brewery at the time of the explosion. The entire tone of the reports changed from a somewhat familiar dread to a sharper, more hysterical pitch. Reports abounded of People being rounded up like cattle from the landing sites and their new apartment complexes. Half an hour later, the first 'Stream stories began to circulate about another explosion, this time at an elevator in South Dakota.

So much, Joshua thought, for the integration process.

Private Petersheim, who had been named Joshua's Chaplain's Assistant back in March, interrupted Joshua as he was downloading yet another 'Stream report to his spectacles.

"Time to go, padre," Petersheim said in a tight voice. Joshua was shocked to see the anger and fear on the young man's face.

On their way out of the landing site, Joshua bit his tongue when he noticed that the People still living in the ship and the caves below it had been placed under armed guard. Outside the fence, they passed protestors hidden behind their cheap Netstream glasses or watching the latest heartrending news unfold on portable screens in their cars, eerily silent again. Any second now, Joshua feared, the massed people were going to explode.

Riding back to the Shrine of Our Lady, Joshua realized he'd left his Bible in his tent. All he had was the book of the People in his hands. He felt like he was somehow responsible for the explosions in Wisconsin and South Dakota. And then he remembered his friend's words.

"Only Elders are in touch with the soul of a people," Johndo had said on that cold day they first met. "Only an Elder knows what must be taken on faith."

Forty-five minutes later, the private turned onto West Lexington and slammed on the brakes to avoid crushing a clot of pedestrians in the street. The crowds reminded Joshua of two sets of the People, in two very different settings: those he'd seen in his vision, and those who were living huddled together under the ship.

The words entered his head, unbidden: "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come."



Joshua grabbed the alien book and touched the arm of the private, who was about to honk at the people in front of them.
"No," Joshua said. "It's okay. These are...my people."

"Oh." The private looked at the people and turned back to Joshua. "You've got a big congregation, huh?"

Joshua saw many familiar faces, though it took him a few seconds to recognize most of them. He didn't want to speak with the hypocrites, the humans who had no faith except in times of trouble. He didn't feel like reassuring this band of skeptics that no, the sky was not falling, and no, the aliens weren't coming to kill them in their sleep, and yes, God was still in heaven and all the world would still be here when they wake up.

"Do you want me to stay, father?" Petersheim asked.

Once again, Joshua heard the slam of the hatch closing inside the ship. "Your redemption is drawing near," he imagined saying to his returned congregation. "Deal with it however you may."

The crowd spread out in front of him, not noticing the big car at first as they all pushed their way closer to the church. From the safe, cool confines of the sedan, Joshua could see old man Ribisi with his oxygen facemask near the entrance, and Mrs. Consiglione rolling her walker across the street, slow as an old car going up a steep hill.

Take me out of here, he almost said.

Then he felt the metal pages of the book the colonel had given him in his hand. He looked down and instead of his Bible, he held an alien book in his hands. The metal edges threatened to cut into his hands from his tight grip, and then, the metal pages softened, yielding to his touch. He ran a finger across a page of the book and the symbols disappeared, melting into the flat black metal, leaving an empty page in front of him.

It wasn't really a book, Joshua realized, but a kind of journal. An incomplete record. There were still many pages left to be filled, more work left to be done. Much more work.

"Private," Joshua said. "Thanks for the ride. You can let me out right here. Take care of yourself, son."

Heat blasted him in the face the instant he stepped out of the car. Joshua looked out at the members of his congregation as they came up to him, calling out his name. Carrying the book of the Wannoshay in his hands, Joshua took one step, and then another, back toward his church and his returned people.

With his congregation crowded around him, Joshua could only make out snippets of conversation, flashes of sentences from the many voices around him:

"Father, the aliens were running out of the brewery right before it blew up..."

"It was the cultists, Father..."

"Father, I don't understand..."

"Got to put all of the aliens away so they can't hurt us like this again..."

"Father...Father..."

Joshua gently removed the hands reaching out for him. "Follow me," he said in a voice that silenced those around him. His chest gave one final twinge of pain as he walked up the steps, and then he forgot about everything but his people behind him and the book in his hands. He had the pages free by the time he walked through the humming security arch. His congregation dropped into the pews, watching him in a shocked silence. Joshua turned to the left-hand side of his church and began arranging the first of metal pages against the walls. He placed them below the stained glass windows and next to the Stations of the Cross. And this time he remembered to hold back the blank pages of the metal book.

Joshua knew he had to show his congregation as much of the People's true history as they could handle. It was the only way they'd understand. Long before he pushed the final eight-sided page with its swirl of almost-decipherable gray symbols against the wall, the heat and energy in the church had already begun to build. As white light filled his church and reflected a rainbow of colors off the stained glass windows, Father Joshua prayed that he and Johndo's People would have time to complete the blank pages of this book, and many books after that.

End