Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

She shook her head and asked simply, “Why are we here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if I’m supposed to believe that Jesus came back for the second time, called the day of judgment and took every human soul to Heaven, then what are we doing here? Why didn’t He take us, too?”

“We weren’t on Earth.”

“Neither were three thousand Lunar colonists, and they got taken.”

“We were doing ninety-eight percent of the speed of light. We were three and a half light-years away.”

“And so God missed us. That’s my point. If He was omniscient He would have known we were there.”

I’d been thinking about that myself in the days since we’d been home. “Maybe He did,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Maybe God did know about us. Maybe He left us behind on purpose, as punishment for not believing in Him.”

She snorted. “What about atheists, then? What about other agnostics? Why just us eight?”

I held up my gloved hands, palms up. “I don’t know. I’m not God.”

“If you were, you’d have done a better job.”

I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a compliment or what, so I decided to ignore it. “What do you think happened, then, if it wasn’t God?”

“I don’t know. Maybe aliens came and took us all for slaves. Maybe we were a lab experiment and they got all the data they needed. Maybe we taste like chicken. There are plenty of more believable explanations than God.”

“What about the photos of Jesus?” I asked.

She rubbed her red nose with a mitten. “If you were going to harvest an entire planet’s population, wouldn’t you use their local religion to keep them in line?”

“Jesus wouldn’t have much sway with Jews,” I pointed out. “Or Moslems. Or athesists.”

“So says the former agnostic who believes in him because of what he read in the paper.” She said it kindly, but it still stung.

“Look,” I said, “Gwen’s going to start pretty soon. You coming or not?”

She shrugged. “What the hell. It ought to be fun listening to an agnostic sermon.”

We swung our legs around off the fence rail and stood up, then started following our tracks back to the lodge, an enormous log hotel built around the turn of the last century to house the crush of tourists who came to visit one of the last unspoiled places on Earth.

I took Jody’s right hand in my left as we walked. It was an unconsciously natural act; we weren’t a pair at the moment, but we had been a few times. With the small crew on the ship and lots of time to experiment, we had tried just about every combination at least once. The warmth and comfort I felt as we walked through the fresh snow together made me glad we’d never broken up hard. It felt like maybe we were headed for another stretch of time together.

Jody must have been feeling the same way. When we got down in among the aspen trees, she said, “Assuming God really is behind all this, and it’s not just some sort of enormous practical joke, then maybe this is a reward.”

“A reward?”

She nodded. “I like it here. It’s pretty, and peaceful. The last time I was here it was a zoo. Tourists wherever you looked, lines of motor homes and SUVs on the road as far as you could see, trash blowing all around. I feel like now I’m finally getting to see it the way it’s supposed to be.”

“The way God intended?”

“Yeah, maybe.” She grinned an agnostic-theologian grin and said, “Maybe we’re the next Ark. We were all set to start our own colony, after all. We’re the best genetic stock the UN Space Authority could find, and we’ve got more fertilized ova in the freezer. Maybe God decided it would be a good time to clear away all the riff-raff and give humanity a fresh start.”

“It’s a little cold for Eden,” I said.

“We’ve got the whole world,” she pointed out.

I thought about that. I supposed we did, at least until the airplanes and hovercars all fell apart. There was no way eight people could maintain a technological civilization indefinitely. Our colonization equipment was designed to keep us at what the UN’s social scientists called an “artificially augmented industrial age” until we could increase the population enough to build our own factories and so forth, but that level wasn’t particularly cosmopolitan. The idea had been to pick a spot and settle in rather than to play tourist on a new planet. Of course the planet needed at least one habitable spot, which was why we’d given up after two years of searching and come home.

“I’d never considered just going on with our lives,” I said. “I mean, after the second coming of Christ, that simply never occurred to me.”

Jody shrugged. “We just landed; we’ve all been too busy trying to figure out what happened. Give ‘em time, though, and I think most of us will start thinking about it. I mean, this could be all the Heaven we need if we do it right.”

A sudden chill ran up my spine, and it wasn’t from the snow. “We may not have time,” I said. “If Gwen’s little prayer meeting works, God may come back for us today.”