AD ALIENOS

By P.R. Gomez

Dear Holy Father,

I hope this message finds you in good health, through the grace of the Almighty. I was greatly saddened when, as soon as I awoke from the cryostat, I was told the Holy Father had abdicated twelve years ago, but my sadness turned to joy when I heard you had succeeded him and had sent me, your humblest servant, a special blessing for the success of our mission.

It is a pity that the FTL bandwidth seems to be wholly occupied with scientific data—or so the Captain, who unfortunately is a convinced atheist, has told me—so I am forced to send this message by laser link. You will not be able to read this until long after the events have taken place, Holy Father, but the delay will allow me to explain things calmly and at length, free from eavesdropping and unwanted censorship—with one exception: it appears that my fellow apostles fear that our efforts will not be understood back home, so they have prevailed on Mission Control to have our proper names automatically expunged from all communications. Therefore, you will likely see some rather conventional (and probably quite inadequate) markers replacing our names, but I hope that will be all the tampering they do.

They awakened our “holy crew,” as the other astronauts have taken to calling us, with the ship already in orbit around HGG42 Gamma 3, so called because it is the third planet around this sun, which is also the third in magnitude in its constellation. As soon as I was able to get my bearings—it is not easy without gravity, as you know, Holy Father—I sought a window to contemplate the planet, and was immediately struck by the wisdom and the power of the Almighty, who made this twin sister of our home so far away, and hid her from our eye till we were mature enough to handle her with the care she deserves. I prayed that the Gammans might be receptive to our word. I think the mullah (I wonder what string the automatic censor will use to replace his name) was doing a similar thing, for he kept doing backflips in his effort to prostrate himself in the lack of gravity.

I wanted to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice right away, but the Captain forbade it on the grounds that the Sacred Species might end up floating all over the mothership and fouling up the ventilation system—as if the source of everlasting life were some kind of trash! I had to content myself with praying as I beheld the planet from my window. My heart ached with sorrow, thinking of those billions of souls who had never come in contact with Our Lord and thus lay in the power of death, but then I felt an immense joy, for their long exile was now about to end: soon they too would be part of our family and share in the life that vivifies us.

I soon learned that the scientific part of the mission was already finished when they took us out of the cryostat. The next day, therefore, was our descent to the surface. Our landing place was quite desolate, though not by any means a desert. The Captain told us he had chosen it precisely because of its solitude, so that there would be enough time to arrange for a pickup if we managed to upset the Gammans.

We were already on the surface and there was gravity, so I decided I would wait no longer. On top of the mess table, in the landing craft, I celebrated the Holy Sacrifice with the greatest dignity afforded by the circumstances. My fellow clerics, the mullah and the rabbi, were kind enough to help me with the liturgy—not so the Lieutenant (an atheist, like the Captain), who is commanding on the ground, and only agreed to the Sacrifice after I threatened to not leave the craft until everyone else was gone, in which case no one could prevent me anymore.

But perhaps I must first explain why I had to celebrate still inside the landing craft and not on the surface of Gamma itself. Even though this planet is very much like ours, it is a little smaller and, consequently, its gravity is lower and its atmosphere considerably thinner. There is oxygen, but not enough to perform any strenuous exercise without fainting. We must wear our pressure suits at all times when we are outside. I did not consider myself authorized to bend the liturgical norms so much as to celebrate with a pressure suit on, hence my decision to do it in the craft. I hope this does not offend our liturgists.

I made my thanksgiving and then it was time to go out. Soon we saw the Gammans our scouts had prepared for first contact, for we had landed very close to their habitat.

Holy Father, I am sure you have seen representations of what the inhabitants of this planet look like, but I assure you they fail to capture their essential hideousness. To begin with, their bodies are wholly out of proportion—a consequence of the low gravity, I presume—with two legs so long that their abdomen would be level with my head. Likewise, their bodies are very long and their two arms located very high, so they hardly have any neck at all. This gives them a curious sort of rigidity and an ungainly, ambling gait. I shook the male’s hand and, although I had been trained to expect it, I almost threw it away with revulsion, for its many squishy fingers kept wiggling as I touched them.

Their faces contain two small eyes that flutter constantly. Their nasal structures, on the contrary, protrude so much out of their heads that their nostrils point straight down (probably in order to smell their food before they eat it). Their ears also jut out significantly, but they do not hear any better because of this. Their hearing is tuned to the sound of their own nasal voices, so it is impossible to communicate with them without an electronic translator.

May the Almighty be praised for this marvel of technology, the translator, for it opens up such a new world to our apostolate. We have translators built right into our pressure suits, so they process our speech into something Gammans can understand, and also translate from their language into ours. They have been programmed according to what our scientists have learned in their short time on the planet, so the translation is not yet perfect, but they are amazingly effective nevertheless. For instance, the very first time I talked to that Gamman, he seemed to understand I had not come to analyze him like the scientists, but instead I was interested in his soul. He told me his name, which the translator did not have an equivalent for, so it passed it through as it was, without translation. It sounded something like “J’s’th,” with a few nasal sounds in-between that I cannot pronounce, let alone transcribe.

The mullah and the rabbi also talked to him, but I think he likes me better. The mullah has told me, however, that he believes the Gamman will soon convert to his religion because all rational beings in the universe belong to it if they are truly rational. I did not want to get in an argument with him, for fear the Gamman would hear us and conclude the wrong thing about us, so I remained silent. Did I do wrong, Holy Father? I do not think I did. I think Our Lord was happy with my meekness and will bring these people into Communion with Him because of it.

Just in case, I told the Lieutenant that I preferred to speak with the Gammans alone, if at all possible. My prayers must have been heard, for he said I could have as much time with the Gammans as I wanted, as long as I got out of his way—assuming the other clerics agreed, of course. From now on, therefore, I will be able to speak with them freely, praised be the Lord.

My companions did not seem to mind it. I happened to mention my thirst for souls as I chatted with the rabbi, after dinner, and was quite surprised to hear that he did not share it. To him, there is only one people able to reach life everlasting, and the only way to belong to it is by birth: the Gammans are out of luck, as far as he is concerned. I felt like asking him why he volunteered to go on this mission and subject himself to eight months of training, twenty years of deep freeze, and then the painful thawing process (and then the same thing again on the way back), if he did not expect anything to come out of it.

But I did not ask him, because I was afraid he would return the question. I must confess to you, Holy Father, that I left home full of bitterness toward my superiors, who seemed to be more concerned with defusing the shameful allegations leveled against me (by the rather expeditious method of removing me for a few decades) than with the good of souls, mine included. I have since forgiven them, and now realize that it was the Holy One who was making use of injustice in order to extend his kingdom. We, his ministers, do not cease being sinners because we deal with the source of everlasting life, and so now I feel grateful and ashamed to have been so chosen, when there were so many who deserved to be here more than I.

Begging your blessings, your humblest servant in the Lord,

The priest

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Dear Holy Father,

I hope my previous message has reached you all right. When you receive it, we will already be on the return flight, and the Gammans will have become our brethren. The Captain (with the connivance of the Lieutenant, who is on the surface with us) refuses, as I said earlier, to let us use any of the FTL’s bandwidth for our apostolic mission. On top of that, he announced over the radio link that there is a forecast for meteoroids crossing our flight path, so he had ordered, allegedly after consulting Mission Control, to begin wrapping up the mission and go home. We are now due to depart in three days’ time. Three days! How can I possibly bring these people into Communion with us in such a short time?

I was despondent for the whole morning, while the mullah hammered the Gamman and his family to make them join his religion. When my time came I did not know how I was going to start. I was then moved to browse the Scriptures at random, and my eye caught the passage where the sacred author teaches that “All there is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eye and the pride of life.” I knew instantly, as if a voice had spoken into my soul, yet without the sound of words, that this sentence was meant to guide my mission, the shortcut I was looking for, which my many sins had not allowed me to see until then.

I recalled how a brother theologian had categorically asserted—not long before the existence of life in HGG42 Gamma 3 was confirmed—that since salvation was universal and beings born on this planet would not likely share in our First Parents’ fault, therefore they could not possibly be intelligent, as we are. They might appear to be so, he said, but they could not have the ability to reach life everlasting. The test, for which the Scriptures had just given me the key, would be whether the Gammans were subject to the triple concupiscence as we are, thus proving their need for salvation.

We had three days on the planet, so naturally I thought it appropriate to devote one day to each of the concupiscences. On this first day, therefore, I checked them for lust.

You must understand, Holy Father, that Gammans, being physically so different from us, cannot be expected to feel lust for one of our race. Like their bodies, their reproductive organs are shaped differently from ours, so that the individuals we would naturally think of as males, because of their bright colors and incessant talk, are actually the females. On this world, females obviously rule: the males are reduced to a kind of slavery, being forced to work outside while the females stay at home and tell them what to do.

With this in mind I approached the female, whose name is something like “S’s’s’th” (with more unpronounceable sounds in-between). Not to be outdone by the mullah, I asked her point blank if she had other males and if so how often. She was not offended as I thought she would be, but instead went into her dwelling and brought out a picture showing two hatchling Gammans.

It seems, therefore, that Gammans exhibit an extreme case of neotenia, so that sexual activity only takes place between adult females and nearly newborn males. Whatever the case may be, this reproductive behavior is clearly not conducive to lust between consenting adults, so I decided to move on to the other lusts, having concluded that the sexual drive was not a powerful motivator for their species.

The next lust on my list was that for food and other life-sustaining needs. Here I based myself on the observation that their mouths, although much smaller than ours, seem to be arranged similarly. They have two horizontal lines of smallish teeth, a sure sign of a vegetarian diet. I had smuggled some fruit from home, carefully folded inside my jacket when I went into the cryostat. Although the fruit did not have the benefit of a controlled thaw as I did, it managed to stay fresh and appetizing (the food on board the ship was horrible, Holy Father, even worse than that during the training program; I would have quit twice on that account alone, if the Lord had not given me strength). I very much desired to eat the fruit myself, but I offered it to J’s’th who, being a male, was therefore malnourished compared to his wife.

He accepted it gladly and took a good bite, but immediately spewed it out amid curses (I didn’t need the translator to tell me what they were), hitting me in the eye. I offered it all up as penance toward the success of our mission (the loss of the food as well as the pain) and moved on to the next test.

The Gammans did not seem to feel a lust for what gratifies the body, so I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to determine if they suffered from what I would call “intellectual lust,” as unfortunately so many of our brethren are prey to. Not being able to communicate ideas as effectively as I would have liked, due to the imperfect translation, I was forced to hint at the pleasures of the intellect through mere sensory aids. The rabbi had told me he had spent most of his time with the Gammans talking about music, of which he is very fond. He did not say whether he played a recording to them, so I suspected he saw something there that he did not want to tell me. Therefore, I went back to the landing craft and downloaded a selection of the best classical music I could get my hands on, and arranged to have it broadcast to my space suit through a private channel. Then I went into the place where the Gammans lived.

I think it was providential that my mind was so occupied with the test, Holy Father, for otherwise I doubt I could have mustered enough courage to enter their dwelling. The door opened into a huge, dimly lit space overhung with obstacles and littered with all sorts of strange artifacts. I tripped repeatedly in the semidarkness, until J’s’th took one of my hands (the touch of his many slithering fingers still gives me a chill when I recall it) and made me sit (so to speak) on one of those artifacts, so my feet dangled a good distance from the ground. I nearly fell off when I realized that two other, smaller Gammans had sneaked up under cover of darkness and were standing directly above me, ogling me with their fluttering eyes and making odd gurgling noises while they bared their small teeth most disturbingly.

I must confess I had feared they might turn violent when I started the music, judging by their father’s reaction to our food, but then the newcomers began moving with the rhythm, stomping on the floor and making loud, sickening sounds by violently joining their hands together. Thus they danced—or I should say, writhed, for such was the way their sinuous bodies shook—until S’s’s’th came in. She had her hands on her ears, so I surmised she wanted me to stop the music, which I did at once. After that, the small Gammans just sat down while S’s’s’th asked me about the ship and our food (her mate must have told her about the fruit) and other subjects that did not give me a chance to tell her about life everlasting and Communion with Our Lord.

It was a pleasant chat, but then evening came and I had to leave, for the Lieutenant has us under a strict curfew and I did not want to anger him unnecessarily. I came back rejoicing that the Gammans had so far passed their test: they did have an attraction to music—and I presume to the other intellectual pleasures as well—but only the young fell prey to its allure. The adults, then, have learned to dominate this concupiscence, displaying great mortification in the face of temptation. I was impressed.

Over dinner, the mullah boasted that the Gammans were about to convert to his religion. The rabbi was not so sure about that, and neither was I, but still I could not avoid thinking that I had to move even more quickly to bring the Good News to those people before others confused them with their superstition. I made my prayer and then went to my cabin in the landing craft, where I am now writing this. I ask you, Holy Father—I know you will not receive this until long after everything has happened, of course, but I am sure the Lord will listen to your prayer and grant it retroactively, for He is outside time—to beg Him for my work of tomorrow, on behalf of this planet that has so long lain in death and darkness.

Sure to receive your blessing, your humblest servant in the Lord,

The priest.

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Dear Holy Father,

I found it hard to sleep last night. I tossed and turned while I debated about what would be the best way to introduce my Gamman friends to our life in the Lord. Would it be best to go straight to the subject, as the mullah had been doing, or rather wait for a sign? Would they be able to understand? And if so, how would I know that grace had touched their souls, since I can barely tell the same among my people? (I say this without bitterness).

Perhaps it was pride that did not let me rest, Holy Father, for I thought that the Gammans’ conversion depended on my personal ability. Whatever the reason, I woke up dizzy and bleary-eyed, and did not get any better during the morning, as I waited for the other two to finish their turn. I was deathly afraid that the mullah would be right and I would find the Gammans already converted to his sect when I spoke to them. Through the Lord’s mercy, however, it was not to be.

The mullah came back to the landing craft in a dark mood. He was so uncommunicative during lunch that the Lieutenant worried that he had somehow offended the Gammans, thus jeopardizing our whole mission. He would not talk to us, but eventually the Lieutenant managed to extract from the rabbi that, indeed, he had gone too far this time and J’s’th had asked the two of them to leave.

The Lieutenant, of course, advised me not to speak with the Gammans under such conditions, on the pretense that they were likely upset with all of us, but I saw the opportunity to reveal the true life to the Gammans and I was not going to waste it. So I went straight to their dwelling before anyone could stop me.

S’s’s’th opened the door, wearing a facial expression that—so I had been taught at the pre-landing briefing—meant disapproval. She invited me to come inside, however. I saw it was too dark to see and so I told her. I think the Gammans are able to distinguish between us by now, because she seemed to realize who I was, and that I was not going to argue with them as the mullah had done. She called J’s’th, who I presume was working somewhere, and then the three of us boarded a kind of gravistat made of rustic materials that was placed near the door. I suppose their ancestors must have come originally from a planet with a higher gravity, and thus they need gravistat sessions to maintain their bone strength, so I did not begrudge it even though the gravistat frequency was so low that it made me ill.

As I expected, the Gammans complained about my companions’ behavior. I tried to mollify them as best as I could, while I prayed that a window might open so I could reveal the Good News to them. Then I realized that their very displeasure was going to allow me to test whether the irascible passions held sway over their souls.

I tried to explain to them that we too get angry quite often, but without going into details about our wars and on-going enmities—I thought doing so would scandalize them, so that I would find it harder afterwards to speak about Communion in Our Lord. I am not sure they understood, but they seemed to be happy to hear me say that—again, according to the facial signs I was taught at the pre-landing briefing. I told them that wrath could be a holy thing when it was directed against sin and selfishness, and that made them even happier. I told them we should love holy things and hate death and its works, and then they began to touch me with their squishy hands, which I understood as a sign of approval.

But then I made a mistake: I was so happy to see that they agreed with me and thus were preparing themselves for grace, that I smiled. I did not remember that Gammans never smile as we do, so that when they are happy they express their joy by signs made with their limbs and faces, but never with a smile. I think my smile caught them by surprise and they became terrified, as a child sometimes does when a stranger fixes his eye on her.

They ran back to their dwelling, leaving me outside, still in the slowly swinging gravistat. I think my companions must have been watching me, for I heard the mullah coming through the intercom. He taunted me about my failure to convert the Gammans, and said that maybe the rabbi should try next, even though he did not want to make any converts, and bosh like that. I did not want to argue with him after being so close to the goal, so I tuned him out and prayed for enlightenment.

It was clear that peace and anger meant something completely different to the Gammans. It was even possible that they were unable to become authentically angry, and so had to express their frustration in a different way. I took this as a positive sign, for it meant that their nature was also free from this deadly sin. So far they had proven to be free from lust, gluttony, sloth, and anger. If they were also free from envy, greed and pride they would be in the state of total innocence.

Testing for greed and envy was the easiest of all: I just had to give something to one of them and not to the others, and watch their reaction. The behavior of him who had received the gift would tell me whether they suffered from greed, while that of the others would no doubt display the ugly face of envy.

I chided myself for not having thought of it before—so clear was it now—and I immediately felt as if Our Lord were humbling me for having believed that I had been chosen because of my intellect, while in reality it was my sins and his mercy that had prepared the way. Without wasting a second, I jumped off the gravistat and returned to the landing craft—rather unsteadily, for I was still dizzy and my legs kept tangling as I walked. I do not think the Lieutenant noticed it and, in any case, I did not give him the chance to object. Ten minutes later I was back before the Gammans’ dwelling carrying one of the spare pressure suits.

The youngsters were working outside with the help of crude instruments made of the same material as the gravistat and a kind of stitched-up ball. I walked straight to the smaller one and, making an effort not to smile again, gave him the suit.

For greater effect, I had turned on the spare suit’s translator, so they could perhaps hear the sound of our speech. It worked: the younger Gamman heard himself translated and became intensely curious. The suit did not fit his sinuous body and long limbs, of course, but the helmet was large enough for him to stick his proboscis. He began to make noises, which the translator amplified, transformed into unintelligible gibberish.

This seemed to attract his brother’s attention. He came up and spoke and again the translator picked it up and this time it converted it into our language—I will not try to transcribe what I understood of their conversation, Holy Father, for fear it would make you pale. Now they both wanted to introduce their proboscis into the helmet. There was only one suit, so either they agreed to share it or soon they would be fighting over it. Here was the test of fire, at last.

For a second, they looked indeed as if they were going to fight for it, which would have proved my theory (and thus disproved my brother theologian’s assertion) that they too had come under the sway of sin and therefore needed Salvation, which I was only too eager to offer. Only for a second, I say, because then the suit slipped from their hands—I should have thought of it: those soft, wet fingers could not possibly hold any reasonable weight, no matter how many they were—and fell to the ground, with such bad fortune that the translator went out altogether.

They seemed to be stunned for a moment, but then they started tossing the suit at each other, swinging it over their heads. I had resolved to observe only, so I watched in horror as the suit was torn up piece by piece until nothing was left but a tattered mess attached to the cracked-up helmet. Thus they used it for about half an hour, and then they abandoned it on the ground, for their mother had called them to go inside (probably to do some more work).

I found it hard to go back to the landing craft and face my team—especially the Lieutenant—but this time the rabbi took my side, so I was not alone suffering the wrath of the Lieutenant over the destroyed equipment. In a spirit of meekness, I lowered my gaze and did not reply to his tirade, although he did not limit himself to upbraiding me on account of the space suit, but also added all sorts of comments about the apostolic mission that Mission Control had tacked on the trip, and my methods. I did not expect otherwise, for I could see day after day how he seethed over the progress the mullah and I were making with the Gammans. He set the rabbi as a model for both of us—here he included the mullah as well, much to his displeasure—and threatened not to let us talk with the Gammans unless it was through the rabbi. The rabbi did not say yes or no, and in the end the Lieutenant got tired of shouting and went to his room to rant at someone else through the radio link.

Needless to say, I lost no time waiting to thank the rabbi for supporting me in the trial. In the spirit of true ecumenical brotherhood, I invited him to join me during our final day, as I finally revealed Our Lord to the Gammans. I was secretly hoping that this witness of faith would shake the rabbi out of his diffidence, so that he too would be filled with zeal and thus open himself to the action of grace. I was perhaps bending a bit the rules set out by Mission Control, that on no account should we try to proselytize fellow crewmembers, but what could they possibly do to me now?

The rabbi, as I have come to expect, merely shrugged off my offer, without saying either yes or no. I hope he will accompany me, though, for I greatly respect his opinion and his keen understanding of Gammans. I recall he was the first to put forth the theory that perhaps they do not have original sin and therefore are in no need of anyone to save them. So far he has been right, for the Gammans I have met do not seem afflicted by any deadly sin but perhaps the last one.

Like last night, I must ask you for your prayers, Holy Father, for tomorrow, our last day on this planet, will be the final test, on which the everlasting life of these people may depend.

Tomorrow is the day of pride.

Begging your fatherly blessing—and your prayers—your humblest servant in the Lord,

The priest.

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Dear Holy Father,

 It is with a mixture of joy and sorrow that I write this, already in our mothership. I spent last night on a prayer vigil to implore from Our Lord the grace of conversion for the Gammans. I prostrated myself on knees and elbows, and told him that I would not move until he had granted me at least the souls of the four Gammans I have come to love and understand so well. I think he heard me, for at once a feeling of great peace overwhelmed me.

It was this grace, I am sure, that prepared me for the bad news. We had not finished breakfast when the Lieutenant told us that an FTL message had arrived and the scientists needed to perform a few more tests before departure. This, of course, was going to happen at the expense of our mission, so he was informing us that we would only have an hour to say goodbye to the Gammans while the landing craft prepared for take off. He said this with badly concealed glee, for which I forgave him.

The rabbi seemed to have been expecting something of the sort all along and did not complain, but I was beside myself. Only one hour! What could I possibly get done in one hour?

The mullah began to talk like the rabbi. All of a sudden he became moody and said it was all written and the Almighty had decreed it so and therefore the best thing to do was just leave and damn if he cared about the Gammans being saved if the Most High did not want them. I took note of his bizarre behavior and decided to stay away from him until take-off time, in case he got a revelation that I too should let things pass, and tried to stop me.

I was not ready to let things pass, of course, for billions of souls weighed on me and on what I would do in the brief time remaining. I do not think it was anything extraordinary: it is exactly how, I am completely sure, you would have acted, Holy Father.

So I grabbed a plant sprayer, filled it with water, and ran to the Gammans’ dwelling to baptize them all—by force if necessary.

I am convinced Our Lord was filling me with his grace, because I felt so strengthened that, despite the run and the low oxygen concentration, I was inspired to remove my helmet so the Gammans would have a chance to see me as I am. I did not faint, as everybody had predicted, and was able, for the first time, to sense the exquisite fragrance that pervaded their dwelling.

It is hard to describe such a supernatural event to anyone who has not experienced it, but I am confident you will understand me, Holy Father, for you have, as our supreme herdsman, a very special grace to do so. That most delicate fragrance was like that of the best and most appetizing fruits of our land, but fresher, as if the scent itself could remove the defilement of flesh and spirit. I tracked its source, and found that the aroma that so intoxicated me emanated from the Gammans’ bodies. It was most intense in the space between their lower limbs.

Who was I, Holy Father, to deny the grace of which I was a minister to souls who so strikingly displayed their holiness? I lost no time and baptized all four then and there with the sprayer, and then prepared to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice in their presence. It would be the first time that members of another species, now our brethren in spirit, would participate in the Sacred Banquet, and so his Body would make them become one with us.

I told the Gammans of my plan and they seemed to understand. As soon as the youngsters arrived, I began the celebration of the Sacred Mysteries. Midway through the first prayer, however, a doubt assailed me: with all my fervor and the rush to get done, I had forgotten to check whether the Gammans were enslaved by pride. I sensed that their trial would come, whether I intended it or not, for they could properly merit grace only if they overcame evil. But what could that trial possibly be?

Thus I went on, my mind lost in cavils while my voice announced the sublime mysteries, when I realized, without anything having happened to bring it about, that the Holy Sacrifice itself was to be their trial, for in it was contained life eternal and, to the soul lost by pride, what could be more tempting than snatching it, to possess it apart from its source? The situation was very similar to that of our First Parents, but here I was the tempter, as I offered them the Lord’s very life-giving Body.

My knees rattled as I approached the canon. Was it possible that the Gammans had been pretending all the time, and now were only waiting for the Sacred Species to be present in order to profane it or—perhaps even worse—to carry their fraud all the way to the end and consume it with a mind to challenge the Lord with his own power?

But there was no stopping now. I shut my mind to those evil thoughts and stretched my hands to hold the Sacred Species. Then I lowered my neck into my mouth and, solemnly, severed it with a single bite. In the middle of my pain, I still felt how my former head, now liberated from the rest of my body, dissolved into a swarm of unicellular, immortal life, ready to assimilate into itself whatever with which it would come in contact.

How could I have foreseen that the Gammans, faced with the Source of all Life, flesh and blood consecrated by pain, which now I held in my hands, would react as they did? I was so engulfed within the Sacred Mystery that I lost track of them for the good half minute that I needed to regenerate and recover sight and hearing. But when I was back as myself, exultant with the contact with the One that makes us all One, they were nowhere to be seen.

I did not know what to make of it. I remained stupefied, hoping they had had to leave due to some emergency that I had missed, but would soon come back. But no one came. Naturally, the Holy Sacrifice had to be completed, so I consumed the Sacred Species and said the final prayers as quickly as I could, inwardly worried that something had gone terribly wrong. Then I went to the area where the Gammans had been.

I found, lying amid overturned furniture, as though they had disintegrated and no part of them was left from which they could regenerate, one of S’s’s’th’s articles of clothing. It was a contraption vaguely resembling an elongated flagon, but porous and pliable, with which she prevented her soft foot from coming in direct contact with the ground.

I picked it up as a precious keepsake, and rushed back to the landing craft. When I got there, I felt giddy, perhaps because of the thin oxygen, but perhaps also because I realized the Gammans’ sudden departure was the sign I had been waiting for. Faced with the presence of the Holy One, their reaction had not been one of pride, as I had feared, but one of profound humility, so much so that they had considered themselves unworthy to stand before it.

The mullah and the rabbi could not understand why I was so happy, even after I told them as best as I could: the Gammans had passed all the tests and no deadly sin had been found in their hearts. They did not need me or anyone else to save them. Their bodies were beyond ugliness but their souls were innocent, as we will never know how to be.

Soon after, we took off and reached the mothership. I did not tell anyone about S’s’s’th’s garment, which will remain with me, as a precious relic, till I emerge from the cryostat. It will be my secret and your secret, Holy Father. I am sure it will find its way to your chapel, a most Holy grail for our liturgical libations, which will forever remind us to entrust ourselves to the intercession of this holy, sinless people.

Affectionately yours in the Eternal,

The priest.