They said that God was fighting a losing battle. Hail and blood along with angel feathers littered the Earth. But in the Jovian Station, on the moon, Europa, there was an eerie peace.
Would he like more wine? She wondered. But her master was busy adjusting the timepieces in his large and varied collection.
He turned, draping a Tristar over her wrist, from 1975. It was the year he was born. His eyes were deep set and his full lips curled into a confident smile.
Her heart beat faster as she felt the steel against her skin. She wasn't a whore, nor in love with riches, but that it reminded her of her slaving ring. That multi-piece curved metal lock around her finger.
She had seen others, slaves as well, die from tampering with their rings. She didn't know how it worked, just that it got tighter when she felt like running away. Not that that was a possible solution out of her forced servitude, there in lonely orbit around Jupiter.
This watch showed the transit schedule of the Earth shuttle, he told her. He had had it made for that purpose. It was important, he added, for their safety. Then he took the goblet from her trembling hands and drank from it.
The slaver returned to his collection of watches. She thought of him, a perfection of masculine genetics, in his figure-hugging one-piece thermal overalls, and secretly mulled the prospect of becoming his wife. He had asked her when he met her but the wars over the Mars-Venus pearl trading route, the atrocities committed by the Arians, had turned her heart sour and hard. You have no country, no planet, he told her -still I love you. You remind me of my Moira.
But she was draped with a short slave tunic, a shoulder-less, plunging, gauzy weave. Her close cropped hair hugging her apricot-shaped head. And her eyes, gray-green like many born on Mars, her brown arms and legs, long and slender. She was only 14 when her parents died in a transporter accident and she was sold into bondage by the revolutionaries.
He waved his hand in dismissal, not bothering to admire, much less look at her. She bowed nevertheless, retiring to her quarters. And it was in her bed that she noticed that the Tristar was still on her wrist. He loves me... no he must be weak... and a fool. Maybe she could escape the lonely sterile station and return to Mars. Her opposite arm began to throb as the ring tightened ever so slightly and she pressed the thoughts of leaving him out of her mind. It was 6 days till the Earth shuttle's arrival. And she smiled to herself knowingly.
The Venusian pearl, he revealed to her, it was a wedding gift from his late wife's parents. God didn't know about this back door to Heaven. We can both be there with the other spacing families, he told her. Suspended in an electromagnetic field, in a haze of alcohol mist, the spirits it contained surrounded them. His wife's form congealed in the steamy air and they joined, in front of her.
This is a watch that times the subtle realms, he said. It is important to note the intervals as they are non-linear. Are they Gaussian? She asked. Somewhat. He gestured in the air and a holoscape, sparkling in vibrant greens and blues descended from the ceiling. In essence, everything spiritual obeys the formula,
I = DF
Imagination is proportional to desire multiplied by fairness. But what do you think of it? He asked her. I know you Martians school in emotional physics.
If I desired to either leave or marry you would that be fair?
Only if you imagined it rightfully. And that is the secret of the ring. He touched the gold pieces that fitted snugly around her finger and they began to slip looser. Her heart beat quickened as she looked into his shadowed eyes, resisting the urge to just pull the device off... but what after that?
How did your wife die? Was she a slave?
No, he replied. She was a free woman from the home world. She died... from a broken heart. The slaver turned to face the wide glass facade of the viewing room. Huge storms raged across the methane clouds of Jupiter, impacts from the cycle of asteroid invaders flung off the Oort Cloud every 22,000 years.
I'm an old man, kept young, even alive, by nanomachine colloids. A heavy, leaden-looking ring draped around his collar, a field harness that regulated the minute devices in his blood. Maybe I wanted too much to live, to enjoy my wealth -these, my timepieces from Earth, and my wife with me. But coming out here to Jupiter, to Europa, took too much out of my Moira. Perhaps I shouldn't have converted -to Space Masonry. I sensed it from before, as the light in her eyes began to fade. And I cast her lifeless body into the center of the Great White Spot. Her soul, I coerced into the station's pearl. So I might have her always.
Now go to your room, he said weakly, with a wavering tone.
In her chamber, she played with her ring. It had loosened a lot and slipped around her flesh, stopping short against her knuckle. She smiled. She put it to her ear and the low buzzing it usually emitted had stopped.
Imagination -that is the secret of the ring.
She looked at the Earth shuttle transit watch. Arrival was just 26 hours away.
Do you desire me? All things considered? He asked, if but a little?
Truthfully, I do, she replied, but my heart is tugged in so many directions.
Aren't you happy here? He asked, choking back tears.
He turned from her and clasped his hands around his face. It was like watching God cry.
The watch on her wrist indicated 6 hours to shuttle docking.
You can leave, he said, noticing her checking the watch. But you must never come back.
I love you, she blurted spontaneously, kneeling in front of him. He lifted her chin. And the ring slipped off her finger. She caught it in her other hand, eager to inspect it but the device came apart into a puzzle of small pieces. He gave her a plush, felted box wherein to deposit them. Then he told her, you have my heart.
It was gusty along the service tunnel that led to the docking bay. She hauled herself down cable that ran by the wide curved walls, afraid to miss the ride home -to Mars where she was born.
There were a few dozen passengers already strapped in along the shuttle's cabin. Giant Jupiter would whip the craft around and into orbit around the Red Planet and there was a half hour to kill before that window opened.
She closed her eyes as the sleep inducer mask flipped itself over her face. Same as it did on the trip here. Pinpricks of light danced lazily somewhere behind her visual awareness and she exhaled deeply.
What's your name? Came a voice from beside her, also exhaling.
I don't have one, she replied.
Slave, eh?
Yes, what's it to you?
There aren't many this far out.
Why not?
The war is going badly. Many are being thrown into the front lines -in droves. In a sense, it was a good thing you had your master.
She turned away from the voice, he said I mustn't return.
As separation makes the heart grow fonder.
I don't love him... Or maybe I do... I just didn't want to be forced into anything. Maybe I was being headstrong, worth less of myself than I thought.
He showed you salvation, didn't he? It slaves to the heart. On a level too deep to shake.
A lump formed in her throat, as if the ring had passed over her neck. She reached for it, making sure it wasn't actually there, then she patted the box of parts in her jersey pocket which rattled reassuringly. She felt of a sudden, like a phantom visiting its urn of cremated bones.
If you feel you're special, it's already begun.
How do you know?
I used to manage back in the day... The voice trailed off. And it was the last thing she heard before her boots touched the rusty crust of home.
The terrarium caretaker's name was Erik. She had asked him for it when they first made love. As they entered the pearl chamber, buried deep in the center of the geodesic dome, she brushed aerial root hairs, butterflies and midges from her face, and they beheld the Venusian-made energy device that powered all of Mars' colonies, concentrated alien energy, condensed into an opalescent sphere so light, it had negative mass-gravity.
Do you know what it really is?
Yes -only what you expect, because I, you see, equals... he started to quote the formula.
But her finger against his lips silenced him. It saves souls... those lost in space.
They say the Jovian station will probably be hit, Tuesday, by fragments from the asteroid they just blasted, headed the way of Earth, Erik said.
She looked at the shuttle transit watch on her wrist. They won't make it. Tears welled in her eyes as she thought of her former master. What a person is worth is as good as their bond. What bond they accept, as as good as their heart. She reasoned out that it was the same for him as for her. Players in a game of religio-emotional Copernicanism. And now the roles were reversed but the technology and their feelings, remained the same.
Erik looked on, as she opened the box with the slaving ring parts. In the field of the pearl, they hopped to life. Do you, slave agree?
Yes, she said. And once again the metal bond slipped and locked around her finger. She called to him, her master. And in the shimmering haze of ether space, a form took her hand.
Where do loose pearls go? Not trapped on a dead moon, nor drifting free amid the fragments of titanium and composites that trailed a path in the gravity of the gas giant, Soul catchers sought their true homes, guided by spirit.
Erik stared at the fragments of slaving ring, discarded where she had entered nether space. He counted 72 parts exactly, and placed each one into a clear sample box, carefully, with soft plastic tweezers.
One day, the parts began to rattle, pooling in the corners of their container like a crude compass. He followed the distressed pieces of noisy metal out into the desert of red sand, where once water flowed, carving chasms, and wind blew sand, hewing arcs and ridges from the stone walls of the canyons.
And thereabouts he eventually found it, lying radiant and iridescent on a shelf of rock -her master's pearl.
Honor, beauty, treachery, all born from overflowing lust, failings of the crotchety, magical gods who came again. He would sooner be rid of them but a wash of compassion overcame him. He was after all, Christian, of a forgiving, messianic old-Earth faith, and the Arians had left him alone believing him bigoted, therefore controllable. Yet as he stared at the soul catching orb lying helplessly on the stony Martian surface, he could not help but feel the exquisite beauty in the ways of the heretics who used it, who loved so openly through means so crude. The ring pieces called for his friendship with the souls within the pearl, to camaraderie that spanned the light-years and years of light.
He snared the untouchable marble-sized device with a suspension yoke and placed it carefully into the portable containment field generator in his backpack. He loved her as well, and he wondered about taking a slave of his own. In his heart of hearts, he ventured a thought: if God and His angels should come to lose this fight.
