Nicodemus III — At a Glance

The Governor

Governor Adaeze Okoli has run Nicodemus III for nine years and looks like she has run it for thirty. Her office is in the administrative block above the elevator terminus, and the window behind her desk frames the cable running up into a sky the color of weak tea.

She was careful with me for the first twenty minutes. Then she stopped being careful.

"I have filed the same request every year for six years. Not a battle group. I am not a fool, I know what a battle group costs and I know we do not rate one. I have asked for a picket. A frigate. Something with the Confederation's name painted on it that sits in orbit where people can look up and see it.

"Do you understand what I am asking for? I am asking for a symbol. I have one hundred and twenty thousand people here who have never in their lives seen a Confederate warship. Not once. Their grandparents saw them. There are people in Landfall who genuinely believe the Navy is something the government made up."

I asked what response she had received.

"The same one every time, and it is not a rude response, it is a reasonable one. The fleets are committed. The frontier is enormous and the hulls are finite and there are places in worse shape than we are. Which is true. I have read the district posture assessment. I know what the Navy is trying to cover with what it has.

"But you asked me why people are converting. That is why. Not theology. Nobody on this world woke up one morning with a burning question about the nature of the divine. They woke up in a place where the roof leaks and the medical shipment is late again, and somebody knocked on the door and said: we see you."

Governor Okoli is not a convert and does not expect to become one. She was also, I noticed, careful never to say a word against the missionaries themselves.

"They repaired the water plant in Sector Four. Nobody asked them to. They did not put a flag on it. They fixed it, and they fixed it properly, and it has not failed since — which is more than I can say for the last three contractors the district sent me.

"You want me to tell you they are enemy agents softening us up. Maybe some of them are. But the man who rebuilt that plant is a forty-year-old pipefitter from Nicodemus II who prays five times a day and cried when the pumps came back online. What am I supposed to do, arrest him? For what — competence?"

The Converted

I spoke with eleven converts over four days. What struck me was how few of them talked about God unprompted, and how many talked about being seen.

Marisol Vantana, 34, silicate technician, converted two years ago:

"My mother worked the processing line for twenty-nine years and the Confederation gave her a certificate. An actual certificate, on actual paper, thanking her for her service to the industrial economy. She put it in a drawer and she cried in the kitchen where she thought I couldn't hear.

"The Church came and they sat with her. Not once — every week, for a year, until she died. They sat with her and they told her that her work had meaning, that she was known, that nothing she did was wasted. Maybe that's a lie. I don't know. But it was a kinder lie than the certificate, and they were there and the Confederation was not."

Tomas Rell, 52, hardgrain farmer, converted eight months ago, was blunter:

"I'll tell you what the Empire has that we don't. The Empire believes in something. You ask a Confederate what the Confederation is for and he'll talk to you about liberty for ten minutes and none of it means anything you can hold. You ask one of theirs and he'll tell you exactly what he believes, exactly what's owed, exactly what happens if he fails. People want that. People are starving for that out here.

"I'm not saying they're right. I'm saying they showed up."

Not everyone was so measured. Deacon Ilse Harrow, who runs the Kessler Street congregation's outreach, told me plainly that the Confederation is "a corpse that has not been informed," and that its worlds will come to the light "either gently, as we would prefer, or otherwise."

When I asked her what "otherwise" meant, she said it was not her place to say. She said the man I ought to ask was Peter.

Peter the Redeemer

He was not difficult to find. He does not hide, and the colonial authority has no legal basis to stop him — the Confederation's own charter of religious liberty is, as several people pointed out to me with some amusement, the reason the Imperial faith can be preached freely on a Confederate world.

The name is taken, not given. He was born Petros Aguilar on Nicodemus III, worked eighteen years as an elevator maintenance foreman, and took orders after a period he describes only as "an illness of the spirit." He is fifty-six. He has the forearms of a man who spent two decades on cable rigs and the voice of someone who has learned, late in life, that he can hold a room.

He made me tea. He asked about my journey, and about the Dispatch, and whether I was treated well by my editors. When I told him I intended to report what he said accurately, including the parts that would make him look bad, he laughed and said that would be a novelty.

I asked him about the Empire's theology directly — about the doctrine that the Emperor's line is divinely sanctioned, and about the gospel's origin. He became, for the first time, entirely still.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and dishonest to make this man sound mad. He is not mad. He is lucid, funny, unhurried, and by every account I gathered — including from people who despise what he is doing — scrupulously honest in his dealings. Three separate Confederate loyalists on this world told me some version of the same thing: he is the most decent man in Landfall and he is going to get us all killed.

The Warning

At the end of our second conversation, I asked Peter what he believed was coming. I expected a sermon. What I got was delivered flatly, in the tone of a man giving directions to a place he has already been.

"You are going to write that I am a threat to this colony. Write it, it is not true but write it. This colony is not what is at issue. This colony is a rounding error.

Understand me: the homeworld will be reclaimed. Not raided. Not blockaded. Reclaimed — because it was never yours to begin with, and because the true believers have been patient in a way your people have forgotten how to be.

I do not know the hour. I am not given the hour. But I know it is close, and I know that when it comes, the thing your Confederation trusts to protect it will not protect it, and everyone who told you otherwise will be very surprised and very briefly."

I asked him whether he meant a fleet action against Sol. He said he meant exactly what he said and would not be drawn further. I asked whether he had knowledge of Imperial military planning. He said that he was a priest on an agricultural colony and that if the Empire were sharing its war plans with him, it would be a poorly run Empire.

Then he said: "You are looking for a spy. I am telling you about a promise. Those are not the same, and it is the second one that should worry you."

Landfall, Last Evening

My last night on Nicodemus III I walked back down Kessler Street. The chapel was full again — a weeknight, no observance scheduled, and it was full. Outside, a boy of about fourteen was handing out printed cards to anyone who would take one. I took one. It was a hymn, the same one from my first evening, in Confederate Standard, about a light that comes to those left in the dark.

Above the street, past the haze, you can see the elevator cable and, if the night is clear, the shipping lanes. There were three lights moving up there. Two were freighters. The third, a man beside me said with total confidence, was a Confederate cruiser on patrol.

It was a freighter. I checked the registry the next morning: an ore hauler out of Nicodemus II, forty years old, running silicates.

He wanted it to be a warship so badly. That is the thing I cannot stop thinking about, filing this from the transit station with the colony shrinking behind me. Not the sermons, not the warnings, not Peter's patient certainty. Just a man in the street who looked up at an ore hauler and wanted so much for it to be someone coming.

Twelve days from here, the Confederate Navy is doing something important. It is always doing something important, and it is always twelve days from here. On Nicodemus III, four days from the Imperial sphere, one hundred and twenty thousand people are drawing their own conclusions about what that means — and every week, a few hundred more of them decide they have waited long enough.