Paths to the Stars

2. A Little Space Music-4

Two hours later I staggered back to my cabin (having made up for the initial lack of drink several times over once the Squill departed). I fell into bed, looked up at the slowly spinning ceiling, and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw up.

The decision was suddenly made for me. I staggered into the bathroom and vomited up everything I had eaten for the last twenty-four hours or so—but not, alas, everything I had drunk.

Discretion being the better part of valour, I decided to spend the next hour or so on the bathroom floor. I had little else to do in that position but reflect on what I had heard.

The Squill religionists, it seemed, had “raptured” Broadway in order to get closer to God.

In view of how far from God, in my experience, most people in the acting profession considered themselves (an opinion shared by most of those in the God-bothering business), the irony was rich. But if you could wrap your head around the Squill point of view, it almost made sense.

The Squill Church, unlike its human counterparts, did not pretend to know the Truth about God and/or the gods, or how to best please/serve/placate/worship He/She/It/Them. Instead, the Church’s purpose was to seek the Truth. It did so by conducting a cosmic opinion poll: it gathered various “Truths” from all over the galaxy to see what could be gleaned from them.

Along the way, the Church had spawned innumerable sub-cults, as various factions decided that the latest “Truth” was THE TRUTH, and stopped searching. But the Great Church Fluorescent and Iridescent (really, that’s how Von Trapp translated it) carried on, collecting bits of alien cultures from all over the galaxy.

The secular government of Squill Primus, while condemning the practice, made no move to stop it. Instead, its ships trailed the Church’s Rapture ships at a respectable distance, apologizing to and reimbursing the affected planets...and, in the process, opening up lucrative trade routes. It seemed a recipe for disaster if the Squill ever met their technological match. But so far they hadn’t, and probably even the Great Church Fluorescent and Iridescent had enough sense of self-preservation not to rapture members of a technologically superior race.

The Rapturers, being essentially pollsters, sought a random sample of religious insights—and used a very broad definition of religious that boiled down to “activities that draw crowds.” On Earth, the “winner” had been musical theatre (with professional hockey a close second).

But something had happened with musical theatre that had never happened before: the Great Church Fluorescent and Iridescent had declared, after watching the actors perform their shows, that there would be no further collecting of religious insight—musical theatre provided THE TRUTH.

The musical theatre performers raptured from Earth, Von Trapp had told me, though prohibited from leaving Squill or contacting their human counterparts, now formed a thriving, pampered human colony, a kind of Vatican City, on Squill. Not only did they produce incredible musicals—the special effects alone, thanks to Squill technology, were literally out of this world—but they sent “missionaries” around the planet, instructing everyone in the newly discovered Great White Way.

Which meant that The Sound of Music—my Sound of Music—was, for the Squill, a worship service.

It made a strange sort of sense, I thought as the bathroom’s spinning finally slowed. Like religions, most musicals present neat little packages of supposed insight, wrapped up in pleasing tunes and eye-candy. To coin a phrase, they’re the “spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.”

Nothing had come up for a while. I crawled back to my bed and climbed into it. But as darkness descended, I felt a faint frisson of fear as I recalled being told it was “unlikely” I would be raptured.

“How unlikely?” I asked the dark, but got no answer.