As a treat for the readers of HERMETIC MILLENNIA, this is a scene that was cut from the final manuscript for reasons of pacing and length, and because I changed to order of some events, but which I dearly wish I had been able to include in order to better establish a change of heart in a minor, though pivotal, character which happens later. For all my inventiveness, I was not able to invent a spot later in the manuscript to introduce the scene unjarringly. Not wishing for total oblivion to overtake one of my minor but beloved villains, so that his villainy not be forgotten, I here memorialize it as its own stand-alone short story.
Lunar Sacrament of Conciliation
The silences of the Moon never grow familiar.
Father Reyes y Pastor was standing on the lunar surface in the graveyard, hands folded and hood bowed, three score and more tall steles marking the burial mounds looming above him, when something touched his shoulder. He expected to hear a footstep when someone come up behind him, and no amount of time on the surface could undo that ingrained and inherited expectation from his nervous system.
His surprise carried him a dozen yards.
Reyes vented air from his wrists and boots to soften his fall. The deceptive elfin gravity did not make a tumble any less dangerous; a man fell at one sixth the acceleration as on earth, but a cut or bruise to the suit could be disastrous.
He landed in a crouch, and the dust formed a curtain about him. In the gloom he saw a hooded shape among the steles, dark in an Hermetic garb, masked against the vacuum, but wearing the tabard of the Senior Landing Party Member, and the gleaming number 2. It was Del Azarchel, and he held up a hand in the sign for radio silence, all four fingers touching the thumb in a not-quite-closed fist, and the attention light from his chest was focused on the glove, making it visible.
Two weeks had passed since last they met, and the time was dusk, and so the sun was setting over the eastern rim of the crater-wall. (By a convention older than Galileo, on the Moon, the direction of sunrise was the west.) The setting sun was neither reddened nor flattened, there being no atmospheric diffraction here. The floor of the crater was filled with shadow black as ink, but the cliff walls and peaks to the east were dazzling like magnesium flame, and this lightscatter was enough to make out the silhouette among the steles.
Del Azarchel hopped toward him in eerie silence, clouds of white dust rising and falling with abrupt vertical motion in the airlessness at each footstep.
Reyes y Pastor waited, still in a crouch, his gauntlets touching the gritty surface beneath him, shockingly cold now that the sun no longer shined directly on it. He looked at the approaching figure, clicking his goggles through several energy bands and interpretative sequences, as if that would reveal some clue. No one came outside the base environs without cause, no more than a crewman would disembark from a submarine. Reyes wondered if he had been blamed for some terrible failure of the Great Work, and was now to be murdered. Was there another cause for such secrecy and solitude? But no: had not Reyes been promised the Eighth Millenium to reshape mankind? Del Azarchel would not rescind his promises.
Reyes y Pastor resigned himself. He simply could not understand the workings of the mind of the someone whose intelligence was between fifty and one hundred points higher than his.
Del Azarchel drew out a wire and extended it toward him. It was a phone wire. Reyes plugged in. Del Azarchel’s voice was tinny, and seemed to come from behind him.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two hundred eighty five years since my last confession.”
And with these words, the dark figure sank to his knees onto the sub-zero lunar surface.
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