Judgment Passed
by Jerry Oltion
Jerry Oltion is the author the novels Paradise Passed, The Getaway Special, Anywhere But Here, and several others. In 1998, he won the Nebula Award for his novella "Abandon in Place," which he later expanded into a novel. He is also the author of more than 100 short stories, most of which have appeared in the pages of F&SF and Analog.
"Judgment Passed," which is original to this volume, tells of the Biblical day of judgment from a rationalist viewpoint; a starship crew returns to Earth to find that the rapture has occurred without them. Oltion has strong views on religion—namely that it's a scourge on humanity—that led him to write this story, which speculates on whether or not being "left behind" would be such a bad thing.
It was cold that morning, and the snow squeaked beneath my boots as I walked up the lane in search of Jody. Last night's storm had left an ankle-deep layer of fresh powder over the week-old crust, and her tracks stood out sharp and clear as they led away through the bare skeletons of aspen trees and out of sight around the bend. She had gone toward the mountains. I didn't need to see her tracks to know that she had gone alone.
Except for Jody's footprints there was no sign of humanity anywhere. My boots on the snow made the only sound in the forest, and the only motion other than my own was in the clouds that puffed away behind me with every breath. Insulated as I was inside my down-filled coat, I felt an overwhelming sense of solitude. I knew why Jody had come this way. In a place that was supposed to be empty, she wouldn't find herself looking for people who weren't there.
I found her sitting on a rail fence, staring out across a snow-covered field at the mountains. She sat on the bottom rail with her chin resting on her mittened hands on the top rail. Her shoulder-length brown hair stuck out below a green stocking cap. There were trenches dug in the snow where she had been swinging her feet. She turned her head as I squeaked up behind her, said, "Hi, Gregor," then turned back to the mountains. I sat down beside her, propping my chin on my hands like she had, and looked up at them myself.
Sunlight was shining full on the peaks, making the snowfields glow brilliant white and giving the rocks a color of false warmth. No trees grew on their jagged flanks. They were nothing but rock and ice.
The Tetons, I thought. God's country. How true that had proved to be.
"I'd forgotten how impressive mountains could be," I said, my breath frosting the edges of my gloves.
"So had I," she said. "It's been a long time."
Twelve years. Five years going, five years coming, and two years spent there, on a dusty planet around a foreign star.
She said, "There was nothing like this on Dessica."
"No glaciers. It takes glaciers to carve up a mountain like that."
"Hmm."
We stared up at the sunlit peaks, each thinking our own thoughts. I thought about Dessica. We'd waited two months after landing to name it, but the decision was unanimous. Hot, dry, with dust storms that could blow for weeks at a time—if ever there was a Hell, that place had to be it. But eight of us had stayed there for two years, exploring and collecting data; the first interstellar expedition at work. And then we had packed up and come back—to an empty Earth. Not a soul left anywhere. Nothing to greet us but wild animals and abandoned cities full of yellowed newspapers, four years old.
According to those papers, this was where Jesus had first appeared. Not in Jerusalem, nor at the Vatican, nor even Salt Lake City. The Grand Teton. Tallest of the range, ruggedly beautiful, a fitting monument to the Son of God. I could almost see Him myself, floating down from the peak and alighting next to the Chapel of the Transfiguration back by the lodge where we'd spent the night. Hard as it was to believe, it was easy to imagine.
What came next was the hard part. He'd apparently given people six days to prepare themselves, then on the seventh He had called them all to judgment. No special call for the faithful, no time of tribulation for the unbelievers; He'd hauled everyone off at once, presumably to sort them out later. The newspapers were silent on the method He'd used, all the reporters and editors and press operators apparently caught up in the moment along with everyone else, but I couldn't imagine how it had worked. Most people had expected to rise into the sky; but above 15,000 feet they would start to asphyxiate and above 40,000 or so their blood would boil. Not quite the sort of thing I imagined even the Old Testament God would want His faithful to endure. Slipping into an alternate dimension seemed more likely, but I couldn't imagine what that would be like, either.
Trying to visualize the unimaginable reminded me why I'd come looking for Judy. "The captain's going to be holding services in a little while. She thought maybe you'd like to be there."
Jody looked over at me with an expression usually reserved for a stupid younger brother. "Why, to pray? To try getting God's attention?"
I nodded. "Dave talked her into it. He figures the more of us doing it, the stronger the signal."
"Very scientific."
"Dave's an engineer. Gwen agrees with him."
"I suppose she's going to ask God to send Jesus back for us."
"That's the general idea, yeah," I said, beginning to get embarrassed.
She gave me the look again. "You don't really think it'll work, do you?"
"It's worth a try. It can't hurt, can it?"
She laughed. "Spoken like a true agnostic."
I shifted my weight so a knot on the fence rail would stop poking me in the thigh. The joint where the rail met the post squeaked. "We're all agnostic," I pointed out. "Or were." When the mission planners selected the crew, they had wanted people who made decisions based on the information at hand, not wishful thinking or hearsay. Those sort of people tended to be agnostic.
"I still am," she said.
I looked at her in surprise. "How can you be? The entire population of the world disappears, every newspaper we find has stories about the Second Coming of Christ—complete with pictures—and all the graveyards are empty. Doesn't that make a believer out of you?"
She shook her head and asked simply, "Why are we here?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean if I'm supposed to believe that Jesus came back for the second time, called the day of judgment and took every human soul to Heaven, then what are we doing here? Why didn't He take us, too?"
"We weren't on Earth."
"Neither were three thousand Lunar colonists, and they got taken."
"We were doing ninety-eight percent of the speed of light. We were three and a half light-years away."
"And so God missed us. That's my point. If He was omniscient He would have known we were there."
I'd been thinking about that myself in the days since we'd been home. "Maybe He did," I said.
"Huh?"
"Maybe God did know about us. Maybe He left us behind on purpose, as punishment for not believing in Him."
She snorted. "What about atheists, then? What about other agnostics? Why just us eight?"
I held up my gloved hands, palms up. "I don't know. I'm not God."
"If you were, you'd have done a better job."
I wasn't sure whether to take that as a compliment or what, so I decided to ignore it. "What do you think happened, then, if it wasn't God?"
"I don't know. Maybe aliens came and took us all for slaves. Maybe we were a lab experiment and they got all the data they needed. Maybe we taste like chicken. There are plenty of more believable explanations than God."
"What about the photos of Jesus?" I asked.
She rubbed her red nose with a mitten. "If you were going to harvest an entire planet's population, wouldn't you use their local religion to keep them in line?"
"Jesus wouldn't have much sway with Jews," I pointed out. "Or Moslems. Or atheists."
"So says the former agnostic who believes in him because of what he read in the paper." She said it kindly, but it still stung.
"Look," I said, "Gwen's going to start pretty soon. You coming or not?"
She shrugged. "What the hell. It ought to be fun listening to an agnostic sermon."
We swung our legs around off the fence rail and stood up, then started following our tracks back to the lodge, an enormous log hotel built around the turn of the last century to house the crush of tourists who came to visit one of the last unspoiled places on Earth.
I took Jody's right hand in my left as we walked. It was an unconsciously natural act; we weren't a pair at the moment, but we had been a few times. With the small crew on the ship and lots of time to experiment, we had tried just about every combination at least once. The warmth and comfort I felt as we walked through the fresh snow together made me glad we'd never broken up hard. It felt like maybe we were headed for another stretch of time together.
Jody must have been feeling the same way. When we got down in among the aspen trees, she said, "Assuming God really is behind all this, and it's not just some sort of enormous practical joke, then maybe this is a reward."
"A reward?"
She nodded. "I like it here. It's pretty, and peaceful. The last time I was here it was a zoo. Tourists wherever you looked, lines of motor homes and SUVs on the road as far as you could see, trash blowing all around. I feel like now I'm finally getting to see it the way it's supposed to be."
"The way God intended?"
"Yeah, maybe." She grinned an agnostic-theologian grin and said, "Maybe we're the next Ark. We were all set to start our own colony, after all. We're the best genetic stock the UN Space Authority could find, and we've got more fertilized ova in the freezer. Maybe God decided it would be a good time to clear away all the riff-raff and give humanity a fresh start."
"It's a little cold for Eden," I said.
"We've got the whole world," she pointed out.
I thought about that. I supposed we did, at least until the airplanes and hovercars all fell apart. There was no way eight people could maintain a technological civilization indefinitely. Our colonization equipment was designed to keep us at what the UN's social scientists called an "artificially augmented industrial age" until we could increase the population enough to build our own factories and so forth, but that level wasn't particularly cosmopolitan. The idea had been to pick a spot and settle in rather than to play tourist on a new planet. Of course the planet needed at least one habitable spot, which was why we'd given up after two years of searching and come home.
"I'd never considered just going on with our lives," I said. "I mean, after the Second Coming of Christ, that simply never occurred to me."
Jody shrugged. "We just landed; we've all been too busy trying to figure out what happened. Give 'em time, though, and I think most of us will start thinking about it. I mean, this could be all the Heaven we need if we do it right."
A sudden chill ran up my spine, and it wasn't from the snow. "We may not have time," I said. "If Gwen's little prayer meeting works, God may come back for us today."
Jody looked up at me, her face mirroring the concern in my own. "Damn," she said, then she took off running for the chapel. I took off after her, both of us shouting, "Gwen! Gwen, wait up!"
Running in snow isn't easy. Our feet punched right through the crust that had supported us when we'd been walking, and we wound up struggling for every step. We were both sweating and panting when we burst into the chapel, gasping for enough breath to cry out, "Don't pray!"
Gwen was standing behind the pulpit, wearing a long white robe with gold hems a hand's width wide. She'd found it in a closet in the priest's sacristy. The wall behind her was mostly window, affording the congregation—Dave and Maria and Hammad and Arjuna and Keung in the front pew—a fantastic view of the Tetons behind her own splendor. Everyone turned and looked at us as Jody said again, "Don't pray. We've got to think this through first."
Gwen frowned. "What's there to think through? We've got to contact God."
"Do we?"
"What do you mean? Of course we do. He left us behind!"
"Maybe that's a good thing." Tugging off her mittens, stocking hat, and coat as she talked, Jody told her what she'd told me, ending with, "So maybe we ought to just keep quiet and go on about our business."
Gwen had been shaking her head the whole time Jody had been speaking. She was a big woman, with a thick halo of curly black hair that wagged from side to side as she shook it. Now she said, "We don't know what that business is. This could just as easily be a test of some sort."
"Exactly! It could be a test, so I think we'd be smart to be careful what we ask for. We might get it."
Dave had been listening with as much impatience as Gwen. Before she could answer, he said, "If God intends for us to repopulate the Earth, wouldn't He have told us so? He told Noah what He wanted him to do."
Jody shrugged. "God was a lot more talkative in those days."
"If you believe the Judeo-Christian bible," Hammad put in.
"The Christian Day of Judgment has come and gone," Gwen said. "What else are we supposed to believe?"
Hammad spread his hands to indicate the chapel, and by implication everything beyond it. "We should believe what we have always believed: the evidence of our own senses. The Earth has been depopulated. Newspapers left behind tell us a being calling himself Jesus Christ claimed responsibility. Beyond that we can only speculate."
"Wait a minute," Maria said, but before she had a chance to finish her thought Arjuna said, "We can too—" and Keung said, "Yeah, what about—" and the room descended into babble.
Gwen hadn't been chosen captain for nothing. She let it go on for a few seconds, then shouted at top volume, "Quiet!"
The chapel grew quiet.
"All right," she said into the silence. "I obviously made a false assumption when I thought we all wanted to ask God to come back for us. Jody doesn't think we should try to contact Him at all. What do the rest of you think?"
A chorus of voices nearly drowned her out again. "One at a time," she yelled. "You, Dave."
"I think we should ask His forgiveness and ask Him to take us with Him."
"Hammad?"
"Ask what He wants us to do, rather than just assume."
"Maria?"
"I . . .uh, I definitely think we should try to contact Him, but I think Hammad kind of makes sense, actually."
"Thank you," said Hammad.
Gwen looked at me. "Gregor?"
I looked at Hammad, then at Jody. "I'm not sure it's a good idea to call His attention to us at all. Depending on whose version of Christianity is true, we could do a lot worse than where we are now."
"Arjuna?"
Arjuna said, "I kind of agree with Jody and Gregor, except I wonder what we'd do if God decides to turn out the lights."
"It's been four years," Hammad said.
"That doesn't mean—" Dave said, and the babble started up again.
"Quiet!" shouted Gwen. She snatched the wooden cross from the front of the pulpit and banged it down like a gavel on the angled top. "All right," she said when we'd quieted down, "let's try this again. Keung, what do you think?"
Keung shrugged. "I don't think it matters. If we can reach Him with prayer, then one of us would have done it already. I think if we can get His attention at all, then there's no point in hiding out because He'll eventually realize we're here."
"Is that a vote for or against praying to Him?"
"It's an 'I don't care.'"
Gwen nodded. "Well then, it looks like the prayer contingent wins, but I don't see anything wrong with asking politely what God intends for us to do before we start begging for divine intervention. Can we all agree on that?"
"No," Jody said, but Dave's and Maria's and Hammad's assent was louder.
Gwen said, "Jody, Keung's right; if prayer works, then somebody's bound to get God's attention sooner or later."
"No they're not," Jody said. "There's millions of guns lying around, but that doesn't mean we have to start shooting each other with them. We don't have to pray."
"I do," Dave said.
Jody stared at him a moment, then shook her head and picked up her coat and hat and mittens again. "I'll wait outside, then," she said, brushing past me toward the door. "Maybe He'll miss me again when he comes for you idiots."
I followed her out. I hadn't taken my coat off, just unzipped it; the cold air felt good through my shirt.
"Idiots," Jody said again when we were alone. "They're playing with dynamite in there. Worse. Antimatter."
"Maybe literally," I said. "Who knows what God might be made of."
"Aaahhh, God, God, God," she growled. "I'm sick of the whole subject. I wish He'd just stayed the hell out of my life."
I poked a finger in her ribs. "He did, silly."
"It's not funny."
"Sure it is. We've spent our whole lives saying it didn't matter what we thought or did about religion, since the truth is inherently unknowable, and now we're afraid somebody is going to pray us out of existence. I think it's hilarious."
We were walking back toward the guest lodge along a path surrounded by pine trees and snowbanks. On impulse I reached up and slapped a branch just as Jody walked under it. "Yow!" she screamed as a clump of snow went down her neck, and before I could back out of range she bent down, scooped up a handful, and hurled it at my face. I stumbled backward and sat down unexpectedly in a snowbank, which saved me from another faceful that flew over my head instead.
As long as I was on the ground I figured I might as well defend myself, so I started throwing snow back at her as fast as I could scoop it up. It was too cold to stick into balls, so we just shovelled it at each other, shrieking and laughing like fools while the rest of humanity prayed for a miracle.
The prayer meeting broke up a half hour or so later. By then Jody and I were snuggling on the bear rug in front of the lodge's main fireplace, an enormous flagstone construction with a firebox big enough to roast a hovercar in. Hammad found us first.
"We seem to have failed in raising the deity," he said as he stripped off his coat and hung it over a peg on the wall. "Unless of course there's a time-lag involved."
"Oh great," said Jody. "Now I'll be waiting all night for the skies to open and a choir of angels to wake me up."
"By the looks of you two, you won't be sleeping much in the first place, unless it's from exhaustion." He sat down in one of the overstuffed chairs beside us and stuck his feet toward the flames. "You know, I think you have the right of it," he said. "We should get on with our lives, and let God get on with His. I have to admit I feel greatly relieved to have missed all the commotion."
"Me too," I said. "Ever since we found out He exists, I've felt like an outsider in gang territory. I keep waiting for the tap on the shoulder that means I'm in big trouble."
"I wonder if that's how religious people normally felt?" asked Jody. "Tiptoeing through life so they wouldn't attract the wrong kind of attention."
Hammad shook his head. "I doubt if most people even considered it that way. They probably—"
The solid wood door banged open and Dave, Gwen, and the others came in, stomping snow from their boots and talking. Dave glared at Jody and me and took off for his room or somewhere, but Gwen, Maria, Arjuna, and Keung took off their coats and joined us by the fire.
"Well, at least we can say we tried," Gwen said as she presented her backside to the flames. She had left the robe in the chapel and was wearing a regular shirt and pants.
"So what now?" asked Jody. "Travel? Sightsee? Play with the leftover toys before they all rust back into the ground? Or do we get straight to work starting a colony?"
Arjuna said, "No offense, but after twelve years of close contact with you guys I'm ready for some time alone."
Keung edged playfully away from her, but he said, "My sentiments exactly. I wouldn't mind having a whole continent to myself for a while."
Maria looked shocked. "Wait a minute. Splitting up could mean some of us might get left behind again if God comes back."
"He's not coming back," Keung said.
"What makes you so sure?"
He shrugged. "I'm not, actually, but I didn't spend my whole life disregarding the issue just to start worrying about it now. If He comes for me, He comes, and if not, that's fine too. I've got plenty to do on my own."
"That's kind of how I feel about it," I said. "I'd like to see the world a little while I've got the chance."
"Me too," said Jody.
Gwen turned around to face the fire, saying over her shoulder, "The satellite phone system still works, so it shouldn't be too hard to stay in touch. There's hundreds of cell phones right here in the hotel, and I'll bet at least some of them still have active accounts, paid automatically every month by credit card. It shouldn't be hard to find a working phone for each of us. Of course we don't all have to play tourist. Whoever wants to could start setting up the colony."
"Where?" Hammad asked.
"The Mediterranean," Arjuna said, just as I said, "California." We looked at each other for a moment, then I shrugged and said, "Okay, the Mediterranean."
A sharp bang sounded from the back of the lodge.
"That sounded like a gun," Gwen said, and she took off running down the hallway, shouting, "Dave! Dave!" the whole way. The rest of us followed close behind her, but I took the time to grab the fireplace poker. Maybe he'd committed suicide and maybe he hadn't. A poker wasn't much of a weapon against a gun, but it felt better than nothing.
We found Dave outside on the deck overlooking the Snake River, a shotgun in his hand and a mess of feathers and blood smeared across the snow. I could see bird seed among the feathers; evidently Dave had scattered a handful and waited for something to come for it. That something had been hardly bigger than a mouse by the looks of its remains.
"Kind of small for dinner, isn't it?" I asked, reaching out with the poker and flipping the tiny bird body over so I could see its underside.
"It's an experiment," Dave said. I was glad to see he was carefully pointing the shotgun away from everyone. "According to Jesus, not even a sparrow can fall without God noticing. I figured that would be pretty easy to test."
Jody had come up beside me and was examining the bird. "It would be if you'd managed to shoot a sparrow," she said. "This is a chickadee."
Dave blushed when we all laughed, but he said, "It's not the species; it's the concept."
"Whatever, it doesn't seem to be working."
"Maybe you should have tied a message to its foot first," I said.
Keung laughed. "You're supposed to use a pigeon for that."
"It's not funny," Dave snapped. He took a deep breath, then said, "I am trying to attract the attention of God. If you think it's funny or useless, I'm sorry, but I think it's important and I'm going to try everything I can until I get the job done."
"What's next?" Gwen asked him. "Sacrificing sheep? Rebuilding the Ark of the Covenant?"
"Whatever is necessary," Dave said.
I felt myself shivering, and when it didn't stop I suddenly realized all of us but Dave were out there without our coats.
"Come on," I said to Jody. "Let's get inside before we catch our death."
We left the next morning for Yellowstone Park. The rest of the crew split up for other parts of the globe, but Jody and I decided as long as we were that close we might as well visit the biggest tourist attraction in the world. We found a hovercar that still ran and whose diagnostics told us it would continue to run for another few hundred hours, tossed our personal belongings in the back, and flew low up the Snake River valley past Jackson Lake and into the park. We ignored the loading ramps and the rail cars that had ferried tourists through for the last fifty years, blowing right past the sign proclaiming it a federal crime to drive a private vehicle within the park's borders.
The forest seemed endless. We flew along the old roadbed down among the trees so we could see more of it, including the animals the park was famous for. In parts of the world where the human population had been denser, the ecosystem was still out of whack from our sudden disappearance, but Yellowstone had already reached a balance without us before the Second Coming. We watched moose and elk and buffalo plodding along like great hoofed snowplows, and we even caught a glimpse of a wolf drinking out of a stream near Old Faithful.
The geysers were probably the same as always, too, but with just the two of us standing there on the snow-covered boardwalk in front of Old Faithful it seemed to me that we must be watching its best eruption ever. Steam and boiling water shot up over a hundred feet in the air, and the ground shook with the force of its eruption.
"You know," Jody said as it subsided, "I just realized how silly it is to come here right now."
"Silly how?" I asked.
"If Dave succeeds in reaching God, we might have all of eternity to watch this sort of thing in action."
I looked out at the steaming mound of reddish rock, then at the brilliant white snowfield and green forest beyond it. "You talking about the pretty parts, or the hot parts?"
"Who knows?"
Yeah, who knew? I'd lived a perfectly moral life, by agnostic standards, but who could tell if that would be good enough for God? For that matter, who knew whether Heaven or Hell really existed, even now? So Jesus had come and taken everyone away; he could have hauled them to Andromeda for all we knew.
All the same, I wondered if we were wise for leaving Dave free to pursue God. The crew had talked about it before we'd gone our separate ways, but none of us knew what else we could do about him. He wouldn't rest until he'd tried everything he could think of, and none of us wanted to attempt confining him to prevent it. I suppose after the prayer meeting and the chickadee incident none of us really believed he would succeed, which was why we weren't more concerned about it. We were all hoping he'd give it up after a while and become the normal—if somewhat obsessive—friend and crewmember we'd all learned to live with.
We realized we'd made a mistake when Gwen got a call from him a few days later. She had formally renounced her title as captain and flown to Hawaii, but she was still acting as our coordinator. Dave had called to find out where the rest of us were, and when she'd asked him why, he would only tell her to warn us away from Cheyenne, Wyoming, or any place downwind of it.
"Downwind?" I asked when Gwen called us to relay his message. "What the hell is he trying this time?"
Jody and I were in the car again, headed north toward Mammoth hot springs. A ghost of Gwen's face peered at us through the phone's heads-up windshield display. "He wouldn't tell me," she replied. "He just said to keep everyone away from the American Midwest for a while."
"I bet he's going to blow up a nuclear bomb," Jody said. "Cheyenne's one of the Air Force bases where they stored them."
"A nuclear bomb?" asked Gwen. "What does that have to do with God?"
I laughed. "Maybe he thinks we just need to knock loud enough to be heard."
"Yeah, but where's the door?" Jody asked. "Certainly not in Cheyenne. I've been there; it's a dirty little government town out on the prairie."
My smile faded. "If physical location matters at all, I'd guess the Grand Teton, considering that's where Jesus showed up."
"He wouldn't nuke the Tetons, would he?" Jody asked, horrified at the thought.
"I don't know," Gwen said. "Probably not for his first shot, at least. He'll probably just lob one into Nebraska or somewhere. But if that doesn't work, then he might."
We'd been passing through a long straight notch cut in an ocean of lodgepole pine; I let off the throttle and the hovercar slid to a stop, snow billowing up all around it. "We're still in Yellowstone," I told Gwen, "but we could get to Cheyenne in—what, four hours? Five?" We'd been dawdling along on ground-effect until now, but we could fly as high as we liked if we had to.
"I don't know if that's a good idea or not," Gwen said. "I don't like the idea of you two heading toward a nuclear explosion."
"I don't exactly like it either," I said, "but I'm even less happy about the idea of him blowing up an entire mountain range just to get God's attention."
"And screwing up the ecosystem just as it's starting to straighten out again," Jody put in.
Snow had quit swirling around us. The car's fans had blown it all away. I tilted the joystick to the side until the car pivoted halfway around, then pulled upward on it and shoved it forward again. The car rose up above the trees and began accelerating southeast.
I said, "Cheyenne itself should be safe enough. That's where Dave will be, after all. Do you think we should call and let him know we're coming, or should we try to catch him off guard?"
"He'll just hide if we tell him we're coming," Jody said.
"But he might not blow the bomb if we make him think you're near the blast zone," Gwen said.
"Might not?" I asked. "Just how far around the bend do you figure he's gone?"
"Maybe not at all," Gwen said. "I don't know. This is a very emotionally charged issue for all of us. I doubt if any of us are behaving entirely rationally, but how can we tell if we are or we aren't? We're on completely new ground here."
"I don't think exploding a nuclear bomb is a rational act," Jody said.
"Not even if he succeeds in getting God to notice us?"
"Especially not then."
Gwen smiled wryly. "That's not entirely rational either, Jody."
"It's the way I feel."
"And Dave no doubt feels he has to get God to come back for him."
"No doubt. Well I feel like I have to stop him."
Nodding, Gwen said, "Just don't get yourself killed in the process."
Jody laughed. "That would kind of defeat the purpose, now, wouldn't it?"