Chapter 1: Getting a Headache, But Keeping One's Faith Testimony
Captain Almira Banneker-Jackson looked at her husband, Admiral Benjamin Banneker-Jackson, and smiled as she watched him do something he had been doing more than sixty years earlier at the Academy: he would spread his cocoa-colored hand across his equally richly colored forehead and then bring his fingers together just above the bridge of his nose, between his eyebrows. It meant he had heard something dumb enough to give him an instant headache, and he was taking the moment to indicate that he was in pain and also to get a prayer through, because …
“I'm not responsible for the foolishness said to me,” he said. “I am responsible for how I respond, and I'm not supposed to be a fool.”
If he sat there and massaged the bridge of his nose for a while, it was really bad – and it was.
“I don't know what was going on at the consortium embassy's fifth outpost,” he said, “but I see why I am an admiral and not an ambassador-in-charge because I would have fired everybody .”
“Well, I'd figure out how to get in charge and fire everybody anyway,” Capt. Banneker-Jackson said.
“Yes, except the embassy has already been vaporized, so we don't have to bother,” he said.
“Never mind,” she said. “Saves us some work, and at 80-plus, that's always a blessing!”
“For the lack of the knowledge of Scripture and also basic common sense and good diplomatic training to know that speaking evil of dignities is a no-no,” he said, “we get to be on the retired part of semi-retired today.”
“Now, Benjamin, you know that first of all, Sunday School doesn't ever get to those books of the Bible, and second of all, bigots don't pay attention to that where it occurs anywhere.”
“Right,” he said, “which is why they need to thank whoever they think they are worshiping that they were not sent to go into eternity today to learn that putting down other people's systems of faith is not it.”
Chapter 2: It Is Written (and Woe To Those Who Don't Get It)
The scrolls of the Sumusidihar showed that although the universal translator did very well with spoken languages among humanoids, written languages even in the 23rd century could not be so easily handled. The numbers of ways a point, a line, a curve, or any combination could be made into sentient language through script and symbol boggled even the computational power of the consortium, because it was impossible for the human mind to fully understand what was meant by a symbol in a script to a mind, soul, and spirit so different from humanity, much less translate that to an algorithm to translate it into human languages.
It had taken a century to be able to understand what was written in the first scroll about the great figure called Mierrorwoh, its perfectly imperfect symmetry, and what it represented. That it represented a deity was clear, and from the history of the people one could tell that there was no confusion among a civilization that numbered some eighty billion souls at its peak that Mierrorwoh was the god, although manners of worship varied over the centuries and millennia later than the scrolls.
In human tongue, the name Mierrorwoh did become The Mirrored One once what was written in the first portion of the scroll was understood:
“All things reflect His glory.
To see His equal, He looks only upon Himself.
All things seen are made by Him to be the reflection of His light.
The reflection of all things is imperfect, and He is not directly seen in them.
He must give new eyes and turn the eyes to the right to see Him.
Imperfection is not in Him.
He permitted ripples in those He made with life to choose, that they may also choose His smoothing again.
It will be seen first how perfection differs from imperfection.
When all have known, all imperfection will end.
All things reflect His glory.
Thus it ever was, thus it is, and though ripples have their time to roll, ever more it shall be.”
Sumusidih was a world that was 85 percent water, with a yellow sun twice the size of Earth; to them, it was the reflection of The Mirrored One given to keep them alive and remind them of his concern for his creation. With all the oceans and lakes and pools, one could not avoid that reminder above and below the horizon. Sunrises and sunsets were huge and gold and bronze and again, reflected above and below, and all things just stopped at the awesome beauty everywhere on the planet – worship took places at those times most often among those of a more ceremonial practice.
Which practice led to the “smoothing of a ripple” and why Adm. Benjamin Banneker-Jackson, the highest ranking officer of devout faith available in Near-Earth to call at the moment because semi-retired, had gotten the call. The entire consortium embassy and several commercial outposts on Sumusidih had gotten leveled to the ground and all the humans deported from the planet. Some of those humans were threatening violence because they had not been compensated for their losses and did not understand why they should have to leave because one of their number had made the comment about, “I thought we left primitive sun worship back in Egypt, and here we are running into it out here.”
And that had led to Adm. Benjamin Banneker-Jackson's headache, and why he had taken several seconds before even speaking to his wife about the situation, much less calling the powers that be.
Chapter 3: Of Logic, Faith, and Truth
“Yes, I know his schedule is backed up, but it's going to take our best to get this leveled off, and we really do need some logic on this – Ambassador Sarek is my recommendation instead of listening to these money-worshipers who want to send in a fleet to force compensation and are willing to charter one. I will personally come out there in a starship and blow that chartered group of terrorists out of the sky – but assume Mierrorwoh is real for a minute. We are not only about to have eighty biillion souls willing to fight dumb humanity to the death, but assume the scrolls are correct and we are just a ripple to smooth out. At the least, Mierrorwoh is a being on the order of a Ring Admiral – a plasma-based lifeform who could take a full fleet of ours and scatter it like a toy fleet while snacking on half a solar flare. It could be a far sight worse.
“Listen, I don't have time to teach Sunday School to all y'all – just check out what the deity nearest in description to Mierrorwoh in our human experience could send an angel to do – to say nothing of doing Himself. Just go read the book of Revelation as research sometimes, from about the sixth to the twentieth chapters. The consortium does not need those 'maker of Heaven and Earth' type of problems.”
Capt. Banneker-Jackson had to go to the next room laughing as her husband put his hand across his head and then drew his fingers to the bridge of his nose and started massaging it again at whatever was being said on the other end of the phone.
“Listen, let me break this down to you in terms you understand,” he said. “I'm a Christian. I still am under commandment to turn the other cheek, but the Sermon on the Mount is not in the scrolls of the Sumusidihar. They beamed every human clear up off of and vaporized everything we had on their planet in under two hours from when that embassy worker started running his mouth! They just decided we were a ripple messing up the reflection, smoothed us out and moved on! We may never get back in there – but for the sake of the reputation of the consortium, we need to get somebody with experience to get over there, apologize if necessary, and smooth things out from our side.
“What do you mean what do we do about our fifth embassy outpost? We have four now and we probably always did – the whole idea that the bigot wing of the consortium state department was hiding out in there and this is how we had to find out is a shame – out in the confessing galaxy of billions of religions and faith practices, and they still don't know how to throw shade on the human confessing past and the beyond human sentient confessing present at the same time?
"What happened is what was supposed to happen – there are consequences for that kind of disrespect of self and others! Every being of faith is not going to take arrogant bigotrry off of us at all times – call it a lesson and plan to rebuild somewhere else!”
“Well,” Capt. Banneker-Jackson said when it was all done, “when you don't go to Sunday School and you sleep through the sermon, sometimes you do get some hard lessons.”
“I don't even worry about the people in high places who don't believe what I believe – my faith does not require external validation like that,” the admiral said. “I worry about the people who say they believe what I believe, but feel the need to shoot down every other belief around them to feel validated. That is not a good or holy idea on Earth, but the galaxy is completely intolerant. The people of Mierrorwoh will not associate with those who dishonor him – good for them.”
“As it should be,” Capt. Banneker-Jackson said. “Real faith does not need to bully and swagger and bigot its way through life – if what we believe is true, truth itself will win out in the end. We just have to represent well.”
“The good thing is that I finally remembered to write to the team working on the scrolls of the Sumusidihar to ping me with updates,” he said. “Now that they have figured out the first part, the next part should be easier, and so forth.”
“Making sure Khadijah is in the mix when they finally get it done, eh?” she said with a smile.
“I suspect that in the scrolls of the Sumusidihar, there is going to be some analog to this: 'The righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.'” he said. "If they get it all the way figured out in Khadijah's lifetime, her children can be part of watching the process."
My Process As Author and Artist
The image of Mierrorwoh, Divine Lord of the Sumusidihar, is a single fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 in a palette of pale gold, rose, and brown -- every now and again, working with the fractal math of Julia and Julian and Juliascope sets (all variants of the famous Julia set, which itself can be transformed into the even more famous Mandelbrot set), a figure with near-perfect symmetry will come out because of the near-perfect symmetries of particularly Julia sets. This was such a rare case, and right on time, rendered on black.
My thinking about this image revolved around some things I know as a Christian by comparison to things known in ancient Egypt: the hymns of Akhenaten, for example, focus on the worship of light as relative to the sun, but sound eerily similar to some of the language of the Psalms of the Bible -- not an exact match, and the focus is different since the Bible will not allow any created thing to be worshiped in the stead of God, but clearly there is some knowledge that is in common grace, for, as it says in Psalm 19, "The heavens declare the glory of God ... day to day utters speech, night to night utters knowledge."
Another "reflection" of sorts: I am a Trinitarian, believing in one God in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and I know this is often represented with the shape of a triangle ... while also knowing that in Egypt, when the pharoahs were believed to be taking their journey to return to the gods who made them, they were entombed in a pyramid, each face of which is, in fact, a triangle ... and then, we have learned in science that the most stable shape is, in fact, a tetrahedron -- a pyramid.
So, I just leveled all that up again, looking at what would be visible in a water world by the beings there, and working from common human knowledge upward to that. I also chose to make only one page of the scroll readable, for I am not trying to make the mistake that some humans in the story are making ... casual acquaintance with any faith is not enough to fully understand it or the people who practice it, and this is a short story -- not enough time and space.