26

After Jane unburdened herself to Leider, he was silent for several minutes. Jane was about to get up and leave, angry that he was teeping again when he spoke.

‘Come to church with me,’ said Leider.

‘I thought I told you not to convert me,’ said Jane.

‘I’m not. I want you to meet my friend, the publisher. She’s been asking about you.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yeah, she wants to know more about your project. I told her I’d bring you along some time.’

Going to church entailed assembling within one of the religious idols the Martians built and listening to speeches or some songs. It is not clear what any of the Martians gained from this practice. MORE?

Jane met Leider on the appointed day in front of the church. This structure was a massive sprawling edifice that looked as though a more elegant building had been dropped from a great height and splattered rooms and roofs in all directions.

‘Well, it sounds fun in there,’ said Jane. Even from where they were standing some distance from the church, loud music could be heard coming from within.

They entered the church and chose places in a row of seats. A group of musicians was playing on stage in front of the large audience. Most of the audience was singing along.

‘Why aren’t you up there?’ Jane said to Leider.

‘Because I wanted to be back here with you,’ he answered, and burst into song.

Not being an acolyte, Jane was not familiar with any of the songs. However, the singing eventually died down, and a large man ran up onto the stage, so quickly that Jane was startled.

The entire audience was almost instantly silent. Jane stared in wonder at the sudden change. Her ears were still ringing from the music. She wondered what the man could be expected to say that would so quickly mute everyone. But the man did not speak at all. He strode about on the stage, shooting intent looks at his audience. Jane began to wonder if it was a test or some strange rite she had never heard of. She glanced around to see if anyone else was uncomfortable, and realized almost immediately her mistake. The man on the stage was teeping. It was evident from the stupid looks on the faces of the people in the audience.

‘You didn’t tell me it was all going to be in teep,’ she hissed at Leider.

He didn’t answer.

She punched his arm discretely, and repeated herself.

‘Sorry,’ Leider whispered back. ‘I thought you’d still like to see it.’

Jane resigned herself to boredom and waited for the man to get off the stage. After a very long time he finally left, only to be replaced by a tall woman in a red coat. She, too, teeped for a very long time, before relinquishing the stage to a different man—far less flashy than the first—who waved his arms about as he teeped.

Suddenly, by the aid of some mechanized system of which Jane was entirely unaware, the church was inundated with water. It splashed down the aisles, and around the legs of the seats, and washed about the base of the stage. Such a volume of water was introduced that it rapidly began to rise. Men and women threw off their clothes, or retained only one, and plunged into the water.¹ When Jane looked to Leider to ask what was going on, she discovered that he was no longer in his seat.

Jane was experiencing the ancient custom of religion called baptism. This was a ceremony where the whole church was flooded with water and the worshipers plunged themselves beneath the surface. It is doubtful that they intended to drown, even though a number of dead were always discovered when the church was drained. The Martians believed this ceremony of communal bathing was necessary to remove the great taint they felt they had accumulated by sinning. No doubt it also served the purpose of improving their hygiene, which was, as I have previously stated, barbaric.

As Jane was trying to prevent herself from slipping off her chair, Leider came rushing through the water and falling on his knees and clasping her round her waist, asked if she was alarmed.²

Leider escorted her out of the church. When they were once again on the outside, he said, ‘I really am sorry. I had no idea that they were going to do that this week. I really didn’t. And when it all started, I got carried away. I hope you aren’t mad.’

‘No,’ said Jane. ‘Of course I’m not. But I would have liked to meet your friend.’

‘Come on, it’s it about time that you started teeping?’

‘I don’t know. It kind of scares me.’

‘What are you so worried about?’

‘It’s got to mess with your mind. Does anybody even know what that Parasite thing does to you?’

‘If it fried your brains, there’d be a whole lot of mindless zombies wandering around. But look at me. I’ve been teeping for months, and I’m not a vegetable.’

‘But what if it changes how you think? It’s some kind of highly advanced thing from a truly alien world. We’ve missed the side-affects of our own technology enough times that we ought to know better than to take this all on trust only.’

‘But everything’s like that. Okay, sure, the Aliens brought this, but that’s why its such an opportunity. Who knows how long it would have taken us to figure all this out. Certainly not in our lifetimes. It’s like a shortcut to the future, and you don’t want to go through it because you’re worried about potholes.’

‘I think it’s more than potholes...’

‘I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t teeping. It’s the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and there’s always something more. What could be better?’³

‘It isn’t ours,’ said Jane. ‘We didn’t create it, we didn’t evolve with it.’

‘So what? I didn’t evolve with sushi, you think I shouldn’t eat it?’

‘At least it came from this planet.’

‘So that’s what this is about. They’re coming to get you, Jane.’⁴

‘Just leave it, Rudy.’

‘I’m trying to help!’ he said.

‘Look! My mind is all I’ve got! I’ve put all my hopes on my poetry. It’s all I have that matters, and if something happened to me that ruined that, that made it so I didn’t even have this little hope...you can understand that, right?’ Jane’s eyes were stinging and she knew that she was going to cry, so she left Leider in the parking lot. Her head and feelings told her of a great change and she went to bed unwell.⁵