As the Stars of Heaven
by Marshall J. Moore
Even after five years on Gloam, Gilbert found himself missing the stars.
Like many such longings, it came upon him at unexpected times, in the small and private moments. Glancing out the viewport while he waited for the fabricator to finish with his evening meal, or walking through the dim streets of the Shimmering and looking up, forgetting for a moment where he was.
Like any pastor worthy of the title, Gilbert had a verse prepared for such moments.
“The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light,” he murmured to himself, peering through the translucent dome of the hyperlift at the opaque canopy beyond. “The rising sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light.”
There was a jolt beneath his feet as the hyperlift detached from its moorings, sending an anticipatory thrill through him as his stomach rose towards his throat. No matter how many times he made the descent, that brief half-second of freefall never failed to conjure visions of catastrophic equipment failure: the hyperlift and its frail human passenger plummeting the hundreds of meters to smash against the great roots of the kilometer-high trees.
“For I know the plans I have for you…” he began, but before he could finish the verse, the lift’s inertial dampers kicked in. The branches and leaves through the viewports whipped past in a dizzying blur, but within the lift itself Gilbert felt as if he were standing still.
The ride from the upper canopy where the hab module was housed down to the distant forest floor was only ten minutes, but that was still long enough to remind him all over again how much he missed Calle. The trip had not felt nearly as long when his friend and fellow missionary had been in the lift beside him, Calle’s voice filling the lift’s confines, their mutual banter echoing off the sturdy walls.
Now the lift was silent, save for the engine’s quiet thrum beneath him, and in that emptiness, Gilbert felt his loneliness all the more acutely.
The hyperlift slowed as it approached the foot of the great tree, then finally ground to a halt as it reached the roots. The door hissed softly open, and Gilbert found himself face-to-face with the waiting Shimmer.
In the immediate wake of first contact, the more sensationalist Terran media outlets had labelled the Milky Way’s second known sapient species as space slugs, a moniker gleefully resurrected from the cheap xenophobic entertainments that flourished alongside humanity’s first toddling steps into the stars. Although the term was now considered rude, the Shimmer did resemble an enormous terrestrial nudibranch. Its gastropodal body was enfolded within a fleshy, flexible mantle, which exuded just enough bioluminescence for Gilbert to see the creature’s outline down here in the lightless depths.
The part of that mantle nearest Gilbert elongated, becoming a gently glowing pseudopod extended towards him, as if offering a handshake. Which it was, more or less.
Gilbert extended his hand, resting his palm and fingers carefully atop the pseudopod. The Shimmer’s flesh was smooth and cool to the touch.
It trembled beneath his hand in a vibration too low and too slow to be sound. At the same time the soft luminescence emanating from beneath the Shimmer’s mantle was outstripped by the appearance of brilliantly shifting patterns of light along its form, whorls and bright flashing spots and pulsing lines illuminating its graceful limbless form.
Perhaps it is no great loss to them, Gilbert thought, not for the first time, that the heavens are hidden from their sight. Not when the Almighty has crowned them with the stars.
Beautiful as it was, the Shimmer’s display was not for his aesthetic appreciation alone. The subdermal implants beneath his fingertips took in the pattern and frequency of the Shimmer’s vibrations, while the optical lenses he wore assessed the organic lightshow. Both inputs fed into his earpiece, translating the Shimmer’s bioluminescent communication into verbalized speech.
“Your assistance is requested and required,” the Shimmer said. “Situation unprecedented. Your prompt arrival is noted.”
That was as close to polite greeting or thanks as Gilbert was likely to get, but he took no offense. The exchange of pleasantries that was the cornerstone of so many human languages was as alien to the Shimmering as vocalized speech.
“I am happy to be of assistance.” As he spoke, the sensors in his bodysuit translated his words into a riotous kaleidoscope of flashing lights across the otherwise matte black garment, accompanied by a pulsing vibration that carried down his arm and through the subdermal implants on his fingertips. “Unprecedented how?”
The upper third of the Shimmer’s gastropod body swayed back and forth, its luminescence turning an agitated orange. “Come. We will explain along the way.”
With a swiftness that belied its two-meter bulk, the Shimmer turned and began to glide along the forest floor, extending one pseudopod behind it and beckoning for Gilbert to follow in a gesture that was disconcertingly human.
Gilbert picked his way along the darkened forest floor with less grace than the Shimmer. The ground beneath his feet was carpeted with soft moss, its glow a faint yellow in contrast to the Shimmer’s predominant blue, but he had learned through a trial of bruises and scraped knees to watch his feet for rocks and roots.
“Have we met before?” he asked, catching up to the Shimmer and resting his augmented hand on the back of its mantle. “You and I, I mean.”
A purplish streak ran along the Shimmer’s flanks.
“No,” it said through his earpiece. “I am not among those of the Shimmering who have conversed with you.”
“What should I call you, then?” Gilbert asked, noting the other’s shift to the singular person.
In answer, the Shimmer’s bioluminescence shifted to a deep, jewel-toned green, shot through with sharp-angled striations running along its flank. Each Shimmer adopted its own signature coloring and patterning; signifiers far more unique to each individual than spoken names.
“Emerald,” Gilbert decided to call the Shimmer before him, speaking slowly and clearly. His bodysuit’s onboard intelligence noted his tone, and flashed Emerald’s name-signature back at it. The Shimmer’s mantle rippled in a manner Gilbert knew indicated approval. “If we have not met before, then you are not a follower of the faith.”
“I am not.” This with a greenish pulsing. “But the one who requested you is.”
“Who?” Gilbert asked, the vague anxiety that had nagged at him ever since receiving the request for urgent assistance finally coalescing into a singular concern. “Is the individual hurt? What is the matter?”
“It is the one you name Lightning,” Emerald answered, several jagged crimson streaks running through its mantle in a manner that reminded Gilbert of electrical discharge—thus the afflicted Shimmer’s vocalized name. “It is currently unhurt, but…”
The Shimmer’s luminescence dimmed, turning noncommunicative, though it made no attempt at shaking loose of Gilbert’s touch. He suspected it was formulating its thoughts.
“It has isolated itself,” Emerald said at last, its greenish light now shot through with sickly patches of yellow. “Cut itself off from the Shimmering.”
Though they were not a true hive consciousness, individual Shimmers were able to pass their memories to one another through touch. A sufficient number of Shimmers sharing their experiences in such a manner led to the formation of a Shimmering, a large but voluntary conglomeration of individuals with a collective pool of knowledge far vaster than could be accumulated in any one lifetime.
“Of its own volition?” Gilbert’s brows lifted, an expression doomed to be lost in translation.
“That is what it says.” The translator earpiece’s ability to convey tone was limited, but five years among the Shimmer had taught him enough of their luminescent body language to read the doubt in Emerald’s pinkish streaking. “In its more lucid moments.”
“Lucid?” Gilbert frowned, his bodysuit mirroring the Shimmer’s last patterning. “You think Lightning is not acting rationally?”
“It is not.” This punctuated with a sharp, dark purple flash. “Its behavior has grown erratic. Violent enough to require physical removal from the Shimmering.”
Unease prickled the back of Gilbert’s neck. In his five years on Gloam, he had encountered only two instances of violence between Shimmers. Though they were as vulnerable to the temptations of wrath as his own species, the giant gastropods were not predisposed to expressing themselves physically.
“Is it sick?” he asked, grasping for an explanation.
“A physical evaluation has been performed. Slight malnourishment and poor rest patterns, but nothing outside ordinary parameters.”
“So it is not dying,” Gilbert said slowly. “Or at least, it is not in immediate danger of doing so.”
Why call for its pastor, then? Out of the thousand or so individual souls that made up this Shimmering, perhaps a hundred had converted under Gilbert’s and Calle’s guidance. Many of the preexisting mores of Shimmer society meshed well with Christian doctrine; in particular, they grasped the concept of a Trinitarian God far more readily than most human converts Gilbert had encountered.
Indeed, if Gilbert had a single complaint about their ministry—beyond the perpetual dark and the lack of stars, and more lately his loneliness—it was that their new parishioners were almost too cerebral in their approach to the holy. They grasped and accepted the tenets of their new religion readily enough, and partook in worship with what he presumed was an appropriate level of fervor—though it was difficult to tell with a congregation whose hymns were a silent lightshow.
But there was no visceral component to their faith. Marriage was unknown among the hermaphroditic Shimmers. Their reproductive pairings were agreed upon by consensus of the Shimmering in what Gilbert understood to be a sort of community-wide matchmaking, but such unions lasted just long enough for the production of offspring, a process neither difficult nor prolonged enough that they needed to importune God for a healthy birth. They confessed themselves to him with a comforting regularity, convicted by the apparently universal need to unburden their souls of their sins, but even those tended to be sins of heart and mind rather than action.
Thus, the regularity of Gilbert’s ministry was broken up only by funerals and deathbed visits. A fact which, he reflected as he trudged along beside the Shimmer, might be exerting an undue influence on his self-perception of his vocation.
Gilbert was so preoccupied with his musings that he did not realize how long the silence had stretched, until Emerald spoke with an abrupt flurry of colors.
“It was following the individual’s attempt at self-termination that your presence was requested.”
“Suicide?” Gilbert frowned, simultaneously alarmed and morbidly curious about what means of self-destruction would even be available to an enormous gastropod.
“Yes.” Emerald’s deep blue strobing was somehow sorrowful. “We know that your faith holds it a grave sin. Our own traditions feel similarly. To rob the Shimmering of one’s depth of experience by choice rather than accident or misfortune is considered grievously selfish.”
Humanity had once possessed similar attitudes, Gilbert knew, though in his lifetime those lost to such tragedy were viewed as the victim of that sin rather than its perpetrator.
“Is that why Lightning called for me?” he asked. “Because it fears to die with its sins unconfessed?”
“In part.” Emerald drew to a sudden halt, turning its upper body to peer closely at Gilbert. This close he could see the dozens of black eyes running along its mantle’s edge, each the size of a lemon. Many were fixed on him. “Absolution of sin is the reason Lightning desires to see you. After much discussion, the Shimmering has reached a consensus that this is to be permitted.”
Gilbert knew that, had he been on the forest floor during such a debate, he would have witnessed a spectacular display: hundreds of Shimmers gathered together in the central hollow that was their community’s analogue to a town square, all pulsing in a bright and riotous display of colors and patterns as each made its case before its fellows, pseudopods extended and entangled as each relayed the message to its neighbors through the Shimmering, sharing not only the message but the experience and outlook that had led it to reach such a conclusion.
Only once before had Gilbert been privileged to witness a communion on such scale. The beauty of the swirling and shifting colors, the almost musical quality of the constantly changing vibrations, and the sight of so many souls opening themselves to one another had brought him near to tears. If there had been any lingering doubt in his mind that these alien souls were as much God’s children as he himself was, the Shimmering had obliterated it.
Yet whatever wistful regret he felt at being denied the opportunity to view a second such gathering was itself obliterated by the gravity of Lightning’s situation. For an entire Shimmering to convene around a single individual’s condition…
“You’re not only worried for Lightning,” Gilbert realized. “This is something that impacts all of you. That’s why you allowed Lightning’s isolation.”
“Correct.” A shiver ran through Emerald’s body. “Were Lightning’s memories of its present circumstances permitted to be passed along, the entire Shimmering might suffer its fate.”
“So you quarantined it instead,” Gilbert said. “Why call for me, then?”
“The Shimmering decided that alien problems require alien solutions.” Emerald reconfigured its body so that its flank was facing Gilbert, permitting more of its multitudinous eyes to survey him even as its forward progress continued uninterrupted. “You are yourself cut off from your own Shimmering, after all.”
Gilbert grimaced. In the months since Calle’s departure from Gloam, he’d come to suspect that the Shimmering had started to view him as a sort of amputee. For a species to whom community was not merely a social construct but a biological one, the solitude in which he now found himself must have seemed an unbearable torment.
Nor could he find it in himself to disagree.
“Does it pain you?” Emerald asked, surprising him. “To be without a Shimmering.”
Gilbert began to answer, then reconsidered. As one of the few envoys of not only his faith but his species, his every interaction with the Shimmers had to take into account the gulf of difference in the way the two races experienced the world. Like many acts of translation, it was a bridge under constant construction, as Shimmer and human alike worked to lessen their misapprehensions of one another.
“Not in the way it does you, I think,” he said instead, resisting the urge to tap a finger to his head, knowing the gesture would mean nothing to a creature with a diffuse nervous system. “We are wholly ourselves, alone within our minds. Unable to share our experiences with one another save through speech alone.”
“Alone,” Emerald said after a momentary consideration, its mantle rippling in repetition of the same pattern Gilbert’s bodysuit had formed. “As you are. As Lightning is.”
It turned, fixing as many of its eyes upon Gilbert as it could. “I have a question to ask you.”
“And I one for you,” Gilbert said, unperturbed by its customary Shimmer brusqueness, “if I’m to help Lightning.”
Emerald’s mantle quivered in surprise, then smoothed as it flashed acknowledgment. “Ask, then.”
“Why did you come to me?” Gilbert asked, his confusion rippling over his bodysuit in waves of nauseous yellow. “I mean you specifically, Emerald. Why not one of the Christian Shimmers, when Lightning itself is one of them?”
This time Emerald was slow to answer. Striations and pulses of luminescence danced across its body as it thought, too low and quick to be speech.
Gilbert waited, mentally offering up a prayer of thanksgiving for the patience his time apart from Calle had granted him.
“The other Shimmers of your faith,” Emerald said, its bioluminescence coming in slow waves and ripples, which Gilbert suspected was to minimize the chance of misunderstanding, “are wary that they too may be… susceptible to Lightning’s affliction.”
“They—” Gilbert forced himself to speak with similar deliberate care, rather than let his emotions run rampant. “They think I might be the source?”
Another pause before Emerald answered, though not nearly as long.
“We have not ruled out the possibility,” it said, the plural pronoun indicating that it spoke for the entirety of the Shimmering, believer and nonbeliever alike. “Though given that you and Calle have been here several years, we deem the risk negligible. As for myself, I was—am—Lightning’s—”
Here it pulsed a slow, undulating series of pink and violet shapes. Gilbert’s frown deepened. “I don’t know that word.”
“No?” The flattening of Emerald’s upper mantle was analogous to a human’s furrowed brow. “I suppose not. It is not a thing we often discuss.”
“Is it taboo?”
“No. It is simply understood, without explanation. It means one who is most dear to us.”
“A spouse?” Gilbert guessed, but this guess was swiftly rejected by an iridescent yellow streak.
“Not a mate,” Emerald said, “though Lightning has told me that among your kind similar bonds are formed among those who reproduce together. It is more a… someone you spend your time with, who knows you better than any other. Whose soul is twin to your own.”
“A companion,” Gilbert said, and his bodysuit pulsed a similar undulation of purple and pink. Not exactly as Emerald had, but close. “As Calle was to me.”
“Yes!” The fringe of Emerald’s mantle rippled excitedly. “A companion, just so. I am to Lightning as you are to your companion Calle. So when Lightning became unwell—”
“You sought me out,” Gilbert finished, glad to have puzzled out the connection. What must the relationship be like, he wondered, between two Shimmers: one Christian, the other not? Certainly, humanity was rife with close friendships, even romances, between those of different faiths. But humans could not pass their emotive experiences between one another with the ease of a handshake.
They are not a hive mind, he reminded himself, as he’d often done during the first two years of his mission. Their memory-sharing may be a gift from God, but they remain and retain their own unique and individual souls.
“I came to seek you,” Emerald confirmed, shaking Gilbert free of his reverie. “Both to help my companion, and to offer you my condolences on the loss of your own.”
“Calle’s not lost,” Gilbert said, more sharply than he’d intended. Hopefully the bodysuit would not make such a distinction in tone. “He’ll be back, one day.”
Won’t he? The question had plagued Gilbert ever since his companion’s departure, all those months ago. Calle had promised to return, once things were settled with his mother. But her illness was a protracted one, and whether she would persevere over or succumb to it, God only knew.
“One day,” Gilbert said again, half to himself. A day far enough off that his church had elected to send another missionary in Calle’s stead, rather than wait for him to be able to return. Someone new; someone Gilbert would need to teach how to communicate with the Shimmers, how to cope with the endless night of a world with neither stars nor sky.
“He’ll return to us,” he said, trying to put all the conviction he did not feel into his voice as he looked at Emerald. “And so will Lightning. Take me to your companion, Emerald, and we will see what can be done to return it to you.”
Emerald glowed an approving orange, then turned and began gliding along the forest floor once more. Gilbert followed after, praying silently for the strength to meet whatever lay ahead.
***
“Here.” Emerald glided to a halt. Ahead loomed what Gilbert first took to be a cave, though a glance at their deep forest surroundings showed that it was in actuality a knothole in one of the titanic tree roots. From within its depths, he could just make out the faint glow of another Shimmer, this one a sickly yellow. Lightning.
Emerald inched forward cautiously, then halted again, two of its pseudopods probing the air as if there were an invisible barrier before it. “You must go on alone from here. I can go no further.”
Gilbert looked down. Emerald’s waving pseudopods gave out just enough light to see the faint glimmer of crystals carpeting the ground before them, laid out in a line thicker than he was tall and running from one end of the knothole to the other.
Wary of interacting with an unknown substance that his Shimmer companion seemed unwilling to cross over, Gilbert held out his hand, mirroring Emerald’s own extended pseudopods. The subdermal implants beneath his fingertips swiftly scanned the crystals, which his earpiece identified as being primarily composed of sodium chloride.
Gilbert looked at Emerald. “Salt?”
A deep red pulse of alarm ran through the Shimmer’s mantle. “A precaution of last resort, and a sign of our desperation.”
Of course, Gilbert thought, sending a swift and silent prayer beseeching forgiveness for his ignorance. Like Terran gastropods, the Shimmers’ skin was a permeable membrane, and exposure to salt would have as deadly an effect upon them as it did their smaller, non-sentient counterparts.
“How did you get this here?” he asked, glancing at Emerald.
“With great care,” the Shimmer answered in a series of purple striations, which Gilbert suspected were indicative of something akin to sarcasm. “Also tools.”
“And this is the means by which Lightning attempted its suicide?” he asked, glancing down.
“It is.” Emerald assumed a somber shade of deep blue. “It has been restrained, for now.”
“Is there anything else I should know before I converse with the afflicted?” Gilbert asked.
Beneath his fingertips, Emerald’s mantle thrummed softly, a rainbow of colors drifting across its surface.
“The Shimmering desires but does not expect that you save Lightning’s life,” the earpiece translated. “Or failing that, its soul. But above all else, it cannot be permitted to rejoin the Shimmering.”
“I understand,” Gilbert said. Steeling himself, he stepped through and over the line of salt, murmuring the twenty-third Psalm as he ventured into the dark.
He could think of no verse more appropriate for the moment.
Yellow light danced up the wall in violently uneven shadows, creating a strobe effect so off-putting that Gilbert resorted to ordering his bodysuit to emit a steady white glow of a similar frequency.
The yellow glow emanating from the Shimmer before him steadied; upon sighting the human’s approach, Lightning had ceased its thrashing. No more violent shadows played along the walls, yet this was small comfort. A forest of saffron pseudopods extended towards Gilbert, some of them reaching farther than he’d ever seen a Shimmer able to extend itself.
The nearest of these halted within a foot of his face. It swayed there, hovering. Past it, Gilbert noted that Lightning’s gastropod body had been glued to the wooden floor by long strands of mucous secretions, which in more typical circumstances the omnivorous Shimmering used to trap prey.
Nor was that the only indicator that something was seriously, dreadfully wrong with Lightning. The Shimmer’s mantle was dry and cracked, oozing pus in places. In others its bioluminescence was disrupted by ugly brownish bruising, and several of its eyes were swollen shut. Even had he not spent half a decade amongst its kind, Gilbert would have recognized that this specimen was badly injured.
Already at the limit of Lightning’s reach, the pseudopod strained towards him, insistent.
“Lord, guide me and protect me,” Gilbert muttered, genuflecting. “Guide Your servant so that I may help one of Your Faithful. Lord, I commit myself into Your hands.”
Then he reached out his own hand and pressed it to the outstretched pseudopod.
A tremor ran from his fingertips up his arm, so violent that it took an effort of will not to withdraw his hand. A riot of lurid colors streamed across Lightning’s mantle, Gilbert’s earpiece translating the sudden display into a cacophony of disjointed speech.
“Hateful crawling sliding ugly fleshthings little worthless souls undeserving of His gaze His attention His love hungry always hungry stumbling in the dark cold dark cold dark dark dark—”
Gilbert gritted his teeth and pressed his hand against Lightning’s pseudopod, interrupting the nonstop nonsense flow.
“Lightning,” he said, slow and clear, his bodysuit assuming the Shimmer’s signature red streaks. “Child of God the Almighty. Can you understand me?”
The Shimmer’s lights abruptly stilled, then dimmed. When they returned it was in a weaker, more sedate pattern, rendered in Gilbert’s ear as plain speech.
“I am here, Gilbert.” Lightning’s namesake marks pulsed weakly. “I am not well.”
“I can see that,” Gilbert said carefully, his bodysuit translating his words into gentle blue whorls. “What is it that plagues you?”
“I… we are not alone.” An agitated shudder wracked Lightning’s body, and for a moment Gilbert feared that the Shimmer was about to break into another unhinged diatribe. “There is… I am not myself. There is another.”
“Another?” Gilbert asked, unable to keep himself from glancing around the confines of the hole. But of course, they were alone.
“Not like that.” There was an urgent quality to Lightning’s shifting coloration, which translated as quick, clipped words. “In me. Like… like a Shimmering within myself. Only not.”
Gilbert’s frown deepened. Despite Emerald’s enigmatic warnings, this sounded like a purely Shimmer affliction. “You are experiencing another’s memories?”
“No!” The pseudopod writhed against his touch. “Yes. I do not know. Only that there is little time before I lose myself.”
To what, Gilbert did not ask, for suddenly the pseudopod withdrew. Lightning’s body trembled and convulsed, ugly blotches of livid purple blossoming across its mantle like cancerous flowers.
A voice spoke. Not from Gilbert’s earpiece, but seemingly from the walls of the hole itself, high and scratchy and in perfectly comprehensible Terran.
“Have you come to console this miserable slug, preacher?”
Gilbert went still, danger prickling at the back of his neck as his eyes roamed the darkness, seeking the source of the voice.
“What is the matter?” the voice asked, darkly amused as Lightning’s stripes pulsed in time with its speech. “Have you not wished all these long months for the sound of another human voice? Is this not a welcome relief after so long with nothing but the lightshows of these unshelled snails to keep you company?”
“It is not,” Gilbert said, finding his voice and staring hard at Lightning. “And you are no human.”
“No,” the voice agreed. “I am not.”
Lightning thrashed suddenly, violently, as it had before Gilbert’s arrival. He wondered with growing alarm whether this was Lightning itself attempting to reassert control against the voice, or if the voice’s owner was amusing itself by inflicting pain upon the poor Shimmer.
“Stop!” he shouted, alarm overcoming his sense of self-preservation as he waded in, heedless of the many pseudopods suddenly affixing themselves to his bodysuit. A dazzling lightshow threatened to overwhelm his senses as he tried to hold Lightning still, his earpiece filling with the same nonsense stream of hateful chatter as before:
“unclean unworthy without voice or soul no stars no sky no sun no God”
“Lightning,” Gilbert said, his bodysuit conveying the Shimmer’s name to it. Silently Gilbert prayed that his words would penetrate the deluge of self-recrimination. “Lightning, there is a God. He made you, He loves you, He—”
The clustered mass of pseudopods shoved him away. Caught off-guard, Gilbert stumbled back, landed hard against the wooden wall.
“He does not love them!” the voice shrieked, causing Lightning’s pseudopods to tremble like grass beneath a wind. “Or have you forgotten the very scripture you cite to these crawling creatures? ‘So God created humankind in His own image; in the image of God He created them, male and female he created them!’”
High, wild laughter echoed about the cave as Lightning writhed. “Male and female! Meaningless words to these hermaphrodites. And if you are the image of God, preacher, what then are these wretched beings, consigned to crawl upon their bellies and devour dust?”
A lie. The thought came to Gilbert, as clear and simple as if someone else had put it there. Perhaps someone had. No one could watch the Shimmers gracefully gliding over the forest floor and call it crawling.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, Gilbert thought, and pulled himself to his feet.
“They are children of God,” he said, drawing near to Lightning once more. “Thinking beings, made in imitation of a thinking Creator. Gifted by Him with free will—”
“Which they misuse and abuse just as you and all your kind have done since your misbegotten beginnings,” the voice sneered. “How cruel of Him, then, to send His only begotten Son to die for you, and not for these.”
“He came to die for all,” Gilbert countered, his hand falling to the cross he’d worn around his neck for so long he’d nearly forgotten it was there. His hands wrapped around it, taking comfort in the smooth wood that had been carved from a tree upon another world. “Man, Shimmer, and whatever other beings may reside in His unending universe. Now begone from this innocent soul, unclean one, you foul demon of hell.”
Lightning did not recoil, as he’d more than half hoped it might. Instead, the Shimmer’s body quivered and convulsed, and the laughter returned.
“So you guess rightly what I am,” the voice cackled. “Took you long enough.”
“In the name of God—” Gilbert started, advancing on it with the cross upheld.
A pseudopod whipped towards him, slapped him across the face. He jerked away, stunned, as the voice spoke again, amusement transmuted to savage fury.
“You think to command me as if you were the Son of God?” it snarled, though Lightning’s body pressed against the floor, like a child striving to avoid the notice of a wrathful parent. “You who are alone upon an alien world, without friend or comforter save the swine you walk amongst? You, who brought me here yourself?”
“What?” Gilbert blinked, his face stinging where he’d been struck, his hand trembling. “How—”
“How came I to this distant corner of the stars?” The voice chuckled; a terrible sound. Lightning seemed to sink further into itself. “To torment and possess the souls of this world? The question betrays your ignorance. The distance between your home and this one is as a handspan to me.”
“That is not the question…” Gilbert shook his head, realizing that further debate served only the demon. He pressed the cross to his brow, took solace in the familiar smoothness of the woodgrain. “Lord, forgive me my iniquities. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I abjure thee, evil—”
Pseudopods shot forward, sickly yellow, pressing themselves like mouthless faces against Gilbert’s hands, his lips, his eyes. They thrummed with sickly light, and through his earpiece the demon spoke in Lightning’s voice.
“You cannot abjure me when you invited me to this place.” The voice became a chorus, overlapping and repeating upon itself. “Not when you carried me here with you like a plague rat, to loose me upon distant shores.”
Alien problems require alien solutions. Emerald’s words came rushing back to the priest, driving an icy spike of doubt through his heart. Was it true? In bringing the Gospel to the Shimmering, had he exposed them to spiritual corruption as well as salvation? Was Gloam an Edenic world, unfallen until humanity had brought sin to it alongside salvation?
“Leave this one to me,” the demon’s many voices now crooned, turning cajoling. “Let me have but one and I shall not trouble your flock again within your lifetime. Refuse me and I will hound you and yours with a thousand torments, until your name becomes a curse to the denizens of this world.”
“My flock,” Gilbert repeated, and drew strength from the words. After all, did not the Lord command him leave the ninety-nine in search of the one lost? “You will not trouble them, or this one, any longer. Get thee—”
More pseudopods extended from Lightning’s mantle, pressing themselves against Gilbert with surprising force, pushing him from the afflicted Shimmer. He stumbled back as a hissing emanated from the shadows all around as the pseudopods withdrew into Lightning’s mantle.
The possessed Shimmer’s body began to tremble. It reared up as high as its bonds allowed. Then, before Gilbert could so much as let out a cry, it slammed itself against the floor, hard enough to shake the walls.
And again, and again.
“Leave!” the voice howled. “Leave now, you lost and lonely messenger of a careless God, if you care for this slug’s life!”
Every instinct within Gilbert screamed at him to run; to turn and flee from this den of horrors. Yet a courage not wholly his own stayed him.
“I will fear no evil,” he murmured to himself, and thrust out his free hand. His fingers found the fleshy stalk of a pseudopod, catching it with a deftness that any snake handler might have envied. It tried to shy away, but he tightened his grip and held it fast.
“Have faith, Lightning,” he said, his fingertips vibrating and his body suit flashing as his words became the silent Shimmer speech. “I will return for you.”
Then he relinquished his grip and turned away, walking in slow, measured strides from the place of horrors, so that the devil would not see him run.
***
Hours later he stood in the center of a great hollow, surrounded by the radiance of a Shimmering.
Nearly a thousand Shimmers had gathered, their great fluid bodies pulsing in a dizzying swirl of lights. Every hue imaginable flowed and shifted across their mantles, blossoming in flowers of indigo, lancing arcs of crimson, and dozens of other patterns even more intricate. They swayed as they communed, pseudopods gently pressed together. The soft hum of their vibrations lay just below the level of sound, lending the gathering an air of quiet solemnity.
Had circumstances been other than what they were, Gilbert might have thanked God for permitting him to not only witness a Shimmering, but participate in one. But with Lightning’s life at stake, the only prayers he could utter were those beseeching mercy and intercession.
Silent though the Shimmering was, a dimming of its collective glow and a quieting of the kaleidoscopic lightshow nevertheless conveyed the same effect as a hush falling over the crowd.
Detaching itself from its nearest neighbors, one of the Shimmers glided across to where Gilbert stood waiting. The flash of a familiar deep green pattern identified it as Emerald, a pseudopod extended towards him.
Gilbert pressed his hand against the outstretched limb, and the Shimmer’s words filled his ears and eyes.
“We are ready for you,” Emerald said, though a hesitant purple tinged its mantle’s edges. “I have relayed your interactions with Lightning to the Shimmering. Your report aligns with what is already known of its behavior. Now it falls to you to make your case.”
“Thank you,” Gilbert said. “May I ask a question first?”
“You may,” Emerald replied, though the lingering purple indicated that delay would be of no help to Gilbert. Or perhaps it was merely concern for Lightning that prompted such an anxious response.
“You are not of the Faith,” Gilbert said, his gaze drifting up to rove about the hundreds of bodies lining the hollow. “Nor are more than one in ten of those gathered here.”
“No. What is your question?”
“There are many humans who do not believe in demons or possession,” Gilbert said, glad he had explained the concept to Emerald in the hours leading up to the Shimmering. “What I have to say will sound doubly strange to your people. Will they believe me?”
“There is only one way to know,” Emerald said, and though it maintained the connection between its pseudopod and Gilbert’s hand, it turned and began to glide towards its neighbors, indicating he should follow.
Emerald stretched out a second pseudopod, and a third, and a fourth, until it was touching half a dozen of its fellows, each of those touching just as many, and so on, and so forth. This was the Shimmering in its truest form, a vast and interconnected web of communication by touch and sight and the sharing of memory.
Here, in the display of unity and light, Gilbert was reminded that no matter how alien their appearance, these creatures too were God’s children.
My flock, he thought again, believer and unbeliever alike. Their welfare is my burden and my joy.
Once that burden had been a shared one, as had the joy. Yet for the first time in so many months, Gilbert no longer felt the keenness of his isolation. Not here, surrounded by a community of minds at once like and unlike his own. Not when the joy so greatly outweighed the burden.
The Shimmering spoke to him then. Not as they had before, in a thousand minds conferring amongst each other, but as a single voice; a single pattern of brilliant blue light playing across a thousand bodies.
“SPEAK,” the Shimmering said.
So Gilbert spoke.
“Friends,” he began, knowing the Shimmer disdain for pleasantries but eager to stress his relationship to them. “You all know of the affliction that has struck the one I call Lightning.”
His bodysuit assumed that unfortunate Shimmer’s signature red streaks, and a ripple of sympathetic pink swelled through the Shimmering.
“This affliction is known to me,” he continued. “Lightning is possessed by a demon.”
The word of course had no equivalent in Shimmer speech, and there was a momentary delay as the bodysuit’s intelligence rifled through its onboard dictionary. The word it settled on was the sickly green spiral that signified certain dermal parasites.
“A spiritual parasite,” Gilbert continued, deciding it was a fitting analogy. “One capable of speech and thought.”
He paused as this sent a ripple of orange shock through the Shimmering, eventually coalescing into a trembling blue line of inquiry: “IT IS A LIVING CREATURE?”
“No,” Gilbert said, then paused. “Not in the sense that you or I are living. It is a creature of pure spirit, without physical form. A parasite of the soul rather than the body.”
A wave of riotous colors spread through the hollow, forcing him to wait until the Shimmering reached a consensus on this claim. When at last they did, it was in a slow, thoughtful violet.
“THIS ALIGNS WITH THE BEHAVIOR OF THE AFFLICTED. YET THE ONE YOU CALL EMERALD REPORTS THAT THERE IS DOUBT EVEN AMONGST YOUR KIND AS TO SUCH BEINGS’ EXISTENCE.”
“It is hard to believe in that which we cannot see,” Gilbert said, his gaze drifting upwards towards the black canopy of the megaflora high above. Somewhere beyond, there were stars. “Yet that is the foundation upon which all faith rests.”
He looked to Emerald, its pseudopod pressed delicately to his hand, through which his words were transmitted throughout the Shimmering. “The parasite claims that I brought it with me to your world. That in telling your people the Good News I exposed them to its possession.”
Yellow consternation bathed the hollow in an unhealthy glow. “DO YOU BELIEVE THAT TO BE TRUE?”
The Devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose, Gilbert reminded himself.
“I do not.” He paused, letting the words sink in. “The parasite is a liar. As a being of spirit, it exists outside of time and distance. Had it desired to torment one of your own, it could have done so before my people and yours ever encountered one another.”
“YET INSTEAD IT WAITED UNTIL YOU HAD SPREAD YOUR FAITH AMONG US. WHY, IF NOT BECAUSE IT CAME HERE ALONG WITH YOU?”
A question Gilbert had pondered ever since the infernal voice had first spoken aloud to him. But now he sensed he had the answer.
“Because the devil delights in torment,” he said, the suit once again substituting “parasite” instead. “Because, had it afflicted one of your own before my coming, you would have dismissed such an affliction as mere madness. Now, when I am here to give a name to it, it can cast the blame for its presence upon the Word I have shared with you.”
The hollow broke out in another cascade of overlapping lights as the Shimmering conversed among themselves. Gilbert waited as patiently as he could, though his thoughts kept straying back to Lightning, lost and tormented in the dark.
The silence stretched on for a long while, colors shifting and changing as the Shimmering strove to reach a consensus. Gilbert whiled away the time by praying for patience, until at last the collective was a uniform russet.
“MANY AMONG US CONCUR WITH YOUR ASSESSMENT,” they said to him through Emerald. “KNOWLEDGE CANNOT BE EVIL IN ITSELF.”
They believe me. Some of the tension Gilbert had been unknowingly holding in his jaw began to slip away.
But the Shimmering was not done.
“YET THE FACT REMAINS,” they continued, “THAT THE PARASITE’S ARRIVAL WAS PRECIPITATED BY YOUR OWN. NOR HAS IT ESCAPED US THAT THE AFFLICTED IS ONE OF YOUR CONVERTS.”
An uneasy feeling twisted Gilbert’s gut, but he forced himself to hold his tongue, to await the Shimmering’s pronouncement.
“HOW SUCH A THING MAY COME TO PASS IS AS YET UNKNOWN TO US,” a thousand silent voices said as one. “BUT FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, IT CANNOT BE PERMITTED TO REOCCUR.”
The sharply contrasting orange and purple pattern of that last statement lingered upon the bodies of the speakers long enough that Gilbert sensed he was being given space to speak.
“Am I correct in understanding,” he asked, his throat gone dry, “that the church is no longer welcome here on Gloam?”
“YES,” the Shimmering said in a flash of angry red, which quickly softened to a cool blue. “WE DO NOT BLAME YOU, GILBERT, NOR YOUR COMPANION CALLE. YOU HAVE BOTH COMPORTED YOURSELF WELL IN ALL YOUR INTERACTIONS WITH US, AND YOUR CARE FOR THOSE YOU HAVE CONVERTED IS EVIDENT. BUT WE CANNOT RISK LIGHTNING’S FATE BEFALLING OTHERS.”
The Shimmering was still shifting its patterns, but Gilbert interrupted before Emerald could convey its collective meaning. “What of those who have already converted?”
“THEY WILL NOT BE PERSECUTED,” the Shimmering assured him, following a brief flash of maroon annoyance at his interruption. “BUT THEY MUST FORM A SHIMMERING OF THEIR OWN. SMALLER, AND AT A REMOVE FROM OURS. UNTIL WE CAN DETERMINE WITH CERTAINTY THAT THEY WILL NOT INFECT OTHERS WITH THE PARASITE.”
Gilbert’s heart was racing as if he were in a dead sprint, yet he forced his voice to remain steady. “Some might say segregation is its own form of persecution.”
“NO HARM SHALL BEFALL THEM,” the Shimmering answered, ugly maroon patches spreading across the hollow. “IT IS NOT SEGREGATION BUT QUARANTINE.”
“And you will not be moved?” Gilbert asked.
“OUR DECISION IS FINAL.”
He nodded, having expected as much. “Then I must ask two things of you.”
“ASK,” the Shimmering said after a mercifully brief conferral.
“First.” His eyes roamed the hollow, wondering which among those now gathered would soon be divided from their fellows for practicing the faith he had brought to their world. “That I be permitted to share in my congregation’s exile. If, as you say, I am responsible for bringing the parasite to them, then I cannot do further harm by remaining among those who have already joined the Church.”
“GRANTED,” came the almost instantaneous answer. “IT WAS OUR INTENT TO SUGGEST THE SAME TO YOU.”
Glad we’re on the same page, Gilbert mused. “Second. I wish to attempt to rid Lightning of the parasite.”
The Shimmering pulsed orange. “NOTHING WE HAVE TRIED HAS SUCCEEDED.”
“I was told,” he said, glancing at Emerald, “that alien problems require alien solutions. Lightning is already in my care, and if it and its fellow believers are to be exiled, then it falls on me to attempt to free it of its affliction.”
“WHY ASK US, THEN?”
Gilbert looked steadily at Emerald, the nearest of its dark eyes peering intently at him.
“Because Lightning was of your people before it was of my faith,” he said. “Because those two things need not be in conflict. And because I am a guest here.”
A long, long pause as cool blues and greens spread across the hollow in long curtains of light, like an aurora.
“YOUR INTENT IS UNDERSTOOD, AND APPRECIATED.” A silvery glow, softer and subtler than any Gilbert had yet seen amongst the Shimmering. “GOOD FORTUNE TO YOU.”
“And to you,” he murmured in return. “God bless and keep you all.”
He turned, tasting the bitterness of defeat upon his tongue, and began to walk from the hollow. Motion caught his gaze as a Shimmer broke from its fellows, gliding alongside him with an extended pseudopod. Emerald.
The last thing Gilbert wanted now was to talk, but he took the offered limb anyway.
“Gilbert,” Emerald said through his earpiece. “I shall come with you.”
“Thank you,” he said, relieved to have company on the long walk back to where Lightning had been imprisoned. “I suppose you want to speak with Lightning before…”
He trailed off, not yet ready to face the magnitude of the task before him. Was it even possible for a human to exorcise an alien?
“I do,” Emerald said, and something in the fervent pulsing of its mantle softened. “And to help you, if I can.”
“Thank you,” Gilbert said, feeling the warmth of the pseudopod pressed against his hand. “I… think I may need that help, soon.”
“It is dangerous, then?” Emerald asked as they exited the hollow, the light of the Shimmering fading behind them. “What you intend to do in order to save Lightning?”
“It may be,” Gilbert said, wishing once again that he had Calle here with him; that he was not forced to confront the demon alone.
Not alone, he reminded himself. Not when he had Emerald, and Lightning, and all the Shimmer converts still depending upon him. Not as long as he clung to his faith.
They traveled in uncommunicative silence for a time, Gilbert walking as Emerald glided along beside him, pseudopod in hand.
“Is…” Emerald started, then tried again. “Is the risk fatal? To you, or to Lightning?”
“Yes,” Gilbert admitted. “It’s possible. Exorcism—”
He paused, realizing that word had no direct translation, and searched for a suitable alternative. He found one in the periodic molting Shimmers afflicted with certain skin fungi were subject to.
“Shedding the parasite,” he corrected himself. “It is difficult, and dangerous. But if there is a chance to save Lightning, I must take it.”
“I understand,” Emerald said, though there was a contemplative pulsing along his mantle’s edges.
The dark entrance to the knothole where Lightning lay imprisoned appeared in the gloom before them, its line of salt crystals glimmering before it. Beyond, Gilbert could just make out the sickly yellow luminescence dancing along the wall in frantic, erratic shadows. Lightning was in the grip of its tormentor once more.
“Gilbert,” Emerald said suddenly, its pseudopod trembling in his hand. “I am afraid.”
“So am I,” Gilbert admitted, keeping his eyes ahead. “But we should not be. All shall be as God wills it.”
“Gilbert?”
“Yes?”
“I wish.” A quavering, uncertain brownish hue, then a riot of colors spread across the Shimmer’s form. “I wish to join your Church in its exile.”
Gilbert looked at his companion, swaying slightly as its translucent flesh glowed a hopeful pink. “You seek to convert?”
“No.” Several of Emerald’s eyes bent towards the knothole and the violent glow within. “Lightning and I have discussed your faith, many times. I am not satisfied with the answers it has provided to the questions I have asked.”
“Why, then?” Gilbert looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the hollow. But he could no longer glimpse the Shimmering’s light through the perpetual gloom. “Why endure our hardship?”
“Because the Shimmering will not risk many to save one.” Emerald’s mantle quivered in agitation. “Yet you will risk yourself for the same. I would learn why.”
The Lord uses all things to the good, Gilbert thought. The devil torments one soul, and in so doing drives another towards God’s arms.
The thought drove all fear from his mind. What would be, would be. Lightning would be saved by his exorcism; of that his faith was absolute. Whether or not Gilbert himself would survive the ordeal was of little consequence. Martyrdom had not been his intent when he came to Gloam, but he would not shy from it, if that was to be his fate.
“Then I will teach you,” Gilbert promised Emerald.
He turned and reached down with both hands to wipe away the thick line of salt that had been spread across the entrance to the cave where Lightning was imprisoned. Only once he was certain that he had cleared a wide enough space for multiple Shimmers to pass through unharmed did he straighten, rubbing his hands free of salt crystals before extending one to Emerald. “Are you ready?”
Emerald’s pseudopod trembled against Gilbert’s palm, its mantle taking on a fiery red hue. “Yes.”
“Then let’s go save your companion,” Gilbert said, looking upwards. Far, far above, hidden from sight but not from his heart, there were stars.
He lowered his gaze, watched as a constellation of soft blue pulses rippled across Emerald’s mantle. A smile spread across Gilbert’s own face, and with it a sense of peace.
All would be as He willed it, he told himself. As it had ever been, so should it ever be.
Together, hand in pseudopod, they went to seek the lost of his flock.
Marshall J. Moore is the award-winning author of the Rites of Resurrection trilogy of high fantasy novels (Shadow Alley Press 2022-2023), the pirate cozy fantasy novel Son of a Sailor (Atoll Press 2023) and its sequels Prisoners of a Pirate Queen and Enemy of the Empire (Atoll Press 2023 and 2024), and the children’s book Postcards from a Lake Monster (Improbable Press, 2024). He has also written over thirty short stories appearing in publications such as CatsCast, Mysterion, Flame Tree, and many others. His short story “Red Lanterns” won Second Place in the 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award Short Story Contest.
When not writing or talking about writing, you can find Marshall teaching Muay Thai at his gym or reading at his home in Atlanta with his wife Megan and their two cats, Delilah and Furiosa.
You can find Marshall online at his website www.marshalljmoore.com, on Instagram at @marshalljmooreauthor, and on Bluesky at @marshalljmoore.bsky.social.
He is represented by Brent Taylor at Triada US.
“As the Stars of Heaven” by Marshall J. Moore. Copyright © 2025 by Marshall J. Moore.
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Even after five years on Gloam, Gilbert found himself missing the stars.
Like many such longings, it came upon him at unexpected times, in the small and private moments. Glancing out the viewport while he waited for the fabricator to finish with his evening meal, or walking through the dim streets of the Shimmering and looking up, forgetting for a moment where he was.
Like any pastor worthy of the title, Gilbert had a verse prepared for such moments.
“The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light,” he murmured to himself, peering through the translucent dome of the hyperlift at the opaque canopy beyond. “The rising sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light.”
There was a jolt beneath his feet as the hyperlift detached from its moorings, sending an anticipatory thrill through him as his stomach rose towards his throat. No matter how many times he made the descent, that brief half-second of freefall never failed to conjure visions of catastrophic equipment failure: the hyperlift and its frail human passenger plummeting the hundreds of meters to smash against the great roots of the kilometer-high trees.
“For I know the plans I have for you…” he began, but before he could finish the verse, the lift’s inertial dampers kicked in. The branches and leaves through the viewports whipped past in a dizzying blur, but within the lift itself Gilbert felt as if he were standing still.
The ride from the upper canopy where the hab module was housed down to the distant forest floor was only ten minutes, but that was still long enough to remind him all over again how much he missed Calle. The trip had not felt nearly as long when his friend and fellow missionary had been in the lift beside him, Calle’s voice filling the lift’s confines, their mutual banter echoing off the sturdy walls.
Now the lift was silent, save for the engine’s quiet thrum beneath him, and in that emptiness, Gilbert felt his loneliness all the more acutely.
The hyperlift slowed as it approached the foot of the great tree, then finally ground to a halt as it reached the roots. The door hissed softly open, and Gilbert found himself face-to-face with the waiting Shimmer.
In the immediate wake of first contact, the more sensationalist Terran media outlets had labelled the Milky Way’s second known sapient species as space slugs, a moniker gleefully resurrected from the cheap xenophobic entertainments that flourished alongside humanity’s first toddling steps into the stars. Although the term was now considered rude, the Shimmer did resemble an enormous terrestrial nudibranch. Its gastropodal body was enfolded within a fleshy, flexible mantle, which exuded just enough bioluminescence for Gilbert to see the creature’s outline down here in the lightless depths.
The part of that mantle nearest Gilbert elongated, becoming a gently glowing pseudopod extended towards him, as if offering a handshake. Which it was, more or less.
Gilbert extended his hand, resting his palm and fingers carefully atop the pseudopod. The Shimmer’s flesh was smooth and cool to the touch.
It trembled beneath his hand in a vibration too low and too slow to be sound. At the same time the soft luminescence emanating from beneath the Shimmer’s mantle was outstripped by the appearance of brilliantly shifting patterns of light along its form, whorls and bright flashing spots and pulsing lines illuminating its graceful limbless form.
Perhaps it is no great loss to them, Gilbert thought, not for the first time, that the heavens are hidden from their sight. Not when the Almighty has crowned them with the stars.
Beautiful as it was, the Shimmer’s display was not for his aesthetic appreciation alone. The subdermal implants beneath his fingertips took in the pattern and frequency of the Shimmer’s vibrations, while the optical lenses he wore assessed the organic lightshow. Both inputs fed into his earpiece, translating the Shimmer’s bioluminescent communication into verbalized speech.
“Your assistance is requested and required,” the Shimmer said. “Situation unprecedented. Your prompt arrival is noted.”
That was as close to polite greeting or thanks as Gilbert was likely to get, but he took no offense. The exchange of pleasantries that was the cornerstone of so many human languages was as alien to the Shimmering as vocalized speech.
“I am happy to be of assistance.” As he spoke, the sensors in his bodysuit translated his words into a riotous kaleidoscope of flashing lights across the otherwise matte black garment, accompanied by a pulsing vibration that carried down his arm and through the subdermal implants on his fingertips. “Unprecedented how?”
The upper third of the Shimmer’s gastropod body swayed back and forth, its luminescence turning an agitated orange. “Come. We will explain along the way.”
With a swiftness that belied its two-meter bulk, the Shimmer turned and began to glide along the forest floor, extending one pseudopod behind it and beckoning for Gilbert to follow in a gesture that was disconcertingly human.
Gilbert picked his way along the darkened forest floor with less grace than the Shimmer. The ground beneath his feet was carpeted with soft moss, its glow a faint yellow in contrast to the Shimmer’s predominant blue, but he had learned through a trial of bruises and scraped knees to watch his feet for rocks and roots.
“Have we met before?” he asked, catching up to the Shimmer and resting his augmented hand on the back of its mantle. “You and I, I mean.”
A purplish streak ran along the Shimmer’s flanks.
“No,” it said through his earpiece. “I am not among those of the Shimmering who have conversed with you.”
“What should I call you, then?” Gilbert asked, noting the other’s shift to the singular person.
In answer, the Shimmer’s bioluminescence shifted to a deep, jewel-toned green, shot through with sharp-angled striations running along its flank. Each Shimmer adopted its own signature coloring and patterning; signifiers far more unique to each individual than spoken names.
“Emerald,” Gilbert decided to call the Shimmer before him, speaking slowly and clearly. His bodysuit’s onboard intelligence noted his tone, and flashed Emerald’s name-signature back at it. The Shimmer’s mantle rippled in a manner Gilbert knew indicated approval. “If we have not met before, then you are not a follower of the faith.”
“I am not.” This with a greenish pulsing. “But the one who requested you is.”
“Who?” Gilbert asked, the vague anxiety that had nagged at him ever since receiving the request for urgent assistance finally coalescing into a singular concern. “Is the individual hurt? What is the matter?”
“It is the one you name Lightning,” Emerald answered, several jagged crimson streaks running through its mantle in a manner that reminded Gilbert of electrical discharge—thus the afflicted Shimmer’s vocalized name. “It is currently unhurt, but…”
The Shimmer’s luminescence dimmed, turning noncommunicative, though it made no attempt at shaking loose of Gilbert’s touch. He suspected it was formulating its thoughts.
“It has isolated itself,” Emerald said at last, its greenish light now shot through with sickly patches of yellow. “Cut itself off from the Shimmering.”
Though they were not a true hive consciousness, individual Shimmers were able to pass their memories to one another through touch. A sufficient number of Shimmers sharing their experiences in such a manner led to the formation of a Shimmering, a large but voluntary conglomeration of individuals with a collective pool of knowledge far vaster than could be accumulated in any one lifetime.
“Of its own volition?” Gilbert’s brows lifted, an expression doomed to be lost in translation.
“That is what it says.” The translator earpiece’s ability to convey tone was limited, but five years among the Shimmer had taught him enough of their luminescent body language to read the doubt in Emerald’s pinkish streaking. “In its more lucid moments.”
“Lucid?” Gilbert frowned, his bodysuit mirroring the Shimmer’s last patterning. “You think Lightning is not acting rationally?”
“It is not.” This punctuated with a sharp, dark purple flash. “Its behavior has grown erratic. Violent enough to require physical removal from the Shimmering.”
Unease prickled the back of Gilbert’s neck. In his five years on Gloam, he had encountered only two instances of violence between Shimmers. Though they were as vulnerable to the temptations of wrath as his own species, the giant gastropods were not predisposed to expressing themselves physically.
“Is it sick?” he asked, grasping for an explanation.
“A physical evaluation has been performed. Slight malnourishment and poor rest patterns, but nothing outside ordinary parameters.”
“So it is not dying,” Gilbert said slowly. “Or at least, it is not in immediate danger of doing so.”
Why call for its pastor, then? Out of the thousand or so individual souls that made up this Shimmering, perhaps a hundred had converted under Gilbert’s and Calle’s guidance. Many of the preexisting mores of Shimmer society meshed well with Christian doctrine; in particular, they grasped the concept of a Trinitarian God far more readily than most human converts Gilbert had encountered.
Indeed, if Gilbert had a single complaint about their ministry—beyond the perpetual dark and the lack of stars, and more lately his loneliness—it was that their new parishioners were almost too cerebral in their approach to the holy. They grasped and accepted the tenets of their new religion readily enough, and partook in worship with what he presumed was an appropriate level of fervor—though it was difficult to tell with a congregation whose hymns were a silent lightshow.
But there was no visceral component to their faith. Marriage was unknown among the hermaphroditic Shimmers. Their reproductive pairings were agreed upon by consensus of the Shimmering in what Gilbert understood to be a sort of community-wide matchmaking, but such unions lasted just long enough for the production of offspring, a process neither difficult nor prolonged enough that they needed to importune God for a healthy birth. They confessed themselves to him with a comforting regularity, convicted by the apparently universal need to unburden their souls of their sins, but even those tended to be sins of heart and mind rather than action.
Thus, the regularity of Gilbert’s ministry was broken up only by funerals and deathbed visits. A fact which, he reflected as he trudged along beside the Shimmer, might be exerting an undue influence on his self-perception of his vocation.
Gilbert was so preoccupied with his musings that he did not realize how long the silence had stretched, until Emerald spoke with an abrupt flurry of colors.
“It was following the individual’s attempt at self-termination that your presence was requested.”
“Suicide?” Gilbert frowned, simultaneously alarmed and morbidly curious about what means of self-destruction would even be available to an enormous gastropod.
“Yes.” Emerald’s deep blue strobing was somehow sorrowful. “We know that your faith holds it a grave sin. Our own traditions feel similarly. To rob the Shimmering of one’s depth of experience by choice rather than accident or misfortune is considered grievously selfish.”
Humanity had once possessed similar attitudes, Gilbert knew, though in his lifetime those lost to such tragedy were viewed as the victim of that sin rather than its perpetrator.
“Is that why Lightning called for me?” he asked. “Because it fears to die with its sins unconfessed?”
“In part.” Emerald drew to a sudden halt, turning its upper body to peer closely at Gilbert. This close he could see the dozens of black eyes running along its mantle’s edge, each the size of a lemon. Many were fixed on him. “Absolution of sin is the reason Lightning desires to see you. After much discussion, the Shimmering has reached a consensus that this is to be permitted.”
Gilbert knew that, had he been on the forest floor during such a debate, he would have witnessed a spectacular display: hundreds of Shimmers gathered together in the central hollow that was their community’s analogue to a town square, all pulsing in a bright and riotous display of colors and patterns as each made its case before its fellows, pseudopods extended and entangled as each relayed the message to its neighbors through the Shimmering, sharing not only the message but the experience and outlook that had led it to reach such a conclusion.
Only once before had Gilbert been privileged to witness a communion on such scale. The beauty of the swirling and shifting colors, the almost musical quality of the constantly changing vibrations, and the sight of so many souls opening themselves to one another had brought him near to tears. If there had been any lingering doubt in his mind that these alien souls were as much God’s children as he himself was, the Shimmering had obliterated it.
Yet whatever wistful regret he felt at being denied the opportunity to view a second such gathering was itself obliterated by the gravity of Lightning’s situation. For an entire Shimmering to convene around a single individual’s condition…
“You’re not only worried for Lightning,” Gilbert realized. “This is something that impacts all of you. That’s why you allowed Lightning’s isolation.”
“Correct.” A shiver ran through Emerald’s body. “Were Lightning’s memories of its present circumstances permitted to be passed along, the entire Shimmering might suffer its fate.”
“So you quarantined it instead,” Gilbert said. “Why call for me, then?”
“The Shimmering decided that alien problems require alien solutions.” Emerald reconfigured its body so that its flank was facing Gilbert, permitting more of its multitudinous eyes to survey him even as its forward progress continued uninterrupted. “You are yourself cut off from your own Shimmering, after all.”
Gilbert grimaced. In the months since Calle’s departure from Gloam, he’d come to suspect that the Shimmering had started to view him as a sort of amputee. For a species to whom community was not merely a social construct but a biological one, the solitude in which he now found himself must have seemed an unbearable torment.
Nor could he find it in himself to disagree.
“Does it pain you?” Emerald asked, surprising him. “To be without a Shimmering.”
Gilbert began to answer, then reconsidered. As one of the few envoys of not only his faith but his species, his every interaction with the Shimmers had to take into account the gulf of difference in the way the two races experienced the world. Like many acts of translation, it was a bridge under constant construction, as Shimmer and human alike worked to lessen their misapprehensions of one another.
“Not in the way it does you, I think,” he said instead, resisting the urge to tap a finger to his head, knowing the gesture would mean nothing to a creature with a diffuse nervous system. “We are wholly ourselves, alone within our minds. Unable to share our experiences with one another save through speech alone.”
“Alone,” Emerald said after a momentary consideration, its mantle rippling in repetition of the same pattern Gilbert’s bodysuit had formed. “As you are. As Lightning is.”
It turned, fixing as many of its eyes upon Gilbert as it could. “I have a question to ask you.”
“And I one for you,” Gilbert said, unperturbed by its customary Shimmer brusqueness, “if I’m to help Lightning.”
Emerald’s mantle quivered in surprise, then smoothed as it flashed acknowledgment. “Ask, then.”
“Why did you come to me?” Gilbert asked, his confusion rippling over his bodysuit in waves of nauseous yellow. “I mean you specifically, Emerald. Why not one of the Christian Shimmers, when Lightning itself is one of them?”
This time Emerald was slow to answer. Striations and pulses of luminescence danced across its body as it thought, too low and quick to be speech.
Gilbert waited, mentally offering up a prayer of thanksgiving for the patience his time apart from Calle had granted him.
“The other Shimmers of your faith,” Emerald said, its bioluminescence coming in slow waves and ripples, which Gilbert suspected was to minimize the chance of misunderstanding, “are wary that they too may be… susceptible to Lightning’s affliction.”
“They—” Gilbert forced himself to speak with similar deliberate care, rather than let his emotions run rampant. “They think I might be the source?”
Another pause before Emerald answered, though not nearly as long.
“We have not ruled out the possibility,” it said, the plural pronoun indicating that it spoke for the entirety of the Shimmering, believer and nonbeliever alike. “Though given that you and Calle have been here several years, we deem the risk negligible. As for myself, I was—am—Lightning’s—”
Here it pulsed a slow, undulating series of pink and violet shapes. Gilbert’s frown deepened. “I don’t know that word.”
“No?” The flattening of Emerald’s upper mantle was analogous to a human’s furrowed brow. “I suppose not. It is not a thing we often discuss.”
“Is it taboo?”
“No. It is simply understood, without explanation. It means one who is most dear to us.”
“A spouse?” Gilbert guessed, but this guess was swiftly rejected by an iridescent yellow streak.
“Not a mate,” Emerald said, “though Lightning has told me that among your kind similar bonds are formed among those who reproduce together. It is more a… someone you spend your time with, who knows you better than any other. Whose soul is twin to your own.”
“A companion,” Gilbert said, and his bodysuit pulsed a similar undulation of purple and pink. Not exactly as Emerald had, but close. “As Calle was to me.”
“Yes!” The fringe of Emerald’s mantle rippled excitedly. “A companion, just so. I am to Lightning as you are to your companion Calle. So when Lightning became unwell—”
“You sought me out,” Gilbert finished, glad to have puzzled out the connection. What must the relationship be like, he wondered, between two Shimmers: one Christian, the other not? Certainly, humanity was rife with close friendships, even romances, between those of different faiths. But humans could not pass their emotive experiences between one another with the ease of a handshake.
They are not a hive mind, he reminded himself, as he’d often done during the first two years of his mission. Their memory-sharing may be a gift from God, but they remain and retain their own unique and individual souls.
“I came to seek you,” Emerald confirmed, shaking Gilbert free of his reverie. “Both to help my companion, and to offer you my condolences on the loss of your own.”
“Calle’s not lost,” Gilbert said, more sharply than he’d intended. Hopefully the bodysuit would not make such a distinction in tone. “He’ll be back, one day.”
Won’t he? The question had plagued Gilbert ever since his companion’s departure, all those months ago. Calle had promised to return, once things were settled with his mother. But her illness was a protracted one, and whether she would persevere over or succumb to it, God only knew.
“One day,” Gilbert said again, half to himself. A day far enough off that his church had elected to send another missionary in Calle’s stead, rather than wait for him to be able to return. Someone new; someone Gilbert would need to teach how to communicate with the Shimmers, how to cope with the endless night of a world with neither stars nor sky.
“He’ll return to us,” he said, trying to put all the conviction he did not feel into his voice as he looked at Emerald. “And so will Lightning. Take me to your companion, Emerald, and we will see what can be done to return it to you.”
Emerald glowed an approving orange, then turned and began gliding along the forest floor once more. Gilbert followed after, praying silently for the strength to meet whatever lay ahead.
“Here.” Emerald glided to a halt. Ahead loomed what Gilbert first took to be a cave, though a glance at their deep forest surroundings showed that it was in actuality a knothole in one of the titanic tree roots. From within its depths, he could just make out the faint glow of another Shimmer, this one a sickly yellow. Lightning.
Emerald inched forward cautiously, then halted again, two of its pseudopods probing the air as if there were an invisible barrier before it. “You must go on alone from here. I can go no further.”
Gilbert looked down. Emerald’s waving pseudopods gave out just enough light to see the faint glimmer of crystals carpeting the ground before them, laid out in a line thicker than he was tall and running from one end of the knothole to the other.
Wary of interacting with an unknown substance that his Shimmer companion seemed unwilling to cross over, Gilbert held out his hand, mirroring Emerald’s own extended pseudopods. The subdermal implants beneath his fingertips swiftly scanned the crystals, which his earpiece identified as being primarily composed of sodium chloride.
Gilbert looked at Emerald. “Salt?”
A deep red pulse of alarm ran through the Shimmer’s mantle. “A precaution of last resort, and a sign of our desperation.”
Of course, Gilbert thought, sending a swift and silent prayer beseeching forgiveness for his ignorance. Like Terran gastropods, the Shimmers’ skin was a permeable membrane, and exposure to salt would have as deadly an effect upon them as it did their smaller, non-sentient counterparts.
“How did you get this here?” he asked, glancing at Emerald.
“With great care,” the Shimmer answered in a series of purple striations, which Gilbert suspected were indicative of something akin to sarcasm. “Also tools.”
“And this is the means by which Lightning attempted its suicide?” he asked, glancing down.
“It is.” Emerald assumed a somber shade of deep blue. “It has been restrained, for now.”
“Is there anything else I should know before I converse with the afflicted?” Gilbert asked.
Beneath his fingertips, Emerald’s mantle thrummed softly, a rainbow of colors drifting across its surface.
“The Shimmering desires but does not expect that you save Lightning’s life,” the earpiece translated. “Or failing that, its soul. But above all else, it cannot be permitted to rejoin the Shimmering.”
“I understand,” Gilbert said. Steeling himself, he stepped through and over the line of salt, murmuring the twenty-third Psalm as he ventured into the dark.
He could think of no verse more appropriate for the moment.
Yellow light danced up the wall in violently uneven shadows, creating a strobe effect so off-putting that Gilbert resorted to ordering his bodysuit to emit a steady white glow of a similar frequency.
The yellow glow emanating from the Shimmer before him steadied; upon sighting the human’s approach, Lightning had ceased its thrashing. No more violent shadows played along the walls, yet this was small comfort. A forest of saffron pseudopods extended towards Gilbert, some of them reaching farther than he’d ever seen a Shimmer able to extend itself.
The nearest of these halted within a foot of his face. It swayed there, hovering. Past it, Gilbert noted that Lightning’s gastropod body had been glued to the wooden floor by long strands of mucous secretions, which in more typical circumstances the omnivorous Shimmering used to trap prey.
Nor was that the only indicator that something was seriously, dreadfully wrong with Lightning. The Shimmer’s mantle was dry and cracked, oozing pus in places. In others its bioluminescence was disrupted by ugly brownish bruising, and several of its eyes were swollen shut. Even had he not spent half a decade amongst its kind, Gilbert would have recognized that this specimen was badly injured.
Already at the limit of Lightning’s reach, the pseudopod strained towards him, insistent.
“Lord, guide me and protect me,” Gilbert muttered, genuflecting. “Guide Your servant so that I may help one of Your Faithful. Lord, I commit myself into Your hands.”
Then he reached out his own hand and pressed it to the outstretched pseudopod.
A tremor ran from his fingertips up his arm, so violent that it took an effort of will not to withdraw his hand. A riot of lurid colors streamed across Lightning’s mantle, Gilbert’s earpiece translating the sudden display into a cacophony of disjointed speech.
“Hateful crawling sliding ugly fleshthings little worthless souls undeserving of His gaze His attention His love hungry always hungry stumbling in the dark cold dark cold dark dark dark—”
Gilbert gritted his teeth and pressed his hand against Lightning’s pseudopod, interrupting the nonstop nonsense flow.
“Lightning,” he said, slow and clear, his bodysuit assuming the Shimmer’s signature red streaks. “Child of God the Almighty. Can you understand me?”
The Shimmer’s lights abruptly stilled, then dimmed. When they returned it was in a weaker, more sedate pattern, rendered in Gilbert’s ear as plain speech.
“I am here, Gilbert.” Lightning’s namesake marks pulsed weakly. “I am not well.”
“I can see that,” Gilbert said carefully, his bodysuit translating his words into gentle blue whorls. “What is it that plagues you?”
“I… we are not alone.” An agitated shudder wracked Lightning’s body, and for a moment Gilbert feared that the Shimmer was about to break into another unhinged diatribe. “There is… I am not myself. There is another.”
“Another?” Gilbert asked, unable to keep himself from glancing around the confines of the hole. But of course, they were alone.
“Not like that.” There was an urgent quality to Lightning’s shifting coloration, which translated as quick, clipped words. “In me. Like… like a Shimmering within myself. Only not.”
Gilbert’s frown deepened. Despite Emerald’s enigmatic warnings, this sounded like a purely Shimmer affliction. “You are experiencing another’s memories?”
“No!” The pseudopod writhed against his touch. “Yes. I do not know. Only that there is little time before I lose myself.”
To what, Gilbert did not ask, for suddenly the pseudopod withdrew. Lightning’s body trembled and convulsed, ugly blotches of livid purple blossoming across its mantle like cancerous flowers.
A voice spoke. Not from Gilbert’s earpiece, but seemingly from the walls of the hole itself, high and scratchy and in perfectly comprehensible Terran.
“Have you come to console this miserable slug, preacher?”
Gilbert went still, danger prickling at the back of his neck as his eyes roamed the darkness, seeking the source of the voice.
“What is the matter?” the voice asked, darkly amused as Lightning’s stripes pulsed in time with its speech. “Have you not wished all these long months for the sound of another human voice? Is this not a welcome relief after so long with nothing but the lightshows of these unshelled snails to keep you company?”
“It is not,” Gilbert said, finding his voice and staring hard at Lightning. “And you are no human.”
“No,” the voice agreed. “I am not.”
Lightning thrashed suddenly, violently, as it had before Gilbert’s arrival. He wondered with growing alarm whether this was Lightning itself attempting to reassert control against the voice, or if the voice’s owner was amusing itself by inflicting pain upon the poor Shimmer.
“Stop!” he shouted, alarm overcoming his sense of self-preservation as he waded in, heedless of the many pseudopods suddenly affixing themselves to his bodysuit. A dazzling lightshow threatened to overwhelm his senses as he tried to hold Lightning still, his earpiece filling with the same nonsense stream of hateful chatter as before:
“unclean unworthy without voice or soul no stars no sky no sun no God”
“Lightning,” Gilbert said, his bodysuit conveying the Shimmer’s name to it. Silently Gilbert prayed that his words would penetrate the deluge of self-recrimination. “Lightning, there is a God. He made you, He loves you, He—”
The clustered mass of pseudopods shoved him away. Caught off-guard, Gilbert stumbled back, landed hard against the wooden wall.
“He does not love them!” the voice shrieked, causing Lightning’s pseudopods to tremble like grass beneath a wind. “Or have you forgotten the very scripture you cite to these crawling creatures? ‘So God created humankind in His own image; in the image of God He created them, male and female he created them!’”
High, wild laughter echoed about the cave as Lightning writhed. “Male and female! Meaningless words to these hermaphrodites. And if you are the image of God, preacher, what then are these wretched beings, consigned to crawl upon their bellies and devour dust?”
A lie. The thought came to Gilbert, as clear and simple as if someone else had put it there. Perhaps someone had. No one could watch the Shimmers gracefully gliding over the forest floor and call it crawling.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, Gilbert thought, and pulled himself to his feet.
“They are children of God,” he said, drawing near to Lightning once more. “Thinking beings, made in imitation of a thinking Creator. Gifted by Him with free will—”
“Which they misuse and abuse just as you and all your kind have done since your misbegotten beginnings,” the voice sneered. “How cruel of Him, then, to send His only begotten Son to die for you, and not for these.”
“He came to die for all,” Gilbert countered, his hand falling to the cross he’d worn around his neck for so long he’d nearly forgotten it was there. His hands wrapped around it, taking comfort in the smooth wood that had been carved from a tree upon another world. “Man, Shimmer, and whatever other beings may reside in His unending universe. Now begone from this innocent soul, unclean one, you foul demon of hell.”
Lightning did not recoil, as he’d more than half hoped it might. Instead, the Shimmer’s body quivered and convulsed, and the laughter returned.
“So you guess rightly what I am,” the voice cackled. “Took you long enough.”
“In the name of God—” Gilbert started, advancing on it with the cross upheld.
A pseudopod whipped towards him, slapped him across the face. He jerked away, stunned, as the voice spoke again, amusement transmuted to savage fury.
“You think to command me as if you were the Son of God?” it snarled, though Lightning’s body pressed against the floor, like a child striving to avoid the notice of a wrathful parent. “You who are alone upon an alien world, without friend or comforter save the swine you walk amongst? You, who brought me here yourself?”
“What?” Gilbert blinked, his face stinging where he’d been struck, his hand trembling. “How—”
“How came I to this distant corner of the stars?” The voice chuckled; a terrible sound. Lightning seemed to sink further into itself. “To torment and possess the souls of this world? The question betrays your ignorance. The distance between your home and this one is as a handspan to me.”
“That is not the question…” Gilbert shook his head, realizing that further debate served only the demon. He pressed the cross to his brow, took solace in the familiar smoothness of the woodgrain. “Lord, forgive me my iniquities. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I abjure thee, evil—”
Pseudopods shot forward, sickly yellow, pressing themselves like mouthless faces against Gilbert’s hands, his lips, his eyes. They thrummed with sickly light, and through his earpiece the demon spoke in Lightning’s voice.
“You cannot abjure me when you invited me to this place.” The voice became a chorus, overlapping and repeating upon itself. “Not when you carried me here with you like a plague rat, to loose me upon distant shores.”
Alien problems require alien solutions. Emerald’s words came rushing back to the priest, driving an icy spike of doubt through his heart. Was it true? In bringing the Gospel to the Shimmering, had he exposed them to spiritual corruption as well as salvation? Was Gloam an Edenic world, unfallen until humanity had brought sin to it alongside salvation?
“Leave this one to me,” the demon’s many voices now crooned, turning cajoling. “Let me have but one and I shall not trouble your flock again within your lifetime. Refuse me and I will hound you and yours with a thousand torments, until your name becomes a curse to the denizens of this world.”
“My flock,” Gilbert repeated, and drew strength from the words. After all, did not the Lord command him leave the ninety-nine in search of the one lost? “You will not trouble them, or this one, any longer. Get thee—”
More pseudopods extended from Lightning’s mantle, pressing themselves against Gilbert with surprising force, pushing him from the afflicted Shimmer. He stumbled back as a hissing emanated from the shadows all around as the pseudopods withdrew into Lightning’s mantle.
The possessed Shimmer’s body began to tremble. It reared up as high as its bonds allowed. Then, before Gilbert could so much as let out a cry, it slammed itself against the floor, hard enough to shake the walls.
And again, and again.
“Leave!” the voice howled. “Leave now, you lost and lonely messenger of a careless God, if you care for this slug’s life!”
Every instinct within Gilbert screamed at him to run; to turn and flee from this den of horrors. Yet a courage not wholly his own stayed him.
“I will fear no evil,” he murmured to himself, and thrust out his free hand. His fingers found the fleshy stalk of a pseudopod, catching it with a deftness that any snake handler might have envied. It tried to shy away, but he tightened his grip and held it fast.
“Have faith, Lightning,” he said, his fingertips vibrating and his body suit flashing as his words became the silent Shimmer speech. “I will return for you.”
Then he relinquished his grip and turned away, walking in slow, measured strides from the place of horrors, so that the devil would not see him run.
Hours later he stood in the center of a great hollow, surrounded by the radiance of a Shimmering.
Nearly a thousand Shimmers had gathered, their great fluid bodies pulsing in a dizzying swirl of lights. Every hue imaginable flowed and shifted across their mantles, blossoming in flowers of indigo, lancing arcs of crimson, and dozens of other patterns even more intricate. They swayed as they communed, pseudopods gently pressed together. The soft hum of their vibrations lay just below the level of sound, lending the gathering an air of quiet solemnity.
Had circumstances been other than what they were, Gilbert might have thanked God for permitting him to not only witness a Shimmering, but participate in one. But with Lightning’s life at stake, the only prayers he could utter were those beseeching mercy and intercession.
Silent though the Shimmering was, a dimming of its collective glow and a quieting of the kaleidoscopic lightshow nevertheless conveyed the same effect as a hush falling over the crowd.
Detaching itself from its nearest neighbors, one of the Shimmers glided across to where Gilbert stood waiting. The flash of a familiar deep green pattern identified it as Emerald, a pseudopod extended towards him.
Gilbert pressed his hand against the outstretched limb, and the Shimmer’s words filled his ears and eyes.
“We are ready for you,” Emerald said, though a hesitant purple tinged its mantle’s edges. “I have relayed your interactions with Lightning to the Shimmering. Your report aligns with what is already known of its behavior. Now it falls to you to make your case.”
“Thank you,” Gilbert said. “May I ask a question first?”
“You may,” Emerald replied, though the lingering purple indicated that delay would be of no help to Gilbert. Or perhaps it was merely concern for Lightning that prompted such an anxious response.
“You are not of the Faith,” Gilbert said, his gaze drifting up to rove about the hundreds of bodies lining the hollow. “Nor are more than one in ten of those gathered here.”
“No. What is your question?”
“There are many humans who do not believe in demons or possession,” Gilbert said, glad he had explained the concept to Emerald in the hours leading up to the Shimmering. “What I have to say will sound doubly strange to your people. Will they believe me?”
“There is only one way to know,” Emerald said, and though it maintained the connection between its pseudopod and Gilbert’s hand, it turned and began to glide towards its neighbors, indicating he should follow.
Emerald stretched out a second pseudopod, and a third, and a fourth, until it was touching half a dozen of its fellows, each of those touching just as many, and so on, and so forth. This was the Shimmering in its truest form, a vast and interconnected web of communication by touch and sight and the sharing of memory.
Here, in the display of unity and light, Gilbert was reminded that no matter how alien their appearance, these creatures too were God’s children.
My flock, he thought again, believer and unbeliever alike. Their welfare is my burden and my joy.
Once that burden had been a shared one, as had the joy. Yet for the first time in so many months, Gilbert no longer felt the keenness of his isolation. Not here, surrounded by a community of minds at once like and unlike his own. Not when the joy so greatly outweighed the burden.
The Shimmering spoke to him then. Not as they had before, in a thousand minds conferring amongst each other, but as a single voice; a single pattern of brilliant blue light playing across a thousand bodies.
“SPEAK,” the Shimmering said.
So Gilbert spoke.
“Friends,” he began, knowing the Shimmer disdain for pleasantries but eager to stress his relationship to them. “You all know of the affliction that has struck the one I call Lightning.”
His bodysuit assumed that unfortunate Shimmer’s signature red streaks, and a ripple of sympathetic pink swelled through the Shimmering.
“This affliction is known to me,” he continued. “Lightning is possessed by a demon.”
The word of course had no equivalent in Shimmer speech, and there was a momentary delay as the bodysuit’s intelligence rifled through its onboard dictionary. The word it settled on was the sickly green spiral that signified certain dermal parasites.
“A spiritual parasite,” Gilbert continued, deciding it was a fitting analogy. “One capable of speech and thought.”
He paused as this sent a ripple of orange shock through the Shimmering, eventually coalescing into a trembling blue line of inquiry: “IT IS A LIVING CREATURE?”
“No,” Gilbert said, then paused. “Not in the sense that you or I are living. It is a creature of pure spirit, without physical form. A parasite of the soul rather than the body.”
A wave of riotous colors spread through the hollow, forcing him to wait until the Shimmering reached a consensus on this claim. When at last they did, it was in a slow, thoughtful violet.
“THIS ALIGNS WITH THE BEHAVIOR OF THE AFFLICTED. YET THE ONE YOU CALL EMERALD REPORTS THAT THERE IS DOUBT EVEN AMONGST YOUR KIND AS TO SUCH BEINGS’ EXISTENCE.”
“It is hard to believe in that which we cannot see,” Gilbert said, his gaze drifting upwards towards the black canopy of the megaflora high above. Somewhere beyond, there were stars. “Yet that is the foundation upon which all faith rests.”
He looked to Emerald, its pseudopod pressed delicately to his hand, through which his words were transmitted throughout the Shimmering. “The parasite claims that I brought it with me to your world. That in telling your people the Good News I exposed them to its possession.”
Yellow consternation bathed the hollow in an unhealthy glow. “DO YOU BELIEVE THAT TO BE TRUE?”
The Devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose, Gilbert reminded himself.
“I do not.” He paused, letting the words sink in. “The parasite is a liar. As a being of spirit, it exists outside of time and distance. Had it desired to torment one of your own, it could have done so before my people and yours ever encountered one another.”
“YET INSTEAD IT WAITED UNTIL YOU HAD SPREAD YOUR FAITH AMONG US. WHY, IF NOT BECAUSE IT CAME HERE ALONG WITH YOU?”
A question Gilbert had pondered ever since the infernal voice had first spoken aloud to him. But now he sensed he had the answer.
“Because the devil delights in torment,” he said, the suit once again substituting “parasite” instead. “Because, had it afflicted one of your own before my coming, you would have dismissed such an affliction as mere madness. Now, when I am here to give a name to it, it can cast the blame for its presence upon the Word I have shared with you.”
The hollow broke out in another cascade of overlapping lights as the Shimmering conversed among themselves. Gilbert waited as patiently as he could, though his thoughts kept straying back to Lightning, lost and tormented in the dark.
The silence stretched on for a long while, colors shifting and changing as the Shimmering strove to reach a consensus. Gilbert whiled away the time by praying for patience, until at last the collective was a uniform russet.
“MANY AMONG US CONCUR WITH YOUR ASSESSMENT,” they said to him through Emerald. “KNOWLEDGE CANNOT BE EVIL IN ITSELF.”
They believe me. Some of the tension Gilbert had been unknowingly holding in his jaw began to slip away.
But the Shimmering was not done.
“YET THE FACT REMAINS,” they continued, “THAT THE PARASITE’S ARRIVAL WAS PRECIPITATED BY YOUR OWN. NOR HAS IT ESCAPED US THAT THE AFFLICTED IS ONE OF YOUR CONVERTS.”
An uneasy feeling twisted Gilbert’s gut, but he forced himself to hold his tongue, to await the Shimmering’s pronouncement.
“HOW SUCH A THING MAY COME TO PASS IS AS YET UNKNOWN TO US,” a thousand silent voices said as one. “BUT FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, IT CANNOT BE PERMITTED TO REOCCUR.”
The sharply contrasting orange and purple pattern of that last statement lingered upon the bodies of the speakers long enough that Gilbert sensed he was being given space to speak.
“Am I correct in understanding,” he asked, his throat gone dry, “that the church is no longer welcome here on Gloam?”
“YES,” the Shimmering said in a flash of angry red, which quickly softened to a cool blue. “WE DO NOT BLAME YOU, GILBERT, NOR YOUR COMPANION CALLE. YOU HAVE BOTH COMPORTED YOURSELF WELL IN ALL YOUR INTERACTIONS WITH US, AND YOUR CARE FOR THOSE YOU HAVE CONVERTED IS EVIDENT. BUT WE CANNOT RISK LIGHTNING’S FATE BEFALLING OTHERS.”
The Shimmering was still shifting its patterns, but Gilbert interrupted before Emerald could convey its collective meaning. “What of those who have already converted?”
“THEY WILL NOT BE PERSECUTED,” the Shimmering assured him, following a brief flash of maroon annoyance at his interruption. “BUT THEY MUST FORM A SHIMMERING OF THEIR OWN. SMALLER, AND AT A REMOVE FROM OURS. UNTIL WE CAN DETERMINE WITH CERTAINTY THAT THEY WILL NOT INFECT OTHERS WITH THE PARASITE.”
Gilbert’s heart was racing as if he were in a dead sprint, yet he forced his voice to remain steady. “Some might say segregation is its own form of persecution.”
“NO HARM SHALL BEFALL THEM,” the Shimmering answered, ugly maroon patches spreading across the hollow. “IT IS NOT SEGREGATION BUT QUARANTINE.”
“And you will not be moved?” Gilbert asked.
“OUR DECISION IS FINAL.”
He nodded, having expected as much. “Then I must ask two things of you.”
“ASK,” the Shimmering said after a mercifully brief conferral.
“First.” His eyes roamed the hollow, wondering which among those now gathered would soon be divided from their fellows for practicing the faith he had brought to their world. “That I be permitted to share in my congregation’s exile. If, as you say, I am responsible for bringing the parasite to them, then I cannot do further harm by remaining among those who have already joined the Church.”
“GRANTED,” came the almost instantaneous answer. “IT WAS OUR INTENT TO SUGGEST THE SAME TO YOU.”
Glad we’re on the same page, Gilbert mused. “Second. I wish to attempt to rid Lightning of the parasite.”
The Shimmering pulsed orange. “NOTHING WE HAVE TRIED HAS SUCCEEDED.”
“I was told,” he said, glancing at Emerald, “that alien problems require alien solutions. Lightning is already in my care, and if it and its fellow believers are to be exiled, then it falls on me to attempt to free it of its affliction.”
“WHY ASK US, THEN?”
Gilbert looked steadily at Emerald, the nearest of its dark eyes peering intently at him.
“Because Lightning was of your people before it was of my faith,” he said. “Because those two things need not be in conflict. And because I am a guest here.”
A long, long pause as cool blues and greens spread across the hollow in long curtains of light, like an aurora.
“YOUR INTENT IS UNDERSTOOD, AND APPRECIATED.” A silvery glow, softer and subtler than any Gilbert had yet seen amongst the Shimmering. “GOOD FORTUNE TO YOU.”
“And to you,” he murmured in return. “God bless and keep you all.”
He turned, tasting the bitterness of defeat upon his tongue, and began to walk from the hollow. Motion caught his gaze as a Shimmer broke from its fellows, gliding alongside him with an extended pseudopod. Emerald.
The last thing Gilbert wanted now was to talk, but he took the offered limb anyway.
“Gilbert,” Emerald said through his earpiece. “I shall come with you.”
“Thank you,” he said, relieved to have company on the long walk back to where Lightning had been imprisoned. “I suppose you want to speak with Lightning before…”
He trailed off, not yet ready to face the magnitude of the task before him. Was it even possible for a human to exorcise an alien?
“I do,” Emerald said, and something in the fervent pulsing of its mantle softened. “And to help you, if I can.”
“Thank you,” Gilbert said, feeling the warmth of the pseudopod pressed against his hand. “I… think I may need that help, soon.”
“It is dangerous, then?” Emerald asked as they exited the hollow, the light of the Shimmering fading behind them. “What you intend to do in order to save Lightning?”
“It may be,” Gilbert said, wishing once again that he had Calle here with him; that he was not forced to confront the demon alone.
Not alone, he reminded himself. Not when he had Emerald, and Lightning, and all the Shimmer converts still depending upon him. Not as long as he clung to his faith.
They traveled in uncommunicative silence for a time, Gilbert walking as Emerald glided along beside him, pseudopod in hand.
“Is…” Emerald started, then tried again. “Is the risk fatal? To you, or to Lightning?”
“Yes,” Gilbert admitted. “It’s possible. Exorcism—”
He paused, realizing that word had no direct translation, and searched for a suitable alternative. He found one in the periodic molting Shimmers afflicted with certain skin fungi were subject to.
“Shedding the parasite,” he corrected himself. “It is difficult, and dangerous. But if there is a chance to save Lightning, I must take it.”
“I understand,” Emerald said, though there was a contemplative pulsing along his mantle’s edges.
The dark entrance to the knothole where Lightning lay imprisoned appeared in the gloom before them, its line of salt crystals glimmering before it. Beyond, Gilbert could just make out the sickly yellow luminescence dancing along the wall in frantic, erratic shadows. Lightning was in the grip of its tormentor once more.
“Gilbert,” Emerald said suddenly, its pseudopod trembling in his hand. “I am afraid.”
“So am I,” Gilbert admitted, keeping his eyes ahead. “But we should not be. All shall be as God wills it.”
“Gilbert?”
“Yes?”
“I wish.” A quavering, uncertain brownish hue, then a riot of colors spread across the Shimmer’s form. “I wish to join your Church in its exile.”
Gilbert looked at his companion, swaying slightly as its translucent flesh glowed a hopeful pink. “You seek to convert?”
“No.” Several of Emerald’s eyes bent towards the knothole and the violent glow within. “Lightning and I have discussed your faith, many times. I am not satisfied with the answers it has provided to the questions I have asked.”
“Why, then?” Gilbert looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the hollow. But he could no longer glimpse the Shimmering’s light through the perpetual gloom. “Why endure our hardship?”
“Because the Shimmering will not risk many to save one.” Emerald’s mantle quivered in agitation. “Yet you will risk yourself for the same. I would learn why.”
The Lord uses all things to the good, Gilbert thought. The devil torments one soul, and in so doing drives another towards God’s arms.
The thought drove all fear from his mind. What would be, would be. Lightning would be saved by his exorcism; of that his faith was absolute. Whether or not Gilbert himself would survive the ordeal was of little consequence. Martyrdom had not been his intent when he came to Gloam, but he would not shy from it, if that was to be his fate.
“Then I will teach you,” Gilbert promised Emerald.
He turned and reached down with both hands to wipe away the thick line of salt that had been spread across the entrance to the cave where Lightning was imprisoned. Only once he was certain that he had cleared a wide enough space for multiple Shimmers to pass through unharmed did he straighten, rubbing his hands free of salt crystals before extending one to Emerald. “Are you ready?”
Emerald’s pseudopod trembled against Gilbert’s palm, its mantle taking on a fiery red hue. “Yes.”
“Then let’s go save your companion,” Gilbert said, looking upwards. Far, far above, hidden from sight but not from his heart, there were stars.
He lowered his gaze, watched as a constellation of soft blue pulses rippled across Emerald’s mantle. A smile spread across Gilbert’s own face, and with it a sense of peace.
All would be as He willed it, he told himself. As it had ever been, so should it ever be.
Together, hand in pseudopod, they went to seek the lost of his flock.
Marshall J. Moore is the award-winning author of the Rites of Resurrection trilogy of high fantasy novels (Shadow Alley Press 2022-2023), the pirate cozy fantasy novel Son of a Sailor (Atoll Press 2023) and its sequels Prisoners of a Pirate Queen and Enemy of the Empire (Atoll Press 2023 and 2024), and the children’s book Postcards from a Lake Monster (Improbable Press, 2024). He has also written over thirty short stories appearing in publications such as CatsCast, Mysterion, Flame Tree, and many others. His short story “Red Lanterns” won Second Place in the 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award Short Story Contest.
When not writing or talking about writing, you can find Marshall teaching Muay Thai at his gym or reading at his home in Atlanta with his wife Megan and their two cats, Delilah and Furiosa.
You can find Marshall online at his website www.marshalljmoore.com, on Instagram at @marshalljmooreauthor, and on Bluesky at @marshalljmoore.bsky.social.
He is represented by Brent Taylor at Triada US.
“As the Stars of Heaven” by Marshall J. Moore. Copyright © 2025 by Marshall J. Moore.
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