Free Planetfall by Emma Newman

and me. “And anyway, saying it’s a sign from God is an interpretation, not a fact.”
    â€œIt’s too close to be anything but!” Carmen’s cheeks are flushed and the baby is stirring in her cot, disturbed by the tone of her voice. “He could have arrived just after the ceremony, or six months afterward, but no, he comes in time to receive the seed himself. We have to acknowledge that God must have planned it that way.”
    The resurgence of this kind of religious talk makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle. The times it’s blossomed in the colony have brought us closer to self-destruction than anything Mack has kept hidden.
    â€œI don’t want there to be any religious talk,” I remember Suh saying at the first meeting with Mack.
    He stared at her for a moment, half laughed and then fell silent when he realized she was serious. “You have half the planet saying you’re the next prophet, you’ve said yourself thatyou want to build a spaceship to find God, and you don’t want anyone to talk about religion?”
    â€œYou said the whole world is talking about me when we spoke on the phone,” she replied. “What’s the other half calling me?”
    â€œMad,” I said as he squirmed. “Messiah complex, mostly. Some of the kinder ones are theorizing that you can’t handle being a late-blooming genius, so you’re claiming a divine element as a defense mechanism.”
    Suh shook her head, closed her eyes for a moment and then looked at Mack. “What do you think I am?”
    â€œAmbitious,” he replied without hesitation. “Brilliant. Fascinating.”
    â€œDo you believe in God?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œRen does.”
    He looked at me for the first time. “And you are?”
    â€œMy best friend,” Suh answered for me. “And before the coma, about twenty times more intelligent than me.”
    He didn’t stop looking at me. “And what do you think?”
    â€œI think that something has sent a message through Suh.”
    â€œGod?”
    â€œI want to go with Suh,” I replied, dodging the question. I hadn’t made up my mind yet. Some days I thought she was mad; some days I found myself weeping at the local church, thanking God for choosing my best friend. “What I think is going on isn’t important.”
    He nodded at that. “True. It’s what investors think that counts. Unless you happen to be a billionaire?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “But I’m an engineer, so I can help.”
    Mack smirked. “That’s like looking at the national debt of the United States and saying that you’ve already had a friend promise to pay back a dime.”
    â€œRen is very gifted and I trust her. That’s the thing that worries me about all this.” Suh waved a hand at the tentative drawings she’d made of the craft that went on to become Atlas. “If this is going to happen, we need to bring in people I’ve never met, but who will have heard of me. I’ve had death threats. How can I trust them?”
    Mack steepled his fingers in front of his chin. “You want to travel millions of miles into outer space, and it’s that that worries you the most?” He smiled with that gleam in his eye. “I’ll worry about the people; you worry about whether you know where we’re going.”
    â€œWhere
we’re
going? You want to come too?”
    â€œIf you’ll have me. I can put in twenty million dollars by the end of today, another ten when I’ve liquidated some assets. I wouldn’t have offered to fund-raise for you if I didn’t believe in the project.”
    â€œI thought you offered to fund-raise so you could earn your fee,” I said, not liking the way he was obviously trying to charm Suh.
    â€œI’ll waive my fee, on one condition.” He was focused fully on Suh again. I wasn’t