YASID: Souls as currency in the war between Heaven and Hell
Rich Horton
got answered:
I am looking for the title and author of an obscure story.
synopsis:
A squad of space marines (or something similar) are sent to
investigate a large medical research station, with which all
communication has been lost.
When they get there, and go inside, the air is extremely hot and wet,
and the walls, floor and ceiling of the entire place are coated with
some strange goo.
they find no people..
When they finally track down the remaining survivor, it turns out that
he has gone quite mad.
He is utterly convinced of a few things, which explain why he has
killed everyone else in the station.
One. Heaven, Hell, and souls are real.
Two: if you die with a "good" soul, you go to Heaven, otherwise, to
Hell.
Three: Souls are the currency / armaments of the war between Heaven
and Hell, and whichever side has more souls come Armageddon is going
to win
Four: infants who die without having "done" anything are by definition
innocent, and go to Heaven if they die.
Five: life begins at conception, and so miscarriages, aborted fetuses,
etc are all souls that go to Heaven.
Integrating all this, the guy has figured out a way to ensure that
Heaven wins.
He has cloned billions of embryos, spraying them, suspended in a
growth medium, onto every available surface of the center, while
making the center hot and warm enough to support cell division for at
least a few cycles. They don't need to survive long.
Result: He has committed, by his own lights, untold murders, but he is
just one soul, and can only go to Hell once. All the innocents he has
created go to Heaven, a net gain tipping the scales massively in
Heavens favor.
Anyone?
David Duffy
> Here's an older one from the Asimov's forum, that I don't think ever
> got answered:
> I am looking for the title and author of an obscure story.
> Integrating all this, the guy has figured out a way to ensure that
> Heaven wins.
> He has cloned billions of embryos, spraying them, suspended in a
> growth medium, onto every available surface of the center, while
> making the center hot and warm enough to support cell division for at
> least a few cycles. They don't need to survive long.
> Result: He has committed, by his own lights, untold murders, but he is
> just one soul, and can only go to Hell once. All the innocents he has
> created go to Heaven, a net gain tipping the scales massively in
> Heavens favor.
It sounds like one by Damien Broderick, appearing either/or as a short story
and as an episode in a novel.
David Duffy.
Rich Horton
I asked Damien directly, and he says it's a garbled description of
"The Magi", which first appeared in Alan Ryan's 1982 anthology of
religious SF, PERPETUAL LIGHT (a book I own but have not read), and
has been collected twice by Damien (in THE DARK BETWEEN THE STARS, an
Australian book, and just last year in UNCLE BONES (another book I own
but haven't completely read yet, from Fantastic Books in the US), and
has also been anthologized in two books of Australian SF, ALIEN SHORES
and CENTAURUS.
For YASID statistical purposes, I'd give the credit to David Duffy ...
or Damien if you want (he used to post here, didn't he?)
Rich Horton
wrote:
>I asked Damien directly, and he says it's a garbled description of
>"The Magi", which first appeared in Alan Ryan's 1982 anthology of
>religious SF, PERPETUAL LIGHT (a book I own but have not read), and
>has been collected twice by Damien (in THE DARK BETWEEN THE STARS, an
>Australian book, and just last year in UNCLE BONES (another book I own
>but haven't completely read yet, from Fantastic Books in the US), and
>has also been anthologized in two books of Australian SF, ALIEN SHORES
>and CENTAURUS.
And now I've read Damien's "The Magi", and while it's definitely the
story to which the poster I was quoting was referring, the incident he
recalls is actually only one small part of the story, and his
recollection is slightly flawed. It's not space marines, but one man,
who comes to a ruined starship, and finds the "gel", which is indeed a
bunch of fetuses, which the mad survivor of the starship disaster is
cloning day after day, then baptizing and killing. There is no really
talk about the war between heaven and hell, just the idea that sending
more souls to heaven is a good thing. (And that human souls in heaven
are in a sense replacements for the angels thrown out with Lucifer.)
The main thrust of the story is the discovery of that one spaceman who
came to the ruined starship, on another planet, of the remnant of a
seemingly wonderful humanlike civilization. The hero is,
significantly, a Jesuit (and, of course also significantly, a Jew by
birth, and one of apparently very few survivors of an Islamic invasion
of Israel) -- the story is at heart in dialogue with Arthur C.
Clarke's "The Star". It's a very fine story, and it's a shame that it
hasn't got as much recognition as it deserves (which is not to say
it's been ignored, mind you).