Trident

Fall

Celebrations at the Quarterly Market had taken on an almost desperate quality. People attempted to have the maximum amount of fun in the minimum amount of time possible. And who could blame them? After all, we could all be dead within the week.

This was the last fall we would spend aboard our doomed vessel. We were heading for the final fall, speeding towards the surface of an unknown planet only hoping that our ship could survive what would be an extremely rough landing.

There were 60 237 of us on board. 20 000 had left planet Earth many generations ago. Despite strict regulations on procreation, our numbers had inevitably grown over time. Our ship was designed and built able to sustain us all, but not for much longer.

We were finally nearing the end of our long journey. And this with a badly crippled ship.

Our navigation was shot a long time ago. The external sensors were mostly bust. We knew we were heading towards a planet. We knew we had no choice but to fall to its surface. What we didn’t know was if we’d survive the crash landing, and if we would, if even some of us did, would the planet itself be inhabitable.

We could only hope. We could only pray.

Our Priests and our Bishops had been praying non-stop since the start of the Evacuation. Generation after generation reciting prayers in four shifts.

They were all praying together now. No more sleep for them. Just hours and hours of fervent prayer.

The rest of us, the ordinary folk, had always done our best to live as normal lives as possible. We’d have our Quarterly Markets at each change of the Four Seasons programmed into our ship’s atmospheric controls after the model of Northern Europe about a century before the Evacuation.

We knew there’d been other ships as well. They’d all dispersed from Earth in different directions during the Evacuation. All with different climates, different peoples and different cultures within. Hoping someone at least would not only get away, and survive a long journey, but even discover a habitable planet at the end of it.

We had no knowledge of the fate of any other ship. We only knew ours had survived so far both by luck, and by the diligent efforts of the crew.

If we could have fixed the navigation and the external sensors, we would’ve done so. Unfortunately, there were several parts we could no longer either fix, or reproduce. We simply did not have the necessary resources.

So here we were. Heading for a final fall. Hoping and praying luck remained on our side.

The chances of any of us being alive next week were not especially high. It would’ve been more accurate to call them negligeable.

So people crammed as much fun as they could to the days we had left. The clergy, on their part, packed as many prayers into the days and nights as possible.

In the end, I believe we were all surprised God actually heard our prayers. Almost everyone survived the crash landing, and a great many learned to survive the conditions on the surface as well.

“What the newcomers failed to realize at first was this world has a presence of its own. We brought here our God and all our customs, but the god of this planet does not always agree with our One True God. We learned this at a frightful cost,” the High Bishop continues his story.