When Pius was assigned to Murk, he assumed he would be translating the Bible into the language of genius octopuses. But the first Thulhu he laid eyes on, rendered grayscale by the mist, only humped a lichen patch, distended tongue audibly slathering against rock, tentacle suckers puckering as they stuck and unstuck, vestigial wings like out-of-body lungs flagging over its backside.

Thulhus were supposed to communicate via tentacle gestures. This thrashing was it, right? But Pius’s visor remained dark. No translation.

His last assignment with the Prabhakarins had been different. They knew first impressions mattered. This tentacly brute didn’t even acknowledge him.

“You’re sure this thing is sentient?” he called back. His voice echoed queerly in the gloom.

“Keep it down!” Zora said in a church whisper. She was a good guide; by reputation a good ethnographer. But she treated him more like a credulous little brother than a client.

“I thought you said they can’t hear.”

“They can’t. But the Thulhus aren’t top of the food chain.” Zora dangled her fingers like a jellyfish. Made them creep. The right fore-tentacle of her Thulhu-suit glided with almost feline surreptitiousness. She snatched her left hand away, and her other fore-tentacle darted behind the nearest hind-tentacle of her suit.

The visor protruding from Pius’s headgear flashed, “Predator.”

He gulped. In this fog, anything worthy of the name predator had to be calculating an ambush.

He was armed, but sensor mesh constricted his trigger finger. He’d chosen the non-invasive Thulhu-suit. Zora’s interfaced directly with her motor cortex, so her gestures were just a symptom of the same neural impulses that animated her suit’s fore-tentacles. Through obliquer mentation she could control the four hind-tentacles of her suit. If it came to flight, Pius had just one option: auto-pilot.

The Thulhu let up its humping long enough to radiate a spasm down its limber fore-tentacles and four stouter hind-tentacles. A shrug?

Pius’s visor proffered “Disbelief” in blocky red print. Then corrected itself, “Amused disbelief.”

Pius groaned. What kind of language was this? He expected elegance, a system of symbols, like the sign language of Prabhakarin children who are deaf-mute until puberty.

“Maybe they just thrash around to mate and warn each other of danger,” said Pius. “That doesn’t mean they have language.”

“Did your Church tell you that?” Zora chuckled like Socrates must have chuckled just before shredding his interlocutors’ preconceptions.

“Just my guess.” It could be bureaucratic blundering that consigned him to Murk, but he had to assume the One Church hadn’t sent him on a fool’s errand.

“Thousands of robots taking millions of pictures all over this region ran pattern recognition, devilishly clever algorithms. The same software derived more than a thousand languages spanning over a hundred species throughout the galaxy. Just think how few Bible translations your Church would have piddled out without it.”

Church doctrine said that the Holy Spirit doesn’t work through software, but brandishing dogma was a nonstarter. “Maybe a different subject would be more cooperative?”

There were other males (Zora called them men) scarfing lichen or sloughing about as though they belonged to a patch of mist rather than a place. And fog-gray females (ahem, women) haunting the periphery of the seen world. Young clung to the floppy wings on their backs as their fore-tentacles flicked about in conversation.

“You’ll have less luck with the others. We’re just …” She let a fore-tentacle go slack like a burdensome limb she hadn’t found the time to amputate.

The translation smote the upper left of Pius’s vision. “Disobedient-other”?

In imitation, he let his shoulder drop, and the whole left side of his Thulhu-suit sagged. He avoided keeling over into spongy marsh only by wind-milling to the other side. His suit would have formed the gesture if he had just spoken the word into his mouthpiece.

Light danced in Zora’s eyes, but she suppressed her mirth.

The Thulhu let up feeding. His fore-tentacles squiggled.

“Derisive amusement,” Pius’s visor flared.

“Why does this one ‘talk’?” asked Pius. Unsure how his suit would react, he resisted the urge to make air quotes.

“Heh, he’s just true to his name.”

“His name?”

“Snarky.”

*     *     *
Snarky made the disobedient-other gesture. Pius’s headset flashed, “Oh, the alien is back.” Snarky’s fore-tentacles mimed a hug, and Pius read the translation, “And she brought a friend.”

Zora nudged Pius.

“How are you?” Pius said into his mouthpiece. His suit gestured accordingly. The feed glowing on the lower-right of his visor said the accusatory gesture for “you” meant literally “other-me.”

“And it has nothing interesting to say,” Snarky gestured, as self-important as a four-year-old. He only stood as high as Pius’s waist.

“You really don’t think I’m a person?” asked Pius.

“Of course I believe I’m a person.” Snarky’s fore-tentacles wrung in dizzying self-referential circles.

Did the untranslatability of “you” confuse him? “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. I’ve been through this with her. In the end we agreed to disagree. She—sage alien that she is—believes there’s a shadowy world of squishy objects behind the mist. I say it’s impossible.”

“Behind the mist?”

“Where else would it be?”

Pius was taken aback by Snarky’s candidness. “What am I then?”

“Just another alien I imagined. Proof that I’m exceptionally clever.”

Or delusional.

“Maybe I’m just bored.”

*     *     *
On second thought, Pius remembered Zora saying that the Thulhus only believe in their own minds. To them, there were no bodies, no other Thulhus; there’s no lichen to eat, no mist. There are only thoughts of bodies, thoughts of other minds, mist-thoughts, lichen-thoughts.

She had lectured him on brain science. “You don’t believe the hemispheres of your brain are two different people just because they communicate in order to render and interpret the world. To Thulhus, that’s what talk is like.”

Scant recognition on his part.

She tried again. “If you saw your brain, you’d know that the gray matter was you. But it wouldn’t feel like you, right? That’s how a Thulhu thinks about other Thulhus. He knows they’re all him, even though it doesn’t feel that way.”

What Pius knew was that he wasn’t a brain but a soul fashioned by his Creator.

Zora only knew a universe in flux, constantly prototyping. Not a universe, vibrant and ushering.

A Godless materiality.

*     *     *
Maybe he could enlighten Snarky. “But everything persists even when you aren’t looking at it. You close your eyes, open them, and—” Pius’s suit broke off gesturing as Snarky leaned upsettingly close.

“Close my eyes?” His cephalopod face was so near, Pius took the hint: Thulhus don’t have eyelids. Thulhus didn’t have to adapt to overbearing light with the mist always about. They might as well have lived inside a cloud.

“Ah, assume you can,” Pius said.

“Very well.” Apparently, Thulhus have a gesture for gross condescension.

“When you cover your eyes,” said Pius, ignoring the slight, “the whole world goes away, and when you see again, it’s the same as it was. How do you explain that if all that exists is you?”

Thulhus don’t have lips, and Snarky’s mouth was beneath his body where Pius couldn’t see it. But Pius knew Snarky would be grinning impishly were it not for his anatomy.

“How can I? I am overcome. You’ve shown me the error of my ways, wrestled your existence from my delusions.”

Zora glanced at Pius sheepishly. But why should Snarky be polite? He believes he’s just talking to himself.

Snarky flapped a fore-tentacle, an off-hand negation. “Sometimes the mist gobbles up what I see, sometimes it doesn’t. This eye-blinking has nothing to do with it. Zora tells me aliens have a similar problem. Sometimes you try to remember and succeed, sometimes you fail. Mist, forgetfulness—they are the same.”

Zora perceived Pius’s mounting agitation. “Persistence for us isn’t the same as it is for them. They only see motion, no colors, nothing that’s still.”

Snarky couldn’t hear, but he must have inferred the purpose of their exchange because he flicked his tentacles in amused squiggles.

“Do you believe in God?” Pius ventured. The software made the fore-tentacles of his suit link together to denote belief then lifted the right in an extravagant salute, “God.”

Snarky emitted a confused wavering. He imitated the extravagant salute. “Is God a person?” His fore-tentacles groped and shivered in the gesture for person.

As far as the software ascertained, his question was meant in all earnestness. But it posed a dilemma: “Person” means an intellect and even more than that, a will, so God is a person. But if Pius said as much, Snarky would reject God as he rejected all other persons.

“Yes, God’s a person.”

Snarky swayed, dithering. “Am I God?”

“No, you aren’t God. We aren’t God either. God is”—Pius struggled to produce a word—“outside. Beyond the mist.” The software raised Pius’s right fore-tentacle in a new salute, an elephantine trumpeting. Reviewing the feed, Pius realized it meant literally one-beyond-mist, which also meant one-beyond-forgetfulness.

“One-beyond-mist,” Snarky gestured. Was that a question?

“Yes, that’s the beginning of what God is,” Pius said carefully. “What would it take for you to believe in one-beyond-mist?”

“Ah, I understand now, becoming God only requires patience.” His tentacles squiggled. “Wait for the mist to clear, and I will be one-beyond-mist!”

“Did you hear what I said? You aren’t God.”

Zora flipped her fore-tentacles disarmingly; she shot Pius a look.

“But if I can’t become God, God is impossible.”

“God is another person, someone always beyond the mist.” Pius struggled to screen the tension from his voice. It came out a plea, “What would it take for you to believe in God?”

“Madness.”

*     *     *
“Snarky likes you,” said Zora.

“Likes me?”

“When I met him, he gestured incoherently just to confuse the software. You had a conversation, give and take.”

“He’s delusional.”

“He’s different. You have to bridge that difference; don’t expect him to.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“Maybe in your translation Jesus can have tentacles. And Satan can be one of the things deep down in the lowlands.” Her tentacles didn’t squiggle like Snarky’s would have, but she cracked a smile. The deep things were just rumor spawned by the same mythos that named the Thulhus.

She would’ve gone on, but Pius cut her short. “What you’re suggesting isn’t translation.”

“Maybe not, but limiting your work to the bounds of this book—the Bible—isn’t going to reach the Thulhus. For a Thulhu there’s only one mind, one author, one work of literature. So think of the Bible as a Thulhu would, as part of a larger work, one constantly expanding and improving.” She grinned. “Your translation is just the next draft.”

*     *     *
Pius sulked for a while on the way back, but eventually Zora tried again. “Back on Earth, biologists had a saying: ‘Life will find a way,’ will thrive in every habitat—the driest desert, the bottom of the ocean. Once we studied other worlds, do you know how that saying changed?”

“How?” Pius begrudged.

“‘Life will find every way.’ The universe will surprise you no matter how your Bible says life should be.” Her constantly prototyping universe in which Christianity is as queer and outmoded as the vestigial wings of a Thulhu.

“Every way? Aside from the Thulhus, I’ve seen sooty ferns, lichen, a few mushrooms, and whatever that is rotting so delightfully in the marsh. Not exactly biological diversity.”

“Those mushrooms.” Her right fore-tentacle wound in a spiral. “They live off radiation. Even in the lowlands where radioisotopes blanket everything.”

“There are mutant mushrooms. So what?”

“There’s the universe, and then there’s your Bible.” Her voice was low but sure, like faraway thunder. “I’ll let you guess which doesn’t fit within the other.”

*     *     *
Pius was glad to be indoors. The air had an antiseptic taste, but it was unmisted, an unmurky corner of Murk. He changed out of his sweaty wetsuit and peeled the sensor mesh from his hands and arms. The skin beneath was clammy, and it itched. There was a solar-spectrum light in his monkishly small dorm. It might ward off seasonal affective disorder (it was always the season for that on Murk), but that merry bulb didn’t assuage his brooding.

He keyed a report to his superiors. “First contacted native sentient species today, Murkaea hectopus cthulhu, commonly named Thulhus. Findings not encouraging. The one Thulhu that condescended to communicate with us via tentacle gesticulations had no concept of God, or I suspect, any spiritual reality. His arrogance was not that of the disbeliever but of the fool convinced that his limited concepts are the only possible lens through which one may perceive the world.

“Serving God and His Word, I contend that the purported sentience of the Thulhus is an invention of the software that derived their language, if it can even properly be called a language. I humbly suggest that sentience be construed in terms of whether a species has a concept of the Divine, not the dictates of software.

“The Thulhus strike me as a hive species; every Thulhu believes itself to be queen and all the members of its cult (i.e. group) mere extensions of itself. We do not sully Scripture by translating it into the mating dance of bees. Let us not sully it with the tentacle-gesturing of the Thulhus. Recommendation is that this project be terminated.”

A response could take weeks, given bureaucratic shuffling. But just two standard hours later: “Your contention is unacceptable. We will send help.”

*     *     *
Cowed by the eight-word reprimand of his superiors, Pius drifted. Should he wait for the promised, and likely degrading, help? Would the project be out of his hands once help arrived? Would he become a mere clerk at the beck and call of a new superior?

Pius prayed for answers but continued to work. Without explicit instruction to the contrary, he had to show progress in daily reports, though only God knew whether anyone would read them.

He had a place to start: the Gospel of John, the fourth and most exalted of the biographies of Jesus. After that he’d translate whatever other Greek portions of the Bible his superiors told him to, hitherto without collaboration. Synthesis happened higher in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

He dictated the opening verses of John in the original Greek into the mouthpiece of his headgear, “En arche en ho logos. …” The shadowy tentacles of a Thulhu homunculus rose and fell across his visor. They froze—stuttering?—then jostled to the next gesture.

He replayed with English subtitles, and right away, the problem was as plain as mist: “In the beginning was the logos (?).” Even the software surrendered before the translation puzzle posed by logos. logos is not just Word, as it is commonly translated into English. Indeed, the capital W only gestures at the capacious semantics of logos, which includes just about everything having to do with language and the mind: discourse, narration, commandment, teaching, reason, intellect, proportion, expectation. In one Bible passage, logos means debt, in another a legal complaint. In several passages, logos has a derogatory connotation, as mere talk or empty rhetoric, like when Paul writes, “The kingdom of God depends not upon logos but on power.”

logos found a niche in most every philosophy and religion throughout the ancient Mediterranean in which John wrote his Gospel: Orphic and Dionysian mystery cults exalted their dying and vivifying gods with epithets of which logos was the germ. Stoic philosophers taught of a logos spermatikos, the rational principle undergirding everything. Aristotle rendered logos as rationality, the soul of humanity.

Pius decided to simply gloss logos as the Thulhu gesture for “word.” It would altogether miss the mark, but the Thulhus obviously had no capacity to construe the expanse of John’s meaning. No one could object to his treating an impossible problem with an inadequate solution.

“Translate ‘word.’” An umbral tentacle rose across his field of view like a hand reaching in supplication, oddly stirring. But the subtitles that crowded beneath provoked no fellow-feeling: “Gesture, verb, word, connection, ascent, legerdemain, guile.”

Pius tried again. The software repeated itself without irritation.

He groaned from a tight place in his chest. The primary meaning wasn’t even “word” but “gesture,” which had all kinds of implications John hadn’t intended.

Pius moved on to “verb,” the second meaning listed. Why should “noun” be absent? The software had to be confused, befuddled by the Thulhus and their supposed language.

The next meaning, “connection,” had worth because gesturing is how the Thulhus connect. And it brought out a shade of meaning latent but not explicit in John’s usage: John says the logos is Jesus, and Jesus is how God connects to His creation.

But the next meaning, “ascent,” had nothing to do with John. “Ascent” conjured images of a Thulhu mounting a steep rise through inscrutable mists like the dread monster Cthulhu from the old Lovecraft tales, the Thulhus’ namesake. Jesus could have no association with that!

“Legerdemain” and “guile” didn’t help. Too underhanded. He couldn’t frame Jesus in such a sinister light.

He leapt up to hammer out a report to his superiors. They’d understand that it was better to preserve John’s meaning than to twist it in translation. Whatever he did would be ignored or ridiculed by the Thulhus anyway. Why even try?

But that prim reprimand stung, a crisp blow. His superiors would see this project done. At best they would ignore him. Worse, they might judge him beneath even unacceptable.

He sagged onto his tiny cot, defeated once by the separateness of languages and again by the aloofness of the Church to which he dedicated his life.

*     *     *
On the day Pius was called to Murk, he’d been watching the sunrise ritual with Prabhakarin children and their non-menstruating mothers. Beneath the banyan tree in the town square of Dhruv, men dipped teak ladles into pots of ghee, heated just to liquidity, then upended the pure oil over a preserved footprint of one of their distinguished ancestors—once, twice, three times. Murmuring a mantra in a forgotten tongue, they bowed prostrate with the fingers of all four hands intertwined like strands of an occult knot. The new sun bathed their backs.

One of the girls—pre-pubescent because her mouths were just lipless slits—caught Pius’s eye with an upward grasping motion, hand-speak for sex. Thank God, it wasn’t an invitation. She was just repeating what she’d seen, a reminder that Pius’s abstinence was a topic of light conversation around Dhruv. He pointed upward with two pronged fingers and drew them to his eyes: the stars are watching you. She turned away, rasping giggles from her inchoate larynxes.

Almost half of the men rose to begin work, most in a marketplace stall, at the docks, or in a warehouse. More would rise soon, but the truly pious would continue prostrations until the sun lifted fully above the horizon. No mean feat given that Prabhakara’s diurnal cycle is forty times longer than a standard day. After the long night, some would keep shoving their noses into the dirt from sheer superstitious relief.

A vibration from inside his dhoti. About time the Church broke radio silence. They could page him through his headgear, but the locals deemed any adornment above the waist womanish, so he rarely wore it.

Undoubtedly, he would be reassigned, perhaps to just another Prabhakarin community, but he suspected otherwise. He’d heard through the missionary grapevine that the Church planned to cut its losses: Prabhakarins spoke too many languages, were too stuck in their ways, too fearful of an everlasting night.

God willing, his next assignment would be on Aletheia. The common tongue, spoken across the entire planet, boasted more than one million words, five thousand colors, five thousand textures, five thousand for every sense. Every mannerism, every flavor of awkwardness and triumph, every nuance of propriety, every stage in every process from nascence to ripeness to moribundity had a name. Most had several, each a near-synonym different only by a flutter of connotation. Anyone, no matter his station, could coin a new word, and if his fellows deemed it worthy, civilizations would take it up. What better language to translate the Gospel into? Pen just one translation, and he could bring billions to Christ.

He rushed into his hut to fetch his headgear. But his wife was in the way, or rather the woman the town council had designated as his wife. Her gourd-shaped head yammered from both ends, left mouth prognosticating doom: the stars would destroy him if he shirked the sunrise ritual again. Then she’d be a tainted widow unable to inherit even his impure off-world wealth. Her right mouth grumbled about stillbirths and deformities.

Murmuring polite apologies, he ducked beneath her accusing arm, knowing she wouldn’t touch him, not during her period. He swiped the jute fiber sack that held his headgear, edged past her, and made for the tree line. He passed the stand of basalt idols that guarded the northern entrance to Dhruv, among them a rough-hewn statue of Jesus. It had two heads like all the other graven images. Pius ground his teeth and impotently fantasized about pulverizing the heathen thing.

The canopy overshadowing him had unfurled entirely after its nightly hibernation. He covered one ear to block the cacophony of tropical birds and donned his headgear. Loam squished beneath his tapping foot.

“You are Pius Judson, missionary of the One Church of Christ?” A machine voice, monotone, like all official Church communication.

“I am Pius Judson, missionary of the One Church of Christ,” he echoed for purposes of voice recognition.

“The Church looks upon your work favorably. You are hereby reassigned to the moon of Aletheia, colloquially named Murk. Report to research station Relyeh on its southern continent at your earliest convenience.”

Murk, the moon of Aletheia. Teasingly near Aletheia but not Aletheia. What had he done wrong? With almost no prodding from his superiors, he’d translated the entire New Testament into the Dhruvish dialect, spoken by merchants and bankers across most of the continent. He’d translated John’s Gospel two more times into the dialects of outlying villages. His attempt to render John in child hand-speak had floundered, but that project was his own.

“Is someone else translating John into Aletheian?”

A pause. “It is given to you to know.” An answer as cryptic as the prognostications of Prabhakarin astrologers.

“Who?”

“Father David Nestor.”

Pius removed his headgear and laughed bitterly. Murk wasn’t his punishment. It was his consolation prize. He’d been outclassed by the greatest Bible translator alive.

*     *     *
When Pius got word that the promised help was David Nestor, he wondered idly if all those sunrise rituals he abstained from provoked astrological backlash after all.

But he wasn’t the one tumbling from Aletheia to the shrouded moon of the hectopus cows. David must have fallen far in the eyes of the Church to be reassigned to Murk.

That thought kindled a grim green warmth in Pius. Envy didn’t shame him as much as it should have. Knowing that staunched the warmth, a little.

*     *     *
David emerged from the decontamination chamber clothed in priestly black—slacks and a shirt, not a cassock. His cheekbones were high, his skin taut and frustratingly boyish even though he was fifteen years Pius’s senior.

Pius shook David’s hand stiffly and led him toward the mess hall, unsure what to say. Pius started toward a bevy of support staff, mostly Devonians, a species of black amphibious fish-people. They weren’t native to Murk, but the damp suited them.

Perhaps the presence of a crowd would stifle whatever probing questions David had chambered in his throat.

But David turned to the side to indicate an empty table. “How about here?”

Inquisition: unavoidable.

Pius slumped into a seat. He said nothing.

David speared a rehydrated potato on his plate with more gusto than the wrinkled tuber deserved. “The potatoes here aren’t bad. See, they spice everything to oblivion over on Aletheia.”

Was David rubbing it in? Hey, Pius, have you heard of scholars’ pagodas on Aletheia? In Asher—marvelous city, really—there’s one just for Bible translation. It has a level for each book of the Bible! And would you believe it’s built into a mountain of pink salt?

David swallowed. “Sometimes plain rations are best.”

Pius wasn’t in the mood for banter. “How should we begin with the translation?”

“Let’s not talk about work. Let’s talk about you.”

Next David would say he’s no longer needed, or worse needed but only for clerical errands. David would be the fount of all creative insight.

“I read your work on translating John into Prabhakarin languages,” said David.

“Really?” Pius wasn’t exactly a distinguished translator.

“I like to know about the people I work with. Your translation of logos intrigued me. I forget the term, but it means action. It struck me as a bit loose.”

Loose? “I wanted to render logos as Word. But to the villagers I lived with language isn’t about description. It’s all about inciting action, so I chose kara, action.”

His mouth felt suddenly dry. “I hope you can see why it was necessary.”

“All language is about inciting action?” said David, his scholar’s soul beaming.

So Pius knew something that David didn’t. “They go too far, of course, but it’s not so strange, if you think about it. When a mother tells her child, ‘It’s eight o’clock,’ she’s not trying to inform her child of anything. She wants the kid to go to bed.”

“Ah, so that’s why your translation was so admonishing, ‘You must believe this!’ and ‘You must believe that!’”

Pius opened his mouth but clammed up.

“You can speak plainly to me, Pius. I’m just a priest, a pastor like yourself.” That confusion in titles said much. In an earlier age, before there was One Church of Christ, they would have stood on opposite sides of an eight-hundred-year-old schism. David would be a Catholic and a Jesuit, Pius a Protestant.

“I know the tone was off, but belief is what the Gospel is about, embracing doctrine, I mean.”

“Perhaps.”

Perhaps? “How would you have translated logos into Prabhakarin?”

Pius thought he might’ve caught him off guard, but of course David Nestor would have an answer. “They have a word, amita, meaning boundless. It’s so much richer than just some generic action.”

“I know the word. Amita orchestrates the stars in a grand ritual, the infinite cosmic ritual that all the rituals the Prabhakarins perform on the ground supposedly emulate.”

“Sounds pretty good, right? Jesus is that boundless principle, the infinite entering history as a finite being. Like in John’s Gospel.”

“But translating logos as amita would have made the Prabhakarins think Christianity was just a repackaged version of their religion.”

“Why not exploit the cultural idiom, write an eloquent translation, and engage Prabhakarin readers? Then we pose some real competition to the canons of the native religion.”

“We can’t do that at the expense of Christ.” Grim warmth again, less green, redder. “You know, Jesus?”

“That’s why there are Gospels.” David didn’t raise his voice. “John goes on to say who the man is that is the logos, what he did, who he was, his sacrifice.”

“You can’t wreck the beginning just because you think John will pick up the pieces later on.” Pius gained his feet. “Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you.”

*     *     *
Pius meant the translation of John that had made David’s reputation, his Orkish translation. The translation that should not have been. Orken One is hell, too hot for water to condense except at its poles. It has a magnetosphere, an atmosphere, wind enough to normalize temperatures through day and night. But life couldn’t have a foothold: it had been molten just five hundred million years ago. That was time enough for reels of amino acids, perhaps inklings of silicon-based life. But further complexity just shouldn’t have been possible. Everyone with pull—star system governments, venerable scientific foundations, enterprising trillionaires—set their sights only on the cornucopia of Earth-like worlds with a real chance at harboring sentient life.

Orken One still attracted pioneers, wealthy tourists scudding by in a luxury cruiser. Peeping through the lenses of drones conferred bragging rights with none of the being boiled alive.

The Dantesque safari amazed them—sandstone hoodoos, geologically young but red like old blood, bearing pyroclastic slabs aloft in unbroken penance. Dunes like white-robed acolytes cowering resplendently beneath the numinous glare of Orken. The wind screaming judgment upon the ever-erring landscape, sometimes skewing it in flagellate wave patterns, other times whipping it in dust devils or driving biting sandstorms of cataclysmic size.

The footage seeped into social media. A keen-eyed researcher took notice. She found no water, nothing fossilized. But wave patterns furrowed the dunes even on windless days, even against the prevailing wind.

The second wave of drones had been equipped with translation software. They discarded any footage of patterns explicable by weather alone. But much remained, too much for chance. Biology notwithstanding, the drones’ Bayes nets and Markov models found language.

It wasn’t long until researchers weren’t just overhearing the Orkens but conversing with them. No one ever found out what they were. Either the Orkens were holding back, or they didn’t know themselves. But biological puzzles didn’t faze Christian missionaries dedicated to bringing the Good News to every sentient race.

None proved himself worthier of the challenge than David Nestor.

*     *     *
“What about me?” said David. Not a challenge, just an honest question.

“How did you translate logos into Orkish?”

“Sun-principle,” said David. “The reason their sun burns. You know that.” Every translator of the Bible alive knew that.

“Do you want to make Christianity sound like sun worship?”

“It might sound like that to us,” David said calmly. “But it doesn’t to them. They don’t worship their star Orken, they just believe their world persists through its light.”

“But that’s not what John meant.”

“It’s not? Isn’t logos the principle that creates and upholds reality? Doesn’t John call Jesus the ‘light of the world’?”

“Later on, but not at the beginning,” Pius protested lamely.

“Really? You know that logos is a philosophical term in Greek. John must’ve known that. And how did its use as a philosophical term begin?”

“Heraclitus,” Pius conceded.

“And what did Heraclitus say the logos is?”

Is he going to make me say it? “A principle that animates the universe.”

“And characterized by fire.”

Pius sighed. “Perhaps your rendering of logos was acceptable.” The word was out before echoes of the reprimand from on-high (unacceptable, unacceptable) seized him. Pius forged on, “But what about later when John writes, ‘And the logos became flesh and lived among us’?”

David smiled. He knew this was coming.

Pius continued, “You translated flesh as spirit, precisely the opposite of what John meant!”

“I think you know why I did that.”

“I know the commentaries and the subcommentaries, but those are others’ reasons. You never said why.”

“That’s because God’s Word needs to stand by itself. If we need long footnotes and commentaries to explain it, we’ve already failed.” David caught Pius with a level stare. “Why do you think I did it?”

There was nothing to do but answer. “The Orkens didn’t have a sand-wave pattern for flesh when the explorers arrived. How could they in a world without bodies?”

“But they came up with one, didn’t they? A word for us, for humans. They never differentiated between our flesh and flesh in general. You see the problem?”

“They would think that the logos-made-flesh didn’t come for them, that Jesus only came for us.”

“I hope you can see why it was necessary,” said David, using Pius’s own words against him.

Pius had to swallow before speaking. “Maybe Jesus didn’t come for the Orkens. John’s point is that Jesus debased himself, became flesh, to redeem us from the death of our bodies.”

“Orkens die too,” David said with a long stare. “Not like us, but they die. And some have died glad they knew Christ. You think if I could do it again, I would abandon the project and deny them that?”

“If God wanted everyone to live a Christian life, he wouldn’t have waited billions of years before coming as Jesus. Think of the—how many? trillions?—dying every day throughout the universe that never knew Christ. God has a plan for them. You think we should compromise God’s Word just to whittle down that number by the barest fraction?”

David regarded Pius wearily, weary as the galactic wanderer he was. “Why did you become a missionary, Pius?”

“God called me.”

“What did God call you to do?”

Pius knew what David wanted him to say, so he demurred, “To safeguard His Word.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all I’ll say.”

David’s lips pursed, fell in the slightest frown, said nothing.

To wipe David’s disappointment away, Pius changed the subject. “You asked me why I was called, but you never said why you came?”

“To help.”

“That’s all? I have to think our superiors have big plans for the Thulhus if they send you in such a hurry. Big plans!” David came to help? Help what?

It dawned on Pius. “You aren’t here for the Thulhus. You’re just the next maneuver in the political game. Our superiors don’t care about the Thulhus, not really. They just want to brag about how the Church translated the New Testament into Thulhuese before the Muslims translate the Qur’an or the Buddhists translate whichever sutras are trendiest.”

“Let our superiors concern themselves with politics, Pius. They do God’s work too, even if they are unaware of it.”

“You’re David Nestor. You have to know something.”

“They didn’t send me. I volunteered.”

*     *     *
Pius avoided David the following day and the next. But on the third day, Zora called them together.

David saw Zora and brightened. He offered his hand, like one dignitary meeting another, but unbeknownst to the joint delegations they were on a first-name basis. She took it. “Zora Mead, it’s an honor.”

Pius scanned both their faces. However Zora identified, it wasn’t Christian. Why would David be honored to meet her?

“You didn’t know?” asked David. “Zora discovered Orkish.”

“That was you?”

“Yup.”

A split-second suspicion: David came for her? But that was ridiculous. Who would give up on Aletheia, come to Murk, just to shake a hand?

“Let’s get down to it,” said Zora. “Tomorrow there will be four minutes of mistlessness where we visited Snarky and his cult. There’s a good chance they haven’t migrated far. Trust me, it’s a rare opportunity.”

“There isn’t another cult in the area?” Pius asked.

“Don’t want another tentacle lashing from Snarky?” said Zora. “He learned more from you than you think. Meet him again. He’ll be a different Thulhu in clear air.” She glanced from Pius to David and back to Pius. “I’ve been tailing a different cult, but if you need me again—”

“We’ll be fine,” said David. “Pius can guide me, and we can radio for help if anything goes wrong.”

Zora looked at Pius uncertainly, then sized David up, frowned in resignation.

“Alright, but go armed. There are reports of lampreys.”

Scarcely thinking about how humid it’d gotten, Pius followed David to the armory, palmed the same munitions as David, and loaded them into the same model handgun.

David would confront him, he knew. Whatever David said, and however he responded, he would always be turned around. He could white-knuckle it, but for how long?

David always knew the right thing to say. He listened as though he’d crossed not only the gulf between Aletheia and Murk for Pius’s sake, but the empty reaches of galactic space. How long could his convictions hold out against the enormity of David’s attention?

*     *     *
A Devonian staff woman had already strapped David into his Thulhu-suit but had yet to help Pius.

“Junia, when you’re done with the Churchmen, come back here and help me with these repairs. Dehumidifiers won’t fix themselves, even on God’s account,” said Junia’s manager, a middle-aged white engineer.

Junia strapped Pius into his Thulhu-suit harness, rushed to snap the buckles into place, and hurried to join her manager.

David called back to her, “You forgot one.”

“Forgot one?” she asked, her black gills flapping listlessly, huge insensate fish eyes on either side of her cleft head.

“His buckles,” said David.

Pius shifted, scrutinized the points where his harness interfaced with his chest and legs. He lifted his right thigh free.

“Oh, sorry about that.” She readily snapped the errant buckle into place.

The manager faced David penitently. “Sorry, sometimes they make mistakes.”

*     *     *
David took to operating the Thulhu-suit easily, bounding over mist-cloaked boulders and winding around sucking marsh without hesitation. He had the brain implant, like Zora. David must have digested everything there was to know about Thulhu-suit operation just like he’d assimilated Pius’s work on the Prabhakarins. But it could just be because he was David Nestor. Everything came easily to David Nestor.

Pius trailed behind David. They weren’t far from the coordinates Zora had given them, where the mist would clear and night would deign to show her star-freckled face. Maybe Pius could avoid another confrontation.

But when they were ten minutes out from the station, David relaxed his pace. “Did you hear what the manager said back at the base, when he apologized for that mix-up with your harness?” David asked.

That was an odd way to brook conversation. “He didn’t say it to me.” And it was my harness that was loose.

“He said, ‘Sometimes they make mistakes.’”

Recalling that the manager’s subordinate was young, black, a woman, and a Devonian, the prejudice of those words slammed into Pius.

“What do you think he meant?” asked David.

“By ‘they’? Could’ve been racist? Maybe sexist? Species-ist?” Pius suggested, sharing in the joke.

“Don’t forget ageist. Classist? Maybe he has something against fish?”

“He could’ve just meant that sometimes the people he manages make mistakes.”

“But why say ‘they’?” asked David.

“Good question.” Pius chuckled again.

“Why write logos?” said David.

“Good question.” His humor was gone. “But I’m not sure God will tell us if we ask.”

“I mean, why would John—why would God—write logos in scripture if He didn’t mean something as rich as logos, with all its meaning, if He didn’t know we would translate it and translate it again, sometimes carelessly, sometimes with all our faculty, but inevitably fail to capture His meaning?”

“He knew that we would sin in this, like we do in so many things. It’s no different.”

“I don’t think that’s it at all,” said David, a touch forlorn. “Why would God entrust scripture to us if He didn’t think we could carry out His will through it?”

Again David managed to turn Pius’s own words around on him, make it seem that he was the one protecting scripture and bringing the true Gospel to new species, while Pius was just straying again and again. “Is there a point in this?”

“No point, just something I’m trying to gesture at.” David raised his right fore-tentacle in the trumpeting salute, the software’s neologism for one-beyond-mist, which might mean God. “Remember in First Corinthians Paul writes of how he spreads the Gospel? ‘I am all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.’ I think logos is like that. It began as just a word, give or take the capital W. Maybe John meant a certain something by it, but God knew that we wouldn’t be able to get inside John’s head, that throughout history and the stupendous variety of His creation, we would inevitably make it richer, even unknowingly, like the crew manager with his ‘they.’ I think logos is the Word to you and I, a solar-principle to the Orkens, and an action to the Prabhakarins. I think it’s what every sentient species needs it to be, and given time, logos will mean everything, will be a word that means everything.”

*     *     *
David cast his spell over Pius while speaking, but they departed again in silence. The mist occluded everything, outlasting mere words and the illusions of the man that wove them. Pius decided that David had spent too long tinkering with the stupendous variety of the Aletheian tongue. Surely, a scholarly fancy overcame him to stretch meaning further and further without regard for scripture or the Christianizing of sentient life. A word that means everything? Were it possible, it would mean nothing at all!

Pius plucked up his courage. Just as they were climbing the rise upon which Snarky and his cult still grazed, he beckoned, “Hold up.” There was still some time before the mist would clear.

David swiveled his Thulhu-suit around.

“Why did you volunteer to come here when you already had work on Aletheia?”

“They can get on without me.”

And I can’t? “It has nothing to do with a word that means everything?”

“No need to think it means more than it does.” David only half-smiled at his own joke. “I just see the richness in logos, and its potential, and I see God in that potential.”

Pius had to lay it on hard. “It’s heresy.”

“Heresy?” At last, David was the one reacting.

“Yes, however we translate logos, God means something by it. God doesn’t send us in pursuit of phantoms, willing that we do violence to the text, refashioning Christianity as just every other religion it comes into contact with.”

“John didn’t invent this word logos. He found it where it was and elevated it for God’s purposes. Heraclitus’s fire, the Stoic logos spermatikos, Aristotle’s soul of humanity, reason, Word, all of that was already there. You think logos is just a title for Christ? No, it was a title for cult deities throughout the ancient Mediterranean: Orpheus, Hermes, Dionysus.” A deep anger, a lash of desert wind, stirred within David.

“You think the difference between us is that you defend the truth of scripture and I corrupt it, but really I have my eye on the spirit of the Word and you defend the dead letter.”

“Me? You have these blinders, this tunnel vision. What about the rest of scripture? Jesus wasn’t Heraclitus, or a Stoic, or Aristotle, and he certainly wasn’t an alien. He was human. He’s what’s decisive, and his humanity is part of that.”

“If that’s how you feel—”

“We don’t even need to go back to your scandalous Orken translation to make my point! You know the prevailing Chinese translation of logos?” David jerked a nod, but Pius spoke over him, “Dao. Because of that Chinese speakers ever since the twentieth century have believed that the real Old Testament isn’t the prophets, the Books of Moses, and the history of the Hebrews. No, they said it’s the Daodejing!” Pius didn’t need to remind him that the Daodejing is foundational to Daoism. And Daoism has nothing to do with any Christian creed. “That’s what I mean by heresy.”

“People misread the Bible all the time. You don’t need faulty translation to find crude innovators.”

“But we needn’t help the innovators along! Our task is to preserve the meaning John intended. Once the alien races acclimate to us, they’ll understand the Gospel as we do.”

David grimaced as if his last meal refused digestion.

Let him. God didn’t incarnate as a Thulhu, or any alien, but as a human.

“And how long will that take?” asked David. “You think we should tell our superiors, ‘Wait a few generations while we figure out how to educate a whole moon of Thulhus about the proper meaning of logos’?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Pius shot back.

“You know,” David said, voice edged with disdain, “you’ve already styled John according to alien religion and you don’t even realize it. Your translation of logos into Prabhakarin: kara, action. You had your reasons, but logos doesn’t mean action. John’s logos is language, reason, transcendence. Not action.”

Pius recoiled, recalling his own words, I hope you can see why it was necessary. David’s tone lowered. “In fact, it’s Satanic.”

“Satanic?” He couldn’t mean that.

“Yes, Satanic. You know Faust? Sold his soul to the devil, and in Goethe’s version of the legend, the one everyone reads, what did Faust translate logos as? Action.”

An ululation punctuated David’s last word. A trick of the mist? Impossible.

There was a shadow. Wait. Not a shadow. A lamprey, going by the row upon row of barbs in its cyclostome maw. It writhed on six gray-green tentacles that branched from its long eel body and shivered over one another. There was no guessing how it would move. Pius’s visor didn’t bother trying to interpret. But when it glided—first laterally, then zigzagging nearer—he sensed the hair-raising splendor of it.

Pius met its eyes last. Enormous eyes, mad with hunger, obsidian like Snarky’s, but there the resemblance ended. Behind those eyes was only instinct and lithe machinery. Pius wasn’t a person, not even an alien. He was a meal.

His arm shot up reflexively. His suit smacked the lamprey with a fore-tentacle. The ghastly thing stumbled. Never before had it chanced upon prey so large as a human in a Thulhu-suit.

Ululation on his other side, higher-pitched. A second silhouette, slimmer than the first and mist-gray. He supposed it was female, though sexing the squirmy horrors was beyond his ken.

Distantly he worried the Thulhus wouldn’t know to flee. They couldn’t hear the struggle, and if they could see down from the rise (the mist was thinning), they’d only recognize him if he moved. Zora had said they could see nothing else. Pius swung his arm, but the tentacle only curled upward like a wounded soldier.

What was he doing? He may stand as tall as two Thulhus, but a tentacle lashing from a Thulhu cult was just the price of a meal as far as these lampreys were concerned. Pius unholstered his handgun.

David was already firing at the putative male. Pius anticipated the snap of discharge, a misted vapor trail, a gory hole, perhaps ricochet.

Nothing. No explosion. Either David’s gun jammed, or …

Experimentally, Pius fired. Again nothing. He cursed Murk and didn’t chastise himself for cursing. David hadn’t checked for dry munitions, and Pius had been too distracted to think of it.

David tested his balance on just his back hind-tentacles and bellowed at the top of his lungs. He struck with his two free hind-tentacles. But the female had already drawn back. She hadn’t bargained for a plus-sized Thulhu rearing like a hellion ripe from the pit.

The male drifted into the mist after her.

“Think they’ll stay gone?” asked David.

“The Thulhus!” Pius scrambled up the rise, his damaged fore-tentacle dangling uselessly behind.

“Pius, you can’t dive in like that!” David called after him. “We’re here to interview, not interfere with the natural order.”

“We already interfered! Our arguing led them here.”

On the top of the rise, where the mist was thinner, the male had one of the Thulhus pinned. It slurped down a tentacle of the subdued Thulhu, its maw twisting savagely. The Thulhu’s four free tentacles languished.

Three Thulhu males—men—darted forward, but the female lamprey stalked side to side, warding them back. The ghostly women Thulhus planted young on their backsides and fled through the slackening mist.

Just one option. Pius flung himself toward the male. His hind-tentacles whipped in pairs, propelling him forward. Just as he was above the male, he dropped his shoulder, making his abortive disobedient-other gesture. The side of his suit sagged; everything tilted on top of the lamprey.

Pius had the male pinned, but it maneuvered his damaged fore-tentacle into its mouth. How long until it gobbled something vital?

Whether inspired by Pius’s dive or rankled over their fallen brother, the Thulhus rallied. Two lost tentacles to twisting lamprey maw, but they assailed the female relentlessly.

David reared again, and the female slunk away even without the mist to cloak its retreat.

Pius almost cried out but didn’t. The male still savored his Thulhu-suit fore-tentacle. A shout might divert it.

David didn’t need to be told, and he didn’t hesitate. Balancing on his fore-tentacles, he flexed two hind-tentacles and strangled the male until it was dead.

*     *     *
The Thulhu men parted, revealing their fallen brother, Snarky. His obsidian eyes opened and closed listlessly, alive but only just. One of his fore-tentacles lifted and fell, lifted and fell again. Once Pius would have thought this wavering a spasm, but now he’d imbibed enough of Thulhu gesturing to know its cadence.

“Distance,” his visor flared. “Distance and clarity”—Snarky’s fore-tentacles went limp and rose again—“is a good way for the world to end.”

Snarky couldn’t see the night or the dead lamprey. But with the mist pulled away, Snarky saw the scrambling forms of the women and young shuffling farther up the rise. The other men gestured safety and calm. Danger was past. Knowing that, he would die, his every thought winking into oblivion, and the world would end soundlessly with him. Such is the boundless egoism of a Thulhu.

Pius could offer some gesture of apology. This wasn’t chance predation; the aliens were to blame. But how could Snarky forgive—or blame—a stranger that, to him, had no more reality than a dream? He whispered evenly, feelingly into his mouthpiece.

“Do you believe we exist now? Or is it still just you?” His suit gestured the message, compensating for the defunct fore-tentacle by use of the hind-tentacle nearest.

“Alien, it was never just about me.” Perhaps he meant it, or maybe Snarky was snarky until the last.

The other men crowded around Snarky while the women and young snaked through the clear air to join the men. Pius and David withdrew to let the Thulhus tend to their dead.

One of the women settled beside Snarky’s body. One by one, she and all the Thulhus careened their necks. Thulhu-suit flashlights cut the dark, but for the Thulhus, the darkness was total. For them, nothing moved, not Aletheia cloud-wreathed and bluely luminous overhead, neither the stars, peepholes into heaven.

In unison, the Thulhus raised their right fore-tentacles in the trumpeting salute, which meant one-beyond-mist, the translation software’s coinage, its attempt at God.

The woman beside Snarky felt over his body, at last raising one of his limp fore-tentacles high.

Why salute? What is the night to them in its static splendor? They had no comprehension of Aletheia waltzing around Murk too slowly for a mortal eye to recognize. They saw only motion, action. Pius followed the arch of their tentacles, passing over Aletheia, the jewel of the panorama according to a human way of seeing.

A fat star twinkled, shifting beneath a film of atmosphere, in sullen majesty near the pole where Murk’s axis processed limitlessly off into space.

Did they know that star, have a name and rank for it in their pantheon of pagan gods? They could, even though these moments of clarity and distance were rare.

Whatever their mythology, they had their wonder. That was enough.

Pius recalled, in the Book of Acts, the account of Paul’s preaching to Greek Stoic philosophers, the most prominent philosophical tradition from which John borrowed logos, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

*     *     *
David and Pius started back, shoulder to shoulder, enfolded everywhere by mist, which to them was different from forgetfulness.

“Next time we grab dry rounds,” said Pius.

“We could have scared both off if you hadn’t keeled over on top of one.”

“Heh, even so.”

David agreed with silence, and after a longer silence, “I shouldn’t have called your translation Satanic.”

“I know you didn’t mean it.”

“It’s not that, I mean it wasn’t fair. Faust just happened to settle on the same translation as you, and he’s just a man in a story.”

“But he had reasons for translating logos as action, right?”

“Faust says that the Holy Spirit moved him, and maybe it did.”

“And maybe it was Satan,” Pius allowed.

“Who can say? I think you made the right choice for the Prabhakarins, though.”

“And now we need to make the right choice for the Thulhus.”

“Any ideas?”

Pius spoke into his mouthpiece, “In the beginning was the Gesture …”