The Trapping of the Ceteroquin: Finale

This is the fifteenth - and final - part of The Trapping of the Ceteroquin. This story appears in full in M/U's 2020 speculative fiction anthology, Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and will be run as a serial online every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months and each entry can easily be found here. To read this in its entirety, along with all of the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.

When the Ceteroquin left the universe and went to the no-place of blank light, everyone who had been sleeping was jolted awake, and though most of them did not have windows in their quarters, they all could sense the white light, visualizing it in their minds and feeling sure that they had left one plane and entered another. They did not succumb to horror, did not experience acute suffering, did not even lose their minds in the manner of Captain Hancock. Instead, they remained rooted to their beds (or in Laura’s case her floor; in Dr. Frietag’s case, his chair), unable to move or even to conjure the desire to fix or fight whatever this was.

If it even needed fixing or warranted fighting. 

If it wasn’t just another thing, another part of the way that it is.

*

Nick was not asleep at the time of this shift; he alone aside from the Captain had anticipated it. But unlike the Captain – perhaps because this was his area of expertise – he remained focused, centered, balanced, and in control. 

He’d had to get there first, of course, having retired to his room, like the rest of them, in shame and high-frequency doubt. He too was embarrassed at his conduct, even if he was sure he hadn’t acquitted himself as badly as some of the others. He was a trained expert in spiritual and religious health and he’d behaved contrary to everything he knew and everything he’d been taught. 

Plus, he realized, it was probable that everyone felt someone else, or everyone else, to have acted worse than themselves. 

It’s always someone else.

But that didn’t really matter. The only way to correct a dereliction of training and duty was through a vigorous return to and refuge within that very training and duty – not in the further dereliction of self-pity and despair or even exhaustion. 

Did he believe in all these things that defined the course and content of his life?

He did.

He was no false priest. 

And if it were so, if his faith were in fact as well as in word true, it is in such times of failure and danger and uncertainty that the fundamentals of the Group and of the Mysteries themselves were to be most relied upon – even if it were also in such times that following the teachings becomes the most difficult.

And so, arms outstretched, he had presented himself before his altar and all his patron spirits and saints, the venerated ancestors, and the deified currents that slither as though riding the highways of space, and he began to pray.

He lost himself here, went outside himself, above himself, beyond, deep, out. And there he prayed. He kept going, and he prayed. He had just managed to expand his energetic being outward to encompass all the ship, such that he could see and feel all within it and all their varied states, inside and out, when he saw – and he did indeed see it – the ship get removed from the cosmos and dropped into the no-place of the pale white glow. 

Having thus undergone the mysterious process of the mini-ordeal, he was able to find himself, able to stand to his feet and to get to work. 

And he was steady

He began to prepare the Sacrament of the Mysteries, the very core of what made their mission unlawful. He ran through the proper sequence of incantations and illuminations, of scents, and, of course, of the consumption of the Mystery itself. This normally took over an hour, at least before the effects of the Sacrament would be perceptible, but in this case, the change was instantaneous. 

So oriented, he gathered his supplies, removed the robe he still wore and headed out into the hallway. 

*

Laura was still pinned to her floor, lost in what had become borderline-ecstasy of this non-place, and though she couldn’t even really turn to see, she was aware that her door was opening and she felt that it was Nick. 

Immediately, she knew why he was there, and she was in that moment released from the floor. She knew what this was. This was everything, the way, the reason they were on this ship. She stood to face the priest, her disheveled undergarments still on, the way she had left them, with a great deal exposed. She removed them and stepped up to the priest, who kissed her passionately, passing with his lips and tongue the substance of the Mystery from his mouth to hers – and they were then joined together. Though they stood nude, bodies pressed together, there was no consummate sexual act; the sacramental union took place on a bigger scope, a higher plane, it was both a form of penetration and consummation and it did include sex but also far more. 

Thus merged, they walked hand in hand to get Ben and Molly and complete with them in turn this mystical consummation, and then the four went to get the doctor and Frank Mario and the novitiates, who suddenly knew themselves absolved of their folly.

The Captain had sensed them coming, realizing – despite his area of expertise – what was now about to happen. He was waiting disrobed when they entered the control room, forming a circle, hands held, to complete the ritual.

Nick knew (on whatever level he was still just Nick) he had never presided over such a High Rite as this, and that none of the others had experienced it either, and that taking such an outward and inward sign of faith into existence was an irreversible thing.

But who – he wondered, as did all of them – would want to reverse it?

As their own multiplanar light answered that of the non-place white, they came, slowly, to believe that the cosmos itself had returned around them. 

The ship was in space again, and all of them had come home.