Teraphim

I found my teraphim at a consignment antique shop two years ago. A curious little statue shaped like a round-headed gnome about the size of my hand, it’s carved from ivory and covered in a strange velvety material that’s cool to the touch. I suspected it was special the first time I saw it. I knew for sure when it began to talk to me.

 

At first, I feared for my sanity, but then my husband told me he, too, had conversations with it — talks about the most meaningful and important things in our lives. The teraphim asked questions that were probing and revealing, and as we built trust, its advice quickly took on the power of commandments. My husband and I were never very religious, but we began thinking of it as our household god, like in the Bible.

 

I mentioned it to a friend (leaving out the talking part), and she found a similar object at the pawnshop. Then she told a few others, and before long, they began popping up everywhere. Soon, everybody had one. I’m sure they were all aware of how significant those trendy trinkets were, but we never discussed them.

 

My husband and I developed separate relationships with the teraphim. Mine was special, private, intimate even. Caressing the talisman opened my heart to my god like kneeling before an altar. I kept it in my nightstand drawer, but my husband would regularly borrow it and retreat to the guest room or the toilet to pray to it behind closed doors.

 

It helped me understand. It knew things about the past, current events, and even things that had not happened yet. I had never tried very hard to make sense of it all, but with the teraphim’s guidance, I began to grasp the truth. It explained the meanings of things, interpreted facts for me, and gave me a moral framework to decide what was right and wrong with the world.

 

And there was plenty wrong with the world. Outside our little household, no one seemed to care anymore. Everyone judged everyone else and found them wanting. They’d all become morons and infidels.

 

The planet suffered from our lack of ability to work together. Infrastructure began to crumble. Electronic communications all but disappeared. The teraphim explained to me this was the inevitable fruit of an immoral society. My former friends and family had all become sinners, and would undoubtedly suffer eternal damnation. For that reason, we no longer spoke with anyone outside the house.

 

Last night, my god told me even my husband had become a sinner. It said he had been unfaithful to me in his thoughts, and, worse, disobeyed the teraphim’s commandments. This angered me at first. But then it helped me understand the ultimate truth, that all I needed to be happy in this life were my faith and my god.

 

Seraphim

Training Supervisor Ra’kna strode the entire length of the space cruiser Prospector II. The enormous ship was barely small enough to hide behind Earth’s moon where the Seraphim had concealed it for the last few solar years. As he approached the call bank, he tapped Lor’stad, the new call answerer, on his shoulder.

 

Lor’stad turned and, in formal Seraph, said, “Syg’la raasti, Ra’kna.”

 

“English!” demanded the supervisor.

 

Lor’stad’s skin glowed red and yellow as if it were on fire, and the six serrated skin flaps along his spine twitched nervously. He said, “Apologies, supervisor. I am currently not connected with my human.”

 

In a calmer but still authoritative voice, Ra’kna said, “Remember your training, young Lor’stad. You are to speak in the aliens’ tongue whenever you are on duty, even if you are not answering a prayer. When your internship concludes, you will have many aliens to guide. We can’t afford even the slightest slip-up now that we’re so close to our goal.”

 

“Certainly, sir. May I ask you a question, sir?”

 

“Of course. What is it?”

 

“Why do we go to all this trouble, this subterfuge?” The trainee pronounced the last word slowly and carefully.

 

“You mean, why don’t we blast them to dust and be done with it instead of pretending to be their gods?”

 

“We are a Tor’lean class battle cruiser, sir.”

 

“We are a prospecting ship, Lor’stad, that happens to be heavily armed. We want the humans’ planet; we need it. But we are not barbarians. If we should kill them all and sanitize Earth, it would be many generations before it is usable again. It might never recover.

 

“When we first arrived, we saw humans possessed an essential fault in their natures, one we could exploit to clean them off their planet without committing genocide ourselves. They had already established more than four thousand different systems of religious faith. Many of those believed the others were evil and their adherents should be damned for all eternity or put to death. Or both!”

 

Puzzled, Lor’stad said, “But we’re making that worse by creating more suspicion and division among humans. Won’t that isolation cause them to continue to fight each other? They also have the means to destroy their planet, do they not?”

 

“That was a risk in the beginning, but not anymore.”

 

Ra’kna nodded toward the array of boxes spread throughout the call bank, each connected to a small transceiver on Earth, not much more complex than the wireless ear pods the humans wore. He said, “We guide them to accelerate their natural tendency toward ideological fragmentation. We are now approaching the limit, where every individual has their own set of beliefs, their own ideology, their own distinct morality. And with no shared set of facts or common reality, they can no longer cooperate to build structures or grow food or govern themselves or form countries…”

 

“Or wage global war,” Lor’stad finished the thought.

 

“Exactly. So humanity will die. Not because of our bang, but its own whimper. And this will occur within only one of our generations. Then the planet will be ours.”