DATE: Year 487-A, Day 3

  LOCATION: Cupertino Cathedral (Qaddafi Mars Authority territory)

  News of the terrorist attack at the Hotel Florida spread fast, if somewhat inaccurately. The death toll in some initial reports was as high as 20,000, which would have been more than the entire population of the Hotel. Nevertheless, while the original explosion occurred on the top floor, structural damage from lack of maintenance brought the fire to several other floors, and inadequate exits turned much of the interior into a death trap. Several thousand people died or were presumed dead, and other hotel residents started a search and rescue operation that lasted weeks before turning into a scavenging and scrapping operation.

  It had been the largest single day loss of life in the solar system since the last war, and with the precipitous decline in the population recorded through several generations of relative peacetime made the Hotel Florida attack that much more a story of interest for people who otherwise didn’t pay attention to the news elsewhere on their planet, moon, asteroid or space station, let alone on one in a totally different part of the solar system.

  It was a Sunday, and on Mars the Cupertino Cathedral was as packed as it had been seven days earlier for Easter services, with believers once again travelling hundreds of kilometers across Mars to worship at the oldest church on Mars, named after Saint Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of space travelers.

  It had been a small structure when it was put up in the first wave of settlement on Mars, which was not successful, and the site was used to establish a church with the same name. Eventually, it became the seat of the diocese on Mars, and after the Rip, the primary church authority, whose head was called, at first derisively but eventually with fondness, the Space Pope.

  The church kept a seven-day week for its calendar, but while humans held on to the convention at first, by the time of the Rip the eight day week, 86 of which fit neatly into a Martian year, had already largely taken over. Unable to become accustomed to the concept of a 688-day year, however, after the Rip, when the Earth calendar became a complete fiction except for religious purposes, the Martian year was divided into 2, an A for the spring and summer and a B for the fall and winter, its 344 day length approximating what humans felt as the Earth year.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Pope Martin XII celebrated the mass. It had been so well attended because people wanted to mourn the dead, and because they were afraid of the reports, less substantiated and less believed, of dragons over the hotel. Could they have been fire-breathing dragons?

  Martin didn’t address the issue at first, talking about the loss of life and warning the people not to go looking for monsters to blame. A lot of suspicion had been laid on the Martian Trading Corporation for the Hotel Florida bombing. The MTC had made an offer to purchase the hotel outright from the Saganites the year before, looking for a foothold in the Jovian system after several failed attempts. Along with the church, the MTC was one of the oldest institutions in human society, tracing its lineage back to the CAMC, although the link was debated and question. It often placed the two institutions on the same side of political divides. The pope didn’t want the people to look at the MTC like a monster.

  He didn’t mention the reports of the actual monsters, the dragons, but told a story about a saint who had had a vision of the Virgin Mary on a planet, with rays of the sun coming from her hands, and said she’d been told to forge a medal of that vision, a medal that even now was still being struck and worn in the hopes of a miracles.

  -Visions, too, he said, could be shared. And here, too, we shouldn’t look for monsters.

  Then he started to talk about visions of aliens, the stories space travelers have told since the first humans came out into space, always airy visions. There had been sightings of aliens and their ships on Earth, too, he explained, stand-ins for the angels and demons humans could no longer see.

  -But it’s not so with aliens, Martin continued. God gave humans dominion over the Earth, and we lost it. Creator of the universe is he, but he gave us dominion only over the Earth. We’re in borrowed space, on borrowed time.

  He ended abruptly, pausing and moving on to the next part of the mass.