“It’s the Earth.”

     “I see,” the voice asks.  “Why do you look at it like that?”

     “Never been there.  I wonder what it’s like.”

     “Is it that special to you?”

     “When Terra was attacked by the Chai’mekha, they downed the
old Earth’s End somewhere over San Francisco.  They also hit
places like Washington, D.C., Peking, and London.  When they
got near Terra, the Spacers immediately began to evacuate the
people of the major cities.  Ever since my ancestors were
evacuated, no Astrid has ever been back there.”

     “Two hundred and seventy some years?”

     “Something like that.”

     “What’s got you thinking?”  The voice is able to see what
happens inside the young woman’s mind.  His voice might just be
the closest thing she has to a real father.

     “What do you mean?”  The young woman asks.

     “You look more thoughtful than usual.  You seem a little
downcast, too.”

     “Are you company?”  The young woman asks.

     “Why?”  The man asks.

     “Because misery loves company.  So I think that you’re
company, if you want to know about what I’m thinking.”

     “Penny for your thoughts?”  The man fumbles his fingers into
his pockets and locates the appropriate one.  He produces a small
piece of copper, stamped with the likeness of some person from a
long long time ago.

     “I’m pondering what my life means.”  The piece of copper
changes hands.  “I’m scared about something too.”  She pauses.

     “Pennies are worth a little more than that,” the man chides.

     “Five hundred year old?”

     “It will be soon.”

     “I’ll tell you more,” she says.  “I’ve been manipulated.  Nine
years of my life haven’t belonged to me.”

     “How so?”

     “I have been genetically altered, specially trained, and I have
been given a family that is not really mine.  I have a million
questions now, and not a single answer.”

     “Why do you search for these answers?”

     The young woman stares back down at the penny, somehow
preserved from the passage of many decades.  It serves no purpose
anymore, and it has no ability to unlock any memories in the
woman.  She ponders it anyway.  It does not offer any answers to
the question the man has put to her.

     “I search for the answers to why this happened.  I ask myself
now, every night since I found out.  One full month has gone by,
and I can’t sleep it off.  Each time I lay down, that question
confronts me, and I can’t figure it out.”

     “Maybe you need some help.”

     “Maybe I do.  Maybe I do not.”

     “Maybe that penny I gave you is philotic to you.  Keep it for
good luck.  Maybe it’ll be all the help you need.”

     “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

     “You gave me a two-sided answer when I said you might need
some help.  Do you think that you need help sorting this out?” 
The man’s voice seems genuinely concerned.

     “I feel... cold.  It’s like I’ve been living in a computer--like I’ve
been--programmed.”

     “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”

     “There is.  I had a talk with an Admiral just before I began to
lose my sleep.  He told me this: the reason behind my
self-questioning is because they have aimed my training toward
the ‘why’ in everything.  Like why have I been treated like this? 
Why did they need to do this to me?  Why haven’t they told me
anything?”  She slips her right hand under the vest of her uniform
and feels for her heartbeat.  She finds it.  Her heart feels about as
worried as her mind does.

     “You have been programmed to think along the lines which
they have trained you to think?”

     “Not that I can see.  Some of it must already be with me, unless
it’s just more of their handiwork.”  She leans against the rail by the
viewport.

     “Maybe they trained you to ask why just so that they could get
you to consistently break away from the constraints of comfort. 
‘Why’ is often the toughest question to ask.  Science is all about it. 
Religion has to do with it, but it claims knowledge of an answer,
which is often found only with long periods of thought, and
usually trial.  But neither has ever supplied all of the answers to all
of the questions, or there would be no need to have either of the
two disciplines.”

     “How do you figure that?”  Astrid switches the discussion to
the direction the man has taken.

     “Religion is like the science of the heart.  It concerns itself with
the metaphysical more than the physical.  It focuses on the study
of a person’s soul, and on how eternal salvation can be attained. 
Even though it focuses like that, it has one overarching purpose: to
love, serve and put faith in God.”

     “And science?”

     “It is like a religion of the mind.  It concerns itself more with
the physical than the metaphysical.  Science tends to focus more
on how to solve a problem or how to explain something.  I tend to
choose religion over science, because it is eternal and science will
pass away.”

     “Maybe this penny is more philotic to you than it is to me,”
Astrid proffers the ancient coin to the man.

     “No.  It’s yours.  ‘Keep the change,’ is how it would be said
during the time these coins were regular currency.”  Her right hand
elevates the penny to eye level in its palm.  Her green eye stares
the tiny face in the eye, but the profile takes no notice of it.  Even
though the green iris is already as wide as the coin itself, the tiny
profile regards it not.  The right hand brings the coin down and
deposits it in a pocket on the inside of the vest.

     “I’m stuck with this.  The Admiral said I’d have to know about
this some time or another, so he decided that now was my time to
know that I am a project.  That no choice I made would have
amounted to anything.”

     “Sure?”  The man asks.  “You must have had some choice in
this matter.  You must have done something somewhere which
was not influenced by them.”

     “Have I?”  The woman finally turns to face the man.  It’s dark
in the observation deck, where Terra half fills the giant view of the
cosmos.  Her face is but a shadow, but there are two milky white
circles.  They are her green eyes.  There are also tiny almost
spidery weblike patterns of silver beneath them.  The teary
tapestries are still forming.

     “My mind has been filled with Plato, Socrates, Wilde.  I’ve
been fed with Kant, Einstein, and Hemmingway.  I have drank
from Homer, Hamilton, and Freud, and sampled a taste of Hume. 
Maybe a tiny, tiny sip of Kierkegaard.
     “I’ve been programmed to ask questions, but why?  I’ve been
constructed to think outside the normal modes of thought, to orient
myself in total silence and solitude.”

     “Is that isolation so bad?”

     “When I have had no choice?  Yes.  Do you know that a long
time ago, a telescope on Terra was damaged?  They had to find a
suitable repairman to fix it.  The one who was found was locked
into a small dark room to think of how to make the proper repairs. 
Do you know who that repair man was?”

     “Not off hand, no.”

     “The repair man was actually a specimen of invertabrate from
the class of arthropods known of as arachnids.  They had a
common spider repair the cross hairs of their telescope with its
own web.
     “Do you know what?  I feel a lot like that spider would have.  I
feel like I’ve been in a tiny little room all my life, and now I’ve
been let go.  There’s something they need me for, and I can’t think
of what it could possibly be.  All I know is that I have got to find
out why.”

     “Sounds like a long search is beginning.”

     “Could you please help me?”

     “How may I?”

     “Pray for me.  All this time, I’ve clung to God, knowing that He
does have the answers that I need.  But now--”  Edlyn Astrid turns
away from the man to fill her eyes with the view of Terra.

     “Now?”

     “I am afraid.  I’m scared--”

     The man does not need to ask what she’s scared about.  Her
shoulders quake a bit.  Instead, he tells her what she is afraid of:

     “You are afraid that they have made you question God?”  The
man still phrases it as a question, and the young woman answers:

     “I am afraid that they will.  I’m scared that I won’t be able to
stop them.  Just because they let the spider out so it could repair
the telescope.  They didn’t let it out to set it free.  I’m afraid that
they’ll open up the door to the box, and let me go out and find
what they’re afraid of looking for.”

     “What have they been looking for?”  The man steps back into
view.  Astrid shakes her head.

     “I haven’t got a clue what it may be.  They have been telling me
and the others that we have to be ready.  They keep on telling us
that something is coming and we have to be ready, and that we
could be the last line of defense for the Union of Planetary
Republics.”

     “If you are, then I pray that God watches over you and over all
of us.”

     “I’ve prayed the same thing night after night since then,” Astrid
says, “But I don’t know whether or not my heart is right with
Him.”

     “Maybe you need to get a closer look at that penny I gave you,
then.”

     “Why?”

     “Not why,” the man says, “just do it, please.”

     Astrid recovers the penny from the pocket in her vest.  She
again looks at it.

     “You saw the face on it?”

     “I did when you first gave it to me.  Is there anything else I
should see?”

     “There should be words on both sides.”

     “I’m sorry I couldn’t make them out,” Astrid says.  From
another pocket in her vest, she produces a pair of spectacles.  She
unfolds them and perches them over the bridge of her nose.  Then
she brings the penny close enough to actually read.

     “What do you see?”

     “It says: ‘The United States of America,’ and ‘E. pluribus
unum.’  Let me turn it over,” Astrid says.  She turns it over so she
can see the face on the coin.

     “What does it say there?”

     “It says: ‘In God we trust,’”  Astrid answers.

     “Do you?”

     “Do I trust Him?”

     “Do you?”

     Astrid looks the man in the eyes.

     “I’m sorry.  It is a hard question to answer.  Sometimes, even I
falter.  I don’t actually expect an immediate answer from you, and
I knew beforehand not to get my hopes up.

     “It’s just that I felt that the question needed to be asked.”

     “I don’t know what to say.”

     “That’s normal.  That kind of question tends to hit people
between the eyes, where they can’t see it coming.  Perhaps I could
ask it like this: ‘Has there been anything in the past that has shown
you that God really is there for you?’  Can you answer me now?”

     “It was two years ago, when I was fifteen.  I had a talk with
Admiral Pon.  He explained everything to me.  About the deaths of
my parents, about my induction into the State Parenting Program,
about my ‘adoption’ by two people.
     “I found out that both of my parents had died when I was not
even two years old.  They both died in an accident, when the ship
we were aboard was hit by an asteroid as it left hyperspace.  They
had been working in the engine room to help people evacuate
when that section of the ship decompressed.  They never made it
out.
     “I had always thought that my adopted parents were my real
parents, because I couldn’t remember my real parents.  When I
found out, I thought that they didn’t love me.  I thought that my
brother didn’t love me anymore.  And I thought that it was because
I had done something wrong.
     “But Mom told me that it wasn’t right to think that, because
everyone had loved me.  And she also said: ‘You haven’t done
anything to make us start loving you, and you can’t do anything to
make us stop.’  Mom and Dad had heard of the orphaned child
brought from off the Anabelle, the one who had been carried away
from the ship crying for her parents.  They told me of what a joy it
was to pick me up at the orphanage.  Even though they said that
they had been chosen by a state agency to raise me, they learned
all about me, and they did it all because they loved me.  When
Mom and Dad were finished reassuring me, I could see Dad cry. 
And that was when I knew that God was like them, that He loved
me from the very first moment of my existence and that I couldn’t
do anything to make Him stop.”

     “Now, is it all right if I ask you do you trust Him?”

     “I know that He was there to help me.  I know that even though
I never got to know my real Mother and Father, God still blessed
me with two loving parents.”

     “You trusted Him then.  You can still do it now.  Admiral Pon
made you question who you were by making you question who
your parents were.  What you told me is that you found an answer
to that question.  If another Admiral brings you to a question of do
you or do you not believe in God, you know that He loved you
before and He still does now, and whatever you do will not make
Him stop loving you.”

     “I guess you’re right,” the woman says.  “But I still feel worried
about what’s going to happen.”

     “Have you ever grown any taller from worrying?”

     “No.  Why?”

     “Do you think you’ll get to live longer from worrying?”

     “Not really.  But why are you asking?”

     “Because Jesus says that you aren’t going to get anything good
from worrying.  Tomorrow will have enough worries for itself. 
Trust in Him, and He will take care of you.”

     “You know what?”

     “What?”

     “Look.  If they send me out on a ship or anything like that,
would you be interested in being a Counselor or an advisor or
something?”

     “You don’t have to repay me for the talk we had, if that’s what
you’re getting at.”

     “No.  Thank you very much, sir.  But, I’ve just got this, like,
feeling in me that’s saying: ‘they’re going to put you on a ship.’ 
And I know it’s what they’re going to do with me.”

     “So you’ve taken the test?”

     “Yeah.  And a bunch of Admirals got to talking with me
afterward.  I know that they’ll send me out on a ship, I just don’t
know which one or what, and I’d like to have you aboard if you
didn’t mind.”

     “Where the Lord leads, I will follow.  I’ll ask Him about it
tonight, when I pray for you.  Also, may I ask your name?  I know
God knows who I’m talking about when I pray, but I feel better
knowing a name.”

     “My name is Edlyn Astrid.  What’s yours?”

     “I’m Eduardo Raimirez.  I work as a chaplain here at Earth’s
End Spaceport.”

     “Thanks.  I know it sounds odd, but I know that I’ve got some
other things to do, you know, errands to run and Admirals to talk
with.  So I’ve gotta go do that before they close their offices.  It’s
been good talking to you, and I feel a whole lot better.  Thank
you.”

     “You’re welcome.”

     The young woman begins to leave the room, but she stops.  She
turns around and waves to him.  He waves back, and she smiles. 
And then she’s gone.