Weekly Writing – February 4 2023

She had spent the morning in most of her EV suit, and in prayer. In her quarters, covering her bases in a way that would have horrified, scandalized, and, worst of all, deeply disappointed the Catholic grandmother who had raised her.
But in space, in a ship so cramped and sparse that ‘bed’ was a wall-mounted set of straps and even the recyclers were recycled, rattly old aluminum, all they had room for was practicality. And practicality said there were fourteen thousand four hundred and fifty nine known religions in the universe, disqualifying sects so small that they couldn’t even be heard piping up to say ‘What about us?’. And within those religions, there was a fluid and truly ridiculous number of gods. Some of them had proven themselves capable of miracles by dint of being suns or lucky chemical reactions, and thus laying claim to creating life from lifelessness. Some were all the horror of viruses or hard vacuum, the sort you prayed to be saved from, or for them to spare you.
None had been proven to actually hear or answer prayers, except in whatever ways their physical natures might consistently react to sound waves, pleas spoken aloud. But some said the last person to set foot on a new planet had been proof otherwise.
A worshipper of some flickering little blue dwarf deity that probably hadn’t been responsible for anything but not saving them. They’d let themself down from their shuttle’s ladder, one small step, and had toppled over dead in the new dust.
Not quite instantly. Between their foot touching the planet’s surface and their collapse, immortalized by the shuttle’s grainy exterior camera, there had been time for them to say two words. Immortalized by the recorder in their helmet – please, no.
Spoken with pitiful terror, but not surprise. She hadn’t heard anywhere near fourteen thousand four hundred and fifty nine guesses as to what could have happened to them, but she’d heard enough.
It didn’t have to be that many. Most gods were provincial, or sentimental, or otherwise obviously disqualified somehow. By her reckoning, she couldn’t have more than a thousand to apologize to or ask protection from before her own step down onto that not-quite-new dust.
She would just have to hope, moving on to number three hundred and twenty two, that it wasn’t something previously uncounted, undiscovered, waiting for her outside.