The lamb
Green stands before me like a sacrificial lamb.
The report on my desk says he’s lived a good life, hurt no one – in fact, tried to make the universe a better place.
But I also have a report that questions his purity.
Most illegal aliens are easy to detect.
Even those children of mixed relationship usually show signs of abnormality, some alien trait that gives them away.
Yet some mixes are very hard to detect.
Even blood tests and DNA won’t confirm or deny it, leaving me and priests like me to decide.
Sometimes at times like these I question my own faith.
How could God in His infinite wisdom have allowed races to intermingle.
This is not a new quandary for moral men like me.
The ancient Greeks once assumed human beings could mingle in such a way with more earthly animals.
For them it was easy to tell since in most cases monster emerged, showing the moral wrongness in the act which created them.
God, fortunately, wisely made animals separate from man.
While some fools still engaged in sinful acts, no offspring resulted.
So as the Greeks did in their day, I eye Green for some sign of monstrousness that will allow me to condemn him to death.
I talk with him, and he speaks with the same reverence for God as I have, perhaps more.
I look in his eyes and see no evil or sign of animal nature.
Yet in my heart, I suspect the worse and fear to let him loose certain that he has horns behind his halo.
I pray to God and admire the wisdom of the Greeks, who like my early Christian brethren, believed all living beings have souls, but only human beings have immortal souls.
The trick, of course, is to tell the difference.
The Greeks, except in theory, never resolved the dilemma.
My Christian brethren resorted to torture.
Freud and his ilk, despite their misconception that no fundamental difference existed between man and animal, gave us the tools to find an answer.
I begin the process on Green, injecting him with chemicals before I begin psycho analysis, do delve deep into his mind where I might find the roots of his racial identity.
Our process, however, differs from those the good Doctor used in the past.
I put on a helmet that allows me to see and feel what Green sees and feels.
I am always reluctant to go this far for fear that I might lose myself inside the other being.
Indeed, for moments, I do not know which part of is me and which is Green’s though I do not recognize many of those thoughts that are clearly day to day thinking in Green.
This confusion only grows worse as we slip into his subconscious, rummaging around in that swamp of unexpressed desires typical of ordinary humans, love of mother, hate of father, the mindless impulses that hide behind even the more innocent of acts.
I am confused, wondering again as I take this journey how anyone could believe after seeing all this, how God could have created man in his own image.
Perhaps having done this job for so long I have grown immune to the shock seeing all the filth that even ordinary people carry around in our heads.
It is only human.
And this only makes me admire Green all the more because has in his conscious life kept from allowing these demons out where lesser men have failed.
Men such as Green restore my faith because God has given men like him the ability to overcome their own limitation.
I only wish I could be so good as Green seems.
Now, I have only one place left to explore though I am comfortable in the belief that Green is human.
Very few have left no trace this deep that fails to reveal them, so I have no doubt that when I reach the most deep place, when I reach the level at which I touch upon archetypical memories common to all men, Green shall come up clean as well.
I’m jolted to a half by some barrier I have never encountered before in anyone – alien or human, and the impact causes me pain.
I can vaguely sense something very, very alien beyond the better, though I cannot quite see what it is.
I hear a voice – Green’s voice – inside my head, telling me there are places even holy people like me should not go.
I am so scared that even my faith abandons me, and I retrace my mental steps in a panic to escape – out, out from this place, this mind that makes me feel so small and insignificant.
I take off the helmet and turn off the machine. I stare down at the small screen where a computer has recorded the whole journey.
Others, I know, will review this all.
Others will make a determination I know I can never make.
Green wakes, and smiles, and asks if I found all I needed to know.
How can I tell him I know what he is?
How – when all is said and done he proves more alien than any alien we have yet encountered – can I, a man of the cloth, order an execution I know will kill God?