The Token Irishman- Day 474: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: token

"The Token Catholic"

source: a photo collage by Miles Kean

Our crew was diverse,

highly skilled, trained to face every kind of adversity except one: how did we get stuck with the token Catholic? When Kevin's Comet struck Palestine and obliterated the Holy Land, all the surviving Jews on Earth had been relocated to their own planet in another galaxy. Muslims colonized a new world of their own in a galaxy far, far from the Jews. Catholics had been falling by the wayside for a long time as the pagans of Old Rome regained popularity, but of course, we didn't get a token pagan. Of all the fringe minorities who'd escaped FUTU, Fundamental Unifiying Theory of the Universe, we got the Catholic.

He was young and green,

with nothing but optimism and perpetual faith that all things work out for the better because God in his infinite wisdom is at the helm. No amount of reason would dislodge the lad from his invisible god--who was as dead as the Viking-ish gods we were on a mission to dethrone.

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Leif O'Leary has Viking DNA,

Leandra told me. That was why he made the cut. It didn't matter that he frolicked like a puppy when we reached the snowy beaches of Eisregen, where low gravity allowed us to run in slow motion and rise, rise, hover, and slowly touch down again the way humans had done in dreams during REM sleep for thousands of years. Leif O'Leary spent more time on the beach bouncing dreamily than he did watching the video footage of the natives.

He should have known better. That damned optimism and self-assurance and Catholic joy. We had ignorant savages to convert to reason or get out of the way

Two teams before us had gone to meet the Eisregenites. It is no easy task to enlighten an ignorant bunch who lived like Earth's long-ago Vikings. Violent, superstitious, rapacious, greedy, they were straight out of an Old World history book. DNA tests showed them to be kin to Iceland natives, supporting the theory that UFOs really had scouted Earth thousands of years before, collecting humans to populate new worlds. Maybe we'd find the gods of Egypt still being worshipped in some desert world lightyears away. Judaism and Islam had been almost eradicated in the Old World, but a small faction of Catholic mystics had never gone extinct. Most had colonized to their own planet, but like dormant seeds sprouting up in disturbed soil, new Catholics continued to pop up like weeds when you thought they were gone for good.

Earth was under reconstruction after being fritzed by a Coronal Mass Ejection, but space colonies like ours were trawling the galaxy for other habitable planets. Our ship, Mannschaft Rinderhund, was on its way to shake some gods loose from those distant cousins of ours on Eisregen. If they were acting like barbarians, let the token Catholic on our crew be the first to greet them.

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You woudn't see him training for battle,

Leif O'Leary. He couldn't get his fill of bouncing around in low gravity. In the cold and snow. Leif seemed to have antifreeze in his veins, like those larvae that could survive a polar vortex. Specialized sugars, proteins, and alcohols kept the larva's internal fluids from freezing, and Leif had acquired some version of that. Too much beer and sweetness in his blood, maybe.

We got him corralled, finally, with a lasso, literally--but he smiled all the while and winked at the ladies as we hauled him to HQ. The vid screens would show him what we were up against, trying to tame these quasi-Vikings.

The first wave of our colonists had been hacked with axes and speared when they came in peace. We'd all seen the old footage, but on-going surveillance showed the Eisregenites continuing to raid and loot and hack each other up.

"God rest their souls," Leif O'Leary said. Later, Leandra said she'd heard him mumbling a Divine Mercy something or other. The point of it was that Catholics must pray for every soul, especially the most awful and unrepentent among us.

Oddly enough, Leif O'Leary didn't protest at being first to go proselytize against the gods. Sure, we had uniforms make of spider silk genetically spiked with goat protein, and some high-tech radiomagnetic shielding, but Leif had to know nothing was foolproof. He would be outnumbered. And he would not likely be able to fire a pulsar to take down dozens of people at once. Well, someone had to go first. Might as well be the token Catholic. Just when the guy was kinda starting to grow on us, with his goofy, fun-loving disposition.

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"I feel kinda bad for him,"

Leandra said as Leif O'Leary get into the pod, made his sign of the cross at us, and bravely whooshed off into the land of the barbarians.

I kinda felt bad too.

But not bad enough to offer to take his place.

TO BE CONTINUED

Day 474: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: token

Tokenism is the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to be inclusive to members of minority groups, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of racial or sexual equality within a workforce. Tokenism - Wikipedia