SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 6, 2021] “The Fire Balloons”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
I haven’t read very much by Ray Bradbury. In the past it was because I kind of dismissed him as a genre writer. But I have read a few things in the last few years that I liked and thought I should give him more of my time.
This story is from The Martian Chronicles, which I have not read. I actually don’t really know much about the Chronicles at all.
This story is set in 2033. Two priests are headed to Mars as missionaries. Father Peregrine and Father Stone spoke about the Martians and the kind of sins they would find among them. Mars was so different, no doubt sin was like a virtue.
Father Peregrine was more open to the possibility that Martians might not be engaging in sins. Or maybe they were engaging in sins they hadn’t even thought of. Father Stone was more conservative and did not enjoy this line of thinking.
But when they arrive on Mars they discover that there are two races. One is pretty much dead and the other is totally not human. Rather, they are round luminous globes of light which act intelligently. The priests decide to communicate with the spheres rather than the people in town who might need the Priests help. They figure any race as inhuman as spheres must need gods love.
Father Peregrine tries to communicate with the spheres, but Father Stone is quite fearful. The sphere seem unresponsive, but when the ground gave way beneath them, the blue spheres came and brought them safely back to ground.
Father Peregrine believes that they are superhuman beings but Father Stone doesn’t trust them. Father Peregrine tests them out once more by jumping off a cliff. And they save him before he hits the ground.
Father Peregrine is convinced that he can reach them, so he sets up an altar representing the Holy Trinity, but as spheres. (“It looks like a geometry problem” says Father Stone). But the spheres do not come. They are about to give up when the spheres float over.
The spheres tell the priests that they were once human and have learned to rid themselves of bodily concerns. They have no need for altars.
I took the story as kind of moral and preachy, but Manguel reads it slightly differently. He thinks that Bradbury “wished to mirror the doubts of a few of the Christian fathers in the New World, attempting to convert indigenous peoples that proved in many cases more spiritually enlightened than their prospective saviours.”
Which does seem more Bradbury than I read it.
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