Alien religion

After working at the station call center, I spent some more time staring at Jupiter. You can't get tired of something like this, seeing it up close and watching it change.
I noticed Minda floating up to me again. She didn't seem as interested in the view. She talked to me about a hairy call she had. I wasn't too interested, having had my fill of craziness, and she must have picked up on that because she changed the subject.
She told me that on her planet, there is a subculture that posts reviews of phone reps along with their pictures, so it's important to do well. I thought that was horrible. She shrugged and said there wasn't anything anyone could do. I told her that my planet has laws against slander and libel like that, but she asked me about tabloid newspapers. I told her that was for famous people and she said we were sort of famous. So I sort of understood then. We then got on the topic of music.
She has strange tastes. When I told her what music I liked, she said her favorite song is the Beepbeep.com jingle. I thought that was awful. I told her it was on ten times a day and was advertising a company, so she said she also liked movie themes and recordings of animal calls. She told me it was common for lots of people on her planet to buy many recordings of animal calls, and that the animal call Pofdons (I guess they're like CD's) sold millions of copies, better than some rap CD's on earth. I asked her about her favorite movie themes. She liked a few that I liked, but a lot of them, however, were overplayed, like John Williams. I was amazed, however, that she liked that little song that was in the movie Troll. Very few people even know what that is. We talked about some other stuff, like video games, then she showed me a new game on the computer. One was like a sports game where Abreyas in jumpsuits played polo on the backs of giant bird creatures, and then I played a couple others that were like racing and action games.
When I tired of messing with them, we went into the conference room and watched cable.
As we were watching a program, she asked me what I thought about the afterlife, so I told her.
She asked me if I thought aliens went there, and I said I didn't know, the bible didn't say anything about it and I guessed they had their own place.
She asked me what if they didn't, and I said I didn't know. She told me they didn't have anyone equivalent to Jesus, and they offered sacrifices to atone for sins.
I asked her how she took care of that on the station, and she said she didn't. She said she was afraid of going to Beptot, their version of hell. She asked me if I thought Jesus could save her, and I said possibly, but I really didn't know if it applied to space aliens.
She said she hoped he did and then said she wondered which religion was true.
I told her I believe mine (the Judeo-Christian one) is true, that every other religion on earth isn't, but I didn't know anything about hers, so I couldn't tell.
So she started telling me all this stuff about her religion. She said she believed that her god, Ponai, sculpted the entire universe out of stellar nurseries, and crafted all life forms from a soup of proteins and chromosomes. She said that her people had a temptation similar to Adam's at the beginning of her race, but they didn't give in to it, and as a reward Ponai taught them space flight and other technologies, but then something happened. Her people called it "the great test", or "the great Qubitgarr" (a word that translates to something like `terrible wave of corruption'). The Gaxea, their holy "book" (it's composed of thousand year old computer documents) said that a giant wave swept over the galaxy from a far off place, infecting everything with evil. She said the source of it is unknown even to this day, but scholars say it is either a test from Ponai or that an evil entity called Kaon called it to happen. Another theory is that an Abreya named Mustafa succombed to the first temptation after a hundred years of peace, but that's an apocryphal story.
She said she'd been watching some of my planet's religious broadcasts and heard of how Adam's sin caused the entire world to be corrupted, and wondered how far the corruption spread. I told her that was very creative, but I really couldn't say for sure.
I asked her how much she watched such programs and she said not often, because she found them boring, or too busy preaching about how praying and doing good deeds could make you a millionaire, but she had learned about Adam and all that.
I told her I didn't know what the right course of action would be, since the bible doesn't say anything about space aliens.
She asked me if I knew what I was talking about and I said yes, I study the bible more than most people I know, with the exception of my pastor.
I said it would be ridiculous to assume that a culture, one that believed that space was just a dome that covered the earth, would think that there was anything but God and angels and heaven up there when they didn't even know about planets.
When she asked me if I thought she was an angel, I said no. She asked me how I could believe in aliens if my religion didn't teach about it and I said God can make whatever He wants, and the bible doesn't talk about gravity or electromagnets, either.
Of course she got confused and I had to tell her that I believed creation is like what it says in Genesis, but that simple words like "light" and "firmament" can have complicated, possibly scientific meanings unknown to the original authors. After all, the earth's atmosphere is arguably a dome of sorts. That being said, I told her, I couldn't make a case for anything regarding extraterrestrials based on the bible. Unless you're talking about angels or something.
We debated the subject a bit further. She finally told me she needed to research this a bit further and she'd get back to me.
I went down and wandered the garden, then paid the caged creatures a visit.
Figuring I was a tough enough guy, I made motions like I were going to reach into a cage to pet one, but it snapped at me. Not nice.
The one next to it was just like it, so I decided they deserved to be dinner and moved on.
I'd noticed a bookcase in the main conference room, so I went up there and tried to read one of the books.
It was in their language so I really wasn't sure what I was reading. I thought it was fantasy, but it confused me. I knew the basics of communication, and this was full of higher level vocabulary. The other books were no better. I put them up and headed to the sleeping quarters.
I found Minda sitting on one of the jellyfish things, clicking buttons on a small device she had. She seemed completely engrossed in whatever it was and didn't even notice when I came in.
I found a transparent package tucked inside the flaps of my bed. I looked inside and found a gold jumpsuit made of some cottony material. It was kind of bizarre looking. The top part had no shoulder straps, being more like a tube top, and the bottom portion looked like capris.
After apologizing for interrupting her studies, I showed Minda the jumpsuit and asked if it were hers. She said no, Sigma got it for me.
After staring at it a minute, I decided it might look okay if I put the tunic over it. Guys wear yellow jogging pants, right?
Anyways, I changed and went to bed. Like the night before, I tossed and turned for awhile. It didn't help that someone was having a religious crisis on the bunk below me and they kept making sounds with their computer thing while I was trying to sleep.
Eventually I got settled and got some rest.