We Asked For Miracles On A Distant World. The Things That Delivered Them Were Not Human

A failing colony on a distant world builds its chapel around an ancient black stone, its top worn into two smooth hollows by knees no one can account for. After forty nights of unanswered prayer, the chaplain who talked thirty-four families out of Kansas kneels there to beg for rain. Before dawn, silver shapes come down out of the hills on their knees, and rain falls on the fields and nowhere else.

The stone grants one prayer a night, exactly as spoken. Soon the whole settlement lines up at sunset with its sentences rehearsed, and the...