“I am Her Grace Cybelle, priestess of this parish. Your suspicion is misplaced: This is a vehicle of worship, dedicated to the furtherance of the holy mission of propagation, and if you board us, you will incur the everlasting wrath of Mother Church.” I gave him a chilly glare, channeling the full vitriol and contempt of my mater eviscerating a subordinate unlucky enough to misplace a decimal point in a compound-interest calculation. “You will acknowledge your understanding and compliance with this declaration immediately! That is all I have to say.”
I gestured at Dennett to cut off the communication, but something had captured his attention, and his response was tardy, which allowed the pirate a vital second in which to regain the initiative. He gaped a nasty grin at me, exposing sharpened canines. “Heh, you aren’t getting rid of us that easily. If you are a vehicle of the Church, then of course you won’t have a problem accommodating a handful of your parishioners, will you? Don’t be worrying, we’re just going to drop by for a friendly and respectful service of holy communion.” He emitted a falsetto titter, then raised a hand to cover his mouth: A membranous flap of skin followed it, stretching taut across his body. “The Church has nothing to fear from the likes of us, it being honest about being a house of worship, if you follow my drift.”
I glanced at Dennett, but from his slack-jawed, shocked expression, he was as taken aback by this unwelcome imposition as I was. So far the pirate chieftain hadn’t accused me outright of being a fake, but how was I to maintain the illusion through a service of holy communion? The transubstantiation of the nutrient broth into the holy pluripotent stem cells of our ancient Fragile forerunners is the most public manifestation of the benison of clergy. I forced myself to suppress a reflexive swallow (another leftover piece of baggage from our predecessors’ nervous systems) and stared at the pirate.
“If you must,” I said icily, “then you should be aware that this vehicle experienced a”—I hesitated a second—“structural embarrassment in flight some time ago. Several members of the mission were killed”—Dennett was gesticulating frantically at me, but I ignored him—“and we have not completely repaired the damage. Accordingly, we have neither time nor capacity to pander to your insulting and trivial demands! If you come aboard, you will find us as we are, and Mother Church will not forgive or forget any insults she is offered.” Old acting skills, like underused musculature, creaked and groaned as I called on them. “Who shall I name to my bishop as the leader of your band of miscreants?”
The pirate yawned. “Name me to their grace as Chief Business Analyst Rudi the Terrible.” More tittering, this time from the chorus line of upside-down pirates behind him: “We’ll be along for communion tomorrow! And to look into certain distressing allegations of insurance fraud that our primary contracting agency has asked us to investigate in our capacity as freelance loss adjusters. If all is as you say, then I’ll be happy to put to rest the pernicious rumors circulating on Taj Beacon to the effect that Your Grace was severely incommoded by your recent reactor meltdown. G’day.” And with that, he cut the connection.
* * *
“What are we going to do?!” I wailed, abruptly lapsing from character.
“Hush, child, something will come up.” Dennett was clearly shaken and fell back on his pastoral persona, the face he used for comforting parishioners. He wasn’t terribly convincing.
“(I’m not a child.) I can’t conduct holy communion! They’ll see right through—”
“Hush. They won’t, because I won’t put you in that position. Let me think.”
Dennett strode around the organist’s nook, head and shoulders hunched, clearly deep in thought as he bounced off the walls, ceiling, and floor. Presently, he became calm. “I think I should attend to Her Grace,” he said, and turned toward the nave.
Lady Cybelle’s sarcophagus rested on a stone plinth in the middle of the chapel. In shape it was a truncated bell of steel, surface marred by circular hatches in the top and sides, and a small porthole obscured by instruments—the classical form of the Soyuz or “Heavenly Chariot” in which the Fragile first ventured beyond legendary Fragile Earth’s blanket of sustaining atmosphere. (It is common to this day to find Soyuz pods and gargoyles adorning the exterior of mendicant chapels as they slowly migrate between the stars.) Three is a holy number, so it had originally held three reclining beds for its vulnerable passengers; however, the two outer couches had been removed and replaced by the feeder vats and fleshstuff printers that slowly poured their marrow techné—and with it, life—back into the gleaming alloy bones of the badly burned priestess.
“She’s not going to be integrated before they arrive, is she? Two days to go, isn’t it?” I realized I was repeating Dennett’s own excuses back at him.
“That was true as of the last time I checked,” he said through gritted teeth. “I shall check again. Maybe the horse will learn to sing if I increase the perfusion flow rate and dial back the target tissue integration threshold.”
I watched for a few minutes as the deacon poked at the control panel on the outside of the sarcophagus, swearing in a most shocking and profane manner. “Ms. Alizond, I need you to go and fetch me fifty liters of sterile isotonic glucose in normal saline, a two-liter cartridge of propylene glycol, and at least twenty kilos of tubespam.” I glanced around, but he was ahead of me. “The remotes are already fetching me a suit heat exchanger. Forcing her tissue integration will make her dangerously feverish, but if I can get her into a suit liner and pump cold water through it, I might be able to force maturation in time. Her Grace is already mostly present in body, if not in soul . . . go on! Get moving!”
I left him to his supervision of the thing on the slab and went in search of the perquisites. Which, in practice, meant a trip down to the kitchen and another tiresome opportunity to try and sweet-talk Cook into releasing the necessities of life. And so it was that I missed most of what happened next—which was probably all for the best.
Mistaken Identities
Idon’t believe in assigning blame when things go wrong. It is an unproductive activity, and more importantly, it makes people defensive—thus reducing their willingness to comply with quality-assurance protocols aimed at preventing recurrences. But I’ll willingly blame myself. I freely admit: I had allowed myself to drift into the chapel crew’s curious pattern of activity. You have probably noticed by now that the members of the crew who had chosen to remain aboard the mission mostly confined themselves to their stations and communicated very little: Cook stuck to the kitchen, the Gravid Mother gestated in her web, Deacon Dennett lurked in his organ pit, and so on. During my off-shift periods, I mostly hid in my cell, behind a locked hatch, and nobody seemed to mind: Doubtless I was just another piece of the picture to them. They were less a crew and more a scattered collection of huddled, sullen individualists. Moreover, there did not appear to be a chapel-wide communications net as such: at least, not one that anybody had introduced me to or logged me in on.
It was no one’s fault but my own that I failed to ask about communications. And so it was no one’s fault but my own when I arrived at the kitchen to find its hatch sealed and silent. I banged on it, waited, banged again, lost patience: “Box, where’s Cook?”
The talking box was silent for a moment. Then: “Cook is in the Gravid Mother’s cell.”
I swore. “What’s he doing there?”
The prehistoric joker who scripted the box’s responses had the last laugh: “Insufficient data. Are you hungry?” I returned the box to my belt, then kicked off for the entrance to Mausoleum Companionway Two.
As soon as I tumbled into the corridor, I knew I wasn’t alone. Some quality of the air currents or the shadows cast by the dim light globes flickering within the bony hands of the alcove occupants: I was unsure what it was, but I knew it wasn’t right. As I entered, I had instinctively kicked off in the direction of the Gravid Mother’s room, so I was unable to turn my head to see at first, but I c
aught hold of a protruding femur and added some spin to my trajectory. “Hello?” I called.
The stranger looked at me blankly. She hung stationary outside the hatch to Storage Node Fifteen, frozen in the act of opening it. I caught a confused jumble of impressions: a fuzz of short-cut hair, a soft, roundish face, austere one-piece free-fall suit, and something not quite right about the way she watched me that put me on my guard.
“Who are you?” I asked, politely enough, as if meeting a new and hitherto-unaccounted-for person aboard a vehicle in flight was nothing peculiar. “Have you seen Cook?”
The stranger twitched, turning and bracing her ankles against Storage Node Fifteen’s hatch. “What is your name?” she asked me, her voice as flat and affectless as a synthesizer. Like me, she wore a utility belt with items clipped to it. Items that included a knife with a blade as long as my hand from wrist to middle fingertip, toward which her own right hand was moving.
The itch of uncertainty became a conviction: “Got to run! Bye!” I called, kicking off urgently toward the internode with Mausoleum Companionway Three, Storage Node Four, and UpDown Axial Gangway Blue. I made no attempt to control my speed but aimed for the dogged-back hatch and grabbed it with both hands, yanking myself to a halt as the stranger’s dagger buzzed angrily and oriented itself, rotors grinding at the air as it turned my way, preparing to attack. Its owner was gathering herself to leap, blank blue eyes focusing on me with nothing of mercy visible in her expression.
I yanked the emergency toggle as hard as I could. Red lights flashed as the hatch hissed loudly and sprang closed. A second later, a metallic clang and an angry whine told me my fear was entirely justified. I glanced around the back of the hatch, trying to suppress a rising tide of panic. VACUUM OVERRIDE looked promising: I twisted the switch, locking it shut as I tried to work out what was happening. She’d thrown a knife at me! Who was she, a stowaway or an agent for the pirates? There was no way of knowing. But I couldn’t isolate her; long before I could make my way around the ring of passageways, she could be out of Companionway Three and somewhere else entirely. I’d have to find some way to warn the deacon of her presence on board—let him sort her out.
The Gravid Mother’s cell was only a short distance away: two nodes, three tubes. I ran for it (or rather, I bounced and kicked and caromed toward it, somersaulting from all available surfaces). Less than a minute later, I came to her door. It was shut. I grabbed the locking wheel and used it as an anchor while I pounded on the door: “Let me in!”
There was no immediate response. Half-panicking, I grabbed the talking box. “Can you override the Gravid Mother’s door lock?” I asked it. “Urgent maintenance is required, by order of Deacon Dennett.”
“Stand by,” the box vacillated.
“Open the door for me, or I’ll use you as a wrench! There’s a telemetry disconnect—”
That worked. The door unlocked, with a loud clunk from somewhere in its rim. I tugged it open and tumbled through into the Gravid Mother’s room.
“Hey! Get out of—”
“No, get her!”
“Excuse me?” I blushed, hideously embarrassed, even as I swung the door shut behind me. (Avoiding embarrassment is a lower priority than avoiding knife-wielding killers.)
The Gravid Mother glared at me from the hammock-bed, in which she floated entwined and entangled with Cook. This much was unpleasantly clear: They’d removed most of the cushions and quilts from the bed for some reason, not to mention their clothes. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded, face reddening. It was not the only part of her anatomy on parade: I tried not to notice.
Cook cranked himself round—when I had entered, his back was turned to me—so that he could look at me sidelong. “Yeah, what are you—”
“There’s an intruder with a knife!” I burst out. “Deacon Dennett sent me for urgent feedstock for the priestess, but there’s an intruder on board! She tried to kill me. And we’re going to be boarded by pirates!”
Cook looked at his partner in concupiscence. “She’s lost her mind,” he grunted. “Let me take care of—”
“You’ve got to help!” I pleaded, “It’s a crisis! Lady Cybelle needs twenty kilos of tubespam and fifty liters of intravenous fluid, and she needs it right now because the deacon is trying to accelerate her integration because we’re going to be boarded by pirates in less than sixteen hours and all you can do is, er—” I spluttered out. It was transparently clear that Cook and the Gravid Mother shared a mutual fascination with anatomical exploration: At any other time, their distasteful distraction would have been none of my business, but right now it was clouding their minds. Indeed, they didn’t even have the decency to undock and clothe themselves. “Disgusting!” I squeaked.
Now Cook separated himself from his partner and turned to face me. I averted my eyes. “Just because you’re not getting any,” he sneered.
The Gravid Mother sighed theatrically. “There’ll be no reasoning with her, Willard,” she told her partner in unspeakableness. “I know her kind. You.” She looked at me. “You aren’t going to breathe a word of this to the deacon, are you? Or to Her Ladyship, when she’s alive again. Or to Father Gould. Are you?”
I shook my head. “Why would I?”
“Because if you do,” Cook butted in menacingly, “I’ll—”
“Doesn’t matter,” I snap. “Weren’t you listening? We’re in serious trouble.” I recounted what had happened to me since Dennett’s summoning. “The intruder’s probably a pirate spy,” I concluded. “And if Dennett doesn’t get the feedstock we need, we’re going to be down one priestess.”
“Go see to the intruder, dear. And get Dennett what he needs.” The Gravid Mother gave Cook a push. “You,” she told me, “are going to stay right here and keep me company while he’s gone.” There was a hard edge to her voice, promising pain if I defied her.
“But I’ve got to—”
She reached out with three meaty hands and grabbed my ankles. “You’re going nowhere until I say you can.”
“But I—” While she held me, Cook grabbed a bundle of clothes from one side of the door, opened the hatch, and sprang out. It slammed shut again with a loud click.
“You’re not going to tell anyone about what you saw, are you?” she said, shaking me.
“Of course not.” I looked at the door. “Do you think he’ll do what you said?” I asked.
“If he wants to get laid again, he will.” She arched her back against the bed-web, all six generous breasts pointing at me like gun muzzles. Was that expression intended to be a saucy grin? Or a dominant snarl? What did she take me for? “Make yourself comfortable. We’re safe from your stalker in here—as long as the door stays locked.”
* * *
Unknown to me, while I was coming to terms with my embarrassment at stumbling upon the Gravid Mother and Cook in flagrante, momentous and fatal events were happening elsewhere aboard the chapel.
After my departure, Dennett pressed ahead, as he had promised: tweaking energy and water inputs, meddling with the temperature in Lady Cybelle’s sarcophagus, and generally meddling with things that he was not, in truth, qualified to meddle with. Perhaps a fully initiated priest of the Mysteries of the Fragile might have been able to bring the fermenting vat of semiferal mechanocytes into domesticated harmony with the unifying will of Cybelle’s still-slumbering skeleton and chassis. But Dennett was a junior minister, undertrained for such a demanding task: and more to the point, sufficiently unskilled to be overconfident about his own abilities.
I am a historian, not an initiate, but in preparing this document, I have made some attempt at informing myself as to the precise nature of the task at hand. People’s bodies—the bodies of post-Fragile people like you and I—are, like those of the Fragile, made out of cells. But whereas Fragile cells are fragile sacks of fatty acids and peptides and water, our mechanocytes are bigger, vastly more c
omplex, and contain control subsystems of entirely artificial design. Fragile cells can replicate themselves but are murderously hard to reprogram—whereas a mechanocyte can be ordered around, told which neighbors to attach itself to and what type of organ tissue to remodel itself into. Mechanocytes don’t self-replicate, but are either manufactured by the specialized marrow techné ’cytes nestled in our long bones, or are produced in bulk in factories. We don’t get cancer, the disease of uncontrolled self-replication. But if we suffer excessive damage, we may be unable to recover without an externally provided infusion of bulk raw mechanocytes—and then we need to have an engineering supervisor or a priest to program them into useful working tissues, lest we end up being eaten by a ball of undifferentiated feral goo. Mechanocytes in a body must sacrifice some of their autonomy for the collective good; they trade nutrients and energy, obey orders, and bid for resources. There is, in fact, an internal economy that unites the ’cytes of a body: a market driven by the debt created by their host’s existence, a life defined by their willingness to cooperate. Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life. We are, after all, homo economicus.
Lady Cybelle had been killed during the micrometeoroid accident that damaged the chapel. Not injured, not burned, but killed: her head smashed and her soul chips irradiated by the reactor excursion, torso and legs horribly burned by corrosive oxidizer. Those of her mechanocytes that survived reverted to feral independence, seceding from the great economy of her life.
But Dennett had retrieved her soul chips—the solid-state backup of her neural activity—from the back of what was left of her skull. That was the key to what came next.
The resurrection of the prematurely dead is time-consuming and difficult but by no means unusual, and under other circumstances, it has become almost routine. You lay down a new skeleton, install seed mechanocytes while running a script to assign them to build new organs, including a brain. You infuse nutrients to buy their cooperation. Then you install the soul chips and train the first neurocytes to play their part in the ensemble of her identity, encoded in the neural net within her skull. The more of them that buy into the enterprise of the body, the greater becomes the pressure on newly added mechanocytes to join the throng: It happens a million times every day, across inhabited space. It happened to me, each time I arrived in a new beacon station arrivals hall.
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