Heaven

by Ian Stewart

  Flocks of fledglings sported in the cooling skies, soaring in the blissfully dense atmosphere of the high-gravity world, chasing each other’s spiny tails, diving on their friends and pulling out horizontally at the last minute in a parody of a direfalcon strike. The shadow of the far rim of the canyon moved up the cliff as the huge orange globe of the star sank toward the horizon.

  When the shadow reached a thin but prominent stratum of pale yellow crystals, the play stopped abruptly. The flocks streamed back toward the starlit side, each fledgling heading for its nest. Their homecoming song filled the skies with harmony, and the mothers soon joined the choir.

  As each fledgling neared its nest, it picked out its mother’s homing symbol and flew straight toward it, slowing to a hover and instinctively clinging to her torso using its tiny, mobile mouth-tusks. The tusks were hollow, and the mother’s body fluids, liquid nitrogen laced with strange organics, flowed through some of them and returned through others, delivering nourishment to the fledglings.

  When the entire brood had completed the homeward flight, the mother Huphun folded her wings closed around them and stepped backward into the open mouth of the nest. Finally, she used her abdominal claw to push a ball of damp spittle against the hole from the inside, to seal it. The nights on Epsilon Cuniculi 7 were deathly cold, but the warmth of a sealed nest would keep the entire family comfortable and safe.

  Unfolding her wings, the mother began to sing a poem to the fledglings, to settle them in the comfortable darkness.

  Disseminator 714 traveled with the mission fleet as it sped toward its objective, the aqueous planet of No-Moon. All of the vessels were propelled by tame magnetotori, to which they were hitched by means of magnetic reins. It was a cheap and efficient way to travel between the stars, and the herders usually had surplus stock that they were keen to sell. Small groups of magnetotori were easier to control than whole herds, and a huge industry had grown up to tame them and turn them into docile beasts of burden. Most of the Galaxy’s travelers owed their mobility to the torus tamers; the Neanderthal trading ships were an exception. Ships with magnetotori as “engines” also used them as their main source of power, bleeding off energy from their living plasma-fusion reactors. They had limited auxiliary power sources for emergencies.

  Activity in the fleet’s duplicator cubbies was becoming frenetic. As the azure sphere of the ocean planet loomed ever larger, Sam found himself doing double duty. The list of goods to be duplicated grew ever longer and more complex, as it always did before the fleet’s arrival in a new system. The evangelical phase of the Unification of the Cosmos placed heavy demands on the duplicators’ capabilities as the high acolyte tried to anticipate obstacles to successful conversion and to devise apparatus to overcome them.

  Sam loved these times. He even loved the sacrifice of sleep.

  Even though Sam hardly ever left the cubby that housed his beloved duplicator, he always enjoyed the change in shipboard atmosphere when the fleet approached a new world. He reveled in the prospect of helping, in his small but satisfying way, to bring yet another sentient species into the loving embrace of the Lifesoul- Cherisher. The joy of it all filled his entire being. To work is to serve: to serve is to love. He knew that his happiness would overflow, probably for weeks. The childhood meme coursed through his mind: To serve is to bring others to Service. The elegant simplicity of this positive feedback loop filled his mind with wonder. And he believed in his very bones that serving Cosmic Unity would open the way to universal love, and the harmony of peaceful coexistence, throughout the Galaxy.

  There could be no more worthwhile way to live.

  Sam had grown up on a typical Cosmic Unity world, living in a huge, graceless housing complex with neighbors of many other species. Life was simple—and dull. Very little ever happened to disturb the daily routine. But then, it never occurred to him that any other lifestyle was possible, so he was content.

  Following family tradition, he had trained as a duplicator operator. Then—it was still amazing to think about it—the priesthood had selected him to leave his homeworld and carry out his spiritual duties on board a starship!

  As a child, he had seen the stars. Only a few times, but their brilliance was burned into his memory. Never had he dreamed that he might go to the stars. None of his ancestors had ever been so privileged. And it was not just any starship, but a disseminator of the Memeplex. From which he had helped to convert unbelievers to the Way of the One. Not just a few lifesouls—entire planets.

  He had already served the Lifesoul-Cherisher on three missions. No-Moon was to be his fourth. He fervently hoped there would be many, many more before the Lifesoul-Stealer put an end to his life. And he knew—he had no idea how, but he never doubted it—that he was destined for even more than this. He would rise in the Church, in the fullness of time. Then he could serve the One to even greater effect.

  It was not something that could be rushed. He must await his moment and seize the chance when it came.

  For now, he was content to operate a duplicator and stay in his familiar cubby.

  One production run ended, and he consulted his list and performed the necessary ritual gestures to start the next. Equipment boxes piled up faster than the menials could remove them.

  Sam had been told, along with the other servants of Unity, that the indigenes of No-Moon were aquatic creatures, male polypoids bred in coralline reefs. Their intelligence was about average, unlike that of their females, which was zero. And—praise the Lifesoul-Giver! —the target was a trading world. A dozen other species were regular visitors. According to advance information, tens of thousands of Neanderthals were transient inhabitants of the sea ports, all across the seven continents, throughout the myriad atolls and archipelagoes.

  Neanderthals. Sam was gloriously aware that, like his ancestors, they had evolved on one of the Founder worlds. They had lived in the System of the Original Sun, along with humans, blimps, and plasmoids. They were among the most privileged of all races. But, if he recalled his childhood lessons in Church history correctly—and he always did, for he had remembered them with arduous perfection—the Neanderthals had been removed from their home planet, leaving only Homo sapiens, the stock of Moish, long before the first voyage of Cosmic Unity had set out to evangelize the Galaxy. They had departed the System of the Original Sun before it had joined the Cosmic All. They had become vagrants, nomads . . . and more than once they had fled from the approach of a mission fleet. They remained infidels—a continuing challenge to the servants of the Lifesoul-Cherisher.

  He did not believe that the Neanderthals were actually wicked. They were obstinate and misguided, to be sure. Instead of believing in their own puny false gods, like most races, they believed in no god at all. Their empathic sense was legendary, but their sense of the supernatural was nonexistent. Infidels indeed: Literally, they had no faith.

  How could any sentient being deny the evidence of the Lifesoul-Giver? It was all around them. Every sunrise, every rainstorm, every perfect crystal of frozen methane shouted the presence of a benevolent being, creating the cosmic order. The proofs were everywhere, mundane or profound. In fact, that was why he’d seen the stars.

  One night, his principal duomother, XVI Eloise, had taken him up to the roof of the housing complex. There, away from the light pollution of the poorly lit streets, it was possible to see the stars. There was still too much light to see the dusty sweep of the Galaxy, but the brighter stars stood out clearly.

  Sam had never seen stars before. He had never been outside the complex after darkness had fallen.

  Eloise had named some of the nearer stars and the patterns they made: the rabbit, the lizard, the coelacanth. Many of his neighbors, she told him, were from species that had evolved on planets surrounding one or another of those stars. She had explained the words patiently, as a good mother should, until he dimly began to understand.

  And then she’d said something that at the time made no sense at all. She had pointed out a bri
ght, slightly reddish star, saying, “We were all born in such stars, Sam. That is where the atoms of our bodies were made. If you need proof that the Lifesoul-Giver is real, that is where you will find it.”

  The moment had stayed with him, but it was years before he properly understood what his duomother had meant. The star was Omicron Oblatratrictis, colloquially known as Orc Eye. It was thirty-eight light years away, and it was a red giant. Red giants were where the universe made its carbon, an essential element for Fyx and Hytth and humans. Who, except the creator of the universe and its sentient life, could turn stars into living beings? And since there must be a creator, there must also be a maintainer, the Lifesoul-Cherisher. And to keep the cosmos tidy by eliminating surplus lifesouls, there must be a Lifesoul-Stealer. . . .

  Which brought him back to the Neanderthals. It was as if they were blind to the presence of the Lifesoul-Giver. As if they felt no need for anything that extended beyond the mundane bounds of the material universe. But, he remained sure, this was ignorance, not evil. With enough effort, even the infidel Neanderthals could be brought into the One Sole Union. And it looked as if No-Moon would afford the perfect opportunity to achieve that holy goal.

  There were a few other species, too, in smaller numbers. No-Moon, in its own secular manner, was already started on the golden pathway to multiculture! That boded well for the success of their mission. The indigenes would be converted. The transient population would be recruited to open up new routes for spreading the gospel of the unity of the cosmos, and they would also help the high acolyte to fulfill her assigned quota of love.

  The ecclesiarchs back on the Cloister Worlds of Intermundia, the religious leaders at the core of Cosmic Unity’s domain, would be well pleased.

  “I just can’t get over how flouncin’ big this thing is,” said Fat Apprentice, who had spent much of the trip so far exploring Talitha in his golden sailor suit.

  “Yeah,” Short Apprentice responded. It was difficult to find better ways to express the feeling of sheer incomprehension that he felt whenever he tried to come to terms with the Neanderthal vessel—and, even more so, with its builders. The biggest sailing boats on No-Moon were cruiseliners about eighty yards long, thirty broad at the beam; their masts were seldom more than fifty yards tall, and the sail, on the occasion he was fortunate enough to be able to go on board and inspect one of those impressive boats, had been absolutely massive.

  Now it seemed puny in retrospect. And Talitha didn’t even have a sail. Not that it needed one.

  Stun had been kind enough to show them a graphic of Ship once the routine of quitting orbit for deep space had been completed. It was vast. There were interminable corridors, some straight, some twisty. Huge engines occupied much of the stern. A veritable flotilla of transpods had been stowed in just one of the capacious holds. Apparently, the Precursor vessel housed not just active crew but their families, from the very young to the elderly. But the family areas were off limits to Fat Apprentice and all the other polypoids, to minimize disruption.

  Ship was twenty times as long as No-Moon’s giant boat—a little over a mile. It was shaped like nothing that Fat Apprentice had ever come across, except maybe a very warty sea slug. Nothing about the starship was geometrically regular or simple; every surface that started to resemble something he could put a name to, like a sphere or a cone, merged into something else or just suddenly stopped.

  The reefwives, if they had put their mind to it, would have known why . . . but they had never seen Ship, nor had they ever needed to. However, if they had seen it, they would immediately have realized that the vessel had not been designed but had been evolved. It was closer to an organism than to a machine. Yes, everything about it was mechanical, made from metal and ceramic, but it had been grown more than built. In fact, Ship’s automata occasionally decided to modify some part of the vessel, often while it was in transit between stars. The Neanderthals and the rest of its crew seemed used to this. Fat Apprentice had been horrified, the first time he tried to go to a part of the ship that he had visited a few days earlier, only to find that the previous entrance had been remodeled and the layout beyond it changed out of all recognition.

  He couldn’t imagine deliberately tearing a boat to bits while it was sailing. The wind and waves of No-Moon did enough of that without assistance. Rebuilding a boat while it was sailing—ah, that they had to do all the time. But no mariner would voluntarily seek it out. And polypoids could swim across an ocean.

  Neanderthals couldn’t swim through space.

  All of this was lost on the crew. They seemed to trust Ship implicitly and never turned a hair when part of it was being melted, crushed, or unglued by robots outside their control.

  If the outside of Ship was weird, the inside was even weirder. The “cabins,” if that was the word—and Fat Apprentice knew no other way to describe the internal compartments of a boat—were of every conceivable shape and size. Some had gravity and some had not, and this was very disconcerting because you could easily wander from one to another without warning. The gravity was generally no more than a tenth of that experienced at the surface of No-Moon, though, so even if you accidentally wandered into a hundred-yard shaft, it was easy to grab something and arrest your descent. And on the one occasion when his desperate grab for a stanchion (or whatever the eel-shaped protrusion was) had failed, and it had dawned on him that even in one-tenth gravity he’d hit the bottom very hard, Ship itself had turned off the gravity-field before he had fallen more than twenty yards.

  For the first few seconds, though, it had been the worst experience of his young life. So now, when he explored Ship, even in areas he thought he knew well, he carried a small lump of rock, which he used to test new cabins for the presence or otherwise of a gravitational field before he let his suit roll him through the opened wall-iris.

  Many areas of the ship were closed to him altogether. The wall-irises were there, but they refused to recognize his presence, staying stubbornly shut. He wondered if that was because the conditions inside were unsuitable for him. Occasionally, as he wandered the passages and cabins, he encountered a crew member. He’d come across plenty of aliens at the seaports, but a lot of these guys were of species that were totally unknown to him. He was smart enough to understand that aliens often needed different atmospheres, temperatures, humidity, whatever. The tanks where the polypoids spent most of their time had been fitted out so that they could live comfortably without suits. Presumably, other parts of the vessel were designed for the home requirements of chlorine-breathers or radiation- consumers. His suit would have protected him even in such conditions . . . but perhaps Ship didn’t know he was wearing a suit.

  It was hard to work out what it did or did not know. It seemed aware of where he was and whether he was getting himself into trouble.

  It never dawned on him that the latter was the main reason why Ship was keeping him away from the home regions of the alien crew. It didn’t want to risk his causing unnecessary damage, so he had been confined to the common quarters, where all the crew were expected, and where it could be assumed that they would be equipped with suitable life support.

  And it was on one of his early excursions that he had blundered into a gallery and found the window into space.

  Fat Apprentice had never seen space before. He’d seen the stars, of course, but space seemed to have a lot more stars—and these were a lot brighter—than anything he’d witnessed during No-Moon’s nights. And he’d found that if he concentrated on some region of the starscape, the window would seem to bulge, and the view would be magnified. When he had put a tentacle against the window, he’d felt no movement. The bulge wasn’t a change in shape, just a change in optical properties.

  Some things that looked like stars, he found, were actually big collections of stars, presumably seen from a great distance. Often these star clusters formed pretty shapes, with spirals being especially commonplace. But they weren’t one-armed spirals like the shells that could be found near the s
hores of No-Moon’s landmasses. They were usually two-armed, more loosely coiled, and flat.

  Maybe a bit bulgy in the middle, but, Maker! Flat shells made of stars!

  One day May found him staring out the window into space. It didn’t take a Neanderthal’s sensitivity to other creatures’ moods to understand what transfixed him. “Many of the experienced crew find it awe-inspiring, you know,” she told him. “And they have made hundreds of journeys in this ship, and seen hundreds of worlds. I can sense their awe. Sometimes it is so strong that I even regret my own inability to share it.”

  Fat Apprentice hardly knew how to answer. May’s leonine features and her graceful movements were overpowering. And her confidence in herself was so much greater than his own. He was still learning his trade, whereas she was mistress of hers, and had been for a long, long time. And here she was, confiding in him.

  Not only that: The shipboard pets that habitually followed her around put him off. He wasn’t used to land animals.

  “You can relax, Fat Apprentice,” she said, sensing his awkwardness. “You have nothing to fear from me or my beasts.”

  He knew that. It wasn’t fear, it was . . . No, she was right; it was a kind of fear. Not the kind you would swim away from, though. It was more a respect so enormous that it was frightening to contemplate it.

  “Eeesh,” he said, evacuating his speech-siphons, and he felt foolish at his hesitation. “It’s just that wherever I looks, I sees more and more stuff. It’s a flouncin’ big universe, beggin’ ya pardon, miz. I can’t see any end to it.” He paused, trying to express himself better. “And I can’t see what it’s all for.”