Heaven

by Ian Stewart

  The nameless invaders transported her to the plains above the cliff, one of the myriad flat-topped plateaus into which the landmasses of the Huphun homeworld were divided like crazed pottery. From there she was taken by transpod to Brooding Canyon, where the neighboring species of Hophuun lived. And there, still in chains, she was brought before her feud-sister, the nestmaker SquareBlueSpotted, for a lesson in spiritual enlightenment.

  Traditionally, there was little love lost between the Huphun and the Hophuun. Their feud had lasted 211,000 starsets so far, with only the occasional lull. Yet now her feud-sister was professing sympathy for the broodmother’s desperate plight, even as the silent strangers stood, their faces shrouded in strange cloths.

  Something was terribly wrong.

  So desperate was GreenCheckeredCircle to end her flock’s misery that she forced herself to ignore this feeling. In the lilting tones of trucespeak she began to explain to her deadly enemy the wickedness that was being inflicted on her fellow Huphun. “Why?” she sang at last, almost breaking down with released emotion. “Why have these creatures treated us so?”

  Her feud-sister, the Hophuun nestmaker, fluttered her own unrestrained wings in a show of superiority. “Because they know of the Huphun’s long-standing intolerance of harmony.”

  “Nonsense! The Huphun are tolerant of all who follow the permitted path.”

  The nestmaker cackled. “And your hatred and enmity for those who do not adhere to your small-minded, narrow path is legendary. Notwithstanding that such folk form the majority.”

  “The unbelievers are wrong,” said GreenCheckeredCircle. “Such matters are not subject to vote. It is the Huphun alone who possess the True Knowledge—”

  “Kreeech! Always you Huphun seek to impose your insane obsession with the Wings of the World! With you there is no other topic of songversation! Despite all counterarguments, you are convinced that you alone possess the true knowledge, and you insist on imposing it on every cliff-dwelling of this planet instead of attending to your own.”

  The broodmother weathered the verbal assault without flinching. “That is your belief,” she sang. “Like all infidel opinions, it is wrong. But you say that we Huphun are being persecuted for our commitment to the Permitted Path. Why should strangers be aware of our ways?”

  “Because we have told them,” replied SquareBlueSpotted. “As have the Hoofen, the Hoffynn, the Who’fun, the Hof-phoon, the Hüfen, the Huff—”

  “You list infidels.”

  “To the Huphun, all other flocks are infidel! You complain of persecution, but it is you who have persecuted every other flock on this world!” The nestmaker calmed herself. “And whenever an opportunity presented itself, you have imposed your will on them.”

  “You would do the same, given an opportunity. You merely lack our skill in combat.”

  “We have rejected the old ways of racialism and guerilla war. We have converted to the Chreech”—here the nestmaker had trouble wrapping her larynges around the foreign term—“the Church of the United Cosmos.”

  It sounded like the Huphun had opposition.

  “We now subscribe to the Memeplex of Universal Tolerance, which preaches love for all of our fellow creatures, here and throughout the Galaxy,” the nestmaker finished.

  GreenCheckeredCircle, sagging under the weight of her chains, glared at her social counterpart and sworn enemy. “The invaders have glued my breeders to the cliffs so that their children fall and perish. That is love?”

  SquareBlueSpotted fluttered her quills to show how serious she would be. “Love so great,” she trilled, “that it risks its own spiritual health to save the lifesoul of the disbeliever.”

  The Huphun broodmother was baffled. “I know not of what you speak.”

  SquareBlueSpotted acknowledged the truth of this statement with a low, mournful crooning sound. “That is the tragedy of the Huphun,” she agreed. “From the moment the missionaries arrived, your flock was identified as a certain source of resistance. That is why your treatment has been so severe.”

  GreenCheckeredCircle, who was not stupid, saw an entry. “But we were denied any chance to obey! We have been prejudged, before any of us lifted a feather! Let us, too, convert to your Church. Let us enjoy the benefits of this . . . memeplex.”

  SquareBlueSpotted soughed like the little-winter wind. “If only that were possible, feud-sister. But we know that you will never truly believe. That is why your flock has been selected—as an object lesson. The missionaries of Cosmic Unity have calculated that for every Huphun that dies, twenty members of other flocks will experience the joy of the Lifesoul-Cherisher. The balance of love is tilted against you.”

  GreenCheckeredCircle did a little dance of frustration and deposited a small heap of excrement to show her contempt. “That is unfair.”

  “So was the Huphun reign of terror that led to your selection for this honor,” replied SquareBlueSpotted. “Your own intolerance has rebounded upon you like a resurgence of rakis mites in a poorly cleaned nesting site.”

  “We have rights!” screeched the broodmother. “Under feud-treaty!”

  “You do not accord rights to others, and so you forfeit your own,” replied the nestmaker. “In any case, feud-treaty is now obsolete.”

  “We will fight this evil,” sang GreenCheckeredCircle. “The Huphun will never surrender to these unbelievers! We will never convert to a heathen religion!”

  For the first time, one of the veiled strangers spoke. Its accent was poor—its translator was not yet trained in the Huphun larynge. But its words were clear enough: “That option is not on offer.”

  Sam absorbed the terrible lesson of the Huphun. At the cost of just one minority group—a group of troublemakers, at that—an entire world had been brought into the fold of the Church. Such a small price to pay for so wondrous an outcome.

  One thing he did understand now: The querists truly believed that their actions were motivated entirely by love. He had always been taught that it might sometimes be necessary to sacrifice a sentient’s comfort for its overall well-being. To administer vile-tasting medicine to cure a disease. And he had learned to appreciate the spartan surroundings of the monastery of equals, whose purpose was similar. What he had not asked himself until now was how far the principle extended. Did it have limits?

  Suddenly, he understood the querists’ position: The answer to that question must also be no. To them, Huff Elder’s principle was absolute. It had to be, or else the Church stood for nothing. A sentient entity’s lifesoul was valuable beyond price, whereas its physical comfort was mere currency.

  He didn’t yet believe that, but he was wavering under the force of the logic. He had been trained since childhood to accept whatever the priests told him. This was a test of his faith, and his doubt made him fear he was failing that test. He resolved to put his doubt behind him and to try to control his emotions better.

  Hesitantly he expressed this view.

  “You progress,” said the querist, beginning to relax. “You have begun a difficult transition. I believe that you now understand intellectually that the foundational memeplexes cannot be denied. My task is now to reinforce that new understanding until you cease to question it. Do you see the necessity for the next step?”

  In Sam’s mind the horror was taking on a new aspect. Emotionally he was still fighting against what he had been told, what he had seen . . . but the querist’s conviction of righteousness blazed like a sun. Sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind. . . . The cruelty had been more extreme than he had ever imagined possible, but the cause was so overwhelmingly vital—not just to the Church but to the individual! Clutch-the-Moon’s tragedy was that his heresy had become so deeply entrenched in his sick mind that only radical surgery could excise it—and, for reasons that were no fault of the Church, the patient had been too physically weak to survive the treatment. His end had been a mercy, but only on the physical level. On the spiritual level, it was a tragedy without end.

  Sam vowed
to pray every evening in Clutch-the-Moon’s memory. He could not save the blimp’s lifesoul now that he was dead, but prayer would help Sam to come to terms with the loss. And reinforce an important lesson.

  Now he felt ashamed at his naive reaction. As always, his master was right; once again he, XIV Samuel, had been mistaken. He should have focused his thoughts on the spirit, not on the body.

  But even as he reaffirmed his determination to obey the Church in all things, Sam was terribly afraid that his newfound conviction might slip away again.

  The three querists shared a common interest outside their ecclesiastical duties: relaxing conversation after a difficult day. Their custom was to meet in the Rhemnolid’s quarters, where the environment was a compromise that the others could easily manage without elaborate equipment.

  To its two friends, the !t! looked distinctly out of sorts. It must have had a tiresome time. It wasn’t hard for them to coax the !t! into telling them why.

  “There was a terrible disagreement,” it said, its frenzied clickings instantly transformed into two varieties of speech. “Two monks, both blimps. The argument became very personal and abusive. I had to intervene and reprimand them.”

  The Veenseffer-co-Fropt felt immediate sympathy. Dissent was so emotionally draining. “What was the dispute about?”

  “It was a sexual matter. You know that in several species within the Church, death of a partner is an integral part of the sex act. One monk was maintaining that sex must be forbidden to such species in Heaven, since the purpose of Heaven is to postpone the onset of death. The other would have none of it, stating that in Heaven nothing could be denied. Neither monk displayed the virtue of tolerance, I regret.”

  The Rhemnolid saw the irony. “But in Heaven this cannot be an isssue. All things are possible, even if they sseem logically contradictory.”

  “Yes, but these were simple folk,” the !t! stated, confirming the obvious. “Strong on faith, short on reasoning power. But I do indeed feel drained.” And with that, it helped itself to a jolt of electricity from a portable stimulator that the Rhemnolid had installed specifically for that purpose. He liked to offer his guests proper hospitality.

  “The young human took today’s revelations surprisingly well,” the !t! remarked. “I was expecting angry denunciations.”

  “Perhapsss he was overwhelmed by our presensss,” hissed the Rhemnolid. “He seemed to be very ssslow on the uptake.”

  “Only at first,” said the Veenseffer-co-Fropt, defending his tutee. “Servant of Unity Fourteen Samuel Godwin’sson Travers is fundamentally a good person, and for a time he was in denial about what he was witnessing. Subconsciously, of course, he knew. But he was not prepared for such an unpalatable truth, and so he ignored the obvious until it became impossible to deny. From that moment on, I think he showed serious promise.”

  “More so than our unfortunate client,” said the !t!, taking a further jolt of electricity. “I cannot credit his stubbornness. It caused him much needless anguish. And such a pity that his main digestive vessel was weak-walled. I really thought that we were beginning to make some progress with him.”

  “I beg to contradict,” said the Rhemnolid. “I have encountered his kind before. Their minds become fixed, and they respond poorly to treatment. If pushed too far, they bend, but they ssseldom break.”

  The Veenseffer-co-Fropt slurped syrupy liquid from a small goblet with his ingestion tube; he had acquired a taste for ethyl alcohol when a novitiate. The !t! consumed another jolt of current. “Personally,” put in the Rhemnolid, “I find both of your habits preposterousss. We Rhemnolidss have no need of artificial stimulusss.”

  “Return your thoughts to young Samuel,” said Sam’s instructor. “I need your advice. I am thinking of recommending him for an accelerated program of advancement. He is malleable and intelligent. I am convinced he has the potential to rise high in the ecclesiarchy. And we all know that such entities are in short supply.”

  “The Church’s logistics are being overstretched, so great is the need for its ministrations.”

  “That soundsss perilously like criticism,” said the Rhemnolid.

  “Don’t be an idiot. It is criticism. And it stays inside this room, as we long ago agreed. We three must be able to speak freely amongst ourselves, the better to assist the propagation of Cosmic Unity.

  “We all know that the Church is fighting too many battles on too many fronts. And you can keep any dislike of military metaphors to yourselves—we’ve been over that before. We are soldiers, my friends—soldiers of the Memeplex. With the difference that the will of the Cosmos is on our side.”

  The !t! idly flicked its sticklike forelimb against the floor in a counterrhythm to its speech. “But that alone cannot guarantee victory, yes? Not if our strategy is misguided.”

  “Or our numbers are constrained. Which returns me to my question. Fourteen Samuel: what is your impression of him? Is he ready?”

  The Rhemnolid heightened its consciousness to verify its opinion. “You are right, of course. He is the most promising novice any of us have yet ssseen, is he not?”

  The !t! clicked its agreement. The question scarcely needed asking.

  “So you recommend that I proceed to the next, most sensitive stage of his training without further delay? Or should we instruct him to assist at other treatments, to make sure that his innate disgust is abating as he becomes accustomed to the harsher aspects of lifesoul-healing?”

  The !t! and the Rhemnolid made eye contact and confirmed their agreement. “We are of one mind,” click-chirruped the !t!. “All three of us. The risks of an accelerated program are high, but the Church’s needs are becoming desperate. And—”

  “And that demands that the risssk be accepted,” the Rhemnolid finished for it. “The decision makes itself, in general terms, but I do not see the specificsss. What, precisely, do you have in mind?”

  The Veenseffer co-Fropt took a deep breath. The issue had been decided. There was no point in further delay.

  “We must send Samuel to Heaven.”

  8

  CROOKED ATOLL

  Empathy has many uses. It can help you to understand your fellow beings, and thereby make their lives—and your own—more pleasant. On the other hand, if you understand another beings’ feelings, you may be able to use that knowledge against them. Of course, such actions would be highly unethical. That is precisely what makes them so useful.

  Archives of Moish

  To all but the most careful observer, No-Moon seemed the same as it had always been. Tailfins, jelloids, and other sea creatures went about their business; mariners sailed the oceans and caused mayhem in the dockside bars. But two hundred miles above the ocean’s surface, Cosmic Unity’s magnetotorus-powered mission fleet had settled itself in orbit. And a few feet below the ocean’s surface, the reefwives were making preparations for war.

  What they had in mind was biological warfare on a planetary scale. It was a contingency that they had prepared for long ago.

  The first line of defense was a virus, which millions of years ago the reefwives had sequestered in sealed capsules, locked into impermeable rock around the shoreline in a dozen locations. The virus would need genetic modification before it could be used to defend the planet. In its present form, several key genes had been deactivated, and protection against common mutations had been added. Such molecular engineering—“gene-hacking,” the reefwives called it disparagingly—was never completely straightforward; genetic changes that seemed harmless in themselves could interact with other genes, with noncoding sequences, with other organisms, or with the environment, in unpredictable ways. But this particular suite of modifications had been tested extensively several times in the past, back on Three-Moons, and experience showed that it could be trusted. Even if the deactivated viruses escaped from their confinement, they would harm nothing.

  Once activated, however, this virus would be devastating. It had been designed from the start to be multispecific—it had
the ability to disrupt the biochemistry of virtually any animal species, with suitable modifications to its surface structure. The reefwives’ timechunk had told them which species to target: Fyx. So they added carefully tailored receptor molecules to the virus, based on Fyx biochemistry. The virus would target the neurotransmitter molecules that controlled the signaling pathways in Fyx nerve cells. Its action was inhibited by a wide range of proteins found only in No-Moon’s plants, and the reefwives had been vaccinating the animals of No-Moon for months—especially the sentient ones, using a short-lived prion complex distributed in the ocean and spread overland on the winds. So only the enemy would be vulnerable.

  Cosmic Unity’s adherents were primarily carbon-based. Lacking immunity, the coming invaders would quickly be infected with a virulent and extremely nasty plague.

  Already the reefwives’ timechunk was predicting an acceptable contagion rate for the plague, and the death of several thousand invaders. This gave the reefwives some satisfaction; they were beginning to find out more about Cosmic Unity’s methods as they cross-correlated Galactic records, and they had never seen any sense in protecting entities that had no scruples about harming others. They had long been puzzled by some species, which had developed a curious concept that they called “rights”; a few seemed to imagine that these rights should be extended to every sentient individual, of whatever species, independently of how it behaved. The reefwives found the idea romantic, and the principle delightfully impractical—but when it came to the crunch, they felt that rights were something you had to earn. Anything that was given away indiscriminately became valueless. Their view was that any creature that failed to respect the rights of others automatically forfeited its own rights, up to and including the right to exist. Nobody had invited Cosmic Unity to inflict its memeplex on No-Moon; it had been the Church’s own idea, and whatever happened to it as a result would be entirely its own fault. There was no need to warn the invaders or otherwise offer them any potential advantage. That would just be poor strategy.