by Dave Duncan
“My views on religion were set when I was nine. We were on a family picnic—my parents, baby sister, me. A sudden rain squall sent us all running for shelter. I reached the car first. I turned around just in time to see a lightning bolt strike them. I ran back, of course. My father was obviously dead. My mother was still twitching, but they had been holding hands and were welded together. My sister had been fried. The Brain detected the deaths, but the aid it sent arrived too late. I was inherited by grandparents, who saw me as an undeserved burden. They leased a nanbot and more or less told it to keep me out of sight until I was adult and knew how to behave. How can I be expected to worship a god who does such things?”
“By faith, Brother. If you believe in a god, you must trust Him.” The friar raised a callused hand to block comment. “I know that is not an adequate answer. If you truly wish private religious instruction, I shall happily spare you as much time as possible on our journey. We can study the Book of Job together, but I admit that you may not understand the Lord’s motives until He explains them to you himself, as I am sure He will.”
About to ask when that would be, Ratty guessed the answer and switched to a safer and more useful topic.
“Who else will be traveling with us to Pock’s?”
“I would prefer not to discuss our journey until we lift off, if you don’t mind.”
Even if Ratty did mind, obviously. Meaning the friar knew no more than he did. The old man would never admit that, because the Church must not confess to ignorance or accept that STARS was pulling its strings just as it pulled every string in the galaxy.
“Since we have time on our hands at the moment,” Brother Andre conceded, “I shall be happy to answer your questions on other matters.”
“Very kind of you, Brother.” It was too late to prevent Cardinal Favela becoming pope, but confirmation might be useful some other time. This was all being recorded for the pack. “Do you go to Guacharo often?”
“No.”
“It’s close to Annatto, I understand.”
Andre shrugged. Emaciated though he was, his shoulders were broad. “About a two-day walk over the hills.”
Oh yes, there was that. Conspicuous humility was an especially odious sort of pride. “You are not walking now.”
“Papal orders overrule the rule of my order.” Eyes twinkling, Andre waited with insufferable patience for the next question.
“I understand that the hospital at Guacharo is run by your mission.”
“No. It is staffed by Capuchins but remains independent of Annatto.” Why did he not ask why Ratty was asking about Guacharo?
“You visited Guacharo last year, around midsummer?”
“No.”
Ratty’s most expensive and experimental implant, the VERIT45, integrated visual and auditory input to determine if a speaker was lying. So far Brother Andre had not raised a twitch from it. Balked, Ratty tried another tack.
“The new pope is the same age as you?”
“Within a few days.” Still no sign of curiosity or any indication that the old man wondered where the questions were leading.
“Your Church supports the population limitation laws?”
“Some of them, including the interdict law.” Andre’s eyes were bright. “I had hoped you wanted to discuss the work of the mission, Friend Turnsole, not just dabble in gossip.”
Ah! Age had not dulled the old man’s wits after all. Good. Ratty enjoyed a tussle.
“What gossip did you have in mind, Brother?”
“I do not repeat slander. If you care to dirty your mouth with it, then I will refute any statements I know to be false. Where possible, I will confirm what I know to be true.”
You cannot like him, one archbishop had said, but you must admire his honesty and fear his example.
“Several witnesses told me,” Ratty said, “that Cardinal Favela underwent heart surgery in Guacharo hospital last year, and that you spoke with him there. He was past interdict age then, of course. It is no secret that the rich and powerful can find ways around the interdict laws, but for a senior cleric to do so would be a major hypocrisy as well as a crime.” That was the news that would have sunk Favela’s candidacy.
Andre seemed unconcerned. “My information is that he underwent no surgery and received no medication. He experienced a dizzy spell brought on by overwork and was granted some bed rest and nursing care. Those are not forbidden, Ratty. Nor are painkillers, but so far as I know he did not need any. I spoke with him, but only by cognition, from Annatto. I offered my best wishes and my prayers. Your informants may be conflating a brief trip I made to Guacharo in the spring. I toured the wards on that occasion.” The eyes glittered. “You were thinking, perhaps, that the untruths you mentioned would have thrown the conclave into disarray? Not so. The rumor was already going around. Several cardinals cognized me to ask whether there was anything to the tale, and I gave them the truth as I knew it. Besides, surgery leaves traces—records in the Brain and scars on the patient. The calumny could easily have been discredited by unbuttoning a shirt.”
“And did Cardinal Favela bare his breast for the cardinals?”
“I cannot say, because I was not there.”
Still not a tweet from the GBA4445. Ratty reluctantly concluded that he had found a witness who would never lie.
Ratty did, though. “I am grateful to you for correcting me.”
Judging by Andre’s grim expression, he was undeceived. “You worry, I suppose, that our new pope seeks to bury his guilty secret by silencing those who knew of it?—me, who doubtless helped stitch up his incision, and you, who threaten to unmask his perfidy. Obviously he has called in some favor from STARS and arranged for us both to die in an unfortunate interstellar accident.”
Ratty had not gotten quite that far yet. With a twinge of alarm, he said, “If you think that, then why are you going?”
“I don’t think that.” The friar smiled pityingly. “I am going because the Holy Father told me to. You must have made many more enemies than he in your career, Brother Ratty. Does STARS have cause to hate you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have even less chance of returning than I do. Besides, in the line of work you have attributed to me, Friend Turnsole, martyrdom is usually regarded as an upward career move. Not in yours, though. Are you still determined to accompany us?”
“Try and stop me!”
“I should not dream of it,” Andre said, and a wonderfully warm smile spread over his age-wracked features. “I look forward to your company. Let us agree to be good foes and fence with the buttons on our rapiers. I am sure your counsel will be valuable.”
Feeling strangely out-maneuvered by that smile, Ratty wondered what Jake and the pack were making of all this. “Do you suppose the team will produce a unanimous report?”
“On, no.” The friar sighed. “I do not even know what it is expected to produce. I am afraid it is not expected to produce anything. I see we have arrived at the landing.”
* * *
Ayne was a beautiful world, said to be the most earthlike planet ever discovered, and the one thing on which almost every one of its inhabitants agreed was that it must be cherished and well husbanded, not desecrated by the sort of “terra-deforming” that some long-settled planets had suffered. So people hid their houses from sight and designed all buildings to make the smallest possible demands on the environment. They kept their population to a number the world should be able to support forever, according to the wise.
Landings were a necessary exception to such rules. Shadoof was a repellent expanse of permcrete, a sterile plain supporting a dozen isolated block houses like giant warts. Both they and the aprons around them were calcined red and black by the hellish energies that bathed them so often. Two were playing host to shuttles like larger versions of suborbitals, and it was to one of those that the car headed.
Ratty was trying to ignore a childish excitement at the prospect of his first trip off-world. Who else would be
chosen for the star-studded jury? He walked in silence beside the friar across the roof to the down shaft. The moment he set foot in it, his sensory implants went dead. He had known that would happen eventually, but he had expected it after liftoff, and it was a startling experience, as if his clothes and skin had disappeared. Angry, he activated the portable recorder.
He thought he heard voices, but there was only one person in the lounge, a woman in severe clothes and stark haircut, perched primly on the edge of a chair. She recognized him, and her eyes widened. They were rather wide eyes at the best of times, protuberant.
“Ratty Turnsole! This is a surprise, Friend Ratty!”
He had never seen her before, and his normal reaction would have been to use the implant in the facial recognition area of his mid-fusiform gyrus to access the Brain and provide her name. As it was, he mumbled, “A happy one, but I confess I don’t know—”
“Doctor Mildred Backet, Director of Health and Population Studies for the Sector Council. Call me Millie.” She simpered.
He oiled. “And obviously an expert enlisted to aid our investigation. You recognize Brother Andre, of course?”
“Oh, yes, I know him from your wonderful Saint of Annatto!” She regarded Andre with some doubt. “An honor, er, Brother.”
“The Lord be with you,” Andre said.
“You are traveling to Pock’s World?” Ratty asked.
“Oh, yes. The secretary general said I should go myself. On such an important matter, you know, she needs firsthand advice.”
The sector secretary general was much too shrewd a politico to let herself be associated with anything as messy as geocide, or even genocide.
The lounge held seats for fifty or more people. The wall screens showed no person or machine working around the shuttle, but there was an air car approaching from the west.
“Brother Andre,” said a syrupy mechanical voice overhead, “confirm your identity and your destination as Pock’s World.”
“Confirmed.”
“Please connect with the medic in the corner. Visitors to Pock’s World require extensive tonic.”
As Andre crossed the lounge, Backet said, “You won’t like it. Traveler tonic for Pock’s tastes worse than any I have had, and this will be the eighth world I have visited.”
Ratty said, “That is a remarkable record, Millie. Which one impressed you most?”
“Oh, none of them can compare with Ayne, Ratty. I had better not express preferences, though. Not in my position.”
He eyed a compact but bulging portmanteau beside her. “You bring luggage?”
“Diplomatic privilege.” Her expression could only be described as a smirk, but interstellar baggage fees were hundreds of times the value of anything she could have packed. No doubt the taxpayers of Ayne Sector would foot the bill.
Andre had placed his wrist in the medic’s stirrup, setting lights a-flicker. “You are slightly malnourished,” the machine announced, “and suffering from sleep deprivation. Leg and foot joints show signs of overuse, but otherwise functional deterioration consequent upon discontinuance of medical maintenance is in the lowest quartile for your age. You must remove your abrasive undergarment before reaching Pock’s World or you will incur severe dermatitis from the pollutants. Personalized tonic will now be provided; drink it right away. Further medication will be required during your journey and while you are resident on Pock’s World. Confirm that your stay will last at least three Ayne days and not more than seven.”
“That is my understanding.”
The beaker in the dispenser began to fill with a purple fluid.
“Ratty Turnsole, confirm your identity and your destination as Pock’s World.”
“Confirmed.” He headed for the medic.
The friar tasted his brew and said, “Ugh! I had forgotten just how bad it was.”
“I warned you!” Backet said with a harsh laugh. “Are you allowed to count that against your next penance?”
The old man drained the beaker and shuddered. “It should be the equal of two hours’ flagellation.”
She pouted at him, not sure whether he was joking.
The medic said, “Confirm that you have not brought any non-standard medications or recreational chemicals with you and do not intend to continue their use during your visit to Pock’s World.”
Ratty disliked being scolded, especially in public. “I have brought none. I’ll party with the locals if they ask me.”
“How much can you tell us about the evidence we shall be inspecting on Pock’s, Director?” Andre asked.
Busily eavesdropping on the medic, Backet did not reply.
“Be warned,” the machine said, “that many local drugs are unsafe for visitors. Your use of supplementary, nonstandard medication may result in unusually rapid deterioration when you reach interdict age. In the short term, expect some loss of sexual function during withdrawal.”
Backet coughed. “Evidence? I expect it to be convincing. STARS would not take such drastic steps without good reason.”
Turnsole took a sip of the tonic and blasphemed.
At that moment a woman sauntered into the lounge and scanned the room with an arrogant glance, as if she owned the world. In a sense she almost did, for Athena Fimble was Minority Leader of the Ayne Senate, the third most powerful politician on the planet.
Ratty blasphemed again. Star-studded indeed!
Chapter 3
In a sense, Athena’s journey had begun a week earlier, on a moonlit night at Portolan. The daylong party had ended when the air cars hummed away into the warm dark. Alone with her problem and her ghosts, she sat on the terrace steps and watched ripples lap the beach. The small moon was rising. The air was scented velvet, the waves’ song a lullaby. She had the world to herself except for a few small sail boats in the distance, where avid fishers hunted night eels.
Inevitably, she thought of her lost child, Chyle, who had died doing that on a night like this. Slysharks had never been reported in the Buttonwood Islands before that evening and only once in all the years since. Fortunately she had not been there to see the monster surface, smash the boat, and eat the occupants—eat half of each of them, a gruesome detail that somehow made the tragedy seem much worse. Sudden death had taken both Chyle and his father, but Athena’s partnership with Sprunt had been long over by then, so his death had not smitten her as hard.
She had drowned her grief in politics, and she was still splashing around in the kettle. Today she had played hostess for all her senior advisers and their families. There had been feasting and games, children sporting on sand and sea, adolescents frolicking in the shrubbery, and serious policy discussions behind closed doors. It was the children, especially, who had brought back the memories, and it was the thought of another that complicated the decision she would make that night.
Closeted with the politicos in the great hall, overlooking the sea and silvery beaches, she had asked for frank advice. Her present office had grown wearisome and frustrating. She did not feel ready to retire, and there were only two ambitions left to her—secretary general of the Sector Council or president of Ayne, and only the second of those titles was worth having. She had known what most of her listeners would say, for they that had been nagging her for a year to declare. Of course she must seek the party’s nomination, they insisted, for the Carabin administration was corrupt, tired, and stained with sleaze. She had earned the privilege with decades of eating tasteless banquet food and listening to mind-destroying blather. The public was ready for the more humane social policies she had advocated for years, and no other candidate came close to her in experience.
As for finance… That was when the fizz had flown. No doubt the party’s usual supporters would finance the presidential campaign, but how many would back Athena Fimble in the nomination free-for-all beforehand?
Two bare, muscular arms wrapped around her. She turned her head; Proser kissed her with carnal intent. She broke it off.
“Come to bed,”
he said. “It’s been a long day.”
“I need to think.”
“You’ll think better in the morning. I can drive your cares away.” Proser was her chief of staff and sleeping partner. The best aide and finest lover she had ever known, he was not much older than Chyle would be if he had lived…
“Not yet, love. I am going to decide tonight, here and now.” That had always been her way.
“What is there to decide? The planet needs you. Carabin has been a disaster. And what have you got to lose, anyway?”
“Portolan,” she said.
“Ah!”
Portolan had been the Fimble family home for a dozen generations, kennel for a celebrated line of artists, judges, soldiers, politicians, and even clergy. It was antiquated and located inconveniently far from the capital, but it reeked of aristocracy and old money, and it never failed to impress. With Chyle gone, Athena was the last of the Fimbles. Most of the old money had gone also, but Portolan she had preserved, and it trumpeted to all comers that here was a politician too rich to be dishonest. In truth she was too honest to be rich. She had squandered her inheritance financing her career. It had let her rise to the highest ranks without becoming overly beholden to anyone, which was rare indeed, but to progress farther she would need other support, and a lot of it. Hence today’s conference.
“If I try for the nomination, love, I’ll have to gamble everything. I may lose everything, even Portolan.” It was the dread of defeat in the primaries that haunted her, of seeing the great Fimble line die out in a humiliating footnote and personal poverty.
“That’s a worst case,” Proser said, “but only you can make the decision.”
“The alternative is to give you that child you want.”
His embrace tightened. “You’re serious?”
“Of course I’m serious!”
Although she had used up her birthright bearing Chyle, she knew Proser was anxious to use his. She was well past natural bearing age, but that was a legal problem, not a medical one. Ayne had a blue-stocking attitude to lab-assisted reproduction. Many planets with looser standards welcomed tourists with the avowed purpose of “adopting” babies. “Star children,” they were called, and they usually grew up to look astonishingly like the rest of the family. Nevertheless, off-world bottle babies were a shady evasion of the law, and the moment it was suspected that Athena Fimble had followed that course, her political career would end. She must choose one or the other.