Heaven (10 page)

“It is for their own safety.”

“That might possibly get them to behave themselves. At any rate, some specific news will help to calm them down.”

Will transmitted the details to her.

“Restless” was an understatement. Second-Best Sailor’s trawl of the bars had netted another thirty-one mariners who were willing
to abandon their wives and atolls, not to mention their boats, to travel to another star. Most were in late stages of algal
inebriation, which was very likely why they had agreed to this crazy plan. Fitting them out with suits was proving to be a
complicated business. The suits were ancient and inexplicable technology that carried them in an upright position, doused
with recycled water through a kind of showerhead, which kept their siphons oxygenated and their skins damp. The suit’s recycling
microfilters osmotically removed excreted chemicals from the water, keeping it fresh-tasting and removing any risk of toxic
shock. Although the suits were “one size fits all,” that is, they adjusted themselves to the form of their wearer, there were
some initialization procedures that had to be carried out before the golden sailor suits were fully operational.

This shakedown was not going according to plan, because the mariners kept interfering with it or forgetting what stage they’d
reached. Second-Best Sailor had his work cut out calming them down and preventing fights from breaking out, while May and
Stun checked off the suits’ functions and ran a few precautionary tests. It would not do to get the evacuees to their new
home and then find that they dried out because of a suit fault.

Eventually, the forty-nine mariners were ready to be loaded on board the transpods, and with a certain amount of grumbling
and horseplay and many good-natured obscenities, they trooped through the wall-irises into the stark loading bays.

The last on board was Second-Best Sailor, preceded by his two apprentices. As they passed Stun and May, Fat Apprentice finally
got around to asking a question that he felt he really should have asked sooner.

“Where are we goin’, miz?”

May gave him a smile. The fat little polypoid was terrified out of his wits but doing his best to conceal it.

“It is a very suitable world. You will like it.”

“What’s its name?”

“Uh . . .” May wasn’t sure it had an official one, but it would be simplest to invent one rather than explaining about official
nomenclature. Recalling the planet’s specifications, she was about to tell him it was Sand when something told her that would
not be sufficiently reassuring.

“Aquifer,” she told him. “The planet you are going to is called Aquifer.”

Praise not the Lifesoul-Giver,

Grim Sower of transient Life,

With its joys, miseries, uncertainty.

Give thanks to the Lifesoul-Cherisher,

Kindly Reaper of the dysfunctional vortex,

Enforcer of the peaceful certainty

Of entropy everlasting.

The Book of Plasms

T
he cliff was six miles, from its abrupt top edge to the enormous scree slope of dislodged rubble at its base, and the canyon
descended a further two miles before it reached the ammonia torrents that had carved it from thick deposits of frozen sulfide,
remnants of a long-forgotten period of planetwide volcanism.

All along the canyon walls, on the side facing the setting star, the ledges were piled several stories high with the round-mouthed
spittle nests of the Huphun. Adults lined up on the nest forecourts to spread their wings, displaying the varicolored homing
symbols that identified each parent to its parthenogenetic young. And as the Huphun watched the star set, they sang to their
neighbors about the beauty of their world and the consonance of the city, attributing both to the Wings of the World, which
were invisible but must exist in order to carry their planet around its star in what every child knew was a slightly eccentric
ellipse. Its resemblance to a breeding-dance flight path was presumably coincidental—the topic had been the subject of continuing
speculation for a myriad myriads of starsets.

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 bright, 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.