Heaven (19 page)

Lists of items for duplication arrived, and he performed the necessary gestures at the machine’s metaphace. Empty boxes arrived,
and full ones were taken away. His days passed without distinction; his nights were troubled only by evanescent dreams. He
no longer felt stressed by the need to adapt to new tasks and to learn new skills.

And yet . . .

Now
duplication
was becoming boring. Was it his destiny to be bored by
everything
? He missed the intellectual stimulus of learning to deal with
new
things. He was disappointed not to meet with Fall. His ambition had grown along with his confidence; now he hoped his separation
from lifesoul-healing would not last too long. He was certain that given enough time, he could have found a way to heal Fall.
Already strategies were forming in his mind. It was frustrating.

Time dragged by.

One evening his instructor left word for Sam to attend him immediately in his quarters. Sam hurried through the frigid corridors
of the monastery, hewn from the solid ice and mostly left unclad, so that the walls sucked the warmth out of anything that
came near them. Here and there the corridors were damp, where the air temperature was high enough for the ice to melt, but
such places were rare, and the dampness just made him feel even colder. He shivered, and not just with the cold. What did
the querist want with him?

He would soon find out. He knocked and was bidden to enter.

“Ah, Servant Fourteen Samuel. I trust your sojourn in the duplicating chamber has improved your mental health? Yes, as I expected.
You had become too emotionally involved with your young client to serve the Lifesoul-Cherisher well, Samuel.” The Veenseffer-co-Fropt
waved his olfactory organ airily, as if brushing away an errant parasite, to show that the matter was of little importance.
“That is only to be expected in a novice. Your persistence was admirable, even if it did border on stubbornness and obstinacy.
You may yet attain the glory of Heaven, if any of us live long enough to experience that joyous transformation.

“And you are wondering why I have summoned you here. Come with me, and you will see the reason. And be pleased.”

A section of furnishings slid aside, and wall became doorway. Beyond was a well-lit corridor, and Sam followed the querist
along the passageway. He had never passed this way before and didn’t know that such concealed tunnels existed—though he was
unsurprised to find that they did, for there was much about the monastery of equals that he did not know. And there had to
be ways for his superiors to come and go, on the business of the Community of the United Cosmos, without their inferiors observing
them.

The passage widened into a ramp, which led downward in a tight spiral, coiling into the bowels of the ice dome. Pass lights
glowed pinkly to illuminate the way, so that the light seemed to move with them as they descended. They passed side branches
and closed doors. There were strange smells and odd little sounds as metal scraped against metal and the ice itself creaked
and groaned.

They came at last to a door that differed in no obvious way from a hundred others. The instructor produced a qubit-coded crystal
key; the door recognized the sequence of encoded quantum spin states, unlocked, and swung open into a darkened room, which
curved in a semicircle. One wall was a transparent membrane. Cupped in the arc of the semicircle was a lighted chamber carpeted
with a soft, deep pile, its walls hung with devotional weavings and decorated with scenes of the Prime Mission—a star with
emergent magnetotorus herds, a dirigible satellite, a gas giant wrapped in bright stripes of cloud.

Seated cross-legged in a worship ring in the center of the chamber was Dry Leaves Fall Slowly.

Sam caught his breath. She was praying.

“How . . . ? It is a miracle . . .”

“You can speak naturally,” the instructor said. “She cannot hear us even if we shout. The membrane has been tuned to be impermeable
to any sound made on this side, but to allow sound from the other side to reach us.

“Are you not proud of your client, Fourteen Samuel?”

Sam nodded, close to tears. He suddenly felt foolish that he had worried about her safety, about what might happen to her.
And he realized that he still had an awful lot to learn about the healing of lifesouls.

He could not see her face, for her back was toward him. She seemed utterly calm, utterly relaxed. She was chanting a children’s
prayer to the Lifesoul-Cherisher—one of his favorites—in a slightly lilting voice. There was no hesitation; she sounded word-perfect.

The prayer ended, and she began another.

“You may observe your client from any angle,” said the querist. “From the end of this room you will be able to see her face.
Observe how serene she is.”

Sam followed the curve of the membrane so that the familiar features seemed to turn until they faced him.
Serenity
, yes, that was the word. Not a flicker of emotion passed over the Neanderthal child’s face.
Beatific
? Yes, there was such a word.
Saintlike
.

Her hair was thick and freshly washed, her skin glowed with health and vitality. She kept her head bowed and began once more
to recite a prayer, the same one he had heard her saying when he first entered the room. It seemed that her repertoire was
limited, but there was no questioning her devotion and her concentration.

“It’s . . . amazing,” he said, his voice trailing off as the immensity of it all hit him. “You—you succeeded.”

The querist nodded. “It was the work of many dedicated healers. With enough love, anything can be accomplished. Even the most
stubborn and misguided of lifesouls can be started on the road to healing.” The instructor’s innate sense of emotions guided
his words as Sam absorbed the awesome nature of the triumph. “Dry Leaves Fall Slowly was a challenge. She was far too difficult
a case for a novice; we should have recognized that right at the start. We tried many techniques, some arcane, before we gained
entry to the source of her delusions.”

Suddenly, without any change in her expression, Fall stopped praying and rose to her feet. Her hair swung away from her neck,
and for an instant Sam saw—or thought he saw—a triangular mark on her skin. Then the hair swung back, and the mark, if there
had been one, was hidden once more.

A door opened to reveal a menial; it beckoned silently, and Fall walked meekly out of the room and disappeared from view.

“Her progress is encouraging,” the querist said. “Her new, acceptable attitudes still need regular reinforcement, but she
has come to embrace the Unity of the Cosmos and the fundamental Oneness of all beings. No longer does she set herself apart
from the world. And her delusions about her family no longer trouble her young mind.”

“Her pet? The grenvil? She thought it had been killed. Horribly.”

“There was no grenvil. It was a dream, an invention. It has been banished from her thoughts. Now she knows that her place
is in the Community of the United Cosmos, where she will be loved as a person and cherished as a lifesoul.” The querist spread
his tufts in the equivalent of a human smile—something Sam had never previously witnessed. It looked as if the serpentine
alien was out of practice. Probably he was. But he seemed happy, and his translated voice held a tinge of pride.

Rightly so. Sam was overawed by the display of expertise. He would never be able to match it, he was sure. Never in a thousand
years.

“You have seen her; she is well. And soon her mind will complete its healing, and her lifesoul will be whole again. But we
waste precious time now she has gone. You have much duplication to perform before your training recommences.”

“Can I not restart my training now?” Sam inquired in disappointment. “With respect, master, I feel ready to return to healing.
More ready than I have ever felt before.”

The instructor “smiled” again. “A worthy feeling, Samuel. But your immediate task must be the duplicator. An unexpected emergency
demands that we all employ all of our skills where they can count for most.”

May had been reunited with her shipboard menagerie, and several of her pets were refusing to leave her side.
We missed you. We want company
. They followed her about the ship and got underfoot.

She played with a hornsnake that was curled round her wrist. It liked the warmth. There had been two, but one had disappeared
into Ship’s superstructure. If it could find enough food to survive, it would give some unsuspecting sentient a surprise one
day. Half a dozen furry ant-moles gamboled at her feet, chasing one another’s long, trailing hind antennae. The snake ignored
them—it ate only worms.

It’s good to be home
.

Will’s thoughts were less happy. “I think the murdering bastards got them all,” he said, studying a data summary displayed
on his command screen.

The remark brought May back to ground with a bump. “All forty-nine corpses have been identified?”

“We have twenty-two, plus twenty-seven probables. A lot of them were so badly damaged that it’s difficult to distinguish them
from offal in an abattoir. Until we know it’s safe to recover the bodies and genotype them, we won’t know for sure. But I’d
bet my lifetime trade profits that every last mariner on Aquifer is dead.”

“I was getting quite close to the little fat one,” said May, sad beyond measure at her loss. “The one apprenticed to that
bane of my existence, Second-Best Sailor.” She shook her mane, as if that might undo what had happened and bring the annoying
but engaging polypoid back to life. “Fat Apprentice asked such foolish questions . . . yet such difficult ones. He made me
rethink some of my most strongly held assumptions. I shall miss him.”

“As shall I,” said Will, absently stroking the crevit slung across his muscular shoulders, hoping to make it buzz. He had
reviewed
Talitha
’s recordings. Nocturnal cloud cover had hidden events in the bay itself, but six floaters had been spotted to the north,
where the cloud thinned. They had continued due north until the horizon blocked the view.

“I shall miss the others, too,” May added. “Even Second-Best Sailor.”

Will took the statement at face value. “There is more to this than personal tragedy,” he pointed out. “The reefwives fear
that this disaster could spell the end for their race. Cosmic Unity is closing in on No-Moon, and all the patterns point to
it being in thrall to a benevolent memeplex.”

“Which may not be as benevolent as its adherents imagine.”

“Exactly. The memeplex holds itself to be benevolent, but the reality may be different. The worlds that this memeplex has
touched all seem to be peaceful, but the reefmind wonders at what price such unnatural peace has been bought. And there are
hints in certain Galactic records. . . . Aquifer was a backup strategy, a safe refuge for a small group of husbands who would
later be provided with wives, ready to rebuild the polypoid population should that become necessary. But now, if No-Moon is
overrun, there is no backup.”

May understood that all too well. Like Will, she was terrified out of her wits. Anyone would be.

And to make their immediate problems worse, there was a high-tech race on the loose on Aquifer, completely contrary to Galactic
records. Armed and vicious. Willing to attack for no reason, or for reasons of its own . . . reasons so alien that they would
make no sense outside that one species. If it was one species. It might be an alliance.

What was it? Who were these murderers?

Could they be Cosmic Unity? The Church might be on the planet already. Could a religion whose central tenet was tolerance
boil forty-nine harmless mariners alive merely for being where they were not expected?

Maybe not. But the reefwives were certain that the Cosmic Unity fleet heading for No-Moon represented the biggest threat their
world had ever faced. They thought that a religion whose central tenet was tolerance could become twisted enough to enforce
that belief through holy war. It was often the religions that boasted most loudly of their love for their fellow beings that
most readily perverted their beliefs into cruelty and destruction. Because
they knew what was good for you
, and sometimes they would stop at nothing to make sure that it happened. This, May realized, was the self-laid trap that
awaited every benevolent memeplex.

    Be cherished, O my lifesoul

free from suffering

free from grief

    free from the perversion of Unbelief

Attended

    mended

    protected until ended

Each cell, each entity, each clan, each race

each species builds a Heaven

    in its rightful place

With rock and cloud and mud and fire and ice—

Until the healer can no longer heal

    Until the Lifesoul-Stealer comes to steal

    the mortal being

    from its self-made paradise

Deathsong of the eighty-first ecclesiarch

S
am’s patience was rewarded more quickly than he had expected. Halfway through his third day back on duplicator duty, he was
interrupted in the middle of preparing the machine to duplicate a batch of spiky things whose end use was, as always, unknown
to him. Previously, such ignorance had never bothered him. Yet now, as he was whisked away before he could complete his assigned
task, he found himself questioning the decision. Only within the confines of his own mind, to be sure—he was not so foolhardy
as to voice his concerns, in case that should be interpreted as dissent. It was just that—well, the replacement servant would
have to start the sequence of ritual gestures all over again, and if he made any mistakes, it might take several hours to
get back to the stage that Sam would have reached if they’d allowed him ten more minutes at the metaphace.

The realization that he was questioning received authority bothered him a lot more than what the authorities had actually
done. No doubt, they knew best. They must have reasons beyond his limited comprehension. But now, thinking back, he got the
distinct impression that, more and more, he was privately questioning the actions of his superiors in the Community. He was
thinking about how his instructions fitted into the broader context of the Monastery’s work, and the Community’s own Great
Mission.