Heaven (37 page)

But, better still, there could be a way to save Fall. If he could get her accepted into Heaven, then her body would be preserved
in its current state. She would be discorporate, but in what amounted to suspended animation. That would buy time to get her
proper medical attention.

The monastery’s transible room on Aquifer was deserted, which was just how a disoriented, recohered Second-Best Sailor liked
it. A few seconds ago he’d been on
Talitha
; now he was under the ice cap, back where he’d been held prisoner. He needed a few moments to take it in and adjust—it had
all been so
scary
.

He pulled his thoughts together with a conscious effort. He was here to do one thing, and one thing only.

His golden suit—it looked and felt just like his old one, but it had the most
amazing
extra features—purred and flowed down from the platform, taking him to a place that really was a place, a location that could
be observed and thus fixed in the classical universe.

The enormity of his task hit him like a shockfront from a subocean landslide. Somehow, he had to find the missing mariner,
and he had only a single planet to search. He must be mad.

Still, negative thinking never did anyone any good. Every search must start somewhere; this one started with the neighboring
rooms.

Empty.

Rounding a corner, he came upon a squad of armed Hytth. They recognized him as an intruder—probably the battle armor gave
it away; he didn’t stop to inquire about their thought processes—and their reactions were quicker than his. His suit turned
from liquid gold to a mirror finish as the laser bolts hit, reflecting them straight back at their sources.

The Hytth’s rifles exploded, shredding the creatures’ brittle exoskeletons. Pale blue gore dripped from the ruins of their
forelimbs.

Second-Best Sailor gave silent thanks to the Precursors for Ship’s ability to grow an armored battle suit and grabbed the
nearest Hytth, still gawping with disbelief at what had happened. His translator screamed:

“Where are the prisoners kept?”

He continued to shake the insectoid and scream at it until, terrified by the continuing loss of vital fluids, the creature
told him.

Since there was a Heaven beneath Aquifer’s Ice Dome, Sam decided, there had to be a Vestibule. There had to be servomechs
to run the discorporators and tend the dismembered bodies of Heaven’s occupants.

There had to be a way in, and he intended to find it. Quickly.

He returned to the duplicator room and retrieved various Church records, mostly of previous runs. He needed access to the
hierocrat’s private archives, and that required a special qubit crystal. He had duplicated a small top-security batch of these
crystals a few weeks after his arrival. He remembered it because of the tiny quantity and the excessive security precautions.

He knelt, and on the fifth attempt he held one in his hands. Now no paths were barred to him. If it worked. Time to find out.

He made his way through the corridors, taking care not to run into the occasional monk or menial, and certainly not into a
band of Hytth security. Locked doors sprang open at the touch of the qubit crystal, hidden consoles activated, and secret
computers mapped out a route for him. The route took him to the hierocrat’s personal suite, which was luxurious beyond anything
he could ever have imagined: a basking pool, a simulated slithing grotto that even had a spume curtain, and a midden of ingestible
cleg-vermin. There, in an encrypted glyphic, he found how to unlock the portal to Heaven.

How crass.

A secret tunnel, entered through a trapdoor.

The mind seldom has the luxury of choosing. Most acts of free will reduce to a comparison of options. Circumstances seldom
permit a truly unconstrained choice. Free will is what it feels like to make judgments in the context of complex constraints.

The Book of Lost Ephemera

O
nce a lion-headed Neanderthal woman had sat here, dangling her feet in the cool, clear water and laughing at the worms that
hoped to eat her, as they tickled her skin. There had been a pier and, behind it, docks—an underwater polypoid town with ship’s
chandlers, trading areas, and bars.

Now only the sea remained, and it was stained by the thick black ink of thousands of dead mariners. Their bloated corpses
floated over the ruins of their dockside buildings, surrounded by shapeless lumps of burned lignoid and tangled lines from
hundreds of boats that would never again sail No-Moon’s oceans.

Flocks of raucous buzhawks gorged on the carrion and fought among themselves for the tastiest morsels of decay. Shyenas, lured
from their hidden tunnels in the forest underbrush, prowled the shore in broad daylight, feasting on the rotting carcasses
and keeping nervous ears open for the slightest whisper of danger. Below the harbor’s rancid surface, pudding eels tore at
the banquet with dainty teeth, and sugarlips of many sizes and species hunted the pudding eels in vicious packs. Larger predators,
numerous species of gulpmouths, circled in the mouth of the harbor, waiting for shoals of sugarlips to make a dash for the
comparative safety of deeper waters. A solitary glutton, forty yards long with a maw to match, waited in ambush amid a forest
of purple quelp, hoping that one of the gulpmouths would make a mistake and pass overhead.

On land, all visiting aliens who had failed to flee the planet were being rounded up by squads of heavily armed Cosmic Unity
missionaries and taken to kindness camps for spiritual reorientation.

In the seas, the reefwives fashioned their remaining husbands into weapons, and debated their most effective deployment.

Cosmic Unity had not anticipated the violence of the reception that awaited it on the surface of No-Moon. After all, their
fleet was on a mission of peace, bringing the good news of the Memeplex to ignorant unbelievers.

And at first, the violence had been so cryptic that the missionaries had not recognized it for what it was.

The first wave of missionaries had been a Fyx laser battalion, a Force of Charity, which would be backed up by aerial support
in the form of a squadron of bliss bombers should it encounter resistance. They had been met by a small group of Neanderthal
males, nomadic traders in search of profit, who had invited the missionaries into their homes as a welcoming gesture.

The Fyx acolyte-general, worried that this openness might be a trick, delegated a platoon of first-wave missionaries to fraternize
with the Neanderthals, while the main Force of Charity began underwater operations to locate and convert the polypoid males
that, so far as they knew, were the dominant sentient life form on No-Moon. Everything that the members of the platoon were
offered to eat or drink in Neanderthal homes would be checked for toxins, harmful microorganisms, and Fyx-affective parasites.
But Cosmic Unity’s equipment did not detect the reefwife virus, because the reefwives had disguised the virus temporarily
as a dozen harmless fragments. Once inside the Fyx’s helical digestive passage, the fragments would assemble. But the virus
would not start to replicate until six genetic switches had been flipped by their hosts’ circadian cycles. Six sunsets, six
excesses of orange-yellow light, would be needed to flip the final gene and trigger viral replication.

It was a chink in the invaders’ elaborate defenses that the reefwives had envisioned in numerous timechunks as the mission
fleet prepared its invasion. They knew that the first missionaries would be Fyx. So the infection had been tailored to Fyx
biochemistry. It had been set up so that its action would be delayed, for maximum effectiveness.

While the reefwives bided their time, Fyx Flotillas of Blessedness prowled the oceans, boarding every mariner boat they found
and offering to accompany its crew and captain back to port for initiation into the Great Memes of Cosmic Unity. Most of the
mariners accepted the offer with enthusiasm, as the reefwives had primed them to do. Some, to ensure credibility, expressed
disinterest and were promptly made prisoners. Many fled into the sea, leaving their boats at the mercy of the invaders. A
few, who had volunteered for the privilege, fought the missionaries with hand weapons, killing and injuring several dozen,
and were totally wiped out. And many forgot what they were supposed to do and made it up as they went along, with varying
degrees of success.

Those that fled into the sea were pursued by the tiny subaquatics that always accompanied a Flotilla of Blessedness, netted,
and taken back to port like the others. Some died, tangled in the mesh of the vast nets, along with huge quantities of marine
life, innocents caught in the crossfire. Gulpmouths grew fat on the banquet.

The pursuit, capture, and slaughter persisted for six days. The Fyx acolyte-general was able to proclaim his growing success
to his superiors on board the mission fleet’s mother ship. Across the planet, hundreds of thousands of polypoids had been
brought to holding-tanks, where already they were responding to a barrage of sermons and diatribes. The Memeplex was disseminating,
as it always did.

The seventh day was different. No reports arrived from the scouting parties on No-Moon. All missionary activity seemed to
have stopped.

This eventuality was unprecedented, but the archives held plans for such a contingency. They advised caution in the face of
numerous possible threats that might be consistent with the loss of contact; they also listed precautions to be taken to avoid
those threats.

The mission fleet watched, and waited, in the hope of gaining a tactical advantage.

Soon, it would react.

Alpha:
In my view the rebuilding of our defense systems is proceeding well. We remember past engagements, and repeat what triumphed
then.

Beta:
Yes, but the enemy is smart. It, too, remembers past engagements.

Gamma:
With us? Have we encountered this enemy before?

Delta:
Not this precise enemy, no. Its general kind.

Alpha:
I/we know the pattern well.

Beta:
Alpha is right.

Gamma:
Beta is right.

Delta:
Gamma is right.

Alpha:
The training of the remaining husbands is proceeding according to plan. Their aggression hormones have more than doubled
since we began our program of biochemical release.

Beta:
And they are aware of this?

Gamma:
“Aware” and “husbands” are not two words commonly found in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence.

Delta:
Except in “I/we are aware that our husbands lack sense.”

Alpha:
Pedant.

Gamma:
The husbands are aware only that they feel bold and invincible.

Alpha:
Nothing new there, then.

Gamma:
They do not know that we are the source of these feelings.

Alpha:
Nothing new
there,
either.

Beta:
In this timechunk, many of our husbands are forfeiting their lives. Too many for me to feel happy with the decision to enhance
their natural aggression.

Gamma:
You have seen the timechunk in which their aggression is left unchanged?

Beta:
Yes.

Delta:
Fewer husbands die, but the invaders take our world and use it for their own incompatible purposes.

Alpha:
And that, we cannot permit—whatever the price. What else, then, requires discussion? Are we agreed on strategy?

Beta:
In the center of my perception I see that the virus trick works beautifully. A first wave of Fyx, as we foresaw. The Fyx
nervous system is very susceptible to viruses.

Delta:
Affirmed.

Beta:
Emphasized.

Gamma:
I believe that the tactic we are introducing against free-swimming marine troops has considerable merit.

Delta:
In my perception, the jellyfish are a masterstroke.

Alpha:
Delta is right.

Beta:
Alpha is right.

Gamma:
Beta is right.

Delta:
Gamma is right.

All:
Again we are in complete agreement.
That is bad
. How can we contingency-plan when we all envision the same contingencies? We risk complacency!

Alpha:
Perhaps there is only one contingency that can be envisioned. This would explain its prevalence, and render complacency an
irrelevant concept.

Beta:
Alpha is right.

Gamma:
Beta is right.

Delta:
Gamma is right.

Epsilon:
Delta is wrong. We are rebuilding our defenses too slowly.

All save Epsilon:
Where did
you
come from?

Epsilon:
I have been spun off as devil’s advocate. Your own intelligences have been diminished in order to augment mine. My role is
to provide diversity of opinion. My own beliefs are irrelevant; my task is to challenge
yours
.

Delta:
Epsilon, you say my/our preparations are too slow?

Epsilon:
Yes.

Beta:
But the preparations are proceeding with maximum speed. We cannot make any greater haste.

Epsilon:
I did not say that we could act more quickly. I said that our fastest speed is too slow.

All:
Then we have a problem.

A single transpod, containing two platoons of monks-at-arms, under the control of a war abbot, circled the port several times
before making an exaggeratedly cautious landing in an open area that offered little cover for insurgents.

While half the force guarded the path for retreat, the rest made entry to the trade buildings. The ansible link between platoon
and transpod was as clear as a bell. “What do you find?”

“Bodies, Podmaster,” said the war abbot.