wrong with the dimensions. But Golliwog tunneled between them
like a decaying alpha particle, looking for Dr. Yee.
He found her soon enough, a puddle
of plaid improbability in a roiling maw of cayenne that was
probably her cabin. He wasn’t sure this was how c-transit was
supposed to work. Golliwog looked around the echoes of her
workspace until he found something that tasted like paper. A stylus
took longer, though he finally decided the cold pressure near the
paper-taste might be it. Golliwog wrote “WOKE DURING C-TRNST TRIED
TO REACH YOU – G”, then drifted among the wounded stars back to the
infinite reaches of his personal universe, where sleep reclaimed
him brutally as any surgeon on a deadline.
‡
Menard: Halfsummer Solar
Space
After a polite but boring period
watching the bridge crew watch their screens, the Chor Episcopos
retired to the ward room to work. He’d been avoiding his ready
room, even though it was part of his quarters, because the angel
had spent the entire journey thus far lurking there.
Menard knew that art or no art,
anything with eyes and a brain certainly qualified as one of God’s
creatures. It was a trial set before him to love, or at least
respect, the angel. Had Bishop Russe possessed anything resembling
a sense of humor, Menard might have believed that his supervisor
had set the angel upon him as a reminder of the Chor Episcopos’ own
failings. But McNally had been correct in his fears for Halfsummer
– angels never traveled away from the Prime See, except when the
Patriarch took it upon himself to conduct a peregrination. The
creatures went wherever His Holiness traveled, of course, scouring
evil so that His Holiness’ feet might tread only on sacred ground.
Their wrath was legendary.
Enough , he thought. He was being uncharitable at best. Menard
offered a small prayer for forgiveness, then looked at the
dataslate on the table in front of him. Once she’d shifted down
from c-space, St. Gaatha had followed ordinary procedure and done a beacon
interchange. The vast majority of that process was highly
standardized information, read-writes of updated shipping
schedules, various sorts of low-priority news and information from
the last beacons she had passed by, as well as dropping off and
picking up whatever mail was needful. Being a Church ship, she
didn’t go through the rounds of time-dependent information
auctioning which were a basis of a major portion of the Imperial
economic system. A complex interplay of scarcity, distinctiveness,
demand, degree-of-confidence and timeliness governed a
multi-trillion credit per year futures market which the Church
considered her flight crews to be above.
What the Treasurer-General
did to manage the Church’s fortunes was another matter entirely, of
course. Menard didn’t doubt that some expert system deep in the
bowels of the ship’s small-scale nöosphere had been auctioning off
commodity and political-legal futures data since they’d first
dropped out of c-transition. That activity simply wasn’t conducted
on behalf of St. Gaatha , her crew or passengers.
As for the mail, since St. Gaatha had moved
ahead of her own information wavefront in heading for Halfsummer,
no one knew they were coming. Therefore neither the ship nor Chor
Episcopos Menard had any individually addressed messages waiting.
There was a small classified Church packet which Menard took upon
himself to review.
There were a handful of parish
report summaries intended to be passed along to the Prime See. He
ignored them. There were three disciplinary files, also of no
interest to him. He marked them anyway, in case he found sufficient
idle time before planetfall to go back and check if any of the
troublesome priests had been found to be xenics in disguise. There
were a whole series of financial logs, which would probably bore
him beyond tears, but Menard felt that he ought to analyze for
anything reflecting Sister Pelias’ K-M curves. Finally, there was a
security
like a decaying alpha particle, looking for Dr. Yee.
He found her soon enough, a puddle
of plaid improbability in a roiling maw of cayenne that was
probably her cabin. He wasn’t sure this was how c-transit was
supposed to work. Golliwog looked around the echoes of her
workspace until he found something that tasted like paper. A stylus
took longer, though he finally decided the cold pressure near the
paper-taste might be it. Golliwog wrote “WOKE DURING C-TRNST TRIED
TO REACH YOU – G”, then drifted among the wounded stars back to the
infinite reaches of his personal universe, where sleep reclaimed
him brutally as any surgeon on a deadline.
‡
Menard: Halfsummer Solar
Space
After a polite but boring period
watching the bridge crew watch their screens, the Chor Episcopos
retired to the ward room to work. He’d been avoiding his ready
room, even though it was part of his quarters, because the angel
had spent the entire journey thus far lurking there.
Menard knew that art or no art,
anything with eyes and a brain certainly qualified as one of God’s
creatures. It was a trial set before him to love, or at least
respect, the angel. Had Bishop Russe possessed anything resembling
a sense of humor, Menard might have believed that his supervisor
had set the angel upon him as a reminder of the Chor Episcopos’ own
failings. But McNally had been correct in his fears for Halfsummer
– angels never traveled away from the Prime See, except when the
Patriarch took it upon himself to conduct a peregrination. The
creatures went wherever His Holiness traveled, of course, scouring
evil so that His Holiness’ feet might tread only on sacred ground.
Their wrath was legendary.
Enough , he thought. He was being uncharitable at best. Menard
offered a small prayer for forgiveness, then looked at the
dataslate on the table in front of him. Once she’d shifted down
from c-space, St. Gaatha had followed ordinary procedure and done a beacon
interchange. The vast majority of that process was highly
standardized information, read-writes of updated shipping
schedules, various sorts of low-priority news and information from
the last beacons she had passed by, as well as dropping off and
picking up whatever mail was needful. Being a Church ship, she
didn’t go through the rounds of time-dependent information
auctioning which were a basis of a major portion of the Imperial
economic system. A complex interplay of scarcity, distinctiveness,
demand, degree-of-confidence and timeliness governed a
multi-trillion credit per year futures market which the Church
considered her flight crews to be above.
What the Treasurer-General
did to manage the Church’s fortunes was another matter entirely, of
course. Menard didn’t doubt that some expert system deep in the
bowels of the ship’s small-scale nöosphere had been auctioning off
commodity and political-legal futures data since they’d first
dropped out of c-transition. That activity simply wasn’t conducted
on behalf of St. Gaatha , her crew or passengers.
As for the mail, since St. Gaatha had moved
ahead of her own information wavefront in heading for Halfsummer,
no one knew they were coming. Therefore neither the ship nor Chor
Episcopos Menard had any individually addressed messages waiting.
There was a small classified Church packet which Menard took upon
himself to review.
There were a handful of parish
report summaries intended to be passed along to the Prime See. He
ignored them. There were three disciplinary files, also of no
interest to him. He marked them anyway, in case he found sufficient
idle time before planetfall to go back and check if any of the
troublesome priests had been found to be xenics in disguise. There
were a whole series of financial logs, which would probably bore
him beyond tears, but Menard felt that he ought to analyze for
anything reflecting Sister Pelias’ K-M curves. Finally, there was a
security
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