codes of kosher and halal.
Interference with public or private practices not on the list of prohibited practices.
Public exhortation of prohibited practices or heinous crimes, except in the public reading of scriptures revealed before the date of the passage of this law (SAYOL 2226) or in the performance of traditional rites.
Unauthorized possession of nuclear-explosive devices.
Theomancy.
Heinous Crimes:
Murder.
Rape.
Kidnapping.
Trafficking in slaves.
Torture.
Poisoning.
Maiming.
Nonmedical vaginal or anal penetration of a person below the age of puberty.
Prevention by force or fraud of any accepted passenger or crew member from embarking or disembarking from a starship.
Causing a nuclear explosion within a habitable atmosphere.
Theicide.
Anyone convicted of a heinous crime may be sentenced to death by public stoning. There is no need to be alarmed by this. The maximum sentence is seldom applied, and when it is, it is usually commuted to death by firing squad.
Have a safe journey, and enjoy your stay.
And whee! Back in KyohvicMisty Harbor, as the helpful stab-in-the-dark translation says in squiggly italics on the sky-port sign, dittoed below in the barred neon of chi-chi OghamMatt Cairns shoulders his duffel bag and heads through the concourse for the shuttle train to town. Foam earpieces tab his throat. The contract brokers will already be yammering after him, but hes not ready yet to come online. He needs a break and doubts his skills are obsolete, for all that his want of trying is everywhere evident in shimmering monitors and remote eyes and the infrared flicker of robot scuttlebutt. In the sixty rack-renting days of his contract on Croatan, this place has jumped forward eight years, and seen more change than in the previous sixteen: Matt knows the pattern, he can clock the curve, hes lived through this shit before; theyre running up the steepening slope to the lip of Singularity like theres no tomorrow, and if the gods have their eye on the ball as usual, there wont be. Cue cannon ball: Somewhere out there in the long orbits, a shot is being lined up in the godgames of Newtonian pool. Or the spidery aliens will irrupt into the system, and Darwinian dice will roll.
Outside the low, flat-roofed concourse, he pauses to inhale the autumn late-afternoon wind off the sea, its salt tang muffled by the faint freshwater scent of the fog in the sound, and the sharper notes of acetone and alcohol derivatives. The skyports on a plateau above the town, its traffic everything from buzzing microlites and zippy little skiffs through new lifting-body aerodynes to the great clunky contraptions of human-built starships like the one hes just stepped off. The town has spread up the valleys like a lichen, sprouted towers like sporulatall, thin hundred-meter spikes of gene-hacked cellulose offshoot. The factory fringe is a fast merge of that sort of biotech or wet nano stuff with the rougher, more rugged carapaces of steel and aluminum, concrete and glass. It reminds him of the Edinburgh he left, centuries ago in his life, millennia ago in real time. The harbors busier than ever, the tall masts bearing computer-optimized wind panels rather than sails, the steamships wispy and clean rather than smoky.
Out beyond the surface vessels, a Nova Babylonian starshipa quarter-mile of iron zeppelin, its hull running with rainbow colorsis poised above the water as though impossibly halted in the last few meters of a long fall. On the headland that shelters one side of the harbor like a shielding arm, the Cosmonauts keep still stands, its prehuman megalithic proportions as unyielding to the eye as ever.
The crowd of merchants and migrants and refugees scurries off the starship funnels, thickening, to the station entrance and packs the carriages. Matt straphangs through the electric down-slope glide, his knees grip holding the big duffel upright. His reflexes havent quite adjusted to the fractional difference
Interference with public or private practices not on the list of prohibited practices.
Public exhortation of prohibited practices or heinous crimes, except in the public reading of scriptures revealed before the date of the passage of this law (SAYOL 2226) or in the performance of traditional rites.
Unauthorized possession of nuclear-explosive devices.
Theomancy.
Heinous Crimes:
Murder.
Rape.
Kidnapping.
Trafficking in slaves.
Torture.
Poisoning.
Maiming.
Nonmedical vaginal or anal penetration of a person below the age of puberty.
Prevention by force or fraud of any accepted passenger or crew member from embarking or disembarking from a starship.
Causing a nuclear explosion within a habitable atmosphere.
Theicide.
Anyone convicted of a heinous crime may be sentenced to death by public stoning. There is no need to be alarmed by this. The maximum sentence is seldom applied, and when it is, it is usually commuted to death by firing squad.
Have a safe journey, and enjoy your stay.
And whee! Back in KyohvicMisty Harbor, as the helpful stab-in-the-dark translation says in squiggly italics on the sky-port sign, dittoed below in the barred neon of chi-chi OghamMatt Cairns shoulders his duffel bag and heads through the concourse for the shuttle train to town. Foam earpieces tab his throat. The contract brokers will already be yammering after him, but hes not ready yet to come online. He needs a break and doubts his skills are obsolete, for all that his want of trying is everywhere evident in shimmering monitors and remote eyes and the infrared flicker of robot scuttlebutt. In the sixty rack-renting days of his contract on Croatan, this place has jumped forward eight years, and seen more change than in the previous sixteen: Matt knows the pattern, he can clock the curve, hes lived through this shit before; theyre running up the steepening slope to the lip of Singularity like theres no tomorrow, and if the gods have their eye on the ball as usual, there wont be. Cue cannon ball: Somewhere out there in the long orbits, a shot is being lined up in the godgames of Newtonian pool. Or the spidery aliens will irrupt into the system, and Darwinian dice will roll.
Outside the low, flat-roofed concourse, he pauses to inhale the autumn late-afternoon wind off the sea, its salt tang muffled by the faint freshwater scent of the fog in the sound, and the sharper notes of acetone and alcohol derivatives. The skyports on a plateau above the town, its traffic everything from buzzing microlites and zippy little skiffs through new lifting-body aerodynes to the great clunky contraptions of human-built starships like the one hes just stepped off. The town has spread up the valleys like a lichen, sprouted towers like sporulatall, thin hundred-meter spikes of gene-hacked cellulose offshoot. The factory fringe is a fast merge of that sort of biotech or wet nano stuff with the rougher, more rugged carapaces of steel and aluminum, concrete and glass. It reminds him of the Edinburgh he left, centuries ago in his life, millennia ago in real time. The harbors busier than ever, the tall masts bearing computer-optimized wind panels rather than sails, the steamships wispy and clean rather than smoky.
Out beyond the surface vessels, a Nova Babylonian starshipa quarter-mile of iron zeppelin, its hull running with rainbow colorsis poised above the water as though impossibly halted in the last few meters of a long fall. On the headland that shelters one side of the harbor like a shielding arm, the Cosmonauts keep still stands, its prehuman megalithic proportions as unyielding to the eye as ever.
The crowd of merchants and migrants and refugees scurries off the starship funnels, thickening, to the station entrance and packs the carriages. Matt straphangs through the electric down-slope glide, his knees grip holding the big duffel upright. His reflexes havent quite adjusted to the fractional difference
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