Heaven (39 page)

A single small rock, released from orbit, could devastate a port, even a major one. And Cosmic Unity had weapons far more
effective than rocks.

It dropped the rocks anyway. Small ones, for now.

The Church still did not understand that its real enemy was the reefs of No-Moon. It thought that the defending forces were
being organized by polypoid males. Only the males had enough intelligence; the females, Cosmic Unity’s bioweapons experts
knew, were mere corals, without a single brain cell among them. But the experts also knew that the males were
reproduced
by the females, within the warm shallows of lagoons, so Cosmic Unity’s mission fleet had bombed the lagoons as a matter of
course, following Strategy #7,421. And the males were marine organisms, so the Church had systematically poisoned the oceans
(Strategy #658).

They had no compunction in so doing. Had not the polypoids attacked
them
with biological weapons? Whatever the strategic council and its decision banks recommended, the mission fleet carried out.

Cosmic Unity’s strategies were paying off, even if that was sometimes an accidental side effect. By attacking the lagoons,
the Church was inadvertently attacking the reefwives themselves, without ever knowing what the true enemy was. By poisoning
the polypoids in the seas, they also poisoned the reefwives.

Now the reefmind’s worst fears were coming true. She herself was suffering serious damage. She began to worry that she was
losing so many components that her timechunks were becoming unreliable. Her computational abilities, which underlay her unique
sense of distributed time, were becoming ever more compromised as her connectivity came to bits. That made the reefmind’s
strategic decisions less well thought out, and less effective.

Reefwives died in their millions, blown to bits by nuclear fusion, boiled by concentrations of heat rays, melted by lava from
volcanoes that had started to spurt from the cracked floor of the ocean, where incoming asteroids had brushed the waters aside
like a ’viathan ridding itself of a rash of suckermouths, smashing a path through the crust to the mantle beneath. For a split
second, reefwives on one side of the world shared their sisters’ agonizing deaths through their shared neural connections.
Then those connections were gone forever.

The severely impaired reefmind split herself into two parts, the most she could afford without the parts’ becoming too stupid,
to review the remaining possibilities.

Night:
Sister, I fear that we have no other option left.

Day:
Last Resort?

Night:
But we should use that only as a last resort!
(Pause.)
I am playing devil’s advocate, you realize. One of us must.

Both:
Your advocacy meets with limited success. I/we shall hold back. But not for long.

The biggest mistakes in history have been made by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

The Wisdom of Chalz

S
o engrossed had Sam been with his search for the Nether Ice Dome’s Vestibule of Heaven that he had not been quite as cautious
as he had imagined. He had evaded Cosmic Unity’s monks, menials, and security, but he had not evaded the triplex eyes of Second-Best
Sailor.

The mariner was pretty sure that he recognized the tall priest in the maroon cloak. When you are completely defenseless and
someone shoots you with a laser and then takes charge of dumping you in the desert to die, you don’t forget them. One glimpse
was enough to arouse Second-Best Sailor’s curiosity, and his desire for revenge. The priest was a landlubber, like a Neanderthal
but thinner, so that it looked half-starved.
Humen,
that’s what they were called. The size was right, the color of the clothing was right, and there was that indefinable awkwardness
about the landlubber’s gait.

Second-Best Sailor followed the priest as it slipped furtively from corridor to corridor. If the mariner was to find his missing
compatriot, he would need to interrogate one or more of the locals. What better choice than the flouncer that had tried to
kill him? He felt no qualms about taking whatever measures might be required to extract the information he needed.

Second-Best Sailor watched from behind an angle of roughly dressed ice as the human inserted a qubit crystal key into a door
lock. In his furtive haste, the priest had left the door slightly ajar, and the mariner slipped inside, having first made
sure that the coast was clear. He watched from concealment as the priest activated a console and flipped through hundreds
of glyphics. He was clearly looking for something, and by the way he glanced nervously around, it wasn’t anything that he
was entitled to.

Second-Best Sailor found all this intriguing enough to resist the urge to activate one of the suit’s antipersonnel weapons.
He needed the priest alive in any case, but for once it occurred to the mariner to wait and gauge the situation before rushing
in. When the priest gave a quickly suppressed shout of excitement, Second-Best Sailor guessed that he’d found whatever he
was seeking. And when he used the same qubit crystal to open what was evidently a hidden trapdoor, Second-Best Sailor decided
he might not get lucky twice. The door had been left ajar, but the trapdoor might not be—and
he
didn’t have a crystal.

As the priest bent over the trapdoor, peering at whatever lay behind it, the mariner pounced. One of the features of his battle
suit was enhanced physical strength, as the suit sensed the movements of his limbs and adjusted its mechanical properties
to reinforce them. He selected this option on a small display that was sensitive to eye movements, and had the priest pinned
facedown before the human even knew that Second-Best Sailor was in the room.

The mariner wrestled the priest upright and pulled his face in front of the battle suit’s visor by tugging at his head fur.

The response took him completely by surprise.

First the priest’s eyes opened wide with the shock of recognition. Then he sank to his knees. Second-Best Sailor knew enough
about ’Thals to recognize this as a submissive posture, and humen were pretty much like ’Thals, apart from their ugly squashed
flat faces and their skin-and-skeleton bodies. The priest was giving in without a fight. Was it a trick?

What Second-Best Sailor did not realize was that Sam was praying. He began to understand that when his translator recognized
the priest’s language and turned his words into sounds that a mariner could comprehend.

“. . . me,” the priest was chanting. “Praise be to the Lifesoul-Cherisher!”

“With significant probability, the missing word is ‘forgive,’”
the battle suit’s translator stated.

“You still wear the golden suit!” the priest half-sobbed. “But it is
whole
!”

Second-Best Sailor realized that the priest must be thinking of his previous suit, the sailor suit. From the outside, the
two were pretty much identical. But this one had some interesting optional accessories, and the priest would soon find out
what some of them were.

“You are returned from the dead! Praise be to the mercy of the Lifesoul-Stealer! I was wrong; I hurt you; I am mortified by
my error.” The priest peered into the battle suit’s visor. “You
are
the prisoner that I shot, aren’t you?” Then he nodded. “Yes, it’s you; I know it is! It’s a mirac—”

Second-Best Sailor yanked at the skein of head fur gripped in the battle suit’s powerful tentacles. “Shut up, you miserable
string of excrement! Forget your stupid miracles! You tried to kill me, but I survived. And now I’ve come back to make your
life miserable.”

Sam ignored the pain as his hair threatened to tear out from the roots. It was no more than he deserved. “Do as you will,”
he told the angry polypoid. “My life is yours. It is worthless. But before you kill me, I beg you to save the Neanderthal
child.”

Somehow, Second-Best Sailor felt, this conversation was not following the intended script. Despite himself, he could not help
asking: “Neanderthal child? What Neanderthal child?”

“Her name is Dry Leaves Fall Slowly,” said Sam. “She has been tortured by evil priests because she would not believe the Memeplex
of the Church. I am looking for Heaven so that she can be saved.”

Second-Best Sailor had now lost the thread completely. “But
you
are a priest! A priest of the same Church that you denounce as ‘evil’!”

“I was once a novice lifesoul-healer,” Sam replied. “In the Church. And to my shame I desired to rise in the hierarchy. My
priestly instructors taught me to harm innocents, and cited the Second Great Meme to quell my objections. . . . I believed
them, and that is why I caused you harm. But now I understand my error. I pledge myself to your service for the remainder
of my life. Ask, and I will obey. And I see the evil of the Great Memes. With your permission, I will strive to destroy the
Church of Cosmic Unity and all who serve it.”

“That,” said Second-Best Sailor, “is the most pathetic bunch of self-serving lies I’ve ever ’eard.” The battlesuit had a lie-detection
feature, and to be absolutely sure, the mariner activated its verifier. During the few seconds that the suit required to calibrate
its sensors for Sam’s speciotype and measure his autonomous neural activity, Second-Best Sailor drove his point home. “You’re
only sayin’ that because you’re scared out of your useless wits. Ya just want to—”

“The human is telling the truth,”
the verifier reported.

“. . . to—
What
?”

“The human is telling the truth.”

“Ya sure ’e ain’t lyin’?”

“The probability of a lie is negligible,”
said the suit.

Second-Best Sailor had to believe his own verifier; that’s what it was for. It seemed he had acquired a devoted servant, who
not long before had deliberately and callously inflicted a painful wound on him, fatally damaged his life support, and left
him to roast alive in the heat of the desert. It was a turn for the better, he had to admit, but it did take a little getting
used to. Still, he didn’t trust the priest. A mind that could change that much so quickly could well change again. The verifier
could assess whether the priest’s words truly represented his thoughts and beliefs
now . . . but it couldn’t predict the future.

In any case, the priest’s change of heart didn’t make any real difference, even if Second-Best Sailor did believe it. He still
needed information, and the human was going to provide it, at whatever cost.
“Ask, and I will obey”? We’ll see about that.

“When ya left me in the desert, you said that
anuvver
mariner was bein’ held prisoner,” the mariner said, transferring his grip to the human’s throat—the suit’s data banks suggested
this as a more vital area than head hair. “Where is he? Don’t try to hide what ya know—I’ll get it outta you one way or anuvver.
Pref’rably a
painful
one.”

“The other mariner?” Sam’s foray into the hierocrat’s computer had given him the answer to that one, along with much else
about the secret world beneath the monastery. “He has gone to Heaven.”

Sam felt the tentacles tightening around his throat. They were like steel cables. “You flouncin’ zygoblasts
killed
’im?”

“No—” Sam gasped, choking. “The polypoid is—alive . . .”

The human’s voice trailed off into a gurgle.
“Continued pressure for nine more seconds will result in the entity’s death,”
the suit reported in a matter-of-fact tone.
“If you wish to extract information, less pressure is recommended.”

Second-Best Sailor forced his grip to relax and reviewed the conversation. Like most of his conversations with priests, it
sounded logical in small chunks but made no sense when you fitted it all together.

“What’s this ’eaven lark?”

“Heaven,” said Sam, rubbing at his neck and trying to get his breath back, “is a special place somewhere beneath this monastery,
where the lifesouls of the faithful can enjoy every luxury.” He snorted contemptuously, having seen what Heaven was really
like. “The luxury is an illusion, Heaven is a lie, and its inhabitants are discorporated meat.”

Second-Best Sailor didn’t recognize that particular word. “Whaddya mean, ‘discorporated’?”

Sam started to speak, stopped himself, started again. “You promise not to strangle me before I can explain?”

“Ya not in a position to bargain, matey.”

“It’s not a bargain,” said Sam. “I just want to be sure I can finish before my air supply is cut off again.”

“Speak. I’ll hear you out and
then
strangle you if I decide to.”

Sam took a deep breath. “No physical harm comes to them, but they are . . . subjected to certain medical procedures . . .
designed to improve the level of care that can be provided. The facilities that the Church calls ‘Heavens’ are staffed by
robotic medics—servomechs. The inhabitants’ minds are free to roam through boundless virtual realities, while their bodies
are . . . er . . . discorporated.” A gesture from the mariner reminded Sam that he had still not explained the word. “Their
bodies are distributed into manageable components, to provide quicker and more effective medical access.”

The mariner stared at him, stunned. “They’re dissected?
Butchered?
”

Oh, Nerydd . . . “That’s what it looks like. But they remain alive, they feel no pain, and the servomechs can reassemble them
almost instantly. You must believe this. I need to find Heaven, so that the servomechs can discorporate Fall and prevent further
damage. Heaven cannot heal her, but it can buy her vital time. I would not let the child be butchered! Believe me, your compatriot
is alive and has suffered nothing.”

“The priest believes this to be the truth,” the battle suit informed its wearer.

Second-Best Sailor decided that the only sensible course was to accept what he was being told. If it was rubbish, he’d soon
find out. And if the other polypoid, whoever he was, really had been discorporated, it would be a good idea to get him
un
discorporated double quick. And that meant taking the priest’s words seriously and making him lead the way to Heaven.