Launch Pad (13 page)

Goins sat heavily, his face working as if he too sought to avoid tears. Or terror. “You have the right of that, my son. But we may yet be forced to lie on their behalf.”

O O O

The racing aeroyacht Blind Justess was so new that Quinx could smell the sealants used to finish the teakwood trim of the forward observation cabin. Her appointments were an odd combination of luxurious and sparse. Like the airship’s rakish exterior form, the interior of fine craftwork minimally applied stood in strong contrast with the lumbering, gilded monsters of the Lateran’s small aerial fleet. Those wallowing aerial palaces served as ecclesiastical transports and courts-of-the-air for peregrinations to distant sees where the dignified estate of the Gatekeeper might not be so well honored.

Quinx had claimed the forward observation chair by sheer presence. The captain owner of Blind Justess, one young gallant by the name of Irion Valdoux, was a scion of the Massalian aristocracy, and very much a traditionalist when it came to handling his own weapons and equipage.

And doubtless his women, too, Quinx thought with a distinct lack of charity. Valdoux was as dark-skinned as any comely lass might hope for in a suitor, with a smile unbecoming a man of serious parts. He had bowed Quinx into the button tucked seat, upholstery so well-stuffed that a horse could likely have taken its ease there. A glass-walled pit opened between Quinx’ feet. At the time of boarding this curious portal revealed a view of dawn over the Attik Main, the ocean opaque with night’s last shadows as they plucked at the tumbled ruins along the shoreline beneath the Lateran’s airfield masts. Though his head for heights was excellent—Quinx had lived in a tower for some decades now—he found the open space beneath him a trifle unnerving.

“When we’re racing for pips under Manju rules,” Valdoux explained, “I keep a spotter here with the grips for the electrick harpoons.” He cleared his throat. “Open class, no restrictions. Justity hates it, they does.”

“I do not suppose the Lateran entirely approves either,” Quinx replied.

Valdoux, who knew perfectly well that the word of the Consistitory Office was quite literally ecclesiastical law, and that the word of Quinx was quite literally the word of the Consistitory Office, fell silent.

“Long explanations wear on the soul,” Quinx supplied a few moments later. “I shall oversee our progress from here.” He favored Valdoux with the sort of smile that re minded some men of small bones breaking. “It would please me to examine your harpoon grips, however.”

“N-not running under Manju rules here over the Attik Main, sir,” Valdoux managed. “But I’ll send the boy for’ard with ’em, sir. Will that be all?”

“No.” Quinx withdrew his smile. “I expect you to break airspeed records bringing me to Highpassage. The Lateran will be most … grateful. As will my office. Brother Kurts shall assist you as necessary.”

Valdoux wisely withdrew to the bridge, which was a deck below the observation cabin.

Quinx had managed a decent view of Blind Justess on the way up the airship’s mooring tower. Her envelope was of very unusual design, more of a flattened vee shape than the usual billowing sausage of an airship. Though he was no engineer, he could appreciate the effort at linestreaming in a racing vessel. Some of the fastest water yachts shared that look. Likewise the high-speed locomotive that ran the express routes between the Lateran and Pharopolis far to the east, the largest city on the south shore of the Attik Main.

The gondola below the envelope was just as unusual, resembling nothing so much as a sleek wooden knife. She boasted a sharp keel that split the air, a fine array of viewing ports in smoked glass, and very few of the usual utilitarian protrusions so common on airships. Just before boarding, he’d noted a profusion of small hatches and ports along the outside of the gondola’s hull—clearly this vessel kept many of her secrets from prying eyes.

Within was that odd combination of wealth and efficiency. The carpets felt thick and cool, of the finest wool and not yet showing any signs of wear. Grab rails and spittoons were brass polished to a painful brightness. Most furniture was gimbaled and latched away against violent maneuvers, or possibly just to save space. Her most salient characteristic was narrowness.

He wondered what to make of that.

Narrow or not, the great diesels encapsulated into nacelles along the lower curve of the gas bag coughed swiftly to life before growling deep in their throats. Blind Justess cast off from the tower smoothly enough, but within minutes she was moving faster than Quinx ever had done while airborne, nearly to railroad speeds.

Kurts had reported a promised velocity of over fifty miles per hour through the air. Quinx had considered his man to be mistaken or misinformed, but as the Attik Main slipped by beneath his feet, his mind was changing.

How much progress had taken place in the factories and laboratories of High Passage, Massalia and the other great cities of the world while he’d spent his life laboring among books and sweating priests and accusations of error? A ship like this, any airship in truth, had been inconceivable when he and Ion were boys. That he could now fly with the speed of storms was …

A miracle?

Perhaps the Increate had always intended this for Their creation. Another generation would have to answer that question, Quinx knew. His was growing old and become too tired to look much further ahead.

Externalism.

His mind had avoided the point of this journey, dwelling on the mysteries of a machine in which Quinx in truth had no interest.

Heresies were for the most part quite boring, even mundane. And the Lateran of these later days was nothing like the Lateran of centuries past. His own predecessors in office had routed out sin and error with a vigor at which Quinx could only marvel. And sometimes shudder at.

Not that he hadn’t broken more than a few men, some of them quite literally. But peculation and sins of the flesh seemed to be the flaws in his generation. Not the bonfires of the heart that had sent armies marching across entire continents in ages past, not to mention setting the Lateran time and again in opposition to the Thalassojustity.

No one cared so much any more. The role of the Increate in man’s tenure on Earth was undeniable—even the poor, deluded atheists were little more than dissenters against a preponderance of evidence from scriptural to archaeological. The rise of science had only reinforced what the Lateran had always taught.

Except for the damned Externalists.

Every time that heresy had arisen, it had been viciously suppressed. Somewhat to Quinx’ continued surprise, even the Thalassojustity had cooperated in the panicked months over the winter of L.5964 and L.5965, when he was new in his place as head of the Consistitory Office and Brother Lupan had grown regrettably public in his insane claims of having found the Increate’s Chariot on an island in the Sea of Sind.

There were a dozen theological problems with Brother Lupan’s theory, but the most practical problem was that he’d had such a vivid, imaginative presentation of his claims that the human race, already birthed elsewhere, had descended from the skies in the hand of the Increate. People listened, at least at first.

Quinx still believed that the Thalassojustity had intervened in what was logically a Lateran internal dispute simply to protect their Insular Mandate. Trade flowed over the world’s oceans under their protection. In return, unless otherwise ceded by treaty, islands belonged to the Thalassojustity. All of them, from the smallest harbor rock to the great, jungled insulae scattered across the eastern verges of the Sea of Sind.

Brother Lupan had been trespassing not only on theology, but also on the private property of the greatest military and economic power on Earth.

Quinx examined the electrick grips the boy had brought forward. Huge things, built into oversized rubber gloves lined with some felted mesh. He wondered where the harpoons were, how one aimed. Was there a reticule to be used here?

It was a silly, juvenile fantasy, and beneath him as a servant of the Increate. No Lateran vessel had sailed armed since the Galiciate Treaty of L.5782, over two centuries ago. In that document the Thalassojustity had guaranteed the safety of all Lateran traffic, as well as the persons of the Increate’s servants here on Earth. Blind Justess, not being a Lateran vessel, and practically papered over with the money required to build her, doubtless carried a somewhat more robust defensive proposition to accompany her rakish lines and inhuman speed.

Quinx let his thoughts go and stared into the wave-tossed sea swiftly passing far below his feet. Externalism was the worst sort of heresy, because it denied the very basis of the relationship between man and the Increate. That Lucan Matroit had seen it openly declared was frightening. From where did such evil arise, and how so swiftly?

Ever was that the nature of his office. To seek out evil and lay it to rest.

Still, he wondered what Ion had known. Now was not the time for a crisis, not with a new Gatekeeper to be elected and elevated and begin setting his own mark upon the Church of their fathers.

O O O

It is the considered opinion of this subcommittee that the study of astronomy and the related arts be placed under much closer supervision than has heretofore been believed advisable. The impressionable minds and irresponsible imaginations of some of our younger researchers may be influenced toward paths of thought not consonant with this institution’s devotion to the spirit of scientific inquiry. A Review Committee is proposed as an adjunct to the Board of Governors, consisting of senior faculty, a representative of the Planetary Society, and by invitation if they so desire to accept, representatives from both the Thalassojustity and the Lateran. We may thus guide the research and observations of our more impetuous young faculty and students along lines fit for men of good social standing, character, and faith.

—Undated memorandum, University of Highpassage faculty senate

O O O

“Show me,” Goins said quietly.

“Show you what?” A surge of recklessness overtook Morgan. “I thought you were forcing me to silence.”

The judge grimaced. “Show me what you found. Because if you can find it, anyone can find it.”

Morgan paused, attempting to sort out if he’d just been insulted. “I hardly think that just anyone could-”

Goins interrupted. “I cast no aspersions, merely indicate that you are not unique. Rather, a man of your time. Or possibly your technology.”

“May I please have my case back then, sir?”

Morgan took the leather bundle from Goins, opened the clips, and slipped out the beribboned folder he’d meant to present for review at the end of his failed lecture. Such a mistake it had been to surprise the Planetary Society. His presentation had been posted as an overview of new observational techniques with attention to some exciting discoveries. Morgan had slyly left all the critical information out of both the proposal and the abstract.

He’d wanted his moment.

Well, now he had his moment.

“You are familiar with the idea of astronomical photography? That we can expose a plate coated with silver salts through a telescope to study the night skies?”

Goins favored Morgan with a flat stare. “Yes.”

“Good.” Morgan tugged the ribbon’s knot loose. “Some astronomers study the planets and their satellites this way. Arguing over the true count of moons about Deiwos Pater is very nearly a club sport among my colleagues.”

“Yes.”

Glancing at Goins again, Morgan saw something very flat and dangerous in the man’s eyes. Here was someone who could start a war on the far side of the world with a mere word. Power was his beyond reckoning. “I am not stalling, sir. Rather, leading you to the point.”

“Yes.”

No more stalling, he thought. “I have been studying the Earth’s libration points, both with respect to the moon and the sun. You are, ah, familiar with the concept?”

“First described by LaFerme in 1873.”

Thalassocratic reckoning, of course. “I did not realize you were an astronomer,” Morgan said, surprised.

“A presiding judge must be many things, Dr. Abutti. Not the least of which is a step ahead of the ambitious and rebellious men around him.”

Which of those categories did Goins consider him to fall into? “Very well.” Morgan held out a series of photographic prints. “The first two are the trailing and leading libration points in the Earth-Moon system, traditionally accounted the fourth and fifth positions. Each is sixty degrees in advance or in retard of the Moon. Note the photographs show only clouds of dust.”

Goins frowned as he studied the images. “I shall have to trust your word on this. A man can only be so far ahead. With what instrument were these photographs taken?”

“The eighty-eight inch refractor at Mount Sysiphe,” Abutti said, pride leaking into his voice.

“Of which you were one of the principal architects, is that not the case?”

A combination of natural modesty and self-preservation governed Morgan’s reply even in the face of a flush of pride. The Mount Sysiphe project had been much of his doctoral work. He’d even put time in on the manufacturing of the mirrors themselves, as well as supervising the great instrument’s initial installation at the site, beneath the enormous iron dome delivered by the shipwrights. “I would hardly say ‘principal,’ sir. Far more learned and experienced men than I sat as members of the project’s Board of Governors.”

A wry smile flitted across the judge’s face. “I am aware of the distinction, Dr. Abutti. Carry on, please.”

“Your question was important to understanding my … evidence. No one has ever seen the heavens so well as those of us with access to Mount Sysiphe.”

“Which has been restricted these past three years.” Goins’ tone made it clear he was in full support of such scientific censorship.

“Yes. Even my access was challenged, as an associate fellow of the New Garaden Institute rather than a University faculty member.” The very mention of the incident recalled all too vividly his stung pride.

“Still, you no doubt persevered in the face of great pressure.”