Chalker, Jack L. – Well of Souls 06

“Sorry. I just saw you fascinated, and wanted to warn you. If you look up when they tilt the module, you’ll be dis­oriented. It catches many by surprise.”

She was undecided whether to follow up this obvious opening right now or look back at the docking. “Thanks. I guess I can look away if it gets me. I’ve been pretty good about balance.”

She stared back up, and almost immediately the module began to turn from camera angle, facing the gap between ship and train and the docking mechanism on the ship itself. It was slow, easy, but took up most of the field of view. Even though the gravity inside was artificial and constant, Angel suddenly felt as if she was falling off the chair onto the floor, and in an instant, that’s where she found herself.

Several people turned and chuckled, infuriating and em­barrassing her. The strange man, who looked to be middle-aged, with thick black hair and a very stylish goatee, tried not to say “I told you so” and instead offered his hand to her.

“Don’t feel too badly,” he consoled. “I think we all did that the first time.”

Still, she was mortified by what had happened to her, and only to her, and also because she’d spilled half the juice on her best suit. “Thank you,” she managed as best she could, only wanting to get out of there. “I think I’ll have to run back to my cabin and change.”

Angel walked out of the lounge, but almost began run­ning once out of sight of the crowd. She didn’t know how she could face them again. As she reached the emotional safety of her cabin, there was a shudder and an awkward jerking motion that almost dropped her to the deck. Bells and alarms were sounding somewhere, and for a moment she wondered if they’d collided with something or maybe cracked up against the ship. She almost hoped so.

There was a second thump and another jerking motion, another set of alarms, and then, abruptly, it was quiet and stable once more.

The module had docked with the ship just forward of the bridge, and then the train had been docked to it. Now, stabi­lizing devices, connectors, and long energy rods held it firm and straight, making the massive vessel less a collection of independent devices than a kind of mechanical organism, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

For a while there was nothing but the vibration and a sense of being so still it felt to Angel as if she were sunk in concrete. Then, when the bridge computer contacted and networked with the computers for each module, passenger and freight, and had checked all safety and stability items and passed everything off, a kind of unanimous vote was sent to the bridge stating that the ship was ready to move. It was the one thing the vessel’s Master did on a nonemer­gency basis. Only he could give the order to move out.

Angel slipped out of her wet clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. She sighed, and removed the brown wig and put it back in its container, revealing a head that was per­fectly shaped but now totally hairless. Lucky the wig didn’t come off, too, she reflected dourly, but though she had no problems with the way she looked, she was pleased deep down to have been spared that one little embarrassment. It was just God’s punishment, she thought, for her trying to pretend she was something that she was not.

She rinsed off, reflecting that this was the second shower she’d had in three hours, but also only the second in many months. Afterward, she wiped off what makeup remained, removed the fake gold earrings and replaced them with the simple copper alloy ones she normally wore—a cross with curved wings set upon a hexagonal base, the same design as on the medallion she always wore around her neck, which had been concealed by the suit. The simple ring, also forged with the same design, went back on her ring finger. No more pre­tenses, she decided. She would be herself, and if they didn’t like it, well, how much worse off socially could she be?

She took out a simple off-white cotton cassock and put it on, leaving the hood down, and looked at herself once more. The loose-fitting cassock disguised her thin figure, although it couldn’t disguise what was to her an overly-large nose and brown eyes too small for her face. She was reconciled to not being a beauty, and this felt almost normal and natural.

A speaker came to life, startling her. “Your attention, please. We have cleared the traffic yard and will be punching into null-space in one minute. It is suggested for your own safety that everyone please take a seat or become still on the floor. Anyone experiencing discomfort beyond the all clear should signal for some mild medication. Thank you.”

She shrugged and took a seat against the bulkhead. This she’d done more than once before. Even so, it wasn’t totally pleasant.

Three bells sounded, followed by a pause, after which it suddenly felt as if she wasn’t holding on to anything at all but falling without physical reference points. The first time she’d experienced this, she almost lost her lunch, but now it was no big deal. There was a roaring, and then a flash. The lighting seemed to go out and then come right back on again. And that was it. Three bells sounded once more to indicate the all clear.

For the next two weeks it would generally feel like they were standing still inside a building on the planet’s surface. From this point on, until they returned to normal space, it was all automatic.

Angel decided to reemerge as herself and perhaps get some dinner in the public dining room before the mandatory ship’s briefing. Heads turned from the still milling group of passengers in their formal wear as she reentered the lounge, but it didn’t bother her. The odds were that few if any of the Terrans, at least, would even recognize her as the same woman who’d been there before.

They weren’t snickering, anyway. The one thing about anyone wearing clerical garb in a crowd of strangers, no matter what the various religions were, was that the cleric usually left the others feeling uncomfortable.

She bypassed onlookers and made for the small cafe entrance. A man and a woman were standing just inside, looking the cafe over, and both turned and gave her the usual facial reaction she got from strangers. She returned a professional smile, and felt very much more at ease with herself. “Please relax,” she told them. “I only try to convert people during business hours. I’m Sister Angel then. Now I’m just Angel Kobe, going to dinner.”

The ice was broken. “I am Ari Martinez,” the man re­sponded in a pleasant voice, and looked at his companion, whom his gesture indicated was not his wife, or probably paramour, either. She was, however, quite a looker, Angel thought, one of those people with all the exotic features of a dozen races and colors and no dominant single one.

“I am Ming Dawn Palavri,” she introduced herself, smil­ing more nervously than the darkly handsome Martinez. “Please—won’t you join us? I do not think there are many in here at the moment and we’ll be shipmates for quite some time.”

“I . . .” Angel looked at Martinez, who betrayed no sig­nals. “I shouldn’t like to impose or interrupt . . .”

“Not a problem,” Martinez assured her at last. “Ming and I are sort of in the same business.” He turned, and Angel was startled to see a formally dressed and quite officious-looking maitre d’. “There will be three for dinner now,” he told the majordomo.

“Very well. Please come this way,” the maitre d’ said in a thin, upper-crust voice, and led them to a quiet table, pulling out the chairs for each of them and lighting the atmospheric period lamp. He then put down three old-fashioned printed menus. “Your waiter will be with you shortly,” he told them, and left.

Angel was startled. “People just to seat you in a restau­rant? Am I showing how primitive I’ve been living, or is this truly unusual?”

Ming laughed. “Not really. There are a number of worlds where it’s still the norm, but most of the expensive and classy places, and pretend classy places, are more like this. It’s actually all holographic. You could walk right through him if you really wanted to. It’s kind of pretend service over the usual automation.”

“I see,” she responded, somewhat disappointed. Not that she hadn’t had a lot of human table service, but it had usu­ally been in dumps and in backwater situations where auto­mation of this level, when available, was usually five years out of whack and in bad need of repair. Well, much of what was fun in this life was in the imagination.

The menus certainly felt real, and looked real. Hers seemed tailor-made for her own likes, dislikes, prohibitions, and re­quirements. No animal matter of any kind, synthetic or not, and a wide variety of veggie, rice, and sauce-heavy dishes including curries, with juices and herbal teas. Ari Martinez’s menu, while apparently identical, appeared from his rumi­nations aloud to be heavy on steaks and fine wines, while Ming’s seemed to have a lot of egg and seafood dishes and elaborate salads. Out of curiosity, after all three had put down their menus, Angel reached over, picked up Ming’s menu and looked through it.

It listed the same dishes as her menu had.

“Caught them in their little trick, huh?” Ming chuckled.

So even the menus were careful illusions. “In this kind of controlled atmosphere, it’s going to be next to impossible to figure out just who and what’s really there,” she responded.

“But that’s the trick,” Ari commented. “Magic shows are far more fun when they are so well done you cannot catch them working the show. The best way is to simply take everything at face value in an environment like this and just enjoy it. We’ll be back in the real universe soon enough.”

A waiter out of a classic movie took their orders, almost certainly a hologram as well, but as Ari had said, it didn’t matter.

“I can’t help noticing the winged cross on the hexagon,” Ming said to her, curious. “I am not familiar with this sym­bol. Might I ask the order?”

“I am of the Tannonites,” she told them. “It is a very Old Order denomination but it is not well known. It does not go back like so many to old Earth times, but evolved on Kate­nea, one of the early colonies. It is basically Christian, but there are elements of many ancient faiths in it as well, including some that are from other races. Our goal is to syn­thesize the One Truth out of the Many, and to do that we no longer have a home, as it were.”

“Sounds like you travel as much as we do,” Ari replied. “We’re management consultants. Not, I might add, from the same company, but we do basically the same thing. We go to the various enterprises our companies run that are hav­ing problems, and we try and determine what the cause of those problems might be and to find fixes for them. Nine out of ten times it winds up that we have to discover and weed out an incompetent or nest of incompetents some­where in management.”

“Ninety out of a hundred,” Ming added. “And all but a tiny speck of the rest turn out to be downright crookedness. It’s quite a fascinating business, really. Sort of like being a detective, only the solution may be far different than simply discovering that it was the butler with the knife in the living room.”

“I should think it would be fascinating,” Angel responded.

“And not nearly so dangerous as tracking down genuine nasties.”

“Oh, we’ve had our share of nasties,” Ari assured her. “I would say that someone’s tried to push me off a balcony or crack me up or some such, oh, maybe on the average of once a year since I started. I think Ming’s average is similar.”

“About that,” she agreed. “The thing that saves you most times is that it always has to look like the perfect accident. Otherwise you’ll just get the real cops plus a lot more people like us showing up, and they’ll find the same thing and gen­erally run down the bad guys. But, it is true, the real chal­lenge is that they are often quite clever and will try and lead you to the wrong person or group or around in circles. Still, it beats sitting in an office somewhere.”

Maybe it did, but they sounded to Angel like two private detectives doing their job for money and the good life rather than out of a sense of service. Still, she wasn’t going to judge them. At least what they did resulted in good; merce­naries could have their uses.

As the food started to come, the conversation turned back to her.

“You say that your denomination has no home?” Ari asked, curious.

“Not anymore,” she told them. “We grew inward on our home world over the years, and very insular, cut off from the rest of society. That was not why God caused us to exist, and it did us very little good except to breed a kind of local colony that was in danger of straying or atrophying. God had no other way to kick us in the backside and get us into action on our true mission, so He caused our sun to go nova.”

That was a meal stopper. “I beg your pardon?” Ming and Ari almost said as one.

“Oh, there were enough warning signs that we knew it was coming. The whole planet had to be evacuated. In a way, it was a shame, since it was quite rich and quite beau­tiful, but we would never have gone otherwise. This was long ago, you understand. Centuries. I have only seen the pictures, which are kept by the Elders. It was the Patriarch and Elders of that time who received from God the divine commission, and since then we have had no home. Wherever we are is our home, and we take with us that which we need. I was born on a far-off world inhabited by a race not unlike the Rithians, which is why I think I get along with them so well. When I was eight my birthmother sent me to the nearest convent for formal education. These are small affairs that are actually attached to space stations like the one we were just on. In fact, I just visited the Asswam sisterhood. That’s where I stayed until this ship arrived.”

“Funny. I’m in and out of space stations all the time, and I don’t remember ever seeing or hearing about one,” Ming commented.

“That is deliberate. We do not wish the convents to be known. They are primarily shut away from all other parts of the station, in strict seclusion. Only the Elder in charge and the Mother Supervisor deal with the station and maintain commerce and communication, as well as, of course, ones like me who pass through, and I cannot really interact with them, as anyone of the faith just visiting must take a vow of silence while inside to preserve the cloistered atmosphere for the students and permanent staff. I realize this must seem odd to you, but it is our way.”

“I hope you are not offended, but all religions seem odd to me,” Ming commented. “The more you see of the uni­verse, the less you believe that there is anything but random­ness out here.”

“You see no pattern? No wonder in its many forms and variations, its sheer complexities?”

“Pattern? No, I don’t think so. Galaxies spin away and crash into one another, stars go nova and wipe out whole worlds, and the range of creatures both sentient and not that could use a much better engineering design, including us, are legion. I live for the here and now, expecting nothing beyond. If I thought there was justice even, I might waver a bit, but I work for too many scoundrels as it is. Did you see that walking zombie Kincaid?”

Angel nodded. “Yes. A very tragic man. He hunts an ancient evil in the guise of a fellow creature, but because it is from vengeance, he usurps God’s role. What about you, Ari?”

The man gave a weak smile and shrugged. “I don’t know. I was raised Catholic, and, I suppose, I remain so, although not exactly in the best of graces. I keep wondering about some things, all those ancient dead worlds of long vanished civilizations we keep stumbling over. Who were they? Where did they go? Why and how did races that traveled through space millions or perhaps a billion years before anybody we know vanish so completely and so abruptly? I was talking with an archaeologist, and he said that the primary mystery civilization had been found across the entire galaxy at the least. We haven’t gone anywhere that we haven’t found their colonies, nor met a new race that didn’t already know them, if no better than we. My old Bible study teacher always was fond of noting that the book of Jeremiah, among others, talks of ancient civilizations and spacefaring angels that existed long before Adam was made. I am not so sure of the faith of my ancestors in a word-for-word fashion, I admit, but I am well aware that there are things of vast cosmic sig­nificance about which we know nothing. I lost my father a couple of years ago, and I like to think that he is still some­where, beyond this sort of life. Call me someone reserving judgment, but with an open mind.”

The meal continued that way, quite pleasant from Angel’s point of view in spite of the lack of spirituality of her com­panions. There was some hope for Ari, no matter how mate­rial his life and attitudes were. Ming, well—none saw God unless they were called to do so, and like most people, Ming was spiritually deaf. Angel knew it was not her job to con­vert such people, only to find those who heard the call but had no clear idea which direction it was coming from. Con­verting the deaf ones was not only fruitless, it was, to her people, blasphemous. If God had wanted them, He would have called.

They finished dessert and got up to go to the Captain’s reception and briefing, but they continued trying to get to know one another. The fact that Angel had made no effort to thump a Bible or preach to them made her acceptable as a fellow traveler. Ari had been aboard and thus wasn’t re­quired to attend, but he hadn’t much else to do.

“So where are you heading?” he asked the nun. “If it’s not too personal, that is. You say you have no home, and you’re far too young to have both education and lots of experience.”

“It’s not too personal, no. Actually, you are right. I’ve just come from a two year assignment assisting a mission on a rather primitive world. It was very basic stuff—digging wells, showing how to create and plant and harvest rice in the old ways, that kind of thing. Our tradition is to get right into the mud and teach by example. Of course, I was also being tutored by the Holy Sisters at the mission, and evalu­ated for personality, aptitude, you name it. They decided that I did have the calling to mission work and that I should be sent to university. I have decided that I have a talent for growing things that experts say can’t grow where I put them, so I will be taking a degree in plant exobiology.”

“Really? And that’s where you are heading now?”

She laughed. “Not directly. Actually, I’m on my way to be married.”

“Married! But I thought—’.’

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