Rigo stared, frankly unbelieving. “You really have no mission there?”
‘The only contact Sanctity has with Grass is through the penitential encampment working on the Arbai ruins. Not all our acolytes work out. It won’t do to send them home to teach other unwilling boys how to get out of their service. So we send them to Grass. Our encampment was already there when the Grassians arrived. The Green Brothers. So named because of the robes they wear. There must be over a thousand of them, but they have virtually no contact with the aristocrats. Over a hundred years ago the Hierarch ordered them to develop some interest they could use as common ground with the Grassians, but there really is no common ground.”
“Trying to make your penitents into more of your damn missionaries,” snarled Rigo.
O’Neil wiped his brow. “Oh, I won’t deny that’s what the man in charge of Acceptable Doctrine would like. His name’s Jhamlees Zoe, and he gets madder than a teased bull about our not converting the planet to Sanctity, by force if necessary. The Hierarch sends him word to calm down or come home, and it only makes him madder,” O’Neil wiped his forehead where the sweat glistened.
“What did the brothers do to develop ties with the aristocrats?”
“They took up gardening.” O’Neil laughed harshly. “Gardening! They’ve become specialists in that. Oh, they’ve become renowned for that. So well known even Jhamlees didn’t dare put a stop to it. But that still doesn’t give them any day-to-day contact with the rest of the planet, not enough to learn anything. And the damned aristos won’t let us in!”
“Not even when you told them …”
“The Grassians aren’t suffering. We’ve tried to describe to them what’s happening, but they don’t seem to care. They were separatists to begin with, more concerned with maintaining the privileges of their rank than with any human concerns. Lesser nobility. Or perhaps merely pretenders at nobility. European, mostly, and ridiculously proud of their noble blood, full of pretensions about it. That’s why they’ve consistently refused permission for a temple or a mission. Ten generations on Grass has only made them more isolationist, more … more strange It’s like they’ve had iron walls built in their heads! They refuse to be studied. They refuse to be proselytized. They refuse to be visited! Except, maybe, by someone like you….
“Sanctity has a navy.” Rigo said it as fact. He disapproved of that fact, but it was true. Planetary governments were isolated and parochial and content to be so, Once the initial explosive overflow of humanity had taken place, Sanctity had done everything it could to stop further exploration. The faith had not wanted men to be so widespread they couldn’t be evangelized and controlled. Discovery had stopped, along with science and art and invention. Though its military technology was centuries old, Sanctity maintained the only interstellar force.
Sender O’Neil sighed deeply. “It’s been considered. If we take troopers in there, the reason couldn’t be kept secret, not for long. All hell would break loose. We can’t even consider it until we know for sure that there’s something there. Please. Whatever you think of us, give us credit for some intelligence! We’ve computer-modeled everything. Our best people have done it over and over again. News of the plagueanduse of force would be equally disastrous! Have you heard of the Moldies?”
“Some kind of end-of-the-world sect, aren’t they?”
“End of the universe, more likely. But yes, they fervently desire the end of the world, the human world. They call themselves the Martyrs of the Last Days. They believe the time has come to end all human life. They believe in an afterlife which will only commence when this one has ended, for everyone. We’ve recently learned that the Moldies are ‘helping’ the plague.”
“My God!”
“Yes. Anyone’s God!”
“How?”
“Carrying infected materials from one place to another. Like the ancient anarchists, destroying so that something better can come.”
“What has this to do with—“
“It has this to do with. All Sanctity’s resources are tied up in tracking and expunging the Moldies. They seem to be everywhere, to breed out of nothing. If they heard … if they knew there was a chance that Grass—“