Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  All this time we were in free fall. Occasional impulses shoved the walls, floors, or ceilings gently toward me: The chapel intermittently rotated this way and that, so that the main engine was pointed away from anything that could be damaged by the exhaust fluxion.

  Toward the end of my shift, as I double-checked the bolts that held the pews to the floor of the nave, a mournful tonk sounded from the tower above me. It was the noise of a muffled clapper banging against a tied-down bell. I looked down in time to see the floor rising slowly toward my feet and watched, fascinated, for the several seconds it took to reach my outstretched toes. I didn’t weigh very much; a flick of the ankles, and I could float halfway to the roof, hanging in midair for tens of seconds. But eventually I fell back down again. We were clearly under way at last, and the acceleration, although low, would be sustained for tens or hundreds of days.

  There were no crashing, tinkling sounds, telltale indications of unsecured assets. Nor were there ominous creaking or grumbling noises, indicative of more dangerous structural instabilities in the stack of stone and wood and bone above my head that had now entered the powered flight regime. This should, I suppose, have made me happy; but I was just relieved to have left Taj Beacon behind. Ahead of me was Shin-Tethys and Ana: Behind me, before Taj, there was the difficult situation on Ganesh. That, too, was vanishing into the distant past—almost nine standard years had elapsed while I was frozen in transmission. Before that, there was the sticky business on Rosen Beacon, six light-years previously. (I spent almost a year there—found employment, bought and furnished a small and cozy apartment, began tentatively attempting to make friends. I would have abandoned this whole foolish quest, except that . . .)

  I shook myself out of my reverie and picked up the talking box. “Krina here,” I said, absently flexing my fingertip chromatophores to force the cleaner’s grime out of my skin: “We are now under acceleration, so I assume preflight lockdown is complete. What do I do next?”

  “Krina, lockdown is confirmed complete. Please traverse Aisle One and identify and secure any debris. Please traverse—”

  “No,” I said firmly. I’d been working for over thirty hours, and I was becoming tired. I was cold and hungry, and my mind was wandering: a sure sign that I needed to schedule some sleeptime. I may not need to eat every few hours lest I starve like a Fragile, but I have my limits. “Box, I need to rest. Where do I get food and bedding around here?”

  “Krina, meal breaks occur every six hours. Next meal break commences in eighteen minutes . . .” Now it told me. I stuffed the box into my utility belt and went in search of the refectory. I assumed it was the big room I’d found earlier—or was that the kitchen? “Thirty hours on; I must be in credit for at least six hours and thirty minutes off,” I muttered to myself as I heel-and-toed along a twilit corridor of stone arches with interlocking fan vaults to support the ceiling.

  An ancient chapel of the classic design begins and ends on planetary bedrock, with little scope for underground facilities. But a chapel of the Church of the Fragile is barely the top percentile of the enterprise; everything of any significance happens below the ground line. This includes the accommodation and mess deck, as I believe it is called, which is sandwiched precariously between the crypt and the navigation/command deck, which in turn squats atop the maintenance spaces, the supply fabricators and feedstock mass, and, finally, the vast fuel and reaction-mass tanks that feed the reactor and propulsion system.

  I found it a bewildering maze at first—if not for the talking box I would have been unable to find my way around it—but eventually I located the small cell that Dennett told me I could claim for myself, and from there it was not hard to orient myself and work out the way to the refectory. Which was apparently not a “mess” (that term is not used in a church even though it is located on the mess deck) but the ecclesiastical equivalent.

  There was a hatch, carved from the lignified structural components of a planet-dwelling tree. I braced myself and pushed it open, then bounced slowly into the refectory. There were benches and tables bolted to the walls, floor, and ceiling; seat belts and sticky patches provided for the retention of diner and dinner alike. The wall at the far end of the refectory contained a recessed pulpit (currently unoccupied) and a hatch through which wafted a pungent odor that reminded me of the miasma surrounding Cook, whose door I had inadvisedly opened at the prompting of the talking box. (I say inadvisedly because he certainly didn’t want his cell cleaned; he drove me away with the most disgusting language I’ve heard in a very long time.)

  “Hello?” I called. “Is it time for dinner yet?”

  “Dinner? Dinner? I’ll give you dinner . . . !” Cook—green-skinned, belligerent—stuck his head through the hatch and glared at me with sullen aggression that slowly gave way to confusion: “Wait, you again! Who are you?”

  I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes: Passive-aggressive resentment of my presence seemed widespread among the crew, and it was becoming tiresome. “The deacon hired me—I’ve just spent a day tying down loose items and scrubbing the deck. Can I have some food? Juice, maybe? Anything to eat, before I starve?”

  Cook looked at me askance, showing the facets of his compound eyes. “His holiness didn’t tell me he was hiring new bodies!”

  I placed a private bet on where Cook’s prejudices lay: “His brotherly holiness seems to be too busy arguing with his imaginary siblings to tell anybody anything useful,” I said. “But you can check with him if you like. I’m sure he’ll remember hiring me for at least another day or two.”

  Cook nodded, his initial suspicion fading. “You can never tell,” he grumped defensively, and made as if to withdraw: “We get stowaways . . .”

  “Food?” I asked hopefully.

  “Can’t you wait? Food! That’s all you people are ever after! Food? Food! You’ve come to the right place, and I’ll sort you out, but you’re going to have to wait until it’s ready to serve up. I don’t know, everyone’s so impatient these days. The others will be here soon enough, so let’s see . . . are you one for the raw diet, or cultured? Do you need radioactives, or are you strictly organic? Salt, sweet, sour, umami, hydrocarbon, or nitriles? And will you be needing the juice bar, too?”

  “Do I look as if I glow in the dark? I need juice and organics. Preferably something more entertaining than blue-green algae.”

  “I’m on it. Do you have a problem taking your organics in the shape of cooked meat?”

  “Meat? It’s not poisonous, is it?”

  “It’s not poisonous.” Cook stared right back at me, as if deciding whether to take offense. “Contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and traces of phosphorus, sulfur, and a variety of other elements. It’s not radioactive, either.”

  “Just tell me you grew it in a tank—”

  “Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?” Cook reached behind his counter and thrust a tube with a mouthpiece at me. I fumbled it—it was disturbingly warm and soft. “Vat-cultured Fragile liver tissue, force-grown. Paté de fois Sapiens. You won’t get it anywhere else in Dojima System. Enjoy!”

  “Er—” But I was too late to remonstrate: Cook retreated into his food-preparation module and slammed the hatch. Presently, I heard banging and much swearing from the other side, so I jumped up and attached myself to a vacant bench on the ceiling while I tried to decide whether to risk eating the stuff. At least the seat was adequately juiced: Soon I felt the comforting warmth of eddy currents flowing through the long bones of my thighs.

  I was working myself up to the point of risking the tube of meat when the door opened, and Deacon Dennett floated in, followed rapidly by three cleaning worms and Father Gould. I say floated, but that gives rather the wrong impression—the deacon clearly anticipated his repast, but at the chapel’s current acceleration, it was impossible to move fast without bouncing off the walls and ceiling. In his eagerness for trac
tion, he lost ground, until he was reduced to flapping his arms and grabbing at the furniture. Meanwhile, Gould mumbled and gibbered incomprehensibly: The poor fellow was driving eight of the field-expedient drones in parallel, and consequently had barely any cognitive bandwidth to spare for his own bodily needs. He was leashed to the deacon’s belt by a length of tape. Of the new arrivals, only the cleaning worms made good speed, undulating through the air and moaning hungrily, like a pack of feral vacuum cleaners.

  “Ah, Ms. Alizond! Finished already?”

  I tried not to bristle at his presumption. “I’ve just put in a thirty-hour shift, your holiness. There are limits to my unrefueled endurance.”

  “Oh, as you were, then. All flesh must be eaten.” He waved magnanimously as he approached the hatch. “Cook, I say, Cook? Are you in?”

  “Gruffum hash intestinal,” Father Gould’s speech center burped.

  The hatch opened. “Whaddayou want?”

  “What’s on the menu today?” Dennett was unperturbed.

  “You gotta choice: gash, or tubespam like her”—he jabbed a thumb at me—“or I can do ya fermented milch curds from the Fragile vat, with added juice an’ fried lice harvested from the waste tank. What’s it gonna be?”

  I noted with interest that Cook’s accent roughened considerably when he addressed the minister, and he was nudging him toward options he never offered me—not that they sounded appetizing.

  “I’ll have the gash and tubespam, if you please.” The deacon showed no sign of being nudged.

  “The vegetable?”

  “He’ll have the same.”

  “Hey,” I called from the ceiling.

  “Yeah?”

  “Those curds—where do they come from?”

  “Mother’s milk,” Dennett said.

  Milk? I’d heard of it, somewhere, once upon a time. “Oh.” Working on the principle that the deacon has been here longer than I and wouldn’t willingly let Cook poison him, I dropped the topic: Instead, I raised my tubespam and ingested a squirt. It tasted spicy, slightly rough, and reminded me of something I ought to know. It contained protein, fat, and mixed carbohydrates in an emulsion of mineral oil and water: I could digest the stuff. It was even piquant although I suspected I could get bored with it really fast. Suicidally bored if I had to eat it for many months.

  Dennett collected two portions of what passed for food, then looked up. “Catch,” he said, and tossed me one end of Father Gould’s leash. While I carefully reeled in the father, he joined me on the ceiling bench. “Welcome to our cozy little parish. I suppose you’ve been busy?”

  My mouth was full of paste. I swallowed: “Yes. The maintenance book kept me running around like a mad thing. Did our departure go smoothly?”

  “As smoothly as can be expected—”

  “Grackle turds! Nom!” (Father Gould clumsily plugged a tubespam container into his mouth and began to chew on it, unopened.)

  “—Under the circumstances. But we’re making a solid centimeter per second squared, and if everything runs smoothly, you should be able to go into slowtime in another three or four days. Until shortly before our arrival, of course, except for the odd maintenance shift.”

  “So we’re due to arrive—when?”

  “Four hundred and fifteen standard days, give or take.” The deacon paused to delicately squeeze a blob of paste into the palm of his hand, then transferred it to his lips while I struggled to conceal my dismay.

  (Four hundred and fifteen days? I’d told the agent I wanted the fastest available crossing! The run usually took less than a standard year, even on a minimum-energy transfer orbit.)

  But the deacon hadn’t finished: “Lady Cybelle should be able to resume her duties in another fifty or thereabouts, I hope and pray. At which point the sarcophagus will be freed up, and we can start growing Brother Boris a new upper torso and skull. If that goes smoothly, we—I include you in this—can share Father Gould’s workload and restore him to a semblance of his former cognitive functionality. And life will get much easier for everyone.”

  “Juice! Ringpiece! Swive! Clunge!” Gould burped, scattering fragments of tubespam from his orifice.

  The deacon sighed. “Things will go so much faster and more easily once we have a full bridge team again . . .”

  “What about the Gravid Mother?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Oh, she’ll be happy once Cybelle impregnates her,” Dennett said casually. “Which reminds me. Cook! Cook? I say! Would you mind taking the slops round to Mother?”

  “Already on it.” Cook harrumphed and closed his hatch.

  Dennett turned his piercing sapphire eyes back to me. “Now, Ms. Alizond. If you will pardon the intrusion—I am curious as to why you are in such a hurry to get to Shin-Tethys?”

  * * *

  This is what I told the deacon (but it is not the truth, the whole truth, or anything even remotely approximating the truth):

  I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to work my way to Highport Shin-Tethys, even though I have little experience as a deckhand and am but a humble noncommunicant.

  My name is Krina Alizond-114. By design, disposition, and doctorate I am a historian: a slight aberration from my lineage, but not a tremendous deviation—both trades involve the scrutiny of documents, evaluation of sources, and reconciliation with conflicting records. Only the time scale differs, and when accounting for slow money, the divergence is trivial: Money is history. But enough of that.

  My peers and I track the history and evolution of slow money, the five-thousand-year-old currency that is our only reliable medium for exchanges of value across interstellar distances. Of course, your church does not need to engage with the base practice of trade: It has a mission and its own way of tracking internal accounts. But to people who are not part of a permanent institution, some sort of permanent store of value is essential if they wish to exchange goods and skills across decades or centuries. Offering to pay in Hector dollars for a valuable shipment of terraforming specialists is all very well, but if ten light-years separate buyer and vendor, then it takes ten years each for the bid and offer to crawl across the gap—and by the time the vendor tries to spend those Hector dollars, thirty or more years have passed, the speculative housing bubble has burst, the money markets have collapsed, and hyperinflation ensued . . . no, ordinary money changes value far too rapidly for interstellar commerce. Medium money, money locked down in real estate or long-duration bonds, is also too volatile for trade across any but the shortest interstellar distances (although it works handsomely for interplanetary exchanges). But slow money—

  All right, I’ll stop. I’m sorry. I just naturally assume that everyone finds the critical underpinning of our cosmic-trade system as fascinating as I—

  All right! I’ll get to the point.

  A very long time ago there used to be a tradition of academic travel—scholars would journey to attend conferences, holy and learned convocations where the young could drink deep of the lore and wisdom of the elders, and new initiates could be introduced before the conclave. Yes, just like your synod. Obviously, the less-than-speedy nature of interstellar travel makes this tradition difficult if not impossible to maintain. Who wants to be dumped to a soul chip, serialized, squirted at a foreign star system’s beacon station, and reincarnated in new flesh, then to reverse the process, arriving home years or decades later—just to spend a week studying with their colleagues? It would require remarkable dedication: not to mention huge amounts of money to pay for the conference and a willingness on the part of the participants to lose precious years of study time while in transit. Worse: To organize a true conference many scholars would have to travel simultaneously. Imagine the chaos if half the members of an entire profession went missing for a couple of decades! Or the paranoia it would engender among them if they weren’t missed.

  But lately, in rec
ent centuries, my order has rediscovered a different, earlier practice—the academic pilgrimage.

  Ours is not a fast-changing discipline. After millennia of slow-paced deliberation, we concluded that serial pilgrimage was the best way to ensure the spread of our professional knowledge. Periodically, we send one in every ten of our number on a pilgrimage to visit and study with another four of their kind. There are network-traversal algorithms dating back to antiquity: With careful routing, fully half of us can pool our knowledge within the space of a couple of decades, in greater depth albeit lesser breadth than at a synod, with much the same level of mixing. And for a smaller, select cadre of pilgrims, it becomes possible to study with many—it is a clear avenue to advancement—

  Me?

  Well, when I set off from New California, it all seemed perfectly clear-cut; first, I should sojourn and study with my colleague Professor Chen on Ganesh—that’s Vista VIIA—for half a year. I would then proceed to GJ 785/Beacon 4 to take a three-year teaching post within the University at Rosen, working with Dr. Jansen. After that, by a hop, skip, and a jump I would head for Taj Beacon in Dojima System, and thence to one of the High Republics in the outer belt, there to study with my correspondent and distant sib Ana Graulle-90; and from that appointment I should transit to another two postings, then back home, to arrive nearly half a century after my departure. That, and five years the wiser—five years devoted to intensive collegiate study with my academic peers.

  Unfortunately, plans laid decades in advance seldom survive to fruition. (Which is why we need slow currency to—yes, yes, I know.) By the time I reached Dr. Jansen’s office, mail was waiting for me from Ana: she was moving to a mid-level kingdom in Shin-Tethys, of all places! And descending into base employment from the commanding heights of academia! So instead of a leisurely flight out to a long-settled and civilized asteroid colony, I found myself alone at Taj Beacon, desperately hunting for transport to Shin-Tethys. And then, and then, my sister turns out to have gone missing.