Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  So I’m going to have to find her. Even if it means I have to grow gills and learn how to swim.

  Visitors

  After eating, I went to my cell and succumbed to a few hours of disturbingly dream-laden sleep. The cell was unfurnished and uncomfortable, so upon waking I went in search of the communal fab and told it to grow me a sleep sack, some cushions and cables, and a spare suit of comfortable low-gee clothing. (Not for me the pastor’s clerical robes; but I needed something to keep the dirt out and my body heat in, and the dole-issue one-piece I’d been wearing since I left the arrivals hall on Taj Beacon was badly in need of cleaning.)

  Over the next two days, I fell into a comfortable routine of cleaning and checking the cargo areas in the atmosphere-holding sections of the chapel. From time to time, the deacon tasked me with some other mission: conveying food and comforts to the Gravid Mother, cleaning Father Gould, a brief tryout running one of the skeletons by remote control. This latter I proved completely useless at—the ability to direct multiple bodies simultaneously is a military skill. (I gather Father Gould held the unenviable task because long ago he was a Serjeant of Arms in the bodyguard of one of the Metapopes.)

  “Once we’re established in steady acceleration, we can enter slowtime,” Dennett announced after dinner on the second day. “I believe slowing to one-fifth real time will suffice to help the time pass without losing situational awareness. We will, of course, need to resume real time when it is time to awaken the Lady, and again upon our arrival.”

  And so it was that on the third day, everything slowed right down. The sensation of entering metabolic slowtime aboard an accelerating vehicle was quite singular: Our acceleration seemed to increase markedly, ambient lights brightened, liquids became runny, the air grew chill. These were all subjective interpretations, of course—in reality, it was merely that my perception of the physical processes around me had slowed—but anything that could make the weeks pass like days was, to my mind, a good thing. Even the increased semblance of gravity helped make it easier to lope around the tunnels and chambers of the chapel without bouncing off the walls and ceiling at random. We might have been moving at nearly a kilometer per second relative to Taj Beacon, but our three-thousandths of a gee of acceleration was barely enough to keep one’s feet on the floor.

  Of course, slowtime had a downside. The intermittent scribble of white lines crossing my visual field—fireworks even in the dark—seemed to intensify: Cosmic radiation worked its malign magic on mechanocytes and marrow techné alike. One might not experience the passage of time the same way, but it still wreaks its damage on one’s systems.

  * * *

  On the fifth day subjective—actually around fourteen real-time days into the voyage—I was transferring fixtures from the vestry to the fab room for remanufacturing when the talking box dinged for attention. “Krina, proceed to the flight deck immediately. This is a priority override.”

  The flight deck was a cramped cubbyhole in the above-stairs level, off to one side of the back of the nave—an uncomfortable bench seat fronted by intimidating banks of Fragile bone-colored buttons and surmounted by multiple rows of vertical organ pipes. I had never had reason to visit it before but had seen it in passing. Traditionally the seat of the organist in an ancient house of worship, the flight deck now served as the control room from which the head of the mission—currently Deacon Dennett—monitored the chapel’s sensors and directed its mighty engines. Normally, it was empty: Events requiring supervision aboard a spacegoing church happened either survivably (by arrangement months and years in advance), or fatally (in a matter of milliseconds). As I entered the nave, I discovered Dennett on the organist’s bench, attended by a trio of Father Gould’s skeletal puppets, his black robe wrapped around him like the gown of a hanging judge.

  “Ms. Alizond!” His tone was curt.

  I stood in the middle of the tiled floor, staring up at him. I’d been expecting—indeed, half-dreading—a moment like this ever since I signed on. “Yes?” I asked, keeping my voice as even as possible.

  “What do you know about pirates?”

  “What?” I stared stupidly at Dennett. This was not the confrontation I’d been expecting.

  “Pirates!” He glared at me. “Adjust yourself to real time. That’s an order.”

  “Pirates?” I squeaked as I came up to speed (lights reddening, gravity diminishing). “What? Um. They’re not my area of history—”

  “There is nothing historical about this situation.” Dennett had matched my acceleration: Now he gestured at the lectern before him. “A troupe of miscreants hailed us an hour ago. They were waiting for us to leave beacon-controlled space, and they are now outaccelerating us. They say they want to audit our cargo.” He fixed me with what I suppose was intended as another steely stare: “Well?”

  I flapped my jaw at him for a few seconds. Pirates! This was absolutely not what I had been keyed up for, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was, if anything, considerably worse. I gathered my scattered thoughts. “They want your cargo? Don’t they know this is a chapel?”

  “Yes, clearly, that’s what our transponder beacon says.” He snapped his fingers impatiently: “Equally clearly, they don’t believe us. Gould, seize her.” The bony bodyguards closed in around me, whirring and clicking as they grabbed my wrists and ankles and lifted me away from any surfaces upon which I might gain leverage. Something cold pricked against the back of my neck. “Ms. Alizond. I must demand a truthful answer: Are you a pirate spy?”

  I don’t think he appreciated being laughed at, but to his credit, Dennett waited me out: “You’ve got to be joking!” I managed, once I wound down from my bout of giggling. The situation was obviously grave—as acting captain of this vehicle, Dennett could, in principle, hold a trial and throw me bodily out of the nearest air lock—but I confess he took me so much by surprise that I had no time to be afraid, and the humor of the situation rose to the surface. “Not only am I not a pirate spy, I didn’t even know this system had pirates! Um. What do they do, exactly? Swap illicit files and denounce the evils of intellectual property?”

  “They’re pirates.” Dennett seemed to be fixated on the word, pupils dilated, skin spiking up aggressively. “You are not obviously lying, but I warn you, it will go the worse for you if you are being deliberately obtuse with me!”

  “I don’t see what you’ve got to be afraid of. It’s not as if you’re carrying anything other than the Fragile, is it?” Abruptly, I recognized my error: “Ahem. That would be none of my business, and I don’t want to know. If I’m wrong, I mean. But this is the Church of the Fragile, and the Church would never engage in any activity like, er, anything that might be interesting to miscreants. Would it? And anyway, wouldn’t any pirates who laid a finger on you be inviting the Curse of the Fragile? So, if I was a spy for a shipful of pirates, I’d be telling them not to waste their time—”

  “Oh very good,” snarled the deacon. My apologetics clearly annoyed him even as they registered. “Let her go,” he added, almost as an afterthought. Bony digits released my sleeves and ankles, and the chill touch behind my skull disappeared. “You may not be a spy, Ms. Alizond, but I know you are holding back secrets, and I should warn you that treachery toward the Mother Church will reap its just deserts. It remains to be determined how we shall deal with this situation. The last time I checked the sarcophagus, it said Her Ladyship would be ready for awakening in another sixty hours: She’d be able to send them packing! If only they give us that long—”

  “How far away are they?” I asked.

  “If they maintain their current acceleration, and we take no additional evasive action, they should rendezvous in fourteen hours. As we’re currently accelerating away from them at full power, that seems likely.”

  “Additional evasive action—”

  Dennett’s face slipped into a spiky, feral grin as one of his soul-siblings surfaced. “Would you ra
ther be boarded by bored pirates or audited by angry pirates? Consider your options carefully: There will be a practical examination later.”

  “Um.” I twisted to stare at the sarcophagus in the aisle. “What makes you think she could make a difference to the situation?”

  “She’s a priestess.” Dennett was growing sniffy. “With the gift that goes with her rank. Every mission should have one.”

  “Oh, you mean she can—” I mimed touching one of the skeletons: even with Father Gould’s fractured personality backing it, it had enough awareness to sense my meaning and recoil.

  “Yes, she has the touch of grace.” Dennett looked at me again, this time clearly speculating. “You’re about the same height as Lady Cybelle. Tell me, can you act?”

  * * *

  Iam a historian, not an entertainer. Nevertheless, one of the key insights the study of my chosen field requires of its students is that people in times gone by were not stupid—they were different, and operated under social constraints that are foreign to us, not to mention technological and scientific handicaps, but their lack of the wisdom of the modern age should not be confused with foolishness. Consequently, one of the techniques we use in training new students out of their preconceptions is to make them reenact the lives of foregone times, to get into character as it were—to use techniques drawn from acting to make them reject their prejudices, so that they can subsequently confront the historical record with an open mind. It is by way of this route that I have acquired some minor acquaintance with mummery over the decades of my study.

  That is not to say that I had ever contemplated impersonating a priestess of the Church of the Fragile before—much less of doing so at the urging of a junior member of the clergy.

  “To the vestry,” Dennett ordered me. “It was spared by the accident, so the robes of office are intact—our pursuers can have no idea of Her Grace’s appearance or delicate condition, for I handled the temporal mission at Taj Beacon. And going by their trajectory, they can’t have questioned any of the deserters in person.” His cheek wattled up in spines for a moment. I scrambled in front of him to reach the doors to the side chamber ahead of the rush.

  “What exactly is it that you want me to do?”

  Dennett gaped at me, as slack-jawed and frightening as one of his cadavers. “We shall dress you in her robes of office, and you will warn them off when they next hail us. What could possibly go wrong? Smartly, to the wardrobe!”

  A saying almost as ancient as civilization has it that clothes make the person. However, not all persons are created equal. While the lower ranks of the Church are as routinely mortal as any other Post or Fragile human, the full priests and priestesses are upgraded. Normal people do not have voluntary control of their own techné, much less the ability to override and reprogram their mechanocytes at will, to push and shove the little atoms of our being around and twist them into strange new forms. It is the privilege of the clergy, as of a few other sacred guilds, to morph our form of life to suit new worlds and alien biospheres, drawing on the wisdom of the Mother Church and its accumulated archives of adaptations and tweaks—which they carry around internally, implanted in their very bones.

  It takes decades to train a new priest or priestess, and they tend toward the eccentric, to say the least. They can also reprogram others’ mechanocytes, to gift them with a healing touch—or something else. One irritates or angers a fully communicant priest of the Fragile at one’s mortal peril: Nobody in their right mind would seek to impersonate a priestess!

  But Dennett wanted me to do so. This, more than anything else, bespoke a certain desperation on his part. Also: pirates! It was bad enough to be at the mercy of these eccentric clergy: The only reason I could think of why pirates might wish to board the chapel was that they had somehow learned of my true mission in Dojima System. (Call me self-centered if you wish.) In that case, letting them board us would probably be a really bad idea. Lady Cybelle herself was unavailable, adrift in the soupy-puddle dreams of a metamorphosing instar, so I allowed myself to be led to the dressing throne.

  Dennett addressed the nearest skeleton: “A mirror, please. And a portrait of Her Grace.” Gould’s skeleton placed itself beside me and retrieved an ancient retina scroll from the chest nearby, which it unrolled and held up. Long-dead pixels stirred fitfully into life, twisting light into an illuminated vision of a severe-looking woman robed in the vestments of the Church. “Yes, you’re of approximately the same build. Can you make your face more like the Lady’s?”

  I stared at her. High cheekbones, pursed, pale lips, a nose as suitable for staring down as any gunsight: Her expression of disdain reminded me of my mother. “I can try.” I tried to adjust my lips first—surface tissues were always easier. But I have never been much of a fashion-follower, and my face had become used to me wearing the same features for so long that it had stuck. After a minute of trying, my chin abruptly creaked and clicked out a notch, stretching my flesh uncomfortably.

  “Try harder!”

  “I’m trying! I’m trying!” I waved my hands: “I’m not used to this.” Without warning, my left eyelashes began to extrude. “Ow. Oh. Right.”

  “Should I fetch the Gravid Mother?” Dennett asked. “I gather she knows something of the cosmetic arts.”

  “How many people do you want in on this?” Which thought shut him up for a minute, during which time I managed to sharpen my cheekbones slightly. The itchy talent of cosmetic biofeedback was returning to me, albeit patchily: After half an hour, I was looking not unlike the Lady Cybelle if examined from a very great distance in bad lighting conditions by an intoxicated witness.

  “Vestments. Bring her a clean body stocking, a full coolant vest, telemetry web, and inner sacramental suit liner . . .” The other two skeletons clattered about busily like dressers behind the scenes at a fashion show. Dennett stared at my head. “You have too much hair. Shed it.”

  I bit back an angry response. “Won’t it clog the air filters?” I asked instead. Lady Cybelle might have chosen to go bald, but I could hardly see how this might affect the perceptions of such admittedly antisocial persons as pirates. And anyway, regrowing my scalp covering would take time—at 0.04 millimeters per hour it might be months before I looked normal again.

  “Just do it,” Dennett insisted. I rolled my eyes in an indication of surrender: He held my hair as I commanded my scalp follicles to let go of it. “I’ll ask the Mother to weave it into a wig you can wear while it’s growing back.”

  Eventually, he had me finished to his satisfaction, with my features warped into a semblance of his superior. I dressed in her alien and complex garments (I still wonder: did the space suits of the Fragile really have such intimate connections? Or does the Church have some strange penitential requirement for mortification of the flesh? Because they were most uncomfortable) and was finally ready to revisit the flight deck. “I’ll manage the communications control panel,” he told me. “Here’s what I want you to say . . .”

  * * *

  Picture a priestess, terrible and austere in the formal surplice and space suit of the Mother Church of the Fragile. Picture such a priestess—a being totally dedicated to the propagation of our maker’s mission to the galaxy—standing with gaze severe behind the altar of a chapel in flight. The altar is surmounted by the ceremonial artifacts of her faith: the tissue printer and the scalpel, the radome and the phlebotomy cup. Ranked behind her are the risen dead, two and two and two to either side, skeletal revenants whose mindless grins induce the onlooker to recall uneasily that hers is a mission older than civilization itself: that hers is the power to command the very tissues of the onlooker’s body to crawl from their bonemetal scaffolding in shame.

  Off to one side, Dennett flipped me a hand signal. I froze my face in an expression of acute disdain and focused my gaze behind the screen before me.

  Reader, I believe it to be unlikely that you have ever made the personal
acquaintance of a pirate chief. Neither, at that time, had I—before the deacon initiated the call. A momentary hesitation on meeting the unknown is to be expected. And so I kept my chromatophores and musculature perfectly still as the screen shimmered and revealed what I took to be the flight deck of our pursuer. It was, let me tell you, quite unlike the organ pit of a chapel in flight.

  “—Ailing purported Church vehicle B017, this is Permanent”—the speaker paused, clearly surprised, and stared at me, before finishing—“Crimson Branch Office Zero Five hailing purported Church vehicle. We believe you are flying under a false transponder code, and we intend to board and audit you for contraband. Please acknowledge.”

  I stared at the pirate. He was furry and snub-nosed, somewhat wrinkly, slightly moist and gray about the edges, and his voice was irritatingly high-pitched and squeaky: He sat cupped in a bowl-shaped mat or nest woven out of random twigs, surrounded by a haze of floating dust and crud. His ears, long and pointy and pierced by shiny metal hoops, twitched this way and that: His eyes were completely dark, lacking any sclera. Only his impish and toothy grin was in any sense piratical. (Behind him, a colony of piratical-looking individuals, many of them shrouded in gray-black rubbery cloaks, hung upside down in the acceleration webbing of their vehicle’s flight deck.) I had been half-expecting the wild glamour and gold eye patches of mythology; the reality was confusingly different.