“Here,” Brother Michael said. “Let me.” He leant across, his shoulder just brushing her front as he opened a distant window. That is, he hit a key that activated a camera floating by itself in space, ten klicks distant. If LizAlec didn’t know better, she’d have thought it part of some defence system.
She’d have liked to have seen The Arc for real, with her own eyes. But radiation was too much of a problem to allow random use of window glass, even the toughened stuff. And the other alternatives were too expensive for a mere shuttle.
“You can see the ring better from the cathedral,” Brother Michael told her. “It has shielded glass.” His hands rested lightly on the console, tapping at an occasional key, but he wasn’t actually docking the ship himself. A semi-AI was taking them in, LEDs on the deck lighting as retros fired in turn to slow the shuttle even further.
Ahead of the shuttle, a vast circle opened like an eye widening with surprise and the shuttle flew through it into darkness, lights immediately flicking on around them as booms moved out to steady and then hold the ship. That was what the apparently random splatter of diodes had been talking about.
Except the optics flashing like tiny electronic fireflies were anything but random. Fixx could have told LizAlec that... Look long enough and you’ll always find the pattern. And even though it might be chaotic, fractal or crypted within itself, the pattern is always there.
Always.
-=*=-
Anchee, Que... Quiet, intelligent, polite... Outstanding SATS... Unquestionably rich in her own right... So far so good. What wasn’t was the lack of visual confirmation that the girl he was holding was indeed the General’s daughter.
Not one current tri-D, no digital grabs, no pix of any sort... Sitting in his darkened vestry, tucked away in a corner of the cathedral, Brother Michael decided he could cope with the irritating time/distancing induced by accessing a cuts library in Los Angeles: it was the lack of photographs that was beginning to concern him.
Of course, had he been Anchee’s father he’d have done exactly the same. Ring-fenced her from paparazzi, made sure no one knew what she looked like and let slip dark hints about what was likely to happen to Ishies who tried to find out. It was a sinful world, full of misguided people.
Something more concrete than threats were in place too, they’d have to be. Anchee’s father would have bodyguards, self-covering contracts. Of course, the man would have a family clone somewhere on ice, but to need a clone was a sign of family failure and it didn’t seem like the General would be happy with that idea.
Brother Michael shivered. It was possible that the girl had run away, but unlikely. And yet, if she hadn’t run off what was she doing stowed away on an Arc-bound shuttle? The question was impossible to answer without more information, and nagging at the problem didn’t make it better.
All recorded information was automatically out of date, that was obvious. The used-news value of information fell rapidly from gold dust to worthless. Only the word of God never corrupted. Even so, there should be news somewhere of Anchee’s disappearance. Brother Michael was paying through the nose for a commercial search that was thorough, up to the minute and, most of all, breathtakingly discreet. And all the agency could come back with was nothing.
Europe he could have understood: after all, the Azerbaijani virus had more or less bombed it back to the Stone Age. But Shanghai produced no news and nor did Los Angeles, and the Web infrastructure was working fine for both. Brother Michael had had that checked, adding to his already astronomical bill.
So where were the rumours that Anchee had vanished? Or had her father locked down even conspiracy theories harder than ice? That might be possible: he owned large chunks of CySat eeAsia and a whole provider network in Western China.
Maybe it was stupid to expect to find news of Anchee’s escape from school.
“Orange juice.” Brother Michael tossed the words out, as if to an angel at his shoulder, knowing it would be heard. One of the handmaidens would find the oranges, pulp them in the way he liked them pulped and then come creeping into the vestry to bring him a juice bladder and his straw. That was what the handmaidens were there for. Well, one of the things. With luck it would be Sarah. He liked the way she kept her pale eyes carefully lowered when she was around him. Or Anne maybe, little Annie Van Hoek, heir to the bioSemtex manufacturing arcology in Montana. She’d been a catch. No trustees, direct control of her own shares: without Annie Van Hoek and her explosives The Arc could never have been built.
It was strange, all those little rich girls with empty heads and aching voids where their souls should have been. So desperate a hunger for love and truth, so little need for the funds and platinum cards that saw them through the choppy waters of early adolescence.
All waiting, just for him. It was magnificent, but then God’s will always was. Once, years back, Brother Michael had gone though torment trying to distinguish between divine intent and his own wishes. In fact, there had even been a time before that when his thirst for God had been a sham. A hollow vessel, all sound and fury signifying nothing. But then, in the overheated, stinking cell of a 4×6 lockdown at Rikers, he’d met the Padre, 200lb of oiled muscle and iron will.
No one touched the Padre. Not the Latino gangs, not the Chink data runners hooked into Rikers out of mah-jong dives on Chatham Square, not even the banged-up Viet street soldiers with their fussy haircuts and dragon tattoos. Even the sodding Aryan brotherhood didn’t trouble the Padre. The only one to try had ended up with a shank rammed where God doesn’t go. His own shank, all of it: crudely ground blade and handle fashioned from molten toothbrushes.
Locked down in a cell with the Padre, Michael Howell had two options: convert or get stamped. Brother Michael converted, taking the cheap paper Bible from the Padre’s fat fingers. He read it, like he was told to, page by aching page.
There was nothing else it was good for. The pages were printed paper, nothing fancy like those nanite Korans that wrote the sacred words on each opening page. And the paper was polymer-coated, impregnated with nauseant. So there was no point ripping out the pages, even if he’d had any skag to roll in them, which he hadn’t. No skag and no blow: the Padre had taxed his last little ball of resin the moment the screws pushed Michael through the door.
Besides, the Padre would have felt bad if Michael had defaced the word of God, no matter how cheaply printed. So Michael read the book, and as long as he was reading it the Padre let him be. He read it straight through, finger limping along the sentences, tongue stumbling over the odd names, the weird-shit families, the blinding strangeness of a world with no automobiles or CySatTV. Stumbling over the oddness of God’s sense of humour.
And then Michael read it again, more slowly, following the twists in the plot, egging on the good guys. The guy writing it didn’t do a good description of the weapons at the fall of Jericho, but Michael knew just what he was talking about. The warders had trashed Block 3 using a borrowed NVPD sonic gun, taking out the Islams. Half the ragheads in Rikers still had their eardrums blown.
The third time Michael picked up the book and started over on Genesis, the Padre took the holy book out of Michael’s hands and made him kneel on the lockdown floor, right down there on the sticky tiles. When he stood up, Michael was a fully fledged member of the Brotherhood of God’s Word in the Desert, licensed to perform marriage in five different states, eligible for zero tax rating (not that he’d ever paid tax, except city tax when he couldn’t avoid it).
He was authorized to take handmaidens, too, young girls for whom suitable husbands could not be found. “Suitable” meant devout, and devout was in short supply unless you included the Latinos with all their gold and fancy titles.
No, back then the Brotherhood was a simple religion, a poor religion. The Padre didn’t like the incense and statues of the United Papacy, but he liked the Church of Christ Geneticist even less. The Messiah wasn’t to be rushed into being by overpaid scientists: He’d come again when He was ready, in His ow
n sweet time.
As for science itself, Michael found it was hard to argue with the Padre’s belief that if God had wanted the world different then He’d have built it different.
But sometimes — of course — you had to compromise. Building big in space was next to impossible if you left nanetics out of the equation.
O’Neills and ring colonies needed to be grown, though no one had yet built a ring colony quite like this one. Dyson spheres would need growing too, when anyone hacked the maths, though Brother Michael wasn’t too sure how he felt about throwing up a shell right around some sun to trap its light. That seemed like arrogance — for humanity to change the face of heaven, even if it was only to darken the light of one star.
Five and a half years now separated Brother Michael from Rikers Island. Sixty-six sweat-filled months in which he laboured to release the vision he’d seen the night D Block burnt to the ground. In the midst of a riot, while blood sluiced down half-gutters let into the white-tiled corridors and flames licked spray-gunned polymer off the walls, Brother Michael stood on the melting roof and dreamed his dream.
Life was corrupted. The howls of the Aryan Nation, the shrieks of screws as they were tipped over the edge and died on the net below: they all said the same. (The net was designed to catch anyone thrown into the stairwell, but the Padre had wired the net to an industrial generator to produce not so much an electric chair as a vast electric bed.)
The Earth was due to be cleansed. And he, Brother Michael, was to build the new arc. No simple flood would be enough this time, it would have to be fire, Brother Michael was certain of it. Nothing else would have the cleansing power. But he would be gone before the conflagration started.
For a prison designed to withstand riot, siege and flame, Rikers Island burnt beautifully, flames licking round Brother Michael like a wall of fire. And when the NYPD lifted him off the burning roof, his eyes were turned not to his rescuers, brave though they were, but to the smoky heavens.
It wasn’t Brother Michael’s intention that his howl of prophecy should be caught by a circling CySat Sikorsky ‘copter, or that CySatC3N bounced that grab of him naked and howling to every one of their US syndicated newsfeeds. By the time a NY Correctional Department official went Webside to stress that Brother Michael was insane, it was already too late. Thirty-two per cent of the US thought he was inspired directly by God.
Money poured in. In Seattle a fifth-generation silicon heiress donated her entire fortune. A bible-belt farmer with 200 draught-blasted acres donated his entire lottery win. Like it or not, The Arc was already a reality in most people’s minds.
“Orange,” demanded Brother Michael crossly: he wasn’t used to having to ask twice. In fact, it upset him more than was rational. But then, rationality was over-used and anyway was merely an adjunct of agnosticism. Pushing himself out of his chair, Brother Michael strode once round the small vestry and ended up at a simple wool-covered sofa, wrapping a belt over his lap to keep him in place. This would have to do...
A door clanged and he saw flickering strip lights stutter shadows on the white vestry walls. A wiring fault in the light outside, he’d have it seen to in the morning. It was Rachel, that much was obvious from the hesitant steps through the gloom towards him. Five months on The Arc and the stupid girl still couldn’t get the hang of ReeGravs.
Sweet Jesus... Brother Michael clicked his fingers and all the lights came up but the olive-skinned girl didn’t increase her speed. She was too afraid of tripping. Long black hair framed Rachel’s face, reaching almost to her thin waist. Only the lumbering hips spoilt the promise of her waist and full breasts: something she’d always known, mainly because her father had never let her forget. In her hands she held a shimmering flask of silver fabric filled with pulped orange. At the bottom was a strip of velcro and from its top protruded a simple straw.
“I’ve brought fresh juice...” She watched Brother Michael bite back some unkind remark and instantly felt sick. If he’d shouted at her, that would have been good. If he’d raised his hand to her, that would have been better. She was used to that. It was his strained patience that Rachel couldn’t stand.
“Come here,” Brother Michael patted the space beside him.
“I have tasks...” Rachel tried to make her voice sound firm, but she never managed it like the other girls did; her words just came out sounding sullen and petulant.
“Here.” Brother Michael patted the seat again, waiting for her to obey. His brown eyes stared at her, peering deep into Rachel’s soul until the woman reddened and glanced hurriedly away.
“How are you?” Brother Michael asked.
“Fine.
“Really?” The man nodded towards the arm of the woollen sofa, watching while Rachel pushed the flask into the cloth, velcro locking the flask safely into place. “Are you sure? You seem uneasy.”
Uneasy! Rachel’s mouth set into a thin line.
“We need to pray,” announced Brother Michael firmly, reaching out for her hand.
“Your juice...”
“God comes first,” said Brother Michael, looking serious. “You know that.” And then, deciding his reply wasn’t sufficient, he smiled his most winning smile, the one that had brought Rachel Cargassi to him in the first place. “Besides,” he said, “what’s my thirst, compared to your happiness, compared to the health of your soul?”
There was no answer. There wasn’t meant to be.
Rachel looked at her tormentor, at the silver dusting of age that touched his temples, at the deep egg-speckled eyes. The man was handsome, as silver-tongued as the devil and as overpowering as incense. Power oozed out of him the way that sour ghosts of fear oozed from everybody else on The Arc.
Even the skin of his instantly recognizable face was an elegant contradiction, soft but weather-beaten at the same time. Most people still had some cosmetic treatment, usually in the early teens when such things started to matter. Rachel knew all about that. Her hips were beyond rebuilding, a deep genetic flaw put there by her father’s refusal to let her mother get the embryo tested.
As for her face, she’d tried five different clinics before she was happy. Four Bupex and finally one black clinic in Budapest that stripped off her old face and then reformatted it using fresh tissue. Rachel didn’t know where her new face had come from: she didn’t want to know. She just knew she liked it and had no intention of giving it back.
Brother Michael clicked his fingers again and the lights in the vestry dipped back into gloom. One elegantly manicured finger brushed over a datapad set into the arm of his sofa and the nearby window exploded into an array of pale blue as Sister Rachel looked out at the curve of the distant Earth. Space would be clear as ice and black beyond imagining once they had left the planets behind. That Brother Michael had promised her.
“Kneel,” Brother Michael demanded and Rachel knelt: not on both knees as she had been taught as a child but with one knee raised the way people prayed in zero gravity, so that a boot could remain flush with the floor, its sole locked to the deck.
Almost casually, Brother Michael gripped Rachel’s narrow shoulders and repositioned her so that she knelt directly in front of him. His knees shut around her raised leg and his hands reached for her head.
Brother Michael’s study was a zero-gravity habitat, but that wasn’t why Rachel adopted that posture. It was the Brotherhood’s trade mark, literally. Lawyers had tied it down on all seven continents, not to mention on Planetside, but then, everything was franchised or trademarked up there. Rachel should have known: through proxies she’d owned three of Luna’s more valuable ad agencies before she’d bequeathed them to Brother Michael.
Prayer with Brother Michael was silent. Or rather, the congregation stayed silent while Brother Michael spoke: sometimes to them and sometimes to God, but mostly to himself.
Hands now rested on the sides of Rachel’s head, fingers lightly caressing her long hair. When she’d arrived at The Arc, Rachel had wanted to crop her hair short but it hadn�
�t been allowed. As Brother Michael had pointed out, her raven-black hair was the one really beautiful thing about her.
Rachel tried not to stiffen her shoulders as his fingers began to knead out their knots of muscle, all the while bending Rachel further, moving her head towards his robed lap. She could smell him through the rough cloth. An earth-like odour mixed with urine. All men were the same, she decided. At least, all the ones she’d met in her twenty-three years. But then, that wasn’t many, as even Rachel was prepared to admit.
“Pray,” said Brother Michael, pressing on the back of her head.
She could feel him, swollen beneath the cloak, his hands pushing her face further into his lap. He’d keep pushing, too, until she did what he wanted, Rachel knew that. It was her choice, the other handmaidens had made that clear right at the start. She could almost suffocate against the cloth of his lap as Brother Michael prayed fiercely over her head. Or she could soothe him, the way David soothed the wild tumult of Saul.
Rachel did what Brother Michael wanted, accepting the inevitable. She was getting good at that, Rachel told herself bitterly. She wouldn’t cry, though. Not now, not ever...
Sliding Brother Michael’s robe over his knees and up around his waist, Rachel bent her head and prayed. Above her, Brother Michael groaned and began to pray even more fervently, his words spilling out into the silence of his starlit vestry.
The other handmaidens had tried to tell Rachel how to grip so he couldn’t fill her mouth entirely. And how to use her tongue and sucking to speed up his release. Rachel tried: every time she was called to pray she tried to remember. And always she gave up, letting Brother Michael push her up and down into his lap.
His words were a litany now, a high complex song that spun up to the cold waiting stars. But Rachel couldn’t hear any of it: she was trying to breathe. And then he was shouting, his hands tight around her head as he pumped wet salt into the back of her throat. Rachel swallowed. She had to, she wanted to breathe.
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