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 triviaclass="underline" 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 recent 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.
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.)