Futurity spread his hands, ‘What can I do?’
Tahget laughed, uncaring. ‘What you priests do best. Talk.’
The dread weight of responsibility, which had oppressed Futurity since he had been ‘volunteered’ for this assignment by the Hierocrat and projected into orbit, now pressed down on him hard. But, he found, his greatest fear was not for his own safety, nor even for the fate of this poor woman, but simply that he was making a fool of himself in front of this dour captain. Shame on you, Futurity’s Dream!
He forced himself to focus. ‘How do I speak to her?’
The Captain waved a hand. A Virtual of Mara’s head coalesced in the air, and Futurity saw a miniature of himself pop into existence in the little diorama of her cabin. So he had been put in contact with this bomber.
He tried to read her face. She looked younger than her thirty-six years. Her face was a neat oval, her features rather bland – her nose long, her mouth small. She would never be called beautiful, though something about the shape of her skull, exposed by the close shaving of her hair in the Ideocratic style, was delicately attractive. As she studied him, evidently without curiosity, her expression was clear, her brow smooth. She looked loving, he thought, loving and contented in herself, her life. But tension showed around her eyes, in hollow stress shadows. This was a gentle woman projected into an horrific situation. She must be desperate.
A smile touched her lips, faint, quickly evaporating. She said to him, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
The Captain rolled his eyes. ‘Our terrorist is laughing at you! Good start, acolyte.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Futurity blurted. ‘I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that I’m trying to get used to all this.’
‘It’s not a situation I wanted,’ Mara said.
‘I’m sure we can find a way to resolve it.’
‘There is a way,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Just take me home. It’s all I’ve asked for from the beginning.’
But that’s impossible. Futurity had never negotiated with an armed fugitive before, but he had heard many confessions, and he knew the value of patience, of indirection. ‘We’ll come to that,’ he said. ‘My name is Futurity’s Dream. I live on the planet below, which is Base 478. Our government is called the Ecclesia.’
‘You’re a priest.’
He said reflexively, ‘Just an acolyte, my child.’
She laughed at him openly now. ‘Don’t call me a child! I’m a mother myself.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. But in his peripheral vision he checked over the manifest details again. She was travelling alone; there was definitely no mention of a child either on the ship or back at Chandra. Don’t contradict, he told himself. Don’t cross-examine. Just talk. ‘You’ll have to help me through this, Mara. Are you of the faith yourself?’
‘Yes,’ she sniffed. ‘Not of your sort, though.’
Since the fall of the Coalition, the religion Futurity served, known as the ‘Friends of Wigner’, had suffered many schisms. He forced a smile. ‘But I will have to do,’ he said. ‘The Captain turned to my Hierocrat for help. Mara, you must see that to sort out this situation you will have to talk to me.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I have to talk. That’s obvious. But not to an acolyte. Or a priest, or a bishop, or a, a—’
‘A Hierocrat.’ He frowned. ‘Then who?’
‘Michael Poole.’
That ancient, sacred name shocked Futurity to brief silence. He glanced at Captain Tahget, who raised his eyebrows. You see what I’ve been dealing with? Perhaps this woman was deluded after all.
Futurity said, ‘Mara, Michael Poole is our messiah. In the age of the First Friends he gave his life for the benefit of humanity by—’
‘I know who he was,’ she snapped. ‘Why do you think I asked for him?’
‘Then,’ he said carefully, ‘you must know that Poole has been dead – or at least lost to us – for more than twenty-three thousand years.’
‘Of course I know that. But he’s here.’
‘Poole is always with us in spirit,’ said Futurity piously. ‘And he waits for us at Timelike Infinity, where the world lines of reality will be cleansed.’
‘Not like that. He’s here, on Base—’
‘478.’
‘478. You people keep him locked up.’
‘We do?’
‘I want Michael Poole,’ Mara insisted. ‘Only him. Because he will understand.’ She turned away from Futurity. The imaging system followed her, but she covered her face with her hands, so he couldn’t read her expression.
Captain Tahget said dryly, ‘I think you need to talk to your Hierocrat.’
II
The Hierocrat refused to discuss such issues on a comms link, so Futurity would have to return to the surface. Within the hour Futurity’s flitter receded from the starship.
From space the Ask Politely was an astonishing sight. Perhaps a kilometre in length it was a rough cylinder, but it lacked symmetry on any axis, and its basic form was almost hidden by the structures which plumed from its surface: fins, sails, spines, nozzles, scoops, webbing. Hardened for interstellar space the ship shone, metallic and polymeric. But it had the look of something organic rather than mechanical, a form that had grown, like a spiny fish from Base 478’s deep seas perhaps, rather than anything designed by intelligence.
There was something deeply disturbing about the ship’s lack of symmetry. But, Futurity supposed, symmetry was imposed on humans by the steady straight-up-and-down gravity fields of planets. If you swam between the stars you didn’t need symmetry.
And besides, so the seminary gossip went, despite the controlling presence of Tahget and his command crew, this wasn’t really a human vessel at all. It certainly didn’t look it, close to.
Futurity was relieved when his flitter pulled out of the ship’s forest of spines and nets and began to swing back down towards Base 478.
478 was a world of ruins: from the high atmosphere the land looked as if it had been melted, covered over by a bubbling concrete-grey slag. Once every resource of this world had been dedicated to the prosecution of a galactic war. Base 478 had been a training centre, and here millions of human citizens had been moulded into soldiers, to be hurled into the grisly friction of the war at the Galaxy’s heart, from whence few had returned. Even now the world retained the number by which it had been registered in vanished catalogues on Earth.
But times had changed. The war was over, the Coalition fallen. Many of those tremendous wartime buildings remained – they were too robust to be demolished – but Futurity made out splashes of green amid the grey, places where the ancient buildings had been cleared and the ground exposed. Those island-farms laboured to feed 478’s diminished population. Futurity himself had grown up on such a farm, long before he had donned the cassock.
He had never travelled away from his home world – indeed, he had only flown in orbit once before, during his seminary training; his tutor had insisted that you could not pretend to be a priest of a pan-Galactic religion without at least seeing your own world hanging unsupported in the Galaxy’s glow. But Futurity had studied widely, and he had come to see that though there were far more exciting and exotic places to live in this human Galaxy – not least Earth itself – there were few places quite so orderly and civilised as his own little world, with its proud traditions of soldiery and engineering, and its deeply devout government. So he had grown to love it. He even liked the layers of monumental ruins that plated over every continent, for in the way they had been reoccupied and reused he took a lesson about the durability of the human spirit.