“Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. ‘The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.’ Brother Pat, you’d better get out of here, or I’ll start raving.”
“Domne, I—”
“What’s keeping you? What’s that, a letter? All right, give it here.”
The monk handed it to him and went out. Zerchi left it unopened and glanced at the doctor’s pledge again. Worthless, perhaps. But still the man was sincere. And dedicated. He’d have to be dedicated to work for the kind of salary the Green Star paid. He had looked underslept and overworked. He’d probably been living on benzedrine and doughnuts since the shot that killed the city. Seeing misery everywhere and detesting it, and sincere in wanting to do something about it. Sincere — that was the hell of it. From a distance, one’s adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one’s own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.
He opened the letter and read it. The letter informed him that Brother Joshua and the others had departed from New Rome for an unspecified destination in the West. The letter also advised him that information about Quo pererinatur had leaked to the ZDI, who had sent investigators to the Vatican to ask questions about the rumored launching of an unauthorized starship…Evidently the starship was not yet in space.
They’d learn soon enough about Quo peregrinatur, but with the help of Heaven, they’d find out too late. What then? he wondered.
The legal situation was tangled. The law forbade starship departures without commission approval. Approval was hard to get and slow in coming. Zerchi was certain that the ZDI and the commission would consider the Church was breaking the law. But a State-Church concordat had existed for a century and a half now; it clearly exempted the Church from licensing procedures, and it guaranteed to the Church the right to send missions to “whatever space installations and/or planetary outposts shall not have been declared by the aforesaid Commission to be ecologically critical or closed to unregulated enterprise.” Every installation in the solar system was “ecologically critical” and “closed” at the time of the concordat, but the concordat further asserted the Church’s right to “own space vessels and travel unrestricted to open installations or outposts.” The concordat was very old. It had been signed in the days when the Berkstrun starship drive was only a dream in the wide imagination of some who thought that interstellar travel would open up the universe to an unrestricted, outflow of population.
Things had turned out otherwise. When the first starship was born as an engineering drawing, it became plain that no institution except government had the means or the funds to build them; that no profit was to be derived from transporting colonies to extrasolar planets for purposes of “interstellar mercantilism.” Nevertheless, the Asian rulers had sent the first colony ship. Then in the West the cry was heard: “Are we to let the ‘inferior’ races inherit the stars?” There had been a brief flurry of starship launchings as colonies of black people, brown, white, and yellow people were hurled into the sky toward the Centaur, in the name of racism. Afterwards, geneticists had wryly demonstrated that — since each racial group was so small that unless their descendants intermarried, each would undergo deteriorative genetic drift due to inbreeding on the colony planet — the racists had made cross-breeding necessary to survival.
The only interest the Church had taken in space had been concern for the colonists who were sons of the Church, cut off from the flock by interstellar distances. And yet she had not taken advantage of that provision of the concordat which permitted the sending of missions. Certain contradictions existed between the concordat and the laws of the State which empowered the commission, at least as the latter law might in theory affect the sending of missions. The contradiction had never been adjudicated by the courts, since there had never been cause for litigation. But now, if the ZDI intercepted Brother Joshua’s group in the act of launching a starship without a commission permit or charter, there would be cause. Zerchi prayed that the group would get away without a test in the courts, which might take weeks or months. Of course there would be a scandal afterwards. Many would charge not only that the Church had violated Commission rulings but charity too, by sending ecclesiastical dignitaries and a bunch of rascal monks, when she might have used the ship as refuge for poor colonists, hungry for land. The conflict of Martha and Mary always recurred.
Abbot Zerchi suddenly realized that the tenor of his thinking had changed during the previous day or two. A few days ago, everyone had been waiting for the sky to burst asunder. But nine days had passed since Lucifer had prevailed in space and scorched a city out of existence. Despite the dead, the maimed, and the dying, there had been nine days of silence. Since the wrath had been stayed thus far, perhaps the worst could be averted. He had found himself thinking of things that might happen next week or next month, as if — after all — there might really be a next week or a next month. And why not? Examining conscience, he found that he had not altogether abandoned the virtue of hope.
A monk returned from an errand in the city that afternoon and reported that a camp for refugees was being set up at the park two miles down the highway. “I think it’s being sponsored by Green Star, Domne,” he added.
“Good!” the abbot said. “We’re overflowing here, and I’ve had to turn three truckloads of them away.”
The refugees were noisy in the courtyard, and the noise jangled overwrought nerves. The perpetual quiet of the old abbey was shattered by strange sounds: the boisterous laughter of men telling jokes, the cry of a child, the rattle of pots and pans, hysterical sobbing, a Green Star medic shouting: “Hey, Raff, go fetch an enema hose.” Several times the abbot suppressed an urge to go to the window and call to them for silence.
After bearing it as long as he could, he picked up a pair of binoculars, an old book, and a rosary, and went up to one of the old watchtowers where a thick stone wall cut off most of the sounds from the courtyard. The book was a slim volume of verse, really anonymous, but by legend ascribed to a mythical saint, whose “canonization” was accomplished only in fable and the folklore of the Plains, and not by any act of the Holy See. No one, indeed, had ever found evidence that such a person as Saint Poet of the Miraculous Eyeball had ever lived: the fable had probably arisen out of the story that one of the early Hannegans had been given a glass eyeball by a brilliant physical theorist who was his protégé — Zerchi could not remember whether the scientist had been Esser Shon or Pfardentrott — and who told the prince that it had belonged to a poet who had died for the Faith. He had not specified which faith the poet had died for — that of Peter or that of the Texarkanan schismatics — but evidently the Hannegan had valued it, for he had mounted the eyeball in the clutch of a small golden hand which was still worn upon certain state occasions by princes of the Harq — Hannegan dynasty. It was variously called the Orbis judicans Conscientias or the Oculus Poetae ]udicis, and the remnants of the Texarkana Schism still revered it as a relic. Someone a few years back had proposed the rather silly hypothesis that Saint Poet was the same person as the “scurrilous versificator” once mentioned in the Journals of the Venerable Abbot Jerome, but the only substantiating “evidence” for this notion was that Pfardentrott — or was it Esser Shon? — had visited the abbey during the reign of Venerable Jerome at about the same date as the “scurrilous versificator” entry in the Journal, and that the gift of the eyeball to Hannegan had occurred at some date after that visit to the abbey. Zerchi suspected that the thin book of verse had been penned by one of the secular scientists who had visited the abbey to study the Memorabilia at about that time, and that one of them could probably be identified with the “scurrilous versificator” and possibly with the Saint Poet of folklore and fable. The anonymous verses were a bit too daring, Zerchi thought, to have been written by a monk of the Order.