Pirius stood up. “And every one of those drone kids” he said, “is better than you, Commissary.” Nilis said nothing more, and Pirius left the room.
Pirius Blue talked it over with Cohl.
“The whole thing’s insane,” he said. In three thousand years, there had of course been many scouting missions beyond the Front and into the Cavity, deep into the nest. That complex place, crowded with stellar marvels as well as the greatest concentration of Xeelee firepower in the Galaxy, was known to every pilot as a death trap. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”
“We?”
He sighed. “If I have to do this, I’d want you with me. But it’s academic, because nobody’s going anywhere.”
“Because it’s insane?”
“Correct.”
“Well,” she said, “not necessarily.” She was lying on her bunk, her hands locked behind her head; she seemed undisturbed by the usual barracks clamor around her. In fact, she had something of Nilis’s remoteness. But then, Pirius thought with loyal exasperation, Cohl was a navigator, and most navigators were halfway to double domes anyhow.
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it could be done. There’s a lot of junk in there, you know, in the Cavity. Astrophysical junk. Plenty of places to hide.” She rolled over. They had no data desks here, no fancy Virtual-generation facilities, and so she started sketching with a wet finger in the dirt on the floor. “Suppose you went in this way…”
The Cavity was a rough sphere some fifteen light-years across at the center of the Mass, bounded by the great static shock of the Front. It was called a “Cavity” because it was blown clear of hot gas and dust by Chandra and the other objects at the very center. But it was far from empty, in fact crowded with exotic objects. As well as a million glowering stars, there was the Baby Spiral, three dazzling lanes of infalling gas and dust. And the Baby, like everything else in the Cavity, was centered on the Prime Radiant itself: Chandra, the supermassive black hole, utterly immovable, the pivot around which the immense machinery of the inner Galaxy turned.
Cohl said, “There are lots of ways in. You could track one of the Baby’s arms, for instance. Even so you’d have to take some kind of cover.”
“Cover?”
“Other ships. Rocks, even.” She glanced at him. “Not everybody is going to get through; you have to take enough companions with you to make sure that somebody makes it. It’s a question of statistics, Pirius.” She rubbed her chin. “Of course the navigation would be tricky. You’re talking about finding your way through all that astrophysics, and keeping a small flotilla together…”
He saw she was losing herself in the technicalities of planning such an ambitious jaunt. But technicalities were not uppermost in his own mind.
After a while she noticed his silence. “You’re not happy about this, are you?
“Am I supposed to be?”
She said, “It won’t make any difference, you know. To them. Whatever we do.”
“To who?”
“To the dead ones.”
Pirius looked at her. “I thought it was only me who had thoughts like that.”
“You ought to talk about it more. You’ll just have to make up your own mind about the mission, Pirius. But I’ll follow you, whatever you decide.”
He was moved. “Thank you.”
She shrugged. “What’s to thank? Without you, the Xeelee would have fried me already — twice. And as for the guilt, maybe you should go talk to This Burden Must Pass. He’s always full of philosophical crap, if that’s what you need.”
That made him laugh, but it seemed like a good idea. But when he went to find Burden, Nilis had got there before him.
Virtual Nilis, reluctantly fulfilling the nominal purpose for his projection here at Quin, was interviewing Burden in his small office.
Pirius wasn’t the only visitor. Perhaps a dozen cadets and privates had gathered outside the office’s partition walls. They sat on bunks, or storage boxes, or just on the floor, and they stared into the room with steady longing.
Nilis seemed relieved to close the door on them. “They’re coming in relays,” he whispered, shocked.
“That’s military training for you,” Burden said dryly. He was sitting at ease in one of the office’s small upright chairs. Unlike the Commissary, he seemed quite relaxed.
Nilis whispered, “I don’t know what they want.”
Pirius grunted. “That’s obvious. They’re here because they think you’re going to take Burden away.”
Nilis, bustling clumsily around the room, flapped his hands. “I’m here to analyze, not to condemn. Even Commissaries are pragmatic, you know; if this quasi-faith helps the youngsters out there keep to their duties we’re quite willing to turn a blind eye. But we do have to be sure things don’t go too far. Of course, by showing such devotion to their, ah, spiritual leader, those cadets are actually making it more likely, not less, that sanctions will have to be applied.”
Burden said, “Commissary, maybe you should go out there and talk to them about it. They’re the ones who are affected by my ’sermonizing,’ after all.”
“Oh, I don’t think that would be appropriate — no, no, not at all.”
Pirius thought that was an excuse. How could the Commissary possibly do a proper analysis of Burden’s faith if he didn’t talk to those actually affected? Nilis seemed afraid, he thought: afraid of Quin, or of the people in it, which was why he clung to this little room.
Pirius sat down on the room’s only other chair. Nilis, with nowhere to sit, flapped and fluffed a little more; then, with a sigh, he snapped his fingers to conjure up a Virtual couch. “Not really supposed to be doing magic tricks, you know,” he said apologetically. “Against the rules of an avatar!”
Pirius asked, “So, Commissary, has he converted you to a belief in the Ultimate Observer?”
“How comforting it would be if he had,” said Nilis, a little wistfully. “But I know too much! Religions have long been a theoretical interest of mine, which is how I was able to wangle this assignment — and intellectually is the only way I can respond, you see.
“That’s not to say there isn’t some merit in this new faith. Consider the Friends’ beliefs. A Friend worships her descendants, who she believes will far surpass her in power and glory. That’s not such an irrational belief, and guides behavior in an unselfish way, as any worthwhile religion should. The old legend of Michael Poole has entered the mix too. Like some earlier messiahs, Poole is supposed to have given his life for the future of mankind. Of course that’s an example always to be admired. Quero’s faith is crude and somewhat shapeless, but it does have some moral weight. And it is interesting, academically, for its novel setting…”
Most human religions, said Nilis, had originated on Earth. Once carried to the stars, they had mutated, adapted, split, and merged, but they had generally retained the same core elements.
“A religion born on Earth will have archetypes derived from planetary living — where the sun must rise and set, where seasons come and go, where living things die but are renewed, without the intervention of humans, but dependent on the cycles of the world. So you find a worship of the sun, and of water, often sublimated into blood; you find a fascination with the figures of mother and child, and with the seed which, once planted in the ground, endures the winter and lives again. Many religions feature messiahs who defeat death itself, who die but are born again: the ultimate sublimation of the seed.
“But here,” he said, “you have a religion which has emerged, quite spontaneously, among a spacegoing people. So new archetypes must be found. Entropy, for instance: to survive in an artificial biosphere one must labor constantly against decay. You can’t rely on the world to fix itself, you see; there are no renewing seasonal cycles here.