“I’m Gravid,” she said gravely: “I incubate Fragile blastocytes in batches of eight at a time, even in high-radiation, microgravity environments. A Fragile female would be worn-out after eight, probably dead after sixteen: I’ve produced more than two hundred during the voyage. But it’s a demanding job, and I don’t like to leave my nest. Especially after, after—” She paused, breathing deeply as she struggled to regain her composure. “I get attached to the poor things: Seeing them die every few decades is very hard. Rosa said we would have a new brood to quicken as we near the promised world, but I haven’t seen her since the accident. She must be very busy.”
“I haven’t seen her either,” I admitted distractedly as I extended the suction duster and applied myself to the nooks and crannies behind the air ducts. I decided not to share what Deacon Dennett had told me: that Lady Cybelle was lying in the sarcophagus in the sepulcher, engaged in the lengthy process of binding two-thirds of her body mass in new and unimprinted mechanocytes into service—a gleaming chromed skeleton lying in a seething vat of iridescent foam as her marrow techné bid for control of the gigantic infusion of new indentured flesh.
“So where do you grow the Fragiles?” I asked, trying to make polite conversation.
“I incubate,” she declared proudly, reaching her three arms around the mound of bedding piled over her abdomen. “I incubate them inside me! I have four uteri, you know.”
“You—” It took me a while to realize what she’d said, and then another few moments to regain control of my mouth. “You incubate? You mean you actually give live birth to Fragiles?”
“Yes, that’s my job! I’m a manufacturing host for the New Flesh. It’s the highest secular calling in our order!”
“I didn’t know that was even possible,” I said, overcome by a moment of nauseous fascination.
“Oh, it’s quite simple! Modern people were originally developed from the old Fragile kind, I’m just backward compatible. It works just the way it used to before Creation, when there were only Fragile people—I can grow two Fragiles in each uterus, just like they used to grow inside each other! Except for the sex thing. That’s different, for us. When we’re ready to incubate, the Priestess of the Holy Inseminatory secretes a blastocyte and injects it into my—”
I screened it out, scrubbing hard at a stubborn stain on the ceiling. Some things are not for the squeamish. How a person made of mechanocytes could incubate and give birth to Meat People might be a miracle of nanoscale engineering, but I didn’t really want to know the details. Although, once I thought about it, the first mechanocytes were created by modifying the old Fragile ’cytes—eukaryotes, they were called—to add machine-phase organelles to control their inner processes: So perhaps the Fragile weren’t so unlike us, if you stripped us of every intelligently designed tweak that makes it possible to survive in this life-hostile universe. But that wasn’t the icky bit. The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting.
I checked the sixteen cables that suspended her bed and kept her from crashing to the deck under acceleration, while she prattled on about the joy of pregnancy, until the talking box decided I wasn’t working fast enough. “Krina, please proceed to Sarcophagus Two, Holy Sepulcher of the Body of our Fragile Lord. Attention: consumable status of Sarcophagus Two is off-line. Please inspect immediately and replenish as indicated. Then report to Deacon Dennett in the vestry.”
“Sorry, got to go,” I told the Gravid Mother apologetically.
She blinked at me. “Oh, really?” She seemed to have completely forgotten her initial indignation at my intrusion. “Will you come back and talk some more?” (She really meant, Will you be my audience? But I didn’t correct her.) “It’s been so lovely having you . . .”
“I’d love to,” I said, leaving out as long as you stay off the subject of spawning. “But I’m needed elsewhere. Tomorrow—next day-shift cycle? Or when we’re under acceleration? By the way, do you have a name?”
“Tomorrow would be lovely!” She cocked her head to one side. “No, I don’t have a name. I might have had one once. But I’m not a who anymore, I’m a what.” She smiled beatifically. “I’m the Gravid Mother. The only one in Dojima System! Doesn’t that make me special?”
The stalker slowly swung on the end of her cable, falling toward the side of the chapel’s sanctuary with lazy grace. She waited patiently as the wall of irregular rocky blocks came closer. Vacuum lichens stained the gray, irregular faces of the stones with green and blue filigrees of tenuous life: the stained-glass windows of the nave (actually slabs of tinted aluminum oxide crystals, ruby and sapphire, held together by a fretwork of machined titanium rather than strips of lead) glowed from within, lustrous in the freezing darkness and knife-edge shadows cast by Dojima.
As the wall of the building approached, the stalker prepared for impact. Like most people, the outer layer of her skin was stippled with chromatophores—specialized mechanocytes that could change texture and color at will, like the epidermis of an ancient Earth cuttlefish. Unlike most, the stalker’s ’phores were military grade: They could shift from purest black to brightest mirror, and their surface-texture options allowed them to extrude setae, gecko filaments that adhered to almost any surface via Van der Waals forces. As she splayed her fingers and the soles of her feet, the exposed skin puffed up and formed tiny whorls and ridges, ready for impact.
The chapel was still barely accelerating as she impacted the wall, landing on her feet with a sticky jolt. She allowed her momentum to carry her forward until she planted both hands firmly against the stones. The cable lazily coiled and fell away behind her as she allowed her feet to disconnect, extended her body, and slowly plastered herself against the wall.
The false stones of the chapel walls were bitingly cold. Vacuum is an insulator, but the background temperature was less than three degrees above absolute zero: The outermost surface of these ceramic-and-aerogel blocks had reached thermal equilibrium well below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Luckily, aerogels barely conducted heat: She warmed what she touched. An observer with near-infrared eyesight would clearly see the slug trail of luminous warm patches that she left as she lowered herself hand over hand down the side of the wall until her feet came into contact with the outer walkway that formed a belt around the chapel at the joint between its pastoral and mechanical aspects—where a planet-based temple would touch the ground.
Here the stalker encountered a dilemma.
This far out from Dojima Prime, the equilibrium temperature of a body in direct sunlight was still rather cold. Although the stalker was better adapted to life in vacuum than her target was, her ability to operate indefinitely in such conditions was limited. If she ventured inside, she could reach her target but would risk detection. Whereas if she remained outside, she had the advantage of total surprise—but in another few hours she’d have to enter a sleep mode in order to conserve energy, and in any event she’d freeze solid if she stayed out for more than a handful of standard days. So the question was not whether to enter the chapel, but when and how.