“Yes, she has the touch of grace.” Dennett looked at me again, this time clearly speculating. “You’re about the same height as Lady Cybelle. Tell me, can you act?”
I am a historian, not an entertainer. Nevertheless, one of the key insights the study of my chosen field requires of its students is that people in times gone by were not stupid—they were different, and operated under social constraints that are foreign to us, not to mention technological and scientific handicaps, but their lack of the wisdom of the modern age should not be confused with foolishness. Consequently, one of the techniques we use in training new students out of their preconceptions is to make them reenact the lives of foregone times, to get into character as it were—to use techniques drawn from acting to make them reject their prejudices, so that they can subsequently confront the historical record with an open mind. It is by way of this route that I have acquired some minor acquaintance with mummery over the decades of my study.
That is not to say that I had ever contemplated impersonating a priestess of the Church of the Fragile before—much less of doing so at the urging of a junior member of the clergy.
“To the vestry,” Dennett ordered me. “It was spared by the accident, so the robes of office are intact—our pursuers can have no idea of Her Grace’s appearance or delicate condition, for I handled the temporal mission at Taj Beacon. And going by their trajectory, they can’t have questioned any of the deserters in person.” His cheek wattled up in spines for a moment. I scrambled in front of him to reach the doors to the side chamber ahead of the rush.
“What exactly is it that you want me to do?”
Dennett gaped at me, as slack-jawed and frightening as one of his cadavers. “We shall dress you in her robes of office, and you will warn them off when they next hail us. What could possibly go wrong? Smartly, to the wardrobe!”
A saying almost as ancient as civilization has it that clothes make the person. However, not all persons are created equal. While the lower ranks of the Church are as routinely mortal as any other Post or Fragile human, the full priests and priestesses are upgraded. Normal people do not have voluntary control of their own techné, much less the ability to override and reprogram their mechanocytes at will, to push and shove the little atoms of our being around and twist them into strange new forms. It is the privilege of the clergy, as of a few other sacred guilds, to morph our form of life to suit new worlds and alien biospheres, drawing on the wisdom of the Mother Church and its accumulated archives of adaptations and tweaks—which they carry around internally, implanted in their very bones.
It takes decades to train a new priest or priestess, and they tend toward the eccentric, to say the least. They can also reprogram others’ mechanocytes, to gift them with a healing touch—or something else. One irritates or angers a fully communicant priest of the Fragile at one’s mortal periclass="underline" Nobody in their right mind would seek to impersonate a priestess!
But Dennett wanted me to do so. This, more than anything else, bespoke a certain desperation on his part. Also: pirates! It was bad enough to be at the mercy of these eccentric clergy: The only reason I could think of why pirates might wish to board the chapel was that they had somehow learned of my true mission in Dojima System. (Call me self-centered if you wish.) In that case, letting them board us would probably be a really bad idea. Lady Cybelle herself was unavailable, adrift in the soupy-puddle dreams of a metamorphosing instar, so I allowed myself to be led to the dressing throne.
Dennett addressed the nearest skeleton: “A mirror, please. And a portrait of Her Grace.” Gould’s skeleton placed itself beside me and retrieved an ancient retina scroll from the chest nearby, which it unrolled and held up. Long-dead pixels stirred fitfully into life, twisting light into an illuminated vision of a severe-looking woman robed in the vestments of the Church. “Yes, you’re of approximately the same build. Can you make your face more like the Lady’s?”
I stared at her. High cheekbones, pursed, pale lips, a nose as suitable for staring down as any gunsight: Her expression of disdain reminded me of my mother. “I can try.” I tried to adjust my lips first—surface tissues were always easier. But I have never been much of a fashion-follower, and my face had become used to me wearing the same features for so long that it had stuck. After a minute of trying, my chin abruptly creaked and clicked out a notch, stretching my flesh uncomfortably.
“Try harder!”
“I’m trying! I’m trying!” I waved my hands: “I’m not used to this.” Without warning, my left eyelashes began to extrude. “Ow. Oh. Right.”
“Should I fetch the Gravid Mother?” Dennett asked. “I gather she knows something of the cosmetic arts.”
“How many people do you want in on this?” Which thought shut him up for a minute, during which time I managed to sharpen my cheekbones slightly. The itchy talent of cosmetic biofeedback was returning to me, albeit patchily: After half an hour, I was looking not unlike the Lady Cybelle if examined from a very great distance in bad lighting conditions by an intoxicated witness.
“Vestments. Bring her a clean body stocking, a full coolant vest, telemetry web, and inner sacramental suit liner . . .” The other two skeletons clattered about busily like dressers behind the scenes at a fashion show. Dennett stared at my head. “You have too much hair. Shed it.”
I bit back an angry response. “Won’t it clog the air filters?” I asked instead. Lady Cybelle might have chosen to go bald, but I could hardly see how this might affect the perceptions of such admittedly antisocial persons as pirates. And anyway, regrowing my scalp covering would take time—at 0.04 millimeters per hour it might be months before I looked normal again.
“Just do it,” Dennett insisted. I rolled my eyes in an indication of surrender: He held my hair as I commanded my scalp follicles to let go of it. “I’ll ask the Mother to weave it into a wig you can wear while it’s growing back.”
Eventually, he had me finished to his satisfaction, with my features warped into a semblance of his superior. I dressed in her alien and complex garments (I still wonder: did the space suits of the Fragile really have such intimate connections? Or does the Church have some strange penitential requirement for mortification of the flesh? Because they were most uncomfortable) and was finally ready to revisit the flight deck. “I’ll manage the communications control panel,” he told me. “Here’s what I want you to say . . .”
Picture a priestess, terrible and austere in the formal surplice and space suit of the Mother Church of the Fragile. Picture such a priestess—a being totally dedicated to the propagation of our maker’s mission to the galaxy—standing with gaze severe behind the altar of a chapel in flight. The altar is surmounted by the ceremonial artifacts of her faith: the tissue printer and the scalpel, the radome and the phlebotomy cup. Ranked behind her are the risen dead, two and two and two to either side, skeletal revenants whose mindless grins induce the onlooker to recall uneasily that hers is a mission older than civilization itself: that hers is the power to command the very tissues of the onlooker’s body to crawl from their bonemetal scaffolding in shame.
Off to one side, Dennett flipped me a hand signal. I froze my face in an expression of acute disdain and focused my gaze behind the screen before me.
Reader, I believe it to be unlikely that you have ever made the personal acquaintance of a pirate chief. Neither, at that time, had I—before the deacon initiated the call. A momentary hesitation on meeting the unknown is to be expected. And so I kept my chromatophores and musculature perfectly still as the screen shimmered and revealed what I took to be the flight deck of our pursuer. It was, let me tell you, quite unlike the organ pit of a chapel in flight.