“—Ailing purported Church vehicle B017, this is Permanent”—the speaker paused, clearly surprised, and stared at me, before finishing—“Crimson Branch Office Zero Five hailing purported Church vehicle. We believe you are flying under a false transponder code, and we intend to board and audit you for contraband. Please acknowledge.”
I stared at the pirate. He was furry and snub-nosed, somewhat wrinkly, slightly moist and gray about the edges, and his voice was irritatingly high-pitched and squeaky: He sat cupped in a bowl-shaped mat or nest woven out of random twigs, surrounded by a haze of floating dust and crud. His ears, long and pointy and pierced by shiny metal hoops, twitched this way and that: His eyes were completely dark, lacking any sclera. Only his impish and toothy grin was in any sense piratical. (Behind him, a colony of piratical-looking individuals, many of them shrouded in gray-black rubbery cloaks, hung upside down in the acceleration webbing of their vehicle’s flight deck.) I had been half-expecting the wild glamour and gold eye patches of mythology; the reality was confusingly different.
“I am Her Grace Cybelle, priestess of this parish. Your suspicion is misplaced: This is a vehicle of worship, dedicated to the furtherance of the holy mission of propagation, and if you board us, you will incur the everlasting wrath of Mother Church.” I gave him a chilly glare, channeling the full vitriol and contempt of my mater eviscerating a subordinate unlucky enough to misplace a decimal point in a compound-interest calculation. “You will acknowledge your understanding and compliance with this declaration immediately! That is all I have to say.”
I gestured at Dennett to cut off the communication, but something had captured his attention, and his response was tardy, which allowed the pirate a vital second in which to regain the initiative. He gaped a nasty grin at me, exposing sharpened canines. “Heh, you aren’t getting rid of us that easily. If you are a vehicle of the Church, then of course you won’t have a problem accommodating a handful of your parishioners, will you? Don’t be worrying, we’re just going to drop by for a friendly and respectful service of holy communion.” He emitted a falsetto titter, then raised a hand to cover his mouth: A membranous flap of skin followed it, stretching taut across his body. “The Church has nothing to fear from the likes of us, it being honest about being a house of worship, if you follow my drift.”
I glanced at Dennett, but from his slack-jawed, shocked expression, he was as taken aback by this unwelcome imposition as I was. So far the pirate chieftain hadn’t accused me outright of being a fake, but how was I to maintain the illusion through a service of holy communion? The transubstantiation of the nutrient broth into the holy pluripotent stem cells of our ancient Fragile forerunners is the most public manifestation of the benison of clergy. I forced myself to suppress a reflexive swallow (another leftover piece of baggage from our predecessors’ nervous systems) and stared at the pirate.
“If you must,” I said icily, “then you should be aware that this vehicle experienced a”—I hesitated a second—“structural embarrassment in flight some time ago. Several members of the mission were killed”—Dennett was gesticulating frantically at me, but I ignored him—“and we have not completely repaired the damage. Accordingly, we have neither time nor capacity to pander to your insulting and trivial demands! If you come aboard, you will find us as we are, and Mother Church will not forgive or forget any insults she is offered.” Old acting skills, like underused musculature, creaked and groaned as I called on them. “Who shall I name to my bishop as the leader of your band of miscreants?”
The pirate yawned. “Name me to their grace as Chief Business Analyst Rudi the Terrible.” More tittering, this time from the chorus line of upside-down pirates behind him: “We’ll be along for communion tomorrow! And to look into certain distressing allegations of insurance fraud that our primary contracting agency has asked us to investigate in our capacity as freelance loss adjusters. If all is as you say, then I’ll be happy to put to rest the pernicious rumors circulating on Taj Beacon to the effect that Your Grace was severely incommoded by your recent reactor meltdown. G’day.” And with that, he cut the connection.
“What are we going to do?!” I wailed, abruptly lapsing from character.
“Hush, child, something will come up.” Dennett was clearly shaken and fell back on his pastoral persona, the face he used for comforting parishioners. He wasn’t terribly convincing.
“(I’m not a child.) I can’t conduct holy communion! They’ll see right through—”
“Hush. They won’t, because I won’t put you in that position. Let me think.”
Dennett strode around the organist’s nook, head and shoulders hunched, clearly deep in thought as he bounced off the walls, ceiling, and floor. Presently, he became calm. “I think I should attend to Her Grace,” he said, and turned toward the nave.
Lady Cybelle’s sarcophagus rested on a stone plinth in the middle of the chapel. In shape it was a truncated bell of steel, surface marred by circular hatches in the top and sides, and a small porthole obscured by instruments—the classical form of the Soyuz or “Heavenly Chariot” in which the Fragile first ventured beyond legendary Fragile Earth’s blanket of sustaining atmosphere. (It is common to this day to find Soyuz pods and gargoyles adorning the exterior of mendicant chapels as they slowly migrate between the stars.) Three is a holy number, so it had originally held three reclining beds for its vulnerable passengers; however, the two outer couches had been removed and replaced by the feeder vats and fleshstuff printers that slowly poured their marrow techné—and with it, life—back into the gleaming alloy bones of the badly burned priestess.
“She’s not going to be integrated before they arrive, is she? Two days to go, isn’t it?” I realized I was repeating Dennett’s own excuses back at him.
“That was true as of the last time I checked,” he said through gritted teeth. “I shall check again. Maybe the horse will learn to sing if I increase the perfusion flow rate and dial back the target tissue integration threshold.”
I watched for a few minutes as the deacon poked at the control panel on the outside of the sarcophagus, swearing in a most shocking and profane manner. “Ms. Alizond, I need you to go and fetch me fifty liters of sterile isotonic glucose in normal saline, a two-liter cartridge of propylene glycol, and at least twenty kilos of tubespam.” I glanced around, but he was ahead of me. “The remotes are already fetching me a suit heat exchanger. Forcing her tissue integration will make her dangerously feverish, but if I can get her into a suit liner and pump cold water through it, I might be able to force maturation in time. Her Grace is already mostly present in body, if not in soul . . . go on! Get moving!”
I left him to his supervision of the thing on the slab and went in search of the perquisites. Which, in practice, meant a trip down to the kitchen and another tiresome opportunity to try and sweet-talk Cook into releasing the necessities of life. And so it was that I missed most of what happened next—which was probably all for the best.
Mistaken Identities
I don’t believe in assigning blame when things go wrong. It is an unproductive activity, and more importantly, it makes people defensive—thus reducing their willingness to comply with quality-assurance protocols aimed at preventing recurrences. But I’ll willingly blame myself. I freely admit: I had allowed myself to drift into the chapel crew’s curious pattern of activity. You have probably noticed by now that the members of the crew who had chosen to remain aboard the mission mostly confined themselves to their stations and communicated very little: Cook stuck to the kitchen, the Gravid Mother gestated in her web, Deacon Dennett lurked in his organ pit, and so on. During my off-shift periods, I mostly hid in my cell, behind a locked hatch, and nobody seemed to mind: Doubtless I was just another piece of the picture to them. They were less a crew and more a scattered collection of huddled, sullen individualists. Moreover, there did not appear to be a chapel-wide communications net as such: at least, not one that anybody had introduced me to or logged me in on.