Rachel tried not to stiffen her shoulders as his fingers began to knead out their knots of muscle, all the while bending Rachel further, moving her head towards his robed lap. She could smell him through the rough cloth. An earth-like odour mixed with urine. All men were the same, she decided. At least, all the ones she’d met in her twenty-three years. But then, that wasn’t many, as even Rachel was prepared to admit.
“Pray,” said Brother Michael, pressing on the back of her head.
She could feel him, swollen beneath the cloak, his hands pushing her face further into his lap. He’d keep pushing, too, until she did what he wanted, Rachel knew that. It was her choice, the other handmaidens had made that clear right at the start. She could almost suffocate against the cloth of his lap as Brother Michael prayed fiercely over her head. Or she could soothe him, the way David soothed the wild tumult of Saul.
Rachel did what Brother Michael wanted, accepting the inevitable. She was getting good at that, Rachel told herself bitterly. She wouldn’t cry, though. Not now, not ever...
Sliding Brother Michael’s robe over his knees and up around his waist, Rachel bent her head and prayed. Above her, Brother Michael groaned and began to pray even more fervently, his words spilling out into the silence of his starlit vestry.
The other handmaidens had tried to tell Rachel how to grip so he couldn’t fill her mouth entirely. And how to use her tongue and sucking to speed up his release. Rachel tried: every time she was called to pray she tried to remember. And always she gave up, letting Brother Michael push her up and down into his lap.
His words were a litany now, a high complex song that spun up to the cold waiting stars. But Rachel couldn’t hear any of it: she was trying to breathe. And then he was shouting, his hands tight around her head as he pumped wet salt into the back of her throat. Rachel swallowed. She had to, she wanted to breathe.
And then it was over, Brother Michael’s hands lifting her head away from his lap to push his gown back into position. They stood after that, his hands on her shoulders as unsmiling eyes stared deep into her. Whatever he saw there he was satisfied.
Fear, probably, Rachel thought bitterly.
“Go with God.” He said it dismissively, fingers already flicking over the sofa’s data panel, closing down the ice-cold array of heaven. Brother Michael waited until Rachel had reached the door before calling her back, pointing to his juice flask. “Take that away. Oh...” He paused, watching her shoulders stiffen and seeing the tendons stand out at the back of her bowed head. There was, he had to admit, something about this one that brought out the worst in him.
“Bring me fresh juice before you go to your bed...”
Lars watched in disgust. Although it was disgust tinged with fascination. So this was Brother Michael, the new Noah. He smiled, not kindly, and shuffled backwards, then flipped himself round and ran on his hands and knees down an air vent. He loved being in zero G, it was even better than being on the Moon. But he was training himself to handle gravity, too. Originally he’d been assigned to the men’s dorm. But Brother Robert was the only man there and he didn’t want Lars around, not with the sandrat’s muttering and sour animal stink. So Lars bedded down in the goat pen.
Tomorrow the goats would be released into one of the Valleys — or so Rachel said — but tonight they provided him with warmth and company. And none of them complained when he unscrewed a panel and vanished for a few hours into the security of the tunnels.
The goat pen was all right, little more than ten paces by ten paces, but the dorm had horrified him, going on into the distance like a great circular emptiness. Nothing but echoing space and curved walls so big that the far side was almost a blur.
Lars didn’t know it and he wasn’t interested enough to find out, but the dorm was a roofed-off segment near the outer end of a four-kilometre spar, which gave the dorm its own gravity, though obviously not quite as much as in the ring itself. And it wasn’t real gravity, of course. But centrifugal force gave a good-enough illusion of gravity to be gratefully accepted by the human mind.
The doughnut ring didn’t need a central spindle. Why should it, when the ring just hung in space and there was nothing to stop it revolving around its own empty centre? In the same way, there was nothing to stop cargo shuttles docking alongside the ring instead of at the southern end of the spindle. At a speed of one revolution every twenty seconds, any decent pilot could dock without trouble; while to a semiAI or bio it would be less than nothing, a mere subset of a subroutine.
But Brother Michael had wanted a traditional wheel-of-life design. Or so Lars gathered, the way he gathered most news, by listening at grilles or hiding in air vents. The only problem for Lars was that the gravity on the station was fucked. Try as he might, Lars couldn’t get a mental fix on what was up and what counted as down, mainly because it kept changing.
When he was in the spindle, then “up” was North, towards the cathedral, and that was the way the lifts travelled. But if he was in one of the four spars that rotated around the spindle, then “up” was towards the spindle and “down” was towards the giant doughnut. At least, that was the way gravity worked, getting stronger the further down he went.
Lars hadn’t been out to the doughnut yet, because it wasn’t allowed. And besides, that was where the mad lady lived, except that Rachel’s friend Ruth said she was sleeping. When the doughnut was finished and the animals were all in place, it would be possible for them to start walking straight ahead and then keep going until they came back to where they’d started, two days later, having walked right round the whole Arc.
Lars wasn’t sure he believed it. In fact, he wasn’t going to believe it until he’d done it for himself. He didn’t tell Ruth that, though. He liked her too much. At first, before he’d seen Brother Michael praying over Rachel, Lars had thought Ruth must be upset not to get called to pray as often as the others: but when he suggested that, Ruth just smiled sourly and flashed him a lopsided grin.
“No,” she’d said, patting Lars on the arm. “I’m lousy at praying. My teeth are too big and I’m clumsy, very clumsy.” Lars wasn’t muddled by that any more. Not now, not any longer. He knew just what she was talking about. In fact, Lars reckoned that Brother Michael was a man who had his shit seriously together... To use the words of Ben, whose head was now probably just slop in a bucket of slime.
All the same, as Lars scuttled rat-like down the air vent back to the warmth and friendship of the goat pen he wondered what LizAlec would do when Brother Michael called on her to pray.
Chapter Twenty-One
Identity/Crisis
Letting the self-cleaning neoprene hose slide back into its mounting, Brother Michael adjusted his cassock and pulled down the panel that launched his office. He’d taken the Sunday-morning communion, presided at breakfast and confessed two of the handmaidens. He was exhausted.
Diodes winked as the flatscreen picked up where he’d left off the night before, pulling up a visual link to the now-empty women’s dormitory. Angrily, the priest hit a key and broke the link. The whole Arc was wired for sight, both infrared and m/wave, but he didn’t want the distraction.
Built into the flap was a neat fold-up keyboard. It had touch-sensitive keys, floating track ball and an input socket for Zeiss wraprounds in case the user was working on something too confidential to be accessed on open screen. The office had tri-D capacity, too — as well as a Sony neural link — and the whole thing had been bought by mail order from a Virgin MegaStore: only Brother Michael didn’t approve of bioClay implants and unfortunately he’d never learned to use a deck, at least not properly. But this wasn’t a message one of the girls could key-up for him.