If the stone didn’t pass, she would get me into the jail infirmary at the base and break it up with sound waves. She left four more shots of ultramorph with the woman in blue and left without a good-bye. The guard—a middle-aged Lusian twice my weight with a flechette pistol in his holster and a come-along neural prod on his belt—peered in, glowered at me, and went back outside to stand by the front door. I will stop referring to the head of the household as “the woman in blue.” For the first few hours of agony, that had been all she had been to me—other than my savior, of course—but by the afternoon of the first full day in her home, I knew that she was named Dem Ria; that her primary marriage partner was the other woman, Dem Loa; that the third member of their tripartite marriage was the much younger man, Alem Mikail Dem Alem; that the teenaged girl in the house was Ces Ambre, Alem’s daughter by a previous triune; that the pale boy with no hair—who looked to be about eight standard years old—named Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem, was the child of the current partnership—although the biological child of which woman, I never discovered—and that he was dying of cancer.
“Our village medic elder… he died last month and has not been replaced… sent Bin to our own hospital in Keroa Tambat last winter, but they could only administer radiation and chemotherapy and hope for the best,” said Dem Ria as she sat by my bedside that afternoon. Dem Loa sat nearby on another straight-backed chair. I had asked about the boy to shift the subject of conversation away from my own problems. The women’s elaborate robes glowed a deep cobalt blue even as the sunlight behind them lay as thick and red as blood on the interior adobe walls. Lace curtains cut the light and shadows in complex negative spaces. We were chatting in the intervals between the pain. My back hurt then as if someone had struck me there with a heavy club, but this was a dull ache compared to the hot agony when the stone moved. The doctor had said that the pain was a good sign—that the stone was moving when it hurt the most. And the agony did seem to be centered lower in my abdomen. But the doctor had also said that it might take months to pass the stone, if it was small enough to be passed naturally. Many stones, she said, had to be pulverized or removed surgically. I brought my mind back to the health of the child we were discussing. “Radiation and chemotherapy,” I repeated, mouthing the words with distaste. It was as if Dem Ria had said that the medic had prescribed leeches and drafts of mercury for the boy. The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall. And what had not been lost had been made too expensive to share with the masses after the WorldWeb went away forever: the Pax Mercantilus carried goods and commodities between the stars, but the process was slow, expensive, and limited. Medicine had slipped back several centuries. My own mother had died of cancer—after refusing radiation and chemotherapy after the diagnosis at the Pax Moors Clinic.
But why cure a fatal disease when one could recover from it by dying and being resurrected by the cruciform? Even some genetically derived diseases were “cured” by the cruciform during its restructuring of the body during resurrection. And death, as the Church was constantly pointing out, was as much a sacrament as resurrection itself. It could be offered up like a prayer. The average person could now transform the pain and hopelessness of disease and death into the glory of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. As long as the average person carried a cruciform.
I cleared my throat. “Ah… Bin hasn’t… I mean… “When the boy had waved at me in the night, his loose robe had shown a pale and crossless chest. Dem Loa shook her head. The blue cowl of her robe was made of a translucent, silklike fabric. “None of us have yet accepted the cross. But Father Clifton has been… convincing us.” I could only nod. The pain in my back and groin was returning like an electric current through my nerves. I should explain the different colored robes worn by the citizens of Lock Childe Lamonde on the world of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Dem Ria had explained in her melodic whisper that a little over a century ago, most of the people now living along the long river had migrated here from the nearby star system Lacaille 9352. The world there, originally called Sibiatu’s Bitterness, had been recolonized by Pax religious zealots who had renamed it Inevitable Grace and begun proselytizing the indigenie cultures that had survived the Fall. Dem Ria’s culture—a gentle, philosophical one stressing cooperation—decided to migrate again rather than convert. Twenty-seven thousand of her people had expended their fortunes and risked their lives to refit an ancient Hegira seedship and transport everyone—men, women, children, pets, livestock—in a forty-nine-year cold-sleep voyage to nearby Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, where the WorldWeb-era inhabitants had died out after the Fall.
Dem Ria’s people called themselves the Amoiete Spectrum Helix, after the epic philosophical symphony-holo-poem by Halpul Amoiete. In his poem, Amoiete had used colors of the spectrum as a metaphor for the positive human values and shown the helical juxtapositions, interactions, synergies, and collisions created by these values.
The Amoiete Spectrum Helix Symphony was meant to be performed, with the symphony, the poetry, and the holoshow all representing the philosophical interplay. Dem Ria and Dem Loa explained how their culture had borrowed the color meanings from Amoiete—white for the purity of intellectual honesty and physical love; red for the passion of art, political conviction, and physical courage; blue for the introspective revelations of music, mathematics, personal therapy to help others and for the design of fabrics and textures; emerald green for resonance with nature, comfort with technology, and the preservation of threatened life-forms; ebony for the creation of human mysteries; and so forth. The triune marriages, nonviolence, and other cultural peculiarities grew partially from Amoiete’s philosophies and largely from the rich cooperative culture the Spectrum people had created on Sibiatu’s Bitterness.
“So Father Clifton is convincing you to join the Church?” I said as the pain subsided into a lull where I could think and speak once again.
“Yes,” said Dem Loa. Their tripartner, Alem Mikail Dem Alem, had come in to sit on the adobe windowsill. He listened to the conversation but rarely spoke.
“How do you feel about that?” I asked, shifting slightly to distribute the ache in my back. I had not asked for ultramorph for several hours. I was very aware of the desire to ask for it now.
Dem Ria lifted her hand in a complex motion that reminded me of Aenea’s favorite gesture. “If all of us accept the cross, little Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem will be entitled to full medical care at the Pax base at Bombasino. Even if they do not cure the cancer, Bin will… return to us… after.” She lowered her gaze and hid her expressive hands in the folds of her robe.
“They won’t allow just Bin to accept the cross,” I said.
“Oh, no,” said Dem Loa. “It is always their position that the entire family must convert. We see their point. Father Clifton is very sad about that, but very hopeful that we will accept Jesus Christ’s sacraments before it is too late for Bin.”
“How does your girl—Ces Ambre—feel about becoming a born-again Christian?” I asked, realizing how personal these questions were. But I was intrigued, and the thought of the painful decision they faced took my mind off my very real but much less important pain.
“Ces Ambre loves the idea of joining the Church and becoming a full citizen of the Pax,” said Dem Loa, raising her face under the cowl of her soft blue hood. “She would then be allowed to attend the Church academy in Bombasino or Keroa Tambat, and she thinks that the girls and boys there would make much more interesting marriage prospects.”