Bishop MacTavish was not accustomed to looking up at anyone, I saw.
“Is what true?” I asked mildly. A soft answer turneth away wrath, I reasoned.
I think it was my height that softened her attitude. “That you’re working on a device to transmit people through space instantaneously,” she replied, her voice lower, gentler.
“No, that is not true,” I replied. Honestly.
She sank down into the chair in front of my desk, which I had cleaned off since Sam’s first visit. There were hardly more than three or four slim reports resting on it.
Bishop MacTavish looked startled for a moment; then she slipped the reports out from beneath her curvaceous rump and let them fall to the floor in the languid low gravity of the Moon.
“Thank God,” she murmured. “That’s one blasphemy we won’t have to deal with.”
“Blasphemy?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
She blinked those gorgeous eyes at me. “A matter transmitter, if it could be made successfully, could also be used as a matter duplicator, couldn’t it?”
It took me a moment to understand what she was saying; I was rather hypnotized by her eyes.
“Couldn’t it?” she repeated.
“Duplicator? Yes, I suppose it might be feasible….”
“And every time you use it you’d be murdering a human being.” “What?” That truly stunned me. “What are you talking about?”
“When someone goes into your transporter his body is broken down into individual atoms, isn’t it? The pattern is sent to the receiver, where the body is reconstituted out of other atoms. The original person has been destroyed. Just because a copy comes out of the receiver—”
“No, no, no!” I interrupted. “That’s fantasy from the kiddie shows. Entanglement doesn’t work that way. Nothing gets destroyed.”
“It doesn’t?”
I shook my head. “It’s rather complicated, but essentially the process matches the pattern of the thing to be transported and reproduces that pattern at the other end of the transmission. The original is not destroyed; it isn’t harmed in any way.”
She cocked a suspicious brow at me.
“It takes a lot of energy, though,” I went on. “I doubt that it will ever be practical.”
“But such a machine would be creating living human beings, wouldn’t it? Only God can create people. A matter duplicator would be an outright blasphemy, clearly.”
“Maybe so,” I muttered. But then I came back to my senses. “Uh … although, that is, well, I thought that people create people. You know… uh, sexually.”
“Of course.” She smiled and lowered her lashes self-consciously. “That’s doing God’s work.”
“It is?”
She nodded, then took a deep breath. I nearly started hyperventilating.
“But if you’re not working on a matter transmitter,” she said, breaking into a happy smile as she started to get up from the chair, “then there’s no cause for alarm.”
The trouble with being a scientist is that it tends to make you honest. Oh, sure, there’ve been cheats and outright frauds in science. But the field has a way of winnowing them out, sooner or later. Honesty is the bedrock of scientific research. Besides, I didn’t want her to leave my office.
So I confessed, “I am working on a matter transmitter, I’m afraid.”
She looked shocked. “But you said you weren’t.”
“I’m not working on a device to transport people. That would be too dangerous. My device is intended merely to transmit documents and other lightweight, nonorganic materials.”
She thumped back into the chair. “And you’re doing this for Sam Gunn?” “Yes, that’s true.”
She took an even deeper breath. “That little devil. Blasphemy means nothing to him.”
“But the transmitter won’t be used for people.”
“You think not?” she said sharply. “Once Sam Gunn has a matter transmitter in his hands he’ll use it for whatever evil purposes he wants.”
“But the risks—”
“Risks? Do you think for one microsecond that Sam Gunn cares about risks? To his body or his soul?”
“I… suppose not,” I replied weakly.
“This has got to be stopped,” she muttered.
I finally came to my senses. “Why? Who wants to stop this work? Who are you, anyway?”
“Oh!” She looked suddenly embarrassed. “I never introduced myself, did I?”
I tried to smile at her. “Other than the fact that you’re worried about blasphemy and you’re the most incredibly beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, I know nothing at all about you.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. I knew that she believed the act of procreation was doing God’s work.
“I am Bishop Ingrid MacTavish,” she said, extending her hand across my desk, “of the New Lunar Church.”
“You must be a newcomer to Selene,” I said as I took her hand in mine. Her grip was firm, warm. “I’d have noticed you before this.”
“I arrived yesterday,” she said. Neither one of us had released our hands. “Actually, I’m an ethicist.”
“Ethicist?”
“Yes,” she said. “There are certain ethical inconsistencies between accepted moral practice on Earth and here in Selene.”
That puzzled me, but only for a moment. “Oh, you mean nanotechnology.”
“Which is banned on Earth.”
“And common practice here on the Moon. We couldn’t survive without nanomachines.”
“That’s one of the reasons why I decided to set up my ministry here on the Moon.”
Interesting, I thought. “And the other reason?”
She hesitated, then answered, “I’ve been hired temporarily by a consortium of law firms to find Sam Gunn and serve him with papers for a large number of major lawsuits.”
At that moment, with impeccable timing, Sam bounced into my office.
“Hey, Dan-o, I’ve been thinking—”
Ingrid jumped to her feet, stumbling clumsily because she was unaccustomed to the light lunar gravity.
Sam rushed over to help her and she lurched right into his arms. With her height, and Sam’s lack of same, Sam’s face got buried in Ingrid’s commodious bosom momentarily while I stood behind my desk, too stunned to do anything more than gape at the sight.
Sam jerked away from her, his face flame-red. The little guy was actually embarrassed! Ingrid’s face was red, too, with anger. She swung a haymaker at Sam. He ducked; she staggered off-balance. I came around my desk like a shot and grabbed Ingrid by her shoulders, steadying her.
Sam backed away from us, stuttering, “I didn’t mean to … that is, it was an accident…I was only trying …” Then he seemed to see Ingrid for the first time, really see her in all her statuesque beauty. His eyes turned into saucers.
“Who … who are you?” Sam asked, his voice hollow with awe.
Ingrid pulled free of me, but I noticed that she placed one hand lightly on my desktop. “I’m your worst nightmare,” she hissed.
“No nightmare,” Sam said. “A dream.”
She wormed a hand into the hip pocket of her snug-fitting trousers and pulled out a wafer-thin data chip. “Sam Gunn, I hereby serve you legal notification of—”
Sam immediately clasped his hands behind his back. “You’re not serving me with anything, lady. You’ve got no jurisdiction here in Selene. You have to go through the international court and even then you can only serve me if I’m on Earth, in a nation that’s got an extradition treaty with the North American Alliance. Which Selene hasn’t.”
Ingrid smiled thinly at him. “Well, you know your law, I must admit.”
Sam made a little bow, his hands still locked behind his back. “How’d you get in here, anyway? Selene doesn’t allow Earthside lawyers to come here. Legal issues with Earth are handled electronically.”