The Sea is Full of Stars

passenger and freight, and had checked all safety and stability items and passed everything off, a kind of unanimous vote was sent to the bridge stating that the ship was ready to move. It was the one thing the vessel’s Master did on a nonemergency basis. Only he could give the order to move out.

Angel slipped out of her wet clothes and looked at herself in the mirror. She sighed, and removed the brown wig and put it back in its container, revealing a head that was perfectly shaped but now totally hairless. Lucky the wig didn’t come off, too, she reflected dourly, but though she had no problems with the way she looked, she was pleased deep down to have been spared that one little embarrassment. It was just God’s punishment, she thought, for her trying to pretend she was something that she was not.

She rinsed off, reflecting that this was the second shower she’d had in three hours, but also only the second in many months. Afterward, she wiped off what makeup remained, removed the fake gold earrings and replaced them with the simple copper alloy ones she normally wore—a cross with curved wings set upon a hexagonal base, the same design as on the medallion she always wore around her neck, which had been concealed by the suit. The simple ring, also forged with the same design, went back on her ring finger. No more pretenses, she decided. She would be herself, and if they didn’t like it, well, how much worse off socially could she be?

She took out a simple off-white cotton cassock and put it on, leaving the hood down, and looked at herself once more. The loose-fitting cassock disguised her thin figure, although it couldn’t disguise what was to her an overly-large nose and brown eyes too small for her face. She was reconciled to not being a beauty, and this felt almost normal and natural.

A speaker came to life, startling her. “Your attention, please. We have cleared the traffic yard and will be punching into null-space in one minute. It is suggested for your own safety that everyone please take a seat or become still on the floor. Anyone experiencing discomfort beyond the all clear should signal for some mild medication. Thank you.”

She shrugged and took a seat against the bulkhead. This she’d done more than once before. Even so, it wasn’t totally pleasant.

Three bells sounded, followed by a pause, after which it suddenly felt as if she wasn’t holding on to anything at all but falling without physical reference points. The first time she’d experienced this, she almost lost her lunch, but now it was no big deal. There was a roaring, and then a flash. The lighting seemed to go out and then come right back on again. And that was it. Three bells sounded once more to indicate the all clear.

For the next two weeks it would generally feel like they were standing still inside a building on the planet’s surface. From this point on, until they returned to normal space, it was all automatic.

Angel decided to reemerge as herself and perhaps get some dinner in the public dining room before the mandatory ship’s briefing. Heads turned from the still milling group of passengers in their formal wear as she reentered the lounge, but it didn’t bother her. The odds were that few if any of the Terrans, at least, would even recognize her as the same woman who’d been there before.

They weren’t snickering, anyway. The one thing about anyone wearing clerical garb in a crowd of strangers, no matter what the various religions were, was that the cleric usually left the others feeling uncomfortable.

She bypassed onlookers and made for the small cafe entrance. A man and a woman were standing just inside, looking the cafe over, and both turned and gave her the usual facial reaction she got from strangers. She returned a professional smile, and felt very much more at ease with herself. “Please relax,” she told them. “I only try to convert people during business hours. I’m Sister Angel then. Now I’m just Angel Kobe, going to dinner.”

The ice was broken. “I am Ari Martinez,” the man responded in a pleasant voice, and looked at his companion, whom his gesture indicated was not his wife, or probably paramour, either. She was, however, quite a looker, Angel thought, one of those people with all the exotic features of a dozen races and colors and no dominant single one.

“I am Ming Dawn Palavri,” she introduced herself, smiling more nervously than the darkly handsome Martinez. “Please—won’t you join us? I do not think there are many in here at the moment and we’ll be shipmates for quite some time.”

“I…” Angel looked at Martinez, who betrayed no signals. “I shouldn’t like to impose or interrupt…”

“Not a problem,” Martinez assured her at last. “Ming and I are sort of in the same business.” He turned, and Angel was startled to see a formally dressed and quite officious-looking maitre d’. “There will be three for dinner now,” he told the majordomo.

“Very well. Please come this way,” the maitre d’ said in a thin, upper-crust voice, and led them to a quiet table, pulling out the chairs for each of them and lighting the atmospheric period lamp. He then put down three old- fashioned printed menus. “Your waiter will be with you shortly,” he told them, and left.

Angel was startled. “People just to seat you in a restaurant? Am I showing how primitive I’ve been living, or is this truly unusual?”

Ming laughed. “Not really. There are a number of worlds where it’s still the norm, but most of the expensive and classy places, and pretend classy places, are more like this. It’s actually all holographic. You could walk right through him if you really wanted to. It’s kind of pretend service over the usual automation.”

“I see,” she responded, somewhat disappointed. Not that she hadn’t had a lot of human table service, but it had usually been in dumps and in backwater situations where automation of this level, when available, was usually five years out of whack and in bad need of repair. Well, much of what was fun in this life was in the imagination.

The menus certainly felt real, and looked real. Hers seemed tailor-made for her own likes, dislikes, prohibitions, and requirements. No animal matter of any kind, synthetic or not, and a wide variety of veggie, rice, and sauce-heavy dishes including curries, with juices and herbal teas. Ari Martinez’s menu, while apparently identical, appeared from his ruminations aloud to be heavy on steaks and fine wines, while Ming’s seemed to have a lot of egg and seafood dishes and elaborate salads. Out of curiosity, after all three had put down their menus, Angel reached over, picked up Ming’s menu and looked through it.

It listed the same dishes as her menu had.

“Caught them in their little trick, huh?” Ming chuckled.

So even the menus were careful illusions. “In this kind of controlled atmosphere, it’s going to be next to impossible to figure out just who and what’s really there,” she responded.

“But that’s the trick,” Ari commented. “Magic shows are far more fun when they are so well done you cannot catch them working the show. The best way is to simply take everything at face value in an environment like this and just enjoy it. We’ll be back in the real universe soon enough.”

A waiter out of a classic movie took their orders, almost certainly a hologram as well, but as Ari had said, it didn’t matter.

“I can’t help noticing the winged cross on the hexagon,” Ming said to her, curious. “I am not familiar with this symbol. Might I ask the order?”

“I am of the Tannonites,” she told them. “It is a very Old Order denomination but it is not well known. It does not go back like so many to old Earth times, but evolved on Katenea, one of the early colonies. It is basically Christian, but there are elements of many ancient faiths in it as well, including some that are from other races. Our goal is to synthesize the One Truth out of the Many, and to do that we no longer have a home, as it were.”

“Sounds like you travel as much as we do,” Ari replied. “We’re management consultants. Not, I might add, from the same company, but we do basically the same thing. We go to the various enterprises our companies run that are having problems, and we try and determine what the cause of those problems might be and to find fixes for them. Nine out of ten times it winds up that we have to discover and weed out an incompetent or nest of incompetents somewhere in management.”

“Ninety out of a hundred,” Ming added. “And all but a tiny speck of the rest turn out to be downright crookedness. It’s quite a fascinating business, really. Sort of like being a detective, only the solution may be far different than simply discovering that it was the butler with the knife in the living room.”

“I should think it would be fascinating,” Angel responded.

“And not nearly so dangerous as tracking down genuine nasties.”

“Oh, we’ve had our share of nasties,” Ari assured her. “I would say that someone’s tried to push me off a balcony or crack me up or some such, oh, maybe on the average of once a year since I started. I think Ming’s average is similar.”