“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“I need to know if you told Haile anything about Lalonde, especially in the last couple of days. It’s vital, Jay, honest. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”
“I know.” She screwed up her lips, thinking hard. “There was some stuff about religion this morning. Haile doesn’t understand it very well, and I’m not very good at explaining it.”
“What about religion, exactly?”
“It was how many gods there are. I’d told her about the Tyrathca’s Sleeping God temple, you know, the one you showed me, and she wanted to know if that was the same thing as Jesus.”
“Of course,” Kelly hissed. “It wasn’t human possession, it was the Tyrathca section, we never released any of that.” She leaned over and kissed Jay. “Thank you, poppet. You’ve just performed a miracle.”
“Was that
“Yeah. That was all.”
“Oh.”
“You snuggle down and get some sleep now. I’ll come visit tomorrow.” She helped pull Jay’s duvet back up and gave the girl another kiss. Jay sniffed inquisitively again, but didn’t comment.
“So?” Kelly asked softly as she walked away from the bed. “You’ve been watching, you know this must be serious. I want to talk to the Lord of Ruin.”
The pediatric ward’s net processor opened a channel to Kelly’s neural nanonics. “Ione Saldana will see you now,” Tranquillity datavised. “Please bring the relevant recordings.”
Despite being on what he considered excellent terms with the Lord of Ruin, Parker Higgens could still be chilled to the marrow when she gave him one of her expectant looks.
“But I don’t know anything about the Tyrathca, ma’am,” he complained. Being dragged out of bed straight into a highly irregular crisis conference was playing havoc with his thought processes. Accessing the sensevise recording of Coastuc-RT and seeing the strange silvery structure which the builder-caste Tyrathca had constructed in the middle of the village didn’t contribute much to his composure, either.
When he glanced at Kempster Getchell for support he saw the astronomer’s eyes were closed as he accessed the recording a second time.
“You’re the only xenoc specialists I’ve got, Parker.”
“Laymil specialists.”
“Don’t quibble. I need advice, and I need it fast. How important is this?”
“Well . . . I don’t think we knew the Tyrathca had a religion before this,” he ventured.
“We didn’t,” Kelly said. “I ran a full search program through the Collins office encyclopedia. It’s as good as any university library. There’s no reference to this Sleeping God at all.”
“And neither did the Kiint, so it would seem,” Parker said. “They actually came and woke you to ask for the recording?”
“That’s right.”
Parker was somewhat put out by the reporter’s dishevelled appearance. She sat wedged into one corner of the sofa in Ione’s private study, a thick cardigan tugged around her shoulders as if it were midwinter. For the last five minutes she had been snatching up salmon sandwiches from a large plate balanced on the sofa’s arm, pushing them forcefully into her mouth.
“Well I have to say, ma’am, that it’s a relief to find out they don’t know everything.” A housechimp silently handed him a cup of coffee.
“But is it relevant?” Ione asked. “Were they just so surprised they didn’t know about the Sleeping God myth that Lieria simply rushed over to Kelly to confirm it? Or does it have some bearing on our current situation?”
“It’s not a myth,” Kelly said around another sandwich. “That’s exactly what I said to Waboto-YAU; and it nearly set the soldiers on me for that remark. The Tyrathca believe absolutely in their Sleeping God. Crazy race.”
Parker stirred his coffee mechanically. “I’ve never known the Kiint to be excited about anything. But then I’ve never known them to be in a rush either, which they obviously were tonight. I think we should examine this Sleeping God in context. You are aware, ma’am, that the Tyrathca do not have fiction? They simply do not lie, and they have a great deal of trouble understanding human falsehoods. The nearest they ever come to lying is withholding information.”
“You mean there really is a Sleeping God?” Kelly asked.
“There has to be a core of truth behind the story,” Parker said. “They are a highly formalized clan species. Individual families maintain professions and responsibilities for generations. Sireth-AFL’s family was obviously entrusted with the knowledge of the Sleeping God. At a guess, I’d say that Sireth-AFL is a descendant of the family which used to deal with electronics while they were on their arkship.”
“Then why not just store the memory electronically?” Kelly asked.
“It probably is stored, somewhere. But Coastuc-RT is a very primitive settlement, and the Tyrathca only ever use appropriate technology. There will be Tyrathca families in that village who know exactly how to build fusion generators and computers, but they don’t actually need them yet, therefore the information isn’t used. They employ water wheels and mental arithmetic instead.”
“Weird,” Kelly said.
“No,” Parker corrected. “Merely logical. The product of a mind that is intelligent without being particularly imaginative.”
“Yet they were praying,” Ione said. “They believe in a God. That requires a leap of imagination, or at least faith.”
“I don’t think so,” Kempster Getchell said. He grinned around, clearly enjoying himself. “We’re messing about with semantics here, and an electronic translator, which is never terribly helpful, it’s too literal. Consider when this God appeared in their history. Human gods are derived from our pre-science era. There are no new religions, there haven’t been for thousands of years. Modern society is far too sceptical to allow for prophets who have personal conversations with God. We have the answer for everything these days, and if it isn’t recorded on a flek it’s a lie.
“Yet here we have the Tyrathca, who not only don’t lie, but encounter a God while they’re in a starship. They have the same intellectual analytical tools as we do, and they still call it a God. And they
“That would also mean it isn’t exclusive to them,” Parker said.
“Yes. Although, whatever it is, it was benign, or even helpful to the arkship in question. They wouldn’t consider it to be
“Powerful enough to defend the Tyrathca from possessed humans,” Ione said. “That’s what they claimed.”
“Yes indeed. A defence mounted from several hundred light-years distant, at least.”
“What the fuck could do that?” Kelly asked.
“Kempster?” Ione prompted as the old astronomer stared away at the ceiling.
“I have absolutely no idea. Although ‘sleeping’ does imply an inert status, which can be reversed.”
“By prayer?” Parker said sceptically.
“They thought it would be able to hear them,” Kempster said. “Stronger than all living things was what that breeder said. Interesting. And that mirror-spire shape was supposed to be what it looked like. I’d like to say some kind of celestial event or object, that would fit in finding it in deep space. Unfortunately, there is no natural astronomical object which resembles that.”
“Take a guess,” Ione said icily.
“Powerful, and in space.” The astronomer’s face wrinkled up with effort. “Humm. Trouble is, we have no idea of the scale. Some kind of small nebula around a binary neutron star; or a white hole emission jet—which might account for the shape. But none of those are exactly inert.”
“Nor would they be much use against the possessed,” Parker said.
“But its existence is enough to fluster the Kiint,” Ione said. “And they can manufacture moons, plural.”
