Marjorie gritted her teeth, forbidding herself to cry. She could quit, of course. There were dozens of excuses she could give the board, all of them acceptable. But she had taken on this duty, and it would be sinful, surely, just to lay it down….
She shook her head violently, sending the hover into a sickening lurch. The blare of a warning siren from the console brought her back to herself. It would be better to think of something else. Of the children: Tony’s aspirations. Stella’s tantrums. She would think of anything else, even of Rigo and his mistress. Mistresses. Plural. Sequential.
The car slid across the boundary of the estate from the hoverway, and she lifted a hand to the head groom as she passed the stables, praying that Rigo wasn’t home to fight with her about where she had been, what she had been doing. She was too tired and depressed to argue. She’d wanted to do something significant, an achievement, some fine gesture, and she’d failed, that’s all. It hadn’t been an unworthy desire, not one Rigo should challenge her about, insisting that she explain why, why, why. Especially now that she wasn’t sure any longer.
Perhaps Rigo had been right in the first place. Perhaps she really had wanted to be a saint. And if that were true?
Wry laughter seized her; tears squeezed from her eyes as she parked the hover and sagged against the seat, wondering how one went about being a saint these days. She started to wipe her face and compose herself, remembering all at once that she didn’t need to pretend composure, didn’t need to pretend certainty, didn’t need to pretend anything. This time, at least, she would not have to explain herself to Rigo. He would not be home until evening. This was the day Roderigo Yrarier, faithful Old Catholic and staunch son of the Church, had done the unthinkable. He had answered a summons to Sanctity.
One hundred golden angels stand on the tower spires of Sanctity, wings wide, trumpets lifted, lit by internal fires which make them shine like a century of suns. Sanctity’s crystal towers mass against one another in a lofty and breathtaking bonfire of glittering surfaces against the dark of an empty sky. Both day and night they are a lighthouse, a guide—so Sanctity says—to the great diaspora of humanity clustered on the nearest possible worlds out there in the darkling seas of space.
They are also a beacon for tourships which hang in swarms the requisite fifty kilometers away, viewports clustered with spectators. The ships are allowed no closer for fear of some unspecified disaster. They may come only near enough for the tourists to make out the huge angels on the summits of the towers and read the linked words picked out in mirrors and lights upon the highest walls.
Sanctity. Unity. Immortality.
Though it is impossible to see anything in detail from that distance with the naked eye, Sanctity is never observed at closer range. To all the worlds Sanctity stands forever upon the Terran horizon, perceivable yet remote, holy and unapproachable, fully accessible only to its chosen ones: the Hierophants, the servitors, the acolytes. If there is reason for a male outsider to come inside (women may not come at all), he must first obtain the proper papers. Then he must use those papers, after proving he is indeed male, to gain access to the well-guarded terminus far out in the surrounding countryside. If satisfied, the guards will allow him to enter a conveyance which will take him through silent tunnels to a reception area a respectful distance from Sanctity’s protected heart.
That heart would be the subterranean quarters of the Hierarch himself, far below the angel-spiked towers and protected by half a mile of earth and stone from all possible harm. The Hierophants of exalted degrees occupy apartments nearby. The machines are above that, and then the chapels, and only then the terminus and reception area. In the lowest rooms of the towers are the suites of the servitors and clergy of moderate status. The farther up one is assigned to live, the lower down the organizational ladder one finds himself, or such is the conventional wisdom. The higher up, the longer it takes one to get down to the chapels and the tunnels where the ritual work of Sanctity is conducted. The higher up one lives, the less valued one is. At the top, communing with the clouds, are the eager converts with too little intellect to be good for anything much; the old, their anonymity fading into forgetfulness; the pledged acolytes, serving out their unwilling terms.
And it is there, in the highest floor of the highest tower, that Rillibee Chime spends his undutied hours, squatting in purported meditation in cloud-surrounded silence, sprawling through papery, celibate nights on his narrow bed, untinted by happy dream. It is here he rises in the morning and washes himself, here he dons his soft slippers, here he puts on a clean, colorless suit with its tight, anonymous hood and touches his face with powder to remove any unseemly color. As he does this, he watches birds going by in long, purposeful V-shaped lines, headed southward toward the warm lands, toward Rillibee’s home. Sanctity is set upon the edge of the waste, both to separate itself from the humdrum daily affairs of the world and to avoid taking up room which nature needs for other things. Behind the glittering towers lie the arctic tundra and the ice and a cold uninterrupted for many centuries.
Though cold has no meaning in Sanctity. Within the towers the temperature never changes. Rain does not fall, nor snow intrude upon these quiet corridors. Nothing grows. Nothing is acknowledged to die. If Rillibee were to fall seriously ill, he would be spirited away and another acolyte would occupy his room, do his work, attend to his services. No one would care that one had
