The line would move forward until it arrived at the coast and the border of Skelp, the thin neck of land going on northward. At that point, the coasts would be occupied, the seas would be watched, and the only land access to the continent of Ahabar would be closed.
From that point, whenever they got there, Saturday and Sam would go on into Voorstod alone. The Commander had sent word for someone from the Skelp Council to come forward and guarantee them safe passage as far as possible.
Until then, they stayed in the vehicle fitted up as the Commander’s field quarters, and did whatever they could think of to relieve their apprehension. Sam stared at the wall and asked himself the same questions he had been asking since he had been about ten or eleven, who he was and whether Phaed missed him, and what there was in Voorstod that he had lost. Maire slept, the sleep of someone who thought she might never sleep again. Saturday sat in a wide window of the vehicle as it moved slowly forward, trying to see in the surrounding countryside those beauties Maire had so often spoken of, and seeing only handless arms, fountaining blood. Until that moment, she had not truly perceived what kind of place she was going to.
Prince Rals had been sent along as their escort. He was only a few years older than Saturday herself.
“I don’t understand why you’re so determined to go into Voorstod,” he said to her. “I’m afraid Mother doesn’t get the point, either. I mean, if you want your cousin, we’ll just tell the damned Voorstoders to bring him out before the lady goes in. You don’t have to go in there.”
Saturday, in the grip of sudden inspiration, said, “It’s a religious matter.”
“Oh,” said the Prince, suddenly cut off from his argument.
“My cousin has been … defiled,” said Saturday. “He must be … cleansed before he can come out again. You understand?”
The Prince shrugged. What was to understand? Religion was, so much was certain, and one didn’t argue about it or with it. Though, for the life of him, he could not recall, despite his comprehensive education as a future diplomat, that people from Hobbs Land had any such beliefs.
“Aren’t you kind of young to be doing religious work?” he wanted to know.
“The person doing the cleansing has to be about the same age as the person being cleansed,” said Saturday, beginning to develop the fable. She thought this over. “Except babies, of course. With them, it takes someone older.”
“It’s a kind of … ritual, is it?”
“Kind of,” she said.
“With sacrifices?”
“Not really,” she murmured. “Anybody who’s died recently will do.”
Despite Saturday’s friendly smile and inarguable beauty, Prince Rals decided to go forward and help the driver.
Saturday, meantime, was wondering if there was likely to be someone recently dead where she and Sam would be going. Actually killing someone would not be a good idea. Actually killing someone would not be what the God wanted at all.
Then she remembered Stenta Thilion and realized there would always be recent dead, anywhere in Voorstod.
• When the Religion Advisory had been set up in the early years of Authority, it had seemed wisest to have it a representational group made up of adherents of the various religions in System, their numbers roughly proportional to the numbers of their worshippers, communicants, parishioners, or whatever they might be called. Shortly thereafter, Authority had added a number of generalists, who had done research in such fields as religious history, xenotheology, deconstruction of scriptures, the anatomy and chemistry of revelation, and the social and economic consequences of prophecy. While the resulting mix suited no one very well, it at least prevented domination by any one system of thought, a sufficient advantage to guarantee the group’s survival, on virtually its original basis, for well over a millennium.
At the current time, there were half a dozen High and one Low Baidee on the Advisory, and twice that many persons representing various of the casual Phansuri sects, none of which (or whom) took themselves very seriously. Indigenous religions were represented by xenotheologians who had studied in the field among the Glothee and the Hosmer, and at a respectful distance from the Porsa, who could not, in any case, be said to have any religion beyond what a few researchers had called, not indefensibly, Holy Shit. The state religion of Ahabar was well represented in the person of a Bishop Absolute and three Importunaries. When the Voorstoders had settled upon Ahabar, one Voorstod prophet and one Voorstod priest had been added to the Advisory, and neither they nor their successors had, for one moment since, ceased demanding that numerous others of their ilk be brought in as well. “Truth,” they said, “could not be represented numerically.”
Each representative had administrative assistants, and the administrative assistants had aides and senior and junior researchers, readers, chaplains, haruspices, oracles, and the like. Over time, a very nice system had developed by which persons actually interested in religion as religion (rather than religion as a system of social control, religion as politics, religion as warfare, or religion as spectacle) met over luncheon from time to time to read their scholarly research to one another, while clerks and aides got on with the endless and self-generating paperwork, for so it was still called, despite the fact there was little or no paper involved.
Matters requiring, or pretending to require, decision were referred to the Official Advisory, or OA, which was simply shorthand for those originally selected persons, or their successors, who had been actually charged with advising the Authority. The Religion Advisory, en toto, including the panels and all the subordinates, consisted of several thousand individuals. The Religion
