The Lotus Eaters

UEPF Spirit of Peace, Luna Starship Holding and Storage Area

At this distance even image intensification couldn't make the boys and girls inspecting and repairing Monnet's sail anything more than dots that occasionally sparked as they used their suits' backpack maneuver units to move across and above the inner surface of the sail.

Wallenstein found that she actually cared about these boys and girls. And why not? They're my people? And they're so damned eager to please they almost make me think the system has a chance. Elder gods, was I ever so innocent?

While Class One parents had not just pulled strings but formed circle and weighed anchors to keep their precious little darlings from being graduated early and dragged off, Class Twos had tended to see the early graduation as an opportunity. It was an absolute fact that, excepting only Richard, Earl of Care, not one Class One middie was scheduled to join Wallenstein's fleet and not one young Class Two or Three had objected to joining.

Marguerite listened, smiling, to the chatter over the radio as the midshipmen found little rips in the fabric of the sail and swooped down to seal the rips with strips of tape specially made for the purpose some long ago day. They didn't find many such rips. That there were rips at all was a result of orbiting astral debris that could even puncture the hull of ship. Indeed, that had been the major job in bringing the Monnet back on line, finding and fixing hundreds of leaks, large and small, in the hull from strikes from fast moving particles, some of them no larger than grains of sand.

On the other hand, Wallenstein thought, it's not as if there are all that many children of Class Ones anyway, or that all that many of those attend the academy. And my Twos and Threes are at least the real children of real people.

Thinking about children—and the middies were, compared to her own century and a half, little more than children—started Marguerite to thinking of other children, younger ones, on a different planet. She'd been able to push it from her mind, for the most part, for decades. But ever since she'd seen the sacrifice at the Ara Pacis, everything she'd tried to suppress had come flooding back.

And I helped raise money for explosives to blow innocent people up, she mentally sighed. How many incarnations is that going to—rightly and justifiably—cost me?

Time to make an appointment with the chaplain, I think.

* * *

It has sometimes been said that, after Saint Patrick came to Ireland, the Catholics moved right in and took over from the druids with hardly a ripple, adopting many of the mannerisms and customs of the druids, the better to spread their own faith. It surprised no one then, that when Christianity was suppressed by United Earth, the druids in many places came back and took over from the priests, again with nary a ripple, and in turn adopting and adapting many Catholic customs. One of these was confession.

* * *

"Bless me, Druid, for I have sinned," said Wallenstein, sitting opposite the chaplain, approximately lotus-style, on the floor of her quarters.

"Speak to me of this," the Druid answered. The chaplain sat at the opposite corner from Marguerite. "Hold nothing back, for the Elder God or Gods, however many or few there be, will know if you do."

Marguerite took a deep breath before answering, "I am a murderess, or—if I remember my Fleet Law class correctly—at least an accessory before the fact to murder, many times over. Back on Terra Nova, while the war on the Islamics was raging, I arranged for many pseudo-kidnappings, the ransoms of which went to buy arms and explosives for the killing of innocents."

The druid nodded, his artificially grayed beard rustling on the robes over his chest as he did. "The Elder God or Gods knew this. What else?"

"I am almost as guilty of attempted megacide, though at least there I was foiled."

"And?" the Druid asked.

She shook her head. "That's all I think, all that was past my duty in any event. Oh . . ."

"Yes?"

"I betrayed the former High Admiral, Martin Robinson, to his enemies, partially in revenge and partially so that I could take over his position.

"And that's really all. Except . . ."

"Go on."

"I arranged victims from among the lowers for the former Marchioness of Amnesty to torture in her sexual games." Marguerite gulped as her eyes grew wide. "Oh, gods, I'm going to be reincarnated as a toad, aren't I?"

Marguerite thought she saw a thin smile on the druid's face, but the beard concealed so much of that she couldn't be sure.

"Quite possibly," he answered. "And that might be a best case." The druid's face grew dark as he added, sotto voce, "Though for all that, I can hardly say you've done anything worse than have my orthodox brethren, of late."

"What was that, Chaplain?"

"Nothing," the druid said. "Just thinking aloud."

Wallenstein suspected she knew what her chaplain had muttered.

"You have a serious problem, Marguerite," the druid said.

"I know that, Druid. Why do you suppose I asked to confess?"

The smile shone through the beard now, without doubt or question. "Oh, maybe because it's been decades," the druid observed.

"No, that's not it," Wallenstein insisted. "Then again, I'm not sure what it is."

That's a lie, a little voice whispered in Marguerite's head. It's that after being used for well over a century you finally realized that you were being used, and to no good end for anyone except those who used you. And you know it, just as you know that you were complicit in your own degradation, and for unworthy goals.

But I have no need to tell him that.

Don't you? the little voice insisted.

No. Not for what I plan.

Suit yourself. You will anyway.

Yes, and isn't that a nice change?

"Well," said the druid, "it doesn't really matter. Ours is a religion somewhat short on mandatory ritual. As least, we of the Reformed Druidic faith are short on mandatory ritual."

The Druid smiled again, asking, "Have you never thought about our religion, Marguerite? I mean really thought about it? How is it that a faith that was essentially extirpated by the seventh century found a rebirth in the seventeenth? And what of what was lost in those thousand years? What of what was lost between when Vespasian overran the Isle of Wight and when Suetonius Paulus destroyed our center at Anglesey?"

"It's never really been my job to think about it," Marguerite answered. "My mother was a priestess and so she raised me in it."

"The answer is simple, in any event," the druid said. "It doesn't matter in the slightest," he shrugged. "It doesn't matter because our faith really isn't about gods anymore, if it ever was. Rather, it speaks to human needs. The God or gods—oh, yes, I believe he or she or they exist—can fend for themselves and hardly need us.

"Instead, we are a philosophy, a philosophy concerned with people living well, and reasonably virtuously. The religious aspects are tacked on tatters and scavenged rags, not even good whole cloth. And none of that matters because we are not about God or gods, but about people.

"It is our reason that leads us to the religious convictions we have. It is our reason that leads us to reject the notion of Heaven and Hell and substitute for them reincarnation, something theologically almost indistinct from the old Catholic notion of Purgatory, just as our reason and our understanding of people has caused us to adopt the old Catholic sacrament of Confession, along with much of the pomp and ceremony.

"You asked to confess because you have a cancer in your soul and need a way to excise it. I would answer you that by confessing you have in goodly part already excised it. I would say to you too that, just as one can never cross the same river twice, so you, too, have changed and are hardly the same person who did the things that are eating at your soul. Finally, I would say to you that to be whole and pure again, you must do some great good for your people, or indeed all people."