The Duke-Elect and the Prelate

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Nereus Rotenaard had been thinking about death a lot recently.

So when his chief of staff mentioned that the Cedrist prelate for Straylight had made the traditional request to meet the new Duke before his coronation, Nereus hadn't given the traditional response - a polite rejection letter and a coffee table book containing one-hundred-one proofs of the non-existence of the gods. He'd scheduled a meeting with Kender Ly'Sakredoet in Discontinuity's small Cedrist chapel, three days before the ceremony was to take place.

The chapel was...functional was the best that could be said about it. It was a small concrete cubic building with a nice view of the larger buildings to all sides. It looked like it could hold about two hundred people comfortably. It was kind of dark, kind of dank, and kind of noisy with the mechanical whirs vaguely linked to the operation of the nearby Sampo. One side had a mural of Ari, Dolphin God of Unix, eating several fish of Balgurd. The style made it look like it had been painted by some talented school children, which was indeed the case.

"I must say, Prelate Kender, I didn't even know Straylight had a Ducal Chaplain."

"Most people don't, Count Rotenaard," Kender Ly'Sakredoet told him. "But it's imperial law that all duchies must have a spiritual advisor. Even barbaric duchies full of wretched nonbelievers like this one." But he was smiling as he said it.

"You seem somewhat flippant, Prelate,"

"I'm Prelate of Straylight, Count. They wouldn't have put me here if they didn't think I was suited for this particular Duchy. The Prelate of Brookshire is a pompous ass, and the Prelate of Elwynn is a schizophrenic mystic. I'm more Straylightean. I'd never survive a minute in this place without a sense of humor. Straylighters are a self-reliant, technologically advanced folk and don't have a lot of tolerance for the say prayers and give us your money style of organized religion. I compensate by being unashamedly liberal and occasionally surprising people with my perceptiveness. And by having a sense of humor."

"And do you think you're winning our hearts and minds?"

"Nah, I know that half of you here think I'm a parasite who you're forced to put up with by imperial law, and the other half think of me as a trophy who gives you a certain type of old-world authenticity, like that ranch that crazy old guy tried to start on a ten meter square plot in Gensym. I know that the latest fashionable theory in Gensym is Yymani Velchovion's suggestion that Cedrism derives from apocalyptic worship of the explosive volcano or meteorite that decimated the ancient So Saran islands superimposed onto an older collection of myths. But there's no point in shepherding people who aren't lost, or saving souls that are saved to begin with. I'm just here so that if someone in Straylight has a spiritual crisis, maybe they remember the ugly old chapel west of the Sampo, and maybe they come here and I can help them. That's all. And to advise the Dukes, of course."

"Okay," said Nereus. "Advise me, then."

"Well, first of all, you know that your position is about as meaningful as mine is, right?"

"Not sure what you mean by that," said Nereus, "but it can't be anything good."

"Look, history lesson time. Straylight started off as a bunch of small isolated economically irrelevant platforms whose total population didn't even add up to a quarter as much as, say, Musica. Each platform was generally owned by either counterculture freaks, unethical corporations, or groups of people looking for somewhere to hide. By a total coincidence, after mainland Shirerithian culture died during the Dark Ages following the death of Kaiseress Semisa, the sancts kept a lot of it alive and became disproportionately important. When Kaiser Mors V tried to reassert Shirekeep's power back in the thirty-first century, most of the folks in Straylight realized it would be good for business to have the old shipping routes and patrols against pirates back.

The platform folk with their strong organization and technology ended up being the crucial factor in Mors' success, and he offered them anything they wanted as a reward. They wanted to be a Duchy - not so much because they loved the thought of participating in Shirerithian life, as because it meant they wouldn't be part of any other Duchy. So we got our own Duchy, about a hundred times smaller than any of the others. We don't look like a Duchy, and we don't act like a Duchy, but we're a Duchy anyway, so we've got to have a Prelate and we've got to have a Duke. For all the good either one does. But I've watched you. You want something more than a fancy title. How do you think you're going to get it?"

"I know Straylight politics better than you do. I worked my way from a small naval architecture firm on Much Rejoicing all the way up to designer of half the large ships sailing the Straylight Sea and of course, in a few days, Duke. I know my limits, and I know what I intend to do inside of them. Do you have anything to tell me other how you don't think I'm very important?"

"Yes," said Kender. "I want to give you a reading. Come with me to the fire-pit."

Every Cedrist temple has, in its center, a deep, steel-and-concrete reinforced pit in which it is safe to detonate the explosives that make up such a big part in the religion's liturgy. The Discontinuity pit was deeper than some, and had been newly filled with kindling. Kender handed Nereus a consecrated grenade from the basket beside the pit. "Pull the pin and throw it into the pit," he offered. "In the flames of the explosion, you will see your past and future."

"You believe in pyromancy?" snorted Nereus.

"No," said Kender, "but it'll work whether we believe in it or not. Come on now, the gods don't have all day."

Feeling a bit silly, Nereus Rotenaard pulled the pin, counted to three (no more, no less) and cast it into the pit. There was a resounding BO0O0O/\/\, and a rosette of orange light filled the pit and burst upwards, striking Nereus' face with its hot fumes. The flash of light briefly blinded his eyes, and rubbing them only produced an array of glittering phosphenes, which danced around before coalescing into form constants that jumped about and distorted themselves. And now they formed the figure of a man.

Nik Raesin, Rear Admiral in the Audente Navy. When Audente had collapsed into civil war, he fled with his ship and joined the Shirerithians, bent on revenge. He'd won renown in his time for his impressive victories over the Grand Commonwealth, but never gotten to deliver the crushing blow he so coveted.

Then the figure of a pretty Oriental girl. Nik Raesin had met her in a cafe in Ergo Sum, whose naval defenses he'd been evaluating. They'd gone out for a drink and then spent the night together. It had been a few decades later when Nik had realized he'd stopped aging, and a few decades after that when he realized that barring accidents he might never die.

Then a blandly sterile hospital in Amokolia, the silence broken only by the moans of the dying and the pouring rain outside, and a mercenary leader in the pay of Ashkenatza named Nathan Ross. There he'd met the girl again, and she'd given her name - Maria Morimoto. And her story - a pharmaceutical tycoon whose bodily fluids conferred immortality on anyone who came in contact with them, and who was intent on killing him and becoming the world's only immortal. The two slept together a second time, before Nathan realized Maria was trying to kill him. After that, he escaped and dedicated the rest of his immortal life to unraveling her secrets and perhaps putting a stop to them once and for all - all while nursing an extremely awkward crush on her.

Then a few centuries later, setting up a naval architecture firm in Much Rejoicing. Of course he was the best; he'd had twenty lifetimes to practice. His success gave him what he had come for: money and status in Straylight, the respect of its political class, the county of Much Rejoicing, and eventually, promotion to Duke: although now under the persona of the original architect's his son. The Duke, he knew, was the only person who might be able to discover the private business of Amara Pharmaceuticals, the company that he believed to be a front for Maria Morimoto's plan to rule the world from behind the scenes.

Then he saw other things. Discontinuity burning. A huge geodesic sphere, floating in a blue void. A fiery crown. A red-eyed dolphin. A darkness. And then he came to his senses, and a smoke-filled but generally intact chapel. He did some quick mental calculations.

"There were volatile hallucinogenic drugs in that grenade," Nereus said. "High dose CCG, if I had to guess."

"I told you it would work even if you didn't believe in it," said Kender. "No one believes priests anymore. You said some interesting things while you were out of it, by the way."

"Y'know," said Nereus, "I could probably have you killed."

"Actually, until you're officially crowned, I outrank you. Church-Nobility Relations Act of 2652 ASC. Look it up. That's not the point. Point is two things. First of all, I want to know if you're going to destroy Straylight."

"You're not really a priest, are you?"

"You can be a priest and a technomaezj at the same time. Techomaezji are only opposed to magic that works. Priest is one of my portfolios and I take it very seriously.

Meanwhile, the two of us share a common enemy. Ari 0 got Maria to protect the technomaezji, but she's since overstepped her boundaries and turned them into another one of her tentacles. Those of us who are still loyal to the old ways want her dead. You plan to kill her?"

"Maybe," said Nereus. "I need to break her power base, anyway. I've made a deal with the Duke of Yardistan. I'm going to legally cede Straylight to him. He has the military might to back us up. I'm afraid it means civil war, but Yardistan can take out Straylight and then some. I'm pretty sure Yardistan's not in Amara's pay. Does that mesh with your own findings."

"It does," said Kender. "Duke Ryan comes from all the way in Lac Glacei. Descended from a mechanical engineer of low family who supposedly saved their people. In any case, the family hasn't been nobles long enough for Morimoto to get around to corrupting them. I called you here to figure out how to do this with as little bloodshed as possible. The Cedrists run a series of hospitals and shelters across Straylight. We can help protect the civilian population while you and the Yardistanis and Morimoto's people duke it out."

"And you said there was something else," said Rotenaard. "One other thing?"

"Why don't you tell me?" said Kender. "What's troubling you? Spiritually, that is."

"Well...umm...what do Cedrists believe about immortality?"

Kender took out an old leather-bound book written in a strange language. "It is, in some ways, the ultimate sin. You know how the world began when Mors, god of death, divorced Vivantia, goddess of life, separating the light from the darkness and creating this world of opposites we live in. And yet, for all the love we bear Vivantia, the chief object of our worship has always been Mors. Why is that?"

"I always thought it was because the Kaisers claimed descent from him," said Nereus. "It's a political thing. Of course the Kaiser wants you worshipping his great granddad."

"There is the political element," said Kender, "but there's also something more. We worship death for the same reason we worship the fire and the explosion - because they represent change. Do you know how your body formed in the womb? First it grew as a great big blob, and then the cells in all the hollow spaces died. It was their death that gave you a human shape, like the old joke. How do you sculpt an elephant? Start with a block of marble, and then remove all the parts that don't look like an elephant.

The unbelievers speak of an empty void, to which complexity and information get added. But we speak of a full world, the selective destruction of parts of which gives it its value. A computer program made of all 1s is as useless as a computer program made of all 0s. It's only the interplay - some bits on, others off - that gives it value. And Mors is not so much a Grim Reaper as a Grim Pruner, who cuts back some parts so that the whole can take shape."

"That's all very...philosophical." said Nereus, unable to think of a more complimentary descriptor.

"It's going to become terribly practical in a few days, when thousands of people die because of Maria Morimoto's try at immortality," said Kender.

"That's specious," said Nereus. "Just because one immortal does something bad, doesn't mean all immortality must necessarily be evil. You might as well say that because Thomas Hubert was evil and a mortal, the gods hate mortality."

"It's religion," said Kender. "It doesn't have to make sense. It's just the rules."

"What kind of Technomaezj are you?"

"The same kind who told the So-Sarans to stop messing with their damn dimensional gates. And who got about the same reaction, for whatever that's worth."

The rest of the conversation between Nereus Rotenaard and Kender Ly'Sakredoet is said to have involved the trivialities of saving one and a half million people on small self-sufficient platforms from the consequences of high-energy total warfare, and has not passed into the records.

[Erik Mortis]