Flag In Exile

"Merciful Tester!" Jackson murmured in a voice that was only half humorous. "How do any of you manage to keep things straight?"

"Well, Manticore was settled by a bunch of secularists," Honor pointed out. "I hope you won't take this wrongly, but I sometimes think that what Grayson actually has is a church which spawned a state as a sort of accidental appendage. I realize things have changed, especially since the Civil War, but the very notion of a church-dominated state would have been anathema to the Manticoran colonists. They'd had too much historical experience with state churches back home."

Jackson cocked his head as he listened to her, then nodded with an air of thoughtful comprehension, but Sutton looked puzzled.

"Excuse me, My Lady, but I don't quite understand," he said.

"What the Steadholder means, Jared, is..." Jackson began, then broke off with a grimace. "Excuse me, My Lady. I believe you were making a point." His grimace became a grin. "Sometimes I tend to backslide into confirmation class mode."

"No, really?" Honor teased gently. The chaplain bent his head in a gesture of surrender, and she turned to Sutton. "Both the people who settled Grayson and the people who settled Manticore came mainly from Old Earth's western hemisphere, Jared, but they had very different reasons for leaving the Sol System.

"The Manticoran colonists primarily wanted to get away from a grossly overcrowded planet. They felt crowded and hemmed in and they were looking for both living space and economic opportunity elsewhere, but very few of them signed on because they felt like a persecuted minority.

"Grayson's colonists, on the other hand, were classic religious emigres who did regard themselves as a persecuted minority. So whereas the Manticorans came from the entire spectrum of Old Earth's religious backgrounds, your ancestors came from a single one. That was, in fact, what set them apart from the entire civilization they were fleeing, which made it inevitable that they should develop a single state church and a theocratic state here."

"I see that, My Lady, but what did you mean about the Manties' 'historical experience with state churches'?"

"Two-thirds of Manticore’s colonists were from Europe, and Europe had a history of sectarian violence and religious conflict that went back to, oh, the sixth century Ante Diaspora, at least. Whole nations had spent centuries trying to kill each other over religious differences, like your own Civil War. The colonists didn't want anything like that happening to them, so they adopted the traditions of those of their numbers who came from North America, where separation between church and state had been part of the fundamental law. In the Star Kingdom, the state is legally prohibited from interfering in religious matters, and vice versa."

Sutton blinked. The notion of an explicit split between church and state seemed so alien that he looked at Jackson as if seeking confirmation that such a thing was even possible.

"Lady Harrington's quite correct," the chaplain told him gently. "And given the wide religious diversity in the Star Kingdom, its founders were very wise to set things up that way." He smiled sadly. "Anyone who studies history eventually comes up against the same cruel irony, Jared. Man has probably spent more time killing his fellows 'in God's name' than for any other single reason. Look at our own Civil War, or those lunatics on Masada." He sighed. "I know He loves us, but we must be a terrible disappointment to Him from time to time."

The primary supports were all in, and Adam Gerrick stood on the scaffolding which crowned what would become the dome's number one access a

He turned in place to survey the entire site. This was one of the smaller jobs, for Lord Mueller had decided he needed a demonstration project before he committed to something the size of a farm or city dome, but he'd certainly picked a gorgeous spot to put it. When the project was finished, it would protect the brand new Winston Mueller Middle School, set atop a bluff overlooking God's Tears, the most beautiful chain of lakes on the continent of Idaho. The school's buildings were in, and once the bluff wore its dome like a gleaming, high-tech crown, work crews would plant Old Terran grass and lay out playing fields, and, Gerrick chuckled, Lady Harrington was donating one of her "swimming pools." The school administrator had expressed his thanks, but the poor man still seemed dreadfully confused by the whole idea.

Small as it was, the project was certainly one of the most satisfying Sky Domes had underway. Especially for him. The entire dome concept had been his, but in the begi

And, he admitted with a broad smile, the fact that he was also in the process of becoming one of the wealthiest men in Grayson's history was pretty nice icing for his cake.

He turned back to the east and watched as the first section went into the uppermost tier. The dome looked lopsided and dangerously unbalanced with that single pane leaning so far out over the center of the school, but Gerrick saw with an engineer's eye. He'd personally checked every decimal place of the stress calculations, and he'd designed a safety margin of well over five hundred percent into the support structure.

The paneling teams sealed the pane with an instantly-setting caulking compound and moved quickly to the west side of the dome. Despite the safety factor, they wanted to complete the first full cross section of roof quickly to balance the stress, and Gerrick approved. Engineers believed as firmly in their calculations as they did in God, but they also believed in minimizing exposure to the Demon Murphy.

Gerrick smiled at the familiar thought and looked down as the high, clear sound of a child's voice cut through the work site's noise. A group of kids, students-to-be in the middle school, had asked permission to watch the completion of the main dome, and their teachers, after checking with the site supervisors, had organized a field trip. Needless to say, the Sky Domes staff had impressed them with the dangers the construction equipment represented, and Grayson children learned early to take adults' warnings to heart. They were well back under the completed eastern wall, and they were staying there, but that didn't mute their avid interest. He could see their excitement even from here as they watched the panels drifting upward on their counter-grav like some sort of impossibly beautiful seed pods and chattered to one another, and he smiled. He'd talked to some of those youngsters himself this morning, and two or three had looked like they had the making of good engineers.

He let his eyes sweep proudly back up the glittering wall above the kids... and that meant he saw it all happen.