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"I must speak with the captain of our blessed transport vessel," Reverend Castell then said to me, as head acolyte. "Stay here and contemplate the start of our great salvation.
As he walked away I chanted the fugue called "Patience Is the Art of Elegant Timing," shivering only a little now, and worried more about my stomach, which rumbled and growled enough to pain me.
"Sixty-four and three quarters hours," one of the other acolytes said, in a tone of disgust. "That means when Eyeclipse comes, it'll be only light from the other moons for the next twenty hours or so." He sarcastically waved his hand in front of his face, as if blind in the dimmness of Cat's Eye. "No suntans here, eh? It's windtan or nothing, unless the frostbite gets you."
None laughed and the jester fell silent.
Haven's night interested me. Reportedly it would never get fully dark, but I thought I'd rather wait and see for myself, experience it. Those CoDo maps and lists and descriptions of habitable worlds tend to change after settlement, I knew. They changed especially drastically with the marginal worlds, like Haven.
Would the other two moons offer at least some light? I wished for a moment that I understood celestial mechanics better, then gri
With a shrug, I went back to concentrating upon my empty belly, and how best to ignore it, or at least nullify its demands. My eyes kept seeing, however, and my ears kept hearing, and curiosity flared in me like lashes of plasma from a furious star.
My senses tempted me into the new world, so I studied it a little. The orange-red tinge of Eyelight allowed sight, but with a diminished sharpness of image, as if details had been carefully erased to allow the world a greater freedom of generality. That idea shuddered through me, as I wondered what this place might show us if, or when, it decided to get specific with us.
My heart thumped and thudded. My limbs felt alternatively heavy and light, never normal. My eyes watered and I blinked away the tears. Cold seeped inward, confident of final victory on this bleak soulscape.
After the e
It was a moment of peace, and I was astute enough to savor it, even in my hunger, or perhaps because of it. Hunger imparts a meditative calm at times. At any rate, our peace was short-lived.
". . . must be kidding," a harsh voice shouted from the shack where the ship's captain and his groundside crew drank and gamed. "It's your world, mister almighty Chucked-Out Charlie Castell, and my people aren't draft animals, and personally I couldn't give less a damn about how you'll move your supplies if they invented atomic damn-splitting."
It was the ship's captain, a cashiered CoDo NCO, whose voice roared forth. He bellowed at Reverend Castell, berating him, mocking his plan of colonization and mimicking his perception of our principles in a drunken tirade that would've spawned riot on any other world at any other time with any other audience.
The two leaders came out of the shack. The captain's fists came within inches of the reverend's face, but our leader neither blinked nor winced. Raising his hands to chest level, Reverend Castell said something in a firm but modulated voice, and that's when the other drunks roiled out of the shebeen, which actually rocked back and forth as shoulders pushed on the sides of the doorframe.
The captain yelled, "You can jolly well wait until your animals grow out of embryo, for all I care, but there's not enough money in the known systems to make me ask my men to do another lick of work for your bunch. Christ on a flapjack, you've got the arrogance of Lucifer himself, I swear."
Laughter and hoots of derision erupted in the mob outside the drinking shack. Our people, the Chosen, stood watching Reverend Castell as intently as audiences watch tightrope walkers, anxiety plain on our faces. I know many thought as I did, that to lose him now would fate us all to meaningless failure.
Several voices among our people said, "I told you he was crazy," or "Now do you see?" or even "Damn him, making them angry like that," but I held out faith in Castell because he'd never failed us yet. Saying as much to my brother acolytes, I got them to circulate amidst the Chosen, spreading harmony and calm as best they could.
The captain and the reverend stood nose to nose as the opposite crowds studied them, some eager for blood, others seeking only peace. An electricity charged the scene, holding everyone static.
And then the violence in the air evaporated as Reverend Castell said something that made the infidels laugh and disperse. He came to us while they gurgled back down the drain, into their iniquitous sink of sins.
"They'll be gone in twelve hours," Reverend Castell told us. As usual, I was standing near enough to him to be able to study his features, and I swear I saw the traces of a satisfied smile there, as if he'd accomplished something difficult with less trouble than anticipated. He slapped me on the shoulder and smiled. "We're too excited to sleep anyway, don't you think, Kev?" he asked. Then, before I could respond in any way, he dashed toward our supplies and began climbing them.
His shipslippers let his toes grip the ropes and canvas on the crates, and soon he stood high above us. So high, in fact, that when he spoke we found that very few of us could see him at all.
His voice, a baritone coaxed and trained, modulated and resonant, fell upon us like ma
We bent and lifted. We carried until our legs quivered. All the while, Reverend Castell stayed atop the diminishing pile of goods we'd brought.
Rocks twisted ankles, divots stole footing, and the light failed gradually but certainly as we moved our precious supplies away from the lake. There were trees, mostly sparse-set evergreens, but we stayed back from them, not knowing what might lurk in their shadows, under their deceptively familiar boughs.
A relatively flat area with harsh grasses that tore at exposed flesh with serrated stalks and sticky leaves that seemed to seal each wound proved the best place to create our first redoubt.
Directing the placing of crates and drums and barrels and sacks, we created a small fortlike square. Our supplies surrounded us, providing shelter as well as other necessities. Slit-trenches were dug by a few of our people who understood such matters, one of whom had been a CoDo marine until he lost his hand in a nameless battle, another of whom had been a mountain survivalist until swept into a city by defoilants and other government plagues. Deadfall was gathered and fires lit, and soon savory broths and other delicious if meatless sustenance sent out whisps of mouth-watering invitation.
Revererd Castell carried the very last crate by himself. He took it to the center of the cleared area and let it drop with a grunt. Such crates weigh more than forty kilos, I knew.
Hopping upon it, he said, "Chosen ones, hear me. This spot shall be our settlement, and from this spot shall we construct a place worthy of true and universal harmony. Here shall we found a place free of secular intrusions, free of the compromises so many of the churches have adopted of late on old, decaying Earth.