“Bring me fresh juice before you go to your bed...”

Lars watched in disgust. Although it was disgust tinged with fascination. So this was Brother Michael, the new Noah. He smiled, not kindly, and shuffled backwards, then flipped himself round and ran on his hands and knees down an air vent. He loved being in zero G, it was even better than being on the Moon. But he was training himself to handle gravity, too. Originally he’d been assigned to the men’s dorm. But Brother Robert was the only man there and he didn’t want Lars around, not with the sandrat’s muttering and sour animal stink. So Lars bedded down in the goat pen.

Tomorrow the goats would be released into one of the Valleys — or so Rachel said — but tonight they provided him with warmth and company. And none of them complained when he unscrewed a panel and vanished for a few hours into the security of the tunnels.

The goat pen was all right, little more than ten paces by ten paces, but the dorm had horrified him, going on into the distance like a great circular emptiness. Nothing but echoing space and curved walls so big that the far side was almost a blur.

Lars didn’t know it and he wasn’t interested enough to find out, but the dorm was a roofed-off segment near the outer end of a four-kilometre spar, which gave the dorm its own gravity, though obviously not quite as much as in the ring itself. And it wasn’t real gravity, of course. But centrifugal force gave a good-enough illusion of gravity to be gratefully accepted by the human mind.

The doughnut ring didn’t need a central spindle. Why should it, when the ring just hung in space and there was nothing to stop it revolving around its own empty centre? In the same way, there was nothing to stop cargo shuttles docking alongside the ring instead of at the southern end of the spindle. At a speed of one revolution every twenty seconds, any decent pilot could dock without trouble; while to a semiAI or bio it would be less than nothing, a mere subset of a subroutine.

But Brother Michael had wanted a traditional wheel-of-life design. Or so Lars gathered, the way he gathered most news, by listening at grilles or hiding in air vents. The only problem for Lars was that the gravity on the station was fucked. Try as he might, Lars couldn’t get a mental fix on what was up and what counted as down, mainly because it kept changing.

When he was in the spindle, then “up” was North, towards the cathedral, and that was the way the lifts travelled. But if he was in one of the four spars that rotated around the spindle, then “up” was towards the spindle and “down” was towards the giant doughnut. At least, that was the way gravity worked, getting stronger the further down he went.

Lars hadn’t been out to the doughnut yet, because it wasn’t allowed. And besides, that was where the mad lady lived, except that Rachel’s friend Ruth said she was sleeping. When the doughnut was finished and the animals were all in place, it would be possible for them to start walking straight ahead and then keep going until they came back to where they’d started, two days later, having walked right round the whole Arc.

Lars wasn’t sure he believed it. In fact, he wasn’t going to believe it until he’d done it for himself. He didn’t tell Ruth that, though. He liked her too much. At first, before he’d seen Brother Michael praying over Rachel, Lars had thought Ruth must be upset not to get called to pray as often as the others: but when he suggested that, Ruth just smiled sourly and flashed him a lopsided grin.

“No,” she’d said, patting Lars on the arm. “I’m lousy at praying. My teeth are too big and I’m clumsy, very clumsy.” Lars wasn’t muddled by that any more. Not now, not any longer. He knew just what she was talking about. In fact, Lars reckoned that Brother Michael was a man who had his shit seriously together... To use the words of Ben, whose head was now probably just slop in a bucket of slime.

All the same, as Lars scuttled rat-like down the air vent back to the warmth and friendship of the goat pen he wondered what LizAlec would do when Brother Michael called on her to pray.

Chapter Twenty-One

Identity/Crisis

Letting the self-cleaning neoprene hose slide back into its mounting, Brother Michael adjusted his cassock and pulled down the panel that launched his office. He’d taken the Sunday-morning communion, presided at breakfast and confessed two of the handmaidens. He was exhausted.

Diodes winked as the flatscreen picked up where he’d left off the night before, pulling up a visual link to the now-empty women’s dormitory. Angrily, the priest hit a key and broke the link. The whole Arc was wired for sight, both infrared and m/wave, but he didn’t want the distraction.

Built into the flap was a neat fold-up keyboard. It had touch-sensitive keys, floating track ball and an input socket for Zeiss wraprounds in case the user was working on something too confidential to be accessed on open screen. The office had tri-D capacity, too — as well as a Sony neural link — and the whole thing had been bought by mail order from a Virgin MegaStore: only Brother Michael didn’t approve of bioClay implants and unfortunately he’d never learned to use a deck, at least not properly. But this wasn’t a message one of the girls could key-up for him.

He couldn’t trust them not to talk.

The screen cleared and a tiny smiling bot asked Brother Michael if he wanted to create a new visual of himself or use the vActor file already in memory. He chose the file. An ex-MGM/UA programmer in Burbank had coded it for him — and it had to be one of the few vActors around that showed its proprietor as less attractive than he really was.

Early on, Brother Michael had discovered that while Central Asian zaibatsu khans liked ostentation, most Chinese zaibatsu grandees considered the West’s obsession with mere surface to be shallow, which it was. (Bizarre as it seemed, face was actually about what went on under the skin.) He’d also realized that many West Coast Americans were only happy if they were physically the most attractive party in any deal. And so Brother Michael looked less good on screen than he did in life.

It saved him millions. For a start it meant the Californians he went up against weren’t trying to screw him because of his good looks, and the Japanese and East Coast Chinese regarded him as more than a mere lightweight.

Which was good policy. At least, Brother Michael thought so. Not least because it had given rise to the myth of his personal magnetism. Every C3N journalist, every CySat power suit he’d come into direct contact with had gone away to spread stories about how magnetic, attractive and spiritually powerful Brother Michael was when you met him face to face.

Excellent surgery, a basic knowledge of the human psyche, Sister Aaron’s side interest in pheromones and an understanding that to err might be human but that most people wanted someone to admire had taken Brother Michael from a forty-three-second picture grab to a role as the new Messiah.

Whether or not Sister Aaron and he would actually go with The Arc to act as angels was a question exercising every station from CySat’s award-winning MyGod to the pirate evangelists of Mongolia. And Brother Michael had to say, quite honestly, that the real answer was — he hadn’t the faintest... What he did know was that Sister Aaron was determined to travel with The Arc and letting her leave would be like losing part of himself. Besides, part of him wanted to leave behind the corrupted cities and launch into the cleansing vastness of space.

The priest smiled, watching his reflection in the screen like an overlay on the more homely vActor beneath. Corrupted cities, the cleansing vastness of space... He couldn’t help it. The simple sentence constructions, the dramatic cadences of speech he’d once found so difficult now came to him like second nature.