The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(2)

“No,” Lenson said.

“Guess.”

“Trying to get away from the other ship.”

“Right,” Tans said. “But do you know how? I already said if we accelerated now, they’d catch us.”

“I don’t know,” Lenson said.

“Come on, work with me, Len.”

Lenson thought about it. “You’re waiting,” he finally said, and hoped that his father wouldn’t ask for any more detail than that, because frankly Lenson had no idea what would come after that.

“Yes!” Tans said. “There’s a point in time after which if we accelerate under full engines, the navy ship won’t catch us before we make the Flow shoal, even under their full power. And that time is”—he looked over to Gonre—“four hours, sixteen minutes from now.”

“As long as the Bransid doesn’t start accelerating before then,” Gonre said.

“Yes.”

“And as long as our own engines are able to handle the load of full acceleration for the three hours it will take us to hit the shoal.”

“Yes.”

“And as long as our push fields stay active so we’re not compressed into jelly by the constant high-g acceleration.”

“Yes,” Tans said, testily.

“And as long as they don’t try to shove a missile into our tailpipe.”

“For fuck’s sake, Gonre,” Tans said.

“Let’s not be too impressed with ourselves yet, is what I’m saying,” Gonre concluded. She turned to her son. “And you, go back to your cabin. The rest of us are going to be busy until we hit the shoal.”

“There’s nothing to do in my cabin,” Lenson complained.

“Sure there is. It’s called studying.”

Lenson groaned at this and trudged back to his cabin, which, despite being roughly the size of a broom closet, was the second-most luxurious accommodation on the ship, after his parents’ cabin, which was the size of two broom closets. In his cabin, Lenson activated his tablet and, rather than study, watched cartoons for a couple of hours until suddenly the cartoons wiped themselves out and educational materials appeared on his screen. Lenson groaned again, annoyed that his mother, who was supposed to be busy, had time to check on what he was looking at. Reluctantly he started reading his religion lesson, on Rachela, the Prophet, first leader and the first emperox of the Interdependency.

Lenson was not a very great student in a general sense but found the religion lessons of his study particularly boring. Neither he nor his parents were in any way religious, or followed the tenets of the Church of the Interdependency any more than they followed any other church. They weren’t opposed to the church, or any other religion—Lenson knew some of the crew members of the Agreed followed their own personal faiths and his parents didn’t care about it one way or the other—but the Ornills themselves left it alone and had passed their rather neutral apathy on the matter to their son.

The most you could say about the Ornill family’s lack of religion was that when it came to which religion they weren’t participating in, they weren’t participating in the Church of the Interdependency most of all. For his part, Lenson knew other religions existed but knew so little about them that it couldn’t be said he rejected or ignored them. They weren’t even on the table.

The Church of the Interdependency, on the other hand, he knew at least a little about. One of the advantages of being the official religion of the Interdependency was that information about it was required reading in the study materials every child in the empire was obliged to have as part of their education. You learned about the C of I, and of the Prophet-Emperox Rachela, whether you believed or not, and whether you cared or not.

Well, that and the Ornills celebrated Emperox’s Day, pinned to Rachela’s standard calendar birthday, like everyone did, as an excuse for sleeping in, trading gifts and eating like a pig.

Lenson’s studies at the moment were not talking about Emperox’s Day, or gifts, or stuffing one’s self, unfortunately for him. They were discussing Rachela’s prophecies, the set of future-seeing pronouncements that galvanized the disparate systems that housed human settlements into the single empire known as the Interdependency and which helped to establish the economic, legal and social systems that the Interdependency still worked from, more than a millennium later.

All of which, Lenson decided, were boring as heck. Not only because the study materials, crafted for readers between the standard ages of ten and twelve, did not go into the prophecies or their impact in any substantive manner, preferring simple declarative sentences that took the material as a pedagogical fact rather than a matter of interpretation and debate (which to be fair, Lenson, again, not a very great student, would not have been an engaged participant in). It was also because of an inchoate feeling that Lenson had while reading about the prophecies, something that he couldn’t have put into words even if he had tried.

But had he tried, what they would have boiled down to would have been, Hey, you know what, basing an entire system of social, political and economic control on the vague, all-too-easily misinterpreted words of a single person claiming divine inspiration is probably not actually all that smart, now, is it.

This was because Lenson, like his parents before him, was a mostly practical sort, not personally given over to matters spiritual, teleological or eschatological, and indeed all of the above offered up a muted sense of disquiet, the intellectual version of biting into a piece of pie and having a taste there you can’t quite pin down but you know is not meant for that particular pie, and throws the whole thing off from being delicious to being a thing in your mouth that you’re not entirely sure you want to be there but it would be rude to spit it out so you just swallow it, cover the rest of the pie with a napkin, and just try to get on with your day.