Ascending - James Alan Gardner [96]
“I couldn’t see exactly,” Nimbus replied. “Starbiter doesn’t have enough control to focus her scanners on anything in particular. And she doesn’t have much attention span either; I tried to keep her looking in one direction, but her gaze kept wandering all over the place.” He added defensively, “That’s perfectly normal for a child her age.”
“Sure, sure,” Aarhus said. “But what did you see?”
“Mostly a bunch of blurs. Nothing large enough to be the Shaddill or even a navy ship. I think it’s a swarm of smaller craft: single-person runabouts or family-sized yachts.”
“Hmm,” Lajoolie said. “That explains the jostling when they took Hemlock in tow. This ship is so big, we’d have to be grappled by a whole pack of smaller vessels. They must have had trouble coordinating who pulled which direction when.”
She looked to Aarhus, obviously wondering if he agreed. However, the sergeant had other things on his mind; he was staring upward with an unhappy expression on his face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Trouble,” he said. “Unless I miss my guess, we’ve just been rescued by an outreach crusade.” He grimaced, then looked around at the rest of us. “Hope you haven’t got anything planned for the next ten years—we’ve just become Cashling slaves.”
Devising A Suitable Ransom
Lajoolie’s face blanched to an unattractive shade of yellow. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
“It’s a good guess,” Aarhus said. “Before Hemlock got zapped, we were headed for the planet Jalmut. That’s a Cashling world; most likely, the ships that answered our Mayday are Cashling too. But the Cashlings almost never travel in groups—they’re too egotistical. Get a bunch together in separate ships, and five minutes later, they fly off in different directions. The only time Cashling ships stay in a pack is when one of their prophets organizes a crusade.”
“And what is a crusade?” I asked. “A religious pilgrimage?”
“They get mad if you use the word ‘religious’—most Cashlings are devout atheists, and fly into tantrums at talk of deities or souls. But the truth is that Cashlings are religious as hell. Fanatic believers. They just switch beliefs every other day.”
“How can that be?”
“Doesn’t make sense to me either,” the sergeant replied. “But Cashlings believe in something called Pu Naram…usually translated into English as ‘Godly Greed.’ Don’t ask me to define it, because every time you blink, a new prophet shows up to put a different spin on what Godly Greed means. One week, it’s all about taking care of yourself and piss on anyone else; the next week, it’s switched to everybody working in harmony so you can all get rich together; then it’s about compassion and helping others, because tossing pennies to cripples really boosts your ego.” He rolled his eyes. “Cashlings always brag how they have a single unified culture, unlike humans and other species at our level of evolution…but the only unity I see is them flitting from one prophet to another, like flies trying to find the smelliest heap of manure.
“As for their outreach crusades,” he went on, gesturing vaguely at some point beyond the ship’s hull, “it’s traditional for a prophet to gather his or her followers and wander through space every few years. Mostly they visit other Cash-ling worlds, picking up new converts at every stop and losing just as many old ones. The turnover in people is substantial: after three stops, a crusade seldom has anyone it started with…not even the original prophet. Someone new decides he or she is a prophet and takes over the whole flotilla.”
Lajoolie favored me with a weak smile. “My husband once told me crusades have nothing to do with belief. They come from a powerful instinct to homogenize the population: to break up communities that are getting too insular and to shuffle around the breeding pool. Uclod says the Cashlings