Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“No. Come in.”

“Lord Captain.” Chandra’s face appeared in the depths of Martinez’s desk. “You paged me?”

“I have a question,” Martinez said. “Did Captain Fletcher wear a pendant in the shape of a tree?”

Chandra was taken aback. “He did, yes.”

“Did he wear it all the time?”

Her look grew more curious. “Yes, so far as I know he did, though he took it off when he, ah, went to bed.”

Martinez raised his fist into view of the pickups on the desk and let the pendant fall from his grasp so it dangled on the end of its chain. “This is the pendant?”

Chandra squinted, and her face distorted in the camera pickups as she stared into her sleeve display. “Looks like it, my lord.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. End transmission.”

Chandra’s startled face faded from the display. Martinez looked at the pendant for a long moment as excitement hummed in his nerves, and then became aware of the silence in his office, of Jukes and Marsden staring at him.

“Have a seat for a moment,” he said. “This may take a while.”

He was still reaching deep into his own head.

He called up a security manual onto his desk display, one intended for the Constabulary and Investigative Service. Included was a description of cults and the methods of recognizing them. He read:

Narayanism,a cult based on the teachings of Narayanguru (Balambhoatdada Seth), condemned for a belief in a higher plane and for the founder’s alleged performance of miracles. Narayanguru’s teachings show a kinship to those of the Terran philosopher Schopenhauer, themselves condemned for nihilism. Though cult tradition maintains that Narayanguru was hanged on an ayaca tree, historical records show that he was tortured and executed by more conventional methods in the Year of the Praxis 5581, on Terra. Because of this false tradition, cultists sometimes recognize one another by carrying flowering branches of the ayaca on certain days, planting ayacas about the home, or by using the ayaca blossom on jewelry, pottery, etc. There are also the usual variety of hand and other signals.

Narayanism is not a militant cult and its adherents are not believed to pose an active threat to the Peace of the Praxis, except insofar as they promote false beliefs. The cult has recently been reported on Terra, Preowin, and Sandama, where entire clans sometimes participate secretly in cult activity.

Martinez gazed up at Jukes and held out the pendant dangling from his fist. “Why would Captain Fletcher wear this pendant?” he asked. “It’s not a particularly rare or precious form of art, is it?”

Jukes looked blank. “No, my lord.”

“Suppose he was actually a believer,” Martinez said. “Suppose he was a genuine Narayanist.”

A look of pure horror crossed Marsden’s face. Martinez looked at him in surprise. Marsden took a few moments to find words, and when he spoke, his voice trembled with what Martinez supposed was fury.

“Captain Fletcher, a cultist?” Marsden said. “Do you realize what you’re saying? A member both of the Gombergs and the Fletchers? A Peer of the highest possible pedigree, with noble ancestors stretching back thousands of years-”

Martinez was taken aback by this rant, but was in no mood for a pompous lecture on genealogy. “Marsden,” he said, cutting him off, “do you know where the personal possessions of Thuc and Kosinic have been stored?”

Marsden’s larynx moved in his throat as he visibly swallowed his indignation. “Yes, my lord,” he said.

“Kindly bring them.”

Marsden rose, put the datapad on his seat, and braced. “At once, Lord Captain.”

The secretary marched away, his legs stiff with anger. Jukes looked after him in surprise.

“An odd man,” he said. “I had no idea he was such a snob.” He turned to Martinez and raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think Captain Fletcher was a cultist?”

Martinez looked at the pendant that still dangled from his hand. “I don’t know why else he’d wear this.”

“Maybe it was a gift from someone he cared for.”

“Acultist he cared for,” Martinez muttered.

He leaned back in his chair and followed his chain of reasoning again, piece by piece. No part of it was implausible by itself, he decided, and therefore his ideas were better than any other theory that had come his way.

Much of it had to do with the way the Praxis viewed cults, and the way servants of the Praxis had interpreted their duty.

The Shaa had believed in many things, but they did not believe in the numinous. Any cult that promoted a belief in the supernatural was, by definition, a violation of the Praxis and illegal. When the Shaa conquered Terra, they had found the place swarming with cults, and acted over time to suppress them, gradually over many generations. Meeting houses of the faithful had been torn down, turned to secular use, or converted to museums. Believers were dismissed from government and teaching posts. Cult literature was confiscated and its reproduction forbidden. Cult organizations were disbanded, any professional clergy dismissed, and schools of instruction shut down.

Any believer determined on martyrdom was given ample opportunity to exercise his choice.

Cults had never vanished, of course. The Shaa, who were not without their own shrewd intelligence, might not have expected they would. But by forbidding the spread of doctrine, professional clergy and houses of worship, and the reproduction of literature and cult objects, they had turned what had been by all accounts a thriving business into a strictly amateur affair. If there were meetings, they were small and took place in private homes. If there were clergy, they had no opportunity for specialized study, and had to hold regular jobs. If there was literature, it was copied clandestinely and passed from hand to hand, and errors crept in and many texts were incomplete.

Believers were usually not harassed as long as they did not practice in public or proselytize, and in time they learned discretion. Though belief was not destroyed, its force was reduced and cults became indistinguishable from superstition-a set of arcane and irrational practices designed to achieve the intervention of who knew what against the inflexible workings of an unknowable fate.

There were certainly cults scattered through the empire, but most of them existed very quietly and often in fairly remote corners of the Shaa dominion. Cult members tended to marry within one another’s families and avoid public service. Occasionally a governor or a local official would try to earn a name for himself by rooting them out, executing some and forcing others to renounce their beliefs, but for the most part they were left alone.

There was no point in persecution. Over the centuries, the supernatural had simply ceased to be a threat to the empire.

Marsden returned within a few moments, carrying a pair of gray plastic boxes. “I assumed you wanted possessions other than clothing, my lord,” he said. “If you want to examine the clothing as well, may I requisition a hand truck?”

That would be for Kosinic’s trunks containing the amazing number of uniforms required of an officer, plus his personal vac suit. Thuc would have had fewer uniforms, and used a vac suit from the ship’s stores.

“The pockets would have been emptied, and so on?” Martinez asked.

“Yes, Lord Captain. Pockets are gone through, and other places where small items might be found, and anything discovered put in these boxes.”

“I won’t need the clothing then. Put the boxes on my desk.”

Martinez opened Kosinic’s box first. He found a ring from the Nelson Academy, from which Martinez had graduated before Kosinic arrived, and a handsome presentation stylus-brushed aluminum inlaid with unakite and jasper, and engraved “To Lieutenant Javier Kosinic, from his proud father.” There was a shaving kit, a modestly priced cologne, and a nearly empty bottle of antibiotic spray that a doctor had probably given him for his wounds. Martinez found some fine paper, brushes, and watercolor paints, and looked at several finished watercolors, most of them planet-bound landscapes of rivers and trees, but including one recognizable impression of Fulvia Kazakov sitting at a table in the wardroom. To Martinez’s unpracticed eye, none of the watercolors seemed particularly expert.