1
BURDEN OF FAITH

The cross weighs on Fola. Even in the micro-g of the asteroid it seems to exert a downward pull. The sensation is more mental than physical. She knows that. The slave-pherions that bound her to the Jesuettes have been cut out with chemical scalpels. But her mind still registers the weight of the cross the way it would the phantom pain of a severed limb.

Scar tissue.

A good thing. That's why she wears the cross, to remember. What she was back on earth. Who she is now.

The cross is a mystery in other ways. Lately, the stone it was cut from has grown heavier, the need to remember more insistent. She finds herself fingering the glass—smooth surface and cracked fragments of embedded bone, absently polishing them in response to some vague, nameless anxiety.

Ephraim. It has to be. Her tuplet buddy's dour moods are seeping into her, a slow capillary trickle through the biodigital wires that connect them. It isn't just concern for his sister. That worry was there from the beginning. This is different. Something else is going on. Another wound has opened up, spilling fresh blood.

Fola never feels comfortable visiting Ephraim, even though they're biochemical siblings and she should be able to empathize with him. His hexcell makes her uneasy. Her mouth goes dry, her palms clammy. A kind of reverse Pavlovian response, according to Pheidoh. Her IA is always offering unwanted and unhelpful psychoanalysis, datamined from the mediasphere.

What bothers her is the decor. Ephraim has graffixed the hexcell's wall panels with Moorish architectural designs and motifs. It reminds her too much of the house she grew up in, before her father sold her to the Church. Circular arches. Tessellated tile patterns that hint at some highly complex but underlying order to the structure of day-to-day life. She was twelve at the time and never saw it coming. That innocence still haunts her. It steals over her like a catchy tune. She finds herself singing along without conscious thought. When that happens she has to take a step back, force the song from her head and replace it with another before she gets too carried away.

Fola's not sure why Ephraim chose the motif—what he finds comforting or appealing about it. She's afraid to ask. Part of her doesn't want to know, doesn't want to get any closer than she has to. Because of that, and his sullen temperament, she really doesn't know all that much about him. Where he came from, what his background is. All Fola knows is that he has a little sister, Lisi, who is indentured to do some kind of uterine piecework and is at risk for becoming mutilated. The details are fuzzy. But Fola gathers that she's gestating nanimatronic seed stock inside her and then giving birth to the full-grown product. If she isn't already sterile, she will be soon. And that's just the start of her medical problems.

Not all that much different from her friend Xophia, who had been saved from permanent physical injury by the Ignatarians. Fola counted herself lucky. Her father had indentured her directly to the Church. Four years as a Jesuette, shaking her booty for God, until Xophia arranged to cut her free.

Now, three years later, with the help of Ephraim and a promise to the ICLU to act as a point of contact for other refugees in the future, Fola was returning the favor.

"You seem nervous," Pheidoh says over her cochlear implants.

"Yes." No sense denying it. The IA knows when she's lying, can unerringly read her neural tea leaves.

"You'll do fine. The Mymercia KBO is not that much different from Tiresias and other large Kuiper belt objects."

She realizes that the IA is referring to her and Ephraim's upcoming work assignment on the surface of the asteroid, not her anxiety about Xophia or Fola's aversion to Ephraim's choice of interior decor. This is her first trip to the Mymercia. Until now, she hasn't actually had to go to the asteroid. All of her work on the latest Kuiper belt colony has been done from the orbiting construction station.

"I hope so," she says.

The timing couldn't be worse. The shuttle carrying Xophia is due any day, and she wants to be on-station when it arrives.

Ephraim is still getting dressed when she enters his hexcell.

"You're early," he says, his voice muffled by the acoustic lichen he's got growing on the walls.

Their shuttle pod to the arcology doesn't depart for another thirty minutes. But, as much as she hates his living quarters, they need to talk. In private, out of earshot of any bitcams or acoustic spores that could pick up their conversation.

She hovers just inside the arched doorway. He's partitioned the cell with tapestree screens, so much of her view of the interior living quarters is blocked. She can't actually see the cuenca tiles with their quiltlike patterns of interlocking mosaics. But she can feel them subliminally, like the screech of high-frequency sound, and there's this mental itch building that she can't scratch.

Instead her fingers go to the cross. The stone polished and smooth, comforting.

Ephraim appears from behind one screen. His biosuit hasn't finished taking shape and still looks a little foamy in places. He must have just slathered it on.

"Any word on the shuttle?" she asks.

Ephraim's gaze brushes the cross and her fingers. He shakes his head. "Not yet."

Copyright © 2004 by Mark Budz