Read Book 3 - Ceremony for Free Online Page A

collapse.
    Marika reached with her touch and scanned the confusion. She
remained awed by the magnitude of what she had set in motion.
Designing it, planning it, talking about it was not the same as
seeing it.
    Flares of light speckled the night as crude brethren ships moved
materials. Already Bagnel was complaining that they had chosen the
most difficult way possible of building the mirror. He was
agitating for a giant pack of balloons in the trailing trojan. His
brethren had orbited a two-hundred-mile gas-filled reflector the
week before. Its energy yield was directed at the developing oil
field in the Ponath. Its value might have been more psychological
than actual. The workers there claimed they sensed a change in the
bitter cold already. Marika had visited and had been able to find
no evidence of any local temperature increase. She suspected most
of the energy was being absorbed before it reached the surface.
    A remarkable vigor and an even more remarkable spirit of
cooperation still animated the venture. There had been far fewer
conflicts than anticipated. Yet even now Bagnel’s best
estimate had the leading mirror eight years from completion.
    That protracted unity, in part, sprang from the project’s
single biggest problem, which existed down below—a sabotage
campaign by those residual brethren still committed to the cause of
the departed villains.
    These criminals were more subtle than their predecessors.
Marika’s old tricks for digging them out did not work nearly
as well. But still, enough were taken to keep the mines working at
capacity.
    Few of the taken had any direct connection with the brethren.
More and more disturbing to Marika was the fact that the criminals
were able to continue recruiting. And that they now were taking a
few females into their ranks. The great hope of the mirror project
had not adequately fired the hearts of the mass of bond meth.
Marika was distressed, but did not know how to convince ordinary
meth that they had as great a stake as the powerful who ruled their
lives.
    The mines were a problem not yet unraveled. In the past there
had been no need for mechanization there. The structure of society
had been such that no demand for ores had been so great that plain
physical labor could not meet it. Meth did not mechanize simply for
the sake of efficiency. They did so only where a task could not be
performed by meth alone. But now . . . 
    Bagnel had been correct. The project was restructuring society.
Traditionally labor intensive areas like mining and agriculture had
to be mechanized either to up volume or release labor for the
project. Marika was, she feared, creating the possibility of
compelling some of the changes the rogue brethren had aimed toward.
Some could not be avoided. There were times when she agonized. She
was in the incongruous position of being the principal defender of
the silth ideal while not believing in it herself.
    Marika’s Mistress of the Ship reached the sunward position
she desired, just miles from the heart of the expanding framework.
The titanium beamwork sparkled, arms radiating from the anchor
point. Marika recalled some old steel bridges, brethren-built, that
spanned the river at TelleRai. Bridges constructed with incredibly
complex girderwork intended to distribute load stresses. Bridges
built in later times were much simpler in design. Was there a
similar design problem here? Was the framework needlessly complex?
Or, like those old bridges, was the design state of the art for the
knowledge available, for the metallurgy of the moment?
    Rotate your tip so the framework is overhead
, Marika
sent.
Your glow is obscuring my view.
    The framework rose, filling the sky.
    A tinny voice spoke in Marika’s ear, from the tiny radio
earplug there. “Hello, the darkship. We will need you to pull
back a few miles. We are coming through your space with
girderwork.”
    There was a time when no male would have dared think of speaking
so to silth. But in space the