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brushstrokes. Instead, with
a hasty prayer and a careful, sacred kiss, he set up his little
traveling icon of St. Niphon with his tiny thurible of Athonite
incense.
    As strange as his quarters were,
they were not so bizarre as the sleeping angel, stretched long and
thin with its boots crossed at the ankles. And though Chor
Episcopos Menard had made more c-transitions than he could possibly
count without resorting to his personnel file, there was still
something fundamentally odd about this whole trip. Even without the
blesséd angel.
    Still, he’d asked to be here. Meant
to be here. Following the shiver in his bones and the pricking in
Sister Pelias’ data.
    Even in the face of Menard’s
interest Bishop Russe had forced the point – something had been
driving His Grace, some pressure invisible to the Chor Episcopos
but still real enough to affect the assignment.
    “ Jonah,” Russe had said. “This is
important. Terribly important. The Metropolitan of Halfsummer will
extend you every possible aid and comfort, but that is a rude
planet in a rude sector. People who serve on the frontiers don’t
understand the logic of empire. Or the importance of our work.”
He’d leaned close, breath reeking of onions. “You will take an
angel. To watch over you, and deal with the xenics if you meet
them.”
    An angel. Menard had never
heard of one leaving the Prime See, except in the direct company of
the Patriarch himself. He certainly didn’t need an angel to watch
over him. To keep watch on him, more like it, in obedience to whatever hidden
force Pelias had alluded to and Russe had so obviously been
responding to. Politics, of course, to which Menard had too often
willfully blinded himself.
    And here was the result of his
deliberate ignorance of the machinations of power: the angel. It
was pale as all its kind – a hairless, sexless creature, close to
three meters tall, wearing red leather body armor, with a red
Maltese cross tattooed on its forehead. That cross was like a
declaration of war to any decent churchman, bloody and wrong. It
had no scent, either, except the faintest aroma of leather from its
armor. Right now it was sleeping, or least immobile, but when it
was alert the solid pink eyes were perhaps the most disturbing.
Like the wing of a beetle made from blood, perhaps, with no white
or pupil.
    This thought came to
him: We find no xenics among the stars, so
we make our own to watch over us.
    The angel was an unfortunate fact
of life at the moment, but it was not what had been nagging at him.
Rather, his thoughts kept ranging to the Internalist position on
xenics. Sister Pelias had been quite insistent about her...well,
call it intuition. Menard had climbed over, around and through
enough alleged xenic sites to have a thoroughly jaded view of
Externalist thinking. To put it somewhat unkindly, he was quite
certain that there were no boojums hiding in secret bases at the
bottom of craters waiting to either save or destroy the human
race.
    That being the case, were the
Internalists any closer to the truth?
    He didn’t understand how they could
be. Not logically.
    Whatever and wherever the
xenics might be, if they truly existed – something he very much
wanted to be true. Menard craved that belief – they hadn’t seen fit to announce
their existence through leaving behind any conveniently ruined
starports or abandoned ship hulls or anything like that. He simply
didn’t believe a mature, material, starfaring civilization could
have fled before the slow coreward advance of humanity without
leaving traces. Consider what humans did to an E-class planet in
the course of a few generations. It would take the passage of
geological eras to erase the road cuts in inconvenient ridges.
Millennia of abandonment to even weather them enough that a
planetologist might question the rounded edges.
    If the xenics were out there in
some kind of physical force and presence, they’d never spent much
time on any world humanity had come to