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Yorick waved them away. “Ever hear of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Father?”
    “No. Who were they?”
    “A hodgepodge collection of escapists, who tried to forget they were living because of an advanced technology, by holding gatherings where everybody dressed up in medieval outfits and performing mock battles with fake swords.”
    “Ah, I see.” Father Al smiled fondly. “They tried to restore some beauty to life.”
    “Yeah, that was their problem. That kind of beauty requires individuality, and reinforces it—so they weren’t too popular with the totalitarian government of the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra. WhenPEST came in, it broke up the SCA and executed the leaders. They all requested beheading, by the way… Well. The rest of the organization went underground; they turned into the backbone of the DDT revolution on Terra. Most of ‘em, anyway; there’s a rumor that about a quarter of ‘em spent the next few centuries playing a game called ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ They were used to being underground.”
    “Fascinating, I’m sure,” Father Al said drily, “but what does it have to do with Gramarye?”
    “Well, a dozen of the richest SCA members saw thePEST coup coming, and bought an outmoded FTL
    space liner. They crammed aboard with all the rank-and-file who wanted to come along, renamed themselves the ‘Romantic Émigrés,’ and took off for parts unknown—the more unknown, the better. When they got there, they named it ‘Gramarye,’ and set up their version of the ideal medieval Page 21
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    society—you know, architecture out of the Fourteenth Century, castles out of the Thirteenth, armor out of the Fifteenth, costumes out of any time between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, and government out of luck. Well, they did have a King, but they paid him a fine medieval disregard. You get the idea.”
    Father Al nodded. “A thorough collection of romantics and misfits—and a high concentration of psi genes.”
    “Right. Then they proceeded to marry each other for a few centuries, and eventually produced telepaths, telekinetics, teleports, levitators, projective telepaths…”
    “Projectives?” Father Al frowned. “You didn’t mention those.”
    “Didn’t I? Well, they’ve got this stuff they call ‘witch moss.’ It’s a telepathically-sensitive fungus. If the right kind of ‘witch’ thinks hard at it, it turns into whatever she’s thinking about. And, of course, the whole population turned latent-esper fairly early on, and they loved to tell their children fairy tales…”
    “No.” Father Al blanched. “They didn’t.”
    “Oh, but they did—and now you’ll find an elf under every elm. With the odd werewolf thrown in—and a few ghosts. Hey, it could’ve been worse! If they hadn’t had this thing against anything later than Elizabethan, they might’ve been retelling Frankenstein.”
    “Praise Heaven for small blessings!”
    Yorick nodded. “You’ll have trouble enough with what they’ve got there already. Be careful, though—new talents keep showing up, from time to time.”
    “Indeed? Well, I thank you for the warning. But I’m curious… Why did you come tell me all this? Why didn’t Dr. McAran just put it all into his letter?”
    “Because if he had, the Pope would’ve thought he was a raving maniac,” Yorick said promptly. “But since he put down just the bare-bones-vital information, and made an accurate ‘prediction’ about who would be Pope…”
    “With a little help from your agent in theVatican ,” Father Al amplified.
    “Don’t say anything against him, Father, he’s from your Order. Anyway, with that much and no more in the letter, the Pope believed it, and sent you.”
    “Ingenious. Also devious. But why bother with the letter at all, since you were coming to meet me anyway?”
    “Because you wouldn’t have believed me if you hadn’t read the