Heaven by Ian Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

inhabitants.
    Sam slipped along the rows of worship rings until he found an unoccupied one. He folded his legs beneath him in a yogic pose
     and emptied his mind of all save a proper humility and respect for the unfathomable diversity of the Lifesoul-Giver’s creation.
     As he waited for the high acolyte to commence the rites, he mouthed a silent prayer to Moish the Firstborn, a simple prayer
     that every Child of Unity learned almost before it could transduce energy.
    The high acolyte’s entrance was low-key, almost demure, and all the more effective for the absence of pomp and panoply. The
     priestess was a blimp from a gas giant’s cloud layer, possibly even a Jovian descendant, though no one seemed to know for
     sure. She was enveloped in a Precursor wrap to protect her lumpy skin from the radiant warmth of the inner-world life forms
     whose veins flowed with liquid ice, and a breathing bulb hovered beside her as she floated to her place at the rostrum, buoyed
     up by the mixture of hydrogen and helium that was almost universal in gas-giant balloonists. Her many tentacles—also a universal
     on such worlds—hung down her sides, and she spun lazily as she advanced, spying out her surroundings in an unconscious reversion
     to evolutionary habit.
    She was followed by a dozen lesser acolytes, each from a different species. Every day they were chosen by lot. Today the first
     was a tall, spindly creature, all black twiglike legs, supported in what for it was high gravity, by a Precursor exoskeleton.
     Sam recognized it as a linecrawler from one of the rare rock webs—clusters of small asteroids linked by thick cables, extruded
     over the eons by a variety of arachnoid organisms that obtained their energy directly from infrared light. It was followed
     by a Wymokh, a representative of a species that he had never seen before, which resembled a tangled ball of wool. Surprisingly,
     it moved not by rolling but by squashing itself flat and suddenly expanding, so that it hopped along in a series of rapid
     bounds. He found it difficult to imagine what habitat might cause such a form of locomotion to evolve. Third in line was a
     steel blue Hytth insectoid. Next was something rather like a stubby centipede, then a metallic construct with what looked
     like wheels, then a procession of three apparently identical creatures like giant butterflies with teardrop bodies—but in
     fact these had originated in totally different spiral arms of the Galaxy and used totally different genetic material. It was
     a strange case of convergent evolution and vivid affirmation of the Unity of Life. Sam was pleased to see an Earth-norm humanoid,
     possibly even a true human—until he realized that the creature just looked like a human. It was a metamorph, and it could
     mimic anything from a neutronium tetrahedron to a beautiful human female—which was today’s choice. The informal procession
     was completed by a chlorine-breathing Illensan, which dragged a spherical powerball behind it on a trolley to run its life-support
     systems.
    So many species
. Sam remembered his childhood priest explaining how much the Church valued a diversity of cultures and species. Universal
     tolerance involved having something definite to be tolerant toward. It was not enough to love one’s fellow species in the
     abstract. They had to be present in the flesh—or whatever else they were made of. The Church made sure that they were present,
     by creating a suitable mixture of species on every converted world and in every space-going vessel that it operated.
    There were, of course, no exotics—no plasmoids, no neutron-star crystallines. As yet, no way had been found to include them
     in such company without destroying it, the ship, and anything else within lethal range. That was beyond even the Precursors,
     or at least beyond the known capabilities of any of their gadgetry that had yet been discovered.
    It was a serious theological embarrassment to Cosmic Unity