"It's these damn conferences," Father Blaire said. “All these strangers coming on-board,” which Panfilo thought kind of stupid, since Father Blaire was a newcomer but complained like a guy who had lived on the station for years.
Father Blaire complained a great deal. He'd been literally possessed when he arrived, and Allec sometimes muttered that the evil Cubus who inhabited him had found it easy since Father Blaire was constantly whining about...something.
Father Jacob Malcom was more mellow. He'd come to the station—or rather, the planet—to get married, but his fiancée turned out to be crazy and he turned to religion. More to religion since he was already pretty religious. But he turned to Monseigneur Rhys and Canon Lider's version of religion, which was a combination of strict honorable compliance with expected behavior and what Allec called “laissez-faire attitudes regarding sentient vagaries.”
Father Malcolm lived mostly on the planet as curate for the incumbent priest, Father Hadaka, and liaison for Monseigneur Rhys. Monseigneur Rhys couldn't reside there because he had a non-evil Cubus companion, Lider, though he and Lider had certain special dispensations that allowed them to visit. Mars Catholics loved Lider and interpreted his partly visible self as angelic, which made Lider squeamish, but Rhys didn't hesitate to take advantage. “Because Rhys lives to find the in,” Allec said.
In any case, Father Malcolm thought the conferences were important but the assassination attempt deplorable and he willingly put Panfilo up in his apartment on Mars.
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| Allec |
Allec and Quinn were Panfilo’s guardians. They were married and couldn't live on conservatively religious Mars. Everybody on Mars adored them too since Quinn still evenhandedly oversaw the Trading Depot that took important minerals out of Mars, which exports paid for just about everything on Mars and the station. And Allec managed the main restaurant on the station, which was open all year round, not only when the ships arrived, and fed regulars on the station and from the planet.
Panfilo wasn’t supposed to live on the planet, being non-human and not an approved alien. But plenty of people, including people he grew up around plus his foster dad, were furious at the attempt on his life.
And too, as Quinn pointed out, humans generally didn’t mind Anthros as much as they minded Cubi.
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| Panfilo |
Unlike Siphons, who evolved on Earth, Anthros supposedly settled on Earth in the early twentieth century.
None of Panfilo's guardians and teachers and protectors believed it.
Aside from Sandy, maybe. Sandy was a Catholic Anthros who lived on the station and often visited the planet. Sandy was huge with pure white hair that resembled a polar bear’s pelt. Sandy never said anything bad about anyone—not even Panfilo's assassin though it was Sandy who conducted Panfilo to the planet and stayed with him the first week after the attempt. Sandy probably didn’t believe that Anthros arrived in the solar system in the early twentieth century, called to Earth by the mammals they happened to resemble, but Sandy never said so. Sandy thought dwelling on the past was a waste of time.
Panfilo mostly agreed. Allec, his primary guardian, was an adult-created clone who became sentient over five years earlier and would die within fifteen years. He embodied a “live in the present, people” perspective.
Except the assassination attempt was about the past, all about the idea that Anthros were either rejoining their mammal cousins or imitating their mammal cousins when they arrived on Earth approximately two hundred years ago. They had not originated on Earth, like the mer-people Siphons, and they had not come to Earth on a wave of neutrinos, like the Cubi. They had come to Earth on purpose to save—
Something.
Humans. Nature. Something.
It was the catechism that not all Anthros accepted but many rarely directly refuted.
It was the catechism of Panfilo’s assassin. His failed assassin.
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