The arrival of a starship around Sky’s Edge was always something of an event. Being a poor and moderately backwards planet compared with many of the other settled worlds, we were not exactly a key player in the shifting spectrum of interstellar trade. We didn’t export much, except the experience of war itself and a few uninteresting bio-products culled from the jungles. We would have happily bought all manner of exotic technological goods and services from the Demarchist worlds, but only the very wealthiest people on Sky’s Edge could afford them. When ships paid us a visit, speculation usually had it that they had been frozen out of the more lucrative markets—the Yellowstone-Sol run, or the Fand-Yellowstone-Grand Teton run—or they had to stop anyway to make repairs. It happened about once every ten standard years, on average, and they always screwed us.

“Is this really where Haussmann died?” I asked Dieterling.

“It was somewhere near here,” he said as we crossed the concourse’s great, echoing floor. “They’ll never know exactly where because they didn’t have accurate maps back then. But it must have been within a few kilometres of here; definitely within the outskirts of Nueva Valparaiso. At first they were going to burn the body, but then they decided to embalm him; make it easier to hold him up as an example to others.”

“But there was no cult then?”

“No. He had a few fruitcake sympathisers, of course—but there was nothing ecclesiastical about it. That came afterwards. The Santiago was largely secular, but they couldn’t engineer religion out of the human psyche that easily. They took what Sky had done and fused his deeds with what they chose to remember from home; saving this and discarding that as they saw fit. It took a few generations until they had all the details worked out, but then there was no stopping them.”