Tides of Light Read Online Free

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     it Family Bishop still, and Killeen had never been sure whether this was a tribute to him, a Bishop, or a simple convenience.
    At any rate, as he watched the hard rod come down upon Radanan’s buttocks, he thought it seemed unlikely that a woman small-minded
     enough to venture into dangerous territory in search of an oddment would benefit from so crude a tactic as flogging. But tradition
     was tradition. They had precious little else to guide them in this vast darkness.
    A dozen cuts of the rod as Family punishment, each one counted out by a midshipman. And as ship’s punishment, twelve more.
     Radanan held herself rigid for the first six and then began to jerk, gasps bursting out from behind clenched teeth. Killeen
     thought he would have to turn away but he made himself think of something, anything, while Cermo ran the count to twenty.
    Then she collapsed to the deck.
    “Belay that!” Killeen said sharply, and the awful businesswas over. She had stumbled so that she hung by her wrists. That took matters beyond anything he would tolerate and gave him
     grounds to call it off four strokes short.
    He struggled for something to say. “Ah-mmm. Very well, Lieutenant Cermo. On to the day’s orders, then.”
    Killeen turned and left quickly, hoping that no one noticed that he was sweating.

FOUR
    He made his way in a sour temper through the slick corridors connecting the life vault with the central axis spiral. His anger
     with himself could find no clear expression. He knew he should have become hardened to the necessity of imposing punishment.
     Barring that, he should have been clever enough to find a way around the situation that Cermo’s quick action had forced on
     him.
    A whiff of sewage wrinkled his nose. He hastened past. All of third deck was sealed off. Even so, some sludge had leaked into
     ventilation shafts here, and crew somehow never got it all cleaned out. The problem had started a year ago with clogged toilets.
     Attempts at repair damaged the valves and servos. The waste had spread through the third deck until work details gagged, fainted,
     and refused to go in. Killeen had been forced to seal the deck, losing bunking quarters and shops.
    He irritably demanded of his Ling Aspect, “You’re
sure
you can’t remember any more about pipes and such?”
    Ling’s reply was stony:
    No. I have informed you often enough that I was brought up through the combat ranks, not the engineers. If you had not let
     ignorant crew tinker with the problem—
    “I got no engineers know ’bout that, in chip or living. You savvy so much, why can’t—”
    If you’ll read the ship’s flow diagram—
    “Can’t! They’re too ’plexified. It’s like tellin’ what a woman thinks by studyin’ every hair on her head.”
    Even a ship like this, though far advanced beyond some I commanded, requires intelligence to run. If you’ll institute the
     study sessions I recommended long ago—
    Make Family sit and decipher for weeks?” Killeen laughed dryly. “You saw how far I got with that.”
    Your people are unlike anyone I ever commanded, I’ll grant that. You are from a society that scavenged and stole for a living—
    “Won battles ’gainst the mechs, you mean. The food and ’quipment we got was war booty.”
    Call it what you will. Such training is a far cry from the discipline and skill needed to fix even a broken sewer connection.
     Still, with time and proper training—
    Killeen piped the Ling Aspect back down again; he had heard all this before. Ling knew of the Chandelier Age, when humans
     had great cities in space. Cap’ns had made year-long voyages between Chandeliers, braving the increasing mech raids. Ling
     himself had functioned then as a full interactive Personality. The Family could no longer maintain Personalities, so Ling
     was available only as the lesser, truncated projection—an Aspect.
    Ling invariably recommended the strict discipline necessary in the Chandelier Age. Superimposed on