The Mission part4b1

(Biographies of the crew members of the SS Bayern)
Those balmy days of summer when I, Joachim, became reacquainted with the man who was to become my Chief Astrogator were care-free and, dare I say, fun. This gentleman was a friend of Mary Juanita Spleefus, whom I had met at several Spacer Guild parties that I had been invited to join. James Ya-Rasta Makeha-meha MacDougal was a member of the Rastafarian Presbyterian Church of the Triune God of Power and was making the rounds of the various technical guilds to raise money for his Church and Astronomical Temple of the Greater Caribbean. James had come from a lineage of strange but God-fearing people who resided in the Free Republic of Jamaica. His great-grandfather, Kameha-makameha, had come to the island from Tahiti after attempting to circumnavigate the earth in his catamaran. The storm that brought him to shore in Jamaica also grounded a ship of Scottish colonists bound for the colony in Darien. These survivors made friends with the locals and established the First Rastafarian Presbyterian Church of Jamaica in the town where they settled down. One of Kameha-makameha’s descendents organized enough of a revolution to secure equal status in the British Commonwealth for Jamaica. But the real story here was that the secrets of the Polynesian method of navigation were passed on to his descendents and James had received these secrets and had extrapolated profound secrets about space-time that had earned him a full-ride scholarship to Cambridge. His paper, “On the Effects of the Luminiferous Aether on the Curvature of Space-Time” brought an invitation to MIT where he continued his research until the elders of his home church asked him for help in establishing the Astronomical Temple. With the opening of the solar system to manned exploration made possible by the Eastinghaus Aether drives there was a great demand for astrogators who could think faster than the binary analytic engines and program the proper instructions for these calculating machines in order to guide the spacecraft of the world’s empires.

When in the course of conversation at one of the fund-raisers, and when James found that I was planning to build the SS Bayern and journey to Titan, he immediately wanted to come along on the journey. I was profoundly flattered that he would be my Astrogator and extremely grateful when he was willing to wait while I ransomed my craft back from the Pirates of Penury. All that summer and into the fall we had occasion to meet at Mary Juanita Spleefus’ house and take the Eighth Sacrament and speak of the discoveries we would make in the name of our Creator.
But then studies began again in earnest at the Sisters Temple of Takoemeq and my brother went forth into the fierce northlands and my path turned away from the Temple of Wireless for a time.