“You see?” Honor said smugly. “There’s a perfectly logical reason.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that adjective means exactly what you think it does,” Henke told her with a chuckle. “On the other hand, I have heard it said that Graysons are just a bit on the traditional side, so I suppose there’s really no reason to expect them to change anything about a game just because it’s over two thousand years old and might need a little updating.”

“Updating is only a good idea if it constitutes an improvement, as well, My Lady,” LaFollet pointed out. “And it’s not quite fair to say we haven’t made any changes. If the record books are accurate, there was a time, in at least one league back on Old Earth, when the pitcher didn’t even have to bat. Or when a manager could make as many pitching changes in a single game as he wanted to. Saint Austen put an end to that nonsense, at least!”

Henke rolled her eyes and sank back into her seat.

“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Andrew,” she told the colonel, “but somehow the discovery that the founder of your religion was also a baseball fanatic doesn’t really surprise me. It certainly explains the careful preservation of some of the… archaic aspects of the game, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t say Saint Austen was a fanatic about baseball, My Lady,” LaFollet replied in a considering tone. “ ‘Fanatic’ would probably be much too mild a term, from everything I’ve ever read.”

“I never would have guessed,” Henke said dryly, letting her eyes sweep over the stadium once more. The huge sports facility seated at least sixty thousand in its tiers of comfortably upholstered chairs, and she hated to think how much the place must have cost. Especially on a planet like Grayson, where what would normally have been outdoor sports required stadiums with things like air filtration systems just to protect the local population from the heavy metal contents of their own atmosphere.

Not that any expense had been spared on more mundane considerations when James Candless Memorial Field was erected. The immaculately manicured playing field was a green jewel, broken only by white stripes of the traditional powdered lime and the bare, rich brown earth of the base lines. The colors of the field and the even brighter colors of the festively garbed spectators glowed brilliantly in the protective dome’s filtered sunlight, and the crowd was liberally festooned with team pennants and banners exhorting the home team to victory. There was even a ventilation system carefully designed to exactly recreate the wind conditions outside the dome, and the Grayson planetary flag, with its crossed swords and open Bible, flew from the top of one of the two foul poles while the Harrington Steading flag flew from the other.

She let her eyes rest balefully on those same foul poles for a moment, then glanced at the huge digital scoreboard projected holographically above the infield, and sighed.