ead, _Baldur honey-rum, from Harry Wong's bar_.

Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'd
first landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had nicknamed
him the Bishop, and before long that had gotten cut to one syllable.
He looked like a bishop, or at least like what anybody who's never
seen a bishop outside a screen-play would think a bishop looked like.
He was a big man, not fat, but tall and portly; he had a ruddy face
that always wore an expression of benevolent wisdom, and the more
cargo he took on the wiser and more benevolent he looked.

He had iron-gray hair, but he wasn't old. You could tell that by the
backs of his hands; they weren't wrinkled or crepy and the veins
didn't protrude. And drunk or sober--though I never remembered seeing
him in the latter condition--he had the fastest reflexes of anybody I
knew. I saw him, once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knock
over an open bottle with his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbed
it by the neck and set it up, all in one motion, without spilling a
drop, and he went on talking as though nothing had happened. He was
quoting Homer, I remembered, and you could tell that he was thinking
in the original ancient Greek and translating to Lingua Terra as he
went.

He was always dressed as he was now, in a conservative black suit, the
jacket a trifle longer than usual, and a black neckcloth with an Uller
organic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterly--once
every planetary day--a draft on the Banking Cartel would come in for
him, and he'd deposit it with the Port Sandor Fidelity & Trust. If
anybody was unmannerly enough to ask him about it, he always said he
had a rich uncle on Terra.

When I was a kid--well, more of a kid than I am now--I used to believe
he really was a bishop--unfrocked, of course, or ungaitered, or
whatever they call it when they give a bishop the heave-ho. A lot of
people who weren't kids still believed that, and they blamed him on
every denomination from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even missing
the Satanists, and there were all sorts of theories about what he'd
done to get excommunicated, the mildest of which was that somewhere
there was a cathedral standing unfinished because he'd hypered out
with the building fund. It was generally agreed that his
ecclesiastical organization was paying him to stay out there in the
boondocks where he wouldn't cause them further embarrassment.

I was pre