Stewards of the Flame (39 page)

At the desk within the shack, with his chair rotated toward the window and sea view, was a grizzled, bearded old man wearing an antiquated plaid shirt. He swung around as he heard Jesse enter. “Sorry, I’m not taking charters anymore,” he said. “I’m closing down.”

“I saw that you’re selling,” Jesse said. “What’s your price?”

“Depends on the terms. You want just the plane, or everything?”

“The whole business—all the equipment you’ve got, records, moorage lease. I’ll pay cash.”

The man stared at him in astonishment. “Thought I knew all the pilots around here. Taught most of the older ones to fly myself. I sure hadn’t heard there was anyone in the market for a charter business.”

“I’m new here,” Jesse admitted. “From offworld. So I’m looking for a good opportunity.”

“Ever do any flying?”

“Not in seaplanes,” Jesse hedged, “though I’ve been up in them with friends.”

“It’s not much different from flying land-based planes, or so I’ve been told. As you probably know they’re all seaplanes here; the island’s not big enough for an airport. But it shouldn’t take you long to make the transition.”

“Well,” said Jesse, “I’ve only flown larger ships, under conditions not much like this world’s. So I’ll need a bit of instruction. Is there a flight school around here?”

“There is, but the guy who runs it will charge you as much as he charges the green kids he caters to, and not give you half the training you’re paying for,” declared the man with evident bitterness. “My instructor’s ticket is still good. If you buy the plane, I’ll throw in lessons.”

“So let’s see it. Have you got time to take me up now?”

For just a moment the old man hesitated, and Jesse sensed doubt in him. But then he said, “Sure. I’m Zeb Hennesy, by the way.”

He led the way to a blue and white seaplane, moored directly at the pier. “The lease on this space is worth plenty,” he said. “If you bought a new plane you’d be stuck way out, and water taxi bills run up fast.”

Jesse had observed enough during his flights with Peter and others to be familiar with the routine of inspecting the floats and making sure that the plane had a full power charge. It was a beautiful machine that had obviously been carefully maintained. As he climbed into the copilot’s seat and they taxied out for takeoff, his spirits soared. This was what he was meant to do. With this, his new life on Undine would be complete.

They accelerated, nose up out of the spray, and he could feel the decrease in drag when the floats began to lift. In a moment they were off the water. The plane climbed, and Jesse gazed down at the canal-threaded city. It was clearly dominated by the massive, glaring white Hospital cluster, which seemed even from the air to dwarf the featureless residential areas. He was glad to be away from there.

“Take over,” Zeb said to him as they leveled off. “Let’s see if you’ve got a feel for it.”

Jesse took the yoke, his confidence rising with the passing minutes. The plane handled very differently from a starship’s VTOL shuttle, of course, and was so much slower that he kept wanting to put on power. But after his trips in Peter’s similar plane, he knew that it wouldn’t take him long to get used to it. The only tricky part would be setting it down horizontally, on water.

“You’re a natural,” Zeb said, seeming rather relieved. “Mostly I’ll just sit back and let you log the hours on dual you need for a license.”

“It may take me a few days to raise the cash,” Jesse said after they’d landed. The price mentioned had meant nothing to him, unfamiliar as he was with colonial money, but he could tell that Zeb wasn’t a man who would cheat him. “Is it a deal?”

“Best deal I ever made,” Zeb said. “Don’t care about the money. I just—well, I wanted her in the hands of somebody who’d treat her right. Not one of those damn fool kids looking for joyrides these days. There’s hardly anybody else in the market for used planes.”

Most people in the colony who needed planes already owned them, Jesse realized, and they rarely had reason to give them up. Zeb was evidently reluctant to let this one go. With his developing access to people’s feelings, he sensed the pain in him, and wondered why the old man was selling. He was past the age to retire, certainly, but if he didn’t need the money, why not keep the plane for personal use?

They shook hands on the agreement, and Jesse, seeing that it was late, took a water taxi through the canals back to the apartment. Carla would be home before him, for once. He could hardly wait to tell her his news.

“That’s wonderful!” Carla said, hugging him. He was elated all evening, and the next morning commenced flying lessons with Zeb. But Peter, when at Carla’s request he met them in a safe house that night, was surprisingly unenthusiastic.

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea, Jess,” he said, frowning.

“Oh, Peter,” Carla said. “Jesse loves it, and he needs to do something here.”

“I know. But a long-term commitment like this—”

“I’m sorry if I misunderstood,” Jesse said, somewhat stunned. “I had the impression that the Group wouldn’t mind lending me as much as my funds will cover.”

“It’s not the money,” Peter assured him. “We can’t give it to you in cash; a transaction that large would have to go through a bank, and would be reported. But it would be perfectly legal for Xiang Li to invest in an air charter service, if you wouldn’t mind signing paperwork to make it look as if the plane’s securing the loan.”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“So that part’s okay. I just wonder if maybe you’re being a bit hasty. You’ve only looked at one plane, after all.”

“It’s in great shape, and I like Zeb Hennesy. We hit it off right away.”

“But you’re not even licensed yet—it will be a while before you can carry passengers, and even longer before you have enough hours to carry them for hire.”

“Surely you don’t think I’ll have trouble learning to fly a seaplane, Peter.”

“No, no—certainly not. You’ll make a great pilot. I’ve got an instructor’s rating myself; we could log some dual hours for you going to and from the Island.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“For one thing, you’d need to acquire permanent, legally-recognized resident status to operate a business here.”

“Peter,” Jesse said, “I can’t live the rest of my life in this colony without the authorities noticing that I’ve become a permanent resident.”

Peter sighed. “I suppose not,” he admitted. “I guess we could hack credit bureau files to prevent your offworld accounts from being discovered, since you’ll have some earned income to satisfy any tax investigations.”

“Hack financial records? I won’t have Carla risk that,” Jesse stated firmly. Much as he wanted to fly, he wouldn’t pursue it on those terms.

“No, of course not. All the financial hacking is done by our contacts on Earth.”

“Well then, as you say, it will be awhile before I can get a commercial license. So we can take care of the red tape later, can’t we?”

“Sure, go ahead and have fun flying—you deserve that,” Peter told him. “I’ll talk to Xiang Li tomorrow.” But he did not look happy.

Puzzled, Jesse worried about it during the night, and finally an answer came to him. He had mentioned to Peter that the plane was moored in front of the house where Ian was living. In fact, Carla had said the one next door, which was owned by Xiang Li, was used as a hospice, too—that made it easy for caregivers to keep watch over two patients, when there were two, without exposing either of them to the danger of the other being found. Sooner or later, perhaps often, bodies would have to be moved out of those houses. And who would be better situated to transport them than a pilot with a plane at the pier across the street?

Peter had previously declared that he wouldn’t be allowed to risk being caught with bodies. Why, Jesse didn’t know. He was as fit to assume that risk as the others in the Group. There had never been any indication that he was not trusted. But for some reason, Peter did not want him to be endangered—just as, he now knew, Peter’s reluctance to preside at the Ritual had stemmed from unwillingness to expose him to possible harm. Was it for Carla’s sake, he wondered? Was it because her first husband had been caught, and for her to go through such an ordeal a second time might destroy her? Worse, might the authorities suspect her if a second partner—even if not her legal husband—was accused of murder? He too felt horror at that possibility . . . and yet he could not live on Undine without taking chances. The most fundamental rule of the Group was that fear must not be allowed to interfere with living.

He was not obliged to respect Peter’s wishes. The Ritual pledges said nothing about obedience to the Group’s leader; on the contrary, his commitment required him to support fellow-members. If they asked him to transport a body, as well they might if his plane was close at hand, he would do it. Knowing this, Peter had hoped he wouldn’t get into such a position. He had backed down because he knew he was wrong to be ruled by anxiety. But excess caution was so unlike Peter that Jesse wondered if there was something more going on, some danger to the Group of which he himself was unaware.

That week was the happiest he’d known since coming to the city. The first day he did little more than acquire the ability to land the plane, practicing over and over without going far offshore. It was odd how nervous Zeb appeared to be about it, considering the many years of instructing he’d said that he had. Surely his young, inexperienced students had been slower learners. But once Jesse demonstrated that he could touch down safely, regardless of wind and weather, Zeb relaxed. From then on, they flew all over the part of Undine within range. Once they even went to Verge Island, the farthest out in the cluster that had been settled, which of course covered only a fraction of the planet’s surface. A few more of the larger islands also had recharging stations; Zeb took him to them, familiarizing him with the common routes and introducing him to the people he would meet during his required solo flights and later, when he began charter flying.

By the time the first offshift arrived, he’d had four days of instruction, three or four hours a day. On the last afternoon, he had soloed, with Zeb standing on the pier cheering him on despite, Jesse guessed, considerable pain at the sight of the plane he loved taking off without him. It marked the true transfer of ownership. Worse, Jesse knew, was the fact that for the next five days he would be taking it where Zeb could not go. With Peter as the official instructor aboard, he and Carla were going to Maclairn Island, which on maps was marked as off limits to landing. “I’m sorry,” he told Zeb, “but my partner has a job, you see, and when she’s free, we fly to a place her friends own. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to have my own plane.”

As he went through preflight inspection the next morning, Jesse was overcome with fullness of joy in the realization that the plane
was
his own. He had literally never owned anything before. He’d gone to the Fleet academy straight from school and in Fleet, with your life spent in space, you didn’t have a chance to buy a house or a car or anything else people normally acquired. You didn’t have a personal computer or video gear, since on starships those things were standard equipment. Even the locally-programmed phones used on shore leave were rented. He’d possessed nothing but his pocket datakeeper and the few clothes he wore when not in uniform.

Now he had everything, intangible and now tangible as well. Carla, friends, use of the Lodge he loved, the prospect of health and long life . . . powers of mind beyond his former imagining . . . a commitment to something important . . . and not merely a way to occupy his time, but a plane that belonged to him and a long-term occupation he would enjoy. If he were superstitious, Jesse thought, he would not dare to acknowledge so much good fortune. It drove his knowledge of the Group’s ongoing danger into the background, so that he was scarcely aware that the trouble-free time could not last.

Peter, seeing his happiness, seemed reconciled to the situation. They took off in high spirits, looking forward to another relaxing offshift. Nevertheless, Jesse continued to sense that he was hiding something, something more than his concern for Ian. Had he told Ian? Jesse wondered. Did Ian watch from his window, aware that they were in this particular plane headed where he must wish he, too, could go?

Evenings on the Island, Peter went up with Jesse to teach him the fundamentals of night flying. The moon, so much larger and brighter than Earth’s moon, made this easy; seaplanes were not limited to daylight as they were on most worlds. Circling the Island, looking down at it, Jesse had an overwhelming sense of attachment. He knew that never again would he want to be a worldless rover—and yet he couldn’t quite forget that there was no refuge from the peril in which he and Carla lived on this particular world.

~
 
43
 
~

At the Lodge, despite the fact that the Net was now accessible, few people watched the news and phones were set to receive only emergency calls. Group members had little desire to be reminded of the world outside. So on their arrival back in the city for Carla’s next workweek, Jesse was startled to find current newscasts heavily focused on a sensational crime. Several houses on the waterfront had been set afire during the past few days, and investigators had sought the arsonist in vain. Much speculation was being devoted to what sort of dreadful mental illness such a person must suffer from.

“Is arson that unusual?” Jesse asked. “Of course, I suppose that here the real firebugs, the pyromaniacs, are diagnosed young and drugged into passivity. And if it were insurance fraud, multiple houses wouldn’t have been hit.”

“There’s more than just that to wonder about,” Carla said. “It’s not easy to set a house on fire; we have no accelerants—none of the petroleum products that exist on Earth. We don’t have gunpowder either, since guns are prohibited here and none have ever been imported. To burn a building, an arsonist would have to either short-circuit its electrical system or use explosives from mining operations. Both those methods require time and skill.”