Stewards of the Flame (56 page)

What difference does that make?

A big one. Freighters don’t call here frequently; the odds on it weren’t great enough for me to worry about before. But freighters carry arms to protect their cargo from piracy. The crew we put into an unarmed shuttle can call ahead for help, and we’ll be pursued until we go into hyperdrive. It gives us too narrow a window.

Does it take long to get into hyperdrive? Maybe I’ve seen too many action vids, but I assumed it was a fast process.

It’s fast enough. The trouble is that I won’t have access to the charts until we’ve gotten rid of the bridge crew. I can’t go into hyperdrive without time to study them—God only knows where we’d end up.

Could we disable the comm equipment of the shuttle we put the crew in?

We could, but then their chance of survival wouldn’t be large, Peter. Nobody will be expecting them, after all. They’ve got to be able to communicate with Undine to land here safely; if they can’t even send an SOS they’ll be shot out of the sky.

We don’t want to get them killed,
Peter agreed.

Seeing nothing that could be done about it, Jesse tried to put it out of his mind. The window would be narrow. He might get only a fast look at the charts. It had been many years since he’d calculated a jump not familiar to him in any case; this merely added one more complication. They could not give up the venture at this stage, so there was no point in worrying.

Yet he did worry. Not just about that, but about the incalculable number of things that could go wrong both before and after their arrival on the unknown world they now thought of as Maclairn. Natives of Undine had known nothing of physical hazards or hardships. Could courage alone ensure the survival of people whose lives had been as sheltered as theirs had?

It wasn’t that he was personally afraid. What dismayed him was the responsibility—responsibility even for Peter, who was carrying the greatest burden and yet had too little experience to recognize the immensity of the perils confronting them. And for Carla . . . he recalled, with a chill, the strong feeling in his dream that if he failed in what Ian expected of him, Carla would die. . . .

She could not help knowing that he was troubled. It came through more in telepathic converse than it would have if they’d been together in the flesh.
Jesse
, she asked finally,
Is there something you’re not telling me?

    
Only that what we’re getting into is more chancy than you know. Than anyone seems to know.

Is that what you think? Oh, Jesse, it’s not like that.

You all act as if we were simply moving to a new island. Even Peter . . .

He’s not as naive as he may seem. Do you suppose he didn’t think it through for weeks before Ian died, before he ever decided to go through with it?

Of course he did, but he saw only what he wanted to see. The ideal. The vision worth striving for. And now, the goal for which Ian sacrificed himself. Not the dark side of it, the real possibility that we’ll never reach that goal.

Have you forgotten the words of the Ritual, Jesse? None of us are unaware of the hazards—we’re simply pledged to live beyond fear.

Yes. “Unfaced fear is the destroyer. We will acknowledge fear and accept it, we will go past it and live free.” He
had
forgotten. The Ritual was a way of life, not simply a means of coping with the familiar risks of violating Undine’s laws. Privately, they had all accepted the magnitude of the danger and were living as they had his first week on the Island, when he’d thought them young and carefree and had envied their ability to have fun. They believed the adventure
would
be fun, but not because they viewed it unrealistically. . . .

It’s like touching flame,
Carla told him.
We just
do
it—and to be able to do it, we have to know we could be burned, and be willing. And the main reason we do it isn’t to reach a goal. It’s simply to be all we can be. We’d lose less by being burned than by turning away.

Like touching flame. Suddenly Jesse’s spirits soared. Putting your hand in flame was impossible—yet he had done it. His release from the Hospital had been impossible, yet he was free. Miracles did happen. But the key to them was that you had to be willing for them not to happen. You had to know that they might not, and still feel all right with what you were doing. Wasn’t that what Peter had taught him in his very first feedback session? Wasn’t it what Ian had conveyed in the dream? Ian must have known perfectly well that the chances of their reaching a new world and surviving there were not large. To assume that he and Peter, or for that matter other Group members, were hiding their heads in the sand did them injustice. He’d underestimated even Carla. . . .

I’m sorry,
he said silently.
Still, after all that’s happened, I hadn’t caught on. I was afraid for you when I didn’t need to be.

I was afraid for you, too, at first. Not for myself. It’s easier to deal with fear for yourself than with fear for someone you love.

Yes . . . I never really loved anyone before loving you
. Nor had he cared for friends the way he cared for Peter and Kira. He suddenly saw why the risks now seemed so worrisome.

~
 
61
 
~

On the next-to-last night before departure, Carla began to know something was wrong. It had begun that morning, when she had been scheduled to fly to the Island with Peter. It was the start of their offshift, and they’d planned to pack up the lab equipment and close the Lodge, from which everyone else had already departed. But Peter hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t answered his phone. Concerned, she’d called everyone she could think of, but he was nowhere to be found.

This was not like Peter—and in any case, there was only one day left. To leave retrieval of the equipment until the very last minute was risky, to say the least; what if something went wrong with the undercover trucking arrangement he’d made? What if a freak storm came up and prevented flying? That was unlikely, to be sure, but still . . .

Peter had been acting strangely about the flight in any case. At first he hadn’t intended to take her with him. “You need someone to help you,” she’d insisted, knowing he had not asked anyone else and that the others weren’t aware that another trip had to be made. “Besides, I want to check the software and records again. I know they’re all in the datakeeper I downloaded them to, still I’d like to be the one to pack the computer.”

“I’d just as soon go by myself, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind.” The loss of the neurofeedback software would be a major blow to the Group from which it would take years to recover. They were taking the lab computer with them, but she’d also stored the software on multiple backup devices. She dared not keep any of these in her apartment, much less carry them to work with her—they contained a complete history of the Group’s discoveries and accomplishments as well as personal records showing mind-patterns of individual members, plus genetic and medical data she’d downloaded from the Hospital. All the copies were at the Lodge, as had been the normal policy. They would be taken directly to the spaceport with the other things. But she felt a need to watch over them personally except for the brief time the boxes were on the truck, and in fact she planned to carry one copy in her own duffle bag. Peter had too much else on his mind to give full attention to them.

“It won’t be a pleasant trip, Carla,” he’d said.

No, she supposed not. Saying goodbye to the Lodge would be hard on Peter; it held memories dating back to his first meeting with Ian during his college years. Being a crèche child, he’d never known any other real home. Everything important in his life had happened there, including his tragically-ended marriage as well as the friendships that mattered to him. “You need someone with you,” she’d insisted. “You shouldn’t have to go through it alone. And I have memories, too, after all.”

So, reluctantly, he had agreed. And then, when the time came, he’d disappeared. She knew he hadn’t gone alone because his plane was still moored in the city; that was the first thing she’d checked. By evening, she was frantic.

She was almost ready for bed when at last he phoned. “I was held up,” he said shortly. “We’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ve rescheduled the meeting with the trucker.”

During the flight, he told her what had happened. It had started with one of the children. Only a few Group members had children—none below teenage—and luckily most of them happened to be home for their offshift. But there was one such couple on the alternate shift, which meant their son would, theoretically, be confined in the crèche on the night of departure. They had expected to hide him for two days instead of letting him go back there when the shift began. Unfortunately, one of his friends had shown up to walk to school with him, and it had been impossible for him to say he wasn’t going.

From a crèche, there was just one conceivable escape. The boy, who was no fool and who had been let in on the secret, had done the only thing he could do—soon after arrival he’d feigned illness and had been taken to the treatment wing of the Hospital. The parents had then contacted Peter for help in getting him out. There wasn’t any legitimate way to do it. The boy hadn’t been aware that he should fake mental illness; he was in a medical ward over which Peter had no jurisdiction. Yet Peter was pledged to support fellow Group members and could hardly have asked them to abandon their son while they took off into space, even apart from the fact that the kid couldn’t be trusted not to reveal their plans if pressed.

In the end, he had simply walked into the ward and smuggled the boy out in inconspicuous clothes, relying on Anne to suppress the alarm at the ID checkpoint. Which would have been okay, except that a search was initiated when he was found to be missing and Peter’s presence in that ward had been noticed.

“God, Peter,” said Carla. “They didn’t suspect you?”

“No. They only thought I might have seen something. But I was questioned for a long time by Warick. The talk got onto . . . other things. I suppose a certain amount of unconscious telepathy goes on no matter how firmly I close my mind to specifics. He knew I was on edge. He jumped to the wrong conclusion as to why.”

“Next week’s election.”

“Yes. He knows I’m bitterly opposed to the microchipping, and I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t give him any further indication of my suspicion about the arsons, but it was plain that he has a guilty conscience. There’s little doubt in my mind that he was back of them, and he’s afraid I’ll go public with what he fears I’ve guessed.”

“Oh, Peter.” She felt a chill; Jesse’s warning had impressed her deeply.

“Well, there’s only today and tonight, and then I’ll be out of his way for good.” Peter frowned. “It was strange,” he reflected. “Warick was hostile at first, made me feel my job might be in jeopardy—and then suddenly he was all smiles. In spite of the low opinion he’s always had of me, he invited me home to dinner, and it wouldn’t have been wise to refuse. That’s why I didn’t call till so late.”

“Maybe he decided bribes would work better than threats.”

“That’s what I thought, but he didn’t offer one. Perhaps he was buttering me up in preparation for a promotion that will depend on my cooperation.”

“Peter . . . did you tell him you were going to the Island this offshift?”

“Yes. I hoped that might reassure him that I won’t be around much before the election.”

For some reason it made her uneasy. Though Jesse hadn’t said anything about the possibility of tampering with the plane, she’d sensed that he was thinking it. But surely even the worst of the Meds weren’t murderers. . . .

All the same, she was relieved when they arrived safely.

The dismantling and packing of the neurofeedback equipment and cryogenic bank took quite a while. Looking around the storeroom for padding materials, she came across the stock of imported candles used for the Ritual, and fit them in between the various wrapped items; there might be no way to make candles in the future. After everything was boxed and she had double-checked that the data backups were well protected, she started to clean up the leftover mess.

“Someone will eventually find this room,” she pointed out. “The government will take over the Island, I suppose—” At Peter’s look, she stopped, biting her tongue. Of course it was painful for him to think of the government seizing his beloved Lodge, even though he’d be long gone.

“Don’t bother to pick up,” he said. “It’s not going to matter.”

They carried the boxes down to the dock and loaded them into the plane, then went back to eat lunch. Most of the food had been removed earlier, but there were some imperishables left that no one had bothered to take. Neither of them had much appetite, but Peter could scarcely eat anything. His face was white. The emptiness of the Lodge so often filled with fun and laughter, the sunlight streaming into a deserted room, the cold fireplace . . . it was enough to depress anyone, Carla thought. Peter had been right; this was not pleasant.

“You’ll need energy to fly,” she said, looking at his untouched food.

“Take it with us. I can’t get it down now, my head aches. I knew today would be hell, but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad. Go back to the dock; I’ll be along in a minute.”

She complied. If he preferred to be alone with his bittersweet memories, he had a right to privacy. Hers had been dealt with the last time she’d been here, after Ian’s funeral, when she had stood beside the fading fire with Jesse. Jesse, too, was making his last flight today, she remembered. He would perhaps fly over the Island once more before giving up his plane forever.

It was a long time before Peter joined her on the dock. She noticed as he approached that he seemed to be stumbling.

“Carla,” he said. The hand that gripped hers was cold. “There’s something I haven’t told you. That I’ve known all along, but couldn’t bear to tell anyone.”