Heritage of Flight (34 page)

And so they had. Managed. Not lived, Ayelet thought. At first, she had missed her mother and her home. Later on, though, she and Ari had understood their own homelessness. Being children, they had had to be content to follow their father—their affable, splendidly competent father—from world to world. And then had come the war, years of enduring and wandering.

Until they came to Cynthia. This was her home now, hers and Ari's, even her father's. He was older now, heavier than he had ever been, oddly breathless and tired at times. Cynthia had taught them all a kind of patience. Lohr had taught her and Ari more: to fight, occasionally to rebel, and to use the rage she often felt but rarely dared express as a weapon in the struggle to endure the terrible days of Ari's sickness and the lean days thereafter, when Lohr stalked the camp as if his sanity had been buried along with his sister; and haunted Thorn Halgerd as if they had been born at one birth.

Those had been hard times for Halgerd too. Like the rest of them, he had grown very lean. Starving himself, Lohr shouted once, enraged at the man. Playing martyr.

"Are you trying to finish off the deaths, join your brothers?” he had snarled.

To Ayelet's horror, Halgerd's pale skin had flushed, his lean fists knotting. Halgerd wasn't just a clone; he had been augmented for speed and strength. If he struck Lohr, he might crush his teeth or his jaw. If he was angry enough, just one blow might snap Lohr's spine; and Ayelet had already known she loved him.

But Thorn had unclenched his fists and turned away.

"That's the first time you've been angry at any of us,” Lohr taunted him.

"The second. Your captain saw me the first time,” Thorn had said, then turned away. Ayelet knew he had walked about the camp rashly, a willing target for anyone who wanted a scapegoat to strike down.

He and Lohr had been close those months, so close—"Don't you worry,
I'm
not one of his stupid brothers!” Lohr had snapped at her once with real venom. That friendship remained, even after Lohr and Ayelet married, and Ayelet conceived Lohr's child. Gradually she accepted the idea of Halgerd as a friend. She had always been patient: Halgerd was quiet, a gentle man who occupied much of his time teaching the littlests to fly, and the rest of it on designing the ultralights Beneatha called a risk to life and limb and a stupid waste of resources. (As Lohr said,
She would!
)

Why had Thorn never married? Ro Economus stared after him whenever he passed by. He was handsome and considerate, even shy, a combination that many women considered irresistible. Perhaps he had been alone too long. Perhaps the bond with his brothers had wrecked him for any other intimate ties. Besides, Lohr told her, Halgerd was still little older in actual waketime than they themselves.

Wake up!
Ayelet ordered herself. She stretched laboriously, as did the child she bore. She patted her belly, exulting in the strength of her child's kicks. Patiently she rearranged herself in a chair that felt like it had grown even harder in the past five minutes and adjusted a cushion to support the small of her back.

She glanced at the monitors. As she expected, there was nothing doing out there in Cynthia system. No ... there was something ... teasing her, way on the edge of reception ... she turned up the gain on the monitors.

Soon her watch would be over, and then even Dr. Pryor couldn't refuse her a chance at light work in the fields. Just let her try, Ayelet promised herself.

That flicker of light again! She froze. It wasn't chatter. It was a signal. She turned up reception again, scanning all the usual bands, and most of the less common ones for good measure.

It
was
a signal. The last time they had suspected Secess’ in-system—and got Thorn out of the deal—all but the eldest, the sickest,
and the pregnant, God damnit!
were evacuated to the moths’ caves.
We don't call them moths, not ever; they are Cynthians,
Ayelet corrected herself. None of the children was permitted to call the Cynthians moths; that was a racist term that reduced sapient beings to winged bugs.
We have to remember that they were people
. How often had the littlests been drilled in that?

Well, even a year after their deaths, the Cynthians’ caves had reeked of musk and formic acid. By the end of the first few days of the evacuation, the stink of stale, terrified humans had been added to the brew. There wasn't much Ayelet wouldn't do to escape ever having to deal with that stink again.

Signal or no signal, she determined, lower lip outthrust and jaw squared in a brief rehearsal of the speech she planned to make, she wasn't leaving home again. This settlement, provincial as her father might find it, was
hers
; and she was staying put.

For she knew that Lohr wouldn't leave; and she wouldn't leave him.

The signal strengthened, grew focused, all chatter melding into one great beam of query directed straight at them.

That was when Ayelet heard the first recognition code.

Lohr, her father, and her brother could shove it, she told herself. She wasn't
that
pregnant (though she decided then and there that she'd exploit her pregnancy if she had to) that she couldn't climb up to the caves. But Cynthia colony was her home. She wasn't leaving. No matter what anyone said.

Anyone? What about these invaders?

Recognition codes ... like all the littlests, the civilians, the officers, and the life-sciences people who were “none of the above,” Ayelet had had the rec codes drilled into her.

Query? she asked when the ship's librarian came in with the data on Cynthia.

"Alliance ID codes,” came the librarian's opinion.

"Alliance?” she asked the computer with the voice of a long-dead librarian.

"Yes, Lieutenant."

The panic button, red and taped down to the console, tempted her. She peeled away the tape.

Again the comms exploded into life with lines and lines of codes. That had to be a ship! Theirs or one of the Secess'? She ought to hit the panic button now, give the littlests a chance to evacuate.

But
I'm
not leaving here
, she told herself, unusually truculent.
This is home
.

Again the signal rose. It was getting closer and closer, as if whatever tracked them scorned standard search patterns. That signal
knew
they were here. Which might mean that the war was over, and that the Alliance had come—with flourishes—to rescue its lost children. But that was a story not even the littlests would believe. Sure, the assured speed of the signal might mean an Alliance ship.

Or it could be betrayal:
that Becker!
Ayelet remembered him, all thoughts and plots as he watched the littlests like they were beasts who might suddenly go mad and leap for him. He might have changed sides; or someone who knew him might have been captured and traded the knowledge of Cynthia base for his life. Or her life.

This called for decisions Ayelet knew she couldn't make. She took out her commlink, blew into it, and spoke softly.

"Rafe, can you come to Comm Central?” she asked, sweating and ashamed because her voice shook.

David ben Yehuda shouted out the final order and stepped back. Rafe chuckled. Even from his hilltop vantagepoint, Rafe could see him frown, and he suspected that ben Yehuda was swearing under his breath. Just last year Dave would have shouted with rage if anyone suggested he take it easier. He was grizzled now, and chest pains meant that he had to ease up on heavy labor. The work crews drew breath (Rafe thought he could almost hear them suck in the air), leaned on their ropes, and lunged forward, straining for each step, struggling against each slide backward.

As they pulled the ropes taut, the great tents rose, soaring higher than any of the domes thrown up in the settlement's first seasons. That cluster had grown; in the past ten years, the settlement had almost earned the name of town; and thriving new families needed temporary quarters. The tents would serve until more permanent housing could be contrived.

Sunlight gleamed golden off the white, resistant surfaces of the tents, spiked and vaned like flying creatures yoked, just for now, to the land. They too were part of a harvest, just as surely as the fields that lay beyond, bordered by the brown river and the violent green of the ground scrub, ordered rows of amber and ochre, greens and golds, glistening violet all around their perimeter from the tiny repellors that protected their crops against stobor.

Even at this distance, Rafe could hear them, faint as the white noise generators that eased human ears on the starships he was well content never to see again. Or to think about. He shrugged off the memory, then rubbed his hands through hair thinning now at temples and brow.

A shout drew his attention. At this hour of the day. many Cynthians, were working in the fields; Rafe saw Beneatha, thinner than she had been, her close-cropped curls graying at the temples, but her bony hands still emphatic as she directed her farmers. This year, her fields would yield three separate crops, spaced out over the growing season.

Rafe grimaced. It had taken months of research and a good deal of shouting to convince Beneatha that agroinfection of the crops with ice-minus posed no danger to vital insects and wildlife (including those ubiquitous, seasonal nuisances, the stobor). Their harvests had been leaner then. Now, however, they would never again have to suffer a lean season like the one they had endured the winter they had torched the ergot-infected grain.

All the settlers had gone short of food, the leaders shortest of all. The littlests’ faces had hollowed out until they almost resembled the wild children Rafe had first seen on board the old
Jeffrey Amherst
. And despite Pauli's quips that it was definitely worthwhile to be pregnant, if only to be sure of full rations, he knew that she had been giving away her food. She had been gaunt by spring. When she miscarried, no one was really surprised. “I have other children to protect,” she had said, and gone off by herself, as she had done more and more in the past years.

After that winter, the spring's planting had been as serious as any battle, Rafe thought as he stared out over the fields. His imagination transformed them to the fields of ten years past: much smaller and browner, new furrows gaping like wounds from which seeds and fertilizer seeped into the river every time it rained—and it usually rained that summer: so much so that once again they feared ergot and the madness it brought.

But the settlement had escaped. As if in celebration, in trust that the bad times were over that winter, at least four of the younger women—and Pauli once again—became pregnant. Rafe had been furious at her and more so at himself, but “she wants to replace her child,” Dr. Pryor told him firmly. “It's her choice; and frankly, I think it will be good for her.” Pryor too had worried about Pauli's long silences.

The colony thrived, what remained of it. Rafe glanced over at the graveyard, too large by far for his liking, yet thank God it was not larger yet. Many of the frailer settlers, those most gravely affected by the convulsions, madness, and tremors from the ergot, had died in the lean seasons before they could reap their next harvest. Some had been older people whose skills the colony could ill afford to lose; but too many of the others had been refugee children. Rafe blinked away angry tears, as he always did when he thought of them. Dammit, they hadn't had very much of a life, had they? He sighed. At least they had had some experience of trust and love to take with them into the dark. ‘Cilla, bless her heart, had proved that. If she hadn't hidden with Rafe and Pauli's son, whom she had snatched to protect, she might still be alive today. Even during the worst shortages, her grave, and then those of others, had always been strewn with flowering plants.

The others? Pauli's voice floated up to him. High overhead, the sky was full of wings: the next generation of Cynthians, wheeling and banking (and escaping collisions by shrill cries and very narrow margins) as they practiced with the gliders. Rafe grinned; his own son Serge was up there, only a bit younger than Lohr had been the first times he had flown.

Lohr folded his wings and dived, straightening out in time to hear Pauli's indignant shouts. He landed, and she limped toward him with remarkable speed.

After she'd broken her leg in a gliding accident (who but Pauli would go aloft in high winds to shepherd a frightened child?), Dr. Pryor had warned her to stay off it until it healed. But that was the autumn the physician's pneumonia returned. For weeks she had been ill, and had never quite recovered, so Pauli promptly forgot her warnings. She had no time to lie, or sit idle, nor patience to delegate others to be hands and feet for her. At least, not for long.

She was up and prowling her settlement as soon as she could hobble; and now, she never would lose that limp.

Golden light glinted off the metal wings, and pooled at the horizon, where the sun was lowering. Fields and sky echoed with voices and songs.
These
Cynthians were alive, and they were making their world richer for their presence.
Please God, let this serve as our atonement
, Rafe prayed, as he prayed every day for years. Not even Pauli knew he had started praying.

Certainly the past ten years seemed to prove that Cynthia had finally decreed that the past was past; and that the stubborn, guilty humans were the planet's children now. That, at least, was what some of the gentlest of the settlers thought—and what Rafe longed to believe.