Jenna Starborn (27 page)

“Then perhaps it is Mr. Taff I should be going to, for he might be willing to pay me an even higher salary for fetching such a treasure for him,” I said solemnly.

Mr. Ravenbeck looked ludicrously crestfallen. “Jenna! You would not do that! And rob me of the chance to play the gallant! It was my solution, after all. I ought to be allowed the satisfaction of acting upon it.

I smiled again. “You have no need to be gallant, or solve the dilemmas in my life. But I do appreciate the offer.”

“Which you are telling me you refuse to accept?”

“Which I am refusing to accept. But I will bring you back some of this apricot concoction, if you wish. My only stipulation is that you share it with me. I have grown curious about its taste.”

“That is a bargain,” he promised. “We will stay up late one night and drink it together in celebration of some event. Your homecoming, for instance.”

“Something more momentous, surely,” I said. “The announcement of your engagement, perhaps.”

He laughed. “Or the night before my wedding. For that is a night upon which I will surely need some fortification! And you would really sit up with me, drinking madly, on such an occasion, Jenna? If you promise me now, I will hold you to it in the future.”

“I do not suppose that even I can get too madly drunk upon half of one bottle of wine,” I said. “And yes, I would be happy to see you through such an evening, if you think my presence would be a comfort to you.”

His eyes rested on me with an unfathomable expression. “You do not know how great a comfort, Jenna,” he said.

“Very well, then, that is settled,” I said briskly. “You have given me permission to leave and permission to return, which is what I came for, and now I have your commission as well. I have much to do tonight, still, and so I must return to my room now.”

“And you will be gone in the morning before we all waken?” he asked.

“Most likely, unless you rise before the dawn.”

“I doubt it. Then say good-bye now.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Ravenbeck. I hope you enjoy the rest of your visit with your guests.”

“Less so with you gone,” he said.

“I know, for your teams will be uneven when you play SpaceShot.”

He smiled, but rather forlornly. “I don't think I can manage it,” he said.

“Manage what? To win at simulated military battles without my aid? I assure you, it will be amazingly easy.”

“To say good-bye. I will miss you while you're gone. It will be strange to wake up in this house and know you are not under its roof.”

“Think of the many days, the many years, you slept here, and I was sleeping on a planet whose only claim to glory was the production of a bad fruit wine,” I said cheerfully. “That should get you through the dreary mornings.”

Another sad smile; I began to think he was truly dismayed at my leaving, and my heart began to race, though I showed no outward signs of excitement. “But I think I missed you even then,” he said. “For I never cared for Thorrastone Park till you were here. I hated to spend even a week in its confines. It must have been, as you say, those dreary mornings that made me avoid it. And now you force me to endure them again.”

“I am sure you can find other consolations,” I said, keeping my voice steady, though it was an effort. “Mr. Ravenbeck, I truly must go.”

“Yes, you must,” he said, but as he spoke, he lifted both hands and set them upon my shoulders, as if to hold me to the spot. His grip was not tight—in fact, he merely rested his palms upon my bones, almost weightlessly, as one might seek to hold in place a shadow that had no substance-and yet I was as effectively anchored to the floor as if he had wrapped me in chains and anvils. Again, he looked down at me with that serious, melancholy, searching gaze, as if somewhere on my face was printed the text to a secret he absolutely must know and had no hope of discovering.

“You will come back, Jenna?” he asked in a woeful voice.

“Nothing could prevent me, sir.”

“You will not forget us?”

“In such a short time? Impossible.”

He opened his mouth as if to say one more thing, then shut it again without speaking. He leaned infinitesimally closer; for one wild moment I thouglit he might kiss my cheek. And then suddenly, he lifted his hands, whirled aside, and vanished from the room without speaking. I stared after him, more startled and unnerved by this abrupt exit than I had been by any of the previous times he had left me in a hasty fashion. He was not happy that I was to leave Fieldstar, that much was clear, but what that unhappiness signified was incomprehensible to me. I slowly dragged myself back upstairs and began the sad business of packing for a journey toward death.

 

 

I
n the morning, I caught the dawn bus at the Thorrastone Park airlock. I was one of only three surly passengers, and none of us attempted conversation. Once we arrived at the spaceport, we disembarked, and I carried my luggage through the quiet streets toward the huge, hulking hangars where the space-going craft awaited their next takeoff. I had some trouble finding which section of which hangar would serve as my port of exit, but eventually I located the proper service desk and caught the attention of a clerk who could issue me the tickets I had reserved. I was prepared to recite my credit account number and was astonished when he shook his head.

“Paid for,” he said, his speech just as clipped though less genteel than Mr. Fulsome's. “Over the StellarNet last night. You're free to board.”

Astonishment saw me silently through the gray corridors of the ship and into the tiny cabin I would share with two other strangers for our one-week voyage to Hestell. Indignation and rage struggled to find a way through my amazement, but they were puny and short-lived compared to the gratitude that sprang up weed-tall and indestructible alongside the shock. Mr. Ravenbeck had trampled on my independence, the very prize of my emotional garden, and yet his motive was so kind and his spirit so generous that I felt beautified, not betrayed.

I chose a bunk at random, installed my belongings in a featureless polystyrene armoire, and left the cabin to check out the amenities of the ship upon which I would spend the next seven days. I needed something real to distract me from the dangerous romantic fantasies in my head.

A
unt Rentley clutched my hand for perhaps the third time in an hour. “Do not go, Jenna,” she whispered.

“I am not leaving. I was merely resettling myself on my chair.”

“I cannot breathe when you are not in the room.”

“I know. You told me that yesterday.”

“At night—there is no air in the room. None at all.”

“Would you like me to bring in a cot and sleep beside you?”

She wheezed heavily, a deeply unattractive sound that yet roused my sympathy. She was skeletal, gray, unrecognizable either as the woman I had once known or, I was sorry to say, even a human member of the parade of species. I thought of the aprifresel wine, the oxenheart tree, things that had been created from two barely compatible organisms. She seemed now a hybrid herself, a discordant crossbreed of life and death.

“Oh, Jenna, if you would do that,” she gasped. “That would be so good of you.”

“Then I will. Tonight.”

The assurance seemed to calm her as nothing else I had said all day had managed to do, and she settled back onto her bed and appeared to sleep. I resigned myself to another few hours of unmitigated boredom. I imagined if you were watching over the deathbed of someone you truly loved, such a vigil as mine would be anything but boring. Painful, heartrending, each broken breath a cause for unparalleled terror—
No, not now, not this breath, it cannot be the last.
But tedium is all you are aware of when you are overseeing the death of someone you only pity.

My aunt had been pathetically happy to see me when I arrived three days previously. She had thrashed in her bed till she achieved a sitting position, and reached out her one free arm as if to throw it about my neck. I had bent down to allow her to hug me as well as she could, and listened to her choked, rasping words of welcome and apology. I could not tell exactly what she was saying to me and it did not matter. That my presence had given her a lift, a sweet extension of life, was evident. My long, dull, expensive journey had been worth it for this.

Since then, we had had nothing that would pass for real conversation. During her waking hours, she was fretful, suffering, and at times delirious, but she was rarely awake. Her left arm was encased in a PhysIV, a metallic gauntlet that completely swallowed her bones from her fingertips to the bend of her elbow. This neat little contraption performed a variety of functions, both to monitor her vital systems and inject her with necessary drugs and nutrients. I imagined that, on the interior surface of the hard glove, various needles were inserted into her skin at immovable points, offering either an entrance for the essential fluids or an exit for the blood and plasmas that must be tested. The PhysIV was attached by great opaque cables to an ambulatory stand so that, if she really desired mobility, she could merely come to her feet and waltz her self-contained monitors down the halls with her.

But it was clear that, by the time I arrived, her days of climbing from her bed were over. In fact, I could almost fancy that my appearance was the signal for her to begin the final descent into oblivion. For the first day I walked into her room, before she caught sight of me, I saw her lying tense and rigid on the bed, every muscle gathered taut, as though she fought off invisible foes through mental kinesis that required great concentration. Once she saw me, once she had thrown her arm about my shoulders and, in a misguided attempt to kiss my forehead, nuzzled my cheek with her thin, dry lips, she relaxed as completely as a child does upon falling asleep at the end of an exhausting day. Every time I saw her thereafter, she was slack, she was supine; she was wax and water, melting under ethereal heat and evaporating away.

When she was awake, no matter how incoherent, she wanted me near her. When she slept, I could escape down to the kitchens. Of the servants who had been here when I had left more than fourteen years ago, only Betista remained. She had been even more delighted to see me than my aunt had been, and more articulate too, and I enjoyed the chances we had for long, informative conversations. She had aged, naturally—she looked thinner, grayer, more resolute than I remembered—but she was happy to see me.

“So tell me of your exciting life!” she had demanded on that first afternoon as I sat in her kitchen, sipping tea and eating pastries. “Traveling all over the universe like a regular adventurer, you've been.”

I smiled. “Hardly that. I've only been to Lora and Fieldstar—oh, and Hestell, to change shuttles, but since I was just there a day, I did not get to see much.”

“Hestell!” she exclaimed enviously. “And is it as beautiful as they say? I've seen it on the 'Net news, of course, but that's not the same as being there.”

“I took a tour of the capital city while I was waiting,” I admitted. “But I was almost frightened! Do you know that one hundred million people live in that one tiny city? Even on Lora, there were not so many people in one small place. I found it hard to deal with, I must say. So many emotions packed down and made that much more intense—hatred, happiness, grief, desire. They are hard enough to handle when they are allowed space to breathe and dissipate, but when they are clamped down tightly like a gas under pressure, you know that there must be explosions every day.”

“Oh, Miss Jenna, how you do talk!” Betista said, laughing. “Most people don't have time for such emotions every day. It's a matter of getting up, struggling through the chores as best they can, and falling into bed each night, glad the effort is over.”

“Most days,” I agreed, thinking of my placid, undifferentiated routine on Lora, and my easy, undemanding weeks on Fieldstar-until Mr. Ravenbeck had arrived. “But when those combustible elements are added to even the most inert mixture—watch out! Things you never expected to react will prove the most colorful and violent.”

She asked me then how I liked Fieldstar, and I told her a little of the inhabitants. Although I did not dwell long on Mr. Ravenbeck and his many virtues, I described in some detail the members of his house party, since I knew she would enjoy some of their absurdities. Having overseen years of Aunt Rentley's entertainments, she could not help but be well-acquainted with the vanities of the upper stratum of citizenship.

“But I have not come here to talk about me,” I said finally. “What of my aunt? How long has she been ill? How has Jerret taken the news of her impending death? And what made her think of me at this dark hour of her life?”