Jenna Starborn (41 page)

I crossed to the door and reached for the knob, but I could not open it. I leaned my head against the frame and tried to summon up the strength to cross the threshold. Oh, what were my own requirements in the face of his despair? So long as he did not suffer, what did it matter that I threw away everything—every principle, every ethic, every personal belief—that had kept me strong through so many perils? If I could save him one moment of wretchedness, should not my whole life be forfeit? Who would care if I faltered, strayed, or disappeared?

A great rush of relief and anticipation washed over me as I thought,
I can stay. I do not have to leave him.
I lifted my head as this great burden of my own morality was lifted from me. I felt pounds lighter—giddy with hope—I would rush down the hall this minute, wake him from his bed or rouse him from his grief-induced stupor in the library, and I would promise to be his for all this life and eternity beyond....

But I could not open the door.

The weight of my conscience descended on me again; the clear, cold eye of reason opened inside my mind. Who would know if I transgressed my own personal ethical boundaries?
I
would know.
I
would care.
I
would have to be answerable, for the rest of my life, to the stern inner guiding voice whose implacable division of right from wrong would not alter for circumstance or supplication. I might for days or weeks be blissful in my surrender to love, but I knew myself, and my reliance on that inner voice, too well. That bright glittering joy would turn to soot and ashes in my hands. I would grow resentful and appalled; I would cease to love or respect Everett Ravenbeck—worse, I would cease to love or respect myself. I would become spiteful and mean, accusatory and hard. He would grow bewildered, then angry, then brutal. Our great love would grow small and pointless—the greatest loss; and heaped upon that tragedy would be material loss, that could result in me being homeless, penniless, and alone.

Even that you can endure!
my defiant heart cried out.
For those few weeks of happiness as his pseudo-bride, you can accept a lifetime of bitterness and drudgery! Live those few precious days, and when he no longer loves you, take your life. It will be worth nothing by then anyway.

I was tempted. Oh, Reeder, so sorely tempted! But as I stood there, frozen to the spot, torn between desire and duty, I heard a great voice speak to me in sonorous, echoing syllables; I heard the compassionate, motherly tones of the animating spirit of the universe.

“This course holds only thorns and tears. Child, be strong and flee.”

And I whispered in response, “Goddess, I will.”

And I picked up my forlorn bag, and I opened the door, and I crept down the stairs and out onto the lawn.

There was a predawn shuttle that passed by Thorrastone Park every morning, and if I hurried across the field, I would be in the airlock in time to catch it. Thus, I did not tarry for anything—not a last, heartbroken look at the stones and windows of the manor; not a farewell to the fallen oxenheart tree; not a glance at the security field that had been my main occupation for so many months. Nothing held me, nothing detained me. I practically ran to the airlock and quickly dialed it open, then closed; and I waited, panting, for the shuttle to pull into view.

It did, not five minutes after I had made it to the rendezvous. I boarded, gave little attention to my fellow passengers, and found a seat to myself. And there I sat, bolt upright and apprehensive, for the entire slow journey into town.

Everyone would know where I had gone, of course. It was too much to hope that Mr. Ravenbeck would not come for me as soon as he discovered my absence. I must be safely off Fieldstar within hours of my arrival at the spaceport. My only margin lay in his probable reluctance to enter my room without an invitation. He might knock on the door, but he would suppose me sleeping, or impervious, for a good many hours yet. Or so I believed. I did not know how quickly he would breach the limits of courtesy and burst into my chamber—or send in Mrs. Farraday to perform the same service. Upon his tolerance for enduring uncertainty I must place my dependence now.

We arrived at the spaceport as sunrise was beginning to send its frail, unpromising streaks of light across the sky. Disembarking from the bus, I headed directly to the main passenger ship terminal, a great gray hulking building of bustle and impersonality. There was, I knew, within this building a ticket window expressly designed for the impecunious and desperate. Here, the impoverished traveler could offer to work off part of his passage on a ship needing extra labor, and here some of the commercial cruisers agreed to take on passengers at half price at the very last moment if their billets were not entirely full. A traveler could not be choosy about his destination or accommodations at such an office, of course, but since I was neither, I had some hope of finding a ship off Fieldstar that left before noon.

It took me some time and many inquiries to locate the window I wanted, for the building was huge, and echoing, and completely disorienting. When I did at last fetch up at the station I desired, at first I thought I was in luck, for there was a man behind the counter and no one in line before me. The small clerk was all-over brown—hair, face, clothing—and he was involved in a desultory conversation with two rather villainous-looking men who lounged against the pillars behind him. I set down my little bag and took a deep breath.

“Sir,” I said. “I wish to travel off Fieldstar as quickly as possible. What kind of accommodations are available?”

“What kind of credit do you got?” was his reply. His voice was not exactly surly, but it was not particularly friendly either. His companions glanced at me once, then resumed their own conversation.

“Not much, I'm afraid,” I said, handing over my credit slip avowal which I had printed out earlier. He took it and snorted.

“That won't hardly get you a pleasure jaunt circling Fieldstar for the day,” he said. “You'll need more.”

I swallowed. “But I don't have more. I'm willing to work, though. I'm a technician, specially certified for nuclear reactor maintenance, but I have other skills that a ship overseer might find useful.”

The clerk shrugged and tapped a few sequences on his keyboard. “Well, there's the
Sallie Mae.
She leaves tomorrow morning, she's looking for sanitary crew,” he said. “But it's dirty work—”

“I don't mind dirty, but I must leave today,” I interrupted. “This morning, if possible.”

“Leaving today I've got
Horatio
. . . naw, that's a commercial cruiser, she's not hiring.
Ojo
's military, they won't take you on.
Macklin's
an agricultural scow, they're always looking for hands, but that's not till late tonight. Other than that”—he shrugged—“no other choices.”

I felt my blood drain from my face and pool in my knees and elbows. “What! Nothing else! But I must leave today! I—it's—surely you could check again, surely there must be something—”

He shrugged and played his hands once again over the keyboard. I stood rooted to the spot, but my mind was working furiously. Perhaps I could find someplace to hide in the spaceport, someplace Everett would not think to look for me, and sneak back to the landing field in the morning to catch either the
Sallie Mae
or the
Macklin
. This was a plan so fraught with risk I hardly dared consider it, but if I could not book passage today, I did not know what my other choice might be.

The clerk looked up at me, uninterest plain on his face. He did not even care what my extreme circumstances might be, that would cause me to flee a place so precipitously that I did not even ask the destination of the starships on which I was willing to book passage. “I don't see nothing,” he said.

One of the men standing behind him had started listening to our conversation a few sentences back, and now he strolled forward with his hands in his pockets. He was large and rather ferocious-looking, for his wild hair and wilder beard were both black and uncombed, and his face appeared to be crisscrossed with scars where it was not hidden by hair. Yet his eyes were alive with intelligence, and it was with some shrewdness that he looked me over. Also—or perhaps it was just my dire need for it—with a trace of sympathy.

“What's the lady need? Quick passage off? We've got a berth open if she wants it,” he said in a warm, rumbling voice. “And we're out of here this morning.”

I nodded at him, gratitude making my eyes brim over, but the brown clerk objected before I could speak. “She's only got a few levels of credit,” he said. “Won't cover the cost, even.”

The big man shrugged. “We've got to run the equipment whether there's somebody in that slot or not. All the other bunks are taken, and everyone else has paid full price. We can take her with us.”

“Yes, but will she want to go with you?” the clerk asked with some humor. He turned back to me and jerked a thumb at his friend. “Barkow's with the
Anniversary
. They're traveling out toward Appalachia. And 'cause she's a refitted scow that can't make standard speeds, the journey takes twice as long as it should. Like, a year.”

I felt my eyes fly wide. “A
year!
But—but—I surely don't have enough credit—and I cannot—and I would need food and provisions—a
year
—”

Barkow grinned. “Cold storage,” he said helpfully. “Only the crew's live. All the passengers go in suspended animation for the trip. Once you're strapped in, you just sleep the time away. We wake you up about two weeks outside of Appalachia.”

I stared at him, his ugly, kind face, and I felt myself turn to ice without benefit of his equipment. I had heard stories of space travel by suspended animation, which was relatively new and highly controversial—and sometimes unsuccessful. More than one ship had arrived at its destination and attempted to revive its cargo only to find every passenger a corpse. The equipment had malfunctioned, the monitors had failed, the intravenous lines had delivered insufficient quantities of food; all these things could and had gone wrong. Even on the more numerous occasions when the passengers had all arrived more or less intact, some had suffered ill effects from the voyage—oxygen deprivation that caused severe brain damage, quasi-starvation, illness. The only reason suspended animation was still used at all was that the price of a yearlong space journey was prohibitive for any except the most wealthy—five or ten times costlier than the journey under hypothermic conditions—and the planets along the outer rim of the settled universe were still looking for colonists. Appalachia was even farther from Fieldstar than Billalogia, where Everett Ravenbeck had once proposed to send me. It was so far away my mind almost could not comprehend its distance. To travel so far would be to sever forever any physical or emotional bond to Fieldstar.

“When do you leave?” I asked through lips that felt already frozen.

Barkow glanced at his watch. “Less than two hours. If you're coming with us, you'll have to decide now, because it takes a little time to put you in place.”

Almost without conscious volition, I nodded my head. “Yes. I will go with you.”

Barkow laughed, and slapped the clerk on the back. “Feed her credit into our account,” he said, and came around the edge of the counter to pick up my bag. “So what's your name, new lady passenger? Or should I not ask, seeing as how you're so anxious to get away from here?”

If I lied, Mr. Ravenbeck might not be able to track me. I glanced at the clerk, who had swiped my information through his terminal. “It's a double transfer,” he told me. “To my general account, then from my account to his. Nobody's going to untangle it.”

I thanked him with a nod of my head. “I would prefer to travel without a name,” I said to Barkow.

He laughed and strode forward so quickly I nearly had to run to keep up. “Fine with me,” he said. “But you'll need a name again sometime. Better be thinking of that while you sleep.” And he laughed again.

We had not covered more than a hundred yards in the terminal before Barkow hailed a man driving a small loading cart that was conveniently empty. We climbed aboard this and took off at dizzying speed across the great space of the hangar to one of the dozens of shuttle ports that ringed the building. Here, we boarded a twenty-seat tug that looked only slightly more sophisticated than Everett's Vandeventer, and which appeared to be the personal ferry of the
Anniversary
, for it had the ship's name stenciled on the exterior and interior walls. Barkow spoke in an intercom radio to an invisible pilot, and minutes after we had strapped ourselves in, the vehicle took off.

“We're the last ones to board,” Barkow said amiably, looking out the window as first the spaceport, then the landscape, and then the great round shape of the planet fell away. “I'll get you set up all nice and tight in your bunk, and we'll be on our way.”

“I can't tell you how much I appreciate—”

He grinned and waved away my thanks. “See how much you appreciate it when you're on Appalachia,” he said with unexpected insight. “If you have no credit left to you—well, we'll see. They're looking for settlers and people with skills, and they're not asking too many questions. Heard you say you were a technician. You ought to do just fine.”

After that, we had no conversation. The journey on the tug out to the main ship took about forty-five minutes, but soon enough we were snapped onto the airlock, and Barkow was carrying my bag on board. I did not get much chance to assess my surroundings as he hurried me through the corridor, not bothering to explain the various doors and hallways that opened off this main route. From what I could determine, the
Anniversary
looked like an older model modified star cruiser, perhaps once used as a commercial passenger liner and now adapted to its specialized mission. The ticket clerk had called it a scow, but that really just meant it did not have the recent improvements that would give it enhanced speed and efficiency. But it was serviceable still—merely slow.