Stewards of the Flame (62 page)

What was he going to do? He could not let everyone die when there was a chance of survival! Would ordering them to comply at gunpoint work—or would some really prefer to be shot? Would it be justifiable to shoot those who preferred it in order to save the rest? But, he thought in agony, if he started that, he would have to carry it through, and what if one of them was Carla?

Peter was leader of the Group. It would easy to let him make the decision he’d seemed to believe was his. But that was not how it worked in space. The responsibility was the Captain’s, whether he actively assumed it or not. Even if he proved unequal to it. Even if his miscalculation led to a slow, agonizing death for all aboard. Falling into Maclairn’s star would have been better than that, Jesse thought despairingly. At least they’d have died instantly. . . .

He sat for a long time, hunched over with his back against the anteroom’s bulkhead, seeing no answer yet unwilling to give up hope. If they were to act, it must be soon. It would be no good having regrets once the life support resources dropped below the level that would permit stasis to be followed by reawakening. Furthermore, enough time must be allowed after waking for establishing an orbit around Maclairn and for the many shuttle trips that would be needed to get everyone to its surface; it would be worse to die within sight of their new world than never to have reached it.

Finally, reluctantly, Jesse went to his cabin. By the clock it was nearly morning; he would need a few hours of sleep to get through the demanding day to come. But in the cabin he would have to face Carla. She would want to make love, and if they did that, if they entered the enhanced telepathic state sex engendered, he could not prevent her from perceiving the truth. He’d hidden the existence of the shipboard stasis vaults so far because he’d felt no personal emotion about them . . . though on an unconscious level he must have shared
her
emotion, despite her resolute suppression of the memory that haunted her. Now, there was no way he could keep them out of his mind.

She was asleep when he entered; he left the light off and tried to undress soundlessly, hoping she would stay asleep. But of course she didn’t. His desperation intruded into her dream. Carla sat up, not needing to see his face to know his anguish. “There’s something wrong,” she said, without uncertainty. “Tell me, Jesse.”

He sat on the bed and drew her into his arms. “I can’t tell you,” he whispered. “It’s too hard a thing to say.”

“Then let me into your mind! Come to bed and show me, if you can’t put into words.” She threw off the sheet and pulled him down; he kissed her, but forced himself to hold back.

“Carla, we mustn’t do this. If we do, you’ll learn something you don’t want to know.”

“Jesse! How could I not want to know whatever’s troubling you? Didn’t I share the very worst with you, when you were condemned, when we believed your mind would be destroyed? Don’t shut me out.”

“The problem isn’t just mine. It affects
you
—and everyone.”

“Is the ship in danger, then?”

“Yes, Carla,” he admitted.

“Well, are you going to keep that to yourself forever? Or are you planning to let me find out when you tell the whole Group? Isn’t the Captain’s wife entitled to advance notice?”

She did have a right, he realized. She would have to know eventually, and to find out this way, through their love, would be easier for her than to hear a general announcement. It was himself he was trying to protect, not her—if their minds merged he would share her shock and terror as intensely as her physical response. So be it. Perhaps he could give her some comfort, for a short while, at least. Anyway, this might be the last time. . . .

The last time. He had not thought of it that way before, but if they went into stasis and failed to wake, this would be the last time they ever made love. Oh God, they could not die like that—shut away from each other, alone in the dark, encased in steel boxes with the AI doing horrible things to their bodies, trapped there forever. . . . He must not let Carla find out that he’d ever considered it. Resolutely he thrust it from his thoughts and buried his face between her breasts, trying not to think at all as his perceptions and hers began to blend.

They joined, lost at first in the rapture of mutual sensations. But he could not feel his usual pleasure in them. Against his will, the image of the vaults welled up again—the vaults as he had just seen them . . . row upon row of racked units, translucent covers darkened so that whether they contained bodies wasn’t apparent. . . . In shock, he withdrew from her, but it was too late; they were both too aroused for the telepathic bond to weaken. Carla, confused, shrank as if from her old nightmare, the execution of Ramón.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought it wouldn’t come back
. . . . Then as she sensed more and cried out, panic overtook him, and she saw, in the nearest unit, her own face.

She jerked away from him, screaming.

As their shared consciousness shattered, Jesse knew with dismay that not all the fear had been Carla’s. Though she’d pushed him over the brink, part of that fear was his own . . . fear for her, but also for himself. The units
had
looked like coffins. He was no more eager to seal himself into a thing like that than anybody else. In horror he recalled the blue-faced body in the Hospital vault’s unit that had failed, the one he’d helped to transfer . . . what if he died in stasis and Carla did not, what if she woke to see his unrevivable corpse, knowing they were doomed after all since without him to pilot, they could not get to the surface of Maclairn? Or the other way around, what if he was forced to open the vaults and found many such corpses, hers among them?

Even if they all survived stasis, it might prove to be for nothing. Was it even possible that he alone, the only one capable of flying a shuttle, could make enough round trips in quick succession to get three hundred people off the starship before the meager life support that would remain ran out? If not, he was asking many to face a futile ordeal. . . .

He pulled Carla toward him again and held her, caressing her trembling body. Her mind was shut tight against him now. Neither of them spoke. After a while he began to shiver and pulled a blanket over them. Eventually she retreated into sleep, but Jesse could not. He lay wakeful beside her until morning.

~
 
67
 
~

By this time tomorrow it would be too late, Jesse thought despairingly. He was Captain, he was responsible for over three hundred lives, yet he was powerless to sway the Group toward the one slim possibility of survival. He was no longer even sure that he himself was capable of doing what he must ask of them. Still, he must offer them the choice. He could not allow Peter to make it for them by default.

Carla was very calm. She knew everything, of course; telepathy takes less time than speech. She had grasped the whole truth in a flash, though not all consciously, and had processed it as she slept. They rose and dressed, saying little.

As he started to leave the cabin, Carla reached for his hand. “I’m not afraid to die, Jesse,” she said. “That’s what the Group has always stood for, isn’t it—not fearing death?”

“But we might live, Carla!” Jesse said. “We might wake up within sight of a new world!”

“No,” she said sadly. “Peter was right when he told you we can’t do that.”

There was a knock on the door and Jesse opened it to Peter. “Kwame has the watch,” he said. “I’ve filled the rest of the Council in, and there’s no question about how things will go. But as a member, you have a right to speak before we vote. Can we meet here, now?” He frowned, his eyes on Carla.

“She knows,” Jesse said shortly. “We slept together.”

“Then I assume she’s confirmed what I told you.”

“Yes.”

“If the Council’s going to meet, I’ll get out of the way,” Carla said, straightening the bed cover.

“No—stay, Carla!” Jesse pleaded. “You and I didn’t talk. You sensed only the worst of it.” To Peter he said, “I’d just inspected the stasis deck. It was vivid in my mind, and I—panicked. Do you suppose I don’t know how hard it would be to—” He broke off, telling himself that it was only for Carla’s sake that he avoided spelling it out.

Kira came in with Hari and Reiko. Before seating herself at the table, she embraced him. “Jesse, dear,” she said, “we all know the hell you’re going through. If there were any possible way we could support you, we would—and it’s our own lives at stake too, after all. But we couldn’t save them by proposing a plan we know people won’t accept. We would only make things worse for those who’d want to follow it.”

“My God, Kira. Are you so sure the rest won’t listen to reason? I’m scared, too—more than I thought I would be. But that’s no excuse for throwing away our only chance to live.”

“There’s more to it than simply being scared. Isn’t that right, Carla?”

Carla nodded. To Jesse she said, “I’m sorry. I wish I were as strong as you are. But you—you came from Fleet, where such things seem natural. For us it’s different.”

“It is,” Peter agreed, “and it’s not a matter of strength or weakness. You see, Jesse, we’re all afraid of
something,
deep down where we may not ever find it. And when we learn to overcome our more troublesome fears, we project the emotion we suppress onto that deep fear, that phobia, so that it becomes a symbol of all the rest. That’s the price we pay for our freedom from them. In the Group, the maintenance of bodies in stasis is that symbol. And because we do live free from other fears, it’s an exceptionally powerful one. It stands for everything we strive to resist.”

“Yes,” declared Jesse, anger suddenly rising in him. “That’s exactly what it is—a symbol. No more than that! It matters to
us,
the living, not to those who die. There is life and there is death—there’s no in between. Maybe something comes after and maybe it doesn’t, but either way, what happens to dead bodies isn’t going to change it.”

“Then why have we been risking arrest all these years to keep bodies out of the Vaults?” Carla protested.

“Because it does matter to us. Because a society that worships mere flesh is built on false values, and can’t ever move beyond that stage to empowering the mind. But we’re beyond it ourselves, after all. Surely you don’t think that if we die in stasis we’ll be trapped in our bodies somehow—like the old tales of ghosts that can’t go to their rest because they’re not properly buried.”

“I don’t know what I believe,” she whispered. “I just know I can’t die the way Ramón and Ian did. I can’t let
you
die that way.”

“Carla—Ian died in stasis so that we could get to a new world! Considering that he did it to save me, shouldn’t I be willing to do the same? Shouldn’t all of us? Aren’t we betraying him if we refuse to even risk the kind of death he accepted for our sake?”

All five of them froze, staring at him. “Dear God,” said Kira. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“Neither had I,” Peter confessed. “I’ve been too wrapped up in how the others would feel to grasp what his sacrifice implies. In the light of it, of course we should follow his example—I’d do so gladly if it could accomplish anything. But I still see no way to persuade everybody. Much as our people loved Ian, they don’t all have his courage—”

Ian . . . once again Jesse was overcome by memory of the dream in which Ian had come to him. The foreboding he’d felt at its end, the knowledge that Ian depended on him, the Group depended on him, that if he gave in to pressure or fear or despair, Carla would die. . . . Had that, like the rest, been drawn from Ian’s prescient intuition? Would inability to get people into stasis, not miscalculation of the jump, be his true failure? Ian had given no clue as to how to win them over . . . or had he?

Suddenly, Jesse was hit by a flash of illumination. “Peter,” he burst out, “what was it he said to you, his mysterious last words?”

“‘You never really understood,’” Peter recalled, “‘And for the Group’s sake I couldn’t tell you. But know that this won’t matter in the end.’”

“You never understood that the Vaults
always were
a symbol,” Jesse said. “Ian never thought stasis was in itself worse than other forms of burial! But he couldn’t tell you that, because a symbol was what the Group needed. He turned the Vaults into a symbol in the first place in order to create the Group.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, Peter admitted, “That might be true.”

“And when he said ‘this won’t matter,’” Jesse continued, “he wasn’t referring to our carrying on after his execution, as we all assumed. He meant that dying in stasis wouldn’t matter to
him,
or to any of us, compared to other ways we might die. He believed what I just said, that it matters only to the living.”

Peter paced across the cabin, his back to the Council table, drawing on memories. At last he turned to the others. “I was blind,” he said, awestricken. “I had to be, to lead the Group without hypocrisy. He knew it would fall apart if we stopped caring about the burial of bodies. That’s why he didn’t let me sense his meaning telepathically.”

Jesse drew a deep breath. “Forgive me, Peter,” he said, “but you still are
blind if you don’t see the flaw in what you’ve been telling me. Our people have a phobia about stasis, you say. Sure—but isn’t that precisely why we have to confront it? Doesn’t the pledge in the Ritual demand it of us? You made me confront everything I was ever afraid of, step by step, and presumably you did the same with everybody. What was it all for, if we end up refusing to face the one thing that might give us a chance to survive?”

Peter, visibly shaken, spoke in a low voice. “I was too close to it,” he said. “Ian gave us symbols, he taught us methods of empowerment, and they worked—I knew enough about psychology to make them work. But I never had to innovate—never had to go beyond the bounds of the one narrow culture we were trapped in. It’s taken an offworlder to show me the limits I’ve set.”

“Those methods still can work,” Jesse said. “I don’t know how to do it, but
you
do—you know how to arouse the powers that make us able to do things we think aren’t possible. God, Peter—we walk on fire, put our hands in fire! Carla said that centuries ago on Earth, a charismatic leader could teach crowds of total novices to firewalk in a few hours’ time! So don’t tell me you can’t get people into some sort of altered state that enables them to enter stasis units, phobia or no phobia.”