An idea in the back of Waverly’s mind started working. There must be some reason for their weakness, something she could use. She knew it. She had only to think.
“Dear…” Waverly felt a hand close around her elbow and turned to see Anne Mather smiling at her. “I wonder if we could have a word?”
“About what?” Waverly asked. Her skin crawled where the woman touched it, but Waverly allowed the older woman to hook arms with her and stroll down the corridor.
“I need your advice.”
Waverly let the silence hover between her and Mather until the woman continued.
“Why don’t you skip the first part of the tour and join me for some tea?” The woman smiled at Waverly, who found herself smiling back, almost naturally. “I think you and I should get to know each other better. You’re a smart girl, and I’m sure you’ve got lots of questions.”
“That sounds fine,” Waverly said, hoping her voice didn’t betray her racing heart.
THE PAST
Anne Mather led Waverly to what would be the Captain’s office on the Empyrean, but here the room had a feminine quality. Embroidered tapestries of scenes from the Holy Book hung on the walls, golden and shining, and a carved wooden dove hovered above her desk. Clearly this was Mather’s office, and she was the ship’s Captain, though Waverly noticed that no one called her Captain. They all called her Pastor.
An earthen teapot was sitting on the desk, and Mather poured a cup for Waverly, then one for herself, and leaned back in her chair. She looked toward the porthole, showing her delicate profile to Waverly as though conscious of the tableau she was creating. “When we first entered the nebula, I thought it was beautiful, didn’t you?”
Waverly glanced at the ruddy gas rushing past the window. It was dense in this pocket, and visibility was practically nonexistent. “I miss the stars.” Waverly sighed.
“Yes, that’s just how I feel.”
Waverly sipped at her tea, refusing to acknowledge that she had even this small thing in common with Mather.
“Chamomile. Good for the nerves.” Mather stared at Waverly over the rim of her teacup. When the girl looked at her, she took a sip, then tilted her head as though noticing something new about Waverly. “I’d forgotten how beautiful young faces are. Really, you’re such a delight to look at.”
“Why did you rendezvous with the Empyrean?” Waverly asked. It wasn’t her most burning question, but she had a feeling it was the key to everything that had happened.
Mather set down her teacup resolutely. “How well did you know Captain Jones?”
“I saw him every day.”
“Did he seem … honorable to you?”
Waverly let her eyes drop. “He was a good leader.”
“Charismatic and intelligent, to be sure. But did he seem like a good man?”
“Yes,” Waverly lied, ignoring the memory of the Captain’s eyes plunging down the length of her body each time she passed him in the hallway. When Waverly’s figure began to mature, she found herself disliking many of the men on the Empyrean.
“I trained with him before we left Old Earth. I wonder if you knew that.”
Waverly didn’t know, but she didn’t give anything away as she looked at Mather.
“We were in one of the orbital biospheres while the climatologists were designing the ships’ ecosystems. We spent four years together with a small crew.”
Waverly picked up her teacup and sipped. The tea was sweetened with honey, and she licked droplets from her lips.
“I’ll spare you the details, Waverly, but the Captain and I didn’t get along.”
“Why not?” Waverly said, staring at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup.
“We had very different ideas about morality. Decency.” The last word issued from between the woman’s teeth like a shard of glass. “He believed that people should be able to do whatever they wanted to whomever they pleased. And I didn’t.”
“Are you talking about sex?”
Mather smiled bitterly. “Not exactly.”
Waverly took another sip of her tea. She felt unsettled.
“You don’t believe me, do you.”
This caught Waverly off guard, but she did her best to hide it. “About what?”
“About why we came for you girls.”
Waverly shrugged.
“I don’t blame you.” The woman got up and looked out the porthole, her fingers knotted behind her back. “I didn’t tell you the whole story. There’s a reason we wanted to rescue the girls first.” Mather walked around the desk, placed her fingertips on Waverly’s trembling hands. “You were unsafe on the Empyrean. We knew you oldest ones were getting to be young women, and we didn’t want you to live through what happened to us.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Myself. Magda. Ruth, the matron who watched over you girls last night. There are others. The women who are old enough to remember what Captain Jones really is.”
Waverly stared out the porthole at the nothing outside. She didn’t want to hear this.
Mather sat heavily on the desk and leaned over Waverly. “I don’t know if I can describe what it was like on the biosphere with Captain Jones and his friends.” She leveled her gaze onto Waverly’s eyes. “Tell me, did the men on the Empyrean ever make you feel … frightened?”
“No,” Waverly said, denying her memory of meeting Mason Ardvale in the gardens and the slithery way he spoke to her. “Everyone was … is … really nice.”
“Really? Because the women on the biosphere had a very different experience.”
Waverly said nothing.
“It began with compliments. Captain Jones … well, he was only a lieutenant then. He started it. At mealtimes, he would remark how beautiful my eyes were. Things like that.” Mather laughed at Waverly’s expression. “You wouldn’t know it looking at me now, Waverly, but I was once beautiful. I felt flattered at his attentions. Soon the others followed his lead, and all the women in the biosphere were getting lots of compliments. We enjoyed it, at first.”
The woman stood up from her perch on the desk and, supporting part of her weight with one hand on the creaking wood, walked back to her own chair, where she collapsed with a sigh.
“After a while, the compliments seemed to change. How can I describe it? I would be trying to give Jones a progress report on some seedlings, and he would interrupt to tell me how nice my blouse was. Only he wasn’t talking about my blouse.” She pulled on her tunic, smoothed it over her frame with fluttering hands. “Soon it seemed as though I couldn’t get any work done without someone interrupting to tell me how beautiful I was. And then…” Her voice faded and she looked out the window. “The tone changed.”
A part of Waverly couldn’t help hearing this. She’d gotten all kinds of compliments from some of the men aboard the Empyrean. Captain Jones always remarked on how tiny her waist was, and just like Mather, she didn’t feel as though he were talking about her waist. And the men of the Central Council seemed to look at her with appraising eyes. It was as if all the men on the Empyrean had taken their cues from Captain Jones about permissible behavior with the girls. Or maybe Captain Jones had chosen a crew that thought the same way he did.
“I remember one night,” Mather went on, “the men stopped listening to us. We were in the cafeteria, eating our rations, and Ruth made some comment to Lieutenant Jones about how we should check something in the water treatment facility. None of the men responded. They just went on talking to each other as if they hadn’t heard. She repeated herself, and I even tried to get their attention, but they laughed as if we weren’t even in the room. That’s when I started feeling afraid.”
Mather poured herself another cup of tea, and Waverly noticed that the stream of liquid was trembling. Mather took a few furtive sips and set down the cup again. “It happened to Ruth first.”
“What happened?”
“They called it a ‘party.’ I can’t describe to you how it changed her. She went from being
a vibrant young woman to—”
“What happened?” Waverly shouted. “What are you talking about?”
One of the guards looked into the room, but Mather waved him off. “I think you know what I’m talking about, Waverly. I can see it in your face.”
“I have no idea.…”
“Yes, you do. You know the men I’m talking about. Who they are and what they’re like. You know!” Mather pounded on her desk. “They made their way around to all the women on the crew.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It wasn’t quite violent, that’s the difficult thing. It was cajoling, teasing, begging, nagging. Talk about how we’re building a new society, how the old rules don’t matter anymore, how we had to maximize our potential, make sure there would be plenty of babies. They had the audacity to claim it was about fertility. We relented, each of us. Gave up the fight. Stopped resisting. Out of fear, I suppose. But mostly, we desperately wanted to be chosen as crew members on one of these ships.” The woman laughed, her smile sour. “People romanticize Old Earth, but believe me, it was a horrible place by the time we left. Almost the entire planet had turned to desert. It was hard to live there, for women especially. We needed to seem like we could play along. Fit in. So we did what we thought we had to do. We…” The woman sighed, her voice distant. “We let them.”
Waverly was suddenly aware of the engines vibrating through the floor underneath her. They seemed to bend the space around her, turn her mind upside down.
“That isn’t even the worst of it.” Dimly, the woman smiled. “When both ships were having problems with fertility, you may remember that the research team on the Empyrean had a breakthrough.”
Waverly huddled her arms around herself.
“They transmitted the formula to us. It was a drug meant to stimulate the ovaries. Well…” Suddenly the woman dropped her face into her hands. When she looked up, her eyes were red rimmed. “The formula they sent killed our ovaries. They sabotaged us.”
“That’s not possible. There’s no way the crew would do that. My parents…”
“Maybe not your parents, but the Captain’s inner circle? Are you sure they’re not capable of such a thing?”
Waverly shook her head. Images flew through her mind of the Captain and Mason Ardvale laughing together. They’d always seemed unsavory, but could they do this?
“Wait,” Waverly said as the implications dawned on her. She felt cold, suddenly, and very afraid. “Do you mean to say that there are no children on this ship?”
“That is precisely what I’m saying. And your Captain Jones is responsible.” Waverly started to deny it, but Mather held up a hand. “I’ll show you the records if you like, Waverly.”
“But that’s crazy. Why would they want to make you infertile?”
“Power. They never liked the way we did things on the New Horizon. We were more religious and less … I believe they’d call it ‘freethinking.’ I think they wanted to make New Earth into their idea of a free society.” Mather shuddered. “Well, I couldn’t let them do that. It wasn’t just about our own futures, Waverly. It was about your future, too. And the future of every generation of women to follow on New Earth. Do you understand what’s at stake here?”
Outrage poured into Waverly. She was furious at Mather for making her doubt herself. But she did doubt. She couldn’t help it. A great deal about the woman’s story made sense and even confirmed her own impressions about how so many of the older women seemed to resent some of the men. Many times Waverly’s own mother had taken her by the shoulders and made her promise she would tell her if any of the men bothered her. She would never say explicitly what made her worry, but Waverly knew that her mother was trying to protect her from something. Mather’s story fell in line with all of this.
“I can see you’re having trouble with this, Waverly. While I hate to cause you pain, I really think it’s necessary that you see this.” The woman twirled a vid screen toward Waverly and pressed a button. The screen showed a much younger Captain Jones in a communiqué, speaking to Anne Mather. He looked strange without his beard. His face was thinner, and his eyes seemed somehow bluer.
“Anne,” he said, “I don’t know what you expect us to do. We’ve sent our research. I don’t see how further help is possible.”
“You sent us a bastardized formula,” the voice of a younger Mather spat back. “You ruined us.”
“It must have been a lab error.”
“No. The formula you sent was purposefully designed to ruin our fertility.”
“We’re talking about a misplaced phenol molecule, Anne. An easy mistake.”
There was an unsteady pause, and then Mather’s voice filled the void, shaking with rage. “How do you know about the phenol? I never told you that.”
“When we heard about your problems, we checked it ourselves.” The Captain nervously pulled on his upper lip. For a moment he looked afraid, but then his features twisted into outrage. “Do you know what you’re accusing me of?”
“Of course I know. And now I expect you to make it right. We need to rendezvous as soon as possible, and we need some of your families to come aboard the New Horizon, or we’ll all be dead in sixty years.”
“A rendezvous is impossible. You’re nearly a light-year ahead of us!”
“You can increase acceleration. If we decrease, we can meet up in a few years.”
“Do you know what that would do to our crew?”
“Don’t forget, the force would still be far less than Earth’s gravity. No more than our bodies are designed for.”
“After a lifetime at low gravity? I can’t ask that of them.”
“You must! Or I’ll report your crimes to the authorities on Earth. They’ll effect a mutiny.”
“There’s nothing they can do to hurt me, Anne, and you know it.”
“So you admit it. You admit you sabotaged us!”
Captain Jones’s face took on a vicious expression, and he pointed his finger at the vid screen. “Listen, you frigid bitch, I’m not going to risk the health of my crew to satisfy your paranoid delusions.”
“I ask again. How did you know about the phenol, Captain? If you didn’t send a bastardized formula?”
With a sour smile, the Captain said, “What’s the matter, Anne? Disappointed you won’t be the Prophet of New Earth?”
Mather pressed a button, and the image of the Captain froze. The twisted look on his face frightened Waverly.
“So you see,” Mather said, “we had no choice. I’m so very sorry you and the girls got caught in the middle. But we’re talking about our survival.”
Waverly didn’t want to buy into Mather’s story, but something about the Captain in the video seemed wrong, just as wrong as Anne Mather seemed.
“So you were lying about the decompression,” Waverly said. “That wasn’t why you came for us at all.”
“No, I wasn’t lying. There was a decompression, but it merely hastened our actions. We didn’t have time for diplomacy anymore. We had to rescue you girls immediately, in whatever way we could.” Mather closed her eyes as though pained by the memory. “We tried to prevent loss of life. It’s looking more and more like we failed.”
The two looked at each other across the desk, taking measure.
“I think maybe that’s enough for today, dear. You have a lot to take in.”
The woman struggled to her feet and walked with Waverly to the door, her hand on the girl’s back. Waverly felt so confused that she wanted to burst away and run to some abandoned place on the ship where no one would ever find her. But she could only follow the guards as they plodded down the corridor toward the elevators.
Everything Mather said twirled like a sickening gyroscope in Waverly’s mind, mixing up her thoughts. As she followed the guards, she tried to find a hole in Mather’s story, but she couldn’t. In truth, she believed what the woman said about how Captain Jones behaved toward the women on the biosphere, because her own experience confirmed it. S
till, she did not trust Mather. Could not.
She barely noticed when the engines kicked into a higher drive, making the floor shimmy. The artificial gravity inched up a notch. She felt heavier as she lifted one foot, then the other, thinking about what the Pastor had said. The guards seemed to feel it, too. They walked hunched, with labored breathing, sweat beading on the backs of their necks. The ship must have increased its rate of acceleration just now, and the artificial gravity increased as a result.
Waverly stopped in her tracks.
Gravity.
She was flooded with understanding. The hunk of metal in the shuttle bay couldn’t possibly be from the Empyrean, and the New Horizon couldn’t be conducting any kind of search for survivors. Above all, Waverly finally understood why the adults aboard the ship seemed so sick and weak.
“Keep up,” said one of the guards breathlessly. Waverly ran to catch up to where they were waiting for the elevator.
By the time the elevator doors opened and she boarded with the guards, she was certain the Empyrean was still out there and that she’d found the key to getting back home.
IN THE BANYAN TREE
Waverly met up with the rest of the girls in the tropical produce bay.
Though the rest of the ship was identical to the Empyrean, the agriculture bays looked completely different. The coffee trees were twice as large as the ones Waverly was used to. In fact, all the plants on the New Horizon seemed to thrive especially well. The tour guide, a smallish man in his fifties with a gentle voice, spoke with pride about how the crew had experimented successfully with different fertilization techniques that increased crop production by twenty percent. Feigning interest, Waverly wove among the girls until she stood by Samantha and Sarah at the back of the crowd.
“Where did that witch take you?” Sarah hissed, and Waverly appreciated again how spirited this girl was. Her small body reminded Waverly of a sapling: If you bend it too far, it’ll snap back and whip you in the face. She had a steel-trap mind and a determination Waverly found very comforting.
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