Jenna Starborn

by Sharon Shinn

“Oh, you have done them—”

  “Indeed, doctor, perhaps your tone—”

  “There are places she can go,” a new voice interceded smoothly, and everyone in the room turned to face the woman from the SSA. She was sleek, compact, and manicured; even her face seemed lacquered on, though she was clearly completely human. Something about her voice made me dislike her instinctively, though I could not have said why. “There are institutions that will take her in.”

  The black-haired doctor turned on the social agent with as much contempt as she had shown for my aunt. “And be treated no better, would be my guess.”

  The agent shrugged with a small economical motion. “These places are schools, training facilities that will enable her to learn a career that will in turn enable her to live a full and productive life. They survive on government funds, it is true, so they are not luxurious places to live, but they are adequate, and they have advantages.”

  “What sort of advantages?” asked the second doctor, a heavyset young man who had not spoken until this point.

  “They will feed her. They will clothe her. They will prevent her from being a drain on society by making her a useful professional instead of a petty criminal or a charity case. Or a homicide case, which in her present circumstances she is likely to become.”

  There was a moment’s silence while everyone in the room assimilated that final statement. The doctors looked thoughtful; my aunt grew positively pink with rage.

  “Are you actually suggesting—you filthy-minded woman, I will have my lawyer charge you with slander this very instant—”

  “A very injudicious comment to have made, particularly before credible witnesses,” the lawyer said gravely to the social worker.

  The SSA woman turned her hard, uncaring gaze on the lawyer. “I have seen hundreds of cases just like this one result in death,” she said. “Hundreds. If you sue me for slander, I will sue you on Jenna’s behalf for child endangerment, and the headlines that your client’s friends will read will destroy her more surely than any careless remark of mine.”

  There was another short silence, during which everyone in the room seemed to take a figurative step backward. Even I, listless and unconsulted in my white bed, pressed my head deeper into my pillow and tried to avoid snagging that cool, indifferent gaze.

  “What do we need to do,” the heavyset doctor asked, “to register Jenna for one of these schools?”

  “Determine which school would be most suitable, obtain Mrs. Rentley’s consent, obtain Jenna’s consent, and send her off.”

  “What if there is no opening?” the lawyer asked.

  The agent smiled faintly. “There are always openings.”

  There was the sound of soft crying from my aunt’s direction. “So she is to be taken away from me, and no one cares what my feelings are,” she wailed. The lawyer patted her insincerely on the shoulder. “And no one believes me when I say I have done my best by this child—”

  “Because you haven’t,” the dark doctor said briefly, and then she sat carefully on the edge of my bed. “Hello, Jenna,” she said, smiling at me. “You must have heard us all discussing your future just now.”

  I smiled back. I liked her. “You want to send me away to school somewhere,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s it. We think you might be happier there than at your aunt’s house. What do you think?”

  I took a deep breath. “I would love to go away to school!” I exclaimed in a rush. “I would love to learn—so many things!—engineering and mathematics and religion and philosophy. Oh, there is so much I do not know....”

  The doctor smiled at me again. “What sorts of things do you like best? You mentioned science and math—those are the things I like too.”

  “Yes, anything with motors or energy or components—my aunt was always angry when I went down to view the generators, but I loved to watch them, I love to think about them spinning and spinning and creating a sort of fire out of nothing but motion—”

  “There is a fine tech school on Lora,” the agent interposed at this moment. “She could get training there and be equipped to work on any of the space stations in the Allegiance.”

  “Lora! That’s pretty far away,” the doctor said, turning her head to survey the agent.

  Who gave again that concise, disdainful shrug. “And do you think she would be coming back here for any reason?” she asked softly.

  “Now, now,” the lawyer said, turning away from my sniffling aunt to rejoin the conversation. “Jenna has strong ties of affection to Mrs. Rentley. I am sure her aunt will be a part of Jenna’s life no matter how far from this planet she roams.”

  Aunt Rentley wiped her cheeks and turned to me with a tremulous smile. “Yes, I’m sure that’s true, isn’t it, Jenna?”

  I met her eyes for the first time since she had entered the room, for the first time since she had banished me from the table for five days of hunger. “No,” I said. “I won’t care if I go away to Lora and never see you again. Send me away to school, please,” I said to the doctor, looking away from my aunt, who cried out and staggered against the wall. “I am ready to begin a new life.”

  Chapter 2

  Classes were cut short that day because of the funeral. We all turned marveling eyes toward Mr. Branson when he gave us that news; never, in the two years that I had been at the Lora Technical and Engineering Academy, had classes been truncated for any occurrence. He caught our wonderment and smiled very slightly, that sad, somewhat guilty smile that seemed to be the only expression he had besides dour abstraction.

  “Until then,” he said, “work on the problems I have posted to your sites. I expect them all to be completed before we leave the classroom in”—he consulted his watch—“an hour and thirteen minutes.”

  I glanced briefly around the room, wanting by some silent communication to share my surprise with one of my classmates; but with Harriet dead, I had lost my closest friend at Lora Tech. I bent to my assignment, calling up the indicated page on my desktop monitor and working my way slowly through the required problems. They were advanced astrophysics equations, and although I was better at math than I was at languages, I was better still at scientific application. The theory did not hold as much appeal for me as the practice.

  Mr. Branson stopped at my desk, glancing over my solutions. “Yes— that’s right, Jenna—I see you were listening yesterday when you did not appear to be attending.”

  I looked up at him. He was a kind man, despite his appearance of utter depression, and this made him something of a rarity among the teachers at Lora Tech. “It was hard to pay attention, Mr. Branson,” I said.

  “Yes. I know. Such a terrible thing ... Steps have been taken to ensure nothing of the kind ever occurs again.”

  I nodded, and returned my attention to my keyboard. He watched a few more minutes in silence. “Very good, Jenna. I did not realize you understood that theorem. But you are, after all, one of our better mathematics students.”

  “Not as good as Harriet,” I said in a muffled voice.

  He was silent a moment. “No,” he said at last. “Well. There were not many on this world as good as Harriet.”

  He moved on to monitor the progress of the others in the class, but I felt my attention slacking again. Harriet had become my fast friend on my very first day at Lora Tech, a day that had been awful in every other detail. The five-week trip to Lora had been wretched in itself, for of course I had no money to command even a second-class berth, and neither my aunt nor the SSA system was willing to pay for luxury accommodations. I traveled in the communal quarters, where food was insufficient, hygienic requirements barely met, and privacy nonexistent. Like the other travelers, I managed to stake out my own space within the first forty-eight hours of our journey, and my boundaries of suitcase and sleeping blanket were scrupulously observed, but I was never comfortable for a single minute of the entire endless voyage. I scraped up a civil acquaintance with my nearest neighbors, watched their twin babies when they
needed a few minutes alone to converse or merely walk the ship for exercise, and always observed the necessary courtesies with my other fellow passengers that kept steerage-level travel tolerable. And yet the voyage was miserable.

  By the time we docked at one of Lora’s twenty off-planet spaceports and took the last of many shuttles to the surface, I was sick, exhausted, and terrified of what lay before me. It proved to be several hours of confusion and despair as it turned out no one from the school had been sent to collect me, and I did not have funds to take a public conveyance to the school—or to pay for my accommodations overnight in a hostel of any acceptable repute. A frantic call to the school elicited the information that one of the professors would be coming to the shuttle station in a few hours to pick up his daughter. I could obtain transportation with Mr. Kelliman.

  The trip from the station to the school that afternoon was an exercise in degradation. Mr. Kelliman was a haughty, silent, well-groomed man of level-two citizenship; his daughter was an exotic brunette beauty who had never known an hour’s uneasiness; and their opinion of my appearance and my circumstances could not have been more disdainful, and more plainly to be read in their expressions. I told myself I did not care, and I stared stonily out the window at the unending lanes of skyscrapers and city boulevards that covered the entire hundred miles between the shuttle and the school. Even so, I wept silently as we traveled through the dense jungle of commercial buildings, and I could not hold back a brief but profound sense of self-pity.

  The first sight of Lora Tech was not designed to reverse my mood. It was a crowded, unappealing campus of perhaps thirty structures, all huddled dispiritedly together under Lora’s two pale suns. The architecture was uninspired, the landscaping was sparse, and the air that hung over the overpopulated acreage was dismal. Students hurried between classes with their heads down and their shoulders hunched; the professors strode past them with an uncaring arrogance that was hard to mistake. I did not see a single smile in the short time it took me to be dumped from the Kellimans’ car and make my way down a narrow, cracked sidewalk to the junior class dorm.

  There, a bored housekeeper registered my name, issued me a series of keys to doors and buildings that I could not remember, and assigned me a room. “Level twelve,” she said. “Sorry, but the elevator’s broken today. Stairway’s over there.”

  So I trudged up the dozen flights of stairs, almost glad at this moment that I had so few possessions they could be contained in two lightweight bags. I stopped twice to catch my breath and gather my wits. I had not felt so disoriented and disembodied since the night before my hospital stay; I was beginning to think my entire journey, my entire life, had been a fitful dream. Where I would be, who I would be, when I wakened, I could not imagine, but I had to believe it would be to a better life than the one I struggled with now.

  Up the endless stairwell—down what appeared to be a coiling, infinite hall—coming finally to a pause before the door that matched the numbers on my key. Fully expecting to find myself balked here, before a door that would not open to my command, I was astonished to find the key a perfect fit, the lock well-oiled, and the door easy to swing open upon my push. The room revealed, though spartan, gray, and cheerless, looked like a haven of mystical beauty to one who had suffered so hard to find it. I stepped inside, let my bags slide to the floor, and leaned my back against the wall for support. I sighed and closed my eyes. Home.

  A small rustle from across the room made me leap to an alert position ; I had not realized there was another occupant in the room. But she was small, smiling, and unalarming; there was a pale prettiness to her fair hair and features that gave the dull room a certain glancing light.

  “Hello,” she said, and her voice was soft and soothing. “You must be Jenna. I’m Harriet. I’m so happy to meet you.”

  My lack of wardrobe was nothing to her. “We are almost the same size. You can borrow my clothes when you like.” The tale of my travel elicited quick, easy sympathy. “I came with the pastor who headed our orphanage. He took such good care of me! But you, poor thing, to travel all that way by yourself. You must be so brave!” My confession of apprehension about my new surroundings, my terror that I would not perform well in my classes, she heard out and responded to. “Everyone is afraid when they first come—and they are strict, it is true. But they have classes for every level of student at every grade of intelligence, and they will find the place suited to you. You will learn quickly how it goes, I promise you.”

  Thus, in a few short sentences, she became the best friend I had ever had; and as the days, weeks, and months passed, she was to become dearer to me than anyone I could imagine. She had such sweetness of temperament, such goodness of heart, that she drew friends wherever she turned; even my stubborn, passionate nature was gentled. I had never met anyone who meted out kindness as a matter of course, unsolicited, unearned. I never again expect to meet anyone as generous as Harriet Fairlawn.

  Her companionship was the only thing that made the first six months of my tenure there endurable, for Lora Tech was not an easy place to be. The hours were long, the classes were hard, the teachers were stern, and, since we were a charity school, the amenities were few. I had had no formal schooling, so I was far behind in every subject. But Harriet encouraged me every night, tutoring me patiently and greeting each small gain with extravagant amounts of praise.

  “That’s it, Jenna! You’re making such progress! Soon you’ll be elevated to your own grade, I know you will.”

  And she was right. One day, inexplicably, all the foreign phrases and incomprehensible equations clicked from nonsense to sense in my brain; I understood the conjugated verbs, I could reduce the calculation as required. I graduated up to my proper grade level, and acquired a new set of teachers who seemed less formidable. I began to learn, truly learn, new ideas and new subjects, and my mind began to wake with a desire keener than hunger. I had always been fascinated by science, and now I became good at it. I was becoming what I had always wanted to be: a person with value to the universe.

  Thus my life unfolded for the next two years. I never heard from my aunt, though Betista sent me occasional poorly spelled notes and, once in a while, a small present. I wrote her faithfully and told her of my progress. Harriet herself received mail on a sporadic basis, from the pastor of her orphanage and various friends she had made there during her ten-year stay. When she received small gifts of money, we would wait for our rare holidays and take a public aircar to the nearest shopping district. Dressed in our drab gray school coveralls, we would find some vantage point on the busiest streets to watch the fashionable parade hurry by: women in their glittering tunics or their bright short dresses or their long ceremonial gold gowns that signified a position of some rank in the political stratum. The men wore a much less interesting array of clothing, coveralls like ours if they were workers, formal black and gray if they were citizens of any standing.

  Because the whole planet of Lora was, essentially, one huge connected city, the parade was absolutely endless; we might watch for hours and not see any two people who looked or dressed exactly alike. Harriet and I pointed out those whose faces we liked, to whom we wished we belonged, and we made up stories about our long-lost relatives whom we would somehow inadvertently discover during these streetside vigils. Our tales became complex and outlandish, and produced much muffled laughter. Those were unquestionably the happiest days of my life.

  Much less happy were the hours spent working off some punishment that a professor or headmaster or residential advisor deemed appropriate for misconduct or high spirits. The youngest miscreants were given jobs such as cleaning the toilets and scrubbing the kitchens; the older students, particularly those who excelled in the sciences, were generally assigned the task of stoking the generators. These were located in a central building near the middle of the grim campus; they supplied power to every one of the dorms and classrooms and research facilities at the school.

  They were also frightening. There wer
e a dozen different generators, all run on different fuels and principles, which had been installed over the decades as theories of power production and consumption were revised. Many of these old, and even ancient, models could be found installed as primary energy sources on planets throughout the Allegiance. For a strange thing had happened once the high-grade citizens had descended a few generations from their robber baron forebears: They had grown lax and suspicious of technology. They knew it had spawned their own wealth and position, but they did not like tinkering with it and facilitating any fresh spate of change and improvement. They had the current patents and equipment, used throughout the Allegiance. They were not interested in having their own systems superseded. Thus technological advancement was discouraged unless it occurred in a few carefully controlled environments—the only environments, to tell the truth, where there was enough money to fund the necessary research.

  Thus, the students at Lora learned how to operate every type of generator, even the obsolete. We did, every couple of years, have a chance to build new ones when some modern model was sanctioned for general use. Since many of us were being trained to become solo engineers and tech support personnel on frontier planets, space stations, and starships, this hands-on experience with the school’s machinery was an important part of every student’s curriculum.

  But Harriet and I were too young to have had much experience with the large, noisy, complex, and variable machines. I, of course, had played around my aunt’s generators more times than I could count, and I loved the interplay of power and reaction contained within the huge silver shells. But Harriet—a math genius, but a poor hand at basic science—was terrified of their noise, emissions, unpredictability, and might. Whenever some alleged infraction sent us down to the generator rooms for the evening, her hands would shake and her voice would tremble as we walked the rounds, checking on output.