Jenna Starborn

by Sharon Shinn

  “She said I must study very hard and learn all my mathematics, for someday I would be the mistress of a large holding, and I would have to know how to do my accounts.”

  “But that is hardly bad news! Mistress of your own property-why, many young girls would be thrilled to know that was their fate!”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to learn my mathematics! I don’t want to know my accounts. I want to marry a rich man, and wear pretty dresses, and eat pastries whenever I wish.”

  I hid a smile. “Well, perhaps you will marry a rich man, and it will be his estates you will be looking over.”

  Ameletta heaved a sigh. “She didn’t think so.”

  “You asked her whom you were to marry?”

  “Yes, and I asked if he would be rich and handsome, and she said that she was unable to foretell, but that he would most assuredly be kind and considerate.”

  “But those are excellent qualities! Why are you so depressed?”

  “Because he sounds so boring! I did not want to marry a boring man!”

  This time I could not smother my laugh, though I did think, even at eight, a girl should have some respect for kindness and consideration. I gave her a little hug and said, “Well, you never know. The mystic could be wrong. You may yet marry a handsome devil who will treat you very badly.”

  She eyed me suspiciously at that. “Miss Starborn, are you trying to be funny?”

  I laughed again. “All I am saying is that you should not put too much stock in the words of a fortune-teller. They are notorious for being wrong, you know. And you have within you the power to make your own fate, no matter what it seems the universe has assigned you.”

  This speech was clearly over her head; besides, she was beginning to lose interest. She picked up one of her little handheld games and, in a few moments, was absorbed in sending her virtual heroine off on a quest for treasure.

  Miss Ayerson’s turn came perhaps forty-five minutes later, and she also reentered the room looking slightly shaken. When she saw my eyes lift to her face as she came through the door, she immediately crossed the room to my side.

  “That was a strange experience,” she remarked, taking the seat beside me.

  “In what manner? You look unnerved,” I replied.

  She laughed slightly. “I’m not surprised. I went in expecting the usual array of pretty promises and sweeping generalities, the sorts of things that could be applied to any half-cit woman working to support herself. But this mystic’s observations were uncannily accurate, and the predictions it made were so near the things I have been wishing for that I truly felt as if the machine had scanned my brain and read from the printed transcript.”

  “That would be unsettling,” I agreed. “Do you wish to share with me any of the forecasts it made?”

  She laughed again, with even less mirth. “Oh, the psychic warned me against following an inclination I would live to regret. I do not wish to be more specific, although she was. And I cannot help wondering: How could she know my heart so thoroughly-and how can she be sure I would regret it?”

  From the staid Janet Ayerson, this was wild talk indeed, and I could not imagine what sort of radical behavior she would indulge in that would cause her a moment’s distress in the future. She had always seemed too serene and contained for rashness. Too much like me.

  “Of course she can be sure of nothing,” I said, almost mechanically. “She is a charlatan, and this is a highly sophisticated parlor game. Take none of it to heart.”

  “I wish I had your unwearied good sense, Jenna,” she said, and rose hurriedly to her feet. “Ameletta! It is well past your bedtime. Come, you and I must go upstairs.” They were out the door a few minutes later, Ameletta uncharacteristically offering no protest. I realized that Janet’s conndences, such as they were, were at an end.

  To tell the truth, I was beginning to get a little tired myself, and had Mr. Ravenbeck not made such a point of including me in the event, I would have slipped away also and made my way to my room. But there was still Mr. Luxton to be returned and Mr. Taff to have his session before I would be called before the psychic. Sighing quietly, I returned to my reading, scarcely looking up when Mr. Ravenbeck brought back the one man and left again with the other.

  Mr. Taff had not been gone five minutes when Mrs. Farraday came to the door, a look of perturbation on her amiable face. She cast a quick glance around the room, obviously seeking Mr. Ravenbeck, and then motioned for me to come over. I did.

  “There is a visitor here for Mr. Ravenbeck,” she said in a whisper. “I offered to show him to this room, but he said he preferred to see Mr. Ravenbeck in private. Do you know where he is?”

  “He is leading each guest by turn to the upstairs study—and then, apparently, staying to guide them through a complex computer program interface. I am scheduled to go in next—would you like me to alert him? Or would you like to go tell him now, yourself?”

  “Oh, no, no, I hate to interrupt him when he is enjoying himself with his friends! Would you be willing to give him the news? The visitor said it was not urgent, but I cannot help thinking—if someone comes to call so late at night—well, perhaps it is not an emergency, but it is something one ought to address as soon as one can.”

  “Certainly. What is the man’s name? Why has he come?”

  “I don’t know why he’s here—he wouldn’t say. All he told me is that his name is Merrick and he comes from Wesleyan-Imrae.”

  I knew very little about this exotic world on the far edges of the settled galaxy, except that it was famous for its export crops of spice and hallucinogenics. As far as I knew, Mr. Ravenbeck did not deal in either.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I shall inform him as soon as I see him.”

  “You’re so good, Jenna,” she said. “Tell him I have put Mr. Merrick in the breakfast room and given him a meal. I hope that was the right thing to do.”

  “I’m sure it was. I shall tell him.”

  She withdrew, and I found myself finally impatient for my turn to come. It seemed to take eons for Mr. Taff to hear his fortune, but at last he reentered the room. Whatever news he had been given seemed to sit fairly well with him, for a change, for he was smiling with great energy and he cast a benevolent look at his friends sitting around the library. But he did not pause to speak to any of them; he came directly to me.

  “Your turn, I believe, Miss Starborn,” he said, and bent his arm as though to escort me from the room.

  I stood. “Yes—but I was expecting Mr. Ravenbeck. I have rather important news to tell him.”

  Mr. Taff shrugged. “He asked me to fetch you and said he had business elsewhere. Perhaps he already has heard your news.”

  “Did Mrs. Farraday seek him out, then?”

  “I did not see her, but she may have encountered him in the hall. Come! I think you’ll enjoy this.”

  I allowed him to lead me from the room. “You seem to have enjoyed it, at any rate,” I observed.

  “Oh, it was great fun! And I received the best news! I can hardly wait now for my future to unfold.”

  It seemed pointless to warn him that this future might well be manufactured, so I was silent while we climbed the steps to the study. Mr. Taff entered with me to explain the mechanism. I was astonished to find that the room, normally quite pleasant and cheerful, had been altered to suit the mysterious circumstances of the event. Only a few lights were on, and these were turned very low, so that the brightest source of illumination came from the terminal in the middle of the room. This was not an ordinary screen, but a great crystal ball, bigger than my head, sitting on a base that appeared to be onyx but which was, no doubt, its electronic connection. It had been set up on a table, over which hung yards of dark velvet, so that it appeared to be situated inside a small curtained tent. The back of the room was in utter darkness. I was surprised to find my skin starting to prickle; I was usually not so susceptible to a staged mood.

  “I take it I am to sit here,” I said, seating myself i
n a straight-backed chair pulled up to the table. I took a moment to glance over the crystal ball. I could detect no mechanisms for collecting or relaying data, but I was sure such devices had been installed in the base. Nor was there a keyboard, nor any way that I could determine to control any of the proceedings.

  In the depths of the round glass, there appeared only a slowly turning image of a constellation on a blue-black sky. “And this is whom I am to speak to?” I asked with a note of derision in my voice. “I am not sure I can take a star cluster very seriously.”

  “The psychic’s face will appear once the program is activated,” he assured me. “It’s stylized, of course, but not at all repulsive.”

  “How do I activate the program?”

  “You speak your name aloud and say you want your reading. There will be a short delay, and then the session will begin.”

  “And how do I know when the program is ended?”

  “She will tell you so, and the screen will revert to this.”

  “It sounds simple enough. If you see Mr. Ravenbeck—”

  “I know. I will tell him you need to speak with him. Enjoy yourself, Miss Starborn! I think you will find this an amazing venture.”

  I waited until the door had shut behind him before I opened my mouth again. Then, reminding myself that I believed in none of this, I stared at the celestial image and spoke in a firm voice. “My name is Jenna Starborn, and I have come to have my fortune told.”

  There was a moment’s complete silence while the constellation continued to rotate on its field. Then suddenly the globe went absolutely blank, and the air thrummed with a faint background music. Just as suddenly, the interior lights of the ball flashed again, and resolved themselves into the image of a woman’s face. It was a virtual woman, with flowing dark hair, snapping eyes, and so many necklaces and amulets wound around her throat that I could not begin to count them. She looked to be an amalgam of every gypsy and tarot reader produced in the last ten centuries.

  “Well, Miss Starborn,” she said in a pleasing, husky voice. “What is it you would like to know about yourself?”

  I smiled. “I already know everything I need to know about myself, though I am curious to know how much of that you may have discovered.”

  “Ah! A skeptic. Have you come to seek a reading against your will?”

  “Not unwillingly, but with very low expectations that you will be able to tell me much of the truth—or the future.”

  “I know your past well enough, though, even you will agree,” she said in that gravelly voice. “Your name Starborn suits you very well, though you might almost have been called Jenna Unborn. For you were not delivered as an ordinary child might be, but generated by science and harvested through technology. You were raised, though not loved, by the Rentley family on Baldus, until you left for an education on Lora. Where you stayed fourteen years until taking your position here as technician. Do you agree that I know the details of your history?”

  “They would not be hard to discover with a database and a little research,” I said calmly enough, though I admit to being somewhat shaken. My existence at Lora was a documented thing and I had, after all, sent my resume through the StellarNet, but I had told only Mrs. Farraday of my conception. I would not have expected her to repeat the tale, certainly not to a conjured mystic. Still, the records were there for anyone who had the time and leisure to track them down.

  “True enough, and research is a valuable tool for someone in my profession,” she said—which I considered a very odd admission for someone labeling herself as a sensitive. “Let me go on to say that your strange origins have engendered in you a passionate belief in the equality of all persons, regardless of race, gender, status, or ability, and that—more than most people who hold such beliefs—you try to live by them.”

  “I am a PanEquist. I suppose you could have gotten that information from any member of this household,” I said. I still found it difficult to believe that Mrs. Farraday—or Janet Ayerson or Ameletta—would have gossiped about such things to such a listener, which rather confirmed some of my earlier suspicions. The master of the house had had a hand in supplying background information to the medium about all his guests, the better to provide her with a chance of reading their fortunes aright.

  “Further,” she said, as though I had not spoken, “this belief in your equality creates a great well of tension in your soul, as you struggle with the disparity between what you want and what you realize you can have.”

  “I would presume that is a common dilemma for many in my situation,” I said. “But I do not agonize over that disparity, as you suggest. I see it, I acknowledge it, I go on.”

  “The disparity need not exist,” she said in a low, whispering voice.

  “What?”

  “The gulf you perceive, between what you want and what you are entitled to—that gulf can be crossed with the frailest bridge that you yourself can construct.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said calmly, though I could feel my pulse begin to quicken.

  “Do you not? What image that you are afraid to gaze on in broad day is imprinted in secret on your heart? What name do you practice in silence that you would not dare to speak aloud? What future do you envision, knowing it will not be realized? I tell you, gaze on that face. Speak that name. Imagine that future-and it will be yours.”

  Now my heart was beating so radically that I was afraid to make the smallest movement for fear my violent shaking would be betrayed. She whispered of hopes so impossible I had not even dared articulate them to myself. “I have no need to build bridges,” I said, making my voice steady by sheer force of will. “I am content where I am.”

  “Are you? In that cold, sterile environment where there is sufficient but there is not plenty?”

  “Coming as I do from the life you have already described, you must realize that for me, sufficient is a blessing. It is so much better than nothing at all. I would rather sip from the glass half full than have the empty glass shattered on the floor before me.”

  “You would rather be ill-fed than starving.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You would rather read by a few faint bulbs than sit, alone and impoverished, in the dark.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You would rather have friendship than lose that friendship by trying to convert it to love.”

  I was silent.

  “Ah! So there are some things for which your desires may overcome your fears.”

  “It is not fear that keeps me from running through the darkness, seeking a blazing fire instead of my few flickering lamps,” I said, roused to something like anger; she was baiting me, and I could not understand why, nor could I let all her innuendo pass without protest. “It is gratitude that I have got so much. I have sat, many a night, in full darkness, with no distraction and no solace to hurry the hours along. I have been given a source of light, and a great text to read by it. Why should I complain? Why should I jeopardize that by complaining that it is not enough?”

  “Exactly! The reluctance to damage the future by tampering with the present is the precise definition of fear.”

  “You speak in riddles,” I said coldly.

  “And you walk through your days, quaking with unspoken dread,” she replied. “You are afraid that the little you have will be taken away from you, and you know there is nothing you can to do prevent that.”

  “So that is the fortune you predict for me? That I shall lose my job here, and my friends here, and be sent off into the universe alone?”

  “Is that what you fear most?”

  “You are the one who claims to have all the answers.”

  “I think there are other things you fear even more, but that leaving Thorrastone Park would in any event be a grave blow to you. And you see it as a possibility before you—you know that there is talk of your employer marrying, and the household being broken up. And you think you are powerless to reach out a hand and alter t
he course of events or stay the cataclysm.”

  “If Mr. Ravenbeck chooses to marry and close down Thorrastone Park, I do not see that any gesture of mine will be able to stop him,” I said with a composure that seemed to me remarkable. “He is a capable and intelligent man. No advice of mine might sway him.”

  “Advice—perhaps not. But entreaty? Supplication? He might be moved by those.”

  “So that is your counsel to me? To beg my employer to cancel his nuptials so that I might have a place to live and work? I believe in the equality of the classes, madam, but I do not believe in such a level field as that.”

  “You misunderstand,” she said—or at least, I thought those were her words. Her image in the globe had started to crumble and distort, and her voice had started to climb to a higher range. “You should not implore him as employee to employer but as—”

  And here the sound degraded altogether into a squeaky incomprehensible whine. “As a what?” I asked, leaning closer to the crystal ball, now filled with an array of random color dots. “In what role should I approach him?”

  The next sound to issue from the speaker was completely different and altogether familiar. “Lord of the seven hells!” it said in the voice of the master of the house. “What’s happened to the damned transmission ?”

  I scooted my chair back and glanced around the darkened room. “Mr. Ravenbeck? Are you in here?”

  “No—yes—I’m next door, or actually, in the hall closet. The damned connection’s been broken, or something. I don’t suppose you’d want to come in here and fix it?”

  His voice was still issuing from the speakers, and I assumed the microphone was still carrying mine to him. I returned my chair to its place before the table. “I don’t see the point,” I said. “Now that you are discovered, you may as well talk to me as yourself and dispense with this ridiculous disguise.”