Jenna Starborn

by Sharon Shinn

  She blushed and disclaimed, but the rosy red of her cheeks was more credible than her disjointed statements about “intending to wait.”

  I added, “And if you fear I will be lonely in any solitary home of my own, let me tell you what a pleasure it will be to have an entire house to myself and not be sharing it with whatever unfortunates have disembarked off the latest starship, disoriented and stupefied, who consider themselves free to wander the hallways at will.”

  “Yes! I confess that I am looking forward to a little privacy as well! But then what becomes of the Public Aid Office? For it is very useful, you must agree, and I would hate to see it disbanded altogether once Sinclair is gone and I am out of the house.”

  “You and Leopold Joester and your other high city officials will hire someone to replace Sinclair and everything will go on as before,” I said. “Your kindness and good nature will be hard to duplicate, but your physical presence will be easily replaced, I promise you.”

  “Yes—that is what Maria says—but I do worry—”

  I reiterated my belief that all would be well, then pressed her for details on her betrothal. She was happy enough to talk of Harmon Joester, and their plans to move outside the Cody city limits and homestead a small tract of farmland. Once again, I saw that my inheritance had made a long-held dream shape up into a practical reality, and I rejoiced for her. If ever anyone deserved good fortune, it was Deborah Rainey.

  But later that night, as Sinclair and I studied after dinner, I reflected that Deborah’s marriage made my own more plausible. It gave me one more reason to accept Sinclair, for it gave me one less reason to stay in Cody, attempting to continue living the life that I found so agreeable. True, it would be hard on Maria to lose me and both of her siblings in a few short weeks—but Maria too had her suitors, and I did not see her living for long alone.

  Did I not want to marry too, with everyone I loved stepping into the bonds of matrimony?

  I was quieter than usual this night, which was obvious to Sinclair, and I had declined the opportunity to resume our studies outdoors on the grounds that a spring storm was moving in and the winds were too disruptive. So we sat in the library, while his sisters read, and we went over a few tangled equations. The last five nights, once our lessons were over, he had spent some time outlining for me again the various attractions of Cozakee, but this night I was not prepared to hear one more word in praise of that distant world. When Deborah and Maria rose to seek their bedrooms, I came to my feet with alacrity and proclaimed my own exhaustion. Sinclair nodded to me with his usual somberness.

  “I will read a few minutes longer on my own,” he said. “But we will talk again tomorrow, Jenna, will we not?”

  Tomorrow, of course, was the deadline I had fashioned for my decision, and so I knew what he referred to. “Yes, Sinclair, we will talk then,” I said, and followed his sisters from the room.

  But once I was in my own bedchamber, I found myself too restless to sleep, or think, or pray. In less than a day, I must announce my intentions, and I was not much closer to certainty now than I had been the night Sinclair first made his proposal. I knew that I was inclined to accept him, but for reasons that did not bear close examination—not because I loved him, not because I was interested in the life he had to offer, but because such a course would free me forever from any need to think again about my own future. I would have to work, but I would not have to worry and wonder. My choice made, I would have no options but to go forward. Such inevitability appealed to me; I felt my battered heart could use some constancy.

  But still I was not sure I could bring myself to marry him.

  “Goddess, I need a little guidance from you this night,” I whispered under my breath. But my small, comfortable room seemed too close and confining to admit of her expansive presence; I thought I might have a better chance of hearing her whispers of wisdom if I stepped outside and stood in the windy dark. Accordingly—fervently hoping that I did not inadvertently encounter Sinclair on his way to bed—I crept from my room and up the back stairs to emerge on the rooftop patio.

  A storm was indeed building up from the plains that lay west of the city. Against the blackness of the heavens, I could see a more forbidding darkness mounting in that direction. It was as if Night herself had drawn her features together in a scowl and, like a distempered baby, was about to vent her ill humor on us in one long howling wail. The wind was even stronger than I had anticipated, and it whipped around me with such force that I staggered back against the door once I had shut it behind me. The very air smelled of sulphur and fury—it crossed my mind that it might not be the Goddess who communed with me this night, but something altogether darker and more devilish.

  Nonetheless, she was the one I had come here to consult, and I pushed myself away from the door with some determination. Fighting the bickering wind, I made my way to the center of the patio, and lifted my face to the manic skies. A few angry drops of cold rain splashed across my cheek and were scrubbed away by the wind. I did not mind; I almost hoped the heavens opened up, a great shower of purification, washing me clean of my cluttered thoughts and leaving me empty, scoured, and serene.

  “Goddess!” I cried, flinging my hands out as wide as they would go and appealing to that faceless, furious sky. “Goddess, command me! I am your obedient child, I am your willing daughter—where would you send me that I might do the most good in your name?”

  A distant roll of thunder answered me, and a spray of rain for a moment blinded me, but there was no clearer directive. I shook the water from my face and asked again.

  “You have spoken to me twice in the past—you have shown your love for me, you have not allowed me to set a foot wrong. I am lost now, I am confused. Tell me what you would have me do—show me what I should know.”

  The wind blew so fiercely for a moment that the door rattled violently on its hinges; I dropped to my knees on the hard stone of the roof to be somewhat out of its way. There was a live quality to that wind, a sentience. I felt it palpitate with the hands or heartbeats of all the creatures it had whistled past on its blistering journey to me. There was sound in it too, mutters and whispers and muffled cries, and I strained to separate out a single voice, a single sentence, of sense and coherence.

  And I heard one word, in that voice I had heard twice before in my life, and that voice said, “Listen.”

  “Listen for what?” I cried, but the wind answered only with its indistinguishable moans. “Listen for whom?” But this time there were no human voices at all, just the rough shrieking passage of the wind.

  I stayed where I was, now folding my arms about me and settling back on my heels, and prepared to wait. The night grew blacker; the clouds piled in the west drew closer and closer, gradually obliterating the shaken stars overhead. Rain began to fall in good earnest, soaking me through in a matter of minutes, and not for a moment did the wind cease its game of chase and follow. And still I knelt, and still I waited, and still I strained with all my senses to hear what the Goddess bade.

  The storm grew so rough that I could hear nothing except the lashing rain and the roaring wind and the things that came crashing down because of them. It was as if I had been transported back in time, to the violent birth of the universe, or forward, to its turbulent death—so primitive did the tempest seem, so full of rage and incontrovertible purpose. I would not have been surprised, upon staggering to my feet, to find I had been hurled to another time or another dimension; such was the force of that gale that I felt it could have launched me to any place real or imaginary.

  I have no idea how long it lasted, though it seemed as though hours passed while I knelt there, buffeted by the most elemental forces at the Goddess’s disposal. At last—a break in the rain, a faltering in the wild air—and then, with an ominous suddenness, complete and utter stillness.

  I lifted my head, for I had drawn it close to my chest for protection, and listened to the profound silence around me. Nothing in the whole city appeared to move
or function. The stars themselves seemed to have halted in their courses and stood, dumb and motionless, overhead. This was the silence at the dawn of the universe, before the planets knew men or men knew speech; this was the breathless advent of time itself.

  All the corridors between all the worlds were open. If a single man spoke, every creature would hear him. If the Goddess blinked her eye, every star would tumble. Every atom was connected, across the unbridgeable distances of space, and every living molecule was contracted into one small dense core of matter.

  And at the precise moment I had this revelation, I heard my name spoken aloud.

  “Jenna!” The syllables rolled across the glittering trails of starlight. “Jenna! Jenna! Jenna! Jenna!”

  Nothing more—my name, over and over again—but I leaped to my feet, panting like a wild thing. “Everett!” I cried. “Where are you?”

  “Jenna!” The voice came back, but fainter now, as if receding across some unimaginable horizon, or as if the speaker himself did not have the strength to go on. “Jenna—Jenna—Jenna—”

  “Everett!” I shrieked, as panicked as if I could actually view him, slipping across the boundary of life and death before my very eyes. “Everett, I am coming! Wait for me!”

  Chapter 20

  Three months later, I disembarked at the spaceport on Fieldstar. It took me some little time to adjust myself to the shapes and scents of the place I had left a year and a half ago. The shuttle hangars were the same huge, bustling, impersonal spaces I remembered, full of too many people and too much noise. Outside the hangars, the streets of the city wound sleepily away. The quality of the air immediately caught my attention, and I glanced up at the faint metallic dome arching overhead. On Cody, I had become used to vagrant breezes and the playful touch of the sun, but I instantly remembered how on Fieldstar, such amenities did not exist. All was filtered, artificial, recycled. I took a deep breath and stepped purposefully down the road.

  What I wanted now was to hire a conveyance to take me to Thorrastone Park. In the past, I had never made the trip between manor and town in anything except the public bus or Everett’s aeromobile, but today I knew the latter would not be at my disposal, and I had no patience to wait for the former. Vehicles and their drivers could be hired, I knew from overhearing the conversation of Joseph Luxton and Harley Taff, but until now I had never had the need—or the resources—to put such knowledge to the test.

  In fact, I was finding I quite liked the advantages to being a woman of substance. My credit account had allowed me, three months ago, to book passage on a fast, commercial liner that would take me between Appalachia and Hestell in one sixth of the time it had taken the Anniversary to cover the same distance. On Hestell I had purchased another expensive ticket on the cargo ship heading toward Fieldstar by the fastest route. Its accommodations were spartan, to say the least, but I did not care about furnishings; I cared about speed.

  I had to get to Fieldstar and Everett Ravenbeck as quickly as I could.

  The Raineys had protested, of course, and I had considered myself obligated to tell them the whole story on the following morning. They had been, I think, shocked to discover yet another twist in my history, though this time at least no name change accompanied the revelation. They could not believe Everett Ravenbeck could still have any claim on my affections after his lies to me, and they greatly doubted my sanity when I described what had transpired on the rooftop patio.

  “We must investigate,” Sinclair had declared, and stalked away to the library monitor, all of us following behind. But after he called up news services and narrowed down his search to Fieldstar, it became clear that something disastrous had occurred at Thorrastone Park. There had been a compromise in the forcefield. Several people had been injured, and one had been killed.

  “Killed?” I repeated in a strangled voice, for Sinclair read these words in a detached way, and his head blocked the screen. I could not see the monitor to read the words for myself. “But who—does it say—but what else happened—”

  “There are very few details,” he said, seeming to skim ahead in the news item. “Oh, but here—it quotes your Everett Ravenbeck as saying he intends to make full repairs to the house. So he at least was not the one to die.”

  One great fear assuaged! But dozens of others instantly swarmed in to replace it. What of Mrs. Farraday—Ameletta—any of the staff members I had come to know and respect? Such names would be of less interest to the media services, which cared only to report on the activities of high-grade citizens, but to me the import of their deaths would be almost as grave.

  “No other news?” I demanded. “Nothing?”

  Sinclair swiveled around to face me. “Nothing,” he said.

  Deborah laid a hand on my arm. “You were right, then,” she said quietly. “He does need you.”

  Sinclair looked contemptuous. “The fact that he has suffered a tragedy in no way changes what he has done to her in the past and the fact that she is better off free of him and galaxies away. The most the situation requires is a note of sympathy—though even that, in my opinion, would be ill-advised.”

  I was looking at Deborah. “I will pack immediately and leave as soon as I can.” Maria and Sinclair exclaimed against this, but Deborah only gave me back a solemn stare and nodded with complete understanding.

  And the next day I was on my expensive cruiser, and then I spent three months in a state of exquisite torture. Wretched as the first experience had been, I almost wished for the oblivion of cold storage for this voyage back to Fieldstar, to spare myself the strain of constant and helpless worry. I hourly checked the media postings but found no news of Everett Ravenbeck’s death. More details of the disaster I could not discover.

  So when I landed on Fieldstar, I was in no mood to brook delays. I marched down the spaceport streets, inquired of the first sensible-looking person I saw where I might hire an aircar, and followed his directions until I fetched up in a slightly seedy-looking office not far from the Registry Office that I had visited once so long ago. Three youthful drivers slouched around the office, debating the merits of some brand of automotive circuitry, and they all glanced rather indifferently in my direction as I strode in.

  “I need to hire a car to take me to Thorrastone Manor immediately,” I announced.

  A slim, long-haired youth whose shapeless clothes did not entirely conceal the fact that she was female, though that seemed to be their intent, was the only one to respond. “No such thing as Thorrastone Manor anymore,” she said.

  I felt hands clutch upon my heart; I am sure I staggered. “Gone!” I gasped. “But—the news reports—I thought the park had been saved—”

  “Oh, sure, the park’s still there, and some of the mining buildings,” the girl replied nonchalantly. “But the house—it hasn’t been fixed up again. Can’t nobody live there.”

  “So—then—the people who lived in the house—where have they taken up residence?” I asked, stammering a little.

  The girl looked at her fellow drivers and shrugged. “I don’t think there were too many people living there. An old lady, a couple of servants.”

  “And Mr. Ravenbeck,” one of the other drivers said.

  “Oh. Right. He got hurt, didn’t he?” the young woman asked.

  “Mr. Ravenbeck. That’s who I’m interested in finding,” I said, making my voice as steady as I could. “Where might he be located?”

  The girl shrugged and, as if that did not convey enough ignorance, spread her hands. “Don’t know. Don’t know who could tell you.”

  I remembered something she had said a moment ago. “But the mining compound is still functional? Is it still being used?”

  She nodded. “Sure. Dropped off a fare there two or three weeks ago.”

  Then Mr. Cartell or Mr. Soshone could tell me where Mr. Ravenbeck could be found. “Take me to the park,” I said as imperiously as if I had had money my whole life. “From there, I will decide what to do next.”

  It was t
he young woman who elected to be my driver, and she talked easily and rather vapidly for the whole flight. Although at first I thought her senseless chatter would drive me mad, soon enough I became grateful for the mild distraction it offered, for the two hours of this leg of the journey seemed to stretch as long as the three-month star voyage had. I sat beside her on the ripped faux-leather seats, my hands clenched tightly in my lap, and tried to keep from shrieking.

  How many times had I made this journey between Thorrastone Manor and the spaceport, and how many times had the trip been almost unendurable?

  At last, at last, we arrived within sight of the familiar enclosure. But how unfamiliar it looked now! Even from some distance away, I could view the damage to the once proud manor, every window shattered, a few shingles and shutters hanging at rakish, negligent angles. All around the house and throughout the great yard, weeds took a rapid ascendancy.

  “Dear Goddess,” I murmured, “it looks like a desolate place.”

  “That’s a fact,” my driver said, slowing down so we could enter the airlock. “Guess all the windows blew when the forcefield went down.”

  “How was the forcefield torn? Was there any damage to the mining compound?”

  She shrugged, as I was beginning to believe she often did. “I didn’t pay that much attention, you know? Didn’t know anyone who lived there. Didn’t really matter that much to me.”

  I had already established that she did not know the identity of the single person killed in the calamity, and I knew it was pointless to ask her more questions now. We paused for a moment inside the airlock, then activated the door that would allow us onto the park grounds themselves.