The Dark Reaches

  She clenched her fists, set them against the hatch, and swore. This was her ship. Her ship!

  And, being Iain, he’d let her discover for herself what he had done. He was afraid to hurt her—at least when he could see it happen.

  Linnea sighed. She was just as afraid to hurt him. Since their talk after she’d arrived, she had said nothing more about otherspace. His fear for her was plain, and painful. But still, thoughts of otherspace rarely left her mind, and she knew that he must guess that.

  She leaned her forehead against the hatch and closed her eyes. As he knew her mind, she knew his. If she forced Iain to name his fear openly, he’d be locked into the one course of action that would seem right to him: to take her back to Terranova as a failed pilot, to live out her life groundside or, at best, as his passenger. She would never have another moment of freedom in otherspace.

  She lifted her head. That must not happen. She had heard the call. No one else had heard it, or even believed it was real. No one else could answer it.

  The sense she got from that other mind, the other pilot—the sense of rightness, of completing something important—whatever was behind that could save them all. Even, she was sure, the one who had called to her.

  And there was no one else to answer.

  The second afternoon, after telling Iain she would rest, she stood motionless at the small window in their quarters, looking unseeing out at the clump of tall, silvery-leafed eucalyptus trees that sheltered the patrol leader’s office shed. Thinking hard. If she left Iain behind, if she jumped as far as Earth . . . then, when she returned, if she returned, years would have passed for him, many more than for her. There was no reason he would wait for her, or even remember her kindly—a woman who had betrayed his trust, abandoned him, and abandoned what he saw as her duty.

  But only Linnea could carry out this task. If Iain did not believe her, did not understand, then no one would. And he had made it clear that he did not.

  Heartsore, she made her decision. One from which there would be no turning back.

  On the second night she lay awake long after Iain had drifted to sleep. Finally, restless, she slid out carefully from his embrace. He did not seem to wake. She sat in the dark, watching him sleep. Now that she knew she was going to try to leave, sadness weighed her down, an ache too deep for tears. In the weak yellow light from the nearby field, Iain slept on, his long black hair loose silk on his pillow, spilling over one brown shoulder, the strong lines of his face softened into peace.

  She would not let herself count over the few years they had had. She pushed away the thought that this was cowardice, that she owed Iain a farewell. Because the moment he understood her intent, he would call port security and have her confined for her own sake. To protect her, he would disable her ship—spin down the jump engine. Maybe he would even let it unbalance, shattering the fine calibrations that kept its energies controlled when it was operating. The containment interlocks would crush it into nothing, irretrievable, never to be repaired.

  Maybe he had already done it. She looked down at him, considering.

  No. Iain had honor. He would not kill her ship without telling her.

  It doesn’t matter anymore.

  She climbed back in beside him, curled against him, and held herself still until sleep took her.

  In the morning, Iain was gone—an early meeting in the town, she remembered him mentioning it in passing. She rose, washed quickly, and dressed in her dark gray pilot’s tunic and trousers—finely woven fabric, the most formal she owned. Fitting for a last voyage. Then pulled from under their bed the travel bag she had packed in secret last night.

  She let herself out silently, willing herself not to look back at the empty room. She would see him again—someday.

  She would hold to that hope.

  Out on the field, in the blue-gray stillness before dawn, she made herself walk at a normal pace along the little row of ships. The one technician she passed looked at her without apparent surprise or interest, then bent back to her work on one of the patrol ships’ fueling lines.

  Linnea’s heart gave a thump as she reached Iain’s ship, stopped in front of its hatch. She had access, of course; and she was sure she could reach orbit even in a ship not specifically fitted to her. Orbit, and radius, and one short jump. Direction would not matter, after all; the jump would just be to put her beyond Iain’s reach. Then, when she had laboriously made the ship her own, she would jump again. Jump, and listen. Wait for word.

  She touched the cool, smooth metal of the ship’s skin. This was Iain’s ship, his own since his first year as a trainee in boyhood; and now she was stealing it from him.

  But she was betraying so much else that mattered even more. Years of his trust, his love. His belief in her good faith. Against that, this theft would hardly weigh in the balance. She forced down a wave of guilt and raised her hand to the access pad next to the hatch.

  And Iain’s voice behind her said, “Linnea.”

  She froze. Then turned slowly to face him.

  He was dressed as she was, in dark gray tunic and trousers: not quite the attire of a Pilot Master, but a sign of pride and serious intent. He stood formally upright, his hands clasped behind his back.

  When she saw the leashed pain in his dark eyes, she could barely speak. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Sorry, for planning to steal my ship?” He did not move toward her, and his expression, firmly controlled, did not change. “But, Linnea, you can’t steal it.”

  “You locked it down?”

  He shook his head, patience clear in his eyes. “No. You can’t steal it because—because, Linnea, all that I have is yours.” His mouth quirked. “Not that it’s much.”

  Now the tears came, burning in her eyes, in the back of her throat. Beyond the shadows where they stood, the first light of the sun touched the top of the clump of eucalyptus at the edge of the field. “I had to try, Iain,” she said. “I couldn’t give up.”

  “No,” he said gently. “You never could.” He touched his ship, and the hatch dilated. “Let’s go in. There’s something I want you to see.”

  She climbed in after him, and stood watching in his cramped piloting compartment as he woke the commscreen, sorted through files, and finally called up an image: a world hanging in the blackness of space, in half-phase, the continents strange to her and yet familiar, known from so many pictures and stories. Earth. Earth long ago, when it still lived.

  She looked at him in puzzlement. Still he was watching her with that deep, considering gaze. “Linnea.” He clasped his hands behind his back, as if to keep himself from touching her. “Tell me. Why is this so important? I know you hope to learn something, find a new weapon to use against the Cold Minds—but it’s more than that, isn’t it? What is it that makes you so determined to try this journey, alone, in a ship you don’t know?”

  She stood for a moment, fighting for calm. Pulling the words up, the thoughts she’d hidden from him for so long for his own pride’s sake. “Remember those children we found when we went back to Nexus,” she said. “Pilots’ sons, left behind when their fathers escaped or died. Left alone. Forgotten.”

  He looked away for a moment, took a deep breath. “I remember them.”

  She chose her words carefully. She had to make him understand. “They waited more than a year, without any hope, with the Cold Minds hunting them down, imprisoning them. Remember how afraid they were. Hiding like, like rats. And the boys the Cold Minds did catch—do you remember what we found?”

  She saw the memory in his eyes. She knew how it had scarred his dreams. He nodded.

  “But, Iain.” Her voice shook. “These people—our people, just as much as those boys were—they’ve waited for six hundred years.”

  He was silent for a while. Then he sighed. “What if I join you in another petition to the Council? If we propose a properly supported expedition, men with experience and credentials—”

  “They won’t listen,” she said. �
�The Line doesn’t want to know. If there are humans alive in that system, that means some were left behind who could have been saved. Who waited, and hoped, for nothing. Who are still waiting.”

  “It was too dangerous,” Iain said, an edge of anger in his voice. “After more than forty years of the rescue, the risk of losing ships was rising. And we needed those ships here, among the Worlds. If anyone was left behind, it was not done deliberately. And they could have followed.”

  She faced him. “Could they? Did they have jumpships of their own? Pilots of their own?”

  “They must have,” Iain said. “But maybe not enough will. Or enough skill.”

  “Or—they didn’t know where we went.”

  “You mean that my fathers kept the secret from them.” His dark eyes sparked with anger. At the Line, or at her?

  She set her hands on his arms. “The Line used their disciplines, the ones you tried to teach me, to blind themselves. Don’t you see why? They were closing the door behind them, Iain—closing it and locking it.”

  “But the Line never forgot Earth,” Iain said.

  “They never forgot their dream of Earth,” she said bitterly, remembering shards of sapphire in a ruined chamber, the dripping of dark water, blackness and rot. “They never forgot Earth the way it was in the old stories. In their minds, they failed no one, abandoned no one. But the truth—” She looked up at him. “Someone wants me to find the truth. Someone in Earth’s system.”

  “It’s too far,” he said, openly angry now. “Even a ship like yours can’t sustain you over a jump that long.”

  “It will,” she said with a confidence she did not feel. “It’s new, it’s powerful. Fully stocked, it should last. And you know I can make an efficient jump. I’m a good pilot, Iain.”

  He was silent. Assessing her madness, deciding on a course of action? Then he said, “I brought you in here for a reason. I want you to tell me your dreams. Describe one of the images you saw.”

  She blinked at him impatiently—then called up the memories. The most vivid was the red canyon, kilometers deep, with snow dusting the walls and ledges and the vast pillars of rock rising from its floor, fresh snow falling on the far rim.

  Before she had half described it, he said, “Is this what you saw?”

  She looked at the commscreen, and her breath leaked away. “That’s . . . that’s exactly the image I saw, Iain.”

  “And you have never seen it before?” His voice was calm.

  “No,” she said firmly. “Never.”

  “It was called the Grand Canyon,” Iain said. “In a place named Arizona. Another?”

  One by one she described them; one by one he called up the images, and they were the same: the ones she had dreamed.

  Places she had never seen.

  Now they were looking at each other, and she felt the same fear she saw in his eyes. “What are these, Iain?”

  He sighed. “These are images we—men of the Line use in some of our private meditations, to focus our minds on Earth. They’re part of a collection that our ancestors brought from the Earth system. They’ve been—part of the inmost secrets of the Line for all these years. Sacred, you know that word? You could not ever have seen them, not growing up on Santandru. We don’t share them. We don’t publish them. They’re—part of the Sorrowing. Which we also don’t discuss.”

  She was silent for a while, looking at him. Then she said, “So they’re real places? Places on Earth?”

  He was silent.

  Time to press. “Iain. Do you believe me now?”

  She saw how that hurt him, but did not regret it. But he shook it off. “This jump point you mentioned,” he said. “What did you see?”

  She described it for him: the blue-green gas giant. The blackness of space, bitter and bare without the Hidden Worlds’ comforting nebulae. The sense of cold and isolation, far from the warmth of the sun.

  And as she described it she saw his eyes change, saw pain fade, replaced by questioning.

  “There is no planet like that in the Hidden Worlds,” Linnea said. “I know it. I searched through the atlases for every system. There is no sky like that anywhere. And the world—it wasn’t Earth, but—”

  “There is a world like that in Earth’s system,” he said quietly, and touched the commscreen again.

  The world she had seen hung there, cold blue against infinite emptiness. A different image, in full phase, but the same world.

  Unspeakable relief flooded her. So that, too, is real. He sees that it is real.

  “I have to try this, Iain,” she said, her throat tight with tears. “I know the way. I can bring those people hope.” She looked up into his face, dark in the dim light of his ship, willing him to understand. To believe her. “And they can give hope to our people. Do you see? They’ve survived in the shadow of the Cold Minds. Defended themselves, somehow. Think what that might mean for us, for our people.” She swallowed hard. “This is more important than one ship, one life.”

  He was silent for a long moment. Then he reached out and took her hand. “One life—or two.”

  Of course she would be breaking his life as well, in leaving him. She felt a tear slide down her cheek and took his hand in both of hers. “I have to try,” she said again, thinly.

  “I do see,” he said, and took a breath. She waited for his words: words of return to Terranova, confinement, the end of her freedom, all for her good. But then he said, “You can’t go alone.” As she stared up at him in shock, he set his hand gently on her cheek. “I won’t let you go alone. Did you think I would?”

  She could not speak.

  “I can’t follow you through otherspace in my own ship,” he said. “So I’ll travel in yours.”

  She stood there frozen, realization a cold trickle down the back of her neck. When she found breath she said, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know you, Linnea. I know what makes you judge the way you do. And I’ve seen it: You judge rightly. So I’ll follow.” He raised her hand in his and kissed it, soberly, formally. “Take us to Earth.”

  SEVEN DAYS LATER

  I ain sen Paolo lay, tense, immobilized, in the darkness of his passenger shell—running through the prelaunch checklist in his mind just as Linnea, in the piloting shell, was doing in reality.

  As a courtesy, she had linked him in to all of the ship’s displays, even though his shell could have no control capability. Using those links, he could have followed her progress directly. But he knew—oh, how well he knew—how Linnea hated the feeling of anyone watching over her shoulder. Even the man who loved her, whom she’d learned, it seemed, to trust. So he was with her only in thought.

  His internal sight showed him the wide, bare landing field around the ship—the ground crew withdrawn to safety, red warning lights set into the pavement spinning to mark the danger zone. Sharp purple shadows stretched far across the sunset field toward the edge of the trees. Iain had spent almost no time on Paradais, in his career as a Pilot Master, and he regretted that now. He wondered if either of them would ever come here again.

  The week of preparation had been intensely busy. Linnea had insisted, and Iain agreed, that they would prepare thoroughly for the jump, all supplies at maximum; Iain passed it off to Paradais Ground as part of the shakedown run for Linnea’s new ship. They had the ground tech crew check every system in the ship, and Iain tested them as well. They added extra air-recycling and water-purifying capacity by having the units built into two of the three passenger shells, under Iain’s close supervision—though it drained what remained of his offworld letter of credit almost to nothing. He would travel in the third shell, now half-hidden by reserve storage for food and oxygen.

  Of course Paradais Ground suspected that something strange was up. But the habit of obedience to Line orders still persisted; even though they knew Iain was not, officially, Line, they knew he and Linnea had power on Terranova, knew that their world’s protection from the Cold Minds depended on the pilots Iain and Li
nnea were, partly, in charge of training.

  Iain’s left arm and shoulder ached coldly where the connections for food, fluids, and drugs had just snaked into place. At Iain’s insistence, three days ago the best clinic on Paradais had thoroughly examined him and Linnea, including, of course, the traditional pilot-competence examinations for mental stability. There was no sign of trouble in Linnea’s results, physical or mental.

  But she had taken these tests before, and she’d read hundreds of trainee tests—she knew the answers the examiners looked for.

  He shook himself. No. He’d told her he trusted her. He would not make that assurance a lie by doubting her now.

  Ten minutes to launch. Linnea should have been finished already—perhaps she was running through the checklist twice. But Iain did not dare speak and interrupt her concentration. Instead, he ticked over the other issues in his mind.

  Supplies were a problem with no good answer. The intravenous nutrients that would support them during a long jump were only part of the need. Even after they reached their destination, it might take days or weeks in realspace to find human habitation and new sources of food, water, and oxygen. And would the people they found give them these things simply because they needed them?

  In the end he and Linnea had stocked the ship with medical supplies, technical and cultural libraries, anything of small mass and high value that they might be able to trade for what they needed. Assuming they were allowed to dock in the first place.

  Iain had privately considered the possibility that they would find no welcome among the humans in Earth’s system—that they would have to return immediately to the Hidden Worlds. He’d packed away a stunrod and neural fuser for each of them, saying nothing to Linnea. If they had to return, they would get the supplies they needed—however it had to be done.

  Linnea had left it to Iain to compose the official, formally worded message for Terranova: taking leave from their positions, saying nothing of their intentions, but making clear that they would not be returning or communicating for several years at least. Iain knew that this alone would stir suspicions within the Line, given Linnea’s highly public interest in the issue of human survivors in Earth’s system.