by Shannah Jay
'Not now. She's changing, as we all are. She's even made some minor prophecies herself. Many Sisters prophesy, you know, even without possessing the major Gift. It seems that the training we undertake fosters that skill, that prescience. The prophecies come as moments of illumination, rifts in a cloudy sky, which allow the sun to shine through briefly.'
He shivered slightly. 'I fear this Gift, Herra. I'm less worthy of it than any of you.'
Again, that warm hand lingered on his shoulder, bringing comfort. 'We all fear it. It's a Gift of leaders, and with it come other responsibilities. Fortunately, dear boy, it develops slowly, allowing one to grow accustomed to the burdens it imposes. And the training helps. Confex couldn't have given you that. The long years of acquiring our Disciplines will enhance not only the Gift, but your ability to cope with it - yes, and to interpret it.'
Herra hesitated, then said thoughtfully, 'It has to do with the balance of life. It seems to me that when I prophesy, I sense the balance of - of everything, everywhere. It may even be, I think, the balance of all worlds, all people. Is there a word for that?'
'The cosmic balance, perhaps.'
'Is that the word - cosmic?'
'It's a reasonably adequate word, as far as words go. In any case, Herra, cosmic balance is as near as I can get. I remember in your major prophecy, the one about me joining you, that you spoke of "all the worlds", even then, when you knew nothing of them.'
Herra quoted softly:
Then Sunrise shall awake with joy,
To banish Serpent dire,
And Wisdom's Looking-Glass employ
To set all Space on fire.
On all the worlds where Discord shows,
The need shall rise and call
To Sunrise, where the God's truth grows
And Wisdom's flowers blow tall.
Davred joined her in the words, known by heart by everyone in the Sisterhood: A thousand Chariots shall ascend
To start a second quest,
And the Children's Children shall contend,
To make truth manifest.
Thus peace shall spread to every world,
The Quest to every heart,
And Wisdom's banner now unfurled
Shall fly in every part.
They were silent for a time, then Davred murmured, 'Yes. The cosmic balance is not as it should be.
Things are going badly on Confederation worlds, as well as here on Sunrise. Even on the satellite. Look at the way Robler is behaving. I can hardly believe that a man in his position can do such things.'
'He's jealous of you, Davred, very jealous.'
'Jealous! That's no excuse. The man was a near Cathartic Agent himself. He's the Exec of the satellite and should be above jealousy! Oh, Herra, it is an Age of Discord, deep and destructive, universal Discord!
Do you really think that we, here on Sunrise, will be able to find a solution for it?'
'We can only try. It's a worthwhile quest, is it not?'
'Yes. Very worthwhile.'
They sat for a while longer in silence, sharing a rapport far beyond words, then she stood up and bent to kiss his forehead with the mother's kiss he’d never known and that she’d not been allowed to offer to anyone for so many years.
'Sleep well, son of my heart!'
'And you, mother of my soul!'
CHAPTER 13 FUGITIVES
Soo and Mak retired to their quarters for the rest period, as usual. They had made no attempt to join the others for a rec-hour drink or game since Robler had decreed that they could not stay married. They knew this was resented, but needed to make plans for their escape and were afraid of betraying themselves. Besides, they no longer had any need for the stimulants which Robler increasingly urged upon their colleagues to enhance their leisure.
When Lizan taxed Soo with what she called this aberration, Soo said frankly that the others would have to force her to share her body with them.
'There are suitable drugs which will make you want to,' snapped Lizan.
'And there are ways for me to kill myself if you try that,' replied Soo quietly, but so firmly that Lizan could not doubt her resolve.
'You've gone mad to talk like that!' gasped Lizan. 'You're becoming a primitive yourself!'
'I simply know what I want in life, which is to be with my Mak,' said Soo, with a joyous smile at the thought of their love.
Lizan walked away, muttering angrily.
That night Met sat watching Soo and Mak on the temporary surveillance screen in the Exec's anteroom.
The two of them were getting ready for sleep, and his lip curled in disgust at the way they performed their ablutions openly and shared a sleeping-pad, just like animals. The image flickered for a moment, then steadied as the two of them lay down to sleep.
Met slid down in his chair and put his feet up on the edge of the desk. He scowled at the sleeping pair on the screen. Four hours of boredom lay ahead for him, but Robler had insisted that Mak and Soo be watched at all times. The Exec had been sure from the start that they would try to follow Davred Hollunby down to the planet, but Met couldn’t believe that any civilised person would want to go down there at the moment, not with all the violence Those of the Serpent seemed to encourage and revel in. It made him shudder even to view their filthy practices. It was the only major issue he and Robler disagreed on - whether to contact Those of the Serpent, now that the Sisterhood had been defeated.
Not until Robler, in his restless prowlings around the satellite, discovered some packages of supplies concealed on one of the lifeships did Met change his mind about Soo and Mak's intentions. Like Davred, Soo and Mak must have gone completely mad. There could be no other explanation. It was therefore Met's duty to help save them and put them in stasis-hold until they could be given treatment at the nearest regional base.
But for all that, spying on his colleagues in their private quarters and making plans to trap them went against the grain, and the situation was making him more and more irritable.
In their quarters, Soo and Mak lay on the sleeping pad until the signal showed that the recorded image of them sleeping was playing smoothly for the hidden observers. Did Robler really think he could put surveillance equipment into her quarters without her knowing? Soo had, of course, set up anti-interference sensors and had known immediately when the room had been tampered with. However, she and Mak had decided to leave these surveillance monitors in place, so as not to arouse Robler's suspicions about their plans.
It was easy enough to make substitute recordings of them sleeping and arrange for one of them to be played whenever they wanted to do something without Robler knowing.
In spite of the Exec's vigilance, Soo had managed to make a few changes to the com-equipment around the satellite. No one could tell whether she was carrying out her normal maintenance functions or installing modifications as long as she worked openly and confidently and always had an explanation ready about what she was doing. Robler would get a few surprises, though, if ever a Confex relief ship came to Sunrise.
When she nudged Mak to say it was safe, they both got up and began to dress in silence. This time they put on the dull grey-green coveralls used for maintenance work, instead of the garish ship-suits, so that once they had landed they would be able to blend with the landscape.
They knew the packages Mak had concealed on the lifeship had been discovered, as they had hoped, but not removed. Those were merely a decoy, for they planned to escape by transcap. The capsules, normally used for transporting goods, could be launched more easily than a lifeship, hopefully without Robler even becoming aware of their departure. This should gain them some precious minutes before they were picked up on the satellite's planetary monitors. It would be close, but they thought they stood a better chance of escaping that way with the lifeships so closely guarded.
The main drawback to this plan was that the transcaps held only one person, so Soo had designed some modification units to link the two transcaps' controls and enable them to stay
close to each other. It had been a relatively simple task to make such adjustments and again, she’d done the initial work right in front of Met's suspicious eyes. If their landing wasn’t as close as expected, they each carried personal com-units with direction finders, and a few other pieces of equipment designed by Soo.
The main difficulty would lie in getting free of the satellite and remaining free for long enough to escape the tractor beams Robler would undoubtedly employ to try to pull them back to the satellite. In the transcaps they would be even more vulnerable to the tractor beams than Davred had been in the lifeship when he escaped, but it was a risk they’d have to take.
They moved quietly along the curved walkway which led from near their quarters to the transport area. At one point they heard someone approaching and had to duck into an ablution unit to hide. Soo's face was pale with tension and Mak could feel his palms sweating as they stood close together inside the small cubicle, waiting for the person to pass. Mak looked down at his hands in faint surprise. Although he’d read about the physiological manifestations of fear, it seemed strange to him, wrong even, that a person from a high-level civilisation, such as himself, should be as vulnerable to them as everyone else. His heart was beating more quickly, too. The adrenalin, no doubt. How alert he felt! He’d expected his senses to be numbed with fear, not sharpened by it.
He grinned at Soo. 'We're definitely regressing towards the primitive!'
But she couldn’t summon up an answering smile.
They listened intently, but once the footsteps had passed, they could hear no more sounds outside. With a shrug and another grin, Mak opened the door. He gestured to Soo to follow him and they crept on towards the hold.
The most dangerous place they had to pass was the recreation area, where there were always two or three people off-duty from among the twenty crew members. Tonight, judging by the noise, half the crew were there and it sounded as if they had been indulging in euphorion, one of the most popular stimulants.
As Mak and Soo approached the door to the rec-area, their hearts sank. It was wide open! They stopped and stared at each other in horror. With so many people inside, it was unlikely that they would manage to cross that bright shaft of light unnoticed.
'What do we do?' Soo mouthed in Mak's ear.
'Try again tomorrow?'
She shook her head. 'No. We'd have to wait several more days for a position favourable for a night descent to our chosen landing area. And I don't think that Robler is going to wait for the thirty days to end before taking action, not the way he's been eyeing me lately. Mak, it must be tonight! I've got the strangest certainty about that.'
They stared again at the open door, then Mak shrugged. 'Well, we'll just have to risk it, then. One at a time.
I'll go first. I'll wait for a noisy moment and walk across. Don't run! That would surely attract attention. If they catch me, you try to get back to our quarters and pretend that you know nothing.'
She shook her head. 'That's not possible. They'll realise that one of us wouldn't leave the other behind.
We'll stick together, my darling, whatever happens.' She still used endearments rather shyly. Neither of them had grown up in cultures which expressed love openly.
He squeezed her hand, then, as a roar of laughter erupted from the rec-area, he walked past the brilliantly lit doorway and stopped on the other side. Heart pounding, Soo waited for a shout to indicate discovery, but the noise and laughter continued with only an occasional natural abatement in volume. People using euphorion were always very noisy.
She could feel sweat trickling down her face as she inched forward. The noise erupted again, but her limbs refused to move properly and she could only walk stiffly across the patch of light. Through the doorway her eyes caught those of her friend, Meera, and saw startled recognition shine through the euphorion. She froze in clear sight of the room, unable to move a muscle for sheer panic, expecting at any moment that Meera would betray her. But nothing happened. As her friend looked away deliberately, Mak reached out to drag Soo to safety. She leaned against him, shaking from head to toe.
'What were you doing? Deliberately trying to let them see you?' he hissed in her ear. 'Have you changed your mind about escaping? If so, you need only say so and we'll go back!'
Soo shook her head and managed to whisper, 'It was Meera - she saw me.'
He swung round to gaze at the doorway. 'But - no one's come out. They're still laughing.'
'Meera didn't say anything. She looked away.' Soo sagged against him in relief. 'We used to be good friends
- until all this happened.'
Mak took a moment to gather his wits, then kissed Soo's cheek gently. 'She's still a good friend, obviously.
Come on, then, love! Let's go!' He moved towards the transport area.
They met no one else. Soo tinkered with the door catch to the hold, which was also linked to Robler's crude surveillance system. The need for action helped her calm down a little, but she was still nervous. Mak stood beside her fretting that he could do so little to help, since his training was mainly with living organisms.
When they entered the vast hold, with its rows of transcaps gleaming in the dim light of the monitor system, Mak asked again, 'Are you sure you're all right?'
'Yes. Yes. Don't worry about me. It was just the shock. Wait there until I deal with the monitoring equipment.' She keyed in another recording to the surveillance system, which would show anyone watching an image of an empty hangar. By the time she’d finished, her hands were quite steady again.
As they walked across the shiny grey floor to the transcap bays, she hugged Mak's arm and he caught his breath as her beautiful eyes gleamed up at him. He could never understand why she’d fallen in love with someone as prosaic as himself. He wasted a few precious seconds kissing her cheek.
She clung to him convulsively. 'I'm terrified something will go wrong, terrified of losing you.'
'Something will definitely go wrong if we stay here. You know that as well as I do.' He kissed her a last time, then stepped resolutely away from her.
Once at the transcap bays, Soo set to work to attach her modified control units to the small drive systems of two of the larger transcaps. Next, she put bypass lines into the exit hatches' com-lines, so that their opening wouldn’t register in the main operations room. Her fingers moved nimbly, securing connections and plas-bonding the new units to the plasteel hulls. Nothing must come loose as the transcaps plummeted down towards the planet.
Mak stowed their packages on board the two transcaps, set up the oxygen tanks and bio-monitoring systems, then waited in tense rigidity for Soo to finish. It seemed to him a very long time until she came back from the hatches and nodded. He nodded back. Even with Soo, he didn’t find it easy to share his feelings.
And yet, if he ever returned to his home planet, he knew his family would find him disgustingly emotional, irrational and therefore unfit for full citizenship. If he ever returned. He pushed the thought of his family aside. Strange, the things that passed through your mind when you were in danger!
'Are you certain this'll work, Soo?' he asked unnecessarily.
'Yes. Of course I am! Come on! Time to go.' She kissed his cheek and climbed into one transcap, while he got into the other. The last thing he saw before he pulled the top of his capsule down and pressed the airseal connection was the pale blur of her face and the gleam of her dark hair as her own lid closed.
A slight vibration from his com-unit was the signal. He counted three, took a sharp breath and pressed the newly installed launch button. Deep vibrations shook the whole transcap. Must be the hatches opening and the capsule sliding forward, he thought, trying to ignore the fear that crawled through his guts.
Then there was a wrenching feeling and he felt the acceleration press him back into the viva-foam that lined the transcap. They’d escaped from the satellite!
But would they manage to reach the planet?
* * *
It was the vibrations
of the hatches opening and closing that alerted Robler, whose quarters were in the same quadrant of the satellite and whose senses were very finely tuned. He rushed from his sleeping quarters into the com-room.
'What're they doing?' he demanded.
'Sleeping. See for yourself,' Met replied, a little annoyed by the brusqueness of Robler's tone.
'Didn't you feel anything? A vibration?'
Met shrugged. 'It'll be one of the adjustment jets firing.'
Robler stared at the image of the two sleeping people on the screen. 'I'm not risking anything. Go and check their quarters in person. Don't come back till you've been inside and seen them for yourself - both of them. Here's a master key.'
'They'll know then that we have them under surveillance.'
'They'll know anyway in the morning. I'm not waiting any longer. You were right. I was a fool to give them so much time. Their re-education starts tomorrow night.'
'Good.'
Robler continued to stare at the screen, his eyes narrowed in concentration. As he waited for Met to return, his fingers played nervously with the lobe of one ear. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Something was very wrong!
Met rushed back in. 'The master key doesn't work. I couldn't open the door. And they're not answering the buzzer.'
Robler didn’t hesitate. In one swift movement, he pressed the emergency button and a harsh siren began to sound, tearing at everyone's eardrums. The figures of Soo and Mak continued to sleep peacefully on the screen while he glared at them. They couldn’t have slept through that noise - the siren had been specially designed so that it was physiologically impossible for a human being to sleep through it. Confex took no chances and made no mistakes where its employees' safety was concerned.
The anteroom began to fill with people in various stages of undress and intoxication.