The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame

by Sylvia Engdahl

  “I’m losing a lot of blood,” Nina called to him. “I pushed the emergency button on my phone, but—”

  “You’ll be okay. We won’t wait for the response team to stop the bleeding.” He crept over to her and took hold of the arm from which blood was gushing. “Just relax; it will stop in a minute.”

  “No it won’t, it’s deep—” She broke off, staring at the slash from which the flow had abruptly ceased. “It just stopped! How could it do that?”

  “Never mind. The pain will stop too, if you relax and squeeze my hand.” His long experience in the neurofeedback clinic made ending it for her second nature to him. Follow me, Nina! We don’t need to suffer, we can go into a state where pain doesn’t matter. . . .

  She met eyes, awed. “You did that, Terry! You turned off the bleeding and the pain! You—you are Aragorn, Aragorn was a healer—”

  She still thought of him that way, several years after their discussion about it. The stress of their injuries opened her mind to him, and he knew that she hadn’t stopped imagining a parallel with the long-delayed union of Aragorn and Arwen. He could not let that continue.

  “Yes, I’m a healer,” he confessed. “As I told you long ago, I came from offworld. From a place where there are other healers who taught me. And I’m married, Nina.”

  “Married? But if you can’t ever get back there, that surely isn’t binding.”

  “It’s binding to me because I still love my wife.”

  “I didn’t believe what you said before,” she whispered. “Now I’ve got to, because you stopped the bleeding. And I believe more than ever that you’re destined to be king—not literally, of course, but to lead us. Elrond will see—”

  “Elrond is dead,” Terry said bitterly. “They killed him; they were afraid he might know too much. Perhaps they thought Guroff had informed him before the trial.”

  “Killed him? But how?”

  “There was a bomb in the car,” he told her. “It was put there when they made us leave it in the stack—somebody climbed up to its rack while we were meeting Elrond. Apparently they never intended to let him go.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “It’s complicated. The paramedics are here now, I’ll tell you later.”

  Terry spent more than a week in the hospital, wishing for a mentor to heal his broken bones more rapidly than he could himself. After that, with a strapped torso and one leg still in a cast, he moved into Alison’s apartment, which was located near the clinic and had a spare bedroom, so she could help him get to and from work. The arrangement worked well and he decided to give up his rented room, in which he had remained since arrival on Ciencia despite the fact that he could well afford a nice apartment of his own. He enjoyed eating his meals with Alison and relaxing in her company during the few minutes when he wasn’t hacking. It was the closest he would ever be to having a home, he knew; he found he was thinking of her almost as if she were family. And he could talk more freely about the conspiracy with her than with anyone else.

  During his hospital stay he had spent a long time thinking, deeply troubled by Elrond’s murder. Though he’d known the government racketeers were ruthless, he hadn’t thought they would go that far—after all, Elrond hadn’t done anything to displease them. Or had he?

  “I didn’t see the whole picture till now,” he told Alison. “The government doesn’t really care what we read—the officials were all born here, and they don’t have any idea of how powerful unscientific thought can be. That’s why they haven’t searched harder for our stuff on the Net. They themselves have never stooped to reading anything suggesting that the mind can do more than reason, so they’ve lost the founders’ awareness that if people came across such material they might take it seriously. What they do know is that offworld contact could threaten stability here, which would mean a threat to their own power—and definitely the end of their smuggling racket. So they’ll do whatever they have to do to limit communication with starships.”

  “Elrond didn’t go to a starship,” Alison said, puzzled.

  “No—but at some point he must have communicated with one. I hadn’t stopped to wonder how he set up our courier system originally. By the time I arrived, he had arrangements with captains who’d agreed to bring data chips from the starships he referred to as “the source.” But Darrow didn’t negotiate with those ship’s captains himself. How did Elrond find out that they were willing to sell data, and how was the price determined?”

  “It would have had to be through a local captain,” Alison said, “if not Darrow, then one of the others.”

  “Yes—and I think it must have been Guroff. When Guroff was questioned in prison, he must have revealed that at some time in the past, he carried messages between Elrond and the starship captain, perhaps even that Elrond was buying chips, something they didn’t know when they framed him for selling cargo. They couldn’t risk his doing so again. And they don’t know who he was acting for or what became of the chips, so they killed him to send a message to the receiver. Either that, or they did know, and the bomb was meant for me, too.”

  “But why didn’t they question Elrond in prison to find out what’s going on?”

  “Probably they did,” Terry said sadly. “He didn’t have time to tell us what happened in there, but Elrond was a lot tougher than Guroff.” With remorse, he thought of how he’d worried that Elrond would want to take charge of the conspiracy; had he suffered to protect it? Had he earned the right to be reinstalled as its leader?

  Alison, who could usually sense the gist of Terry’s thoughts despite not being consciously telepathic, said, “If he held out to protect the other conspirators, it was because he’d come to believe what we’re doing is important, that it will change the world. And you are the best person to accomplish that, Terry. You mustn’t feel guilty because he died when you didn’t.”

  Slowly, Terry said, “I had two close friends on Earth who were killed for the same reason Elrond was—they were trying to foster public acceptance of mind power. Even if Ciencia’s government didn’t know that was what he was doing, he knew. It was why he risked himself. I’ve got to do more than I have so far, Alison. We have to have a plan for making it happen.”

  “You couldn’t do more than you already have,” she pointed out. “You’re killing yourself by working at it day and night.”

  “I can’t spend more hours,” Terry agreed, “but I could change the selection of texts a little. It’s been mostly fantasy and books about spirituality or psi or the mind’s role in health. I haven’t been sending for political books. But people are ready now to start thinking about connections.”

  “That’s a whole lot more dangerous,” Alison protested. “The government isn’t going to ignore political ebooks the way they discount unscientific speculation, and besides, it will be obvious that they come from outside.”

  “All the same, it’s necessary—all the more so because the offworld connection will be clear. Most of our readers haven’t ever wondered where the ebooks come from. They think contact with the outside is impossible, so they may assume we’ve got a bunch of gifted writers creating some sort of imaginary world that’s different from the world we live in. They need to be told there’s hope that we can change things here.”

  “I’m not sure there is, Terry. Just knowing facts that aren’t taught here is important in itself. Changing the government’s policy is probably more than we can expect to accomplish.”

  “It may be,” he agreed, “but people should want it. They should share some symbol of wanting it.”

  Late that night, after he had finished catching up with the file changes that had backed up during his hospitalization, Terry inserted a new easter egg where his readers would be likely to discover it. “There is a ship,” he wrote, “and its name is Estel, which means hope. Its captain came from the stars and his heart is there, but at times his ship descends to bring the knowledge that’s rightfully ours. And someday this knowledge will no longer be hidden
.”

  ~ 63 ~

  It took a while, but eventually people everywhere were talking about the ship Estel, presumably orbiting Ciencia, which the police ships diligently sought but did not find.

  “You’re crazy,” Darrow had told Terry. “To deliberately reveal that texts hidden on the Net are coming from space—”

  “They would have figured that out anyway as soon as I started posting political texts that can’t be accessed from standard references,” Terry pointed out. “This way they’ve been misled into hunting for a ship that doesn’t exist, and it’s keeping them busy.”

  It was an effective means of distraction. The police knew Estel did not land and therefore must rendezvous, yet the routinely-monitored trackers on all the local ships, including those of the large mining companies, showed that no one rendezvoused with anything except the known starships to which cargo was sold. They would not, of course, have had any jurisdiction over a starship in high orbit; all they could hope for was to arrest whoever was bringing data from it. So periodically, they strip-searched incoming crews, whose captains could not protest the humiliation because of the racketeers’ hold over them. Nothing was ever found, as Darrow was alert enough to destroy the chips the few times Bonanza was boarded. Actually, after the strip-searches started few texts were imported; the cloud already contained far more illicit material than anyone could read in a lifetime.

  Occasionally officials located and erased some of it; they hunted now, but weren’t knowledgeable enough about the subjects covered to find the easter eggs, which were accessed not by single words but by non-adjacent combinations. Terry had, of course, used suitable precautions to keep bots out of the files themselves. The inspectors looked for political books, which were in the minority, and since he reposted them with different access points as soon as they disappeared, the countermeasures were not damaging. They also searched for the name Estel and found it in an appendix to Lord of the Rings that he had deliberately left open to discovery for the purpose of confusing them; the discovery of the name Elrond in the same text looked promising, but since Elrond was dead and they already knew he had communicated with a starship, it yielded no new information.

  Terry’s biggest worry was that one of his backup hackers would be caught. However, they were people he felt were capable of withstanding pressure; he did not think they would betray anyone, and even if they did, the worst that could happen—apart from their personal fate—was that the bulk of the reading material would be lost. It would take decades to get all traces of it out of the cloud, and by that time it would have served its purpose, since it could never be gotten out of the minds of the thousands of people who had been exposed to it.

  As for him, he was beyond suspicion. He gave up delivering cargo when he stopped picking up data at the spaceport and focused on his work at the clinic, for which he had become renowned. Inevitably, over time clients had caught on to the fact that his personal gift, rather than just the neurofeedback, was responsible for alleviating their pain. Many other neurofeedback clinics had opened after observing the success of Alison’s, and they did not get comparable results. Alison herself did not get comparable results on the occasions when she had to take over for him. And much as he hated being acclaimed for his healing power, he had to concede that it was a valuable cover for his other activities. No one would guess that a celebrated healer spent his spare time hacking the Net.

  To be sure, the government didn’t approve of healing either, since it was considered fraudulent by science. But they couldn’t arrest him for it as long as neither he nor Alison claimed that he did anything more than conduct standard neurofeedback sessions. Despite their knowledge that he was a former cargo courier, they ignored him. Because they assumed that any healing effects attributed to him were imaginary, they viewed him as a harmless crackpot.

  So the years passed, and for Terry one was like another. He didn’t give himself time to stop and reflect, for if his thoughts drifted to anything beyond the demands of his undercover work, he soon found himself remembering Maclairn, and Promise, and the happy days of his youth. And Kathryn, always Kathryn . . . sometimes during the night he dreamed she was in his arms, that their minds were about to merge, when suddenly he was torn from her and awoke, his body and soul aching with frustration over what he could not have. Then, if he couldn’t go back to sleep, he got up and went from his small dark bedroom to the sitting room of Alison’s apartment and stood by the window, looking out at the perpetual dusting of snow that surrounded the city buildings, their glassy walls reflecting the glow of the reddish night sky; and he thought of how above that sky there was a black expanse full of stars, as he had seen it so many times and never would again.

  Often, when this happened, Alison too got up and came into the sitting room and fixed hot drinks, and they sat at the table, not talking, just feeling the comfortable companionship on which he came more and more to depend. Sometimes he sensed that she shared his longing to be free of this confining planet, that she ached to travel between worlds and see the wonders of space as much as he did, now that he had made her aware that to do so was a human birthright. Yet she did not speak of it; she did not want to stir the feelings that she knew were an ongoing torment to him. She seemed to know the limits of what he could bear.

  Though she was a charming woman well-liked by her clients, Alison had little social life, and after the first few years he had known her, she had rarely gone out with men. Terry was mystified; she seemed to him far more appealing than less thoughtful women like Nina, and he couldn’t see why men wouldn’t be attracted to her. It was strange that she wasn’t in a long-term relationship; perhaps, he thought, one had ended that she was still mourning. But whenever he tried to ask her about it, she seemed embarrassed and turned away, closing her mind to him. He wished he could put his arm around her and offer sympathy, as she had many times shown sympathy for him; but for some reason he did not quite dare.

  His only other close friend was Darrow, who was unmarried and spent little time on the planet’s surface. Whenever he returned from a mining trip they got together for drinks or a meal, for although they were rarely bringing in data now, Terry liked the man. He had never imagined that he might choose a smuggler as his best friend, despite having acquired more respect for smuggling than he’d had as a Fleet officer. But they agreed on politics, and Darrow was eager to hear what Terry knew of governments on other worlds as well as his hopes for change on Ciencia.

  Still, Terry had never told him about his own past. They knew each other too well now for Darrow to think he was crazy, but he would undoubtedly envy his starship experience and understand his grief over the loss of it. He didn’t want to put him through that, nor did he want the captain to take the risk of transporting him into space, as he might well do if he knew why he longed to go there. He knew that if Darrow suggested it, he wouldn’t have the strength to refuse the offer. He had gotten used to the confining gray sky, but sometimes he thought he would die from depression if he couldn’t see the sun or the stars just once.

  He had been on Ciencia more than twelve years when Darrow was badly injured in a mining accident. He knew nothing of it until Darrow called him from the hospital, where he had been taken after a police ship rescued him and his crew of miners from the asteroid where it had happened. One of the officers had brought his ship down without cargo; it sat at the spaceport, abandoned.

  Terry felt for him, but it was only a temporary grounding, after all; Darrow would recover enough to fly, though he might have to give up the physical work of mining, and so his deep depression seemed out of proportion to the situation. He visited him in the hospital daily, relieving his pain as he did for the clients at the clinic—an ability Darrow had heard he possessed but until now had not fully believed in. When he was released, Terry drove him to the rooming house where he lived while onworld, promising to return after work.

  “Stay now, if Alison can spare you just this once,” Darrow said. “I may have only a littl
e time.”

  “A little time for what? You’re not going to be doing anything until you recover.”

  “A little time before they arrest me.”

  “Arrest you?” Terry exclaimed, shocked. “What for? Surely they won’t blame you for not bringing in money when you’re unable to fly.”

  “You’re my friend, and you have a right to know,” Darrow said. “I’ve been duping the extortionists. Besides taking cargo up to the starship I’ve been selling platinum metals there—of course all the mining captains do that, and the government knows it, since they know how much ore we deliver to the orbiting refineries and how much metal they return to us, and they know what we sell to the city buyers. They overlook the discrepancies because they want their cut. Well, usually I don’t sell quite all I’ve got, and nobody notices because I’m a better negotiator than some and my proceeds come within the expected range. I hide the rest of the metal in the ship, and then when there are several starships bidding up the price, I can sell more than the government thinks I’ve got, and keep the difference. I’ve been getting away with it for years—I thought I was smarter than Guroff because he just held back money and pretended he’d made a poor deal. I never stopped to think they’d find my stash if I was grounded.’”

  “Maybe they won’t. Your crew’s not likely to report you if they haven’t so far.”

  “My miners haven’t reported me because they’ve been getting shares. What we dig out is ours, and the government racketeers have no right to profit from it; I hired people who agree with me on that. But they may not all be loyal. I’ll be grounded for a long time and they won’t get shares while I am, whereas any one of them could get a damn big reward from the government. It’s been a long time since an example was made of Guroff, and another is past due.”