When Freerunner’s crew finished retrieving the stashed metals from Bonanza, his relief at the completion of his mission was mixed with regret that his stay aboard Freerunner was so short. And with sudden excitement he wondered, did it have to be?
Yakimov seemed to consider him a kindred spirit. He might agree to take him into his crew—they might welcome an extra pilot, especially if he revealed that he was qualified to handle jumps. It wouldn’t be a bad life. It couldn’t get him home to Maclairn, of course, but he could go to Earth, and if Kathryn still made trips in Promise . . . He wouldn’t attempt to go where there were mentors—he had long ago decided that contact with mentors would make his past years of exile meaningless—but he might well have a chance to be reunited with Kathryn in secret. And at least he would be away from Ciencia, with its corrupt government and its dull forbidding sky.
It wouldn’t be a betrayal of Darrow not to go back. He had enough credits banked to pay him for his ship, and if Bonanza was reported lost there would be no evidence that there had been a stash. Except—oh, God, Terry thought. The miners. They couldn’t be left stranded and if the police were alerted to rescue them, it would become known that their missing captain had docked with a starship. There was only one reason anyone would take such a risk, so it would be assumed there had been cargo, and the miners had proven that they didn’t care about protecting their employer. The evidence would be circumstantial, but if they were bribed or pressured into testifying against Darrow, it might be enough to convict him—or at least raise enough suspicion for the racketeers to use the evidence of smuggling they’d had on him all along.
Well, thought Terry sadly, he had never expected to escape from Ciencia. He had been resigned to his confinement for years now; a chance he must reject was not really worse than no chance at all. He said goodbye to Captain Yakimov and headed back into Bonanza.
As he left the airlock he glanced at the adjacent viewport and saw with cold, sick dismay that the police ship was approaching.
They must have taken the unprecedented step of monitoring the commercial frequency in order to catch him—they would have gotten here first, but they’d waited until his transaction was complete before closing in. For a moment Terry stood frozen, aware that there was no possible means of escape. Then, realizing that all his reasoning about circumstantial evidence against Darrow now applied, he hurried back into the starship.
“You’re Darrow’s friend, right?” he asked Yakimov.
“Sure. Done business with him for years; he’s a straight dealer and a great guy.”
“There’s a police ship coming,” Terry said, “and they must not find out that his ship carried cargo. If they do it will mean life in prison for him. So if they ask, deny it, and give this secretly to the mining boss on condition that he keep quiet about it.” He handed back the credit chip he had received.
“I will, but they’re likely to guess that you sold me something. Why else would you have come?”
“Leave that to me,” Terry said. “And back me in what I say.”
He knew there was only one thing he could say, one possible way to save Darrow; and as far as he himself was concerned it wouldn’t make things any worse than they already were—his mere docking with a starship had already condemned him. He watched as the police officers boarded, savoring his last moments of freedom.
“You’re a fool to have thought you could get away from us,” an officer said, “and a brazen one to attempt selling what you stole to smugglers from offworld. Don’t you know that offworld contact is a more serious crime than theft?”
“I am not a thief,” declared Terry, “though I sometimes pretend I am, for cover. I didn’t come here to sell. I came to buy.”
“Buy? What could you want from offworld traders? There’s no market here for anything they have to offer.”
“I think you know what I buy. You’ve been seeking me for years, after all.” At the officers’ blank look he drew a deep breath and added, “I am the captain of Estel.”
Part Five: Estel
66 - 67 - 68 - 69 - 70 - 71 - 72 - 73
~ 66 ~
Terry was taken aboard the police ship in handcuffs. At first the officers had laughed at his announcement, and they still suspected it was an idle brag. But Captain Yakimov had backed it, as Terry had requested. Ciencia’s government could not touch Yakimov as he was not a citizen and not on the surface; the worst they could do would be to shoot his ship down if he was foolish enough to descend to low orbit. So he was free to say that he had sold information from the knowledgebase to agents from Ciencia over a long period of time. Terry realized that this wasn’t mere fabrication. As a friend of Darrow, he was undoubtedly one of the smugglers who had been referred to as “the source.”
“I won’t name the people I dealt with,” Yakimov had told the police, “and I never knew who the ultimate buyers were. I’ve heard rumors of a ship called Estel; whether this man is its captain, I can’t tell. In any case its contacts seem to have taken over the text purchasing, since I haven’t received offers from anyone for some years now.”
“Where is your ship Estel?” an officer demanded, addressing Terry.
“Where you won’t find it,” Terry said honestly, “and in any case outside your jurisdiction. You can put me in prison, but you won’t be rid of Estel so easily.”
He hoped that this was true. The texts on the Net were well hidden through methods designed to propagate them; he did not think it would ever be possible for the government to delete them all, and they were influencing the lives of readers. That was some satisfaction, considering that his own life was effectively at an end.
He was resigned to spending the rest of it in prison, just as he had become resigned to his imprisonment on Ciencia. The time for raw anguish was past. He was no longer young enough to summon rage against fate; he was thirty-eight now, and too long accustomed to loss to be thrown by it. For a few minutes, aboard Freerunner, he had let himself imagine what it would be like to travel among the stars again, but even before realizing that Darrow would bear the consequences of his departure he had sensed that it wasn’t going to happen—precognition, he supposed, like the flashes he’d had in his younger years. They had not come to him for a long time, perhaps because there had been nothing ahead worth foreseeing.
The thing that worried him most about his arrest was the possibility that it would lead to other members of the conspiracy being caught. He didn’t really think they would be; he had covered his tracks when hacking, and his backup people were competent to do so as well. No new data had been added recently, and none needed to be. Few members knew names of anyone but their immediate friends, and the capture of the leader should have no bearing on the danger they faced. The prison authorities would, of course, try to make him name them; but he was well equipped by his mind training to deal with that sort of thing.
Still, he couldn’t help fearing that some suspicion might fall on Darrow. The police investigators’ assumption that Terry had conned him was his best protection; hopefully he would have the sense to see that and let them think he had known him merely as a cargo courier—a role he’d assumed specifically as a cover for their other dealings. Darrow was good at looking out for himself and he knew nothing he could say would help Terry. But if despite caution he was accused of complicity, at least he would be no worse off than if Terry had not acted to protect him. His vulnerability to arrest had become a matter of risk, rather than a sure thing.
It was harder for Terry to confront the thought of danger to Alison. He was her business partner and lived in her apartment; they would surely question her. But as far as anyone knew, to her he was simply an alleged healer responsible for the success of their neurofeedback practice. Even if it was learned that his bank account had been transferred to her, as he had told his backup hackers to do in case of his death or imprisonment, there would be no reason to suspect he had told her he was involved in conspiracy or discussed forbidden texts with her. On the contra
ry, they would assume he had used his work at the clinic as another cover. They would think his reputed ability to heal was a con, too; it was unlikely that they would open their minds to the idea that relief of pain through mind power might be real.
But there was another reason why the thought of Alison tormented him. She would grieve for him, and now that he knew why, the grief was mutual. He had left her just as he had left Kathryn, assuming that he would return. And then he had disappeared. Neither of them would ever see him again—he knew Alison wouldn’t be allowed to visit him in prison, even if she found out he was there—and so both had been hurt deeply. He cared too much for Alison not to feel pain at the thought of her suffering as Kathryn must have suffered . . . and besides, he would miss her. He would miss her more than anything else in the pseudo-life that had replaced his real one. Waking in the darkness of his cell he reached out for solace, and while still half-dreaming he thought of Alison in the next room as for years now she had been—and that comforted him until he was jolted into awareness that she was not there.
The cramped prison cell was even smaller than quarters aboard a ship and without such amenities as shipboard staterooms provided. There was no window, and he was not sure whether that was a bad thing or a good one. On one hand, the blankness of the walls was nerve-wearing, but on the other, he was not eager for another look at Ciencia’s depressing gray sky. His surroundings had not mattered to him as long as he had a computer and hacking to do. Now he had nothing. The daily interrogation sessions by an arrogant police officer named Quaid were at least a diversion.
These sessions were conducted in a civilized manner so far, and probably would be until after his trial. The authorities were in no hurry; they knew the members of the movement he represented were not going anywhere. Some of them might turn up at the trial, in which case they might cause a disturbance if he didn’t appear to be in good shape.
Quaid was a fanatic about the alleged corrupting effect of unscientific thinking. “The founders of this colony managed to keep out all the superstitious nonsense that has retarded human progress since the beginning of time,” he told Terry. “It was the greatest social achievement in history, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let some fool pilot with a warped sense of his own importance lead the public astray.”
“If the ideas that have come from Estel appeal to the public, that shows there’s truth in them,” Terry ventured.
“Of course it doesn’t. Silly notions about extrasensory perception and life after death once appealed to the public too, and only the crackpots were taken in. The other stuff was, and still is, more dangerous because some of it sounds plausible.”
“As to life after death, I don’t know,” declared Terry honestly, “except to say that historically, a great many people who weren’t crackpots believed in it. Extrasensory perception, on the other hand, is a capability humans are known to have.”
“That’s a pernicious falsehood,” Quaid stated. “All input to the brain comes through the senses. If people got ideas some other way, out of thin air, they couldn’t keep their thoughts straight. They wouldn’t be able to control the content of their minds.”
This was a fairly accurate description of what bothered the people afraid to admit that psi existed, Terry thought. And it had deeper roots than fear of psi. Tristan had explained it to him, but he doubted that he could find the right words to explain it himself. Nevertheless, he enjoyed baiting Quaid so he made a stab at it.
“Just where do you think scientists get new ideas?” he asked.
“By reasoning, of course.”
“No, I don’t mean how they evaluate them. How do they get ideas to reason about?”
“By putting two and two together,” Quaid declared. “That’s a matter of logic.”
“But if it were only logic, the universe would have been figured out long ago,” Terry argued. “Any intelligent person can put two and two together. New ideas require intuition. And intuition doesn’t get into human minds through the senses. Sometimes it comes through unconscious ESP and other times it just comes in some way we don’t understand. That’s true for everybody, not just scientists. If you rule out all the knowledge intuition provides, there couldn’t be any scientific progress. So minds have more powers than reasoning, even here, and people have a right to use them. Even when they come up with ideas you guys don’t happen to like.”
Quaid frowned. “The trouble with you, Rivera, is that you’re not only crazy but you want to make everybody else crazy along with you. I don’t think you even have a hidden ship—you probably made the whole thing up. You admit you’ve been buying illicit texts from smugglers. By passing them off as having some mysterious origin you’ve conned people into thinking they’ve got value, just the way you conned Willard into thinking you had some magic words that could ease people’s pain better than drugs.”
Terry was not sure how many of his readers knew that Estel was imaginary, or whether officials other than Quaid suspected it was. But since he had indeed brought in most of the texts concealed on the Net—and had, albeit somewhat earlier, come from the stars—it was not really a lie to say so. He had no intention of confessing to deception, for Quaid was right that making a symbol of the ship encouraged people to read.
“Everything brought by Estel originated on Earth or some other world,” he said. “That’s no mystery.”
“Yes, nonsense about mind and spirit has infected Earth throughout history—which is why its civilization never overcame conflict and is now decaying. It’s too late for anything to be done about that. But as for other worlds, if there are colonies breeding superstition they should be wiped out! We didn’t learn how to eliminate such ideas just to have them sprout again and reinfect advanced societies like our own.”
My God, Terry thought, that sounds just like what the enemies of Maclairn advocate, the conspirators at League headquarters who’d tried to prevent contact with Maclairn even at the cost of violence. For the first time in years he let himself wonder if they had made any more attempts. Had more mentors been murdered? Had Maclairn and its goals been endangered when he was powerless to defend it? He’d been so overwhelmed by personal loss that he had not dared to speculate about what was happening to the plan for spreading acceptance of psi on Earth.
“Don’t think we’re going to let you contaminate this world,” Quaid declared. “You’re going to admit in public that you invented the Estel myth, and you’re going to provide us with any information you have about the people who’ve been posting your trash on the Net. No freaking megalomaniac with a savior complex is going to undermine the stability we’ve maintained here.”
Quaid launched into such tirades more than once. So far, they were only words. But Terry knew that within the prison more sinister things went on. The lifers, among whom he was already understood to be numbered, were isolated from the rest of the inmates; he was not sure whether they were allowed contact with each other or were kept in solitary confinement. In any case, since from most of them no information was sought, his case was special. He did not expect that he would be accorded any legal rights.
~ 67 ~
The trial was held three weeks after Terry’s arrest. It would, of course, be a farce—since he had already admitted his guilt, there was no jury—but the government authorities wanted publicity and so did he. Their aim was to demonstrate that the man claiming to be captain of Estel was an ordinary criminal of no account and the legends about his mysterious ship were foolish. His was to prove the opposite.
The authorities wouldn’t be pleased by what he was going to say, Terry knew. But even if it fell on deaf ears he would take satisfaction in it, and there was nothing worse they could do to him than what they were already planning.
He was taken from the prison to the courthouse in the center of the city, which like most of the larger buildings had outer walls that looked as if they were made of glass. A product of chemistry, virtually unbreakable and strong enough not to need much surrounding framewor
k, it let in more light than he was accustomed to seeing on dreary Ciencia—less expensive buildings such as the one housing Alison’s clinic had less of it. Little as he liked the view, Terry couldn’t help wondering whether this was the last daylight he would ever see. Such exercise space as the prison provided was enclosed.
To his surprise, both the street and the courtroom to which he was taken were crowded. He’d had relatively few friends, after all, and as members of the conspiracy they could not take the risk of appearing. He supposed the government had promoted the trial as a sort of spectacle. Not until his telepathic sensitivity alerted him to the feelings of the people present did he understand what they were there for. They were pulling for him! These were strangers who believed in Estel.
He would be conducting his own defense; as Darrow had told him long ago, no lawyer would take a smuggling case, or any case involving contact with a starship. This didn’t bother him, considering that he had been caught on board, which alone was enough to assure a sentence of life imprisonment. What he wanted was to convince people that the hidden texts on the Net were worth reading, and that, no lawyer could have done for him.
The prosecutor, a middle-aged woman who showed little enthusiasm for a case she considered already settled, presented it straightforwardly. She called police officers to testify that they had observed Terry lifting off in Bonanza, a mining ship belonging to Darrow; had followed it; and had found him aboard the starship Freerunner, a smuggler’s ship illegally orbiting Ciencia. She also called Renssalaer, who stated that he called the police because he had cause to believe Terry was a thief, as well as the three miners, who testified that they had expected to work on an asteroid and—falsely—that they did not know why the starship had been visited first. It was obvious, said the prosecutor, that there must have been something aboard to sell. No doubt Terry, who was known to have a past history as a cargo courier, had taken advantage of Darrow’s generosity in loaning his ship in order to dispose of stolen goods.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 40