“Which put you in a position to prevent its use,” added Jon.
“Yes, but no thanks to Quaid—looking back, I realize that he wanted me to observe the destruction of that colony and feel responsible, because he’d been unable to shake my faith in its people’s goals.”
On the verge of further questions Gwen held back, realizing that this touched on secrets she wasn’t supposed to know. They said goodnight, exhausted from the length and stress of the day.
But Terry was too keyed up to sleep. He remained alone on the bridge, torn by elation about the impact his words might have had on listeners and fear that some should have been left unsaid. Had he indeed made himself vulnerable by naming Quaid? he wondered. Suddenly uneasy, he recalled past times when he’d been struck by the feeling that now spread through him, a sense of something ominous just beyond his reach—perhaps a trace of true precognition. He had never been sure. In principle, precognition could rarely be distinguished from other forms of psi, if the possibility of long-range telepathy was assumed; and there was little doubt that Quaid now wished him dead. Yet the foreboding seemed more than a personal warning, and it was stronger than ever before, suggesting that events more momentous than his own death had been set in motion.
Still, fate had favored him in the past even when it had led him into peril, Terry told himself. There was little use in worrying that it might not always be so benign. Happy that his mission was at last underway, he began programming the jump that would take them far from Ciencia, sure that whatever dangers lay ahead would pale beside his gladness in being free.
Part Two: Centauri
11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22
~ 11 ~
The jump to Centauri was experienced with relief by everyone and as something of an anticlimax by all except Terry. “Is this all there is to it?” asked Alison in surprise. “We’re already orbiting a different star, when you said we were about to jump only a few minutes ago?”
“I programmed the AI while you were asleep,” Terry told them, “so all I did on the bridge just now was authorize execution of the maneuver. Jumping through hyperspace doesn’t take any perceptible time. We’re in the Alpha Centauri system, but of course it will take several days to get to the colony.”
“Why?” asked Gwen.
“Because if we emerged too close to a star there’d be a risk of falling into its gravity well. Jumping isn’t precise enough to aim for a particular planet’s orbit.”
They celebrated with a meal made no less special by the lack of anything but standard rations to eat or drink. And then, Terry knew, planning his next move could be put off no longer.
He had avoided making specific plans while preoccupied with reaching Alison and escaping from Ciencia. Actually, he had very little idea of how to proceed. “I don’t know a lot about the smuggling business,” he confessed to Jon, “except that in most colonies it works differently from what you’ve been doing so far.”
Jon nodded. “On Ciencia the smugglers’ starships put out a call for cargo, and since the government looked the other way, all we had to worry about was getting a good enough price to avoid being suspected of shortchanging the racketeers. The captains never told me what they did with what they bought. For all I know they may have sold some of the electronic stuff legally; the fact that it was illegal to export doesn’t mean it couldn’t be imported on other worlds. But my source told me that smuggled pharmaceuticals are contraband everywhere, and so making contact with someone who deals in them may not be easy.”
“Centauri won’t be the best place for that,” Terry said, “because it gets plenty of freight traffic and it’s got the largest Fleet installation anywhere besides Earth’s moon.”
“Then why are we going there?” Jon inquired.
“Because it does have a big Fleet center, which means we can get current information about conditions on Earth. We need that—it’s been over twelve years since I’ve had any contact with the League. Also, I know my way around Centauri City; I was stationed there for more than a year while I was in Fleet. And I know how to hack my way into its Net.”
“Why do we need to do any hacking if everything’s legal to read?” asked Alison.
“A lot of our readers on Ciencia were hooked by the mere fact that our texts were secret,” Terry said. “Secrets are more appealing than what everybody has easy access to. So I’ve been thinking that the fastest way to develop a following in another colony would be to insert easter eggs just like I did before—some leading to existing texts, but also some new ones. If we’re going to make Estel a symbol, we have to introduce it in a way that will be noticed.”
“This is going to be fun,” Gwen said.
“Especially since we can’t be arrested for it,” Alison agreed. “That will be a nice change.”
“We can be arrested,” Terry pointed out, “because hacking—especially hacking a public system like a knowledgebase—is illegal everywhere. I’m pretty good at it and I’ve been lucky so far, but it’s a long way from safe, even without counting the danger from self-appointed watchdogs who don’t like what we say.”
“Our ship will be obvious if it’s in low orbit,” Jon pointed out. “If the police want the Captain of Estel, we’ll be sitting ducks, won’t we?”
“I’m starting to worry about that,” Terry admitted reluctantly. “I probably made a mistake when I registered the ship as Estel. All I cared about when I first realized I owned it was that the imaginary ship could be made real. But if the word’s to become a symbol everywhere, I don’t want it associated with smuggling even among people who won’t report us—and certainly it would be dangerous to identify our location to those who will. I think we’ve got to orbit under a false name.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Alison said. “That way Estel can be kept mysterious, as it was on Ciencia, a ship no one ever sees.”
“But it’s got a registered transponder like any other ship, hasn’t it?” Jon asked.
“Fortunately, it has two,” Terry said. “The one for its original registration as Venture was deactivated but not removed.”
“It looks like your outlaw friends who repaired the ship had foresight,” Jon remarked dryly.
Perhaps the Elders had indeed foreseen the need for camouflage, Terry realized. It had seemed strange at the time that they hadn’t just ripped the old transponder out. “Can you deactivate one transponder and activate the other?” he asked Gwen.
“Sure, if you’ve got the right tools.”
“I have basic ones. We’ll have to buy more for ongoing maintenance.”
“And some clothes for Gwen,” Alison added. “She hasn’t anything but what she’s wearing.”
“Which brings up the question of what we’re going to use for money,” said Jon. “It may take a while to convert our platinum to credits.”
“I have money—enough for the tools, too, if Terry doesn’t,” Gwen declared.
“We can’t draw on Ciencian accounts,” Alison reminded her. “We’re supposed to be dead.”
“It will be easy enough to find a dealer in platinum, that’s a legal business here,” Terry said. “But we’ll have to sell at least part of our cargo soon, too. Getting your IDs modified is going to be expensive, and we don’t have life support or provisions for more than a few weeks; the consumables have to be replenished.”
“Do we have to change our IDs?” Alison asked. “Why? Since Ciencia has no official contact with the League, word that we’re alive won’t reach the authorities there, will it?”
“It could very well be reported through the free traders that Ciencians had been seen elsewhere, and that would alert them to the fact that Bonanza escaped. Besides, you all need worldless status just to bank credits, so you can buy food in cafés even if not to shop.”
“Must we change our names, too?”
“No, that’s not necessary, but there are other things to be fixed. Jon doesn’t have a League pilot’s license, which he mig
ht need to show. Gwen will need an official engineer’s rating to use port repair facilities for the shuttle. And since it’s illegal for me to carry passengers who don’t have transit permits, you’ll need crew status too, I guess as a comm technician.”
“I thought you told me long ago that you couldn’t alter an ID file,” Jon said.
“I can’t. It takes a forger with access to an ansible, which couldn’t be obtained on Ciencia, and even here it’s a Class A felony—meaning that the fee will be very high.”
“So getting in touch with a buyer for the cargo is our top priority.”
“I can probably locate a black-market drug dealer by poking around the Net,” Terry said. “The problem will be finding one who doesn’t push street drugs along with legitimate medical ones. All moral considerations aside, it’s best to steer clear of such contacts if we don’t want to be double-crossed.”
“How close to reality is the old space fiction you sneaked onto Ciencia’s Net?” Jon asked. “The captains I dealt with were honest free traders, but I judge from the stories I read that on most planets there’s a lot of swindling and killing, and no one can be trusted.”
“Well,” Terry said, “the stories are exaggerated; not everyone in the underworld acts like Jabba the Hutt. But there’s certainly some truth in them. We might be wise to carry sidearms when merchandise changes hands, if only for the sake of appearance.”
“Have we got sidearms?” Alison asked in dismay.
“Any starship carries a few. As a Fleet officer I practiced with them, but never had occasion to put that skill to use.”
“Are there really bounty hunters?” Jon persisted.
“Yes,” Terry replied, catching himself just in time to avoid saying in front of Gwen that shortly after the colony on Maclairn was founded, bounty hunters had nearly put an end to it.
“Well, then, what’s to prevent Quaid from hiring one to come after you?”
“He doesn’t know my new name,” Terry pointed out. “There’s no way his contacts on Earth could connect it with the one I used on Ciencia. And if we don’t identify the ship as Estel, they can’t find me that way, either.”
“But if we identify it as Venture, word may get back to him that Venture still exists, and the last time he saw you, you were piloting it. He probably assumes that’s how you returned to make the broadcast.”
“True,” Terry agreed with a sinking feeling. He hadn’t thought about that. Nor had it occurred to him that the original captain of Venture, to whom it was still registered, might want it back despite having been paid more than its value for falsifying its flight plan. Above all, he did not know whether either Quaid or the backers of the plot to destroy Maclairn had learned why their plan had failed. They might not be aware that the two terrorists were dead; they might think they’d gotten cold feet and fled instead of attempting to go through with the suicide mission. In that case Maclairn’s enemies might well be on the lookout for Venture. And since they were League government insiders, they would know if it appeared near Fleet’s Centauri base.
“I guess we’ve got to call it something else,” he decided. “Gwen, can you damage the transponder in such a way that it looks accidental, so that if the port authorities board us to check on it, they won’t suspect anything wrong?”
“They’ll want us to replace it,” Jon said, “and that’ll cost plenty. There may even be a fine. Not to mention the fact that whatever we name it won’t be found in the registration files.”
“It will be when we need it to,” Terry said. “We’ll have bought enough time for me to hack the records.”
“In an official League database? You’d need ansible access for that too, wouldn’t you?”
“They’re not as secure as ID files—they’re Fleet records kept in two-way mirror files linked to Moonbase. I worked some on Fleet’s computer system when I was stationed here; all explorer pilots had to have a secondary skill and mine was AI maintenance.” The passwords would have changed, of course, but he knew a backdoor.
He had not intended to go anywhere near Fleet. Of course he wouldn’t need a physical presence in order to hack; still it seemed a bit more chancy than he’d have preferred. But there wasn’t any alternative.
“We’ve got to think of a name that can’t possibly be in use,” he said. “None of the obvious ones, or one from mythology or well-known literature, or a famous person. And of course names connected with Ciencia or Maclairn are off limits.”
“What’s Maclairn?” Gwen inquired.
Oh, God. He had slipped. It probably couldn’t have been avoided much longer anyway since he didn’t have to be careful around Jon and Alison. “It’s the name of a colony that must never, never be mentioned except among the four of us,” he said. “Can I count on you for that, Gwen? I can’t tell you yet why it’s so secret, but it’s important not to reveal that it exists. A lot of people might be hurt if that got out.”
“Are we ever going there?”
“No,” Terry said sadly. “I’m pledged to stay away.”
“As to a ship name, practically everything has been ruled out,” Alison said quickly, trying to change the subject. “Can we just pick an uncommon girl’s name and hope no one has used it?”
“I suppose we’ll have to. How about Coralie? It’s my mother’s name, but no one knows that.” No one had known except Kathryn. He had not thought about his mother in years; it was too painful. He hadn’t contacted her during his trips to Earth with Promise, as it would have been difficult to tell her of his marriage without mentioning Maclairn. Fleet would have notified her of his presumed death on an exploratory mission without saying where it occurred.
He sensed Alison’s rush of sympathy. “I didn’t know your mother was alive,” she said softly.
“I don’t know either, but she’s not old enough to have died naturally. She’s probably still grieving for me, unaware that she has a grandson.”
“You have a son, Terry?” exclaimed Gwen in surprise.
“It’s a long story,” he told her, “but yes, I was married on Maclairn. My son was unborn when I left there, but I learned recently from friends that he’s well and happy.” The Elders had told him this when they rescued him.
“Yet you can’t go back? That’s awful!”
“It’s the price that had to be paid for saving Maclairn from harm. I have a new life now and I’m looking forward to it. I’m legally dead under my old identity and my former wife is with someone else; I wouldn’t intrude even if it were possible. But you see, Gwen, that’s why I have to keep on spreading hope to other worlds, in spite of the danger we’ll be walking into. I lost too much not to make my exile count for something.”
Confused, she protested, “Hope? I thought that on other worlds life is better than on Ciencia, like you said at your trial.”
“Better because there’s less censorship. But people aren’t happy anywhere—they don’t look ahead the way they did when they were establishing new colonies. They haven’t anything to reach for, and they know how everything’s declining on Earth. They’ve lost interest in searching for new frontiers.”
“And new faculties of the mind are the frontier that’s needed,” Alison added. “What was it you said, Terry—that it’s the next step in evolution?”
“Yes. And it’s vital, because if human civilization doesn’t move forward, it will die.”
“I—I didn’t know,” Gwen whispered. “I thought we were just escaping, and that what you said in the broadcast to Ciencia was only about winning freedom there.”
Terry opened his shirt and drew out the tiny flame pinned to its inner surface. “This is a symbol of the human mind’s power,” he said, “that was given to me long ago by friends I cared about. I can never show it publicly because on Earth there are people who would recognize its origin, and some of them might have come to colonies. Nevertheless I wear it, in remembrance of the pledge I made to serve the cause it stands for.”
He paused. Now that the time h
ad come for action, he wondered why he had ever thought that he and a few others could have any influence on humankind at large. “I’m not sure how to begin,” he said, “and we’ll have to move one step at a time. But this is why we’re here.”
“And,” declared Jon, “whether or not we can accomplish anything, we’re damn well going to try.”
~ 12 ~
The three days spent in transit were busy. Gwen switched the transponders, hiding one and disabling the other; Terry taught Jon how to pilot Estel in normal space; and Alison learned what she could from the onboard knowledgebase about the colony they were headed for. In his spare time Terry prepared the texts he was going to plant on its local Net, wondering how he could manage to attract readers without also attracting security agents. But at night, alone with Alison in their stateroom, he gave himself over to the joy of lovemaking, elated by the telepathic link—unconscious on her part—that was forming between them.
His darkened skin had nearly faded by the time they arrived at Centauri, leaving it close to its natural color as determined by the Elders’ restoration of the genes they had previously altered; the pallid skin of a Ciencian would be too conspicuous in other colonies. Since his companions’ Ciencian citizenship was to be concealed, this was true for them too, so it was necessary for them to acquire a light tan through very careful exposure to the ship’s sunlamps. Terry allowed them to believe that his own disguise had been the result of long hours under the bright sun of the world where his crash injuries had been healed; having no experience with tanning, the inadequacy of this explanation wasn’t apparent to them—nor were they familiar enough with skin variations to ask how he had been made to look Ciencian during his exile.
The colony Centauri was located on Centauri Prime, the largest planet of the double star Alpha Centauri, which was the closest habitable exoplanet to Earth and therefore the first to be settled. It had taken the name of the entire system, though a small settlement on one of the other planets had been established later. Centauri served primarily as a maintenance and supply base for Fleet’s starships so as to keep them out of the way of the heavy interplanetary traffic within Earth’s solar system. But its civilian residents were fiercely proud of its status as the first extrasolar society and, Terry recalled, they had a thriving economy based on the production of plastic resin pellets for industrial use. These were legally exported, but since the demand elsewhere exceeded the supply, a good many were bought up by smugglers.
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