Vale of Stars

by Sean O'Brien

  Tann’s eyes widened momentarily, and a look of fury passed across his face for an instant.

  Jene spoke in almost a whisper. “I’ve checked the records. I had to pull some strings here and there, but if you can do it, so can I. You’ve never fathered a child.”

  Tann had regained his composure again with admirable alacrity. “That has nothing to do with the case.” His face was a mask of stolid inscrutability, and his voice was unnaturally even.

  Jene studied the man for a moment, and with a flash of insight, she knew what he was hiding. His homosexuality was merely a cover for a secret so shameful that he would do anything to hide it.

  “You’re sterile.”

  Tann’s mask almost held. “And if I am, Doctor? Does this make you feel superior to me?” A flush slowly grew on his face and the veins on his bald head began to stand out. “The meanest shippie immigrant, with no skills save those which we have taught her, can produce dozens of children to populate the planet while argie laborers work a few hours more each day to support the increase. And the mother is applauded for her efforts! ‘Children are our future’ says the slogan. Perhaps they are, but one thing is certain, Doctor Jene Halfner,” he took three quick steps until he was almost nose to nose with the taller woman, “there will always be a difference between argie children and shippie ones.”

  “Why not just sterilize all of the shippies?” Jene asked quietly.

  Tann laughed, almost crazed. “Do you think something like that would have gone unnoticed? Besides, we need shippie children. Professor Dolen’s underclass needs workers. There is a phrase from Old Earth—”the world needs ditchdiggers too.’”

  To her surprise, Jene found herself growing calmer and calmer as Tann lost control. She stared at the man, watching him breathe deeply in his underdeveloped chest. “You realize that by creating a new breed of human who can survive outside, you are giving the hybrids an advantage.”

  Tann sneered. “What advantage? The terraforming process will be complete in a few generations. In one hundred years, all of us will be able to live outside. What use is their mutation then? And they will always have the social stigma of the outcast—I have found that sociology always outlasts biology, Doctor.”

  “I won’t argue,” Jene said quietly. “There is no point in arguing with you; our fundamental beliefs are too different.” She turned again to go but threw a final barb over her shoulder. “But you will regret what you have done. You have not ended a crisis—you have set events in motion that will precipitate a far worse one.” And she left. Kuarta and Dolen were waiting some distance down the corridor from Tann’s office.

  “What was that about?” Kuarta asked.

  “Nothing important,” Jene sighed. Kuarta opened her mouth to say something, but thought better of it. The three continued towards the lab where Yallia was being readied for transport.

  She was sitting morosely in the outer lab, wearing a shapeless grey jumpsuit that had all manner of biomed sensor patches on it. Three technicians were also present, looking at a holo display of Yallia’s vital signs as broadcast by her suit sensors. Yallia looked up when the door opened to admit her family and broke into a faint smile. For an instant, Kuarta saw an eerie wisdom in the child’s eyes, as if Yallia understood why her mother had consigned her to exile. Then the illusion was gone, and Yallia was just her frightened child.

  Kuarta and Dolen hugged her. One of the technicians started to move forward to admonish them to back off—their embrace was distorting the sensor images—but Jene waved her off. The technician hesitated, then returned to her compatriots.

  “Mommy? Daddy?” Yallia said, her voice muffled by their arms.

  “Yes, dear?” Kuarta said.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  Kuarta felt the tears trickling down her face. She and Dolen had already talked to her at length about what was to happen and why. But Yallia, as all children, needed assurance of certain facts.

  “No, of course not, darling. We love you very, very much.”

  “Then why are you sending me away?”

  Dolen handled this question. “We are not sending you away, sweetie. You are going to live outside and we will come see you all the time.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Yallia hugged her parents and cried again. The hysteria, the fighting, had all ended hours ago. Yallia accepted what was to happen now, since she had no choice. She even understood a tiny fraction.

  “Is this because of Pem?” she said between sniffles.

  Kuarta said, “No. You are a very good girl. Sometimes…people have to go away for a while. It just happens. One day, you’ll understand.” And Kuarta could not help but to glance at her mother. “Like I do,” she added, her eyes locked on Jene’s.

  There were more questions concerning the nature and frequency of their visits, and there was more pleading, but in the end, Kuarta, Dolen, and Jene left the child to the hands of the transport technicians.

  Jene was the last to speak with her. Even as the techs closed in to take her away, she held her granddaughter and whispered, “Don’t forget any of this, child. Come back one day. No matter whom you have to hurt. Come back.”

  And Yallia was taken away.

  It was a long time before Jene and Kuarta spoke privately again. The next few hours were spent in silent lamentation as the three grieved for Yallia. But the time came when the two women were alone, late at night, after Dolen had crawled into bed.

  “You’re coming with us tomorrow morning to see where they’re putting her?” Kuarta asked her mother over coffee at the kitchen table. When Jene did not answer immediately, Kuarta asked, “Aren’t you?”

  “I…I have to see someone.”

  “Ma, you’ve seen everyone. There’s no way to reverse this now.”

  “No, not to reverse this. There’s one person I need to see. I need to ask him some questions.”

  “Who?”

  “Eduard Costellan.”

  “Who?”

  “You probably don’t think of him much. He was the leader of the Flight Crew on Ship.”

  Kuarta snapped her head back in surprise. “Ship’s just an observation satellite now. Is it still staffed?”

  “Yes. The Flight Crew could never leave their null-g environment. We left the central core in orbit after we stripped away most of the rest of Ship. They’re self-sufficient up there.”

  “But Costellan must be…how old?”

  “I don’t know. One hundred and fifty. Old Earth years, of course.”

  “He can’t still be alive.”

  Jene shrugged. “Maybe not. But I would have thought his death would have been reported to us. Shippies, I mean—not Commissars.”

  “Why do you need to see him?”

  “There are some loose ends that need tying up.”

  Kuarta did not pry further. Jene’s relationship with the Crossing was wholly different from Kuarta’s, of course. Kuarta had enough respect for her mother to leave the issue alone. “I have some loose ends of my own to tie up, Ma.”

  Jene looked at her expectantly. Kuarta dropped her gaze to the brown liquid swirling in her cup. “I…I never really understood why you sacrificed Renold and me all those years ago. Until now.” She looked up at her mother. “I know the circumstances where different, but…I just want you to know…I forgive you.”

  Jene took a deep breath. “Thank you, dear.”

  “I hope Yallia will do the same for me in her time.”

  Jene started to say, “I’m sure she will,” but something held her back. She simply took her daughter’s hand. The two women gazed at each other for a long time as their coffee cooled slowly in the timeslip.

  * * *

  “You are expected,” the tall, reed like woman said to Jene as the latter exited the airlock. Jene had been able to secure a trip to the orbiting relic with little difficulty—Tann evidently was willing to let her have her way in matters unimportant to him.

  The wom
an before Jene was wraithlike in her gauntness. Jene tried not to stare. The woman was at least two and a half meters tall but so thin she could not have weighed more than fifty kilos planetside. She wore no clothes and only the absence of a penis marked her as female. “My name is Heavenwatcher Eee. Welcome.”

  “Thank you,” Jene murmured. As she strove to keep her glances at the woman within the bounds of decency, Jene noticed her scrutiny, an expression of barely concealed disgust on her elongated features.

  “Something wrong?” Jene said pointedly.

  The woman made no show of embarrassment. “I was examining you. I have never seen a groundcrawler before.”

  “Groundcrawler, eh? Well, that’s a new one.” After the stresses of events planetside, Jene found this whole situation mildly humorous. “Take a good look, sweetheart. But while you gawk at me, perhaps we could head over to Mr. Costellan. I think he’s waiting for me.”

  “Of course.” The escort turned gracefully and floated down the access tunnel that Jene vaguely recognized as the same tunnel she had navigated many years before.

  “Since you were so bold in your exam, may I ask you how old you are?” Jene said at the woman’s back. As she spoke, she watched the interplay of bones in the woman’s arms. There was a thin but noticeable flap of skin connecting the woman’s tricep to her latissimus dorsi, forming a small triangular sail on either side. As Heavenwatcher floated, she flapped her arms slightly, and Jene immediately saw the purpose of the flaps—they were for movement in microgravity.

  “I am only a child. Merely forty-three years old.”

  “Old Earth years or New Earth?”

  Heavenwatcher pivoted in air and looked at Jene angrily. “Year: the amount of time it takes the planet Earth to make one complete revolution around its star.” She spun back around again.

  “Right.” Jene shut up.

  The two entered a vast chamber that should have been the control room. Instead, it had been converted to a three-dimensional plaza. A dozen men and women, all unclothed, flew gracefully to and fro, and Jene even saw a child swooping down from above to some destination on the other side of the sphere. The chamber was perhaps one hundred meters in diameter, dotted with innumerable outcroppings on all sides whose functions Jene could only guess at. Jene grabbed at a stanchion and gawked at the spectacle.

  “Our Father is waiting on the other side. Do you think you can fly over?” Heavenwatcher asked.

  “I think I can make it,” Jene answered and pushed off awkwardly. The two slowly floated towards an opening in the opposite wall, and when it became apparent that Jene had misjudged her aim and was going to collide with the far wall some distance from the opening, she appealed to her guide.

  “Uh, I think I might have missed. Can you shove me over?”

  Heavenwatcher stared at her in shock. “Use the wall and pull yourself over. I will wait.” Jene thought she saw the woman shudder in disgust.

  Jene slowly and painfully made her way to the opening, aware that the inhabitants of the plaza were watching her with wide-eyed stares. Despite the beauty of the sphere, she was glad to escape into the tunnel.

  “Continue straight ahead. He is waiting for you. Tell the sentinels who you are,” Heavenwatcher said.

  “Thank you. I—” Jene started to add a comment that she had known Costellan before, in an attempt to explain her presence here, but Heavenwatcher launched herself into the plaza and did not look back.

  Jene grunted and propelled herself towards the end of the tunnel. It was well-lit, and before long she could make out two humanoid forms (men, a brief glance downward told her) at the other end. Both held weapons that resembled ancient blunderbusses.

  “I am Jene Halfner. I am expected,” she said nervously.

  One of the two men nodded and pressed a contact. An iris valve, the panels of which had not been visible a moment before, opened and revealed a darkened room.

  “Enter,” the other sentinel said.

  Jene nodded and floated inside, careful not to bounce off either of the two guards. As she entered the room, the iris valve closed behind her, plunging the room into near-darkness.

  Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the dimness of the room. She thought she could hear…wheezing? She began to make out a dim outline of a figure floating horizontally before her.

  “Costellan?” she said softly.

  “Doctor Halfner,” breathed a man’s voice. The voice carried with it the unmistakable impression of extreme age. “I am glad you came. I would not have summoned you for my death, but the fates conspired, eh?”

  Slowly, Costellan’s face came into view as Jene floated closer. It was his face—Jene could recognize it even through twenty years and despite the dimness. The room was slowly revealing itself as her eyes adjusted—an elaborately furnished bedroom in a style that once would have been called Victorian. Jene was surprised to discover that Costellan was floating a few feet above a four-poster bed.

  “Impractical, isn’t it?” Costellan laughed, catching her gaze. “In my old age, I found myself growing increasingly…homesick. A word I’m afraid you won’t understand, my dear.”

  “Why not? Ship was my home, Mr. Costellan.”

  “Eduard, please. I get enough honorifics here as it is. Yes, Ship was your home, but not the same way Earth was mine. You knew Ship was artificial and temporary. You never had a home like I did.”

  Jene resisted the impulse to argue. “Maybe not. But we are trying to build one now.”

  “So I see.”

  “You see?”

  “Yes. You know we watch you, don’t you, Doctor? Surely, you don’t think we just serve as a survey satellite, weather satellite, communications hub, and all that without keeping you under surveillance?”

  “I never really thought about it.”

  “Which is as we wish. We do not want to meddle in your affairs.”

  Jene wanted to move closer but was afraid to do so lest she bump into Costellan. She lowered her voice instead. “Nothing has changed, then, from twenty years ago.”

  Costellan didn’t answer, but Jene could see him close his eyes.

  “I have a question for you, Eduard. I need to know the answer before you die.”

  “You had best ask it now.”

  “There were more communications between EE3 and Ship than you told me about twenty years ago,” Jene said simply.

  “That’s not a question,” Costellan said.

  “Don’t bandy words, Eduard. It’s not like you.”

  “True. Forgive me, Jene. I have been keeping the secret for a long time. The wheels of revelation need lubricating. Yes. There were more communications between Arnson and an official planetside.”

  “What was the official’s name?” Jene asked. She had come all this way to ask, even as the answer burned in her brain. But she had to know.

  “Carll Tann.”

  She thought she had steeled herself against the truth she had come to suspect these past few days. But when Costellan spoke the name in his husky, dying voice, Jene reeled nonetheless. Even a confirmed believer in conspiracy has, in the dark recesses of the mind, a glimmer of doubt—a tiny spark of optimism that defies the evil all around it. To have that spark finally arrested and killed is a powerful blow, one that Jene Halfner could not have prepared herself for.

  “He knew all along,” Jene said. “Arnson. He knew.”

  “Yes,” Costellan confirmed, but his voice was hesitant, as if there was still much more unsaid.

  Jene focused her eyes again on the present, to the man floating before her above his deathbed. “And so did you, Eduard.”

  “Yes. We all knew.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  Costellan’s voice rose in pitch. “Tell whom? The public? We told the leader of the Ship government. What he did with the knowledge cannot be laid at our feet.”

  “But you knew he was keeping the secret. You could have broadcast to all of Ship and stopped the war!”

  �
�It is not for us to meddle. We turn our eyes outward.”

  “You….” Jene stopped, unable to find words to express her frustration. Here the truth had been known: had she known what Arnson had known then, she would have—

  Jene frowned. “You say Arnson knew of Tann’s intentions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why didn’t he stop the fighting? Why did he continue to plead his case for prioritizing medical services and materials?”

  Costellan did not answer immediately. Jene grabbed one of the bedposts and maneuvered herself closer to him. “Why?”

  “Arnson tried to strike a deal with Tann,” Costellan said slowly. “Tann agreed to abandon his plan for infection if Arnson agreed to wipe out all…undesirables from Ship before it started sending colonists down.”

  Jene whispered, “Genocide?”

  “That was the final solution.”

  “And what for Arnson in return?”

  Costellan sighed. “Power, of course. A seat in the Assembly, prestige among the argies.”

  “Tann wouldn’t have kept his side of the bargain,” Jene mused. “He just wanted Arnson’s cooperation in ridding Ship of the Class D’s. But how could he have expected to accomplish that in just a few months?”

  “Arnson asked Flight Crew to help.”

  “Help?”

  “He asked us—ordered us—to engage the light-pressure sails earlier than necessary for added braking as we approached Epsilon Eridani. He wanted us to also alter course through the Oort cloud in the system.”

  “The Oort cloud?”

  “A ring of cometary debris and assorted particles some distance away from a star.”

  “Why through the cloud?”

  “He never told us. However, such a course correction would have drastically increased the chance of striking debris. We would have experienced a hull breach similar to the one we had back in S.Y. 55.”

  “He wanted to cause a hull breach?”

  “In our opinion, yes.”

  “To try to increase the crisis, I suppose.” Jene looked away. “To place a demand on the medical staff that they could not possibly meet and thus abandon then and there the Class D’s. He wanted to force the decision. He was ready to kill hundreds.” Jene’s head snapped back to Costellan. “But you didn’t do it.”