Jenna Starborn

by Sharon Shinn

  Deborah smiled again, still sadly. “Yes. And Maria and I are sure he will agitate to relocate again in a year or so. He feels a duty to the Public Aid Office here, and I don’t believe he will leave until it is completely organized and self-supporting—but you have made that last condition, at least, very nearly a reality! Lately I have heard him speaking of a planet called Cozakee which has just recently been surveyed by scientific teams for habitability. If it indeed is found to be livable, anyone who agrees to homestead there is guaranteed a substantial tract of land and two full citizenship upgrades. I am sure he will go. If not to Cozakee, somewhere. It is just a matter of time.”

  “You do not sound as though you would be willing to follow him this time,” I said.

  “No—I don’t know—no, I don’t think I would.” She smiled again, a tight, painful smile, and there was a world of unspoken loss in that expression. “You see, when we came to Appalachia, all of our lives improved so much! We had all lived on Newyer, sharing the smallest quarters imaginable and laboring every day just to get a little money ahead. We were all half-cits, of course, and Newyer is such a crowded planet that featureless, ordinary people like ourselves had almost no value. Neither Maria nor I had any special skills, so I worked in a kitchen and Maria worked in a child care facility, and the hours were long and the pay was terrible.

  “Sinclair had done much better than we had, for he had been discovered to have a gift for administration and he had been given the task of running a social services office. In fact, he was doing so well at it that he had been offered a pay and status upgrade to level-five citizenship. We were ecstatic, as you might imagine, but Sinclair said he would only accept on the condition that Maria and I also be given such citizenship status. His employers refused, and Sinclair resigned.

  “Well, we were in dreadful straits then! We could not afford to live without Sinclair’s income. But he had already been investigating emigration at this point, and he had done a great deal of reading about Appalachia. We knew that the planetary government was looking for colonists, and we knew that if we could come here, work for five years, and make any kind of reasonable contribution, all of us could eventually earn citizenship. Maria and I still had grave doubts—for we are not, as you can tell, adventurers!—but Sinclair was very persuasive and we really had no other options. So we applied for admittance, sold our few major possessions, and came here.”

  She was silent a few moments while I waited to hear the rest of the story. “In fact, Appalachia was not Sinclair’s first choice,” she said slowly. “He wanted, even then, to go somewhere wilder, riskier, somewhere that we could earn citizenship in a year or less and where our very presence would be almost the only mark of civilization on the planet. He fancies himself—oh, almost a missionary in this regard. He wants to be in the vanguard of humanity as it spreads across the universe.

  “But Maria and I would not agree to go someplace so—so barren. We had to have some amenities, some social structures in place, and so we compromised on Appalachia. We have now been here three years, and, as I say, Maria and I are as happy as we have ever been. We have food, space, employment, friends, a purpose in life—everything we ever had wanted, everything that for so long we had been denied. For us it is enough—it is more than enough—it is a rich bounty. But for Sinclair . . . he will not be content to stay here long.”

  She had fixed her eyes on her folded hands during much of this last part of her tale, but now she looked up at me again. “All that by way of explaining to you,” she said lightly, “why Sinclair wants to learn nuclear generator maintenance from you. If he really emigrates to a desolate and unsettled planet, he will need every mechanical skill he can master. And he knows it. You will do him a great service if you can teach him what he needs to know.”

  “I will be happy to do so. I would like to in some small way repay the many favors he and his family have done for me. But what of you and Maria? If he leaves, will you be able to survive without him?”

  “Yes, I think so. Maria and I can run this institution ourselves, especially if we are able to generate some income by selling energy, and the city officials have been by recently to discuss expanding our services. We may soon be in the position of needing to hire more help! Plus it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that one or both of us might marry—” She stopped abruptly and looked away, blushing. I hid my own smile.

  “So you have no fears for your own welfare, should Sinclair decide to move on,” I said gravely. “But you are not happy about the possibility of him leaving.”

  Still not looking at me, she shook her head rather violently. “No! For as long as I can remember, Sinclair has looked after us. He is only three years older than Maria, but he is ten years my senior, and I do not remember a day of my life that I didn’t feel was made more secure because of Sinclair’s presence at my side. When I was growing up in Newyer—in such poverty! I cannot describe it—he was my physical protector. He made sure I was safe when I had to travel from one destination to another, and he made sure I always had food to eat, even if there was not enough of it. I knew that no real harm could ever come to me as long as Sinclair was in my life. And even though I know that now, situated as I am, no real harm will come to me if he is gone—still I cannot imagine such a circumstance. It has never existed for me before.”

  The next question had to be delicately put, but I was really curious about the answer. “You say that Sinclair cared for you,” I said. “Then I take it your parents were not much of a factor?”

  “We had no parents—no real ones,” she said bitterly. “I suppose you might not be familiar with the gen tanks on Baldus, but that is where Sinclair and Maria and I were all conceived.”

  I hid my amazement, as there was obviously so much more she had to tell me, but I could not wait to reveal to her some of my own mysterious origin.

  “We had been commissioned, one by one, by a wealthy couple who were unable to have children of their own,” she said, seeming to keep her voice steady only with great effort. “You may have remarked how different Sinclair’s appearance is from mine and Maria’s. That is because he was sculpted from entirely different genetic clay. Maria and I came from very similar gene pools, for they liked her looks when she was a baby and they wanted her sister to match. But they did not spare much thought for us once we were all in the household. They were not cruel to us, they were just neglectful. They did not bother to send Maria or me to school, so Sinclair—who had had basic educational classes—taught us language and math in the evenings. No one was assigned to watch us, so we ran in and out of the house and ate when we wanted and slept when we wanted and outgrew our clothes and lived like wild creatures half of our lives. And then they died, and we learned that not only had we not been formally adopted, we had been left only the paltriest sums in their wills. And that their home was no longer our home, and no one had a claim on us, and no one had a care for us, and we were truly on our own.”

  “How old were you?” I asked sympathetically. I was appalled but not surprised; this was a common story among those who had been harvested from the gen tanks. I was very familiar with it myself.

  “Sinclair was eighteen, Maria was fifteen, and I was eight. We went into the city and used our small legacy to pay a month’s rent in the smallest apartment we could find. Sinclair and Maria got jobs within three days. I started working as soon as I was old enough. And that was our life until we came to Appalachia.” She took a deep breath and released it. “So you see,” she said, on a small laugh, “why we all became PanEquists! It has been called the religion of the forgotten man, and no one could have been as forgotten as we were!”

  I could contain my excitement no longer. I was almost bouncing in my chair as I leaned over to take her hand. “Deborah,” I said, and such was the tone of my voice that she was instantly alerted to something unusual, for she looked up at me with wide eyes. “You know how glad and surprised you were to discover I too am a PanEquist?”

  “Yes,�
�� she said.

  “And you know how well you and Maria and I understand one another—how well we work together, how we at times seem more like sisters than companions?”

  “I have often thought it,” she said.

  “Well, listen! When I first came here and you asked my name, you thought I said Jenna Starrin, but I did not. I have called myself Jenna Starborn for years because—”

  “Starborn!” she cried, for she too knew the common name taken by children of the gen tanks. “But then—does that mean—”

  “Yes! And not only was I conceived, gestated, and harvested as you were, but all this happened on the same planet! On Baldus! And I would not, at this point, be surprised to learn we were grown and harvested in the same facility, for there cannot be that many facilities in the civilized universe, and certainly not on Baldus—”

  “Oh, Jenna! Oh, I cannot believe this! You are a sister to us, I have always sensed it, but even so, this is wonderful beyond belief!”

  And we both leaped from our chairs and hugged each other like twins long separated, and we wept like people to whom joy is so rare that it sometimes feels like sorrow.

  “I cannot believe it,” she said, over and over again, first drawing back to study my face for kinship, and then renewing her fervent embrace. “Jenna, we are sisters—in spirit, and in history, and perhaps in some kind of true genetic fashion—”

  “Oh, would that it were true! That some of our cellular material is the same!”

  “We can pretend it is, in any case—”

  “And I feel as if it were so—”

  “If nothing else, we must consider ourselves cousins,” Deborah said at last. “For we are at least as close as that.”

  Nothing would do, of course, but that we must go immediately to share the glad news with Maria and Sinclair. Maria reacted much as Deborah had, with exclamations of wonder and many affectionate hugs. Sinclair’s gladness was more tempered, but appeared equally genuine.

  “I have so few relatives that I am always happy to claim one more, particularly one who has made herself such an intrinsic part of our family already,” he said, crossing the room and taking my hand. “I agree with Deborah—we shall call you cousin and be done with it. Welcome to the family, Jenna,” and he bent down to plant a chaste kiss upon my forehead.

  That night we celebrated with a special meal, and the next few days were gilded with a sort of lingering euphoria, but nothing else about our routine changed drastically. The women and I still maintained the house and the dorm and cared for the boarders, while Sinclair spent his days engaged in administrative tasks. In the evenings, we usually gathered in the family room to read, talk, counsel our new residents, play games—or study.

  Sinclair had purchased the textbooks I had directed him to buy—for I still had no credit of my own—so very soon I was ready to begin teaching him the basics of nuclear generator maintenance. We sat in one corner of the large room, quietly going over theorems, while the others sat scattered in their various positions in chairs throughout the room. It was not, perhaps, the best possible situation for teaching, but I preferred it to working alone with Sinclair in some more sterile environment. I still found him a formidable figure who was easier to take when diluted by his sisters’ presence.

  He was a quick learner, for his mind was very agile and his will to understand was extraordinary. He retained every stricture, turned in faultless lessons, and studied on his own in his free time. More than one morning, after I had made my way to my work station in the generator room, I found him there before me, examining the equipment and preparing new questions.

  “I begin to think that, very soon, you will need a teacher with greater skills than mine,” I told him one evening. “Perhaps your friend Leopold has a technician on his staff who could take up your training once you have learned all you can from me.”

  “I do not think I will need to learn more than you know,” Sinclair replied. “And this is how I wish to acquire knowledge.”

  I wondered if this had been intended as a compliment, but I was fairly certain it had been a simple statement of fact with no positive or negative connotation attached to it. And, indeed, if I could truly teach Sinclair everything I knew about generator maintenance, he would be well-equipped for the life Deborah had outlined to me. There might be more he could learn from someone, but he would know enough to survive.

  During this period of time, only one event transpired to disturb my equilibrium. It came late one evening, after everyone else had gone to bed and Sinclair and I had spent an extra hour working on a stubborn calculation. When he finally solved it, Sinclair pushed his chair back from his desk and rewarded me with a rare smile.

  “Well! If there are not too many problems like that in our next few lessons, I think I shall acquit myself tolerably well,” he said. “I am more impressed all the time at the layers of knowledge that you keep locked up so demurely in your head. To look at you, one would not suspect that the greater part of your brain spends its highest percentage of energy solving mathematical dilemmas that the rest of us cannot comprehend.”

  I smiled. “No, indeed, I do not perform math functions for my amusement. Only when I am required to.”

  “Speaking of problems, I am faced with one that is not centered around arithmetic,” he said, speaking so calmly that it did not even occur to me that I should be experiencing a sense of panic. “Perhaps you can help me with it.”

  “Surely. If I have any knowledge at all, I will be glad to share it.”

  He rummaged through the homework papers lying before him and pulled up a sheet that had apparently been printed out from his computer terminal sometime recently. “There is a general notice that has been circulated among the governmental and social services agencies of Appalachia,” he said, still in that ordinary, unalarming voice. “Indeed, I assume it has been sent out to most similar offices on all the outer worlds where colonization is under way. There is a man, a high-grade citizen, who is looking for someone who has disappeared. He seems to think she may have taken refuge on some world which does not look too askance at half-cits without a work history.”

  I felt myself growing colder by a degree with every word that left his mouth. He spoke with complete dispassion, so that I could not tell if he expected his words to have any effect on me or not. Did he believe I was a runaway—this runaway—or did he merely think this little tale might have some slight interest for me, a half-cit whose own life had been difficult?

  “Who is the man engaged on this quest?” I said, trying desperately to keep my voice steady.

  He glanced at the printout. “An Everett Ravenbeck. The notice was issued from Corbramb, but he says the woman disappeared from Fieldstar.” He paused and frowned down at the paper. “Fieldstar. That is quite some distance away from here. A terraformed planet, I believe.”

  “Yes, that sounds right,” I managed to say.

  He looked up at me again, and his fathomless blue eyes could have held all knowledge or no inkling whatsoever; they were that clear, that unreadable. “He says here that the woman he’s looking for is named Jenna Starborn, so you can see why I thought it might be you.”

  There was a long silence while I tried to think of a reply. I could not renounce the name that I had so recently claimed; and I could not—I simply could not—bring myself to say aloud “I know no one by the name of Everett Ravenbeck.” Nor could I imagine what course Sinclair Rainey would take if I did admit to being this hunted creature. Would he betray me, would he continue to shelter me, would he demand to know the tangled story of my life before he made his judgment? I merely stared at Sinclair, my face showing I could not guess what despair, and waited.

  He dropped his eyes, shuffled his papers together, and laid the notice on the top of the pile. “Well, I suppose there may be any number of women in the settled universe who have the name Jenna Starborn,” was his next unexpected remark. “Just the other day I went onto the StellarNet to search for Sinclair Raineys, and I fou
nd ten without even looking very hard. There are probably a dozen or so of you Jenna Starborns traveling through the star systems, and it’s likely he will never find the one that’s missing.”

  I felt as though I had surfaced after a stay too long underwater; I could feel myself struggling to catch my breath. “Yes—no doubt—both given name and surname are quite common,” I said, stammering a little.

  “I shall not contact him, then, and raise his hopes,” Sinclair decided. “And everyone else here still knows you by the name Starrin, so I do not think they will be alerting him to your presence. Just as well. We would not want this Everett Ravenbeck to think he has found the woman he is searching for when she most certainly is not on Appalachia.”

  Again I was overcome by so much emotion that I could not speak. I did not know how to express my gratitude, for I was not in the habit of giving Sinclair the easy embraces I so often bestowed upon his sisters, and I absolutely could not utter a word. Besides, I was not entirely positive that he was playing a charade just to simplify my life; he might actually believe that I was the wrong Jenna. Sinclair was so guileless it was hard to tell.

  “Well, it’s quite late, you know,” he said, glancing around the room as if for the first time realizing that everyone else had vacated it. “You have worked doubly hard today, first at your chosen vocation and then at teaching me. Go to bed, Jenna, and sleep well. We shall continue with our studies in the morning.”

  And that was the only time he mentioned Everett’s name to me; and if he spoke of the incident to his sisters, they did not repeat it. They had called me their cousin, and cousin I had become to them, someone to whom the shelter of the family would be extended for whatever protection it could offer against whatever threat materialized. I wished with all my heart there was some way to pay them back for every kindness, every gesture of affection. I knew I would be as unsparing as they had been if my opportunity arose.