To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  “Livya Jeter, haven’t I taught you better respect than to contradict your mother? You’re only a child. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I felt them,” she repeated, cooler now. “They are not slimy. What else have you taught me that’s wrong?”

  “Livya!” She recoiled, shocked. “I’m your mother!”

  Turning on her heel, Livya walked out from between the branches that isolated them from the main group. Her mother followed, and as they emerged they heard voices to their left.

  Cheryl Inikar, too, had heard the men’s voices raised in brittle anger, and she came striding past them straight for the area to their left where Brian Inikar tended Yone. Drawn irresistibly, Livya trailed after Cheryl around the end of the branch.

  Yone had struggled to his feet, and though he sagged like a man beaten in a fight, he faced off against Brian, spitting words like bullets. “YOU. I. Forbid. To. Touch. Me!”

  Brian sighed hugely and picked up his hat, slapping it against his knee to dust it off. Livya had only a moment to realize that Yone had used none of the filthy epithets, the handy labels, and meaningless catch phrases with which everybody else addressed the Distect conspirators.

  Then Cheryl started toward Yone, finally stung to a tearful rage. “You ungrateful savage! If it weren’t for Brian, you’d be dead right now. You can’t possibly think that bumbling incompetent Alamain could have done what Brian—”

  Her husband stopped her advance with one out-flung arm and turned her to him. “Forget it, Cheryl. How else would you expect a Tecton channel to behave? He’ll be all right now, for a while at least.” He turned to Yone. “You better get Alamain to finish the job I started for you, or you’ll be in convulsions by midnight.”

  “I don’t require your advice.”

  Brian’s lips compressed briefly over a retort, but then he relaxed and said gently, “You may hate me, but you’re alive, so we’ve all still got a chance to survive.” He turned to his wife and walked back the way she had come. When they reached Livya and her mother, Brian stopped to look down at the girl with a trace of sourness.

  Livya tilted her head back, and for the first time since being marooned with the Distect convicts, she examined his face. Brian was a tall, lanky Gen with a face to match. But what she saw in those narrow features was a kind of hard-bitten integrity incongruous in an outlaw. And it was coupled with self-control not unlike that she’d found in Yone.

  When he spoke, his voice was low-pitched, roughened by suppressed emotion. “You...you ought to be ashamed for what you did to him. But it’s not surprising, considering your upbringing!” He raked Evelyn Jeter with a glance of unfathomable contempt, and took his wife on toward the spot where the other Distect convicts were gathering.

  For long moments afterwards, Livya stood in a paralysis of mixed emotions, not hearing her mother’s voice or seeing Yone pulling himself together to face the next task. She knew only that Brian Inikar, the one man who had every reason to feel shame before law-abiding folk such as herself, had the incredible power to make her feel guilty. Not only that, but he had selected the one insult which she had never been able to ignore urbanely, that she was what she was because of some external influence and not by her own choice.

  Swamped by this nameless guilt, she was unable to defend herself against the insult, and instead searched inwardly for the cause of her shame.

  How could saving myself be wrong? But at what price? He looked like death! I’m not responsible for that, she told herself. Brian Inikar thinks so, something inside her answered. He’s Distect. He’s an expert on Simes. But he’s a convicted criminal, a conspirator bent on overthrowing the Tecton! I can’t accept his values. Then why do you feel shame and guilt? an insidious whisper demanded.

  Never had she known such confusion in all her seventeen years. She was so intent on her dilemma that she didn’t see Valyu Alamain finally make his way up from the rear of the column and start toward Yone. She didn’t see Yone start to walk out to meet his Donor. The channel was just suddenly there before her and she had to grasp his words by force of will.

  “Miss Jeter, my oath requires that I apologize to you. And I do offer that formal apology. But I want you to know, in addition, that I am personally shamed by my lapse of control, I have never regretted any act so much.”

  Her mother spoke from behind her. “You don’t regret it half as much as you’re going to! When we get back, I’ll see that the right people learn that you let Brian Inikar—”

  “Mother!”

  As if realizing for the first time that she was giving the Sime a good reason to see that she, at least, didn’t get back, Evelyn Jeter subsided. Livya met the Sime’s eyes firmly. And with a little shock, she realized that in the three months of walking with him, depending on him for her very life, she had not exchanged more than a few words with him. Now, suddenly, she wanted to know everything about him.

  Yone Farris did not look like a typical member of the celebrated Farris family. There was only a shadow of family resemblance around his fine-sculpted lips, prominent nose, and wide forehead.

  His skin was lighter than the typical Farris, and his hair was almost ash-blond instead of jet black. His face was too young yet to show character lines, but now it revealed an inner tension very much like a man forcing himself “just-one-more-step” beyond endurance. He had, however, the solid black eyes typical of the Farrises.

  Those eyes now locked onto her gaze as if he wanted to tell her everything about himself in one word, but couldn’t find the word.

  “You must not worry, Miss Jeter. I will see to it that you all get home. But I can’t promise that my reflexes won’t betray me again, so I advise you to stay as far away from me as you can.”

  “I...will....” The tremble in her voice embarrassed her.

  “I forgive your refusal to offer me the Exemption. I do not wish you to feel guilty or ashamed about it.”

  Her eyes were suddenly fever dry, and her voice steadied. “I have done nothing wrong.”

  “You cannot comprehend the wrong that you have done, and so for you it isn’t wrong. That is the only kind of wrong that I forgive.”

  “Then don’t forgive me, because I do comprehend. Your ‘right’ demands prostitution, and I reject that as ‘wrong’.”

  He sighed and shivered suddenly as if from a chill, clenching his teeth momentarily. “And I reject it as wrong, too, Miss Jeter. Utterly. I could gain nothing from such a person, and so could not be attracted to one.”

  “You must mean something different by it than I, then.”

  He drew himself together and took one step toward Alamain. “Possibly, but I doubt it.” He turned, raising his voice toward the donor, “Valyu! Come, we must see that they are making camp. We can’t go any farther today. You and I must do some recruiting among the donors.”

  Livya went about the business of making camp mechanically. She and her mother chose a spot against the giant fallen tree trunk between two of the large, lower branches which they shared with several other families they always camped near. While the men went out hunting dinner, she helped the women spread their porta-tents using the tree trunk as one side of the tent and anchoring the corners of the flat sheeting with small boulders.

  The porta-tent was a thin film of shiny material on one side, black on the other. Powered by a small selyn battery, the sheeting was a very efficient heat pump. In the desert where they had crashed, the self-cooling tents had saved their lives day after day. Here they used the heat at night.

  Now, Livya wondered if Yone would be able to recharge the selyn batteries for them. The accident with the tree had suddenly driven home to her just how vitally dependent they were on the channel, while before it had just been a phrase said by rote.

  Their fire strikers were selyn-powered. How could they even make a cooking fire without the strikers? And most of their cutting tools, the really useful ones, were selyn-powered vibro-blades. The hand tools took hours to cut down a little tr
ee, and once she had taken a turn using the hand machete to hack a way through the underbrush. They couldn’t survive without recharging their tools.

  Livya had become the fire-specialist among these families, learning quickly which woods would burn best and how to design a safe firepit. As she worked that afternoon beside the majestic tree trunk, she found a renewed awe at the size of the thing, and the incredible hardness of the wood which wouldn’t burn. The trunk itself was more than thirty feet in diameter, and some of the branches were more than six feet thick. She couldn’t calculate how much selyn it had cost to deflect its fall, but she reached a kind of numb astonishment that such a feat could be done.

  The tree had stood with its roots on the bank of a stream. Undercut by recent floods, the bank had given way and the tree had fallen across the stream and into the forest. The campers used the stream for water and even caught a few fish, while they grumbled about how they were going to cross it.

  As the hunters returned and the women dressed the carcasses and dug up roots to make soup, the leaders gathered for muttered conferences at the tent of K. Martin Flick, their elected spokesman to the Tecton, which consisted here among the refugees only of Yone and Valyu Alamain. There was much coming and going of grim faces past Livya’s fire, and the air of crisis did not escape her.

  Yone’s tent had been set up, as always, a little apart from the main group. This time, it was on the opposite side of a rather large boulder, using the rock face as one wall, spreading over a convenient limb of a tree, and anchored on the forest floor with heavy branches. The side-flaps were tied down for privacy, and all afternoon, a trickle of Gen volunteers had been going to and from his tent, donating selyn. But the grim faces told her quite plainly, it wasn’t enough.

  Eventually, word came down the line that they would have to do without heat for their tents this night. “Conserve what you have left, and pray your batteries don’t leak. Light fires from your neighbor’s when possible, and conserve your vibro-blades, too.”

  When her mother heard that they would sleep cold this night and for the foreseeable future, she was indignant. “We can’t get along without heat! You’ll catch your death, Livya. They can’t do this to us!”

  “They? They! What do you mean, ‘they’? That man,” Livya said, waving the fire striker wand toward Yone’s tent, “saved your life today, and nearly died for it. But he didn’t use one bit of your selyn to do it.”

  Evelyn Jeter recoiled. “You don’t talk to your mother in that tone of voice! You have to respect your mother. Remember, it’s your welfare I’m looking out for.”

  “How can I respect someone who can’t even stick to a subject for two sentences?”

  “And I suppose criminals and weasely Simes are respectable! Standing around in public talking to such riffraff as if they were worth listening to, and they don’t even make sense. Then you turn around and won’t even speak civilly to your own mother!”

  “Riffraff! That...that....” She pointed a shaking finger in the direction of Yone’s tent “...that ‘riffraff’ talks better sense than you ever did. Why can’t you see truth when it happens before your eyes? You’re wrong about their tentacles being slimy, and you’re probably wrong about everything else too!”

  “You don’t contradict your—”

  “I don’t, facts do. That man saved us all from getting crushed today. That’s a fact. He refused to let himself take advantage of me. That’s a fact. He’s the only thing that stands between us and death. That’s a fact. And you refuse to donate even a tiny dribble of selyn to run your own tent’s heating unit. That’s a fact.

  “Right now, Mother, it seems to me that you’re the riffraff around here, and everybody thinks I’m just like you. I am so ashamed!”

  Mrs. Jeter gathered herself up into her most self-righteous stance and pointed, “Go to the tent and get to bed. You’ll get no supper tonight. Think what you’ve said about your own mother, and tomorrow you’ll apologize on your knees. You’re almost a woman, and you’re going to learn respect if it kills me.”

  “With you as a teacher, I haven’t got a chance!”

  “Go!” Their screaming had attracted the embarrassed stares of half a dozen people, but none would intervene.

  For one tense moment, Livya teetered on the brink of total defiance, but her own feelings were so confused that she didn’t know where else she wanted to be except huddled in her own sleeping bag, where she could fight her way through the whirlwinds that seethed in her.

  She would not refuse herself what she wanted simply to defy her mother, and so she fled to her sleeping bag. At first, while the camp was having supper, she surrendered to gales of tears that seemed to feed on themselves. Eventually, she cried herself into a feverish slumber.

  When she woke, the deep silence of late night was on the camp, her mother asleep beside her. In the clarity of emotional exhaustion, she realized that her anger at her mother had stemmed from her need to make her mother earn the “respect” she demanded and Livya herself so desperately wanted to give. She had never found anyone she could really admire. Except, maybe, Yone Farris.

  He had used the community selyn reserves to save her life. That was selyn collected in tiny bits during the last three months from forty-four General Class donors out of the seventy-seven survivors. There were twenty-four kids not old enough to create selyn. And there were six Distect Gens he wouldn’t touch with a waldo, let alone a tentacle.

  It seemed fair enough to her that the community should support the kids. And it seemed reasonable to keep the convicts away from their only channel, since it was known that any Sime exposed to a Distect Gen inevitably goes Distect, not caring whether they Kill in transfer.

  But Yone had rejected that lure. The prisoners made themselves useful around camp, and then made themselves prudently scarce. They weren’t freeloading, but they weren’t recruiting either.

  She and her mother were freeloading because they could donate, but didn’t.

  And that, she realized, was the basis of her reaction to Brian’s words. Brian Inikar had called her a freeloader, and she agreed. He had implied that she was a freeloader because her mother was a freeloader, and thus she couldn’t help it. That infuriated her, and she did not agree. She could always help it.

  She had struggled halfway out of her sleeping bag before she remembered Yone’s warning: “But I can’t promise that my reflexes won’t betray me again, so I advise you to stay as far away from me as you can.”

  It was one thing to donate selyn, even over her mother’s authoritative “forbid.” When they got home, maybe, they’d put her in reform school for being intractable, but at least she’d be in the right. It was something else to compromise her own integrity by risking something she had agreed was wrong.

  Suddenly, the whole thing became too complicated for her, threatening to smother her in frustration and ignorance. She felt an irresistible urge to move, and after a few restless tosses that threatened to wake her mother, she pulled herself out of her sleeping bag, wrapped a blanket around herself, and went out into the chill night.

  She stood a moment, trying to catch a glimpse of the stars through the trees. In the distance, she heard the night watch tromping through their rounds, tending the fires. There were dangerous night-prowlers in this forest. Twice, Yone had saved them from losses, once wrestling a toddler from the very jaws of a cat-like hunter. He’d killed it bare-handed.

  She set off through the trees towards Yone’s boulder refuge. He had warned her to stay away. The responsibility was now hers. Somehow, accepting that eased her restlessness. Whatever happened, her action wouldn’t smudge anybody else’s record.

  But it was there, in that tent, that the answers lay. She felt that without those answers, the problem would surely smother her to death. Yet, when she drew near and heard footfalls to her left, she hung back in the shadows behind a boulder.

  The steps came purposefully nearer and an arm drew aside the tent flap, spilling dancing firelight out
onto the ground, and onto Cheryl Inikar. She was dressed in her hiking clothes, but her hair was down about her shoulders.

  From within came Alamain’s tenor voice. “You! Haven’t you done enough for one day? He doesn’t want you here. Go back to your tent.”

  “My God! What are you doing! Give me that! Didn’t Brian warn you?”

  “Get out of here,” said Alamain coldly.

  Yone’s voice, choked up as if he were suppressing a cough, said, “Please!”

  “Don’t worry, Hajene,” said Valyu, “I won’t leave you.”

  “Oh, yes you will!” said Cheryl. “Yone, give me that.”

  Unable to contain her curiosity, Livya crept around the rock to the end of the tent not being used as a door. Her mind was a tumult of questions. Was the Sime injured? By her or the tree? How badly? There was a crack through which she could see what went on inside, and a little of the warmth spilled out.

  The tent floor had been swept clean, and on a ledge outthrust from the rock face burned a merry little fire, heating and lighting the tent. It was vented through a small hole formed where the top of the boulder drew back from the material of the tent. The space within was just large enough for the three of them, with Yone stretched out on his sleeping bag. A few steaming pots of water were set about him.

  The “that” they were fighting over was a folded strip of material being used as a hot compress around Yone’s forearms, As Livya set her eye to the crack, Valyu began to wrap the length of steaming cloth around Yone’s arm, starting at the elbow. Cheryl streaked across the tent and ripped the cloth from his fingers. “No, not like that!”

  Caught off balance, the Donor went over backwards, his feet kicking in the air. Cheryl circled the sleeping bag on which Yone lay helpless and took the Donor’s place, deftly wrapping and twisting the compress from wrist to elbow, finishing before Valyu could regain his feet.

  Then she moved to Yone’s other side, where his other arm was clad in a similar, but cool, bandage and unwrapped it, dunked it into a steaming pot, wrung it out gingerly, and said to Alamain, “You may as well go. This is going to take a while, and you aren’t very much help.”