2
THE SONIC CRUISER sliced through the cloud cover over Seattle and emerged into a drizzling rain, its wings glistening with moisture. Jin-Li Chung and another Port Force longshoreman, Buckley, watched the landing from the shelter of their opensided cart. It wouldn’t take long to unload the plane. They had been told there were only two passengers.
Buck lounged in the driver’s seat, smoking, one booted foot on the dash. Jin-Li watched the passengers riding the external lift down to the wet tarmac. The man was running a comb through his hair and yawning. The woman beside him, fine-boned and rather small, wore severe black clothes lightened only by a white band collar. Jin-Li recognized the Magdalene tonsure. The priest’s bare head shone with raindrops as she stepped away from the lift, until the attendant from the plane caught up with her to hold an umbrella over her head.
Jin-Li stepped out of the cart, brushing raindrops from the beige uniform jacket just as the man hurried past without a glance, eager to get out of the rain. The Magdalene moved more slowly under the attendant’s umbrella. As she passed, she looked up, directly into Jin-Li’s face. showing clear gray eyes under narrow dark eyebrows. She looked tired. Jin-Li touched fingers to cap in a friendly salute, and the priest smiled, an expression somehow full of warmth and sadness at the same time. Jin-Li watched her narrow back as she crossed the airfield and went into the Port Force terminal.
“Hey, Johnnie,” Buck called. “Gonna make me do it all by myself, or you gonna watch the suits?”
“Sorry,” Jin-Li said with a little laugh, and turned to the open cargo compartment of the plane, where Buck was waiting to begin on the small pile of luggage.
Buck indicated the terminal door with his head as he handed down the first valise. “Here for the kid, don’t you think?”
Jin-Li glanced back at the terminal. The two passengers and the attendant had disappeared. “Orders are not to discuss it, Buck. Last thing I need is more trouble.”
Buck picked up another case and handed it down. “Yeah, I know. Sorry. Just curious.”
“Yes,” Jin-Li said, lifting the cases onto the slatted shelves of the cart. “Me, too.”
Rumors had circulated through the Port Force barracks and cafeteria. The child’s arrival was supposed to be secret, but it was easy to get assigned to the flight, just a persuasive word to a friend in Dispatch, and so Jin-Li had also been on duty the week before, when the shuttle came in with its mysterious passenger.
The girl’s escorts had not been Port Force, but Admin. Jin-Li had known that by their dress, their attache cases, and the way they ignored the longshoremen waiting to offload the shuttle. There had been three of them, a woman and two men, making a little circle around the girl. But Jin-Li caught a good look as the group crossed the tarmac to the terminal.
The girl was at least as young as the rumors said. She had dark, velvety skin, enormous eyes that flashed white when she lifted her head. Someone had tied her long hair back, and dressed her in an overlarge blouse and a wrap-around skirt that just reached her knees. Her thin legs looked fragile and coltish, and they were just visible through the transparent quarantine suit that enveloped her whole body.
The trio hustled the child into the terminal, the girl stepping awkwardly in the quarantine suit, and disappeared with her through one of the security doors. No Port Forceman had seen the girl since. But Jin-Li, who cultivated acquaintances in every corner of the service, knew where they were keeping her.
The Multiplex in Seattle was home port to all the Offworld stations. R-wave transmissions were received in the dome of Admin, high above the foambrick barracks, the Rec Facility, the three cafeterias. Jin-Li, despite being forced back to Earth in disgrace, was allowed to teach karate in the Rec Fac. The infirmary was sandwiched between the Rec Fac and Admin, and it was there Jin-Li had delivered the boxes and cartons from the shuttle that had carried the little girl. There was no sign of the child, but the inference was not hard to make. No one was being allowed inside. A guard had been posted. And a priority announcement had gone out to all personnel that, for an indefinite period, medical complaints would be handled in a room in the basement of the Rec Fac.
On the day the Magdalene arrived, Jin-Li walked slowly past the infirmary, noting the drawn curtains, the guard lounging beside the door. The child had hardly seen Earth’s sun, and had breathed its dubious air only through the filter of the quarantine suit. It was whispered in the cafeterias that there was something strange about the girl, something alien, but no one in the Multiplex knew what it was. Jin-Li hoped the Magdalene would be kind to the child from Virimund.
*
ISABEL SHIVERED AS she followed Cole Markham through the layers of the Port Force terminal. Even indoors, the air felt chilly and damp on her scalp. The secretary who met them greeted them briefly, stood back to let them pass, then spoke to the door. It closed and locked. She gave Isabel a cool smile, and led the way into a carpeted elevator. A string quartet played over the sound system as they rose five swift flights, and came out into a corridor with muted lights and a series of doors, some open, some closed, each marked with the circled star of ExtraSolar, and a name and title in gilt. At the last door in the corridor, the secretary paused. “Mr. Markham, Mother Burke, could you hold here for just a moment? Our in-house archivist wants a picture.”
“I beg your pardon?” Isabel looked around. A man in a suit came through the door, holding a small camera in his palm.
“Just for our records,” the secretary said blandly. “And for the media, of course.”
The archivist arranged Isabel and Markham on either side of the door to expose the gilt legend, GRETCHEN BORESON, GENERAL ADMINISTRATOR, EARTH MULTIPLEX. The palm cam hummed once, twice, three times. At least, Isabel thought tiredly, the archivist didn’t ask her to smile. She didn’t feel at all like smiling.
Gretchen Boreson’s corner office was elegant, with a thick carpet, a desk made from a thin slab of translucent stone, and pieces of modern art glass arranged in niches. Mullioned windows looked north over the mist-shrouded towers and spires of Seattle, and west to the runways busy with sonic cruisers and short-hop flyers. At one end of the airfield the nose of a space shuttle extended from an enormous hangar, its particle shields opaque in the mist.
Boreson stood up as Isabel and Markham came in. She wore a trouser suit of subdued gray fabric, and perfectly applied cosmetics. Her hair was so white it was almost silver, and it shone in a smooth chignon. She touched it with one hand as she came around her desk. The other hand, manicured and white, she held out to Isabel.
“Mother Burke,” she said. “Thank you for coming. How was your flight?”
Isabel, touching Boreson’s hand, suppressed a shiver. The white fingers were icy. “The flight was fine. Thank you.”
“We’re delighted you could join us.” Boreson indicated chairs. “Please sit down.”
Isabel took the indicated chair, and linked her fingers together in her lap, watching the other woman. Gretchen Boreson’s skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones. Her pale blue eyes gave Isabel the feeling she was looking into an empty sky.
The administrator resumed her seat. She picked up an r-wave transmission wand and tapped it lightly on the pale stone of her desk. Isabel felt her attention focus, like a beam of light narrowing and intensifying, with herself at its center. “You understand that we have a situation here. Mother Burke,” she said.
“I’ve read the archivist’s report, Administrator.”
Boreson nodded, and touched her lips with one silver-polished nail. “Children,” she said. “It’s very sad. We feel it’s our duty to do something about them.”
“Administrator, I realize you weren’t there, on Virimund. But there will have to be an explanation for why a child died.”
“Dr. Adetti—the power park physician—did all he could, Mother Burke. No one intended for the child to be injured. But our people were attacked.”
“They should not have approached the indigenes in the first place, Administrator. That’s expressly forbidden in your charters.”
Boreson nodded again, and tapped the wand. Its rhodium tip gleamed. “Of course. But it was well-meant. And you realize, the Sikassa are not indigenes. They’re Earth citizens.”
“Perhaps they no longer feel like Earth citizens.”
The transmission wand tapped. “That’s possible.”
“And they must have believed they were abandoned. Forgotten.”
“Even so—our people were only curious.”
“Your people,” Isabel interrupted, “murdered a child. This much we know.”
“It seems to have been unavoidable,” Boreson said.
“They should have been warned not to attempt contact.”
“It was most unfortunate,” the administrator said, her voice sharpening. “Our information said the planet was uninhabited. We had no way of knowing.”
“Does that excuse what happened?” Isabel’s jaw tightened. She drew a careful breath, and touched her cross. “Why were they armed. Administrator?”
“What if they hadn’t been armed? They might all have been killed!”
“By a group of children?”
Markham shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “The thing is,” he said, “as regrettable as it all was, it’s done now, and we have to try to smooth things over. ”
Isabel ignored him.
Boreson flicked him a glance, then transferred the wand to her other hand, rolling it between her fingers. Her voice was level. “We need Virimund, Mother Burke.”
“We? Do you mean ExtraSolar?”
“Not only ExtraSolar.” Isabel saw the soft wrinkling of her lips as she spoke, the fissures that marked her cheeks beneath her cosmetics. The Administrator was not a young woman. Lines at the corners of her eyes ran improbably upward, evidence of the surgeries that had given her face its smooth appearance. Isabel saw an involuntary twitch of the risorius muscle at the side of Boreson’s mouth, and she wondered if the older woman was more nervous than she seemed. “By we,” Boreson went on, “I mean Earth. All of us. The long-range transports are essential to the expansion effort, and they need the hydrogen the power park will produce.”
Isabel unlinked her fingers, made her hands relax on the curving arms of the chair. Beyond the mullioned windows a cruiser rose from the port, its curving nose piercing the clouds that blanketed Puget Sound. Two black flyers hovered out of its way, waiting their turn at the airspace.
Boreson toyed with the transmission wand, the veins on the back of her hand vividly blue against her white skin. “If Earth—” She waved the wand at the world beyond the windows. “If the nations of Earth want to expand, we need bases, we need food sources, we need—”
“Cash,” Markham put in.
She nodded. “Mr. Markham is right. ExtraSolar wants to fulfill the charters given to it by the Coalition, and by World Health, but for that we need to be profitable. We spent a lot of time and money finding a planet where we could put a hydrogen power park. Virimund is almost all ocean. It’s perfect.”
“And you didn’t know the Sikassa were there.”
“No one did!” This was from Markham, and it had the indignant ring of truth.
Boreson interrupted. “Unfortunately, some who oversee the charters think the Sikassa should be treated as indigenous. I don’t agree, and I was hoping you wouldn’t, either.”
Isabel drew a deliberate breath. Penance, she reminded herself. But she hated being manipulated. She rose and went to the window, looking out past the striations of rain to the glass and steel towers of the city. “Administrator,” she said mildly. “Think of it. The Sikassa have lived on Virimund for three hundred years. More than ten generations.”
The flyers had landed. Suited men and women climbed out, and Port Force longshoremen set to work around the aircraft. Isabel thought she recognized the stocky figure of the one who had met her own plane, the one with the long, heavy-lidded eyes. It had been a pleasant face. It had been the only friendly face she had seen today. She put one finger against the cool glass, and a damp spot formed where she touched it. She turned abruptly to Gretchen Boreson and Cole Markham.
“What is it you expect me to do?” she asked. “And why in heaven’s name did ExtraSolar take this child from her home? Surely your people could see that their action compounded the offense already committed.”
“Dr. Adetti did what he thought was best.” Boreson’s voice was tight. “Remember, there is fault on both sides.”
“We don’t know enough to judge that. The study should have come first.”
“Look, Mother Burke.” The administrator stood up, and came around the desk with quick, short steps that gave the impression she was about to fall down. She stopped beside Isabel, bracing herself with one hand on the wall. The muscle jumped again beside her mouth, rippling the thin skin of her cheek. “We secured an extraordinary empowerment provision from the charter governments to allow us to study this child and her people,” Boreson said. “Your guardianship of her is stipulated by that provision. By helping us, you will be helping the girl. We need to understand what’s happening on Virimund. What has already happened.” She waved her hand at the towers and domes and spires of the city beyond the Multiplex. A narrow beam of sunshine lanced through the cloud cover to brighten the rooftops. “We didn’t know the Sikassa were there, we truly didn’t. And there’s still no sign of anyone else except this group of children. But ExtraSolar needs what Virimund has to offer.”
“It’s a lot to ask of one person.”
Boreson nodded and, to Isabel’s relief, stepped away from her. “If you need an assistant, you have only to ask.”
“Have you spoken to this child yourself?”
Boreson’s shake of the head was dismissive. “No. I understand she doesn’t speak much English. And I’m afraid I’m not good with children.”
“What made you think of the Magdalenes, Administrator?”
Boreson’s delicately tinted lips curved slightly. “I believe the Magdalenes are still trying to establish themselves. We thought you might need us as much as we need you. And your Mother General told me you would be perfect. She was quite eager for you to accept.”
Marian Alexander, of course, had her own agenda. Isabel knew very well how ambitious she was for her order, how much she wanted to prove its worthiness to Holy See. And Isabel, returning from Oceania with a stain on her soul, had provided Marian with the ideal answer to ExtraSolar’s request.
“I’d like to see the girl now,” Isabel said.
Boreson, with the same quick, falling steps, moved back to her desk and fitted the transmission wand into its receptor. She spoke into it briefly, and then turned her chilly smile on Isabel. “They’re expecting you in the infirmary,” she said.
“The infirmary?” Isabel asked. “Is the child ill?”
Boreson’s features froze, just for an instant, but the moment of stillness made Isabel’s neck crawl. “No,” Boreson said. “Not so far as we know. It seemed the safest place.”
“Who has been caring for her?”
“There’s a nurse. And Dr. Adetti sees her every day. Naturally her health is of prime concern to us.”
“Naturally,” Isabel murmured.
“But, Mother Burke—the more time that passes, the more money we lose. We have men and women on Virimund, equipment, supplies. They’re ready to begin.” She laid down the transmission wand with a little click. “Can you try to work quickly?”
Isabel looked out the window again, away from the tightly stretched features of Gretchen Boreson and into the soft grayness of the January day. “Please take me to the child,” she said.