Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.
—Galileo Galilei
Nikol Valori climbed the stairs past the spillway, where silt-heavy water spewed in rhythmic, dark brown pulses from the huge river outlet a hundred meters up the forewall. From there it fell in a thunderous, rushing torrent to crash and churn at the forewall base. The steel behind the cascade was green with two hundred years of luxuriant moss, and around it a vast fan of wild vines inched their way toward the suntube. Their fruit was a free cornucopia for anyone who cared to come and harvest it, but only deer and nesting birds did. The land next to the forewall was Crew territory, a rule as ironclad as it was unofficial, and harvesting food was something the Believers did. The roiling water collected in a broad, clear pool at the base of the waterfall, sending spray up to join the perpetual gentle mist that hugged the base of the forewall. The water stilled in the pool momentarily, rippling gently against its sides, before slipping away and aftward to become the Silver River. A pipe diverted some small fraction of the flow to a settling tank that separated out the silt and provided the University with running water. It was a simple system, set up by some long-dead builder of the original crew, when the decision was made to turn the hodgepodge of welded-steel buildings that made up what they called the construction shack into the University. Ever since, most of the Crew had lived and worked there. If you can call what we do work. Nikol held an advanced degree in physics, another in history, and he still wasn't sure he'd ever done anything truly useful for his world. I have spent my life learning and teaching things that won't be useful for ten thousand years, if ever. The "if ever" qualification was almost blasphemous. It was the received wisdom among the Crew that science, history, mathematics and all the other disciplines of the University would be absolutely essential when Ark reached Heaven. Of course they could hardly believe otherwise, because keeping that wisdom alive was the entire purpose of the Crew. Without that purpose, we might as well be singing to the stars.
He pushed the thoughts aside as he climbed the stairs up from the University, established in the warren of rooms that had once housed who-knew-what arcana during the ship's construction. They weren't in the official diagrams of the ship, but they had obviously been of some significance. There were long-abandoned conduits in the walls, marks on the floors were equipment had once been mounted. Some of the equipment was still there, halls full of intricate mechanisms that nobody knew how to use anymore. Once the construction shack had been the nerve center of the greatest engineering project in history, its residents almost casual about the tremendous power to create that they commanded. It was built of the same stainless steel that made up Ark's hull, huge plates that had been joined to the forewall by actually melting the steel in place. It was a technique far more durable than they had needed to use. They'd done it just because it was easiest for them. Nikol stood in awe of that. The construction crew had built things; there was nothing in Ark they hadn't built, which was a slightly amazing thought. They had built them to last, even these supposedly temporary construction buildings, where two hundred years later only a handful of the overhead lightpanels had gone dark. The Crew who were their descendants merely learned things, and there was something sad about that. We can't even fix the lightpanels.
He went through the library and past the classrooms to the communications room, where a constant watch was kept on the broadcasts from the home world. It had been the construction crew's operations center, and bronze bas-reliefs of Joshua Crewe and all of the prelaunch chief engineers were set into the back wall, underlined with their names etched deep into the steel. Below them were the names of everyone who had participated in the building of Ark, ranks and ranks of them. His own ancestors were up there, and he himself was a descendant of those first chief engineers, a fact he regarded as of little importance, though the University hierarchy seemed to make much of it. The deification of ancestors, another sign that we have lost our way. More than half the names were in Cyrillic, but no one spoke Russian anymore.
Nikol quickened his steps. He had an appointment with the current chief engineer. Her office was in the senior administration hallway, beyond the communications room, but he went past it. Melany Waseau had asked him to walk on the ledge, the wide walkway that ran along the top of the University complex, one hundred meters up the forewall and right the way around Ark. It was a custom they had had, some twenty years ago, when they were both eager students, absorbing all their world could teach them. He went out a set of well-worn double doors and climbed another flight of stainless-steel stairs, feeling the strain on his knees. When I was young I used to run up these stairs. Age came to all men. When he was young he used to run the annual Ledge Race, thirty-one kilometers, all the way around the vast ship's circumference. When I was young . . .
The chief engineer was waiting for him, leaning on the railing and looking out over the countryside toward the aftwall.
"Nikol, zdras." She smiled.
"Zdras, m'droog. Melany, it's good to see you." He embraced her. When I was young, I loved Melany and never told her. I wonder if she knew?
"You should see me more often then."
Nikol nodded. "I haven't had the time, since Lynne . . ." He didn't finish.
"I'm sorry, Nikol. I know how hard it must be."
"Everyone gets one life—birth, death and the time in between. She lived hers well."
The two were silent for a moment; then Melany spoke. "I brought tea if you'd like some."
"Dandelion?"
"Of course. I remember what you like."
Melany picked up a well-worn daypack, made of some tough prelaunch synthetic, and took a thermos flask out of it. Nikol looked out over his world. The mist was lighter than usual, and he could see over the roof of the University and the Prophet's Tower, over the tops of the arrow-straight Douglas firs that grew fast and tall in the moist and well-nourished soil near the forewall and on to the point where the forest thinned and the trees grew shorter where Believer logging had made itself felt. After that there was a broad belt of domesticated land, broken into a patchwork of farmers' fields and orchards, dotted with houses and barns, bisected by the rivers that the silt pipes fed. Farther aft the patchwork frayed into smaller farms, separated by stands of still virgin forest, where the younger sons of the Believers were clearing land to establish their own dynasties. A third of the way to the aftwall the forest had restablished itself in thick green luxury, no longer formed of the tall, mist-loving firs but of bushy ironwood and oak, until it met the distant ocean shore, an indistinct blue in the hazy distance. Most of our artificial world is still uncolonized. The crew built our ocean, but how long has it been since anyone has stood on its shores? On either side the world arched up in both directions until the sides met at the suntube, and the ocean glinted silver where the suntube's light hit it at just the right angle. The view from the ledge was one of the best in Ark. Except it's an enclosed one. I have no horizon here. He looked up at the foredome, but it was impossible to see any stars. And that is something else we have lost.
The chief engineer had unscrewed the lid of the flask. There was a cup nestled inside it; the lid itself formed a second cup. "I hope you know I would've come, had I known . . ."
"She didn't linger, that was a blessing." Nikol Valori paused, started to say more, then stopped. Some things were better left unsaid, and for others there were no words. After a moment he said something else. "She didn't want a service."
"And . . ." Melany paused, searching memory for a name. ". . . Kylie, how is she?"
"She's as well as can be expected. No child should lose her mother, but she's young, she'll adapt." He studied the view for a long time, fighting down emotions he didn't need to have brought to the surface. "You didn't ask me here to ask about my family."
"No, I didn't. That doesn't mean I don't want to hear about them. You've always been hard to talk to, Nikol."
"Touché. I don't make it easy to be my friend. Why did you ask me here?"
She poured the tea, still steaming, and handed the lid cup to him. "To talk you out of resigning. I want you here, Nikol. I want you to run the simulation center."
"You know I don't want it. There's hundreds who'd jump at the chance." He drank his tea, almost too hot to swallow. She'd laced it with honey and spice, just the way he liked it, and he felt its bittersweet warmth flood through him. She does know me, she does care.
"None who know the systems as well as you."
"You're flattering me now." He swallowed the cup down, wincing at the burning heat in his throat.
"The truth isn't flattery." She sipped her tea. "Another truth is you always did drink too fast."
"Sipping isn't my style, and I'm complimented by your truth." Nikol put an ironic stress on the last word. "Still, I'm happy with my decision. The University will manage without me, and my students are in good hands."
Melany sipped her tea again. "I can't believe teaching kolkoz children is a challenge for your mind."
"It's a challenge to my spirit, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't call them 'kolkoz.' "
"I'm sorry. It's common slang, I don't intend it to be derogatory."
"Of course you don't, you are too educated for that, it's only what everyone calls them—every Crew, that is." Despite himself Nikol heard the passion come into his voice. "The fact is, it's derogatory by nature. It implies the Believers are only peasants, cargo, something that we, the educated, enlightened crew, are carrying from point A to point B, with no contribution to make on the voyage."
"Some might argue that the cargo is the entire point of the voyage."
"Some might, but no one does, until someone like me points out their use of an insulting term for an entire class of people. However, you're correct. The cargo . . ." He stressed the word to emphasize his point. ". . . the cargo are the entire point of the voyage. They are the ones with the skills we're going to need, the skills necessary to pioneer a new world. They till the soil, grow crops and raise stock, not us. They build and sew and carve and mill. There's going to be no requirement to demonstrate Euler's theorem when we get to Iota Horologii. Nobody is going to care about the factors leading to the rise of the UN as a world government."
"You used to say the same things when we were young. You still chose to go into academia."
"When I was young I thought I had no choice. Crew schools don't teach us the skills we need to do anything else."
"Crew skills are still necessary, even if we don't use them every day. There's going to be a need to be able to operate Ark's survey instruments in order to select a landing site. Somebody's going to have to pilot the shuttles into the atmosphere." Melany sipped her tea again, then, satisfied with its temperature, she drank more deeply.
"Ark's computers can do the planetary survey by themselves, and the autopilots in the landing shuttles are certainly going to be more reliable than some far-distant Crew descendant whose learned skills are four hundred generations removed from anyone who's actually flown anything."
"We have the simulators, that's why I need you—"
"Do you really believe the simulators are going to be working in a thousand years?"
"They were built—"
"Of course, of course, everything's been built to endure. Look at this flask." Nikol picked it up from where it rested on Melany's backpack. "The finest flask ever built on Earth, with an iridium-alloy double shell, vacuum-sealed for insulation, an integral heating element, inductive of course so the connection can't fail, no moving parts. I can't imagine what it must have cost the Earth economy to make, but it'll be holding hot tea long after you and I are dust. Still, do you really think it's going to stand up to a thousand years of use?"
"It was engineered to last ten thousand."
"Of course it wasn't." Nikol gave her a disgusted look. "It couldn't be, nobody had any experience engineering something to last so long, not once in all of Earth's history. It was engineered to last a long time, because the construction crew wanted their children and their children's children to live as they did, but how long? Sooner or later someone will break the element trying to clean lime scale out of it with a stick, or drop something heavy on it and crack the shell, or find another use for it and ruin it as a kettle, and if none of those things happen the metal will just slowly wear until the vacuum fails. It's just a flask. What chance have complicated simulators got? What chance have computers got? We've lost half of them already."
"We'd better hope computers can last that long, because we've got one flying the ship."
"Ark's computer has to operate for ten thousand years, it isn't going to be used, and that's the difference. That's why it's carefully sealed away from prying human hands. All the ship's systems are. We are the weak link in the system, and the construction crew knew we would be."
"That's not true. We have maintenance access if necessary."
"If the computer decides it needs our help. It hasn't once, in two centuries. I pray it never will, because who among us could actually fix it?"
"You could, or I."
Nikol raised an eyebrow. "Could you really, Melany? Fix for real when you've only practiced on models, in a pressure suit you've never really worn, on a system you've never touched?"
"I don't claim it would be easy."
Nikol snorted. "The fact is, neither of us could even fix this flask. The builders didn't build it to be fixable, they built it to last. We can't fix it because we lack to tools to work the alloys. The builders left us halls full of machines, and not one of us can actually use them."
"We use the simulators, and the teaching stations."
"Not the flexfab."
"Only because we lack the raw materials."
"Only because we're too lazy to go out and collect the raw materials the builders saw fit to give us."
Melany threw up her hands in exasperation. "Why create a University to pass on knowledge that will never be used?"
"Because our ancestors were human, that's why. Because once the builders finished building their jobs were done, and the important work passed to the Believers—simply farming and raising families and living their lives and waiting for the day we arrive at Heaven. The construction crew became the cargo at that point, but they didn't want to be cargo, and they didn't want to be farmers either, and most especially they didn't want the balance of power on the ship to pass to the Believers, where it naturally would because they produced the food and did the work and they outnumbered our ancestors. So the crew became the Crew, the sacred holders of the flame of knowledge, and they created this playpen of learning for us that we call the University, and the myth that somehow these vast systems they'd built, designed and redesigned to run hands-off for lifetime after lifetime, somehow they needed us to look after them. We look down on the Believers because of the quaint superstition they call their faith, but look at us, we've turned learning into sacred ritual, sanctified our exalted position with tradition and ceremony because we do nothing of substance to justify it. We have become a new priesthood, only our mythology is built of empty facts instead of empty belief, so much so that we even live on their tithings." He held up his left hand, where his little finger bore the iron ring that marked an engineer. "Look at this. I call myself an engineer, but I've never built anything. I call myself a researcher, but I've never discovered anything no one has ever known. What have I done? I've studied what other people have built and discovered, people long dead on a world I'll never see. I lack scope for discovery and resources for construction. What's left to me? I can't farm, so I'll teach, and each young Believer who learns to ask questions will be a victory. I'm making a difference in their lives, because it's the only difference I can make. Do you see?"
"You've said all this before. Nikol, I, we, still need you." She moved a little way down the ledge. "Walk with me."
Nikol fell into step beside her. "You need me to renounce my heresy before I contaminate others, you mean. Will you put me to the Inquisition if I don't recant, shun me if I don't conform?"
Melany shook her head. "That's their barbarity, not ours, and a perfect illustration of why we shouldn't associate with them. They are superstitious savages, and that's not derogatory, that's simply true."
"I'm not blind to their faults. I work to uplift them, not exalt them."
"Uplift them to what? If our own way of life is so bankrupt, where are you leading them?"
"To science, of course, to knowledge. Education truly is priceless, just not empty education, rote facts learned for the sake of learning. Facts don't matter except as they aid understanding, that's something we've lost track of in the Crew. The Believers have never really had that, but it's something I can give them."
"You'll fly full in the face of their dogma, and I'll have to make explanations to the Elder Council. You'll be lucky if you don't wind up in in front of the inquisitor yourself."
"Perhaps, but I'm careful in what I say. I don't intend to blind them with enlightenment."
"Nikol, come back to us." Melany's voiced was imploring. "Teach here, if you won't run the simulators. We have students too, young and curious minds that need inspiration."
"I can't, Melany. It isn't the students, it's the University. It's Burkins and Stroink and all those old fossils who care more about their status than their subjects."
"Stroink is ready to retire. You could be the next chancellor. With my backing, you will be the next chancellor."
"I don't want to be chancellor." The stainless steel beneath their feet had been given a rough texture to aid traction, but there was a path in the middle worn shiny by two hundred years of Crew, walking and running and simply enjoying the view. How many have come before me here? How many more will come after?
"Nikol, you're making my position difficult."
"It's not my intention, but neither is it my responsibility to make things easy for you. You're chief engineer. It's up to you to deal with the problems that come with your office." Nikol walked to the edge of the shiny strip.
"That's what I'm trying to do. You aren't cooperating."
"Tell me, just who is it who finds it so uncomfortable that I'm doing what I'm doing. You aren't so small-minded that you care personally. I'm sure Stroink is happy to see an end to my agitation and Burkins is glad to be rid of a rival."
Melany didn't answer at first, and they walked on in silence for a while. Farther away from the University the ledge was less worn, and the shiny path in the middle was flanked on either side by metal that carried a whitish patina left by the minerals carried in the mists. Lichen and moss crusted the steel, and in places sucker vines had climbed all the way up from ground level, their main branches thick enough to hold a man's weight, if the man was careful. Here and there even bushes had found enough nutrients to grow on the inhospitable surface.
"It's the Prophet," she said at last. "He isn't comfortable with you teaching Believer children."
"The Prophet? The Crew have been teachers since Ark was launched, it's what we do. What does that stripling care that I'm one of them?"
"I say the Prophet, but it's really the Elder Council objecting through him. There's never been a senior professor of the University who stepped down to teach a parish grade school. His—I should say their concern is that might be interpreted as a push to expand the Crew's influence at the expense of the Church's."
"Surely they've got more common sense than that."
"Surely you have more common sense than that," Melany shot back. "The rank-and-file Believers have always been suspicious that we'll lead their children away from the Bible. That isn't the council's concern, their concern is that others will choose to see it that way. There's some power struggle going on with them, I don't have all the details, but the Prophet isn't doing anything useful to control them for me. Just your presence will give them an excuse to challenge his rule."
"Control them yourself. There's no need to use him as a mouthpiece."
"There is, actually. It's tradition, and we alter it at our peril. We might find it ridiculous that they give such authority to a boy, but to them, he is God on Earth, literally. He's supposed to be our advocate, but I think the bishops, or a faction of them, are trying to get him under their thumb."
"If that's true then the both of you have larger problems than me to deal with."
"We do. We aren't popular with the Believers, Nikol, and we rely on them completely for virtually every necessity of life. As long as the Prophet stands with us we are safe, but if the Prophet isn't with us . . . I don't have to tell you how bad that could be."
"All the more reason for us to climb down from our ivory tower and learn how to look after ourselves."
"Nikol, that's . . ." Melany stopped. "I can see I won't convince you, I know I can't stop you. I'll even grant that you might be right that we've lost direction in some ways." She paused, and turned to look out over the countryside again. "I have to work with what we have, and that includes Stroink and Burkins and everyone like them. It takes time to make changes." She looked back to him, studied his face with an intensity that he found slightly uncomfortable. "Just be careful what you say to those children. We don't need to see you up in front of an inquisitor. Seriously."
"The Prophet's got no authority to do that."
"The Prophet isn't my concern, and the council has whatever authority they can make stick."
"Not among the Crew."
"Perhaps among the Crew."
Nikol stopped, and turned to face his friend. "Melany, you're not saying you'd hand me over if it came right down to it."
The chief engineer met his gaze, then looked back out over the vista, staying quiet for a moment that stretched out and out until Nikol began to think she simply was not going to answer. Finally she spoke. "I'm saying that things are sensitive right now. I'll do what I have to do to keep our people safe. Our people and our way of life." She turned to face him again. "Don't give me any hard decisions, Nikol. Neither of us will like the way they turn out."
Charity Parish school was a prelaunch building, metal-framed and with glass windows. To Jedediah Fougere it smelled of wood and chalk and homework. For fifth grade they had a new teacher, and at first Jed, who had had the kindly Mrs. Dolorson since kindergarten, had been unsure about him. However, as the first morning's lesson progressed, he began to grow more comfortable with Dr. Valori.
"Night." The new teacher drew a big circle on the wooden chalkboard. "The Earth is a ball, and the sun is another ball, so light from the sun can only hit one half of it at a time." He drew a much smaller circle, and drew lines from it to the larger circle to show the effect.
"Excuse me, sir." Jed put up his hand. "I thought you said the sun was larger than the Earth."
Dr. Valori smiled. "Indeed it is, Jedediah. If the Earth were the size of a cherry, the sun would be a ball almost as big as I am. I drew it this way because the sun is so far from the Earth that it looks much smaller—but it doesn't matter too much. Imagine it the other way, so this big circle is the sun and the small one is Earth. See, still only about half of it gets sunlight—just a tiny fraction more than the other way." He looked to see if Jedediah was following. "The Earth spins like this . . ." He illustrated with his hands. "So all of it gets sunlight every day, but only half of it at a time. The other half of the time it's dark, they call it night, and the only light is from the stars. We don't get night in the Ark because we live on the inside of a tube instead of the outside of a ball, so the suntube lights up everywhere all the time. You can't see the stars through the foredome, because of the reflected light from the sun tube, but they're out there.
"Doesn't Ark spin too?" asked Jed.
"It does. Every ninety seconds. That's what gives us gravity, or rather centrifugal force, which feels like gravity to us, standing on the ground inside Ark. Ark isn't big enough to have real gravity like Earth. If Ark were the size of this piece of chalk . . ." He held up his chalk to illustrate. ". . . then Earth would be as big as the school."
Jed nodded slowly, absorbing that. Dr. Valori was the first male teacher he'd had, but he seemed nice, and if all of fifth grade was as interesting as the first day he would have a good year.
The lesson went on, describing other ways life on Earth was different from life in Ark. The biggest difference was that everything in Ark was built by people; even the plants and most of the animals had been designed carefully. Certain berries were made so they produced medicines to help sick people. Ironwood trees—lignum vitae, Dr. Valori called them—were made to grow much faster than they did on Earth, and much harder too so they could be used for tools. People had already changed cows and pigs and horses so much there was no need to change them more, but sheep had been made so their wool would just come off at shearing time, rather than needing to be cut off, unlike Earth sheep.
"And people will change too," said Dr. Valori. "Only much more slowly, and we can only guess in what ways. People on Earth look different from place to place because each place has a unique environment, different amounts of sunlight, different ranges of temperature and different foods that were available. Today we look pretty much like Earth people look, but as time goes on we'll adapt to Ark's environment, we'll be different from Earth people."
Matthew, Jed's best friend from their very first day of school, put up his hand. "Sir, people look different from each other in Ark."
"That's true, Matthew. What I mean is—" Dr. Valori's answer was interrupted by the tolling of the noon bell from the Charity church tower. "What I mean is, it's time for lunch. We'll continue this in the next lesson."
The class got their lunches from the shelf at the back in the room, and ate them around the craft tables. Jed ate his with Matthew and his other friend Abel, while Abel went into detail about the size and quality of the new hog barn his father was building. When they were done they ran outside to the playground. Jed paused to get his leather toss ball from his desk and ran after them, planning on a game of catch or tagball, but on his way out the door he found himself face-to-face with a girl he didn't recognize, her hair pulled back into pigtails, dressed in a simple ruffed frock.
"Zdras," she said "I'm Kylie. I'm from the Town."
"Blessings. I'm Jed."
She smiled. "Come on, I'll show you where there's a whole bunch of frogs."
Jed hesitated. The Town was where the Crew mostly lived, a kilometer foreward of the little village of Charity where the schoolhouse was, itself three long kilometers of trudging back and forth from Riverview, the Fougere family farm. He wasn't allowed to play with Crew children, unchurched Crew children his father called them, because as unbelievers they were all going to Hell. He looked over to where Matthew and Abel were already playing tag with some of the other boys. He didn't want to commit a sin.
"They're really interesting." Kylie pronounced it int-ter-rest-ing, carefully separating each syllable. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and headed for the path leading toward the creek, and away from the playground. He hesitated again. Mrs. Dolorson, his fourth-grade teacher, had made it clear that the path was strictly out of bounds. Did the same rules apply in fifth grade? Dr. Valori hadn't said so explicitly, and he didn't know for sure that Kylie was a Crew just because she lived in the Town. It was Abel's mother's day to watch the schoolyard at luncheon recess, and she was sitting on the fence by the road talking to another mother. If he got in trouble he could claim he didn't know. For a moment the lure of the forbidden fought against the rules imposed by adults. Twenty paces down the path Kylie turned around. "Come on," she said insistently, impatient as only a nine-year-old girl could be.
Matthew and Abel were running and yelling with the other boys. Jed glanced at them, then ran off to follow Kylie. The frogs were there as advertised, leopard frogs, big and fat and green. They caught one each and tried to race them, but the frogs just hopped into the long grass beside the stream and had to be chased down and caught again. They grew bored of that game when it became clear the frogs weren't going to cooperate, and instead watched a bumblebee gathering pollen. Eventually the church bell rang again, followed quickly by the clanging of the school bell. They ran back to the schoolyard, arriving out of breath and with muddy shoes, but unnoticed by any adult. Kylie, Jed decided, was not only pretty but clever, and a worthy new friend even if she was a girl.
He walked partway home with her that afternoon, to the end of the Charity road, where the crossroad led forward to the Town and aftward to Riverview. On the way he learned that her father was Dr. Valori, which made her Crew for sure, since her father was. When he discovered that, he tried to warn her that she had to become a Believer to avoid going to Hell, but she just laughed and said there was no such thing as Hell, there was only Heaven, and it was a planet like Earth. He didn't know quite what to make of that confident assertion. He did know it would be better not to raise it with his father. John Fougere was a man of temper, and he brooked no disagreement when it came to matters of faith. Fortunately, his father showed little interest in what happened at school. To him education was simply a way of keeping Jed from underfoot until he was old enough to start doing serious work around the farm. Jed decided he wouldn't mention Kylie either, and then the question of playing with a Crew wouldn't come up.
At the crossroads he said good-bye to his new friend and walked the rest of the way home, past green pastureland, tilled fields full of corn and oats and the rolling orchards of apples and cherries that hid the river from view. Riverview was one of the most prosperous farms in Ark, and as the oldest son Jed was going to inherit it. It was supposed to be a tremendous privilege, but it didn't seem that way. He spent his waking hours that weren't in school either doing his chores or making himself scarce to avoid having more chores assigned. His father felt children should be seen and not heard, but Jed had learned that he got in the least trouble when he wasn't even seen. After school he would stay out of sight until suppertime, often hiking down the orchard lane to the river to explore the trails there, watching squirrels or swallows or just throwing sticks in the water to see them swirl downstream in the eddies. He only had to be back in time for supper. Suppertime was a ritual in the Fougere household, with everyone's presence expected and a certain formality. After supper his usual routine was to carry the slops out to the pigs, feed the chickens and clean out the henhouse, and then climb up into the hayloft of the horse barn to whittle or play in the warm and quiet semidarkness. He would go back just before bedtime, for a slice of buttered bread with peach jam laid out by Ruth, his father's second wife, before being tucked in by his mother.
He played with Kylie again the next day, and over the next weeks they became fast friends, though he was careful to spend time with Matt and Abel as well. The weeks slowly turned into months, the passage of time marked only by the tolling of the church bells and the alternation of school days and church days. At home the crops came in, were harvested, milled and sold, and the fields were replanted. At school he learned math and spelling, history and science and the story of Ark. Saturdays were especially difficult, the day he couldn't avoid chores by avoiding people, his day to do heavy farmwork, plowing and planting and harvesting, so that when he grew to inherit Riverview he would have the skills to run it. Sundays and Wednesday evenings were given over to going to church in Charity to listen to the bishop deliver his usual sermon, and Sunday afternoons there was Sunday school, taught by the bishop or sometimes by his wife. As befitted one of the leading families in Charity Parish, the Fougeres sat in the front pew, his father closest to the aisle, then his mother and Mary, his older sister, and Jed himself, then Ruth, holding baby Magda, then his uncle Thomas and finally his grandparents, who had lived at home with them but had now moved to a new house in Charity. It was a small family by Believer standards, and Matthew and Abel had both expressed their envy that Jed didn't have to share his elders' attention with a half-a-dozen siblings. Jed himself was unsure that having less of his father's attention would be a bad thing. The hard work was made no easier by his father's constant criticism. John Fougere was a demanding man, and he frequently found fault with Jed's worthiness to succeed him. Over time Kylie became his best friend, and since he never officially asked her whether she was Crew or not, and his father never asked him about it either, it was as if the reason for his initial hesitation in allowing her into his life didn't really count. Fields he'd helped plant he now had to help harvest. Dr. Valori introduced fractions into their math class, and told them interesting tales of Earth history. Christmas came, was solemnly celebrated, and went again, and his life moved steadily through its normal orbit of home and church and school. It seemed to Jed as constant and unchanging as the suntube overhead. It never occurred to him that it might ever change.
Nikol Valori looked up through the mist, trying to get a glimpse of the foredome through the forest canopy, but it was pointless. Tall pines and firs thrived in the constant mist that fell from the edges of the foredome's ice cap, as well as the abundant groundwater from the headwaters of the rivers. They made it very difficult to see anything overhead at all, but at least he could see enough of the suntube to keep a steady course forward. He returned his attention to choosing his path. The thick canopy combined with the carpet of pine needles on the forest floor to keep the undergrowth down, which made the going easy. Still, Nikol took his time. His backpack held a leather waterskin, some cured sausage and a few other supplies; Kylie was spending the day with a neighbor and there was no reason not to enjoy his surroundings. There was more in the forest than the chance to see the foredome. If he found what he was looking for, so much the better. If not, he still needed the exercise.
An hour forward he was getting exercise. The mist got heavier closer to the forewall, the tall conifers had given way to smaller trees and tangled blackberry bushes grew in thickets beneath them. Their thorns tore at his clothing, and the dew on them quickly soaked him through and through. He had to hack his way forward with his ironwood bush knife, sweating hard and making slow progress. A good steel blade is what I need here. Metalworking had become a lost art aboard Ark, but Nikol was about to reinvent it, and despite the hard going he found himself enjoying the exploration. The crew has been too frightened of honest work for too long. He pushed ahead, forded a small stream and finally came up against the vertical grey steel of the forewall. It loomed overhead, seeming to go up forever to the point where the foredome bulged out and over. Kiwi vines as thick as his wrist clung to it, and a colony of thrushes chirped and warbled in among their leaves, occasionally peeking out only to dart back into cover. Overhead a pair of peregrines circled, which explained why the smaller birds were hiding. He plucked a couple of kiwis, but they were hard and sour, unripe. He got his waterskin and took a long, deep drink, both to wash away the taste and to hydrate himself. He had long way to go before he would be done.
And now the hard work begins. He retightened the straps of his backpack and set off counterspinward, away from the University, trying to keep as close to the forewall as he could. Midway between the river outlets there were shipsteel drops, where a mechanism high up the forewall metered out ingots of high-chromium steel. It had been the intent of the builders to provide Ark's inhabitants with a steady supply of the material to help support their civilization over time. It had been the discovery of this fact that had finally convinced Nikol that the Crew's role was purely symbolic. Not only did the builders not trust us to maintain the ship systems, they didn't even trust us to ration steel. At first he had been insulted by the implication, that the builders had not had enough faith in their own descendants to work and make sacrifices for the success of the mission, but he had gradually come to terms with it. The builders were showing only a shrewd understanding of human nature. Given unlimited access to a resource, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere down the line would choose to exploit it immediately for short-term gain, at the expense of the long-term picture.
It was hard going right next to the forewall; the underbrush was thick and wild. A couple of times he startled deer, and once he saw a tawny flash that might, or might not, have been a clouded leopard. He tensed when he saw it, and gripped his bush knife tighter. The leopards were Ark's keystone predator, one of the only species in the artificial world that might pose a threat to a man. I don't know enough about moving in the forest, my life has been too sheltered. There was only one way to change that, and that was through experience, and there was only one way to get experience, and that was by getting out and trying things and making mistakes. With luck he would make no lethal ones. I have to remember our environment was engineered to be benign. The builders must have come to the realization at some point that it was impossible to build an absolutely safe environment and accepted a certain amount of risk on behalf of their descendants. Little comfort for Nikol if he wound up eaten by a leopard.
The evening bell sounded, telling him he'd hiked past dinner, and that meant it was time to turn back. He looked back along his trail, the sweat and moisture chill on his skin when he stopped moving, and then looked forward again, unwilling to admit defeat quite so easily. The way ahead of him was more open. I'll just go through to the other side of the clearing. He did so, and on the other side of the clearing there was a game trail that led him forward again, and then, not even expecting to, he found what he been looking for. He nearly missed it, so dense was the undergrowth beside the trail. He nearly chose to detour around the thicket that hid his treasure, but a glint of shiny steel grey caught his eye, and he hacked his way through the shrubbery to find a comical pile of steel ingots. He nearly cackled with joy at the sight, picked one up and hefted it. It was heavy, easily twenty-five kilos, and there had to be a hundred tons of steel in the pile. The builders had rationed Ark's population to a kilo of steel per year per person, based on an average population of twenty thousand people, and the documents he'd read detailed long discussions over how much was enough, and how much was too much. They had failed to anticipate the social dynamics that would govern the use of the resource. The Believers were still using and repairing prelaunch tools and building new ones using ironwood, which fit well with their strong tradition of woodworking. The Crew had started out with advanced metalworking tools, but as they moved more and more toward pure academia the machines in the workshops had fallen still, and now sat unused. Nikol wiped moisture from his brow with his sodden sleeve, a reflexive and futile gesture. It was going to be a lot of effort to get even one ingot back home; there was no way he was going to be able to carry two. I can understand more why they gave up on metalworking. It was going to be a backbreaking job to transport enough steel to do anything useful.
And yet I will do it. In truth, he had to do it. It was one thing to teach, and it was far better to teach unfettered by the University's stultifying emphasis on regurgitation of knowledge, but it was another thing entirely to do, to create with his own hands, to discover with his own mind. It was a fundamental drive within him, long buried and long unsatisfied. The Believers were master woodworkers, there was nothing he could discover there, perforce, he would rediscover what it was to work metal. For too long Nikol had dealt with abstract knowledge, first as a student and then as a teacher. It was time to do something concrete. He took off his pack and put the steel ingot into it, using the waterskin to cushion the hard metal against his back. The pack was uncomfortably heavy when he shouldered it again, and the straps dug into his skin. He would be sore when he got home, sore the next day, as underused muscles protested this abuse. He didn't care about that. The burden he was carrying was freedom.
It was getting close to Easter when the bishop died, and there was a funeral where Jed had to dress in black. His uncle Thomas harnessed the two black mares to the buggy and the women of the family wore black veils. The service was on a Saturday, and the Prophet himself was there to lead the congregation in prayers of thanks for the years of devotion the old bishop had given to the church, and to the district of Charity. The whole experience was somewhat surreal to Jed, with many of the adults crying and hugging each other as the plain pine coffin was lowered into the new-dug hole in the small graveyard by the church. He understood what death was; nine years living on a farm had made that very clear to him. He understood the old bishop wouldn't be coming back, and he had liked the old bishop and knew he would miss him, but he didn't feel particularly sad, or indeed particularly much of anything. He had been sadder when Simon the barn cat had died, because Simon used to come up and sit with him in the hayloft while he whittled with an ironwood knife, alternately hunting for mice and coming over to purr and be patted.
The Prophet also introduced the new bishop during the ceremony, and anointed him to lead the Church in the district. The Prophet was a young man, even Jed could see he was really barely more than a boy, and he seemed uncertain in his role. By contrast the new bishop, Bishop Nemmer, exuded confidence and physical strength, with a deep and impressive voice and flashing eyes. He had led the congregation in Joseah Parish, so far spinward that it was on the other side of the suntube and a considerable distance aftward, and now had come to Charity. By the time the service had ended Jed thought he was an huge improvement on the old bishop. At the next Sunday's service that theory seemed to be borne out. He delivered a sermon on the ten plagues of Egypt so vivid that Jed, normally bored to tears at the old bishop's rambling speeches, found himself sitting on the edge of seat as the story unfolded. After chapel came Sunday school, also taught by the bishop, and Jed expected great things of Bishop Nemmer here as well. The old bishop had taught them simple and moralistic lessons about what was right and wrong, what God expected of every Believer, and Josh had found them, like his sermons, utterly boring. The new bishop said they would begin with what they had covered in the sermon, and began to elaborate on the lessons to be drawn from the ten plagues of Egypt, drawing quick sketches on the blackboard to illustrate key points in the story. It was much more like one of Dr. Valori's history lessons, and when it was done Jed put up his hand, for the first time interested rather than simply dutiful. The bishop pointed to him and Jed stood up and spoke as he had been taught.
"Blessings, sir. My name is Jedediah Fougere."
"And what is your question, Jedediah?"
"Why did God kill all the firstborn of Egypt, when he eighth commandment says 'Thou shalt not kill'?"
The bishop shook his head. "God made the Commandments, he can't break them because he is above them. It was a terrible thing he had to do, but Pharaoh forced him to, by disobeying his commands."
"Couldn't he have just killed Pharaoh, or even made him do what he wanted?"
"He could have, but Pharaoh's people needed to be punished too. They went against God, and were evil."
"But sir, even so, it wasn't the children who did anything wrong. God killed them for no reason."
The bishop's face grew suddenly angry. "Jedediah Fougere, that is blasphemy."
"But sir . . ." Fear surged in Jed as he realized he had transgressed one of those indefinable adult boundaries and landed himself in trouble.
"Do you think you know better than I do? Do you think you know better than God?" The bishop's intense eyes were suddenly focused hard on Jed.
"No sir, I just don't—"
"We will have no more from you today, young man." The bishop strode forward and grabbed Jed by the ear, hauling him away from his desk. "You'll spend the rest of the lesson with your nose in the corner."
Ears burning, Jed stood in the corner, somewhere between angry and humiliated, and resolved never to put his hand up in Sunday school again. He had liked the new bishop for his narrative skill, but try as he might to find the forgiveness of Jesus in his heart, it just wasn't there. He hadn't meant to commit blasphemy, and it seemed to him that his question was fair while the bishop's answers had not actually answered anything. At the end of the day the bishop had sent him home with a note to his father. He walked home slowly, dreading the reaction he knew he would get. He wasn't disappointed. His father read the note before dinner, his face growing increasingly hard.
"Jedediah, it is not your place to question the bishop."
"But Father—"
"Do you think you know better than him?" his father interrupted.
"No, Father, I just—"
"You just chose to defy him in his own church, is that it?"
"No, Father—"
The flat of his father's hand came down across Jed's face, knocking him to the floor. "Don't lie." His voice was loud and angry. "No son of mine will be a liar and a sinner." He shook the note at Jed. "I have it right here in the bishop's own hand."
Tears started from the corners of Jed's eyes, but he was determined not to cry. He stood up again, struggling to speak around the tight lump in his throat. "Father, I only asked because I didn't understand—"
"The first book of Timothy, chapter five, first verse. Rebuke not an elder, but entreat him as a father." Jed's father grabbed Jed by the scruff of his shirt and hauled him out of the house toward the horse barn. At the barn he grabbed a length of bridle leather, pushed Jed up against the wall of the birthing stall. "I will not have you bring disgrace upon this family, you stupid little boy. I will not have a sinner living under my own roof." He raised the leather high. Jed gritted his teeth. The leather came down, but Jed bit his lip and refused to cry. The whipping went on for a long time, driving pain into his body with every stroke, as his father held him there against his struffles, until finally his resolve cracked and the tears came.
Afterward his father left him, tossing aside his improvised lash with a gesture of disgust, as though anything touched by Jed's flesh was ever after too impure to again be used by the hand of a Believer. For a long time Jed just stood there, no longer sobbing aloud but helpless to control the tears welling from his eyes. Eventually he reached around behind him to touch the interlaced welts on his back, wincing as he did so. His father had been too angry to even make him remove his shirt, but the cotton was too thin to have offered much protection. Eventually the evening bell rang, time for dinner. The evening meal was sacrosanct in the Fougere house, but he found he had little appetite and no desire at all to see his family. Missing dinner might earn him another whipping, but he was beyond caring at that point. He climbed up into the hayloft and found a warm corner to sit and nurse his wounds. The loft was comforting in its familiarity, the smells of hay and horses blending in familiar ways. It was lit with only the light that managed to filter through cracks between the boards. He would have preferred night, as Dr. Valori had described it, a darkness so complete that he could be invisible within it. He wished Simon would come and comfort him, but Simon was no longer there, and the new barn cat didn't care much for human company. And it isn't fair to be punished twice, and isn't fair to be punished just for asking. Eventually he got on his knees and prayed, asking God to forgive him for his blasphemy, most of all to get his father to forgive him. For good measure he added a prayer for God to resurrect the old bishop as he had resurrected Jesus. Frequently Jed had wished, not prayed, not prayed because it would be a sin to pray for such a thing, for the old bishop to go away just because he was so boring and Sunday sermons seemed so interminable. It occurred to him that even such a wish might make him responsible for the old bishop's death, which would certainly be a sin. Could the new bishop be God's punishment for that sin?
The problem with both prayer and sin was that results took so long, if they came at all. How many times had he prayed for an end to his father's anger? Time passed, and he imagined running away, perhaps to live with the Crew, maybe with Kylie's family. Eventually he began to feel better, and hunger started to make itself felt. He considered going in but did not yet feel like facing his family so he just sat where he was. A long time later, the barn door opened and closed, and footsteps on the loft ladder made him tense. His father might be as outraged at his missing dinner as he was at his questioning of the bishop.
He relaxed when a familiar face appeared. It was his uncle Thomas.
"No supper for you, young man?"
Jed shook his head.
Thomas held up an apple. "Well, I was going to give this to one of the horses, but I guess you might as well have it." Thomas tossed the fruit to Jed, who caught it reflexively. "No appetite?"
Jed shook his head again. Thomas nodded. "Well, that which does not destroy you can only make you stronger." He came over and ruffled Jed's hair. "Why don't you come inside, your mother will be getting worried."
Jed nodded and stood up. His uncle led the way back down the ladder and out of the horse barn toward the house. Thomas was the younger brother, uninherited and so far unmarried. He helped with the management of the farm, supervised the hands at whatever needed doing, and as the best bow shot on Riverview farm, kept the rabbits under some degree of control. Jed envied him in his relaxed and easy manner, and the effortless way he seemed to move through his day. Rabbit hunting was a necessary chore, but was nevertheless a lot more fun than fieldwork, and he was the only one among all the family and farmhands who didn't back down from John Fougere. Josh followed him down the ladder, feeling better, and by the time they reached the front door of the house he'd finished the apple. The Fougere home was a rambling wood frame structure, built by Jed's thrice great-grandfather before Ark boosted and extended by every son of the family since. It was well built and well appointed, as befitted the main house of one of the most successful farms in Ark. The windows were glass, even in the newer sections. Glass was a pre-boost luxury, a cultural holdover from Earth houses that were built to be fortresses against wind and weather, and there were some in the church that said it amounted to vanity to install it, because every new pane had to be bought from someone else. Most new-built houses had open windows, with curtains and wooden shutters for privacy and to shut out the light for sleeping. The Bible spoke against pride of property, but Jed had heard the old bishop say more than once that the Fougere family had a lot to be proud of, always while admiring the house and buildings. To Jed, all the house conveyed was oppression and he found he wanted to go anywhere but back inside.
Thankfully, his father had already gone to sleep. His mother was sitting in the kitchen, looking worried. Wordlessly she took him up to bed and tucked him in, her eyes pained when she saw his bruises, and she fussed over him as though that would somehow make it all better. After she left it took him a long time fall asleep, looking at the thin streaks of light from the suntube filtering through the shutters. Breakfast in the morning was as it always was, as if nothing had happened the night before. His father left the table early to organize the hands in the orchards, and Jed went in to school as he always did.
At school it occurred to him that Dr. Valori might answer the questions the bishop would not. All morning he considered whether he should raise the question of the ten plagues with his teacher. He didn't want to earn another punishment, but Dr. Valori was always encouraging his students to ask questions, and it didn't seem in his nature to consider a mere question to be blasphemy. Then, too, there was the issue of vindication. He had first asked his question of the bishop because he couldn't understand how God could kill innocent newborns. When he had asked it, he had been sure that the bishop would have an explanation. Having had time to consider it it now seemed that there could be no explanation. Babies were born innocent, the old bishop had taught. Whatever their parents had done couldn't be their fault. If that were true then it meant his question wasn't blasphemy, because the Bible itself contained a contradiction. He had asked his first question looking for an answer. Now that he had discovered his own answer, he wanted to know that he was right. He waited until lunchtime and then rather than running out to play with either Kylie or Matthew and Abel, he paused in the classroom to ask his teacher why God hadn't just stopped Pharaoh from doing bad things, instead of killing all the firstborn.
Dr. Valori looked at him sideways. "That's a good question, Jed, but it's one you should ask your bishop."
Jed made a face, annoyed at the evasiveness of the answer. "I have asked him, sir, but I didn't really understand what he said." He left out the story of his subsequent punishments. "I mean if it was wrong for Pharaoh to enslave Israelites, why wasn't it wrong for God to kill the Egyptians' children? He said it was because the Egyptians needed to be punished, but two wrongs don't make a right. And it was Pharaoh who did wrong, not the children."
Dr. Valori nodded slowly. "I understand your confusion, but I'm afraid I don't have an answer for you."
"Why not?" Jed blurted the question in sudden frustration, then clapped his hands over his mouth, certain he'd gone too far.
Dr. Valori didn't seem to notice his sudden apprehension. "Well, Jed, not every question has an answer. I'm a scientist, so I can only answer questions about science and nature, and perhaps some history. Questions of religion belong to the Church."
"But it's a question about people, and you're a person too."
His teacher looked at Jed for a long moment, considering him. "What did the bishop say?"
Jed hesitated. "I got in trouble. I shouldn't have asked."
Dr. Valori nodded. "I'm not surprised." He came around his desk to sit on the bench beside Jed. "You're a smart boy, Jed, so I'll try to explain without getting us both in trouble. It's good to ask questions, that's what leads to understanding, but it's important to be careful what you ask, and who you ask. Religious questions are specially tricky."
"But what about the plagues?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you, I'm not a Believer."
Jed looked up. "My father says that the Crew are all going to Hell because you don't believe."
"I don't think he's right, at least I hope he's wrong, but I can't talk to you about it. On Earth people could afford to fight about such things, but Ark isn't big enough for fighting, we need to get along. Before Ark was launched the builders came to some agreements about how they could work together, how we could work together. One rule is that Crew and Believers should keep themselves separate, except the Prophet himself would always live with Crew. That's so the Believers would always have a reason to tithe so the Crew could concentrate on learning. I wanted to to teach in a parish school, but because I'm from the Crew I had to get special permission from the bishop, the old bishop, to do that. One of the things I agreed to is that I wouldn't talk about religious questions."
"And that's why you can't tell me why God did what he did to the Egyptians?"
"Exactly right." Dr. Valori smiled. "And I think that's enough theology and politics for now, Jedidiah m'droog. Kylie's having her birthday next week. Why don't you ask your mother if you can come?"
"I will. Thank you, sir."
He spent the rest of the lunch hour adventuring around the schoolyard with Matthew and Abel, and when he got home that night asked his mother if he could go to Kylie's party after church the following Sunday. She gave her permission without asking if Kylie's family was Crew, and he didn't volunteer the information. It isn't bearing false witness if she didn't ask. Somehow he wasn't quite sure that was true, but he still couldn't see that there would be any sin in a having a friend who was Crew. The next Sunday the Sunday school lesson was on the battle of Jericho, which again raised questions in Jed's mind, but this time he knew better than to ask them of the bishop. He kept his doubts to himself, and when his mother asked him how the lessons had gone he just smiled and said "Fine." He saw the concern in her eyes, the worry and the desire to do something for him, but there was fear there too. "I have to go and see to the chickens," he said, and slipped away before she could ask more.
Jed's mother never contradicted her husband, never stepped in to spare Jed his anger. Her time came afterward, to comfort him, to let him cry his tears against her breast, but as Jed grew older and his relationship with his father became more polarized her comforts seemed to matter less and less, until finally he simply found them annoying. It was as if, in trying to find in himself the strength to stand up to John Fougere, he found her support lent him only her weakness. After he'd fed the chickens, he went down to the river beyond the orchards, coming back only when it was time for dinner. After dinner he did his chores dutifully, and then climbed up to the hayloft to whittle and be alone with his thoughts. His back was still sore from the previous week's punishment, and it hurt somewhat as he leaned against the rough boards of the barn wall. He ignored the discomfort. There was really nothing else he could do about it. He'd been whittling a duck out of a hunk of good clear pine, and he wanted to get it finished in time to give it to Kylie for her birthday present. Uncle Thomas had offered to help and paint it once it was done.
His welts were mostly healed by the following Sunday, and the duck was finished. He could hardly contain himself through the bishop's sermon, and Sunday school seemed to drag interminably while he waited impatiently for the noon bell to release him. After the bells sounded he hiked up to Kylie's house for the party with a neatly folded note with directions to the Valori household in his pocket, the duck in a decorative red cloth bag that Mary made for him, and a bottle of preserves from his mother for good measure. It took a good two hours for him to get to the Town, and he was somewhat trepidatious when he reached it. It was far bigger than Charity, with wood-framed houses that even he could see were prelaunch-built, all with glass windows and metal door handles. Most of them had small gardens, but it was obvious the Crew didn't have to feed themselves, with more space given to flowers than food. A slight mist hung in the air, swept down from the permanent clouds that surrounded the top end of the sun tube. Dr. Valori had explained how the suntube evaporated water from the ocean at the aftwall and how it moved up the thin air at Ark's axis to condense against the cold foredome. The huge white circle in the center of the foredome was actually solid water—it was called ice in that state. Around the edges, where the air was thicker and warmer, it melted and ran down the forewall. The cold made some of the water condense before it even got to the ice layer, like warm breath on a windowpane, and that made the clouds that then got pushed down by the air circulation to cause mist and rain in direct proportion to how close you were to the forewall.
There were few people on the roads, and in the distance Jed could see the squarish grey outlines of what could only be the University, built right into fore-wall when the Builders made Ark. Most of the Crew would be there during the day, he supposed, learning science and getting ready for the far distant day when Ark would arrive at Heaven. He carefully followed the directions on his now-crumpled note carefully, until he found himself standing in front of a well-kept Crew house, nowhere near as large as the Fougere home, but still somehow intimidating. Sounds of laughter came from inside, and he gathered his courage and went to knock on the door.
Kylie answered it, with her father behind her, and he was led into the living room, where the other children had already started with the presents. She hugged him when he gave her the duck. He found her enthusiastic affection was slightly embarrassing, but at least Matthew and Abel weren't there to witness it; he was the only the Believer guest, all Kylie's other friends were children of Crew families. It made him feel somewhat awkward that he didn't know any of them, and he felt strange when they didn't say grace before the meal. The adults had organized some good games for after the cake, bobbing for apples and a treasure hunt the required solving puzzles to get clues. He teamed up with Kylie and they got the highest score, although the prize went to the next-best team because Dr. Valori said it wasn't right for her to win at her own party. Eventually the other parents came to collect their children, and one by one the other partygoers went home, until it was just the two of them. Kylie led him through a field to a row of tall pines. One in particular had branches arranged almost like a ladder, and they climbed up. Some thirty feet up Jed was surprised to find a broad platform of cut lumber hidden in the boughs.
"This is my secret place," Kylie told him.
"Did you build it yourself?" asked Jed.
Kiley shook her head. "No, my cousins did, a long time ago. They don't use it anymore, and nobody else knows it's here."
"You can see all the way to the ocean."
"And to the forewall, but those other trees grew and they're in the way now." She hesitated. "You mustn't tell anyone about it. It's secret."
"I won't."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
The sat silently for a while, enjoying the view, and then she said, "You're my best friend, Jed."
Jed nodded, not sure what to say. Abel and Matthew had been his best friends, but all they wanted to do was play games. Kylie was more serious, like her father, and like Jed himself. They were together, and alone, at the top reading level in their class, and they vied for first place on math tests. Abel and Matthew would collect chestnuts in huge numbers, just because they were fun to collect, and occasionally fun to throw at each other, but it was Kylie who noticed the teeth marks on one, and then used chestnut bait to draw out and then tame the squirrel who was eating them. For two weeks she and Jed had stopped at the crossroads after school, to lie motionless in the grass and watch the small creature scurry back and forth in nervous haste, caching the wealth of food they had provided for it. Their reward came when they found its nest, high in a hollow in an old gnarled oak tree. They climbed carefully up while the squirrel chattered angrily below them, and used a prelaunch stainless-steel dinner plate as a mirror to reflect light inside to see the cluster of tiny pups huddled there.
And it was true that Kylie was his best friend; did it matter that she was Crew and a girl? He decided it didn't. "You're my best friend too, Kylie." The sat in silence for a moment, and then she asked, "Do you have your whittling knife?"
He nodded and offered it to her. She took it and said, "Give me your thumb."
"What are you going to do?" he asked, looking at the knife apprehensively.
"On Earth, when people are best friends they mix their blood to prove it. I read it in a story about pirates."
"What are pirates?"
"They're thieves who sail the oceans, but they're noble thieves, with an honor code." She looked aftward and up the curve of the world to the blue ring of water at the aftwall. "I want to live on the ocean one day, like they do." She took a deep breath, in and out, and then returned her attention to Jed. "Give me your thumb.
Jed looked dubious. "I don't want you to cut me."
"You can do it yourself." Kylie put out her own thumb. "Here, I'll go first."
She looked at it for long moment and then with one sudden motion stabbed the sharp, black blade in. She shook the injured digit and red blood welled in the small wound. "Now you." She handed him the knife.
It was harder to cut himself than he thought it would be, he kept reflexively jerking his hand away whenever he went to make a slice. Finally he put his hand flat on the platform so it had nowhere to go, closed his eyes, counted to three and jabbed. There was a sharp pain in his thumb and he opened his eyes to find a small wound oozing blood. It was bigger than he'd meant it to be and it stung, but he wasn't going to admit that to Kylie. He went to rub the digit on his pants to staunch the bleeding.
"Don't do that, we need the blood," she said. Solemnly they mashed the cuts together, mixing their blood. "Best friends forever."
"Best friends forever," he answered. Their thumbs were still touching, and the ceremony seemed to demand something more. After a moment Jed leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Kylie giggled. "Let's go down to the stream."
Jed wiped the blood off the wooden blade, and they climbed down, but before they got to the stream there were some rabbits to watch, and then they got hungry and went back to Kylie's house.
"When are your parents coming, Jed?" Dr. Valori looked up from plucking a chicken in the kitchen. "Or will you be staying with us for dinner?" As he asked the University bells pealed seventeen o'clock and Jed realized how far he had to go to make it home in time for dinner.
"They aren't coming, sir. I walked here." In the distance the Charity church bells began echoing the University, carrying news of the changing hour out into the wider world.
"All the way from the other side of Charity? That's too far for a boy your age. Wait there and I'll get the buggy and take you home."
Jed had a sudden vision of arriving home sitting beside Dr. Valori in the buggy. There would be no concealing the fact that Kylie was Crew in that case, and his father would not be pleased.
"No, thank you, sir. I'll go myself. I'm used to walking places."
To his relief Dr. Valori didn't insist. He said his good-byes as quickly as politeness would allow, and then started running. He had just an hour to cover the distance it had taken him two hours to travel on the way up. With no way to gauge the time it was taking him he had no choice but to run as hard and fast as he could the whole way. He arrived exhausted and sweaty, but in time to run up to his room and change before sliding into his seat at the supper table. His nearly late arrival went unremarked by his father, and his mother asked only once how the party was before the conversation moved on. His father and his uncle were discussing the growing size of families and the effect that would have on Ark's population and their demand for fruit and corn and cattle and pigs. There was some tension in the discussion that Jed couldn't quite put his finger on, but as long as he wasn't in the focus of it he saw no cause for concern.
One of the benefits of teaching grade school was that there was no pomp or ceremony attached to graduation. Schoolchildren simply cheered and ran outside to play when the school year ended. Unfortunately Nikol Valori hadn't quite managed to sever all his ties to the University, and so when convocation arrived he found himself taking a seat on the institution's auditorium stage, uncomfortable in his tasseled mortarboard and his academic robes, resplendent with the golden trim that symbolized the scientific disciplines and the scarlet collar of a full professor.
The space now called the auditorium was the largest room in the University by far. Once it had been a hangar for the dadushka fliers the construction crew had used to move around inside the ship when they were building the ecosystem. Most of the dadushka had been moved into storage behind the meter-thick stainless-steel seals that separated the departure gallery from the ecocylinder, to remain there until Ark's computer decided there was an emergency that required human intervention and opened them. A handful of fliers were still in the hangar as training hulks, and a couple of those could probably still fly, if there were hydrogen to charge their tanks. There was no hydrogen, and the airframes were used to train pilots and mechanics who would never practice their skills on a real aircraft. Nikol found that strangely sad. What a thing it would be, to live in a world where I could build such a machine and fly for real. He found his seat and, reluctantly, sat down to wait out the ceremony. His robes seemed heavy and constrictive, but he knew his distress didn't stem from any failing of the clothing itself. It was made of heavy cotton, beaten soft by the Believer seamstress who'd made it for him and she had made it to his measure and it fit him well and comfortably—what made him uncomfortable was what it stood for. Convocation was a ceremony, and the University had far too many ceremonies now, and far too little substance.
But there were students he'd taught out there on the floor, students who had worked hard and long for their degrees, and their effort and accomplishment was real, even if the system that supported it was increasingly divorced from reality. And so here I am, participating in what I thought I'd abandoned. The students, dressed in their own robes at the back at the auditorium hall, were sitting in silence, while the auditorium filled with chattering parents and well wishers. The rule was that if you spoke during the ceremony you would be failed from your program, and nobody wanted to fail at this late stage of the game. Nikol pursed his lips. It was an overly authoritarian rule, made purely to serve the University administration's desire to make the ceremony easier to manage, and he didn't approve of it. Bellingham came in and sat beside him, his robes bearing the green trim of the medical profession. One of the few professions we have that still does real work. Still, even doctors had their scope of responsibility severely curtailed in Ark's sealed environment. Every last one of her original complement had been put through a pathogen-cleansing protocol so extreme it had nearly killed them. And yet even mice got aboard. It was likely that somewhere in the ship there lurked a pathogen that needed only to awaken, a small mutation perhaps, or a jump from an animal host, to become a killer. The thought was not reassuring. A sudden, deadly plague run amok in Ark's small population could turn their world into a ghost ship. Not quite a ghost ship; the ecosystem will keep running without us, until the hydrogen is gone and the suntube fades. Small comfort to us.
Bellingham made himself comfortable. "The chief tells me she's asked you to come back to the University."
"She has."
"I've never understood why you left in the first place." Bellingham held up a hand to forestall Nikol's reply. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those who say the kolkoz are unclean and unworthy. They're my patients, good people, hardworking people."
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't call them kolkoz."
"Believers then, whatever you like. Working among them is a noble thing, I'm proud to do it. At the same time, you're a full professor. You've got more in you than teaching grade school."
"I'm doing more than teaching, I'm blacksmithing now. Working with steel."
Bellingham's eyebrows went up. "That's supposed to be an improvement?"
Nikol considered his colleague for a long minute. "Did the chief engineer ask you to talk to me?"
Bellingham harrumphed. "Nothing of the sort. I'm just saying, you can do better. You've got a rare mind, Valori. Don't waste it."
"You think I'm wasting my talent?" Nikol paused, considering how far he wanted to go in making his point. As far as I have to. I've spent too long being silent. "I'll show you wasted talent. Watch this." He stood up and looked into the assembled graduates, found a young man with the same golden trim that his own robes bore. He beckoned the student forward, watched his eyes grow wide. To be called out of the assembly by a full professor, just minutes before graduation, could only be bad news in his world. He climbed up on the stage, looking nervous.
"Don't worry, young man, you're not in trouble," Nikol reassured him. "I just want to ask you a few questions." He turned to Bellingham. "Observe."
"Of course, Professor." The student's voice still carried worry.
"What did you study?"
"Physics, Professor."
Nikol smiled. "You don't have to call me Professor every sentence either. Can you tell me Planck's constant?"
"It's six point six two six oh six times ten to the negative thirty-four joule-seconds, Professor . . . sir . . ." The student stumbled, unsure of how he should act now that the rules had changed.
"And the speed of light?"
"Two hundred ninety-nine thousand seven hundred ninety-two kilometers per second."
"Now tell me, how can you prove those values are correct?"
"They're all listed in Physical Constants and Formulae, Seventeenth Edition, sir."
"Yes, but how do know Physical Constants and Formulae has them right?"
The student looked confused. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir."
"What if I told you the speed of light was two hundred thousand kilometers per second, not three. How can you demonstrate that I'm wrong?"
"Sir, with all respect, the numbers in Physical Constants and Formulae were derived by the best scientists on Earth with the best possible equipment. They can't be wrong."
"And if I don't accept what's written in the book?"
The student's expression moved from confused to nervous. "But sir, the book is right. It's the fundamental reference work of physics."
"Imagine you didn't have the book. How could you prove me wrong then?"
"Well, I don't need the book itself, sir, I've memorized all the relevant constants and formulae." The student couldn't quite repress the pride in his voice as he said it.
"I see. Well, I'll ask you a different question. Give me Newton's second law."
The student nodded, more at ease now that he was once again on familiar ground, answering direct questions in his chosen field. "The acceleration of a free body as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the inertial mass of the body."
Nikol nodded. "And how does inertia work on a free body moving in a rotating reference frame?"
"The body appears to experience a force pushing it to the outer diameter of the frame, centrifugal force."
"Very good. State the law of gravity."
"Objects are attracted to each other in direct proportion to their masses and in inverse proportion to the distance between them, squared."
"And which is more important here in Ark, gravity or inertia?"
The student looked puzzled again. "I don't understand what you mean, sir. All laws of physics apply everywhere in the universe."
"That's true." Nikol paused. "Ever play catch when you were young?"
"Yes sir."
"Can you throw a ball farther spinward or counterspinward?"
The student laughed. "Counterspinward."
"What if you throw it straight foreward or aftward?"
"It curves spinward, but with all due respect, sir, these aren't science questions."
"Why isn't it science?"
"Well, every child knows that."
Nikol nodded. "You're right, every child does." He considered the youth for a minute. "Why do things fall when you drop them?"
"Well . . . sir, I mean . . ." The student stammered, suddenly frightened, knowing he was expected to know the answer, and knowing that he simply didn't. "Well, they just do. They fall—"
Nikol cut him short. "That's all right young man, I've bothered you enough. Enjoy your graduation." The student's face showed relief and he turned to go back to his seat. Nikol turned to Bellingham. "You see."
"See what? He seemed to know his stuff to me."
"Yes, he knew his stuff, but what is his stuff? Some empty incantations about physical law, nothing more. He's memorized his physical constants to six decimal places, but has to accept the book's word that they are correct. He knows the formulae for inertial movement in a rotating reference frame, but he doesn't understand that we live in a rotating reference frame, and that's why things fall when you drop them. He knows the difference between gravity and inertia, but he doesn't realize that things here don't fall quite the same way they will on a planet. He's memorized the rules but he understands nothing. He's not a scientist, he's a mystic, and Physical Constants and Formulae, Seventeenth Edition, is his tome of magical lore."
Bellingham harrumphed. "Physicists and philosophers, they live with their heads in the clouds. You won't get argument from me on that point. Still, I think you're making too much of this. The boy knows his facts, he isn't making them up."
"No, but he might as well be. What good are facts with no understanding? It's an exercise in futility. Look at how he acted, terrified that I'd deny him graduation. It isn't as if I could take the knowledge out of his brain, but in our delightful little world the knowledge in his head counts for nothing. It would count for nothing even if it weren't just a collection of empty, useless facts, which it is. What we value isn't education, it's the official recognition that a person has gone through an appropriately approved process to enter the educated class. That's functionally identical to the priesthood of the Believers. Look at his attitude! See how he defers to his seniors, like any acolyte. He was terrified I might find something he hadn't already memorized, and it didn't even occur to him that he might know something I didn't. He came right out and said that something can't be science if everyone knows it. That's because science has become a collection of esoteric secrets, dispensed and sanctified by the high priests of this very institution, which is to say, you and I. He might as well be memorizing the Book of Job, for all the relevance his knowledge has to the world he lives in. My daughter playing at the pond is more a scientist than he is, any child is. Watch how they observe the world, soak up its lessons, experiment with it. Young children haven't had their curiosity extinguished by what we pass off as education."
Bellingham laughed. "You're lucky we have no inquisitors or the chief engineer would have you put to the question. There's a difference between us and the Church."
Nikol snorted sardonically. "Give it time. We'll have them yet."
Bellingham pointed. "I think they're starting."
They were starting. A proctor came out to center stage and held up his arms, standing there as a symbol of silence until the crowd of parents and well-wishers below noticed him and became as quiet as the students. Nikol watched as the ceremony began. And if they could they'd suck the facts out of my brain for my heresy, they'd certainly do it. Or maybe not. Where rote learning replaces research and recitation counts for understanding, facts are no longer truth anyway.
Once the crowd was silent the proctor lowered his arms and turned to face the arch at the back of the stage where the University executive waited. A steady drumbeat started, and then the Board of Governors came out, looking somber and serious in their gowns and caps. As they approached the front of the stage the proctor turned back to the waiting assembly and swung his arms in a gesture that told them all to stand. They did, and as the executive passed the ranks of seated faculty they stood as well. Nikol stood with them when his turn came. I find this protocol noxious, and yet I still sanctify it with my own participation. It was expected that as a professor he would be there to see his students graduate, and he had two more of these heavy pageants to get through before the last of his protégés earned their own gold-trimmed robes. And then I won't have to come anymore. He nearly laughed at his own thought and suppressed it. And I should take responsibility for myself and admit that I don't have to come now. I'm here because I'm expected to be here, and simple expectation is enough to make me abandon my principles and waste my time.
Except he'd hurt some feelings if he didn't come, and respecting other people's emotions was a perfectly valid principle. He abandoned his self-flagellation and resigned himself to enduring the ceremony. Melany was last in the line of University dignitaries, and as her subordinates took their places on the benches placed at the front of the stage, she moved to stand in front of them at the podium, resplendent in the formal robes of the chief engineer. The Prophet was waiting for her there, and he raised his arms, symbolically blessing her. Most of the Crew actively rejected the Believers' religion, but the link between the Church's tithings and their own survival demanded the symbolism of his presence. Thus the merger of study and religion is complete. The Prophet was a callow youth, younger than most of the graduates, and without even the benefit of the crippled education they had received. On one level it astounded Nikol that ultimate authority for graduation rested with such a boy. But it shouldn't. This is all pokazkhua, all of it, and he is only playing the role he's been given in the play.
The ceremony was long and laborious and time dragged heavily by. Nikol found himself tuning out the droning words of Melany, the Prophet, the various heads of the various faculties, the student valedictorian, the parentis-elect and all the rest who'd come to inflict their words upon the newly qualified disciples. Instead he found himself studying the weave of his robe and the repeating patterns formed by the ranked students in their ranked portable chairs. There was an underlying symmetry there, and in more than the geometric sense. The fabric was Believer-grown cotton, because only the toughest and heaviest of the prelaunch synthetics had survived the time since departure, and over half the chairs were of native wood for the same reason. Earth's memories inexorably fade, replaced by that we create here.
Eventually the ceremony ended, the students all threw their hats in the air and cheered, as tradition demanded. The solemn assembly became a noisy gathering, filling the vast hall with the sounds of celebration. Nikol moved into the crowd, congratulating those he had taught the previous year, welcoming proud parents, greeting his erstwhile colleagues, or at least those who would acknowledge his existence. The crowd thickened toward the back of the hall where long tables waited, laden down with food and drink. All of it grown by Believers, delivered by Believers, prepared and served by Believers. He looked around at the smiling faces surrounding him, eating, drinking, talking, celebrating the achievements of the graduating class. We have lost so much, and nobody here even realizes that.
A hand on his arm. Melany.
"Chief Engineer." He smiled his first genuine smile since the ceremony had ended. "A pleasure as always."
"I was hoping you'd come, I need to talk to you." She kept her hand on his arm, urging him toward the parked dadushka, where the crowd thinned away to nothing.
"Not to convince me I need to come back, I hope."
"Exactly that."
Nikol's eyebrows went up. "I'm flattered, of course . . ."
"Nikol, I know there are problems with the system. I want to fix them, and I need your help." She sensed his coming rejection and interrupted him to forestall it. "We've been gifted with a tremendous treasure in our knowledge base, we have to keep that alive."
"Most of it is already dead. No matter how hard you try you can't reanimate a corpse. It isn't that the effort isn't noble, but what we have in our databanks is the working knowledge of a planet of twenty billion people. There's no way a few thousand of us could possibly make that live. The Crew is just maintaining the forms of study because it doesn't know what else to do."
"Don't make it sound so trivial. What we do is important. You're right that we need to do more than simply study what other people have discovered. I'm bringing in some changes." She put a hand against the flier they were standing beside. "We're looking at getting these airborne again. We want to do a study of shipsteel and see if we can re-create it. These things are going to have an impact on the way people live their lives."
"No, Melany." Nikol paused, trying to suppress the sudden anger he felt. There was no point in turning Melany into another burned bridge. Nevertheless when he spoke his passion was clear. "What you do—you, not me—what you do is not important. What you do is make the exaltation of form over function into high art." He smacked the side of the dadushka with his open palm. "You can't make this thing fly, we don't have the fuel, and we can't make it. You can't re-create shipsteel, because we don't have any raw materials. The builders supply us with shipsteel."
Melany was silent for a moment. "You worry me, Nikol. The builders are long, long gone."
Nikol rolled his eyes. "I don't mean the builders themselves, I haven't lost my sanity. Ark meters it out. There's piles of it at the foot of the forewall. I'm learning to work it."
"I didn't know that."
"Of course not. I only know because I specialized in studying Ark's construction, but everyone should know. Why else do we have machine tools to work shipsteel?"
"Leftovers from the builders, I thought." She gestured to the flier. "Like this and everything else."
Nikol shook his head. "Everything we have comes from the builders, but they wanted us to be able to do things for ourselves. We haven't and that's the tragedy. I tried to puzzle out the flexfab. Too much knowledge has been lost."
"Everything is in the databanks."
"Only the theory. The practical working knowledge is gone, and the theory can only take you so far."
"I don't agree with you."
"You can't agree with me, your position won't allow it. Believe me anyway, I tried. Answer me this, why are you so eager to bring me back into the fold?"
"Because you're one of the best professors we've got."
"And because if one of your best professors lowers—no, desanctifies—himself so much as to teach children in grade school it throws the whole system into question." Nikol was angry now, and though he realized that he was taking out his own frustrations on Melany he was unable to stop himself. "Just one heretic can destroy the whole system, and so heresy cannot be allowed. Our ancestors were scientists, but we're a priesthood." He held up a hand before she could interrupt him. "No, hear me out. We have a sacred body of knowledge, just like a priesthood, we have a hierarchy and rituals, just like a priesthood. We have the required rigidity of thought, the required disdain for the uninitiated, the required rigorous exclusion of those deemed unworthy."
Melany stiffened. "Unlike a priesthood, our body of knowledge is based on truth."
"Based on truth, but divorced from reality. You don't have to agree with me, just realize this. There's already one priesthood in Ark. There isn't room for two. Sooner or later there's going to be a clash."
There was hurt in her eyes, no less genuine because he might be right. "We were friends, Nikol. Close friends."
"We still are, Melany." He meant it too, but they stood on opposite sides of a widening gulf, and he no longer knew how to bridge it. He shook her hand and went out of the auditorium, leaving his robe hanging from the outboard winglet of one of the fliers. He wouldn't be back for any more convocations. His last students would just have to graduate without him.
In time fifth grade became sixth grade, and to Jed it just seemed natural that he would spend more time with Kylie and less with Abel and Matthew. He found school more interesting now, and was starting to regret that seventh grade would be his last year. All Believers left school after seventh grade, while the Crew went on to at least thirteenth grade, and many took advanced studies after that, as Dr. Valori had. He chose to work with Kylie whenever he got the chance, and it became their habit to meet in the mornings under the chestnut tree at the crossroads, and then walk in together to school. After the day they would reverse their steps to the tree, and frequently they would linger there, feeding their squirrel, discussing their lessons or the plans for their next adventure. There was some teasing from the other children, who seemed to think there was something inherently strange about boy-girl friendships, but they ignored it and eventually it went away. Sometimes, when their mood was more serious, they'd talk about their respective futures. Kylie was going to study biology and become a doctor, Jed would inherit Riverview and raise crops and stock. Inwardly Jed felt his future was more of a burden than an opportunity, but Kylie thought it was exciting. "I can come over all the time and ride horses and swim in the streams. It'll be fun."
His eleventh birthday came and went, and with it an expansion in his chores. It was time for him to start learning how to run a farm, his father said, and put action to words by putting Jed to work in the fields. On a Saturday morning before Christmas Jed found himself behind the knife plow, guiding a team up and down, plowing the furrows in one of the aftward fields. A light drizzle had cooled the air and softened the ground, but it was still hard and heavy work and his furrows left a lot to be desired. His father made it clear that he expected better, but Jed had no idea how he could improve. The knife plow was so big he could barely hang on to it, let alone guide it. The horses just dragged him along, and it was only through their familiarity with the routine of plowing that he accomplished anything at all. He was exhausted by the time the bell rang for the noon meal, and he took the horses back to the barn and handed them over to Josiah, the stablehand, with a sense of relief. Lunch was on by the time he got up to the house, and he was more than ready to eat. Saturday lunches usually involved his father questioning him on the details of what he'd done that morning, but this time his father didn't even look at him through the whole meal. He seemed tense and distracted, and though tension in him usually translated into short, sharp words for Jed, this time he barely spoke a word. Jed ate in silence himself, listening to Mary natter on to his mother about Matthew Dermit, her current fancy. Mary was of age to be declared marriageable, and normally such open campaigning on her placement would have provoked a reaction from their father, but he ignored that too. His brooding preoccupation made itself felt around the table and the atmosphere grew uncomfortable, but finally his mother took up her plate, signaling the end of the meal. Jed was about to excuse himself to go and finish the plowing when his father pushed back his plate.
"I think we shall go to afternoon services, Mother," he said. There was a tightness in his expression that overcame his attempt at a relaxed pose.
"Of course, John." Jed's mother smiled her barely perceptible smile.
"Jedediah, harness a team and hitch the buggy."
"But Father, I have to finish the plowing . . ." Plowing was work, but since the incident with the new bishop Jed had taken a strong dislike to church services.
"The plowing will wait." John Fougere's voice was stern. "Do as I say, boy. The bishop is expecting us."
Jed opened his mouth to protest, closed it again as he saw the tension lines tighten in his mother's face. There was nothing to do but obey; protest would only create a fight without changing anything. "At once, Father."
He went out to the barn and got Josiah to help him get the buggy, then drove it carefully up to the house. He was a confident rider, and getting better with a team pulling a plow, but still a little uncertain with a buggy and wagon. He'd been there the day Jack Pullman's father's team had run away, spooked by God only knew what. The cart had rolled on a corner and pulled the team into the ditch, and Jed could still hear the screaming, broken horses struggling to get up, and see the shattered remnants of the cart with the crumpled body lying so still beneath it. There had been a funeral then too, as there was for the old bishop, and Jed was well aware that a team hitched to a harness bar was less controllable than a horse you were astride yourself.
"Remember your manners, Jedediah." Jed's father waved a hand as he pulled the buggy to a halt in front of the house. "Be a gentleman, help your mother up."
He did so, and helped Ruth and his sister up as well for good measure, then clambered back up himself to sit on the first bench between his father and his uncle. But why are we going to church today? His father stirred up the horses, and Jed's curiosity had to wait.
The churchyard was full of buggies and horses. The bishop held services every day, but most families attended only on Sunday and their chosen family day, unless it was a special holiday. Jed traded a glance with his uncle. Wednesday was the Fougere family day, and this was Monday. Something was up. Inside, the pews were crowded close with Believers in their worship clothes, the Maddas, the Fludds and the Rossnens. The crowd was buzzing with chatter. After what seemed to be a long time Bishop Nemmer came up to the pulpit in his ceremonial white robe. He held up his arms for silence, perhaps unconsciously mimicking the shape of the cross on the wall behind him. The crowd stilled.
"Blessings, Brothers and Sisters," he began.
"Blessings from God," answered the congregation, as they were expected to.
The bishop pulled back his hood, seeming even taller looking down on the congregation from the pulpit, his eyes alive with the light of God. "I would like to thank you all for coming today, on such short notice. Today is a great day for our parish, a great day for Believers, a great day for God." He went on with his sermon, which emphasized duty and obedience more than usually, and warned against the dangerous secularism represented by the Crew. "They call themselves a Crew, but do they tend this vessel that's carrying us to Heaven? No, the builders wisely put us in God's hands when they launched our Ark. Do they till the soil or log the forest? No, the builders gave that job to us." Bishop Nemmer was in fine form, and there was a great deal more like that. Diatribes against the Crew had become a frequent component of his sermons, and while most of the adults still seemed to find him a captivating speaker, Jed had come to find him as boring as the old bishop.
He had drifted off into a daydream about building a treehouse like Kylie's when a sudden change in the congregation yanked him back to the here-and-now. His eyes focused on a red- robed figure, fully hooded, who now stood at the front of the assembly. An inquisitor! The bishop had just introduced him, and was standing aside. Jeb looked over his shoulder to see two white-robed servitors standing at the church entrance, waiting to be called on, and in the meantime effectively blocking the only exit. A thrill of fear shot through him. This explained his father's tension and the unexpected call to church. He had seen an inquisitor only once before, and then from a distance, but there was no mistaking the red robe, nor the fear it engendered in all who saw it.
The inquisitor made the sign of the cross. "Any who have a sin to confess should come forward now to know God's forgiveness."
The congregation sat in silence. Even the virtuous feared the inquisitor, but nobody moved, even though early confession might ease the sentence. Jed sweated through a long, painful wait until finally the inquisitor spoke again.
"Aeron Neufeldt, stand, please."
Aeron stood. He was a middle-weight man of middle age; his farm wasn't quite as prosperous as Riverview, but solidly in the second rank of producers.
"What have you to say, Aeron?" asked the inquisitor.
"I saw my wife with a Crew, Jake Toller—" Neufeldt was cut off by his wife's voice.
"Aeron, what are you doing?" There was fear and panic in Shealah Neufeldt's face.
Neufeldt ignored her. "I want to know the truth of this, Inquisitor."
The hooded figure nodded. "Shealah Neufeldt, you stand accused of adultery," it intoned. He made a gesture and the servitors came forward.
"I didn't, I never . . . Aeron, please . . ." Shealah grabbed her husband's arm, but he looked icily at the front of the church while the servitors came and dragged her off him. They hauled her, protesting, up to the end of the chapel. The bishop undid the rope that held the cross from its place of honor behind the dias and lowered it to the ground. Shealah was unceremoniously bound to it with tight ropes, cinched around her wrists to hold her in place for the Inquisition to come. "Aeron! Aeron, please, I've always been faithful . . ."
A thrill of fear shot through Jed as he realized what was happening. Shealah Neufeldt hadn't kept herself separate from the Crew. She had broken the rules, and was about to be punished for it. He looked suddenly to his father, whose face set like stone as he watched the spectacle. Had John Fougere somehow found out about his bloodbond with Kylie? Was he about to be put to the question over sharing blood with a Crew? I only kissed her on the cheek. Father couldn't give me to the inquisitor for that, he wouldn't have . . . But Jed couldn't shake the feeling that perhaps his father had.
The inquisitor came toward Shealah, his whip coiled at his waist. To Jed it seemed like a blacksnake, coiled and ready to strike a hapless rabbit. "Shealah Neufeldt," he intoned. "Did you commit the sin of adultery with Jake Toller, of the Crew?"
"No! I did not." Her voice quavered, but it was clear and her face was defiant. She raised her chin. She was a proud woman, she wouldn't be brought low easily.
The inquisitor brought his whip down, and Jed jumped at the sharp crack as it bit into her plain chapel-going dress. Shealah grimaced, but did not cry out, and the question was repeated. "Shealah Neufeldt, did you commit the sin of adultery with Jake Toller of the Crew."
"No!" She shouted the word angrily.
Again the whip came down, harder this time, and again the question was asked. This time she didn't answer, only shook her head with her lips pressed tight together against the pain. The question was repeated, and Shealah answered with her eyes, burning with an anger that answered for her where her voice would not. Undeterred, the inquisitor continued. The question, the refusal and the burning lash were repeated again, and then again, and Jed found himself unable to tear his eyes from the horrific spectacle. On the sixth stroke a strangled cry escaped Shealah's mouth. By the twelfth stroke she was crying, her head hanging down, no longer bothering to deny the accusation even in her expression, though she still refused to answer. The lash had torn her clothing in places, and her hands and feet were starting to turn blue where the ropes had cut off the circulation. Jed found himself wishing he could shrink into the pew and vanish, if only to spare himself having to watch. Time seemed to inch past as the whip stroke rose and fell and Shealah's cries turned into screams that rose and fell with it, as she begged and pleaded with the inquisitor, with her husband, with the bishop to let her go, until finally she fell silent once more, barely even responding to the lash, though the front of her dress had been reduced to shreds, and bright red lines laced angrily over her breasts and belly. Jed became vaguely aware of the tolling of the church bell in Hope, the next village over. Their own bell wouldn't ring until the Inquisition was done. Most of an hour had passed without his being aware of it. The inquisitor had grown frustrated and was putting real muscle into the strokes, grunting as he laid them in, and his voice was short of breath when he demanded her confession. Jed looked over to see Mary twisting her handkerchief as though the lashes were landing on her, her eyes wide and her face pale. His father's face was set grimly, his mother was looking out the window, her expression far, far away, Ruth's hand clutched tightly in hers.
Finally, after a particularly hard lash, Shealah stirred and said something, though it was too low to be audible.
The inquisitor paused, his whip upraised. "What was that?"
"I did it." Shealah spoke louder.
"Did what?"
"I slept with that man, whoever he is. I slept with a Crew. Is that what you want to hear?" She raised her head, ignoring the inquisitor to lock eyes with her husband. "I laid down with him Aeron. I did it a lot." Her voice grew angry and her eyes flashed. "Every day, Aeron, because you're not good enough. Every day, because you're too small a man to satisfy a woman. I laid down him every day while you tilled the fields, you miserable little man, because he was so much better than you. My father told me you weren't good enough for me." She struggled against the ropes that held her to the cross, as if her anger would be enough to break them, and her expression made it clear that Aeron Neufeldt was fortunate that she couldn't. She spat at him instead, then slumped down, crying bitterly.
For a long, long minute there was silence in the church, broken only by Shealah's sobs. The congregation sat there, the bishop stood with his mouth hanging open, even the inquisitor seemed taken aback by the sudden power of her rage, his whip hanging slack. Jed realized he was holding his breath, and it took a considerable effort of will for him to breathe again.
It was Aeron Neufeldt who finally broke the spell, his jaw working, his own face so red it seemed to Jed about to explode. He stood slowly, his eyes at first locked on the gob of spittle on the chapel floor, halfway between his wife and himself. He started to speak, and only a harsh croak came out. He swallowed hard, and then in a voice that cut like an ironwood knife he said, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you." Then he turned on his heel and stalked out of the church.
Again the congregation sat in stunned silence at the spectacle. The bishop stepped forward and took the pulpit. "Look at this poor woman, see how she suffers for her sin." He turned to gesture to Shealah. "Take pity on her. How can we blame her when we ourselves allow Satan's workers to thrive in our midst, when we feed them and clothe them, when we send our impressionable children to school to learn from them who knows what lies, to be turned against the Bible, to have their eyes closed to God."
The bishop looked around the congregation, meeting every eye one by one. His gaze crossed Jed's, sending a thrill of panic through his spine, seemed as though he were suddenly naked, as though the bishop could see right into his soul and root out the guilty secret of his friendship with Kylie hidden there.
"Look at her," continued the bishop. "She committed the sin of adultery, she suffers for it. And yet that sin cannot be committed alone. So where is the man who tempted her into betraying her husband? Why isn't he up there beside her, being purified on the cross?" He held up his arms as if imploring God for the answer, then brought them down to point accusingly at the congregation. "Because he's Crew, that's why. Because he thinks he's above our laws, because he thinks he's above God."
The sermon went on for some time while Shealah hung there, and afterward the congregation filed out quietly, the normal cheerful post-service babble reduced to a subdued murmur. Jed rehitched the buggy, and the family rode in silence back toward home, Jed watched the fields slide past without really seeing them, the steady clip-clop of the horses' hooves providing a counterpoint to his thoughts. It could have been me up there, it could have been Kylie. The thought of the inquisitor's whip coming down on him filled him with fear, the thought of it coming down on Kylie filled him with anger. Even his father had nothing to say until they were home. He finally spoke when they were dismounting the buggy.
"Jed, you put the horses away and finish your chores." There was a hardness to his father's voice that stifled protest before it might be voiced. But I haven't eaten. Jed didn't say it, avoiding the inevitable rebuke. He saw his mother open her mouth, then close it. Her eyes met his. The penalty for missing dinner was to go hungry, but his mother would see that there was a snack waiting for him when he went to bed. Jed didn't argue, grateful for the chance to be alone with his thoughts. Something had changed in his father. Normally he spent the entire ride home from the chapel expanding on the bishop's sermon, stressing the requirement to live the life that God had demanded of his subjects. Jed hated the lectures, but he found his father's withdrawn silence even more disturbing.
He put away the buggy team, and went out to feed the chickens. He couldn't get the image of Shealah bound to the cross out of his mind. He knew it was forbidden for Believers to marry Crew, and adultery was against a Commandment, though he was a little unsure of exactly what adultery was. It was the harshness of her treatment that was shocking. Inquisitions were rare, and he'd never before seen one in which the inquisitor actually used his whip. Usually transgressors simply hugged the cross, knelt and begged forgiveness. The whip would be touched to their back in a completely symbolic way. Once he'd come into church to see a young man actually tied to the cross, for what transgression he didn't know. The man's expression was vacant, his eyes focused on something far beyond the physical, and the entire service had gone on as if he wasn't there. Jed hadn't dared to ask anyone who he was or what he'd done, but his father had lectured them on disobedient sons on the way home. The point was clear enough.
He finished with the chickens and headed for the horse barn, only to meet his uncle coming the other way.
"Blessings, Uncle Thomas."
"Blessings, Jed. Are you done your chores?"
Jed hesitated. A question like that was usually a preview to more work, but he couldn't lie to his uncle.
"Yes, Uncle. I have schoolwork though." The work in question was to study for a math test still a week off. He hadn't planned to do it so early, but it might serve now to avert more chores.
"Well, that will wait a bit. I'm going to plow the west field. It's high time you learned how to run a team properly; your furrows would stagger a saint. Come give me a hand."
"Yes, Uncle." Jed trailed his uncle to the horse farm, and helped him harness the team, two new drays they were breaking in. They drove the team out to the west field and began. After the first three furrows his uncle rested the horses and leaned against the wooden fence rail that marked the edge of the field.
He wiped sweat from his brow and drank deep from his water flask before offering it to Jed. "What did you think of today's performance?"
"The Inquisition? I was scared, Uncle. I didn't like it."
"I saw your face, that's why I thought I'd ask you."
"I know sinners deserve punishment, and adultery is against a Commandment."
"Do you know what adultery is?"
"Sort of. It's not keeping yourself separate from the Crew."
Uncle Thomas shook his head. "No, not exactly, though I can see where you got the idea. You're young yet for the full explanation. Let me just say in very broad terms that it happens when a man loves a woman who is not his wife."
Jed's eyebrows went up, his original fears returned. Do I love Kylie? I kissed her, does that make me an adulterer? The change in rules left him even more guilty than before, and the fear he had felt while watching Shealah being whipped on the cross returned full force.
"What's wrong, Jed?" Uncle Thomas's face was suddenly full of concern. "You look like you just saw the devil."
"I . . . I . . ." Jed looked down, suddenly ashamed. "Nothing, Uncle."
"Something, obviously." His uncle reached down and raised Jed's chin. "Don't tell me you've been sinning in the bushes yourself."
Jed shook his head violently. "I didn't mean to, Uncle, I didn't know. I don't want to be whipped." He looked up, scared. "Please don't tell Father."
His uncle laughed. "Well, aren't you the precocious one. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell anyone. Who's the lucky girl of your affections?"
"Promise you won't tell?"
"My lips are sealed."
"Kylie Valori."
"I don't think I know her."
"She's in my class, my teacher's daughter."
Uncle Thomas nodded. "A Crew girl."
"I didn't . . . I mean . . . she never said she was Crew . . ."
"No, it wouldn't have occurred to her that it might matter, I expect. And I don't suppose it occurred to you to tell your parents either, once you figured it out."
"They never asked," said Jed, defensively.
"I'm sure they didn't. And exactly what did you and Kylie do to commit adultery?"
"I . . . I kissed her."
"Anything else?"
"Only once, Uncle, and only on the cheek."
Jed's uncle laughed gently. "Well, I wouldn't worry. I don't think there's enough there to support an Inquisition."
"We . . . we also mixed our blood," said Jed, motivated by his uncle's easy manner to unburden himself completely.
Thomas's eyebrows went up. "What does that mean?"
"That we're best friends." Jed explained what Kylie had told him about pirates, suddenly worried anew. "Was that a wrong thing to do? It was her birthday, and she wanted to."
"Yes." Uncle Thomas pursed his lips, thinking. "Well, I'm quite sure there's neither adultery nor sin in what you've done, Jed. Nevertheless, I think you've been wise in keeping your friendship with her away from your father, and away from the bishop too, while you're at it."
Jed heaved a sigh of relief. "But if there's nothing wrong, why does it have to be secret?"
"You're a smarter boy than that. Just because there's no sin doesn't mean it won't get you in trouble. Shealah Neufeldt was blameless, I feel morally certain. That didn't keep her off the cross."
"She said she did it, while she was on the cross. The cross compels truth."
"I think it's the whip that does most of the compelling," Thomas said, pressing his lips together. "And it only compels what the sinner thinks the inquisitor wants to hear."
"Why would her husband accuse her if she was innocent?"
"Well, that's a bit of a mystery. I can imagine a couple of reasons, but they're nothing more than theories."
Tell me, Uncle"
His uncle leaned back. "One part of the puzzle is that their farm is really Shealah's, or it was. She inherited because her father had no sons. Aeron is a second son himself, so he'd have no land if he hadn't married her. The Prophet—the previous Prophet, of course—was going to place her with the bishop, the old bishop, back when he was a young man, or younger anyway." Uncle Thomas laughed. "She wanted Aeron, but of course that didn't matter. Still, she was smart enough to know how to get him in the end."
"How did she do that? I thought the Prophet placed wives on God's command."
"Indeed he does, Jed. But sometimes, just sometimes, people's desires get in the way of that. Shealah saw what was happening, and moved in with the old bishop before the marriage. She would have been his third wife, but she made his household such a living hell that soon he was begging the Prophet to call off the wedding. That gave her power, you see. She let them know that she would show the world a vision of the bishop that the Church would rather not have them see. Everyone would believe her because she had lived there, and everyone would be talking about it because the cancelation of a placement is very big news indeed. The price of her silence was placement with Aeron. It isn't often that a woman beats the Church, but she did."
"That still doesn't tell me why Aeron would accuse her like that, especially if they loved each other so much."
"That was twenty years ago, Jed, I wasn't much older than you when it happened. People change in that much time, what the change was, I can't tell you. I can tell you that, now that Shealah is a fallen woman, that farm is going to belong to Aeron. He's only ever had one wife. Maybe the Prophet will see fit to place another with him. We'll see how generous his tithing gets over the next year or so." Uncle Thomas stood up. "Come on, these furrows aren't going to plow themselves."
They went back to work, Jed straining his muscles to control the heavy plow as the horses plodded up and down the field. The world of adults didn't make a lot of sense, but he was relieved to know that he wouldn't be going to Hell for adultery, or worse yet, to the cross.
Melany Waseau heard the clanging before she rounded the corner of the Valori house, metal on metal, rhythmic and ringing. The smell of hot steel mingled with the smell of wood smoke. When she came into the backyard she found the source of both. Nikol Valori had transformed his yard into a forge, and was hammering a piece of red-hot steel into shape. The forge was a simple enough affair, a raised hearth of clay brick supported a bed of coals, their flames blown hot by air forced through channels beneath them. The air was supplied by a wooden blower fan, cranked enthusiastically by Nikol's daughter. Overhead a chimney carried away the smoke and sparks. The flower bed that had been the centerpiece of the garden had been replaced by stacks and stacks of cordwood, shiny blocks of ship steel piled beside wooden racks that held tongs and hammer and various other implements she didn't recognize.
"Nikol," she called. "What are you doing?"
"I'm blacksmithing." He looked up from his work and smiled at her. "Or at least I'm trying to." He was wearing heavy leather gloves, and picked up the half-shaped bar of steel and thrust it into the coals, making sparks fly.
"You're filthy," she said, and he was, his bare forearms and face streaked in soot, his hair matted with sweat.
"I know," he replied. "I'm healthy too."
And, now that he mentioned it, he did look fitter, the muscles in his arms and shoulders corded tight, his body leaner than she'd seen it since they'd both been students.
"Can I ask why?"
"I'm building myself a role in the community. Teacher, blacksmith, neighbor, that's me."
"Can you spare a few minutes?"
Nikol removed the now red-hot bar from the heart of the forge. "I can." He put the steel down on the hearth. "Kylie, devuchka, why don't you see if you can find us some lunch?" Kylie stopped turning the blower and went inside. Nikol dusted off his hands and perched on a pile of bricks. Melany looked around and sat, by default, in one of the old garden chairs that had been pushed to one side to make room for the forge.
"Not bad, is it?" He gestured to take in his handiwork. "The Believers' original steel tools are starting to wear out. I get half a cord of wood for just a good kitchen cleaver."
"It's impressive," she said, and leaned forward. "Nikol, I've come to ask your advice."
He laughed. "I can't help but feel I've been very disappointing to you, in both help and advice. I'm flattered that you keep coming back in hopes that I'll improve."
"I can trust you to keep secrets. I can trust you to tell me the truth." On the hearth of the forge the workpiece was slowly cooling, orange fading to cherry red fading to black.
"Even though I've abandoned all you hold dear."
"Maybe because you abandoned all I hold dear. I tried to speak to Stroink. He won't listen."
Nikol hesitated, unsure what to say next. "I was short with you the last time we spoke. I'm sorry for that, I hope you can forgive me."
"You've never been easy company." She smiled. "It's part of your charm."
"You know I'm not coming back, don't you."
"I know. I'm having a different problem." She took a deep breath. "The Elder Council isn't listening to the Prophet."
"Why should they? All he does is parrot what you tell him to."
Melany looked annoyed. "He isn't the puppet you think him to be. He lacks experience, but he's an intelligent young man, well trained for his position in life."
"I won't argue the point with you. What's the immediate problem?"
"They've been holding Inquisitions without his approval."
Nikol raised an eyebrow. "And this concerns you?"
"Not the Inquisitions themselves, the Prophet would approve them as a matter of course, it's a formality. But if they aren't following the formalities . . . The Prophet is our only means of influence . . ." She trailed off, unwilling perhaps to make her worries real by voicing them.
"You're worried about the tithing. If grain doesn't come to the Prophet, it won't come to you either."
"Exactly."
Nikol nodded, pursing his lips while he mulled that development over. "Well, if you want my assessment, your concern is quite legitimate. The Prophet is not the most intelligent man in Ark, nor the most ambitious. He's a spoiled child, content to collect wives and wave his staff around at high holidays. I can't see that he's made any great investment in leading the Church, so doesn't surprise me that the Church has little interest in following him. Still, I don't think the congregations will be going along with their bishops against the Prophet. He is the literal embodiment of God in Ark, and if the bishops desanctify him, who will they call on for their own authority?"
"I don't know, I've never seen him like this. He came to me after the last meeting of their Elder Council, and he was literally shaking, he was so scared. He wouldn't tell me what they'd said to him, only that I had to protect him."
"It would take strong threats to get a reaction from that man. How old is his eldest?"
"Three, something close to that . . ."
"You might be better off to install him as Prophet, appoint yourself as his caretaker and deal with the elders directly in his name."
"A three-year-old? And what about the Prophet? We can't just bypass him."
"So do something with him."
"What do you mean?"
"Need I be blunt? He needs to be removed from his position, permanently. I'll leave it to you to figure out how."
Melany looked shocked. "Are you suggesting I kill him? I can't do that."
Nikol shrugged. "This is about power, and power has its own demands. You're the high priestess of the Crew cult. You can't put yourself above ecclesiastical intrigue or you'll find yourself and your religion displaced by a stronger God."
Melany bristled. "Don't call me a high priestess. Mischaracterization doesn't help."
"It isn't a mischaracterization. I'm not being difficult, Melany, and I'm not downplaying the size of your problem, in fact I think it's more serious than you suspect. It was inevitable that sooner or later the Believers would tire of their extraneous priests. The days of the Crew are numbered."
Melany's voice was plaintive. "We don't oppress them, all we do is teach, and learn."
"You don't have to oppress them, because the Prophets and the Elder Council have done that for you all these years, extracted ten percent of all they produce so we Crew could lead comfortable lives in our ivory towers. It hasn't been brutal oppression, nothing like you might read in an Earth history, but it's oppression all the same. It was inevitable that sooner or later there'd be a Prophet too weak to keep a grip on the church. It's your misfortune to be chief engineer when that happened. Some ambitious bishop, or a group of them, has realized that they can gain power by exploiting the natural resentment of the people toward the Crew to dethrone the Prophet. Do you know who it is?"
"No."
"Find out. The Prophet made the mistake of not making himself popular with his followers—or rather you made the mistake of not ensuring that he did so, since it's obvious he hasn't got any idea of what is necessary. Inevitably his bishops have taken it upon themselves to interpret God's word independently of him. Don't take it personally. This is about power and ambition, nothing more."
"But if they stopped tithing what will we do? What will we eat? We have stores for a month at the University, maybe more if we stretch it. After that . . ."
Nikol shrugged. "This had to come, maybe not in our generation, but it was inevitable. My strong advice to you, and to the rest of the Crew, would be to find ways to make yourself useful. I teach in a parish school, so the community knows me. I'm learning to blacksmith, so I'll have something to trade for food. If the Crew falls, I'm not going to fall with it, because I'm planning now, working now, to make sure that Kylie and I will have enough to eat. I can't do much to help anyone else, but anyone willing to work can be my apprentice. Shipsteel is heavy, and there's tons of it yet to haul back from the forewall. I'll trade knowledge for work, and that's not a bad deal."
"The whole of the Crew can't become blacksmiths."
"No, but I'm offering what I can." Nikol sighed. "The end of the University isn't going to be pretty, but it's coming. You still have some time left. If I were you I'd take the entire Crew aftward to the forest and start clearing land."
"Nikol, you know they won't do that. Could you imagine Stroink behind a plow?"
"Yes, and it would be a disaster. He's going to have to learn, though, if he doesn't want to face worse. If I were you I'd tell them what's going to happen, and tell them that they're going to have to change the way they live promptly. And then I'd resign my position and get aftward to get the best land I could myself." Nikol hesitated, considering whether he ought to say what he wanted to say. "You could come here, if you wanted." He did his best to keep his voice casual. "I could use the help, and Kylie . . ." He stopped himself before he said too much. Twenty years later and Melany still has a spell for me.
"Leave? I can't leave." Melany didn't seem to have caught the significance of what he was suggesting. "I'm chief engineer, I can't just run away and hide. I'm responsible for these people."
"No, they're responsible for themselves. Bellingham will do fine, the Believers will still need doctors. Stroink . . ." Nikol shrugged. "He's made his choices. If the faculty don't want to do what's necessary, they're going to have to deal with what happens." The back door opened, and Kylie appeared, carrying a loaf of bread, some cheese and sausage and a pitcher of water. "Let's not talk more of this," Nikol went on. "I don't want to upset my daughter."
"You'll tell me, won't you Nikol, if you hear anything? You have much better contact with the community than anyone I know."
Nikol sighed. "It's funny how every priesthood needs spies. You'd think with divine guidance they wouldn't." He straightened himself in his chair, and leaned forward. "I'll tell you what I do know, from what I hear in Charity. Bishop Nemmer is building hatred against the Crew, and tithing is his leverage. He's doing it deliberately, and he's doing it successfully. When he chooses to unleash that hatred, tithing will stop. What else will happen . . ." He shrugged. "I don't know. I'm doing my best to be useful. That's the best advice I can give." He took the bread and cheese from Kylie and began cutting it to serve. He paused after he handed Melany her slices and held up the knife. "I made this," he said. "It's the first thing I made that didn't bend or break." He smiled. "It isn't all bad. There is a future to be had here, and a lot to be learned."
It was a month after the Inquisition of Shealah Neufeldt that the bishop came to dinner, and the Fougere household was buzzing with excitement. His mother and Ruth spent the day in the kitchen, cooking and preparing, and when Jed came home from school he was pressed into service scrubbing the dining-room floor while Mary washed the precious prelaunch chinaware, fragile ceramic with inlaid floral designs that simply couldn't be made in Ark. Conversation in dinner revolved around the tithing. Usually it was made in pigs and grain, but Bishop Nemmer wanted some of it made in lumber this time. The population was growing, fast, and he wanted to build a larger church to properly hold services. "Why, in a few years you won't be able to get all of Charity into our church," he declaimed expansively over dessert, "and simple Christian charity demands we give something to the aftward parishes, they have such a struggle clearing land."
"You'll get whatever you need from us," replied Jed's father. "The Fougeres have always been generous in tithing. I'm going to be felling a good stand of ironwood for the new barn, I'd be pleased to give some of that in lieu of grain."
"It isn't your generosity that's my trouble, it's keeping enough of the tithe from the Prophet's hands." That last sentence surprised Jed. The bishop had always taught that the Prophet's word was God's Word, but it sounded like they were having a difference of opinion.
"Jed, Mary, you're excused." John Fougere nodded to his children, signaling that it was time for them to leave as the conversation moved to adult topics.
"I think I'll go and survey that stand, now that you mention it, John," said Thomas. "We're going to have to know how we're going to cut it before Sunday."
Ruth excused herself as well to go and nurse the baby, while Jed's mother busied herself with cleaning up. Jed wasted no time escaping in the general exodus, before someone could think of some extra chores that needed doing. He went to feed the chickens and pigs, and then to the hayloft, to whittle and think and enjoy his own company. He hadn't been there long when he heard voices. They rose as the speakers came closer, and then he heard of the barn door opening.
"I can handle my own daughter!" His father's voice was clear and hard-edged.
"While she's a girl you can. What about when she's grown to a woman? She's marriageable now—"
John Fougere cut Bishop Nemmer off, a hint of irritation in his voice. "She's not marriageable until I say she is. When you find someone decent to place her with, I'll declare her."
"Someone decent." The bishop sounded exasperated. "Donald Madda—"
"Donald Madda's got three wives already. My daughter will be a first wife." There were footsteps and Jed shrank back into his corner. Would they come up into the hayloft?
"His son Luke—"
"Is a lout and a simpleton. I'll wait for young Colin to come of age first." The footsteps stopped and then receded again.
"Colin is Donald's second son, he won't inherit."
"He'll run that farm when he's old enough, you know it and I know it. If it goes to Luke there'll be nothing left of it in ten years."
"The Prophet won't place Mary with a second son, you know that."
"Luke will prove he isn't sound to inherit eventually. Donald is blind when it comes to him, but the Prophet won't see such a fine farm go wasted."
"You're a hard man to convince, John Fougere." The bishop's voice grew harder. "Just bear in mind, Mary is marriageable now. It isn't seemly to keep her undeclared, and she might not wait that long herself. Shealah Neufeldt was consorting with a Crew. Now she's gone to the Prophet and she's demanding to keep Aeron's farm."
"How dare you, how dare you compare my daughter to that harlot." Jed's father's voice was suddenly loud and angry.
"You misunderstand me, John." The bishop's tones were placating. "I'm not questioning your daughter's virtue, I'm pointing out that it's better not to wait. What if she were to go to the Prophet herself, with a suggestion for her placement? He might just give it to her."
"She wouldn't dare."
"Last week, I'd agree with you. What if Shealah gets what she's asking for? She won't be the last woman who suddenly finds it in her heart to go straight to the Prophet."
"She won't get it. The Prophet speaks for God."
"The Prophet speaks for the chief engineer. The Crew want our land as much as they want our tithing. That land should go to Aeron, but the Prophet is going to attach the land to the Temple." The bishop snorted derisively. "He might as well give it to the Crew directly. And who do you think is going to run it for him? Shealah herself. It's an insult."
"Bishop," a note of warning crept into John Fougere's voice. "I won't hear words against the Prophet, no not even from you."
"And why not? The Prophet is still a man, and this Prophet is a feckless youth. He may hear the word of God, but he lives with the Crew and the Crew are a poison in this world. Where do you think the lad got the idea of attaching that farm? From the chief engineer. The Crew are trying to take Believer land, land our fathers cleared and worked, land that belongs by right to Charity Parish. This decision doesn't serve God."
"That's blasphemy." Up in the hayloft Jed heard the anger grow in his father's voice and cringed involuntarily. "Watch your tongue in my house, Bishop. I will not have these words."
"It's reality." The bishop's voice was cold. "We are the chosen people, on a voyage to Heaven with God's eye on us. The church is under threat from within and without. There is no hiding. Someday soon you're going to have to decide whether you stand with the church or with the Crew, and I'll tell you right now that the Prophet stands with the Crew."
"Bishop!"
"I won't intrude further, John Fougere, but think on this. Your son is being taught un-Creation by a Crew professor with the Prophet's sanction. Un-Creation! That's blasephemy too. We're going to be seeing more Inquisitions soon. In the meantime, consider where you want to see your daughter placed."
There were footsteps and the sound of the barn door opening and closing. For a while after that there was silence, and then Jed heard his father moving around. The sound of the pump and running water told him he was watering the horses. At one point he froze as his father came up the ladder to the hayloft, terrified that he was about to be caught eavesdropping, but his father only threw some hay down for feed. It seemed to take an eternity for him to finish, but finally the barn door opened and closed a second time, and he knew he was once again alone. Even so he waited a long time before climbing down from the loft and going back to the house for bed. It took him some time to fall asleep as the bishop's words and his father's echoed in his head. He resolved to ask Dr. Valori about what he'd heard, but the next day was Saturday. On Sunday the bishop delivered a particularly cutting sermon on the dangers of associating with the Crew, how only the Bible contained the wisdom necessary to get Ark to Heaven, and how the unchurched crew were doomed to Hell. During the prayer he implored God to give the Believers strength to resist the Crew's temptations. It did not seem particularly different from any of the bishop's other sermons to Jed, long on implication and incantation and short on interest. To him words preached in church were extensions of the Commandments, lists of things that shouldn't be done, or that must be done, for flawed men to remain pure in God's sight. They were about prayer, and ritual, and the admonishment of sin. It never occurred to him that they might have any further impact in the day-to-day world.
He discovered on Monday just how wrong he was. It began as any other, with the breakfast bells sounding from the church and the walk into school, and he went to the chestnut tree to meet Kylie, as he always did. As he came around the corner nearest the crossroads he saw a cluster of children there. Voices rose over the fields, chanting.
"Crew, Crew, we'll get you. Crew, Crew, we'll get you."
One of the figures pushed another, a girl in a frock, and she fell. The other children formed a ring around her and she vanished from view.
Kylie! Instinctively he started running. "Kylie!" He could see the gang throwing things, and time seemed to slow down. He had only two hundred meters to cover to get to her, but it seemed to take forever to cover the distance.
". . . unchurched Crew!"
"You're going to burn in Hell! Burn in Hell!"
". . . cry, Crew girl, cry . . ."
"Stop!" His shout went unheard over the chanting. "Stop! Kylie!"
As he approached the circle he could hear her crying, but there wasn't enough room to get between the shouting children in the circle to get to her. She was lying on the ground in the center, and they were throwing chestnuts at her. Red rage swept over him, but some part of his mind remained calm, almost detached, and it seemed to watch him from a distance as it calculated the best way to handle the situation. Take the biggest, it said, and then watched as he went for the largest boy, a husky seventh-grader named Nebiah, nearly twice his size. He grabbed the boy's arm as he made to throw another chestnut, pulling it backward and wrenching him to the ground. His opponent grunted in surprise, and then Jed was on him, driving his fist down and feeling a crunch that could only be Nebiah's nose breaking. Nebiah swore and blood started to stream from his nostrils, but he fought back, and he was stronger than Jed. A chestnut smacked into his head hard enough to make his skull vibrate, spiking pain and making his vision blur, but he ignored it, driving his fist down into Nebiah's face over and over. The calm part of his brain assessed the situation. If he gets up, it's all over. Nebiah was struggling, trying to buck him off, one arm crooked to ward off Jed's attack, punching him with the other wherever he could find an opening. More chestnuts rained down, bruisingly hard, as the other children began to chant. "Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight."
Nebiah landed a punch in Jed's face hard enough to stagger him back, then surged upward, rolling Jed off him. He lunged to get on top of Jed, and Jed twisted out of the way and spun to his feet. The two boys stood, facing each other, both bleeding profusely from their noses. The barrage of chestnuts stopped, but the chanting went on. If I don't beat him now, I'll have to fight them all. Jed stepped forward, driving his knee up into his adversary's groin. Nebiah went down screaming, clutching his testicles, and Jed kicked him in the ribs, once, twice, three times, until he saw Nebiah wasn't defending himself, was just lying there crying and bleeding. He had won.
He had won, but only the first battle. He was in the center of a circle of unfriendly eyes, standing beside Kylie. The other children looked stunned, unsure what to do, but their hostility was palpable. He had cheated the pack of their prey.
"Who's next, come on, who's next." He could barely get the words out, his voice was so choked with rage. "You filthy cowards, who's next?" He pivoted, saw their expressions, saw the war between fear and the desire to hurt written there, saw realization dawn that despite what he'd done to Nebiah they still outnumbered him. He couldn't beat them all, not even one at a time, and they wouldn't come one at time. Only surprise had let him fight Nebiah alone.
He locked eyes with one of them. It was Matthew, his best and oldest friend. Shy Matthew, who wanted to be liked so much he would always trade the treats from his lunch, stolid Matthew, who always ran out of imagination in imagination games, loyal Matthew, who had stood by him even in squabbles with Abel. Now Matthew's face was hard, and he had a handful of chestnuts, but in his eyes Jed could see uncertainty. Matthew was part of the group, and he wanted to be part of the group, wanted to be part of the forceful imposition of the group's power, but at the same time Jed was his friend. Matthew's gaze wavered, and Jed lunged at him. Matthew turned and bolted, and Jed switched course for a tall sixth-grade girl, who fled as well. The boys on either side of her turned and ran with her, and that was all it took. The group dissolved into individuals, scattering like swallows from a cat, and leaving Jed alone with Kylie and Nebiah, still crying on the ground. Jed leaned over to help Kylie to her feet.
"Are you all right?"
She was still sniffling, her face red. "Jed, you're bleeding."
It was only then he realized that the front of his shirt was soaked in blood. He pinched the ridge of his nose to stop the flow. "It won't kill me. What happened?"
Kylie made a few fruitless attempts to straighten her crumpled and torn frock. "I was just by the tree, waiting for you. Maggie and Joan came by and we were talking, and I don't know how it came up, Maggie said I only had a nice dress because my father was Crew. I told her I wasn't . . . that it wasn't true . . . and they said it was, and Maggie pushed me, and then the boys joined in and then they started throwing chestnuts . . ." She started crying again.
He put an arm around her and they walked toward the school, leaving Nebiah still lying there. The other children were still in front of them, walking in their own groups now, each keeping a safe distance from the others. When they got to the schoolyard Kylie helped him wash the blood off his face and shirt at the pump. In the classroom everyone took their seats in class as they always did. Except for a few hostile stares the incident might never have occurred—a children's secret kept from the teacher. Dr. Valori began the lesson, on how Ark's ecosystem worked and everyone got out their notebooks. Jed had just begun to take notes when Nebiah came in.
There was no concealing the fact that Nebiah had been in a fight. His face was bruised and cut, one eye blackened and swelling, his nose swollen and lopsided. He was limping, and the class fell silent as Dr. Valori took in the spectacle.
"Nebiah, what happened?"
"Blessings, sir. There was a fight."
"I can see that. Who was it with?"
"Jedediah Fougere, sir."
"I see." Dr. Valori's voice was serious. He got up and went out. "Jedediah, Nebiah, come with me." He turned and went out, and reluctantly Jed followed him, walking ahead of Nebiah. The Charity Parish school had four classrooms. Three were used for teaching for the early, middle, and upper grades, the fourth for storage and for the teachers to do their preparation work. Dr. Valori led the boys to the fourth classroom, and told Jed to wait in one of the two straight-backed wooden chairs there and took Nebiah inside. Jed waited, feeling ill. He liked and respected to Dr. Valori, and he didn't want to be in trouble with him. I was protecting Kylie, it was the right thing to do. Somehow that reason seemed flimsy with the benefit of hindsight. The incontrovertible fact, as Nebiah was surely relating to their teacher right now, was that Jed had thrown the first punch, and had attacked when Nebiah's back was turned. The incontrovertible fact was that he had beaten Nebiah when he was down, and that Nebiah's injuries looked serious. He'd seen the look the other children had given him as he went out into the hall behind Nebiah and Dr. Valori. It was the self-righteous delight of seeing an adversary caught by authority. You're going to get it now.
It seemed to take forever for Dr. Valori to finish with Nebiah, and Jed kicked his heels as he sat there, thinking of what he might say that could mitigate what he had done, his stomach knotted tight. His father would beat him when he found out, that was inevitable, but losing Dr. Valori's respect was a far more painful prospect. I only did it to protect Kylie. Jed doubted that line of defense would get him far. Dr. Valori had shown himself to be absolutely evenhanded when it came to his daughter. He could expect no favoritism or special treatment on that front. He strained to hear what Nebiah was saying behind the classroom door, but though he could hear the voices he couldn't make out the words. His eyes traced the grain patterns in the wood on the walls. There was nothing else to do.
It seemed to take an eternity before the door opened. Nebiah came out, looking chastened, but not so chastened that he didn't give Jed a look of hostility on his way past. His nose was straighter now, the nostrils plugged with cotton, and Dr. Valori had fixed some sort of splint to either side of it. Jed went into the room, and his teacher closed the door behind him. He didn't seem angry, he simply asked Jed to describe what happened in his own words. Jed told the story as simply as he could. There wasn't much he could say in his own defense. He had hit Nebiah from behind, and had kept hitting him even after he was down. It was only when he recounted the fight that Jed realized his own knuckles were bruised and swollen. Dr. Valori's lips tightened when he described how the other children had been throwing chestnuts at Kylie, but he made no comment. When Jed had finished, he looked at the window, his expression distant. He looked away long enough that Jed began to fidget uncomfortably. Even a lecture would be better than the silence.
Eventually Dr. Valori looked back. "Thank you, Jed. You can return to class now. Please send Kylie in."
When he got back to class he found that Mrs. Dolorson had taken over and was going over spelling corrections. He relayed Dr. Valori's request to her and took his seat. Mrs. Dolorson told Kylie to go and talk to her father, and quelled the class's sudden whispering by smacking her ruler on the teacher's desk. Nebiah wasn't there, and Jed found it impossible to concentrate on the lesson. Kylie didn't return to class either, though Dr. Valori came back to call other children for interviews, all those who had been involved in the fight. Neither Matthew nor Abel nor anyone else would talk to him at lunch, so he ate his alone, and went back to sit at his desk while everyone else went out to play. Dr. Valori was back for the first lesson at the end of the lunch hour, a stack of papers in his hand.
Jed expected a lecture, followed by a punishment, but Dr. Valori simply gave a very brief summary of the fight, stated his disappointment with those involved, handed each of them a beeswax-sealed letter and sent them home. His manner seemed calm, but there was something different in his tone, something about the way his jaw was set when he paused between sentences, that said he was not. Something had changed there, something deep. It was a relief to be out of the classroom and the oppressive presence of his classmates, but Jed trudged the distance back to Riverview disconsolately. He considered throwing away the letter, or at least unsealing it to find out how much trouble he might be in, but to do either invited a far harsher punishment. Better to get it over with sooner rather than later.
But not too much sooner. He dawdled on the way, in no hurry to meet his fate. It was strange, how normal the world seemed, how unaware it was of the changes within it, how indifferent to the dread that now lurked in his own heart. The road was the same as when he walked in the morning, the familiar landmarks just as he had left them. On either side of him the world still curved up and arched over the suntube, and the fields still ripened beneath its steady warmth. Halfway up to spinward and aftward he could see Hope, the village at the center of the next parish. It always seemed that Hope couldn't help but slide down the steep slope, it was at such a crazy angle, but it never did, and when his father had taken him to Hope one day to look at horses it seemed that Hope was at the bottom of the world's arch, and Charity should be the one to fall. Beyond that was a lake, he didn't know which one, crystal blue and ringed with white sand amid the brown and green patchwork of fields. His eyes followed its river aftward to the ocean, a deeper blue cylinder up against the grey aftwall, hazy in the distance. Most of the distance to the ocean was the uniform green of mature forest, with just a few farms cut out along the waterways. The world was big and most of it was unused. The woods were full of game, and he wasn't a bad shot with a rabbit bow. For a long time he thought maybe he should just head out there, away from school, away from church, away from his father . . .
Away, just away. It was a frightening thought. Eventually he ran out of time and had to go home. He gave the note to his father immediately before dinner, on the theory that the meal would allow time for his anger to cool. His father read it dispassionately, his face hard. He nodded slowly, as if considering what to do, while Jed tried not to look scared. Finally he said, "We'll talk about this later," and went to sit down with the rest of the family. Jed found such restraint in his father almost more frightening than the sudden outburst of anger he had anticipated. Discussion over dinner was mostly between his father and his uncle on the good prices pigs had been fetching recently. The two of them went out after dinner, and Jed was in bed and pretending to be asleep before they were back. He remembered, as he lay there, that he had intended to talk to Dr. Valori about the bishop's words to his father in the barn. The excitement and upset over the fight had wiped that concern from his attention, but he resolved to tell his teacher about it in the morning. Eventually he slept, only to be wakened by Ruth at an hour that seemed all too early.
He felt slightly better at breakfast, though very tired. The welts where the chestnuts had struck him were now painful bruises, and his nose was still tender. His father still made no mention of the note, and he hoped against hope that it had been forgotten. That hope ended when he went to pick up his school bag.
"You won't need that, Jebediah," his father said. "You'll be coming with me today."
"But, Father—"
His father's face darkened. "Give me no insolence, I've made my decision."
Jed's guts clenched and fear. "Yes, Father." He waited silently until his father was ready and gestured for him to follow.
At first he was certain he was to be taken to the horse barn for a beating, but there was no anger in his father's face, instead, his father took him out to walk the fields. He still didn't seem angry. "It's time you start learning how to run a farm. Your uncle and I have planned some changes. The world is changing, Jed. You look at all the young families around. John Sackmore just had his eighth child, and not one of his wives is thirty yet. The population is growing fast, and pigs are going to be in high demand."
"But you've been selling pigs." For a moment Jed thought he'd gone too far in implying his father had made a mistake, and he winced, expecting at least a tongue-lashing, but his father took the remark in stride.
"Pigs grow fast too, with eight or twelve in a litter. If you didn't eat them you'd drown in them. Anyone can have a hog barn."
Jed nodded. "Abel's father is building a big one."
"What doesn't grow so fast is good, cleared land to grow corn for pigfeed, and good horses to work it. We're going to turn the pig barn into a second horse barn, Jed, and we're going to build a third barn too, put more land into raising corn to sell to pig breeders, and we'll do just fine."
They walked farther, over the hill toward the orchards on the other side of the stream to check on the breeze pumps that pushed the irrigation water lazily through its channels. The breeze pumps turned slowly in the steady, gentle wind, and John Fougere went over them carefully, making sure all was in working order. "Let the hands build things," he said. "Let the hands fix things, but always check yourself to make sure they do the job right."
He shoveled mud from the bottom of the pump channels so it wouldn't clog the paddles, and Jed helped. It was a pleasant change to have his father speak kindly to him, almost as an equal. They finished with the pump and went back up the hill toward home and lunch. His father stopped at the top of the hill, swept an arm over the landscape.
"This will all be yours one day, Jed. You'll be old enough to marry in a few years, and we want the elders to place some good wives with you. What do you think of Ellen Madda?"
"Father, she's a little girl," Jed blurted, before he could stop himself.
His father stiffened. "Mind your tongue. She'll be a woman soon enough. Tomorrow we'll start you with plowing and seeding the west field."
Tomorrow, that couldn't mean . . . "Father, am I not to go back to school?"
"No. You've enough education to run a farm, what you need now is experience. This fight, over a Crew girl no less . . . The Crew aren't like us, and I never wanted to see you taught by that man in the first place." His father's voice grew harder. "The bishop was right. I won't have your mind turned from God."
Jed opened his mouth to protest, then closed it in silence. There was an air of finality in his father's words, and arguing would be pointless. They walked the rest of the distance in uncomfortable silence while Jed pondered the possibility that he'd have Ellen Madda placed on him as wife. I could always marry Kylie later. Except he doubted she would want to be a second wife. Or perhaps even want life on a farm, if she knew what it was really like. Everyone seemed to think he should be pleased about the wealth of his much-foretold inheritance, but more and more it seemed to be nothing but a burden. And why am I thinking of marrying Kylie? It was a strange thought, but when he considered he realized that it had been there all along. They were best friends, she was a girl, what more natural than that they be married when the time came?
The next day was devoted to plowing and planting, as his father had said, and the next, and the next, and the next. Jed found it exhausting. When he had only worked on Saturdays his body had time to recover from its exertions, but now he found himself facing each day still tired and sore from the previous day's labors. By the time the Sabbath day came he was utterly spent, his hands blistered, every muscle aching, every joint sore. Sunday was the day of rest, but he found it too occupied with the usual Sunday service to be restful. Since Shealah's crucifixion Jed had been unable to look at the bishop as he had before. His services never mentioned her directly, but they went heavily into the Godless nature of the Crew and how their secular ways seduced the faithful away from the true path of God. The Crew were parasites, he said, taking from the community and contributing nothing. They were Satan's agents, working to undermine the Believers' faith in God, working to stop the chosen people from completing their ascent to Heaven. They were a test, said the bishop, included on the Ark to see if the Believers might falter before Saint Peter's gates, and the time would soon come to see them cast into endless night. Believers would have to be watchful, of themselves and of each other, because it was impossible to know when a Crew might arrive to tempt them into sin. His sermons had taken on a dark intensity since Jed had overheard him and his father talking in the horse barn. He kept expecting another Inquisition, but there hadn't been one, at least not so far. The cross, hanging as it did at the back of the alcove behind the bishop, seem to loom with hidden menace now, awaiting its next victim with infinite patience. When he saw it he saw Shealah upon it, being whipped without mercy until she confessed. Today was no different, except instead of Shealah he saw Kylie, crying as she had when his classmates had formed a chanting ring around her and pelted her with chestnuts.
He shook his head at that vision and looked down, not wanting to remember either incident. He missed Kylie, and her absence hurt more than the hard physical labor did. He sat through the service in silence, rode home in silence, and when he put the horses out to pasture he forgot to latch a gate. The next day found the horses out of their paddock and into the new-sown oats in the next field. His father cuffed him for it, and made him replant the damaged rows after supper. By the time he'd finished and got the horses put away for the night he was exhausted. Everyone else was long asleep by the time he got to bed. At breakfast he was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open, and the thought of another day of plowing seemed too much to bear.
"Did you finish the oats last night, Jedediah?" his father asked.
"I did, Father."
"I have two sows that need to be taken to market. You'll do that today. Take no less than twenty tokens for them."
"Yes, Father." Jed kept his expression even, but inwardly his heart swelled with elation, his tiredness washed away in an instant. A day at the market in Charity would be a welcome respite from the fields. More importantly it would bring the chance to drop by the school and see Kylie.
"And make sure the buyer makes the first offer." Jed barely heard his father's admonishment. He finished breakfast as fast as he thought he could without showing his eagerness, then ran out to the barn. Josiah was feeding the horses, and he helped Jed get a buckboard hitched with the team, and then load the pigs. Jed had driven a team by himself, but never so far as the Charity market, and he felt rather proud to be entrusted with the task. He had a few anxious moments as they set off, things seemed to happen so much faster when he was by himself, but he had a stolid and reliable team who knew exactly where they were going. The sows settled down in the straw in the back, and soon they were arriving in the market day bustle of the Charity village square. He had slowed down as he passed the school, hoping Kylie might see him in his new position of responsibility, but everyone was in class and he didn't see her.
The market was an informal affair, and farmers and craftsmen and Crew folk from the Town mingled and did business with noisy good humor beneath the suntube's perpetual brightness. He pulled the horses up, climbed down and walked them through the square to an unbusy corner, where he unhitched the wagon. He took the horses out of the square and turned them into the Charity common pasture, then went back to sit with the hogs. It was considered unseemly to call out to potential customers, which suited Jed just fine. Selling hogs might well be a lot of work, but waiting for someone to come and buy them was easy—or so it seemed at first. As the morning wore on a few people stopped to look at his wares, but none were so interested as to ask him the price. A pair of inquisitors came past, anonymous beneath their red hoods, and Jed's breath caught in his throat. He had never seen even one in public like that before; indeed, it seemed few people had. Conversations stilled suddenly as they came close, to bubble up again even more after they passed. For a long, tense moment it seemed they were looking at him and Jed bit his lower lip, trying to look casual. They went by without turning, and he breathed out in relief. They moved on, out of his sight and, he presumed, out of the market; at least, he never saw them again. After a while the excitement they'd caused died down, and time began to drag. He became bored and took to inexpertly weaving hay into straw mats, as he had seen Mary do. The church bell sounded eleven o'clock, and a few of the vendors who'd sold out early began to pack up. Jed began to worry what his father would say if he came home without having accomplished his task. Perhaps I need a better location. He had chosen his corner of the market because it was easy to get the wagon in without any tricky maneuvering of the team, but it was not the most trafficked side of the square. He considered moving it to one of the newly vacated spaces in a busier area, but that would require going back down to the pasture, running up the horses, rehitching the wagon, moving it, unhitching it again and returning the horses to the pasture, which wouldn't leave much time at all to sell the pigs. He was glumly considering what to tell his father when he spotted a familiar face in the crowd, Solomon Garcio, Abel's father. He remembered Abel's talk of his family's new and expanded pork herd. He jumped off the wagon and ran over.
"Blessings, sir," he said when he got close, slightly out of breath.
"Blessings, Jedediah." Brother Garcio looked surprised. "Why aren't you in school?"
"My father told me to bring these sows to market and sell them. They're fine animals, would you like to see them?"
"It wouldn't hurt to look." Abel's father followed Jed back to the wagon. Once there, he ran a practiced eye over the pigs, patted a flank, examined their feet and their eyes. "These are well finished, good healthy stock," he said. "They haven't been bred."
The last wasn't quite a question, but Jed answered it anyway. "No, sir." Hope rose in his heart. Solomon Garcio wanted the sows for breeding stock. He'd buy them, and he'd pay a good price.
"Hmmm . . . Tell you what, young man. I'll give you thirty-six for the pair."
"I can't sell them for that, sir. My father told me not to . . ." he had been about to say take less than twenty, but brother Garcio had offered eighteen right up front. That was practically twenty, and more than once he'd heard his father talk about the fine art of bargaining. ". . . take less than twenty-five," he heard himself say. His voice didn't waver as he said it, but he suddenly found his heart beating faster. He'd show himself worthy, more than worthy, of his father's respect if he got twenty-five tokens each for the pigs. But what if he says no . . . The market would be closing soon and Solomon Garcio was the first serious buyer he'd had all day. If he went home empty-handed he'd be lucky to get off with a cuff. The instant confidence he'd felt when he'd upped the price to twenty-five vanished as quickly as it had come, and he almost blurted out I meant twenty. He somehow managed to swallow the words. To back away from his first price like that would only invite Brother Garcio to bargain him down, and he really could go no lower than twenty. It seemed to take forever for Abel's father to answer, and when he did it did nothing to relieve Jed's sudden worry.
"Well, let's have another look at them."
Solomon went over the pigs again, this time were carefully. He stood for a while, considering, and finally said, "Fair enough, young man, twenty-five. Your father breeds good stock."
Jed breathed out, only then realizing how tense he had become. "Thank you, sir. I'm sure you'll be pleased with them."
Brother Garcio counted out the money from his coin bag, and Jed helped him unload the pigs from the wagon. The market crowd was starting to thin out as he went to get the horses back from the pasture. He hitched them to the wagon, and with new confidence climbed up on the seat to take them home. He swung past the school again, hoping to see Kylie, eager to bask in his new adult status. He didn't see her in the playground, but his former classmates saw him, and one by one the groups stopped playing to watch him. Nobody said anything, but the hostility was palpable.
But I'm not going to let them stop me. He wasn't a schoolchild any longer, he was a farmer, a marketer, the heir of Riverview, and he was above petty schoolground rivalries. He pulled the wagon to a halt in front of the school building, threw the horses reins over the rail and went in to talk to Dr. Valori.
He went into his old classroom, and found himself surprised at how strange the room felt after such a short absence.
"Jed!" It was Mrs. Dolorson, sitting at Dr. Valori's desk. "Where have you been? I've been getting concerned." At least she seemed glad to see him.
"I'm sorry to have worried you, ma'am. My father has me working on the farm now." He hesitated. "Is Kylie here?"
"Dear me, no. She's going to the school at the University now, after what happened."
"And Dr. Valori?"
"No, he left as well." Out in the playground the school bell began to clang, calling the students in after lunch. "Jed, you should . . ."
But Jed wasn't listening to what she had to say. A vast black chasm seems to have opened in front of him. I'm never going to be able to see her again. "Thank you, ma'am, I have to go now," he said. Scuffling feet in the hallway told him his classmates were coming in. He went out, wordlessly, meeting their gaze as he passed. Not one said hello to him, not even Abel. He had chosen sides, and their side was not his.
Outside he climbed back on the wagon and stirred up the horses. On impulse he turned the team around and headed for Kylie's house. Doing so would make him late getting back and invite his father's wrath, but he found he didn't care. He had fifty tokens in his coin bag, a decent improvement on what his father had thought he could get for the sows, and that success would help to offset any trouble he got into. He was struck, as he had been when he came home the day of the fight, by how unchanged the world seemed, how the suntube shone on relentlessly, the same as it had when he had been a schoolboy and not a farmer, as it had when he was born, as it had for his entire life, giving no hint at the passage of time.
He was halfway there when he saw a figure walking down the road, a girl, blond hair . . .
"Kylie!" He snapped the reins, encouraging the horses into a trot. "Kylie!" She turned around and he waved. Half a minute later he was pulling the wagon to a halt beside her.
"Kylie, what are you doing here?"
"I was coming to see you. I wanted to thank you for standing up for me." She hesitated. "My father said I should come in today and thank you, that Mrs. Dolorson said you had been at home all week."
Jed nodded. "My father has me working on the farm."
Kylie clambered up into the wagon to sit beside him. "I don't know why they were so mean to me, I didn't do anything. I don't even know most of them."
"They don't like it that you're a Crew. I was going to tell your father, the bishop has been speaking against the Crew in church, saying they're a poison, even speaking against the Prophet."
"What's wrong with being a Crew? If we go to Hell for being unbelievers that's our problem, not anyone else's."
"I don't know." Jed hesitated. "I miss you, Kylie, I wish it hadn't happened."
"So do I." They sat in silence for a while. "We can still be friends, can't we?"
Jed nodded. "As long as my father doesn't find out. He didn't even know we're friends in school, at least he didn't know you were Crew, until the other day." He sighed. "He does now. That's why I'm doing farmwork."
"I'm so sorry, Jed."
"It wasn't your fault."
"I'm still sorry." She stopped. "I don't want to talk about it. It's neat that you get to drive the wagon. Can you take me for a ride?"
Jed hesitated. If Father sees us together it won't be good. Reflexively he looked behind him to see who might be there. The aftward road from Charity would take them straight past Riverview, but there was a side lane not a hundred meters ahead that would take them up over the orchards and down to the river. It was only early afternoon yet, and his father would be out overseeing the hands in the spinward fields. "Sure," he said. He jogged the reins again and the team started off, the ironwood wheels creaking. It took some hauling to get the horses to turn into the side lane, they knew how close they were to home and food and rest. He persisted, and managed to get the wagon around the curve, and they were off.
For the rest of the afternoon, it was as if the incident at the crossroads hadn't occurred. The lane wound through the orchards, fragrantly bursting with cherry blossoms. At the end of the fields it curved down to run along the riverside, aftward again to the lake and on to the Danielson farm and beyond. They left the wagon in a small clearing with the horses contentedly grazing, and swam in their underwear in the cold, clear water. Later they followed a game trail through the woods that lined the riverbed, until they came upon a small herd of deer, munching down the fallen fruit from a wild-grown stand of oranges. They crept up on the herd quietly and got within an easy bowshot before the senior doe snorted and looked up to see them. She jumped off and the herd followed her. There was a secret spot there, a protected space in the crook of a fallen log, in a leafy hollow beneath a willow beside the citrus trees, with just enough room for the two of them to squeeze in side by side. They sat there a while, eating oranges and talking. The two-o'clock bells sounded, and then the three-o'clock, and then they had to go. Jed drove the wagon back up the lane, while Kylie ate oranges and talked about what she was learning in Crew school. The horses balked again as they came to the main road, now even more eager to get back to the barn, and Jed had to wrestle them to get them moving in the direction of the Charity road. He had planned to drop her under the same tree they'd always rendezvoused under, but somehow when they got there it didn't seem right to let her walk the rest of the way home. The four-o'clock bells pealed before he had her there, and he realized with a sinking feeling that he would be late for supper, a cardinal sin in the Fougere family. He urged the horses to a trot. When they got to her house, Dr. Valori came out to greet them.
"Will you have supper with us, Jed?"
"I can't, sir, I'm expected at home."
"Well, you're welcome any time. I didn't have a chance to tell you, but I owe you a great deal for standing up for Kylie like that. That was a very brave thing to do."
Jed found himself at a loss for words. He hadn't felt brave doing it, he'd felt scared. "Thank you, sir," he finally managed to say.
Kylie jumped down from the wagon. "I'll see you soon."
"I hope so." Jed wasn't so sure he would see her again, it would certainly be much harder too if he didn't get home in time. He got the team turned around and headed back aftward toward Charity, and home. He tried to urge them to speed, but the heavy drays were built for pulling power, not speed, and while they'd break into a clomping trot for a while, they refused to keep at it for long. The five-o'clock bells were ringing as he was unhitching the horses in the barn. He hurriedly led them into their stalls, then ran up to the main house. He burst in the front door, kicked off his shoes and ran in the dining room in time to be impaled on his father's cold gaze. His mother met his eyes, tension lines clear in her face, and Mary gave him a look that spoke volumes. His mother's parents traded a glance, and Jed saw his father's hands were pressed together for grace. Barely in time, maybe . . . Had he started yet? Only his uncle Thomas gave him a welcoming smile.
Jed sat down and put his own hands together and bowed his head, and the rest of the family did as well. Not quite late then. That was a relief, but the frosty reception showed he hadn't got away scot-free either. The silence stretched out to uncomfortable length, and then John Fougere began his prayer. "Our Father, whose Heaven we voyage to, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on Earth, in Ark and on Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever." He paused at the end and looked up at Jed before he finished. "Amen."
"Amen," echoed the family one after the other, Jed answering after his uncle and before Mary, as befitted his place as oldest son.
His mother began serving the vegetables, fresh young potatoes from the lower field and steaming corn-on-the-cob from the ripe crop in the upper. His father carved the meat, a haunch of fresh pork. The Fougeres set a fine table, as befitted their position, but Jed found himself suddenly without appetite.
"So Jed, did you sell the hogs?" His father's gaze was hard on him.
"Yes, Father, twenty-five tokens each." Jed kept any hint of pride out of his voice, but he was pleased with his performance. He'd done well, and that unexpected coup would lessen his father's wrath. It would be poor manners to show money at the table, but the coins were a firm mass in his coin bag, hard against his thigh in the carry-pocket of his pants.
John Fougere nodded. "I see. And did you get that price by telling Solomon Gracio that I would accept nothing less than that for them?"
Fear shot through Jed. When his father asked leading questions like this it meant he already knew the answer and disapproved of it. But I got a good price, what could be wrong?
And there was nothing to be gained by compounding the problem. "Yes, Father."
"I see." His father's expression darkened. "I'll see you at the barn after dinner to discuss this."
"Yes, Father," Jed replied. The tension around the table slowly subsided and the conversation picked up, but Jed found he had lost interest in talking as much as he had in food. He forced himself to eat while dinner dragged on, and when it was over he walked out to the barn to await his father's displeasure.
He didn't have to wait long. His father appeared and wasted no time. "Show me the money."
Silently John handed over his coin bag. His father counted out the money, forty iridium disks from one side of the bag to the other, ten that he held out in his hand. When he was done he looked up. "Well at least you haven't stolen any."
The injustice of the implication stung hard. "However I've displeased you, I'm no thief, Father!" Jed blurted the words even as his better judgment was telling him to stand mute.
His father's fist struck like a bolt launched from Heaven, wrapped tight around the ten heavy coins. It caught Jed on his temple and sent him spinning to the ground. He looked up, his vision momentarily blurred, tears already starting in his eyes though he refused to allow himself to cry openly. Not this time, not this time, not this time.
"Yes you're a thief. You stole these ten tokens from Brother Gracio just as if you'd taken them out of his pocket. What was the minimum price I gave you?"
"Twenty tokens, Father." Jed got hesitantly to his feet.
"Twenty tokens. And did you have Brother Gracio offer first, as I told you to?"
"Yes, Father."
"And what did he offer you?"
"Eighteen tokens each, Father."
"A fair offer from a fair man, and yet you lied. You lied and told him that I told you to accept no less than twenty-five."
"Please Father! Solomon Gracio is building a new pig barn. Those were prime young sows. He was happy to pay twenty-five. He would have paid more."
"I don't care if he would have paid a hundred. You lied."
"I bargained!"
"With lies!"
Jed opened his mouth to argue further, closed it when he saw his father's upraised fist. He looked down at the dirt. "Yes, Father."
"So." His father looked at him and the silence stretched uncomfortably. "Tell me where you were this afternoon."
"I went to the market in Charity, Father," Jed said, avoiding the question.
"Don't treat me like a fool, Jedediah Fougere. Where did you go after the market."
"Down to the river." Jed's voice was low with repressed anger of his own.
"Down to the river." His father's lips tightened, his suspicions confirmed. "And who did you go with?"
So that's what this is really about. His father wouldn't be asking the question if he didn't already know the answer. Jed raised his eyes to lock them on his father, daring him to strike again. "Kylie Valori."
The fist came down, harder than before. Pain exploded and Jed went sprawling, tasting dirt. He put his hand to his face to feel it already hot and swelling, but the tears that had started with the first blow dried up completely, replaced by a cold rage that constricted his throat past the ability to speak and clenched his own hands into fists.
"Kylie Valori." John Fougere spat the name, his voice shaking with the anger he had previously kept under control. "She is Crew, landless, unchurched Crew. I will not ask you if you sinned with her. I will not ask you that. You will not see her again." He paused, his jaw working, and when he spoke again his voice was cold with fury. "The counterspinward fallow field needs plowing. It will be done before you sleep." Without waiting for a reply Jed's father turned on his heel and stalked off. Only then did Jed cry, the feelings of anger and frustration and hurt welling up, and he pounded his fists in the dirt. After a while he went into the barn to harness up a team to the plow. The fallow field was a full hectare and it would be halfway to breakfast bell before he was done. It was unjust and unfair and . . . He stood up, squeezed the tears from his eyes and took a deep breath. There was no point in bawling like a child; fallow field wouldn't plow itself. He went to the barn, turning his anger to productive use, and hitched a pair of mares to one of the chisel plows. He didn't even consider running away. There was nowhere he could go. He cracked the reins harder than he meant to and the horses started, lurching the plow forward so Jed had to scurry to keep up. He drove the team out to the fallow field and got started. He was already tired and sore, and the field was a full day's work for a grown man. He wrenched hard at the plow, letting his anger overcome the exhaustion. I won't always be smaller than him, not always . . .
He'd done twenty furrows and the hard physical work had taken the edge off of his mood when a familiar shape came through the hedge gap.
"Uncle Thomas." Jed pulled the team to a halt and raised a hand.
"Jedediah, my favorite nephew. How goes the work?"
Jed wiped sweat from his brow and smiled at the old joke despite himself. "I'm still your only nephew, Uncle. And the work goes well enough I suppose."
Thomas looked at the swollen bruise on the side of Jed's face. "I see my brother has left an impression."
"It wasn't fair, Uncle." Some of Jed's anger and frustration returned. "I was only trying . . ."
"You were only trying to get the best price you could."
Jed nodded and rubbed his jaw reflexively. "Yes, you think he'd be happy."
"Hmmm. It wasn't the price he was unhappy about."
"I didn't lie, I bargained."
"You did both, but it wasn't the lying he was unhappy about either, not really."
"It isn't as if I lied about the pigs," Jed went on, reluctant to move the conversation to the real reason his father was angry. "They're fine sows of a good line. I've done no harm to Solomon Gracio."
"Hmmm, no." His uncle sat down on a furrow. "Sit down and I'll share a few things, if you like."
"I have to finish this field first."
Thomas waved a hand. "Sit down, sit down. Rest those beasts and let an old man feel he's doing his job as an uncle and then I'll help you with the plowing. Deal?"
Jed nodded and sat down reluctantly, unable to think of another reason not to.
Thomas smiled. "Now I'll talk first about truth, and I'll be brief because I know you don't want to hear it. First of all this has nothing to do with Solomon. He's quite happy with his purchase I'm sure."
Jed sighed. "I know the ninth Commandment as well as you, Uncle."
"No, this has nothing to do with the Commandments either." Thomas noted Jed's expression. "Don't look shocked. What is a Commandment but a rule written down by a man?"
"Uncle . . ." Jed groped for words. "That's heresy!"
"So do me a favor and don't tell the bishop I said it. I don't need an Inquisition." Thomas held up a hand to forestall further argument. "Don't make me explain myself, not yet anyway. I have your soul to save, before I can worry about theology." He paused to let that sink in. "You're a good salesman, Jed. Your father knows livestock better than any man in Ark, but you beat his named price by twenty-five percent. How did that come about?"
"I knew from Abel that his father has his new barn built; now he needs sows to start filling it. He doesn't want meat or even just a litter, he's starting a line. I knew he'd pay better than market rate for a pair as good as I had." Jed hesitated. "I mean, I suppose I knew all that, I wasn't really thinking it through, I ran and got him when I saw him, just by chance. I was going to tell him twenty, at the last minute I told him twenty-five. There wasn't much interest in them before I saw him really. It was a risk."
"Good thinking, good plan and good instincts, all three. And how did you feel when you got your price?"
Jed answered slowly "I was pleased that I'd gotten more than Father wanted for them."
Thomas nodded. "And how did you think your father would feel when he heard?"
Jed looked away. "I thought he'd be pleased."
"Anything else."
"I thought . . ." Jed looked up. He hadn't really thought of his motivations before, but his uncle's questioning left no choice. "I thought he'd be forced to acknowledge I'd done a good job."
"Even a better job than he could have done himself?"
"Perhaps . . ." Jed paused. "I know that's prideful, Uncle, it's just that . . ."
"Just that he's always hard on you and sparse with praise, and you wanted to show him you were as good a man as he, perhaps better. Well, you certainly did show him." Thomas ran a hand through the youth's hair. "What did you expect him to do, congratulate you and admit you were smarter than him?"
"He might have done as well. He couldn't have gotten more, I'll swear that on the cross."
"You're right about that, young man, but what did you expect his response to be?"
"I don't know. I suppose I didn't think about it."
"You were too busy feeling smug, imagining him being forced to praise you as you humiliated him ever so subtly in front of the whole family."
"Uncle! I'm not so petty."
"No, you aren't, but your father is. He's a petty, angry, small-minded man who uses his piety as a stick to beat everyone around him. You can't be faulted for playing his game by his rules." Thomas paused, looking away. "However, you can be faulted for not rising above it. You're a man now, Jed, not a boy. What's more, you are a better man than he is, a better man than he'll ever be, so act like it."
Jed looked up at his uncle, not sure whether he should be proud of the implied praise or wounded at the rebuke. Thomas went on without stopping. "Which brings up another question. Why did you lie to Solomon Garcio?"
Jed moved his gaze away, up the curve of the world and aftward to the ocean, hazy in the distance, and wished the question would go away. Thomas waited patiently for an answer, as though he had all the time in the world. Jed knew from the way he'd asked the question that there was a lesson his uncle wanted to drive home, and he knew from experience that neither time nor evasiveness would stop Thomas from getting an answer. Sometimes even patience could be a trial. He sighed, resigned to the inevitable. "To get a better price, I guess."
"Couldn't you have done the same thing without lying?"
"I suppose. Maybe. I don't know." He looked at his uncle. "Does it matter?"
"It matters to you, I don't care what your father thinks, or Solomon Garcio. You told Solomon your father wouldn't accept less than twenty-five tokens as a negotiating tactic. What did that gain you?"
Jed thought about the question for a moment. His uncle's questions often had hidden barbs for the unwary quick answer. He was like Dr. Valori in that. "Well, it meant that if he wanted the sows he had to pay twenty-five, take it or leave it."
"So another way of putting it is, you told him you lacked the power to sell them for less. You told him your father was the one in charge."
"I suppose."
"Well don't just suppose it, think about it long enough to understand that it's true, or find a reason why it's wrong."
"Uncle, what is the point of this?"
"Or you can ask distracting questions in the hopes that I'll give up trying to teach you anything."
Jed threw up his hands. "Fine, I agree, you're right."
"Essentially you saved yourself from having Solomon pressure your price lower by abdicating personal power."
"Yes." Jed said it reluctantly, irritated by the implications in Thomas's argument, though he couldn't put his finger on why.
"Not only did you explicitly say that your father had more power than you did, you also told Solomon that he had more power than you did too. You told him you were afraid of him."
"What? Uncle, I said nothing like that. I've got no cause to be afraid of Abel's father, he's always been kind to me."
"No? If you weren't afraid of him, why didn't you just say 'I won't take anything less than twenty-five,' rather than saying your father wouldn't?"
Jed shrugged. "I don't know, it just seemed easier."
"Easier because he couldn't argue with your father, who wasn't there, while he might bargain quite hard against you. He had to take it or leave it, because you didn't have the power to bargain with him."
"I suppose." Jed looked at the dirt.
"You suppose. I won't make you say I'm right this time." Thomas leaned back against the wagon. "Sometimes not having power is a kind of power all its own. That's a lesson your father has yet to learn. All the same, you shouldn't be handing your own power away so freely to people like Solomon and your father."
"I don't understand."
"Consider this. If you hadn't been afraid of Solomon Garcio, if you hadn't worried that he might outbargain you, then you would have told him that you wouldn't accept a coin less than twenty-five for those hogs, you, not your father. He would have scoffed and told you they were worth fifteen, he would have told you no other farmer would give you more than twelve, and he would have generously offered eighteen, just out of respect for the Fougere family. And, if you were right about how much he wanted them, he would have given you twenty-five at the end of the day because that's what they were worth to him, because that's how much he paid. The difference is that when my brother later asked you how you came to get that much for them, he wouldn't have had the ninth Commandment to hit you with."
"You make it seem so straightforward."
Thomas laughed. "The truth is too slippery a thing to be straightforward, but it has a lot of power. When you use it, you gain that power. It also means you have to be careful how you use it, careful about when you tell it, how you tell it, who you tell it to. And while I'm mentioning that, let me mention that half the truths you come across are better left locked up in the back of your brain. Silence is just as powerful as truth, if you can use it well."
"I know I shouldn't have sinned like that, Uncle." Jed hung his head, feeling shamed about his action for the first time. "I'll never lie again, Uncle."
"Whoa, boy, let's not go that far. Untruths are a form of power too, but the more you use them the less power they have. Save them for when you really need them."
"Are you telling me to lie, Uncle?" Jed asked, confused.
"I'm telling you to use the brains God gave you to figure out the right thing to do on a case-by-case basis. Ninety-nine times in a hundred that means telling the truth. When it's necessary to lie, as opposed to simply convenient, you'll know it."
"Not when I just want to get a better price on some hogs, you mean. I can see that was wrong." Jed hesitated. "I don't think that's really what Father was angry about."
Uncle Thomas raised his eyebrows. "No? What was it really then?"
"After the market I went and played with Kylie."
"The same Kylie you told me about before?"
"Yes, Uncle."
Jed's uncle laughed. "I can see why your father wouldn't like that."
"I didn't kiss her, Uncle, I promise. I didn't sin."
Thomas took in Jed's glum expression and reached over to ruffle his hair again. "There are bigger sins than sharp bargaining, Jed. Bigger sins than kissing a Crew girl. I've sinned . . ." The big man looked away and stopped speaking.
"What did you do?" asked Jed, suddenly intrigued. His uncle's manner hinted at depths Jed hadn't suspected existed.
"Let's just leave it that I've sinned." He stood up. "Perhaps one day God will forgive me. I doubt your father ever will." He smiled. "Now you go hitch another team, and we'll get these furrows done."
Jed headed up to the barn, thinking over what his uncle had said and wishing that Thomas, with his patience and wisdom, were his father.
* * *
Bishop Nemmer's sermon that Sunday was about the people of Earth, whom God had punished with a plague, just as he punished the people of Noah for their rejection of his word. He went into detail about how the Plague of Earth had struck down God's enemies. Only the Believers, safe in the their Ark as Moses' family had been in his, would survive the wrath of God. The Believers were the new Chosen People, he said, chosen by God to voyage from the living Hell that had been Earth to the planet of Heaven. All things of Earth were evil, he said, contaminating the purity of Ark and all within it. He went on like that for a while, and then he called on the congregation to reject everything of Earth, to embrace all that was of Heaven. They should cast aside everything Earth-made as inspired by Satan, cast it out of their lives to purify themselves. Then he started talking about the Crew. They were not Believers, they were Earth people, carriers of the same plague that had destroyed the world, he said. They were a pestilence within the body of holy Ark itself. They were a test of faith, sent by God to determine if the Believers were truly worthy of Heaven. It was not enough to cleanse themselves, God required that all of Ark be purified. It was time to return to the ways of poverty and humility before Jesus that were the core of Believer faith.
The bishop spoke with flashing eyes and a voice so passionate and deep that Jed found it frightening, and after he had done speaking he led the congregation outside, where a large pile of firewood and tinder was set alight. He led them all in hymns to the glory of God, and the worshippers started a line past the flames. One by one the whole congregation filed past and threw things into the flames. It took Jed a while to realize that everything being sacrificed was prelaunch—glassware, tools, books, trinkets. When the Fougere family's time came not one of them had anything to throw in, save Thomas, who with an expression Jed couldn't decipher, threw a multibladed pocketknife into the flames. There were looks from the rest of the congregation, and they weren't friendly. It was clear the Fougere family had been expected to sacrifice more. The bishop began preaching again, speaking of the need to purify themselves through fire, the need to prepare themselves for more and deeper sacrifice. God's anger with Earth could not be allowed to spill over to Ark. They would have to be strong to do what must be done, and those who were not strong enough would be broken and cast aside, and their souls would fall back to Hell, like all those that had remained behind on Earth. Only the pure in heart would be allowed to proceed to Heaven.
Jed kept expecting the bishop to mention the Crew again, but he didn't, and much of what he said seemed aimed directly at the Fougeres. "From those to whom much is given, much is expected," he said. They endured the rest of the sermon, and though the usual greetings and blessings were exchanged with the rest of the congregation at the end of the service, there was a sudden cold distance in their neighbors' words. The family returned home from church in uncomfortable silence for the second time in a month. His father's face was ashen, his uncle's pensive. Ruth held the baby close, whispering to her as though it were the child who needed comfort and not Ruth herself. Jed's mother held Mary, her expression somewhere between weary and worried. Jed bit his lip. Something has happened. I need to know what.
Nothing was said that night, though his father and his uncle went off to talk in the barn, the usual tension between the men seeming to have eased somewhat. His mother and Ruth and Mary busied themselves with housework, and Jed took advantage of the lack of attention to go to bed early. The morning bells woke him some ten hours later, and he got up feeling very refreshed, and at breakfast his uncle announced, "Come on, Jed, you and I are going hunting."
Jed glanced reflexively at his father, who said nothing and didn't return his look. He hurried through the rest of his bacon and eggs in silence, anxious to finish before some other chore got wished on him to interfere with the day's plan. It was a rare treat for Jed to get away hunting with his uncle. Rabbits were the business of the day, though there were deer around too. Sometimes they would come up through the trees that lined the riverbanks, and make themselves a nuisance among the berries, but there was something almost taboo about hunting deer in Charity Parish. Hunting for meat was for those who couldn't feed their families with farming.
He finished and ran to grab his bow, but his uncle stopped him. "Grab a change of clothes, we're going to be gone overnight. Come down to the barn when you're packed." Jed's eyebrows went up at that, but he knew better than to ask questions, he just went up to his room, threw the essentials into his leather daypack, then ran down to the barn to meet Thomas. His uncle had one horse saddled and was bridling a second.
"Where are we going, Uncle?"
"I thought we'd go down toward the aftward forest and see how far we can go."
"What about the rabbits?"
"The rabbits will wait for us to get back."
His uncle finished with the saddling and Jed helped him load the saddlebags. They set off, away and aftward. Jed had never really gone in that direction, he realized. School and church, Charity and the market and his friends and everything else important seemed to lie forward, though he'd never really realized it before. Before the next hour bell sounded from the church steeples they were well outside of Charity Parish and into Blessed, the next parish aftward. The landscape was beginning to change as well, with more trees and fewer and smaller fields. Jed had known that Riverview was an especially prosperous farm. What he hadn't known was that Charity Parish was an especially prosperous parish. In Blessed, the farms weren't just smaller, they were noticeably less developed. The farmhouses were not so well built, and luxuries like prelaunch window glass and fine new ironwood barns were nonexistent. Another hour bell later they were aftward of Blessed, and there were no more well-ordered orchards or wide grazing pastures. The people here lived in cabins of hewn wood and their small fields had been laboriously cut from mature forest, with goats and sheep grazing around huge stumps that had yet to be dug out to allow the proper tilling and planting of a crop. There was a different mood among the people too. In Charity Parish neighbors would wave and smile, in Blessed they nodded as you passed. Here toward the edge of the forest they seemed indifferent and the few looks they drew in passing made Jed uneasy.
"You're learning something here now, Jed," his uncle said, noticing his discomfort.
"I am, but I'm not sure what."
"What do you notice?"
"People are poorer, there's not so many horses."
"What else?"
"I'm not sure."
"How many women do you see?"
Jed paused, thinking back. "None, now that I think of it."
Thomas nodded. "A farmholder in Charity might have two wives, or three, even a farmhand is as likely to be married as not. There's about as many boys born as girls, so that means a man here in the aft-lands is much more likely to go unmarried."
"Still, some of them must be. We should see some women."
"Some are, but you won't see their wives on the road, certainly not unaccompanied. When something is scarce it's valuable, and when it's valuable you hide it away so someone won't steal it."
"How can you steal a person?"
His uncle laughed without humor. "You'll understand soon enough. Just understand this. Farmers give fealty to the Prophet with dutiful tithing and loyalty, those the Prophet favors he rewards with wives. Those he doesn't favor go without. All these second and third sons have little reason to love the Prophet."
"That's a sin."
"That's a reality, Nephew." Thomas paused. "I was born and bred a Believer, but when I look at how the Church works, it seems entirely too worldly for me. Bishop Nemmer comes from Joseah Parish, which is as poor as this one or poorer, and that's where his power base comes from too. I don't know what the internal politics of the church are, but he wasn't chosen to come to Charity Parish by accident. Everything he's done since he got there has been a direct challenge to the Prophet—and to us and people like us."
"But to challenge the Prophet, that's challenging God."
"That's a risk he appears willing to take. You saw what happened at chapel, that was a direct warning to us. That's why I thought it best to come down here and see what we might find." His uncle paused. "That and I thought it would be good to get you out of the way for a while."
"But what of Father and Mother and Ruth and Magda . . ."
"Riverview is a strong farm, and my brother is a strong man. He's got the hands to help out, and they're loyal to him. I doubt the bishop will want to confront him quite so directly, not yet anyway, though he's got his eye on us, no question. If he's going to get any leverage it'll be through you."
"Through me? How?"
"By giving you the honor of joining the priesthood."
"But I don't want to join the priesthood." Jed looked puzzled and his uncle laughed.
"You're right, you don't. You'll start as a servitor, which means that your life will not be your own from that day forward, and Riverview will become the property of Charity Parish church when you inherit, which is the real point. So we're making you unavailable for a few days. Maybe this will all settle down." He looked pensive. "I hope so. In the meantime you're going to get some real practice with your bow, just in case you need it."
The crested a small rise and found a small church beyond it. The church was small and not nearly so well built as the church in Charity, but its was well kept up, and its grounds were immaculately groomed, in stark contrast to most of the farms in the area. The parish sign on the gate to the churchyard read Bountiful, which struck Jed as ironic enough to be funny. He smiled to himself, and then his smile froze on his face as they came past the building and saw a cluster of red cloaks on the other side of it. Inquisitors! There were twenty there at least.
"Don't stare, boy." His uncle's words came to him, pitched low enough that only he could hear them. "Just give them a wave and keep going."
Jed did as he was told, and after a second's hesitation one of the hooded figures waved back.
"Uncle, why are there so many of them here?" Jed asked when they'd put the church far enough behind them that he could speak normally without fear of being overhead.
"I don't know, Jed." Thomas's expression showed concern. "I don't know, but it's bad news for someone. Those were awfully young men to be inquisitors, if I'm any judge." He looked down and read Jed's worry in his face. "They're no concern of ours right now though, and I pray they won't be later."
Jed nodded, and they hey rode on in silence for a while, while he absorbed that. I was right that things are changing. Knowing how to fight and shoot and survive are going to be important, but they aren't going to be enough. If the social order failed, as his uncle seemed to be implying it might, as his own observations warned was already happening, then he needed to have allies. But who? Not the backward and dangerous aftward people, and certainly not his neighbors in Charity, he'd made enemies of them when he'd made enemies of their children, notwithstanding the willingness of Matthew's father to buy his pigs. Not his father, antagonistic as he was toward Jed, and not his mother, subservient as she was to the head of the household. Certainly not the Bishop Nemmer, who disliked Jed personally and would certainly make life under his father seem blissful should he gain Jed as a servitor. Uncle Thomas was on his side, and his support meant much within the walls of the Fougere household, but in the bigger picture he was just one man, without land, more importantly without power. The Crew? He missed Kylie, and Dr. Valori seemed like a good man, but the Crew weren't his people.
And so I am going to have to be able to look after myself. The realization came to Jed slowly as the horses clopped their way past the last of the small holdings and into the forest proper. The road petered out into a winding trail that curved up and down through towering first-growth oaks and ironwoods. Now and again a startled squirrel scampered through the leaf litter and up a tree, to chatter in annoyance as they passed. Eventually the trail itself faded into the forest floor, and they used the suntube overhead to navigate. The forest smells were rich, and close, and light darkened as the canopy closed overhead. The enclosing gloom seemed appropriate.
Melany Waseau, chief engineer of the Crew, did not often feel nervous in her position, but as she went to the True Prophet's Temple, set in a tower high above the Auditorium, she had to admit to butterflies in her stomach. She had to walk through the big, empty space, her footsteps echoing from the distant walls, the silent dadushka fliers seeming to watch her, as though their double-bubble canopies were eyes. There was something very wrong. The young servitor who'd brought her the message was panting and out of breath. The message itself was hastily scribbed on a scrap of pre-launch paper. All it said was "Please come at once."
And so she was coming, hurrying because the Prophet had never sent such a note before, and it could only mean bad news. There was another servitor waiting for her at the entrance to the tower, holding the door open, looking scared. Not a good sign. "Blessing, Chief Engineer," he said as she passed, the relief in his voice was palpable.
"Blessings," she answered automatically, and resisted the urge to run up the winding stairs to the Prophet's quarters. What's going on? The Temple tower had once been used to control flight operations in Ark. The lower two levels had been converted to quarters for the Prophet's attendants, the next two as his private quarters, the two above held his wives, and the top level, glassed on three sides and giving a view aftward as good as the one from the forward ledge, was the Temple proper, where the Elder Council met and the highest Believer rituals were carried out. As she went up she saw one of the women peering out from behind a door, a baby held to her breast, her eyes frightened, and Melany's concern grew I should have brought help. She hadn't, and it was too late now.
At the top floor her way was blocked by four inquisitors, anonymous and menacing in their hooded red cloaks. She advanced on them, trying to project a confidence and authority she didn't feel. "Move aside. This is a Crew area, and I am chief engineer."
The inquisitors didn't move, and she took a deep breath and raised her voice. "I am chief engineer, and I don't know what is going on here, but I will speak with the Prophet."
Again the inquisitors didn't move, but then a voice called from inside the Temple. "Let her through."
And then she was inside. She had expected to find the Elder Council in session, but it wasn't. The True Prophet was, however, trussed naked to a wooden cross, the little authority he had ever held stripped away with his robes. He was nothing more than a frightened and frail-looking youth. A fifth inquisitor, menacing and anonymous in his hooded red cloak, stood before the cross, a vicious-looking whip in his hand, and she could see the angry red lines that covered the Prophet's body.
"Chief Engineer." The Prophet's voice shook; he had obviously been crying. "In God's name, make them stop."
"What is—" she started to say, but a voice cut her off.
"Welcome, Chief Engineer." She turned around to face the speaker, saw a man she didn't recognize in bishop's robes, flanked by two more inquisitors. "I am Bishop Nemmer."
"Bishop Nemmer," Melany spoke with ice in her tones. "This is a Crew area, under my authority. Have him cut down immediately."
"No." Nemmer shook his head slowly. "I won't do that. I don't think you understand. Our Prophet has defiled himself." There was a vicious edge to his voice. "Our Prophet has defiled our Church. He has turned away from God, and now God must see him punished him for his sins." Nemmer's eyes were intense, locked on hers. "And the Crew has no authority here. Not anymore."
"They've stopped the tithing." The Prophet sounded desperate, pleading. "Make them stop, I'll tell them not to do it, make them—" His words were cut off in a scream as the inquisitor in front of him brought his lash down, hard.
"He won't you know." Nemmer ignored the Prophet, keeping his eyes locked on Melany. "He won't ever issue another edict on your behalf. Look at him. Did you really think his position would last a second longer than I wanted it to?"
"Where are the rest of the Elder Council?" As she spoke Melany thought furiously. Is he acting alone? This might yet be reversed.
Nemmer shrugged. "That's unimportant. I am acting on God's word now, and five hundred men, five hundred new inquisitors of the aftward parishes, act on my word."
Melany looked at Nemmer in stunned amazement. This is far worse than I might have dreamed. He's created an army. She remembered Nikol's warnings on the realities of power, and with sudden crystal insight saw how events would unfold. With the Prophet eliminated Nemmer would take control of the Elder Council, by force if necessary, though the mere threat of it would probably be enough. That was easy, his larger problem would be getting the Believers to follow him instead of the Prophet. He's cut the Prophet out, and he's going to take command as the voice of God in Ark. The realization was a cold certainty in her heart, and taking that reasoning one more step explained the current drama. Bishop Nemmer had used the tithing as leverage, as a tool to build resentment among the Believers against both the Crew and the Prophet. And I cannot allow him to succeed.
"Bishop," she began, but Nemmer cut her off with a wave of his hand.
"I don't speak to unchurched Crew. If you seek conversion, come to Charity Parish church on Sunday, and God will know you then."
"I thought God was always and everywhere in Ark."
Nemmer smirked. "Don't play games, Chief Engineer. You'll find the church is generous to the poor, as the Lord commands us to be. It behooves the poor to be humble in return."
"Do you think . . ." Melany's temper flared, and she found herself momentarily lost for words. "Do you think we're going to come groveling to you for charity? You owe the tithings to the Prophet. That was the agreement, between your ancestors and mine. That was how you came to be on this ship at all. We won't plead for what's ours."
"What I think, Chief Engineer." Nemmer's eyes were hard and cold as he spoke. "What I think is that the time of the Crew is long past. You contribute nothing useful to justify your existence."
"We contribute knowledge. We maintain the living culture of Earth. The University is important, you can't just throw that away."
"Knowledge." The bishop snorted. "You can eat that, if it satisfies you, or see what you can trade it for in the Charity market square if it doesn't. Believers are not going to feed the deniers of God, not now and not ever. You will be punished in your turn, cast down as Jesus cast down the mighty in his time. In the meantime . . . I have business to finish here." He made a gesture and the two inquisitors advanced on Melany. She held up a hand to stop them. "I can leave on my own." And indeed it was all she could do. She heard another crack of the lash, another scream from the hapless Prophet, and she clenched her fists in impotent rage. There was nothing else she could do. I need to tell the Crew this. First I need a plan.
Nikol Valori had spent the day hiking up his now well-beaten path to the forewall and the continually shrinking pile of shipsteel ingots there. His first hint of the trouble was as he walked up the Town road toward home, Kylie and supper. The first cheering wagonload of Crew aroused only his interest, but more followed it and he knew what must have happened. The wagons were laden down with sacks of flour, with piles of fruit and vegetables, even with caged chickens and squealing pigs, and the faces of those that rode them were both angry and exultant. Most of the faces were men, Crew men, with a scattering of women. Most of them carried improvised wooden clubs, occasionally a farming implement, and they shook him in the air as weapons. The Believers have stopped tithing, and the fools have gone to collect what they felt was theirs by right. Nikol took a deep breath and quickened his pace. I hadn't thought it would happen so quickly. He had expected riots, hoarding, and stealing when the tithing stopped, he had feared food raids and murder and possibly civil war. He hadn't expected any of that to happen until hunger set in, and on that basis he had expected at least a week of warning, time to read the signs and make a decision as to how to best protect himself and Kylie. At least a week, and I hoped for a month, or longer.
He had not counted on the moral outrage of a newly disenfranchised priestly class, had not thought the restrained, refined sensibility of the University establishment would lend itself quite so easily to mob violence, but he recognized it when he saw it. As he watched a fight broke out on one of the wagons, over what he couldn't tell, and a panicked sheep lept free, tumbling as it hit the ground, then leaping to its feet and running off, bleating madly. I didn't expect them to take action, because I thought them incapable of any action to which they were not forced, and I was a fool to be so blind. He had been gone six hours, just the time to make a round-trip to the forewall on foot. The triumphant shouts of the wagon-mounted raiders had drawn other people from their houses. They were friends, neighbors, acquaintances, people he'd known all his life, and they frightened him as a mob. People on the carts were throwing sacks of flour, cornmeal, vegetables, and who knew what else to the gathering throng. It was market day, and all too obviously the Crew had gone into Charity in force. A woman on one of the carts was heaving watermelons to the crowd, oblivious of the fact that no one was catching them. The melons broke and splattered when they hit the ground, to be trampled under the hooves of the horses pulling the following wagons. Bags split and grain spilled, and several more scuffles broke out as people in the crowd fought for the spoils, but mostly there was just yelling, voices raised in self-righteous anger and the exhultation of victory. He caught a few snatches above the general clamor.
". . . damn kolkoz . . ."
". . . deserved it . . ."
The fools, the pizzdets fools. He broke into a run. The University had a month of supplies, Melany had told him. That was a month to negotiate, to plan, to take measured action to adjust to a new reality if everything else failed. That opportunity was lost now, there would be war between the Crew and the Believers, and while neither side had any recent experience with violence he had little doubt that the instinct for organized murder would surface as easily as it always had in the human heart. The most important thing now was to keep Kylie safe.
His rational mind told him that Kylie was safe, at home where he'd left her just as she always was. It would take the news of the market raid some time to spread among the Believers, and it would take more time for them to organize their retaliation. He probably had several hours. Beneath the reasoning was naked fear, and it allowed little room for measured introspection. He had to get back now. It was all he could do not to drop the twenty five kilos of steel on his back, but he overrode the instinct. He had worked hard to get it, and it would delay him only a minute or two. Blacksmithing, and the regular hikes to collect ingots of ship steel had melted away his middle-aged fat and hardened his muscles, and with the impetus of adrenaline he ran the distance with no difficulty. It seemed to take forever for him to get home, although in total time it was probably only a few minutes.
It was quiet in front of his house, the main commotion being down on the Main Street, although a few faces peered through curtained windows. The door was jammed shut when he got there, and it took him a few minutes of fruitless shoving to realize that Kylie had deliberately locked herself in. Smart girl. She had seen what was happening, and taken the best action she could. He went around to the back, but that was jammed shut as well. He knocked loudly, called her name, and after a pause he heard motion behind the door. She opened it, her face worried.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to lock you out, it's just—"
"No, you did the right thing."
"What's happening?"
"I don't know exactly everything, but I do know we're in trouble." He saw the sudden concern on her face. "Not us in particular, devuchka. I think everyone's in trouble, Crew and Believers alike."
"What are we going to do?"
Nikol hadn't thought that far in advance, but there was really only one answer. "We're going to leave."
"For how long?"
"I don't know. For a while."
"Where?"
"I don't know that either, devuchka." He saw the worry in her eyes. Somewhere safe."
"Are we ever coming back?" She was fighting back tears, fighting to be strong. She didn't want to be a burden to him, he could see the determination not to crumble fighting with the fear in her face, and it stabbed his heart to see her bravery.
"I hope we are, we'll have to see what happens. We're in a better position than a lot of people."
She nodded. "What do I have to do?" She sounded shaken, but there was a new resolution in her voice. She had vanquished her fear.
He took her into his arms and hugged her tight. "You have to be as brave as you're being right now. You have to know in your heart that I will always, always take care of you." He found himself having to fight back his own tears. "I promised your mother, it was the last thing I ever said to her, I promised that I would take care of you, and I will."
She hugged him tight and return, nodding fiercely, unable to answer, and he knew it was because if she did her fragile control would shatter and she would cry if the child she didn't want to be. I have to take my own advice here, I have to be brave, I have to hold it together for both of us. He put her down and they went inside. She'd used a chair to wedge the door, and closed and locked the shutters as well. He didn't yet know where they were going to go, but they would need supplies and provisions. Provisions he had, thirty days' worth, although unfortunately a lot of that was in the form of fruit preserves, pickled vegetables and meat that didn't lend themselves to travel. He did a quick inventory, and found he had about a week of dried meat, dried fruit and hard bread, food that was nutrient dense and suitable for carrying. More problematic was the question of how it would be carried. He had his own small backpack that he used for his hikes to the forewall, and Kylie had her book bag for school, but they were lacking anything larger. Also lacking, he realized, were waterskins, tools, anything to make a shelter out of, even a basic map. I never thought we'd have to abandon our home. Even as he thought it he realized, in surreal fashion, that once they left they would never be coming back. He picked up the biggest knife he'd made, a heavy, forward-curved multipurpose blade called a kukri, based on a Nepalese design he'd found. It was big enough to chop down a decent-size tree, fine enough to shape its wood into another tool. It could butcher a deer should he be so lucky as to catch one, and kill a man, should it ever come to that.
He hefted the blade and swung it, considering how best to use it in a fight and feeling long buried instincts coming to the fore. It will come down to killing before this is over. There was a chilling certainty in the realization. I thought I was ready. How very wrong I was. Facing the situation, he realized that the deficiencies in his inventory were only the start of his problems. He had little practical experience in the woods, and none at all with long-term survival in the wild. He couldn't hunt, couldn't fish, couldn't find nuts or berries without wandering randomly until he stumbled onto them, couldn't track or trail, didn't know how to avoid the big cats. I'm lucky that Ark was designed to be easy for humans to live in. If they were to survive, it would be thanks to their benign environment, and not at all due to his own planning and foresight. I knew this conflict was coming, I deluded myself into believing it would have a peaceful solution. He had hoped to establish himself within the Believer economy, to become independent of the tithing and separate from the Crew, to establish himself as a productive member of a productive community. That would've worked, if the Crew had accepted their fate calmly, but they hadn't. Anger had won out over the desire to negotiate, even over rational thought. The exultant looters couldn't be unaware that the Believers outnumbered the crew by twenty to one or more, and yet they had chosen their rash act anyway.
And can I really have anticipated that? The question was irrelevant. All that mattered was getting himself and Kylie to safety. They packed a few belongings quickly, tied up in bed sheets, and he quickly cut two poles from a pine tree behind the house. Tying one end of the ungainly packages to either end of each pole created two reasonably balanced loads that can be carried on their shoulders. He put the most essential things in his backpack and Kylie's book bag, starting with a steel prelaunch hatchet, a model he'd been trying unsuccessfully to duplicate in his forge. He also included the kukri knife, the water skin, the bulk of the dried meat, a blanket each, some sundry supplies he felt they couldn't do without. The lack of water was the most serious concern, but that could be addressed by staying close to streams and rivers. When it was all assembled it seemed pitifully inadequate when measured against the task of surviving alone in the forest.
He looked out the window. The road outside was quiet, the mob had moved on, or dispersed. There was nothing to suggest that anything had changed at all, and for a moment it seemed like madness to even contemplate leaving the security of their home, leaving all he'd worked for all his life, and taking his young daughter out into an uncertain and dangerous future. Maybe we should just wait, maybe this will all blow over. In his heart he knew it wouldn't. The world had changed, and he had to change with it. He helped Kylie lift her now overloaded book bag, and shoulder her small pole with its improvised burden bags. He hefted on his own backpack, shouldered his own load, and they went out into the road. The next decision to make was what direction to take. It would have to be foreward, to the woods he had learned so well in his steel-hunting searches. He knew the territory in that direction, and it was away from Charity Parish and the Believers, who were very certainly already gathering to retaliate on the raiders. There would be food enough from berries and fruit, and perhaps he could figure out how to snare small game. A skill I put off learning too long. It was too late to regret that now. Going foreward could only be a temporary solution. The near constant mist and frequent rain meant they would be more or less permanently wet unless they had better shelter than he could build in the short term. It would be acceptable for a couple of days, survivable for a couple of weeks, perhaps, but it would be miserable, and not sustainable in the long term. Going directly aftward was out of the question, they'd run straight into any angry Believers coming out of Charity.
They set off down the road, and Nikol had to force himself not to turn around and look back. My forge, and all that shipsteel . . . It would be nice to think that it wasn't all wasted, that they would be back and then he would once again be blacksmithing. It was going so well, I was supporting us, learning so much . . . He pushed the thought aside. There was no time for regrets now. Instead he looked up the curve of the world to find the crossroad through Charity, let his eye follow the thin dark line until it narrowed to a thread, moving up past the cluster of buildings that was Hope and farther, up and counterspinward to the point where the land arched over the vertical and overhead until it was lost in the glare of the suntube. There were other villages there, places he knew only as names on the University's maps. Those places would hear of the Crew raids and the retaliation of Charity's Believers, but they wouldn't have experienced them firsthand. Once the situation had had time to settle down they might find shelter there, trade work for food, maybe even start blacksmithing again. He looked down at Kylie, gamely trotting beside him, her small frame bent forward under the weight she carried. He remembered her tears the day her schoolmates had attacked her, the bruises from the chestnuts, most of all the hurt of rejection from those she had considered her friends. I can't expose her to that again. Two hundred years of tithing had left a deep scar of resentment in the Believer soul, where the Crew was concerned. Released of its religious restraints, it would burn hot. How long it would stay hot he could only guess.
Jed could smell the smoke before he could see it. At first he didn't think anything of it. He and his uncle were riding back, after four days of hunting in the virgin aftward forest, each with a gutted deer carcass awkwardly lashed to their saddle, and several brace of rabbits and squirrels as well. It had been a good trip, and a welcome change from the tensions of home. The smoke smell grew stronger, and gradually it entered his awareness that this wasn't some aftlander's cooking fire, this was something much bigger.
"Look." His uncle pointed, as they came around a corner of the path. They were on a small rise, just breaking out a treeline that marked the edge of a stump-filled smallholding. A thick dark plume was rising up toward the suntube, black against the silver-white of the foredome's ice layer. "Something's wrong."
"Is it home?"
"It's in that direction. Let's pray it isn't Riverview."
They rode on in silence for a while, contemplating the smoke plume. As their road turned this way and that it seemed sometimes that it came from somewhere beyond Riverview, other times that it could only be their farm itself that was on fire. Tension grew in Jed's belly, but there was no point in expressing it. They would find out the truth soon enough.
They came to the aftward border of Blessed Parish just after the noon-meal bell. There were some figures standing at the crossroads there, men and horses, and as they grew closer Jed could see they were all in the red robes of inquisitors. Their uniforms brought to his mind the merciless interrogation of Shealah Neufeldt and he looked to Thomas for reassurance, but his uncle stayed silent, his expression unreadable, though his eyes narrowed briefly. He finally turned to Jed as they approached the group. "Whatever you do, don't say anything, just follow my lead. Don't show fear, don't ask anything, if they ask you anything, just tell the truth, as briefly as possible."
Jed nodded, and found his heartrate speeding up. Something has definitely happened. Something is wrong. The smoke cloud in front of them had grown and spread, reaching almost all the way to the suntube. It wasn't a good omen.
The inquisitors were waiting, watching as they drew nearer to the crossroads, four on the ground, four on horseback. In addition to their normal robes, Jed could see they all carried wooden staves a good two meters long.
"Blessings, Brethren." Thomas smiled widely and waved as they came up to the group. "What's the news?"
One of the mounted inquisitors came forward, his hood uncharacteristically thrown back. His stave, Jed now noticed, was sharpened at one end, and he saw that the others were too. Those are weapons, this could get dangerous. In spite of himself, he felt afraid.
"Who are you?" The inquisitor was a big man, broad shouldered and heavy set, with dark hair and hard eyes.
"I am Thomas Fougere, and this is my nephew, Jedediah."
"I see. What's your home parish?"
"Charity."
"Charity Parish . . ." The man considered that, as if he could weigh the words to determine their truth. "Who's your bishop?"
"Bishop Nemmer. If I can ask, Brother, do you know—"
The inquisitor cut Thomas off with a raised hand. "I'll ask the questions." His voice was as hard as his eyes. "What are you doing here, on the far side of Blessed?"
"I took my nephew hunting, as you can see."
"Hunting." The inquisitor traded a glance with one of his fellows on horseback. "Not like the wealthy farmers of Charity to stoop to hunting deer, is it?"
The other shook his head. "Not at all."
Thomas shrugged. "Meat is meat. Deer fills the belly as well as pork."
The inquisitor nodded, his manner softening slightly. "That it does." He seemed to reach a decision. "You can go on. Be careful."
"Brother, what's happened?" asked Thomas.
"We've turned out the Crew, that's what's happened. The Town is burning, you can see it from here, part of Charity too, but we made them pay the devil for that, I can tell you. There's a lot of them running around loose still, we're hunting them down."
"Hunting them down?" Thomas's eyebrows went up. "Why?"
"To kill them, what else? Parasites, that's all they are." The inquisitor smiled as he said it, and Jed suddenly realized why the sharpened end of his stave was stained darker than the butt. "The men anyway. The women, we keep them for ourselves."
Thomas nodded. "Blessings, Brother." He stirred up his reins and went past. Jed nudged his mount to follow him, breathing out slowly. There was something tugging at the edge of Jed's awareness, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. They were halfway across Blessed Parish before it came to him.
"Uncle," he asked. "Were those Riverview horses they were riding?"
His uncle nodded grimly. "They were, Jed. I don't know what we'll find when we get home."
The inquisitor's last words were burned into his brain, and he couldn't help thinking of his mother and Mary. The women we keep for ourselves. He didn't even let himself think of what might have happened to Kylie.
After . . . How long has it been? Three weeks? Six? Nikol couldn't count the time he and Kylie had been living in the bush beneath the forewall. Long enough that their skin was sore and sloughing off in places from constant dampness and the clothes were starting to rot from their bodies. Finally he had decided to move himself and Kylie into the University. It was a dangerous decision, because the Believers had an army now, or at least a faction of them did, thugs in red cloaks with spears and bows and an easy readiness to do violence, and they too were moving into the University. They had attacked it, and made prisoners of the Crew. It was their base of operations, and they were busily transforming the place into a fortress. It was a calculated risk, but the University was a very large space, much of it unused even when the Crew had occupied it. It was rambling and much-modified over the century of Ark's construction, and Nikol knew its secrets as no Believer ever could. They came and went by way of the forewall ledge, invisible from below if they were careful to stay away from the edge, and lived in an upper level storage room, full of arcane equipment of forgotten purpose left behind by the builders. It also had a pile of heavy fabric pads, also purpose unknown, but they made serviceable bedding. Their first night warm and dry had been heavenly, and they quickly discovered that the red cloaks, busy with imposing their rule on their world, had neither the need nor the inclination to climb the endless stairs to the upper levels of the structure. They had safety for the short term, and more importantly shelter. He needed a long-term plan, but that would have to wait for a while.
They also had water and sanitation from the University's water system, and every few days would make a food gathering expedition, up the stairs to the forewall ledge, along it for three kilometers, to a place where the creeper vines grew thick enough to climb up and down as easily as a ladder. His frame, tautened by blacksmithing, grew lean on the exercise and the steady diet of fruit, roots and nuts, while Kylie, with the agility and lightness of youth, learned to swing herself up and down the forewall face as easily as she could walk. As their damp-ravaged skin began to heal Nikol felt better than he had in years, though he had begun to crave meat in a way he wouldn't have imagined possible. He continued to experiment with snares made with wire salvaged from builder equipment, but had no luck.
The red cloaks, by contrast, were having no trouble getting meat. They were bringing in cured sides by the wagonload, as well as fruit, vegetables, grain, and finished goods to furnish the place to their liking, a standard of living that seemed far higher than what even the Crew had been accustomed to. For a war that had started over tithes, the Believers seemed to have merely traded one yoke for another still heavier one. None of that surprised Nikol. The methods of tyrants were ancient and well proved. Give the commoners an enemy to revile, then control them through their hate and fear. At that they were better off than the targets of that hate and fear. Kylie found a spot high on the ledge where a tenacious bush gave cover, and with little else to do he took to watching Ark's new masters, studying their movements, even making notes. In another long-abandoned storage room he found a surveying instrument of some kind. Its fuel cell was long empty, but its optics were in perfect working order, and he used it to observe their comings and goings. Every day saw a steady trickle of captives dragged up the road to the auditorium, increasingly gaunt and bedraggled as the days crept past. Some of them were put to work on fortifying the University, digging a perimeter trench and lining it with sharpened stakes, erecting a rampart of earth and logs, building a prisoner stockade. Others . . . He didn't like to think about that. The red cloaks had erected crosses on the road leading down toward the town, and prisoners who raised the ire of their captors were lashed up to die of starvation and thirst, with their bodies left to rot away as an example to others. He saw Stroink go that way, and Bellingham, his value as a man of medicine not high enough to save him. The female captives were kept separate from the men, and the red cloaks who supervised them had no compunctions about stopping work for a round of casual rape. Nikol's jaw clenched the first time he saw it, and his hand instinctively when to his kukri knife—but ultimately there was nothing he could do to stop them. He turned instead to his notebook, writing down every detail he could discern through his lens. At least these crimes won't be forgotten.
What began as observation became obsession. He found a dusty parabolic dish antenna in another storage room and he and Kylie dragged it and its mounting up to their observation post. He replaced the feed horn at the antenna's center of curvature with a salvaged funnel and ran some flexible tubing from that. Sound bounced from the dish was focused into the funnel, and by aiming it at a group and holding the tube to his ear he could, usually, make out what was being said. Putting the dish on the forewall ledge was a risk, its sudden appearance might alert the red cloaks to their presence. It was a small risk, he rationalized to himself, but he couldn't escape the fact that it was unnecessary, and as such unnecessarily endangered Kylie. He warred with himself over that, but in the end it was Kylie herself who convinced him to do it. She seemed to share his need to bear silent witness to the unfolding atrocity, her fear overridden by something deeper and stronger in her character. He compromised by taking her to the forest for three days immediately after they installed it. He used the time to try some new trapping techniques, which yielded them a rabbit on the third day. They had left twigs around the dish, where anyone examining their eavesdropping post would have to disturb them. When they came back the twigs were undisturbed. The rabbit became a tasty stew, cooked in old builder glassware over a small and well hidden fire.
Having gotten away with installing the dish, they tried it out. It worked surprisingly well, and when it was aligned on a group he could make out their voices, tinny and distant, but clear enough that he could make out what they were saying. With the ability to listen as well as watch his notes exploded, incidents, times and dates, names and relationships. Kylie came with him, and they took turns watching, listening, recording. They learned that the red-cloaked thugs were inquisitors, and that they were led by a bishop named Nemmer, who had killed the True Prophet for denying God, and taken his place in the Temple. It was a worrisome change. The inquisitors had traditionally been the guardians of the Believer faith, and there had been at most a handful of them. This new group were very different from the Believers he had known, with their emphasis on community, brotherhood and humility before God. And this will destroy all that they are, inevitably. He found himself more saddened by that realization than he would have expected.
It also became clear was that inquisitors were a poor army. Their weapons were nothing more than sharpened sticks, most of them didn't even have a bow, and few of those with horses knew how to ride them properly. They didn't have anything that might amount to armor either, and their tactics amounted to rushing an outnumbered enemy in a mob. More importantly they lacked discipline and had little organization. The work on the fortification was haphazard, and it was common enough to see groups of prisoners standing around doing nothing while their masters argued over something. Fights between inquisitors were common. Any of the Earth armies Nikol had studied would have wiped them out with little effort, but they were more than adequate to hunt down and slaughter the hapless Crew. One result of their indiscipline was that they all went to sleep at the usual time, without thought for assigning guards and watches, except around the prisoner stockade itself. Even then the breakfast bell often found the guards asleep. A determined prisoner revolt in the sleeping hours could easily break the stockade and overwhelm the guards. And if the rest of the inquisitors were caught sleeping . . .
Except the imprisoned Crew were too dispirited to even make the attempt. They shuffled when they walked, eyes downcast, and only showed enthusiasm for food and for sleep, their efforts directed at walking the fine line between slacking at their labors and avoiding the whips of their masters. The men were completely defeated, none even bothered trying to escape. A few of the women did, perhaps driven by the fear of rape, but they were individual efforts, and the escapees simply vanished into the woods. There was no attempt at group action, no attempt to free anyone else, no thought to turning the tables on their captors. The Crew lived life easy for too long, and nobody remembers how to be hard. The fury that had risen in him when he'd first seen the inquisitors' bestiality had faded, but the images he saw through the surveying lens never left him. One night he'd awoken with a start from a formless nightmare to find Kylie holding him close. "You were crying in your sleep," she said, and when he put his hands to his face they came away wet. The details of the dream wouldn't return to his conscious mind, but he somehow knew their substance—Kylie beaten, Kylie raped, Kylie left on the cross to die. He hugged her tight to him then, rocking her back and forth as much to comfort himself as her. I can't let anything happen to her, I can't. Eventually she fell asleep again. He kept holding her, stroking her hair, saying devuchka beneath his breath over and over again. He found himself yearning for his long-dead wife. Lynne had given Kylie that name when she was newborn. She had cried constantly as a baby. But she never cries now. She had turned that part of herself off, he knew, stored the fear and sadness and loss away for a later time, when it would be safe to take those feelings out again. He lay for a long time, contemplating the wall. I need to find a way to make her safe. Eventually he slept.
Kylie was already up when he arose, slicing open mangos for their breakfast with her own shipsteel knife, and he saw her suddenly as if seeing her for the first time, the curve of her budding breasts and the swell of her hips, the practiced way she handled the knife, her easy grace as she moved. She was no longer his devuchka, no longer his little girl. She was becoming a woman—in truth she is already. It was unthinkable that she go on as they had been, living like rats beneath the feet of the inquisitors. His daughter needed more of a future than that. We will have to wait, but not too long. Bishop Nemmer was still securing control, and until he did it would be dangerous to have contact with Believers, but it would not always be so. Bad feelings against the Crew might linger in Charity, but elsewhere they would fade. Sooner or later Nemmer would feel secure enough in his rule that the hue and cry for fugitive Crew would die down. In those faraway parishes a man with a skill to trade will be able to make a place for himself. A place for himself, and for his daughter too. He nodded to himself. There would be risk in doing that, but there was risk in everything, and a life of furtive survival was no life at all.
In the meantime watching the inquisitors became even more important, because through their actions they could gauge their mood, which would be the best indicator of when it was time to go. Their work pattern had settled down to a routine now, and each day Nikol and Kylie watched the new defenses grow more formidable. The University was ringed with a semi-circular ditch now, running right up to the forewall on either side and almost as far aftward as the oak grove and the cemetery on the main road. It was three meters deep and full of razor sharp stakes at the bottom. The dirt from the ditch had been piled up to make a steep rampart, and the toiling Crew captives were now working to face it with timber. Behind the rampart a parapet of logs was being started. As they watched and listened they learned the names of the their leaders, learned to recognize Nemmer himself, who now came down frequently to supervise the work. The bishop was a man of presence, and Nikol could recognize him even without his improvised telescope, just by the way he stood, and by the way those around him deferred to him. When he was there none of his subordinates dared fight, and he steadily imposed more organization among the inquisitor rank and file.
As time went on fewer struggling captives were being brought in, one or two a day at most, and there were far fewer crucifixions. It seemed that Nemmer had figured out that his labor force was a valuable resource, not to be squandered unnecessarily. As if to compensate for the diminishing number of Crew being added to the stockades the inquisitors began to bring in Believers as well, recognizable by their plain dress, and because they showed no sign of the privations of a fugitive. The new captives gained no advantage for sharing their faith with their captors, the inquisitors worked them just as hard, and applied the lash to Crew and Believer alike to keep the University's new defenses progressing.
As Nikol watched the ditch and wall extend it bcame obvious that Bishop Nemmer's army wasn't aware that the forewall ledge gave access to the heart of their new citadel from above and behind. They probably don't even know it's here. That might become important before this is over. He and Kylie found themselves settling into a routine that echoed that of the inquisitors, watching while they worked, sleeping when they slept. Days slipped into weeks, and they gradually improved their hiding place until it was comfortable, and even almost homelike, using scavenged supplies from the long abandoned store-rooms to make furniture and fixtures. Their part of the University was built over the older, pressure-sealed section that had been used before Ark got its atmosphere and, once Nikol was certain the inquisitors wouldn't notice the change, he slipped down three floors and closed the pressure doors, jamming their locking wheels so they couldn't be opened from the other side. He felt more secure after that. Even if the inquisitors discovered their presence they could only get to them by climbing the outside of the structure.
And then they brought in Melany. It was Kylie who was watching through the surveying instrument when it happened. "Father," she asked. "Isn't that Dr. Waseau?"
"Where?"
Kylie pointed, and he saw, then took his daughter's place behind the instrument to see better. The woman being brought in was gaunt and dirty, her hair matted and tangled, but unmistakably it was Melany. She was tied hand and foot, being dragged from a just arrived tithing wagon.
"Quick, get the dish pointed." Kylie put the funnel to her ear and began adjusting the eavesdropping dish while Nikol kept watching. Melany's captors pulled her toward the women's stockade, and he found himself tensing with repressed anger. They were about to throw her into one of the cages used for new prisoners when something happened, and the inquisitors pulling her stopped and looked to the side. He swung the telescope to see what had caught their attention, saw Nemmer himself, gesturing for them to bring their captive over.
"Almost got it," Kylie said, and handed him the listening funnel.
He took it without looking up and held it to his ear while she tweaked the gimbals to line the dish up on Bishop Nemmer and his group. Down below, the inquisitors had stood Melany up in front of Nemmer and were untying her. Evidently their leader wanted to talk to his prize. Melany was angry, and she was saying something, her expression tight and bitter. Nemmer said something back, and then Melany struck him, hard enough to snap his head around. He looked up, slowly, and then cuffed her hard enough to knock her over. He made an angry gesture, and then the three inquisitors who had brought her forward grabbed her and carried her off. Kylie got the dish adjusted, just in time for him to hear Melany's last screamed words. ". . . rot in your hell, yobany!"
She might have said more, but one of the inquisitors holding her swung his pole up and around and brought it down on her head. She slumped and was silent, and Nikol felt anger surge up in him like a physical force, and his hand involuntarily went to the handle of his kukri blade. There was a scuffle of activity, and then what remained of Melany's clothes were being ripped off. She recovered herself enough to fight back, but she didn't have a hope of getting away. The man landed another pair of sharp blows that left her hanging limp, and then finished stripping her while the other two held her down. He opened his cloak, and Nikol's jaw clenched hard. The man was going to rape her.
"Stop!" The voice was Nemmer's conveyed through the tube at his ear. The inquisitor stopped, and the bishop advanced, moving out of the dish's focus.
"Follow him," Nikol told his daughter, and Kylie swiveled the dish to follow Nemmer. He finished speaking before he finished moving, so Nikol missed what he'd said, but the content of his words rapidly became clear. The two who had been holding Melany down picked her up again, the one who'd been about to rape her went back the way he had come. Nikol breathed out, long and slow. Melany wasn't safe, but at least for the moment Nemmer had given her some degree of protection. She wouldn't be raped or killed at random. Nemmer was still speaking, and he pointed to one of the one of the crucifixes erected beside the main road, just inside the new barricades. As Nikol watched, the two inquisitors hauled Melany over to it. There was already a body on the cross, rotted halfway to a skeleton, but they just strung her up on the opposite side of it using the loose ends of the ropes already there. She was still groggily defiant, but the pain of her position quickly overcame the anger on her face. One of the inquisitors drew his whip and began lashing her, alternating strokes between left and right while Nemmer watched impassively. Kylie finally got the dish realigned on the group, and her anguished cries came through the listening funnel. He dropped it as if it were a snake. I have to get her out of there. The thought came with the strength of instant conviction. I can't let her die like that. His throat constricted painfully, in anger and in fear, but his rational brain kept working, assessing the situation.
He couldn't act immediately, he would have to wait until the inquisitors went to sleep. The plan was simple. Sneak down through the lower levels of the University, past his old office, past the classrooms, down through the auditorium and out to the main road, cut Melany loose, and come back the way he had gone down. There would be the stockade guards to contend with, but if they acted true to form they'd be asleep by the midnight bell. He would have his kukri, more than a match for sharpened-stick spears, as long as he faced no more than one or two. He felt his belly tighten as he visualized the route he would take, considering how best to avoid the inquisitors, not down the main stairs but down through the faculty quarters, and through the labs, and then out through the auditorium. And I have to make sure Kylie is safe. He looked to his daughter and saw, not for the first time, his wife's face in hers. She was entering the stage of her life where a young woman needed a mother's guidance. Lynne, how I miss you, how I need you. He looked back to his optics, back to Melany. The inquisitors had stopped lashing her, had abandoned her to hang and suffer. Nikol realized that he was grinding his teeth. Nemmer is going to pay for this.
The wait for the evening bell seemed interminable. He spent some of the time talking with Kylie, going over what he was going to do, what she was to do if he didn't come back. She was scared beneath her courage, and he was angry at himself for making her scared. But I can't abandon Melany, I can't . . . He pushed down his own fear, and sharpened the blade of his kukri.
Nikol woke with a start at the midnight bell, the hazy remnants of another nightmare vanishing as he opened his eyes. Kylie was asleep, curled up beside him, her face relaxed and peaceful and innocent. He kissed her gently on the cheek, and she stirred. He had meant to leave without waking her, but as he was turning to go she yawned and stretched and her eyelids came open.
"Are you going then?"
"I'll be back soon, devuchka." He went back to her and hugged her tight. "I'll be back soon."
He went out, went to the stairs to the Crew's quarters and down, into the heart of the University. To move about while the world slept felt strange, and he found himself instinctively seeking the cover of a non-existent darkness, his hand gripped tight around the haft of his kukri. My genes evolved in a world of nights. On the upper levels dust was beginning to collect on the floors. As he went down he began to see signs of the inquisitors. They had ransacked the place in their first, furious search for Crew. Blood smears marked places where someone had died, most likely impaled on an inquisitor spear. In one classroom the blood was caked so thick and black on the floor that at first he couldn't believe it was blood. They slaughtered dozens here. He would have thought himself immune to horror after all the atrocity he'd documented, but his throat tightened at the sight. Farther along he opened a stairwell door and was turned back by a corrupt stench so powerful it made him vomit on the spot. He closed the door, recovered his breath and tried again, driven to see what was causing it, though there was only one possible source of such a smell. It was here they dumped the bodies. By holding his breath he managed to get down one flight, but then was driven back, not throwing up a second time only because he had already emptied his stomach. He took another path, his mind struggling to come to grips with what he was seeing. Farther down he came to the flexfab, where massed ranks of the builder's intelligent tools had waited patiently for the return of someone who knew how to use them. The inquisitors had vandalized them, ripped the dexterous manipulators from their mountings, smashed in the control panels, spilled the intricate, delicate mechanisms across the floor like the guts of a badly butchered hog. A new feeling rose in Nikol, a sense of loss that washed over even the sharp, red anger the inquisitor's brutality had kindled. Even the killings seemed less wanton, at least there was some internal logic to the brutality. This was destruction wrought purely for the pleasure of destroying.
He continued down and saw more evidence of the inquisitors' fury, from the simple ransacking of offices and classrooms to the burning of the library. He knew what he would see there before he saw it. The long streaks of soot blackening the steel ceiling and the heavy smell of stale smoke told him all he needed to know. Still he had to go and look, was compelled too. The library doors had been chocked open to let in enough air to feed the flames, and they'd burned the books on the shelves, ripping out the data desks so they could hurl them into the inferno. His stomach clenched and he nearly wept. All that knowledge destroyed. He forced himself to turn away. They don't just want to eliminate the Crew but the entire culture of the Crew. He steadied himself. The past couldn't be undone, all that mattered was the future. On the floor below he encountered his first inquisitors, sleeping in hammocks in what had been an office. He felt an overpowering urge to slit their throats as they slept, but he confined himself to stealing a red cloak, protective camouflage. He put it on, taking pains to be silent as he did so. There were more inquisitors camped out in other offices. Evidently the conquerors had disdained the bloodstained Crew quarters for the administrative level. Two levels farther down he came to the auditorium hangar. The inquisitors had tried to vandalize the fliers there, but their spears had only managed to flatten the tires, and the fires they built had only charred the paint on the fuselage underbellies. Nikol smiled grimly at this small triumph of civilization over barbarity. He passed the entry to the Temple tower cautiously, but there was neither movement nor sound. So far so good . . .
He crossed the hangar doors and went out to the aftward road, looking around cautiously. Ahead of him Nemmer's crucifixes stood in ranks along the roadway. In the warm and humid air most of the bodies on them had already rotted to skeletons, but even so the smell of corruption came to him as soon as he stepped outstide, a fainter echo of the stench that had made him vomit in the stairwell. To his right were the prisoner stockades, heavy log fences topped with thorny vines and ringed by a stake-filled ditch. There were four guards at each compound, carrying out their duties through the simple expedient of having one of their number sleep against the foot of the gate. Their red cloaks were draped carefully to ward off the chill of the mist, and their hoods were pulled down over their faces against the brightness of the suntube shining through it. He couldn't see the prisoners, but he knew from his vigils that they would be asleep too, lacking cloaks they huddled close for warmth. Nikol's skin itched in sympathy as he remembered the discomfort of living perpetually exposed to the damp. He straightened himself from his instinctive crouch, which took more of an effort than he might have imagined, and walked down the road, trying to walk confidently, as if he every right to be there. Now is the time to be bold. It seemed to take forever to cover the scant hundred meters to the forest of crucifixes. The stench grew stronger, but he was able to face it and carry on. Once there it seemed to take even longer to find Melany among the strung up bodies, though it was probably no longer than a minute or two. She stood out in being alive, he would scarcely have recognized her otherwise, her face was so gaunt and drawn. She was conscious but semidelirious, her eyes half-lidded, staring at nothing, her expression slack, her lips moving slightly, pronouncing words only she could know. He shook her, shook her again. Her eyelids fluttered, and her eyes seemed to focus on him. Movement caught the corner of his eye and he froze. To his left an inquisitor was urinating in the ditch, one of the gate guards. Melany started to say something, and he held a finger to his lips, as suddenly desperate that she remain quiet as he had been a moment earlier that she respond. Her lips started to move, and he put a hand to her mouth to silence her before she could speak. The other man finished, turned and went back toward the main gate, his slightly uncoordinated movements betraying the fact that he'd been sleeping. There were half a dozen more inquisitors there, sleeping in hammocks strung across the ditch or between the posts of the still unfinished inner fence.
And then they were alone again.
"Melany, it's Nikol." She turned her head in his direction but didn't seem to recognize him. "Melany, it's Nikol. I'm getting you out of here."
"Nikol?" She blinked at him blearily, uncomprehending, then her eyes snapped into focus. "Nikol! Where have you come from?"
"I'll tell you the story later." With swift slashes of his kukri he cut her arms free, right and left. She collapsed forward and he caught her, which made it difficult to cut the ropes at her ankles. I should have cut them first. It took some awkward jockeying before he could get the knife into the right position, but finally he managed to cut her loose entirely. He held her, steadied her, but when she tried to stand on her own her knees buckled. He put her arm around his shoulder and held it there, so he could support her walking. Now it only remained to get her back up to his hiding place.
"Blessings, Brother. Where are you taking her?" Nikol nearly jumped out of his skin at the voice, and he swallowed hard to steady himself before he turned around. It was the urinating man. He seemed curious rather than suspicious, and he didn't have his spear.
"Blessings." He put on his best Charity Parish accent. If the man recognized him as Crew . . . that didn't bear thinking about. "Nowhere special. Just going to have a little fun with her."
"Are you out of your mind? Didn't you hear what Nemmer said? You get caught with her and he'll put you up there in her place."
"Nemmer's asleep, he'll never know."
"He won't know because you are not going to . . ." He paused, came closer. "What parish are you from?" There was sudden suspicion in his tone.
In response Nikol dropped Melany and drew his knife. He swung overhand, aiming to split the inquisitor's skull, but the man instinctively thrw an arm up to block the blow. The knife hit home with a solid thunk, and Nikol felt it dig into the bone. The man screamed in pain, his face instantly transformed into a mask of fear, and turned to run, blood gushing liberally from his half-severed arm. Nikol swung again, but missed, and then the other was running back to the gate, screaming for help. Nikol took a step to chase him and stopped. There was no way he could catch the inquisitor before he woke his compatriots, no way he could fight them all at once, even with the advantage his knife gave him. Melany had fallen when he'd let her go, and struggled back to her feet. He grabbed her hand, pulling her along. Behind him he could hear confused shouts as the other inquisitors woke up. Ahead of him the guards at the stockade were standing up, looking around, trying to orient themselves as to what was going on. We don't have much time. Melany stumbled and he had to stop to pick her up. When he did he saw the group from the main gate already giving chase, spears in hand. They weren't going to get away with it. He glanced up reflexively, to the top of the University, to the forewall ledge and his eavesdropping dish. Kylie, please be safe. I love you, devuchka. There were just four in the group ahead, and he was closer to them. He might, with speed, aggression and luck, get past them. He tightened his grip on his knife and charged.
Riverview under the New Prophet was a grimmer place. Red-cloaked inquisitors were always around, poking their noses into every corner of the farm, questioning everything, making sure that God's commands were carried out to the letter, and making sure that the increased tithings demanded by Bishop Nemmer were met in full. Nobody liked them, but nobody dared say so out loud. There was the example of Hosiah Fludd, who had objected loudly to their presence on his land, and found himself tied to the cross in Charity Parish church having a confession to blasphemy extracted under an inquisitor's whip. Nor did his punishment end there, because Bishop Crowley, who had taken over the parish when Bishop Nemmer was elevated, attached his farm, his house and even his wives to the church, and then granted them all to one of the senior inquisitors. Hosiah had been forced to go aft, and no one in Charity or Charity Parish had seen him since. Mary was gone, declared marriageable and placed as a wife to Nemmer himself. Many of the hands and most of the horses were gone too, the hands to take well-paid jobs clearing land in the aft parishes, the horses claimed as mounts for inquisitors. Bishop Crowley came around frequently as well, and every time he did he suggested, strongly, that Jed be given over to train for the priesthood. His father had so far refused, but Jed had taken to hiding in the barn hayloft whenever the bishop arrived. At Thomas's suggestion he kept a pack full of clothing, hard bread, dried fruit and a waterskin hidden there as well. "You might find it easier to go out on your own than stay when the time comes," said Thomas. "This way the choice will be yours, not theirs." His father's mood grew dark and darker, and he would go for days without saying a word to anyone that was not a command or a rebuke. His mother's face grew lined with worry, and Ruth took to avoiding everyone, spending her days hovering over Magda. Magda, insulated by the innocence of youth and her mother's doting, nevertheless picked up on the tension and became stubborn and fussy. Only Thomas's personality seemed unchanged by it all, though the unvoiced concerns he carried were written clearly in his face.
And yet there were still fields to be plowed and grain to be harvested, the work all the harder because of the lack of hands. Once they'd harvested the current set of crops John and Thomas decided to let some of their land lie fallow, a decision that raised the ire of Bishop Crowley, who questioned their ability to meet their tithing responsibility. "Much is expected from those to whom much is given," he said. Jed, remembering the way his father had dressed down Bishop Nemmer over his defiance of the True Prophet, was surprised by the weakness of John Fougere's response. He didn't give in, but there was none of the force and conviction that had been his his hallmark for as long as Jed could remember. The change in his father was good in a way, replacing the anger that had characterized their relationship with withdrawn silence, but it made Jed acutely uncomfortable. He worked hard in the fields each day, trying hard to shoulder a man's burden on thirteen-year-old shoulders. The grand plans to raise and breed horses had long since gone by the wayside. It was small compensation that the special focus Bishop Nemmer seemed to have aimed at their family had gone with him to the Temple tower. Under Bishop Crowley it seemed there was no sin too small to escape the inquisitors, and no one was safe from the sudden denouncement of a friend or a neighbor, but he paid no more attention to the Fougeres than to anyone else. Church days became fraught with fear, with Inquisitions happening almost weekly, sometimes with two or even three sinners crucified and whipped into contrition. The Inquisition of Shealah Neufeldt, which had once shocked Jed with its harshness, now seemed a pleasant memory. The inquisitors were now putting sinners on the cross to be put to the test with fire and water, and the Inquisitions could last for days.
The Crew, Jed learned in one of Crowley's fire-breathing sermons, had been cast down as heretics and unbelievers. There was a bounty of a hundred tokens on any Crew turned in and caught, and plenty of people were eager to claim it. Three times now mounted squads of inquisitors had come charging through Riverview's fields in hot pursuit of a fleeing Crew, leaving rows of crushed corn behind them and dragging away their hapless victim. Bishop Crowley preached of the need to reclaim their souls before they were lost to God forever, of the need to reconsecrate the cross in blood to affirm their love of Jesus Christ, and there were nervous rumors that at the Temple itself the crosses were bloody indeed. Jed thought of Kylie whenever the bishop mentioned the Crew, and frequently at other times. I hope she's safe, wherever she is. He clung to the hope that she was. Dr. Valori was a smart and resourceful man. If anyone could look after her, he could, and Jed didn't want to think of Kylie on the cross . . . Anything but that . . .
And then one day, while he was walking the upper field, assessing the ripeness of the wheat, a group of four inquisitors on horseback came over the crest of the hill in the horse pasture and came toward him. They were trotting easily, not in pursuit of anyone, so he stopped and waited for them to come closer.
"Blessings, young man." The leader's voice was deep, and it carried an aftward accent. His eyes were sharp and piercing, as though they could see right through people to ferret out their innermost secrets.
"Blessings."
"You're John Fougere's boy, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"I thought as much. How long have you been up here?"
"Since last bell, sir. I'm walking the fields for my father."
"We're looking for a runaway Crew. Have you seen anyone come by here?"
"No, sir."
"Well swivel your eyes, and if you see anyone, shout out, we'll be casting around here for a while. It's a girl we're looking for, about your age, dark hair."
"I'll watch, sir."
"Good lad." The man spurred his horse and headed off at a steady trot, and his companions followed him. Jed watched them go, and dared to hope. A girl my age, dark hair. Maybe it's Kylie. Maybe I'll see her. Something tugged at his memory, and almost without thought he started walking, up from the upper field, going slowly, carefully not looking over his shoulders to see if the inquisitors were watching him. He got up to the top of the hill, and when he was over the crest he looked back, to see the horses vanishing down the aftward trail that ran along the top of Riverview. He ran then, down the hill and through the cherry orchard, toward the river. The long grass tugged at his legs as he ran, down through the ranks of fruit heavy trees, to the edge of the orchard, into the woods along the river, to a grove of wild oranges, to a willow tree, to the secret hollow beneath it where he and Kylie had sat, side by side, best friends a lifetime ago. He burst through the curtain of hanging willow branches, knowing in his heart that he would find her there.
He didn't. She wasn't there. Disappointment instantly replaced hope in Jed's heart. I was so sure. He had, in the brief span of time between speaking to the inquisitor and arriving at the willow, convinced himself that she had to be there, that she could be no other place. In the face of the reality that she wasn't he realized how foolish that really was. The world was big, and he hadn't seen Kylie in . . . How long has it been? A year, a year and a half or more, since the fight with Nebiah. There was no reason for her to remember him after that much time still less for her to come to this place that they'd shared only once, such a long time ago.
And yet when he looked in the crook of the log where they'd sat, the grass was pressed down. He looked closer, saw the trail worn into the grass, saw a small pile of orange peels. Someone had been there, and hope rekindled itself in his heart that it might be her.
"Jed?"
He jumped at the voice, whirled around, saw a ragged figure, gaunt, barefooted, clothing torn and hair matted, so thin he could barely recognize her. Kylie.
Kylie!
"Kylie!" He ran to her. "Kylie!" He reached her, threw his arms around her and held her tight. She was skin and bones in his embrace, so light he nearly fell over backward when he lifted her. "Where have you been?"
"Oh Jed." There were tears in her eyes all of a sudden, and her voice was tight with emotion. "I've been wishing for you . . ." Her arms were tight around him, holding as if he might vanish if she slackened her embrace in the slightest.
"What happened? Where's your father?"
"They took him . . ." Despite her thinness her muscles were hard beneath the remnants of her dress. She wore a length of rope as a belt, and a heavy steel knife hung from it, ready for instant use. Kylie had grown up in a hurry. "Oh Jed, I've been so scared."
"Who took him? The inquisitors?"
"They took him and . . . and . . ."
"You're safe now." He held her, and she broke down and cried, long and anguished sobs of loss, repressed until now, in the service of survival. Jed held her until she stopped, until she had recovered herself, and then, suddenly conscious that he was holding her, he let her go. They stood there for a moment, suddenly awkward. He had always known she was a pretty girl, but when she looked up, even with her eyes red and her cheeks puffy, he realized she was beautiful.
"Come on, let's get you inside and fed." She nodded, and Jed led her back through the fields, keeping a sharp eye out for the roving inquisitors along they way. There was no question of taking her into the house, his father's reaction could only be negative. The barn was a better option by far. Once they were there he took her up to the hayloft, to his own favored hiding place, then went to the house himself to get her some food, leftover lamb stew and bread still warm from the oven. She tore at the food greedily. "You have no idea," she said between bites, "how sick I am of blackberries and oranges."
"Tell me what happened?"
She finished her stew and then told him her story, how she had woken after her father went to rescue the chief engineer, stumbled bleary-eyed to their surveillance perch on the forewall ledge to watch, and from there she had seen the red cloaks take him, beat him, stab both him and Melany to death with their spears. Nemmer himself had come down, incensed at the penetration of his fortress, and ordered a search of the entire University. She had fled before they could get started, first to the forewall forest, where she and her father had hidden for the first weeks after the Crew attack on Charity, and when the mist and rain became unbearable she had moved aftward to the Town. She found it leveled, every building burned by the inquisitors.
"We saw the smoke," Jed said.
"Our house, the forge, it was all gone, except for his steel." She laughed a bitter laugh. "Only because they couldn't set fire to it."
She had stayed for a few days at her secret treehouse, but a patrol of inquisitors had found it and burned it, fortunately while she was away gathering berries for food. They set an ambush for her as well, but the fire warned her, and she came back cautiously, and by a different route. Even then she was nearly caught. One of the horsemen had spotted her and the whole group had given chase, but she ran into a ravine full of dense undergrowth and the horses couldn't follow. The inquisitors had searched hard, but she had crawled into a dense rose thicket. The thorns had torn her clothes and skin, but her pursuers hadn't been willing to fight their way into it after her, and so she had escaped. From there she'd worked her way steadily afterward, skirting Charity. Another inquisitor patrol had caught her in open fields, but they didn't have horses and the plowed furrows had slowed them down. She'd run hard and fast to the river, and jumped in and let it carry her downstream. Again, her pursuers has been unwilling to follow, but for the last three days inquisitor patrols had been searching diligently along the riverbank.
"I remembered that day we spent together, and I knew this would be a good place to hide, where I wouldn't have to go too far for food."
"You're safe now. They won't find you here, if we're careful."
"A hayloft." She looked around, as if assessing the barn for the first time. "It's a better place to live than most places I've been sleeping."
"I'll talk to my uncle Thomas. He should be back for supper bell. He'll know what to do."
"There's more. Look." She took out a sheaf of paper bound in a leather binder and gave it to him. It was prelaunch paper by its fineness, though it was wrinkled and stiff from being soaked and dried several times. "Jed, you're the only person I can trust with this."
The handwriting was somehow familiar, though it took Jed a moment to realize where he'd seen it before, in school, on his work. Dr. Valori. He read. There were dates, people beaten, raped, killed, sometimes with names given, sometimes only with physical descriptions. He flipped forward, saw notes on the construction of the defenses at the University, and diagrams, and then more atrocities, each one carefully documented. At times the writing changed, and Jed realized that it must have been Kylie herself who made those notes. He flipped to the last page, and saw in her own hand the description of her father's murder. The language was precise, detailed, as dispassionate as any of the other entries, but she had put force behind the pen as she hadn't before, the lines were heavy, and deeply indented, as the emotion she had kept out of her words came through in her hand. He looked at her in awe, realizing what she had come through, and suddenly his own troubles under the reign of Bishop Nemmer evaporated to nothing.
He found himself unable to speak, not knowing what to say. He closed the leather binder and handed the book back to her. For quite some time they didn't say anything, just lay side by side in the hay, taking comfort in each other's presence. Eventually Kylie fell asleep, and some time after that, lulled by the darkness and the hay and the shared warmth, Jed did too. He dreamed then, of a city, an Earth city so vast it stretched from forewall to aftwall, the spires of its buildings reaching for the suntube, filling the entire world with their bulk. He dreamed he was flying over it, flying up the curve of the world and around its arch, in a machine that soared and swung, dipping low to wave at the upturned faces below, then soaring high and higher that the world seemed to wrap around him and the heat of the suntube scorched the wings of his craft. He dreamed of Kylie beside him, her face soft and smiling, and then he was was yanked to sudden wakefulness by blow across his face. His eyes flew open and he found his father kneeling over him, fist upraised to strike again.
"Sinner!" The fist came down again, but Jed managed to raise an arm to block it. Pain flared in his forearm, but at least his face was spared.
"Father! No!" Jed scrambled back out of the way, but his father advanced on him, his face was a mask of anger, pulling his belt from its loops to use as a weapon. The commotion had awakened Kylie, who was frozen in the hay, watching the tableau with fear in her eyes.
"You dare to defile my house! You dare!"
"No, Father, I—" Jed kept backing up, felt the barn wall hard behind him. He could retreat no further.
"Heretic!" John Fougere raised his belt and in spite of himself Jed cringed against the blow.
"Stop!" The voice was deep, authoritative. Jed looked past his father, and saw his uncle, just coming off the ladder into the hayloft, his bow over his shoulder. "Stop right there, John Fougere. Hit him again and I swear on our father's grave I'll kill you."
Jed's father turned slowly to face his brother, pointed to Kylie. "He has lain with this Jezebel!"
Thomas unslung his bow and put an arrow to the string, his face hard. "I don't care what he's done. You aren't touching him again."
"After all I've given you—"
Thomas cut his brother off with a sharp gesture. "After all I've given you, John, faith, loyalty and sacrifice. This boy is your flesh and blood and your misfortune is no fault of his. Be a father to him or stand aside for someone who will." He switched his gaze to Jed, not waiting for his brother to answer. "Is this Kylie?"
"Yes, Uncle."
Thomas nodded. "I'm pleased to meet you, Kylie. Jed, get your pack, it's time to go."
"Why, Uncle?"
"Because a dozen inquisitors are searching the house right now, ransacking it. Someone saw you bring this young woman down from the upper field. They'll be here as soon as they're tired of that."
Kylie got up. "I'm sorry. Jed doesn't have to go, I will. I didn't mean to . . ."
Thomas shook his head. "There's nothing to be sorry about, child. There's nothing happening now that wasn't going to happen anyway, and soon. If you hadn't given them the excuse they'd have found another, sooner or later. The thing now is to get you and Jed safe away." He returned his attention to Jed. "Hurry, son."
"Yes, Uncle." Jed fetched his emergency pack from its hiding place in the rafters.
"Now, John," his uncle continued, addressing Jed's father. "You and I have fought for forty years, but we are brothers, and this is our family, and our farm. Bishop Nemmer means to take it, and our women, and our children. We can fight each other, or them. Which is it going to be?"
His father was about to answer when the barn door banged open below, and a voice came up from below. "I heard something. Check up in the loft . . ."
A thrill of sudden fear shot through Jed, and Thomas held his fingers to his lips, drawing his bow. There were footsteps on the floor beneath them, and the ladder creaked as someone put their weight on it, climbing. A red-hooded head appeared at the top of the ladder, a surprised face started to shout, and Thomas put an arrow through the man's forehead. The body fell backward, hitting the floor below with a sickening crunch. Immediately his uncle advanced on the ladder opening, putting another arrow to the string. He saw something, drew and fired. There was a strangled cry and a thud.
"Thomas, you've murdered a man!" Jed's father's face was aghast.
"Two men, John, and there's ten more to be killed if we're to have any hope at all of keeping what's ours." Thomas was moving around the ladder, searching out threats. "I think there were only these two here, but the rest will miss them soon enough. Now, are you going to help me or not?"
Jed watched as emotions warred on his fathers face, shock, anger, fear, and resolve. Finally John Fougere's jaw tightened, his eyes hard. "What must I do?"
"Get a bow. Quickly!" He turned to Kylie. "Can you ride?"
"I can. I'm not the best."
Thomas nodded. "Jed, you and Kylie get saddled. Take a mare and a stallion." He was already climbing down the ladder. John followed him, then Jed, then Kylie. "John, get a bow and watch the door."
At the bottom of the ladder Jed couldn't help but stare at the two bodies lying there, blood already pooling beneath them, its color so well matched with their cloaks that it created the illusion that they were melting. "Jed!" His uncle's voice was sharp. "Get saddled."
Jed nodded, and moved to obey, motioning for Kylie to help him. John Fougere had already grabbed a rabbit bow and a quiver of arrows from the rack, and was watching the door.
"They're coming down from the house, going through the toolshed." There was a sharp edge to John Fougere's voice.
"Can you see any of our hands?"
"No."
"We'll wait until they come for the barn, and take them in the open. Take the ones with bows first." John Fougere nodded, and his uncle followed Jed and Kylie into the stalls, where Jed had already led Scarlet and Tannis, the grey mare, out. Kylie was bringing saddles from the tack room. "Jed, you're going to ride aft, all the way aft, to the ocean. Don't take the roads, stay to the fields. When you get deep into the forest it'll be hard going with the horses, but keep them, you'll need them. Once you get to the ocean you're going to stay there."
Jed threw a saddle over Scarlet's back. "Uncle, what about—"
"What about nothing. You're looking after yourself now, and Kylie, and no one else. If something changes here I'll come and get you. I don't know how long Bishop Nemmer is going to last, I suspect a long time. If I don't come for you, it means there's nothing left here for you, so don't you dare come back." He turned to face Jed, looked him in the eye. "Promise me now, and swear it. Don't come back."
"How are we going to live?".
"You're going to hunt. You're good with a bow. Now promise me."
"I promise, Uncle."
"Good. Now, remember that promise when it gets hard, when you long to come home. Remember you gave me your word, as a man, and as a Fougere. Now hurry." Thomas was strapping tools to their saddles as he spoke, an ironwood shovel, an ax and a bucket to Kylie's, a coil of rope, two rabbit bows and a quiver, a second ax and a pair of heavy horse blankets to Jed's. He cinched the straps tight, then boosted Kylie up onto her mare. He turned to do the same for Jed, then paused to hug him, tight enough to take his breath away. "I love you, son. Take care."
"I love you too, Uncle."
Thomas paused, held Jed at arm's length for a long moment, a strange expression on his face. Finally he spoke. "I'm your father, Jed."
"What?"
"You're a man now, and there's no point to keeping secrets any longer. My brother can't sire children, but it's the eldest who inherits and the church will only grant title with his first child. We made an agreement, he and I and your mother, and Ruth too, when she came, so we could keep Riverview in the family."
"They're coming, Thomas." John Fougere's voice came from the main floor, tight with tension.
"Uncle . . . Father . . . tell me . . ."
"There's no time, and you have the truth that matters. Everything else you want to know comes from that. Now ride." Thomas pushed Jed up into the saddle. The stallion whinnied, sensing the urgency of the situation, and Thomas ran to open the main doors, but they opened before he got there, at the hand of a red-cloaked man on the other side. John's bowstring twanged, and his arrow took the man in the chest, throwing him backward. Thomas nocked an arrow and fired as well, aiming at someone beyond Jed's line of sight, and was rewarded with a gurgling scream. He nocked another arrow and jerked his head at Jed. "Ride!"
It was now or never. Jed dug his heels into the horse's sides, and the stallion broke into a trot and headed out the door. He dug his heels in harder and leaned forward, and his mount broke into a lumbering gallop. The suntube was painfully bright after the dim coolness of the barn, but through the glare he could see more redcloaks running toward the barn, spears upraised. One was unslinging his bow, and without conscious thought Jed pulled on the reins to head straight for him. He dug his heels in to keep the stallion in his reluctant gallop, and pulled the reins hard over when he tried to balk. They overran the archer at full speed, leaving him crushed and moaning behind them. He took a single glance back, to see if Kylie was following, and saw Thomas and John at the barn doors, bows in hand, firing at the inquisitors closing in on them. Another Inquisitor, farther behind the others, also had a bow and was aiming directly at Jed. A second later the arrow was on its way, and Jed watch in half-paralyzed fascination as it got bigger, and then suddenly it was buzzing past his ear. He pulled the reins left and then right, trying to get established in some kind of evasive pattern. More arrows followed, but they fell wide, and then they were away. He risked a second glance back at the barn, saw John Fougere fall with an arrow through his neck. Three inquisitors were down too, and Thomas was nocking another arrow, but he was outnumbered and there were already half a dozen arrow shafts sticking out of the ground around him. As Jed watched an arrow took in him in the arm. Thomas released his own shaft, but his wound spoiled his aim and it went wide.
"NO!" Jed hauled back on the reins to turn Scarlet around. He couldn't leave his uncle . . . My father . . . Sensing their advantage, the inquisitors charged Thomas, spears upraised. Jed dug his heels in to get back into the fight, even as he realized it was too late to save Thomas, and the attempt would likely cost his own life.
"Jed! Look!" Kylie's shout made him swivel around in the saddle to see. She was pointing up the slope, where four mounted inquisitors were galloping down on them. Kylie pulled up and turned with him. He hesitated, saw Thomas go down beneath a hail of blows.
"Jed!"
Decision time, but there was only one decision that made sense anymore. "Just ride, Kylie, follow me," he yelled. He dug his heels in again and turned back the way they had been heading, away from the barn, from the farm, from his entire previous life. Riverview has nothing left for me now. There was no time to consider what that meant. The big stallion surged beneath him, now fully committed to his gallop and needing no further urging. Jed headed him for the upper field and the orchards. The fruit trees were spaced wide enough to let him ride through at a full gallop, but were dense enough that perhaps they could lose their pursuers. Kylie followed, but she wasn't the rider that Jed was, and he had to slow his pace so she could keep up. The red cloaks were gaining on them steadily, and he fumbled with the rabbit bow to get it loose. I can't hit anything from horseback, but they won't know that. A few arrows loosed backward might do a lot to discourage pursuit. He grabbed an arrow from the quiver, managed to get it on the string despite the jouncing, but before he could shoot the upper field fence loomed ahead. He urged his mount over it, glanced back, willing Kylie to do the same. He saw the fear in her face as she came up to the rails and he realized that she'd never jumped before. He held his breath, but her mare knew what she was doing and leapt the obstacle without breaking stride.
Top field was furrowed and planted, and the soft ground slowed them enough that they were only halfway through when the first inquisitor leapt the fence rail. He was a better rider than the others and a good hundred meters in front of them. The others came over seconds later, as awkward as Kylie, but they all made it. Again Jed twisted in his saddle to shoot at them, and again he didn't quite have time to get the shot off before had to jump the fence at the far end of the field. Kylie made it over again, though her horse knocked the top rail and nearly stumbled and then they were among the fruit trees. Jed led them on a zigzag course, heading generally aftward and counterspinward, bent low over his horse's neck to avoid the branches whipping past. The world was a blur of green, and he glanced back to see if Kylie was still with him. His blood froze. She was there, and right behind her was the lead inquisitor. There was no way he could shoot at all with the branches in the way. In desperation he hauled back on the reins, slowing almost to a halt. Kylie thundered past, her knife in one hand and desperation in her face, overlaid with surprise at seeing him stop. "Keep riding!" he yelled, and then the inquisitor was coming by, his spear upraised. He thrust it at Jed as he went past, but his target was Kylie and he didn't slow down when he missed. Jed dug his heels in again and the stallion leapt forward. Keeping low he pulled back the bowstring, but he would have to be close to make the arrow count.
He glanced backward again to see if the other inquisitors were close, but they were nowhere to be seen. Lost in the orchard . . . or riding around it to catch us on the other side. There was nothing he could do about that, just ride on through the trees until they broke clear, and they'd deal with what they found when they found it. Ahead of him the man chasing Kylie had drawn almost level with her and was jabbing at her with his spear. Jed fired his arrow, though he knew he was too far and saw the shaft go wide. The inquisitor had figured out that a one-handed thrust wasn't going to give him enough leverage to stop Kylie and had switched to an overhand grip, thrusting down so the force of his attack would skewer her against her saddle. She was trying to fend him off with her knife hand, but the weapon was too short and the angle was wrong for her to strike. Jed fumbled for another arrow and caught a branch across the face as the price of his distraction. The lash cut skin and the sudden pain made him drop the arrow. He tasted blood in his mouth and spat it out, fumbled for a second arrow and nocked it. Ahead of him Kylie dodged left into the next lane of trees. It gained her momentary respite from her pursuer, but the inquisitor cut over at the next gap, and when he did he had closed enough distance to be able to grab her reins. Both horses skidded to a stop, and the inquisitor thrust his weapon at her again. It caught her in the chest, knocking her backward and off her mount, and then Jed was on them. The inquisitor turned to face him, spear upraised again, and Jed fired.
The arrow took the man full in the chest. He looked down, his expression transformed from anger to shock in an instant. He dropped his spear and put his hands down to pull the arrow from his chest. It came free with a horrible grating sound, and he screamed in pain. Jed ignored him, reining to a halt beside Kylie and leaping off his horse and kneeling beside her. She was gasping in pain, the front of her shirt soaked in bright red blood. He ripped it open, saw a nasty gash in her left breast, bleeding profusely. He stared dully at it for a moment, unsure what to do. She's going to die right here and I can't fix it.
"How does it look, Jed?" There was worry in her eyes and in her voice.
"It's fine," he lied. "There's a lot of blood, but it's just torn skin and flesh. You'll be fine." Behind him the injured inquisitor was moaning.
"Are you sure?"
"Oh yes." Under his breath he said a quick prayer that what he said would be really true. He got up and got the waterskin from his pack, brought it back to clean away the blood, frightened of what he might find. But at least she'll feel I'm doing something for her. She winced as he rinsed her wound. There was a lot of blood, but when it was washed off it looked like he was right after all, the spear hadn't penetrated her ribs. He went back to the pack, and emptied a small cloth bag full of dried lamb into a side pouch and returned with it. He folded the bag into a square and pressed it against her wound. "Here, hold this against it."
She did as she was told, and he suddenly realized he was looking at her naked breasts and looked away, unsure of whether it was right or not. She seemed to sense the change and re-arranged her bloody shirt to cover herself.
"Oh Jed, I got blood all over you."
"Blood brothers, remember?" He smiled at the memory and she smiled back. "Don't be worried about it."
She looked down at her injury and seemed about to speak, and then another voice interrupted. "For the love of God . . . help me . . ."
It was the injured inquisitor. He had tried to crawl away, but had collapsed face first in the grass, his breath coming in short, panting gasps. Sure now that Kylie was safe, Jed went over to him. We should just leave him. Instinctively he looked around to see if the others were close, but the orchard was still, bees buzzing peacefully from blossom to blossom, the three horses placidly cropping grass, as if they hadn't just been involved in a life-or-death chase. Jed looked at the man. What do I do now. The inquisitor was an enemy, personally responsible for Kylie's injury, and there was no doubt in Jed's mind he would have killed them if he could have, or worse taken them back to face the cross. He had not thought twice about leaving behind the man he'd ridden over with Scarlet. And yet then I had no choice, and this one is right here, and still a human being, and God's creature. The inquisitor had collapsed in the grass, and a slick, dark pool of blood was forming under him.
"Here, roll over." The man moaned, but complied, and Jed helped him to turn over to lie on his back. As he had with Kylie, Jed washed his wound, but where the spear had only torn her breast and skidded off her rib cage, Jed's arrow had penetrated the inquisitor's ribs on the right hand side. When he'd pulled the arrow out, he'd torn the ironwood arrowhead off the shaft, and Jed could see the head was still lodged inside. The inquisitor was bleeding profusely through the wound, and it was leaking air when he breathed as well. Jed tried to get the arrowhead out, but it was lodged too deeply, and the narrow base of it was too slippery with blood to get a grip on. Every time he tried the man screamed and moaned, which made Jed afraid he'd draw the attention of the others, who had to be somewhere close. But I can't leave him like this. Wincing against her pain, Kylie emptied another bag of dried lamb into the side pouch of the backpack. Jed folded it up and had the man press it against his injury. It quickly became saturated with blood, but it reduced the whistle of air through the wound when the man breathed.
"Thank you . . ." The inquisitor seemed only half-coherent, his eyelids fluttering open and shut. "I'm sorry . . . Please God, know I'm sorry." He didn't seem to be speaking to them, but then he reached up and took Kylie's hand, looked directly in her eyes. "I'm so sorry . . ."
"Don't worry, it's fine." Kylie kept holding his hand, and Jed lifted his head and folded one of the horse blankets under it so he would be more comfortable. He thought about replacing the improvised compress with another folded bag, but it was clear that there was nothing they could do to stanch the bleeding. It took the inquisitor a long time to die, though after a while he was mostly unconscious, only occasionally waking up enough to apologize once again, or ask for his mother. Jed found the experience unsettling. It's strange that we were enemies. It's my arrow that's killed him, and here I am comforting him as he dies. He felt that he should be the one apologizing, and silently and to himself, he did apologize. Please God, forgive me for what I've done here today. Eventually the man's breathing became imperceptible, and then sometime later it stopped. The change that came over him in death was subtle, but unmistakable. Please God, take this man's soul to the planet of Heaven, so that we can meet him again come planetfall. Jed felt tears well up in his eyes, and Kylie put her arm around him, and then he threw up. I have become a murderer today.
"You had to do it, Jed." Kylie hugged him, awkwardly because of her injury. "He would have killed us, or taken us for crucifixion."
"It's wrong to kill, it's a sin." Jed looked at the body, wondering if there was something, anything he could do that would somehow bring the man back to life.
"No." There was a sudden fierce intensity in Kylie's words. "It isn't wrong, not always. My father told me that nothing is always wrong and nothing is always right. It wasn't wrong this time."
"He didn't deserve to die . . ."
"He's a Believer, isn't he? If he's dead then he's in Heaven. Isn't that a good thing?"
"I don't know, I guess so." Jed took a deep breath. "I feel horrible."
"You saved me, that's not bad." She hugged him, hugged him again, harder this time and heedless of the pain of her wounded breast. "We should go."
Jed nodded. "The others must have given up, or gone ahead. If they were searching the orchard they would have found us by now."
"Come on." Kylie climbed up into her saddle, wincing as her injured chest took the strain of mounting.
"Shouldn't we do something about him?"
"There's nothing more we can do."
Jed nodded again, but it didn't seem right to do nothing, so he took the horse blanket from beneath the man's head and covered him with it. Then he mounted his stallion, stirred the reins, and they rode off at a slow trot. He felt tired all of a sudden, and hungry too, but it seemed important to at least get out of Charity Parish. The immediate hue and cry seemed to have passed, but he knew from experience that the inquisitors wouldn't give up so easily. In the distance the midnight bell sounded. I hadn't realized how much time was going by. They stuck to the orchards and fields, jumping fences when they had to, and they pressed on through the night bells, eating the dried lamb from his side pouch. They were out of Charity and through Blessed before the breakfast bell, and the forest had closed in on them. Finally, exhausted, they stopped in a small clearing in an young grove of ironwood. They hobbled the horses and found a soft, sheltered spot in the tall grass. Jed put his rabbit bow and quiver down within easy reach, and they pulled the remaining horse blanket over themselves. Jed fell immediately into an exhausted and dreamless sleep. His last thought was of Kylie. When he had first met her they had been exactly the same height, but now she seemed so small, cuddled close against him beneath the blanket's warmth.
He awoke to the sound of voices, and feet crunching through the underbrush. The inquisitors were out in force, hunting for them. He froze, not daring to move. He and Kylie would be hard to find where they were, a searcher would almost have to step on them to find them, but he had taken no special pains to hide the horses, and if they were found it would concentrate the search right on top of them. The tree trunks and the tall surrounding brush of the forest had seemed dense enough at the time, but now it seemed scant protection at best. He held his breath as time dragged slowly past. Kylie moved in her sleep, and the slight rustling of the grass seemed to echo. The group hunting for them was large and persistent, and some of them came so close it seemed impossible they couldn't see the horses, who continued to graze placidly among the trees. Somehow no one did. He raised his head slowly, trying to see what was going on. Kylie awoke beside him, and he put a finger to her lips to warn her to silence. Her eyes grew big with fear, but she took her knife in her hand. The inquisitors weren't going to take her without a fight. Stealthily Jed reached for his bow, then drew an arrow from the quiver. Each click of wood on wood, every rustle of grass seemed magnified. He nocked the arrow and waited, heart pounding. The voices seemed to be all around them, searching steadily, methodically through the forest. He wondered for a moment why the inquisitors would bother to put all that effort into finding a pair of runaway children when they already had Riverview, but the question answered itself. I killed two of them yesterday, Father and Uncle killed more. They can't let that go unpunished. If they did manage to catch him they would kill him for that, he realized, and they would do it publicly and painfully. Prophet Nemmer would want to send a message to anyone else who might want to defy his desires. The sounds seemed to go on forever, getting closer, then moving farther away but never quite leaving. Eventually the evening meal bell sounded in the distance and the voices started to grow distant. Jed allowed himself to relax, when there was a sudden shout.
"Brother Jacob, I found their horses."
There was the sound of running feet, and Jed traded a glance with Kylie. Her jaw was set in grim determination. Nobody was going to take her alive, to do to her what she'd watched done to so many other Crew. And I should make the same vow. He tightened his grip on his rabbit bow and slowly raised his head above the grass, until he could just barely see the horses heads, and the tops of red cowls, one, two, three, he couldn't tell if there were more. They were conversing among themselves, but he couldn't quite make out the words. It didn't matter. They would come soon, and then he and Kylie would sell their lives for the highest price they could extract. Jed could feel the pulse pounding in his ears. His hand shook on the half-drawn string of his rabbit bow, hard enough to make the arrow vibrate where it rested against the bow's curve. It took a conscious effort to ease the tension on the string enough to stop the trembling. He considered popping up and opening fire. The range was twenty meters, no more. He was sure to hit, and with surprise he could certainly take two before they could react, possibly three. But what if there's more? Underlying the thought was another one, deeper. I don't want to kill again, not like this, not in cold blood. What concerned him was not how hard it had been to kill but how easy. His reaction, as strong as it had been, didn't seem strong enough. I'll shoot when they come for us, not before.
They didn't come, which surprised Jed; they didn't even try. Instead they took the horses and moved off, their voices and footsteps fading into the distance. For a long time he and Kylie stayed frozen where they were. Eventually Kylie spoke, just a whisper close to his ear. "I think they're gone."
"They're probably waiting to ambush us."
She shook her head. "The evening meal bell went. They've gone to eat, and then to sleep. They won't be back before breakfast bell."
"That would be foolish, they had to know we were close."
"They are foolish, I watched them for months. They're foolish and lazy and cruel. They sleep when they should watch, and fight each other as much as the Crew. They've got the horses, they figure that's enough for now."
"Are you sure?"
"As sure as I can be. We should move, take advantage of the time."
Jed nodded. It was only when they got up that he realized the sudden enormity of the situation. All their equipment, their food, their water, everything was on the horses. All they had now was Kylie's knife, his bow and seven arrows, and the horse blanket. The forest would provide food, though in the drier aftward lands the fruit trees and berry bushes that populated the foot of the forewall and Charity Parish were less frequent. And there's nothing to do but keep moving ahead.
They did move ahead, for how long he didn't know, because at some point the peal of the hour bells grew faint and vanished. They moved until they were too exhausted to walk straight, and then slept again, on the ground beneath the horse blanket, to wake some timeless time later and walk again, keeping direction by the suntube overhead, leading them ever aftward. They found nothing to eat the next day, the ironwood and pine had given way to gnarled oak and beech trees, and the air was noticeably drier. They grew thirsty and moved spinward, hoping to intersect the next river over, but didn't reach it before they had to sleep again. Without hour bells to orient their time sense it seemed to make no difference how long they walked, or slept, or anything else, but Jed's throat was parched when he awoke, and he knew that they hadn't much time to find water, or they'd die. They marched on, slower now, and it was harder to fight their way through the brush and undergrowth. All thought of pursuit was long gone now, but the forest held its own dangers. In a clearing they came upon a clouded leopard, sunning itself on a hillock, its great golden eyes contemplating them with infinite calm, sizing them up. Jed put an arrow to his bow then, and Kylie gripped her knife as they carefully circumnavigated the clearing, on the side away from the animal. When they were halfway through it stood, and with a flick of its tail it vanished into the undergrowth. Whether it had eaten recently or decided they were too big to take they couldn't know. It was enough that it didn't attack. When they were safely away Jed allowed himself to breathe out. But for every one I see there are ten that see us.
They were nearly delirious when they reached the river, the name of which they had both learned in school and which neither could remember. They drank from a sandy spot by a clear pool in deep, glorious mouthfuls, heedless of soaking themselves. It was then that Jed understood that something fundamental had changed in him. When he finished drinking he caught sight of his reflection in the water, leaner certainly, and dirty, with his hair in disarray, but it was what was in his eyes that held him. They were hard, and strangely distant, and he felt as though he were looking at a stranger, and a dangerous one. It was a startling realization. I don't feel that way on the inside. But there was no denying that he had changed. Perhaps that's what happens when you kill a man, perhaps that's God's mark upon my soul for my sin. He slapped the water with his open palm to erase what he had seen and got up, looking away from the river as though it was to blame for what had happened. But I can't erase what I've done.
They slept again by the riverbank, in a thicket he hoped would be too dense for a leopard to bother with, and walked again when they awoke. They found a small clearing full of strawberry plants, and stopped long enough to strip it bare, but when they were done they were still hungry. Jed kept his bow at the ready, hoping for a rabbit or a chicken—or anything at all, but the game seemed to have vanished as well. There was nothing to do but walk, and it seemed then as if they had been walking forever, but when he looked up he could see the ring of the ocean coming closer overhead, blue against the aftwall. It looked like it was right on top of them, which meant they should already be there, and when it failed to materialize behind each copse of trees, over each rise in the ground, it began to seem more and more like it was a cruel joke, an optical illusion tempting them into a never-ending quest. Thomas was my father, all those years and I never knew . . . Walking gave too much time to think, and Riverview seemed like a lifetime away. As for the future, he couldn't even imagine what it held. Thomas had told him to go to the ocean, and so he was going because he had no plan of his own. And what would he say if he knew I had no plan?
And then they found it, over a low hill, immensely bigger than anything Jed had ever seen in his life. The ocean was a vast blue ring, ten endless kilometers from the beach to where it encircled the grey aftwall, with the suntube glinting from its waves. There's so much water even the air smells wet. Strange that the land should be so dry right next to the world's largest expanse of water. But what matters is, we're here. A few hundred meters to spinward the nameless river had built itself a network of channels out into the depth of the ocean, mud and sand carried downstream from above. Kylie came up beside him, and almost automatically he put his arm around her.
"We're here. We made it. We're safe, or as safe as we can be."
She nodded. "The inquisitors will never come here, never." She paused. "Now what?"
Jed swept an arm out over the water, "We'll never be thirsty again. What we need now is food, and shelter."
Kylie nodded. "Food first. Hey!" He jumped at her sudden exclamation, followed her excitedly pointing finger. "Look!"
She was pointing at the expanding ripples where a fish had jumped by the shore, a big fish by the look of it. They ran down to the water, found a wave-carved pool half-sheltered from the ocean itself, steep-banked and still, a tributary of the river, now nearly cut off by the shifting flow of silt and sand. In it was a school of circling fish, big ones. Without thought Jed drew his bow and nocked an arrow, then followed one of the fish until it came almost directly beneath him. He fired and the fish darted, transfixed by the arrow but still alive. He dived in after it, splashing and struggling. The other fish scattered but he emerged, triumphant and laughing, with the arrow in his hand with the fish still on it, flopping and gasping. He threw it up on the bank and clambered out.
"Do you think it's good to eat?"
Kylie nodded. "Father would fish sometimes. It's called a trout, I think. If we can cook it we can eat it." She looked at the fish dubiously. It didn't look like it would be very appetizing raw. "I don't see how we can cook it. Maybe dry it in the sun?"
"I can make fire, if we can find some ironwood."
"How?"
"With friction. I'll show you if we can find some." He frowned. "I wish I'd thought to cut a branch when we were back where there was a lot. I haven't seen any since we came to the river. I just wasn't thinking about cooking."
"Aren't your arrow shafts ironwood?"
Jed brightened immediately. "Perfect, and just the right shape too."
Minutes later she was watching in fascination as he gathered some driftwood, piled it into a cone shape. "Lend me your knife," he asked.
She did, and he split a small piece of driftwood and shaved it with the knife, made a groove to accept the arrow shaft, and minutes later he was demonstrating the use of a fire drill.
"That's amazing," she said, as the tiny ember brightened into a small flame.
"My uncle . . . I mean my father taught me."
Carefully he transferred his hard-won prize into the pile of twigs. They caught fire too, and soon they had a proper blaze going. Kylie split and gutted the trout with her knife, spit it on a stick and started it roasting. It sizzled appetizingly, and Jed suddenly remember how very, very hungry he was. Funny how your body will forget that, until there's food. They ate it with their fingers, washed down with gulps of fresh ocean water. After that they sat by the fire, side by side though there was really no need for the warmth.
"Do you think we'll ever be able to go back?" Jed asked.
Kylie shrugged. "I've got nothing to go back to now."
Jed pursed his lips. "No, I suppose you're right. Neither of us do." Jed remembered his uncle's parting words, and the promise he had given. Nothing to go back to. It was a simple statement of fact, somehow divorced from any of the emotions that should have gone with his losses. The future is survival. I have to concentrate on that. He pointed to the pool where they'd caught the trout. "We could get sticks, make a fence across that and catch all those fish at once."
"Later." She moved to sit beside him, leaned her head on his shoulder. "Let's just rest for now."
He put his arm around her. It was pleasant just to sit there, bellies full for the first time in days, their future suddenly transformed from simple survival into . . . Jed looked out over the ocean to the distant, looming aftwall, up to the suntube, back down to Kylie beside him, and felt the future transform itself. . . . into something more. Not just survival, something different, something new . . . She looked up at him, and he leaned forward and kissed her, on the lips for the first time. She kissed him back, shyly at first. . . . into something beautiful.