Heritage of Flight (31 page)

A change in the light woke Pauli, and she shifted under her blankets, She could not remember having wrapped so many of them about herself. Nearby sat Halgerd, who looked as if he had not moved since the night before. Had he watched over her all night? Half-embarrassed, half-touched, she sprang up and went to the cave's mouth. The day had dawned crisp and cold. “Good flying weather!” Thorn approved, and Pauli returned his grin.

"I think I can probably get through to the settlement now,” she said, and activated the powerful transmitter they had left in the caves but which Thorn, thinking no one would care to hear from him, had never used.

For an eternity, static crackled, and then—"Pauli, is that you?"

"Rafe!” Abruptly the signal waned, then rose, disintegrating into howls and spatters of static.

"—emergency generator going! Yes, I'm here."

"Rafe, I've got the material we need. It's weather patterns! A cold winter, a wet summer, and you've got conditions under which you have to watch out for ergot. But the life-sciences people ought to be able to spray, and to select out an ergot-resistant strain! I'm coming down!"

Rafe's voice cut through her exultation. “That's fine, Pauli."

Over the static and the hum of transmission, Pauli heard other voices, sharp and dismayed. But she only heard sounds, not words, almost as if Rafe kept the speaker pressed against himself to drown out the messages.

"Not now,” she heard him hiss.

"Rafe, what's wrong?” she demanded. “Have there been any more deaths?"

"Two miscarriages.” She practically had to pull each word from him.

"It's not Dr. Pryor, is it? Rafe, damn you, if I'm worrying, how can I get back down there safely?"

"All right, Pauli. I'll tell you. Last night, there was a theft from the storage domes: food, heatcubes, blankets, and tools. Sometime in the night, the kids—all but the ones still actively sick and Dave's twins—sneaked out of the camp. I think Lohr decided that they'd have a better chance on their own, so he's taken them and gone to ground."

The pause dragged on so long that she almost didn't have to ask the next question. “Serge too?” she asked. In a moment more she would collapse, would draw herself into an aching knot and keen her loss. But not now. Not now, dammit!

"'Cilla's disappeared,” Rafe said. “And you know how attached to Serge she is."

"I'm coming,” Pauli forced the words out. “I'll fly down to you. Rafe, have you told me everything?"

The comm was silent for so long that Pauli was sure he had broken transmission.

"No,” he said, his voice leaden. “When people discovered that the littlests had vanished, there was a riot. Somebody painted those black winged things all over the life-sciences’ domes. Worse yet, in the confusion, one of the quiet crazies got loose again and wrecked some of our repairs. All the grain storage domes are without power now. Freezing cold. We've abandoned them for now."

"I'm on my way,” Pauli ended transmission and stood up.

"The children are gone?” Thorn asked.

Pauli shook her head sorrowfully. “All of them. They couldn't trust us to take care of them. They couldn't even trust me to care for my own son!” It was Lohr, she knew. Lohr with his talents and his strength, his fears, his angers—and the trust the adults had betrayed: they had promised him protection, but been unable to protect those he protected from themselves.

"How far could they go without being spotted?” he demanded. All his earlier hesitancy and deference had vanished in what Pauli realized was his overwhelming relief that there was something he could do.

"Pauli, you fly back to the settlement. I'll take my wings—Lohr's wings—out and start a search pattern. One good thing about living up here alone. I probably know the land better than any survey map. Once you get the riot under control, you come fly patterns with me, or send someone else. Someone who can work with me and not see a murdering nonhuman bastard,” he added.

"And if you see the children?"

"I'll signal you, then land and try to convince them to let me bring them back."

The words stuck in her throat. “If I know Lohr, they're armed. They've lived wild, Thorn, and they've killed before."

Thorn lifted Pauli's wings from her pack and began deftly to assemble the struts and the harness.

He looked up with a faint, bleak smile. “I don't think they'll kill me,” he said. “For one thing, I'm faster than they. For another—look what a mess Lohr made of it the last time! When he's afraid, he turns angry. But he's lived among adults for too long. I think he'll be glad to hand over the responsibility for the other children—if not to me, then to someone he trusts. Someone he ... loves."

He held out the wings to her, and she turned her back, allowing him to adjust them, before she fastened the harness. “Just fly straight,” he told her. “I'll check in later."

How had she ever thought of him as young and vulnerable? What an ally he was going to be!

Pauli stepped to the edge of the cliff. The sky was pale, with a drift of cirrus clouds, more fragile and lovely than any wings. She waited, choosing her moment, her gust of wind the way surfers chose their waves. There it came!—cold, fresh, swooping down to take her with it—

Pauli Yeager stepped off the cliff, extended her wings, and soared into long-awaited, exultant flight. The sun glinted off her wings, and she cried out a welcome.

19

A tech's hand shook Rafe from a waking nightmare that somehow had turned into restless sleep. He leapt forward, his instincts screaming fight, then, as his eyes focused, he sank back. God, how his back ached! Once again, he had lain sprawled over his desk, his head buried in his arms among the clutter of notes he had scrawled longhand until he thought he never again would be able to uncurl his fingers. They still ached. His neck and back shifted and ground like tectonic plates, and when he spoke, only a rasp came out.

"Now what?” he muttered, and the tech bent confidentially close. The last time they'd waked him, it was to tell him that Beneatha Angelou had wandered away from the settlement with a relapse of her hallucinations. She had fallen, she told the medics, and when she recovered consciousness, she had staggered back home. He'd yawned. If that was what she wanted him to believe, well enough; better yet that she was still alive.

Perhaps in Beneatha's wanderings, she had seen the children on their way to whatever refuge Lohr thought he had found for them. (Rafe didn't think that the boy could get them all the way to the caves, which, at any rate, were occupied.)
Couldn't they even trust me to care for my own son?
Serge was gone, missing with all the children except Ari and Ayelet, whom David had taken home once his son's fever and sweating and nausea subsided.

Husky specimen that he was, Ari was out of danger, now. And waiting outside to talk with Rafe. Rafe called him in; and his sister came too. Perhaps one of them might have an answer for him.

Ari flushed and went silent. But Ayelet proved more talkative. Since she had not eaten any of the tainted bread, she had escaped the madness, though worry about her brother and her colony had set dark circles under her eyes and made her jump at any sudden movement.

"Why did you pass up the bread?” Rafe asked her.

"Lohr said I was too fat,” the girl muttered, her eyes downcast, her full cheeks flushing awkwardly.

Rafe looked over at ben Yehuda, who shrugged, then took over the conversation.

"Sweetheart, did Lohr ever say anything to you that—"

"I've been trying to remember!” she cried. “You know Lohr: he's always quiet about what he thinks. Do you think you can bring him back, him and the littlests?"

Rafe covered his face, massaging temples with trembling fingers.

I'm not the one to ask. Rafe the weakling, with his smile for everyone, and his broken nerve. Look what happened: Pauli takes off for the cliffs, risking her neck because she knew I couldn't handle that mission. What happens here? She leaves me in charge, and the whole place falls to hell, or worse than hell. And now those mad bastard kids stole my son! Lohr, if I ever see you again...

Someone shook at him, and he leapt up, his hand grabbing for the weapon he always carried these days.

"Oh, ‘s'you,” he grunted, staring bleary-eyed at the tech who watched him from a wary distance this time. Last time he'd tried that, Rafe had caught him by the throat.

"Wha's it now?” he grumbled.

"Someone's coming in!” cried the man. Someone? It had to be Pauli! Thank God. Tears came to his reddened eyes again. Rafe struggled out of his uncomfortable chair, stretched the worst aches from his spine, and hurried outside.

Noon light glinted off the reflective surfaces of canted wings as his wife's glider banked and spiralled down toward the camp. Rafe started toward her, breaking into a shambling run as he anticipated her turns and her landing site. He was there as she touched down, staggered, and overbalanced into his arms.

For a moment, Pauli's face retained the exultant grin she wore whenever she managed flying time. Her body was taut, ready ... poised, seemingly, for takeoff the moment she caught her breath.

Never love a pilot!
he reminded himself. But the look on her face reminded him just how easy he had found it to love her. But as he steadied her, pressing her against his body, the exultation went out of her; and she clung to him. Her grief flooded out from her hands and the skin of her cheek to engulf him.

"I've got answers for us,” she whispered. “Thorn's flying search, and he should call in soon. He'll let us have the computer from the caves, and all the supplies we gave him."

Rafe straightened up, one moment past the brattish impulse that tempted him to sob out his failure in his wife's arms. How tiny she was—and how brave! And how terribly he had failed her when she had trusted him to keep order. Well, he'd kept some order, but he had not been able to prevent the children from fleeing, or the madmen from breaking loose. Smoke still wound up in greasy trails from some of the ruined domes; crudely painted black moths still dripped down the sides of many others.

Almost as bad as the ruined worlds
, he thought, choking back tears.
No wonder the kids fled us. They'd had a bellyful of adult “protection."
His hands tightened on Pauli's narrow back and he drew on the strength that was the greatest thing about her.

After a long moment, she drew a shaky breath, and pushed free of him, her hands fumbling, despite long familiarity, with the glider's harness until the wings toppled from her back to the ground.

"Get everyone out here,” she told him. “Everyone, even the people who are sick—but not crazy enough to run wild if we take them outside. I'll speak to them outside the commhut."

Not a word of their child. Neither of them had ever been good with fine words: nor had they needed that many words between them. Now he could see grief bleeding her white, as it had bled him from the moment when he learned that Lohr preferred the wilderness to the adults who had murdered an entire race to protect them.

She stood waiting, the bright folds of her wings casting sparkles upon the grimy flightsuit that she had worn for the climb, as people walked, hobbled, or were carried toward the central area outside the commhut. Then, walking slowly so that everyone could see that she was still alive, still sane, still there for them, she joined them.

"I understand,” she began in a clear, quiet voice, “that some of you have decided that we don't belong here. What I want to know is where you do think we belong? There aren't any ships, you know, to listen to us whine, and come take us away—unless, of course, you want to run the risk of the Secess’ finding us.

"Have you thought of what might happen, though, if our own people find us? what they'll call us? how we're likely to be sentenced? Maybe some of you have, because some of you, I can see, think that the only thing left for us to do is die here."

She let the mumbling begin, rise, then peak in a few shouts of angry agreement, “How dare you?” she began in a breathless, angry voice that rose like wind blowing across stone: cold and unforgiving and dangerous. “How dare you suggest that we let ourselves die here? What sort of remembrance is that of the people we killed: to lose heart and die, and leave their world a desolation?

"I ask you, do you really think you deserve to die, and to forget what you've done—what we've all done? An entire species is dead, killed by us to protect our children. And now our children are missing"—her voice crackled with sarcasm—"and some of you are probably whining that we ‘cannot interfere,’ or that the kids—children, all of them!—are smart enough to choose wisely.

"I told you when we killed the Cynthians: we have to make our own choices, and live with them. We ... we the adults. That's what adults do. If we don't shoulder the burdens, no one else will. But we cannot choose death for our children, who've had so little of life."

"Where are they? Find them!” Pauli heard people in the crowd begin to cry.

"I've got a man looking into it,” she assured the people. “Thorn Halgerd. He's giving us the supplies we gave him—bribed him with—to leave us alone. Giving them to us, because human children are lost, and he cannot bear that any child suffer pain if he has breath to stop it. He's coming down now. I don't expect you to love him. But I do expect you to make him decently welcome. Because his first thought, when he heard that our children were lost, was to think how best to help us. Not to scheme how he'd wait till we'd killed ourselves off, then contact the Secess'."