Jenna Starborn (44 page)

“I'm not sure I can eat,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could. “I'm not sure I can keep food down.”

She looked at me sharply. “You can't—eat? Is that what you said?” she asked.

I nodded. “I'm not sure. I've been—” It was too complicated to explain. “Sick,” I finished lamely.

“Well, I brought you some tea and some soup,” she said briskly. “Very easy on the stomach. Let's try it and see how you do.”

Indeed, the bowl of soup looked more like broth, though it smelled wonderful, and tea, of course, was an invalid's mainstay the universe over. I ate cautiously at first, then more ravenously as my stomach did not reject my offerings, and I finished every ounce of food on my tray.

The woman watched me with a face half pleased and half wondering. “Gracious, you must truly have been starved,” she said. “Would you like more? Or perhaps we should wait a while and see how well you handle that much.”

“Yes, let's wait,” I said.

She had settled in a facing chair while I ate, and now she studied me with frank curiosity. “Do you feel better now? Can we try to talk?” she asked. “I'd like to help you, but I think I need more information.”

“I'm Jenna Starborn,” I said right away. “And you?”

“Your name is Jenna? Is that what you said?”

I nodded.

“Starrin? Jenna Starrin?”

I shrugged, then smiled. It was a manufactured name anyway; that was close enough. “Yes,” I said. “And your name?”

“I'm Deborah Rainey,” she said, seeming to understand my question with ease. “My brother and sister and I run the Public Aid Office here on Appalachia.”

“Public Aid Office?” I repeated, for I had not heard of such an institution. In many of the larger cities, there were facilities for taking care of the indigent and the outcast, but these were referred to by such unattractive titles as Half-Cit Rehabilitation Center and the Welfare and Reform Office, and only the lowest and most desperate creatures would think to seek shelter there.

Though I was a low and desperate creature, and at the moment, I would not scorn any help at all.

Deborah Rainey was answering my half-articulated question. “Yes, my brother, Sinclair, founded this facility three years ago when we first relocated to Appalachia from Newyer. Our goal had been to purchase a tract of land and begin farming, though none of us had any experience with agriculture. We were just looking for a hopeful new start on life! But Sinclair had friends who had set up businesses here in Cody—”

“Cody?” I could not form a complete sentence, but Deborah Rainey seemed to catch the drift of my one-word question, for she answered this one easily as well.

“Yes, the name that has been bestowed upon the major spaceport here. It has grown to be so much like a city that we have given it a real city name. Anyway, Sinclair had friends here who were already established, and who knew Sinclair from our days back on Newyer, where he also ran a charitable institution. And they persuaded him that Cody needed such a facility right away, for it was growing so fast and receiving such an influx of would-be settlers that there were any number of people getting lost in the shuffle. The Job Op Office does what it can,” she added in a careful tone of voice, “but the personnel there don't have the time and patience to deal with people who aren't instantly prepared to take up the rhythms of a new life. So we have found ourselves very often taking in travelers who need a period of adjustment before they can accustom themselves to their new world.”

“I cannot pay you,” I said instantly. “I have no credit.”

“No, no, we are entirely funded by the business owners of Cody,” she said quickly. “We provide a service to the city by keeping wanderers off the street and helping displaced travelers recover their senses. And most often, after a stay of a few days or a few weeks, these travelers become the energetic, productive people they were when they left their home planets, and they take new jobs, and they are quickly absorbed into the economy of Appalachia. It is very satisfying work.”

“Then I can stay?”

“Yes, Jenna, you can stay. As long as you need to.”

I could not help myself. I started crying. Deborah Rainey leapt to her feet and came around to hug me, patting my disheveled hair and murmuring reassurances into my ear. It did not matter that the reassurances were generic, for she did not know what my sufferings were and how to allay my true fears. Her words seemed genuine, and her embrace felt sincere, and I felt safe as I had not felt in over a year.

 

 

T
hat night at dinner, I joined Deborah Rainey, her sister, her brother and their other temporary boarders in a communal dining room. Maria Rainey looked much like her sister, except that her face was several years older and her hair not quite so lustrous. Still, her expression was just as warm and welcoming, and I immediately liked her as much as I had liked Deborah.

Sinclair Rainey, on the other hand, seemed to have been constructed from an entirely different set of raw materials than his sisters. His face featured fine modeled cheekbones and a firm, determined chin; his oakblonde hair formed soft curls that he had cropped as short as he could, though nothing could entirely subdue their gaiety. His eyes were such a brilliant blue that I would have sworn they were enhanced, except that five minutes in his company led me to believe he would scorn such personal embellishments. For he had the expression, attitude, conversation, and courtesy of an aesthete—a fanatic—a man called to a mission that he would serve with so much passion he would forget the needs of himself and the ones he considered that he loved. I did not know what his mission was, but that he had one, I was willing to swear that very first evening.

The other guests were, like me, rather beaten-down and disoriented casualties of a long space voyage and no clear plan of action. Three of them formed a small, miserable family—father, mother, and son—while the fourth was an older man of somewhat rakish mien who spoke wistfully of his days on some planet I could never definitively identify. The family members I assumed had come to farm, but I was not certain what the older man's claim to employability might be. In any case, I was not required to converse with him. Maria Rainey spent most of the evening listening to his rambling talk with every evidence of interest on her good-natured face. The rest of us made short, hopeless attempts at discussion, but mostly applied ourselves to our food. Which was very good and caused no rebellion in my stomach at all.

After the meal, Sinclair Rainey disappeared and the sisters invited the rest of us into a small parlor where, they said, there were books, games, monitors, and other entertainments. The others gratefully accepted this possibility of a few hours' distraction, but I excused myself, and went up to the small bedroom I had been allotted. Within a few minutes, I had washed my face, breathed a prayer of heartfelt thanks to the Goddess, and fallen deeply asleep.

 

 

T
he next morning, I presented myself in the kitchen as soon as I was awake and sensed the house astir. Maria and Deborah Rainey were already there, moving in comfortable silence from the freezecase to the bakeshelf as they put together ingredients for a morning meal.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

Maria almost dropped a bread knife, for she had not seen me come in, but Deborah smiled and motioned me forward. “You may come and keep us company,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, very.”

“That's an excellent sign!”

Maria asked, “And nothing you ate last night disagreed with you?”

“No, it was a wonderful meal. Thank you both so very much. But I would like to do something to prove my gratitude—or earn my keep.”

Deborah laughed. “I told you, nothing like that is required. We are funded by the city.”

“Yes, but I am not accustomed to sit back idly while others work to take care of me,” I said, noticing as I spoke how much clearer my words sounded today. And, indeed, neither sister seemed to have trouble understanding me, for they both smiled.

“Very well, then, you may mix up this batter if you wish. Do you like to cook, Jenna?” Maria asked.

I obediently took a bowl and a spatula and began folding in ingredients. “I don't know. I've never done it.”

“Never!” Deborah exclaimed. “Why, where have you lived that you have never had to cook for yourself?”

And
, the unspoken question hung in the air,
how have you fallen on such hard times that you now must work like a servant girl?

“I have not enjoyed a luxurious life,” I assured them. “I have lived in grand houses, but they were not my own. I grew up as the ward of a lady with much wealth but very little heart, and then I lived at an educational institution where all the food was prepared for us by cafeteria workers. From there I went to work in a great manor where all the meals were served by a cook who did not like others to meddle in her kitchen.”

“I cannot decide if such a life sounds adventurous or sad,” Maria commented.

I smiled somewhat bitterly. “At times it has been both.”

“Here, when you have done with that, you may chop these into the finest pieces you can manage,” Deborah said, setting a knife, a chopping board, and a mass of small vegetables beside me.

I was bemused by the sheer volume of work laid before me. “All these, for just the eight of us staying in this house?”

The sisters laughed. “Oh, there are only five of you who are our guests here, but we run another small facility nearby,” said Maria. “At the moment, I believe there are ten others staying at the dorm house.”

“Eleven,” Deborah said.

“Eleven, then. They have been here a few weeks and are really in transition—most of them have found jobs already, but they do not have places to stay yet, so we provide beds for them—and breakfast. Everything else they are responsible for on their own, though Sinclair is instrumental in helping them find both housing and employment.”

“It must keep all of you quite busy, running two households and what is essentially a job placement office,” I observed.

“Quite
busy!” Maria said with a smile. “But we all enjoy the work.”

Deborah handed me another bag of vegetables and turned the conversation back to me. “So what did you do at this grand manor where you used to work?”

“I was a nuclear technician,” I said.

The sisters exchanged glances. “Really! But that's excellent!” Maria exclaimed. “Can you repair systems? For ours is most unreliable and Sinclair simply
will
not take the time to call in a repair team.”

“You have your own generator?” I asked in surprise, for normally all the buildings in a city would draw on the energy from one or two central power plants.

“Well, we do, but it's a long story,” Maria said. “It's very small, and it hardly ever works, and when it doesn't, we rely on city power. But someone offered to sell the system to Sinclair for a very low price, and he bought it thinking
he
could then sell extra power to nearby businesses as a way to raise additional money for our programs, but since the day we've owned the generator, it's been broken more often than not. Of course, no one will contract to buy from us, because they don't trust us to supply power on a regular basis—and they're quite right!—but Sinclair refuses to sell it because he keeps saying it was an excellent investment. But if you could repair it for us—”

“I should be able to, unless some complete systems breakdown has destroyed its usefulness.”

“Oh, this is wonderful!” Deborah said. “Right after breakfast, I will take you to the access area. First we will feed you, though, or you will faint of hunger before you can do us any good at all!”

She was clearly joking, and all three of us laughed, and I felt sustained by a warm glow of companionship that was more nourishing than the breakfast that I helped served a half hour later. The other four boarders were in the dining room, patiently awaiting food, but Sinclair Rainey was nowhere to be seen. I imagined he was often absent; he seemed like a man so preoccupied with larger issues that he would rarely remember to feed his body with food or refresh his soul with conversation.

After the meal, Deborah escorted me to a cramped, poorly lit room tucked off of one utilitarian hallway (where laundering equipment and a multitude of storage boxes also had made their homes). It seemed astonishing to me that the equipment worked even intermittently, so poorly organized were the fuel leads and generator cables, but a cursory examination of the items on hand led me to think there was nothing irreparably wrong.

“Though I may need to replace a few parts,” I said, looking doubtfully at some worn connectors. “Is there any budget for that?”

“I would imagine Sinclair would be happy to drop some of his credit on machinery, if you could ensure it would function in the future,” Deborah said. “Perhaps, if you could get an estimate—”

“And there are supply stores in Cody where I could get parts?”

“I'm not sure, but you could check with the power companies and see if they would be willing to sell you items.”

“Yes—that's a very good idea—well, first let me take a thorough look at the setup and see what might be missing.”

“I'll check back with you at lunchtime,” she said, and left me.

I spent the next few hours happily enough, absorbed in work that I understood and that seemed to render me valuable to people who had been kind to me, which made it twice as satisfying. I kept a growing inventory of parts that needed immediate replacement, parts that should for future reliability be replaced soon, and parts that were so outdated that it would be better just to upgrade them now. I also scoured down a few encrusted connectors and checked safety levels and investigated the toxic dumping hoses (which, I was glad to see, appeared to be in excellent condition). It was, or would be, a tidy little system which could supply enough power to run a couple of city blocks; I was sure Sinclair Rainey would be able to realize his dream of selling enough energy to his neighbors to make his facility self-supporting.