Jenna Starborn (52 page)

The storm grew so rough that I could hear nothing except the lashing rain and the roaring wind and the things that came crashing down because of them. It was as if I had been transported back in time, to the violent birth of the universe, or forward, to its turbulent death—so primitive did the tempest seem, so full of rage and incontrovertible purpose. I would not have been surprised, upon staggering to my feet, to find I had been hurled to another time or another dimension; such was the force of that gale that I felt it could have launched me to any place real or imaginary.

I have no idea how long it lasted, though it seemed as though hours passed while I knelt there, buffeted by the most elemental forces at the Goddess's disposal. At last—a break in the rain, a faltering in the wild air—and then, with an ominous suddenness, complete and utter stillness.

I lifted my head, for I had drawn it close to my chest for protection, and listened to the profound silence around me. Nothing in the whole city appeared to move or function. The stars themselves seemed to have halted in their courses and stood, dumb and motionless, overhead. This was the silence at the dawn of the universe, before the planets knew men or men knew speech; this was the breathless advent of time itself.

All the corridors between all the worlds were open. If a single man spoke, every creature would hear him. If the Goddess blinked her eye, every star would tumble. Every atom was connected, across the unbridgeable distances of space, and every living molecule was contracted into one small dense core of matter.

And at the precise moment I had this revelation, I heard my name spoken aloud.

“Jenna!” The syllables rolled across the glittering trails of starlight. “Jenna! Jenna! Jenna! Jenna!”

Nothing more—my name, over and over again—but I leaped to my feet, panting like a wild thing. “Everett!” I cried. “Where are you?”

“Jenna!” The voice came back, but fainter now, as if receding across some unimaginable horizon, or as if the speaker himself did not have the strength to go on. “Jenna—Jenna—Jenna—”

“Everett!”
I shrieked, as panicked as if I could actually view him, slipping across the boundary of life and death before my very eyes. “Everett, I am coming! Wait for me!”

T
hree months later, I disembarked at the spaceport on Fieldstar. It took me some little time to adjust myself to the shapes and scents of the place I had left a year and a half ago. The shuttle hangars were the same huge, bustling, impersonal spaces I remembered, full of too many people and too much noise. Outside the hangars, the streets of the city wound sleepily away. The quality of the air immediately caught my attention, and I glanced up at the faint metallic dome arching overhead. On Cody, I had become used to vagrant breezes and the playful touch of the sun, but I instantly remembered how on Fieldstar, such amenities did not exist. All was filtered, artificial, recycled. I took a deep breath and stepped purposefully down the road.

What I wanted now was to hire a conveyance to take me to Thorrastone Park. In the past, I had never made the trip between manor and town in anything except the public bus or Everett's aeromobile, but today I knew the latter would not be at my disposal, and I had no patience to wait for the former. Vehicles and their drivers could be hired, I knew from overhearing the conversation of Joseph Luxton and Harley Taff, but until now I had never had the need—or the resources—to put such knowledge to the test.

In fact, I was finding I quite liked the advantages to being a woman of substance. My credit account had allowed me, three months ago, to book passage on a fast, commercial liner that would take me between Appalachia and Hestell in one sixth of the time it had taken the
Anniversary
to cover the same distance. On Hestell I had purchased another expensive ticket on the cargo ship heading toward Fieldstar by the fastest route. Its accommodations were spartan, to say the least, but I did not care about furnishings; I cared about speed.

I had to get to Fieldstar and Everett Ravenbeck as quickly as I could.

The Raineys had protested, of course, and I had considered myself obligated to tell them the whole story on the following morning. They had been, I think, shocked to discover yet another twist in my history, though this time at least no name change accompanied the revelation. They could not believe Everett Ravenbeck could still have any claim on my affections after his lies to me, and they greatly doubted my sanity when I described what had transpired on the rooftop patio.

“We must investigate,” Sinclair had declared, and stalked away to the library monitor, all of us following behind. But after he called up news services and narrowed down his search to Fieldstar, it became clear that something disastrous had occurred at Thorrastone Park. There had been a compromise in the forcefield. Several people had been injured, and one had been killed.

“Killed?” I repeated in a strangled voice, for Sinclair read these words in a detached way, and his head blocked the screen. I could not see the monitor to read the words for myself. “But who—does it say—but what else happened—”

“There are very few details,” he said, seeming to skim ahead in the news item. “Oh, but here—it quotes your Everett Ravenbeck as saying he intends to make full repairs to the house. So he at least was not the one to die.”

One great fear assuaged! But dozens of others instantly swarmed in to replace it. What of Mrs. Farraday—Ameletta—any of the staff members I had come to know and respect? Such names would be of less interest to the media services, which cared only to report on the activities of high-grade citizens, but to me the import of their deaths would be almost as grave.

“No other news?” I demanded. “Nothing?”

Sinclair swiveled around to face me. “Nothing,” he said.

Deborah laid a hand on my arm. “You were right, then,” she said quietly. “He does need you.”

Sinclair looked contemptuous. “The fact that he has suffered a tragedy in no way changes what he has done to her in the past and the fact that she is better off free of him and galaxies away. The most the situation requires is a note of sympathy—though even that, in my opinion, would be ill-advised.”

I was looking at Deborah. “I will pack immediately and leave as soon as I can.” Maria and Sinclair exclaimed against this, but Deborah only gave me back a solemn stare and nodded with complete understanding.

 

 

A
nd the next day I was on my expensive cruiser, and then I spent three months in a state of exquisite torture. Wretched as the first experience had been, I almost wished for the oblivion of cold storage for this voyage back to Fieldstar, to spare myself the strain of constant and helpless worry. I hourly checked the media postings but found no news of Everett Ravenbeck's death. More details of the disaster I could not discover.

So when I landed on Fieldstar, I was in no mood to brook delays. I marched down the spaceport streets, inquired of the first sensible-looking person I saw where I might hire an aircar, and followed his directions until I fetched up in a slightly seedy-looking office not far from the Registry Office that I had visited once so long ago. Three youthful drivers slouched around the office, debating the merits of some brand of automotive circuitry, and they all glanced rather indifferently in my direction as I strode in.

“I need to hire a car to take me to Thorrastone Manor immediately,” I announced.

A slim, long-haired youth whose shapeless clothes did not entirely conceal the fact that she was female, though that seemed to be their intent, was the only one to respond. “No such thing as Thorrastone Manor anymore,” she said.

I felt hands clutch upon my heart; I am sure I staggered. “Gone!” I gasped. “But—the news reports—I thought the park had been saved—”

“Oh, sure, the park's still there, and some of the mining buildings,” the girl replied nonchalantly. “But the house—it hasn't been fixed up again. Can't nobody live there.”

“So—then—the people who lived in the house—where have they taken up residence?” I asked, stammering a little.

The girl looked at her fellow drivers and shrugged. “I don't think there were too many people living there. An old lady, a couple of servants.”

“And Mr. Ravenbeck,” one of the other drivers said.

“Oh. Right. He got hurt, didn't he?” the young woman asked.

“Mr. Ravenbeck. That's who I'm interested in finding,” I said, making my voice as steady as I could. “Where might he be located?”

The girl shrugged and, as if that did not convey enough ignorance, spread her hands. “Don't know. Don't know who could tell you.”

I remembered something she had said a moment ago. “But the mining compound is still functional? Is it still being used?”

She nodded. “Sure. Dropped off a fare there two or three weeks ago.”

Then Mr. Cartell or Mr. Soshone could tell me where Mr. Ravenbeck could be found. “Take me to the park,” I said as imperiously as if I had had money my whole life. “From there, I will decide what to do next.”

 

 

I
t was the young woman who elected to be my driver, and she talked easily and rather vapidly for the whole flight. Although at first I thought her senseless chatter would drive me mad, soon enough I became grateful for the mild distraction it offered, for the two hours of this leg of the journey seemed to stretch as long as the three-month star voyage had. I sat beside her on the ripped faux-leather seats, my hands clenched tightly in my lap, and tried to keep from shrieking.

How many times had I made this journey between Thorrastone Manor and the spaceport, and how many times had the trip been almost unendurable?

At last, at last, we arrived within sight of the familiar enclosure. But how unfamiliar it looked now! Even from some distance away, I could view the damage to the once proud manor, every window shattered, a few shingles and shutters hanging at rakish, negligent angles. All around the house and throughout the great yard, weeds took a rapid ascendancy.

“Dear Goddess,” I murmured, “it looks like a desolate place.”

“That's a fact,” my driver said, slowing down so we could enter the airlock. “Guess all the windows blew when the forcefield went down.”

“How was the forcefield torn? Was there any damage to the mining compound?”

She shrugged, as I was beginning to believe she often did. “I didn't pay that much attention, you know? Didn't know anyone who lived there. Didn't really matter that much to me.”

I had already established that she did not know the identity of the single person killed in the calamity, and I knew it was pointless to ask her more questions now. We paused for a moment inside the airlock, then activated the door that would allow us onto the park grounds themselves.

“Now where?” she asked.

“The mining compound,” I said, pointing away from the house. “I'll find someone there who can help me.”

It was another twenty minutes or so, however, before this goal was accomplished. I had never actually been inside the compound, so I was not certain how it was laid out, and we maneuvered our little vehicle past several very dreary and abandoned-looking buildings before we found any sign of human occupation. Then we spied a cluster of workers who greeted our arrival with some surprise but who willingly offered to go fetch Mr. Soshone, “being as Mr. Cartell is not on the premises this afternoon, miss.”

“Yes, Mr. Soshone, I will be happy to meet with him,” I said, feeling a great sense of relief that I would now finally be able to speak with someone who could give me some concrete information. I turned back to my driver—whom I had been reluctant to release until I had some assurance that the park was indeed inhabited—asked what I owed her, and paid her. She drove away while I stood there, two small suitcases at my feet, and awaited the arrival of the assistant mine supervisor.

When he came on the run a few minutes later, I could read the astonishment on his face. The last time he had seen me had been under conditions of such excruciating humiliation that I could not wonder that he had never expected to see me on Fieldstar again.

“Miss Starborn!” he exclaimed, a little winded, as he pulled up beside me. I remembered his plain-featured, good-natured face and the awkward courtesy that made him hold out his hand as though I might not be willing to accept it. But I was.

“Mr. Soshone,” I said warmly, shaking his hand as though he had been a dear friend instead of a virtual stranger. “I know my appearance here must be an odd thing—let that go—but I must have information from you. I learned only recently of the horrors that occurred here, but I have no details at all. Tell me, please, what exactly happened—and who was killed in the disaster.”