Stewards of the Flame (55 page)

“Precognition doesn’t take away freedom. But since we don’t want to change what he foresaw for us, let’s stay on the safe side and help make it come true.”

Jesse began downloading data about the planet, his mind still on the baffling question of what Ian had perceived. “You said he saw me in the dream before he met me, and later recognized my face. Was that precognition too, or did he see me clairvoyantly in real time, here on Undine?”

“He was never sure; remote viewing can show the future, and there’s often no way to distinguish. But unless you wear your Fleet uniform on the new world, at least part of what he viewed must have been in real time before you were taken to the Hospital. In the bar, maybe.”

Jesse’s mind was whirling. “Peter . . . why did I pass out for a few moments in that bar? I never have figured it out; I hadn’t drunk any more than I often had before. Was it fate, as you’ve been calling it—or did I somehow sense Ian’s desire for me to stay? Were we in telepathic contact on an unconscious level before I was trained to recognize unspoken thought?”

“We’ll never know, any more than we can be sure whether he saw this planet in his own dream via psi or showed it to you through recollection of the picture.”

“It’s a beautiful planet,” Jesse said. “I don’t think we could do better.”

“Does it have a name?” Peter inquired.

“No—its star has only a catalog number. They don’t name individual planets until they’re opened for settlement.”

“Well then,” declared Peter, “from now on its name is Maclairn.”

~
 
60
 
~

Jesse and Peter did not attempt to meet secretly again. With Jesse being tracked, it was too dangerous. Jesse did not see Carla often, either. Reluctantly, they decided there was too much risk in her coming regularly to his apartment. They would have the rest of their lives to live together. A few weeks of separation was a small price to pay for making sure no suspicion would fall on Peter. And besides, he now could converse with her telepathically as she sat in a café near his building; he’d found that with practice this required less drastic alteration of consciousness than it had in the beginning.

He did see Kira, whose friendship could be explained by her having served as his nurse during his recovery. Through her as well as through Carla, the details of the plan were relayed to other members of the Group. Jesse’s chief task was the selection and preparation of people for crew duties. While in space, his role in the Group and Peter’s would be reversed—Peter would be Executive Officer, although, lacking any experience with starships, his job would consist mainly of carrying out the Captain’s orders. Carla would be in charge of dealing with the starship’s computer. Kira, of course, would be medical officer, assisted by the other member physicians. Knowing more of the members than he did, she helped him pick those with qualifications for work in life support and communications. Since the former was AI-controlled and the latter consisted mainly of ensuring that no communication went out from the ship after they took it over, there would be little for them to do; but they needed to gain all the knowledge they could from the Net so as to be ready for emergencies.

An engineering team, headed by Kwame because of his power-plant experience, was also chosen. Though they could not hope to become knowledgeable enough to fix problems with the ship, once aboard they could begin learning how the equipment it carried could be used in building the colony. As for routine work such as meal preparation and cleanup, that would be rotated among all members not otherwise assigned, just as it would have been under Fleet command. Colonizers were not luxury liners; they didn’t carry cooks or stewards.

One other team was assembled without Jesse’s involvement: the remote viewers who, it was hoped, could provide valuable information when it came to choosing a landing site on Maclairn. “You need to be aware of this,” Kira told him, “but Hari will take full responsibility for its implementation. Peter wants you to stay completely away from it. When he told me during your training that you were not to be exposed to remote viewing, I was puzzled; it’s an easier psi skill to learn than some of the others and normally we do teach it to trainees. Once I knew you’d be taking us to a new world, though, I understood. We’re dependent on your practical knowledge and experience as a control. Remote viewing is often useful, but it’s inconsistent—it produces false information a fair percentage of the time. By comparing impressions from many of our most talented viewers, we can judge which ones are worth following up, whereas if you as Captain were to personally receive psi data about the planet’s surface, you’d be tempted to rely on it. And that would be dangerous.”

Jesse had not even heard of remote viewing except in connection with Ian’s dream. “Do you mean to say people in the Group have been doing this all along—seeing things at a distance clairvoyantly?” he burst out in astonishment.

“Most of us have tried it from time to time. It’s not very useful on Undine because there’s nothing to see on the rest of this world—just sea and scattered islands, all alike, with no way to get feedback except from weather satellites. We’ve no need to spy on distant activities, which it was used for on Earth at times when an open-minded minority briefly overcame official skepticism.”

“Did it work? Remote spying, I mean?”

“Yes, subject to the cautions I just mentioned. But tolerance of it never lasted long; its very success aroused people’s underlying fear of psi, and led government officials who’d temporarily endorsed it to turn and run. They didn’t
want
it to work, any more than you wanted to believe in the paranormal when you first came to us.”

Somewhat dazed, Jesse protested, “Since we can gain information about Maclairn this way, Fleet could use it for exploration! If it’s a known phenomenon on Earth—if there are even a few individuals willing to experiment—could they someday locate us?”

“Not unless they’re orbiting our world. Controlled remote viewing isn’t possible over interstellar distances. Though neither space nor time limits psi in principle, human minds have built-in filters that protect us from the infinite amount of input we’d receive if we had access to the whole universe.”

But in dreams, Jesse thought . . . Ian might have crossed interstellar space in the dream, and in any case, he crossed time. . . .

While Jesse and Kira were planning the voyage, Reiko was designing the new colony, which as a historian and sociologist, she was well qualified to do. Of highest priority was the formation of committees from among experienced builders, farmers, and mining experts to coordinate the establishment of a settlement. Furthermore, there was the matter of government. At first, with only three hundred citizens, it would be run like a city government by the existing Council. But the Group’s organization had never been formalized; now, it was necessary to write a charter to be discussed and voted on while the trip was underway. In addition, Reiko—with some input from Peter—began to draft the constitution that would shape the future society.

It was decided that until departure, Jesse should continue to fly, as for him to be unemployed might be considered cause for the Meds to question his stability. Though as a mental patient, he could now never qualify for a license to carry passengers for hire, he was permitted to carry cargo and in fact needed a source of income to keep them from wondering who was supporting him. So he kept on logging hours in the air, his feelings mixed at the thought that this phase of his life would soon end. Eager though he was for his coming space command, he would miss the rapture of flying out across the sea. Occasionally he flew over the Island from which he was now barred, looking wistfully down at it, wondering how it would feel to look back on it from another solar system.

The date
Mayflower XI
would arrive at Undine had been set by Fleet when the charter was confirmed by down payment of Jesse’s legally-transferable funds. On the night before, all Group members would have to desert their jobs and relatives without notice and proceed to the spaceport. There had been a good deal of worry over how they were to get there; the bus that served the adjacent power plant ran infrequently, and for multiple cabs to be called would surely arouse questions. Fortunately, the road leading to it passed a public park on the outskirts of the city. This park could be rented for private celebrations, and so Nathan and Liz—who were both without families—had reserved it for a wedding reception that the Group planned to turn into an all-night bash. Fleet had one passenger van, normally used to transport crews on shore leave. During the night, it would shuttle members in from the park. Once inside the port’s boundaries, there was no way they could be stopped. The spaceport was Colonial League territory over which local authorities had no jurisdiction.

Any property that people left behind, however, would be confiscated by Undine’s government. The Administration would be outraged by the loss of tax revenue that would result from depletion of their dead ancestors’ offworld accounts. Both those accounts and the Group members’ own would no doubt be frozen, which wasn’t going to matter—by that time there would be no funds left in them. The starship would not load passengers until the full charter fee had been paid. So the transfer of funds had to be carefully timed and coordinated with the Group’s contacts on Earth, who were to perform the necessary hacking. A committee headed by Xiang Li had been appointed to collect financial passwords from individual Group members. All their liquid assets were to be turned over; amounts above what was needed for the charter fee would be earmarked for transfer to Fleet later, as compensation for its loss of the ship. A clear warning had been given that anybody who missed the departure, whether accidentally or because of second thoughts, would probably be arrested for tax evasion.

To be financially destitute would be no hardship for emigrants, since there would be no way to access offworld assets from an isolated colony and cash would be meaningless there for some time. The loss of personal possessions would be more painful. Fleet had a strict limit on baggage—one duffel bag per person, which was all that could be carried in the rush to the spaceport anyway. That meant that except for e-files, little trace of their former lives could be preserved.

The Group as a unit was entitled to ship just enough freight to allow for some warm clothing not available on Undine—which would be brought from a colder world—and for the irreplaceable neurofeedback gear and cryonic bank. Most of the starship’s cargo would be furnished by Fleet and was covered by the charter fee: all the equipment and supplies necessary to found a colony and support it for its first year, as well the seeds and embryos necessary to establish agriculture. Also included would be an electronic library covering the full range of Earth’s accumulated knowledge. These things were not scheduled to be unloaded on Liberty. They were standard, sealed into detachable pods provided aboard all colonizers for emergency use in case a ship was lost. It had never occurred to Fleet that this policy might enable a party of colonists to get lost on purpose.

Removal of the lab equipment from the Island would be easy enough to accomplish, but its delivery to the spaceport presented a problem. Private export was not allowed, and though Fleet wouldn’t report an illegal shipment, no Group member owned a truck and no trucking firm would accept unauthorized boxes. At least not openly. Peter, in desperation, concluded that the only solution lay in bribery, and put aside a sizeable amount of cash. But he dared not offer it far in advance, nor could the cryogenic container be maintained long with a portable power source. The boxes would have to be taken directly from his plane to the spaceport. So the lab would not be dismantled until shortly before departure.

Another reason for this was that Peter was doing some last-minute recruiting. There were three people in Hari’s front group that he considered good candidates, plus several adolescent children of members. Ordinarily these potential recruits would not have been approached quite so soon, but Peter hated to leave them behind. One of the normal selection criteria was judgment of a person’s ability to keep a lifelong secret from friends and family—and since this would no longer be a requirement, he decided to accept them despite relative immaturity. That meant bringing them one by one to the lab to be tested and then welcomed by the small number of Peter’s friends he could still safely invite to the Island.

The worst of the problems confronting the Group was what to do about people currently receiving hospice care. No new patients had been accepted since the decision to leave had been made. There were three already living in safe houses, two of whom died during the ensuing weeks and were taken to the Island for burial despite the now-great risk. But one old black woman, a longtime Group member, was expected to linger. She was bedridden. There wasn’t any way to transport her to the spaceport, and in any case, liftoff in a shuttle would kill her. Peter and Kira agonized over it, yet could see no answer. Finally, with less than a week remaining, she took matters into her own hands and called an ambulance. “I follow in Ian’s footsteps,” she wrote in the note she left, “just as I always have. They’ll take care of me in the Hospital, and by the time I’m put into stasis, I won’t know it’s happening. The Group is about living, not dying. What matters is not how you die, but how you live on the new world.” No member who visited her came away with dry eyes.

The departure date fell in the week before Undine’s election. “A narrow escape,” Kira said. “As soon as the votes are counted they’ll start microchipping people; now that it’s in the news, it’s all too obvious that the public favors it. Peter says the Hospital staff will be the first victims. If someone’s looking to discredit him, that could be disastrous—if he were brought in for questioning at the wrong moment, he might be held long enough to miss the ship. We’re getting out just in time.”

Jesse, as the only one with a legitimate excuse to contact Fleet openly, kept in touch with its office.
We’ve got a problem,
he told Peter telepathically during his final outpatient visit to the Hospital.
There’ll be a freighter in orbit at the time we’re scheduled to depart.