The Second Star, page 32
“I’m glad I’m back too. It’s good to see you all. But now I have to ask you a big favor. Can you let me… let Martin and me… talk to your other people for a little while? The big folk? I promise, I will come back later if you want me to. And then we can spend some time together. But now I need you to go back and call your original big person. We need to tell them something, something that it’s easier to talk to them about.”
Gadfly looked rebellious. “But it isn’t fair. We know all about…”
“You know a lot of things,” Stella said. “I know I learned a whole lot from all of you. I never got to say thank you for those drawings you sent me, but they were beautiful. And they helped me figure out a whole lot of stuff.”
“We know secrets,” Glory said, beaming.
“And now that I’m back, if you want to, you can tell me later. But now—please let us talk to the others? At least for a little while? Trust me.” Stella glanced at Martin, and then back at the Parada group. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She heard Martin suck in his breath, but he didn’t interrupt. The other four gazed at her from four sets of childlike eyes, their heads tilted, considering her promise.
“Okay,” Momo said, after a moment. “We’ll see you later.”
“I’ll never get used to this,” Martin muttered as he watched the faces and eyes change, all around the table. Alaya was still wearing the smile she had on her face as Momo, but it was demonstrably the smile of a grown woman now; Han sat back and crossed his arms; Rob folded his hands on the table before him and gave Stella a small nod of welcome and recognition; Jerry…
“Loki,” Stella said. “Not now.”
“It’s actually so much easier when you aren’t here,” Jerry said, sounding a little aggrieved, wiping the mocking glint in Loki’s eyes and stepping back into his own original body. “Other people don’t instantaneously classify us. I can play other people along for a while, and it’s so much more fun.”
“I dare say,” Stella said dryly. “But for once it isn’t about you. I gather Philip told you? About Lily Mae?”
“Yes,” Alaya said. “They are all right, you know.”
“I know,” Stella said, a little too quickly, hoping that Martin wouldn’t notice that she was heading this particular idea off before Alaya could get into details. To Stella, the ‘they’ meant so much more than Lily Mae’s cohort of resident souls. It meant that one extra one, the one that Martin did not know about. Must not know about. “I knew that you guys would know. If you could—”
“Wait,” Martin interrupted, suddenly rousing. “Wait. If you know that—if you can tell that—then you must have known… that she was not really…”
The reaction spoke of an epiphany, a flash of understanding that Martin had reached before Stella had done so, and she frowned, going back to the chaotic night of Lily Mae’s death. She ran the memory through her mind’s eye, looking for things she might have missed on the night. She had been summoned by a piece of blunt and shocking news, and she had been focused—perhaps hyper-focused—on Lily Mae herself. But now she retrieved the other members of the crew and their reactions, and something suddenly stood out for her that had simply not done so at the time.
The rest of the Parada crew had a quiet and coherent story to tell of the events of that night. A story that—in twenty-twenty hindsight—sounded remarkably cohesive, remarkably calm, almost rehearsed. There had been sorrow there, certainly, and it would have had to be there because Stella would have been expecting it… but she suddenly realized with supreme clarity that she had missed one very important detail.
They had been sorrowful. But what they had not been… was surprised. What grief there was, in the face of this second death from amongst their rapidly diminishing ranks, was not the same grief that had been there when Boz had died. There had been something real, something raw, in the aftermath of that death. Lily Mae… might have taken a bite of a poisoned apple, and was waiting for the kiss of the appropriate prince to wake her and send her back, living and laughing, into the world.
“You put the thought into my head,” Stella said slowly. “You did. The way you looked—the way you spoke—that thing that sent me looking for…”
Rob held her gaze for a long moment, and then looked down at where his hands lay folded on the table before him, his eyelashes, long and curled like a girl’s, veiling his eyes.
Stella stared at all of them in turn, one after the other, lifting a peremptory hand to silence Martin when he would have spoken. And then her lips thinned.
“All right,” she said, her voice a knife. “I do believe it’s time I asked some rather pointed questions. You said you would work with me—well, you’d better start. And Martin… a word.” She beckoned him away from the table and he followed, clearly annoyed that he was being summoned in that manner.
“Well?” he said in a low voice, his back turned to the crew table, standing by the door of the habitat.
“You asked me to help you, and I am willing to try. But if you want me to do that… you need to go away. They will not talk to me with you here.” She paused. “Or under your surveillance. They know every move they make, every word they utter, is on record. Now they’ve pretty much told you that’s done.”
“What are you trying to tell me? That a complete surrender…”
“Were we at war?” Stella asked sharply. “Look. They told you their terms. Me. They told you they would work with me. And I will work with you. Think about me as the bridge across the chasm. Now go away, and turn off the cameras. I will come straight to you when I am done here.”
“Ten minutes,” Martin said, biting the words off. “I will turn off the surveillance sound system. For ten minutes.”
“You will turn off the whole system, and you will give me more than ten minutes, damn it,” Stella said. “In fact, it is entirely possible to make a case of it staying off. I must say, I’ve recently had cause to review some footage of the surveillance that you have gathered from the habitat, and for the most part all that you are accomplishing is accumulating an endless loop of repetitive routine. You are not learning anything from any of it—not when the people you are watching know they are being watched. You can stop. Mothball the whole effort. Starting now. If they don’t choose to tell you something, you won’t learn it by voyeurism or by eavesdropping, that should be abundantly clear by now. And by your own word—they are not here as prisoners who need to be constantly guarded at all times. Not everything can be crammed into military time or context.”
“But I need…”
“Martin. You asked me to help you. I said I will. But they have information you might want.” She glanced back at the crew, none of whom were carefully looking in her direction. “I think they’re willing to share it. Some of it. It’s still your court, but it’s their ball now. Play the game, or call it quits.”
Martin’s eyes spoke volumes—whose side are you on?—but he clenched his teeth to keep an intemperate response from coming out.
“That is not my decision,” he said instead, after a moment to gather his thoughts. “But I will take it under advisement. As for now… you have half an hour.”
“Martin.”
He paused at the door, about to stalk out, to glare back at Stella.
“You will do this. I need your word. I am invoking whatever doctor-patient privilege I can at this point. You will let me talk to them, in private, and I mean in private—if you won’t turn off that surveillance, at least temporarily, then I am afraid that we will all just have to go pile into the nearest non-surveilled bathroom and see how many grown humans can fit inside that shower, until we are done discussing this.”
Martin yanked his tablet out of his pocket, toggled in a contact, barked in an order, and then opened up a screen on the tablet and handed it to Stella. It briefly showed an image of the habitat, with all of them at the table—the view of the surveillance cameras, exactly what the people on duty in the Surveillance Room were seeing. As Stella watched, the image blinked, and died. The screen went black.
“Keep that,” Martin snapped. “So long as you can’t see anything on that screen, neither can anyone else. You’ll know when you’re back on view.”
Doors weren’t built to slam in this place, but Stella had the distinct feeling that this was the one time Martin might have wanted to slam one in his wake. But that was all the time she had to spare for him at that moment. If he was being straight with her, she had less than thirty minutes to get to the bottom of what was suddenly looking like it was a dizzyingly deep well she hadn’t even known existed until mere minutes ago.
This time, when she turned back to the crew, every single pair of eyes was on her. Waiting.
Taking a deep breath, she made her way back and took a seat, leaning forward on the table, pushing Martin’s tablet with its blank screen out into the middle so that they could all see it.
“All right,” she said, “so long as that’s blank, they’re not watching or listening. Talk to me.”
“You trust him? On this?” Jerry asked cynically. “He turned it off… just like that?”
“Not just like that,” Stella said. “There will be a price to pay for it. But I will pay that, not you. First. Tell me, and tell me the truth. Did you know that Lily Mae was not really dead? How did you do this?”
“We had… help,” Han said carefully, eyeing the tablet without a great deal of conviction.
“Yes, let’s speak of that help, at last.” Stella said. “Where is it now? Still with her?”
“That is why she needed to go,” Rob said, and the intensity of his voice rocked Stella. She looked over at him and his hazel eyes were glowing as he gazed at her, leaning forward to emphasize his words. “It was… necessary. And they weren’t ready to let her go. Any of us go.”
“On your word, maybe,” Jerry said.
“With all honesty,” Stella said, and she really meant it literally, “none of this is my decision. All I can contribute is a professional opinion. And I don’t know if any of you are ready to deal with that outside world right now, or ever will be—I believe in your right to do it, bitterly, and I fought to get the Juno crew to be released, but they never—never—had to deal with what you have had to face here. They came back from the stars with just their own souls intact, not splintered into the dozens of people you all carry. All of you… except Boz. I’m right there, am I not? He had Jiminy. Jiminy was real. That was all. Everything else… was a stage dressing. So that he would fit with the rest of you. Especially after you returned here. And there was space there, inside, for… for what you brought back with you. But then Boz died, and it had to go… somewhere. And you’re telling me that Lily Mae is not alone out there.” Stella grimaced. “Where is she supposed to go? What is she supposed to do? Why did you send me down there after her that night?”
“We—she—had a plan,” Rob said. “But if she needed help… we needed someone there whom she would trust. Just in case things went badly.”
“You do know that poor Aisha—the cleaner—is compromised, sedated, probably won’t be able to shake this, even if they ever trust her enough with knowledge of any of it to let her go free without any major consequences? And me—you knew I knew things I had not told anyone else about. I kept your secrets, trying to understand—trying to protect you—because I was afraid of where such knowledge in the wrong hands would leave you—and you led me straight to a place where I had to make the choice to go against the rules and regulations—that, or run to someone with higher authority with everything I knew. How could you possibly be certain that I would not do the second thing?”
She swallowed, looking around at them. “They want her,” she said. “They want to find her. I told them that only you—what remains of this crew—have the necessary connections with Lily Mae to be able to track her, to have any idea of whether or not she is alive or dead. Now you told them that you don’t want to work with anyone except me. Just what is it that you want me to do? Do you want me to go looking for her? I can’t do it—I can’t do it alone, not unless you tell me right now where to go and find her, or without at least one of you in close enough proximity to activate those connections I know you all have, and lead me to her. Do you want me to find her? Why?”
“Why did you run after her?” Rob asked gently.
“Because I knew what I knew. Because I was afraid of what they might find out, and if they learned what I already knew the military might not have bothered weighing their options before they took steps to eliminate what they would consider an unacceptable risk. And I could not help them to—to—do you have any idea what sort of mayhem could have gone down here? Why would you take such risks to help her flee, and now be ready to help someone go out there after her, ostensibly to bring her back here? How can you even be sure that she can survive out there, right now, alone? For how long?”
“But she is not alone,” Alaya said.
“And that,” Stella said, “is the heart of the problem. If we—if I—turn around and tell Martin Peck that Lily Mae can survive out there right now and why, my fears of the consequences of that remain exactly the same. I cannot possibly tell any of them out there—tell Martin—your truth, not without condemning you all. So here’s the situation. I think you have a very clear idea that the authorities are probably never willingly going to allow you to leave this place and go free—however much I myself passionately want to see that happen, and to have you recognized out there for everything that you have done, and been, for Earth.”
She looked intently at each one of them for a long moment, then went on. “That suddenly mattered enough that you were willing to risk everything on one throw of the dice to let one of you—possibly the most important one of you, given the circumstances—escape from here. And now you’re telling me—what? That you are willing to help those authorities—or not those authorities, but just me—track down the very person you did so much to help to leave this place, and bring her back here?”
“But you wouldn’t bring them back,” Han said. “Not in obedience, not because of duty. Yes, Father Philip told us.”
“He talks too much, for a priest,” Stella growled.
Han smiled. “But we knew that already. The children knew that. The children helped put it all together. Don’t blame the good Father for talking out of school. When Boz died… everything changed… with Lily Mae it was just not that simple to begin with, and then it got even more complicated, very quickly. But they had to go. And we all did what we could to make that happen. The children knew that you would help us. That you understood it. The odds were against us, against any of this working, when we came to the conclusion that Lily Mae had to get out of here we had no real notion about how to go about it—but then Lily Mae made the connection with Aisha, and Aisha offered to help. We—the rest of us—don’t know any more than that. We don’t know where Lily Mae went. We don’t know if she is safe, or if she is for how long she will be. You yourself have been telling us that the world is very different from the one we knew—and we have no idea if Lily Mae is going to be able to find her way in it…”
“But I trust Alabastra and Diana to get her through the rough spots,” Jerry interrupted.
“I think it was Alabastra that scared Aisha witless,” Stella murmured.
“She has that effect on people,” Jerry said, with a touch of smugness, as though Alabastra had been his idea.
Han glanced at the still blank tablet. “Assuming Martin is telling the truth, we don’t have much more time unobserved,” he said. “Jerry, stop distracting us from the issues at hand. Stella, we do want your help to find Lily Mae.”
“I thought it was more about me needing your help,” Stella said.
“That, too,” Han said, smiling.
“But I still don’t understand - why? Why? If I—if we—don’t track her down, and she is lost, then you have accomplished nothing at all. If we do find her… what do you expect me to do?”
“You can’t help us, not anymore,” Rob said quietly. “But you can… help her. We need you to help her. And we will do everything we can to help her, even buried in this bunker and cut off from her. Of all the people who have touched our lives since they brought us back to Earth, aside from Father Carter, you were the only person who saw us as more than the problem to be solved, more than a curiosity, more than a potential disaster if our very existence was revealed. Even after… you learned just how much of a disaster it could become. If we find Lily Mae… she needs our one friend. She needs you. The rest of us…”
“The rest of you have lost everything,” Stella said. “You’ve lost Philip, He might be replaced but you’ll have to start all over again and you might never really trust another priest to be the same kind of man that Philip is, able to wrestle demons and come out on the side of right even when it cost him half his own soul. And one way or another… you lost me—I was on my way out of the door, Martin kicked me out of here, and whether or not he would have replaced me with anyone else from my field to continue to study you… you remaining four… you were already even more alone than you were before. What did you possibly accomplish by all this that was worth the price you have already paid, never mind what you will continue to owe…?”
“They are free,” Alaya said softly. “At least one of us… came home.”
“Okay,” Stella said, walking into Martin Peck’s office, “we’ve talked it through. This is how we think this is going to work. There is a connection between the crew, something that I couldn’t begin to explain to you in empirical terms—a very solid and specific link which is something that I, despite my affinity with them, utterly lack. In theory, they can use that to connect, to track Lily Mae out there—to figure out where she is, how she is getting there—but they cannot do that from in here. If you were hoping that their cooperation would boil down to them sitting down with you over a map and pointing to a location to which you can send your men to surround Lily Mae and bring her back here—it doesn’t work that way. If you want her, we’re going to have to go hunt her.”
