The Second Star, page 37
But the woman seemed to understand perfectly. She reached out to a board on the wall behind her where a handful of old-fashioned keys tagged with wooden numbers were hung, took down Key Number Two, and motioned them to follow.
She showed them up a flight of stairs and into a small second-floor room at the back of the house, looking out into a compact square garden with an incongruous fountain in one corner where a classically draped plaster woman poured a trickle of water from an ewer into a chipped basin below. The walls around it were high, and the young sun had still not risen enough to spill real light into the shadowed square—but it touched the window of the room, which faced east, and a brightness was spilling inside. Stella chose to take that as a good sign. She tried calling Philip, standing in that light by the window where the signal was best, but he wasn’t answering; she texted, as she had been instructed, a message, simply, We’re here.
When she looked up, Rob was smiling.
“What?” she said.
“You. In that light. Anything looks possible.”
Stella flushed. “Don’t be so sure,” she said. And then her features drew into the faintest of frowns, and she looked at Rob a little more closely. “You keep asking if they got Lily Mae. Is there something you aren’t telling me?”
He hesitated. Too long. Stella straightened, sharpening her gaze. “Talk to me. If there is something I need to know, talk to me. Now. For the love of God, look at us—we’re riding the ragged edges out here, and it all started with the Lily Mae incident. No. With Boz dying. What suddenly broke, Rob? There was—I don’t know—a stasis there. Things weren’t exactly wonderful but you six—or however many of you there are, by alternative counting methods—were hanging in there, but there was… a balance of sorts. And then—Boz, Was the transfer into Lily Mae planned or was it an accident that tipped the scales? Was it me? Things were hobbling along and then I waded in with both feet and dragged you all out to that rooftop and everything fell apart after that—was it my fault?”
“Oh, no—no—don’t ever think that,” Rob said passionately. “What you did for us went a long way towards healing wounds we didn’t even know were there. And we all knew, we were all very aware of the fact that you were willing to go to the mat for us, no matter what. But you may be right, that may be what tipped things for Boz—although I don’t know, I can’t be sure, it isn’t as though we ever talked directly to the Illogon, not as such, how could we? We had no way to communicate in any kind of language.”
“So how did you communicate?” Stella said, diverted.
Rob gave a helpless shrug. “It thought at us. It felt at us. It put a sense of something into our minds and our brains that would translate that into a human metaphor that we could understand. Oh, it worked well enough. You can think of us as a glorified translator bud in your ear. The Illogon could think itself lonely or in danger and that feeling would be translated and put into words by whichever of us had it inside us. We all spoke for it, at some point, aboard the Parada, when we first met it.”
“What, like it was a ventriloquist and you just opened your mouth and out came whatever it wanted to say?” Stella said, sounding appalled. “That’s one hell of a lot of control.”
“No, it didn’t have its fingers in our jaws, or in our mind, flapping our mouths at its will,” Rob said, with a touch of impatience. “I am doing a really bad job at explaining this. It needed a safety shell, so it sought one—none of us were what it wanted, what it had to have—our minds were too crowded even though it might well have been the Illogon’s own doing that they became so. Boz was the closest thing to its having its own space, its own shape, its own body—but even Boz was already fully Boz, it wasn’t as though it was a blank mind, with no life experience or memory there, something that the Illogon could simply overwrite like a palimpsest. It is an ethical being, in its own way. It needed… it needed… but it couldn’t simply take what it needed, with no regard for other sentience or other prior claims.”
“So Boz…”
“Maybe Boz tried to give it that,” Rob said quietly, a world of pain in his voice. “Maybe in the end they reached an agreement—maybe Boz was willing to give it space in his mind, maybe the Illogon gained what it required, consent. And maybe, somehow, it all went horribly wrong and when Boz…died…or maybe killed himself, erased himself to make room… there was nothing left there for the Illogon to take over. Maybe that fully adult human body and human mind weren’t able to divorce from one another, either at all, or fast enough for the Illogon to take the proper control. We’ll never know now, will we? But I think the crossing into Lily Mae wasn’t planned, I think the Illogon was hurt by it, I think Lily Mae was changed by it, and I think that a whole different price needed to be negotiated… and it could not be paid, Stella, not with us in that place, not with Lily Mae in controlled captivity—the Illogon inside of her would have doomed her, would have doomed us all…”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“I can’t tell you now,” Rob said desperately. “I have a vague idea of the direction in which she ran, because you are right, the Illogon link is sufficient for that. But what I don’t know—what I have no idea of—is how she is, or if the Illogon, now free and in a body which it can manipulate and control in its own ways up to a point, has done anything at all to affect a transformation that it needed, to her body, to her mind. There are times I think having the Illogon with her is only going to help her because its survival instincts are strong and those will inevitably work to help Lily Mae survive, too. But the flip side of that is… she has the Illogon in her. And I don’t know where that is going to end. And if Philip’s news is anything about her—if they found her, caught her, took her back, then they are all in danger. All of them. All that remains of the crew. And I—I feel as though I cheated, somehow, to get out here—to be—”
“We’re all damaged,” Stella said quietly. “Stop it. If we both start wallowing in our various guilts, we won’t be any use to anybody. Maybe Philip has the answers. How long is it going to take him to get here?”
In the end, there was little to do but wait.
When, finally, a soft knock sounded on the door of the room, both Stella and Rob flinched, as though they had been expecting death itself to come calling. It was Stella who stepped up to the door to open it… and it was Philip.
He was dressed in full Jesuit kit, black cassock hanging all the way down to below his ankles, a short cape over his shoulders, his hair cropped shorter than when she had last seen him as though he had made it a penance to undergo a particularly violent haircut after he pulled out of the Parada habitat. It made him look a little alien, sufficiently different from the man whom Stella had come to look on as ally and equal while they were working together with the crew that she found herself unable to speak out loud, her voice fading from her lips even as she opened them to speak. Instead, she merely stepped aside, offering him space to step into the room.
He did, apparently fully aware of the reasons for her silence, reaching out to lay one hand on her shoulder as he stepped past to give her a reassuring squeeze. His other hand held a black duffle bag, which he dropped as he came inside. He paused as Stella softly closed the door behind him, and his eyes found Rob, who was perched on the edge of the armchair by the window, his back rigid and straight.
The two men looked at each other for a long moment, and then Rob got up out of his chair and stepped up to Philip. They both reached out instinctively and gripped each other’s forearm in an almost antique greeting, one that might have been exchanged between two noble knights in the age of chivalry, holding one another’s eyes; Stella blinked back a sudden sting of inexplicable tears.
“I almost didn’t recognize you, in full battle dress,” Rob said.
“I almost don’t recognize you, outside your four grey walls,” Philip responded, with a faint smile.
“As for that,” Rob said somberly, “there’s still an echo of that back in those walls, Jerry is still there, after all.” The unspoken words that followed that hung between them in the air: And may never leave.
“I didn’t want to risk anything I didn’t know about, and you said you were coming, but now you’re here, and I’m starting to get really spooked,” Stella said. “For the love of God, what is going on?”
“Is it Lily Mae?” Rob asked, softly, intensely.
Philip dropped Rob’s arm and reached for a tablet in the pocket of the cassock. “Not specifically,” he said. “But… there’s this.”
He found what he was looking for, scrolling down the screen with his finger, and then turned the tablet towards Stella and Rob, who both craned their heads to look.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CREW OF THE PARADA?, a large headline screamed at them from the top of a tabloid page.
Stella sucked in her breath, looked sharply up at Philip. “When did that land?”
“Yesterday,” he said grimly. “It’s still just the more lurid press, the tabloids, the more out-there news sites—but there’s a conspiracy theory being whirled together as we speak.”
“The truth is, it was…is…a conspiracy,” Rob said with sudden savagery,
Philip simply nodded and went on, “I am told that Martin Peck’s superiors called the Father General demanding to know if I had spoken to anyone about my sojourn in the ‘quarantine’ quarters. They were able to swear that I had not been in contact with anybody who was outside the contract I had signed like the rest of you when I got to the habitat. But I’m afraid that by that stage your flight was already known, and they’re now focused on you, Stella.”
“But it wasn’t me,” Stella gasped. “I spent the last forty eight hours first racing around Istanbul trying to figure out the Lily Mae situation, and then getting Rob and myself out of there, we’ve been on that bus all last night, I didn’t have time to blab to anyone even if I had wanted to which I wasn’t going to blunder into doing before I thought…”
“I know,” Philip said. “I know. But it does mean that you might find it difficult to slip out of sight now. There’s an alert.”
“Are they watching you?” Rob asked.
“Why would they? I am a priest who goes where he is sent,” Philip said serenely. “And there’s a way I can both get you two out of here, and get you to where you want to go—America—but I’m very much afraid I’m going to have to get you both ordained to do it.” He nodded at the duffel bag by the door, ignoring their startled reactions. “There’s a cassock in there for you, Rob, and one of my spare dog collars. And one of the good sisters from a somewhat conservative convent in Rome—one where they still wear habits—has parted with hers, for you, Stella. There’s a chartered flight leaving from Rome for Chicago in four days. We are all going to be on it.”
12.
The cassock intended for Rob Hillerman fit him reasonably well, although he looked sufficiently uneasy wearing the clerical dog collar that Philip made him keep it on after trying the whole garb on for size so that he could get used to it. Stella’s new habit proved to be the cause for some wholly unintended hilarity, though, since it was clearly meant for someone rather larger than Stella and it both hung untidily off her slender frame and was too long by several inches, the hem pooling around her so as to completely hide her feet.
It was, incongruously, Philip who undertook the necessary alterations. Stella kept giggling every time she caught sight of him sitting in the armchair by the window, patiently plying the needle at the adjusted hem of the habit, and it was infectious—even in the midst of the drama in which they found themselves embroiled they couldn’t seem to stop smiling at one another when they caught each other’s eye.
“What?” Philip said equably, biting off a thread with an expert familiarity. “You think we have seamstresses at our beck and call? I’ve mended my own rips many a time. And, with all due apologies, these things don’t come off the rack—I had to guess at the size, at that. For what it’s worth, it’s a compliment. You’ve so much presence that I obviously believed that you were taller than you are. Here, try that on and see if it’s any better.”
It was, in terms of length, but even if Philip’s gifts ran to more intensive alterations there was no time to spare for them—they would just have to hope that a good cincture and the protection of a nun’s persona, which meant that nobody would be caught staring too openly at her, would do to protect Stella from being unmasked.
“You’d better not speak to anybody, though,” Philip said. “There’s going to be forty people on that flight, and not a soul on it would believe you to be a professed nun if you opened your mouth to them.”
Stella roused up to glare at him, outraged at the implications, and both men grinned. “Oh, and refrain from doing that, either,” Philip said. “Look anyone in the eye with that kind of defiance and it’s over. Can you hope to stay meek and silent for the five or six hours it’s going to take us to fly there? You’re wearing that rosary at your waist—pretend to be praying, or something. Or maybe I should just let it be known that you’ve taken a vow of silence. Or one of the two of us has to hover over you at all times, to head off…”
“Oh, so I’ll make a terrible nun, but Rob is going to do just fine as a preacher?” Stella demanded, still annoyed.
“She has a point,” Rob said equably.
Philip raised his eyes—to the ceiling of the room, and above. “Lord, help me get them through this,” he said, only half-jokingly. “Rob, for once, use the gift that this alien gave you. I remember talking to you, back in the habitat, once, and you were… you were someone called Abraham. You were no slouch at arguing with me about God, back then, as Abraham, at least. Can you bring him out, for the journey, at least? Can you control it that finely? Can you handle being… who you need to be…?”
Stella, suddenly all too serious, glanced from one man to the other. “That is so dangerous,” she said quietly. “It’ll be playing with fire. And if you’re really telling me to be seen and not heard, there’s very little I can do if you suddenly switch to something… less appropriate…”
Rob’s grin had faded, and he looked a little grim. “I never thought I would have to… use this… as a charade,” he said.
“I’ll be there,” Philip said. “For what it’s worth. I cannot hover over both of you at once all the time and, Stella, you are going to have to hand over the reins for this one. Trust me. I really need you not to draw too much attention to yourself. There are going to be only two other female clerics on that flight—one other sister, and a female anointed priest from a wholly different denomination—it is probably going to be natural for at least that other nun to want to be in your company, but I’m going to have to pay way too much attention to protecting Rob, you are going to be on your own, can you handle it?”
“It’s the only way out,” Stella said, very white around the mouth. “Believe me, I appreciate that you had to have pulled a lot of strings for this—this is likely to cost you, even if you aren’t completely found out—and if either of us slips up—”
“It might cost me a non-negotiable trip to some distant chapter house for retreat and contemplation of my sins,” Philip said, “or maybe a couple of years’ service in some particular post that nobody is greatly eager to be called to serve in. It could be good for me, at that. Curb unwholesome ambition, if nothing else. But it isn’t going to be…”
“Ambition,” Rob said. “You never did really tell us why they sent you to us.”
“One of you asked for a priest,” Philip said, shrugging his shoulders. “So we were told.”
“A priest,” Rob said. “Not a prince of the church.”
“You didn’t get a prince of the church,” Philip retorted. And then his lip curled into a small self-deprecating smile. “Only a minor aristocrat. My family has deep roots in the Church—to hear my French grandmother tell it, hers was the family that paved the road for the Pope’s move to Avignon in the fourteenth century. When it was my turn to step up to take vows, I ended up as one the under-secretaries to the Father General, and the worst that could happen to me is that I will have to face him while he tells me how disappointed he is in me. But even that—Father Lorenzo Garibaldi, Father General of the Society of Jesus, is a hugely pragmatic man. And I’ve known him for way too long not to have an understanding of that, and him having a decent idea that I am aware of it. You need to be, perhaps, in that position.”
“Were you groomed for it yourself, then?” Rob asked, with a faint smile.
“I don’t think anyone ever looked at me as a candidate for that—and if Father Garibaldi had any ideas about it, from my pedigree, before he met me, he probably found me wanting anyway. I have far too many faults, as a Jesuit monk.”
“You’re a good priest,” Rob said, “but I do think you make a lousy monk. No offense.”
“None taken. I sometimes agree with that so much it hurts. Neither of you is aware of the kind of spirituality we are supposed to practice, in my order—but one of our basic tenets is to regulate our lives in a manner that allows us to make decisions that are free from any inordinate attachment to anything. Anything except the greater glory of God, of course.”
Philip bent a glance on both his companions, and it was a wholly open one, completely vulnerable—he was trusting them with some deeply personal things, but it didn’t seem to be unwarranted. There was a bond between them now almost as strong as the bond that an alien soul had forged between the Parada crew. Stella honestly felt choked with love for these two men, and their willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. It seemed only natural that they were both dressed in the garb of men of God—with all that this implied—even if she, Stella, had openly told Philip that she believed in no part of the creed which he so cherished and tried to live by.
“And look at me,” Philip said, shrugging. “How attached am I now to things that are not directly of God? Here I am, doing what I am doing, freely and under no duress… and under Jesuit rules I am an abject failure. It is a question of loving God and loving Man and I am supposed to make a proper distinction between them—but sometimes…”
