Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Kether Station

Written by C. L. Polk

Illustrated by Laura Givens

The Faithful spend their last credit to stare at the Kether Nebula. They squat in the crawlspaces of their new Jerusalem, migrate from window to window like Monarch butterflies, and all Crown can do is limit viewing to a half minute six times a day, and curse Jefferson Minneapolis for insisting his space station have picture windows.

If Crown Array and Power had the shields down now, the Faithful would see stars born in the spiraling birth canal of hydrogen gas that throws off so much juice the phrase "Power Crisis" is obsolete. They'd see an independent cargo hauler called the Copenhagen Star, parked out front with a full array of batteries fed from raysails that soak up starbirth energy like plants in the sun.

And if one of the Faithful looked closely they might see Lana Miraflores, who used to be Lana Lima, doing the EVA backstroke toward a maintenance lock.

But the shields are up, and Lana has the many-armed dance of Kether—known as the Crown of Creation, the Life Matrix, and the Great Star Mother—all to herself. It's majestic and awesome, but she doesn't much like it.

It makes her feel small.

****

Fresh, grown food was what lured Lana to the station she hated most in all the galaxy. She bought a bowl of real soba with ostentatiously fresh vegetables from Adroa on every run, and buried herself in her reader while she ate and felt strangely heavy.

Lana was absorbed in the part where the story's heroes were meeting the first aliens mankind had ever seen when a shadow fell over her table.

"Sister?"

Lana looked up from her story at a woman dressed like a Sister of the Star Mother—hair grown long and authentically oily, black tunic the backdrop for a lightwave pendant of the nebula. The Sister leaned forward and the pendant dangled in Lana's eyes, bearing the motto "She changes everything she touches."

Lana set her reader by her cooling soba. "Yes?"

The sister swept one welcoming hand toward the windows. "It's nearly time."

Crowds had gathered by the shielded windows while Lana had buried herself in the opening chapters. Lines of the Faithful held hands and sang syrupy songs of praise.

Lana ignored the Sister's outstretched hand. "Oh, that's all right. Thanks anyway."

"She will welcome you, Sister. As soon as you are not afraid."

"Groovy," Lana muttered, and buried her nose in the reader. The Sister of the Star Mother went away.

The shields came down, and the ruckus was enough to make Lana peep over the top of her reader at the Faithful. They gaped at the cavern of light, dancing around its crèche of stars. The Faithful wept. They laughed. They rushed the window as if they could touch its glorious light—

Except for the boy stealing whatever wasn't nailed down.

He slipped in and out of the fringes, lifting commerce chips, identity cards, even someone's briefcase until animal instinct made him freeze and look up at Lana, who grinned at him and gave him a get-out-of here toss of her shaved head.

The boy dashed off with a smile of his own, the two front teeth large and square in his child's head.

Lana watched, and then recognized—Sergei—

She tried to lunge out of her seat, but the table was still locked down. Her half bowl of soba tumbled and slopped down her right leg; her reader fell to the floor and shattered. She pried her way free as her kidnapped son ducked between a beam and a Church of the Crown kiosk and disappeared.

****

He would have been eight years, seven months, and twenty-two days old. No. He is eight. I saw him.

Lana never had her POV cameras removed; those micron-thin optic wires had settled into her brain for too long. She'd have had to train herself to see all over again, with grown eyes and synaptic therapy. Besides, they were too useful.

She huddled in a commode and looped his face turning toward her, replayed the shock and fear. The relief that she wasn't going to rat him out, and his answering big-toothed smile just before he took off like a dart.

She never had her parasymph removed either. Boredom, bouncing left foot, the crown of shifting muscles as she smiled, with a touch of tingle of her scalp. The tiny, total tension over her shoulders and abdomen, her eyebrows rising, the jolt of fear in her guts as she connected that eight-year-old face to her memories—

"What, did you die in there?" a man's voice demanded.

No, Lana wanted to answer. I died back there, when I saw my son picking pockets.

But she banged the stall door open and glared down at him, her head shaved slick and bald. The man backed away from the spacer, the intimate friend of abyssal nothing.

She smiled, all teeth and no kindness. "Sorry. Just got in after three weeks. It's all yours."

She stepped aside with a grand gesture, and made the mistake of glancing down the line, into the shocked face of recognition.

"Lana. It's you. I knew it was you," Maddy said.

Lana fought nausea. "That's not my name."

Some of the light faded from Maddy's eyes, rekindled again a bit cooler.

"You look different." Maddy smiled like it was a joke. She tossed her hair—perfect Hollywood blond— over one shoulder. "And you're a lot taller. Is that the gravity? Sorry, the free-fall?"

"I'm sorry, but I think you've mistaken me for someone else. If you'll excuse me?" Lana stepped to the right and left the public washroom. The crowd eddied around her.

Maddy followed, shoving a Church of the Crown recruiter into the newly enlightened he'd been proselytizing. "Forget it. You may not look like your old headshots, Ms. Lima, but you probably get people saying you look like so-and-so. If you had hair."

"I'm going to have to call Station Security if you don't leave me alone, ma'am."

A woman yelped as she got the point of Maddy's elbow in her back. "I'll tip a reporter," she sang.

"Lady, for the last time: Get lost."

"The resemblance is uncanny, isn't it? Right down to the buck teeth."

Lana stopped and Maddy smacked right into her.

"I saw him running. I saw you trying to get out of your chair to catch him. You saved me a lot of bribery with that." She sounded just as she had when some producer wanted Lana, and she had him by the balls.

Lana walked away from Madelene while she tried to swallow.

"Lana, please," Maddy called out. "Please talk to me."

She ducked around some Monks of the Crown, and ran.

****

Lana Miraflores, who wasn't Lana Lima any more, fled to the Copenhagen Star. She shut off communications, found some space on the computer and compared her sighting of the kid to pictures she had of Sergei as a baby. The computer pointed out twenty-eight facial structure similarities—not enough for a court of law.

But appearance surgeons were really that good. He could be altered. Lana wondered what Sergei had been through all this time, and thought about how she would have been leaving for Adroa in an hour if she hadn't gone in for fresh food. She struck the raysail and towed the battery array into the hold—2,048 baby ducks following mama in a gentle ballet of thrusters and marionette strings.

The green purple gold of Kether shone through her helmet visor. She couldn't see it very well after a while, and she couldn't wipe her eyes.

****

Kether's sector hallway was a writhing serpent of bodies biting its own tail, full of too many people who shouldn't be there (but claimed that they had the right), too many people who had adopted the crawlspace life to look at something that they could believe in.

And the Faithful wouldn't have gotten out of the way of a mere actress, even if they'd known who she was, even if she swung a sack full of Oscars to clear a path. Lana dodged and sidestepped her way along the migrating crowds, taking deep breaths, competing for oxygen with all the Faithful who fouled the hall with their CO₂ and their sweat. She even looked up at the ceiling, as if she could tell if the photosynth paint was malfunctioning, or if it was scrubbing off the carbon and giving life back.

Lana stood in line at a food kiosk and ordered more food than she could eat if she were starving. She found another seat in this viewing gallery, and watched the kids.

There were plenty. They offered to clear away the tourists' dishes so the lazy wouldn't lose their seats, but they only offered to people who still had food on their plates. Lana nibbled on soba, ate half a gyoza, and leaned away from her repast with a gusty sigh. They'd make you give all those Oscars back if they saw that performance, she thought.

But a boy came along and said, "The shields are coming down in forty-five minutes, ma'am. Would you like me to take that for you so you don't lose your seat?"

Lana smiled at him, giving her tray a tiny push in his direction. "If you'll help me out."

He backed up half a step. "What?"

"There's a kid," Lana said. "I was wondering if you knew him. No, don't tell me. I'll tell you, and you go tell him and let him decide if he wants to see me."

"Okay." He picked a set of chopsticks out of his sleeve pocket, and started eating the noodles right away. "They're better hot," he said. Lana thought the broth had tasted a bit off, but he gobbled it down.

"They are. Okay, today I saw a kid. About eight. Dark auburn red hair. Buck teeth in front. He had on big thermal boots, brown pants, and a black coat that was way too big for him."

"Why do you want him?"

"He looks like family, and I do the battery run," Lana said. "He might want to come and do some work, or go see somebody else in his family on the route, you know." "Crown, Lady! I'll be your firstborn son for that," he said through a mouthful of buckwheat noodles. Lana winced. "You know your family, kid?"

"No," he said.

"You got a last name?"

"Warsaw."

"Tell you what: You pass on the message to the kid and come with him when he comes to see me. We'll check out your family while I check out his. How's that?"

A shadow flickered over his face. "Having someone tell you what to do all the time could be bad."

"Could be. But at least you'd know where they were, and you could decide about it later, if you wanted."

"Yeah. Later," he said. "Is your line from Poland?"

"Peruvian."

"Oh," he said. "I'll be back." He picked up the bowl and drank the broth, holding the heatstone away with his chopsticks. He grabbed the gyoza dumplings and wrapped them in a napkin, and they disappeared inside a pocket along with a bag of cola. He gave Lana a trembling smile and ran off, bearing a now finished tray in his hands, his rubber-soled socks flashing like they had wings on the heels. Lana waited for two hours with her new reader, and had just gotten to the part where the aliens revealed their true mission to the spaceship crew when the boy Warsaw came back alone, looking like someone had just shoved his dog out the airlock.

Lana tucked the reader in her pocket. "You couldn't find him?"

"It's too late," he said. "He's in SecWeb."

Lana launched out of her seat at a run. The kid tried to follow, but the wings on Lana's boots were a little bigger.

****

SecWeb is a labyrinth. There's no point in looking for a main entrance—visitors just pick a thread on the web and go in. Lana ran down a corridor that was a roomy seventy-five centimetres wide following the green track to Visitor Services.

Traffic on the green line was thick. It bottlenecked once the corridor narrowed because of some ninety-kilo dude who was just out for a stroll.

"Hey, can you pick it up there?" Lana called.

"Yeah, move it," someone else grumbled.

"I got respiratory problems," the front man complained. "No physical exertion."

"Crown and Stars," someone else complained. "I've got to block a deportation order."

"Can I help that? I've got a Medical Condition."

They travelled the last three hundred meters at the stately pace of monks.

Lana and the others tumbled out the door and dodged around him to the various departments. She angled for the Witness Services rogue's gallery and found the kid's—Sergei's—picture, requested further information, and settled down to wait. The spiritual rights lawyer joined the scrum of Sisters of the Star Mother and Station Security administrators and jammed on the refrain of personal freedom in the major key of spiritual discrimination.

Lana did her best to ignore it, and before long a woman who barely made the height requirements halted by her seat and smiled. "How may I help you?"

Lana held up a sheet of glasspaper with Sergei's picture on it. "I came to get this person. How might I find him?"

The Sec/off took the sheet and scanned the code, and gave Lana a cute little frown. "You don't know his name?"

"Sergei Lima-Gothenburg," Lana guessed.

Her smile brightened. "Sergei's been released to a declared guardian. You just missed them," she said.

"To Madelene Hull?"

"Yes. You know where to find her?"

"I do." Lana smiled. It wasn't her fault. "Thanks for your help."

Lana turned and made her way out of the Web, jogging down the path marked out by the green line, and swerved her way through the crowds—migrating again, or perhaps on their way to or from whatever ventilation corridor they called home. There was only one hotel fit for the accommodation of Madelene Hull.

Though the conceirge of Kether's only luxury hotel would not announce her, or even confirm the presence of any of the guests. He would only take a message, but wouldn't take a message if Lana wouldn't leave a way to be contacted. Not that Madelene would call her until after she'd stuffed Lana's son full of Turkish Delight and promised to make him a prince.

Lana said that she would remain in the lobby, discreetly out of earshot. She moved away to the departures lounge and even kept her back to the man while he made his furtive call.

****

"I thought I might see you again, even though we're strangers," Maddy said.

"Enough of that. Good work, Detective Hull. How did you know he was there?"

"Kept my eye on the new arrivals on the network. I figured he'd get in trouble with the law."

"You probably reported him yourself."

Her old agent wiped away the smile at her own cleverness. "They're going to hear the case day after tomorrow. I've already said that I'm willing to take him off station—"

" You're willing to take him off station?"

"Lana, please. I declared guardianship for him. It's only paperwork—and besides, we haven't even matched him yet. What does it matter who did it?"

It mattered. "I know someone who will do the typing—they're only a couple days from here—"

"The trial's in two days."

"So I'll wait two stinkin' days. I've waited this long—"

"And my travel permit is for Clio."

"Well, that's fine; I can let you know what happens."

"I'm taking Sergei with me."

Lana's ears grew hot as the sound of the ocean rushed through them. "No you're not."

"Legally, I'm his guardian. Yes, I am."

"Maddy, you can't do this."

"You want to fight it? Get an injunction."

"You bitch." Lana clenched her fists, fighting not to smash the screen—she wanted to reach through it and wrap her hands around Madelene's neck, and squeeze, and bash her head against something solid and unyielding. Lana could taste Madelene's blood in her mouth, and then felt the pain where she'd bitten her lip.

"I must be cruel only to be kind," Madelene said. "I'll take Sergei with me and I won't even let you see him on video until you come back."

"You don't even know if he is Sergei!"

"And neither do you! And you won't until you come home to Clio and find out."

"You'd use him like that?"

"Hell yes!" she shouted.

"Maddy—"

"I've been frantic about you! You know what I thought? I thought he'd taken you too, until I—"

"Maddy, Sergei—"

"—found out from that detective that you'd straightened up all your money affairs and then I thought you'd—"

"Maddy!"

"Shut up and listen to me!" she screamed.

"Maddy, Sergei just went out the door!" Lana shouted. She whirled out of the camera's POV. She ran around the suite . Scandalous to live in all that space here, bigger than the head of Engineering's place I'll bet—

Madelene came back and sat down at the console. "I'm so sorry," she said. She wouldn't look up at the screen.

"Sorry won't bring him back," Lana said, and hung up.

****

The last time Lana had been to Kether they had been introducing Panacea regina to the Kether Nature Preserve. She sat on a resin bench in the midst of carefully sculpted wilderness in the heart of the station. She studied the fluttering gold of an Orange-Barred Sulphur that landed on a flower matching the pale underside of its wings, and the muscles across her back twitched as footsteps clicked on the path behind her.

"I thought you'd be here," Maddy said.

Lana didn't answer.

"I just want to tell you how sorry I am. I took him to the swankiest hotel on the whole goddamned station," she said, "and the second my back is turned—"

"Yeah. Mighty ungrateful of him, Maddy. You think you can talk about how he's a bargaining chip where he can hear you and he's going to stick around?"

"I wouldn't have harmed a hair on his head," she said.

"Think about it: You're a homeless kid and some stranger busts you out of jail and sets you up in the cashest digs around? Who's got that kind of money and wants anything to do with kids nobody gives a fuck about?"

"You're saying it's my fault?"

"Damn straight. Crown of Creation, I could have scared him with a bowl of soup! He could really be Sergei—he could really be my son—" Lana pressed the heels of her hands against the throbbing just above her eyes. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't shove you out an airlock."

The Sulphur spread its solar wings, showing the bright yellow backs with smudges of orange. His. His wings.

Maddy spoke into the silence. "It was the only way I could see to get you back home."

He struggled to rise into the air, to flutter and dance for a pale ivory mate, the highlight of his ten days as an adult.

"Did the kid