The Chosen

and floppy on top, combed-a foreigner's style, different from both the Chosen crop and the bowl-cut of a Proti. He wore a thin fabric pullover printed in bizarre colorful patterns, baggy shorts, laced shoes with rubber soles, and a ridiculous looking billed cap.

'Hi,' he said, holding out a hand. Then: 'Ah, guddag.'

'I speak English,' John said, shaking with the brief hard clamp of the Land. English and Imperial were compulsory subjects at school, and he'd practiced with his mother.

The other boy flexed his fingers. 'Better'n I speak Landisch,' he said, grinning. 'I'm Jeffrey Farr. That's my dad over there.'

He nodded towards a tall slender man in a white uniform who was standing a careful twenty meters from the Hosten party. John recognized the uniform from familiarization lectures and slides: Republic of Santander Navy, officer's lightweight summer garrison version. It must be Captain Farr, the officer Mom had been seeing at the consulate about the citizenship stuff.

I wish she'd tell me the truth. I'm not a little kid or an idiot, he thought. That wasn't the only reason she was talking to Maurice Farr so much. 'John Hosten, Probationer-hereditary,' he replied aloud.

A Probationer-hereditary was born to the Chosen and automatically entitled to the training and the Test of Life; only a few children of Proteges were adopted into the course. Then he flushed. He wasn't going to be a Probationer long, and he could never have passed the Test, not the genetic portions. Not with his foot. He couldn't be anything but a Washout, second-class citizen.

'You don't have to worry about all that crap any more,' Jeffrey said cheerfully, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the liner Pride of Bosson. 'We're all going back to civilization.'

The flag that fluttered from her signal mast had a blue triangle in the left field with fifteen white stars, and two broad stripes of red and white to the right. The Republic of Santander's banner.

John opened his mouth in automatic reflex to defend the Land, then closed it again. He was going to Santander himself. To live.

'Ya, we're going,' he said. They both looked over towards their parents. 'Your mother?'

'She died when I was a baby,' Jeffrey said.

There was a crash behind them. The boys turned, both relieved at the distraction. One of the steam cranes on the Bosson's deck had slipped a gear while unloading a final cargo net on the dock. The Protege foreman of the docker gang went white under his tan-he'd be held responsible-and turned to yell insults and complaints up at the liner's deck, shaking his fist. Then he turned and whipped his lead-weighted truncheon across the side of one docker's head. There was a sound like a melon dropping on pavement; the docker's face seemed to distort like a rubber mask. He fell to the cracked uneven pavement with a limp finality, as if someone had cut all his tendons.

'Shit,' Jeffrey whispered.

The foreman made an angry gesture with his baton, and two of the dockers took their injured fellow by the arms and dragged him off towards a warehouse. His head was rolled back, eyes disappeared in the whites, bubbles of blood whistling out of his nose. The foreman turned back to the ship and called up to the seamen on the railing, calling for an officer. They looked back at him for a moment, then one silently turned away and walked towards the nearest hatch. . slowly.

The gang instantly squatted on their heels when the foreman's attention went elsewhere. A few lit up stubs of cigarette; John could smell the musky scent of hemp mingled with the tobacco. A few smirked at the foreman's back, but most were expressionless in a different way from Chosen, their faces blank and doughy under sweat and stubble. They were wearing cotton overalls with broad arrows on them, labor-camp inmates' clothing.

'Hey, that crate's busted,' Jeffrey said.

John looked. One wood-and-iron box about three meters on a side had sprung along its top. The stencils on the side read Museum of History and Naturel Copernik. He felt a stir of curiosity. Copernik was capital of the Land, and the Museum was more than a storehouse; it was the primary research center of the most advanced nation on Visager. He'd had daydreams of working there himself, of finally figuring out some of the mysterious artifacts of the Ancestors, the star-spanning colonizers from Earth. The Federation had fallen over a thousand years ago-it was 1221 A.F. right now-and nobody could understand the enigmatic constructs of ceramic and unknown metals. Not even now, despite the way technology had been advancing in the past hundred years. They were as incomprehensible as a steam engine or a dirigible would be to one of the arctic savages.

'What's inside?' he said eagerly.

'C'mon, let's take a look.'

The laborers ignored them; John was in a Probationer's school uniform, and Jeffrey was an obvious foreigner-an upper-class boy could go where he pleased, and the Fourth Bureau would be lethally interested if they heard of Proteges talking to an auzlander. Even in the camps, there was always someplace worse. The foreman was still trading cusswords with the liner's petty officer.

John grabbed at the heavy Abaca hemp of the net and climbed; it was easy, compared to the obstacle courses at school. Jeffrey followed in an awkward scramble, all elbows and knees.

'It's just a rock,' he said in disappointment, peering through the sprung panels.

'No, it's a meteorite,' John said.

The lumpy rock was about a meter across, suspended in an elastic cradle in the center of the crate. It hadn't taken any damage when the net dropped-unlike a keg of brandy, which they could smell leaking-but then, from the slagged and pitted appearance, it had survived an incandescent journey through the atmosphere. John was surprised that it was being sent to the museum; meteorites were common. You saw dozens in the sky, any night. There must be something unusual about this one, maybe its chemical composition. He reached through and touched it.

'Sort of cold,' he said. Not quite icy, but not natural, either. 'Feel it.'

Jeffrey stretched a long thin arm through the crack. 'Yeah, like-'

The universe vanished.

* * *

Sally looked over her shoulder. Where was John? Then she saw him, scrambling over the cargo net with another boy. With Maurice's son. She opened her mouth to call them back, then closed it. It's important that they get along. Maurice hadn't made a formal proposal yet, but. . She turned back.

Karl had his witnesses to either side: his legal children, Heinrich and Gerta, adopted in the fashion of the Chosen. Heinrich was the son of a friend who'd died in an expedition to the Far West Islands; they were dangerous, and the seas between, with their abundant and vicious native life, even more so. The other had been born to Protege laborers on the Hosten estates and christened Gitana. Karl had sponsored her; she was a bright active youngster and her parents were John's nurse and attendant valet/bodyguard respectively.

Maria and Angelo stood at a respectful distance; their daughter ignored them. Ex-daughter; no Chosen were as strict as those Chosen from Protege ranks. She was Gerta Hosten now, not Gitana Pesalozi.

A Chosen attorney exchanged papers with the plump little Santander consul, then turned to Sarah.

'Sarah Hosten, nee Kingman, do you hereby irrevocably renounce connubial ties with Karl Hosten, Chosen of the Land?'

'I do.'

'Karl Hosten, do you acknowledge this renunciation?'

'I do.'

'Do you also acknowledge Sarah Hosten as bearing full parental rights to John Hosten, issue of this union?'

'Excepting that John Hosten may continue to claim my name if he wishes, I do.' Karl swallowed, but his face might have been carved from the basalt of the volcanoes.

'Heinrich Hosten, Gerta Hosten, Probationers-adoptee of the line of Hosten, do you witness?'

'We do.'

'All parties will now sign, fingerprint and list their geburtsnumero on this document.'

Sally complied, although unlike anyone born in the Land of the Chosen she didn't have a birth-number