me on a camel down a winding mountain trail to an oasis on the high desert. A long day of clinging to a clumsy wooden seat on the back of the lurching beast left me sun-blistered and aching.
The torrid sun was low before we could dismount at the edge of a tiny lake at the end of a dry stream that ran down from the highlands in the monsoon season. It was on a stony plateau, the low desert and the vast salt marshes on the coast still a full mile farther down, but even after sunset the heat was stifling. Laurel used her barter card to pay for our rooms and meals at a lodge where her brother had worked through his social service year.
She gave me a little handful of bright green beans.
“The seed of the angel tree,” she said. “A shrub from down along the coast. It’s a natural drug for hell fever. We’re trying to grow it here.
I chewed one of the seeds. Its sharp astringency burned my mouth, bitter as my own predicament.
“It’s better than it tastes.” She laughed at the face I made. “It saved my father’s life.”
Radiant at breakfast next morning, she wanted to show me the rows of young angel trees her brother had planted, and took me through a little museum that held the relics of a tragic chapter in the planet’s history. A shipload of Free Space convicts had been left at the oasis with no supplies. Nearly half of them died. Gunter Greenlaw led the team that opened the road and got the survivors to the Vale.
“We earned our liberty,” she told me.
Later, we rode south to ski on the slopes of that dead volcano. The road ran beside the Avalon through gardens, fruit orchards, grain fields, green meadows where spotted cattle grazed the slopes above us. Laurel spoke proudly of the pioneers who had tamed a hostile wilderness, dammed mountain streams for water, cleared land for crops and cattle, built their new society.
The beast’s lurching gait kept bumping us together on the high wooden seat. Tormented by her body warmth, breathing her haunting scent, listening to her easy laugh, I tried to contain tides of wild desire and bitter despair.
At the lodge I offered my card and asked for two rooms.
“One will do,” she told the clerk, and turned to grin at me. “I love you, Kiff. You do like me, don’t you?” Trapped in a tangle of emotions, I stammered that I did.
“Do you think we must be married?” The clerk stared, and she laughed at me. “You’ve talked about your government and how it limits all you do. We have more freedom here.”
The clerk punched my card for just one room, but I needed time to sort my tangled feelings out. I said I felt hungry. We had dinner and a bottle of wine, out on a terrace below the snows. She admired the view and asked if we had snow sports on Earth. I found little to say.
“Kiff, you are hard to understand.” She pushed her glass aside and leaned to stare into my face. “Even when I know how different your old world was. Are you unhappy here? Is there someone you love back outside?”
Honestly, I told her there was no one. Still I couldn’t tell her what I felt, but the wine had begun to dull my reservations. When it was gone, we went to bed together. She was passionate. I half forgot my mission. Honestly, I told her I loved her, but all I couldn’t say choked me with bitter shame.
We spent three days there. There were no lifts, but a big windmill drove an endless cable that pulled us to the top. The sun was bright, the slope great fun. Laurel was more intoxicating than the wine. She seemed radiant, imagining our future together.
“My brother has Free Space friends,” she told me. “They say the star worlds have to change. He hopes we can make some kind of peaceful contact with them. Do you think a time will come when I can go with you back to the stars?”
“That would be wonderful,” I told her. “If it could happen.”
I knew it was impossible.
My radio stayed dead until the night when I found a green light flashing. Admiral Gilliyar was overhead, on a geosynchronous orbit that kept his armada over the highland ridge. I spent the rest of the night transmitting my recorded notes and pictures.
The sonic boom of an emerging skip craft pealed out of the sky while we were at breakfast a few mornings later. Jets roared overhead. A clerk rushed in, shouting that a Terran lander was down on the pad. A sleek little craft, it carried the Terran flag painted on its armored flank. Black-muzzled guns jutted out of the top turret.
Nobody got off. It sat there nearly an hour, while uneasy citizens gathered around it. A door dropped at last to make a ramp. I heard a roll of martial music. A flagman led a squad of riflemen down the ramp. A cameraman followed, set up a tripod, and shot Admiral Gilliyar marching out of the air lock in dress blue and gold, medals flashing on his breast.
Moving with the music, he took the flag and stabbed the sharpened staff into the ground. He turned, found me standing with my hosts in the watching crowd, and called my name. I stood there a moment, caught in confusion and bleak regret, before I stumbled toward him. Laurel ran to overtake me and threw her arms around me.
“Kiff!” she whispered. “I’ve always been afraid they’d come after you. Can’t we help?”
I stood there an endless time trembling in her arms, too sick to speak. Breathing at last, I muttered that I was sorry, terribly sorry. I kissed her. Sobbing, she clung to me.
“I never meant—never meant to hurt you.” The words stuck in my throat. “But I’m a spy. In the service of Cleon III and the Terran Republic.”
She gripped my arms and stared at me, her wide eyes strange with shock. Blind with my own sudden tears I pulled out of her grasp, blundered on toward the admiral, and stopped to give him a stiff salute. Smiling, he returned the salute and came on to shake my hand. The little crowd had fallen silent, waiting till he turned and spoke.
“I am Terran Space Admiral Acton Gilliyar.”
He paused for a moment before he went on, his mellow eloquence echoing off the long stone wall. He came in peace, to bring President Cleon Stawhawke’s most cordial greetings and a heartfelt welcome into the Republic. I hardly heard the booming words. I was watching Laurel.
Her face white and stiff at first, she flushed pink. Her small fists clenched. Glaring at me with a look that changed from shock to scornful contempt, she spat on the ground.
“The President regrets your long neglect,” his polished voice rolled on. “I understand that you are trying to survive here in a stare of lawless anarchy. I have come to bring you the law and order of Terran civilization. President Starhawke has appointed me the first governor of the planet Lucifer.”
Muttering, people stared at one another and back at him.
“ Sir!” Laurel’s voice rang loud, heated perhaps by her anger at me. “We want none of your Republic.”
She looked around at those beside her, saw them nodding with agreement. “We need none of you!”
“Madam.” He raised his voice, his tone grown harder. “With all due respect, I must inform you that your planet has belonged to the Terran Republic since the discoverers landed here and raised our flag.”
“Non—nonsense, sir!” She caught her breath and lifted her quivering voice. “You threw us out of your wicked empire, and left us here to die. We’ve earned our freedom and we’ll die to keep it.”
“You may die. You’ll never keep it.”
“We’ll never give it up.”
“I must warn you, madam, that your words are a reckless incitement to treason.” His voice slow and grimly solemn, he looked around at the little crowd and fixed his eyes on her. “If you want to die, the choice is yours. In modern times, suspected traitors are no longer merely exiled. The penalty now is death.”
I heard a stifled outcry from her mother, a furious oath from her father. Friends gathered around them in a muttering group. The admiral turned to lift his hand at nose of the lander. The martial music rose again. He ordered his rifle squad back to the ramp. Laurel darted past them to the flag, pulled the staff out of the ground, and hurled it against the side of the lander. She stood staring at him and then at me, breathing hard.
“We witnessed that outrageous act of open treason!” he shouted at her. “What is your name?”
“Laurel Greenlaw.” She tossed her head. “What is yours?”
“Acton Gilliyar.” He grinned at her bleakly. “We’ll be meeting again.”
