it was little Debra Dutchman’s laughing attempt to get him to dance with her that haunted Faelin most. What had he done to earn that kindness?
Winter turned to spring. With the better weather, clipper ships came into dock. Faelin was drawn to them, haunted by his past. At first he watched from a distance, admiring the white spread of the sails. He began to think that if only he could get off this damned island, maybe he could earn enough to make his way. He’d lost weight and muscle, but the skills were there.
Soon, whenever he wasn’t working—earning just enough to keep him in poor food and worse clothing— Faelin took to lurking about the docks, the pride that had kept him away faded to a shadow. In a way he was still afraid to be seen by anyone who might know him, yet he longed for the contact that might get him a berth.
Late one afternoon in September, almost a year after he had fled Richmont, a voice spoke his name. “Faelin?”
He looked up, trying to place the voice, realizing with shock that the man who was speaking to him was Simon. Superficially, Simon looked the same, but there was something to his bearing—a straightness, a way of meeting your eye when talking to you—that transformed him into another man. Faelin, who had been much beaten and kicked this past year, had to fight an automatic urge to cringe.
“Faelin!” Simon repeated, dropping to his knees next to him. “Man, you’re alive! I’d given you up for dead. I’ve been looking…”
He stopped, shocked as he assessed his former partner’s condition. Then he went on in a deliberately steady voice:
“I’ve been looking since last year. Someone said they saw your buckskin for sale in a shady market at the edge of Auckland. I went there, but no luck, though I did find someone who remembered a man wearing what had to be your shirt. It wasn’t you though—for one thing he was older, for another fair as a whale’s belly. I kept checking for you though, came on all the supply runs to Auckland, but never got a whiff of you.
“When the clippers were due, though, I thought I’d check again. Seemed you might have gotten a berth, if by luck you’d gotten here alive. God’s own, man, but what happened to you?”
Faelin told him, first crouched there on the street, later, when Simon recovered himself, in a tavern where they drank good ale and Faelin had his fill of chowder and bread.
“And so here I am,” Faelin concluded. Simon’s honest joy at finding him alive had robbed him of any defensiveness. He’d told the entire thing straight, even including the embarrassing parts.
“And what do you want next?” Simon asked. “If you want a berth, I’ll buy you out of your share of the claim, if…”
“You’ll buy me out?” Faelin interrupted, astonished. Surely he’d abandoned any right to the claim a year since.
Simon misunderstood him, though.
“I’ve managed to hold it. Made a deal with the Dutchmans. I work their place in return for keeping our livestock with theirs. Got another dog and that helps with the sheep. Named it Repo. That’s Maori for ‘swamp,’” he added inconsequentially. “Was just as hard to house train as Roto.”
“But you say I still have a share?” Faelin asked. “After I walked out on you?”
“Sure. You started the whole thing, Faelin. I’d never have had the courage to jump ship and find my way to Richmont without you. I owe you my life and my… well… prosperity. In a way, I owe you my happiness, too.”
Simon blushed.
“I got married this winter to Lamont’s younger daughter, Idelia. She’s not a looker like Jocelyn, but she’s a sweetheart.”
“And you’d still give me a share?” Faelin asked again.
“That’s right,” Simon said. He looked Faelin squarely in the eye. “I’ll sell enough to make up your half of the sheep and cattle—based on what we had when you left. Same for the dog and the riding stock, less that buckskin. There’s something I’d rather do though…”
“What?”
“Convince you to come back, Faelin. You’ve the makings of pakeha, if you’d just get rid of the idea that something can be had for nothing but your wanting it. Idelia knows how I feel and though she’s a bit nervous—you scared everybody white when you went at old Chapin—she says she trusts my judgment.”
Faelin considered. Impossibly, he had a second chance and he thought he understood a whole lot better what he was being offered.
He thrust out his hand.
“It’s a deal, partner.”
This time, he knew he’d make his word good.
DEVIL’S STAR
by Jack Williamson
My mother had chronic bad luck, and a secret shield against it. On no evidence at all, she clung to a stubborn belief that she was the great-grandniece of an illegitimate son of President Cleon Starhawke I, who had won fame for the interstellar conquests that added half a thousand planets to the Terran Republic, and notoriety for the beauty and fertility of his numerous mistresses.
“Never forget that we have presidential blood,” she used to urge me. “Live up to it, Kiff, and it will make you great.”
With no proof of the myth, I grew up proud of my Starhawke blood, loyal to the Republic and dreaming of a chance for some signal service to the President. My father abandoned us before I was five, migrating to a newly opened planet with a younger woman. My mother spent the next few years working as a domestic servant before she found another husband and skipped out with him, leaving me alone on Earth.
My own luck ran better. Both husbands left funds toward my education. She enrolled me in the Starhawke Space Academy. I came of age and earned my commission there, swearing eternal allegiance to the Terran Republic and Cleon III.
Graduating as a military historian, I begged for the chance to make my name with some active force out on the Rim frontier. Instead, I found myself still stuck on Earth, the freshman member of a little research team in the library at the Presidential War College near New Denver. Our project was to produce an updated history of Devil’s Star. On my first day there, a discontented senior officer tried to shatter my illusions.
“You’ll find no career here.” He looked around and dropped his voice. “The library was founded to glorify the Starhawkes, but they won no wars on Devil’s Star. The planet may justify the name, but it has no history.”
I asked for facts about it
“None worth knowing.” He shrugged. “Sea level air pressure nearly twice Terra’s. Surface mostly too hot and too hostile to be terraformed. No resources worth attention. The explorers had labeled it Lucifer and passed it by.”
“Wasn’t it once a penal colony?”
“A death pit.” He shrugged again. “Called the Black Hole. Infested with hostile life and strange disease. Prisoners sometimes sent down in old landing craft, with no fuel to take off again. Public outrage stopped that when the truth got out. No landings since.” He made a bitter face. “We’re in the same fix here, condemned to our own hopeless hole.”
“The convicts did survive?”
“A disappointment to the executioners.” He grinned. “A hardy few climbed out of the heat, to a high mountain ridge that runs down the middle of the main continent. A cooler corner of hell. Some are likely still alive.”
Trapped there, with nothing to do and no future in sight, I was feeling as hopeless as another maroon until the day an officer in the uniform of the Presidential Guard caught me in my little cubicle with the news that Space Admiral Gilliyar wanted to see me at once. Astonished and a little alarmed, I asked why.
“He’ll tell you why.”
