“What language do they speak?” I asked.
“Regular Earthian standard plus some Mercan or Omniont jargon the ex-bondspeople have picked up. We’ll understand one another. The area we’ll go to is called The Valley. It has no doctor. No hospital. Not much of anything in the way of health care.” Bryan’s brows pulled together, making a deep furrow between his eyes. “We’ll have to build something, a clinic, a small hospital. But I can practice medicine the way I need to, without all this damned bureaucratic red tape! And Margaret will make a good nurse…”
Which would have been the last thing I would ever have considered being! Even as a child, I, Margaret, hadn’t played at being a nurse…a healer. The healer part of me had been totally…separate. I wasn’t interested in people’s bodies. The very idea was appalling! I tried not to let my dismay show on my face. The whole universe was conspiring to make my education useless.
He pleaded, “Margaret, we don’t have much time!”
“Margaret?” urged Father.
I cried frantically, “Father, I tried to talk him out of it. This isn’t fair to him…”
I was talking to his back. He was leaving, saying, “I can’t offer anything to this discussion!” The door shut behind him.
Bryan stared after him.
“My father…often…departs when things are difficult.”
Bryan took my hand. “Margaret, we’ll be together, you’ll have a job to do that needs doing, your life expectancy ought to be the same as on Earth or better, you won’t be eaten by some ET monster or worked to death in the fields by some ET slave driver.”
I drew away from him. “But you were so enthusiastic about your new residency…”
He almost snarled at me, face darkened with passion. “Damn it, listen to me, Margaret! I’ve given it up. No matter what you say, yes or no, I can’t get it back. It’s gone!”
The words clanged at me as though I were inside a huge bell! Something inside me snapped. If I had to be dragged away against my will, at least let it be by someone who cared about me.
“All right, all right! I suppose it’s for the best. I’ll go with you.”
Bryan seized me in his arms, laid his cheek against mine, then released me. There was no time for talk, he said. No time for anything but continuing the process, getting to the assembly point. It took only moments to make the com contact with the Bureau of Volunteer Services, to give my identity number to the authorization clerk, and the whole thing was done.
Rather than drag my father back into the situation, I did what I knew he would prefer. I added a postscript to the note I had already written, saying Bryan and I were going together. I was numb, in the grip of that same, weird vacancy I had felt on the day the first proctor came, as though I had been split in two, as though some monstrous cleaver had irrevocably sliced me apart from myself.
And yet, when I turned to Bryan, ready to argue once more, I saw on his face an expression of exaltation. He clasped my hand between his and smiled gloriously at me. I bit my lips, choking back what I’d meant to say. If this was how he felt, it had to be all right. It would turn out to be the best thing I could do. He had given up…whatever he had given up, but I would make it up to him. No matter what it took. I told myself this, over and over again. A mantra. I will make it up to Bryan.
At the assembly point, we were taken aside by a young usher who led us to a smaller area set aside for volunteers. There our papers were processed by an efficient woman who, when she saw we were headed to Tercis, shook her head and bit her lip.
“Are you leaving anyone here on Earth that you hope to communicate with in the future?” she asked.
“My father,” I said haltingly. “Bryan’s family,” turning to him, only to find him staring, red-faced, at his feet.
“You weren’t told that will be impossible?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“There’s a time anomaly on the Tercis route. The way around it is too expensive to consider. You’ll arrive on Tercis…sometime before you leave here.”
I thought of the international date line on Earth and nodded, showing I understood. I thought I did.
“The difference is about fifteen to twenty years,” she said. “Any message you sent might arrive before you were born.”
“You knew this?” I asked Bryan.
He confessed that he did. For a moment I was furious, then I wondered what difference it actually made. The Gentherans were the only ones who could travel among the stars without losing their lives to time. Bryan and I had known we would not see our families again. In fact, it made no difference at all.
“You should have told me,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
In the dormitory we sat for most of a day and a night, silently holding hands. I repeated the mantra to myself whenever I began to get edgy, echoing it again as we queued for the subway. Once we were seated, exhaustion took both of us, and we slept all the way to preshipping.
Anxiety didn’t return until we actually boarded the elevator. We stood at the mouth of the pod, confronting all those heads, like beads, like bubbles, a pavement of heads, all going away, to where? To what? Was it even certain there was a destination at the other end? Then we were seated; officers came through with their calming sprays; and all my concerns were temporarily put to rest.
I remember turning to Bryan, and saying dreamily, “Bryan, do you know anything about the Third Order of the Siblinghood?” His eyes were shut. He didn’t answer. I went back to
