Flight of the Outcast (3 page)

   "Tell her," said the chairman gravely, "that such events are manifestations of Balzius, the god of fate."

   Asteria said fiercely, "Then are my father's murderers to escape without punishment?"

   Finally, the chairman took notice of her. He sternly said, "Punishment and reward are not for human wills or hands to disperse. The Empyrion maintains protection over our world; it is up to the Empyrion to pursue those who have killed her family. They mind the worldly business, and the Bourse mind the more important business of the soul. Is there anything else?"

   Fiercely, Asteria whispered into Nels's ear. He straightened and said, "My masters, the girl would like the personal possessions and the legal documents taken by the Cybots from the ruins of her home. Is that permitted?"

   More murmuring consultation among the men on the bench. Then the chairman said firmly, "She must learn that mere material things of this world are no longer of any importance. However, for the time being, recognizing the tragedy of her experience, we will permit her to select six items to retain. The rest will be kept safely for the man who will eventually marry her." He stood. "It is so decided. May our decision please the Six Great Gods."

   The others droned, "All glory to the gods—"

   But Asteria was no longer even listening.

Six things to represent her whole life. Because the Bourse believed that the gods ordained six as the perfect number, she could choose only six.

   A picture of her father and her cousin, Andre—dark-haired like her, blue-eyed like her, laughing in the image. She cried a little. She and Andre had been such a handful, always practicing martial arts when they should have been working. Andre, always boasting of his appointment to the Royal Military Academy in Corona, the capital of the Empyrion. She, always envious that he was to be released from the dull world of Theron, from the boring farm.

   She would give anything to be back on that farm now.

   Another picture, her mother, whom she barely remembered. Felice Locke had been a willowy thing, a sixth-generation inhabitant of a low-gravity planet. She had been a supervising technician during her husband's many operations and slow recuperation. She had married Carlson Locke before he had received his pension and land grant, before he had become prosperous. Her mother had known that her health was fragile, that childbirth would weaken her, and yet she had given birth to Asteria. She had been ill in Sanctal the last time Raiders had attacked, and when their bombs collapsed part of the hospital, she had perished.

   Four more. Asteria kept the land-grant deed, her cousin's ID/ communicator processor, a digitized copy of her father's will (leaving everything to her), and an old-fashioned paper document. It was only a few tens of centimeters square, and it did include an embedded chip that validated its information.

   Asteria read the dust-smudged letters:

   In recognition for the service rendered by Carlson Locke to the Royal Space Fleet, the Empyrion grants to A. F. Locke the privilege of attending the Royal Military Academy when said candidate reaches the age of thirteen Standard years.

They were both A. F. Locke.

   In the privacy of her room at the Hospitality Hall—a bare cubical with only a bed, a chair, a desk, and walls that continually glowed with shifting religious texts—Asteria thought about what she was going to do.

   It was illegal.

   There would be trouble.

   But she would face the trouble when it came, and it would come when she was far away from this place.

   At least the Bourse ignored her for the most part. It would be almost comical, if it weren't so nightmarish. They seemed afraid that her lack of belief in their Six Great Gods might be contagious. Except for mealtimes, she could be on her own for most of every day—as long as she didn't want to do something that girls were not permitted to do, like go outside.

   The Hospitality Hall, Asteria thought, could not be much different from a Bourse prison. It was a long, low building constructed of blocks of gray stone quarried from the fjord cliffs. The rooms were tiny and dark, each with only one small square window. The Bourse had put Asteria in a room far down from the only door. She had no neighbors. Three times a day, a Cybot brought food, and the travelers who stayed at the Hospitality House ate at a table in the center of the building.

   The Cybot seated Asteria all by herself, at a small table in a dark nook. No one particularly noticed her. Once a woman wearing the small, red flame tattoo of the Aristocracy took a meal in the Hospitality Hall. Asteria glimpsed her, surrounded by servants, but Asteria wasn't even allowed to eat in the same room as an Aristo. The Cybot brought her meal to her room.

   It looked like a slender robot, approximately human-shaped, with a tiny head that was mostly binocular eyes (they glowed red, like her father's artificial one had) and a smaller triangular sensor array. The arms were capable of complex bends, not like a man's arm, and the hands were very delicate.

   "Who are you?" Asteria asked it as it served her bread, water, and a thin vegetable soup.

   "Unit 2312 Th-301," the Cybot said in a soft, uninflected voice.

   "Who were you when you were human?"

   "That question has no meaning for me."

   No, of course not. Cybots had portions of functioning human brains at their core—but brains stripped of personality and memory. No Cybot remembered its former identity. None of them had emotions. Most of them had the brains of condemned criminals in their chest cavities. If the Raiders who had killed her family were captured alive, this would be their fate. They would live on in a way—unconsciously, to be sure—for perhaps two hundred Standard years as the central intelligence units of Cybots. Asteria knew all this, but because her father refused to deal with Cybots—he thought that their very creation was cruel—she had never had a chance to speak to one before.

   "Do you have to accept my orders?" asked Asteria.

   "I must perform any lawful activity commanded by a human," responded the Cybot.

   "I want a faulty transceiving unit replaced," she said.

   "I am capable of performing that action."

   "Here, then."

   It took less than a minute. The Cybot unquestioningly removed the central unit from her wrist transceiver and replaced it with the one she supplied. It then asked, "Do you require initialization?"

   "No!" The word came out more quickly and anxiously than she had intended. She strapped the transceiver onto her wrist. "This one has been pre-programmed. Uh, thank you. Don't tell anyone about this."

   "Unless my directives are overridden. Do you require anything more?"

   "That will do," Asteria said. "Thank you."

   The Cybot stared at her. "'Thank you' has no meaning to me."

She was not exactly a prisoner. Yet if she started toward the outer door of the Hall, started to walk forth in the streets of Sanctal, immediately someone would stop her: "Maiden, you cannot walk alone. Back into the Hall, or find an escort."

   And so she became a thief and an impostor. A young man, hardly taller or heavier than she was, unexpectedly spoke to her one lunchtime: "Child, can you name the Six Principles of Good Living?"

   "I'm not a Bourse," she said, but not harshly. She was studying the thin, young fellow's black-and-white tunic and baggy, gray trousers. "Sir, are you a priest?"

   The young fellow actually blushed. "I am an apprentice priest of Hippock, the god of healing," he said. "I have been sent by our settlement to learn medical arts here at the House of Healing."

   "My name is Asteria Locke."

   "I am Harst Gavron." He cleared his throat. "So you are an Unbeliever? I have never met one."

   "Would you like to tell me about the six gods?" she asked innocently. "Do you have time? Are you staying here or just having a meal?"

   "Oh, I'm staying," he said. "The third room there."

   "It's small and dark, isn't it?" Asteria said.

   He looked eager. "Oh, plainness is a virtue! 'A man's spirit flourishes if his life is spare.' So say the gods."

   Asteria nodded.

   His gaze grew intense. "So say the gods," he repeated.

   Suddenly she understood that he expected her to chant the words along with him. She couldn't bring herself to do it, so she just shrugged.

   The poor young man spent the next hour telling her how good discomfort was for the soul. And when he left the Hospitality Hall for the Hall of Healing, she gave him the chance to experience a little more of that wonderful discomfort. She slipped into his room and stole his only other tunic and trousers—and hid them well before calling the Cybot in to her little room.

   "Cut my hair," she told it. "Cut it very short."

   The Cybot obeyed, trimming her hair so close to her skull so only a dark mist seemed to cling to it. A little later, in the cool twilight, she went out dressed as a young priest, carrying almost nothing with her.

   No one seemed to notice her.

   Sanctal clung to the southern shore of the fjord. It was a twisting, narrow town with three parallel streets crammed onto the little, flat shelf that backed against the high, dark crags behind. But what the town lacked in depth it made up for in length: it followed the jagged lines of the fjord for many kilometers. The dwellings looked as though they'd sprung from the rocky ground—all of them low, their walls made of the gray stone and their roofs of black slate. Everything looked wet even in dry weather.

   Asteria tried to remember the town's geography from the times she had come in with her father to deliver crops or to bargain for supplies. She knew where one vital spot was—the landing center. It was far up the fjord, on a kind of plateau overlooking the town. She made her way toward it, following a winding street. At one point, she could look seaward through a narrow cleft in the cliffs and see the dark rolling ocean. At another, she could not even see the Sound, the harbor around which the town clustered. She climbed, heading inland and upward, wondering when the people at the Hospitality Hall would miss her.

   At last, she saw the high force-wall pylons ahead. Out of breath, she trudged up the last incline to the gate. A heavyset man in the black and silver uniform of an Empyrean guard sat in a security booth. He looked bored. "Business?" he asked.

   "I want to find a ship to take me offworld," she said, trying to pitch her voice low.

   The guard laughed. "Eager to get off this rock pile? There's only the shuttle to the high docks. It leaves in a little less than a Standard hour. Departure pads are to your left. It will be Station One."

   It didn't take her long to find the small ship, poised to spring. She spoke to a crewman, who took her to the captain, a worriedlooking man well into middle age. His cheek tattoo was tiny and on the left cheek—he was an Aristo, but one of a minor branch. "Passage to the high docks?" he asked. "That's expensive."

   "This trip is on the Empyrion," she said. She showed him the document.

   He scowled at it, then scanned her wrist transceiver. His scanner spoke to him: "A. F. Locke, candidate cadet for the Royal Military Academy. All ships are directed to assist this candidate cadet to secure passage to Corona."

   The captain frowned. "The Empyrion reimbursement won't even cover the extra fuel cost."

   "Scan this," she said, producing the datacard that held the details of her inheritance. He did and looked at her with more respect.

   "I'll make out an order to pay you from that," she said.

   "All right—
sonny
," the captain said with a wry look. "At least I'll get the Empyrion payment. Climb aboard." His voice fell to a whisper. "And don't trust that haircut to fool everybody."

   Wincing in irritation at her own timidity, Asteria turned away and hurried toward the boarding ladder. An Aristocrat could order a Commoner to be arrested without a warrant, imprisoned with no charges—and she was a Commoner: a Commoner whose disguise had just been compromised, no less.

   But still, she had an appointment to the Royal Military Academy, she reminded herself. She climbed a steep ladder through an open hatchway. The interior of the shuttle was dim, and it smelled of sweat. A double row of seats ran down a short passageway, arranged back to back. Twenty seats in all, no one in any of them. She went to the far end, sat down, and strapped herself in.

   There was a flurry of clangs and clatters as the shuttle prepared for takeoff. Whirs and whines of machinery. Asteria crossed her arms and sat with her chin on her chest, trying to fight the flutter of her heart. Why couldn't they just go? Why did they have to wait here on the ground? If they had missed her in the Hospitality Hall—if poor apprentice priest Harst had returned and found his spare clothing gone, if someone came looking—

   After what seemed more like half a day than half an hour, the captain's voice rang out: "We are ready to lift off. Make sure your seat restraints are secure. In the event of an emergency, don't worry about a thing, because you'll die." He barked a short laugh. "Understood?"