Visions of Liberty (8 page)

Rebecca looked up at me, curious, hope in her eyes.

"You know a cure?"

"There are many cures, though I have never been permitted to apply them here," I answered. "If we leave, we can go to the spaceport. You heard the Englishers' ship land. They haven't left yet. They will study the area for a bit, look around to make sure the spaceport is okay, and then leave again. They can take us to a hospital. We can easily cure you there."

Rebecca grabbed my forearm.

"But would they take us up with them?"

"Yes." One of the reasons they kept the spaceport cleared, and a regular schedule, was for reasons like this. A small percentage of the inhabitants changed their mind and took the subtle offer.

Rebecca leaned against me. "My parents will not approve."

"They can't stop you," I said. "This is your life we're talking about." I kissed her hair. It smelled of fresh bread and pumpkin pie. "Come with me."

She stood up, letting go of my hand. "The hospital," she said. "Can they . . . really . . . ?"

"Yes. Don't pack anything," I told her. "Just be ready."

"Tonight?"

I looked back down the road we would have to take to get to DY-99. "Later tonight."

Rebecca walked back into the house. I saw her falter for a second, and she held on to the edge of a table for support. I winced.

I approached David. I felt wrong for deceiving him slightly as I asked him about a good deal for one of his horses.

He smiled and stroked his beard.

"We wondered how many more days it would take before you got tired of asking for rides," he said. He named a price and I agreed on the spot. I could have dickered a little, but I wanted to go home as soon as I could.

We walked to the stables, and David led my new horse out. He was a sturdy young fellow. I chose not to pay too much attention, though, as I would be leaving him behind soon enough.

"
Herr
Doctor," David said. "You still feel badly about young Suderman?"

"Yes," I said. "I could have saved him."

"All the good health in the world would be useless with an empty life, or in a community that had rotted away."

"If there is no one alive to appreciate the community," I said, "then it is all pointless."

"You believe this is all pointless, then."

"No." I leaned my head against the horse, smelling its musky sweat. It shifted. "No. But it
is
wasteful." I broke into the words of the Hippocratic oath: "Into whatsoever house I shall enter, it shall be for the good of the sick to the utmost of my power . . . and then to also believe in the community and follow our practices."

"Did you anticipate being torn like this? Before you came to New Pennsylvania?"

"No," I said. "I was wrong. I thought on a world with total freedom that a doctor would be free to cure the sick."

"But you
do
tend to the sick."

"With methods and cures that haven't changed in five hundred years," I said bitterly. "Out there"—I waved my hand at the stars—"they replace hearts and lungs as easily as you replace a torn shirt. Yet
here
 . . ."

"You should have looked deeper into your heart before making the decision to come here."

"Then who would have tried to save Mark Suderman?" I said. "I lose far too many patients, patients I could save anywhere else—but I do save
some
."

"He was saved the day he made the decision to join the church," David Yoder said with a certainty that I wished I possessed. About anything.

"It's getting near dark," I said. "I will be going now."

"Gute nacht."

I pushed the horse to a run after I was out of sight.

I threw two suitcases of clothes together. In my desk I pulled out something I never thought I would need, but had kept anyway. It was a wallet, and inside were plastic cards that on any other world would link me to lines of credit and old friends. I hitched the new horse to my spare buggy and tossed the suitcases in the back.

A horse and buggy turned onto the gravel of my drive. I was sure it was David Yoder, but I was wrong. Two Elders, Zebediah Walshman and his brother, Paul, pulled aside the storm curtains.

"William Hostetler?"

I walked up to the buggy.

"Yes."

"We talked to Brother Yoder. He feels you are going through a crisis," Paul said.

Zebediah looked over at my buggy. "Are you leaving for a while, William?"

"Possibly," I said.

"You are going to the Englanders?"

I didn't reply.

"We can't deny you that choice," Paul said. "But you will not take Rebecca with you."

They turned the buggy back around and rattled off down the road. My heart pounded, my throat dried with nervousness. I walked back to my buggy and kicked at a wheel with my boot. The pain was briefly satisfying.

The air was chilly, and as I turned up the road toward the house I extinguished the buggy's road lamp. I stopped the horse a bit down from the usual post, tying him to a tree. I patted his neck and jumped the ditch onto David Yoder's farm.

It took me a few long minutes in the pitch black to find a ladder. The notion of it—a clandestine meeting with a ladder in the twenty-third century—struck me as ludicrous. But there was nothing ludicrous about the purpose of it. I walked it over to the point under Rebecca's window and leaned the ladder against the side of the house as gently as I could.

She was waiting. She opened the window, bunched up her skirts, and got onto the ladder. It creaked as she came down step by agonizing step.

I led her around the house toward the waiting buggy.

We didn't get far before David Yoder's gentle but firm voice came from the porch.

"Rebecca, come back inside the house," he said.

She froze.

"Come on," I said. "Keep walking. You're free to leave. He can't stop you."

"I can't stop you," David agreed. "But think about what you are leaving. Rebecca, you are already saved, no matter what you do here. But when you leave, you will no longer be able to come back. You will be healthy, but unable to ever see us or speak to us again. Do you think there will be a family out there, with the Englanders, for you? What sort of lives do they lead? Good lives, or will they be confused, and spiritually cluttered, caught up with worldly goods." He paused. "Remember," he concluded, "if you leave, you can never come back. Your children can never come back."

Rebecca's tears trickled down her cheeks and collected along her jaw. "I can't do this!" she told me. "I can't!"

"Then you'll die," I said. "Probably within a couple of months. And in terrible pain that I am not permitted to alleviate on this world." I took off my hat, trying to do something useful with my hands.

"I know," she said. She brushed the side of my face with her hand and kissed me lightly on the lips. "I'm sorry, but I cannot be other than what I am. Better to die as what I am than to live as what I am not."

I watched her go back up into the house.

David and I stood there watching each other.

"She's free to go," I said.

"She was never free to go," said David. "There are certain laws that are unwritten, and these are the most powerful laws of all."

"You've signed her death warrant," I said bitterly.

"Do you think I
want
her to die?" he demanded, and the light of the four moons reflected off the tears running down his cheeks. "This is God's will, not mine. Never mine!"

And I suddenly realized that he was caught in the same web that had ensnared Rebecca and me. I had thought, just a moment ago, that I hated David Yoder. Now I knew that I could never hate him; I could only pity him, as I pitied us all.

"What will you do now, Dr. Hostetler?" he asked.

"I don't know."

I turned and began walking across his yard.

I rode the horse hard. My hat blew away, and the cold wind played with my hair. The horse started to lather by the time I saw my house, and I slowed us down, struck by remorse. There was no reason to take my anger out on the poor beast.

I hadn't cried in a long time, but I cried that night.

And along with crying, I examined my life and my options. DY-99 was only a few miles away. It would be so easy to get on it, to go out into the galaxy where I could use all my skills.

And if I did, who would take care of Rebecca? Who would deliver Esther's child, and help make sure it grew into a healthy adult? Who would even try to save all the Mark Sudermans after I left?

I turned the buggy around. With a snap of the reins I sent us both trotting back toward the Yoders. In the coming days and weeks I was going to preside at two more miracles, the miracle of death and the miracle of birth. I was going to do it under adverse conditions, like a racehorse carrying extra weight, but Rebecca had not asked to die and Esther's child has not asked to be born, so in a way we were all running handicapped.

In a moment of clarity, I realized that it just meant that we had to try harder. If we were already saved, then it was only right that God wanted a little extra effort in return, whether it was dying with grace or struggling to save people who placed so very many restrictions on their savior.

Somewhere along the drive back, I took the wallet from my pocket and threw it into the dark forest along the road.

"He's the most conservative man you'll ever meet."

The speaker was an attractive woman, although Special Agent Palmer didn't approve of her surgically implanted third eye that regarded him from an otherwise placid brow. He couldn't get used to these modern fashions, preferring instead an old-fashioned girl with a wedding ring in her navel.

Giving one of her breasts a friendly squeeze (and grateful that there were only two of them) he turned his attention to the gentleman in question. The man certainly stood out in the crowd.

"I had a professor like him once," said Palmer. "He probably thinks the world went to hell in the twenty-third century."

She laughed. "You're almost right but try the twenty-first."

He was surprised. "So tell me, Bretygne, why do I need to converse with this genuine eccentric?"

"Because," she breathed into his ear while returning his friendly squeeze at a lower altitude, "he will provide invaluable assistance when we exchange pleasantries with the ambassador. You see, your crazy Mr. Konski is actually a fan of that old man's books."

In all the miserable time he'd spent on the self-styled anarchist planet Lysander, Palmer had not learned that Konski read any contemporaries. He pulled his forelock, the usual method of expressing thanks to a comrade. The Lady Bretygne Lamarr always did her homework.

"You'll put in a good word for me in your report?" she teased him.

"Why bother? They never read mine but settle for the oral briefing. Now you, my dear, they actually read."

"Flattery has always been your strongest suit." With that, she kicked off on her disc and scooted in the direction of the Amazing Conservative Man.

Palmer wasn't lazy enough to use a disc in low gravity. With a hop and a jump he was right next to her. Admittedly that sort of calisthenics was discouraged but he was good at it and hadn't knocked anyone over yet.

Professor Bernard Astaroth greeted them with a broad smile. "My darling girl," he said to Bretygne, squeezing her other breast (which fine point was noted by Palmer's acute skills at espionage).

"Allow me to introduce Diplomat First Class Palmer, attached to the United States of Earth." She got that out in one breath.

"No first name?" quizzed the professor.

"I'm not partial to them."

Bretygne laughed for him and the professor kept the conversation going with, "I understand that we both enjoy Lady Lamarr's way with words."

"You're too kind," she replied, switching on a phase-three blush in her normally pale cheeks.

"She tells me you're a writer."

"Yes, on aestheto-politics with a heavy emphasis on history."

"Orthodox?" asked Palmer, eyebrows raised.

"Would we be here together tonight if I were?" The professor smiled.

Bretygne thought it politic to change the subject. "Palmer spent a full quarter on Lysander."

"Before or after the insurrection?" asked Astaroth.

Palmer shook his head. "There was no insurrection, no civil war. It was one of their stupid property disputes."

"That evaporated a whole continent?" The professor was incredulous.

"You'd think they would have given up on anarchy after that, but no," said Palmer. "One of the idiots said he had a natural right to protect his property line against intruders. Then he evaporated a six-year-old girl who wandered onto his land. Instead of apologizing and offering restitution, the father amazingly turned the matter over to his defense agency. The other fellow's defense agency didn't agree that their client had overreacted. Then the God-given natural right everyone has to own plasma bombs came into it and the continent went poof."

"You were planet-side during this?" asked Astaroth.

"Safe behind a force field on the other side of the planet. Admittedly the anarchists over there seemed a little more inclined to take things to arbitration."

"Whew," said the professor. "I did a paper about Lysander, but I'm a few years out of date."

"Palmer is always on top of things," Bretygne grinned, her arm around his waist.

The professor nodded and then did them the favor of lowering his voice. "You're both spies, of course, and lovers as well. There's not much point to the former unless it adds spice to the latter, or do I have it turned around?"

Color drained out of the lady's face, again at the flick of a switch.

Astaroth finally continued: "There's no need to dissemble. Tonight we'll be dealing with an anarchist who has less regard for our rituals than even I! We must be frank."

He gestured to a servo-mech and the machine dutifully floated over. Palmer and Lamarr quickly ordered strong heroin and tonics. The professor settled for a vodka martini.