People say she has a daughter, a little girl, by the name of Leilah, but that she doesn’t much care about her.
She may be coarse and uneducated and have a limited vocabulary, but she’s a perfect survivor, and a natural leader.
She always knows what to do in every situation.
And she does it without a word of complaint.
They are Adam and Jowe.
Adam is tall, young, gangly, and clumsy.
He uses artificial lenses because he wore out his own eyes long ago staring at holoscreens and browsing through technical reference manuals that are so old, they’re actually printed on paper.
Adam can build anything, using nothing but bits of trash, patience, and inventiveness.
From a hyperengine to a high-powered ruby laser.
Some say he could manage even if there weren’t any trash available…
He’s a super-handyman.
A genius of technobricolage, convinced that his talent is pitifully wasted on building illegal arms and other brilliant doohickeys.
His usual clients are people like Friga.
He’s just gotten out of eight months in Body Spares on account of some masers he made, which later on were supplied to some Yakuzas.
And Body Spares wasn’t what you might call his cup of tea.
He was conscious almost the whole time he served as a “horse.”
He was mounted by a guzoid from Regulus who was very interested in extreme experiences.
Purely sexual and other sorts.
He survived.
But he still has scars…
He dreads having to go through something like that again, which he knows will be very hard for him to avoid given the only kind of life he’s ever been able to live.
Though his sentence also had its upside.
That was how he met Jowe.
Jowe is still young, but his face already looks like a weathered chunk of rock.
Jowe would be handsome, with his golden bangs and his big blue eyes, if they weren’t as icy as the blue of chrome-vanadium steel.
Jowe has dead eyes.
The eyes of a person whose soul must have frozen.
His eyes look like the sort that have seen everything there is to see about pain, betrayal, disappointment… and more.
Jowe is intelligent, seems well educated, has delicate, sensitive, skillful hands, like an artist’s.
He never talks about his past.
In general, Jowe rarely talks…
Jowe just gazes straight ahead, at the stars.
And his gaze is terrifyingly empty, doesn’t hold much hope.
Barely even a motivation to keep on living.
Even Friga, who isn’t afraid of anyone or anything, sometimes gets a chill around Jowe.
The idea of the Voyage was Jowe’s, and when he speaks of it, the words that emerge from his lips sound like beauty itself.
The Voyage is the Exodus.
Like in the Bible.
Escaping from the kingdom of Pharaoh in search of the Promised Land.
In the Promised Land there are clusters of grapes so large it takes two men to lift them, and there’s work and opportunity for all.
The rivers flow with milk and honey, and every enterprising man can achieve his dreams of wealth.
The Promised Land is any land but Earth.
Humans aren’t exactly the Chosen People, but…
The Promised Land belongs to the Philistines, and nobody promised it to the people of Earth.
The Philistines are the power behind Pharaoh’s throne.
Xenoids who manipulate the Planetary Tourism Agency puppet and who despise the Earthlings.
Philistines who don’t want humans to enjoy the same quality of life that they do, because they fear their worlds might be polluted by the inferior race.
The xenoids are mighty in arms and money, so sword and purse are unlikely methods to win victories against them and their Planetary Security puppets.
What’s left is shrewdness and cunning.
That is, entering the Promised Land by stealth.
Taking advantage of the fact that not all Philistines think alike, that there are some who patrol the borders of their kingdoms looking for hands to work in their fields.
The fact that there are always a few “compassionate” sorts who take in runaway humans and, in exchange for the runaways’ virtual slave labor in their factories, keep them hidden for three years and three days.
After that period, if the human can show that he has remained among the Philistines the whole time, he gets a chance to become a citizen of the Promised Land.
A second-class citizen, of course.
But at least that’s something, and it’s better to suffer directly under the yoke of the Philistines than to do it under their puppet Pharaoh.
Better the Promised Land than its virtual colony, Earth.
Shrewdness and cunning, then, mean escaping.
The Voyage means Escaping.
Escaping is no easy matter.
There are two huge obstacles: Distance and Surveillance.
Distance is a serious business all by itself.
To get to the Promised Land you must always cross some desert first.
The stars that the worlds of the xenoids orbit are light-years away.
They are separated from Earth by an endless desert of empty space, which hyperships cross in a matter of seconds.
But only xenoids have the technology to build safe hyperships.
Though hyperengine construction is well within the reach of many human “super-handymen” such as Adam, the steering and power control systems are another kettle of fish.
A homemade hyperengine built on Earth works only once… and the ship that uses it can return to ordinary space almost anywhere.
Maybe near a solar system full of xenoids, maybe a thousand parsecs from any stellar bodies.
Or in the middle of a gas nebula, or inside a globular cluster.
Fortunately, the structure of the hyperengine itself prevents it from working very close to large masses.
There’s no danger of materializing in a space that’s already occupied by a sun or planet.
The flip side is that in order to activate a homemade hyperengine without control systems, you first have to get some distance away from the plane of the ecliptic containing the Sun, Earth, and the other planets.
The only way to get far enough away is by conventional propulsion, relying on the law of action and reaction.
Ballistically, the safest trajectory for getting as far away from the plane of the ecliptic as quickly as possible with minimum fuel consumption is by traveling almost perpendicular to Earth’s orbit.
The safe zone is no more than twenty arcminutes wide.
In the semisecret, semitechnical jargon of those who aim to make the Voyage, this route is called the Escape Tunnel.
Naturally, Planetary Security is also familiar with it and keeps it under constant surveillance.
Planetary Security was created, and exists, to maintain control.
Control means, among other things, stopping Voyages by all possible means.
All possible means add up to a multi-level system.
The first level includes everything from surprise raids in search of the hideouts where homemade ships are built, to generous payments to an extensive network of informants who are retained to locate those hideouts, to ultratight controls on all the raw materials and instruments used to manufacture space engine parts.
The second level is the network of Earth-based radars that rake the atmosphere with their invisible fingers day and night, distinguishing between commercial aerobus flights and any Unidentified Flying Object taking off from the planet.
The third level is the system of orbiting radars that similarly distinguish between shuttles bearing passengers or cargo to hyperships waiting at docking points and any Unidentified Flying Object that attains escape velocity.