“It is you!” Monel’s tone made it clear that he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing.
Linc could feel his face harden toward Monel. “That’s right. I’ve come back. Jerlet sent me back to you.”
“Jerlet? You don’t expect us to believe—”
“I don’t expect anything from you,” Linc snapped. “I’m here to see Magda. I don’t have time to waste on discussions with you.”
Monel’s thin face went red. He held up a hand, as if to stop Linc if he should try to move. The guards behind him tensed and gripped their weapons more tightly.
“You’re not going to see Magda or anyone else until I’m satisfied that you’re no danger to the people—”
Linc smiled at him, but his words were dead serious: “There’s only one danger to the people, and that’s delay. Jerlet showed me how to save the ship. We’re not going to die; the yellow sun isn’t going to kill us. If we act quickly. There’s a new world waiting for us, if we do the right things to get there.”
Monel’s chair rolled back a few centimeters, but he insisted, “Jerlet showed you? You mean you talked with Jerlet?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why didn’t he come with you?”
“He died—”
A shock wave went through them. Linc could feel it.
“Died?”
“Jerlet is dead?”
“Yes,” Linc said. “But he’ll come back again someday. When we’ve reached the new world and learned how to live on it. Probably not in our lifetime, but our children will see him when he returns.”
Even Monel was visibly shaken by Linc’s words. “I don’t understand…” His voice was almost a whisper.
“I know,” Linc said. “That’s why I have to see Magda. She’ll know what to do.”
Monel pursed his lips, thinking. The others—the farmers and Monel’s guards—clustered around Linc wordlessly. One of the farmers reached out and touched the rubberized fabric of Linc’s pressure suit.
“We’re wasting time,” Linc said to Monel. “I’ve got to see Magda.”
He started striding down the corridor, and the others hesitated only a moment. The farmers fell into step behind Linc. Monel’s guards shifted uneasily, eyed their sallow little leader, then looked toward Linc and the farmers.
“Don’t just stand there!” Monel snapped at them. “Get me up there with him.”
If anything, Magda was even more beautiful than Linc remembered her. She stood in the center of her tiny compartment, her dark eyes deep and somber, her finely-drawn face utterly serious, every Linc of her body held with regal pride.
“You returned,” she said.
Linc stepped into her room, and suddenly the crowd of people that had gathered around him as he had marched down the corridor seemed to disappear. There was no one in his sight except Magda.
“Jerlet sent me back.”
But Magda didn’t move toward him, didn’t smile. Her gaze shifted to the people crowding the doorway behind Linc.
“Leave us,” she commanded. “I must talk with Linc alone.”
They murmured and shuffled back away from the door. Linc shut it firmly. Then he turned back to Magda.
“I knew you would return,” she said, her voice so low that he could barely hear her. “Every night, every meditation, I knew you were alive and would return.”
“You don’t seem too happy about it,” Linc said.
Instead of responding to that, Magda said, “I must know everything about your journey. Every detail. You really saw Jerlet? He spoke to you?”
Linc sat down cross-legged on the warm carpeted floor and leaned his back against the bunk. Magda sat next to him, and he began to tell her about his time with Jerlet.
He knew this room, had known it all his life, since long before Jerlet had gone away from them and the kids decided to turn to Magda for the wisdom and future-seeing abilities that had made her priestess. But the room seemed different now. Magda was different. Everything looked the same: the carpeting, the drawing on the walls that Peta had done, the glowing zodiac signs traced across the ceiling. But it all felt different. Strange.
Magda listened to Linc’s tale without interrupting once. Her eyes went misty when he told her about Peta, otherwise she showed no emotion at all. The room’s lights dimmed to sleeping level, and still Linc wasn’t finished. On the ceiling, the Bull, the Twins, the Lion, the Virgin also listened in their customary silence. In the shadows Magda sat unmoving, straight-backed, as if in meditation. The only sign that she heard Linc was an occasional nod of her head.
“…And, well, I guess that’s all of it,” Linc said at last. His throat was dry, raspy.
Magda seemed to sense how he felt. “I’ll get you some water,” she said, rising to her feet. “Stay there.”
She went to the little niche in the wall where the water tap was and filled a cup for Linc.
Handing it to him and sitting down beside him again, Magda asked, “Jerlet wants us to fix the machines?”
Linc could hear uncertainty in her voice. Disbelief.
“Yes,” he answered. “The machines are our only hope. If we don’t fix them and use them properly, then we will fall into Baryta—the yellow sun. And we’ll all die. But with the help of the machines, we can reach the new world. Beryl. And we can live there.”
Magda said nothing.
Linc reached through the shadows to grasp her arm gently. “Think of it, Magda! A whole world for us! Open and free and clean. No more conning walls. All the air and food and water we could want. All the room!”
“The machines,” she said softly. “Jerlet told us long ago never to touch the machines. Never.”
Linc smiled at her, even though it was too dark for her to see it. “That was when we were children. Babies! Of course he told us not to touch the machines then. We would have hurt ourselves or fouled up the machines.”
She didn’t move away from his touch. But she didn’t move toward him, either.
“If Jerlet himself could tell us to fix the machines—”
“He can’t. He’s dead.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“He used the machines himself. All the time. Even when he was dying.”
“They didn’t save his life.”
“He was old, Magda. Unbelievably old. And he’d been sick for a long time.”
“But the machines still let him die,” she said.
Linc answered, “He’s inside a machine now. A machine is keeping his body safe until we—or our children, I guess—learn enough to bring him back to life.”
He felt her shudder, as though a touch of the outer darkness’s cold had gone through her.
Linc lay back on the carpeting and stared up at the softly glowing figures on the ceiling. The Ram, the Scales, the Scorpion. Once they had been strange and mysterious signs that had puzzled and even frightened him a little. Now, thanks to Jerlet, he knew what astronomical constellations were and how the art of astrology had begun on old Earth.
“Magda,” he said, surprised at the tone of his own voice. “We’re dealing with the difference between life and death. We can save the people, and reach the new world. But only if we use the machines. We’ve got to repair them and then use them. If we help the machines, they will help us. To live. If we don’t do it, then we will all die.”
“Jerlet told you that.”
“Jerlet showed me the truth of it. He taught me. He put ideas and information into my mind. I know what we have to do. But the people won’t do it unless you tell them to. You are their priestess. If you tell them that it’s the right thing to do, they’ll believe you.”