The Way to Freedom

Chapter 1

"Nora, you've got to get Keren back to 8055. Now. Yesterday! Or you' re going to lose her."

In all my 56 years of living, I can't remember when I heard words that scared me more than those ones did. Go back to Planet 8055, from which I and my survey team mates escaped (damn near miraculously) ten years earlier? Go back there on purpose, to a world where a post-menopausal woman like me is under an automatic death sentence-where the Ast and their almost equally mysterious (and ruthless) allies rule-and the human inhabitants are doomed to extinction, as soon as the current generation dies off? All that would have been bad enough to contemplate, but Dr. Reiko Ballantine was telling me I must take my nine-year-old daughter with me.

"Are you sure there's nothing you can do to help her?" I asked my old team mate Rudy Tasker's wife, who also happened to be the best pediatric endocrinologist in the business. She'd come all the way to Rigel 5, home to me (and for the past decade, to my husband and our daughter, too) to try to diagnose Keren-Happuch Mira Cranshaw Falconi's curious malaise, that approaching puberty seemed to be worsening...and that, Reiko had just let me know, heralded a much worse problem.

Marc, my team mate throughout my long career as a planetary survey leader and my husband ever since we returned from 8055, sat beside me in the office Reiko had borrowed at Rigel 5's best pediatric hospital. He reached out for my hand, because we no longer had to act like colleagues now that we were both retired. Retired in mutual disgrace, because of how our careers ended...but that' s another story. A long one, called Regs. Maybe you've read it? But if you haven't, don't worry. I'll make sure you can understand this one, without doing that first.

"Yes, I'm sure." Reiko nodded, and then sighed. "Whatever those 'Others,' as you and Rudy always call them, did that made all of 8055's women sterile except you...and made you fertile again, somehow, at the same time!...also affected Keren. While she was in utero. That's my best hypothesis, anyway, since what's happening to her is definitely a function of her body preparing itself for menarche. What I'm sure about is that we'll never find the answer here. You've got to get her back to where you conceived her, and-oh, hell, Rudy's going to kill me when I tell him this, but there's no help for it! I'll have to come with you."

She made it sound so simple. Which, of course, it was. But "simple" is not at all the same thing as "easy," and unfortunately she'd made it sound that way, too. So I asked again, not believing I was doing so when my little girl's welfare surely depended on this woman's continued willingness to go far beyond the call of medical duty, "Reiko, are you sure she won't survive if she stays here?"

"Yes. I'm afraid I am. If Keren goes on deteriorating at her present rate, she may celebrate her tenth birthday-but she'll never make it to her eleventh. Not even with any palliative treatments I might be forced to prescribe, if you' re refusing to try the one thing that I believe can actually work."

Once again, Dr. Ballantine had no idea what she was saying.