The Way to Freedom

Despite being married to a survey op, she was clueless about the impossibility of getting our hands on a ship capable of making the passage from here to 8055-taking it, unnoticed, down to the planet's surface (assuming neither our own forces nor the Ast had stopped us from crossing the interstellar border)-blending into the population there for long enough so Reiko could determine the exact cause of Keren's condition-and then getting back into space, and safely across the border in the opposite direction. Nor did she realize, I felt sure now, what getting stranded on that world would mean.

Especially for women. Surely Rudy had been honest with his wife about our last sojourn there? Technically a survey op wasn't supposed to tell outsiders about his experiences on a world like 8055, but most of us made exceptions for our nearest and dearest.

Then again, not many ops managed to maintain such long-term relationships as those words implied. I'd had Grandmum, and no one else of any significance, waiting back home during my first decade as an op, and I was pretty typical in my scarcity of personal ties. After the old girl died-in a "recreational mishap," which was how the local university described it when their Mathematics Department Chair Creature fell into a crevasse while chaperoning a Mountaineering Club outing-I had no one left at all. That was about the same time Marc parted company with the mother of his first child, after which we turned to each other for something more than the comradely friendship we already shared.

You had to expect it would be like that, when you chose a survey op's life. You just couldn't get home often enough, or stay there for long enough at a stretch, to be of much use to a spouse. Not when your life's work required spending time (sometimes long stretches of it) on a succession of alien worlds that had populations which Survey Central deemed worthy of study. People to whom their families mattered a lot usually didn't last longer than a mission or two-if they made it through op training in the first place, which they often didn't. And that, of course, was a damn good thing.

Did I dare to open my yap now and ask Reiko a series of blunt questions, until I was sure she knew enough about 8055 to make an informed decision about going there? Or should I just be glad she was so willing, and start making travel plans?

"Good thing Rudy's still on active duty," Marc said from beside me, in the tone he always uses when he's waited long enough and finally decides I must want him to take the point (conversationally speaking). "He'll have to find us transportation, you know. We're not poor, Reiko, but chartering a long-range shuttle's beyond us. Even if we used every credit we've got, plus everything we could borrow."

"It would have to be a charter flight, wouldn't it? Or you'd have to buy a ship outright. I guess I'm too used to just getting myself a ticket and then hopping aboard a liner, and winding up anywhere I've ever wanted to travel. So I didn't think about how we'd be getting to 8055 in the first place." Ballantine looked at us both, not just Marc, with the beginnings of wisdom (otherwise known, sometimes, as fear) in those dark eyes with their vestigial hint of Terra's Orient. One of her parents-it would have to be her father, since "Ballantine" must be her mother's surname-had bequeathed to her characteristics seldom seen on the faces of today's homogenized humans. But back on Terra, which was Reiko's home just as Rigel 5 was mine, some regions still had populations that exhibited their ancestors' racial traits.