Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

He brought out his people like sheep, guiding them like a flock in the desert... I could only hope that there was more than poetic imagery behind the words.

"Doesn't look very inviting," Calandra murmured from beside me.

I looked at the display she was indicating. "The crew boss said it was mostly desert," I reminded her.

"I've seen other deserts," she said shortly. "They didn't look like this."

I pursed my lips, studying the landscape slowly scrolling down the screen. She was right; there was far more variation in color and visual texture than in the handful of deserts I'd seen from space. "Well... desert in this case may just mean that most of the soil isn't easily arable," I suggested.

"Maybe."

I shifted my eyes to her. "Worried that the Halloas may be just barely scraping a living for themselves, and therefore not inclined toward helping strangers?" I asked.

The muscles of her face tightened slightly. She could read others without compunction, but she didn't much care to have the roles reversed. I felt a flash of annoyance at her double standard; a heartbeat later it belatedly occurred to me that I felt exactly the same way. "The thought had crossed my mind, yes," she growled. "That, along with the normal pattern of outcast societies." She glanced at me. "Or did the Cana settlement conveniently leave that one out of your curriculum, too?"

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," I said, getting the distinct feeling I wasn't going to like this one.

"Really," she said, her voice heavy with contempt. "Well, it seems that religious groups that go off and establish their own societies to escape persecution almost always wind up being just as bad to their own minorities."

"The Watchers didn't—" I began; then broke off.

A bitter smile touched her lips. "That's right," she agreed, following my unspoken thought. "Aaron Balaam darMaupine's Bridgeway was heading exactly that direction when he was finally stopped."

I clenched my teeth. "You don't know that it would have become that," I pointed out. But it was a weak argument, and I knew it—besides which, what was I doing playing advocate for darMaupine in the first place? "I don't recall learning that in Cana, no," I added, getting back to the issue at hand. "But I wouldn't think the Halloas have been here long enough to have forgotten their own problems with intolerance."

She shrugged uneasily. "I guess we'll find out soon enough," she said, nodding toward the display. "We're coming down."

—

The whole thing went reasonably smoothly, I suppose, especially considering that the Cricket's autopilot probably cost less than a hundredth of the one aboard the Bellwether and was operating without benefit of a spaceport tower system besides. A few jerks and stomach-wrenching jolts—a couple of sudden swerves for no reason I could discern—one final thud and a last-second drive shriek that left my ears ringing, and we were down.

The drive shut itself off, and in the silence Calandra and I looked at each other. "I don't care if they execute me tomorrow," she announced evenly. "I'm not riding one of these things again."

I took a deep breath. "That's not especially funny."

"It wasn't meant to be." Moving stiffly, she began to unstrap. "Any signs of life out there?"

I found the control for the outside cameras, got them sweeping. "Um... small dust cloud forming over one of the hills. Probably a vehicle approaching."

She craned her neck to look; and right on cue, a pair of cars topped the hill and headed toward us. "Reception committee from the Halloas?" she ventured.

"Probably. I don't see anything official-looking about the cars." I hit my own strap releases. "Come on—let's get the ship ready for the next leg and then go out and meet them."

They were waiting patiently outside their cars as we emerged from the Cricket: two men and a woman. At first glance all three struck me as impressive... and it was several seconds before I realized how remarkable that subconscious conclusion actually was. Standing next to old mul/terrain vehicles, dressed in neat but drab clothing, there was no immediately obvious reason why I should find them anything but perfectly ordinary.

And yet I did... and a couple of seconds later I realized why. There was something in their faces, in the senses of each of the three, that seemed to radiate peace. Not the artificial and short-lived counterfeit of peace available from bottles and pills, nor even the genuine kind of peace that most people experience only rarely and for similarly brief periods. This was a far deeper and more permanent sort of peace; a peace, moreover, with an unshakable dignity of soul attached to it.

It was the sort of peace I'd seen occasionally among the Watcher elders of my youth... and nowhere else that I'd ever traveled.

"Good day to you," the man in the center said with a smile as Calandra and I approached them. "Welcome to Spall."

"Thank you," I nodded to him. About fifty years old, I estimated—perhaps twice the age of each of his companions—with a neatly trimmed fringebeard and the sort of wrinkling about his eyes that comes of long outdoor work and frequent smiling. The eyes themselves... measuring me with a keenness almost Watcher-like in its intensity. "You must be from the Halloas," I told him. "An elder, I presume?"

A slight ripple of distaste touched his companions, but the spokesman didn't flinch. "I'm a shepherd of the Halo of God, yes," he said, correcting my terminology. "The term 'Halloa' is considered derogatory, by the way."

"I'm sorry," I apologized. "We'd never heard you referred to as anything else."

His eyebrow twitched. "Ah. I take it, then, that you haven't come here to join us?"

I shook my head. "No, I'm afraid not. We have some rather pressing business on Spall... which we were hoping you might be able to help us with."

His sense shaded toward wariness. "What sort of business?" he asked cautiously.

"Life and death business," I said bluntly, watching him closely. "If we're unsuccessful, someone will die."

His eyes continued to measure me. "People die all the time," he said, a hint of challenge in his voice. "And death is, after all, only the passage from this life back to God."

"Perhaps," I acknowledged. "But injustice should not be the ticket to that passage."

His eyes flicked to Calandra, returned to me. "I'm Shepherd Denvre Adams," he said; and with his name came a sense of at least provisional acceptance of us. "Two of my associates from the Shekinah Fellowship: Mari Ray and Danel Pommert." He gestured to his companions.

"I'm Gilead Raca Benedar," I told him, watching carefully for reaction. "This is my friend, Calandra Mara Paquin."

There was some reaction, certainly, among the three. But not at the level I would have expected from people on the alert for a pair of fugitive Watchers. Carefully, I let out the breath I'd been holding; apparently the alarm hadn't yet made it this far.

"So. Watchers." Adams nodded as if finding a piece to a puzzle. "I should have guessed right away. The aura of alertness surrounding you is very distinctive."

"We find it so ourselves," I agreed, wondering how much of that had been made up on the spot to impress his companions. "Most people manage to miss it, though. Is there some place where we can talk in private?"

"The Shekinah settlement is only about fifteen minutes away. We can talk there." His eyes flicked over my shoulder at the ship. "I take it you could use a ride?"

"Yes, thank you," I said. "If you'll give us a minute, though, we need to get our supplies off. And to set our ship to take off."

Beside me, I could sense Calandra's displeasure at my telling him that. I didn't much like it myself, but I couldn't see any way around it. The faster we got the ship headed for the outer system, the less inevitable it would be that the search would zero directly in on us here; and trying to concoct a lie about how the ship had accidentally launched itself could easily lose us any Halo of God support we could hope to get.