Firebird

THIRTY-NINE

The two girls, who'd already been sufficiently frightened, picked up Melissa's near panic. The fact that they were lost, stranded with a stranger whom they could not understand, did not help. The younger one got hysterical. The older tried to play the role of the big sister. She held her sibling and tried to calm her, speaking in a voice that had itself grown shrill.

The Jubilant was first to arrive at the site. Cal reported that a sweep of the area showed no sign of anyone.

By the time we got there, it was hopeless. Dot's air supply would have been exhausted. We continued to hunt, hoping, or maybe not hoping, that we'd find her somewhere.

Jon Richter arrived on the Gremlin minutes after we did. Michael and Allie and the rest of the squadron arrived over the next few hours, and we continued to look. But there was no sign of Dot, or of the Intrepide.

After three days, we faced reality. “Time to go back,” Alex said.

We moved the girls and Melissa from the McCandless onto the Belle-Marie. Melissa was infuriated, despondent, and overwhelmed by guilt. It wasn't clear whom it was all aimed at. Us, I suppose. Herself, for not dissuading her mother from an action she now saw as suicidal. At Dot, who didn't come back when she had a chance. And probably at the natural order of things, which puts everybody at hazard. She tried to fight off her moods by taking care of the kids, but she was really in no shape to do anything but make matters worse, so ultimately it fell to Shara to calm things down.

The AI took the McCandless home.

We provided food and soft drinks for our new passengers. Melissa finally got her act together and spent time, with Belle's help, trying to set up a system that would allow us to speak with the girls. The plan was for Melissa to say something, which Belle would put on-screen, along with a French translation, and whatever pictures seemed likely to be of use. Of course, they started with basics. Hello. How are you? I'm Melissa. Would you like more juice? We have a game you might enjoy.

She asked the girls to write their responses, which made Belle's translations easier.

“We are happy that you are with us,” said Melissa. “What is your name?”

“I'm Sabol,” said the older child. “My sister is Cori.”

“Beautiful names,” said Melissa.

Cori began to cry.

“It's okay, Cori,” Melissa said. “You're safe.”

The child wiped her eyes. “Where is my father, Melissa?”

Melissa looked at me, and I shook my head. I didn't really want to say anything because I didn't trust my voice. “He is still where he was,” I said, very slowly. “In the ship. But he is all right.”

“I want to go back to him. Can you take me back? Please?”

My heart began to beat harder. “What do I tell her?” I asked Melissa.

Alex broke in: “The truth. Lying to her won't help.”

Melissa, pronouncing each syllable carefully, said, “We can't reach him.”

“I want to go back.” Cori was crying harder.

“We can't go back, Cori. The ship you were on has gone in a different direction.”

Sabol was teary, too. “Why did you take us away from him?”

“We were trying to help.”

“So why can't you take us back?”

“Sabol, we would go back and get him, too. If we could find the ship. But we don't know where it is.”

“I wish you'd left us alone.” Cori knocked over her glass, and tears streamed down her cheeks.

“We're your friends, Cori.”

“Go away, Melissa,” she said. “Take me to my father.”

If they'd believed their father dead, it might have been easier. But the fact of the separation, the knowledge he was out there somewhere, and that they couldn't get to him, tore at them. Melissa, once she got her emotions under control, was magnificent. She talked to them throughout the ordeal, picked up some of the language, assured them we would not leave them, that they were safe with us. And that, eventually, their father would also be rescued. “But it will take a long time,” she said. The experience, I thought, helped her get past the loss of her mother.

“Maybe,” she told me, “we'll be able to explain to them about a time warp. Let them know he's okay, even if they won't get to see him again.”

We brought out chocolate ice cream every evening. Shara helped Melissa make a couple of nightgowns for them. We didn't have fresh clothes they could change into, so when the girls went to sleep, she ran their clothes through the cleaner, and they were ready again in the morning.

And, eventually, we were all able to talk with a bit less emotion.

“How long were you on the Intrepide?” asked Shara.

They both answered at once. Cori didn't recognize the name. Sabol had to think about it. “About three weeks, I guess. Everybody was getting pretty scared because the captain didn't seem to know where we were.”

“You knew you were lost?”

“Sure. And everybody got upset.” She was a pretty girl. Smiled easily. She had bright, intelligent eyes, long amber hair. At the moment, though, the eyes were dim. “And now they're lost again.”

Melissa looked toward me. How to explain this to a twelve-year-old? “We'll find them,” she said.

Cori was sitting beside her sister. “We won't get lost, will we, Melissa?” she asked.

“No. We're fine, Cori. We're going home.” Then after a pause: “Where are you from?”

“Quepala.”

“Is that a town?”

“A town?” She seemed puzzled. “It's our country.”

“Is it a beautiful country?”

“Yes. People often come to visit. To see the ocean.”

“Your father: Is he a scientist?”

“He's a policeman.”

Alex followed the conversations with interest. Occasionally, the girls asked for more details on what had happened to them. He responded that sometimes ships just get lost. “Not ships like this one,” he added. “But some ships do.” Later, when the girls were asleep, he admitted he wasn't comfortable trying to explain it. “Let's try to stay clear of the subject as much as we can,” he told us. “I think we should let the doctors figure out how to handle it.”

Melissa was in full agreement. But both of them, when the girls asked questions, or needed support, ignored their own advice. “Your dad is fine,” Alex said. “You won't see him for a while, but he's okay.” Looking back now, so many years later, I'm still impressed with how well they handled things. Especially Melissa. I'm not sure what we'd have done without her. She was even able, by the time we reached the home system, to talk casually with the girls in their own language.

Sabol held up pretty well, except for periodic bouts of depression. Cori slipped into occasional crying jags. Melissa stayed with them, though, and they rode it out together. We brought them up to sit on the bridge and pretend to pilot the ship. Belle invented games for them. We watched shows. But whenever the subject of going back to Rimway came up, the kids got sad. And the tears never really went away.

“It's all right,” Melissa told them. “We'll keep you with us. You'll always be with friends.”

On the next-to-last night, when we were approaching home, and the girls were asleep, Melissa said she thought that they had probably been better off on the Intrepide. That Dot had given her life doing something we should not have done.

The loss of Dot, of course, was something else to contend with. When, finally, we arrived back in the home system, a day or so away from Skydeck, Melissa sent a message to her grandparents, to explain, as best she could, what had happened. When she'd finished, she told them they'd have been proud of their daughter, that she'd sacrificed everything to rescue two girls trapped on a lost flight.

We sent visuals of Sabol and Cori, who smiled at the lens. And waved. It was not a live exchange, of course. The signal wouldn't even reach Skydeck until several minutes after transmission.

But they did respond. When the transmission came in, we put it on-screen, and Dot's parents looked out at Melissa and the girls. “We had no idea, Melissa,” the father said, “that anything like this could happen. Dot said nothing about taking her life into her hands. All she said was that she and you were going to try to find a lost ship, but she didn't think it was really there. Somebody's responsible. Please pass that to Mr. Benedict. I'll be looking into it.”

“I wish we could have gotten everybody off,” I told Alex.

Alex didn't want to talk about it.

But there'd be no containing the story, and we knew the media would be waiting for us. We were still twelve hours out from Skydeck when the calls began to come in. Every journalist on the planet was asking for an interview. Talk shows wanted to book Alex and Melissa. People we'd never heard of sent transmissions demanding to know whether it was true that we'd rescued two girls who had been born seven thousand years ago. Politicians wanted to be on record congratulating Alex for his contributions to science, humanity, and whatever.

By the time we docked at Skydeck, pretty much everybody on the mission had sat for multiple interviews. But the media types wanted especially to talk with the girls. We debated whether to expose them to the public eye, but there was really no way they could be kept away from the journalists. There was, however, a cause for frustration: None of the reporters could speak the girls' language, not even the AIs. So Melissa had to help.

When we came out of the connecting tube, we were inundated by a screaming crowd. A band serenaded us with patriotic songs. The President's Executive Secretary was there to shake our hands. A special-care unit showed up to look after Cori and Sabol, who by then were the best-known kids in the Confederacy. That produced a standoff when we refused to turn them over. The special-care unit claimed we'd agreed to the arrangement, but no such request had been received.

We answered questions while people cheered, and were virtually carried to the President's shuttle, where we did still more interviews during the descent to Andiquar.

While we were on our way down, a presidential representative announced at a press conference that an investigation was being set in motion to determine why StarCorps had refused to help. Alex hadn't commented on the subject, but somebody evidently had.

And, finally, we were back at the country house, which had been surrounded by reporters. Biggest story ever, they were saying. Real time travel. A dazzling rescue. And, of course, Dot Garber had become the hero of the hour. There was talk during that first day back that a vid featuring the rescue was already being planned. (Clara Beaumont was eventually signed to play Dot.) Somebody else had gotten a book deal. Two senators had moved that her statue be placed in Heroes' Park, across from the Hall of the People.

Part of the reason for the special-care unit, though it was not stated at the time, was a concern that Sabol and Cori might be carrying germs against which current immune systems would be helpless. But the kids checked out okay, I'm happy to say. There was also a possibility that the reverse might be true, that the girls might not be able to defend themselves against microbes hanging out in the Andiquar area. They were given a series of treatments to upgrade their defenses, while Melissa was instructed to keep them separated from the general population for a few weeks.

Sabol and Cori moved in with Melissa. There was a deluge of applicants to adopt the girls, but Melissa asked them if they'd like to stay with her, and they said absolutely. They said it, by the way, in Standard.

The downside was that the Intrepide had been, for the next few years, our last chance to rescue one of the lost ships. Shara's information indicated that there wouldn't be another surfacing-the terminology had caught on-for decades. We'd gotten lucky, had encountered two over a few weeks. But that was over now.

Shara, though, thought the information in Robin's notebook might change that.

“Instead of looking for black holes, then tracking them back,” she said, “Robin searched for missing ships, and used them to locate areas of danger. Sometimes, most of the time, that doesn't lead to anything, because ships can go missing for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with time/space instabilities.

“But sometimes the disappearances line up. Sometimes they form a trail.”