Drifter Read Free Page A

refer to us as The Chosen. They use those particular words to make us seem arrogant and self-centered."
    The woman gave an apologetic shrug. Light reflected off her electro-implant. "I meant no offense."
    "And none was taken."
    "It's just that I'm not very good with words, not that kind anyway, and I wondered if you'd say something for Wilf. You know, something about God and so on."
    Wendy nodded solemnly. "I'd be proud to say something for Wilf."
    And so it was that three strangers said goodbye to a man none of them knew, while their fellow passengers looked on, and a costume ball took place two decks above.
    Later, after they'd carried Wilf's body over to the lift tubes and notified the ship's crew, Wendy had retreated to the comparative privacy of her own bunk. The curtains were thin but better than nothing at all. A pair of newlyweds were busy making love right below her, but Wendy tuned them out.
    She discarded the distractions around her one by one until she was all alone inside a cocoon of warmth and peace. It was there that she examined Wilf's death and the circumstances that surrounded it.
    She felt no sorrow, for Wendy believed that Wilf's essence lived on, but the manner of his passing troubled her greatly. Why had the ship's medical personnel denied him treatment? How could the vast majority of her fellow passengers be so callous? What could she have done to make things better?
    They were difficult questions, and Wendy failed to find any easy answers. But the episode did prove the elder's wisdom. There is little room for good where people are packed too closely together and machines hold sway. The sooner she reached HiHo and discharged her responsibility, the better.
    Two more cycles passed before the liner reached the correct nav beacon and made the transition from hyper to normal space. Like most of the passengers on D deck, Wendy knew very little about the physics involved and was forced to trust the machinery around her.
    Part of Wendy, the part that had grown up on a farm where even robo-tillers were regarded as necessary evils, was troubled by this dependency on technology.
    Another part, the part that had attended and graduated from the Imperial School of Medicine on Avalon, trusted machines and what they could do.
    Both parts felt the momentary nausea that goes with a hyperspace jump and gave thanks that the first half of the journey was nearly over.
    But it still took the better part of a full cycle for the ship to work its way in from the nav beacon and enter orbit around HiHo.
    After that it was semiorganized chaos as everyone pushed and shoved, hoping to get aboard the first shuttle dirtside. They were soon disappointed, however, as passengers from A, B, and C decks were taken off first.
    Hours passed. Children cried, people argued, and the air grew thick with tension. The pressure of it, the feeling of being confined within such a small space, gave Wendy a splitting headache. She popped two pain tabs and washed them down with some of the ship's bitter water.
    And then, when all the upper decks had been cleared, and the D-deck passengers were clumping their way aboard a pair of clapped-out contract shuttles, Wendy forced herself to go last. It was a form of self-discipline, a self-imposed penance, a punishment for her own lack of inner tranquility.
    Finally, after she had passed through the liner's huge passenger lock, and boarded the reentry-scarred shuttle, she got to look out a viewport. This, and only this, was the part of spaceflight that she loved.
    Wendy saw nothing of the spacecraft's bolt-down seats, the bare metal bulkheads, or the trash-littered decks beneath her feet. Her eyes were completely taken with the huge brownish-orange orb below, a one-in-a-billion miracle of physics, geology, biology, and chemistry that could support human life. A creation so wondrous, so perfect, that it could single-handedly prove the existence of God.
    Not some white-haired tyrant in a mythical realm, but a