Heritage of Flight by Susan Shwartz

Author:Susan Shwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART III

Bread of Affliction

Lo, this is the bread of affliction ...

—Passover Ritual

15

As the wind sent the snow dancing in the counterpoint of light and shadow cast by two moons, Pauli paced, waiting for Alicia Pryor to emerge from the dome that served the settlers as a medical center.

Scared, by God, of a feast. I must be losing my grip, she berated herself. She stamped her feet and the glittering snow crunched underfoot ... like scales ... Rafe and I climbed up to the eaves where the moths laired, and their scales lay scattered everywhere until we stole enough to kill them.

For an instant, the crisp snow and the white cloud of Pauli's breath reeked with the pheromones of moths, aroused for their mating dances in the thermals of the mountain passes.

Stop calling them moths, she corrected herself. They were Cynthians. Moth, Beneatha Angelou informed anyone who would listen, was a racist term. If you called the Cynthian natives moths, you created an excuse to think of them as less than human: bugs to be swatted out of the way as Pauli had ordered. But her order had wiped out intelligent creatures—humans in all but physical shape—and must not be softened by terms more suitable to pest control.

Wiped out. Had all the Cynthians been wiped out? One night Rafe had waked laughing from a dream of Cynthians swooping down from cliffs by a turbulent ocean. What about the other continents? he had asked. What if somewhere on this world (which they might never explore fully) Cynthians still flew, still built their pallid towers along the planet's magnetic lines, and still fled from their hideous young?

It was still genocide, Beneatha had declared when the subject of Rafe's dream came up. Just the attempt, just the thought, was enough to brand them: and they had succeeded too well as it was. If that's how she feels, why invite me to this feast of hers?

Pauli paced back and forth. Where was Pryor? Her feet were damp, damp on the frozen earth. Not earth, she reminded herself. Earth is long lost to us; this is just soil.

Whatever you called it, however much you escaped being Earthbound in speech and heritage, the ground was cold. Stupid field boots should have been proof against winter snows but they weren't. One of the techs was working on a way of replacing boots when their service issue wore out. Now that was a nice, satisfying task: you mended soles, stitched them, kept heels level, and considered the ways of making a better boot. You could do far worse on Cynthia than be a cordwainer.

For example, you could be a ... a leader. Then you would have no chance to retreat to the comfort of physical work. Your task would be to make the decisions no one else wanted to make, to face—and keep on facing—issues those who followed you would have probably rather forgotten. Your tools were logistics, psychology, nerve, and will. Your products were the decisions you made, and had to live with, you and those you protected.

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