DISCLAIMER: Highlander and its canon characters are the property of Davis/Panzer Productions or a successor corporation; no copyright infringement is intended.
x
x
x
With her back to the window - head down, eyes closed behind wraparound protective glasses - Xanda Veniti activated the control that would part the heavy curtains.
Cautiously, she opened her eyes. Peered into the carefully positioned mirror.
She wasn't seeing her reflection - that of a strong young woman, Caucasian, with close-cropped dark hair. The mirror was showing her something outside the window.
Far outside the window.
She examined it closely.
And shuddered.
She closed the curtains, removed her glasses. Then she took a deep breath, and walked out into the windowless corridor where two dozen children were waiting. Not playing, not milling about...just huddled together, too frightened even to cry.
"All right," she said, making herself sound more confident than she felt. "We'll only be outdoors for three minutes." Unless some of you break down, and I have to come back for you. "Make sure your coveralls really do cover everything, and your helmets are secure. You'll be able to see a little, through the faceplates. But you won't have any real need to see, if you listen to my voice and stay close to me."
Their helmets would supply oxygen and transmit sound, at its actual volume. Incoming sound could be muted, but not so easily that children might do it accidentally.
She made a quick check to see that everyone mature enough to understand her instructions had complied. Took care of the little ones. After donning her own helmet, she gathered up the toddlers and held all three in her arms.
"Now let's recite that poem I taught you!" Switching from Standard to the Old English from which it had developed, she led them in an encouragingly loud chorus of:
"Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight...
"I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight."
"Remember," she cautioned, "don't look up at the star while we're running! Just know it's there, and we're wishing on it."
"Whadda we wish for?" a small voice asked.
"For you kids to have a wonderful new home, where you'll never have problems like this again. And it's a wish we know will come true. So while these next few minutes are going to be unpleasant - even painful - you can feel sure, the whole time, that you'll be able to look back on it later as a grand adventure!"
Another small voice said, "I love you, Xanda." Several more chimed in.
With a lump in her throat, she said, "I love you too. All of you.
"Okay. Now I'm going to open the door." She could reach that remote control with her foot. "And we all just run, straight ahead, got it? I'm going to keep reciting the poem out loud, so you can hear me and stay as close as you can. Ready...
"Go!"
But no one did. Instead, all the children screamed when the door opened, and they were hit by a blast of outdoor heat.
Xanda gritted her teeth. "Yes, that was bad. Take a deep breath, everyone." The babies in her arms were bawling, and she heard pathetic whimpers from the others. But they couldn't stop now. "Again. Let's do it and get it over with. Ready...go!"
This time, everyone did begin running, clustered around their leader. Xanda forced herself to ignore their screams - and the searing pain that threatened to take her breath away - and keep repeating the poem.
"Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight...
"I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight."
What she really wished was that their garments could prevent burns. They were flameproof, couldn't catch fire...but at this air temperature, they couldn't protect sensitive human skin. Only their helmets provided that degree of protection.
"Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight...
"I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight!"
She was staggering now. How could the wailing children in her arms have become as heavy as adults?
And her faceplate limited her range of vision. She couldn't make out where any of her other charges were!
Three minutes. However long it may seem, we can't have been out here more than three minutes.
"Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight..."
Then strong hands were grabbing her, unintentionally inflicting more pain as they pulled her into a different type of "corridor." Enclosing a flight of steps that she knew led to the interior of a spaceship.
"The children," she gasped, trying to look back. "Are any of them still out there?"
"No," a male voice assured her. "We've got them all. Most of them passed out, though."
"That's good." Her own knees buckled, but she was determined not to pass out.
The children's burns would be completely healed by the time they came to. As for her, she could already feel the damaged skin beginning to mend. She was still in pain, would be for several more minutes; but she'd experienced rapid healing often enough that she could take it in stride.
In a minute or so, she'd even be able to greet the pilot of the rescue ship with a handshake and a smile.
x
x
x
"It's an honor for me to meet you, Sera Veniti," the pilot said as they exchanged that handshake. He did indeed seem awed.
"Not Sera Veniti," she told him, "just plain Xanda. To you, the kids, everyone.
"And I'm the one who should feel honored to meet you. My husband and I couldn't have lived with ourselves if we hadn't reported the situation we found, and tried to help by at least gathering some of the kids together. The real heroes are people like you, who were tens of light-years away, under no obligation to risk your lives by responding to our SOS."
"Thank you, Xanda." He was actually blushing. "I'm Tal. Short for Talisman."
The name didn't strike her as unusual. In her era, people could be named almost anything - and change their names at will, to almost anything else, as long as they informed some level of government.
He looked younger than she, no older than his early twenties. But since he'd undoubtedly Transitioned, she knew looks counted for nothing. His age in standard Earth-years could be anything from those early twenties to upwards of four million.
"I'm sorry we couldn't get the ship closer to your compound," he went on. "You didn't have to bring the kids over, my co-pilot and I would have done it -"
"No, the kids wouldn't have trusted anyone but my husband or me." Reading his expression, she explained, "And if you're wondering about him, I haven't even told him your ship's arrived.
"Right now, he's hard at work on the science project that brought us here. Studying this...bizarre destabilization of space-time. Conditions are changing rapidly, and we have to keep abreast of them.
"I risked looking at...it...in the mirror before I left the house. I swear the color is deeper than yesterday, and the disk larger."
Tal frowned. "Yes, it's definitely burning helium."
After they'd spent a few seconds pondering that development, she said, "Anyway, my husband's been outdoors way more than I have this week, getting the other fifty kids aboard two earlier ships."
Not to mention all the foraging he's done for provisions, in abandoned stores and homes. They'd come to the planet anticipating they'd have a much shorter stay, and wouldn't be feeding anyone but themselves.
"I know it would have been a little less hot if I'd waited till after sundown. But I figured we shouldn't risk any waste of time. Your co-pilot's putting the kids in suspended animation now, right?"
"Right."
"Suspended animation" was a euphemism. Xanda knew the children were being temporarily "killed" - via the same quick, painless "lethal injection" used in planned Transitions - and would then be kept in an airtight compartment till the end of what might be a yearlong journey. There was no alternative; provisions for living passengers would have doubled the weight of the ship.
"That's all of them from this continent," she said somberly. "I feel terrible that we couldn't reach the hundreds on other continents. We found abandoned aircraft that we knew how to fly, but not enough fuel."
"It's going to work out," Tal assured her. "Volunteers are headed for all those regions, and they have the best kind of sensing equipment. They'll be able to detect human life-forms, even if the kids are 'dead.'
"But if you and your husband hadn't scanned for other human life when you first got here...if you'd taken for granted the evacuation had been complete...all those Ever-Youngs in orphanages would have suffered terribly. For how long, no one can say, if they kept 'dying' and coming back to life. In the end, they would have been vaporized. And the bastards who abandoned them would have gotten off scot-free."
"I'm not even sure why we thought to do a scan." She shook her head. "Just scientists routinely running checks on everything in a new environment, I guess."
"How are you planning to leave?" he asked anxiously. "We couldn't take two more people aboard this ship - we're at maximum weight - but I get the impression you didn't want us to, anyway.
"I know there can't be anything larger than an aircar in that hangar of yours. And you're cutting it awfully close. It may take us six months to get to the wormhole! The usable wormhole."
"You're right, we don't have a ship." She tried to sound unconcerned. "Colleagues dropped us off here. And there's a plan in place for getting us away safely."
"Well, I hope it's a good plan. You and your husband are citizens the Human Worlds can't afford to lose." Then his voice changed, sounding almost boyish. "You know you two are sort of...legendary, right? Is it true what they say, that you've been married to each other for a million years?"
She wouldn't have thought anything could make her laugh today. But this did.
" 'Legendary'? That's a hoot!
"Yes, we have been married, very happily, for a million years. But hey, we're only a little over a million years old!
"We met and fell in love in our twenties. Transitioned together, hand in hand, then got married on our Transition Day, so it could be one big celebration. And we've never regretted it for a minute.
"But...there's a question new friends always want to ask us, and for some reason, they're always hesitant about doing it. No, neither of us was a virgin when we met! We're real, flesh-and-blood human beings, not characters in a romance novel."
"That's great." Tal too was smiling, the horror of a destabilized star momentarily forgotten. "Have you had many children?"
"Two hundred fifteen," she said proudly. They had of course been conceived through cloning techniques that required only parental DNA (not sperm or eggs), then carried to term in uterine replicators. But they were, genetically, hers and her husband's. "Raising every one of them was a delight. And none of our children ever had an injury that caused a premature Transition.
"Neither of us had parents who were married, even briefly. We grew up in loving homes! And there was never any ill will. But every one of our parents had hundreds of children, with hundreds of different partners. By the time we were born, they'd given up trying to keep track of their offspring.
"I guess we've gone to the other extreme. We try to stay in touch with all of them. But..." Somber again, she admitted, "It isn't easy, once they're grown. Two hundred siblings born in different centuries or millennia...can't have any two close together, because of the risk of overpopulation. After all, hardly anyone ever dies.
"The siblings barely know each other. They're uncomfortable at having to share their parents with so many other people. And still, they're having widely-spaced children of their own, needing to deal with all of them.
"Parent-child bonds don't seem to last. But raising another human being is wonderful! And if the parents have a lasting love...that's all anyone can ask for."
From the way Tal hung on her every word, she suspected he really was young.
x
x
x
Before heading back to the house, she called her husband, to arrange for him to come to the door and yell. That would be enough to keep her moving in the right direction.
She was already imagining herself in his arms.
But she thought of a question she'd meant to ask Tal. "You said that if we hadn't reported what happened, the people who'd abandoned those Ever-Youngs would have gotten off scot-free. Are they going to be prosecuted? You're sure?"
"Yes," he said grimly. "There's even talk of reinstating the death penalty. But beheading's too merciful. They should be sent back here, and left to be boiled alive!
"As if things weren't bad enough...the worst mistake in the history of humanity was followed by the worst crime."
She thought about that. "In terms of numbers, more innocents have been slaughtered in the past. And all these youngsters may ultimately be saved. But for the sheer horror of the crime, the agony being inflicted on defenseless children...you may be right about its being the worst.
"And there's no doubt about the mistake. I know some of the scientists who approved the plan for creating and stabilizing that Inner System Wormhole, and they'll never forgive themselves.
"My husband and I were born on Silverthorn. But even we off-worlders will grieve, for the rest of our lives, over their having accidentally destroyed this star.
"And this planet...Earth."