Engineman - Eric Brown [75]
"But, you don't understand, I must! I promised... If I didn't..." She could only imagine her friend's disappointment if she failed to turn up on the most important day of his life.
She told herself that nothing could keep her from attending L'Endo's passing. Even if her father locked her in the villa, she would find a way out.
"I'm sorry, Ella. But I've taken this matter to higher authorities. You are to transfer schools immediately. From the day after tomorrow you will attend a Danzig boarding gymnasium in the south."
"No!" she screamed. "No, you can't-"
Even then she could not fully comprehend the implications of what he was saying. Nothing could keep her away from the Lho. She would escape now, live with the aliens until L'Endo's passing.
She turned and ran for the door.
She might have known that Conway would be one step ahead of her. As she was hauling open the door, he grabbed her around the waist and carried her kicking and screaming to her room.
The following day, her father left early for Zambique City without so much as a word of farewell. Conway drove her south. Ella went without protest, thinking that if her father had any way of gauging the degree of anger within her, then he would surely feel ashamed.
She vowed she would show the bastard.
For the next three months, before her fifteenth birthday, she paid no attention to her instructors and failed her exams. Her father had once mentioned, at a dinner party held for senior executives in the Organisation, that Ella was a bright pupil who might one day work for the Danzig Colonial Administration.
She'd show him...
The day after her fifteenth birthday, Ella walked from the dormitory of her college and, with savings scraped together over the years, booked her passage through the interface network to Earth.
She attended a third-rate art college in Paris, sold her paintings in the streets. Then she met Eddie, and joined the Church and converted. The day after her conversion, she communicated with her father for the first time in three years. She sent him a photograph. It showed Eddie in his radiation silvers, standing stoically, holding a beer and staring into the camera. Ella was behind him, without clothes, arms around his neck and a leg twisted around his thigh. Her chin was hooked over his shoulder and she was laughing. Displayed prominently on her forearm was the infinity symbol tattoo of the Disciples.
Ella picked up a flat stone and skimmed it across the surface of the lagoon.
She was, she knew, only delaying the inevitable meeting. She checked her watch. It was seven o'clock. The curfew began in one hour. She could make her way down to the villa now, or spend the night here at the lagoon, but she didn't want to do that. The place was full of too many memories, too many reminders of the girl she'd been, a fourteen-year-old full of naivety, hope and ambition. She wondered what that girl might have to say to the woman she was now, who wanted more than anything to make peace with her father.
She left the lagoon. She decided to leave the bike where it was in the bushes and walk down the track. At the first bend, her father's house came into sight - a split-level ranch-style villa, its central section raised above the wings. She wondered if the Organisation had the house under observation. They had no way of connecting her to the sabotage of the interface, but she had evaded their surveillance last night... That set her to wondering why they had allowed her onto the Reach. Was it that her father had pulled strings to facilitate her entry?
And that, of course, begged the question of why her father had summoned her. "I've seen the light, Ella. I need to see you-"
She paused at the top of the path that descended though her father's cacti garden. He'd seen the light... It came to Ella that he had found out that the Organisation was responsible for the genocide of the Lho-Dharvo. He'd seen the light, seen the evil at the heart of the Organisation, and wanted absolution from the daughter he had so mistreated