The spectacle was unbelievable. Flanik Or, known for his conservatism, had spared nothing to make his son's safe return the grandest event in living memory. Clustered along the boulevard that cut through the dome on Orefall, signs held by both paid and unpaid supporters displayed clean slogans of welcome to the young man. Some called Choron a hero. He was the martyr who didn't die, the savior who had managed to deliver himself.
Nara's mother had sighed at the radio's announcement of the parade. “Be sure that when an Or tosses this much money to the public, he has plans you'd rather not fathom.”
Flanik's plans seemed quite clear to Nara: he was too late to make himself into a hero, so he was using his son as a key to the public's heart. The man wanted to gain influence, and now was the greatest chance we would ever have.
She watched Flanik waving to the crowd from his sleek car. Choron had landed; his father was coming to recover him from his rescuers. The extreme issues of the time—namely, the fate of the settlement on Orefall—had apparently called for a new kind of maneuver. The people around her were already caught up in Flanik's fiction.
Pira had called her with an edge of panic in her voice after Nara's fabrication of the S.O.S.: Choron's father had already begun his campaign. Instead of using a private means of communication, Or had broadcast a calculated plea to every corner of miner space: Reward offered for the safe return of my son, Choron Or, who encountered unknown danger on his mission to the Great Rock, his last known location. If you are in the vicinity, please contact me. Never mind the dubious claim that he had accidentally sent the message on public channels; after that, the story had exploded into the people's consciousness. Every public transmission, news or otherwise, seemed to contain an update on the rescue effort, and within after Choron had been found, it was hard not to know the estimated time that Choron would arrive. A day of hourly barrage had narrowed the vision of the populace to include only the worry-creased face of Flanik Or. If dad were still around, she thought, he would have fallen face-first into this scheme.
Her father had never thought things through. He had held tightly to the old miners' adage, real men act; weak men muse. His long string of failures in mining had driven him to drink. By the time of his death, his name was a blight on the tab of every bar, grocery, and fuel station in the system. The small life insurance payment had done nothing to help them settle the family's debts. Choron's rough-hewn gems had saved them: the foreign traders had always desired the stones—Nara's charm and beauty in displaying them on her body had spoken to their greed far better than her voice could have.
Even Choron had expressed concern when he learned of her means of clearing the family name. “Look, Nara. It's none of my business what you do. And I know you. But people here will think you're just a prostitute.” The word seemed to hit him as hard as it hit her. “Especially those traders. I don't like the way their eyes linger on you.”
Her anger had trapped her pleas. Choron, it is your business, she had thought. Just tell me to stop, and I'll do it for you. Her words had been different. “Let them think what they will. I've almost finished paying for my father's mistakes, and until I have, I'm confident that my visions will protect me.”
She would have given anything to hear Choron put to words the feelings she saw in his eyes.
Since those times, Nara and her mother had come out from under her father's shadow. Nara's dreams provided limited guidance in most of the mundane issues they encountered. The vision she had shared with Choron was the most important she had ever experienced, but its meaning, and how to arrive at the future it described, escaped her. She wished her dreams could tell her how to deal with Flanik's manipulations.
The only course for the moment was to wait; he was due to give a speech upon his reunion with Choron. Although Or was wealthy and scheming, he rarely took much effort to conceal his plans. The speech would probably fill the last of the gaps that Nara had not understood on her own. It was always odd to look forward to one of Flanik's lectures: on one hand, she wanted to have answers to the inevitable questions; on the other, those answers were usually discomfiting.
Someone touched Nara's shoulder from behind. She spun to see who it was, coming face-to-face with one of the servants from the Or estate.
He was a kindly gentleman, perhaps a decade older than Flanik, and his name was lost in Nara's memory. “Miss Nara, I am sorry that I startled you. Lady Or has sent the staff of the Estate to find you and to inform you that your presence at the reunion would be delightful.”
“How will I get there?”
The servant understood the meaning of the question and laughed. “Lord Or has decided to take his time on the way there; you will take the car in which Lady Or is riding.”
Relieved, Nara asked, “Have I dressed properly for the occasion?”
A quick, critical glance down the length of her brough a smile to his face. “If you permit me to say so, I believe that young Master Or will be thrilled by your beauty.”
She took his arm; he led her to a waiting car.
Few words passed between Nara and Choron's mother. After their greeting, there was little left to say or do. Nara contented herself by watching the structures of the settlement pass quickly before the window next to her seat.
The spaceport on Orefall served a limited use: providing docks and lodging for prospectors and the foreign traders from distant systems. Because of this, the founders of Orefall had built it at the unmovable edge of the dome, out of the way of the normal miners' lives. When the rest of the dome had expanded to accompany the growing population, the spaceport had remained as the dome's anchor point. It was a unique facility in a colony with ruthlessly efficient city planning: rather than following the design of the gateways to the housing grid—which were as stark as the exteriors of the ship-homes to which they led—the port had kept up with some of the design trends described by the traders. Whether these men gave an accurate portrayal of long-forgotten worlds far beyond the reach of Orefall's sun, the people of the settlement could never know. As long as the traders felt at ease in their only designated zone on the planet, accuracy did not matter.
Nara remembered the place well; she had seen every corner of its public areas while she plied Choron's jewels to the foreigners. Even so, its atmosphere still felt alien. Choron, landing his tiny prospecting ship, had no other choice of a place to dock, but it was still the most appropriate location for his return: as far back into the ages as the Or family line stretched, Choron now belonged somewhere exotic.
Pira cleared her throat when the car sidled up to the port's entrance. “I know that you and my son share a special... affinity. We are here early so that you might visit him before he becomes lost in the wave of publicity that is still crawling down Central Boulevard. You will meet him in privacy.” She held the tips of her fingers to Nara's mouth when she tried to speak. “This is my way of thanking you for saving my son.” The chauffeur opened the car door and escorted Nara into the strange structure.
Inside, she found the lobby empty, save for a wiry young man who leaned against one of the perforated metal support columns that hid the ceiling high. He looked handsome: his body's lines shaped by an oddly grueling life in microgravity, his green eyes the only part of him that revealed the burden he had gained from incredible experiences on the Great Rock. It was Choron, of course, wearing his usual one-piece flight suit.
He was lost in thought, his hands in his pockets, his eyes to the jagged horizon that invaded the spaceport through its magnificent observation window. To his right, the dome curved out of sight, and the pock-marked, exhaustively-mined surface that was the untamed wasteland of Orefall dominated the rest of the view.
Nara knew he saw none of it: he was seeing the throbbing, living skin of God Himself, from the vivid memories given to the only man who had survived landing on it. He saw veins of light. He saw a New World.