The Great Escape Chapter 17, Part 7 of 8

The Great Escape
Chapter 17, Part 7 of 8

If Ezra thought visiting the Juniors might be relaxing, he soon learned differently. The girls had seen him before but were still in awe. He put them at their ease, and they quickly overcame their shyness, emboldened to do what they always wanted to do, which bombarded him with questions. He patiently answered or deflected them, inured to the process by now, but it was tiring, and after twenty minutes, he'd had enough and stood up.

"I hope you don't mind, Ladies," he said, "but I came to talk to Wildchild. Can we go outside for a walk?" he asked her.

Outside, out of hearing, he said:

"I don't have anything important to say, and I just wanted to get away. How are you getting on?

Is there anything you need me to do for you?"

"I'm getting on very well. Thanks, Ezra. I don't need anything. Everything is just perfect."

"You look lovely in that dress," he added, remembering his chivalrous manners.

She smiled, thanking us. She was radiantly happy, in fact, and not ashamed of her girly clothes.

He noted her change and was in two minds: pleased that she was comfortable with her girlish side but also regretting the loss of the silent, angry tomboy he loved. The tomboy wouldn't have accepted such a compliment before, nor even seen it as a compliment.

He laughed at himself again and told Wildchild he thought her bedmate was beautiful, which pleased her. Then they talked about their friends in the forest. She was alarmed at the news about Annela but laughed when he described what Tamar had been up to.

Walking through the orchard beside the Council Chamber in the bright sunshine was pleasant, but it was soon time to leave.

Now, Yumi announced her decision to stay with the Cloners. It was expected. The Cloners had enticed her with a comfortable bed in her room, their long pregnancy experience, and a pile of old technology to mend.

Ezra understood.

"It's a good decision," he said, "but now I have to explain it to Mirselene."

"Please thank her for the hospitality of the Woodlanders - of all the three tribes - but I think my place is here, with the broken machinery, though I've no reason to think I'll have more success than you in getting it working again."

"If anyone can, Yumi, it's you. I'll see you as often as possible."

The Herder party returned to their Northern Camp, and a week later, the three tribes held a monthly meeting.

In the last week of their stay with the Herders, Carlin and Tamar went on long rides on the plain and drank milk from the dairy cows' udders.

Carlin honed her riding skills, learning gymnastic skills from the trick riders, and Tamar revisited old friendships, though she avoided the girls who used to bully her. Most of the bullies were grown-up now, and Solange's benign influence had been to dampen down the aggressive side of tribal life.

The following month, Ezra stayed with the Mariners, where he helped Devon, Althea, Salema, Leanne, and Elinor deliver their daughters.

Wildchild arrived at the Beach Settlement on her horse in the final week. She brought a message from Madam Cloner: the cloning kits had been successfully replenished. Therefore, she invited Kalyndra to the City to try the cloning treatment again.

Kalyndra asked Ezra to accompany her. She wanted him to donate a cell to be implanted in her by the Cloners instead of using one of her cells. As the father of ten girls, he was easily persuaded to try to father a son.

Therefore, after the next monthly meeting, the Herders gave Kalyndra and Ezra a lift to Cloner City.

Madam Cloner herself performed the treatment, using cells scraped from the skin of Ezra's upper arm. Ezra waited with Kalyndra for the required week to tell if the treatment was successful. It wasn't. Kalyndra had her period. They agreed to try again next month.

It also failed again in the second month, so Kalyndra told Ezra they should try her cells if only to eliminate the possibility that Ezra couldn't father boys. His toll so far: five Woodlander daughters, two more children on the way, five Mariner daughters, two more expected, and eight Herder daughters suggested this might be the case.

It became a pattern for Kalyndra for the next few months to visit Cloner City and come back disappointed until she decided that being aunt to Devon's daughter and Thalassa's future daughter would have to be satisfaction enough. However, she couldn't help feeling sad.

She tried not to show her sadness to Ezra during his next visit, but she couldn't hide her feelings completely. It was cruel that her hopes were raised after she'd long been reconciled to barrenness and then dashed again, significantly when Devon was so absorbed with her baby daughter, and Thalassa was radiantly pregnant herself.

Ezra understood and took her mind off her sorrows by dominating her all week, ordering her to always kneel in his presence. Serving him was a joy and satisfaction to her. Devon and Thalassa left them alone at night, and each night, he tied her arms behind her back and made her suck his cock until he came down her throat. Then he hogtied, gagged, blindfolded, and fucked her until he was exhausted.

He left her tied up all night and woke every few hours to fuck her again, resting his head afterward on her magnificent tits to sleep.

At the end of their week, he was exhausted, and she was sore all over, but she loved him more deeply than ever, and she never felt quite so sad again.

Yumi was doing well at Cloner City. She had good luck almost immediately with broken technology. She borrowed Wildchild's laser penknife and used it, on its most precise setting, as a soldering iron to work on circuit boards. She also mended the Cloners' faulty penknife, so now there were three simple but useful tools on Samothea.

Unfortunately, that was her best success. She got some machinery to show lights or make sounds, but nothing, besides the penknife, worked as intended. Instead, Yumi turned her skills to purely mechanical devices and built a pump for the Juniors to fill the baths on the second floor of the Council Hall.

She also made better oil lamps and improved the carts the Farmers used to transport their produce. She worked on her projects between teaching engineering and physics lessons to the students.

All the while, her belly grew. The Cloner women were helpful and caring and were reassuringly well-prepared for pregnancy.

Yumi was pleased to see Ezra the two times he visited with Kalyndra and, especially in her sixth month of pregnancy when she went through a very horny stage, he came with the Herders and stayed overnight.

She pounced on him when he came out of the Council Chamber and dragged him up to her room. There, she seduced him, like she had about eighteen months earlier. They made frantic, exciting love after only a moment's hesitation when Ezra said:

"Yumi, the Cloner tribe are off-limits to me."

"I'm not a Cloner," she said, stripping off his clothes, "and, anyway, I'm pregnant."

As he could feel her beautiful round belly, he couldn't dispute it, so he sucked on her dark sensitive tits and made her cum with his finger before he laid her back, raised her legs against his chest, and pumped her until they both came with gasping moans and groans.

Yumi had her child three months later—a son, the first boy born in Samothea in over a century. She named him Hayate after her father and understood why the celebrations were so long and loud. There was a chance that Hayate, in eighteen years, could make human life on Samothea sustainable without cloning. There was much to celebrate in such a thought.

Before the Cloner Fair

When it was time to prepare for the Cloner Fair again, Ezra was the father of twenty-two daughters and no sons. No one could say if the cause was Ezra himself or the cosmic rays from the black hole, but it meant there was something important to decide at the meeting of all the tribal chiefs.

This was the question of whether the ban on Ezra taking bedmates from the Cloner, Farmer, and Miner tribes should be lifted or whether they should continue to rely only on cloning, just in case.

Not all the tribal chiefs would be discussing the matter. Solange delivered a beautiful baby girl and stayed in the Southern Camp while Galatea led the tribe to the Fair.

Ezra spent the month before the Fair with the Woodlanders. Life in the Forest went slower now that Annela, Dipti, Sharne, Dagma, and Urulla were all nursing mothers and Adarna was pregnant. There was more foraging and farming, less hunting, and plenty of repairs for Ezra to do whenever he visited.

He made a roofed wooden walkway to the crapper to be used at night during the rain. All the huts now had wooden roofs, and he joined their verandas together so that the whole ring of huts would be protected from sun and rain.

On his first day back in camp, however, he collected Freya and Krupa and dandled them on his knees, giving Annela and Dipti some much-needed rest. Sharne, Dagma, and Urulla sat quietly beside him on the benches by the campfire, suckling, burping, or cuddling their daughters.

Back from foraging, Tamar skipped up to tell him about her hopes for the coming celebrations.

Despite being sixteen and on the verge of womanhood, no one was more excited than Tamar, not even Pepi, the most excitable girl in Samothea.

Having never been to the Cloner Fair, Tamar was almost anxiously beside herself, hopping from one foot to the other as she told Ezra what she'd already told everyone else many times.

"I'm going to try every dish of every cook. I'm going to dance every night in every tribe's style of dancing. I will climb the hill behind Cloner City to see the tents laid out with the flags of all the tribes flying in the wind. That's a beautiful sight, isn't it, Ezra?"

"Yes, I believe so."

"I know I'm too old to dance around the maypole, but I'll supervise the younger children."

"I understand," he said, "and if it so happens that enthusiasm for the dance makes some of the little ones fall over, then you couldn't be blamed if you joined in to help them, could you?"

She smiled knowingly at him.

"And I'll meet the Miners - every single one of them! They're the tribe I was born into. I haven't seen them since I was too small to remember."

Even Tamar sometimes had to run out of breath, but Ezra waited patiently for the eager girl to unload all her hopes onto him.

"And I'm going to hug Wildchild so hard she'll burst!" Tamar finished triumphantly.

He laughed and had a good look at his young friend.

Tamar had grown another couple of inches that year. She'd overtaken Carlin and caught up with Annela. All the growth seemed to have occurred in her legs, however, which were long and bony. Curves were still to come.

The girl had swapped her long dress for a short grey skirt and a faded checkered blouse. She used her cloak only for cold mornings and nights. Her bow was usually slung over her shoulder, and Wildchild's knife was tied in its holster around her waist.

Despite having the knife, Tamar had let her hair grow all year in anticipation of 'Haircut Day' at the Cloner Fair. Her thick golden tresses fell to the middle of her back, framing a face of perfect angular beauty, graced by substantial brown eyes that focused with unstinting inquiry on a world of mystery and delight.

If there were brief moments when Ezra missed Earth and his family so that neither his children nor his bedmates were sufficient comfort, he just had to think of the innocently curious Tamar asking her questions, and his joy would return. Even more than his loving bedmates, Tamar could always reconcile him to his exile from Samothea.

He beckoned her over and kissed her cheek, saying: "I love you, Tamar. Don't ever change."

In addition to the university's financial backers, the Samothea Project consisted of Danielle as team leader, the engineers of Hyper Star Japan and Oakshott Industries, Danielle's brilliant students, Rosa Silverstein and Li Qu Yuan, Jonathan Wright, who worked remotely from Caltech on Earth, and Herman, who took whatever time he could spare from his advanced mathematical studies to help where he could.

While they waited for the prototype engine to be tested, Danielle wrote combined papers with Rosa and Li on long-distance, low-cost hyperspace travel using communication through the plume. She, Rosa, Li, and Jonathan Wright wrote another combined paper on configuring the hyperspace beacon. At the request of Hyper Star Japan, they kept publication until they were assured of the engine's success.

The Japanese company was paranoid about copyright theft and preferred to work secretly rather than apply for a patent and let the world know about the radical new design. Danielle had to agree, especially when it turned out that Hyper Star was working twice as quickly on the engine as any other company, trying to make a successful prototype before the secret was revealed.

Conceived by men, designed by expert systems, and built by robots, each engine iteration took only a week to assemble and was immediately sent out for a month of testing. The first two prototypes exploded on launch. Prototype three launched but didn't come back. Prototype four was a success and, true to plan, jumped ten light-years to a good-size star, unfurled its solar panels, and constructed the return beacon, which powered up properly. A few hours later, there was joy when the new engine bounced out of hyperspace a few hundred miles from its starting point.

Prototype five was heavier, faster, and could go further. It also came back. Prototype six disappeared somewhere in the plume, but prototype seven was ready before a replacement could be built. It was a full-size model and almost full-weight. It also came back successfully.

Two months of tests followed, with incrementally further jumps through hyperspace and triumphant returns.

In the latest test, the prototype leaped four hundred light-years in one go and returned undamaged. These were by far the furthest single hyperspace jumps in history and used only a fraction of the fuel that the two or three conventional jumps over the same distance would have required, not to mention the time saved by not having to take star-readings and re-calculate for each jump.

It had taken just over a year to prove the Samothea Project viable, and success made everyone impatient to try the real thing. Everyone except Danielle, however, who, more than anyone, felt the incentive to reach Samothea quickly, yet she wanted more data and more tests. Her reputation was at stake, of course, but more importantly, the chance for a full-scale rescue from Samothea if her brother were still alive would be diminished if too many attempts failed.

Nonetheless, when the university's financial backers complained about the expense of making progress in such small steps and suggested leaping to Samothea in one go, insisting that, after all, this is what the Samothea Project was all about, what it was named for, Danielle allowed herself to be persuaded.

So far, Hyper Star Japan has conducted all the tests using its beacon, getting the trajectory data from Danielle and her team. However, a jump to Samothea needed a more prominent beacon, which meant hiring time on a commercial rig. Oakshott Industries would arrange this, but it would mean publicizing the secret.

It was time to invite the press to the launch and submit the papers for publication, and Danielle agreed to this.

However, two weeks before the scheduled launch, Danielle realized something was missing after the trajectory and fuel load had already been calculated, double-checked, and triple-checked. She gathered her team and said:

"The comms probe has no transmitter."

"It's a commercial probe," Li explained. "We lightened it by removing all redundant equipment, including the burster."

"Which made sense for all previous missions," Danielle agreed. "Even a four-kilogram transmitter and dish drastically affect the calculations and adds grievously to the fuel burden.

However, we only needed to measure our location and calculate the return pathway on our test runs. Now, we're going all the way to Samothea. We need to be able to transmit, just in case someone is listening."

Everyone agreed.

"So how long to re-calculate the pathway and fuel load?" Danielle asked.

Rosa had been tapping at her computer tablet.

"Can we delay the launch?"

"I'd rather not," Danielle said. "The press has been invited."

Rosa asked, "How much will the transmitter weigh, and how much energy will it use?"

I had approximate answers, and Rosa tapped some more. I turned to his tablet as well.

"About a week," Rosa said, "if we get exact details of the weight difference today and set the computers working immediately."

"I agree," Li said. "I can get you the exact weight, Rosa."

"All right. Go ahead, you two, but keep your work separate. I want to compare your answers.

Meanwhile, I'll do my calculations.

I'll tell Hyper Star to fix the burster and compose a message to transmit. Off you all go."

Two weeks later, the engineers and scientists were at the launch. Jonathan Wright made a memorable trip from Earth. Roger took a break from publicizing his video film and came to support Danielle.

They were in the control room of a survey ship near the large commercial beacons belonging to Capella Spaceport. Screens around them showed computer readouts and video links to the beacon and the traveler with its hyperdrive motor and payload.



To be continued