The Great Escape Chapter 20, Part 3 of 6

The Great Escape
Chapter 20, Part 3 of 6

After a hard day's work, they needed to rest. They sat on the ground, looking downhill toward the coast. Cloner City was about ten miles away, its white box buildings and larger Council Hall recognizable as shiny dots on the horizon. The snaking river lapped its northern edge, flowing lazily into the wide estuary, shimmering pink in the setting sun.

Yael sighed.

"What is it, Yael?" Hazel asked.

"I don't know," she answered. "It's odd. I want things to change but don't want them to change. I want to have hovercars, jetboats, and everything Ezra and Brad discussed, but I also wish for our life now to be simple, friendly, and peaceful.

Yael sighed again.

As the red sunset, the ears of corn in the field seemed to catch fire, their stalks throwing black shadows over the girls' feet.

"Do you think there's a way we could have all the technology but also keep our lives as they are?" Yael pondered. "I mean, with the tribes and Ezra and everything?"

The Wildchild answered:

"I don't see how we can have technology without the technology itself changing us, besides the new people who will come. I'd welcome some changes myself, though I'm unsure why we must change everything. I want to consider how to manage the changes that will occur.
"Come on, Yael," Hazel said. "Let's go to the feast. You've earned it."

"You won't believe the food the Farmers eat," Wildchild added.

The Farmers and Miners welcomed Yael. She slept with Hazel and Wildchild in their hut. Lying between two hot naked girls, who took turns to kiss her goodnight, Yael felt comforted. She hugged her friends, and they intertwined their legs and arms. This was the first time the horny couple had slept together without making love.

Yael stayed another day, making new friends among the Herders and Miners. She loved how they worked, singing together as they hoed, dug, weeded, and sowed, sometimes in a long line across a field, their skirts flapping in the cool breeze from the mountains as they dispersed the corn from wicker baskets.

Yael was ready to go home when she returned to Cloner City.

A few days after Yael's departure, while the Advisory Committee was meeting in the Council Chamber, there was a raucous disturbance outside the corridor. A girl's voice cried out:

"Daddy, Daddy! I want Daddy!"

It was Freya, running from the school into the Chamber, tears streaming down her red cheeks, crying with distress.

"Excuse me, Ladies," Ezra said to the Council as he got up to comfort his oldest daughter. "I think these are real tears."

He picked up Freya, carried her to the steps outside the Hall, sat down, and held her in his lap.

"What is it, Sweetheart?" he asked.

"Them naughty girls!" Freya answered, spluttering between her sobs.

"What did those girls do?"

"They said I wasn't a clone. Tell them I'm a clone, Daddy!"

"Do you know what a clone is?"

"No."

"How do you know being a clone is a good thing?"

Freya had calmed down, and now she was in his lap. The question further pacified her, giving her something to think about. She frowned as she contemplated.

"I don't know, Daddy. What's a clone?"

Ezra hesitated. How could he explain that easily without suggesting that one kind of child is better than another?

"Well, there are two kinds of people on Samothea: clones and 'mixed' people. Clones are exact copies of their mothers. Other children, like you, Yumi, Hayate, all my daughters, and me are all 'mixed' because we've got mothers and fathers."

"You're not a clone?"

"No."

"And I'm not a clone?"

"No."

"Are we better than clones?"

"No, certainly not. All my bedmates are clones. Your mother's a clone."

"Mummy's a clone?"

"Yes."

This made Freya ponder. She understood most of what Ezra told her and dearly loved her mother, though she had been asleep for more than a year in the Escape Pod. Freya remembered her as an angelic beauty, love, and calm image, but what worked most on her was her father's soft voice and placid manner.

Crystal, who was acting as a schoolteacher, now ran up, apologizing:

"Sorry, Ezra, I couldn't stop her. I had to settle the other girls before I could run after her."

"I know, Crystal. Don't worry. Freya's very fast."

"I am," the girl agreed, proud of her athletic prowess.

"I'm sorry for running away, Miss Crystal," she said earnestly, entirely without prompting from her father, a stickler for good manners though he was.

"Good girl," he said to Freya. "Now give me a kiss and return to the classroom with Crystal."

She kissed him, and as the girls walked away hand-in-hand, Freya told Crystal what she'd learned:

"I'm not a clone, and Daddy's not a clone, but Mummy is a clone. Are you a clone, Miss Crystal?"

"Yes, I am, Freya."

"That's all right, Miss. It's no better to be a clone than a mixed."

Back with the committee, Ezra waited for the end of the session to announce his decision.

"Madam Gloria, Ladies," he said. "You have Yumi here to answer your questions about Earth.

I want to return to my bedmates if you don't need me. I feel I'm neglecting them."

No one could fault Ezra's sense of loyalty, and only Solange, with whom he had been sleeping for the last week, had a good reason to keep him in the Cloner City. She generously let him go.

"I will come with you," Mirselene said. "I've also neglected my duty to the tribe long enough."

Mirselene was content to let Madam Law speaker and Madam Recorder continue her anti-colonization argument: women were just as hard-headed as she.

Galatea and Calliope also left for home at the same time.

Ezra took Freya with him and renewed his progress through the Outer Tribes, starting again with the Woodlanders at the end of the week.

Brad returned safely to Celetaris. His debriefing brought profound and unexpected joy to Danielle, who wept at the fantastic news about Ezra.

When Brad told them about Ezra's thirty bedmates and thirty-five children so far, those who were media-savvy counseled that they should try to manage the release of that news item; no one, especially not Brad, should talk to the press for now.

The first person Danielle sent the good news to was Yumi's brother, Itsuki, because she knew she'd forget everything as soon as she began talking to her parents. Yumi had requested that neither her family nor Michio Nakatani be informed about her son, so Danielle omitted that information from her message.

Afterward, Danielle spent hours talking to her parents on Earth, weeping again and wishing they were together to share joy. She didn't know quite how to mention Ezra's children, so she just blurted it out in a single breath. She was grateful for the twenty-minute delay between their messages, but Mariotta and Nathan Goldrick were unfazed. Mariotta was unshockable.

"I told the boy to get himself a wife and start giving me grandchildren," she said. "And if he didn't, I would choose him a wife. It looks like my words finally sank in."

"Thirty-five grandchildren, Mum," Danielle cautioned.

"The more the merrier, I always say!"

Rosa had some bad news when the Samothea Project Team met in the Physics Department of the Celetaris Institute for Science to plan the next mission.

"From the data gathered by Brad's instruments," she said, "we know that the cosmic rays are more powerful than we predicted. I doubt Brad's beacon's shielding will last more than six months. To be safe, we should send a traveler and a new beacon to Samothea within three months."

"That's an incredibly short schedule, but I think it's feasible," Danielle said. "Do you have a vehicle in mind?"

"The current engine can take a fifty-ton traveler through a tethered link," Rosa answered, "but we need extra shielding, so I suggest a five-man mission in a planetary shuttlecraft with a hold for a pod and a twenty-ton beacon."

"The pod is for the woman with a brain tumor," Danielle explained to the team. "We have sponsorship for her treatment in the Medical Centre here."

"If we're to be ready in three months," Danielle concluded, "then we'll have to work to our maximum capacity. I'm counting on you to perform miracles. Do you all know your jobs? Yes?

Then off you go!"

The publicity from Brad's mission was initially positive.

There was praise for a remarkable technological achievement. The Physics Web was abuzz.

Finding the long-lost colony still surviving amazed everyone. Diplomatic offices were abuzz with the news, and there was widespread interest in a society composed entirely of women.

However, some parts of the general public had salacious fun with the story of a man stranded on a planet entirely of women, triggering the kind of smutty male humor that circulates in rugby
clubs and on the stock exchange.

So far, it had been just risqué jokes, but Ezra's story was itching to be told. Brad's mouth betrayed him again despite multiple warnings that the story should be released carefully. He blurted out the details at a drunken party he was given to celebrate making history's furthest and fastest manned hyperspace jump. No one could blame him. It was too good a story to hold in and was bound to come out anyway.

However, Brad's report scandalized the prurient society of Celetaris, on whose benefaction the Institute for Science strongly depended. Stern opinions were recorded from local dignitaries and political bigwigs so that the Institute's Board of Directors feared that Ezra's sexual exploits on Samothea might bring the Samothea Project and, thus, the University into disrepute.

The fall-out from the bad publicity was even more severe on Earth, where there were hysterical denunciations of Ezra's illegal polygamy, a practice forbidden in the Anglosphere, fulminating against harems, which were offensive to all respectable people in the galaxy, especially women. Earth demagogues criticized Ezra's exploitation of the poor, vulnerable women of Samothea, declaring that such behavior rendered the Outworld Settlements morally unfit to resume the colonization of such an important planet.

It was all hypocrisy, of course. The real motivation for Earth to get involved was the commercial value of Samothea. As the "other Earth," a planet of almost the same size and climate as old Earth, it was a promising prospect for profitable colonization, a favored destination for Earth's teeming billions. Authorities on Earth exerted political pressure on Outworld Ventures, the Settler Company, to assert its claim to ownership of Samothea, emphasizing the Earth-based enterprise's role in protecting the planet's female inhabitants and shaping its future colonization.

When the media frenzy was at its height, Danielle and the Project Team gave brief interviews on technical matters to serious scientific journalists. Still, they were too busy—and not inclined—to provide personally revealing 'human interest' stories to the popular press. Unfortunately, this refusal was reported as 'arrogance'.

The bad press prompted Paul Kessler to hire a team of professional publicity managers - or 'weaselly spin doctors,' as he called them, with a smile of ironic self-mockery - to coordinate future contacts between the Project Team and the news media.

The publicists began work by presenting the women of Samothea as Ezra's rescuers and saviors rather than his compliant and submissive harem. It was a story of hardy and inventive survivors: courageous women who thrived in a hostile galaxy. They hoped this story might allow a two-sided debate about the future of Samothea.

When the Project Team began to recruit new crew members, however, it was a sign that the salacious version of the story of Samothea still prevailed because there was no shortage of horny male applicants wanting to jump to Samothea and get their harems.

It was all a good joke to the younger Prospectors, whose belief in Samothea as a sexual paradise added to the bad publicity.

If Earth politicians were motivated by greed to denounce Ezra, then the feminists were motivated by ideology, which was worse. Brad attempted to make amends by giving an interview in support of Ezra to set the record straight. He soberly explained what a good father Ezra was and how much he helped the women of Samothea.

The tide of public opinion was now against the Samothea Project; the media bias had been fixed. Brad said: "The Samothea Project Team believes that women are incapable of surviving independently without a man to tell them what to do." The vocal and well-funded feminist lobby latched onto this interpretation.

When Brad called Danielle to apologize again for saying the wrong thing, she replied:

"Who cares what a bunch of whiny, self-obsessed, failed women think about anything?"

Unfortunately, the Celetaris Institute for Science Board of Directors was a group of older men who cared deeply about what the feminist lobby thought of the Samothea Project. The conservative board always feared lousyBoaBoardty and performed contorted acts of appeasement and compromise to avoid offending any political pressure group, however minor or insane.

The Board's first weak response was BoaBoard'sive surrender. They proposed setting up a Women's Studies Department. This met a stern response from Joan Mayfield, Vice-Principal of the University.

"Not under my tutelage!" she proclaimed. "We're an Institute for Science. We deal in evidence and logic, not special pleading and mythology."

Unfortunately, like all committee members, the Board wanted only the control board away, so Joan Mayfield brought a pessimistic report to Danielle. The Board was committed to the upcomBoardisBoard, but any further trips to Samothea would have to be funded by the Samothea Project.

When Danielle reported this bad news to the Project Team, the Team lawyer, Paul Kessler, asked:

"Is it time to sell the technology under license and make fortunes for your industrial backers and everyone on the Team?"

"That will come," Danielle assured him, "but rescuing Ezra and Yumi and doing right by the colony of Samothea is our main priority. I don't want the hyperdrive system on the open market yet because anyone can go to Samothea. The wrong kind of settler might exploit the women there, including Ezra's children."

However, Danielle knew she had to reassure Stephen Oakeshott and Hyper Star Japan that their rightly owed returns from the motor would begin to flow soon.

It was a challenging and exhausting task to undertake all this work: teaching in the labs, tutoring students, verifying the engineering specifications for the traveler, recruiting a crew, and meeting the justified demands of her business partners.

That evening, after a long, hard day working on the Samothea Project, Danielle got home, kicked off her shoes, set a cup of tea to brew, and returned to her desk to work.

Later, she became aware that Roger was home because she vaguely heard the door open, felt him kiss the back of her neck, and then, after he'd thrown away the tea she never finished making, brewed her another cup and brought it over to her desk.

She nodded an acknowledgment but didn't look up from her work. She frowned, wrote, or spoke to the computer and occasionally ground her teeth.

Roger also had a long, hard day filming his new video book, so he called a restaurant and ordered dinner to be delivered. He knew what Danielle liked but had a question for her.

"Danielle, we're having braised steak. Which wine would you prefer?"

Disturbed from attending to a hated administrative problem, Danielle looked up, trying to register what he said.

"Wine? With dinner," he repeated.

"Who cares?" she snapped angrily, returning to her screen. "Have anything you want!"

It was the silence that alerted her. She hadn't meant to take her irritation out on him. She didn't know what she'd said. Danielle feared looking up, not wanting to see the pain on her husband's face, but she forced herself to look at him and was relieved. Roger wasn't hurt; he was angry.

"I'm sorry, Darling," she said. "I didn't mean to snap. It's this damn project. It's just so stressful."

Roger - his eyes narrowed, his mouth unsmiling - was still on the call to the restaurant.

"We'll have the red Zinfandel," he said calmly. Please deliver my order within three hours.

He closed the call and stood up.

"Come with me to the bedroom," he commanded.

She stood up promptly as if her legs were acting independently but remained standing.

"Roger, I want to, but I've got so much work to do, and I'm just so stressed!"

"I will help you relax," he said, "eventually."

"Honestly, Darling, I am busy."

"I know, but I doubt there's anything so urgent that having your mind off the problem for a while wouldn't make it easier."

Danielle knew that was true, but the project was her baby, and it was her brother she was rescuing. It made her want to control everything, regardless of the burden's significance. This was the first time she realized that she was not the only one suffering from her stress.

"Come on," he commanded again.

"But, Roger, I'm not in the mood."

"I'll put you in the mood."

"Why now?"

"When did we last have sex?" he asked.

"I don't know. Two or three days ago."

"Nine days! This means I owe you two spanking sessions, two 'tie my wife up and fuck her nights,' two anal sex nights, and assorted others. I mean to catch up all once."

Danielle now had no excuse to deny or delay. It was mortifying to realize that she'd been neglecting him, taking him for granted, and which was worse, he'd been too understanding to say anything about it. She also had a weird feeling, one she hadn't felt before. She didn't want to make him angrier than he was, but she also didn't want his anger to dissipate. It was a turn-on.



To be continued