Margarida fell in step. Without looking toward Adele she said, “The Service is a renounced community. You’re aware of that, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Adele. “As soon as Daniel—”
She cleared her throat, then resumed, “When Captain Leary said this would be our next landfall, I read the histories of New Delphi which I had available. Quite a considerable amount of information, actually; though they omitted a few salient points.”
“Yes,” Margarida said, blushing a poisonous color in the yellow-green light. “Now that you’re leaving, I’m sure you’ll see to it that the accounts are corrected. There’ll be riots against the Lay Service, I suppose.”
Adele looked at the woman in silence while one of the escorts unbarred the door to the outside. The wind curled in; tiny sand-grains gnawed Adele’s face and hands.
“We’ll certainly see to it that the wider universe learns the full truth of your operations here, yes,” she said as she and Margarida started across the ridged sand toward the ship. “And people being people, there’ll likely be a degree of anger at an institution for moral uplift which turns out to have practiced human sacrifice. So yes to the second part of your question also.”
“It wasn’t—” the girl said angrily, then blushed again and swallowed the remainder of her words. She was intelligent enough to realize that while Adele was being deliberately uncharitable, the description was within the bounds of truth.
“We see things differently, I know that,” Margarida said, squeezing her arms against her torso. “I shouldn’t have brought it up, I’m sorry.”
She looked straight at Adele for the first time and went on, “Mistress, I wanted to ask you. . . .”
She paused, eyed the male spacers close ahead of them, and blushed. Then she continued, “I sent a note to Captain Leary as a trick so we could, well, take him for elevation. You know that?”
“To kidnap him,” Adele said in a level voice. “Yes, I know that.”
And I’ve allowed you to live because that’s what Daniel wants, she added silently. But don’t push your luck.
“Mistress,” the girl blurted. “It was a trick. But I’m only twenty-three, I’m a woman. I haven’t taken second orders yet, I’m still a novice, and I think . . . I think. . . .”
Margarida swallowed; she’d begun to cry. “Mistress,” she said, “the Service does great good, unique good. I saw that on my own world, Regis, but it’s the same on hundreds of worlds. Only I’m not sure I’m strong enough to be what I want to be. Mistress, what should I do? I know that you understand!”
Adele met her eyes, trying to compose a satisfactory answer; an answer that would satisfy either one of them.
“Sister Margarida,” she said. She’d only hesitated a few seconds, but the chasm between them seemed far wider than that. “You believe I’ve renounced the world—” the euphemism twitched Adele’s lips in a cold smile “—as you wish to do. That’s not the case. I didn’t have to surrender something that I didn’t have in the first place.”
The girl stared without comprehension. They might be speaking two different languages for all the communication they were effecting.
“Sister,” Adele said, “I wish I could help you. I can’t. I don’t have either your faith or your desires. You’ll have to decide for yourself what you do with your life.”
She chuckled without humor. “That’s true for all of us, of course.”
They’d reached the catwalk. Most of the Sissie’s hatches were already closed, though the big port on the bridge remained open as well as the main hatch. The air had a burned smell, the residue of the recent trial of the plasma thrusters.
Adele stopped and put a hand on Margarida’s shoulder, turning her so they were facing one another for the first time since they met outside the library. The escorting spacers were already on the boarding bridge. They faced about with worried expressions.
“Sister Margarida,” Adele said more fiercely than she’d intended. “I can’t tell you what to do, but I’ll tell you what I did. Oh, not sex—that doesn’t affect me, I told you that already; but the world in the larger sense does.”