Prodigium: Ascension: Prodigium, #1

By R. D. Blake

Faith. Fate. Two words so full of potency, yet fraught with nuances that touch on many of humanity's hopes and fears. Two words commonly employed as if they are mutually exclusive—that the realities they represent exist within continua in complete opposition to each other.

Forty-five hundred years earlier, through the remarkable efforts of one woman, humanity sprang outwards from the surface of Earth to reach for the stars, for new worlds to mould and then inhabit. A new beginning was enabled, one that put behind the fears that humankind would forever be doomed to reside on a world that was rapidly overheating, running out of resources and, it seemed with every passing year, becoming less conducive to life.

Humanity believed it had been freed to spread out across the Milky Way with a future fundamentally set on a new course, a future full of previously unimaginable and burgeoning possibilities. Such vital hopes were held by so many. Yet…yet…

Yet, nothing fundamentally changed. Civilization continued to form unconsciously along lines of inequality and worked to enforce that singular condition. To those who refused to accept that nothing could be done, the question essentially became: what would it take to bring about a permanent and lasting change? A wider, a more encompassing vision? A mass movement? How would it be led? By whom? The answer was surprising. And it came, remarkably in a similar fashion to how humanity first reached for other stars. By two exceptional teenagers.

Both born on the world of Galileo, Jude LeClaire and Bree Matthews could not have been more removed from each other: one born to privilege and wealth, the other to squalor and quasi-slavery. Yet each of their respective states arose from the same source, and it, primarily, among other forces, both propelled them to what they ultimately achieved and yet worked to oppose them.

For akin but unlike on other worlds, an evil has existed on Galileo—for millennia, festering, unsated, hidden, unknown by the bulk of its population.

In the midst of malignant intent, deception and betrayal, both faith and fate worked to bring these two prodigies together—apart, adrift and alone—until they found each other again after the most inauspicious of beginnings.

And by that means they ascended and brought humanity with them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. D. Blake
• Release date: Aug 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780987982674

R. D. Blake

R.D. Blake recently retired from a successful accounting and business career. Even as a child, he had an interest in science in general and space in particular and loved reading science fiction. As a parent, he enjoyed entertaining his young children with inane and wild stories he would make up on the spot. And now he is turning that interest and talent toward a larger audience. He currently resides in Kitchener, Ontario Canada.

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Prologue

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Myth. Fact. First, we must not deceive ourselves: it has always been difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the two. To begin this narrative otherwise would be to insist that only I am in possession of the truth—that I alone have been able to gather and assemble the data pertinent to the events which unfolded after Jude LeClaire and Bree Matthews first met. The occasion of that brief encounter, in the aftermath of all of what ensued during the years which followed and having now reached a nearly religious significance within the general population—and more than a fervent few vigorously espouse that exact belief—that the Good God Himself acted directly in the course of human affairs—instigated a fundamental shift in our civilization which no one could have predicted. Further, few would dispute that the impact of these two individuals continues to resonant across the wide swath of the Milky Way wherever humankind now dwells.

Ever since the Age of Reason, that long ago era already possessing many of the elements of myth itself, our race has prided itself on the twin pillars of logic and adherence to what they consider the empirical sciences. In truth, though I was personally privy to only limited aspects of the events that came to encompass this young woman and this young man and what they eventually accomplished, I must be candid with you: essentially, I was a mere bystander, as was almost everyone else. There was so much that was hidden, secreted away, misunderstood, obfuscated—and as the old adage says, Never to see the light of day. And I will confess, though it pricks my pride, that many of the facts were right there in front of me, but I personally failed to see beyond them to what their true meaning signified. As I expect is the case with many of you, I draw some dubious comfort in discovering that I was not the only fool.

Beginnings. It should be a simple matter for you to predict where this story has its proper origin. I have already alluded to it. However, as any scholar would tell you, matters are never so simple. To truly understand our times and the events surrounding Jude and Bree and those few others whose lives became intertwined within theirs, one must reach into the past. And that means, as I am certain many of you are now anticipating, that this account must, as with so many others, begin with Basira Naru.

That name alone has survived the millennia as no other, with perhaps the exception of her sister and her cousin and, of course, Faouzi Kohli. There has not been any other woman or man in recorded history who has altered the course of humankind as she did, despite my earlier attestation that fact and myth are forever entangled with each other. There is no need for me to ready a dissertation on the quibbling disputes about who she was and what has been accredited to her. Earlier and far more capable scholars than I have provided us with a vast trove of irrefutable evidence. However, the salient points should and must be cited to bring a needful context to the issues that moved Jude and Bree to act as they did.

Basira Naru was born in the year 2055 AD (Year 0 ABN based upon our current calendar dating system), the second child of Kasra and Liyana Naru in the small city of Shorkot in what at that time on Old Earth was called Pakistan, a nation-state wedged in between two larger countries, formerly ascribed as India and Iran. Though it is difficult to believe, let alone accept, in that ancient time women were relegated to secondary positions within the culture active in that particular region of Old Earth. They were expected to fulfill only certain customary roles, those chiefly of bearing children, being their care-givers, and taking responsibility for the running of the family household. Any significant decisions were reserved for the males within a woman’s own family or, if married, her husband—her chief purpose was to serve the men within her circumscribed world—a situation completely at odds with our current society and the world of Galileo, the planet which gave birth to both Jude LeClaire and Bree Matthews. But these facts are somewhat an aside to what is germane to this story and of what we must remind ourselves.

As you all know, Basira Naru was the first to classically develop the full theoretical framework of GUT: the acronym that even today we still know as the General Unified Theory. As almost every child now learns, with the exception of those from whom Bree himself arose, scientists and theorists of that era struggled to discover what is now accepted as a rather simple matter: it was the underlying laws applicable to gravity that had perplexed our ancient forebearers. Basira, whose incisive intelligence had earned her the rare opportunity to study at a centre of higher learning well past the normal educational levels delineated for her gender (her sister Adala had also won a similar dispensation—and within a certain cadre of academics with whom I will not quibble the issue, they considered Adala the more brilliant of the two siblings), had begun working as an assistant under the former and highly acclaimed physicist Faouzi Kohli, performing the usual duties associated with such a position: organizing experiments; running calculations; editing Kohli’s latest papers and dissertations; even, as it was alleged and has often been reported, making the famous man his morning coffee and serving him his meals as and when he demanded them. Such were subordinates, and notably female associates, treated in that long ago era.

Whatever feelings Basira Naru might have held in regard to such undertakings have been lost to time, but one telling event suggests a crucial aspect of her relationship with her superior: her sudden departure from his department and faculty. Basira struck out on her own, which I must emphasize from my own research on those times was an act that no woman, even one with her rising credentials, risked. Within a year, Basira Naru published her own paper on GUT. Shock waves resounded and for years afterwards continued to resonate across our original home world. Of course, the greatest tsunami came from the very lips of Faouzi Kohli who charged Basira with the most malicious of academic crimes: that of intellectual theft. He accused her of using his own research and, more insidiously, his own theories. His accusations continued until his death, and the controversy endured for decades afterwards among a select cadre of his purported followers, those who also had vested interests in their own alternate theoretical conjectures. Simply put: how does one deal with discovering the egregious and deflating fact that your life’s work has been entirely pointless and, more so, in error?

However, Basira, as many of my more learned colleagues would attest, displayed the greatest of her now acknowledged incalculable acumen, for she had prepared for Faouzi Kohli’s false claims. She demonstrated, clearly and succinctly, that her theories were her own. Even a brief survey of her thesis and any and all of the theoretical work of Faouzi Kohli reveal she had leap-frogged the man by a vast intellectual distance, in fact, of all of the men and women of her day who were also working on such related investigations.

But it was not her theories on the uniformity of the forces and matter comprising our physical universe that were her greatest contribution to humankind. No, it was what she envisioned could be done with her hypotheses. There is a term, still in general use, describing the period of the three hundred years or so predating Basira as the Industrial Revolution. I will not devolve into a lesson on this particular aspect of what is now mostly irrelevant human history. I only refer to it to emphasize the upheaval in the thinking and the culture and the future of humanity from that point in time onwards to where we currently exist: a true revolution.

We take it all for granted today, as I suppose most humans do in any era regarding the technology they make use of on a regular basis. Even if we ignore inter-solar travel across the vast distances encompassing our still nascent and loose confederation of worlds, there remain countless, a near infinite plethora of devices and inventions her theories birthed, anti-gravity and null-gravity being at the root of most. Though it is now long ago, during the earliest (and thankfully, briefest) period of my academic career, I retain far too many memories of the earnest, yet incredulous statements gushing forth from the mouths of my former students. What follows are the tamest from the long litany of them.

How did they ever survive? Exist? Function? Have any purpose or meaning in their lives? I could repeat many more such youthful declarations concerning our ancestors’ lack of gravatic technologies. It serves no purpose in this dissertation to give answer to such exclamations. The only response necessary is to state that Basira Naru categorically and undisputedly displayed her brilliance through the creation of the first null-gravity device. True, it was rudimentary by the standards of today. But I ask you: what has not? But it was only the precursor to her next invention, the grand culmination of her theories, again another leaping upward and outward of her burgeoning intuition and her innate sense of the formulas she had developed representing the nature of our physical reality: the folding of space-time to create a wormhole.

Is it not this discovery that has defined humanity and permitted it to escape the bonds of our mother planet, to become what we are today? I could cite other such innovations in our mutual history, but I surmise they would be incomprehensible to you: metallurgy, the steam engine, the electric dynamo, petro-chemicals, and the transistor. But all these had some underlying connection to each other, one being built on its predecessor. Basira Naru's work and accomplishments were outside of these except in the most tenuous of ways. Yes, indeed, we all know and revere her to this day. Rightfully, she is considered the modern Eve of humanity. She birthed us and, contrary to what our sacred scriptures espouse, her actions freed us to leave our ruined Garden of Eden to establish another, and not just one.

And that is another matter which was a somewhat unrelated consequence of Basira’s seminal work: the salvation of Old Earth itself. By the late twenty-first century, the full effects of the unwise employment of petro-carbons and their ilk into the atmosphere and the environment of Old Earth had resulted in the planet's average annual temperature rising by more than three degrees Celsius with further inexorable increases predicted. All of us, I am certain, intuitively understand the consequences of a climatic change of that magnitude.

To that time, no nation had truly put in the effort necessary to reduce carbon emissions—just as those long-ago governments had similarly and vainly attempted to reign in their deficit financing. There were always too many mouths to feed, to clothe, and to shelter. Those needs precluded any such efforts from being successful and demanded the continuation of the economic activities which were despoiling Old Earth. Seeking to avoid the chaos of social unrest motivated by one set of needs only triggered another form of it when the world’s environment unalterably changed. As another old, familiar adage states: The piper must be paid. By the advent of Basira, the bill had become inevitably due. There was no avoiding the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the attendant use of carbon in all of its various forms which provided the motive and heating energy our ancestors insatiably craved.

A great die-off was occurring across the planet, and at an accelerating rate, beginning with rudimentary life such as plankton in the oceans and wide swaths of soil-enriching microbes. The disappearance of these fundamental pillars of life resulted in an appalling death spiral rising up to decimate the more complex organisms. In every ecosystem, the cycles of biological life were breaking down and changing. And our ancestors, despite their well-intended efforts, could not find a means to reverse them except by one method—until Basira Naru, that is.

Across wide bands of our home world our ancestors were beginning to perish in significant numbers. And more than a tenth of the remainder were on the move due to famine. Food production had drastically been curtailed, both by a climate that was heating up and with its attendant changes: rising ocean levels; deluges; chronic droughts; prolonged heat waves; soil breakdown and erosion; and the arrival of infestations of new pests, parasites, and moulds that thrived in the warmer temperatures. The greater portion of mankind, that for the moment was above survival stage, either wanted nothing to do with the restless and never ceasing waves of refugees or believed they were incapable of providing the necessary assistance.

Starkly, most experts of those times concluded humankind would eventually be reduced to numbers approximating only several millions, those few being relegated, despite their relative level of technology, to isolated pockets that would, of necessity, be completely cut off from the environment. It was even debatable whether those would survive. However, with the demise of civilization, many believed Old Earth’s climate would eventually return to something akin to what it had been prior to the rise of humanity at its earliest origins.

But then again, Basira’s discoveries provided the path to recovery and set out the methods by which we have terra-formed Earth-like planets in the past and still do today. Anti-gravity was the means. Modes of transportation, power generation, capture of carbon in all of its attendant forms and its removal from Old Earth itself (the sun was often the ultimate disposal site), and weather modification and control—the methods employed are too multitudinous to recite here. For those who possess limited knowledge on these processes or wish to be reacquainted with them, there are many sources through which you can satisfy your own particular interests.

It should be sufficient to say that our home world’s climate was rapidly brought back to oscillate within acceptable parameters, reversing most of the damage wrought over the previous three centuries. Such was human ingenuity and, perhaps more so, the desperation that fuelled it.

Now, it is not enough to speak only of Basira Naru, for our present society was not only defined by her but by her sister, Adala. From our vantage point, now more than 4,500 years in the future, it is no easy task to separate what one sister accomplished from the other for, if nothing else is clear, the two often acted together and how one influenced the other is impossible to distinguish. Still, it is relatively certain Adala was the one who instituted the changes by which the ancient Islamic world and its culture shifted in its treatment of women and eventually grew to encompass the entire planet.

Basira’s sister’s area of professional interest and study was Islam, as well as the other major religions of the era in which she lived. In as much as Basira revolutionized human society from a technical and scientific point of view, Adala affected it in much the same fashion from a cultural perspective. As mentioned earlier, women, particularly in the Muslim world, were barred from roles and occupations they might have otherwise wished to have and to hold. And as accomplished as Adala and Basira were, they were both restless and concerned with the plight of their sisters. Few were granted the privileges which had been provided to them as gifts.

So, Adala boldly made use of the present her sister had given her. She argued, with Basira’s connivance, that, as proper Muslims, the acclaim for her sister’s discoveries must be credited to God, Allah in the parlance of Islam. No one within the Muslim religious community could properly contest such an assertion, but then Adala went further by asking the question: Why did Allah not give this revelation to a man? The answer was obvious. Allah wishes to teach us a new lesson...to grant us a new manner of living, a replacement for the one that no longer need apply. For though He is immutable, we are not, and He awaits His own good time to reveal His Will to us.

Adala went on to insist with unfeigned humility, supported by many references to the oldest version of the Koran, that Allah never intended that women be subjugated to men, rather only to Himself, as are men themselves—so she contended in an exposition that was built tightly upon both logic and faith. And what, if I may be pedantic, could those religious leaders, to the last man, offer as a counter-argument except tradition? It was as irrefutable as what Basira had accomplished. The world had come to nearly worship at her feet, and the accolades rising to lift her even higher were a flood that was near impossible to oppose.

And these men were no fools. The economic impact of Basira’s discoveries was undeniable. Islamic society, representing a sizable portion of Old Earth, underwent a second (some would insist a third) revival, erupting once more upon the world stage—for Basira had ensured Muslim communities would be the first to benefit from her discoveries. She patented all of her inventions and her theoretical speculations with the world government responsible for such legalities—for the global enterprises of that era had given rise to those particular institutions. Through those registrations, for a number of decades, Basira licensed her work solely to governments in predominantly Muslim countries—to the detriment of the rest of the world. A broad level of new investment was made in these truly nascent industries. Employment rose, solving a particularly thorny problem within the developing world and pointedly among young men. With abundant work everywhere, what did it matter if you were competing with a woman for the same job? There were always more than enough to choose from.

One of the consequences of Adala’s insistence on the relinquishment of the restrictive traditions regarding the roles of women within Islamic culture was the granting of their right to a full and complete education. It proved to be another revolution and one that grew to have no means of being turned back. For the emancipation of female intellect brought another economic transformation across the Islamic world. The contribution of this formerly nameless and faceless half of humankind cannot be understated. Many, indeed most of the later discoveries, building on Basira’s theories, can be attributed to the efforts and diligence of Basira’s and Adala’s sisters and their female-gendered children, grandchildren, ad finem.

The freedom of a woman to choose her own path in life was one more pillar built upon Basira’s life’s work. There was another just as pervasive and deep. And all of you will know to what I am referring. It still remains implausible to my manner of thinking that the constants of our current human society trace their roots back to an age more than 4,500 years ago and, more so, that their source arises from one single extended family—for there is one other member of the Naru family who brought his own heavy influence to the cultures of his time and, undeniably, to a future as remote as our own.

Rahet Cheema was a second cousin to Basira and Adala. True to his genetic roots, he possessed a goodly portion of the same mental acuity that ran through the family lines of the Narus. In his case, his expertise lay in genetic microbiology with a strong secondary interest in mathematics, particularly relating to the discipline of statistical analysis. His own field of research was in the historical development of DNA, human and otherwise.

To Cheema’s growing frustration and eventual troubling consternation, he kept foundering within the deep seas representing the enigma of what I will risk describing as the classic chicken and the egg causality dilemma. If you do not understand this reference, look it up within the Holy Compendium. There are countless examples provided there which will give you the comprehension you require. During the era in which Rahet lived, it required some level of faith, if I may use that term somewhat loosely, to accept the natural development of RNA, the assumed evolutionary precursor to DNA. Many theories and postulations had been put forward to provide some logical explanation for the rise of DNA from RNA. Evolution through viral biological processes appeared to be the most promising process. But Rahet had arrived at what seemed to him a permanent barrier to that likelihood, and many of his more pragmatic colleagues across the world had accepted defeat as well and were looking elsewhere for an answer.

Almost as a lark (I won’t trouble myself to explain the use of the word), Cheema thought to make use of his statistical skills to work out the odds of the natural evolution of the double helix—the unique feature of DNA which gives rise to most of what we classify as the higher levels of biological life. His first level results were dismal, then appalling, as he continued to labour at what grew to be his singular preoccupation. Finally, after years of work, he came to the only conclusion he felt in all honesty he could. There could be no other explanation. There had been an intervention—and not by some imagined interstellar means.

Rahet brought in another set of experts: all engineers. He wanted their professional and reasoned judgement on the issue. It mattered not that these people had no real understanding of the biological processes involved. The question he placed before them was simple enough: what was needed to create a mechanism that would accomplish the variety of functions DNA did, with all of its attendant feedback systems and the low, miniscule error rate. Even with a relatively non-complex system (forget living organisms as unpretentious as a plant), this team of engineers had only one response and it was unanimous: it could not be built with the tools at hand. An engineer had been involved: some party, some entity, that understood intrinsically what would devolve (or better said evolve) in the aftermath of the creation of the early forms of DNA.

It was clear and irrefutable to Cheema. Here was the indisputable hand of God, of Allah. There were those, of course, who disputed Rahet’s work, who tried to punch holes in his logic, his methods and assumptions. However, with the support of Adala, then Basira, and not much later that of the Islamic clergy (many of whom still felt the sting of giving way on the matter of women), his findings received greater acclaim and a growing acceptance.

For working in conjunction with his conclusions was a rising return to religion in all of its associated forms. The great cataclysm of climate change was its most significant impetus. Many of our ancestors were coming to believe there was no escape for them. The planet was dying and so, too, would they. The need for a saviour, a redeemer, a being greater than themselves, came to be fixed once more in their minds, in their hearts—and in their souls. So, with Cheema’s scholarly pronouncement, there arose a greater interest and acceptance that God, Allah, Brahman, or better and more in line with the current thinking of that age, the Great Engineer, existed and had an interest (to state it mildly) in humankind and its future.

There were many changes to the religions of that era which have culminated in what is now considered the One True Faith and, too, the alternate appellation, that being The Good God, we more commonly employ these days to describe the Great Engineer. There are variants, of course, local and otherwise, but the main tenets are held by most of humanity. And these have remained unchanged over the last four millennia for perhaps one simple fact. Nowhere humankind has travelled or established itself has any other form of biological life been discovered. None.

True, among a handful of worlds, out of the millions we have visited and studied, we have found those rudiments to the precursors to life: amino acids, simple sugars, lipids and nucleobases. But there has been nothing more complex than these simple molecules. Since the advent of true wormholing, humankind has travelled extensively through more than five percent of the Milky Way. Starkly, irrefutably, there haven’t been any signs of life other than that of ourselves. We are unique—our theologians would tell us as was intended. The Good God designed and created us, in a loose way of employing the term. His Purpose for us is still being revealed. But we know one thing: He did not intend us to remain solely on the good Earth He prepared for us.

And now that I have set the stage, a reference to which even the least of you should comprehend the meaning, it is time to begin my account of Jude LeClaire and Bree Matthews, and it started somewhat earlier than most of you are aware: it was a festival—better yet, one might describe it as a birthday party.

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Chapter One

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Date: Year 4542 ABN, Day 78 (OEFO)

In an odd and uncustomary sequence of sensations, Jude felt much like the yoyo she held in her hand, an archaic toy given to her earlier in the day as a personal gift. She was up. She was down—and so uncertain of which was more important to feel at any particular moment. Still, she was enjoying the party arranged in her honour. All of her crèche Sisters were in attendance and there were many others, both older and younger—though, disappointingly, her mother and her half-sister Fluren were not here—those treasured, yet troublesome, occasions were so rare. Ever since she had been informed of the plans for today, Jude had been holding onto a secret wish, hoping that her family would be granted permission to be present and share in this very special occasion with her. Today’s festivities spoke of the importance of this gathering and the celebration of the completion of her eighth year of life, as calculated using Old Earth full orbits (OEFO). But chiefly, most of all, she felt the ending of what would hereafter only remain as a series of memories. In a few short days she would...

Jude, it's time! It was Elizath shouting out, almost breathlessly in all of her simple glee. We’re waiting! The pixie-sized girl was the only one of her classmates Jude considered a true friend, though that same sentiment was held by many of the other girls within her crèche when it came to their redheaded Sister. Jude had always thought it strange in a way. Elizath seldom exuded any of the same enthusiasm Jude and her crèche-mates held for their studies. In fact, the smaller girl struggled with the simplest of their lessons, even deca-poly algorithms gave her fits, whereas Jude and the others of her study group simply sailed through what was being taught. Once one grasped the essential truth of a lesson, what followed became elementary, simplicity itself. But not so for Elizath.

It seemed more than once every ten-day or so, Jude wondered why Elizath had been included in her crèche. She couldn’t keep up or truly understand much of what was being taught. In some ways, Jude thought Elizath would always remain a child, falling further and further behind. Still, her best friend’s empathy, her innate happiness, her willingness to stand aside so another could stand out or gain the notice of the adults who oversaw all of their Sisters, her willingness to be a friend through thick and thin, those qualities were what made Elizath, Elizath. There was a warm and secret part of Jude that would never want the smaller girl to be anything else, though it was maddening not just for her, but for many of the others who were often less patient than she (and more biting and critical) when required to explain, more times than one would ever wish to, some simple theoretical proposition to their good-natured classmate. More often than not, Jude silently added another word when she thought of her dearest friend: poor Elizath.

But that was not a word Jude would ever consider applying to the tall, black-haired girl standing beside Elizath, scowling slightly, her lithe posture displaying her impatience for the next game to begin: Lilith. If Jude had a rival within the crèche, it was Lilith Tildan. Rank was far more important to the girl who was half a year older than Jude. It was only several ten-days ago that Jude had twigged to the fact that her departure from the crèche ahead of Lilith rankled her classmate deeply. Lilith viewed everything, absolutely everything, as a competition, and she had both the will and the ability to end up on top—except that she didn’t. In the tests, the games, the debates, in most things, Jude was almost always awarded first place. She didn’t rue her achievements; she worked just as hard as the others, sometimes even more so. Jude couldn’t help it if she saw through to the core of things and extrapolated their consequences far better than her classmates and could predict what the theoretical results might be before the others were halfway there, if there at all.

If it troubled her crèche Sisters that she was more successful than they, they hid it better than Lilith. It wasn’t that Lilith didn’t come first at times. In those moments, Jude would sense some great burden lift from the girl’s narrow shoulders, but it wasn’t often enough to satisfy whatever moved within her Sister. Of course, Jude could understand, at least in part. Lilith’s mother was one of the most influential members of the High Council, the governing body responsible for the administration of their entire world. And Lilith’s three older sisters had already passed through the secondary phases of their education and were currently assigned to duties that would ultimately place them high in the government of Galileo and, perhaps in later years, on the Council itself. It was an illustrious family and one that insisted on success for each of its members. It didn’t require much of Jude’s imagination to gauge the pressure Lilith lived under on a daily basis. For herself, Jude never felt the burden to succeed, though her mother would remind her during those infrequent occasions, when they were granted leave to visit each other, that she must do her best.

Jude had never enquired, nor did she truly want to be told, if her mother pushed to see her or if it was her own preference to meet with her as seldom as she did. In those dark moments, in the middle of the night, when she found herself awake, Jude sometimes wondered just how much her mother truly loved her. For unbidden in those moments, she feared her mother cared far more for Fluren than she did for her.

Yet in a few more days, Jude would have to do her very best, for she would sit before the Board of Examiners. A flutter of butterflies suddenly moved from the lower depths of her abdomen to reach to the back of her throat. Maybe this was what Lilith experienced every day. That thought made Jude uneasy and, she supposed, was contributing to the mood swings she had been experiencing almost from minute to minute throughout the entire day.

Jude, what are you waiting for? You love this game!

Indeed, she did. Jude cast her inner thoughts aside and spun on her heels to face Elizath. Coming!

She tripped over to the smaller girl, careful of her elaborate party dress, and took her best friend’s slender hand. Who’s going to be it?

Marjo. She was willing.

Jude tittered. She imagines herself more a huntress than anything else.

Several of the adults came forward and brought some further organization to the game, for the eagerness of the girls was such that their natural enthusiasm was overrunning their usual reticence in front of their proctors and teachers. Most, if not all, Lilith perhaps being the sole exception, had been looking forward to the party and the chance to wear gowns and dresses instead of their usual and dull school uniforms. If these young wards had been taught or made aware of the historic antecedents of the game in which they were about to participate, they would have easily noted that most of its features resembled that oldest of games from the 20th century and earlier: Hide and Seek.

The party had been arranged to be held outside in what would be considered a large arboretum, formally known as the Lauren Greens. A silk tent had been erected in one corner of the four hectares of woodland; this property owned by the Silva lay hidden deep within the centre of one of their sprawling estates. No safer or more secure location was thought to be available for their precious wards. For outside of Elizath, these girls represented the cream of society on their planet. Unknown to the six to ten-year-olds gathered here, they were being trained to be the leaders and the managers of the planet they would eventually inherit, once death removed those who now had the charge and care of the many vast enterprises which underpinned the economy of their world.

After a semblance of order had been re-established, mayhem once