Free Choices by Ann Herendeen Page B

had made the sensible choice. Still, she was pleased,
brushing off my words of contrition, saying, “I’ve been called
worse, for less reason. Let’s forget it, and see if you can
graduate from high school.”
    I was hopeful, almost eager, as I resumed my
lessons with the young people. I had been dreading this more than
anything, having to sit with Drusilla and Rosalie with the memory
of yesterday’s breakfast hanging over us. But the welcoming mood
that had enveloped me last evening was just as strong today. As we
practiced our physical control, performing frivolous tasks and
using prisms of different shapes and sizes to improve our
dexterity, the others were quick to praise my skill.
    “You’ll be part of a cell soon,” Drusilla
said, looking on in admiration while I made the heavy wooden chairs
skate around on the stone floor as easily as if they had wheels.
“When you’re a sibyl, I can boast I was once in the same class with
you.”
    It was the rejection that had rankled with
everyone, I realized. My evenings with Dominic—not just the last,
uninhibited one, but all of his visits—had indicated a turning away
from the others. During the earlier visits my unpolished but
serviceable shielding skills had kept the details of our
conversations secret, but everyone had known I was having some kind
of unauthorized communication. Success as a seminarian requires
wholehearted devotion to one’s classmates and coworkers. Our group
would live together more closely than a married couple, sharing
every thought and emotion, our minds open, withholding nothing. To
squander intimacy on an outsider was betrayal. I had been treated
like the straying spouse I was, and I was being welcomed back to
the conjugal bed accordingly.
    After dinner and the siesta I was scheduled
to begin training for the signal station, the practical application
of the theory I had been studying. I had been told only that the
signal station was like a “radio antenna,” which left me as
ignorant as before. As I climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the
top of the annex that housed the station, I was expecting something
mysterious and grand. Instead, I saw Julian Vazquez, Edwige’s
deputy, sitting at a console, his face resting on the padded
binocular eyepiece of a large telescope that angled up and poked
through an aperture in the roof.
    Julian greeted me warmly, unlike his usual
distant politeness, but without taking his eyes from the scope or
moving from his place. “We’ll all be grateful when you can take a
shift. Alicia is a good teacher. You’ll catch on fast.”
    Alicia Molyneux was already here to show me
what to do. The minute that Julian stood up, Alicia hustled me to
the seat. “Rest your face on the mask,” she said, “and look through
the scope. Lower your shields and use both eyes.”
    I had thought telescopes were used for
stargazing at night. At this hour it was still daylight, with a
clear blue sky, some wispy high clouds, and the sun hanging over
the trees at the western edge of the mountains. When I looked, I
saw—nothing. Nothing at all. No light, no color, not even
blackness.
    “Now focus your attention,” Alicia said, “as
if it were a mind.”
    I tried, but there was nobody there. It was
just a set of large prisms encased in a tube and looking out
into—nowhere. Connecting with it was like trying to read a mind
that had no personality. Like a computer, it was empty of all
thoughts except those put there by a human being. I pulled my face
away. “There’s nothing—”
    Alicia pushed my head back to the eyepieces.
“Never take your face away from the scope,” she said. “While your
shift lasts, you are the only connection with the other
stations.”
    For two hours I sat, staring at nothing, my
eyes going unfocused and my thoughts wandering, as Alicia told me
what a signal station is, and how it works.
    I was grateful for the company and the
lecture. Alicia talked about how, in the early days of Eclipsis,
before