Free Coyote Rising by Allen Steele Page A

marshes. Winter was coming, and yet she didn’t feel the cold. Instead, for the first time in many years, she perceived a muse whose voice she hadn’t heard in many years. She picked up her flute, put it to her lips, and without thinking about what she was doing, began to play anunfamiliar melody; for her, it sounded like a song of redemption. When she was done, there were tears in her eyes. Two days later, she taught it to her students. She called the piece “Cecelia.”
    Despite invitations to move to Liberty, she remained in Shuttlefield, living in the small one-room cabin on the outskirts of town. Every morning, just after sunrise, she sat outside and waited for her neighbor to finish feeding the chickens. Then, regardless of whether the days were warm or if there was snow on the ground, they would practice together. Two women, playing the flute, watching the sun come up over Shuttlefield.
    And waiting. Waiting for the return of Rigil Kent.

Part 2

BENJAMIN THE UNBELIEVER
(from the memoirs of Benjamin Harlan)

 

     
    Three days after I betrayed the prophet, the hunting party from Defiance found me at the base of Mt. Shaw: starving, barely conscious, more dead than alive. At least so I’m told; that part of my memory is a blank spot. The hunters fashioned a litter from tree branches, then tied me to it and dragged me back to their hidden settlement. I slept for the next two days, waking up only now and then, often screaming from nightmares that I don’t remember.
    I went into the wilderness of Midland along with thirty-one people, including their leader, the Reverend Zoltan Shirow. I was the only one who came back out. So far as I know, the rest are dead, including the woman I loved. I tried to save them, but I couldn’t. Indeed, perhaps only God could have saved them . . . and if Zoltan is to be believed, then God had His own plans for him.
    I begin my story here so you’ll know, from the beginning, that it ends in tragedy. This is a dark tale, no two ways about it. Zoltan’s disciples were in search of spiritual transformation; I wish I could believe that they achieved their goal, yet there’s no way of knowing, for when the time came for me to stand with them, I fled for my life. Though my motives were base and self-serving, I’m the only one who survived.
    A lot of time has passed since then, but I’ve never spoken about what happened until now. Not just because what I endured has been too painful to recall, but also because I’ve had to give myself time to understand what happened. Guilt is a terrible burden, and no one who considers himself to be a decent person should ever have to shoulder the blame for abandoning someone he loved.
    This is my testament: the final days of Zoltan Shirow, God’s messengerto Coyote, as told by Ben Harlan, his last remaining follower. Or, as Zoltan liked to call me, Benjamin the Unbeliever.
     
    The prophet fell from the sun on a cold winter morning, his coming heralded not by the trumpets of angels but by the sonic boom of an orbital shuttle. I was standing at the edge of the snow-covered landing field as the spacecraft gently touched down, waiting to unload freight from the starship that had arrived a couple of days earlier. I like to think that, if I had known who was aboard, I might have called in sick, but the truth is that it wouldn’t have mattered, because Zoltan probably would have found me anyway. Just as Jesus needed Judas to fulfill his destiny, Zoltan needed me . . . and I needed the job.
    Good-paying jobs were tough to find in Shuttlefield. I’d been on Coyote for nearly seven months, a little more than a year and a half by Earth reckoning. My ship, the Long Journey —full name, the WHSS Long Journey to the Galaxy in the Spirit of Social Collectivism —was the third Union Astronautica ship to reach 47 Ursae Majoris. On the strength of a winning number on a lottery ticket and promises of a better life on the new world, I’d spent forty-eight years