Free Stewards of the Flame by Sylvia Engdahl Page A

Peter said. “We can never be sure outsiders’ boats won’t pass by—we’re within range of the mining camp on Verge Island.”
    Back at the Lodge, he and Peter changed to dry clothes in silence. When they returned to the common room, people had gathered as usual around the fire. But there was no music, no casual chatter. They all seemed to be waiting.
    Jesse looked for Carla, then froze. Anne was sitting beside her. Anne had indeed brought the plane, then, and the body. . . .
    “Forget your first meeting with Anne,” Carla said easily. “She couldn’t tell me in public, but she knew there’d be a way to get you out—a better way, one with a legal signature.”
    Days beforehand? Jesse thought, puzzled. Well, if Carla was satisfied, he would be too; he returned Anne’s friendly greeting. Still, he felt something had been held back.
    “Okay, people, we need to talk,” Peter said. “Jess needs to know the truth about this world. Now that he’s seen what went on tonight, that’s more urgent than ever.”
    Carla said, “We were going to tell you tonight, anyway. It’s a hard thing to speak of casually. Bear with us.”
    Jesse nodded. “All right. I’m listening.” The truth about the world? he thought, with foreboding. Not just what he’d seen of its dictatorial health laws?
    “I’ll ask you a hard question, straight out, Jess,” Peter said in a tone uncharacteristically serious. “What’s the worst thing you can imagine happening to you, that really could happen? I don’t mean some freak accident. What do you really fear about your own eventual end?”
    Jesse froze. This was a taboo subject in any society he had ever known. You simply did not ask that question. Everybody already knew the answer to it, anyway.
    “Don’t back away from it, Jesse,” Carla said. “We are not going to be shocked by what you say.”
    All right, they wanted honesty. “Old age,” he confessed. “Outliving my capabilities. Being helpless, dependent on strangers, even on—” He broke off, unable to carry it through.
    “On machines,” Bernie finished for him. “Or being mentally incapacitated, senile. Physical dependence might be tolerable, but disintegration of the mind’s harder to contemplate.”
    Jesse bent his head. “Yes,” he agreed. He was older than they were; he had not supposed they’d even ventured to think about it yet. Still, the friend they’d buried had been elderly. “Do you think I’d question your not calling an ambulance for an old woman?” he asked. “Stop worrying—you don’t need to justify yourselves to me.”
    “The issue goes deeper than that,” Kwame said. “Earlier, we mentioned shared fear—”
    “And we have to explain the reasons for it,” Ingrid said. “Jesse, you may have to live out your life here. The Hospital provides custodial care. Does the idea frighten you?”
    They were all looking at him very intently, and he perceived that he was being tested in some obscure way. With them, there was no end to the surprises. The only clear thing was that they did not like timidity—not in any form whatsoever. If you shrank from something, then that was the very thing they contrived to make you do.
    “Yes, I fear that,” he repeated forthrightly. “I guess we all hope to go quickly when our time comes. But it doesn’t happen often nowadays, after all—not as it used to before all fatal disease except aging became curable. I’m not likely to have much choice.”
    “On some worlds I hear they do,” Nathan said pointedly.
    “Assisted suicide, you mean? Yes, it’s legal on Earth, in fact. But—” Jesse paused, guessing now why they’d hidden the death and hesitant to risk offending. They sat silent, not letting him off the hook. Hell, he thought, if anyone takes this as an insult, they asked for it! “It’s not my business to judge others,” he said, “but that’s not the choice I’d make for myself. It’s always struck me as cheating, somehow. I mean,