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THE JANUARY WIND chilled Isabel Burke's naked scalp as she trudged up the slope through the winter-dry vineyard. Fingers of dormant grapevines caught at her black shirt and trousers. Desiccated leaves crunched under her feet, and the faint fragrance of burning olive wood floated in the crisp air. She paused for a last look at the pastel houses of San Felice, framed by the sere brown folds of the Tuscan hills. This view had comforted her in the last difficult months.

Above her, in front of the Mother House, she could just see the nose of the long black car in the gravel drive. It was time. She adjusted the white band of her collar with cold fingers and resumed her climb.

The long sweep of aging, stuccoed elegance that was the Magdalene Mother House molded itself to the hillside overlooking the vineyards and the village. Once the castello of a noble Italian family, it now housed the priests and novices of the struggling Priestly Order of Mary Magdalene. Isabel had thought of it as home for the past fourteen years, the length of her priesthood. Its gardens lay black and lifeless, but cheerful yellow lights beckoned from its windows. All the ground-floor rooms were alight, the foyer, the r-wave center, the Mother General's office. On the second floor one darkened window marked Isabel's room, empty now.

And at the foot of the broad cement steps, the black car waited for Isabel.

It had all happened too fast. Ordinarily she would have had months to get ready for field work, months to plan and study. Only two days had passed since she'd met ExtraSolar Corporation's administrative envoy, Cole Markham, in the Mother General's office. Two days since she'd learned of the near-alien child taken from her home, transported to Earth, isolated for months in quarantine. Two days of hurried preparation, scanty research, packing. She had bid her fellow priests good-bye, smiled at the novices' curiosity, thanked the staff as they hurried to help her prepare for her flight to the far northwest coast of America.

Isabel could have refused this assignment, but she didn't. It was her penance. And she could never have left the child in the control of people like Cole Markham. She had known that the moment she touched his hand.

The Mother General, Marian Alexander, had summoned her early that decisive morning, two days before. Isabel was just leaving Mass in the tiny chapel behind the castello, chatting with two of her sister priests, when Marian's secretary found her. She circled around to the front of the castello, past the crumbling stonework of the courtyard. An unfamiliar car, long and black, was parked in the drive, gleaming darkly in the pallid sunshine. Isabel went through the double doors and waited briefly in the foyer before Marian put her head out.

Marian Alexander was also bald, like all the Magdalenes. When they could, they wore their black shirts and trousers, the white priest's collar. But often, in their farflung missions, it was necessary to wear other clothes. The bare scalp, the full tonsure, was their sign of community. It singled them out, sometimes inviting resentment from those Roman Catholics who thought the priesthood should be reserved to men. But the Magdalenes persevered.

Marian was much older than Isabel's thirty-six years. The Mother General's thick eyebrows were silver, her pale face lined. Isabel's own slender brows were still dark, but she knew that she, too, had begun to accumulate lines around her eyes and her mouth. They had deepened in the painful year just past, reminding her of her shame whenever she looked into a mirror.

"Isabel, come in," the Mother General said, and Isabel obeyed.

A stranger rose at her entrance. He wore a light suit with pencil lapels and a matching shirt, a fashionable look out of place among the simple wooden shelves of paper books, the racks of disks that crowded Marian's office. His smile was pleasant, but when Isabel shook his hand, a sense of emptiness, a sort of hunger, distressed her. She managed to say, "How do you do, Mr. Markham," and released his hand as quickly as she dared.

"Mother Burke," he said. "I've been hearing great things about you."

Isabel turned to Marian, one eyebrow lifted. "Yes," the Mother General said. "I've been giving Mr. Markham your résumé, Isabel." She sat down behind her desk, and Isabel took a chair. Markham stood where he was, hands thrust into his pockets, smiling his bland smile.

"Would you like to explain, Mr. Markham, or shall I?" Marian said.

He pulled his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them together. "I'm happy to do it, Mother Alexander. Thank you." He smiled down at Isabel as if he were about to give her very good news. "Have you ever heard of Virimund, Mother Burke?"

Isabel linked her hands in her lap and tried not to look away from his face. "One of the expansion worlds, I think?"

"Right, right. I've been telling Mother Alexander, here, that Virimund is mostly ocean, but with a ring of equatorial islands. Moderate climate, no moon. ExtraSolar has established a branch of Offworld Port Force on one of the islands to construct a hydrogen retrieval facility—apower park. For the long-range transports, you know. Fuel cells. Electricity."

He sat down in the chair next to her, leaning forward. She inched back in her chair. "The problem is, Mother Burke," he said. "We found people there."

"People? You mean, human beings?"

He nodded. His face adopted a grave expression. "It seems one of the emigrant ships of the old U.N. found this planet and landed there."

Copyright © 2004 by Louise Marley