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on her elbows. She cupped her hands against his temples and kissed him. "I
don't want to be ordained either," she said softly.
He stared at her, the shock of the kiss forgotten. "But you must, Jenine!
I have to escape. I have to get away from... from..." He almost said "my
mother'. "From here... From everything."
"But not from me?"
He heard himself saying, "No not from you. Especially not from you."
"Then there's no problem."
"I don't want to be responsible for what might happen to you."
"I'm the only one responsible for me," said Jenine firmly.
Ewen hesitated. "You know what will happen to us if they find out?"
She nodded and continued to hold his head, her fingers played with his
hair. "We'll be mindwarped, and left to cope as ordinary citizens as best we
can. I could bear that if I was with you, Ewen. Our selection was a mistake.
It has to be otherwise why have our bodies changed the way that they have? Why
do I feel about you the way that I'm sure you feel about me?"
There was a long silence.
Jenine kissed Ewen again. He returned the kiss because he discovered that
this time he was able to thrust his guilt aside. Her touch, her scent and the
sheer delight of her closeness felt right.
Perfectly right.
* * * *
It was dark when Jenine woke. She experienced a moment of disorientation
until the pieces fell into place. She was in Ewen's bed and he was asleep
beside her. Something was worrying her; not what had happened with Ewen - she
had no regrets about that - but something else. She slipped quietly from the
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bed to avoid waking him and got dressed. She hated having to wind the bandage
around her breasts. They now quite large - the bandage a painful constriction,
but there was a chance that Calen would be working late in the study. She was
relieved to find that he had gone to bed. She gathered up all the hardcopy
maps and seismographs that she and Ewen had left scattered on the floor, and
sat at the table with the datapad to study them. Ten minutes slipped by. Ewen
entered looking dishevelled. He came up behind her and slipped his arms around
her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder. They were silent for a while,
savouring the closeness of each other.
"So what have you found?" Ewen asked at length.
"It's more a case of what I haven't found. We haven't done any proper
tests directing the seismic beam upwards."
"What about the tunnel tests?"
Jenine sorted out the printouts. "We used a wide angle beam so that we
could calibrate the seismoscope. We needed to plot the position of known
tunnels therefore we found a suitable spot in the chord-metro system where
there were plenty of spurs and junctions. Right?"
"So?"
"So the place we selected is quite low. Not as low as Steyning, but still
low. See?"
Ewen studied the seismograph and agreed that Jenine was right. "Okay. So
what are you saying?"
"We've not gone high up and carried out upward tests using a narrow-angle
beam to give us a long range."
"But there won't be anything upwards," Ewen objected. "We'd be wasting
our time."
"Because of what Calen said about a large dome having to be down?"
"Yes - his reasoning made sense."
"But we haven't tried searching upwards," Jenine persisted. She hunted
through the maps of Arama. "Look - Keltro is high up." She pointed. "And
look... There's a short pedestrian tunnel linking two industrial domes. It
would be easy to close the tunnel for the few minutes that a test would take."
5.
The narrowness of the pedestrian tunnel at Keltro played on Jenine's
fears of confined spaces but she kept her feelings to herself. Closing the
tunnel was simply a matter of placing a pedestal-mounted GoD symbol sign at
each end. It was a low tunnel therefore there was no need to use a platform to
reach the roof. Nevertheless, Ewen's arms were aching by the time the laser
cutter had done its job.
The couple took several full-power soundings in rapid succession, making
slight alterations to the upward direction of the narrow-angle beam between
each firing to obtain the maximum coverage. They stowed their gear, reopened
the tunnel, and hurried back to the Centre to evaluate the results.
* * * *
"Come on," said Ewen impatiently as the wipe bar edged down from the top [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]