Schism

     'So,' Marta thought, 'This is how it ends.' She looked out across the dry landscape and began plotting a course. In that moment, which she wouldn't recognize for some time, a new start had been made and even in the black abyss of her grief she had begun to live again. A brief memory of Liam blossomed, but the dark-haired woman set aside the remembrance. Reliving happier times would generate a burst more painful than would simple repression - especially now, when survival would depend on her every decision and on constant awareness. As always she found solace in the act of planning her next move.

     Marta examined the faces of the women around her. Forty-seven individuals exiled and expected by the others to die or come crawling back. She, for one, never would return. The rules they dictated were no less a death sentence than the desert and its dangers. In leaving they had some semblance of dignity and self-determination.

     Several of the exiles avoided her stony gray eyes and looked toward the broad-shouldered figures striding away. Evan had chosen that way and had, in the final tally, also chosen to betray her to the ruling regime. Betray his sister, betray his friend, betray his lover, and betray the cause of equality and freedom. Traitor or patriot, she reckoned it depended on which side won. Hers hadn't - his had. Therefore, who was the Judas?

     In the long run, most settlers had made the identical choice. Most chose because they believed the party line, others for the sake of comfort and getting along, and the rest because parental responsibility to protect their small children dampened a righteous fire.

     Oddly enough, a few considered themselves moderates and decided to work within the system to affect a return to rationality. They would find changing the religious fervor an impossibility, Marta thought. Divine guidance made a difficult adversary.

     In all fairness the majority, though not always right, were the majority and had a right to expect compliance from everyone, and hadn't gotten it. Thus, the harsh judgment rendered.

     A quick glance at Della's pale face and red-rimmed eyes revealed how difficult standing by her comrades-in-arms was proving to be. Evan hadn't looked back or singled her out for special consideration. Had he not wanted to influence her - or hadn't he cared enough to try?

     "You could stay," Marta whispered, and then repeated the words loud enough for the entire group to hear. "They would take you back if you agreed to the new doctrine. They will need you desperately." Yes, once pregnancies again came to term in utero under Verdant's strange influence, and more women perished in the attempt to deliver the too-large fetuses would all females - even former revolutionaries - become valuable commodities and sought-out companions.

     Oneida, of the bronzed skin and dark eyes, laughed aloud. "Yes, be a brood mare and serve your function without questioning the dangers. Be dispensable." She shouldered the small pack that the Abelites allowed with a toss of the proud chin and disdainfully turned her back on the hovercraft transport. The luxurious thick black hair that would have bounced in the gesture had been hacked off, a treatment common to all of the rebel females. A minor blow to feminine egos, but the reprimand, plus banishment, was nothing so much as pettiness when compared to the devastating punishment meted out to their male counterparts.

     Another image of Liam, the horrific one of his execution, blinded Marta for a moment with unexpected but completely familiar tears. In an effort to hide the emotional response, which would set off a cascade and put fear reborn into the gentler ones, she knelt to check her pack. The worldly belongings of each of the exiles consisted of two liters of water, a knife, and a primitive medic-kit. Hardly sufficient for crossing a cultivated valley let alone crossing a wasteland. Hard times ahead, but worse ones were behind. Time would prove that.

     Marta shrugged the straps into comfortable positions on her shoulders. "I will hear no word against those who choose to stay. Our path will be difficult enough without dragging along those who would not go willingly."

     Oneida, Carmacita, Kirsten, and Justine frowned. They would question her authority - if not now then eventually. Alpha personalities, movers and shakers, and the backbone of the failed revolution - they would be her rivals in the years to come. Would they support her for the present?

     She met each measuring stare with one of superior attitude. She knew, as none of them did, the location of the secret haven. A place prepared when peaceful secession seemed possible, long before the outcome of their ensuing insurrection became clear to even the least hopeful. The one secret she had kept during the not-so-gentle questioning of the inquisitors. The one plan she had kept from Liam and Evan and Della; trusting her own council and strength above any. Had she known their weaknesses - Liam's to pain, Evan's to comfort, Della's to love - better than they knew hers? She didn't know but knew that, where they had broken, she had not.

     Liam had always said her only weakness was the strength of her convictions, which would not let her bend or compromise. He would tell her those things while making her feel helpless with his loving hands and lips. Had he enjoyed destroying all her barriers, reducing her to sensation, and rocketing her into ecstasy simply because she was strong? She wondered then, for the first time but definitely not the last, why was she so determined to live? Never to see his smile, never to smell his scent, never to have his fingers stroking her dark hair - and again she averted her face and shielded her eyes as if the sun's glare made the tears come. But it wasn't enough and others noticed.

     Della cried out, and broke rank first. Eleven others, shame-faced, followed. A dozen turncoats, fewer than Marta had expected but more than she'd hoped. The women stumbled back across the barren terrain, stopping only when one of the men held up his hand in a halt motion. Marta couldn't hear the words, but knew them to be the oath of bondage as each of the Stayers prostrated herself before the self-proclaimed authorities. Her mind would crack before her legs would lower her belly to the gravel, but maybe - to some - living under a known yoke is preferable to a potential death burdened by nothing but choice.

     Marta saw Evan gesture to claim his woman and watched Della take her place - behind him. Even from this distance she could see the triumph in his stance. How had her brother, the man who had been her larger-than-life hero since before leaving Earth, become so small? Had this world's hostility somehow infected him - and the other Abelites - with a retrovirus of the psyche? Had they in some way devolved? Would they regret the animosities and revert to the friendliness of old in a sort of symbiotic cycle at one with Verdant's fluxes? If so, it would be far too late to regain her loyalty.

     A chasm had formed. A gulf, impossible to bridge by letting bygones go, would forever separate them. Marta burned with the possibility of revenge, but knew that simple survival would occupy her energy for a long time to come. Not her doing, but she would maintain the schism and leave the Abelites to the fate they had dealt themselves in their fanatical search for an unanswerable question of why.

     The how was so much more important than the why of their lives. How to cope with the unexpected difficulties of Verdant? Why the difficulties existed made no difference in the long run. Marta had always had a talent for seeing the tide before it turned and planning accordingly.

     The trio of transports lifted and sped north toward the more temperate regions where the drought-phase would not begin for a few more months.

     Fixing her expression to careful indifference, she gazed out over the unexplored and uncharted to find the first landmark on their journey. With firm steps - more steady than the frantic beating of her heart - Marta started. She never looked back to see if anyone followed, but they - thirty-five women - all did.

     She mentally revised her earlier thought. 'No, not an ending,' she mused with a grim snort, 'This is how it begins.'