This is a very old story, one of my earliest.  It appeared in the July 4th, 2000 issue of State of Being, devoted to the theme of freedom.  Given the philosophical nature of the characters, and their unusual  belief-system, and the political climate of moralistic extremism taking shape in America then and today, I found that extremely fitting. And I still do.

WARNING: There are elements of irreverence and sexuality in this story some readers might find offensive.

.......................................

When the Purist Movement came to power my Daddy said we didn't have no other choice but to take a star transport out to the Foward Edge and make a life there.

There were lots of planets to choose from, but Wahoo seemed the best bet because it was just coming on line and the multi-national corporations who owned it needed people for colonization and work.

On the night we decided we were leaving Earth for good Tudd linked into the DataSphere and learned all about Wahoo.  There was all kinds of advanced planetology stuff like axial tilt and oblation I didn't understand.  Tudd started on about Wahoo's star, using words like ‘luminosity’ and ‘insolation parameters’.  Sindee said he was jus’ showing off talking that way, and why didn't he just say straight if it was a good place to go live?

So Tudd did.  He said Wahoo was square in the middle of its star's habitable zone.  That's the region around a sun where Earthlike life can live and maybe make a good home.  Which sounds pretty nice at first until you realize the MNC's have to pay people to go out to the Foward Edge because there's nothing out there like we got on Earth.  Another piece of news was that the alien plant and animal biochemistry on Wahoo was CHON-based.            

"That means we would have a real chance to survive once we got there," Tudd explained, "because if a plant or animal of a new world uses the same basic elements as we do, then maybe we can eat it during times of famine.  Maybe."

Sindee, ever the pragmatist, said, "That is if it doesn't decide to eat us first, Tudd."

That didn't scare me so much.  Not really.  The universe is a tough place no matter where you go.  Everybody knows Chaos Reigns.  You just have to make sure you're tougher and recognize your limitations.  I expect that's what daddy did when the Purists seized power throughout the Western Bloc.  He knew we wouldn't be able to stand up to them.  A lot tougher groups than us had already gone down, and Purists were televising real-time executions and bonfires on the morning newsblinks to show they meant business.

Those were bad days.  It was enough to put you off your breakfast of raw liver and cornflakes.

Well, we spent that whole night packing, and what I remember most was me crying because I didn't want to leave the Enclave.  I was supposed to be ordained within the year, but now daddy was saying all that was out the window and we had to leave our old lives behind.  Hell of a nerve, really, and I got mad whenever I had a few spare minutes between packing clothes and religious artifacts to think about it.

Who did he think he was uprooting us like this in the middle of the night?  It just wasn't fair.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying I believe in justice or anything like that.  (I mean, come on.)  I just figured we should have more of an explanation from the patriarch of our Family and the head of our Enclave than 'Pack your rags –- we're leaving in the morning for the Foward Edge.  Like it or lump it.'

After I fed the baby his bottle of goat's milk and put him down for the night I went outside for some air.  Daddy was sitting on the wrought-iron swing with Lila snuggled hard in his lap, kissing.  Lila turned to me, an expectant curl on her lips.

"Come to join us, Cleo?"  One of her pale hands held daddy's hand high on her thigh.  The hard nipples of her breasts showed through her thin cotton blouse where he'd been kissing them.

"No," I said, "I still have work to do."

She simpered.  "So who's stopping you?"

"I want to talk to Fath in private.  So scoot, you little tramp."

Lila pulled one of her patented heart-tugging pouts and pleaded with Fath.  "Do I have to?"

He saw the look on my face and knew I meant business.  He swung Lila off his lap.   "Better go help your sisters and brothers finish packing.  Cleo has something deep on her mind."

"But--"

"Do what I tell you."  He gave her a departing swat on her tight rump.  "And when you're done packing I want teeth brushed and everybody in bed.  Got a long trip ahead of us tomorrow and we need to be rested."

"Yes, sir."

Lila slowly walked towards the battered screen door, pausing now and then to see if Fath might suddenly change his mind.  She hung around the doorway one final moment, giving him a chance to call her back, but when he didn't she disappeared inside the house.

Daddy loved us all, but Lila was his favorite.  No surprise there seeing as how she was the last child Mawn gave him before dying of the Blue Fever that came out of Asia last year.  Killed a bunch of folks, it did.

Lila shared his bed as much or more than any of us, I guess, because she was special –- a part of Mawn.  You see, Mawn hadn't been very old when she had herself cloned.  Her chromosomal teleomeres hadn't been naturally shortened to produce a replicate that would age unnaturally fast.  And Lila was beautiful, achingly so.  We all enjoyed her company, especially at night.

Now my daddy had a lot of faults, don't get me wrong, but he was always a fair and good teacher.  Even Tudd was fast becoming a man after years of Fath's careful tutelage.  Why, just last night I had been helpless under Tudd's strong hands and loving it.  I still had the rope burns on my wrists and the ache in my thighs to prove it.  And if that's not enough to convince you, our baby, Adrian, was tucked safely away in his bassinet.

"Baby asleep?" Fath asked before letting me get down to business.  He was the patriarch of the Enclave.  I was the oldest.  I had to keep him up to date with everything that went on in the house and the Family.

"Yes, sir.  He's a little grumpy.  I think another tooth is coming through."

Fath nodded.  He had seen lots of baby teeth along with other growing aches and pains –- some natural, some deliberate –- in all four of his natural children, not to mention the score or so that belonged to the other families of the Enclave.

Fath lit a jung and passed it over.  I took a hit, holding the pungent smoke in my lungs.  I knocked the ash off the end of the jung before handing it back.

He made room on the swing for me.  "Have a seat, daughter.   You look all in."

I followed his advice, draping one bare leg over the edge of the swing and the other over his knees.  He was right, I was exhausted.  I had been rushing all night trying to get our circus on the road, wondering how Mawn would have handled the crisis in my place.  I was always comparing what I did with how I remembered her and more often than not found myself coming up short.

I started with something innocuous so I could feel him out and determine what kind of a mood he was in.

"This move came on us all of a sudden like."  I tried not to sound like I was complaining.  "I'm doing everything I can to get us ready in time."

"I know that, Cleo.  I'm not judging you.  How can I when you're tougher on yourself than I could ever be?"

I reached for the jung which lay forgotten between Fath's fingers and finished it off.  We sat quiet for a minute or two.   The porch light wasn't too bright.  I could see the stars and the moon's silver face rising above a distant mountain range.  The Necklace was up in the sky, too.  One half looped across the heavens while the other half drowned in Earth's umbral shadow.

A bobwhite called across the lonely flats that surrounded our commune.  Another answered, farther away.  You always hear them, but you never see them.

"Fath," I asked quietly, "what space tower are we going to use tomorrow?"    
    
He shrugged.  I wasn't too happy to see a hint of resignation in his eyes.  It's hard when a daughter learns for the first time her father isn't as strong and powerful as she always fantasized him to be.

"Olduvai is the only free tower left," he said.  "Goddamn Purists have shut down all the others."

"I don't want to leave our home, dad."  There, I'd said it, even if I had blurted it out in one breath.

"I know that, Cleo."  A strange look stole into his eyes.   "Do you think any of us does?  You think I do?"

He got up so quickly I had to grab the edge of the swing to keep my balance.  He stared out across the flats, hands stuck defensively in the back pockets of his jeans.  "This is my home," he said low.  His voice sounded funny.  I mean, different than I’d ever heard it before.  Not like my dad, but more like a stranger.

He tilted his head back to look at the bright stars overhead.  "Eighty acres of dirt and juniper bushes and an old rambling house and the Orthodox Church of Satan."  He sounded lost and uncertain.  "Now I have to trade all that in for something new and different and I don't know how, Cleo, or if I even can."

I swallowed.  "Dad, are you scared?"

His conviction was like a band of iron.  "Not if we keep the family together."  He turned around and looked at me.  "We have to make sure the family stays together during the crossing."  He gave me a meaningful stare.  "You understand that, don't you, daughter?"

"Yes, sir."  I thought about the religious jihad sweeping across the world.  There weren’t no place for chaos or entropy in the Purist's intolerant, mechanistic worldview.  No place for any belief system other than their own.  But what the Purists didn't understand was once they cleansed the world of every man woman and child who didn't kowtow to their insecure god, there wouldn't be anyone left for them to hate.  Blinded by their arrogance, they would then turn upon themselves and the Earth would become a chaotic and hopeless Hell.

Which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, but for the fact it would be a Hell not of our own making.

That's why everybody who could (not just our Enclave) was runnin’ for the Forward Edge.  At least our Enclave never went on Crusade.  We never persecuted women and children in the name of love.  We were always honest in what we believed; we were never hypocrites.

Fear and persecution are great motivating factors.  That's why the multi-national corporations were footing the bill to ship millions of people and billions of cryogenically frozen samples of germ plasm to the Forward Edge.  The only problem was once you got selected you didn't always know where you would end up.   There were no guarantees.  Sure, you might want to go to Wahoo, but maybe you'd be sent to Camberwell instead.  Or, perish the thought, April's Dawn.  And if you were really unlucky –- Cerne.  And last I heard they’re still eating each other.  Okay, you signed up for frontier colonization, but maybe a corporation needs to replace a worker who died in one of the kafirstone mines on Ymir or one of the mulch vats on Kandy III.  Faced with the choice, what are you going to say?  No thanks, I don't want to work there, you lied to me?  Good luck.  Space was full of desiccated bodies of people who didn't do like they were told.  

It's the ultimate burying ground for the corporations to hide their mistakes.

"Fath, why can't we live on the Necklace?"

"Cleo, how long you think the Necklace can hold out?  A year?"
             
I thought about it.  "Maybe two."   But he was right.

"And what if the Purists shut down the space towers?  Nothing imported or exported, nothing going up or down.  No food.  No water.  No air."  My father sighed.  "We might as well stay here and die, for all of that.  Or is that what you want?  To see your sisters and your brother and every member of our Enclave dead at the hands of those uber-moralistic bastards?  Do you want to see Adrian thrown into one of their 'cleansing bonfires'?"

"Of course not."

"Then don't pretend the Purists are anything other than arrogant fanatics."

"What about all them months I wasted memorizing the New Testament backwards?"  And kneeling for hours on broken rocks before an inverted crucifix, I reminded myself.  Don't forget that bit of fun.

And last All Hallow's Eve leather-strapped naked to an iron cross and suspended over a pit of yellow dogs while the hundred-plus members of our Enclave sang hymns.  I had screamed in terror until my throat was raw.  Then one of the deacons cut me down and I was passed around among the men (and not a few women) until daybreak.

It seemed to me a lot of work on my part had gone for nothing if what Fath was saying was true.

"Do you feel that was wasted time on your part, child?"

"Well, no, I guess not," I admitted.  I mean, I didn't really consider the black mass a waste.  "But what good does my faith do in the face of an implacable foe determined to kill me?"

 "Chaos reigns," he said, as if this bon mot explained any doubts I had.
            
The bobwhites started back up.  I listened to them talk to each other across the night so I wouldn't have to hear my own heart hammering madly behind my rib cage.

My mouth was dry.  The jung had left a stale taste on my tongue.  The night was warm but my hands and feet felt cold all of a sudden.

Fath stood over me, watching and waiting to see what I would do.  I looked at him, a genetic reflection of my own long black hair and pale narrow face.  I had his good looks, but everyone in the Enclave said I had inherited Mawn's grace and strength of character.

Chaos Reigns.

Yes.  It does.

I held my hand out and he pulled me up from the creaking swing.  Before I knew what I was doing I flung my arms around his neck and sobbed against his shirt collar.
                
"Don't, Fath!  Please.  We need you.  Tudd, and Sindee and Lila and little Adrian ... and the other families in the Enclave.   And me.  And me!"

He held me, like a father, which is what he always was –- despite the times in his bedroom he had me kneeling on black satin sheets and hanging on to the headboard, staring up at an inverted crucifix nailed to the wall above us.

"You must keep the family together."  He brushed strands of hair out of my wet eyes.  "Ours is not an easy path, Cleo.  But this is my home, girl.  Don't you see?  Not out there among the stars, but here.  Cleo, my father and his father and all the Chattertons before them ran and hid for thousands of years.  Now, in these Mad Times, we gotta run one last time.  Run as far as any man can go –- out to the stars.  And never return."

I knew that look in his eyes.  He had made up his mind.   Nothing I said or did was ever going to change it.  He sure as hell wasn't going to change it.

All I could say was, "I love you, Fath."

He hugged me tenderly.  "And I love you, Cleo.  I love you.   Your daddy loves you."

We went back inside together.
 

                                                                           *   *   *


We found everybody in the living room drinking hot chocolate and munching cold pizza.  Luggage was stacked by the fireplace, all ready to go.
 
Tudd was telling Sindee and Lila what to expect during the crossing.

"We'll sleep inside zero-tau stasis tubes," he said, "after the med techs fill our lungs and abdominal cavities with flotation oil."

Sindee wrinkled her nose with distaste.  "What ever for?"

"So your organs won't slosh around under the immense acceleration of the star transport.  You want to end up like a squashed melon?"

I saw Tudd was enjoying himself.  He liked being in charge, being the only one who knew things others didn't.  Well, I thought, he'll have to know a lot more once we get out to the Foward Edge.

We all would.

Fath cleared his throat.  Tudd looked up with a guilty expression.  "Oh, hello, sir," he said.  "I know we're supposed to be in bed, but Sindee wanted to know--"

"That's not true," Lila piped up.  "Tudd just wants to show off how smart he thinks he is."  A wicked grin crept across her face.  "Anyway, he hasn't gone to bed yet because he wants Cleo again tonight, even though it's my turn."

"Never mind," Fath said, "there's something you must know.   Something that affects the whole family."  He deferred to me. "It's your place to tell them, Cleo, not mine."

I was shaking.  The armpits of my black dress were soaked. "Fath has decided I am to be the Enclave's new Mawn--" I began.

"Cleo, that's great!"

"Oh, how wonderful!"

"You'll be the best Mawn ever!"

"--but Fath isn't coming with us to the Foward Edge."

It was like sluicing cold water over their heads and it pained me hard to see it.  Tudd's smile wilted like month-old lettuce.  Lila's mouth opened in an 'o' of surprise.

Sindee was the first to speak.  "You mean you're staying behind, Fath?"

"If Fath stays then so do I!" Lila demanded in a hot and angry voice.

"Fath?" Sindee, plaintive. "Are you?"

"No, I won't be staying behind, either."

Slowly, the shattering truth dawned on each of them.  Tudd hid his face in his hands.  Sindee stared at the carpet, a total blank.  Lila crawled towards me like a helpless animal.
 
"Mawn!  Mawn!" she cried weakly.  "Don't let him do this!"

When I saw Lila crawling like that the strength was cut right from my legs and I fell to my knees.  I gathered her up in my arms, tight.  "I can't stop him, honey."  My words were muffled in her hair.  "We have to go on without him and that's all."

Tudd lifted his face from his hands, his handsome face twisted into something tortured and unrecognizable.  "How can you do this to us, Fath?"

"I know why he's doing it."  Sindee's soft voice brought everybody up short.

Tudd grabbed her upper arm.  "How do you know?"  A muscle jumped in his jaw like a live wire.  "Tell me!" he demanded.

Sindee locked her eyes with mine for confirmation.  "Because if we make it through this we'll be strong enough to make it through anything the Forward Edge can throw against us."

Tudd blinked.  He was breathing heavy.  "Is that right, Cleo?"

"Yes."

"No.  No.  No."  Tudd was really taking it hard.  Young men are always weakest when they come face to face with the limitations of their fathers.  It’s different for us girls.  Well, a little different.  I still thought about Mawn.

"You must survive," Fath said.  "All of you.  Including Adrian."

I added, "All of the Families making this crossing with us must anneal their faith through similar trials of fire.  It's the best way to insure we are strong enough to build a new life on a new world.  The Enclave must survive."

"Chaos reigns," Sindee said softly.
          
"It is a Truth," Tudd's voice was hoarse with emotion.

Lila was cradled in my arms.  "You understand why we have to do this, don’t you honey?" I asked her.

She nodded stiffly, her face buried in the warm crook of my neck.

I whispered into her ear so no one else could hear.  "You're going to be the next Mawn after me.  You know that, don't you?"

She moved her lips close to my ear in an act of intimacy and breathed, "Yes."

"Do you want to be the Mawn of our Enclave?" I asked her.

"Yes."  No hesitation.

I hugged her tight.  "That's because you're already strong," I said with pride, "Strong like our real mother.  Strong like I have to be now.  Will you help me?"

She nodded again.  I buried my face in her dark curly hair and wept soundlessly.

                                                                          *   *   *

Tudd carved the epitaph into the headboard with his athame after Fath stopped breathing.

                                                   Here Lies Damon Chatterton
                                                            Father & Husband
                                                His Sacrifice Makes Us Stronger  
 
Sindee lit red candles and we knelt around the side of the four-poster bed.  The sun was edging over the salt pan outside.  The room became very quiet and very still in the presence of death.

"What are we going to do now?" someone asked, sniffing back tears.

"Let's pray," came a suggestion.

We prayed together: "Our Father, who art now in Hell, unhallowed be thy name..."

Later we packed everything into a rented airbus and punched in the coordinates for Olduvai Space Tower.  My father's words rang in my ears as the ground fell away beneath me and the airbus circled one last time over the rundown commune that had been my home for the past twenty-one years.

Keep the family together, Cleo.  Whatever you do, keep the family together.

Five days later, our star transport opened a gate into null-space.  My family was together and we were on our way to the Forward Edge.


                                                                                  The End