Over the winter at the Institute there had been disheartening talks of technical collaboration with the neo-shamans. The summer's assignment of the flyglider fleet would include a thorough search of Ancients' artifacts for clues to a hypothetical cult of the Mother, particularly at ruins of sacred sites. It was claptrap, yet the flyers were told to 'find something.' Disgusted, Betula took an overdue vacation to visit her parents at their home, a farm in the lower Andes. There, her Scientist father, an agronomist, had found fame in a sideline to his research in the breeding of lamas. He had devised a diet that had the animals produce droppings that burned with a high caloric content and a light, fragrant smell, a discovery that made him an idol of the cooks of the land. In that rural, conservative area, this had eased the grudging acceptance of his light-skinned daughter whose infirmity was blamed on his spouse, Spiranthes-the-nth, a descendant of the first Spiranthes. Fortunately, their second daughter was a perfect child of the Mother. She had grown into a slender, curvy girl, with a mane of black hair falling over large, dark eyes and answering to a very traditional first name, Consuela.

Quasi betrothed to the Institute since her teenage years, Betula did not see her family very often but her visits to the farm were always a treat. She loved the place, its soft-contoured grounds below the steeply rising slopes, the brilliant shades of green over pastures and trees, the heady smell of the animals. After the struggles of her upbringing, she smiled at her parents' easy interaction with their normal child and her affection for the girl was well reciprocated. Travel bags dropped at the door of Betula's old room, Consuela dragged her to the stables to show off her new horse and soon the sisters were barreling down the dusty road, riding bareback as always, with little notice of their father's shaking of the head.

After dinner they walked to a hilltop and sat together, wrapped in blankets against the chill of the early night, leaning back against boulders to watch the stars bright against a moonless sky, hoping for meteors. Those were not as frequent as they once had been since the last of the Ancients' satellites had burnt on reentry. A relief actually, you never knew what was in these things and where they were headed. To spice up the occasion Betula decided it was time to tell the story of her infamous landing at the waterfall on her final class trip with Liriodendron. The tale's outline was known only to a few outside of the Institute where respectability was a concern given the scandalous history of the Scientist Order's beginnings. Secrecy was the rule in matters of questionable behavior, but Betula gave her family a detailed relation of the event. A silence ensued which Spiranthes-the-nth was the first to break, perhaps thinking of her youth.

"I wish I had done that," she said.

"Me too," piped up her younger daughter.

Her father's answer was a thundering "not until you leave our house, you little bug-eyed lamalmmb..." the rest of the oration lost in one of his booming laughs, the kind that would have the help on the farm thinking of asking the boss for a raise while he was in such good mood. ⁰0Next, they were all laughing with the lama lamb pummeling her father's ribs and protesting that she did NOT have bug eyes.

Then Betula told a less detailed story of her relationship with Liriodendron, something that had remained unknown outside of the flyglider fraternity though, even there, the eternal Beauty-and-the-Beast fairy tale was retold with much mirth; Betula was the beast. It was not a love story that traveled well, particularly in livestock breeding localities. Liriodendron's disappearance however was a well-known fact. The family's laughs gave way to tears and affirmations of faith and they rallied over the observation that no one was done for until a body was found. A shooting star would have been a welcome sight to cap the evening, but the Mother did not grant such a ray of hope to the grieving family.

The rest of Betula's vacation was the usual mix of hugs and kisses, great meals, hiking, swimming and fishing in ponds. And lots of riding bareback on dusty roads. She was revived, full of energy, ready for the challenges ahead, but the closer she was approaching the Institute the deeper her mood sank. She wished she could just hop into her flyglider and escape over the borderlands. She was longing for the silence of the ice and the renewal of her kinship with those she more and more accepted as 'her other people', if only in her dreams.

The flyglider teams were in a bad mood, disgruntled by their new assignment, that 'something' they were now to search for. It dawned on Betula that starting close to home might unearth a useful hint to what she would be supposed to find. The Institute Library had thousands of ancient works under restricted access in a subterranean 'clean space' that once housed the fabrication of satellite components at the former Area 71. Gathered in days when the Institute was still 'Camp Galaxy' it was a haphazard collection of rarely perused books and manuscripts that had been kept in university basements or remote government storage sites with no trade with the public. They had escaped the bonfires and the stoves when any combustible was fuel for warmth over the hardships of the cataclysm and in order to salvage as much scientific information as possible, the first explorations by flygliders had been directed to known sites relatively near Camp Galaxy. Later, at ease with longer range flights, they reached distant locations with a transport for company to carry home the bounty.

As one of the flyers elite whose predecessors had gathered the treasure, Betula had no problem obtaining permission to view it. A clerk checked an alphabetical list of the inventory and handed her the required cotton gloves before directing her to the coordinates of the 'MO' shelf. She was walking into a mysterious universe of antiquated memories bathed in musty odors, but she was disappointed at first. There were dozens of files, mostly police or government reports on the Mother Cult of the Shaman in its jungle days. But there was also an older, slim volume titled 'Mother Earth Nonsense, Gaia'. A quick read revealed a caustically critical review of a hypothesis positing Planet Earth as a live organism, Gaia, that moderated earth processes for the optimal welfare of its dwellers, man, beast or plant. Well, Gaia sure has had her hands full, thought Betula before realizing that here was a solid confirmation of the validity in the neo-shamans' request. Time to get out of here, she told herself. On her way out she noticed next to the 'Mother' group another inhabitant of the MO shelf, 'Mona's Journal', a book of slightly more recent vintage, perhaps misfiled. She filched it, in another of her reckless impulses, like pointed fingernails. When she returned her gloves, the clerk politely asked about the results of her search and noted her answer in the library record.

"You have no choice but report it. The clerk will rat on you if you don't," said Fixit-the-nth, the blue-eyed engineer who took care of her craft, "it's too big a story, hell will brake loose, they will nail you." She didn't care, she wanted out, she asked him to stock her flyglider for a two-season trip so she could try to find Liriodendron. "I can't do that Sweetheart, you will die," he said. Sweetheart, he had called her Sweetheart! With Liriodendron gone, she had thought of it herself, Sweetheart Fixit. But what would become of them, a couple of mongrels? Could she consider sentencing children to a life like hers, perhaps worse? She gave him a long hug and walked to the bureaucrat in charge to tell of her finding at the Library.

Hell broke loose anyway. She was charged with having noticed in previous trips the clues that motivated her library search and that she had hidden that knowledge. Why, what else could you expect from a mongrel descended from morons? A high-level commission of Scientists cleared her from wrongdoings, but there were dissents. Relieved from her teaching duties Betula sequestered herself to her rooms where she spent much of her time reading and re-reading Mona's Journal. A soul mate, Mona who did her work well and darkly concluded that institutions were bound to repeat their mistakes and return to the chaos she had just survived. One afternoon Mona had gone for one more run to the far reaches of the site, still looking for her dog. Her body was never found. In her desk there was a small package branded 'just-in-case' and addressed to Fixit. It was the storage drive with the key to the site's electronic encryption.

To Betula, that sounded more and more like a desirable option. What did she care if she didn't make it over the Rocky Mountains, at least, she would have tried. The Personnel Disappearance Inquiry had closed its Liriodendron dossier. He was presumed dead. His craft must have disappeared in the ocean or a lake, even a pond where he could have tried to ditch in an emergency. She knew he was too good a pilot for that, and one evening there came a knock on her door from someone who very much agreed, his flying school instructor. The man said that he had been sworn to secrecy by Liriodendron who didn't want her to learn what was happening to him.

"She would scratch that bastard's eyes out," he had told him. The bastard was a high-level staff officer at the flyglider school, a known abuser of young men but Liriodendron had disappointed him with a kick in the nuts and a threat to go public with the attempt.

"He had bought himself a ticket to the Andes mines. He knew it, and he may have chosen to disappear," said the instructor. He was now approaching her in spite of his sworn secrecy because the bastard in question had been the flyglider corps' representative at the inquiry that had just disgraced Betula and he was the author of the dissent section of the judgment. The instructor thought her turn had come to face slandering attempts from a man who probably thought Liriodendron had confided in her.

"Be careful, do your work, keep your nose clean," he said, "most of us are on your side, but you have to understand, one pilot out means a chance to fly for someone else, someone who might be one of that bastard's pets."

Betula thanked him for his confidence, promised discretion, even swore not to scratch anyone's eyes out, but after she closed her door on the instructor's back, she was struggling to keep from screaming and she had to return to her reading to calm down.

Mona wouldn't have been surprised by these revelations. She considered all hierarchical organizations with limited membership and little advancement opportunities to be breeding grounds for inescapable corruption, be that of the 'pay-to-play' sort in Liriodendron's experience, or the cash trading of pay grades, or the spies' outright sale of valuable information.

In their selfless zeal for rewriting the rules in hope to create an ideal human society the early Scientists came to face that dilemma. Believing that indiscriminate sharing of the military's murderous techniques would make impossible a peaceful resolution of future strife, they found kinship with the Sages then trying to curb the Shaman's violence, some of them having had to save their lives via Santiago's Underground Railroad. But having capitalized their avocation and designated it an 'Order' over Mona's strong objections, the Scientists made an exception in their banning of most advanced technology by creating a corps of pilots to get the flygliders and transports out of their caches at the urging of the few who had returned to Area 71 hoping to fly those further South. Mona objected on the grounds that these were perfect instruments of war that would surely graduate from the advocated search for scientific material to lethal use by some murderous shaman or tyrant to come. Fly spoke of the flyglider's extraordinary technology, the changing shapes of its wings in the fashion of birds, the ultra-light batteries recharged by the solar panels molded in the fuselage skin, its ability to take off backwards and land on a dime at speed, like a fly. The features built into the craft had made it the most sophisticated flying machine ever built. You just couldn't let that rot in a cave.

Mona could not win all of her battles. She did succeed in the banning of electronic communications as the nefarious spreaders of propaganda and false intelligence they were shown to be in the cataclysm's chaos, but relented in favor of the printing press, a necessary tool of education and information. She was glad that the ever-blabbing mouths on TV or radio lost their platform to concise message drumming, a simple, accessible technology already in use.

Betula felt Mona's anguish in her writing and recognized that their fate was probably bound to the same tragic disappearance. She began work on a letter that someone in her confidence, perhaps Fixit-the-nth, could forward to her family and she decided to assume an ordinary routine instead of her reclusive lifestyle. She began at the Library where most of the staff was friendly while a few took notes of her readings. Her studious examination of a pre-cataclysm atlas of the North American continent drew no suspicion. She was looking for sacred sites, she confided to a curious clerk, for possible locations of the Mother cult she had discovered. Actually, she was committing to memory the latitude of westerly passes through the Rockies, but her equanimity was shattered when she was looking for a work on the survival ways of populations on the North Pacific coastline and the aging dame at the counter chirped "oh, I don't know if you want to read that, Liriodendron was the last one to check it out."

"It's alright, she answered calmly, "he told me it has good sections on pre-cataclysm ice-ocean interactions."

The lady would have no clue to what ice-ocean interactions could possibly means, but surely it was a legitimate concern given the borrower's professional duties. Betula could not wait to get back to her rooms where she opened the tome to discover through her tears that it was all about the survival resources of the natives of Alaska and well beyond the Brooks Range. That was odd, it was North of his assigned range of exploration and surely lost under the polar ice.

The library rats found themselves thoroughly frazzled by Betula's next request: "We will be going there before I retire," she improbably explained to the clerk who had to fetch from the 'clean room' where she was now persona-non-grata an ethnographic study of the Arctic's Inuits, "we must know what we may find." The woman has gone nuts, they thought.

Spring departure date fast approaching it was quite easy to fool a portly supply clerk into swapping her ration of mocha bars for lighter, but rather tasteless, dried protein strips.

"Funny, the only other flyer who ever asked me for that trade was Liriodendron. Sure didn't help him much," he said, pointing to the back of the room. "Over there, last shelf, help yourself, nobody like those things."

"Really," she said, and did as instructed. She was wearing a bulky winter coat, a bit warm for that sunny day, but it had very deep pockets.

She was on a roll, so she returned to the library to ask the lady at the lending counter the favor to extend the loan duration of the Artic Inuits text to the length of her forthcoming trip and to add the old Atlas to her borrowing record.

"You can't learn ethnology without geography," said Betula, leaning over the counter to discreetly confide to the dame her plan to begin a doctorate on her return, a work devoted to a rigorous assessment of the possible survival options of future explorers in those icebound northern regions. It was a mouthful of pie-in-the-sky nonsense, but the flygliders pilots were routinely allowed two scientific texts from the library each season. Yet, Betula's choices were without a doubt the sort of volumes that were not to ever leave the Institute grounds, but the lady looked at Betula and didn't check the list of lending restrictions before scribbling approval in the appropriate box of her journal. Perhaps she saw before her a young woman with great ambitions in spite of her loss and the growing chip on her shoulder, perhaps she thought of her own younger days when she would have kicked anyone who would have suggested she would end her career passing books across a counter to impatient, ill-mannered youths, or perhaps she was just careless, she was so close to retirement you see, and no one ever looked at these old books anyhow.

"There you are, dear, I wish you the best in your aspirations," she said with a warm smile. Betula thanked her profusely and headed for the door feeling a bit guilty and thinking, 'aspirations lady, you don't know the half of it.'

The final itch would be to convince Fixit-the-nth to reconsider his refusal to overstock her craft. He would do it, she knew, he would understand her resolve when she gave him the letter to her family. And he would not rat.

Next, BETULA'S MUTINY.