Caitlín sat straight, hugging her knees, looking over him to the argent wilderness. “Also, because I lack her gift for figures and organization, I couldn’t share in the adventure of your enterprises,” she said. “I’ll not be a parasite. And a steady, safe job in a single place would soon have me daft. A bird of passage have I been since the hour I was born.”
Mirth crowed from her: “Och, I’m moonstruck! How would a bird get born?”
He hoisted himself to sit cross-legged beside her. “The same way an idea gets hatched,” he suggested.
“Aye,” she responded quickly, “see, Einstein brooded long over his—they had to bring him his food and tobacco where he sat—until one fine day the egg went
crack
and a little principle of special relativity peeped forth, all wet and naked, and then the poor man must scurry to and fro fetching long wiggly equations to stuff down its beak, but at last it was grown to be a grand big cock of a general relativity theory and the quantum mechanics came to build a proper perch for it.”
“Ye-es.” He laid an arm around her. “As for launching a project, I see it lying on the greased ways, and you come and break a bottle of champagne across the director—he’s the figurehead, of course—”
Their foolishness went on. Her merriment was an indivisible part of what he held dear about her.
“Hey,” he remarked eventually, “you haven’t told me how you found this cave. Not that I wasted time asking. But since we’re taking a rest, how did you?”
She grinned. “How do you think?”
“Uh—”
“The handsomest hunter last year… Do you know, my treasure, I could almost wish—almost—you’d set out a single day later? I was developing designs on that lad when you came by. Ah, well, no doubt he can bide for a bit.”
He tried not to stiffen. She felt it, embraced him, and said, “I’m sorry. Have I hurt you? I mourn.”
“Well, naturally, I can’t expect you to stay celibate months
on end,” he made himself reply. “You’ve got too much life in you.”
“You are him I love, Daniel. True, there’ve been past loves, and they flamed too, but none like this. Your strength, your knowledge, the skill in your darling hands, och, you are wholly a
man,
and yet you are kind and generous and caring. You I will love till they close my eyes. The rest… some few turn out bad, most are good, none have been dull, but frolic is all they really ever are. Or, at most, a making of closer comradeship.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m not exactly a monogamist either.”
She tried to get past the barrier in him: “I’ve told you, my heart, I’m no she-cat. An impulse now and again, aye, but mainly I must think well of him first, and after that reckon I would not be the harm of anybody else, before I will give more than a kiss. It’s no vast number of lovers I’ve had. A score, maybe, since I turned sixteen on Earth?”
“And me, I’ve not always been choosy,” Brodersen admitted.
He caught her to him and held her there a minute. “Forgive me,” he said thereafter, shakenly. “I didn’t mean to react like that to a little teasing. But—”
“But?” she urged, seconds later.
“I think what did it was your kidding me that I might’ve left home today instead of yesterday. Suddenly I remembered that I did leave home, and why.”
“And you stepped back into jealousy because the real thought pained you too much. O beloved.” She knelt before him, stroked his face, regarded him through tears.
“Could be,” he said. “I’m not in any habit of probing my psyche.” He pulled his lips upward. “As long as the damn thing runs, not rattling a lot, I’ll simply give it an occasional change of oil. Okay, let’s drop this subject with a dull, sickening thud.”
She remained grave. “No, Dan. You are in danger, and everything you care about is, Lis and the children foremost. How could I deserve being your mistress if you must shelter me from your griefs? Tell me.”
“I did while we drove here.”
“You laid out a skeleton for me. Breathe on it now, that it may rise alive.”
“I, uh, I don’t know what to say, Pegeen.” That was a name for her which they had private between them.
“Let me lead you, then.” She settled beside him fresh; they touched, arm to arm and flank to flank, while they gazed outward at torchflies, trees and fugitive stars. Save for the
springwater, the night was growing still as it grew old. “Why are you in rebellion?” she asked. “Sure, and I hunger to explore yonder suns myself. But you have
Chinook,
that you got remodeled and crewed for the same purpose.”
“Yeah, after the alien ship passed through the Phoebean gate. Have you forgotten, though? Only a watchship was around, to see what precise guidepath she followed—which, actually, only a couple of specialist officers did. Damn them, they didn’t release the information except to their high command, and the Union government promptly declared it super top secret. Don Pedro himself—the Señor, the head of the Rueda clan and combine—he’s never managed to pry the data loose. If the rest of the crew hadn’t babbled, maybe you and I would still not know that an outworld vessel ever did come by.
“Oh, yes,” Brodersen went on, out of the acridness in his gullet; “I could see the reasoning. Why, I could agree, sort of, would you believe? We’d no idea what kind of beings were at the far end of that gate. We couldn’t let any random team charge through, to raise any possible kind of havoc. That had to include me and my company. When I commissioned
Chinook, I
did it on sheer hope, that the official expedition would come back bearing good news, so the government could freely let responsible private parties go. Or else, if the expedition did not come back, the Union Council would some year let me make a second attempt. At that, I kept her fully stocked, so I could take off too fast for a politician or bureaucrat to get my clearance cancelled.
“And God damn it,
Emissary
did return! And they’re suppressing the fact! They want to kill our chance for going, ever—”
He slumped. “Hell and damnation,” he said, “you’ve heard me drone on, over and over, about what’s common knowledge. Last time we met, you heard me talk about my earliest suspicions. Today you heard me rant about what’s happened since. Why do you put up with my repeating like this?”
She laid her head against his shoulder. “Because you have the need, my dear, my dear,” she answered. After a moment: “But tell me next, what was the need in you to charge forward like O’Shaughnessy’s bull? You steer yourself well. Why could you not be patient and cunning, till at last you held the truth gathered between your fingers for a noose to do hangman’s justice?”
More than the words, her tone calmed him. “Well,” he said,
“I’d already compromised myself to a degree. Then I trusted Aurelia Hancock too much, and look what happened.”
“You could have outwaited that. How many years, or millions of years, blew by while the Others were growing into the galaxy and we abiding blind on our single globe? Would a few more matter?”
“They will to the
Emissary
crew,” he grated. “You know that the mate, if he’s alive, is family to me. And another is a, a good friend of mine. Not to mention the rest. They have their rights too.”
“Aye. Yet against this you surely set the welfare of Lis and Barbara and Mike, to say naught of hundreds who get their livelihood from Chehalis.” Caitlín gripped his nearest hand. “Dan, dearest, something beyond is driving you. What might that be? Yes, many a time you’ve told me how marvelous it will be for humans to have the freedom of the stars, more than fire or writing or the end of disease. And have I differed with you? But why this terrible haste, at whatever cost? We’ll die, darling, old and wicked if I have my desire, before we’ve known all there is to know here on Demeter by herself.”
He knotted his fists while his mind groped for clarity. “Pegeen, on Earth I saw too much of what big, passionate convictions do to people, especially when governments have them. Then I started reading history, and found what horrors they’ve brought in the past. That made me swear I’d stay objective. If nothing else, I figured I could keep from orating at everybody in sight.
“Except… I guess when we get right down to bedrock, I can no more set my strongest beliefs on a shelf to wait for a convenient moment than anyone else can.”
Briefly, a part of him wondered if she noticed the mixed metaphor. Probably. But she kissed him and requested, “Tell me them. How I wish you had earlier.”
He heard how strained his voice was but couldn’t amend that: “This is what I’m afraid of. If the human race doesn’t take off soon for the stars, it dies.
“The Union is in bad trouble. I thought, when I quit the Peace Command as a young fellow, that we’d pretty well worked ourselves out of a job. Earth looked orderly and sane. Well, I was wrong. Too many two-legged animals are jammed onto the planet. More and more lunacies keep boiling up. Religions like Transdeism. Heresies like New Islam. Political faiths like Asianism. Nations where mobs, or cabinet ministers, scream for
secession if they can’t get what they want when they want, no matter if it’s feasible. And the worst is, a lot of those grudges against the Union are legitimate. More and more, the world government is trying to run everything—everything—from the center. As if an Oceanian mariculturist, a Himalayan knight, a businessman in Nairobi, and a spaceman working out of an Iliadic base didn’t know best what their special problems are and what to do about them. Judas priest, are you aware that dead-serious talk is going on in the Council about resurrecting Keynesian fiscal policies?
“I suppose you’ve been spared the knowledge of what those were.
“The point is, whenever I visit Earth, I see it more sick. A lot of sociologists claim that the revelation about the Others, a completely superior race of beings, had considerable to do with bringing on the nuttiness that led to the Troubles. I dunno. Maybe. But if that’s correct, then the Covenant didn’t buy us anything except a breathing spell. We haven’t yet come to terms with the fact of the Others. We never will, either, unless we can get out there. No, I’m sure that the way things are going, Earth will explode pretty soon. The best result of that would be a kind of Caesar; and the Caesars weren’t really very durable. The worst that can happen—the worst doesn’t bear thinking about, Caitlín.
“And don’t suppose we can safely sit out the disaster here. My personal experience, these past several weeks, says different. Demeter may be two hundred and twenty light-years from Earth—the latest estimate I’ve seen from the astronomers—but that’s just a skip through the gate for a ship armed with fusion missiles.
“Oh, yes,” he ended, “maybe I am being too apocalyptic. I said I try to steer clear of fanaticism. Maybe they’ll muddle through somehow. But I know for certain, if I know nothing else, that Earth won’t get any new ideas except from the stars, and meanwhile the old ideas are killing people. Same as they killed my first wife.”
He stopped, exhausted.
“Dan, you bleed,” she half wept, and cradled him as best she was able.
At last: “You’ve never really told me what happened with Antonia. You loved her, and married her, and she died a bad death. Would you tell me the whole story this night?”
He stared before him. “Why saddle you with it?”
“So I can understand, my most dear. Understand you and what is in you; for sure it has become to me that this is your great wound and the reason why you could not stay quiet about
Emissary.”
“Perhaps,” he mumbled. “You see, it was a political assassination, and the politics wouldn’t have existed if we weren’t stuck in these two miserable planetary systems.”
“Speak, Dan. About your Antonia. I’d make a song in honor of her memory, if you would like that.”
“I would. I would.”
“Then first I must know.”
He was merely average articulate, and full of grief; he groped and croaked:
“Okay, to start, how we met. After my discharge from the Peace Command, I wanted to go into spatial engineering, and had the luck to be accepted for the academy that the Andean Confederacy runs. When I’d graduated, I went to work for Aventureros Planetarios—
the
big corporation, you know, that the Rueda clan dominates. I did pretty well, got invited to some parties they threw, and there was Toni.
“She herself said she’d be damned if we sucked the timocracy’s tit. She was into astrography, and good at it, too. We wangled locations for us both at Nueva Cibola. That’s an Iliadic satellite, you may recall, but an office of Aventureros is there, and so is Arp Observatory.
“Six Earth years… I traveled a lot, necessarily, as far afield as Jupiter; but you know, Pegeen, though women were usually along on our jobs, through that whole time I really was a monogamist. Not that Toni’d have disowned me; but she was, and that settled the matter.”
He fell mute, while Caitlín held him.
“At last we decided to start a family,” he resumed. “She loved children. And animals and…everything alive. She wanted to have the baby at home, in the Rueda mansion, for the sake of her grandparents. They were too frail to leave Earth, but it’d mean a cosmos to them to see the next generation arrive.
“Why not? I had an assignment ahead of me on Luna, which’d keep me away for several weeks. She might as well return to the clan at once and enjoy them. They’re grand folk. I expected I’d finish before birthtime, take leave of absence, and join her.
“Well—Quite soon after she landed, the
residencia
got
bombed. By terrorists. They issued an anonymous announcement that they were protesting the Ruedas’ hogging the benefits of space development from the masses. It was an incident in a wave of revolutionary violence going through South America.
“That’s faded out. Temporarily. It’s rising again. The Ruedas are still targets. Yes, of course they’re rich, because their ancestors had the wit to invite private space enterprise to Peru. But hogging the wealth? Why, suppose that money was divided equally among the
oprimidos
. What sum would each person get? And where’d the capital come from for the next investment? Pegeen, Pegeen, when will these world savior types learn some elementary economics?