"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 Ut. She was into astrography, and good at it, too. We wangled locations for us both at Nueva Cribola. 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 Caitlin 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, wbich'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 Peth. 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?
"Anyway. . . this bomb didn't do much. Destroyed a wing of the house, and three servants who'd been around for most of their lives-and, aye, aye, Toni and her baby.
"She didn't die immediately. They rushed her to a hospital. She asked if she could see the Moon in the sky-the last thing she asked-but the phase wasn't right. And I was off on Farside in a lunatrac, and a solar flare lousing up communications- "Well. That's the story. I went on the bum for a year, but the Ruedas bore with me, and helped me straighten out, and staked me when I decided to go to Demeter and start a business like theirs. You see why I worry about Carlos aboard Emissary?"
Brodersen and Caitlin sat silent together. The night waned.
Finally he said, "Toni was a lot like you."
Being a bard, she knew when not to speak. She only gave him whatever was hers to give. At first he was passive, then he tried to respond and she let him understand that that was not needful, then slowly he realized with his whole being that the past was gone but she was here.
Later they did sleep a while.
She woke before he did. Rousing, he saw her seated in the cave mouth, limned against the mysterious blueness that on Earthlike planets comes just before sunrise. She had programmed her sonador for unaccompanied guitar, making the instrument ring. Most quietly, she gave forth last of the many stanzas in her festival song:
The peaks grow gold, the east grows white,
A breeze pipes the end
Of the summer night,
And wide across a widespread land
The dancers turn homeward with
Hand laid in hand.
Go gladly up and gladly down.
The dancing flies outward like laughter
From blossom fields to mountain crown.
Rejoice in the joy that comes after!
VI
I was a caterpillar that crawled, a pupa that slumbered, a moth that flew in search of the Moon. The changes were so deep that my body could not remember what it had formerly been; I was as if reborn to wings. Nor had I the means to wonder at this. I simply was. Yet how bright was my being!
Even my infant self, a hairy length of hunger, lived among riches: juice and crisp sweetness in a leaf, sunlight warm or dew cool or breezes astir over his pelt, endless odors with each its subtle message. Then at last dwindling days spoke to his inwardness. He found a sheltered branch and spun silk out of his guts to make himself a place alone, and curled within its darkness, he died the little death. For a season his flesh labored at its own transformation, until that which opened the cocoon and crept forth belonged to an altogether new world. Soon my outer skin sloughed off me, my freed wings grew dry and strong, and I launched myself upon heaven.
Mine was the night. In my eyes it glowed and sparkled, full of vague shapes that I knew best by their fragrances. My food was the nectar of flowers, taken as I hovered on fluttery wingbeats, though sometimes the fermented sap of a tree set me and a thousand like me dizzily spiraling about. Wilder was it to strive as high as might be after the full Moon, more lost in its radiance than in a rainstorm. And when the smell of a female ready to mate floated around me, I became flying Desire.
Another blind urge set our flock on a journey across distance. Night by night we passed over hills, valleys, waters, woods, fields, the lights of men like bewildering stars beneath u~ day by day we rested on some tree, decking it with our numbers. While I was thus breasting strange winds, One gathered me up, taking me back into Oneness, and presently We knew what my whole life had been since I lay in the egg. Its marvels were many. I was Insect.
VII
Cold and empty, Emissary orbited Sol a hundred kilometers behind the San Geronimo Wheel. Dwarfed by remoteness, the sun gave her only a wan light, and she seemed lost among the stars. The Wheel was more impressive, two kilometers across, majestically rotating to provide Terrestrial weight for the workshops and living quarters around its rim. The hub, at the middle of the spokes which were passageways, could readily have accommodated the ship in its dock. Its radiation shielding aluminum plated, the whole structure shone as if burnished.
Yet it was a failure. Men had constructed it a century ago, to serve as a base for operations among the asteroids. Thinly scattered though those remnants of a stillborn world are, they could profitably be worked by robots, as could the Jovian moons at times around inferior conjunction. Soon improved spacecraft made that whole idea obsolete. It grew cheaper, as well as more productive, for men to go in person, boosting continuously at a gee or better, directly between these regions and the industrial satellites of Earth. The Wheel became a derelict. There was talk of scrapping it for the metal, but incentive was insufficient. Already then, the price of every metal was tumbling. Eventually title went to the Union government, which had it refurbished and declared it a historical monument. It got few visitors.
When Ira Quick, Council Minister of Research and Development, authorized its occupancy, nobody paid much attention. He declared that it was well suited for studies of interplanetary gas. This would be the merest detail work, with nothing fundamental to be learned, but presumably worthwhile; besides, a private institution was underwriting the project. The measurements being delicate, the Wheel and its vicinity must be barred to outsiders for some weeks or months. This would scarcely inconvenience anyone, least of all the custodial staff, who would enjoy a salaried leave of absence. The item rated a line or two in various astronautical journals, and about thirty seconds on perhaps a dozen newscasts.
A port in Joelle Ky's apartment showed her the heavens, the view rendered vertical by a set of prisms. They did not stream by too fast to watch, for a turn took almost three hours, and the sight was glorious. But she soon wearied of it and would have spent most of her time in the holothetic state, had the equipment been on hand. Thus far her prisonkeepers had declined to remove it from the ship or take her there.
They were apologetic, explaining that they dared not act without orders. The twenty men who guarded Emissary's crew and passenger were decent enough in their fashion, North American secret service agents on special detail. They sincerely believed that what they did was right and necessary. But then, they were handpicked, raised in the cult of discipline and obedience which had prevailed in the former military regime. Their chief, who presided over interrogation and exhortation of the captives, was less simpatico. He was no brute, though, and when he told Joelle that Quick himself was coming to see them, he promised to request permission to fetch the apparatus over for her.
"Of course, Dr. Ky," he added, "if you'd cooperate better, if you'd appreciate what your duty is, why, you should go free altogether." She felt too weary to respond.
She had withdrawn into books, recorded visual art, and music. The director had not refused to have the vessel's enormous bank of references, recreational material, and data transferred- especially since the major part of his task was to find out what the explorers had done and learned in their eight years agone. Except for meals, Joelle virtually abandoned social life.
