Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court
My mansion is.
Michael W. McClintock
To reach Ganymede from Earth the purposeful traveler must first secure passage to Trojan Port, from which all interplanetery traffic departs. The other space station, Gateway, at the rim of whose great Wheel an Earthman may stand erect and coffee may be drunk from cups, looks chiefly inward, as befits an instrument of the Conservancy. Few of the station’s eyes are turned toward space; from Earth come all its visitors, and to Earth they all return. But at Trojan Port the longrunner Vega was hanging out, so to Trojan Port the purposeful traveler went. Slugged with benotex to ward him against claustrophobia during the fifty-hour transfer, he rode out in a passenger capsule lashed in a cargo module among cartons of microfilm and bales of paper. The capsule had been borrowed from Canaveral, because Zanzibar hadn’t boosted live payload for fifteen years. It had been that long, too, since Trojan Port had had to deal with an up-bound Earthman, but the technician at the portal got the capsule open and started the little adrenalin pump without mishap. The traveler yawned, shivered, and looked at the two lanky orbiters hovering beside him.
“I’m falling,” he said, “so I must be up.”
“Do you feel nauseated, man Kalkas?”
“Thank you for your concern. I don’t feel nauseated; I do feel hungry.”
“Hey, that’s a good symptom, and we can treat it, too. Oh, I’m Neal Abramowitz, Communications Officer.” With the unfailing egalitarianism of the Spaceborn, he also introduced the technician.
Kalkas held out his hand, first to the technician, then to the diplomat. “Your comrade, man Abramowitz. What’s the local treatment for hunger?”
“Best food in the System. I hope you like it.”
The provender of Trojan Port was not uniformly depressing; several fruits and vegetables flourished in weightless hydroponics. But protein appeared as either little cubes of vat beef or eggs from the automatic chicken, and the only condiment was salt. Among his twenty kilograms of luggage Kalkas had brought fifteen grams of oregano, forty of paprika, and seventy-five of powdered garlic. During his first months on Mars as Agent Delegate in Libya Dome, Kalkas had attempted to introduce a few mild spices into the bland cuisine of his official entertainments; the subsequent complaints of gastritis among those of his guests who swallowed more than a bite or two had puzzled him until he learned that he was contending not only against tastes, which could be educated, but also against biochemistry, which couldn’t. Kalkas told Neal Abramowitz that eating a good lunch would be a pleasure.
When the adrenalin pump stopped, the technician disconnected Kalkas from the capsule and Abramowitz led him to the personnel hatch. The Spaceman spidered easily along the net that lined much of the wall, while Kalkas moved painstakingly lest he cast himself adrift. His muscles had to work continuously against themselves, as if he were moving a heavy weight or a stiff lever just a millimeter or so; resistance must be overcome, but it must not be overcome too vigorously. At the hatch Kalkas needed to catch his breath. He had an uncertain sense of having passed this way before: perhaps he had been brought, for his last drop to Earth, to the same portal through which he had just returned to space. But all the portals are similar to each other, and on the day of going down he had been stupid with the drugs that would buttress him as he resumed the burden of his home planet’s gravity. Amid the fuss and melancholy of the Retirement he had too long extended his tour of duty on Mars; then he had paid for his added weeks there with an invalid year. At the end of this journey he would, he hoped, not need the lyserganol or the walking armor. To the pacemaker, the kidney drain, and the calcium seep, Woomera Clinic had added two stabilants and a broad-spectrum trace implant. If he kept up his exercises and his potassium intake he should be able to go home without danger.
Beyond the hatch, cables of various colors hissed along the wall, towing orbiters at a quickstep pace. Open-frame buggies, propelled by electric fans, whirred more rapidly through a screened central passage. Fashion in dress had apparently altered more in space than it had on Earth; the deep green leotard worn by Neal Abramowitz was conservative among the florid bikinis, cutaways, mesh vests, jockstraps, shorts, longs, and odd wrappings aswarm in the tube. For Kalkas the invariable seventeen degrees of the spaceworlds had always been sweater weather; he had many years ago become inured to the second glances or the stares of the acclimated.
“Do we go now to the hostel?” he asked Abramowitz.
“We can if you want to, but we’re only a hundred fifty meters from the best cafeteria on the Port. Are you nervous about riding the cables?”
“There’s some slight technique involved, I believe? Perhaps you’ll refresh my memory.”
“It helps to give yourself a little push and match speeds with the cable. And you have to remember to go overhand past the pulleys. Or I can get a buggy if you’d rather go that way.”
“I’ll do well enough on the cable, I believe. I have ridden them before. By the way, how is my luggage being handled?”
The Communications Officer was puzzled for a moment. “Hey, I don’t know, exactly. The freight rack, I guess, or a buggy, if that’s handier.”
“It will, in any case, be placed in my room at the hostel?”
“Room. Oh-right, right.”
Kalkas found once more that riding the cables was a simpler though more conscious skill than cycling; he was at leisure to look about as he rode. Trojan Port appeared not to have changed substantially since he had last been in its tubes and volumes. Its characteristic colors were still the off-whites and greys of various plastics, its characteristic sound was still the hum of fans, and its characteristic odor was still the vaguely fecal scent from the food-machines. Its people, however they dressed, were mostly long and pink. Kalkas was accustomed to the compromises struck between the needs people carried with them and the requirements of the places they came to; those compromises marked all of the Spaceborn’s homes, built where there was no air that men could breathe, where no grain grew. But the new homes were not identical each to each. Outside the wall of Libya Dome on Mars were hills and plains and craters, land and dust, a kind of air and a kind of life. Beyond the hulls of Trojan Port was the void. In a sense, the orbital station was the furthest from the old world of all the new worlds, even though it was the old world that the station orbited, and not many more generations could pass before Trojan Port was as alien to the other spaceworlds as they all now were to Earth.
The best cafeteria on the Port was a smallish volume nicely paneled in imitation redbrick and genuine moondust tile. Dining cotes, their frames covered with brown velvet, were anchored along a web of stationary cables sheathed in leathery scarlet plastic. The lighting was the dimmest Kalkas had ever seen, except in radar rooms, anywhere off Earth. He remarked to Abramowitz that the Spaceborn were beginning to develop sophisticated tastes.
“We’ve got a little time and energy to spare these days, so we can afford some fancy touches. Nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, either. The woman who designed this volume worked from holos of some of the big . . . cafes? Do you call them that?”
“Restaurants. Or clubs.”
“Right, right—clubs. Clubs in Miami and Honolulu. Does it remind you of them?”
“Yes. It certainly does.” Kalkas omitted to add that like the designer, he had seen such clubs only in holos.
“Hey, you’ll feel right at ease. That’s good.”
Putting the traveler at ease was the prelude to discovering the purpose of his trip, an enterprise that Neal Abramowitz undertook with vigor. Kalkas had decided months ago that only a convincing imitation of forthrightness could carry him through such interviews as this one. Few Spaceborn understood statements that depended for their significance upon implication or allusion; none that Kalkas had ever met were receptive to innuendo. If Kalkas tried to talk with Abramowitz as he would under comparable circumstances with, say, the Clerk Plenipotentiary of North America, the orbiter would almost surely be puzzled, even vexed, and might feel insulted. Since Kalkas had not only to reach Ganymede but also to gain a prize there and return with it to Earth, he must take care both to keep his way clear ahead and to leave no suspicions or dislikes behind. Fortunately, the Blushing Tunnels themselves provided a serviceable public motive for his journey.
“So the Conservancy has heavy hopes for the N’yerere process?” Abramowitz asked.
“We hope eventually to reforest all the Northern Rockies, perhaps re-establish grasses on the Great Plains. Terrestrial stocks of europium will be quite inadequate for the task.”
“If the Conservancy were negotiating through us, we’d save you the flight.”
Kalkas smiled at what passed for subtlety among the Spaceborn, knowing that Abramowitz would understand the smile to be an acknowledgment of Trojan Port’s commercial acumen. He specifically reinforced that understanding by saying, “I’m sure you’ll devise means of collecting your share, and probably more, of the transfer costs. And the transaction will be sufficiently expensive for us without our paying you ten per cent for making arrangements.”
“Even so, we’re a little surprised that the Conservancy would break its own rules for a few tons of rock. And our charges are always reasonable.”
“What would you have asked this time? A couple of Calder stabiles, perhaps, and a Pollock or two?”
The ploy succeeded; for the next twenty minutes they talked not of why Kalkas was traveling to Ganymede but of abstract expressionism. Trojan Port’s Culture Committee had offered a million megawatt-hours for Broadway Boogie Woogie; the Ministers of Conservancy were debating whether or not the sale would be an unwarranted expenditure of an unrenewable resource. Abramowitz had a holograph of the work in his private volume. It was one of his favorite paintings, in part because he thought that Mondrian had worked from traffic-flow statistics. Kalkas said that, for all he knew to the contrary, the artist might have done so.
“I really hope you make the trade. Holos are neat, but they don’t have the feel of the real.”
“No, of course not. But you mustn’t be greedy; Trojan Port already has the best gallery above Earth.”
“Right, right. Hey, would you like to see it?”
“Yes, I would, but only for a short while, please. My adrenalin seems to be close to normal, so I expect I’ll begin to tire soon.”
Trojan Port had begun its Art Space just after the turn of the century but had acquired the most important works in the collection during the past two decades, as the Port Commanders and the Exchange Committee grew ever more knowing not only about trade but about art. When Kalkas had last seen it the Space had been a slender tube near the hydroponics volume, featuring many holos, a few Klees, and a single Chagall. Now the first thing he saw as they entered an enormous sphere was Guernica, upside down. Like the cotes in the Port’s best cafeteria, two hundred or so paintings, sculptures, stabiles, and mobiles were suspended in a scarlet web that filled the volume. A few score orbiters drifted along the strands or hung still before various works, turning occasionally to alter the perspective, sometimes pivoting very slowly on the long axes of their bodies. As Abramowitz towed him along the radii and chords of the display, Kalkas might have been one of his own Attic forebears being given a conducted tour of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. Kalkas had little discernment in art and little affection for the works of the Consumption Age, but now he began for the first time to appreciate emotionally how much the Conservancy was paying for the megawatts, the metals, the rare earths, and the machinery to keep its folk alive while the lands grew green again. It is earthborn, he thought; someday it must come back to us.
Abramowitz had not utterly forgotten his diplomatic intelligence assignment, and before they had completed half a circle he asked whether Kalkas might be followed by other travelers coming up. Kalkas found it easy to say that, with luck, there could be several more; hovering before Kelly’s Colors For a Large Wall he thought of adding that some, once up, might stay, but he knew that that would be too suggestive of the truth. He must not provoke the Spaceborn to any thorough and coordinated investigation, for the vital connection could be discovered from a few questions asked in Libya Dome. The risk was already so high that Ferenc Troyant might realize that the inane suspicions he had harbored nearly two decades before had been well founded, that Auckland’s procomps had refused to venture a prediction beyond Kalkas’s transfer to orbit. The only thing that made the gambit practical was the coincidence that the N’yerere process, which would, indeed, require large quantities of europium, was succeeding in the Bitterroot tests.
Soon Kalkas was honestly able to plead weariness. He and Abramowitz rode in a buggy to the hostel. The Communications Officer spoke casually of new facilities or extensions of the port; Kalkas seldom replied with more than a nod or a murmur. At the hostel—a short hexagonal tube boasting a bathcloset in each of its twenty-four private volumes—Kalkas pressed his thumb to a record card, thanked Abramowitz, and went to what he persistently thought of as his room to check the integrity of his luggage. He assumed it had been scanned, and it could have been opened, but nothing was missing or noticeably rearranged. Clearly no one had been ingenious enough to discover that the stainless steel liquor canteen was a cryogenic flask. Neither had anyone cracked the seal on the full cologne bottle to discover that the liquid inside was nothing like cologne. Kalkas broke a different seal, fitted a self-closing straw to the nozzle, and, in defiance of Woomera Clinic, drew a sip of Djokjakarta’s finest scotch.
The Conservancy’s purposes, he thought, might have been better served by a different agent; he had said as much to the Minister of Futurity. But a form of the seduction that had first drawn him up thirty-five years before drew him again: Once more he would be going far and going into strangeness, where the light of the sun is not the light that falls on Earth; once more, too, he would be putting behind him, for a space, all that he most desired to have when he returned. Thus he had agreed to travel some billions of kilometers and fetch, if he could, a gram or two of Cris Troyant’s skin.
He would also arrange for the shipping of several tons of europium oxide, with which N’yerere’s crews would try to turn North America’s sad grey mountains once more black with conifers, but the only prize would be the chromosome sample for the New Breed project. If Cris carried the sort of genes that her heredity suggested, and if those genes were unmixed with catastrophic recessives, and if the requisite clonic crossbreeds could be fixed, then the Conservancy might be able, within a few decades, to send its own colonists into space. Perhaps it would be no easier for these theoretical spacegoing Earthborn to return to their birthworld than it was for the Spaceborn to visit it. The Conservancy’s biochemists, however, would insure that they remained of Earth, and the psychologists would insure that they never forgot it. Most important, they could continue to crossbreed with ordinary Earthborn. The genetic disaster of cross-infertility would not recur. Thus the success of the project would insure for the Conservancy a supply of energy and raw materials not to be endangered by any vagaries of Spaceborn taste or evolution.
“You want a species of inverted Janissaries,” Kalkas had told the Minister of Futurity, and then had had to explain the allusion.
The Minister had agreed. “Yes. Because we cannot depend upon ourselves, and we dare not depend upon the Spaceborn. The pro-comps forecast a four per cent probability that the woman’s genes are precisely what we require. Even if they are not, the procomps forecast almost eighteen per cent that they can be clonically crossbred to the optimum.”
“Forecast?”
“The procomps don’t think they know enough about the mother’s genetic endowment for a prediction. When the conservation of every earthborn species may be at issue, I think we must pursue even these odds.”
Snug now in the padded, anchored sleeping pouch, Kalkas drew a last sip of scotch and recalled one of his infrequent visits to the Troyant compartment. Cris had been walking sturdily, so it could not have been many months before the Retirement. The little girl had nothing of Ferenc in her, save perhaps a lack of laughter, but she had her mother’s green eyes and shaggy red hair. Kalkas was pleased with that resemblance, which appeared in neither of the child’s brothers. Nothing about her as an embryo or as a puling infant had pleased him, but she had begun to charm him now. He was showing her parents the near-mint copy of the Bonestell Centennial Portfolio that a historical survey group had found in the abandoned Maryknoll Dome when she bounced over to look too. Both Macky and Ferenc were amused by the primitive, though sometimes surprisingly prescient, visualizations of planetary surfaces, but Cris, to whose point of view the reproductions were upside down, gazed at them soberly, occasionally tracing a line or two with one finger. When they came to the painting of the Milky Way as seen from an extragalactic rogue planet, Cris said “Oooo” and for many minutes would not let the page be turned. Macky said something about the child’s liking mandalas.
Kalkas wondered what patterns stood or spun in the body and the mind of the young woman who had been that child.
* * * *
Neither the Logistics Board nor the Transportation Subcommittee ordinarily levies a fare for passage, but both are scrupulous in the allocation of volume. Of the nineteen primary craft that the Conservancy traded to Luna and Mars at the time of the Retirement, only the five emigrant carriers are properly fitted for passengers, and of those the four oldest, all first launched before the beginning of Trojan Port, are no longer quite safe. Travelers, therefore, must either suit their plans to the schedule of Altair or attempt to wangle part of the supercargo volume of a freight craft. To avoid any formal involvement of Ferenc Troyant, the Conservancy had negotiated Kalkas’ passage with Luna, consigning him thereby to a voyage longer by a week than one undertaken in a Subcommittee craft. Kalkas did not begrudge the time spent in transfer, but he was sorry that celestial mechanics and the acceleration tolerances of Moonmen would require him either to return tediously by way of Mercury or to wait seven months on Ganymede for Betelgeuse. The Director of Information Resources had argued for the layover, but Kalkas had persuaded the Minister of Futurity that two weeks was adequate. Negotiations with the Board grew complex, but finally Kalkas had the option of returning with Vega or waiting for Betelgeuse, and Luna was guaranteed the freighting of europium oxide from Ganymede for five years. Luna also had a choice between Blue Poles and White Light.
A day after his arrival at Trojan Port, Kalkas rode in a vacuum boat the five hundred kilometers out to Vega. Despite Woomera Clinic and Djokjakarta’s finest scotch, or perhaps because of their interaction, he had slept badly, dreaming in fits and snatches of his life on Mars, his many journeys, the horrid year in the walking armor. At last, unable to sleep at all, he had gone to breakfast, then wasted a gram of garlic and half that much paprika attempting to make palatable the fare served by the hostel. His dyspepsia was intensified by Neal Abramowitz’s honest cheerfulness when the Communications Officer came to see him to the boat portal. Kalkas was certain that the orbiter would have come out of mere friendliness even if he had had no official business.
“We’ve been hoping that the Conservancy would find a way to launch out the gamete trade again.”
“You may as well hope for immigrants, which, I assure you, the Minister of Demographics wishes he could send. But Auckland has no reason to think that the results would differ from those of the last experiments.”
“Stein Bayly has a good argument for the mechanistic interpretation. Hey, maybe you saw his paper? We tried to make sure it was broadcast kinda widely.”
Five years earlier the Officer’s predecessor had been less circumspect: “If we have to, we’ll saturate every RTV frequency on Earth.”
“I read it,” Kalkas said. “I read Li Hong’s refutation, as well, and like the Ministers I found the geneticist more persuasive than the biophysicist. But as I understand the situation, Bayly’s thesis did suggest certain interesting new lines.”
He did not add that the lines, when they did not reach dead ends, only reinforced the Conservancy’s determination not to reopen the gamete trade but to pursue New Breed instead. That intention had not disturbed Kalkas until he learned that the pursuit required his services. A third- or fourth-hand rumor of the project had reached him some five years ago, by way of an anthropologist on a working visit. Kalkas had had little interest, then, for anything but his diplomatic history; he was trying to bring the orderliness of hindsight to a concluded age, and he preferred not to speculate whether that age might open anew. But soon the project directors, pressed by nearly all the Ministers to produce results quickly, had set aside their attempts to construct the appropriate chromosomes from purely terrestrial bases and had begun examining the records of Earthmen in space through the fifty years preceding the Retirement. Within a few weeks it had occurred to someone to interview the Earthman who had been longest in space and who had been among the very last to come down.
Thus Kalkas was the first Earthman to come out of Retirement. As he handwalked gingerly through the short tube joining the vacuum boat to the longrunner he felt again, more strongly now, the sense of repetition that had touched him yesterday as he left the portal. This time, however, the sense had a clear association: he recalled, not his first transfer out nor his last one in, but his return to Mars after his rotation leave of 2140. Then he had felt that whatever direction he took he would return to something earlier left behind, as if he could not go away from but only toward. The perception had gratified him, but its notional recurrence, eighteen years later, was subtly disturbing. He intended to have no home on Ganymede.
A long young woman, dressed in the snug, many-pocketed coveralls common to longrunner staffs, awaited Kalkas in the lock at the end of the tunnel. She introduced herself as Nadya Strode, Head of the Astrogation Unit, and Kalkas recognized a diplomatic pattern. The Spaceborn, not wanting to offend the man who might signal the Conservancy’s re-entry into space but also not wanting to appear overanxious, were delegating first officers to escort the traveler. Twenty years ago Kalkas would have been met in Trojan Port by the Logistics Officer, if by anyone; the Associate Quartermaster would have welcomed him aboard Vega. But he suspected that now the Commander’s first impulse and the Captain’s had been to greet the Earthman himself, that impulse diverted by the reflection that the Conservancy occasionally misled by being entirely straightforward. Kalkas guessed that the Blushing Tunnels had already been advised to have the Executive Engineer at the landing zone.
Nadya Strode’s own concerns were obvious: She wanted to store the supercargo for which she had been made responsible and hurry back to the control bay where she belonged. Although she betrayed no curiosity about the only Earthman she could have seen since she was ten or twelve, she did try to put Kalkas at ease in an environment she seemed to assume was thoroughly strange to him.
“Things will seem more normal when we start blasting,” she said. “That’ll give us up and down again.”
Like any flight attendant demonstrating the safety bubble, she showed Kalkas how to use the netting strips and handholds, then led him along the gallery. The interior of Vega differed from the interior of Trojan Port chiefly in scale and the frequency of straight lines. There were no buggy cages, of course, but the elevators had a similar function. Kalkas remarked that the longrunners had apparently not been altered in fifteen years.
“It’s a good design,” said Nadya Strode. “When we build our own they won’t be a tad different.”
In a more amiable mood or of a less businesslike person Kalkas would not have permitted himself to ask, “Do you expect ever to serve on a Moonbuilt longrunner?”
“No, we’ll probably ask Trojan Port to build them. I’ve heard we’re beginning to stockpile capital materiel in Grimaldi.”
Kalkas would have been less discomfited had there been any hint of sardonicism in Strode’s manner.
The design of supercargo volume in a longrunner intended primarily to transfer goods owes much to George Pullman. During the years since the Retirement Kalkas had forgotten what thin partitions divide one acceleration couch from another and what modest arrangements are made for privacy. His own bungalow in Canea was small, of course, but he could never feel cramped while the Mediterranean was soughing forty feet from his window. Now he had neither window nor door but only the grey screen of a tape deck and an accordion-pleated panel. After unfolding the panel and checking the bins to make sure his bags had been stowed, he strapped himself to the couch and, on a whim, asked the library if it had Hugo. He wanted to read “Driving Montana” again, because he had remembered, in this most purely manmade place, that “you are lost / in miles of land without people, without / one fear of being found, in the dash / of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl / merge and clatter of streams.” The library responded with a sette of Odes et Ballades, leaving Kalkas with nothing to do but doze until the blast started, wondering hazily what sort of bird an antelope had been.
A klaxon announced five minutes until blast, and at one minute a taped voice began counting down. The return of weight, unlike that provided briefly by the vacuum boat, was instantaneous and continued, a jerk that never tapered off, so that Kalkas could not for a moment repress the emotional certainty that the longrunner was plunging out of control. In a magnetic bottle a hundred and fifty meters astern the fusion bomb had been detonated that would explode throughout most of the next three weeks. The traveler, committed now to his farthest travel, felt at once blank-minded and exuberant, caught up utterly in the wonderful fact of departure.
For twenty minutes or so, while the possibility was greatest that the blast might have to be canceled and rezapped, Kalkas remained on his couch, given up to wandering thoughts of where he had been and where he was going. Once he had been to the Eagle’s Pylon in Tranquilitatis; he guessed, as he read the names and dates etched into the anodized metal, that none of those men had expected to die without seeing a second series of exploratory footprints scuffed in the ancient dust. Once he had been to Pasadena; there the administrative engineer, speaking in the tones of a man who likes his job and wants to continue doing it for a long time, told him that there were enough sulfates in the local ecosystem to keep the cracking plant pouring out water and free oxygen for fifty or sixty years, provided the power were not cut off. Never once had Kalkas been to Boilerplate, the first colony settled exclusively by Spaceborn, but now he was on his way to the Blushing Tunnels, the first colony in whose establishment the Conservancy had taken no part. The range of his travels was implausible. As a young person newly certified by the Canea Institute, he might have joined one of the terrestrial Ministries with fair prospects of becoming sometime a Clerk, a Minister, an appointed Delegate. He had never explained to himself nor had anyone, even Macky, ever asked him why, after a week’s hiking on the fringe of the Rhone Barrens, he had applied for a posting to Space Affairs. Perhaps in another time he would have become an agnostic monk.
After the same voice that had counted down announced the security of the blast, Kalkas released himself from his couch and looked for the stalls; the embarrassingly ingenious apparatus built into the couch, since it had to be emptied by hand, was to be used only when one was strapped down for hours or while weightless. The stalls, meant to be used only under acceleration, were little different from those in any earthbound aircraft. They were both occupied when Kalkas found them.
Within a few minutes a man emerged from one. He looked at Kalkas’ clothes and said, “You must be the Earthborn.” They chatted briefly, and Kalkas, learning that the other traveler came from Mars, agreed to join him for coffee in the common room.
Apparently everyone aboard but the duty crew had foregathered in the semicircular volume a short way around the deck from the supercargo. Twenty people were sitting or standing about, most sipping from mugs or from tall glasses filled with the garish waters that passed for soft drinks. Kalkas presumed that the longrunners still maintained the custom of limiting alcohol to dinnertime.
The Marsman, having gotten coffee for Kalkas and himself, had taken a table near the serving station at the middle of the inner curve. The chatter of conversation did not stop as Kalkas moved to join him, but it did stammer and change pitch for a moment, as it would were a white person to enter a chewing room in Cape Town. Kalkas nodded, pleasantly and casually, to those who turned to look at him, receiving “hi’s” and “harya’s” in turn.
“You show up like flygrass in Noachis,” said the Marsman. “I’m Ed Smith, man Kalkas.”
“Your comrade, man Smith. I find the attention mostly agreeable; it’s difficult, you know, for an individual to be noticed on Earth.”
“The teeming millions, huh? Be rum if we could trade you space for population.”
“It must be one of Finagle’s Laws that the most attractive barters are the ones that cannot be made. You may recall the negotiations about the longrunners just before the Retirement? Everyone involved knew that Trojan Port was the logical choice to hold most, if not all of them, but for one factor: they couldn’t possibly staff them with their own people.”
“Real hard. I don’t know much about it; I was still in studies then.”
“Your field?”
“Exobiology. I’m going to Blushing to do a project on the squirms with Rosenbaum’s team. See if we can find out how they eat X-rays.”
“I’m fascinated. Tell me more.” Kalkas was disappointed. Neither a physicist nor an administrator, Smith probably did not even know Ferenc Troyant, save by name, much less work with him, and so could scarcely provide Kalkas with pertinent information. Kalkas began to give more attention to the other passengers. Marsfolk, no less than Earthfolk, must move more selfconsciously under Lunar acceleration than do those who were born to it. But his observations were made superfluous when Nadya Strode came to the table. She carried a glass full of mauve liquid that Kalkas guessed was meant to imitate grape juice, and a crescent of it stained her upper lip. Seating herself, she asked whether they had realized that they were the only non-Moonfolk aboard.
Kalkas smiled. “Of course: You see how we gravitated toward each other.”
Smith only looked blank, but, surprising Kalkas, Strode grinned and replied, “Light-footed, light-witted.”
“Light-hearted, too, then,” Kalkas added, but that turned out to be an idiom no longer current among the Spaceborn. He had to explain that it named an attitude, not a physiological condition. Ed Smith said that it sounded to him like a way of giving irresponsibility a biophysical excuse.
“Man Kalkas,” asked Nadya Strode, “would it be fair to say that the Earthborn know more about irresponsibility than anyone else?”
“It would be fair—if you added that we have also learned more about responsibility than anyone else.”
“I don’t want you to read this personal,” said Smith, “but you had to learn. You didn’t have an option.”
Having resigned hope of learning much about Martian conditions in general or the Troyants in particular, Kalkas had begun to wonder if he would have no better way to occupy his time in transfer than reading or playing bridge. Now he was certain that he had found a more engaging diversion. Besides the twelve other men among the little crowd in the common room, he could assume two more among the duty crew. Allowing for instances of indifference or distaste and assuming that Strode would, indeed, be in the game, he could expect that she would chum at least six or seven during the transfer, some repeatedly. Kalkas, unlike many Earthborn, had never been fond of competitive venery, but Smith was so model a Marsman that outplaying him at anything would be like old times in Libya Dome.
“ ‘Option’ may be the wrong word,” he told Smith, “if we identify the growth of the Conservancy with our learning process. Some of the institutions that now seem to serve us best, grew up almost accidentally. And no one can certainly predict that the choices we have made and must continually make will prove correct. We may fail in the end.”
“But no one would choose failure,” Smith objected. “Success is the survival factor. You had to try what you could.”
Kalkas practiced a wry smile. “Man Smith, I believe you wish to deny us credit for whatever tentative success we have enjoyed.”
Nadya Strode interrupted: “Man Kalkas, are all Earthfolk ... I can’t think of the word.” She scowled, not, as Kalkas would have, with embarrassment but with simple uncertainty.
Smith suggested “pessimistic.”
“No, that’s not on. Not ‘sad,’ either. ‘Melancholy.’ That’s the one. Are you all melancholy?”
“Not at all. For example, I’m a quite cheerful person, but I don’t demonstrate that I am in such ways as you might. We have different vocabularies of emotion.”
“So we’d need a translator.”
“I doubt that there is one. We’ll have to devise our own mutual glossary.”
“Who wants more coffee?” Smith asked.
Kalkas never learned the exact ratio of his success to Smith’s in the contest that Smith never realized had been joined, but he was confident that Strode came more often to him than she went to the Marsman. He was glad she was active; he would have found it tedious to hunt.
Kalkas became acquainted with the other passengers and staff; he found a bridge game, and during the rest of the transfer he spoke to Smith no more than half a dozen times. The Marsman’s couch was too far around the curve of the supercargo gallery from the Earthman’s to allow Kalkas to mount even an informal watch. Thus he had to infer from irregular observation and tangential conversations with Strode the state of affairs between Marsman and Moonwoman. The triangle bore some resemblance to the one he had made with the Troyants. Kalkas was Kalkas, Ed Smith was not unlike Ferenc Troyant, but Nadya Strode had little in common with Macky. Even had Macky ever traveled, she would have been no player; her loyalty to Ferenc, bound up as it was with her dedication to Mars, had never broken, no matter how the stress of her passions distorted it. Occasionally Kalkas had wondered if her desire for him was anything but some oddly mutated element of her diplomacy; certainly his own involvement had proceeded as much from his exasperation with Ferenc as from his taste for Macky.
Often enough he had regretted that the involvement had ever grown past that early duplicity, for he had learned that he could purchase joy only with detachment. The execution of no other duty had hurt him so much as retiring from Mars, yet even as he departed from his last hour with Macky he felt relief at the completion of the affair. The news, eight years later, of her death had struck him as hardly more than a fact.
When Kalkas saw his daughter for the first time in fifteen years, she was seated at a programming console making patterns flash in a readout globe; he scarcely glanced at her. Neither did she look up from her work as the Executive Engineer explained how the tunneling machines and, indeed, all the robots were directed by the procomps arrayed here. The Instruction Center was the third stop on the tour Kalkas was being given, following a quick hike along the primary tunnel and a glance into the main extension in progress, preceding a more leisurely inspection of the slag dumps, the labs, and, as a climax, the surface dome. Kalkas had no need to pretend interest; the factitiousness of the Blushing Tunnels absorbed and disquieted him. Alone of the permanent settlements, Blushing began and continues with neither a political nor an economic purpose. The four older colonies expend energy and capital materiel, Libya Dome and Boilerplate contributing some of their people, for an enterprise from which none can expect any goods in return. Blushing is the most permanent research station ever established. The United States at their grandest never ventured such a pure extravagance.
“I hesitate to open an unpleasant subject,” Kalkas said, “but do you have contingency plans in case the inner space-worlds discontinue their support?”
The Executive Engineer seemed to be surprised by the notion. “There’d be no reason for ‘em to do that. Jupiter’s got to be the biggest thing this side of the sun.” Then he shrugged and made the qualification pro forma: “Well—star flight.”
“Whether or not it ever needs to be, could Blushing become self-sustaining?”
“I doubt it. There’s probably no recoverable iron in the whole ball. I random we’d move to Io.”
“You wouldn’t petition Luna for immigration?”
“What damn for? Our rationale’s Jupiter studies.”
By the time they reached the conveyors that rose to the dumps, Kalkas was certain that he wanted to secure his passage home on Vega; the tedium of a three-month transfer could not be worse than a seven-month confinement among these appalling epistemophiles. But first he must devise a meeting with his daughter. He wished he knew what she looked like.
The Executive Engineer had hinted, very broadly, that the vision of Jupiter from the surface dome would be entrancing; he was prepared, he implied, to allow Kalkas an hour or so of contemplation before dragging him down again. In the event, it was Kalkas who suggested after fifteen minutes that they go below and who had twice to repeat the suggestion. The colors, the banded clouds, the rather foreshortened Red Spot, the visible moils of the deepest, most agitated planetary atmosphere in the System, all combined into a handsome display, but Jupiter was no more imposing than any other planet seen from a close orbit. The violet blush along the horizon was more interesting but no more seductive, since it reminded Kalkas of the energies and ingenuity required to insulate this place.
As they descended in the elevator Kalkas tried to lighten the Executive Engineer’s disappointment by asking questions about the progress of the Jovian researches. The Ganyman turned out to be a competent popularizer; Kalkas learned about gas-giant tectonics, quasi-phoenix reactions, and ammonia organics. It was not information that Kalkas cared to retain beyond the moment, but the Executive Engineer’s enthusiasm for it suggested a minor cultural puzzle.
“I should have thought,” Kalkas said, “that Jupiter would allure you more as studied through procomp readouts than by unaided vision.”
The Executive Engineer was silent a few seconds. “I never thought about it,” he said. “Maybe we respond to it directly because we know what it means.”
Having wearied of science reportage, Kalkas did not ask what it meant. Although he wondered if such mysticism could have drawn Cris Troyant to Ganymede, her motives scarcely concerned him. Yet he needed, for the sake of his errand, to know more about her, so, over coffee in the canteen, he turned the conversation to the staffing of the Tunnels. The Executive Engineer would rather have talked of squirms or grazers or scaphes, perhaps, but he accommodated himself to his guest’s wishes.
“More from Libya Dome than Boilerplate, pos, more to give. But that makes no problems. Most Mercuryfolk’re only a generation, two, away from Mars. I random there’ll never be real difference. Possibly a little in the musculature.”
“You’re a Mercuryman, aren’t you?”
“Pos, how’d you random? But I’m a Ganyman now.”
When the Executive Engineer’s great-grandchildren thus named themselves, Kalkas thought, they would be no less than morphogenetically precise.
“Do you, perhaps, know a young Ganywoman, who used to be a Marswoman, named Troyant?”
The Ganyman did, identifying her as one of the best procomp handlers in Blushing, and Kalkas explained that she was the daughter of a Martian acquaintance. Since the Executive Engineer was not curious about the connection, Kalkas did not bother to lie about it; he turned his attention, instead, to persuading the Engineer that the notion of asking Cris to join them for dinner was the Engineer’s own. They spent the rest of the afternoon in preliminary discussion of trade ratios: so many tons of unprocessed europium oxide for so much cloth, so much paper, so much liqueur, and so forth. Kalkas had been prepared to invent minor difficulties in the interest of plausibility, but the lack of any standard medium of exchange or any precedent for this transaction made that unnecessary. The Ganyfolk— two others had joined the Executive Engineer—were hard bargainers, and so Kalkas had two motives for agreeing that business talk should be forbidden during dinner.
The characteristic fare of Blushing depressed Kalkas less than the food of Trojan Port or Vega; the Ganyfolk, dependent upon a supply line and more interested in Jupiter than in colonization, had no automatic chicken, no nowcow, no vat for beef, no accelerated rice. Fruits and vegetables they had in plenty, of course, but most of their protein was, more or less unabashedly, seaweed, yeast, and algae. With the aid of his spices Kalkas found it easier to swallow the honestly insipid pastes of the canteen than the artificially flavored foods of the cafeteria or the common room. Unfortunately, Blushing did boast a turkeypot which was harvested for special occasions. The first Earthman to visit Ganymede was a special occasion, and at dinner turkey was regularly set before him. He drew heavily upon his diminishing reserves of spice without being able to generate the illusion that the textureless white discs were anything but edible plastic.
Cris Troyant was slightly offended by the spices, not, it seemed, because their use implied a comment about Blushing’s premier food but because they were an Earthborn taste that no Spaceborn had ever acquired. Her nose was sensitive; she wrinkled it immediately when Kalkas opened his little box of paprika, and asked him if that was one of the flavorings he had used in the famous Agency dinners.
“Ferenc told you about those? I experimented with paprika once, very lightly, on cabbage. It wasn’t such a disaster as garlic, but it convinced me not to go on to cayenne.”
“These things change the flavor of the food.”
It wasn’t a question, but Kalkas replied as if it were. “In a sense they do. They have their own flavors, and they can also be used to emphasize the flavors of the foods to which they’re added. They help us pay attention to what we eat.”
Looking blank, Cris turned back to her plastic turkey. By the time the meal ended, Kalkas had begun uneasily to wonder if there were any possible approach to the girl. She seemed to be unresponsive, not because she was shy or preoccupied, but because she had no interest that Kalkas could touch. Her eyes, opaque rather than dull, received but did not send, and her lips were compressed. He imagined her exercising to relax, preferring water to coffee, and studying thoughtful books in her spare time. He understood why he had not recognized her when he saw her earlier, in the Instruction Center. Her hair had lost its flame; she was nearly chubby. She dressed in the stylized utilitarianism of Mars, but her clothes lacked the usual clashing bright colors; her pullover was light grey, her shorts were pale blue, and her only accessory was a narrow peltex belt that held a brooch in place over her navel. The brooch was a disc of polished olympistone, orange rather than crimson, lightly carved with a Greek cross. Kalkas thought she might talk about it, but she said only that it had been a gift. She didn’t stop for coffee, and Kalkas was left with no choice but to prospect among the other Ganyfolk.
“She doesn’t seem much like her parents.”
“Never met ‘em,” said the Executive Engineer. “Mother died. Cris doesn’t communi much. Ever beep bids with Ferenc?”
“Often, but more often with Macky. Ferenc didn’t sit on the Communications Subcommittee until shortly before the Retirement. He was never voluble, but he was never so locktaped as his daughter seems to be.”
“Voluble?” The Executive Engineer didn’t know the word.
The Head Beep Programmer said, “Long-interval polytalker,” and went on to tell Kalkas that Cris connected better through readouts than through speech. “She’s a booster on the procomps. I’ve been gramming for thirty years, and I’m not many diblets quicker than she is now.”
Two days later Kalkas found an excuse to adjourn the session early and relaxed from the negotiations by strolling through the Tunnels. Using the creddy his hosts had provided him for such casual occasions, he sampled the flavored alcohol served by a tiny step-in, rented a few music settes for the player in his room, and bought a charming little crystal pendant that held within it a complex three-dimensional pattern traced with europium oxide. Presently his wanderings brought Kalkas to the procomp section. No one objected to the Earthborn guest looking in on some of the daily labors of the colony, so he stayed for a while and grew interested in Cris Troyant’s work. When, once, she paused and leaned back from her console, he asked her a question, which she answered shortly but clearly, and then he asked if she would spend a few minutes over coffee telling him about her work.
She would, although she hadn’t much time to waste and she didn’t —as she said when they reached the canteen—like coffee, preferring instead a bubbly concoction called Greenwhistle.
“What do you want me to tell you?”
Kalkas wanted to know what his genes could possibly have contributed to her, but he began talking with her about the extent to which Blushing relied on the procomps. His own quite informal acquaintance with the devices had come chiefly in Libya Dome, where every office, every kitchen, every lab had a terminal, and most drudgery was performed by slaved specialty robots. Afforded such sybaritism, Kalkas had promptly shed the housekeeping habits in which Earthborn children are trained, but he had never grown easy with the quasi-cyborgs that made his domestic laziness possible. Both the energy-extensive policies of the Conservancy and the naturistic element of the global village culture inhibited the use of procomps on Earth; even the Clerks and Ministers who relied most heavily on them felt some distaste for the things. But the Ganyfolk used them even when metallic circuitry or human labor might be more efficient: some of the research teams, Cris said, were composed solely of procomps whose handlers only checked program obedience and methodology patterns.
“I handle quasi-phoenix study a lot,” she said by way of illustration.
“And you don’t know precisely what your procomps are doing, but you know they’re doing it?”
“Pos.”
The certainty of her knowledge perplexed Kalkas just as the mode and content of it disturbed him. He was familiar with readout globes as auxiliaries to screens and printers; to the procomp handlers of Blushing, screens were useless and printers only supplemented holographs recorded directly from the globes. Cris read the shifting patterns as easily as Kalkas read Kuoyü. The analogy was imprecise, of course, because the procomps employed a language that could not be spoken, whose tagmemes were points, lines, colors, and motions. It was not a tongue, it was a face, and Kalkas doubted that any Earth-born had ever made it.
For a short time Kalkas supposed that facility with the procomps was to Cris what talent was to some painters and sculptors and composers, either cause or symptom of a radical inarticulateness. But as he tried to improve his acquaintance with his daughter, he realized that she was simply impatient with the linearities and cadences of ordinary language. She preferred the meaning mandalas; she disdained what she thought a poor substitute. Kalkas was at the worst disadvantage of his career.
Weeks later, as Vega decelerated past the orbit of Earth in vector to Mercury, Kalkas concluded that it had been, after all, the inhuman symbography of the procomps that had led finally to his success. His reflection was prompted by the image of Earth displayed on the big screen of the common room; the planet happened to be only a few million kilometers from the longrunner’s course, and the astrogating scope had been fixed on it for several hours. Examining his responses to the display, Kalkas found among them, as he had expected, no hint of any feeling that the image was making a statement to him, that the planet as shown meant anything—anything, at least, but itself. Yet Cris, certainly, would endue it with some recondite signification; her inability to make clear what she meant when she spoke of the physicality and the inevitability and the connectingness of the signs in the globes had been what provoked her to lead Kalkas up to the surface dome.
“Jupiter’ll show you,” she said.
She would not have been trying to explain or even to state what she meant, perhaps would not have bothered to mean at all, had she not been made loquacious by scotch. To give himself apparent leisure for his real work, Kalkas had concluded negotiations for the europium oxide in four days, at a cost that would strip three rooms of the Retrospect Gallery and commit to Blushing half of Sulawesi’s coffee crop for the next five years. Then he concentrated upon his secret diplomacy. He was prepared to be egregious, if he must: break into the cubicle Cris shared, waylay her in a deserted corridor, the sort of antics in which the Garbage Authority occasionally indulged. But he preferred other tactics, so he happened to meet his daughter at breakfast or lunch or supper or odd moments, two or three times he visited the procomp section, and once the Head Beep Programmer had an impromptu yayho to which Cris came for a short time. Cris liked the crystal pendant, offhandedly given, casually accepted, and opened, in her fashion, to the interest in procomps that Kalkas painstakingly simulated.
Yet for all his efforts Kalkas had made little progress toward the isolated fifteen minutes or so that he needed, and was nearly settled upon a Garbage method, until the shalom party given him two nights before Vega was to blast. Before leaving his own cubicle Kalkas filled his little cryogenic flask with the last of his scotch. As he anticipated, both flask and scotch became talk things at the party. The flask, not inspected too closely, was admired as quirky craftsmanship, and the scotch, once sniffed, led to discussions of taste and chromosomes. Cris, sipping Greenwhistle, became interested when Kalkas, with a straight face, asserted that the Spaceborn were handicapped.
“We can all smoke or drift or dazzle,” he said, “but to drink, you —not I—must camouflage the alcohol with dextrose or sucrose or plastic flavors. Even then your tolerance is low.”
“What do we dump?” asked Cris.
From among his disreputable reading a quotation occurred to Kalkas. “ ‘The troubles of our proudly angry dust / Come from eternity and will not fail. / Bear them we can, and since we can, we must. / Shoulder the sky, my boy, and drink your ale.’“ He was glad he remembered it in English; in Persian, of course, it did not rhyme. Neither did it appear to say much to Cris, even after he explained “dust” and “ale” to her, and he abandoned the notion, never very promising, of getting her intoxicated. But when he poured a second forty millies for himself, she asked if she might have a taste. She sipped delicately, did not gasp or choke, and finished the few millies Kalkas had given her, and asked for more. Kalkas, his hopes rising, poured a long squirt.
Although she thus began her fall by attempting to show that Spaceborn could drink just as neatly as Earthborn, when she grew talkative her subject was the procomps. For her they were not the essence but perhaps the sine qua won—although she didn’t know the phrase— of the Spaceborn achievement; through them and by them and in them the Spaceborn not only knew the universe but spoke with it. She did not, however, mean “spoke,” so she had to try to explain the language: “It’s not like words, because the connections are inevitable. In any system you can use.” “See, we can assume reality, because it doesn’t count if it’s not real, and every quiddy is real as it is.” “If there’s a vector, it’s physically there” “You don’t memorize compsy, you see it. Like you see stars.” “Jupiter’ll show you.”
Standing again in the surface dome, Kalkas would have given his attention, as he had before, mostly to the auroras at the horizon, where the charged particles bound in Jupiter’s magnetosphere were turned away from the dwellings of men. But Cris wanted him to attend to Jupiter, fifty degrees up the curve of the sky, flaunting its racing bands, its sodium cyclones, its presence. She described, not very clearly, some findings of the quasi-phoenix studies.
“See,” she said, pointing to the gibbous disc but looking continually at her father and now touching his arm, “all meaning and beautiful.”
For many seconds Kalkas stared at the gas giant; he had been touched suddenly by sympathy for Cris in her frustration, as she tried to make a language she despised serve her. Speaking carefully he said, “Yes. The sight of Jupiter is powerfully emblematic to you because the planet is the reason you’re here, the focus of all your labors. Furthermore, it’s an enormous and complex thing, yet from here you see it singly and at once, so the perception is intense, extremely intense. Is this analogous to the functioning of the readout globe patterns for you?”
Cris had begun to look disappointed before he finished. In the space between them or between worlds, a link had been broken or had never been forged. After a few mute seconds, Cris looked away from Kalkas to Jupiter, then away from both. Tired, vexed, still wondering how he might complete his errand, the purposeful traveler began to follow his daughter down the circular stairs that led into the safety lock and so to the elevator. As she went, Cris lifted one shoulder in what seemed to be a kind of shrug.
“I random Earthborn never will reckon,” she said. “We’ll run without you.”
Hoping she’d break her neck, Kalkas pushed her, and she clanged down the spiral in a flurry of arms and legs.
The fall was not lethal, but it was stunning; Kalkas had the opportunity he wanted. In the dome’s tiny washroom he rinsed the flask of the remaining scotch. With his penknife he sliced several grams of skin from Cris’s left forearm. He scraped the wound roughly, as the edge of a step might have done, and sealed his prize in the flask; the suspensor fluid would have to be added when he returned to his cubicle. He had what he had come to get.
Many years later he would have to count what he had given for it.