“Austere but lovely,” the man said into silence. His breath smoked, though the season, late summer, brought no deep cold. “Like you. Tell me, what do Dennitzans see in the markings on their moon? Terrans usually find a face in theirs.”
“Why … our humans call the pattern an orlik. That’s a winged theroid; this planet has no ornithoids.” A sad smile flickered over Kossara’s night-ivory lips. “But I’ve oftener thought of it as Ri. He’s the hero of some funny ychan fairy tales, who went to live on Mesyatz. I used to beg Trohdwyr for stories about Ri when I was a child. Why do you ask?”
“Hoping to learn more about you and yours. We talked a lot in space, but we’ve our lifetimes, and six hundred years before them, to explain if we can.”
“We’ll have the rest of them for that.” She crossed herself. “If God wills.”
They were laconic thereafter, until they had chosen a sleeping place and spread their bags. By then the crater wall showed dream-blue to south, and the short night of the planet was near an end. Rime glimmered. Flandry went behind a tree to change into pajamas. When he came back, Kossara was doing so. “I’m sorry!” he apologized, and wheeled about. “I forgot you’d say prayers.”
She was quiet an instant before she laughed, unsteadily but honestly. “I was forgetful too. Well, look if you wish, darling. What harm? You must have seen the holograms … ” She lifted her arms and made a slow turn before his eyes. “Do you like what you’re getting?”
“Sun and stars—”
She stopped to regard him, as if unaware of chill. He barely heard her: “Would it be wrong? Here in these clean spaces, under heaven?”
He took a step in her direction, halted, and grinned his most rueful. “It would not be very practical, I’m afraid. You deserve better.”
She sighed. “You are too kind to me, Dominic.” She put on her bedclothes. They kissed more carefully than had been their way of late, and got into the bags that lay side by side in the heavy shadow of a furbark tree.
“I’m not sleepy,” she told him after a few minutes.
“How could I be?” he answered.
“Was I wanton just now? Or unfair? That would be much worse.”
“I was the Fabian this time, not you.”
“The what? … Never mind.” She lay watching the final stars and the first silvery flush before daybreak. Her voice stumbled. “Yes, I must explain. You could have had me if you’d touched me with a fingertip. You can whenever you ask, beloved. Chastity is harder than I thought.”
“But it does mean a great deal to you, doesn’t it? You’re young and eager. I can wait awhile.”
“Yes—I suppose that is part of what I feel, the wanting to know—to know you. You’ve had many women, haven’t you? I’m afraid there’s no mystery left for me to offer.”
“On the contrary,” he said, “you have the greatest of all. What’s it like to be really man and wife? I think you’ll teach me more about that than I can teach you about anything else.”
She was mute until she could muster the shy words: “Why have you never married, Dominic?”
“Nobody came along whom I couldn’t be happy without—what passes for happy in an Imperial Terran.”
“Nobody? Out of hundreds to choose from?”
“You exaggerate … Well, once, many years ago. But she was another man’s, and left with him when he had to flee the Empire. I can only hope they found a good home at some star too far away for us to see from here.”
“And you have longed for her ever since?”
“No, I can’t say that I have in any romantic sense, though you are a lot like her.” Flandry hesitated. “Earlier, I’d gotten a different woman angry at me. She had a peculiar psionic power, not telepathy but—beings tended to do what she desired. She wished on me that I never get the one I wanted in my heart. I’m not superstitious, I take no more stock in curses or spooks than I do in the beneficence of governments. Still, an unconscious compulsion—Bah! If there was any such thing, which I positively do not think, then you’ve lifted it off me, Kossara, and I refuse to pursue this morbid subject when I could be chattering about how beautiful you are.”
At glaciation’s midwinter, a colter of ice opened a gap in the Kazan ringwall. Melt-begotten, the Lyubisha River later enlarged this to a canyon. Weathering of mostly soft crater material lowered and blurred the heights. But Flandry found his third campsite enchanting.
He squatted on a narrow beach. Before him flowed the broad brown stream, quiet except where it chuckled around a boulder or a sandbar near its banks. Beyond, and at his back, the gorge rose in braes, bluffs, coombs where brooks flashed and sang, to ocherous palisades maned with forest. The same deep bluish-green and plum-colored leaves covered the lower slopes, borne on trees which grew taller than the taiga granted. Here and there, stone outcrops thrust them aside to make room for wild-flower-studded glades. A mild breeze, full of growth and soil odors, rustled through the woods till light and shadow danced. That light slanted from a sun a third again as bright as Sol is to Terra, ardent rather than harsh, an evoker of infinite hues.
Guslars trilled on boughs, other wings flew over in their hundreds, a herd of yelen led by a marvelously horned bull passed along the opposite shore, a riba hooked from the water sputtered in Flandry’s frying pan while a heap of cloud apples waited to be dessert—no dismally predictable field rations in this meal. He gestured. “How well a planet does if left to its own devices,” he remarked.
“Nature could take a few billion years for R D,” Kossara pointed out. “We mortals are always in a hurry.”
He gave her a sharp look. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“N-no. You echoed an idea I’ve heard before—coincidence, surely.” He relaxed, threw a couple of sticks on the fire, turned the fillets over. “I am surprised your people haven’t long since trampled this area dead. Such restraint seems downright inhuman.”
“Well, the Dolyina has belonged to the Vymezals from olden time, and without forbidding visitors, we’ve never encouraged them. You’ve seen there are no amenities, and we ban vehicles. Besides, it’s less reachable than many wild lands elsewhere—though most of those are more closely controlled.”
Kossara hugged knees to chin. Her tone grew slow and thoughtful. “We Dennitzans are … are conservationists by tradition. For generations after the Founding, our ancestors had to take great care. They could not live entirely off native life, but what they brought in could too easily ruin the whole little-understood ecology. The … zemly-oradnik … the landsman learned reverence for the land, because otherwise he might not survive. Today we could, uh, get away with more; and in some parts of the planet we do, where the new industries are. Even there, law and public opinion enforce carefulness—yes, even Dennitzans who live in neighboring systems, the majority by now, even they generally frown on bad practices. And as for the Kazan, the cradle of mankind out here, haven’t heartlands often in history kept old ways that the outer dominions forgot?”
Flandry nodded. “I daresay it helps that wealth flows in from outside, to support your barons and yeomen in the style to which they are accustomed.” He patted her hand. “No offense, darling. They’re obviously progressive as well as conservative, and less apt than most people to confuse the two. I don’t believe in Arcadian Utopias, if only because any that might appear would shortly be gobbled up by somebody else. But I do think you here have kept a balance, a kind of inner sanity—or found it anew—long after Terra lost it.”
She smiled. “I suspect you’re prejudiced.”
“Of course. Common sense dictates acquiring a good strong prejudice in favor of the people you’re going to live among.”