Hans felt that he was the odd man out, the single exception to the general cheer. He ought to be enjoying the moment, even if in his case it would be no more than a brief interval of peace before the next task. That task would be the most difficult one of his life, if he was any judge, but he could not avoid it — because this time he was assigning it to himself.
The final minutes on Labyrinth had taught him something of profound importance. He had not just endured their troubles, he had enjoyed wrestling with and beating them. He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot. Trouble was always dangerous. But it was addictive and stimulating, thrilling and energizing, the ultimate roller-coaster, more exciting than anything else in life. And he was the best damned trouble-shooter he had ever met.
That formed the root of his current problem. He could do this job. Maybe no one else could. But how was he going to break the news to Darya? He could produce plausible but bogus reasons: that he would never be able to stand her sedentary lifestyle; that she could never bear to live in the Phemus Circle. But the two of them had been too close for too long to permit lies and half-truths. So he was going to make her miserable.
Hans realized that, unusual for him, he was procrastinating. At the moment Darya certainly didn’t sound miserable. She was standing behind him, humming tunelessly to herself and massaging his neck and shoulders. She probed stiff-fingered into his trapezius muscles, hard enough to hurt. It felt great.
“Relax, Hans,” she said. “You’re too tense. What has you so knotted up?”
“I was thinking that we fit really well together.”
“Mm.” The grip on his shoulders tightened. “The men from Phemus Circle. One-track minds. I don’t believe you, you know.”
“You don’t think we fit well?”
“Sure we do. But I don’t believe that’s what you were thinking about when I asked you.”
Which only proved that he had been right. He couldn’t fob Darya off with false reasons. It had to be the bald truth.
“I’m going back to the Phemus Circle, Darya. I have to.”
Her fingers froze on his back. “You’ve received orders?”
“No. Worse.” He turned to face her. “I made the decision for myself.”
Her hand came up again to touch his cheek. “Can you tell me why?”
He could hear her uncertainty. “I want to explain, Darya, but I don’t know if you’ll understand. Maybe no one can understand who isn’t from the Phemus Circle.”
“Try me.”
“You think you know the Phemus Circle, because you’ve visited it. But you don’t really know the Circle at all. Maybe you have to be born there. When I was stuck inside Paradox, I started thinking about my childhood on Teufel in a different way. Half my friends died before they were ten years old, from predators and drought and malnutrition, or while we were on water and food duty. It seemed inevitable at the time. I’ve finally realized it’s anything but. It doesn’t have to be that way — on Teufel, or anywhere else. Since I became an adult I’ve been sent to one world after another, wherever and whenever a bad problem appeared. I study the situation, and I solve the problem — every time. The infant deaths on Styx, the encephalo-parasite on Subito, the runaway biosphere on Pelican’s Wake, infertility on Scaldworld, the crop die-off on Besthome, the universal sleep on Mirawand, the black wave on Nemesis — there isn’t one that has beaten me. It’s a great feeling, shipping home and thinking: that’s another one in the bag.
“I had to leave the Phemus Circle completely before I could recognize a different truth. I haven’t been solving problems, you see, not in any final sense. I’ve been plastering over them. The real difficulty lies higher, in the government that runs the Phemus Circle. There are excellent ways of modifying planetary biospheres, small changes that don’t cost a fortune and don’t harm native stock, but translate into enormous lifestyle improvements for human colonists. Hell, I’ve done terraforming, myself, on loan in Alliance territory. We’ve known the techniques for thousands of years. But I’ve never once applied those methods in the Phemus Circle. Teufel remains as it was the day I left it. So do all the other god-forsaken Circle worlds.”
“Why?”
“That’s the big question. That’s what I have to find out. It’s as though the people who control the central government of the Phemus Circle want people to live short, stunted lives. They have more control that way. But I’m going to change things.”
“How?”
“You keep asking questions I wish I could answer. I have no idea how. But I’ll do it, or I’ll die trying. I’m sorry, Darya. Will you forgive me?”
“Forgive you? For what? For being responsible, and brave? There’s nothing to forgive. I’m proud of you, Hans.”
“But it means that we won’t—”
She silenced him by leaning forward and kissing him gently on the lips. “There. We’re going to see a lot of each other whenever we have a chance, but we are going to have separate jobs and separate lives. Right?”
“That’s one reason I feel so bad. To talk to you this way, just when your work has been destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Her laugh was not at all the laugh of a broken-hearted woman. “Hans, I’ve got the best and fattest job ahead of me that a research worker could ever have. Before all this started, I was happy to study beings whom I thought had left the spiral arm at least three million years ago. Now I have all that old knowledge, plus more new information than I ever hoped for. And with Quintus Bloom gone I’m the only person, the only one in the whole arm, with all the information. Don’t you see it’s my duty to produce a final, definitive study of the Builders? I’ll even include Bloom’s theory, though I know it can’t be right.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“You’ll be sure, too, if you think about it. Because you know Quintus. If he is in the future, and they have time travel, he would make one action his top priority. What would it be?”
Hans frowned. “He’d send a message back. To prove to everybody that his theories are right.”
“Exactly. And he would do it in a way we couldn’t possibly overlook. No cryptic polyglyphs for him, no hiding in the middle of an artifact. So he can’t be right. But he’ll be in my reports anyway, along with every other speculation about the Builders. Can you see what a huge job I have ahead of me? It will take years and years of labor, and I’m going to need all the library support and computer power and research facilities that Sentinel Gate can produce. This is work I can’t do on the road. But I’ll still have to travel — the Phemus Circle had artifacts, and it’s at the intersection of two of the other major clades. I’ll visit you, sure I will, wherever you happen to be. And you can visit me whenever you get the chance, and stay as long as you like.”
“I will. No shared home, though. My job will be dangerous. The powers-that-be in the Phemus Circle won’t like what I’m planning to do.”
“They can’t touch me here on Sentinel Gate.”