“Not a—”
“We’re considered nonwhite.”
“But that shouldn’t make any difference, Ivo. Not in America.”
He did not pursue that aspect farther. “Anyway, since we had no parents or relatives, some of us invented them. It got to be quite a serious thing. We’d pick figures from history and trace the lineage and work out a line of descent for ourselves. We had the whole world to choose from, of course — all times and all races. We’d show how these ancestors resembled us in some way, or vice versa. Anyway, my white ancestor was Sidney Lanier.”
“I think that’s very sweet, Ivo. But what made you decide he was the one?”
“I suppose it was the flute playing. Lanier was a fine flutist, you know — perhaps the finest in the world at that time. He earned his living for several years as first flutist for a prominent orchestra, even though he had tuberculosis, before he got more serious as a poet.”
She frowned. “The flute? I don’t see — Ivo! You play the flute!”
He nodded.
“Did you bring it with you? You must be a very good musician!”
“Yes, I brought it with me — the only thing I did bring. That’s the way Lanier would have done it. I guess music is my strong point. A single talent, like my math-logic talent. I never really worked at it, but I could play the flute better than any of the others.”
After another session with the macroscope, he yielded to her importunings, assembled his flute and played for her. The notes were oddly distorted in the confined space and trace-gravity air, but she listened raptly.
For her? He was playing for himself, too, for he loved the flute. He caressed the instrument, letting the music flow through his being as though they were merely two stops between composer and audience. He lived each note, feeling his soul expand and renew, animated by the melody. This was the theme that brought him closer to his ancestor.
After that it became a regular routine between them, for he felt comfortable while playing and her pleasure was genuine. He played the cold out of the bleak Schön-moonlet landscape; he played mighty Neptune up over the Triton horizon (Triton never turned a new face to Neptune, but Schön’s revolution about it caused a regular eclipse of impressive dimension); he played the spirit of Earth into their exile.
Sometimes, too, he took time off from the galactic bands to survey Earth and pick up the headlines from a New York newspaper, because Beatryx liked to know what was going on locally. In many respects, these sessions with her were as comfortable as anything he had known.
Meanwhile, below, developments were impressive. If flute-playing was Ivo’s genius, machinery was Groton’s.
“The problem is this,” Groton had explained. “Information does not equal gadgetry. The amount of detail work required to build even a crude shelter at a place like this, with temperature, gravity and atmosphere problems, is appalling. Cutting, fitting, finishing, sealing, installing, testing — many thousands of man-hours, not to mention the equipment! So I need to know how a party our size, with a macroscope and an atomic engine and a planetary module and a few hand tools can terraform a world like Triton within, oh, six months. There must be a program for it somewhere. Find me that program!”
Ivo found it. One of the far galactic stations had a complete A-to-Z presentation beginning with a way to tie down a Type I technology rocket so that the heat and power of the blasting motor could be utilized planetside, and ending with the proper etiquette for the housewarming party.
Groton spent a tedious month fashioning the first crude semielectronic prerobotic tooclass="underline" a type of waldo adapted to respond to a galactic instruction-beam. This device greatly facilitated the detail work for other machines, and progress multiplied.
An alien factory melted the rock of Triton, mixed it with chemical elements extracted from the ocean and produced a fine, strong, airtight nonconductive material that bonded to itself in a matter of hours upon contact, regardless of ambient temperature. Other units carried huge blocks of this “galactite,” light in the quarter-gravity but still heavy as inertial mass, to the lakeside site Groton had selected for the human enclave. Soon there was a pyramid of dominoes fifty feet on a side, completely sealed. The airlocks were more complicated, but a week of signal-directed labor sufficed. This castle was pressurized and heated and lighted, and the human party was able to move in and reside in suitless comfort.
Meanwhile, Afra took her turn to babysit. Beatryx had the first several sessions, but the group felt that rotation was best, in the long run. Ivo was at this point transcribing the horrendously complicated data the early machines required. He hardly understood the terms or concepts, and had to consult with Groton frequently for lessons in elementary electronics. He did not dare augment his very limited comprehension through the program itself, because that might also let in the destroyer. He was forced to perform in ignorance, and it was hellishly fatiguing.
It was not easy to be alone with Afra, however. She was too bright, too beautiful, too bitter. Ivo could hardly blame her, yet it was hard to accept her subtle coldness with equanimity.
“You never knew your parents?” she inquired during one of the breaks.
“None of us did.” Evidently Beatryx had been talking to the others. Well, he hadn’t asked her not to.
“How many of you were there?”
“Three hundred and thirty. Of course, there may have been other groups, for other ages; we were all within a year of each other. A few months, actually.” Why had she grown so curious about his background? Or was it merely a ploy to fill time?
“So you and Brad and Schön are the same age?”
“Yes.” As he said it, he realized the trap. Brad had told her that the groups were separate, and he had just admitted that they were not.
She was silent for so long he felt moved to break the mood. “The idea was to combine—”
“I know!” Then, guilty at her own ferocity. “It is just so hard to believe that Brad could have been colored. I never suspected it.”
This vestigial bigotry in Afra, though he had suspected its existence, came as a nasty shock to Ivo. “We varied in appearance, but the ratios were similar. Brad happened to be very light-skinned, while some were considerably darker than me. Does it matter?” Foolish question.
“Yes. Yes it does, Ivo.” She turned away and looked out over the ice. “Oh, I know I’m supposed to say I’m a Georgia girl brought up in the twentieth century without prejudice. I know what a person is is what matters, not his lineage, and everyone is equal in our society. That the seeming inferiority of the nonwhite population stems from cultural and economic disadvantage and has no genetic basis. I understand that when Black Power burns its ghettos and pillages stores it’s only the frustration speaking that the complacent white majority has fostered for a century. That all we need to do is work together, all races and all subcultures, to build a better society and negate the evils of the past. But — but I wanted to marry him!”
She spun about to face him, gripping the handrail. “It just isn’t in me to love a Negro. I don’t even know why. All my experience—”
She let go and floated, both hands covering her face. “Oh, Brad, Brad, I do love you—”
Damned either way. Ivo kept his mouth shut, remembering the thousand little ways he had been advised of his own inferiority, once he left the project. The liberals liked to claim that discrimination was a thing of the past, but few of them were to be found residing near Negro families. Official segregation no longer existed, but he had discovered how unpleasant it could get, how rapidly, when the powerful unofficial guidelines were ignored. He had heard from others how suddenly positions advertised as “equal opportunity” became “filled” when a nonwhite applied — and reopened for subsequent whites. Brad had chosen to “pass” — and had risen too high, too fast for reprisal when the truth leaked out. And evidently the truth had not reached Afra’s ears, at the station. Ivo had chosen not to pass — and had paid the penalty. He was not one-third Caucasian, one-third Mongoloid; he was one-third Negroid, and that meant he was black. 1/3 C + 1/3 M + 1/3 N = N. He was less intelligent than a purebred white, despite the white tests that said otherwise; he was less wholesome, though he washed as often and brushed his teeth with a popular white dentifrice; he was indefinably but definitely unequal and everybody in America knew it, whatever they might utter for public consumption. Whether it was “Get out of here, Nigger!” as it had been in 1960, or the rigid courtesy he had experienced in 1970, or selective blindness in 1980, he was an intruder upon society.