She laughed. “No, not here. I only found out where `here’ was when I decided to make this little foray. I gather we were all supposed to be off and well on the way, but instead we’ve been stuck here in orbit. Surely you must know that.”
He nodded. “Yes, you’re the talk of the spaceport, really. I’ve even met a couple of your passengers. I assume that they’re not all on your expedition. That ancient opera singer wouldn’t be much good in a fight.”
“Oh! You met Anna Marie! Isn’t she fascinating? Where did you meet her?”
“In a bar inside the spaceport, I’m afraid. She came in and asked whether a fellow who happens to be at the top of the Navy’s ten most wanted criminals list was here. Then she rushed off to the ship. A few others have come through this way, too. I gather you were already aboard?”
“Yes, they picked me up at the previous stop. Interesting about the criminal. What’s he done?”
“He’s a pirate. I know that sounds like an ancient and outdated term, but there’s no other word for it. He attacks and loots transports. He’s not only stolen a great deal. He’s murdered a considerable number as well. The mention of his name is one reason why everybody’s so curious about your ship.”
She seemed to think something over, then nodded. “I can understand your interest, then. So this wasn’t an accidental meeting?”
“Well, yes and no. I’m off duty, nobody assigned me to come and have dinner with you, but I happened to hear that the shuttle was coming down and that the taxi had been hired for here. I decided to see if it was anyone familiar or someone new, and, in the process, get an excellent meal on the expense account all of which has happened. Satisfied?”
“Yes, I suppose so. It’s kind of disappointing that it wasn’t more of a chance thing, at least for an evening. I’ll be off soon and that’ll be that, the way people come out of those holes different ages and such.” Something seemed to strike her suddenly, a thought she hadn’t entertained until now. “You know—I suppose that work I did has been published by now. Probably long ago back at the university. Professor Klashvili was getting on in years when I left him. He’s probably well retired now, unless he’s dead. Strange. It makes me feel so—cut off. He and the department and research assistants back there were the closest thing to family I had. Does it get to you like this?”
He nodded. “It did for a while. Then, over time, you get used to it and you simply don’t factor it in. You try not to establish any long-term relationships with people who aren’t going where you’re going, for one thing. We get to thinking of our ship and company as our family.”
“You don’t have one of your own?”
“No, most career Navy don’t. If you decide on a family, you wind up on a base and on port duty, period. You don’t go into space again unless you take the family with you, and Navy vessels aren’t built for real families. Spacers just don’t have homes except our ships. A lot of us are orphans—of which there’s a ton now that migration has turned to refugees overrunning all creation—or greatly estranged. Just make sure that when you decide to settle down, you settle down in a place you can grow old and die happy in.”
She stared at him with sad big brown eyes. “And where’s that, Mister Harker? Where’s that?”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? If we could just make a jump to another arm, we’d have an escape route, but nobody who’s ever tried it ever came back. I dunno. So, let’s get on a happier note. What is your specialty, anyway?”
“Retrogressed cultures,” she responded. “There’s a ton of them out there even now. Early religious colonies that got themselves deliberately lost and wound up building very primitive societies when they were cut off from The Confederacy, social experimenters, political radicals wanting to build their own colonies, that kind of thing. Mostly they cut themselves off on marginal worlds off the beaten tracks centuries ago, and they all thought, of course, that they could build a higher or better culture with no dependence on the old system. In many cases it’s less anthropology than recent archaeology, since they die out a lot. The ones that succeed can quickly become bizarre, even in a few short generations. They are, however, the finest living laboratories on human behavior and cultural evolution that exist, particularly since it’s unethical to deliberately do it to people or groups.”
“Got an example?”
“Hundreds, but I’ll just be general for now. The one rule we have found to be eighty percent true: people as a group will survive under the most incredible conditions, and sometimes even thrive. There is a significant deviation but primarily as a group dynamic—a charismatic leader or some such who leads the desperate and trapped group to mass ritual suicide or the like. For the most part, however, people find a way, often by doing things that would have been inconceivable to them before. We’ve found cannibalism developing in desperate situations far more than we’d thought, for one thing, and even if they find a way to get around needing it as an emergency food source, it tends to remain as ritual. The general consensus is that the first practitioners are unwilling. They must eat some of their number to get out of a particularly nasty situation or they all die. After that, they have to justify it to themselves or they feel guilty, often consumed by guilt and nightmares. So, to deal with it as a survival practice rather than as a one-time thing, it becomes some kind of religious experience.”
“Seems to me that if you began eating your fellow human beings, you’d soon not have any fellow human beings. The last two survivors would be hunting each other,” he noted.
“No, no! It’s counterproductive if you do that, and you’re right, they’d all die. But suppose you were trapped by a seasonal thing—subzero cold and snow, or a long dormancy before crops appear, or a drought. Then it becomes more of an imperative, and after that it becomes something you have to justify to posterity. You keep it alive in limited form as a ritual—as many early human civilizations did back on our ancestral world—so that if the need arises you won’t have to go through heavy moral judgments or angry fights to do it.”
He considered it. “I often wonder what happened to any survivors who weren’t captured or whatever the Titans do to survivors after one of those worlds gets changed. You think they survive, maybe underground?”
“Oh, I think they survive even on the surface. The Titans’ ultimate objective appears to be, well, gardening.”
“Huh?” He’d been dodging and weaving around the bastards for decades but he’d never heard that before.
She nodded. “The worlds they remake are uniformly in a temperate range that runs from sixteen to forty-eight degrees Celsius. That’s basically subtropical to almost hot-house, but it’s entirely within the life range of our race. Much of it is simply reseeded with Titan variations of local flora that can stand up to this range, lots of trees, lots of nutrient grains and grasses, but in the center of each growing area is a vast swath of, well, gigantic and exotic-looking alien flowers. You’ve certainly seen the photos. That’s what they do. They move in and they start planting and raising exotic flowers. Perhaps they compete at Titan flower shows. Who knows? At any rate, on a majority of worlds they use hybrids we’ve introduced there in the past for fruit and grain, even things like vegetables and sugar cane and the like. It’s possible to sustain a fair population on that.”
“I knew about that. But they’d have to keep their numbers low to avoid attracting attention to themselves, and they’d be limited to totally non-powered tools. Kind of an animal-like existence. I’ve seen surveys of worlds after a few decades that can show life-form densities, and we’ve never picked up anything that might be a significant population of humans. They’re down there, but they’re few and scattered.”