Grooming the neohorses with long, patient strokes, their warm sides smooth under his fingers, their whuffles of contentment a soft counterpoint to his words, he tried to explain the growing hate and fear more and more of the planet-bred were developing for the star-travelers (here, again he didn’t say it, repeated in miniature in this conflict between the colonists and the crew) and its effects on himself and the others. Nor did he explain—he and many others had tried, and the non-technology-oriented never understood—one of the other main causes of that hate and fear, the gift of relativistic time. A starfarer could spend a year of his own physiological time traveling at high speeds from world to world, and return, seemingly unaged, to find fifty years had passed on the slow-spinning worlds, and those he knew aged or dead.
Nor did he mention the basis of truth in the accusations of mutant: the starfarers, exposed to radiation on their long voyages, did produce a high proportion of deviates, higher still if starfarer bred to starfarer. (And, to world-bound eyes, worse than the outright cripples and deformed, were the tiny minority who enjoyed improvements, blessed with extra gifts of mind or body.) Instead he spoke of reactions to hate and fear, and the careless actions or deliberate cruelties of some who knew that decades if not centuries must pass before they returned to a particular world.
“Action and reaction,” Sergei finished, kneeling to splash the last bit of warm water in one of the buckets onto his own face and shoulders. “Beware the stranger. But even your brother becomes a stranger, if you have changed and he has not. Anger breeds anger, distrust distrust. Fear becomes fury, prejudice violence. Until… think, Elder. You yourself regard us as all alike, because, in your heart, you think of us as different, and lump us all together.”
“Nay, now, Friend Sergei!”
“I’m not blaming you, Elder.” A bit of rough, clean toweling hung on a hook, and he used it to dry his face and hands. “It’s only human nature to think so. But—for example, I’m service-bred. I’ve known no other life, though I’ve seen countless societies on countless worlds. But many of the crew would have been planet-bred recruits, from the computer alone knows how many different worlds or ways of life. Even if two recruits came from the very same city on the very same world, generations of world time, with all the changes that implies, could separate them, if they came aboard on different voyages. I know why I came here, I wanted to come, I wanted to be part of what you’re building here. I’ve had time, in those long watches I’ve spent, to do plenty of thinking—”
With only a thin skin of faked normality to separate you from the endless night without; and sometimes, in those weary hours, there’s the observation blister, forbidden except for necessary sightings. But, ah! The distorted wonder of those surrounding immensities. But not even the forbidden glory was enough to compensate for the loneliness, the alienation, the separation from the rest of humanity, the sense that all your accomplishments were melting away like a sand castle before the rushing tide of time….
“—Time, and wandering,” Sergei went on, after a long breath—or ten. “The ship, a ship, and the crews, but never anything lasting, never anything permanent, never a feeling of being a part of, instead of an outsider. I was looking for you, or a people like you, long before you started looking for a captain like me.”
“Ah.” The grizzled head nodded. “I think I see. But the others?”
Sergei shrugged. “Running away, I’d guess, instead of running toward.”
The elder was chewing a very bitter cud. “So you suggest?”
“Let me think on it. In the meantime. I’ll try to talk to them again.”
Elder Werner’s scowl grew even sourer, then he took a deep breath and his face smoothed out. “Ah, then, Friend Sergei, you’re a lucky man, you are. She’s her mother’s touch with the stew pot, that she has. We needn’t worry about your Marya, need we, then? She’s settled down.”
Marya lifted the tanned hide that was the only door to the single turf-roofed subterranean room that would someday be their cellar but was now their living quarters. “Sergei, I was just going to call—Elder Werner!” She sketched a quick curtsy. “I didn’t know—”
“Nay, lass, I but dropped by to wish you good day. Good as it smells, I must be on my way or Ella’ll worry. Besides—” He pinched her cheek genially. “I’d not take away from that second you’re eating for.”
“Elder Werner!” She stamped her foot. “How did you know?” She looked down, smoothing her skirt over her still flat midriff. “It doesn’t show.”
He grinned broader. “Eight my Ella’s had, and the ninth coming. Do you think, child, I don’t know that look on a woman’s face when I see it?” He clapped Sergei’s back. “Congratulations, Cousin Sergei, to the both of you. Oh, aye.” He chuckled. “Settled down all right. Ah!” A loud, long sniff. “If I didn’t know Ella was waiting and keeping mine hot…”
“Just a quick taste, then, Elder Werner,” Marya coaxed, “to be sure your nose wasn’t playing tricks on a hungry man?”
He was ready to leave, had mounted his neohorse and said goodbye to Marya when he remembered one last item. “Friend Sergei, there’s something else I’d have you do if you would.”
“If I can.”
“Get your wife to talk to her sister Innis. They’re much alike, and very close, and mayhap your Marya’s word will help. And young Innis—I like her, you know. She’s a gay little spirit, she brightens the room she’s in. But she’s young, and foolish, and my liking won’t help her a bit if she treads too close to disobedience.”
But when Sergei passed this on to Marya, to his surprise she pursed her lips over the sweater she was knitting and said, “There’s nothing I can do.” “Because you don’t know what’s the matter?”
“Because I do know what’s the matter, and there’s nothing I can do. There’s only one of you, you see.”
“You’re not going to tell me young Innis thinks she’s in love with—she’s just a child!”
She shook her head, her lips tight. “You wouldn’t understand.” And that was all he could get out of her.
The busy days passed. Fall, winter. Sergei could only hope that the Council’s patience was holding.
Oddly, it was Marya who lost her patience. One winter evening, she hurled the spindle she was using across the room. Sergei looked up from the broom he was painstakingly carving from a single thick branch, by shaving layer after layer of thin blades up to a predetermined point. “What’s wrong, darling?”
“Everything, that’s what! This is stupid! It takes forever to spin any yarn on this ridiculous spindle. There must be a better way!”
“Not by the agreement,” he said mildly, solicitous of her pregnancy. “No machines. We can’t use anything we can’t reproduce ourselves. So—”
“I’m not talking about machines,”
she grumbled. “Though when I think of all the lovely machines we heard of back home (not that they allowed us to use them, either!) but machines that could produce yards and yards of lovely cloth in the time it takes me to spin a teensy thread, well, I could just cry, or—or scream. But—” She stared at her husband. “There must have been something in the middle. Something more efficient than this stupid, slow, rotten spindle. Something that could be made by hand, but…” Her voice trailed off, but her lash-shaded hazel eyes remained fixed on her husband.
He wanted to please her, and he couldn’t see the wrong, as long as it was something that could be made, with whatever effort, by hand. He had kept a Link with the giant ship’s computer, which had been left, just in case, on stand-by. So he got a diagram for a spinning wheel.