“Dammit, it doesn’t feel right that way.”
“Charles, forgive me, but—surely you will admit that your emotional judgment might be clouded in this matter?”
I sighed. “Ezequiel, look me in the eye. I have not been in love with Shara Drummond since shortly before she died. I have examined my soul and the dance that came out of it, and I feel no urge for personal vengeance, no thirst for retribution.”
“No, your dance is not vengeful,” he agreed.
“But I do have a grievance—not as a bereaved lover but as a bereaved human being. I want those aliens to know what they cost my race when they wrought the death of Shara Drummond, when they forced her hand and made her into Homo caelestis before there was any place or any way for one to live—” I broke off, realizing that I had blundered, but DeLaTorre did not even blink.
“Was she not already Homo caelestis, or ala anima, when they arrived, Charles?” he asked as blandly as if he was supposed to know those terms. “Would she not have died on her return to Earth in any case, by that point?”
I recognized and accepted the sudden rise in our truth level, distracted by his question. “Perhaps, Ezequiel. Her body must have been on the borderline of permanent adaptation. I have lain awake many nights, thinking about this, talking it over with my wife. I keep thinking: Had Shara visualized what her Stardance would do financially, she might have endured a brief wait at Skyfac, might have survived to be a more worthy leader for our Studio. I keep thinking: Had she thought things through, she might not have chosen to burn her wings, so high above her lost planet. I keep thinking: Had she known, she might have lived.”
I sucked rotten coffee from a bulb and made a face. “But all the fighting spirit had been sucked out of her, drained into the Stardance and hurled at those red fireflies with the last of her strength. All of her life, right up to Carrington, had been slowly draining the will to live out of her, and she threw all that she had left at those things, because that was what it took to scare them back to interstellar space, to frighten them so bad that their nearest subsequent approach was a billion klicks away. There was no will to live left after that, not enough to sustain her.
“I want to convey to those creatures the value of the entity their careless footstep crushed, the enonnity of her people’s loss. If grief or remorse are in their emotional repertoire, I want to see some. Most of all, I think, I want to forgive them. And so I have to state my complaint first. I believe that their reaction will tell us quicker than anything else whether we can ever learn to communicate and peacefully coexist with them.
“They respect dance, Ezequiel, and they cost us the greatest artist of our time. A race that could open with any other statement is one I don’t much want to represent. That’d be Montezuma’s Mistake all over again. Norrey and the others agree with me: this is a deal-breaker.”
He was silent a long time. The last thing a diplomat will concede is that compromise is impossible. But at last he_said, “I follow your thought, Charles. And I admit that it leads me to the same conclusion.” He sighed. “You are right. I will make the others accept this.” He pushed free and jaunted to me, taking both my shoulders in his wrinkled, mottled hands. “Thank you for explaining to me. Come, let us prepare to go and state our grievance.”
He was closeted with the other three for a little over twenty minutes, and emerged with an extremely grudging accord. He was indeed the best man Wertheimer could have chosen. Half an hour later we were on our way.
III
It took the better part of a day to coax Siegfried from Titan orbit to the Trojan point, without employing accelerations that would kill us all. Titan is a mighty moon, harder to break free of than Luna. Fortunately we didn’t want to break free of it—quite. We essentially widened the circle of our orbit until it intersected the Trojan point—decelerating like hell all the way so that we’d be at rest relative to it when we got there. It had to be at least partly by-guess-and-by-God, because any transit in Saturn’s system is a ten-body problem (don’t even think about the Ring), and Bill was an equal partner with the computer in that astrogating job. He did a world-class job, as I had known he would, wasting no fuel and, more important, no passengers. The worst we had to endure was about fifteen seconds at about .6 gee, mere agony.
Any properly oriented wall will do for an acceleration couch—since everything in a true spaceship is well padded (billion-dollar spaceprobe designers aren’t that unimaginative). I don’t know about all the others, but Norrey and I and anybody sensible customarily underwent acceleration naked. If you’ve got to lie flat on your back under gravity, you don’t want wrinkly clothes and bulky velcro pads between you and the padding.
When we drifted free of the wall and the “acceleration over” horn sounded, we dressed in the same p-suits we had worn on our Last Ride together, a year before. Of the five models of custom-made suits we use, they are the closest to total nudity, resembling abbreviated topless bathing suits with a collared hood. The transparent sections are formfitted and scarcely noticeable; the “trunks” are not for taboo but for sanitary reasons; and the hood-and-collar section is mostly to conceal the unaesthetic amount of hardware that must be built into a p-suit hood. The thrusters are ornate wrist and ankle jewelry; their controls golfing gloves. The group had decided unanimously that we would use these suits for our performance. Perhaps by the overt image of naked humans in space we were unconsciously trying to assert our humanity, to deny the concept of ourselves as other than human by displaying the evidence to the contrary. See? Navel. See? Nipples. See? Toes.
“The trouble with these suits, my love,” I said as I sealed my own, “is that the sight of you in yours always threatens to dislodge my catheter tube.”
She grinned and made an unnecessary adjustment of her left breast. “Steady, boy. Keep your mind on business.”
“Especially now that the bloody weight is gone. How did you women put up with it for centuries? Having some great heavy clod lay on you like that?”
“Stoically,” she said, and jaunted for the phone. She diddled its controls, and said, “Linda—how’s the baby?”
Linda and Torn appeared on the screen, in the midst of helping each other suit up. “Fine,” Linda called happily. “Nary a quiver.”
Tom grinned at the phone and said, “What’s to worry? She still fits into her p-suit, for crying out loud.”
His composure impressed and deeply pleased me. When we left Skyfac I would have predicted that at this pre-curtain moment, with a pregnant wife to worry about, Tom would be agitated enough to chew pieces off his shoulder blades. But free space, as I have said, is a tranquilizing environment—and more important, he had allowed Linda to teach him much. Not just the dance, and the breathing and meditational exercises for relaxation—we had all learned these things. Not even the extensive spiritual instruction she had given that ex-businessman (which had begun with loud arguments, and calmed down when he finally got it through his head that she had no creed to attack, no brand label to discredit), though that helped of course.
Mostly it was her love and her loving that had finally unsnarled all the knots in Tom’s troubled soul. Her love was so transparently genuine and heartfelt that it forced him to take it at face value, forced him therefore to love himself a little more—which is all anyone really needs to relax. Opening up to another frees you at least temporarily of all that armor you’ve been lugging, and your disposition invariably improves. Sometimes you decide to scrap the armor altogether.