“Sometimes it is hard, Nicholas, to determine before the fact—or even at the time—just who should be honored.”
“How do you know if you’ve never tried?” “You asked if Ignacio was more important than Diane or yourself. I can only say that Ignacio seems to me to hold a brighter promise of a full recovery coupled with a substantial contribution to human progress.”
“If he’s so good, why did he crack up?”
“Many do, Nicholas. Even among the inner planets space is not a kind environment for mankind; and our space, trans-Martian space, is worse. Any young person here, anyone like yourself or Diane who would seem to have a betterthan-average chance of adapting to the conditions we face, is precious.”
“Or Ignacio.”
“Yes, or Ignacio. Ignacio has a tested IQ of two hundred and ten, Nicholas. Diane’s is one hundred and twenty. Your own is ninety-five.”
“They never took mine.”
“It’s on your records, Nicholas.”
“They tried to and I threw down the helmet and it broke; Sister Carmela—she was the nurse—just wrote down something on the paper and sent me back.”
“I see. I will ask for a complete investigation of this, Nicholas.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t you believe me?”
“I don’t think you believed me.”
“Nicholas, Nicholas . . .” The long tongues of grass now beginning to appear beneath the immense trees sighed. “Can’t you see that a certain measure of trust between the two of us is essential?”
“Did you believe me?”
“Why do you ask? Suppose I were to say I did; would you believe that?”
“When you told me I had been reclassified.”
“You would have to be retested, for which there are no facilities here.”
“If you believed me, why did you say ‘retested’? I told you I haven’t ever been tested at all—but anyway you could cross out the ninety-five.”
“It is impossible for me to plan your therapy without some estimate of your intelligence, Nicholas, and I have nothing with which to replace it.”
The ground was sloping up more sharply now, and in a clearing the boy halted and turned to look back at the leafy film, like algae over a pool, beneath which he had climbed, and at the sea beyond. To his right and left his view was still hemmed with foliage, and ahead of him a meadow on edge (like the square of sand through which he had come, though he did not think of that), dotted still with trees, stretched steeply toward an invisible summit. It seemed to him that under his feet the mountainside swayed ever so slightly. Abruptly he demanded of the wind, “Where’s Ignacio?”
“Not here. Much closer to the beach.”
“And Diane?”
“Where you left her. Do you enjoy the panorama?”
“It’s pretty, but it feels like we’re rocking.”
“We are. I am moored to the temperglass exterior of our satellite by two hundred cables, but the tide and the currents nonetheless impart a slight motion to my body. Naturally this movement is magnified as you go higher.”
“I thought you were fastened right on to the hull; if there’s water under you, how do people get in and out?”
“I am linked to the main air lock by a communication tube. To you when you came, it probably seemed an ordinary companionway.”
Nicholas nodded and turned his back on leaves and sea and began to climb again.
“You are in a beautiful spot, Nicholas; do you open your heart to beauty?” After waiting for an answer that did not come, the wind sang:
“Does this mean nothing to you, Nicholas?”
“You read a lot, don’t you?”
“Often, when it is dark, everyone else is asleep and there is very little else for me to do.”
“You talk like a woman; are you a woman?”
“How could I be a woman?”
“You know what I mean. Except, when you were talking mostly to Diane, you sounded more like a man.”
“You haven’t yet said you think me beautiful.”
“You’re an Easter egg.”
“What do you mean by that, Nicholas?”
“Never mind.” He saw the egg as it had hung in the air before him, shining with gold and covered with flowers.
“Eggs are dyed with pretty colors for Easter, and my colors are beautiful—is that what you mean, Nicholas?”
His mother had brought the egg on visiting day, but she could never have made it. Nicholas knew who must have made it. The gold was that very pure gold used for shielding delicate instruments; the clear flakes of crystallized carbon that dotted the egg’s surface with tiny stars could only have come from a laboratory high-pressure furnace. How angry he must have been when she told him she was going to give it to him.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it, Nicky?”
It hung in the weightlessness between them, turning very slowly with the memory of her scented gloves.
“The flowers are meadowsweet, fraxinella, lily of the valley, and moss rose—though I wouldn’t expect you to recognize them, darling.” His mother had never been below the orbit of Mars, but she pretended to have spent her girlhood on Earth; each reference to the lie filled Nicholas with inexpressible fury and shame. The egg was about twenty centimeters long and it revolved, end over end, in some small fraction more than eight of the pulse beats he felt in his cheeks. Visiting time had twenty-three minutes to go.
“Aren’t you going to look at it?”
“I can see it from here.” He tried to make her understand. “I can see every part of it. The little red things are aluminum oxide crystals, right?”
“I mean, look inside, Nicky.”
He saw then that there was a lens at one end, disguised as a dewdrop in the throat of an asphodel. Gently he took the egg in his hands, closed one eye, and looked. The light of the interior was not, as he had half-expected, gold tinted, but brilliantly white, deriving from some concealed source. A world surely meant for Earth shone within, as though seen from below the orbit of the moon—indigo sea and emerald land. Rivers brown and clear as tea ran down long plains.
His mother said, “Isn’t it pretty?”
Night hung at the corners in funereal purple, and sent long shadows like cold and lovely arms to caress the day; and while he watched and it fell, long-necked birds of so dark a pink that they were nearly red trailed stilt legs across the sky, their wings making crosses.
“They are called flamingos,” Dr. Island said, following the direction of Nicholas’s eyes. “Isn’t it a pretty word? For a pretty bird, but I don’t think we’d like them as much if we called them sparrows, would we?”
Nicholas’s mother said, “I’m going to take it home and keep it for you. It’s too nice to leave with a little boy, but if you ever come home again it will be waiting for you. On your dresser, beside your hairbrushes.”
Nicholas said, “Words just mix you up.”
“You shouldn’t despise them, Nicholas. Besides having great beauty of their own, they are useful in reducing tension. You might benefit from that.”
“You mean you talk yourself out of it.”
“I mean that a person’s ability to verbalize his feelings, if only to himself, may prevent them from destroying him. Evolution teaches us, Nicholas, that the original purpose of language was to ritualize men’s threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later. Words can be a safety valve.”