She turned, accepting the glass that was offered her, and smiled. It was their last day on Saturn's largest moon. Tomorrow the Meridian sailed for Mars. So, tonight—if "night" was a term that made any sense in a place like this—the Governor had thrown a special reception, inviting the leading citizens from each of the nine colonies. They had been arriving here the last six days, all manner of strange craft cluttering the big hangar to the south of the town.
Jelka looked about her momentarily, taking it all in. They were a strange, austere people out here, sparsely fleshed and taut-muscled beneath the pressure suits they wore at all times. A tall, angular-looking race whose movements were slow, considered. A product of the harsh environment, she realized, and felt, once more, a kind of awe at it all. Over two million people lived out here in the Saturn system. Two million mouths that needed feeding. Two million pairs of lungs that needed air. Two million bodies needing water, warmth, and protection from the unforgiving elements.
One hundred and seventy-nine degrees below zero it was beside the great ethane lake. An unthinkably bitter cold that brought with it no end of technical problems for the men—and women—who worked Saturn's moons, mining and manufacturing, or harvesting the rich soup of complex hydrocarbons that lay within the great ethane lakes of this, Titan, the largest of the colonies.
She moved through the packed crowd, smiling, offering a word here and there, making her way across to the Governor, who stood with a small group of Security officers on the far side of the great circular room, beside the ancient orrery. She had met most of the people there on her travels about the colonies. Only tiny Mimas, closest to Saturn, had proved impossible to visit. Otherwise she had seen it all. And recorded it—for Kim.
"How are you, Jelka? Have you enjoyed yourself?"
She stopped to answer the query, smiling, remembering the man from lapetus Colony.
"I'm fine, Wulf Thorsson," she said, clasping his hand momentarily. "And I have enjoyed myself greatly. I will be sad to go. But one day I will come back here, maybe."
The big man smiled broadly, placing both his hands over hers, as if to enclose them, or keep them warm. "With your husband, eh?"
"Maybe," she said thoughtfully, then, with a brief nod, moved on. Yes, they were good people out here. Reliable, trustworthy people. And so they had to be. If you couldn't trust your fellow man out here you were dead. Sooner or later.
She squeezed through between the last few people and came out beside the Governor. Helmut Read was an old friend of her father's; a big man, made from the same physical mold. The same mold, she realized, that Klaus Ebert and his son—her onetime fiance—Hans Ebert had been cast from. The thought disturbed her briefly, then it passed. Like her father and Old Man Ebert, Read emanated an aura of certainty, of ageless, infinite capacity. There was no problem too great for him; no wrong that he could not somehow put right. So it was with her father, she realized. Even so, sometimes such men were wrong, however good their intentions.
Read turned and, seeing Jelka there, grinned broadly, welcoming her. "Come through, my love. Come and talk to us!" he said, taking her hands and drawing her close to hug her, then setting her there next to him, her hand clasped tightly in his.
He had taken her under his wing from the moment she had entered Saturn's system, three months back, and since then had gone to great trouble to show her everything he could. She could picture clearly the pride with which he had shown her the great hollowed shafts of the mining operation on Tethys, the enthusiasm with which he had talked of the expansion going on on tiny Phoebe, and of the plans to build a whole new city on the far side of Titan, where Huygens Base now stood. Things were happening out here, and far from being bored, she had found it all quite fascinating. But then, she had always felt that she was seeing it for two, and had tried to ask the questions Kim might ask.
And sometimes, just sometimes, the sheer beauty of it touched her.
As if, in this rawness, she had a glimpse of that same austere beauty that had once been Kalevala, the place from which her own people had come two thousand years ago, the land of lakes and rocks . . .
The Governor turned to her, squeezing her hand gently. "I am sorry you have to go tomorrow, Jelka," he said, looking at her sadly, as if she were his daughter. "I cannot express how much I have enjoyed having you here. Why, if I were twenty years younger . . ."
"And unmarried," added one of the officers, to general laughter.
"And unmarried," Read acknowledged, his smile broadening, "I would have found a way to keep you here."
"I shall leave with a sad heart," she said quite genuinely. "I had no idea what I would find out here, but I can see now why so many stay here. It is a beautiful place. Perhaps the most beautiful in the system."
"Then you do not mind the danger?" one of the officers asked, his slightly stilted accent typical of the Colonies.
"No," she answered, clear-eyed. "Indeed, that's part of its beauty, neh? That sense of living on the edge of things. These suits . . ." She tugged gently with her free hand at the strong but supple cloth beneath the rigid neck and smiled. "IVe grown rather fond of mine. Why, I think I'll continue wearing one when I get back to Chung Kuo. Who knows, it might set a new fashion among the warm-worlders!"
There was delight at that, and laughter. Many times on her travels she had heard how soft they thought the "warm-worlders" of Chung Kuo; it being confided, at the same time, that they thought her different from the others who came out on the big tour ships like the Meridian. Totally different.
And so she was. Back there, close to the sun, she had felt cut off from her fellows; a stranger among "friends," always the outsider. But out here she felt strangely in her element and had found herself drawn—instinctively drawn—to these big, slow, fiercely independent people.
She smiled, looking about her at their finely sculpted faces. It took a special kind of person to come and live out here, two billion li from the sun; a special kind of mentality. The intense cold, the pressure, the fact that everything—food, water, air, everything—had to be manufactured: these factors had forged a whole new race. Or remade the old. She wasn't sure which.
For a moment she looked down, studying the ancient brass orrery nearby. Four tiny planets circled the sun closely—Mercury, Venus, Chung Kuo, and Mars. Beyond them, some way out, was Jupiter and then, the same distance out again, was Saturn, where she was now.
She had come a long way these past fifteen months. Was ten times farther from the sun than when she'd started. But her father had been wrong. She had not forgotten Kim. Not at all. In fact, the farther out she came, the more she thought of him; the more she tried to see things through his eyes and think of them as he might think of them. The films she took, the things she noted in her diary—all were for him. And if it took six years before she could see him again, nonetheless she would wait, holding herself prepared; saving herself for him. For the time would come. The time would surely come.
Three days ago his "letter" had arrived. At first she had set it aside, confused by the official-looking nature of the package, by the SimFic logo on the reverse. It was only some fifteen hours later, after a long and tiring tour of the Great Escarpment, that she returned and finally opened it.
It was the first time she had heard from him since that day when she had been hustled aboard the Meridian at Nanking spaceport. But not, it seemed, the first time he had written. From the things he said, it was clear he had written often to her. The thought of that angered her, even now. The thought that her father had been meddling again, keeping things from her, trying to run her life the way he wanted it and not as she would have it.