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The creature bore David Ryerson’s body in its arms.
17
Where Sunda Straits lay beneath rain — but sunlight came through to walk upon the water — the land fell steep. It was altogether green, in a million subtle hues, jungle and plantation and rice paddy, it burned with green leaves. White mists wreathed the peak of a volcano, and was it thunder across wind or did the mountain talk in sleep?
Terangi Maclaren set his aircar down on brown-and-silver water and taxied toward the Sumatra shore. Each day he regained flesh and strength, but the effort of dodging praus and pontoon houses and submarines still tired him. When his guide pointed: “There, tuan,” he cut the engines and glided in with a sigh.
“Are you certain?” he asked, for there were many such huts of thatch and salvaged plastic along this coast. It was a wet world here, crowding brown folk who spent half their cheerful existences in the water, divers, deckhands, contracting their labor to the sea ranches but always returning home, poverty, illiteracy, and somehow more life and hope than the Citadel bore.
“Yes, tuan. Everyone knows of her. She is not like the rest, and she holds herself apart. It marks her out.”
Maclaren decided the Malay was probably right. Tamara Suwito Ryerson could not have vanished completely into the anonymous proletariat of Earth. If she still pla
He drove up onto the shore. “Stay here,” he ordered his guide, and stepped out. The quick tropic rain poured over his tunic and his skin. It was the first rain he had felt since … how long? … it tasted of morning.
She came to the door and waited for him. He would have known her from the pictures, but not the grace with which she carried herself. She wore a plain sarong and blouse. The rain filled her crow’s-wing hair with small drops and the light struck them and shattered.
“You are Technic Maclaren,” she said. He could scarcely hear her voice, so low did it fall, but her eyes were steady on his. “Welcome.”
“You have seen me on some newscast?” he inquired, banally, for lack of anything else.
“No. I have only heard. Old Prabang down in the village has a nonvisual set. But who else could you be? Please come in, sir.”
Only later did he realize how she broke propriety. But then, she had declared herself free of Protectorate ways months ago. He found that out when he first tried to contact her at her father-in-law’s. The hut, within, was clean, austerely furnished, but a vase of early mutation-roses stood by David’s picture.
Maclaren went over to the cradle and looked down at the sleeping infant. “A son, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes. He has his father’s name.”
Maclaren brushed the baby’s cheek. He had never felt anything so soft. “Hello, Dave,” he said.
Tamara squatted at a tiny brazier and blew up its glow. Maclaren sat down on the floor.
“I would have come sooner,” he said, “but there was so much else, and they kept me in the hospital—”
“I understand. You are very kind.”
“I… have his effects… just a few things. And I will arrange the funeral in any way you desire and—” His voice trailed off. The rain laughed on the thatch.
She dipped water from a jar into a tea kettle. “I gather, then,” she said, “there was no letter that he wrote?”
“No. Somehow… I don’t know. For some reason none of us wrote any such thing. Either we would all perish out there, and no one else would come for fifty or a hundred years, or we would get back. We never thought it might be like this, a single man.” Maclaren sighed. “It’s no use trying to foresee the future. It’s too big.”
She didn’t answer him with her voice.
“But almost the last thing Dave said,” he finished awkwardly, “was your name. He went in there thinking he would soon be home with you.” Maclaren stared down at his knees. “He must have… have died quickly. Very quickly.”
“I have not really understood what happened,” she said, kneeling in the graceful Australian style to set out cups. Her tone was flattened by the effort of self-control. “I mean, the ‘cast reports are always so superficial and confused, and the printed journals so technical. There isn’t any middle ground any more. That was one reason we were going to leave Earth, you know. Why I still am going to, when our baby has grown just a little bit.”
“I know how you feel,” said Maclaren. “I feel that way myself.”
She glanced up with a startled flirt of her head that was beautiful to see. “But you are a technic!” she exclaimed.
“I’m a human being too, my lady. But go on, ask me your question, whatever you were leading up to. I’ve a favor of my own to ask, but you first.”
“No, what do you want? Please.”
“Nothing very important. I’ve no claim on you, except the fact that your husband was my friend. I’m thinking of what you might do for his sake. But it will wait. What did you wonder about?”
“Oh. Yes. I know you tuned in the aliens’ transceiver and didn’t realize it. But—” Her fists clenched together. She stared through the open door, into the rain and the light, and cried forth: “It was such a tiny chance! Such a meaningless accident that killed him!”
Maclaren paused until he had all his words chosen. Then he said, as gently as might be:
“IT wasn’t so wildly improbable. All this time we’ve known that we couldn’t be the only race reaching for the stars. It was absurd to think so; that would have been the senseless unlikelihood. Well, the Cross was farther out than men had ever gone before, and the alien spaceship was near the aliens’ own limit of expansion. It was also bound for Alpha Crucis. Odd what a sense of kinship that gives me, my brother mariner, with chlorine in his lungs and silicon in his bones, steering by the same lodestar. Contact was certain eventually, as they and we came into range of each other’s signals. Your David was the man who first closed the ring. We were trying call patterns we could not measure, ru
The water began to boil. She busied herself with the kettle. The long tresses falling past her face hid whether she was crying or not. Maclaren added for her, “Do you know, my lady, I think we must have called hundreds of other space-traveling races. We were out of their range, of course, but I’m sure we called them.”
Her voice was muffled: “What did the aliens think of it?”
“I don’t know. In ten years we may begin to talk to them. In a hundred years, perhaps we will understand them. And they us, I hope. Of course, the moment David… appeared… they realized what had happened. One of them came through to me. Can you imagine what courage that must have taken? How fine a people your man has given us to know? There was little they could do for me, except test the Cross’ web and rule out all the call patterns which they use. I kept on trying, after that. In a week I finally raised a human. I went through to his receiver and that’s all. Our technicians are now building a new relay station on the black star planet. But they’ll leave the Cross as she is, and David Ryerson’s name will be on her.”
“I thought,” she whispered, still hiding her face, “that you I mean, that quarantine rules—”
“Oh, yes, the Protectorate tried to invoke them. Anything to delay what is going to happen. But it was useless. Nothing from the aliens’ planet could possibly feed on Terrestrial life. That’s been established already, by the joint scientific commission; we may not be able to get the idea behind each other’s languages yet, but we can measure the same realities! And of course, the aliens know about us. Man just can’t hide from the universe. So I was released.” Maclaren accepted the cup she offered him and added wryly: “To be sure, I’m not exactly welcome at the Citadel any more.”