Macroscope

Was it the single rose he smelled again?

“Moonstruck,” Brad had termed him, setting that emotional snare, and Afra was that moon. Ivo knew he would have loved her anyway, whatever her color, whatever her intelligence. It was perhaps her appearance more than her personality; he had disillusioned himself long ago about his romantic values and hers. Still, the love he felt encompassed all of her, the violent along with the beautiful. All, no matter what.

She jerked her head up, eyes widening in shock, showing that blue again. Ivo jumped guiltily, thinking she had caught him staring, but her exclamation banished such inconsequential alarm immediately.

“It’s tracking us!”

Groton and Beatryx seemed to materialize beside her.

“It’s live!” Afra said with the same shock. “It has a range-finder on us.”

“Since we’re a sitting duck, all we can do is quack,” Groton said, but he did not look as complacent as he sounded.

Beatryx ventured one of her rare technical comments: “Wouldn’t it have done something, if it meant to?”

Afra smiled, as she did so readily and prettily now. “You’re right,” Tryx. I’m getting hysterical after the fact. We’d be smithereened by now if we were going to be. We’re within fifty thousand miles, and you can bet that’s well within its sphere of control. So eradication just isn’t in our horoscope for today.”

The strange ante

The journey via melting and ten-G acceleration had reduced the problems of deceleration and docking to elementary ones; maneuvering was nothing after distance had been conquered. Afra piloted them into a companion orbit — the destroyer-sphere five light-minutes distant, small as it was, was the primary for both — and let Joseph drift. None of them had conjectured how an object two miles in diameter could have a gravitational field about it equivalent to that of a small star. Galactic technology had done it, utilizing gravity as a tool, and that was explanation enough.

“Someone should stay on the ship,” Groton said. “We can’t be sure what is waiting — there.”

“Ivo should stay,” Afra said. “If anything happens, he’s the only one who can get the ship out. Neptune, rather.” She said it as though he were a fixture, a commodity; she hadn’t asked his opinion. “Give me one companion, though; I’m afraid of the dark.”

“I’ll stay,” Beatryx said. “You go, Harold.”

Ivo could find no legitimate objection to make.

The two got into their suits and departed via the airlock at the appropriate time. Ivo was alone with Beatryx for the first time since their last conversation on satellite Schön, seemingly so long ago. In the interim he had traveled into Earth’s historic past, and into its geologic past, and beyond the fringe of the galaxy. His body had run through the astonishing liquefication and reconstitution so many times that the process had become routine, even tedious. He had lived many lifetimes, and many of his basic certainties had been a

Why, then, did it bother him so much that Afra and Groton should be together?

He tried to say something to Beatryx, but realized that he could not ask her advice without undermining her own framework. She had proper faith in her husband.

He looked at her, realizing in this isolated moment of association and reflection how much she had changed. She had been plump and fortyish when he met her at age thirty-seven; in the period of the Triton trouble she had become emaciated and fortyish. Now she was thirty-eight — and had regained her health without her former avoirdupois. She looked thirtyish. Her hair had brightened into full blonde, her limbs were sleek, her torso reminiscent of the goddess she had been momentarily during the first re-constitution. It had happened gradually, this change in her; the surprise was that it had taken him so long to recognize it.

“You have changed, Ivo,” she said.

“I’ve changed?”

“Since your visit to Tyre. You were so young at first, so unsure. Now you’re more mature.”

“I don’t feel mature,” he said, flattered but disbelieving. “I’m still full of doubts and frustrations. And Tyre was nothing but violence and intrigue — not my type of life at all. I don’t see how it could have changed me.”

She only shrugged.

He glanced at the screen again, reminded that half their party was in the alien structure. Groton and Afra—

“She has let go of Bradley Carpenter,” Beatryx said. “Have you seen the difference? She’s changed so much. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Was there such a thing as being too generous? True, the two were risking their lives by attempting personal contact with aliens likely to be powerful and hostile; but the human interaction could not be entirely ignored. “I’ve noticed the difference, yes.”

“And she gets along so much better with Harold. I’m sure he has been good for her. He’s very steady.”

Ivo nodded.

“She’s such a lovely girl,” Beatryx said. There was no malice in her tone; nothing but concerned pleasure.

“Lovely.”

“You look tired, Ivo. why don’t I keep watch while you rest?”

“That’s very kind of you.” He went to his hammock and strapped himself in. It was an anchor rather than a support, in this weightlessness.

It was this about Beatryx, he thought: she was happy. There was no place in her philosophy for jealousy or petty conjecture. She did not worry about her husband because she had no internal doubts.

How much could the group have accomplished, without her? The ingredients of strife had been abundantly present, particularly with the strong personalities of Groton and Afra clashing at the outset, and the background specter of Schön, but somehow every flareup had been diverted or pacified. Beatryx had done it… and profited in the doing. Intelligence, determination, skill — these would have come to nothing without that basic stability.

He must have slept, for he was Sidney Lanier again: poor, ill, his aspirations unrecognized. He did some more teaching, but the pupils were unruly, the employers exacting. It was the Reconstruction, and it was bad; the carpetbaggers corrupted everything. “Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,” he wrote, “we lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.”

But the love of Mary Day, now Mary Day Lanier, sustained him. She was as ill as he, and as hard put upon, but their marriage was an unqualified blessing. His son Charles delighted him, for he loved children though he did not really understand them.

In 1869 James Wood Davidson published a survey of two hundred and forty-one Southern writers. Lanier was listed, though largely for completeness; much more space was devoted to others considered more notable.

But you were the greatest of them all! Ivo cried. If only your contemporaries had opened their minds—

But nothing changed. The mind of Ivo was prisoner to the situation of another person; he could watch, he could know, but he could not influence.

As Schön was watching him even now…

At Macon they spoke of Sidney Lanier as “A young fool trying to write poetry.” They paid no attention to his dialect poems — a form whose origin was later to be credited to another man — or his cautions against the shiftless, shortsighted Georgia Cracker ways. Cotton was destroying the land; wheat and corn were far better crops, but the farmers refused to change.

He put his sentiment at least into a major poem, “Corn,” and sent it off to the leading literary magazine of the day, Howells’ Atlantic Monthly.

Howells rejected it.

Lanier was crushed by this response. He believed in his work, yet the unambitious efforts of others achieved readier acceptance. “In looking around at the publications of the younger poets,” he was later to remark, “I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even attempt anything great. The morbid fear of doing something wrong or unpolished appears to have influenced their choice of subjects.”