Imperial Earth

It must have been flattering to have held in your hand the soul of someone as talented and beautiful as Karl-even if he had been enslaved accidentally, with the aid of a machine….

He saw very clearly now why all Karl’s later liaisons and marriages had exploded violently. They had been doomed to failure at the start. Always, the image of Calindy would have stood, an unattainable ideal, between Karl and happiness. How lonely he must have been! And how many misunderstandings might have been averted if the cause of his behavior had been realized in time.

Yet perhaps nothing could have been done, and in any case it was futile to dream about missed opportunities. Who was the old philosopher who had said:

“The human race will never know happiness, as long as the words “If only .” can still be spoken”?

“So it must have been a surprise, when he finally did turn up.”

“No. He’d dropped several hints-I’d been half expecting him for a year.

Then he called me from Port Van Allen, said he’d just arrived on a special flight, and would be seeing me as soon as he’d completed his gravity reconditioning.”

“It was a Terran Survey supply ship, going back empty-and fast. Even

so, it took him fifty days.” And it couldn’t have been a very comfortable trip, Duncan added to himself-fifty days inside one of those space trucks, with minimal life-support systems. What a contrast to Sirius! He felt sorry for the officers who had i

Calindy had recovered some of her poise. She stopped pacing around, and rejoined Duncan on the divan.

“I was not sure whether I really wanted to see him again, after all these years, but I knew how determined he was; it would have been useless trying to keep him away. So-I suppose you can say I took the line of least resistance.”

She managed a wry smile, then continued: “It didn’t work, of course, and I should have known it. Then we saw in a newscast that you’d just arrived on

Earth.”

“That must have been a shock to Karl. What did he say?”

“Not much; but I could see that he was upset and very surprised.”

“Surely he must have made some comment.”

“Only that if you contacted me, I was not to tell you that he was on Earth.

That was the first time I suspected something was wrong, and started to worry about the titanite he’d asked me to sell.”

“That’s a trivial matter-forget about it. Let’s say it was just one of the many tools that Karl used to reach his objective. But I’d like to know this-when we met aboard Titanic, was he still with you?”

Another hesitation, which in itself supplied half the answer. Then Calindy replied, rather defiantly: “Of course he was. And he was very angry when I said I’d met you. We had a bad row over that. Not the first one.” She sighed, slightly too dramatically. “By that time, even Karl realized that it wouldn’t work -that it was quite hopeless. I’d warned him many times, but he wouldn’t believe me. He refused to face the fact that the Calindy he’d known fifteen years before, and whose image was burned in his brain, no longer existed….”

Duncan had never thought that he would see tears in Calindy’s eyes. But was she weeping for Karl, he wondered—or for her own lost youth?

He tried to be cynical, but he did not succeed. He was sure that some part of her sorrow was perfectly genuine, and despite himself was deeply touched by it, And more than touched, for now, to his great surprise, he found that sympathy was not the only emotion Calindy was arousing in him. He had never realized before that shared grief could be an aphrodisiac.

This was a development that he did nothing to discourage, but he did not want to hurry matters. There was still much that he hoped to learn and that only Calindy could tell him.

“So he was always disappointed when we made love,” she continued tearfully, “though at first he tried to conceal it. I could tell-and it wasn’t pleasant for me. It made me feel-inadequate. You see, by this time I’d learned a good deal about imprinting and knew exactly what the trouble was.

Karl’s case isn’t unique…. “So he got more and more frustrated-and also violent. Sometimes he frightened me. You know how strong he was-look at this.”

With another theatrical gesture, she slipped open her dress, displaying the upper left arm-not to mention her entire left breast.

“He hit me here, so hard that I was badly bruised. You can still see the mark.”

With the best will in the world, Duncan could discover no trace of a bruise on the milky-white skin, smooth as satin, that was exposed before his eyes.

Nevertheless, the revelation did not leave him unmoved.

“So that’s why you switched off the viddy,” he said sympathetically, and edged closer.

“Then Ivor’s friend called me, with that query about Titan. I thought it was an odd coincidence… you know, Duncan, that was an unkind trick to play on me.” She sounded more sad than angry; and she did not

268 move away from him. Almost half of the sofa was now unoccupied.

“And then everything started to happen at once. Did you know that Terran

Security sent two of its agents to interview me?”

“No, but I guessed it. What did you tell them?”

“Everything, of course. They were very kind and understanding.”

“And also clumsy,” said Duncan with deep bitterness.

“Oh, Duncan, that was an accident! You were an important guest-you had to be protected. There would have been an interplanetary scandal if something had happened just before you were going to address Congress. But you should never have gone after Karl, in such a dangerous place.”

“It wasn’t dangerous-we were having a perfectly friendly discussion. How did I know that trigger happy idiot was lurking in the next ante

“What was he to do? He’d been ordered to protect you at all costs, and had been warned that Karl might be violent. It looked as if you were starting to fight and that laser blast would only have blinded Karl for a few hours.

It was all a terrible accident. No one was to blame.”

Perhaps, thought Duncan; it would be a long, long time before he could view the whole sequence of events dispassionately. If there was blame, it was spread thinly, and across two worlds. Like most human tragedies, this one had been caused not by evil intentions, but by errors of judgment, misunderstandings…. If Malcolm and Colin had not insisted that he have a showdown with Karl, confronting him with the facts… if he had not wanted Karl to prove his i

It seemed as if they had both been enmeshed in some complex web of fate

from which there had never been any possibility of escape. And though the scale of that disaster was so much greater that the very comparison appeared ludicrous, Duncan was again reminded of the Titanic. She too had been doomed, as if the gods themselves conspired against her, by a whole series of apparently random and trivial chances. If the radioed warnings had not been buried under greetings and business messages… If that iceberg had not sliced so incredibly through all those watertight compartments… If the radio operator on the ship only twenty kilometers away had not gone off duty when the first of all

SOS signals was flashed into the Atlantic night… If there had been enough lifeboats … It was like the failure of a whole series of safety devices, one by one, against incalculable odds, until catastrophe was inevitable.

“Perhaps you are right,” said Duncan, trying to console himself as much as