She smiled and beckoned.
Next morning she wakened Wat by prising his arms from around her and saying, “You neednae hold so tight, I won’t run away.”
She slipped out of bed and pulled on a long loose shirt. He raised himself by an elbow to watch. Playing a keyboard invisible to him she made a clear round window in the wall before her and raised it until it framed a hawk perched on the top branch of a Scotch pine and the summit of Whitelaw against a pale sky. By light from this Nan opened elegant boxes holding the materials of a meal and made breakfast.
She was nearly forty with short dark hair and a lively, clever face which appreciated everything she saw. While poaching an egg her frown of concentration left a small smile at the corners of the mouth, a humorous look which had been inherited by her daughters. Nearby was a loom where she wove rugs, door curtains, pillows with patterns that made this room different from any other, also the screen she used to design new patterns or play music. She had a talent for every worthwhile art, handling utensils with swift ease which soothed Wat’s mind as much as her fingers had soothed the rest of him the night before. He said, “I want to stay with you, here, in this room, till all the seas run dry, my dear, and the rocks melt in the sun. Can I do it for a week or two?”
“War fatigue?” she said, looking hard at him.
“No. I’m afraid of news from Geneva.”
“Are you feart they’ll disqualify the draw with Northumbria?”
“No. I hope they disqualify that draw. It will discourage suicidal heroics that have become the bane of honest warfare, especially in Scotland.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“Did ye see our last battle?”
“Certainly not. No decent woman who’s borne a son watches battles.”
Slowly, almost unwillingly, Wat told her that someone he knew had struck a blow which had the appearance of being foul and might be condemned as such.
“Who was that?” said Nan, looking at Wat more closely still.
“If Geneva condemns him you’ll soon know,” said Wat drearily, “If it doesnae I’ll try to forget about it. Let me stay here for a fortnight Nan.” She said firmly, “Not possible. An hour from now I become mother and I cannae mother a whole household with you waiting round to be served. Sit up.”
She placed a closed mug of coffee where his mouth could reach a tube sticking from the top, then she sat on the bedside with a plate on her lap and fed him slices of poached-egg-on-toast. She said, “Go to Annie’s room — she’s mad about you and has no responsibilities. Stay there as long as you like. It will teach her something. Craig Douglas needs more bairns now and I don’t want to carry another.”
He groaned and said, “I think of Annie as a wee sister.”
“Aye, because you never look at her. Do it. Dick Megget was her dad. The Meggets havenae fucked with Dryhopes for three generations, there’s no fear of incest.”
He said wistfully, “With you, in this room, I feel better, more sure of myself than anywhere else in the world.”
“I doubt it. Annie says you looked bloody sure of yourself in that last battle. She plays it six times a day. She says you’re magnificent. Why are you no magnificent with me?” He scowled. She said, “Cheer up! You were my favourite soldier long before the rest got chopped. I liked you most because you didnae act the big hero. Yet in battle you’re better than others. Why?”
“Easy told,” said Wat drearily, “I’m usually clumsier than other men because I don’t like life as much, so danger speeds this body without upsetting this brain. Most soldiers only enjoy battles when looking back on them — while fighting they’re too excited to think so do it automatically. I think cooler and hit faster while fighting so I enjoy it at the time. Afterward the memory depresses me. I wish I had another talent.”
“I remember you six years ago as a queer lanky clever lad who wanted to seed the stars and got accepted for it. Were you useless there?”
“No, I could do the work but I hated the narrow places in the satellites, hated that every gramme of air we breathed or green thing we looked on had been contrived by human skill. I didnae hate it all, of course. A good thing about satellites is their lack of nourishment for our kind of powerplant, so men and women earn their living room by working together as equals. The men have no time for warfare. They sometimes fight duels, but hardly ever to the death. Many couples live as husband and wife and think of earthmen as lazy lecherous belligerent primitives. I agreed with them but I couldnae stand the enclosed spaces they lived in. Anyway, for me the satellites were just stepping-stones to the universe where immortals are making new worlds — and I hated that universe most of all. I could hardly face the deserts of dead rock and frozen stoor between the domed craters. The stars are fearsome out there, white, steady, and intense. Look at any two of them and if, like me, you’re cursed with good sight, you soon see a hundred between. Look hard at any two of those and the same thing happens no matter how close they seem. I lost all sense of darkness between them. It was not the vast darkness but the endless lights, the millions of starlights that made me feel less than a grain of stoor myself — I felt like zero. I trudged across one of these deserts with Groombridge who was testing my fitness for immortality. He said immortality would madden me unless I had a good reason for it and the only good reason was in the grains of dirt under our boots, the millions of stars over our helmets. He said the silence of these spaces did not appal minds in the network conspiring to bring them to life, but generations of mortals would die and be forgotten before Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn had the ground and air to support freely evolving plants and intelligences. This was why people who chose immortality must prepare to live almost completely in the future. The main difference between neo-sapience and proto-sapience (that is what immortals call themselves and us) is, that the longer neo-sapiences live the more they know of their future, the longer we live the more we know of our past. Groombridge said mortals cling harder to the past as they age, so our lives have a tragic sweetness neo-sapience lacks, a painful sweetness got from memories of lost childhood, lost love, lost friends, lost opportunities, lost beauty et cetera — lost life, in other words. He said, ‘Our rejuvenation treatment still retains an embarrassing wealth of early memories but in two or three centuries we’ll overcome that. If you become immortal, Mr. Dryhope, by your five thousandth year the first fifty will have been erased by more recent, more urgent, more useful experiences, most of them gained through a virtual keyboard and scanner or their future equivalent. By your five thousandth year it is possible — and by your five millionth inevitable — that you will work in another galaxy in a body whose form we cannot now predict. By then, of course, the planet of your origin, like a myriad other worlds you’ve helped reshape, will have ceased to be even a cipher in your calculations. Perhaps I repel you, Mr. Dryhope?’ Yes, he scunnered me like a creature I once saw in an aquarium. It was harmless but I couldnae watch it because it breathed, ate and ejaculated through holes which, to my mind, were in the wrong places. From feeling zero he had made me feel minus, an absence with an ache inside. I had to return to things as bonny and temporary as you and those.”
He pointed to the green hilltop and the bird on the branch, then began biting his nails. She stopped that by putting down the plate and kissing him.
Later she washed, dried and dressed him in clean garments saying, “Don’t play the helpless wean too much with Annie, she’s had none of her own. Your hands will soon heal if you work the fingers.”