“I’ve told you many times!”
“I don’t understand!”
“Don’t yell at me. Stop it!”
Ev clenched his teeth to silence himself. As long as he had deluded himself that Miraly would come with him, it had been easy to plan to go to the stars. Now it was a gaping, awful prospect that he wanted to rail against.
Miraly said, “listen to me. Forever after this, Earth will know there are other worlds with intelligence on them.” Her voice sounded solemn and almost ceremonial, resonating in the room’s semi-darkness as though it were a theater, rather than a bedroom. “Finally, there will be no doubt that there is other intelligent, civilized life in the Universe. Not under our control. I think it will change the politics, the ideas, the whole way civilization is headed. I can tell by how hard they’re fighting it”
Ev shook his head. “Fighting hard and dirty. I can’t see any sense in staying through that”
Miraly sighed. “Dear sweet Mark works on grasses, and you work on genes. Neither of you have a lot to do with generations.”
“You’re being about as clear as the atmosphere of Venus,” he said, with a pained grin which there was just enough soft light from the electric candles for her to see.
“Oak trees generate new oaks. People have children who grow up, and neither oaks or people are like century plants that grow for a long time, go to seed, and keel over dead. Earth is more like an oak or a human”
He groaned. “For God’s sake stop being so Venusian—what do you mean?”
“Some people hoped the outplanet colonies could be like children of Earth who grow up. But the Moon and Mars and Titan never will be full-grown worlds like Earth. Yours will. Ev, people do sometimes try to hang onto their children forever. But having full-grown children who leave you and live out there, apart from you, maybe stronger and wiser than you, makes a difference in how you live. Knowing that other civilizations exist out there will make a difference for the Earth.”
“And that’s why you can stand to stay?”
She nodded. Strands of her dark hair loosely framed her fine-boned face, and made Ev’s heart pound faster at her beauty.
“You never explained it like that.”
“I’ve been thinking very, very hard these last few weeks.”
Ev groaned again. “I understand what you mean now, but I can’t buy it. I can’t accept it.”
“The reason I can, is because I’m not going. You are. You have to have your own truth, and it has to be about the new world, not the old one. Ev, what is it?”
“What?”
“I mean exactly what I asked,” she said crisply. “Why are you going?”
Ev got out of bed, threw on his silk pajama bottoms, and paced in a hot sweat. He was Ev Reynolds, first the boy and later the man could always say something plausible. Not tonight. Tonight, what he said had to be not just plausible, but true.
Mark wanted to husband a new world; he also needed a simpler world than this Earth, even if a harder one. Ev respected Mark’s motivations. Certain other people were not attached to much in this Solar System, and were out for sheer adventure or a clean slate in life—motives that had gotten a great many strange lands explored in the history of human life on Earth, but not Ev’s motives. Then there were the people who gave Ev the general impression of rats leaving a sinking ship. It had to be a better thing than that for him.
“It stopped being a game for you a while back,” said Miraly. “I realized you’d go. But I still don’t know why. I’d really like to know.” She paused. “Ev. I wasn’t going to tell you this. But I think it’s the only way to make you tell me why you’re doing this. And maybe tell yourself. I haven’t used birth control for weeks. And I’m pregnant.”
Stunned, Ev halted his pacing. He couldn’t keep his voice from rising to a near-shout. “To make me stay?”
“No, so that your father and I have part of you to remember you after you’re gone!” She put her arms around herself, not him, and the gesture tore at Ev like a bandage coming off a wound. It was the first motion of her pulling away from him.
In pain, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”
Of all women, only she could have said what she did next with no acid in her tone, just level honesty. “Tell me, what am I going to tell your child?”
Ev could not reply. They held each other in silence for the slender remainder of the night, tightly. In the morning she left for work in the hospital in Galveston. Ev waited for the call from the Genesis Foundation.
Visiting the bathroom, Ev stared at himself in the mirror. He looked haggard. And this morning, of all mornings, he saw the first faint wrinkles of age in his skin.
Ev had always tried to overlook wrinkles in women, and disparaged them in other men. What you get for living too close to the Sun. Gravity’s calling card, he called them. But today young wrinkles stood in his own face to tell him that the irresponsible kid he had been was no more. He had to do something with his life, something more permanent than his physical being.
I know I have to go. But how can I explain to her? And to myself? Waiting, he stared at the Ladies of the Lake, as if to ask the picture or the stars: what is my why?
Ev let himself slide into the wide picture, imagining the scene as if he were the first man to explore that nameless world with new stars in its sky reflected in the nitrogen lake: starry Sisters in their swaddling nebulosity, and the other stars, red and blue and yellow, that belonged to the same young open cluster.
Lost in the painting, Ev imagined climbing one of the sharp islands that ringed the nitrogen lake. He chose the island or peninsula in the left edge of the picture that had a low saddle-back profile, climbable in the world’s relatively low gravity with easy, careful strides. He wore a cold-moon spacesuit. There was the inhalation and exhalation of his own breathing in his ears, and static—the soft radio hiss of atoms of gas in the Pleiades’s nebulosity.
Since this was imagination anyway, he let his boots make footprints in the nitrogen frost. The footprints were dark and graphic—the frost was thin; under that layer, the mountain was sooty with stardust, grains with embedded glassy traces, primitive organic compounds, everything that had been swept out of space by the radiation of the new Pleiades and clotted on the skin of this planet.
At the top of the ridge, Ev turned his face up to the shining skein of stars stretched across the black sky like the bright banner of creation itself. So it was when my own Sun formed, Ev thought. In its day it was one of a cluster of stars. They condensed out of thick dust and gas that had been blown into the Universe when some of the First Stars turned into novas and supernovas.
I started in the stars. I am atoms forged when supernovas died. I am Earth distilled from the dust between the stars. “For you are dust and to dust you shall return ”
Startled so much that his imagination fell back out of the Pleiades print, Ev took a deep breath. His mind, strained with lack of sleep, gingerly cradled the new, sharp idea that it wasn’t exile but homecoming that he was poised on the brink of, return to the once and future glory of the stars.
Then the Netnode trilled, and the contoured tone told him that it was the Foundation calling. His return to the stars had begun.
The Gulf of California flashed beneath the wings, a narrow sea of glare. Mark hardly noticed. His eyes were glued on the base of the gigantic tower that was the axis of Star Field, Baja California.
The Star Tower had been constructed here in case it fell down in whole or in part: it was better for it to fall into shallow sea than onto possibly inhabited land. Mark’s heart fluttered. It hadn’t fallen yet, he reminded himself. It had already launched the two earlier starships on their journeys.