"It's expected," I said. "The captain briefed me on it. A courtesy call. As if he were a king or prime minister or potentate or something. I couldn't have ducked it very well."
"What I don't understand," Elmer said to Cynthia, "is how you fit into it. Not that you aren't welcome." Cynthia looked at me. "Didn't Fletcher tell you?"
"He said something about treasure…"
"I suppose," she said, "I'd better tell it all. Because you have a right to know. And I wouldn't want you to think I was a simple adventuress. There is something rather shoddy about an adventuress. Do you want to listen?"
"We might as well," said Elmer.
She was silent for a moment and you could sense her sort of settling down, getting a good grip on herself, as if she faced a difficult task and was determined that she would do it well.
"I am an Alden native," she began. "My ancestors were among the first to settle there. The family history-perhaps a better way to say it is the family legend, for it's not documented-runs back to their first arrival. But you won't find the Lansing name listed among the First Families-the First Families, capitalized. The First Families are those that prospered. My family didn't prosper. Bad management, pure laziness, lack of ambition bad luck-I don't know what it was, but they stayed poor as church mice. There is a little place, way back in the outland country, that is called Lansing Corners, but that's all there is, that is the only mark my family made on Alden or on Alden history. They were farmers, small tradesmen, labourers; they had no political aspirations; no genius blossomed in them. They were content to do a good day's work and at the end of it to sit on the doorstep of their cottage and drink their beer, chatting with their neighbours, or alone, watching the fabulous Alden sunsets. They were simple people. Some of them, I guess a lot of them, went off-planet with the years, seeking fortunes that I imagine they never found. If they had, the Alden Lansings would have heard of it and the family legends make no mention of it. I imagine those who were left stayed on simply because they hated to leave; there wasn't much there for them, but Alden is a lovely planet."
"It is that," I said. "I came there to attend university. Until now I never quite worked up the nerve to leave."
"Where did you come from, Fletcher?"
"Rattlesnake," I told her. "You have heard of it?" She shook her head. "You're lucky, then," I said. "Don't ask. And please go on."
"Myself, I suppose," she said. "A little background on myself. I set out to make something of myself. I would imagine that through the years many of the Lansings did the same, but it came to nothing. As I may come to nothing. It is a little late in the day to do much for the Lansing image. My father died when I was young. He owned a fairly prosperous farm-not an outstanding farm, but one that made a living and a little more. My mother managed it after his death and there was enough to send me to the university. My interest was history. I dreamed that in time I might hold a chair in history and do learned research and write penetrating papers. I did well in my studies. I should have. I spent all my time at them. I missed many of the other things that college life can give you. I recognize that now, but I didn't mind. There was nothing in the world that fascinated me like history. I simply wallowed in it-far places and far people and far times. At night when I was in bed, in the dark, I'd imagine a time machine and travel through far time to those distant places to observe those ancient people. I'd lie there in the dark and imagine that I was lying in my time machine, in those far lands and times and that just beyond the wall of darkened time moved and lived and breathed those people I had come to spy upon and that all about me those great events were happening that form the tide of history. When the time came to specialize, to follow one specific line of study, I found myself drawn irresistibly to the study of the ancient Earth. My adviser warned me against it. He pointed out that the field was narrow and the resource material very limited. I knew that he was right and I tried to reason with myself, but it did no good. I was obsessed with Earth.
"My obsession with the Earth," she said, "I am quite certain, was in part a rapport with the past, a deep concern for the old beginnings. My father's farm was only a few miles from the locality where the first Lansings had settled on Al-den, or so the legend ran. Nestled in a little rocky canyon, at a point where it opened on what at one time must have been a wide, rich valley suitable for farming, was an old stone house, or what at one time had been a stone house. Large parts of it had crumbled, the very stones weathering away with time, disturbed by the small shiftings of the ground that would become significant only after many centuries. There were no stories about it. It was not a haunted house. It was too old to be a haunted house. It simply stood there. Time had made it a part of the landscape. It was not noticed. It was too old and self-effacing to attract human notice, although many little wild creatures, I found when I went to visit it, had made it their home. The land on which it stood and the land around it was so poor and worthless that it interfered with nothing, so it had escaped the tearing down and razing that is so common a fate of many ancient things. The area, in fact, is so worn out for any economic use, ruined by centuries of forgotten farming, that it is seldom visited. Legend said-I must admit, a very shaky legend-that it had been, at one time, the residence of a very early Lansing.
"I visited it, I suppose, because of its very oldness. Not because it may have been Lansing, but simply because it was so old-old beyond the memory of man, a structure from the deeper past. I expected nothing from it. The visit, you must understand, was just a holiday, the filling of an empty day. I had known of it, of course, for a long time, and like all the rest, had ignored it. There were many others who knew of its existence and accepted that existence as they would the existence of a tree or boulder. There was nothing to recommend it, nothing at all. Perhaps I would never have thought of it except in passing, or would never have visited it if it had not been for a gradual sharpening of my concern for olden things. Can you understand what I'm saying?"
"I think," I said, "I understand it far better than you may suspect. I recognize the symptoms. I have suffered most acutely from them."
"I went there," she said, "and I ran my hands along the old, roughly hewn stones and I thought of how human hands, long gone in dust, had shaped them and piled them atop another as a refuge against the night and storm, as a home on a newfound planet. Looking through the ancient eyes of the builders, I was able to understand the attraction of the place of building, knowing why they might have chosen this particular place for the building of a house. Protection of the canyon walls from the sweeping winds, the quiet and dramatic beauty of the place, the water from the spring that still ran in a trickle from underneath a hillside rock, the wide and fertile valley (no longer fertile now) spreading just beyond the doorstep. I stood there in their stead and felt as they would have felt. I was, for a moment, them. And it didn't really matter whether they were Lansings or not; they were people, they were the human race.
"I would have been richly repaid for my time in going there if I had walked away right then. The touching of the stone, the evidence of the past would have been quite enough, but I went into the house…"
She stopped and waited a moment, as if gathering herself for the telling of the rest of it.
"I went into the house," she said, "and it was a foolhardy thing to do, for at any moment a part of it might have come crashing down upon me. Some of the stones were balanced most precariously and the entire thing was unstable. I don't remember that at the time, however, I gave any thought to this. I walked softly, not because of any danger, but because of the sanctity of time that hovered in that space. It was strange, the feeling that I had-or, rather, the conflicting feelings. When I first went into it I felt that I was an invader, an outsider who had no right of being there. I was intruding on old memories, on old lives, on old emotions that should have been left alone in peace, that had been there so long that they had earned the right to be left alone. I went inside, into what had been a rather large room, perhaps what you might call a living room. There was thick dust upon the floor and the dust was marked by the tracks of wild and small things and there was the odour of wild things having lived there through millennia. Insects had spun webs of silk in the corners and some of the older webs were as dusty as the floor. But as I stood there, just inside the doorway, a strange thing happened-a feeling that I had the right to be there, that I belonged there, that I was coming back after a long, long time on a family visit and was a welcome visitor. For blood of my blood had lived there, bone of my bone, and the right of blood and bone is not erased by time. There was a fireplace in one corner. The chimney was gone, fallen long before, but the fireplace's remained. I walked over to it and, kneeling down, touched the hearthstone with my fingers, feeling the texture of its surface through the dust. I could see the fireplace's; blackened throat, blackened by the old home fires; the soot-still there, resisting time and weather, and there was a moment when it seemed I could see the piled logs and the flame. And I said-I don't know if I said it aloud or only in my mind-I said it is all right, I have come back to tell you; the Lansings still persist. Never for a moment confused as to whom I might be saying it. I waited for no answer. I did not expect an answer. There was no one there to answer. It was enough that I should say it. It was a debt I owed them."