“Or find loopholes in them?”
“If possible. Mainly, though, I’d say we should start by getting the Navy men on our side. Make them agree the Gathering of Sehala is more important than a minor base way outside the theater of war. Their word should bear more weight in Mexico City than any amount of impassioned pleas from us. I repeat, Dejerine and his staff strike me as basically decent, reasonable persons. They support the war, but that doesn’t mean they’re lunatics.”
“Do you plan a grand tour for them?”
“Not yet. I’m bound for Sehala tomorrow, to tell the assembly that… whatever help they were counting on from us, they’ll have to wait for.” Sparling winced. “It won’t be easy.”
“No,” Jill said low. “I wish it didn’t have to be you, Ian. It does. You must empathize with them better than anybody else, and Lord knows they think the cosmos of you. But I wish you didn’t have to take on the pain of it.”
He looked at her through thunder. She cares this much about me?
Turned thoughtful, she went on: “Suppose meanwhile I have a go at persuading those Earthsiders. Well, not persuade, that can’t be done overnight, but putting our case to them, laying out the facts. I’ve no professional ax to grind; a naturalist can continue research unaffected. And I do have a brother in uniform. So they should listen. I’ll be polite, yes, downright cordial. Do you think that might help, Ian?”
“Would it!” he blurted. At once: I don’t believe the idea’s crossed her mind, what a charming young woman can accomplish. She has no conscious notion of how to flirt. It moved him, though at the same time he was wrenched to understand that her concern for him was that of a friend, only a friend.
She tossed her head. “Okay. We ain’t licked yet. Which may mean we’re dry behind the ears. Not between them, let’s hope.”
Seriously: “When you see Larreka in Sehala, tell him from me, ‘Yaago barao!’ ”
“What?”
“You don’t know?… Well, it’s not Sehalan. From a dialect in the Iren islands, where the Zera was stationed, oh, decades ago.” She hesitated. “A rough equivalent of ‘I have not begun to fight.’ If Larreka hears it from me, he’ll feel better.”
Sparling squinted at her. For both of them, the banter which had long been a shared pleasure could become a refuge. “Rough, did you say?” he murmured. “How rough? What’s the literal translation?”
“I’m a lady,” she retorted. “I won’t tell you till I’ve decided I need practice in blushing—or you do.”
They stood silent for a little, hand in hand.
“Too lovely a sunset for anything but itself,” she said, looking across the river. Light from clouds and water poured hot gold across her. “Does Earth really have places left like this?”
“A few.” He was chiefly conscious of her clasp.
“Your stamping grounds?”
“No, they’re different. Woods, mountains, sea, wet climate—”
“Silly! I know you’re from British Columbia. You’ve now confirmed what I also knew, that you’re as literal-minded as a computer. If I said ‘frog,’ you wouldn’t simply jump, you’d do your best to turn green.”
He smiled across an inward flinching. “Come to Earth and meet a frog. Kiss him and change him back into a handsome prince. Then you’ll be sorry. You see, the conservation of mass will require you become a frog.”
Did she see that she had called him old and stodgy? For she spoke with renewed seriousness. “Sure, they’ve kept enclaves of nature on Earth, and you had the luck to grow up in one. But didn’t you first truly luck out when you came here? Aren’t you happier where we are the enclave? Freedom—” Abruptly she pointed. “Look! Look! A bipen!”
Sparling’s gaze followed her gesture. The animal which flew lumberingly from above the row of trees was less birdlike than the other ptenoids in view. Instead of four legs and two wings, it had four wings and two legs—and endless further differences, from bone to feather-plant. He was familiar with the dipter, which dived after ichthyoids off the South Beronnen coast. But the majority of fourwingers, less successful than two-wingers, were confined to Haelen. He’d never seen a bipen before. It was a large and comely creature, plumage violet in the sunset rays.
“They’re beginning to move north,” Jill breathed. He glanced at her, saw how her eyes shone, and lost interest in the bipen. “I thought they would. Remains from the last cycle—shifts of storm belts—lan, am I awful for being fascinated by what Anu passage does to the ecology?”
No, he wanted to say; you can do no wrong.
He couldn’t have voiced it thus, but he groped after a word more meaningful than “Certainly not.” Her cry interrupted him. He cast his attention back skyward.
The saru which had been at hover descended. Its wings drove clawed feet and hooked beak; Sparling heard air whistle behind. He heard the impact which broke the bipen’s neck, and saw blood spray. The blood of ortho-Ishtarian life is purple, and wildly fluorescent. The saru labored off with the heavy catch it had made.
Jill choked. Again he glimpsed tears. She mastered them. “Bound to happen, I suppose,” she mumbled. “Every thousand years. Maybe the species has even gotten dependent on this kind of thing.” She turned to him. “But we don’t need to. Do we?”
He shook his head.
“By God, and I mean the original,” she went on between her teeth, “we will not quit.” Gulping: “ ’Scuse me. I’ll try to be brave and all, but—that poor birdling coming this far to die— Let’s give em hell, Ian. Thanks for everything. Good night.” As she let him go and walked swiftly back, Bel went under the world-rim.
Sparling stayed where he was, loading his pipe, till she had gone from his view and for minutes after. Clouds darkened in a blue dusk, save where the moon tinged them. The early stars trod forth, and mellowly shining Marduk. He thought how tormented that planet was by the storms Anu raised in its immense atmosphere. But across a few hundred million kilometers, nothing is visible except peace. The air around him grew cooler still, water clucked, smoke gave his mouth an acrid kiss.
Indeed, he thought, this moment and place were more serene than his birthland. No matter that Earth was blessed above Ishtar, except maybe in having brought forth man; the West Canadian coast and the Inland Passage were never like the Jayin Valley, they were clouded, wave-beaten, storm-swept, and upon a sunny day what you saw was a stem majesty.
Jill’s right. I have been lucky. His daughter had said the same last year, when he took her on a cruise through the remembered country. Her college was in megalopolitan Rio de Janeiro.
Boyhood among trees and clean currents, because his father happened to be a space architect who commuted to Vancouver when he didn’t leave Earth entirely, his mother a programmer who could work right out of her house, and they between them able to afford Ocean Falls—I’ve seen Welfare and the Backworld, too, he told Yuri Dejerine as he had not during the day’s discussions. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize, I agree those people deserve a better break. And as far as pride in being human goes, I was at the formative age of fifteen when Gunnar Heim brought us to our victory over Alerion. I don’t merely know, I feel what that meant.
But working outsystem as a young engineer, I met Naqsans, and Satan take it. they’re our kind. Then for the last twenty years I’ve been on Ishtar. this has become my world, here’s where my duty lies—
He shook himself. Past time to report in. His boots racketed.
Twilight was deepening toward night, more and more stars out, when he finished the short climb up Humboldt Street from Riverside and opened his gate. Window gleams caught wilted roses and bald patches in grass. Terrestrial plants didn’t give way to weeds if neglected. For that, some years would first have to pass, killing off imported earthworms and soil bacteria, restoring the original balance of acidity, nitrogen, and trace elements. letting native microbes rebuild humus. Untended exotics simply sickened and died. I’ve got to fertilize, drain, whatever’s needful, he thought. When I get the chance. If I do. No groundsmen were for hire in labor-short Primavera. Becky had handled the work.