The big grotesque creatures were frank about being neutral in the strife between People and Flyers. Erakoum did not hold that against them. This was not their home, and they could not be expected to care if it grew desolate. Yet she had shrewdly deduced that they would try to keep in its burrow their equal intimacy with members of both breeds.
If Hugh had been anxious for her to be soul-tied to him this night, doubtless another human wanted the same for a Flyer. It would be a special joy to her to bring that one down. Besides, looking as she fared for a pale ray among firemites and stars might lead her toward a whole pack of enemies. Rested, she began to trot inland.
Erakoum was hunting.
Jannika Rezek was forever homesick for a land where she had never lived.
Her parents had politically offended the government of the Danubian Federation. It informed them they need not enter a reindoctrination hospice if they would volunteer to represent their country in the next shipful of personnel to Medea. That was scarcely a choice. Nevertheless, her father told her afterward that his last thought, as he sank down into suspended animation, was of the irony that when he awakened, none of his judges would be alive and nobody would remember what his opinions had been, let alone care. As a matter of fact, he learned at his goal that there was no longer a Danubian Federation.
The rule remained in force that, except for crewfolk, no person went in the opposite direction. A trip was too expensive for a passenger to be carried who would land on Earth as a useless castaway out of past history. Husband and wife made the best they could of their exile. Both physicians, they were eagerly received in Armstrong and its agricultural hinterland. By the modest standards of Medea, they prospered, finally winning a rare privilege. The human population had now been legally stabilized. More would overcrowd the limited areas suitable for settlement, as well as wreaking havoc on environments which the colony existed to study. To balance reproductive failures, a few couples per generation were allowed three children. Jannika’s folk were among these.
Thus everybody, herself perforce included, reckoned hers a happy childhood. It was a highly civilized one, too. In the molecules of reels kept at the Center was stored most of mankind’s total culture. Industry was, at last, sufficiently developed that well-to-do families could have sets which retrieved the data in as full hologrammic and stereophonic detail as desired. Her parents took advantage of this to ease their nostalgia, never thinking what it might do to younger hearts. Jannika grew up among vivid ghosts: old towers in Prague, springtime in the Bohmerwald, Christmas in a village which centuries had touched only lightly, a concert hall where music rolled in glory across a festive-clad audience which outnumbered the dwellers in Armstrong, replications of events which once made Earth tremble, songs, poetry, books, legends, fairy tales… She sometimes wondered if she had gone into xenology because the ouranids were light, bright, magical beings in a fairy tale.
Today, when Hugh led Chrisoula outside, she had stood for a moment staring after them. Abruptly the room pressed in as if to choke her. She had done what she could in the way of brightening it with drapes, pictures, keepsakes. At present, however, it was bestrewn with field gear; and she hated disorder. He cared naught.
The question rose afresh: How much did he care at all, any longer? They were in love when they married, yes, of course, but even then she recognized it was in high degree a marriage of convenience. Both were after appointments to an outpost station where they would maximize their chances of doing really significant, original research. Wedded couples were preferred, on the theory that they would be less distracted from their work than singletons. When they had their first babies, they were customarily transferred to a town.
She and Hugh quarreled about that. Social pressure—remarks, hints, embarrassed avoidance of the subject—was mounting on them to reproduce. Within population limits, it was desirable to keep the gene pool as large as possible. She was getting along in age, a bit, for motherhood. He was more than willing. But he took for granted that she would maintain the home, hold down the desk job, while he continued in the field…
She must not reprove him when he came back from his flirtatious little stroll. She lost her temper too often these days, grew outright shrewish, till he stormed from the hut or else grabbed the whiskey and started glugging. He was not a bad man—at the core, he was a good man, she amended hastily—thoughtless in many ways but well-meaning. At her time of life, she couldn’t likely do any better.
Although—She felt the heat in her cheeks, made a gesture as if to fend off the memory, and failed. It was two days old.
Having learned from A’i’ach about the Shining Time, she wanted to gather specimens of the glitterbug larvae. Hitherto humans had merely known that the adult insectoids swarmed aloft at intervals of approximately a year. If that was important to the inhabitants of Hansonia, she ought to know more. Observe for herself, enlist the aid of biologists, ecologists, chemists—She asked Piet Marais where to go, and he offered to come along. “The idea should have occurred to me before,” he said. “Living in humus, the worms must influence plant growth.”
Moister soil was required than existed at Port Kato. They went several kilometers to a lake. The walking was easy, for dense foliage overhead inhibited underbrush. Softness muffled footfalls, trees formed high-arched naves, multiple rays of light passed through dusk and fragrances to fleck the ground or glance off small wings, a sound as of lyres rippled from an unseen throat.
“How delightful,” Piet said after a while.
He was looking at her, not ahead. She became very conscious of his blond handsomeness. And his youth, she reminded herself; he was her junior by well-nigh a decade, though mature, considerate, educated, wholly a man. “Yes,” she blurted. “I wish I could appreciate it as you do.”
“It is not Earth,” he discerned. She realized that her answer had been less noncommittal than intended.
“I wasn’t pitying myself,” she said fast. “Please don’t think that. I do see beauty here, and fascination, and freedom, oh, yes, we’re lucky on Medea.” Attempting to laugh: “Why, on Earth, what would I have done for ouranids?”
“You love them, don’t you?” he asked gravely. She nodded. He laid a hand on her bare arm. “You have a great deal of love in you, Jannika.”
She made a confused effort to see herself through his eyes. Medium-sized, with a figure she knew was stunning; dark hair worn shoulder length, with gray streaks that she wished Hugh would insist were premature; high cheekbones, tilted nose, pointed chin, large brown eyes, ivory complexion. Still, though Piet was a bachelor, someone that attractive needn’t be desperate, he could meet girls in town and keep up acquaintance by holocom. He shouldn’t be this appreciative of her. She shouldn’t respond. True, she’d had other men a few times, before and after she married. But never in Port Kato; too much likelihood of complications, and she’d been furious when Hugh got involved locally. Worse yet, she suspected Piet saw her as more than a possible partner in a frolic. That could break lives apart.
“Oh, look,” she said, and disengaged from his touch in order to point at a cluster of seed pyramids. Meanwhile her mind came to the rescue. “I quite forgot, I meant to tell you, I got a call today from Professor al-Ghazi. We think we’ve found what makes the glitterbugs metamorphose and swarm.”
“Eh?” He blinked. “I didn’t realize anybody was working on that.”
“Well, it was a, a notion that occurred to me after my special ouranid started me speculating about them. He, A’i’ach, I mean, he told me the time is not strictly seasonal—that is not necessary here in the tropics—but set by Jason—the moon,” she added, because the name that humans had bestowed on the innermost of the larger satellites happened to resemble a word which humans had adopted, given by dromids in the Enrique area to an analog of the sirocco wind.