Afra did not seem fully satisfied, but she shrugged into shorts and a fresh blouse. She didn’t bother with a brassiere in quarter-gravity. “Assuming that we find a suitable location, exactly how do you propose to construct ‘permanent quarters’? The only abundant building materials we have are plain rock and cold dust, and those have certain limitations.”
“I am aware of the limitations. But I figure Ivo can take another peek through the scope and come up with some galactic blueprints for us. This must be a fairly common situation, galactically speaking, and there must be survivors’ handbooks. Why not use them?”
“I can try. Tell me what kind of information you seek, and I’ll look for it. I can’t use the computer’s automatic search pattern, since this is intellectual, but—”
“Fine. I’ll work out a schedule and talk to you again, and we’ll ferry you up to the scope in a few days. I suppose we’d better set a limit on free-fall time, though — say, no more than one day in three. That sound reasonable?”
Afra and Ivo nodded. Whatever leadership existed here seemed to be gravitating steadily to Groton, perhaps because their immediate problems had become ones of engineering — or perhaps, Ivo thought, just because of his level-headed calm.
“Should he be alone?” Beatryx inquired.
“Um, that too,” Groton agreed. “Maybe we’d better make another rule that nobody be alone. That macroscope is dangerous, as we know — but so is Triton. We’ll have to watch each other all the time, because we may not be able to survive as a group if even one of us goes.”
“Should we make sure each of us can do each task?” Afra asked next. “Right now, Ivo’s the only one competent on the scope. Harold and I can pilot—”
“If we can’t get along without all of us,” Ivo pointed out, “it doesn’t really matter what any one of us knows. We function as a group or not at all.”
“There is macabre sense in that,” Groton agreed, “if we ignore the possibility of someone’s temporary incapacity. Let’s assign tasks, then, and let people train for others as circumstance dictates. Ivo, you’re the scoper, of course; Afra, you’re the pilot, because I’ll be the construction engineer. Beatryx—”
“Cooking and laundry,” she said, and they laughed.
It was Beatryx who stood watch with him his first day on scope duty. Afra had piloted them off Triton and ensconced them safely in the macroscope, then dropped back to keep Groton company and help him survey for his construction. He had remained below in his suit, no one thinking to invoke the never-alone rule against him this time. Ivo had a carefully rehearsed headful of specifications, and his job now was to locate some galactic station that had the products required. He hardly comprehended the electronic terms, but he hoped that he could at least match bid to asked.
The first assignment was rough: a survey of galactic physical technology. But Beatryx was there when he emerged from the awesome visions of the cosmos, and she was cheerful and unassuming, encouraging and sympathetic. Ivo could appreciate the reason Groton, no intellectual slouch himself, had passed over the female engineers he might have had and chosen a woman like this. It was the feeling of familiarity, of home, that he needed most when the revelations of the ages shook his fundamental assumptions, and she carried about her a pleasing aura of homebody Earth.
Again he remembered Brad’s remark about normality being no insult, and again he appreciated it intensely. Intelligence might be defined as facility at solving problems — but it was only one talent among many required for existence. What about the problem of being fit to live with? By that definition, Beatryx was the smartest among them.
“Now I know what Lanier meant by the relation of music to poetry,” he said as he removed helmet and goggles, his head revolving with the music of the spheres and the meter of communication. “The rules are identical — there.”
“Lanier?” she inquired. “Sidney Lanier who wrote about the marshes?”
He looked at her, realizing his slip. “You know of him?”
“Only a little. I never understood the interpretations they taught me in school, but I did like some of the verse. I suppose I liked the American poets because they seemed closer. I remember how sad it made me when I learned about Annabel Lee.”
“Annabel who?”
“She was by Mr. Poe. I always used to think he was Italian, because of the river. I mean, he wrote about her. I memorized it because it made me cry.”
Ivo looked at her, seeing a woman of 37 who only once in the brief period he had known her had shown a sign of unhappiness. “Do you remember it now?”
“I don’t think I do, Ivo. It was a long time ago. Let me see.” She concentrated. “ ‘She was a child and I was a child. In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love — I and my Annabel Lee.’ ” She shook her head. “She died — it was a wind blowing out of a cloud — but he loved her forever anyway.”
“I didn’t realize you liked poetry,” he said. “What’s your favorite poem of all time?”
“Oh, I remember that one,” she said, her face animated. Ivo had judged her to be forty or more the first time he met her, then had learned her true age; now she seemed to have lopped half a dozen more years off that. People became so much much more alive when occupied in something really interesting to them. “It was so sad, but it seemed so true. I mean, I don’t know it any more, but it was my favorite. It was about Jesus Christ and how they slew Him, when He came out of the woods. Oh, I wish I could remember how it went—”
“ ‘Into the woods my Master went / Clean forspent, forspent. / Into the woods my Master came / Forspent with love and shame.’ ”
“That’s it! Oh, Ivo, that’s it! How did you know?”
“A Ballad of Trees and the Master,” he said, “by Lanier.”
“Yes, yes, I had forgotten, yes that was his! But how did you know it?”
“I know — quite a bit of his work. I — well, it’s a long story, and I don’t suppose it matters now.”
“Oh yes it does, Ivo! He’s such a good poet — I know he is — you must tell me! I remember it, I think. He came out of the woods — ‘When Death and Shame would woo Him last,’—”
“ ‘From under the trees they drew Him last; / ’Twas on a tree they slew Him — last / When out of the woods He came.’ ”
There were tears in her eyes that would not fall in the trace gravity. “He found peace among the trees — and then they crucified Him on a tree. Wood, anyway. Such an awful thing.” She reflected on it for a moment. “But you didn’t tell me how you know about Sidney Lanier.”
Ivo was touched by her genuine appreciation and interest. “It was a kind of game we played. You see, none of us knew who our real parents were—”
“You didn’t know? Ivo, where were you?”
“In a — project. They took people of all races and — mixed them together for a couple of generations and got children who were a combination of everything. The idea was to breed back to the basic stock of man, or at least obtain something equivalent to what he would have been if he hadn’t split into so many races. To see if he was any better than the — well, the whites and the yellows and the browns and the blacks. They wanted to reduce cultural influences and make it all the same, so we had no parents. Just supervisors.”
“How horrible, Ivo! I didn’t know.”
“It wasn’t so bad. Matter of fact, we had quite a time. We were never hungry or cold or neglected, and had all the best of everything. It was quite stimulating, as it was meant to be. There were several hundred of us, all the same age and — race. I didn’t really realize until I got out of the project that I was not a normal American.”