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‘No-one, until they find out about the Neighbor Star.’

‘But that might take a long time. For that long time, they would all flock to Alpha Centauri, or to any of a few other obvious choices. They would never notice a red dwarf star at their doorstep, or if they did notice it, they would dismiss it as unfit for human life - if they didn't know that human beings had already made it a going concern.’

Insigna stared at Pitt uncertainly. ‘But what does all this mean? Suppose we go to the Neighbor Star and no-one knows about it. What is the advantage?’

‘The advantage is that we can fill the world. If there is a habitable planet-’

‘There won't be. Not around a red dwarf star.’

‘Then we can use whatever raw material that exists there to build any number of Settlements.’

‘You mean there would be more room for us.’

‘Yes. Much more room than if they came flocking in after us.’

‘So we would have a little more time, Janus. Eventually we would fill the room available for us at the Neighbor Star, even if we were alone. So it would take us five hundred years instead of two hundred. What difference would that make?’

‘All the difference you can imagine, Eugenia. Let the Settlements crowd in as they wish and we will have a thousand different cultures, bringing with them all the hatreds and misfittings of Earth's dismal history. Give us time to be here alone and we can build a system of Settlements that will be uniform in culture and ecology. It will be a far better situation - less chaotic, less anarchic.’

‘Less interesting. Less variegated. Less alive.’

‘Not at all. We'll diversify, I'm sure. The different Settlements will have their differences, but there will, at least, be a common base from which those differences will spring. It will be a far better group of Settlements for that. And even if I am wrong, surely you see that it's an experiment that must be tried. Why not devote one star to such a reasoned development and see if it works? We can take one star, a red dwarf throwaway that no-one would be ordinarily interested in, and use it to see if we can build a new kind of society and possibly a better one.

‘Let us see what we can do,’ he went on, ‘if we don't have our energies worn out and broken by useless cultural differences, and our overall biology constantly perverted by alien ecological inroads.’

Insigna felt herself moved. Even if it didn't work, humanity would have learned something - that this wouldn't work. And if it did work?

But then she shook her head. ‘It's a useless dream. The Neighbor Star will be independently discovered, no matter how we try to keep it secret.’

‘But how much of your own discovery, Eugenia, was accidental? Be truthful now. You just happened to notice the star. You just happened to compare it with what you could see on another map. Might you not have missed it altogether? And might not others have missed it under similar circumstances?’

Insigna did not answer, but the expression on her face was satisfactory to Pitt.

His voice had grown softer, almost hypnotic. ‘And if there is a delay of only a hundred years. If we are given only a hundred years to ourselves to build our new society, we would be large enough and strong enough to protect ourselves and make the others pass by and go on to other worlds. We won't have to hide any longer than that.’

Again Insigna did not answer.

Pitt said, ‘Have I convinced you?’

She seemed to shake herself. ‘Not entirely.’

‘Then think about it, and I'll ask you just one favor. While you think about it, don't say a word to anyone about the Neighbor Star and let me have all the data in connection with it for safekeeping. I won't destroy it. My promise. We will need it if we are going to go to the Neighbor Star. Will you go that far at least, Eugenia?’

‘Yes,’ she said at last in a small voice. Then she fired up. ‘One thing, though. I must be able to name the star. If I give it a name, then it's my star.’

Pitt smiled briefly. ‘What do you want to call it? Insigna's Star? Eugenia's Star?’

‘No. I'm not that foolish. I want to call it Nemesis.’

‘Nemesis? N-E-M-E-S-I-S?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why?’

‘There was a brief period of speculation back in the late twentieth century about the possibility of a Neighbor Star for the Sun. It came to nothing at that time. No Neighbor Star was found, but it had been referred to as “Nemesis” in the papers devoted to it. I would like to honor those daring thinkers.’

‘Nemesis? Wasn't there a Greek goddess of that name? An unpleasant one?’

‘The Goddess of Retribution, of Justified Revenge, of Punishment. It entered the language as a rather flowery word. The computer called it “archaic” when I checked.’

‘And why would those old-timers have called it Nemesis?’

‘Something to do with the cometary cloud. Apparently, Nemesis, in its revolution about the Sun, passed through the cloud and induced cosmic strikes that killed off large portions of Earth life every twenty-six million years.’

Pitt looked astonished. ‘Really?’

‘No, not really. The suggestion didn't survive, but I want Nemesis to be the name just the same. And I want it to go on record that I named it.’

‘I promise you that, Eugenia. It's your discovery and that will enter our records. Eventually, when the rest of humanity discovers the Nemesian region - would that be the right way of putting it? - they will then learn who made the discovery and how it came about. Your star, your Nemesis, will be the first star, other than the Sun itself, to shine over a human civilization; and the first, without exception, to shine over a human civilization that originated elsewhere.’

Pitt watched her leave and felt, on the whole, confident. She would fall in line. His letting her name the star was the perfect touch. Surely she would want to go to her own star. Surely she would feel the attraction of building a logical and orderly civilization about her star, one from which civilizations all over the Galaxy might descend.

And then, just as he might have relaxed in the glow of a golden future, he was shaken by a faint touch of horror that was utterly alien to him.

Why Nemesis? Why should it have occurred to her to name it for the Goddess of Retribution?

He was almost weak enough to think of it as an evil omen.

3. Mother

6

It was dinnertime, and Insigna was in one of those moods when she was just a little afraid of her own daughter.

Those moods had become more pronounced lately, and she didn't know why. Perhaps it was Marlene's increasing tendency to silence, to being withdrawn, to be always seeming to commune with thoughts too deep for speech.

And sometimes the uneasy fear in Insigna was mixed with guilt: guilt because of her lack of motherly patience with the girl; guilt because of her too-great awareness of the girl's physical shortcomings. Marlene certainly didn't have her mother's conventional prettiness or her father's wildly unconventional good looks.

Marlene was short and - blunt. That was the only word that Insigna could find that exactly fit poor Marlene.

And poor, of course. It was the adjective she almost always used in her own mind and could just barely keep out of her speech.

Short. Blunt. Thick without being fat, that was Marlene. Nothing graceful about her. Her hair was dark brown, rather long, and quite straight. Her nose was a little bulbous, her mouth turned down just a bit at the ends, her chin small, her whole attitude passive and turned in upon itself.

There were her eyes, of course, large and lustrously dark, with meticulous dark eyebrows that curved above them, long eyelashes that looked almost artificial. Still, eyes alone could not make up for everything else, however fascinating they might be at odd moments.

Insigna had known since Marlene was five that she was unlikely ever to attract a man on the physical plane alone, and that had become more obvious with each year.

Aurinel had kept a languid eye on her during her preteen years, obviously attracted to her precocious intelligence and her almost luminous understanding. And Marlene had been shy and pleased in his presence, as though dimly realizing that there was something about an object called a ‘boy’ that was somehow endearing, but not knowing what it might be.