“Would you dream of taking me with you, Elijah?”
“No Spacers, either.”
“It seems you Earthmen are as unreasoningly exclusive as we Spacers are.”
Elijah nodded glumly. “Madness on both sides. But even if we were sane, I would not take you. You could not stand the life and I’d never be sure that your immune mechanisms would build up properly. I’d be afraid that you would either die quickly of some minor infection or that you would live too long and watch our generations die. Forgive me, Gladia.”
“For what, dear Elijah?”
“For—this.” He put out his hands, palms upward, to either side. “For asking to see you.”
“But I’m glad you did. I wanted to see you.”
He said, “I know. I tried not to see you, but the thought of being in space and of not stopping at Aurora tore me apart. And yet it does no good, Gladia. It just means another leave-taking and that will tear me apart, too. It is why I have never written you, why I have never tried to reach you by hyperwave. Surely you must have wondered.”
“Not really. I agree with you that there was no point. It would merely make it all infinitely harder. Yet I wrote to you many times.”
“You did? I never received one letter.”
“I never mailed one letter. Having written them, I destroyed them.”
“But why?”
“Because, Elijah, no private letter can be sent from Aurora to Earth without passing through the hands of the censor and I wrote you not one letter that I was willing to let the censors see. Had you sent me a letter, I assure you that not one would have gotten through to me, however innocent it might have been. I thought that was why I never received a letter. Now that I know you weren’t aware of the situation, I am extraordinarily glad that you were not so foolish as to try to remain in touch with me. You would have misunderstood my never answering your letters.”
Baley stared at her. “How is it I see you now?”
“Not legally, I assure you. I am using Dr. Fastolfe’s private ship, so I passed by the border guards without being challenged. Had this ship not been Dr. Fastolfe’s, I would have been stopped and sent back. I assumed you understood that, too, and that that was why you were in touch with Dr. Fastolfe and didn’t try to reach me directly.”
“I understood nothing. I sit here amazed at the double ignorance that kept me safe. Triple ignorance, for I didn’t know the proper hyperwave combination to reach you directly and I couldn’t face the difficulty of trying to find the combination on Earth. I couldn’t have done it privately and there was already sufficient comment all, over the Galaxy about you and me, thanks to that foolish hyperwave drama they put on the subwaves after Solaria. Otherwise, I promise you, I would have tried. I had Dr. Fastolfe’s combination, however, and once I was in orbit around Aurora, I contacted him at once.”
“In any case, we’re here.” She sat down on the side of her bunk and held out her hands.
Baley took them and tried to sit down on a stool, which he had hitched one foot over, but she drew him insistently toward the bunk and he sat down beside her.
He said awkwardly, “How is it with you, Gladia?”
“Quite well. And you, Elijah?”
“I grow old. I have just celebrated my fiftieth birthday three weeks ago.”
“Fifty is not—” She stopped.
“For an Earthman, it’s old. We’re short-lived, you know.
“Even for an Earthman, fifty is not old. You haven’t changed.”
“It’s kind of you to say so, but I can tell where the creaks have multiplied. Gladia—”
“Yes, Elijah?”
“I must ask. Have you and Santirix Gremionis—”
Gladia smiled and nodded. “He is my husband. I took your advice.”
“And has it worked out well?”
“Well enough. Life is pleasant.”
“Good. I hope it lasts.”
“Nothing lasts for centuries, Elijah, but it could last for years; perhaps even for decades.”
“Any children?”
“Not yet. But what about your family, my married man? Your son? Your wife?”
“Bentley moved out to the Settlements two years ago. In fact, I’ll be joining him. He’s an official on the world I’m heading for. He’s only twenty-four and he’s looked up to already.” Baley’s eyes danced. “I think I’ll have to address him as Your Honor. In public, anyway.”
“Excellent. And Mrs. Baley? Is she with you?”
“Jessie? No. She won’t leave Earth. I told her that we would be living in domes for a considerable time, so that it really wouldn’t be so different from Earth. Primitive, of course. Still, she may change her mind in time. I’ll make it as comfortable as possible and once I’ve settled down, I’ll ask Bentley to go to Earth and gather her in. She may be lonely enough by then to be willing to come. We’ll see.”
“But meanwhile you’re alone.”
“There are over a hundred other immigrants on the ship, so I’m not really alone.”
“They are on the other side of the docking wall, however. And I’m alone, too.”
Baley cast a brief, involuntary look toward the pilot room and Gladia said, “Except for Daneel, of course, who’s on the other side of that door and who is a robot, no matter how intensely you think of him as a person.—And, surely you haven’t asked to see me only that we might ask after each other’s families?”
Baley’s face grew solemn, almost anxious. “I can’t ask you—”
“Then I ask you. This bunk is not really designed with sexual activity in mind, but you’ll chance the possibility of falling out of it, I hope.”
Baley said hesitantly, “Gladia, I can’t deny that—”
“Oh, Elijah, don’t go into a long dissertation in order to satisfy the needs of your Earth morality. I offer myself to you in accord with Auroran custom. It’s your clear right to refuse and I will have no right to question the refusal. Except that I would question it most forcefully. I have decided that the right to refuse belongs only to Aurorans. I won’t take it from an—Earthman.”
Baley sighed. “I’m no longer an Earthman, Gladia.”
“I am even less likely to take it from a miserable immigrant heading out for a barbarian planet on which he will have to cower under a dome.—Elijah, we have had so little time, and we have so little time now, and I may never see you again. This meeting is so totally unexpected that it would be a cosmic crime to toss it away.”
“Gladia, do you really want an old man?”
“Elijah, do you really want me to beg?”
“But I’m ashamed.”
“Then close your eyes.”
“I mean of myself—of my decrepit body.”
“Then suffer. Your foolish opinion of yourself has nothing to do with me.” And she put her arms about him, even as the seam of her robe fell apart.
8
Gladia was aware of a number of things, all simultaneously.
She was aware of the wonder of constancy, for Elijah was as she had remembered him. The lapse of five years had not changed matters. She had not been living in the glow of a memory-intensified glitter. He was Elijah.
She was aware, also, of a puzzle of difference. Her feeling intensified that Santirix Gremionis, without a single major flaw that she could define, was all flaw. Santirix was affectionate, gentle, rational, reasonably intelligent—and flat. Why he was flat, she could not say, but nothing he did or said could rouse her as Baley did, even when he did and said nothing. Baley was older in years, much older physiologically, not as handsome as Santirix, and what was more, Baley carried with him the indefinable air of decay—of the aura of quick aging and short life that Earthmen must. And yet—