I always thought that was the most unexpected stab in the back I'd ever had in my life, but that was before Puget. I just didn't know what to do, say, or think. Neither did anyone else. Jeron was scowling furiously, fiddling with the guns. Molomy was pouting, and the other kids were staring back and forth, trying to figure out what was going on; tableau. Then Darien broke it. "Put the guns away, please," she said. Jeron glowered at her furiously, then disdainfully hurled the guns to the ground. "Thank you," she said. "After all, we can't blame you."
"Blame us!" I squeaked. I couldn't help it.
She looked at me, sadly and sympathetically. "Excuse me if I'm hurting your feelings, Eve. I know you mean well-according to your lights. We've been bugging you since the day you landed, you know; we know everything you've said to each other. You think you can run our lives better than we can, and I guess that's natural enough. That's the kind of world you come from. Old von Knefhausen there, he learned how to trick and force and cajole from some of the best teachers in the world, and he manipulated the eight of you, and you manipulated your kids, and I guess you just can't imagine any other way of dealing with people. Any of you. But we don't want it. We know you think you'd be doing it for our own good. So were our Japanese friends, when they came around to include us in their Greater Pacific Co-Recovery Sphere, and we had a lot of trouble talking them out of it." She nodded across the bay, to the rusting warship on the beach. "The thing is, we want to make up our own minds what's for our good. And so what we'd like best of all from you folks, please, is if you'd leave. Go back to Alpha. We won't bother you, we promise. And we won't let you bother us, either—because," she finished, "I should tell you, it doesn't make much difference whether you got the guns away from us or not. Up on the rooftops there are twenty more of us with machine guns. If they start shooting they'll likely hit some people they're not aiming at, and some of us will get killed—as well as all of you. Or all of you that still can get killed. And you know what? It will be worth it."
We all looked up at the rooftops. Darien had told the truth, all right. I could see a black barrel pointing out over the red Howard Johnson's cupola, and two more over the K-Mart, and others all up and down the beach avenue.
Jeron looked at me. I looked at Jeron. None of us said a word, until I did. I sighed. "Kids," I said to Araduk and Molomy and Jeromolo Bill, "put the guns away. Darien? Toby? Leave us alone for a minute. We've got some talking to do."
31
IN THE EVENING OF DAY 22,305, HOUR 17, MINUTE 22—1 CAN give you seconds to the millisecond, if you like, even to that least of all Dirac units, the length of time that it takes light to cross the radius of an electron. At that moment, I say, I watched Nephew Jeron set foot on his own planet. Watched? Watch. Will watch; you know the trouble us ghosts have with mortal temporal fancies. It is all one time, not causal, and it goes on forever. If I pick one moment to consider a "now," it is my own caprice to do so— as you might, strolling, stand on a particular flagstone next to your wading pool to survey your property, rather than the graveled driveway near the mint patch. One place is as much "your place" as any other. One moment is as much "my moment" as any of the myriad alternatives from the instant events began to their remote terminal full stop. Oh, yes! I have been there! But the farther I go from my physical "now" the harder it is, and so I have gone only once to The End, and will not again. Enough of that. I don't want to speak of things that terrify even a ghost. For even the end of events is not the end of time.
So what I seek is friendly, familiar events, the doings of my colleagues and our get. It was just the same when I was in college. I faced the cruel beauty of mathematics and was glad to turn from it to the letter from home, Joan's new baby, Arnie's transfer to California, the leak in the porch roof, and how well the little vegetable garden was doing this year. And so it gives me pleasure that Jeron has found himself a world, and that the Jeron-Molomy cross is doing so well, and that Eve Barstow has her heart's desire.
Jeron surprised us all in Puget, would not stay, would not go home; he had a better idea, he said, and he was right. He went back to Aleph only long enough to build new ships and recruit a new community, and now he has a world of his own. If I had had eyes I would have wept with pleasure when he brought the fleet of golden globes to the third planet of Epsilon Eridani. Rich genes to cross! He had a dozen former Pugets with him, and a couple of the President's old White House guards, to add to the stock from Aleph—including fifteen of his children in body and about a hundred more in stored buds from the cabbage patch. They will make some handsome strains. Molomy was not there; she stayed on Earth with Eve. And that's going well enough, for Eve is fat and frail and happy with her Toby and their lives. She persuaded Puget to make treaties with New York and London and all the other great glamor places of the Grand Tour, and now she drinks tea at the Ritz and eats onion soup on the Champs Elysees whenever she wishes to, and the old mother planet is gradually limping toward ease. Ann? Ann is encrusted inside her own planet. She makes it rumble now and then, throwing up a mountain range or opening a sea. I visited her once, in her crystal catacomb at the core, but she responded to me not at all, and anyway magma is not to my taste. Shef and Flo have built forty navigable habitats and sent some of them flying off to Arcturus and Procyon, with Jeromolo Bill and some of his children and grandchildren to fly them, solving tensor equations in their heads. And I . . .
Oh, I'm all right. More or less.
I'm alone, of course. Now and then I would call up a Knefhausen or a former love to imitate a companion, but it was like making faces in a mirror. I wait and hope. Hope for someone as cowardly as myself, who dares not break through the surface tension to see what is on the other side; but all the other larvae seem willing to turn to dragonflies.
So I roam. Looking for the starburst. Slipping through gas clouds and watching the organic molecules form. Plumbing the hearts of suns. Waiting. As long as events occur I will have something to do, but after events stop . . . oh, after events stop! When the last stars of spongy iron dissolve as their protons melt away and there is only a universal soup of decaying photons—
Oh, then I will have no choice but to spread my wings and enter the place I fear; and then, perhaps, I will rediscover purpose. And the coming of the knowledge of that purpose, yes, that is it: that is what I fear.