“Not with what they meant in the beginning, though,” she said. Tears glimmered suddenly in the long hazel eyes; he wondered on whose account. “Another reason I wanted to get off Earth.
Everything was such a ghastly mess, no clear rights or wrongs anyplace you searched.” She drew a breath before continuing, with swift earnestness:
“But can’t you see what harm the French have done? It looked as if the dispute with Alerion could be settled peacefully. Now the peacemakers have been tied in a legal knot, and it’s all they can do to prevent the extremists from taking over control of Parliament. The Aleriona delegation announced they weren’t going to wait any longer. They went home. We’ll have to send for them when our deadlock is broken.”
“Or come after them, if it breaks my way,” he said. “What you can’t see, you won’t see, is that they’ve no intention of making any real peace. They want Earth out of space altogether.”
“Why?” she pleaded. “It doesn’t make sense!”
He frowned into his glass. “That’s something of a puzzle, I admit. It must make sense in their own terms; but they don’t think like us. Look at the record, however, not their soft words but their hard deeds ever since we first encountered them. Including the proof that they deliberately attacked New Europe and are deliberately setting out to exterminate the French colonists there.
Your faction denied the evidence, but be honest with yourself, Joss.”
“You be honest too, Gunnar—No, look at me. What can a single raider do but make the enmity worse? There aren’t going to be any more privateers, you realize. France and her allies have been able to keep Parliament from illegalizing your expedition, so far. But the Admiralty has frozen all transfers of ships, and it’ll take more of a legislative upheaval than France can engineer to get that authority out of its hands. You’ll die out there, Gunnar, alone, for nothing.”
“I’m hoping the Navy will move,” he said. “If, as you put it, I make enmity worse—Uh-uh, not a delusion of grandeur. Just a hope. But a man has to do what little he can.”
“So does a woman,” she sighed.
Abruptly, sweeping to her feet, taking his glass for a refill, smiling with an effort but not as a pretense: “No more argument. Let’s be only ourselves this evening. It’s been such a long time.”
“Sure has. I wanted to see you, I mean really see you; when you came back to Earth, but we were both too busy, I guess. Somehow the chance never seemed to come.”
“Too busy, because too stupid,” she agreed. “Real friends are so rare at best. And we were that once, weren’t we?”
“Rawthuh,” he said, as anxious as she to walk what looked like a safe road. “Remember our junket to Europe?”
“How could I forget?” She gave him back his glass and sat down again, but upright this time, so that her knee brushed his. “That funny little old tavern in Amsterdam, where you kept bumping your head every time you stood up, till finally you borrowed a policeman’s helmet to wear. And you and Edgar roared out something from the Edda, and—But you were both awfully sweet outside Sacre Coeur, when we necked and watched the sun rise over Paris.”
“You girls were a lot sweeter, believe me,” he said, not quite comfortably. A silence fell.
“I’m sorry it didn’t last between you and him,” he ventured.
“We made a mistake, going outsystem,” she admitted. “By the time we realized how much the environment had chewed our nerves, it was too late. He’s got himself quite a good wife now.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“What about you, Gunnar? It was so dreadful about poor Connie. But after five years, haven’t you—?”
“After five years, nothing,” he said flatly. “I don’t know why.”
She withdrew herself a little and asked with much gentleness, “I dare not flatter myself, but could I be to blame?”
He shook his head. His face burned. “No. That was over with long ago. Let’s discuss something else.”
“Sure. This is supposed to be a merry reunion. A nuestra salud.” The glasses clinked again.
She began to talk of things past, and presently he was chiming in, the trivia that are so large a part of friendship—do you remember, whatever became of, we did, once you said, we thought, do you remember, and then there was, we hoped, I never knew that, do you remember, do you remember?—and the time and the words and the emptied glasses passed, and finally somehow she was playing her flute for him, “Au Clair de la Lune” and “Gaudeamus Igitur,” “September” and “Shenandoah,” Pan-notes bright and cool through the whirl in him, while he had moved to the lounger and lay back watching the light burnish her hair and lose itself in the deep shadows below. But when she began “The Skrydstrup Girl”.
the flute sank to her lap and he saw her eyes shut and her mouth go unfirm.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t thinking. You taught it to me, Gunnar.”
He sat straight and laid a clumsily tender hand on her shoulder. “Forget that business,” he said. “I should’ve kept my big mouth shut. But there was no real harm done. It was no more than… than one of those infatuations. Connie didn’t hold it against you. She nursed me through the spell okay.”
“I wasn’t so lucky,” she whispered.
Dumfounded, he could only stammer: “Joss, you never let on!”
“I didn’t dare. But that was the real reason I talked Edgar into leaving Earth. I hoped—Gunnar, when I came back, why were we both such idiots?”
Then suddenly she laughed, low in her throat, came to him and said, “We’re not too late, are we? Even now?”
III
Staurn rotated once in about eighteen hours. Seven such days had passed when Uthg-a-K’thaq finished work on the naval computers and rode a tender down to Orling spaceport.
As his huge cetacean form wallowed into the yacht’s chart-room, Endre Vadász, who had been waiting for him, backed up. Phew! the minstrel thought. Decent and capable he is, but I always have to get reacclimated to that swamp stench… How do I smell to him?
“Hallo, C.E.,” he greeted. “I hope you are not too tired to depart at once. We have spent too much time here already.”
“Quite,” replied the rumbling, burbling voice. “I am in-watient as you wy now. Ewerything else can ’roceed without me and, I weliewe, reach com’letion simultaneously with this swecial missile tur-ret. That is, iw the Staurni system is as good as claimed.”
“Which is what you are supposed to decide.” Vadász nodded. Another irritating thing about Naqsans was their habit of solemnly repeating the obvious. In that respect they were almost as bad as humans. “Well, I’ve seen to your planetside supplies. Get your personal kit together and meet us at the lift platform outside in half an hour.”
“Us-s-s? Who goes to this Nest?”
“You and the skipper, of course, to make decisions, and Gregorios Koumanoudes to interpret. Myself… ah, officially this falls in the steward’s department also, since the extra armament will affect stowage. But in practice the steward’s department is idle, bored, and in dire need of a jaunt. Then there are two from the Quest, Victor Bragdon and Jocelyn Lawrie.”
“Why come they with?”
“They’re here for xenological research, you know. Accompanying us on a business trip to an important kinfather is a unique opportunity to observe laws and customs in action. So Bragdon offered to lend us one of his flyers, provided he and the woman could ride along. He wanted several of his people, actually, but Nesters limit the number of visitors at one time. Suspicious brutes. In any event, by using the flyer, we save this yacht for shuttle work and so expedite our own project.”