“Aerie’s not under a tyranny,” Shaun said. “The way things had worked out—at least, as of when we were there—government was mainly by town meetings scattered around the continent. The Magistrate provided peace and order, police, through his militia, and higher justice—court of appeal, court of legal review—through his telepresence. Otherwise he generally left people alone, which most times is the best thing government can do. But after several generations had passed the office down from one to the next, he held a huge lot of assorted properties, and people didn’t give him much backchat. He was a reasonable sort, though, in his rough-hewn style. We had no trouble ranging about in our own flitters, seeing things and making deals. And we were on a live, uncluttered world. Yes, that was a good three-four months.”
“For us,” Erody laid to this. Her music throbbed and keened. “We were not wholly benign. In some whom we met, we from the stars awakened dreams forgotten, wishes un-grantable, and belike we will never know what has afterward brewed from that discontent.”
“One boy in particular,” Shaun said. “Valdi Ronen, his name was. A bastard son of the Magistrate, raised at the castle in a hit-or-miss way, but with fairish prospects ahead of him. He might become an officer in the militia, for instance, or a rancher or an engineer, he being bright and lively. By Earth reckoning, he was about fourteen.”
“A thin lad, shooting upward, his hands and feet too big for him, though he was not overly awkward,” Erody remembered. “Pale-skinned, like most on Aerie, hair a flaxen shock, large blue eyes, sharp features. He often went hunting in the wilderness—sometimes alone, despite his mother’s command that he have ever a companion or two; and we gathered that at those times he traveled farther in than men thought wise.”
“He didn’t after we arrived,” Shaun said. “No, he hung around us like a moon around a planet. Most of us had studied and practiced the local language en route, of course. It hadn’t changed a lot from what was in the database. I got pretty fluent, myself. We could talk, we two.
“I was willing to put up with him when I wasn’t too busy, his countless questions, his bursts of brashness, everything that goes with being that age. My son had been too, not terribly long ago, and had metamorphosed into a presentable human being. Besides, Valdi told me and showed me quite a bit, better than grownups probably could, about native wildlife and youngsters’ games and lower-class superstitions and whatnot. Some of that might well go into the documentary our production team was planning, might help it sell when we got back. In fact, Valdi couldn’t do enough for us. If we asked anything of him, he’d try his best, no matter how tough or dirty a chore it was.”
“We meet not wondersmitten youth like that on worlds elsewhere as often as erstwhile, do we?” Erody asked low. “That may be as well. It has been painful to see the grief in them when we bade good-bye.”
“Yes, I saw what was coming, and tried to head it off,” Shaun continued. “ ‘Valdi,’ I told him, ‘starfaring is our life and we wouldn’t change if we could, but we were raised to it.’ ”
“ ‘We were born to it,’ I told him,” the woman recalled. “ ‘Our forebears for many generations were those who wanted it. They who could not endure it left, taking their genes with them. Kithfolk today are as chosen for space as birds are chosen to wing aloft.’ His ancestors had brought some birds here, and several species had flourished.”
“ ‘But people don’t grow wings!’ he argued,” Shaun added. “His voice broke in a squeak. He went red. Just the same, he pushed on. ‘People build ships and, and l-l-learn to sail them.’
“I hadn’t the heart to answer that nobody but a groundhugger would speak of sailing a spaceship. Instead, I set out the grim side for him. I talked about weeks, months, maybe years crowded into a metal shell or into still more cramped sealdomes, never able to step outside for a breath of clean air, only in a suit—because, I reminded him, planets where humans can walk freely are bloody few, and to make the profit that keeps us going we often have to call at other kinds. I talked about danger, death, and the worse than death that environments may bring down on us, bodies crippled, minds gone to ruin, and little our meditechs can do to remedy things. And coming back from even a short voyage, after ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred or more years have gone by, the people you knew old or dead, and every voyage leaves you more and more an alien. And how they react to this on the planets—Earth—Oh, I laid it on kind of thick, maybe, but I was trying to convince him he’d better be content with what he had.
“No use. ‘You have each other,’ he said. ‘And you go to all those worlds, you go to the stars. Everything here is always the same.” Shaun sighed. “When did a fourteen-year-old boy ever listen to reason?”
Erody nodded. “Yes, he dreamed of joining us.” Her hand struck a chord that was like a cry. “Or else it was the vision that dreamed him, for he came to be consumed by it; nothing else was quite real to him any longer.”
“M-m, I don’t know about that,”
Shaun countered. “He stayed smart and cocky. In fact, once in a while he’d revert to his age and be downright obnoxious, like when he slipped what they called a squishbug into Nando Fanion’s shoe or, guiding me around in the woods, got me to fall into a lurkfang’s muckpit, and in either case stood there cackling with laughter. I’d have decked him if he hadn’t been the Magistrate’s son.” He shrugged. “Or maybe not. A boy, after all, hopelessly in love with what he could never have.”
“Our scoldings eventually stopped the pranks,” Erody said. “He came to me and asked my help in learning our language. I warned him that would be pointless, but he begged, oh, so winningly clumsily, until I set up a program for him. He applied himself as if he were attacking a foe. I was amazed at how quickly be began to speak some Kithish and how fast he improved. And when he heard how widely used Xyrese is around the heart stars, naught would do but that he study this also, and again he was on his way to mastery.”
Shaun nodded. “It got me wondering if he might not actually be recruitable. Planetsiders had joined the Kith now and then in the past. And… some fresh DNA in our bloodlines wouldn’t hurt.
“I hinted to his father, and gathered that he wouldn’t mind. He’d never see his son again, but on the other hand, wouldn’t have to worry about providing for him or sibling rivalry or whatnot. So I put it to Captain Du one day, privately, just for consideration. He wanted no part of it, though. We were too close-knit, he said, our ways too special, a newcomer would have too much to learn. And supposing he could—which I did believe Valdi was able to—would whatever he contributed during the rest of his life be enough to make up for the time and trouble his education, his integration with us, had cost?”
“Our margin is thin at best,” Erody whispered through a rippling of cold string-sounds, “in material profits and still more in the spirit.”
“I tossed the notion aside. Naturally, I didn’t mention any of this to Valdi. But I felt kind of glad that we’d be leaving soon.”