“Besides David,” she said.
“If he is alive. Do you still believe it, after all these weeks?” Magnus began scraping out his pipe. He did not look at her.
“I don’t believe he is dead,” she answered.
“The Lunar crew couldn’t establish gray-beam contact. Even if he is still alive, he’ll die of old age before that ship reaches any star where men have an outpost. No, say rather he’ll starve!”
“If he could repair whatever went wrong—”
The muffled surf drums outside rolled up to a crescendo. Magnus tightened his mouth. “That is one way to destroy yourself… hoping,” he said. “You must accept the worst, because there is always more of the worst than the best in this universe.”
She glanced at the black book he called a Bible, heavy on one of the crowded shelves. “Do your holy writings claim that?” she asked. Her voice came out as a stranger’s croak.
“Aye. So does the second law of thermodynamics.” Magnus knocked his pipe against the ashtray. It was an unexpectedly loud noise above the wind.
“And you… and you… won’t even let me put up his picture,” she whispered.
“It’s in the album, with my other dead sons. I’ll not have it on the wall for you to blubber at. Our part is to take what God sends us and still hold ourselves up on both feet.”
“Do you know—” Tamara stared at him with a slowly rising sense of horror. “Do you know, I cannot remember just what he looked like?”
She had had some obscure hope of provoking his rage. But the shaggy-sweatered broad shoulders merely lifted, a little shrug. “Aye, that’s common enough. You’ve the words, blond hair and blue eyes and so on, but they make not any real image. Well, you didn’t know him so very long, after all.”
You are telling me I am a foreigner, she thought. An interloper who stole what didn’t belong to me.
“There’s time to review a little English grammar before tea,” said the old man. “You’ve been terrible with the irregular verbs.”
He put his book on the table — she recognized the title, Kipling’s Poems, whoever Kipling had been — and pointed at a shelf. “Fetch the text and sit down.”
Something flared in the girl. She doubled her fists. “No.”
“What?” The leather face turned in search of her.
“I am not going to study any more English.”
“Not—” Magnus peered as if she were a specimen from another planet. “Don’t you feel well?”
She bit off the words, one after another: “I have better ways to spend my time than learning a dead language.”
“Dead?” cried the man. She felt his rage lift in the air between them. “The language of fifty million—”
“Fifty million ignorant provincials, on exhausted lands between bombed-out cities,” she said. “You can’t step outside the British Isles or a few pockets on the North American coast and have it understood. You can’t read a single modern author or scientist or… or anybody… in English — I say it’s dead! A walking corpse!”
“Your own husband’s language!” he bawled at her, half rising.
“Do you think he ever spoke it to anyone but you, once he’d he’d escaped?” she flung back. “Did you believe… if David ever returns from that ship you made him go on and we go to Rama — did you imagine we’d speak the language of a dying race? On a new world?”
She felt the tears as they whipped down her face, she gulped after breath amidst terror. The old man was so hairy, so huge. When he stood up, the single radiglobe and the wan firelight threw his shadow across her and choked a whole corner of the room with it. His head bristled against the ceiling.
“So now your husband’s race is dying,” he said like a gun. “Why did you marry him, if he was that effete?”
“He isn’t!” she called out. The walls wobbled around her. “You are! Sitting here in your dreams of the past, when your people ruled Earth — a past we’re well out of! David was going where… where the future is!”
“I see,” Magnus Ryerson turned half away from her. He jammed both fists into his pockets, looked down at the floor and rumbled his words to someone else — not her.
“I know. You’re like the others, brought up to hate the West because it was once your master. Your teacher. The white man owned this planet a few centuries ago. Our sins then will follow us for the next thousand years… till your people fail in their turn, and the ones you raised up take revenge for the help they got. Well, I’m not going to apologize for my ancestors. I’m proud of them. We were no more vicious than any other men, and we gave… even on the deathbed of our civilization, we gave you the stars.”
His voice rose until it roared. “And we’re not dead yet! Do you think this miserable Protectorate is a society? It isn’t! It’s not even a decent barbarism. It’s a glorified garrison. It’s one worshipping the status quo and afraid to look futureward. I went to space because my people once went to sea. I gave my sons to space, and you’ll give yours to space, because that’s where the next civilization will be! And you’ll learn the history and the language of our people — your people — you’ll learn what it means to be one of us!”
His words rang away into emptiness. For a while only the wind and a few tiny flames had voice. Down on the strand, the sea worried the island like a terrier with a rat.
Tamara said finally: “I already know what it means. It cost me David, but I know.”
He faced her again, lowered his head and stared as if at an enemy.
“You murdered him,” she said, not loudly. “You sent him to a dead sun to die. Because you—”
“You’re overwrought,” he broke in with tight-held anger. “I urged him to try just one space expedition. And this one was important. It could have meant a deal to science. He would have been proud afterward, whatever he did for a career, to say, ‘I was on the Cross.’”
“So he should die for his pride?” she said. “It’s as senseless a reason as the real one. But I’ll tell you why you really made him go… and if you deny you forced him, I’ll say you lie! You couldn’t stand the idea that one child of yours had broken away — was not going to be wrenched into your image — had penetrated this obscene farce of space exploration, covering distance for its own sake, as if there were some virtue in a large number of kilometers. David was going to live as nature meant him to live, on a living soil, with untanked air to breathe and with mountains to walk on instead of a spinning coffin… and his children would too… we would have been happy! And that was what you couldn’t stand to have happen!”
Magnus grinned without humor. “There’s a lot of meaningless noise for a symbolics professor’s daughter to make,” he said. “To begin at the end, what proof have you we were meant to be happy?”
“What proof have you we were meant to jump across lightyears?” she spat. “It’s another way of running from yourself — no more. It’s not even a practical thing. If the ships only looked for planets to colonize, I could understand. But… the Cross herself was aimed for three giants! She was diverted to a black clinker! And now David is dead… for what? Scientific curiosity? You’re not a research scientist, neither was he, and you know it. Wealth? He wasn’t being paid more than he could earn on Earth. Glory? Few enough people on Earth care about exploration; not many more on Rama; he, not at all. Adventure? You can have more adventure in an hour’s walk through a forest than in a year on a spaceship. I say you murdered your son because you saw him becoming sane!”