Maclaren paused until he had all his words chosen. Then he said, as gently as might be:
“IT wasn’t so wildly improbable. All this time we’ve known that we couldn’t be the only race reaching for the stars. It was absurd to think so; that would have been the senseless unlikelihood. Well, the Cross was farther out than men had ever gone before, and the alien spaceship was near the aliens’ own limit of expansion. It was also bound for Alpha Crucis. Odd what a sense of kinship that gives me, my brother mariner, with chlorine in his lungs and silicon in his bones, steering by the same lodestar. Contact was certain eventually, as they and we came into range of each other’s signals. Your David was the man who first closed the ring. We were trying call patterns we could not measure, running through combinations of variables. Statistically, we were as likely to strike one of their patterns as one of ours.”
The water began to boil. She busied herself with the kettle. The long tresses falling past her face hid whether she was crying or not. Maclaren added for her, “Do you know, my lady, I think we must have called hundreds of other space-traveling races. We were out of their range, of course, but I’m sure we called them.”
Her voice was muffled: “What did the aliens think of it?”
“I don’t know. In ten years we may begin to talk to them. In a hundred years, perhaps we will understand them. And they us, I hope. Of course, the moment David… appeared… they realized what had happened. One of them came through to me. Can you imagine what courage that must have taken? How fine a people your man has given us to know? There was little they could do for me, except test the Cross’ web and rule out all the call patterns which they use. I kept on trying, after that. In a week I finally raised a human. I went through to his receiver and that’s all. Our technicians are now building a new relay station on the black star planet. But they’ll leave the Cross as she is, and David Ryerson’s name will be on her.”
“I thought,” she whispered, still hiding her face, “that you I mean, that quarantine rules—”
“Oh, yes, the Protectorate tried to invoke them. Anything to delay what is going to happen. But it was useless. Nothing from the aliens’ planet could possibly feed on Terrestrial life. That’s been established already, by the joint scientific commission; we may not be able to get the idea behind each other’s languages yet, but we can measure the same realities! And of course, the aliens know about us. Man just can’t hide from the universe. So I was released.” Maclaren accepted the cup she offered him and added wryly: “To be sure, I’m not exactly welcome at the Citadel any more.”
She raised large eyes to him. He saw how they glimmered. “Why not?” she asked. “You must be a hero to—”
“To spacemen, scientists, some colonials, and a few Earthmen glad of an end to stagnation. Not that I deserve their gratitude. There are three dead men who really did all this. But at any rate, my lady, you can foresee what an upheaval is coming. We are suddenly confronted with — Well, see here, the aliens must be spread through at least as large a volume of space as man. And the two races don’t use the same kind of planets. By pooling transceiver networks, we’ve doubled both our territories! No government can impose its will on as many worlds as that.”
“But more. There are sciences, technologies, philosophies, religions, arts, insights they have which we never imagined. It cannot be otherwise. And we can offer them ours, of course. How long do you think this narrow little Protectorate and its narrow little minds can survive such an explosion of new thought?” Maclaren leaned forward. He felt it as an upsurge in himself. “My lady, if you want to live on a frontier world, and give your child a place where it’s hard and dangerous and challenging — and everything will be possible for him, if he’s big enough — stay on Earth. The next civilization will begin here on Earth herself.”
Tamara set down her cup. She bent her face into her hands and he saw, helpless, how she wept. “It may be,” she said to him, “it may be, I don’t know. But why did it have to be David who bought us free? Why did it have to be him? He didn’t mean to. He wouldn’t have, if he’d known. I’m not a sentimental fool, Maclaren-san, I know he only wanted to come back here. And he died! There’s no meaning in it!”
18
The North Atlantic rolled in from the west, gray and green and full of thunder. A wind blew white manes up on the waves. Low to the south gleamed the last autumnal daylight, and clouds massed iron-colored in the north, brewing sleet.
“There,” pointed Tamara. “That is the place.”
Maclaren slanted his aircar earthward. The sky whistled around him. So Dave had come from here. The island was a grim enough rock, harshly ridged. But Dave had spoken of gorse in summer and heather in fall and lichen of many hues.
The girl caught Maclaren’s arm. “I’m afraid, Terangi,” she whispered. “I wish you hadn’t made me come.”
“It’s all we can do for David,” he told her: “The last thing we’ll ever be able to do for him.”
“No.” In the twilight, he saw how her head lifted. “There’s never an end. Not really. His child and mine, waiting, and — At least we can put a little sense into life.”
“I don’t know whether we do or whether we find what was always there,” he replied. “Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose — order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it — does exist.”
“Here on Earth, yes,” she sighed. “A flower or a baby. But then three men die beyond the sun, and it so happens the race benefits a little from it, but I keep thinking about all those people who simply die out there. Or come back blind, crippled, broken like dry sticks, with no living soul the better for it. Why? I’ve asked it and asked it, and there isn’t ever an answer, and finally I think that’s because there isn’t any why to it in the first place.”
Maclaren set the car down on the beach. He was still on the same search, along a different road. He had not come here simply to offer David’s father whatever he could: reconciliation, at least, and a chance to see David’s child now and then in the years left him. Maclaren had some obscure feeling that an enlightenment might be found on Skula.
Truly enough, he thought, men went to space, as they had gone to sea, and space destroyed them, and still their sons came back. The lure of gain was only a partial answer; spacemen didn’t get any richer than sailors had. Love of adventure… well, in part, in some men, and yet by and large the conquerors of distance had never been romantics, they were workaday folk who lived and died among sober realities. When you asked a man what took him out to the black star, he would say he had gone under orders, or that he was getting paid, or that he was curious about it, or any of a hundred reasons. Which might all be true. And yet was any of them the truth?
And why, Maclaren wondered, did man, the race, spend youth and blood and treasure and all high hopes upon the sea and the stars? Was it only the outcome of meaningless forces — economics, social pressure, maladjustment, myth, whatever you labeled it — a set of chance-created vectors with the sardonic resultant that man broke himself trying to satisfy needs which could have been more easily and sanely filled at home?
If I could get a better answer than that, thought Maclaren, I could give it to Tamara. And to myself And then we could bury our dead.