MacRoscope (25 page)

There was no accident. They loaded minimum supplies into the module and set off as a group for Triton. Not until the rough landing was over did Ivo allow his mind to function normally again. The experience had frankly terrified him, and he knew that Beatryx had reacted similarly.

Here at last there was gravity. Suited again, they stepped upon their new moon-planet home and looked about.

They were in a valley formed by the curving walls of adjacent craters that were now great mountain ranges jutting to either side. Other ranges were visible in the distance. Not far from their landing spot was an immense crevasse: a geologic fault running between the craters, V-cleft, and filled at the bottom with liquid. The ground surface was packed with dust, somewhat like solid snow, with rocks nudging through it irregularly. Mighty Neptune provided a dim illumination; there was nothing like Earth’s sunlight out here.

“Well, we have our world,” Beatryx said dubiously, after they had returned to the module. “Now what do we do with it?”

“We’ll have to camp in the module until we can construct permanent quarters here,” said Groton thoughtfully. “But before we do that, we’d better survey the area for good locations.”

Afra had stripped off her suit in the pressurized cabin and was wiping the perspiration from her body with an absorbent cloth. Ivo realized that she was nude from the waist up — and further realized that their situation had intensified group interaction to such an extent that he hadn’t even noticed her action until this moment. He suspected that it would be a long time before there was room again for modesty, when cubic yards were all the space available for the four, here. The macroscope had been roomy, compared to the module.

“I’d like first to know how long we’re going to stay,” she said. “Is Schön-person somehow going to find us here, and if so, how soon? No sense building anything fancy if it’s only for a few days.” She had not interrupted her clean-up.

Ivo remembered the breastless carcass he had watched melting, and was tempted to reach out and verify again that what he saw here was real. He refrained.

“Ivo?” Beatryx prompted.

He jumped. “I don’t think Schön is coming. Anything we do, we’ll have to do on our own.”

“Can you find him or can’t you?” Afra demanded, peeling down the nether portion of her suit. “Or contact him. You’ve been more and more mysterious, and there’s still that business about that poet—”

Beatryx interrupted what was threatening to become a tirade. “Afra!”

“But he’s refusing to cooperate! We can’t put up with—”

It was Harold’s turn to interrupt. “If the rest of you will leave off, I will address myself to the problem of Schön. I’ll make a report when I have something to report. Meanwhile, there’s nothing to stop us from setting things up. We’ll need a base of operations regardless of the company. Let’s just do things in an orderly manner and see what develops.”

Afra did not seem fully satisfied, but she shrugged into shorts and a fresh blouse. She didn’t bother with a brassiere in quarter-gravity. “Assuming that we find a suitable location, exactly how do you propose to construct ‘permanent quarters’? The only abundant building materials we have are plain rock and cold dust, and those have certain limitations.”

“I am aware of the limitations. But I figure Ivo can take another peek through the scope and come up with some galactic blueprints for us. This must be a fairly common situation, galactically speaking, and there must be survivors’ handbooks. Why not use them?”

“I can try. Tell me what kind of information you seek, and I’ll look for it. I can’t use the computer’s automatic search pattern, since this is intellectual, but—”

“Fine. I’ll work out a schedule and talk to you again, and we’ll ferry you up to the scope in a few days. I suppose we’d better set a limit on free-fall time, though — say, no more than one day in three. That sound reasonable?”

Afra and Ivo nodded. Whatever leadership existed here seemed to be gravitating steadily to Groton, perhaps because their immediate problems had become ones of engineering — or perhaps, Ivo thought, just because of his level-headed calm.

“Should he be alone?” Beatryx inquired.

“Um, that too,” Groton agreed. “Maybe we’d better make another rule that nobody be alone. That macroscope is dangerous, as we know — but so is Triton. We’ll have to watch each other all the time, because we may not be able to survive as a group if even one of us goes.”

“Should we make sure each of us can do each task?” Afra asked next. “Right now, Ivo’s the only one competent on the scope. Harold and I can pilot—”

“If we can’t get along without all of us,” Ivo pointed out, “it doesn’t really matter what any one of us knows. We function as a group or not at all.”

“There is macabre sense in that,” Groton agreed, “if we ignore the possibility of someone’s temporary incapacity. Let’s assign tasks, then, and let people train for others as circumstance dictates. Ivo, you’re the scoper, of course; Afra, you’re the pilot, because I’ll be the construction engineer. Beatryx—”

“Cooking and laundry,” she said, and they laughed.

It was Beatryx who stood watch with him his first day on scope duty. Afra had piloted them off Triton and ensconced them safely in the macroscope, then dropped back to keep Groton company and help him survey for his construction. He had remained below in his suit, no one thinking to invoke the never-alone rule against him this time. Ivo had a carefully rehearsed headful of specifications, and his job now was to locate some galactic station that had the products required. He hardly comprehended the electronic terms, but he hoped that he could at least match bid to asked.

The first assignment was rough: a survey of galactic physical technology. But Beatryx was there when he emerged from the awesome visions of the cosmos, and she was cheerful and unassuming, encouraging and sympathetic. Ivo could appreciate the reason Groton, no intellectual slouch himself, had passed over the female engineers he might have had and chosen a woman like this. It was the feeling of familiarity, of home, that he needed most when the revelations of the ages shook his fundamental assumptions, and she carried about her a pleasing aura of homebody Earth.

Again he remembered Brad’s remark about normality being no insult, and again he appreciated it intensely. Intelligence might be defined as facility at solving problems — but it was only one talent among many required for existence. What about the problem of being fit to live with? By
that
definition, Beatryx was the smartest among them.

“Now I know what Lanier meant by the relation of music to poetry,” he said as he removed helmet and goggles, his head revolving with the music of the spheres and the meter of communication. “The rules are identical — there.”

“Lanier?” she inquired. “Sidney Lanier who wrote about the marshes?”

He looked at her, realizing his slip. “You know of him?”

“Only a little. I never understood the interpretations they taught me in school, but I did like some of the verse. I suppose I liked the American poets because they seemed closer. I remember how sad it made me when I learned about Annabel Lee.”

“Annabel who?”

“She was by Mr. Poe. I always used to think he was Italian, because of the river. I mean, he wrote about her. I memorized it because it made me cry.”

Ivo looked at her, seeing a woman of 37 who only once in the brief period he had known her had shown a sign of unhappiness. “Do you remember it now?”

“I don’t think I do, Ivo. It was a long time ago. Let me see.” She concentrated. “ ‘
She
was a child and
I
was a child. In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love — I and my Annabel Lee.’ ” She shook her head. “She died — it was a wind blowing out of a cloud — but he loved her forever anyway.”

“I didn’t realize you liked poetry,” he said. “What’s your favorite poem of all time?”

“Oh, I remember that one,” she said, her face animated. Ivo had judged her to be forty or more the first time he met her, then had learned her true age; now she seemed to have lopped half a dozen more years off that. People became so much much more
alive
when occupied in something really interesting to them. “It was so sad, but it seemed so true. I mean, I don’t know it any more, but it was my favorite. It was about Jesus Christ and how they slew Him, when He came out of the woods. Oh, I wish I could remember how it went—”

“ ‘Into the woods my Master went / Clean forspent, forspent. / Into the woods my Master came / Forspent with love and shame.’ ”

“That’s it! Oh, Ivo, that’s it! How did you know?”

“
A Ballad of Trees and the Master
,” he said, “by Lanier.”

“Yes, yes, I had forgotten, yes that was his! But how did you know it?”

“I know — quite a bit of his work. I — well, it’s a long story, and I don’t suppose it matters now.”

“Oh yes it does, Ivo! He’s such a good poet — I know he is — you must tell me! I remember it, I think. He came out of the woods — ‘When Death and Shame would woo Him last,’—”

“ ‘From under the trees they drew Him last; / ’Twas on a tree they slew Him — last / When out of the woods He came.’ ”

There were tears in her eyes that would not fall in the trace gravity. “He found peace among the trees — and then they crucified Him on a tree. Wood, anyway. Such an awful thing.” She reflected on it for a moment. “But you didn’t tell me how you know about Sidney Lanier.”

Ivo was touched by her genuine appreciation and interest. “It was a kind of game we played. You see, none of us knew who our real parents were—”

“You didn’t
know?
Ivo, where
were
you?”

“In a — project. They took people of all races and — mixed them together for a couple of generations and got children who were a combination of everything. The idea was to breed back to the basic stock of man, or at least obtain something equivalent to what he would have been if he hadn’t split into so many races. To see if he was any better than the — well, the whites and the yellows and the browns and the blacks. They wanted to reduce cultural influences and make it all the same, so we had no parents. Just supervisors.”

“How horrible, Ivo! I didn’t know.”

“It wasn’t so bad. Matter of fact, we had quite a time. We were never hungry or cold or neglected, and had all the best of everything. It was quite stimulating, as it was meant to be. There were several hundred of us, all the same age and — race. I didn’t really realize until I got out of the project that I was not a normal American.”

“
Not a
—”

“We’re considered nonwhite.”

“But that shouldn’t make any difference, Ivo. Not in America.”

He did not pursue that aspect farther. “Anyway, since we had no parents or relatives, some of us invented them. It got to be quite a serious thing. We’d pick figures from history and trace the lineage and work out a line of descent for ourselves. We had the whole world to choose from, of course — all times and all races. We’d show how these ancestors resembled us in some way, or vice versa. Anyway, my white ancestor was Sidney Lanier.”

“I think that’s very sweet, Ivo. But what made you decide he was the one?”

“I suppose it was the flute playing. Lanier was a fine flutist, you know — perhaps the finest in the world at that time. He earned his living for several years as first flutist for a prominent orchestra, even though he had tuberculosis, before he got more serious as a poet.”

She frowned. “The flute? I don’t see — Ivo! You play the flute!”

He nodded.

“Did you bring it with you? You must be a very good musician!”

“Yes, I brought it with me — the only thing I
did
bring. That’s the way Lanier would have done it. I guess music
is
my strong point. A single talent, like my math-logic talent. I never really worked at it, but I could play the flute better than any of the others.”

After another session with the macroscope, he yielded to her importunings, assembled his flute and played for her. The notes were oddly distorted in the confined space and trace-gravity air, but she listened raptly.

For her? He was playing for himself, too, for he loved the flute. He caressed the instrument, letting the music flow through his being as though they were merely two stops between composer and audience. He lived each note, feeling his soul expand and renew, animated by the melody. This was the theme that brought him closer to his ancestor.

After that it became a regular routine between them, for he felt comfortable while playing and her pleasure was genuine. He played the cold out of the bleak Schön-moonlet landscape; he played mighty Neptune up over the Triton horizon (Triton never turned a new face to Neptune, but Schön’s revolution about it caused a regular eclipse of impressive dimension); he played the spirit of Earth into their exile.

Sometimes, too, he took time off from the galactic bands to survey Earth and pick up the headlines from a New York newspaper, because Beatryx liked to know what was going on locally. In many respects, these sessions with her were as comfortable as anything he had known.

Meanwhile, below, developments were impressive. If flute-playing was Ivo’s genius, machinery was Groton’s.

“The problem is this,” Groton had explained. “Information does
not
equal gadgetry. The amount of detail work required to build even a crude shelter at a place like this, with temperature, gravity and atmosphere problems, is appalling. Cutting, fitting, finishing, sealing, installing, testing — many thousands of man-hours, not to mention the equipment! So I need to know how a party our size, with a macroscope and an atomic engine and a planetary module and a few hand tools can terraform a world like Triton within, oh, six months. There must be a program for it somewhere. Find me that program!”

Ivo found it. One of the far galactic stations had a complete A-to-Z presentation beginning with a way to tie down a Type I technology rocket so that the heat and power of the blasting motor could be utilized planetside, and ending with the proper etiquette for the housewarming party.