he mumbled. “Don’t we? While we live? There will never be any roads really for us, roads we can walk on, ever again.”
She smiled. “Sure, and you’re not losing heart already, are you, Martti, lad? When we’ve only just snatched our lives back to us and won free?”
“Free?” His gaze swung wildly about, he gripped the table edge with needless force, till his nails whitened. “Locked in a metal shell, blundering blind through space as long as our food holds out, no longer, if we don’t go crazy first-” He wrestled for control.
She stroked his head and made comforting noises low in her throat. At last he could say with simple despair, “You do know, don’t you, we’re lost?
Fidelio’s confirmed his folk have never been here. We’ll grope from T machine to T machine- In a thousand years, spending billions of probes, the Betans found how to go between a couple of score stars… and no Others, nobody to help…
Caitlin, we’re done for.”
She shook her head, still smiling through the hair that streamed athwart stars, and answered quietly, well-nigh merrily, “I’ll believe that of me when they lay the coppers on my eyes, and maybe not then. But suppose the thing that you say is the worst, Martti, darling.”
He jerked violently. “Och,” she breathed, “you’re in bad shape, so you are. If you’re to help me, let me help you first. Hold still.”
In a deft maneuver she released the table, drew alongside him and slightly behind, caught his left arm in her left hand and pinned his legs between her knees. He uttered amazement. “Easy, lad, easy,” she said. “I must be anchoring myself if I’m to give you the good strong back rub you need.” Her right hand went over him. “Aye, a rat’s nest of Charlie horses, as my father would say were he less dignified and more Irish. Peel down your coverall to the waist.”
He trembled as he obeyed. “Relax,” she urged. “Let go. We’ll drift loose, but sooner or later we’ll fetch up against a wall- a bulkhead- and meanwhile I can be loosening of that poor latissimus dorsi for you.”
Kneading, she chuckled. “All my own invention. Free fall sex made me wonder about free fall massage, the more so when himself often is tensed- No, easy, I told you, easy.”
Looking about her as she worked: “Suppose we shall indeed go lost for some years, until our food is no more and each of us must choose how to die. I do not admit this is the case, mind you, but suppose it is. What a grand fate!”
“Huh?” he exclaimed. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am that. Oh, it will be hard to give up mountains and seas, sunshine through rain, a hearthfire at evening. But think, Martti, dear. Look. The glory yonder, and we making ready to know it- then more suns, more worlds, more beauties and marvels, maybe at last a new Demeter for us, though if not, why, then at the end our few years out here in the universe will have held more than most centuries ever did before.” Her hold upon him tightened, her working hand grew eager. “Be glad in your life!”
* * *
Intended for the unknown, Chinook bore a superb panoply of scientific instruments. But save for the two computermen, no specialist in any of their uses was aboard. Sufficient technical knowledge, including the knowledge of how to look things up, existed among the travelers that, largely under Weisenberg’s guidance, they could find ways to learn something about the realm wherein they were stranded. However, that might prove to be fatally little.
Then Joelle made her announcement to captain and engineer: Fidelio had the skill. His race had explored many planetary systems, no two alike. Its professional spacefarers included a cadre trained in making and interpreting an enormous range of observations, against the day when the next robot probe would return with the news that it had found another gateway back.
He had been one such, as well as a xenological officer who spoke for his ship when she visited aliens. The combination had gotten him picked for Emissary.