“Oh, yes,” he ended, “maybe I am being too apocalyptic. I said I try to steer clear of fanaticism. Maybe they’ll muddle through somehow. But I know for certain, if I know nothing else, that Earth won’t get any new ideas except from the stars, and meanwhile the old ideas are killing people. Same as they killed my first wife.”
He stopped, exhausted.
“Dan, you bleed,” she half wept, and cradled him as best she was able.
At last: “You’ve never really told me what happened with Antonia. You loved her, and married her, and she died a bad death. Would you tell me the whole story this night?”
He stared before him. “Why saddle you with it?”
“So I can understand, my most dear. Understand you and what is in you; for sure it has become to me that this is your great wound and the reason why you could not stay quiet about Emissary.”
“Perhaps,” he mumbled. “You see, it was a political assassination, and the politics wouldn’t have existed if we weren’t stuck in these two miserable planetary systems.”
“Speak, Dan. About your Antonia, I’d make a song in honor of her memory, if you would like that.”
“I would. I would.”
“Then first I must know.”
He was merely average articulate, and full of grief; he groped and croaked:
“Okay, to start, how we met. After my discharge from the Peace Command, I wanted to go into spatial engineering, and had the luck to be accepted for the academy that the Andean Confederacy runs. When I’d graduated, I went to work for Aventureros Planetarios -the big corporation, you know, that the Rueda clan Side 25
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
dominates. I did pretty well, got invited to some parties they threw, and there was Toni.
“She herself said she’d be damned if we sucked the timocracy’s Ut. She was into astrography, and good at it, too. We wangled locations for us both at Nueva Cribola. That’s an Iliadic satellite, you may recall, but an office of Aventureros is there, and so is Arp Observatory.
“Six Earth years. . . I traveled a lot, necessarily, as far afield as Jupiter; but you know, Pegeen, though women were usually along on our jobs, through that whole time I really was a monogamist. Not that Toni’d have disowned me; but she was, and that settled the matter.”
He fell mute, while Caitlin held him.
“At last we decided to start a family,” he resumed. “She loved children.
And animals and. . . everything alive. She wanted to have the baby at home, in the Rueda mansion, for the sake of her grandparents. They were too frail to leave Earth, but it’d mean a cosmos to them to see the next generation arrive.
“Why not? I had an assignment ahead of me on Luna, wbich’d keep me away for several weeks. She might as well return to the clan at once and enjoy them.
They’re grand folk. I expected I’d finish before birthtime, take leave of absence, and join her.
“Well- Quite soon after she landed, the residencia got bombed, by terrorists. They issued an anonymous announcement that they were protesting the Ruedas’ hogging the benefits of space development from the masses. It was an incident in a wave of revolutionary violence going through South America.
“That’s faded out. Temporarily. It’s rising again. The Ruedas are still targets. Yes, of course they’re rich, because their ancestors had the wit to invite private space enterprise to Peth. But hogging the wealth? Why, suppose that money was divided equally among the oprimidos. What sum would each person get? And where’d the capital come from for the next investment? Pegeen, Pegeen, when will these world savior types learn some elementary economics?
“Anyway. . . this bomb didn’t do much. Destroyed a wing of the house, and three servants who’d been around for most of their lives-and, aye, aye, Toni and her baby.
“She didn’t die immediately. They rushed her to a hospital. She asked if she could see the Moon in the sky-the last thing she asked-but the phase wasn’t right. And I was off on Farside in a lunatrac, and a solar flare lousing up communications- “Well. That’s the story. I went on the bum for a year, but the Ruedas bore with me, and helped me straighten out, and staked me when I decided to go to Demeter and start a business like theirs. You see why I worry about Carlos aboard Emissary?”