“Oh, never mind. How about a drink or a smoke or both?”
She pressed her solidity down to hold the arm beneath her. “Not yet, please. Dan, Caitlin could help you. May I try?”
He scowled at his feet. Frieda and he were in her cabin, which contained hardly anything else to look at, none of the small bright touches the Irishwoman had given theirs. As usual, she had music playing, a Bach fugue, turned low but remaining ineluctably noble.
“Let me guess.” She rolled onto her side and nestled against his breast, to spare him her gaze. “You feel guilt about Zarubayev and Fidelio, about the rest of us who are lost in space-time because of what you suppose is you. Dan, Liebchen, you know we went freely, gladly. We who you safed from the Wheel –
Fidelio too, yes, Fidelio foremost, I belieff – whateffer comes on us, while we liff we will thank you. Mistakes, misfortunes, effery captain knows about those.
You are too strong a captain for letting them darken you. No, you will learn from them and then go on slugging, for the good of your followers. And if in the end, what I suppose is likeliest, in in the end we do not succeed, we neffer come home… why, what a glorious adventure we haff had!”
“Yeah,” he sighed.
“Caitlin makes you feel that in your blood. It is too bad she is not with you tonight.” Frieda paused. “Or maybe it is best. Maybe she makes you too happy for looking deeper, at the roots of your sorrow. Dan, you were thinking about your family.”
He drew a spastic breath.
“Your wife, your children,” she said. “You suppose you haff deserted them. When Caitlin is gone, they come back too much. From there you go on to punish yourself in effery way you can find.”
His mouth writhed, his lids squinched. “Listen, let’s drop the subject,”
he grated. “You’re no… psychotech… and I’m no damn patient.”
“Ja, ja, I know, I am simply your shipmate Frieda. Can we talk, though?
Can you tell me about Lis? I would like to hear.”
Long afterward, he lay at peace of a sort, drowsy. “You’re a marvelous woman,” he said beneath the muted music. “I’d no notion how kind you are –
helpful, understanding-”
Bitterness crossed her which he did not see. “Oh, yes, I haff my reputation, coarse old she-soldier. Well, the two grenadiers in the song, they cried, when they came back and found their Emperor was taken.” She chuckled: a statement. “Now if you want to do me a fafor, Dan, you will sleep, and wake up feeling fine again before breakfast. An hour before breakfast.”
His grip tightened slightly about her. “Sure. Good idea.”
Impulse broke through as she said, “Dan, we had better find home soon.
Else I am going to fall very hard in luff with you.”
Seen from outside, the planet was a deeper blue than Earth or Demeter, marbled by clouds that bore the softest touch of amber within their whiteness.
Continents made rusty blurs in that clarity, save where snow gleamed on peaks Side 161
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The and altiplanos. Their outlines were hazy; sunrise and sunset colors, as Chinook orbited close, were fantastically vivid; polar caps were lacking. Three moons attended.
Massive, dense, gravity at the surface a fifth again the Terrestrial, this world held a thick atmosphere. Humans could not have breathed unaided at sea level. Their lungs would accept the oxynitro composition, but not the concentration; and greenhouse effect kept lowlands hot in the high latitudes, unbearable closer to the equator. Only on the uppermost plateaus might man survive.
Yet life overran the globe, not much different from the Earth kind, as differences go in the cosmos.
“Damn it, that could be the reflection spectrum of chlorophyl off the vegetation,” Dozsa muttered. “Masked by something else, of course, but-”
“The chances against our being able to nourish ourselves down there, with no seeds or synthesizers, are absurdly big,” Weisenberg interrupted.
“We could investigate,” Leino proposed.
Brodersen shook his head. “No. I’d like to, but the risk’s too great, the stakes too small, when we’ve found no sign of civilization, of any intelligence.”