“Don’t underrate that, my dear. As isolated as we are – no matter what grandeur is around us, we become more and more defenseless against ourselves.”
He brought his lips close to her ear. “You saw me through a bad night. I’ve not forgotten. Call on me whenever you wish.”
“Well-” Abruptly she seized his arm. “Could we go somewhere and talk?”
They sought his cabin. He tuned in Swan Lake, a performance recorded on Luna perhaps a hundred million millennia ago, but simply to bring the room alive. No alcohol or marijuana were on hand, and she declined his offer to use the hotplate for making tea. Quietly settling into a chair, he let her pace.
“Aye, you spoke truth,” she said. “About our being so cut off that our own pettinesses take us over till we become monkeys in a cage. I wasn’t quite realizing of that before, for the splendors we found were always too great. But in this tomb of Creation it comes to me at last – things that have happened –
and we, are we really to blame if we go mad? At home, when trouble struck, we had sunsets and sunrises, forests, heaths, loughs, larks, or simply a city, a world of fellow humans, where we could go out and do. Here, in a metal shell, what is left but staring, the while we follow a marshlight to nowhere? … No, worse than that, for a marshlight would at least beguile us through an honest bog, water chill and a-splash, reeds to rustle, frogs to croak, and in the end, when we drowned, peat to receive us and preserve us for our descendants to find and marvel at, in mere thousands of years!”
“You too, then?” he replied. “You also want to turn back? Nobody imagines any more that we’d find home, but- New Earth? Caitlin, there isn’t a chance.”
“Och, well I know. Yet we’d have stars to see. Or- Earth and Demeter are not the oniy living worlds. I could die gladly on Danu, among the singers and dancers.”
“We can’t return there either. Inbound is not a straightforward reversal of outbound, and Joelle hasn’t the information, let alone the basic knowledge, to compute a path exactly.”
“That I know too. But we could seek to when the galaxy was alive, could we not?”
Caitlin prowled back and forth for a time. Bright phantoms leaped where music flowed. At last she halted, stood before Weisenberg, and demanded, “What do you want for us, Phil?”
“To go on,” he said. “As long as necessary, or as long as we can.”
“In the faint hope we may somehow pick up a pilot for Sol?”
“Yes.” From his self-contained leanness, he beheld her desperate fullness, and said, “Caitlin, I think that underneath your longings, you agree.
True, it’s easier for me in a lot of ways. I’m no child of open land and skies, I’m an engineer. A machine is as natural to me as a tree or a rainfall. Space was always my love, the stars, the idea of the Others… next to Sarah and the kids, of course, but damn it, exploring further is the sole way to maybe regain them, and meanwhile, whether we win or lose- Oh, hell, I’m getting maudlin.”
She stood and looked at him.
He stirred, shifted his eyes about, and said uncomfortably, “Caitlin, you wouldn’t be this troubled if you weren’t trying to shoulder Dan’s load for him. Would you?”
“He shoulders the crew’s,” she replied.
“And still he has no notion how heavily he’s drawing on you?”
“You exaggerate, Phil. But insofar as I can cheer him who is my life, aye, that’s what I’m for.”
Nearly appalled: “As independent a person as you would say that?”
“Why not? Would he not be doing the same for me, did I have need?”
Weisenberg sat silent, his gaze upon the deck, before he glanced back at her and said, “All right. It’s not so different from what’s- what was- what is between Sarah and me. But Caitlin, if you’d like to let go for a while, just let the control go, remember Ireland aloud or anything else you want, well, here I Side 171