There was the time a dark young man with unhappy eyes, Abbey Roberto, bad searched out the Coordinator
and warned him that Ilaloa was a witch. Trevelyan remembered Sean’s account of Roberto having overheard something about telepathy. There lead been mutterings and sidelong glances when Ilaloa passed by. And the mounting tension aboard ship as they plunged into mystery could unsettle stabler rninds than these.
At least the Peregrine had a fairly definite goal now. The point in space from which the sky should look as Ilaloa’s vision said could be identified within a few tens of lightyears. At full crusing speed, it lay about six weeks’ journey from Er-ulan.
A month passed. It could have been a week or a century, but the clocks said it was a month.
They were in the park, four of them together talking and wanting companionship. Nicki sat cross-legged beside Trevelyan, linldng an arm with his. Opposite them was Sean, Ilaloa leaning against his side.
The park was the largest division of the ship aside from cargo space and, after the byper-engines, the most impressive. It filled ninety degrees of bull curvature on the outermost deck, and its length reached a hundred and twenty meters from the bows. But that was necessary.
In the day of great cities, men bad been caged in the sto-@iy, glassy mountains of their creation, and it was not strange that so many had retreated into madness. What then of humanity locked in a shell of metal and raw energy, betweei the stars? They could not have endured it without some relief, grass cool and damp underfoot, tl-.e rustle of leaves and ripple of flowing water.
This was the place of assembly, the captain speaking to men who stood on the wide green lawn in front of him, But just now there were only some children playinr ball there. Otherwise the park was a place of trees, the tre s of Earth, and of hedges, flower beds, fountains, winding paths and secret bowers.
Trevelyan anti his party were in one of the bowers, leaning against the dwarf trees hemming it i . An oak spread above them, its branches dripping with heavy grapevines; rosebushes and willows made a little grotto of the place.
A viewscreen opened on the outside. It sat vertically, like a window, and its metal outlines were drowned in ivy. Space loomed frightfully there, framed in a gentleness of leaves, ablaze with the diamond points of stars, falling outward to the uttermost ends of the universe. Ilaloa sat on the farther side of Sean, not looking at the screen.
They were talking of civilization. Always Nicki drew Trevelyan out, asking him about his home, and be was not loath to respond. He wanted the Nomads to understand what was going on.
“in some ways,” he declared, “we’re in a position like that of Earthbound man in, say, the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. That was a time when any pirt of the world was accessible, but the voyages were long and difficult and communications lagged. Transmission of inforrnation-tbe ideas, discoveries, developments of both home and colonies-was slow. Coordination was virtually impossible -oh, they did influence each other, but only in part. It wasn’t even appreciated how foreign the colonies were becoming. North America was not England; the whole ethos became something else. If they had bad radio then, even without better ships, Earth’s history would have taken a fantastically different course.
‘Well, what have we today? A dozen or more highly civilized races, scattering themselves over this part of the Galaxy, intercourse limited to spaceships that may need weeks to get from one sun to the next-and nothing else. Not even the strong economic ties which did, after all, bind Europe to its colonies. Cross-purposes are breeding which are someday going to clash-they’ve already done so in several cases, and it’s meant annihilations
“Hmm-yeab.” Sean ran a band through his unruly bair. The other arm was about Ilaloa, whose eyes were somber, and be saw that she was tensed as if waiting for something.
Nicki nodded toward the Lorinyan girl. “‘Lo is right,’ she said. “You do think too damn much, Micah, and you’re
too lonesome up there in your own head.” She gestured at the viewscreen.