He thought, in triumph; there’s a whole technology here, a whole heritage, preserved entire for our descendants. It won’t be in my lifetime, or Moray’s, or perhaps in my children’s lifetime. But when we grow past the small struggles of day-to-day survival, the knowledge will be there, the heritage.
It will be here for now, whether the knowledge for the hospital of how to cure a brain tumor or glaze a cooking-pot for the kitchen; and when Moray runs up against problems in his structured society, as he inevitably will, the answers will be here. The whole history of the world we came from; we can pass by all the blind alleys of society, and go straight to a technology which will take us back to the stars one day–to rejoin the greater community of civilized man, not crawling around on one planet, but spreading like a great branching tree from star to star, universe upon universe.
We can all die, but the thing which made us human will survive–entire–and some day we will go back. Some day we will reclaim it.
He lay and listened to the distant sound of singing from the New Skye hall, in the dome which had become his whole life. Vaguely it occurred to him that he should get up; dress; go over to them, join them. They had something to preserve too. He thought of the lovely copper-haired girl he had known so briefly; who, amazingly, bore his child.
She would be glad to see him, and surely he had some responsibility, even though he had fathered the child half-knowing, maddened like a beast in rut–he flinched at the thought. Still she had been gentle and understanding, and he owed her something, some kindness for having used and forgotten her. What was her strange and lovely name? Fiona? Gaelic, surely. He rose from his bed, searching quickly for some garments, then hesitated, standing at the door of the dome and looking out at the clear bright sky. The moons had set and the pale false dawn was beginning to glow far to the east, a rainbow light like an aurora, which he supposed was reflected from the faraway glacier he had never seen; would never see; never cared to see.
He sniffed the wind and as he drew it into his lungs a strange, angry suspicion came over him. Last time they had destroyed the ship; this time they would destroy him, and his work. He slammed the dome and locked it; double-locked it with the padlock he had demanded from Moray. This time no one would approach the computer, not even those he trusted most. Not even Patrick. Not even Camilla.
“Lie still, beloved. Look, the moons have set, it will be morning soon,” Rafe murmured. “How warm it is, under the stars in the wind. Why are you crying, Camilla?”
She smiled in the darkness. “I’m not crying;” she said softly, “I’m thinking that some day we’ll find an ocean and islands for the songs we heard tonight, and that some day our children will sing them there.”
“Have you come to love this world as I do, Camilla?”
“Love? I don’t know;” she said tranquilly, “it’s our world. We don’t have to love it. We only have to learn to live with it, somehow. Not on our terms but on its own.”
All across Base Camp, the minds of the Earthmen flickered into madness, unexplained joy or fear; women wept without knowing why, or laughed in sudden joy they could not explain. Father Valentine, asleep in his isolated shelter, woke and came quietly down the mountain, and unnoticed, came into the Hall in New Skye, mingling with them in love and complete acceptance. When the winds died he would return to solitude, but he knew he would never be wholly alone again.
Heather and Ewen, sharing the night duty in the hospital, watched the red sun rise in the cloudless sky. Arms enlaced, they were shaken out of their silent ecstatic watching of the sky (a thousand ruby sparkles, the brilliant rush of light driving back the darknesses) by a cry behind them; a shrill, moaning wail of pain and terror.