“Of course I will.” I looked at Bill. “We do have to take a Man or two. The family could stay together.”
“You don’t understand. You don’t get it at all.” He stood up. “I’m going to a new world, too. And I’m going tomorrow.”
“You’re leaving?” Marygay said.
“Forever,” he said. “I can’t stand this anymore. I’m going to Centrus.”
There was a long silence. “What about the house?” I said. “The fish?” The plan had been for him to take it all over, when we left.
“You’ll just have to find somebody else.” He was almost shouting. “I can’t live here! I have to get out and start over.”
“You couldn’t wait until–” I began.
“No!” He glared at me, struggling for words, and then just shook his head and left the table. We watched in silence as he threw on his cold-weather gear and went outside.
“You aren’t surprised,” Sara said.
“We talked this over,” I said. “He was going to keep the place; do the trotlines.”
“The hell with the fish,” Marygay said quietly. “Don’t you see we just lost him? Lost him for good.” She didn’t cry until we were upstairs.
I just felt numb. I realized I’d given him up a long time ago. It’s easier to stop being a father than a mother.
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book two
THE BOOK OF CHANGES
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Chapter nine
Bill only stayed in Centrus for two days. He came back, embarrassed at his outburst. There was still no way he was going to get aboard that starship, but he wasn’t going to go back on his word; he’d take care of the fish as long as it was necessary.
I couldn’t blame him for wanting to go his own way. Like father, like son. Marygay was happy at his return, but wistful and a little shaken. How many times would she have to lose her son?
We were headed for the big city ourselves, which provoked an odd association with my own boyhood.
An unimaginably long time ago, when I was seven or eight, my hippy parents spent the summer in a commune in Alaska. (That’s when my brother was conceived, by somebody; my father always insisted he looked like him!)
It was a fun summer, a highlight of my childhood. We puffed up the Alcan Highway in our old Deadhead Volkswagen bus, camping or stopping in little Canadian towns along the way.
When we got to Anchorage, it seemed huge, and for years after, whenever he told people about the trip, my father quoted the guidebook: If you fly into Anchorage from an American city of any size, it seems small and quaint. If you drive or ferry up through all the little villages, it seems like a teeming metropolis.
I always remembered that when I came into Centrus, which is smaller than Anchorage had been, a millennium and a half ago. My own life has adapted itself to the scale and pace of a village, so my first impression of Centrus is one of dizzying speed and neck-craning size. But I take a mental deep breath and remember New York and London, Paris and Geneva–not to mention Skye and Atlantis, the fabulous pleasure cities that sucked away our money on Heaven. Centrus is a hick town that happens to be the biggest hick town within twenty light-years.
I held on to that thought when we came in to confer with Centrus administrators–which is to say, the world’s–about our timetable for fixing up and crewing the Time Warp.
We’d hoped they could just rubber-stamp it. Fourteen of us had spent most of a week arguing over who was to do what, when. I could just see starting over and repeating the process, with the additional pressure of demands from Man.
We went all the way up to the tenth-floor penthouse office of the General Administration Building, and presented our plan to four Men, two male and two female, and a Tauran, who could have been any of three sexes. He turned out to be Antres 906, of course, the cultural attache‚ we had entertained at our house the night I earned my first entry on the police blotter.
The five of them read the three-page schedule in silence, while Marygay and I looked out over Centrus. There wasn’t really too much to see. Beyond the dozen or so square blocks of downtown, the trees were higher than the buildings; I knew there was a good-sized town out there, but the dwellings and businesses were hidden by evergreens, all the way out to the shuttle pad on the horizon. The shuttles themselves weren’t visible; both were inside the launching tubes that rose out of the horizon mist like smokestacks on an old-fashioned factory.