He took refuge in facts. “That’s because we’re rather heavily laden, Freelady, which Eagle wasn’t. Our gamma factor is down to about three hundred and fifty.” Not that it ever gets much above four hundred. We merchantmen are not legendary Envoy. It isn’t necessary for us, it wouldn’t pay; and maybe even we Kithfolk have lost the vision. Kenri put the thought from him. It spooked too often through his head.
For a while they stood wordless. Ventilation hummed, as if the ship talked to herself. Nivala had once wondered aloud how a vessel felt, what it was like to be forever a wanderer through foreign skies. He hadn’t actually needed to explain, as he did, that the computers and robots lacked consciousness. She knew; this was a passing fancy. But it stayed with him, having been hers.
Nor did she now resent his pointing out an obvious technicality. She looked at him again. A breeze brought him a faint, wild trace of her perfume. “The time is more frightening than the space,” she said low. “Yes, a single light-year’s too huge for our imagining. But I can’t really grasp that you were horn eight hundred years ago, Kenri Shaun, and you’ll be traveling between the stars when I’m dust.”
He could have seized the chance to pay a compliment. His tongue locked on him. He was a starfarer, a Kithman, belonging to nowhere and to no one except his ship, while she was Star-Free, unspecialized genius, at the top of the Dominancy’s genetic peerage. The best he could do was: “The life spans we experience will be similar, Freelady. One measure of time is as valid as another. Elementary relativity.”
She cast the mood from her. It could not have gone very deep. “Well, I never was good at physics,” she laughed. “We leave that to Star-A and Norm-A types.”
The remark slapped him in the face. Yes, brain work and muscle work are the same. Work. Let the suboptimals sweat. Star-Frees shall concentrate on being aesthetic and ornamental.
She saw. He had not had much occasion to conceal his feelings. Abruptly, amazingly, she caught his right hand in both hers. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to — I didn’t mean what you think.”
“It’s nothing, Freelady,” he answered out of his bewilderment.
“Oh, it’s much.” Her eyes looked straight into his, enormous. “I know how many people on Earth dislike yours, Kenri. You don’t fit in, you speak among each other of things unknown to us, you bring wares and data we want and drive hard bargains for them, you question what we take for granted — you’re living question marks and make us uncomfortable.” The pale cheeks had colored. She glanced down. Her lashes were long and sooty black. “But I know a superior type when I meet one. You could be a Star-Free, too, Kenri. If we didn’t bore you.”
“Never that, Freelady!”
They didn’t pursue the matter and he soon left her, with trumpets calling in him. Three months, he thought. Three ship months to Sol.
A maple stirred overhead as he turned at the Shaun gate, its leaves crackling in the wind. The street lighting didn’t do justice to their scarlet. Early frost this year, he guessed. The wind blew chill and damp, bearing autumnal odors, smoke from traditional hearthfires, cuttings and soil in gardens. He realized suddenly what had seldom come to mind, that he had never been here during a winter. He had never known the vast hush of snowfall.
Light poured warm and yellow from windows. The door scanned and recognized him. It opened. When he walked into the small, cluttered living room, he caught a lingering whiff of dinner and regretted arriving too late. He’d eaten at the spaceport, and not badly, but that was tech food. His mother cooked.
He saluted his parents according to custom and propriety. His lather nodded with equal restraint. His mother cast dignity aside, hugged him, and said how thin he’d gotten. “Come, dear, I’ll fix you a sandwich. Wei-tome home.”
“I haven’t time,” he replied. Helplessly: “I’d like to, but, well, I have to go out again.”
“Theye Barinn was asking about you,” she said, elaborately casual. “The High Barbaree came in two months ago.”