“Delay would be worse for en … and, as I told you, even ens fellows. The situation has been approaching horror for those poor Tahirians. If Emil can go piloting, and share ens pleasure in the special Tahirian ways, it should change their feelings for the better. And they are also crew.”
“You, though. What of you?”
He shrugged. “I’ll find other ways to keep busy. . . . No!” he snapped. “No whining. This is a ship meant for humans. Any who can’t make a reasonable life aboard her is a sorry canijo.”
Yu refrained from mention of those who were gone. Seeking a diversion, she turned her gaze on the half-completed clay figurine. It was a bust, not in his former representational manner. The head was misshapen in some purposeful fashion, the visage and its expression still more.
“Your hobby,” she murmured. “But this is unlike anything else I have seen from you.”
“Tahirian influence,” he said. “I thought, I suppose like everybody, that every school and style was exhausted long ago and there’s nothing to do but make variations on them. Tahirian art gave me new ideas. Perhaps the black hole and the fact of the holonts has, too. At any rate, a pastime.”
“You are not doing this just for amusement,” she said. “It is too grim. Terrifying, in a way. I don’t know why, and that is part of the terror.”
“Well,” he said roughly, “I don’t doubt your analysis of the engineering matter is correct, but I would like to go over it with Emil, as well as your new design. Will you download them for us?”
“Of course.” Her undertone continued: “Yes, what we bring back may revitalize art on Earth, together with science, technology, philosophy, everything.”
He yielded enough to what was in him that he muttered, “Assuming we get back.”
“I expect we will, given your leadership,” Yu replied, “but what we will find, I think not even the Holont knows.”
Trouble crept likewise over Zeyd. Once he had prepared an explication of his science, transmission of its details was work for a computer. Unlike Mokoena, he could contribute little to the ongoing examination of fundamental questions — the nature of life and its evolution, whatever the form it took. Bit by bit, daycycle by daycycle, it was borne in on him that now he did best to keep out from underfoot. The efforts of his friends to tell him otherwise only made it worse.
He pursued such outside interests as he found. Among them, he took up fencing after he and Nansen improvised outfits. He grew more observant in his faith, reread the Qur’an, pondered new interpretations of it for the universe unfolding before him. Mostly he maintained a cheerful demeanor and was quick with a quip.
But Mokoena knew.
“I shouldn’t say this yet,” she told him. “I will, however, if you will keep it confidential for a while.”
They were in her cabin, late one evenwatch. She had dimmed illumination to the level of candlelight and made it rosy. A screen showed poplars shivering and shimmering in a double row, at the end of which a dome and a minaret stood above white walls. Ventilation blew with the same soughing warmth. He looked up from the chair in which he slumped. “Why the secrecy?” he asked.
She stood above him, dark, full-figured, lightly clad, her eagerness more heartening than any spoken sympathy could have been.
“Announcement would be premature,” she said. “Unscientific. Leaping to a conclusion we may never actually be sure we have reached. And still, I can’t hold it in any longer. I have to share it. Who better than with you, darling?”
He sat straighter. “Yes?”
“We — we’re learning more about the holonts. What they are, how they can possibly be. Not just patterns, mathematical abstractions. What embodies them? How can it be stable?”
She rejoiced to see and hear the awakening in him. “After all our puzzlings about that, is Hanny getting a definite answer?”
“We are, together.” She stroked his cheek. “That includes you. Your data showed the holonts how our life works. Then they could draw conclusions about it.” She paused, like an athlete readying for a sprint. “It is too soon. This interpretation may be wrong. But it does seem — Selim, it does seem the configurations are not transitory. They have a certain permanence. And life like ours, it’s pattern and process, too. Does it impose its own trace on the vacuum? Some direction on the randomness, some change in the metric? Do these last? Selim, maybe the holonts — maybe the Holont thinks they do!”