“You have Ricardo Nansen especially in mind, don’t you?” Sundaram prompted softly.
Dayan swallowed. “I don’t believe we can stay together without him.”
“He will not desert us. That isn’t in him.”
“No, but — He’s been so remote,” she quavered. “Polite, dutiful, firm but considerate — and nothing else. Nothing behind his eyes.”
“Oh, there is. He simply does not show it.”
They stopped, as if they had read an agreement in one another’s bodies, and stood face-to-face. “Why not?” she pleaded. “I thought. . . here, resting, wounds healing, he’d come back to us — his spirit would — but as soon as we were established, he went away. Why?”
“He told us he wanted a change of scene.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Unless he’s broken inside.”
“You care very much, do you not?”
Dayan stood mute.
Sundaram smiled now as a man would smile at his troubled young daughter. “Put your fears aside, Hanny. He has taken the deepest hurt of any of us. He —” After a few seconds: “He did speak several times with me. I may not reveal what he said, of course. But I can point out the obvious, which you in your own pain seem to have let pass by. Ricardo Nansen is an aristocrat. He does not readily bare his feelings. To come to terms with his grief, he wants a surcease, a time alone. The captain is never alone, always on call. I helped him arrange it with the Tahirians. I may have given him a thought or two to consider. He will return to us, also in spirit.”
Dayan laid fist in hand and looked past her companion, hopeward. Finally she turned her gaze to him and said, “Thank you. I wish I knew better words, but thank you.”
Sundaram bowed. “Shalom, Hanny.”
The island lay solitary, the top of a midoceanic volcano. From its crater the slopes fell rough and bestrewn, hundreds of meters down to surf. Woods blanketed the lower reaches in bronze and amber. Flocks crowded the skies, swimming creatures lanced the waves. Winds blew mild, full of salt and fragrances. Nevertheless the island was uninhabited. A population kept well under the carrying capacity of the planet had no land hunger. Besides, the benign climate would not last, and meanwhile geologists foresaw eruptions. An aircar was a rare sight on these shores.
One rested, a bright bubble, above the black sands of a beach, near a shelter. Nansen and a Tahirian stood outside.
“(I am glad it was you who came to take me off,)” said the man on his parleur.
“(Would you not rather it were Simon or, better, Emil?)” inquired Ivan.
“(We bade our good-byes when we landed from the ship. They were — )” Nansen paused. The breeze ruffled his hair. Beyond the little quadruped who confronted him, sea tumbled blue, indigo, and white. Surf whooshed low, crumbling rather than breaking, with none of the violence he had seen along coasts of Earth.
“(They are friends,)” he said. “(I always wished you, too, could be my friend.)”
Stance, gesture, and sharp, gingery odor did not altogether reject him. “(That is difficult, after what you have done to my people.)”
“(Those others do not see it as harm.)”
“(No, many have not. But the lifetimes since you first arrived here, during which we were away at the black hole, have been less than serene.)”
“(Everything seems peaceful.)”
“(Yes, seemingly. Yet our society is trembling, old customs abandoned, restlessness rife. The very purpose of maintaining stability is in question. This latest flood of new information, new concepts that your return has brought, it will have consequences still less foreseeable, perhaps uncontrollable.)”
“(Is it bad that possibilities open up?)” Nansen argued. “(I envy your race its nearness to the black hole. You can discover more than we today can imagine, thousands of years before we will be able to.)”
“(What cost docs progress bear?)” Ivan retorted. “(I have studied what you related of your human history. I witnessed the slaughter aboard ship.)”
“(Need it happen to you? Cannot you make choices as free as ours?)”
“(I hope so. I realize you did not intend to disturb us. You could not know. It chanced, as the collision of a stray planet with Tahir might chance. The cosmos goes deeper than our minds ever will.)”