CHAPTER 5
Early sunlight slanted over old buildings. The mansion stood as it had stood for centuries, red-tiled and amber-walled. The same family dwelt there as always. Modernizations throughout its history had not changed its appearance much or stolen away its soul. Barn, shed, and workshop were likewise little changed, although now they held only artifacts of the past, exhibits. Trees — chestnut, cedar, quebracho — shaded a broad stretch of lawn. Flowers trooped their colors. Several members of the staff were outside, some doing minor tasks, one showing a party of tourists around. Their talk lifted cheerfully but was soon lost in the wind.
It blew slow from the south, cool, scattering insect hordes. The odors awakening in it were as green as the grassland that billowed onward to the horizon. Anthills dotted the plain like dull-red stumps; groves stood scattered, murky except where tossing leaves caught the light. A few emus walked sedately, not far off, and the sky was full of wings, partridge, thrush, dove, parrot, vulture, and more: wildlife that came back after the cattle were gone.
Ricardo Iriarte Nansen Aguilar and Hanny Dayan rode off. He could have shown her more if they had taken a hovercar, and later they would; but when he suggested an excursion on horseback for her first morning here, she accepted eagerly. To her it was an exciting novelty, to him a return to memories.
Hoofs thudded gently, leather creaked, otherwise they went in silence until they were well out in the open. The whisper of wind through grass became an undertone to the whistles, trills, and calls from above. Dayan looked right, left, ahead, over immensity. She had arrived yesterday evening, when the welcome she got took all her time before she withdrew to her guest room.
“A beautiful country, Paraguay,” she said in the English they shared. “I’ve trouble seeing how you can leave it … forever.”
Nansen shrugged. “It isn’t my country,” he replied without tone.
“No? It’s your family’s, and I can see they’re close-knit, and your own roots are here, aren’t they? Your grandnephew told me —”
She hesitated. That man was gray and furrowed. The man at her side was still young, under fifty He sat tall in the saddle, lean, shoulders and hands big for such a build. Under straight black hair, his face bore blue-gray eyes, Roman nose, chin clean-depilated and strong. His garb was nothing uncommon — iridescent white shirt, close-fitting black trousers, soft boots — but he wore it with an air that she thought might, long ago, have been a gaucho’s.
Well, he had been to the stars and back.
” — your grandnephew, Don Fernando, told me your ancestor who founded this place came from Europe in the nineteenth century,” Dayan finished. “A history like that must mean a great deal.”
Nansen nodded. “Yes. Though we weren’t all estancieros, you know. One son would inherit. Most others went into trade, professions, the Church, the army, sometimes politics in the democratic era — eventually, when the time came, into space.”
“Then don’t you belong here?” Dayan persisted. “The land, the portraits on the walls, books, goblets, jewels, mementos, traditions — the family.” She smiled. “I studied you up beforehand, Captain Nansen, and now I’m seeing for myself.”
“You see the surface,” he replied gravely “They are cordial to me, yes, because I am of the blood, and they’re proud of what I’ve done and will do. But they’re strangers, Dr. Dayan.” He fell quiet, gazing before him. A hawk swooped low. She recollected from news accounts of him that in his boyhood he had been a falconer. “Or . . . no, it is I who am the stranger,” he said. “I came home from Epsilon Eridani, and many of the same people were still alive. Things had not changed beyond recognition. Already, however — It seemed well to join the 61 Cygni expedition.”
“Surely not in despair?”
“Oh, no. An exploration. My calling, after all. I don’t regret it. Those planets, lifeless but full of astonishments and challenges.”
His look went aloft. Beyond the blue shone the Centaur. Five thousand light-years hence, other ships fared, and their crews were not human.