He was still finding it exhilarating just to be able to stand outside without a roof between him and the sky, even if the sky was turbulent gray, and the wind cutting and laced with stinging dust. Sariena was acclimatizing, getting outside for gradually longer spells, and spending as much time standing as she could comfortably manage.
“I never thought of it that way,” she said. “Remember to tell that to Vicki when she gets here.”
One of the subjects that Vicki had been involved in since the days on Earth, which was now just one more puzzle in the story of biological origins and change that the Kronians were trying to piece together, was how not only dinosaurs but the whole world of massive life-forms that they had been part of could have existed, since they simply weren’t viable under the conditions of modern Earth. The prevailing theory was that at the time it existed as a satellite of Saturn, Earth’s surface gravity had been smaller on the side that was phase-locked toward the primary, and extinction of the largest creatures had been part of the upheaval that had come with its detachment.
“I think I run into my own dinosaur problem when it comes to figuring out the right way to deal with Rakki and his Tribe,” Sariena said. “Trying to talk with them can only get you so far. But if nothing they’ve known or can remember gives them any grounding to relate to what you’re talking about, how do you get through?” She sighed. “Sometimes I feel like some kind of moral preacher. There’s got to be a better way.”
“Definitely not your image,” Keene agreed.
“Well, do you have any thoughts, Lan?”
“Did Gallian put you up to this?” Keene asked curiously. It was a subject that Gallian had been lamenting about and asking for suggestions on from all who would listen, both down at the base and up in the two ships.
“Yes, he did. . . . Why, what’s wrong with that? It seemed a sensible thing to do.”
Keene just smiled and shook his head to himself. Sometimes the Kronians’ directness and utter incapacity for guile left him with nothing to be said. Small wonder they had walked into a blender when they tried taking on Earth’s political establishment.
He looked back at the riveting crew moving into position to secure the roof member while the crane operator held it steady. The piece had traveled from Saturn on one of the unmanned open-frame freight haulers, after being formed on Titan from ores extracted from Hyperion. All around, work was in progress on the beginnings of bringing a devastated world back to life. He felt again an exultation at the power of creativity of the human species and the knowledge that he was a part of it. . . . And yet it was the same power that could unleash such destructiveness. That was the dilemma that Sariena had meant: How to open people’s eyes to the potential within them to reach the stars, when their lives had been lived under a canopy of darkness?
“Show them,” Keene said suddenly. “Of course all the talk in the world isn’t going to do any good. It never has.” He waved an arm to take in the things going on all around them, the constructions taking shape, the shuttles on the far side of the pad area and the excavations in progress behind them. “Bring them here and let them see for themselves what it’s all about. . . . Even take some of them up to the Varuna.” He turned back to Sariena and shrugged. “Why not?”
She stared at him for a moment, then repeated, “Why not? It’s too obvious, isn’t it?”
But of course, something like that would be a matter of mission policy, not a decision that the two of them could make purely on their own initiative. Keene used his compad right there to raise Gallian, who was bustling about the site somewhere. Keene put the proposition to him.
“A great idea!” Gallian said right away. “Very well. Let’s get on with it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Yarbat AG arrays built into the Aztec’s deck structures were working well. They made the whole ship more compact and elegant of line than the ungainly, rotating conglomerations of struts, booms, tethers, and ties that had been gyrating around the Solar System since before Kronia was founded. It was more in keeping with what unaided imagination and intuition thought a spacecraft should look like. Vicki saw it as the beginning of a revolutionary technological era, like those that had brought steamships, trains, automobiles, airliners. And there had been no complaints of the vertigo that affected some people in the older vessels.