Well, she and her seven kin had always known change. Merchant princes and brawling warriors were strangers to petty bourgeoisie and subservient peasants under the Tsars, who in turn were foreign to twentieth-century engineers and cosmonauts… Yet they had all shared most of what they were with each other, and with her. How many still did?
Tersten brought her from her memories when he gasped, “I’m awake” and struggled to sit up. She knelt, urged caution, helped and supported him. “Water,” he said. The suit swung a tube to his mouth and he drank greedily. “A-a-ah, good.”
Concern furrowed Mswati’s chocolate countenance. “How are you?” he asked. “What happened?”
“How should I know?” Clarity and a little vigor returned to Tersten’s voice as he talked. “Sore in the belly, sharp pains in my lower left chest, especially when I bend or take a deep breath. Earache, also.”
“Sounds like a cracked or broken rib, maybe two,” Svoboda said. Relief overwhelmed her. He could have been killed, suffered such brain damage that revivification would have been pointless. “My guess is that a falling boulder hit you with more force than your suit could withstand. Hm, yes, see.” Her finger traced the semblance of a scar. The fabric had been ripped open, and promptly closed itself again. Within an hour it would be completely healed. “Everything: conspired against us, didn’t it? We’re not going to scale this mountain. No matter. It was hardly more than a whim of ours. Let’s get you back down to camp.”
Tersten insisted he could walk, and managed a gait halfway between a step and a shuffle. “We’ll call for a vehicle to fetch you,” Mswati said. As if to confirm, a relay satellite flitted across the constellations. “The rest of us can finish. It will be easier going from here than it was on farside.”
Tersten bridled. “No, you don’t! I’ll not be cheated out of this.”
Svoboda smiled. “Have no worries,” she reassured. “I’m sure you’ll just need a knitpatch or two injected, and they can return you to us in fifty hours or so. We’ll wait where we are. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind slacking off that long.” An inner glow: My kind of human is not altogether extinct.
Bleakness: How many years can you remain what you are, Tersten? You’ll have no reason to.
Do I keep young in spirit, or merely immature? Has our history damned us, the Survivors, to linger retarded while our descendants evolve beyond our comprehension?
The plateau and camp came in view. Genia ran to meet the party. Someone must stay behind in case of trouble. She had gotten the shelter deployed. More a mothering organism than a tent, it spread beneath the radiation shields that curved like wings from the top of the freight carrier. “Tersten, Tersten!” she called. “I was terrified, listening in. If we’d lost you—“ She reached them. All four embraced. For that moment, at least, under the stars, Svoboda was again among beloved friends.
“You SEE,” Patulcius strove to explain, “what I have done is what the old Americans would have called ‘worked myself out of a job.’“
The curator of Oxford, who for reasons unrevealed to him currently used the name Theta-Ennea, lifted her brows. She was comely in a gaunt fashion, but he never doubted that under the plumes growing from her otherwise bare scalp lay a formidable brain. “The record indicates that you served well,” she said—or did she sing? “However, why do you suppose you might find occupation here?”
Patulcius glanced from her, through the glass window of her almost as anachronistic office. Outside, wind chased sunlight and cloud shadows along High Street. Across it dreamed the beautiful buildings of Magdalen College. Three persons wandered by, looking, occasionally touching. He suspected they were young, though of course you couldn’t tell. “This isn’t simply a museum,” he replied after a moment. “People do live in the town. The preservation of things puts them in special relationships among themselves and to you. I imagine that makes a kind of community. My experience— They must have problems, nothing too serious but nevertheless problems, questions of conflicting rights, duties, wants. You must have mediational procedures. Procedures are my strong point.”