“But you programmed the scrapsaq, didn’t you? She told me it was an amazing job, given the time available.”
“Well, we had to keep the snowrither’s haodah sealed all the way to Drupit, so I had plenty of time to get to know your aroma. Mimicking it well enough to condition a scrapsaq wasn’t hard.”
She found herself feeling a little uncomfortable in the presence of this person who had risked and suffered so much in a cause which, a moon-long ago, she had been accustomed to dismissing as worthless.
Sensing her mood, Karg inquired, “Are you having second thoughts about going to Slah?”
“No, quite the reverse!”—with a harsh laugh. “I’m looking forward to it. I never thought my folk could be so brutal!”
After a pause, Karg said, “I’ve been talking to Yull about your people. She said … I don’t know if I ought to repeat this. It’s indecent to talk that way about another folk.”
“Say anything you like and I’ll say worse!”
“Very well. But there isn’t really another folk, is there? We are all one. We’re budded, and we die, and in between we make the most of what’s offered to us, and afterwards whatever it was that made us us returns to whence it came. Maybe next time it will animate creatures under another sun, so different from ourselves that when what used to make up you and me comes back we won’t recognize each other. But of course there can’t be any way of knowing.”
Albumarak was not in the habit of debating the mystery of awareness; the academics of Fregwil had long ago decreed that certain problems were inherently insoluble and should be left to take care of themselves. She said hastily, “You were about to quote Yull, weren’t you?”
“All right, since you insist. She holds that your folk must be less than civilized because you take no thought for the future, and won’t invest effort to promote the survival of our species but only for your own immediate enjoyment. She says this is proved by the way you waste so much of your resources on entertainment and distraction. You don’t have enough left over to make sure either that your food-plants are healthy or that the air you breathe has been purged of poisonous metals. If you did, you’d be working to ensure that even though we as individuals can’t escape into space our budlings or their budlings may. She’s so convinced of this, she’s going to insist on all of us being purified from crest to pad when we get home. And she swears that’s why the people of Fregwil went crazy enough to want the futile victory of conditioning me by force!”
He ended on a defiant note, as though expecting Albumarak to contradict.
And only a short while ago she would have done so. But her journey with Presthin, brief though it was, had given her the shadow of an insight into what Karg must have braced himself for when he volunteered to fly into space. To her the snowbound wastes of the highlands were alien enough; how much more, then, the boundless desert between the stars!
Hesitantly she asked, “Did it do any lasting harm? The conditioning, I mean?”
He gave a dry chuckle. “Probably not very much, vulnerable though I was. I had to learn to cling hard to reality a long time ago. I used to supervise an underwater quarry, you know, in an environment nearly as harsh and lonely as outer space.”
“I didn’t know! In fact, I know almost nothing about you, do I? This is the first time we’ve met properly.”
He stretched himself; his injuries were tightening as they healed, causing discomfort. “Well, that was why they picked me—that, and the fact that I was much smaller than the other candidates, so they could loft a bit of extra reaction mass for free-fall maneuvering. Do you understand how my craft works, or rather, was supposed to work?”
“I think so. The gas-globes were to carry it above most of the atmosphere, and then the drivers were to blast you into orbit, and then you’d fire them again to—”
“Not quite. Out in space I was to use regular musculator pumps to expel a heavy inert liquid that we’ve developed. The fuel used for the drivers becomes unstable under free-space radiation. We lost two or three of our early cylinders that way, before we figured out what the problem was. Or rather, I should say ‘they,’ not ‘we,’ because that happened long before I joined the team.”