Kenmuir considered him. “That isn’t quite true of you, is it?”
“Not quite,” Venator admitted. After several more strides through the wind: “In spite of everything, I don’t envy you.”
Nor I you, Kenmuir thought.
“I would nonetheless like to know you better,” Venator said. “Can’t be, I suppose. Shall we discuss those practicalities?”
Night had lately fallen over the Lunar Cordillera. From Lilisaire’s eyrie three peaks could still b& seen far to westward, on which brightness lingered. Only the edges were visible, flame-tongues slowly dying. Elsewhere the mountains had become a wilderness of shadowy heights and abyssal darks. Eastward they dropped away to boulders and craters almost as dim. Stars stood above in their thousands, the galactic frost-bridge, nebulae and sister galaxies aglimmer, but Earth was no more than a blue arc along a wan disc, low above that horizon.
A clear-domed tower overlooked it all. From tanks and planters in its topmost room grew gigantic flowers. Starlit, their leaves were dark masses or delicate filigrees. Blossoms mingled perfumes in air that lay like the air of an evening at the end of summer. Fireflies flittered and glittered through their silence.
Lilisaire entered with Kenmuir. Neither had said much in the short while since he arrived. She passed among the flowers to the eastern side and stopped, gazing out. He waited, observing her profile against the sky and her hair sheening beneath it.
A song crystal lay on the ledge under the dome. She picked it up and stroked fingers across its facets. Sound awakened, trills, chimes, whistlings, a shivery beat. She made them into a melody and sang half under her breath:
“Stonefatt, firejlash,
Cenotaph of a seeker.
But the stone has lost the stars
And the stars have lost the stone.”
He had heard the Lunarian words before, a snatch of a lyric by Verdea. No tongue of Earth could have keened like them or carried the full meaning behind their images.
Lilisaire laid the crystal back down and was again quiet. After a minute Kenmuir took it on himself to say in Anglo, “That’s a melancholy piece, my lady.”
“It suits right well,” she answered tonelessly.
“I should have thought you’d be happier.”
“Nay, you did not.” She turned to meet his eyes. Hers seemed to brim with light. The countenance could have been the mask of an Asian Pallas. “You are intelligent. You will have priced this prize you won.”
He had known he must speak plainly, but not that it
would be so soon. The muscles tightened between his shoulderblades. He kept his voice level: “Well, yes. At any rate, I’ve wondered. Proserpina is open to you, with everything that may imply.” Which was what? He couldn’t tell. He wouldn’t live to learn. “However, the Habitat—“ He left the sentence dangling, reluctant to declare what they both understood.
She completed it for him. “The Habitat is made certainty.”
“It always was, wasn’t it?”
She shook her head. “Not altogether, not while something in far space remained unknown, may-chance the instrument of a victory clear and complete. But now it is found.”
For an instant he harked back to the house of the Teramind. Reality as discovery, mind as its maker— No, that couldn’t be, not on any tangible, humanly meaningful scale, and even at the quantum level there must be more than the paradoxes of measurement; there must!
“No weapon,” Lilisaire sighed. “Merely an escape.”
As often in the recent past, he spun the mundane possibilities by his attention. Lunarians rebellious or adventurous—no few, either kind—would move to the iron world, piecemeal at first, later in a tide. The Federation would not oppose; it ought actually to help, because thereby both the case against the Habitat and the opposition to it should bleed away. Nevertheless, that colonizing effort would engage well-nigh the whole Lunarian spacefaring capability; and this in turn would draw folk from their homes on the inner asteroids and the outer moons. The Venture, the whole strong Lunarian presence on the planets, would fade from history.
“And a bargain of truce,” Lilisaire finished.
For her part, Kenmuir thought, she could not denounce the long concealment of her ancestral treasure, and she must yield on the matter of the Habitat. Her interest in a smooth compromise was as vital as