Just the same, Kenmuir had grown tired of hearing coldly hostile remarks about the World Federation, and this one was ridiculous. Granted, Lunarians had not rejoiced when their world came back under the general government of humankind. Resentment persisted in many, perhaps most, to this day. But—name of reason!—how long before they were born had the change taken place? And their wish for “independence” was flat-out wrong. What nation-states bred while they existed, as surely as contaminated water bred sickness, had been war.
“The message went in clear because it must, if we were to read it,” Kenmuir said. “We don’t have cryptographic equipment aboard, do we? Very well, it’s in the databases now. Who cares? If somebody does notice it, will he send for the Peace Authority? I hardly think the lady Lilisaire is plotting rebellion.”
Recognizing his sarcasm, he made haste to adopt mildness: “Yes, we’ll notify the Venture, though I daresay she has already. It ought to dispatch another ship and teammate for you. Within a week or two, I should imagine.”
He was relieved to see no anger. Instead, Valanndray regarded the spacefarer as if studying a stranger. He saw a man drably clad, lean to the point of gauntness, with big bony hands, narrow face and jutting nose, grizzled sandy hair cut short, lines around the mouth and crow’s-feet at the gray eyes. The look made Kenmuir feel awkward. He was amply decisive when coping with nature, space, machines, .but when it came to human affairs he could go abruptly shy.
“The lords of the Venture will be less than glad,” Valanndray said.
Kenmuir shaped a smile. “That’s obvious. Upset plans, extra cost.” When everything was marginal to begin with, he thought. The associated companies and colonists didn’t really compete with the Space Service and its sophotects. They couldn’t. What kept them going was, basically, subsidy, from the former aristocratic families and from lesser Lunarians who traded sk with them out of Lunarian pride. And still their enterprises were dying away, dwindling like the numbers of the Lunarians themselves …
He forced matter-of-factness: “But the lady Lilisaire, she’s a power among them, maybe more than you or I know.” His pulse hammered anew.
Valanndray spread his fingers. A Terran would have shrugged shoulders. “She can prevail over them, yes. Go you shall, Captain.”
“I, I’m sorry,” Kenmuir said.
“You are not,” Valanndray retorted. “You could protest this order. But nay, go you will, and at higher thrust than a single Earth gravity.”
Why that grim displeasure? He and Kenmuir had shaken down into an efficient partnership, which included getting along with one another’s peculiarities. A newcomer would need time to adjust. But the Earthman felt something else was underlying.
Jealousy, that Lilisaire wanted Kenmuir and not him, though Kenmuir was an alien employee and Valanndray kin to her, a member of her phyle? How well the pilot knew that tomcat Lunarian vanity; how well he had learned to steer clear of it.
Or a different kind of jealousy? Kenmuir pushed the question away. Just once had Valanndray seemed to drop an erotic hint Kenmuir promptly changed the subject, and it arose no more. Quite possibly he had misunderstood. Who of his species had ever seen the inmost heart of a Lunarian? In any case, they had a quivira to ease them. Kenmuir did not know what pseudo-experiences Valanndray induced for himself in the dream box, nor did the Earthman talk about his own.
“If you loathe the idea, you can come back with me,” he said. “You’re entitled.”
On the Moon, obligations between underlings and overlings had their strength, but it was the strength of a river, form and force incessantly changeable.
Valanndray shook his head. Long platinum locks fell aside from ears that were not convoluted like Kenmuir’s. “Nay. I have sunken my mind in yonder asteroid for weeks, hypertext, simulations, the whole of available knowledge about it. None can readily replace me. Were I to forsake it, that would leave the Federation so much the richer, so much the more powerful, than my folk.”
Kenmuir recalled conversations they had had, and dealings he had had with others, on Luna, Mars, the worldlets of the Belt, moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Few they were, those Lunarian spacefarers and colonists, reckoned against Terrankind. Meager their wealth was, reckoned against that which the machines held in the name of Terrankind. But if they leagued in anger and raised all the resources at their beck, it could bring a catastrophe like none that history knew.