For the thousandth time, he considered her. The picture had been taken when she was in early middle age. She stood tall for an Earthborn woman, 180 centimeters, against the background of a conservatory where flowers grew extravagant under Lunar gravity. A sari and shawl clothed a form robust, erect, deep-bosomed. He knew from recordings that her gait was free-striding. Her features were a bit too strong for conventional beauty, broad across the high cheekbones, with slightly curved nose, full mouth, and rounded chin. Eyes wide-set and sea-blue looked straight from beneath hair that was thick and red, with overtones of bronze and gold, in bangs across the forehead and waves down to the jawline. After half a lifespan of sun and weather and radiation, her skin remained fair. He had heard her voice. It was low, with a trace of burr—“whisky tenor,” she called it.
If her spirit, like Guthrie’s, had stayed in the world until this day, what might the two of them not have wrought? But no, she ordered oblivion for herself. And she knew best. Surely, in her wisdom, she did.
Hard to believe that once she too was young, confused, helpless. Kenmuir found his imagination slipping pastward, as if he could see her then. It was a refuge from the present and the future. In the teeth of all fact and logic, he felt himself headed for worse trouble than anybody awaited.
It was always something of an event, reported in the local news media, when Anson and Juliana Guthrie .visited Aberdeen, Washington. Self-made billionaires weren’t an everyday sight, especially in a small seaport, twice especially after the lumbering that had been the mainstay of adjacent Hoquiam dwindled away. Not that this pair made a production of their status. On the contrary, they took ordinary accommodations and throughout a stay—usually brief, for their business would recall them—^they avoided public appearances as much as possible. Dignitaries and celebrities who tried for their company got more or less politely brushed off. Instead, the Guthries were together with the Stambaughs and, later, the Ebbesens. This too caused wonderment. What could they have in common with people who worked hard to earn a humble living?
“We hit it off, we enjoy each other, that’s all,” Guthrie once told a reporter. “My wife and I aren’t silver-spoon types either, you know. Our backgrounds aren’t so different from these folks’. We’ve known ‘em for years now, and old friends are best, like old shoes, eh?” Those friends said much the same to anyone who asked. The community learned to accept the situation. As the political climate changed, envy of them diminished.
The relationship came to seem truly remarkable when the Guthries bet all they had on the Bowen laser launcher and founded Fireball Enterprises. Their failure would have been almost as spectacular as their success was, if less meaningful. But after seven years their company dominated space activity near Earth and was readying ships to go harvest the wealth of the Solar System. Nevertheless they returned to Aberdeen every once in a while and were guests in the same small houses.
At last they even invited young Dagny Ebbesen to come along with them up the coast for a little vacation. Centuries later, lan Kenmuir could conjecture more shrewdly than her neighbors ever did what the real reason was and what actually went on.
In the beginning the girl drew strength and comfort more from the woman. Toward the end, though, Juliana drew her husband aside and murmured, “She needs to talk privately with you. Take her for a walk. A long one.”
“Huh?” Anson raised his shaggy brows. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t think it, I feel it,” Juliana replied. “She’s fond of me; she worships you.”
He harked back to their own daughter—she was in Quito, happily married, but he remembered certain desperate confidences—and after a moment nodded. “Okay. I dunno as how I rate that, but okay.”
When he rumbled to Dagny, “Hey, you’re looking as peaked as Mount Rainier. Let’s get some salt air in you and some klicks behind you,” she came aglow.
The resort was antiquated, shingle-walled cottages among trees. Across the crumbling road that ran past it, evergreen forest gloomed beneath a silver-gray sky and soughed in the wind. A staircase led down a bluff to a beach that right and left outreached vision. Below the heights and above the clear sand, driftwood lay tumbled, huge bleached logs, lesser fragments of trees and flotsam. Surf brawled white. Beyond it the waves surged in hues of iron. Where they hit a reef, they fountained. A few gulls rode the wind, which skirled bleak, bearing odors of sea and bite of spindrift. At this fall of the year and in these hard times, Guthrie’s party had the place to themselves.