“You, though?” she challenges very softly.
He lifts his head. “We live here, my people and I. We have our roots here, where many of us have spent most of our lives. You should sympathize, … madame,” he finishes hastily, clearly seeing he has let slip what could be offensive.
She takes no umbrage, nor desires to pretend it. “Yes,” she says, “I do,” through memories reaching back over a lifetime. How deep into her do they go, now? She cannot tell. Will she ever find out?
He is emboldened. “Pardon me, but perhaps you have a certain bias. You—your original—did choose to bear Lunarian children.” Again he retreats a step. Although he feels increasingly desperate, he is not a fanatic. “True, in those days you did not foresee, nobody did, how alien they would be.”
“No more alien to me, in their ways, than a lot of Terrans I’ve known, in theirs,” she says, keeping to mildness. “We get along. Partnership, friendship, love were possible between us, and are.” Between living Dagny and them. The download is close to none but Guthrie, and that relationship too has become something other than what binds him and the woman.
Huizinga sighs. “It happens. If only it were always possible. Please believe me, the Human Defense Union is sincere about ‘human’ meaning everyone. This is not a matter of race prejudice.” She doubts that. Experience, observation, study of history, a look into her soul, decided living Dagny that Guthrie was right when he remarked once, “Xenophobia isn’t pathological in itself. A degree of it is built into our DNA, and is healthy. Not all men are brothers. The trick is keeping it under control, and setting it aside when it isn’t needed.”
The download does perceive Huizinga as a man who would not wittingly insult or harm anyone merely for being different from himself.
“It is a matter of survival;” he declares.
She sharpens her voice. “Nobody threatens your lives.”
“No,” he growls, “they threaten what we live for. Already Lunarians dominate the Moon.” Better fitted for the environment, they usually move into the better positions, and their numbers are rising faster. Some Terran couples still enter the genetic lab and come forth prepared to have Lunarian children. But it would be impolitic to remind the angry man of that.
“Without the protection of Federation law, my people would soon be helpless against them.” He refers mainly to the equalization program, the special facilities and subsidies and hiring quotas and exemptions that lie at the heart of so much Lunarian resentment. “They do not want democracy, you know. Or anyhow, their powerful ones, their damned Selenarchs, do not; and it is the Selenarchs who would be in charge of a ‘free’ Luna.” She can hear the sarcasm. “They would take it entirely out of the Federation!”
“You are reacting to a nightmare, not a reality,” she says. “Independence is by no means sure. In fact, at the moment its chances of passing the Assembly are practically zero. That won’t change soon. It may never change.”
“Unless the Lunarians revolt. They have come close to it, more than once.” All too true. Single incidents, but how easily a spark could flare into wildfire, and who knows what conspiracies are brewing in hiddenchambers and along sealed communication lines? “If they snatch command of the globe, the Federation may well yield,” rather than fight a war—a war— which could destroy the prize and for which the Peace Authority is in any case ill equipped.
“You’re borrowing trouble, I tell you. Don’t.” She quotes Guthrie: “The interest rate is too God damn high.”
He blinks in surprise, rallies, and says firmly, “We wish to forestall trouble, madame. If we are prepared, it is far less likely. A loyal militia, able in an emergency to occupy key points and hold them until Earth can act, that should deter any treason.”
She fashions intensity for visage and voice. “Don’t you realize what you’d provoke? Counter-organization, and more among your fellow Earth-types, I’ll bet, than among Lunarians. They’re already making noises like this in the National League,” the Terran faction that wants independence and reform, though within the framework of a democratic republic and Federation membership. “Then more and more Lunarians will see no recourse but to give troth to the barons and accumulate arms for them. You must all stop it, now, before we start sliding downhill into a three-cornered civil war.”