They touch on other aspects, rather cursorily, but lightning flashes are brief.
As he bids her a courtly adieu, he leaves off inquiring how she has fared personally. He would have asked his mother. She tells herself that it ought not to hurt. She is a download.
Alone, she reviews the daycycle. Much remains to be done, and events can always whip out of control; but it does appear that this latest potential for eruption can be safely drained off, and maybe even a little progress made toward a united Moon. That is the true goal. Without a commonalty, there can be no Lunar independence, probably no peace, possibly no survival. JVlost of Vancouver Island was park. You had to wait your turn for camping, but day trips were unrestricted and Victoria offered visitors an abundance of services. The smaller businesses among these were accustomed to cash payments. In the-morning Kenmuirand Aleka would get a private, manned cab to Sprucetop Lodge in the mountains. From there it was a stiff day’s hike down to the Fireball property, where the gate should recognize him and let them in.
First they would take a night’s rest here. The risk seemed less than the need.
As they left the cafe where they had had dinner, light blazed off windows in the Parliament buildings. It was as if those stately museum pieces momentarily remembered how life once busied itself within them. The light streamed from a sun golden-hazed on the horizon, threw a glade across the bay, drenched lawns and flowerbeds, gilded the wings of two belated gulls asoar in silver-blue. A group of young people stood gathered on a dock. Song lifted, a guitar toned, otherwise the evening lay quiet and few folk moved along the streets. •’
“Beautiful,” Aleka murmured.
“Yes.” Kenmuir barred himself from calling it somehow sad. Was that only his mood?
“Like home,” she said.
He arched his brows. “Really?”
“Oh, the country, the air, everything’s different. What a wonderfully various planet this is, no? But the peace and happiness, they’re the same.”
Which she hoped to preserve on Nauru. Could she? Even if this crazy gamble of theirs, incredibly, paid off, could she?
They started toward the house where they had engaged bed and breakfast. Perhaps that caused her to fall silent. They had agreed on the tubeway that it would be safest, minimally noticeable, to stay as companions. “I can mind my manners,” he promised, feeling a flush in his cheeks. She nodded, smiled, and relieved him by saying no more.
Instead they had mostly talked of what was past and what might come to be. Bit by bit, shyly at first, later more freely, they grew well acquainted, and liked what they found.
They were walking along a tree-shaded boulevard, already in twilight, before she spoke further. “I want to show you my home.”
“I’d love to see it,” he answered. See it, and know it for doomed.
“This place reminds me so much,” she repeated herself. “Not that I haven’t been in others like it, in their particular ways. We do live in a golden age, almost.”
Though he didn’t want to argue, he was unable to let a misstatement go by. “May I point out that gold is solid and inert?”
She frowned. “You needn’t. I’ve heard enough about how nothing ever really changes any more, how we’re at the end of science and art and adventure.”
“Aren’t we?”
“Look around you.” She stopped, which made him jerk to a halt, turned, and gestured back toward the water. How supple every movement was, he thought. “Those youngsters there, or those we saw leaving Winnipeg, or nearly any kids anywhere. To them, the world is new. Love and sport and Earth and Moon, all the great works, all the story of our race, it’s theirs/’
“True,” he must concede. “I’ll never use up the facts in the databases. Or Shakespeare or Beethoven, 111 never discover everything that’s in them. A lifetime’s too short for it.”
“Exactly.”
“Nonetheless you’re at odds with the system.”
She stamped her foot. “How often will we go over this ground? Haven’t we trampled it flat by now?” She resumed walking, long strides. “I didn’t claim things are perfect, or ever will be. We’ll always have to fight off entropy.”