“Just the same,” she said, “you carry on. Fireball can’t do without you.”
“The hell it can’t. Quite likely better.”
“Then why do you stay at the helm?” The face grinned wryly. “Well, if nothing else, given the power it’s gotten, sometimes acting damn near like a government, Fireball does need restraint. Otherwise it might degenerate into being one.”
“For Luna? We could do a lot worse.” .”MacCannon forbid!”
She tried to match his effort at lightness. “Oh, you certainly wouldn’t want the job.” Lunarians thwarted, angry, the mighty among them weaving God knew what plots. Terran Moondwellers still more divided, some avid for independence, others dreading what it could mean to them, both factions threatening to mobilize. The Federation equally split on the issues— the right of societies and especially metamorphs to be themselves, an end to an increasingly troublesome and costly problem, versus the common heritage principle, fear of a rampant new nationalism, powerful interests vested in the status quo—and unable to reach a decision, now when Earth’s mounting woes claimed most of its attention … Whatever humor had been in him and her flickered out.
“No,” he said, “I’m in my right mind. Besides, the united governments would never stand for it. Privatizing government?” His visage grimaced. “But somebody’s got to run the show here, and their man Haugen sure as entropy isn’t succeeding. Not that Wahl could have for much longer, without you. You’re the one who’s been shoring things up, over and over, year after year, and it’s worn you hollow.”
“Not I,” she protested. “The Council—“ for Lunar Commonalty, not the High Council of the World Federation but her unofficial, informal gathering “— and the magnates and mayors who’re wise, and—the common sense of common folks—“ She had spent her breath. Her pulse wavered.
“Yes,” Guthrie persisted, “but you’ve been what brings them together and holds them together, smooths down their squabbles and tickles their egos and prunes them back to size, gives them a direction and holds them to it, provides the God damn leadership.”
His long, drawled sentence gave her time to recover. No doubt that was part of his intention. “I’m more a symbol, really, than a leader,” she said. “Could be, which makes you all the more important. But the minority piece of you, the brains and guts, that’s boosting away too.”
Against a gravity field like Jupiter’s, or a dead star’s, or a black hole’s. And she’d about exhausted her fuel, she thought. “Even being the symbol, the grand ancient, is getting to be too much,” she mumbled. “This latest—“ An appeal on the big public screen had not stopped rioting between the Terrans in Leyburg. She’d gone to stand there in person, in plain sight at the top of the cybercenter ramp, where anybody could throw a rock that under Lunar weight could kill her. The alternative would have been the turmoil going altogether out of control, deaths, destruction, possible major damage to the life-containing structure, martial law, and unforeseeable consequences everywhere around the Moon. “It wrung me dry.”
And it had been no more than a wave on an incoming tide, and did anybody know, did anybody dream what ran underneath?
A new song from Verdea was going widely about. Though the Lunarian was close to untranslatable, snatches of it found utterance among Terrans in their ancestral tongues, as if somehow it spoke to them too—a phrase tossed into talk, a shout through nightwatch, a scrawl on a bulkhead, a flash onto a communicator screen.
“—You: Law alone, sight unbloodied, and never a heart ripped loose for gods that never were. Death is no more than stones that lie still in the groundgrip of waterless wastelands; ever obedient whirl the worlds; their ways you will understand and their whys will be born of your brains. You have given yourselves to serve and to master the steadiness of the stars.
“But the dust of stones shall be bones, dry bones rising for a journey from doubt into darkness. Your forgotten begotten shall trouble your dreams, the heart shall break its cage, and death shall laugh at your law. For the stars are also fire.—”When first she heard it, Dagny had gone cold. She felt without any reason she could name that her daughter was less crying rebellion than looking beyond, into a future far and obscure.