“I know.”
She remembered she had already emphasized this to him, and flushed. A gulp of wine lent sufficient assurance for her to dangle bait. “Of course, we’ve stayed in touch, and I visited them on my last vacation and expect I will again occasionally.” With a companion? Better swing the subject back. “We were talking about you, though, for a change. You mentioned something earlier about not having gone directly into your profession.”
“I bounced about.” His tone softened. “We had a summer cottage in the upper Dordogne. In my childhood I got so familiar with the local farmers they nicknamed me Jacquou le croquant, Jacques the peasant, from a famous novel. I believed I would become a farmer too, until I found put that technology long ago made the family farm extinct and my friends were just administrators. Besides, my father’s work, it soon had more romance for me. But then my mother, she has an export-import business, textiles and artwork, through her I came at age sixteen to spend a year in Malaysia. That made me restless to see more of the world than tourists do, and at age eighteen I enlisted in the French section of United Nations forces.” Could an unlucky love affair have given impulse? “We were sent to the chaos in the Middle East—you know, when Europe was establishing the Befehl there.”
“You saw action?” Dagny dared ask, low.
“Oh, yes,” he answered grimly. “Too much. Any amount of combat is too much. In between, I began really thinking. After two years I was wounded badly enough for discharge.” So he’d stuck it out that long, having pledged his word, in spite of hating it, and must have been brave, because a man that smart could wangle a rear-echelon assignment if he tried. “The physicians fixed me all right, I carry only some scraps of metal in me and they do not bother. But I was quite ready for civilian life, studies, field work on Earth, my degree, and then, four years ago, a postdoctoral fellowship on Luna.”
As he talked, he cheered up afresh. “Here I am happy,” he finished. “True, it is not perfect. Those hours per daycycle in the bloody centrifuge, we could very well do without them, hein? How do you spend that time?”
“Going through the standard exercises,” Dagny said. “Doesn’t everybody? Otherwise, read, write letters, watch a show, whatever. In a big unit, I mean. Not much choice on a field platform.”
“On one of those, when I am alone except for a counterweight, I turn off my transmitter and sing,” he confessed. “Then nobody else must suffer my voice.”
She laughed. “You see, the necessity isn’t a total nuisance!”
“It is not too bad,” he agreed, “not too high a price. When they begin to study Mars and the asteroids in earnest, I would like to go. But there is no limit yet on what is to do here.” He regarded her. “Nor, I find, is there lack of good company.”
Her heartbeat refused flat-out the order to quiet down.
As the ship neared on her approach curve, Luna in the viewscreens shifted from ahead to below, from thickening crescent to dun stoneland scarred with craters. Earth hung high and horned above the south. Silence had grown heavy. Kenmuir cleared his throat. “Well, Barbara,” he said, hearing the awkwardness, “it’s goodbye—for a while, at any rate.”
“May your meantime be happy,” replied the ship. He had ordered a female voice when she spoke with him alone. The Lunarian-accented Anglo sounded friendly, even warm. Valanndray had specified a whistling, birdlike, unhuman timbre for himself. He hadn’t said why and Kenmuir had never asked. When all three talked together, the vessel used a neutral male tone.
“Thank you. And yours.”
The absurdity of it struck at Kenmuir. His mouth twisted upward. What was he doing, swapping banalities with a sophotect? Yes, it was conscious, it thought, but in how constricted a range! By tapping the cultural database, it could give him an interesting conversation on any subject he chose, from the puns in Shakespeare to the causes of the Lyudov Rebellion, but he knew how purely algorithmic that was. Its creativity, its self lay in the manifold, ever-varying functions of a spacecraft.