Maybe she was giving Eyrnen a taste of his own medicine, no matter how innocent her smile. He accepted it, replying, “The improvements in the lifelock are partwise qualitative, better technology, but main wise quantitative, more of everything. As the ecology below strengthens and increases its fertility, and as the region grows, invasive pressures will heighten. We must anticipate them.”
The elevator hissed to a stop, the door slid open, and the three emerged onto a balcony from which a ramp spiraled on downward. Rydberg caught his breath.
He stood near the ceiling of a cavern whose floor was almost two kilometers beneath him. The inset sunlike lamps that lighted it shone, as yet, gently, for this was “morning” in their cycle. They made warm a breeze that wandered past, bearing odors of forest which must be thick and sweet on the ground. Distance hazed and blued the air; seen across tens of kilometers, the other walls were dim, half unreal. Cloudlets drifted about. Birds flew by. So did a human a ways off, wings spread iridescent from the arms, banking and soaring not in sport—that was for such places as Avis Park—but watchful over the domain. It stretched in a thousand-hued greenness of crowns, and meadows starred with wildflowers, and a waterfall that stabbed out of sheer rock to form a lake from which a stream wound aglitter …
Eyrnen let the others stand mute a while before he said, “Let us go and walk the trails. Shall I summon a car for the ramp?”
“Not for me!” Beynac exclaimed. She took the lead, in Lunar bounds, as a girl might have.
“It’s a wonderful creation,” she had said the dusk-watch before. “I look forward on my own account, but still more to seeing you see it for the first time.”
Having finished supper, they lingered over coffee and liqueurs. Drinks had preceded the food and a bottle of wine complemented it, for this celebrated the beginning of several daycycles she had arranged free of duties. Her son had completed his business for Fireball and meant to spend that period with her before going home. They were all too seldom tofsther. A glow was in their veins, an easiness in their earts.
She had cooked the meal herself, to a high standard, but served it in the kitchen. Now that she lived alone, except for, visits like his, she saved her baronial dining room for parties. The kitchen was amply spacious, an abode of burnished copper, Mexican tile, and fragrances. A picture of Edmond Beynac in his later years, at his desk, looked across it to a Constable landscape reproduced by molecular scan. A Vivaldi concerto danced in the background.
“I’m eager,” Lars said. “From everything I have screened about it—“ He hesitated. “That’s not much.”
If only the Lunarians would cooperate with the news media, at least about matters as harmless and to their credit as this, he thought. If it weren’t for the Earth-gene Moondwellers, what would Earth ever learn?
Dagny let his remark pass. “I’ve been far too long away from it,” she mused. “I do miss natural nature.”
“Most of your communities have lovely -parks.”
“Oh, yes.” Her glance went to the painting. “But no living hinterlands.”
He smiled. “If that’s what you wish for, come see us again on Vancouver Island.”
She smiled back, shaking her head a bit. “I’ve probably grown too creaky for the weight.”
“You, at a mere ninety? Nonsense.” Not just because of faithfulness about her biomed program and regular vigorous exercise in the centrifuge, he thought. She’d had luck in the heredity sweepstakes, and shared the prize with him. He did not feel greatly diminished in his own mid-seventies. “Do come.”
“Well, maybe.” She sighed. “There’s always so bloody much to do, and the months go by so fast.”
“Come for Christmas,” he urged.
Her face kindfed. “With your grandchildren!”
She had great-grandchildren here, but they were Lunarian.
She loved them, he felt sure, and no doubt they liked well enough the old lady who brought th^m presents and had the grace not to hug them or gush over them; but did they listen to her stories and songs with any deep feeling, did they ever care to romp with her?