“In that case,” Aleka said, “they could have told you so like honest po’e. Plenty of information’s not allowed loose, but everybody knows why. How to scramble a driver robot to make the vehicle crash onto a target, for instance. But no, they broke in on you, your perfectly legitimate inquiries, before you’d even begun them.” She was still for a moment. The hidden ticking seemed louder than before. “I don’t want anarchy either,” she finished low. “But I believe we’ve run afoul of a criminal conspiracy.”
“And we alone will oppose it?” he jeered.
.She stepped close and caught both his hands. Hers were warm and firm; he felt small calluses. “Listen, I beg you. Maybe, somewhere along the line, we should go to the proper authorities. But who are they? What can we prove? That you were bugged … by someone who can’t be traced. Someone well positioned to strike at us, though, and afterward bury the story in a subduction zone. We need more information before we surface. I think I know where and how to search for it. Come along with me that far, Kenmuir. You’re a man, a free man. Come!”
Freedom, Lilisaire, and a regathering sense of outrage to avenge. If they had done this to him, what might they do to others? He cast his mind back across history, terror that could have been crushed when it was newly hatched but instead was let grow and grow. What had Burke said? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Something like that.
Was this actually evil that he had met? How could he tell, save by hunting the truth down? If he could. Aleka believed it was possible, and she was better informed than he was, and—
“Very well,” he heard himself say, and saw joy blaze up before him. “For a while, reserving my right to opt out when I choose.”
and, laughed a devil in his head, he was most infernally curious about this secret that went back to the dawn of Lilisaire’s world.
T
Liars Rydberg had soon come to feel that when he visited his mother and stepfather he was at home, more than ever elsewhere, even with the old couple who gave him his upbringing and all their love. The Beynacs were spacefolk, Fireball folk. His missions that sundered him from them, so that they rarely and briefly met in the flesh, also bound him to them.
On this occasion the big viewscreen in their living room played a record from the Stockholm Archipelago. Sailing was his great pleasure on Earth. Waves danced and glittered among the islets; wind tossed the crowns of trees, sent clouds scudding across blue and boats heeling and dancing before it. Sound went soft, rush and whistle. The air cycle had been set for a tang of salt and sunlight to join the perfumes of Dagny’s flowers. She wanted to gladden him. Today everybody needed that.
It had gone much as she hoped, from the moment she bade him welcome. True, his smiles came seldom, but he always was a solemn, undemonstrative sort. Now they sat with drinks, hearing him tell of his latest faring. Altogether the company numbered four. Jinann, her youngest, still lived here.
“—nothing special on the way out,” he said. “The common long, lazy haul.”
“But it was urgent, you told us,” Jinann interrupted. “Why ran you not at one g the whole way?”
She was less educated about such matters than mostMoondwellers. Her interests were art, notably the jewelry work from which she was beginning to earn pretty well; and men, a series of stormy affairs; and, paradoxically, a search for truth and meaning. Withal, she was closest to her parents of that whole brood and most nearly Terrestrial in appearance—at twenty-four, not unlike the young Dagny Ebbesen.
Rydberg’s look at her was discreet but unmistakably enjoyable. “With such a mass, the fuel cost would have been ridiculous for the time saved,” he explained.
Dagny reminded herself that usage had changed of late. “Fuel” didn’t mean simply antimatter, but also the reaction material it torched forth. Although superb capabilities were coming on line, she must remember, too, that it was taking a while, that the capital investment in older vessels couldn’t just be spouted away—She was thinking in Guthrie’s words. Pain stabbed.