It’d be nice if he took a North American wife. Of course, more and more people in that country felt the constitutional republic wasn’t coping with its problems. But you could move abroad if you had to. While Lars wasn’t exactly young any more, neither was he too old to start afresh. Plenty of life ahead of him yet, an estimated seventy-five years if he followed his med program and didn’t come to grief …
Oh, if only Uncans had been born enough later for the treatments to take full hold and give’tiim that much!
But then everything would have been different, Dagny would never have known him, in fact never have existed—
She blinked away tears and heard Jinann: “Do you truly thus and altogether shut yourselves away as you fare? Gives a journey no scope for samadhi?”
Youthful earnestness, Dagny thought. A slight, comforting smile touched her lips. Jinann had been a Buddhist, afterward a Cosmicist; now she wandered and mused on her own beneath the stars of Luna. Would she someday become a prophetess to her kind? , “We get a sufficiency of the universe on the job,” Rydberg said. “Here is the far terminus of our voyage, out beyond the orbit of Saturn.”
The camera had scanned a small comet. At first it was unimpressive, well-nigh ugly, a dark, rough lump against the galaxy’s glory. When the edited sequence swept close, you realized with your senses as well as your mind that “small” meant something else in these depths, multiple billions of tonnes of rocks, frozen gases, and ice, ice. The view passed breathtakingly over a pitted surface to the clustered human works. What the robots had built for the engineers was not dwarfish either. Those buildings, machines, and tall frames would have stood out in any landscape.
The view steadied. Rydberg activated a pointer image to show where girders were buckled or skewed. “You see how the foundation gave way below the mass driver,” he said: damage exceeding the repair capacity of the system or its machine attendants. “Probably you remember from newscasts that it was caused|by a major quake, which the continued stress of reaction triggered.”Beynac snorted. “I told those bloody fools at the start, they should study the interior of the comet more thoroughly before they began. Tetes de merde!”
“Well, it was a judgment call, as Leota Mannion would say,” Rydberg replied, mainly for Jinnan’s benefit. “At its original distance, with few torchcraft then available, more investigation would have taken years of expensive time. Meanwhile its position would be getting less and less favorable, until the window of opportunity closed. The decision was to proceed on the basis of what appeared to be reasonably good knowledge, and get started nudging it sunward.”
“I know, I know,” Beynac grumbled. “If they had sent me and a few of my students out, we could have warned them.”
How he would have reveled in that, Dagny thought. He’d solved too many of the Moon’s riddles. He had scant taste for filling in details; more and more his field trips reminded her of a wildcat pacing its cage.
“Actually, as you also know, fail-safes were built in, and this mishap was not catastrophic,” Rydberg said needlessly. “We got it fixed in time.” We. Dagny was impatient to see the record of her son and his crew aiding the team. “It’s bound back again for its new orbit,” he finished.
“For its transfiguration,” Jinann murmured.
Rydberg raised his brows. “Do you disapprove? Some people do,” holding that comets should be left inviolate, to salute the sun with a flare of beauty. But this one would never have done that, Dagny thought. Never in eon after eon while it swung through the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Neptune and Pluto where Sol was merely the brightest among the stars.
Jinann shook her head. “Eyach, nay. I said ‘transfiguration.’“
Into life. The thrill went through Dagny anew. Ice mined and brought to Luna, water, a harvest more abundant than any from the asteroids, the beginning of a lavishness that would at last bestow rivers, lakes, maybe an interior sea, upon habitation; and living things are mostly water.
She bore no pride more high than knowing she had been in the forefront of the battle for this, the call, the politics, the bargains and connivances, setbacks and despair and toilsome return, until the World Federation agreed that a wholly alive new world was worth paying for.