“I’m afraid he may be, uh, compromised. If he’s been to see Lilisaire recently, and she’s under suspicion—”
“We are aware. Could you not make him disappear with you?”
“Ura-m.” She considered. “Yes, maybe. Whether anything will come of it, I can’t say, except that the odds look poor.”
“Will you make the attempt?”
Go slow, she warned herself. Hang onto independence and common sense. “Why should I?”
That was curt, but the machine didn’t seem to take offense. Could it, ever? “Granted, the risk will be significant. You shall not assume it without compensation.”
“What am I offered?” A Lunarian attitude, she thought.
“If you make an honest effort and fail, a substantial sum. Before you refuse, think what it might buy for your people.”
“Depends on the sum.” They could wrangle about that later. She thrust onward. “What if somehow I succeed?”
“How would you like a country of your own?”
“What?”
The machine explained. At the end, she was on her feet, sobbing, “Yes, yes, oh, Pele, yes.” The machine started to discuss details.
When she left, emotionally exhausted, dusk was creeping out of the east. By the time she got back to Fell Street, night had fallen. The clouds made darkness heavy; the glow from the pavement could not entirely raise it. Fog streamed thicker on a wind grown colder.
She felt unable to cope with Mama’s good cheer. In an autocall she got a hasty supper, paying no attention to the taste. At the inn she went straight to her room.
Try to relax, try to get sleepy. A pill could knock her out, but she’d wake in the same turmoil as now. She had already decided against patronizing the quivira. Matters were amply complicated without adding memories of things that never physically happened. A vivifer would have been ideal, but this place didn’t have any. Bueno, the multiceiver could engage her eyes and ears, while imagination supplied additional inputs.
But what to watch? She retrieved a list of major broadcasts. None appealed, and she didn’t care to check out hundreds of lesser channels. The informant on her wrist, then. Thousands of entries in it, both text and audiovisual, both facts and entertainments. Many of them she hadn’t yet seen, only put in because she thought she might like to someday.
She keyed for the sort of thing she wanted and pushed the bezel against the scanner. Titles and brief descriptions marched across the screen. Having chosen Sunrise Over Tycho, she directed the multi to get that from the public database, and settled back. This was a comedy she remembered favorably, set in the early days of Lunar colonization, when life was simpler, entirely human.
Opacious and gracious, the Beynacs’ living room gave a near-perfect illusion of being above ground and on an Earth long lost. Flowers on shelves splashed red, yellow, violet, green against ivory walls, above deep-blue carpet. Their perfume tinged air that went like a summer breeze. Furniture was redundantly massive. A giant viewscreen could have presented the outside scene or someplace within the Moon, but instead held an image from the Dordogne; trees stirred in a wind that blew up a hillside to a medieval castle, their soughing an undertone to peacefulness. Opposite it hung family pictures, not activated at the moment, and a scan-reproduction of a Winslow Homer seascape. A cat lay asleep on one chair.
But you moved with unearthly, ease, and if you dropped something, it fell dreamlike slowly.
Three people entered. “Welcome,” Dagny said. “We’ll give you the grand tour later. Right now it’s time for a drink before dinner.”
“I see already, this is quite a place you’ve got,” Anson Guthrie replied. “Bueno, you’ve earned it.”
“We have built much of it ourselves,” Edmond told him. A little bragging was allowable. The job had never been easy, often damned tough, what with shortages of materials, equipment, and, above all, leisure. It had taken years.
Again Dagny felt glad of how lightly those years seemed to have touched her grandfather. She had not encountered him in person for five of them, and pictorial messages or the occasional phone conversation didn’t convey enough reality; Besides, his recent loss was of the kind that can break a spirit. But when she met him at the spaceport, his bass still boomed and he hugged her as bear-vigorously as ever. Though the hair was white and thin, the craggy face deeply furrowed, he bade fair to keep the helm of Fireball for decades more.