“That,.. is plenty, … I would say,”
“Your life is bound to have been much more interesting.”
“I doubt that.”
“Tell me about it.”
“And I am not a very interesting person,” he said doggedly,
“I’ll be the judge of that, if you please.” Beynac shitted position, leaned back, crossed her legs, an attitude that invited easiness.
He found his tongue moving more readily as he talked. “Well, you have heard the basic facts. I was raised as a Swede. We traveled, I saw a good deal of Earth, but I was always … starstruck. I wanted out, as the North Americans say, and at age eighteen I was admitted to Fireball’s academy. My talent and wish were for piloting, and it has become my work. I have flown both regular and exploratory missions, and am newly back from Jupiter.”
“And you call yourself dull. Huh! How about your Earthside life? Married? I lust to start having grandkids.”
“No,” he replied harshly. “I was, for three years. It ended.”
Her tone went like a hand that stroked his hair. “Didn’t intend to pry. I won’t discuss anything you’d rather not, nor investigate it. A promise.” After a moment: “Pilots are dreadful marriage risks. Everybody knows it. She must have been a brave and loving girl.”
“She deserved better. I hope she will find it.”
“Drop that remorsefulness, will you? Switching back—again, not to pry, but—you said you were starstruck, but you must have been too smart not to know the hazards and sacrifices and miseries of space, as well as the glamour; and you’ve described a pleasant life on Earth, by no means boring. You could have gone into a career that would soon provide you the money to taste space as a tourist. I mean the kind of tourist who trains for it till he can have real experiences. Nevertheless, you say you wanted out. Why? What was wrong?”
“I—I felt, well, cramped, restricted.”
“Really? I remember Anson Guthrie remarking once that when he was young, Sweden was what he called a nanny state, but it got rid of that and nowadays people there are more free than in most countries, including North America. Which is obviously one reason why he placed you where he did.”
“True. Still, everywhere on Earth—everywhere fit to live in—you have a feeling that everything is settled, everything important has been done, anything truly new can only make us uncomfortable. And that, what is the word, that smarmy Necromantic movement, claiming to bring back traditions that for hundreds of years have existed only in books, if they ever existed at all—it made me gag. In space they are not afraid of newness and greatness. They have their customs, their genuine traditions, and those are growing, they serve a purpose, they live.”
Beynac nodded. “I realize it wasn’t anywhere near as simple as that, and probably your motives never were clear to you and never will be, but I see your drift.” With a smile: “I also see you are not a bore. I’llbet in your teens your age mates found you an intolerable, stiff-necked nonconformist.”
After a silence she went on, carefully, “I do need to ask what made you search me out. It was not idle curiosity.”
“No,” he said. “It was that same feeling of rootless-ness, of belonging to nothing and nobody. Yes, I am fond of my foster parents, but in every other way I have grown apart from them.”
“I know how they feel,” she said half under her breath.
He decided not to pursue that. “Fireball is my real family now, as for so many of us. And yet, maybe it is that I have not quite matured out of a lonely adolescence, yet there was this emptiness in me. It made no sense, but I could not fill it. At last I thought that if I could learn who my true parents were, where and what I came from, it might make healing. But I did not want to disturb them. Simply knowing who you are, meeting you this once, that is a miracle.”
“You don’t have to go away, Lars,” Beynac told him. “You won’t, if I can help it.”