Venator harked back: From Guthrie’s rebellious exodus, unforeseeably, arose Demeter Mother. But at least she was light-years removed, only tenuously and indirectly in touch with Earth, an abstraction to most humans of the Solar System, nothing to catch their imaginations as the prophets and visions of old had done. Let her remain so, and hope she perished with her planet.
Meanwhile, keep watch, but never let her know. Laser beams went back and forth between Sol and Alpha Centauri, bearing words and images. Merely words and images. To humans of the Solar System, the colonization that had once been an ongoing epic was become a commonplace, a remote background, irrelevant to them. The cybercosm encouraged that attitude by proclaiming its own lack of interest. It declared itself willing to communicate and give advice if asked —which seldom happened any more, as diiferent as the Centaurians had grown to be. But physical space exploration was not for the Teramind. The grand equation that unified all physics had long since been written. The possible interactions of matter and energy were manifold and held surprises, but they would always be details, nothing that could ttot have been computed in advance or, at any rate, be accounted for as another permutation. The endless frontier lay in the mind and its creations.
Venator smiled. Of course the cybercosm didn’t speak quite candidly. Miniprobes followed events around Alpha Centauri as best they could, and sent reports that were neither overheard nor made public. Unacknowledged spacecraft were ranging out into the galaxy, though decades or centuries must pass before word came back from them. The destiny of the cybercosm was to transcend the material universe, but before then, some of the permutations might prove important.
Demeter Mother already had.
However, she was afar, and everything else was farther. Proserpina orbited the cybercosm’s home sun.
And Luna bore, as it had borne since the first Lunarians came to birth, the seeds of chaos. For a moment Venator wondered how often they had sprouted, not openly as history knew of but in secret. How many deaths had been murder disguised?
Enough brooding on the past. Fong had returned to sight. Venator gave him his concluding instructions, ended transmission, and set about the next stage of the campaign. The phone roused Dagny about 0600. Its program recognized that the matter must be that urgent. She sat up, ordered, “Light,” and blinked at the suddenly seen room. For a moment its familiarity came strange to her, ‘Mond’s picture, the children’s from years when they were little, the recent portrait of them with their mates and many of their descendants down to an infant in arms who was her newest great-greatgrandchild, a very unlunarian posing done for her sake only, the gaudy purple-and-gold drapes she had lately chosen to liven things up—She had been gone. Her dead friend faded in awareness. She turned tothe bedside screen and ordered, “Receive.” Rita Urribe de Want’s face appeared. She too must have been wakened, for her hair was unkempt and a robe was thrown over her nightgown. Tears sheened on her cheekbones and ran down to the corners of trembling lips. “Setfora, S-seriora Beynac,” she stammered, “el esta’ muerto.”
Knowledge struck home like a knife. Dagny mustered her Spanish, though the other woman’s English was better, to cry, “Jaime? Oh, my dear! What happened?” Was it in truth a knife?
“In his swimming pool—found—Nobody knows. The medics are there now.” Rita gulped, squared her shoulders, and made her voice toneless. “I have called you first, after them, because of what this can mean to everybody. You will know best whom to consult, what to do. He would have wanted it, I think.” The resoluteness cracked, “And, and you were always good to us.”
Heartbreaking humility, Dagny thought. And undeserved. She’d cultivated acquaintance with the governor general, these past five years, as she had done with his predecessors, because how else could she play any part in containing the fires of strife? … But, yes, she had gained a certain liking as well as respect for Jaime Wahl y Medina, considerable sympathy as well as respect for his wife, and it showed.
“I’ll be right over.”
“No, no, that is not necessary.”