The pallet bumped its way down the slanting wall, out of blackness and onto the ledge. Kaino took advantage of weak gravity to hold Ilitu’s back fairly straight as he moved him. He undid the bight, closed and disconnected the air tubes, fastened the straps. “Haul away,” he called. The hurt man rose from his sight.
“I have him,” Brandir transmitted after a few minutes.
“Then let the robot reel me in,” Kaino whooped, “and we’ll go—go—go!”
The cable tautened, drawing him toward the stars.
Afterward Brandir determined what happened. He had rejoined his machinery, which rested well back from the crevasse rim. The robot was very close to it. At the moment of catastrophe, four billion-odd years ago, rocks as well as metal were thrown on high. The horizontal gush of molten iron that made the deck over the crack had a mistlike fringe that promptly congealed into globules along the verge. The stones dropped back on these and hid them. The planetoid swung out into realms where meteoroids are fugitively few. None ever struck nearby to shake this precarious configuration.
Low gravity means low friction with the ground, and here the shingle rested virtually on bearings. The weight at the end of the line tugged at the robot. The regolith underfoot glided. The robot lurched forward. It toppled over the edge and fell in a rain of stones.
Below it, Kaino tumbled back to the shelf, skidded off, and plunged into the lower depth. The knives received him.
In the big viewscreen, surf crashed on a winter shore. The waves ran gray as the sky, burst into white, sentwater hissing up the sand almost to the driftwood that lay bleached and skeletal under the cliffs. Wrack flew like smoke low above; spindrift mingled with rain-spatters; the skirl and rumble shook air which bore a tang of salt and a breath of chill. It was as if Dagny Beynac’s living room stood alone within that weather.
She thought that maybe she shouldn’t have played this scene. It fitted her mood, she’d had it going since dawnwatch, but it was altogether alien to the young woman before her. Might Etana read it as a sign of hostility, of blame?
“Won’t you be seated?” she asked. Unusual on the Moon so early in a visit, that was an amicable gesture. Besides, her old bones wouldn’t mind.’ She’d been pacing overmuch lately, when she wasn’t off on a long walk, through the passageways and around the lake or topside across the crater floor. High time she started returning to everyday.
The guest inclined her head, more or less an equivalent of “Thanks,” and flowed into a chair. Dagny sat down facing her and continued, “Do you care for tea or coffee, or something stronger?”
“Grace, nay.” Etana looked at the hands tightly folded in her lap. “I came because—I would be sure you understand—“ Lunarians were seldom this hesitant.
“Go ahead, dear,” Dagny invited softly.
The dark eyes lifted to meet her faded blue. “We thought of how we could leave him … in his honor … beneath a cairn on Iron Heath. Or else we could bring him home, that his kinfolk cremate him and strew his ashes over his mountains. But—”
Dagny waited, hoping her expression spoke gentleness.
“But a freeze-dried mummy!” Etana cried. “What use?” More evenly: “And although we must perforce lie about where and how he ended, to do it at his services were unworthy of him, nay?”
“You’d have attended?” wondered Dagny, taken unawares. Lunarians didn’t bother to scoff at Earth ceremonies, they simply avoided them. Christmas without grandchildren got pretty lonesome.
“Ey, your friends would have come and misliked it did his siblings and companionates hold away.” Etana paused. “But without a body to commit to its rest, our absence is of indifference, true?”
“Actually, I wouldn’t have staged a funeral,” Dagny said. “My man didn’t want any. I don’t for myself. It’s enough if you remember.”
“Nothing else? His companionates will—No matter.”