Ilitu was lucky. A pebble pierced his garb, drew blood from a shoulder, and exited. The holes promptly self-sealed. As for Edmond Beynac, a lump the size of his fist smashed open his helmet. Air puffed away into emptiness.
That is a kindly death. You are unconscious within seconds, gone very soon thereafter.
His sons met with their mother in her home on the Moon.
“Later, yes, we shall bring more folk into the circle,” Brandir said. “This evenwatch must be ours alone.”
Like her and his brothers, he was standing. Behind him stretched the big viewscreen. Its mobile view of the River Dordogne, green valley and a castle on the heights beyond, seemed doubly remote from his tall, black-and-silver-clad form, the long pale hair and the features that were not wholly Asian nor of any other race upon Earth. And yet, Dagny thought, he too dwelt like a baron of old in his towered mountain
“Why?” she asked. Why not, at least, his sisters?
Because, she realized, these men had not come to mourn with her. For she heard: “We have our father to avenge.”
“What?” she exclaimed. Punish a barren bit of wreckage?
No. This new generation was strange but sane. If anything, below the cavalier style lay an inborn realism colder than she liked to think about. Language mutates. “What exactly do you mean?” she demanded.
Kaino was the most outspoken among them. Through his lifespan she had heard him enraged, rancorous, sarcastic, hostile, but never so bleak: “We’ve a reckoning to make with them who wrought his bane.”
Chill touched her. “Wait!” she cried. “Those two poor guys who touched off the rockfall? No!” She filled her lungs, captured his eyes, and declared to them all, “I forbid you.”
When the ship returned, she had taken the pair aside to give what consolation she was able. “I don’t pardon you,” she said, “because I have nothing to pardon. Nobody could have known.” Oliveira wept and kissed her hands. Nkuhlu saluted as he would have saluted Anson Guthrie.
Brandir swept an impatient gesture. “Needless,” he replied. “Innocence is theirs. I grant them my peace.” His arrogance bore for Dagny a curious innocence of its own, akin to a cat’s. “It is the Earth lords to whom we owe ill.”
“Had we had a vessel that was ours,” Kaino said between his teeth, “and a Lunarian crew—”
“I would have sent him afare well-manned, and geared with the best that technics offers,” Brandir stated.
By now he could probably afford the cost, Dagny thought. His enterprises—the undertakings of those mostly young persons who had pledged fealty to him—were enwebbing the globe. Barred, though, among many things, were the building of spacecraft and any Moondweller enterprise more distant than to Earth.
“Lunarians would have had a sense for whatever traps lay in wait,” Kaino said.
“Belike not fully they, either,” Temerir answered.
Dagny’s glance went to him. Her third son generally kept silent until he saw reason to make some pointed remark. Slight, gray-eyed, pallid, he stood in his plain blue coverall as a contrast to Brandir’s elegance and Kaino’s flamboyancy. But his was the most purely Lunarian face of the three.
“Nay,” Brandir agreed. “Yet would the odds have been better.”
“And the venture ours,” Kaino added.
Brandir turned to Dagny. “This be the vengeance we take and the memorial we raise,” he said, “that we break the ban of the overlords and set Luna free in space. Mother, we ask your aid.”
Dagny’s pulse wavered, recovered, and beat high.
They could not bring about a change in the lawwithout her, she knew. They might amass the wealth of dragons, but politically they were dwarfs, in large part because they lacked the gifts of born politicians.
Not that oratory, truth-shading, backroom bargains, wheedling, compromise, blackmail, bullying, bribery, promise-breaking, lip service, and self-puffery were very natural to her. “I, I don’t know,” she stammered.
Her look went past Brandir to the Dordogne view. It had moved to a mossy spot along the shore, oh, could this be the same spot where she and “Mond came walking hand in hand, stopped, skimmed stones across the water, sat down on damp softness and let sun pour through them while he laid his arm about her waist and kissed her? His chin was a little scratchy …