It was as if ice abruptly thawed. She had wolf-howled that first nightwatch alone after the news came, but things beyond counting were necessary to do and say, smiles beyond counting were necessary to manufacture, therefore let the automaton run through its program and at bedtime switch off. The emptiness could await her leisure, it would never go away.
At this instant—
Abide a little longer, only a short while more. Then she could loose the tears. Then she could go through his desk, his clothes, his books, the database of his calls and messages to her when he was in the field, all of their years, daycycle by daycycle. Then she could know with her whole being that he was gone into forever, and come to terms with the fact, and warm her hands at his memory.
Not yet, not quite yet. At this instant, the eyes of his children toward her like guns, she had work to do. The triune god of Edmond Beynac had been kinship, truth, and freedom.
She straightened. Her muscles pleasured in the movement. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try. I’ll do my bloody damnedest.”
Politics was more than fraud and brutality, she thought. In fact, most of it was honest, was simply the means by which people ordered the affairs they had in common. Suppose she started by approaching Technocommissioner Lefevre. He and ‘Mond had been pretty close …
Kaino embraced her. He hadn’t done that since he was ten.
She would not cry.
He drew back. She said quickly, “Don’t expect miracles. I may or may not get something going. At best, it’ll take a long time, and we’ll have to scrabble for allies.”
Brandir nodded. “Aught you may need that we three can provide, you shall have,” he said, “including our patience.”
“Well, to begin with, your sisters—Verdea, anyway. She might stir up the kind of general sentiment we’ll want,” as Shelley and Byron did for the liberation of Greece, Solzhenitsyn for Russia, Jaynes for North America.
“And Fia, yes, I think Fia,” Brandir murmured.
Helen, black-tressed, russet-eyed, reserved, formal, secretive, save where it came to music … Carla-Jinann, no, until matters got to the stage of emotional pressure, speeches, parades, demonstrations, appeals, at which point she could be a valuable link between Moondwellers, demonstrative Terrestroid and aloof Lunarian …
“How long estimate you?” Kaino blurted at Dagny.
His yearning cut at her. “I don’t know, I told you,” she sighed.
“I also must drink of time,” Temerir said.
Surprised, she regarded him where he stood limned against her flowers and asked, “What? Why?”
“I mean to search after the great planetoid that Father dreamed of,” the astronomer answered. Brandir was having his personal observatory built for him on Farside. “The hunt will likely consume years. That is the more so because it shall be our secret.”“Huh? A scientific project secret? You’ll sneak time for it when nobody’s looking? How come, for Christ’s sake?”
He spread his fingers. His parents would have shrugged. “Father’s emprise won clues for me to follow. But few ever paid much heed to his notions about the early Solar System. Those were taken for the idiosyncracy of an elsewise mighty mind. It should be easy to let the matter slide back into obscurity—with your help, Mother. Who foreknows what a Lunarian may someday discover?” The wintry gaze sharpened upon her. “Unless all here tonight pledge muteness, I will not make the seeking I wish to make in honor of Edmond Beynac.”
A shiver passed through Dagny. Was this, in his way, the most formidable of her sons? Seen from above, the plains reached endless, a thousand mingling hues of green below a’summer sky of the same vastness. Often a wind sent waves through the grasses, swift and shadow-delicate; Kenmuir could well-nigh hear them rustle, smell the odors of growth and of sun-warmed soil. Where terrain sank to make a wetland, trees walled the water-gleam and more wings than he could count wheeled above. A few roads ran spearshaft-straight, with hardly any movement upon them. Transmission, towers stood as lonely. They seemed no violation of the landscape. Rather, those soaring, gracefully crowned slendernesses brought to the fore the life around them.