Dagny broke the crust. “Now can we get to business?” she asked as gently as might be. She knew full well what the business was. Sadness edged her pleasure. ‘Mond should have been at her side to hear.
She put the wish from her. In six years she hadn’t stopped missing him, but it was no longer so that every small thing that had been his, every place she had ever seen him, cried aloud to her. She had dear friends, captivating work, lively recreations, a grandstand seat at humankind’s ventures into the universe. From Anson Guthrie she had learned early on that self-pity is the most despicable emotion of any.
Nevertheless wistfulness touched her. “Maybe afterward we can be sociable a while?” she added. “I don’t see you a lot.” Nor the rest of her offspring, or their mates and children, now that Jinann was with that Voris who had been Reynaldo Fuentes. It wasn’t that they were estranged or even indifferent, it was that their lives were no longer close to hers and, she believed, it seldom or never occurred to them that she might wish it were otherwise. Lars, her darling bastard, understood; but he wasn’t on Luna very often.
Brandir’s voice rippled at Temerir. Dagny caught that he put a question.
The astronomer cast her a pale glance and replied in English, “Yes, of course we are safe from listeners. I assured that before I called you.”
Brandir’s short golden-hued cloak swirled from his shoulders as he bowed. “Your pardon, lady Mother,” he said. “I forgot me.”
The inconsequential gesture made Dagny’s eyes sting. “Oh, that, that’s okay,” she faltered. “I canfollow Lunarian pretty well, you know, when I set my mind to the job.”
“Yet not readily, nay?” blurted Kaino.
No, she thought. It was a mercury language, swift-flowing, shimmery, fluid also in its meanings, impossible for her to quite close hands on. She had borne these brains within her, but little of what was in them had passed through hers or Edmond’s. “Admitted,” she said. “Gracias.”
From between her dark tresses, Fia frowned a bit at her brother’s impetuosity. To Temerir she said, “The matter is simple for either tongue. You have found the planetoid our father foretold.”
Yes, Dagny thought, at last, after these years. How long they seemed, looking back. But, true, he’d had to search on what amounted to stolen time, inventing pretexts and manufacturing their justifications. Though he ruled this place entirely, his fief from Brandir, those who worked with him and for him were not readily fooled.
She hadn’t kept track of how it stretched on. Her existence had been too crowded. Personal matters, everyday jobs and joys, the occasional sorrow, a friend in need or a youthful confidence. The growth of Lunar population, industry, undertakings, the rewards they brought and the demands they made. Her engineering administrative work for Fireball becoming entangled with the whole society around her, resources to find and allocate, conflicting plans and ambitions. Friction worsening among Moondwellers, be they Lunarians, Terrans born on Earth or in L-5, avowed Earthlings …
“I have,” she heard, “if’planetoid’ be the rightful word for a thing such as yonder.”
“What know you for certain?” Brandir snapped.
Temerir met the gaze of the taller, more powerful man as does an equal. “That which instruments and computations can tell,” he replied. “Telescopic quest brought a huge harvest for winnowing.” Yes, Dagny recalled, he could publicly mount a program to investigate the remote reaches of the Solar System, sketch-map and estimate-count the comets of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and the Oort Cloud beyond it. What he held to himself were certain of the results he got. “Some few appear to be asteroids, but small and rocky, not what Father meant. When a candidate was promising, I must take what faint spectrum I could. Then, be the promise not immediately shown false, I must find occasion to send robotic probes far enough, fast enough to get a parallax. But you know of these procedures, you who are here this daycycle. In the end, one and only one body manifested the possibility.”
“What is it like?” Kaino nearly shouted.
Temerir stayed ice-calm. “Seemingly akin to Father’s bane, far larger. The form is spheric, diameter approximately 2000 kilometers. Much surface is overlaid with dull material, but sufficient reflects in ferrous wise to suggest that thus is the most, giving a high mean density. The orbital inclination is a few minutes less than forty-four degrees, about the same as for the lesser object that we came to know too well. This too implies a similar composition. Perihelion is 107 astronomical units and a fraction, eccentricity is above 99 one-hundredths.” Judas priest, Dagny thought, that made the aphelion point something like thirty or forty thousand a.u. out. This fitted also with ‘Mond’s asteroid. Oh, ‘Mond, ‘Mond! “At present the body is 302 astronomical units hence, spaceward bound.”