“You’ve come to love them, then?” Matthias asked softly.
Taken aback, Kenmuir could merely say, “Well, I, I feel for them.”
Matthias lifted a finger. “Mind you, I don’t hate them. I agree they’re admirable, the way a tiger is.And, yes, they are a leaven in this thickening world of ours.” He paused. “But we have our own race to think about.” With a shrug: “As if what you or I think, what we do, will make the slightest difference.”
Kenmuir knotted a fist. “The Habitat is wrong.”
Matthias raised his brows. “Wrong, to give thousands of humans, and whole generations after them, once again a frontier?”
Yes, Kenmuir thought, he’d heard it before, the renewed dynamic, humankind looking outward from its games and shadow shows, to the endlessness of the universe. He was pleading the case of native Americans as the whites rolled across them on the way to the Pacific. But what was it Lilisaire had said, about a wave of Lunar colonists being directed into a holding tank? He had spent many a watch in space exploring the past of Earth. After the white Americans filled their new land, vested interests and demagogues did not take long to make citizens into subjects.
“Sir,” he persisted, “I’m an example of what Lunarian freedom can mean to Terrans. If we’re ever to go to the stars—“ where download Guthrie was, but how barely! “—it will have to be together with them.”
“Maybe. Speak your piece.”
“They deserve a chance, the same as we do.”
“I’d not deny that, if it be a fair chance. Though, to repeat myself, what choice in the matter do you or I have? Say on.”
Kenmuir drew breath and plunged ahead. In the course of three daycycles, Lilisaire had filled out details of what she first told him, but mostly she had kindled him for her cause. He said nothing about what happened when they were not talking. Did Matthias, impassive in his chair, guess?
The Rydberg made a single comment: “Remarkable, that those activities Niolente got carried out in space could stay a secret.”
“Well, sir, you know how basic the etaine is there.” Kenmuir chose the L’unarian word because its usual translation as “family” or “clan” was not really right. Nothing that quite corresponded occurred in any Terran culture. Sometimes he had speculated that “pride” might serve—but no, Lunarians weren’t lions either. “Apparently the expeditions were highly cy-berneticized, the few organic personnel chosen for ties of blood as well as their skills. They’d keep silent. Niolente presumably meant to reveal her design at the right moment, under the right circumstances, which would give Luna the advantage she was working for, with her and her phyle in firm control of it.
“At the final catastrophe, it seems everyone who knew perished with her. They were holed up together under Delandres Crater, and you surely recall how the missiles collapsed their shell around them even though the Peace Authority was only trying to force them to surrender. I think she kept them in a group like that precisely to retain the secret, and threatened to catapult warheads only as a bargaining counter that might win favorable terms—amnesty, at least. Instead, it got her bombarded.
“Apparently, also, she’d wiped what files on the project she could. The record that the Peace Authority laid hands on was fragmentary. All that her adult children knew was that something major had been under way. You’d expect them to be close-mouthed about it, wouldn’t you? They passed it down through the generations, under pledge of secrecy, very much like … the Rydbergs in the Trothdom.”
Hoarsened, Kenmuir drained his beer. A stillness followed, wherein his blood beat loudly through his veins.
“And now this female wants me to give you the Founder’s Word, for her benefit and in hopes she can use it to thwart the Habitat,” Matthias said at last.
“If, if possible, and if—”
“Exactly what does she fantasize it is?”
“Information. Long before Niolen|e’s time, Dagny Beynac’s son Kaino led a mysterious mission into deep space. The family never let out what it had been. Most likely it became the basis of what Niolenteundertook. Meanwhile, Lars Rydberg had learned something, probably from Beynac herself, which he considered to be of the first importance.”