He scowled. Anson stood sullen. “Clean yourself,” Edmond ordered him. “Then go to your bunk.”
“Hold on,” Dagny exclaimed. “What’s this about?”
“No supper for him,” Edmond snapped. “He was insubordinate and reckless.” To the boy: “Go.”
“Wait just a minute,” Dagny countermanded. “What did he do?”
“He left us,” Edmond said. “We were sorting our specimens into the boxes and did not notice before he was gone. We called and got no answer. His trackswent upslope to bare rock where we could not trail him. For more than an hour we searched, until we found him in a cleft. He had not answered us, that whole while.”
“I couldn’t receive you.” Anson spoke with a clipped precision which in him registered fury. “The ridges screened it. That overhang below your site must have blocked the satellite relay.”
“You told me already. And I told you—bloody hell, how many times?—you do not leave your party without permission.” . ‘
“When I started off’, you didn’t call me to stop.”
“You knew we were not watching. Hein? I told you, if you want to walk around, you must stay in line of sight. If you get into a no-reception zone, you retrace your’steps. Immediately! Mon Dieu, you could ‘ave been lost, somesing could ‘ave ‘appened—“ The father’s voice wavered. “After daycycles, we might ‘ave found your mummy.”
Dagny wondered whether this was their first real exchange or they were going over the ground again for her. Undoubtedly Anson had received an awesome tongue-lashing, but it had only stiffened his spine. “That’s far too true,” she said to him, keeping her ‘ tone ^ow. “Why did you do it?”
The boy met her gaze. He was the beautiful one of her brood, slim, straight, cat-graceful, bird-soaring in this gravity for which he was made. Already the great height that would be typically Lunarian had brought his head even with his father’s. Ash-blond hair fell in bangs over milk-white temples wherein a vein stood as blue as the big, slanty Lunarian eyes. The cheekbones were Asian, the nose and mouth,and chin Hellenic, though neither blood was in him; it went with th~e altered genotype and had surprised the geneticists themselves. They talked of chaos inherent in biological systems, but she gathered this meant “We don’t know.”
, At her he smiled, to her he spoke gently. “It was all right, Madre. I wasn’t in danger. The sun gave me a direction, and the high, jagged peak south of us, that’d be a landmark any time I climbed to where I could see it.”
“Merde!” Edmond roared.
Dagny shushed him with a gesture. “But why did you go, dear?”
“Bueno, I got out of sight before I noticed, and then I thought how I wanted a better look at those formations we found in the cleft, that Padre doesn’t think are interesting.” Anson shrugged. “Honest, I’d have come back before they were ready to leave.”
“If you did not bloody lose your way in that—that jumble, that labyrinth.” Edmond’s hands trembled a bit. He’d want comforting tonight, Dagny knew.
“I wouldn’t have,” Anson argued. “I never do.”
It could well be the truth, she thought. Not that he’d been anywhere alone before now, but on guided excursions he acted as though he’d drawn maps in his head. Virtually no visitors, and few long-time residents, could do that, on this world that was not Earth.
This world that was to be his.
She mustn’t undercut ‘Mond.. “You could have discovered the hard way that it’s possible,” she said. “In any case, you were selfish and inconsiderate, you made a whopping lot of trouble, and most especially, you breached discipline. If you don’t learn better, someday you may cause somebody’s death. Go wash and lie down.”
Mute, haughtily erect, the boy departed. When he was out of sight, the man embraced the woman. She laid her head against the hard solidity of him, inhaled his warmth and male smell, clutched him tightly. “I ‘ate sis,” he whispered in her ear. “But we are obliged.”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she breathed. “For their sakes.”
If he and she knew what was right. How many of the old rules held? These were not children like any that had ever been before. In a sense, they were not human. They’d never be able to breed with her kind, nor even abide for very long on Earth. Not for them were windand wave, blue heaven, thunderheads, rainbows, the great wheel of the seasons; theirs were the naked stone and the scornful stars and a life to make from a new beginning. She had not believed the otherness of their flesh would matter too much. Else she would not have borne them. But how foreign were their souls? As soon as she left the tubeway that had taken her from the airport, Aleka Kame realized she needed a wanner garment than she had brought along. The sky hung low and leaden. A raw wind harried tatters of fog borne in off the sea. Earth’s atmosphere didn’t always respond as it should to the nudges it got from Weather Control, and sometimes even short-range local prediction failed. Ultimately, the planet was chaotic.