Her tone stayed amicable. “Also enemies negotiate.”
“I’m not exactly an envoy, my lady. And to me you are no enemy. Nor are Earth or the World Federation enemies to you.”
The voice stiffened. “Speak for yourself, not them.”
“Who wishes you harm?”
“Wishing or nay, they make ready to wreak it.”
“Do you refer to the Habitat, my lady?” he asked: a socially necessary redundancy.
She evaded directness. “Much else has Earth done to Luna.”
“Why, it was Earth that brought Luna alive.”
She laughed. The sound was brief and low, but in some sly fashion uttered with her whole body. “You have a quite charming way of affecting naivet6, Captain. Let me, then, denote us as dwellers on the Moon.”
He followed her conversational lead, for his real purpose was to explore her attitudes. “May I speak freely?”
“Is that not the reason you came?” she murmured.
Now she was playing at being an innocent, he thought. “When you say ‘dwellers,’ I suspect you mean Lunarians, not resident Terrans, not even those Terrans who are citizens. And … if you say ‘Lunarians’ to me, do you perhaps mean the Selen-archic families—or the Cordilleran phratry—or simply its overlings?” Try, cautiously, to provoke her.
The green gaze levelled upon him. The words were quiet but steady. “I mean the survival of the blood.”
That should not have put him on the defensive, but he heard himself protest, “In what way are you threatened, your life or your property or anything that’s yours?”
“My lineage is. You propose to make Lunarians extinct.”
The shock was slight but real. “My lady!”
Lilisaire finger-shrugged. “Eyach, of course the fond, foolish politicians who imagine they govern humankind, they think no such thing, insofar as they can think at all. They see before them only the ego-bloated eminence that will be theirs, for that they opened the Moon to Terrans.”
“The gain’s much more than theirs,” he must argue. “Those people who’ll come are bold, enterprising sorts. What new work has been done here for the past century or longer? They’ll build the way your ancestors did, cities, caverns, life—make the Moon over.”
For they were the restless ones, the latent Faustians, he thought for the hundredth time. They found their lives on Earth empty, nothing meaningful left for them to do, and their energy and anger grew troublesome. He had wondered whether the Teramind itself had conceived this means, the Habitat, of drawing them together here where they could expend themselves in ways that were containable, controllable—in the course of lifetimes, tamable.
“They will swarm in,” Lilisaire said, “they will soon outvote us, and all the while they will outbreed us.”
“Nothing prevents you Lunarians from vying with them in that,” Venator said dryly.
Except, he thought, their lack of the strong urge to reproduce that was in his race, that had brought Earth to the edge of catastrophe and was still barely curbed, still a wellspring of discontent and unrest. The Habitat would give its beneficiaries some outlet for this, for some generations. Lunarians were never so fecund. Why? Was it cultural or did it have a genetic basis? Who knew? To this day, who knew? You could map the genome, but the map is not the territory, nor does it reveal what goes on underground. He himself supposed that the effect was indirect. Arrogant, self-willed people did not want to be burdened with many children.
Again Lilisaire laughed. “At last a thousandfold worn-out dispute shows a fresh face!” Lightly: “Shall we leave it to twitch? Be welcome, Captain, as a new presence in an old house. Will you take refreshment?”
He had gotten used to Lunarian shifts of mood. “Thank you, my lady.”
She poured, a clear sound against the Pan pipes, gave him his goblet of cut crystal, and raised hers. The wine glowed golden. “Uwach yei,” she toasted. It meant, more or less, “Aloft.”
“Serefe,” he responded. Rims chimed together.
“What tongue is that?” she asked.
“Turkish. ‘To your honor.’” He sipped. It was glorious.
“You have ranged widely, then—and, I deem, as much in your person as in vivifer or quivira.”
“It is my duty,” he said dismissingly.
“What breed are you?”