Unicorn Trade by Anderson, Poul. Part five

MURPHY’S HALL

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flowers of every possible hue and some you would swear were impossible, dreamlike catenaries of vines and labyrinths of creepers) he caught her summary odor.

The sun was down and Jupiter c!6se to the full. While the terraforming project was going rapidly ahead, as yet the satellite had too little air to blur vision. Tawny shone that shield, emblazoned with slowly moving cloud-bands that were green, blue, orange, umber, and with the jewel-like Red Spot. To know that a single one of the storms raging there could swallow Earth whole added majesty to beauty and serenity. A few stars had the brilliance to pierce that luminousness, down by the rugged horizon. The gold poured soft across crags, cliffs, craters, glaciers, and the machines that would claim this world for man.

Outside lay a great quietness, but here music lilted from the ballroom. Folk had reason to celebrate. The newest electrolysis plant had gone into operation and was releasing oxygen at a rate fifteen percent above estimate. However, low-weight or no, you got tired dancing—since Ganymedean steps took advantage, soaring and bounding aloft—mirth bubbled like champagne and the girl you admired said yes, she was in a mood for Jupiter watching—

“I hope you’re right,” Arne said. “Less on our account—we have a good, happy life, fascinating work, the best of company—than on our children’s.” He squeezed a bit harder.

She didn’t object. “How can we fail?” she

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answered. “We’ve become better than self-sufficient. We produce a surplus, to trade to Earth, Luna, Mars, or plow directly back into development. The growth is exponential.” She smiled. “You must think I’m awfully professorish. Still, really, what can go wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “War, overpopulation, environmental degradation—”

“Don’t be a gloomy,” Catalina chided him. The lambent light struck rainbows from the tiara of native crystal that she wore in her hair. “People can learn. They needn’t make the same mistakes forever. We’ll build paradise here. A strange sort of paradise, yes, where trees soar into a sky full of Jupiter, and waterfalls tumble slowly, slowly down into deep-blue lakes, and birds fly like tiny bright-colored bullets, and deer cross the meadows in ten-meter leaps … but paradise.”

“Not perfect,” he said. “Nothing is.”

“No, and we wouldn’t wish that,” she agreed. “We want some discontent left to keep minds active, keep them hankering for the stars.” She chuckled. “I’m sure history will find ways to make them believe things could be better elsewhere. Or nature will—Oh!”

Her eyes widened. A hand went to her mouth. And then, frantically, she was kissing him, and he her, and they were clasping and feeling each other while the waltz melody sparkled and the flowers breathed and Jupiter’s glory cataracted over them uncaring whether they existed.

He tasted tears on her mouth. “Let’s go dancing,” she begged. “Let’s dance till we drop.”

MURPHY’S HALL

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“Surely,” he promised, and led her back to the ballroom,

It would help them once more forget the giant meteoroid, among the many which the planet sucked in from the Belt, that had plowed into grim and marginal Outpost Ganymede precisely half a decade before the Martian colony was discontinued.

Well, I guess people don’t learn. They breed, and fight, and devour, and pollute, till:

Mother: “We can’t afford it.”

Dad: “We can’t not afford it.”

Mother: “Those children—like goblins, like ghosts, from starvation. If Tad were one of them, and somebody said never mind him, we have to build an interstellar ship … I wonder how you would react.”

Dad: “I don’t know. But I do know this is our last chance. We’ll be operating on a broken shoestring as is, compared to what we need to do the thing right. If they hadn’t made that breakthrough at Lunar Hydromagnetics Lab, when the government was on the point of closing it down— Anyway, darling, that’s why I’ll have to put in plenty of time aboard myself, while the ship is built and tested. My entire gang will be on triple duty.”

Mother: “Suppose you succeed. Suppose you do get your precious spacecraft that can travel almost as fast as light. Do you imagine for an instant it can—an armada can ease life an atom’s worth for mankind?”

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