“But more. There are sciences, technologies, philosophies, religions, arts, insights they have which we never imagined. It cannot be otherwise. And we can offer them ours, of course. How long do you think this narrow little Protectorate and its narrow little minds can survive such an explosion of new thought?” Maclaren leaned forward. He felt it as an upsurge in himself. “My lady, if you want to live on a frontier world, and give your child a place where it’s hard and dangerous and challenging—and everything will be possible for him, if he’s big enough—stay on Earth. The next civilization will begin here on Earth herself.”
Tamara set down her cup. She bent her face into her hands
and he saw, helpless, how she wept. “It may be,” she said to him, “it may be, I don’t know. But why did it have to be David who bought us free? Why did it have to be hith? He didn’t mean to. He wouldn’t have, if he’d known. I’m not a sentimental fool, Maclaren-san, I know he only wanted to come back here. And he died! There’s no meaning in it!”
XVIII.
T
HE North Atlantic rolled in from the west, gray and green and full of thunder. A wind blew white manes up on the
waves. Low to the south gleamed the last autumnal daylight,
and clouds massed iron-colored in the north, brewing sleet.
“There,” pointed Tamara. “That is the place.”
Maclaren slanted his aircar earthward. The sky whistled around him. So Dave had come from here. The island was a grim enough rock, harshly ridged. But Dave had spoken of gorse in summer and heather in fall and lichen of many hues.
The girl caught Maclaren’s arm. “I’m afraid, Terangi,” she whispered. “I wish you hadn’t made me come.”
“It’s all we can do for David,” he told her: “The last thing we’ll ever be able to do for him.”
“No.” In the twilight, he saw how her head lifted. “There’s never an end. Not really. His child and mine, waiting, and—At
• least we can put a little sense into life.”
“I don’t know whether we do or whether we find what was always there,” he replied. “Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose—order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it—does exist.”
“Here on Earth, yes,” she sighed. “A flower or a baby. But then three men die beyond the sun, and it so happens the race benefits a little from it, but I keep thinking about all those people who simply die out there. Or come back blind, crippled, broken like dry sticks, with no living soul the better for it. Why? I’ve asked it and asked it, and there isn’t ever an answer, and finally I think that’s because there isn’t any why to it in the first place.”
Maclaren set the car down on the beach. He was still on the same search, along a different road. He had not come here simply to offer David’s father whatever he could: reconciliation, at least, and a chance to see David’s child now and then in
the years left him. Maclaren had some obscure feeling that an enlightenment might be found on Skula.
Truly enough, he thought, men went to space, as they had gone to sea, and space destroyed them, and still their sons came back. The lure of gain was only a partial answer; spacemen didn’t get any richer than sailors had. Love of adventure . . . well, in part, in some men, and yet by and large the conquerors of distance had never been romantics, they were workaday folk who lived and died among sober realities. When you asked a man what took him out to the black star, he would say he had gone under orders, or that he was getting paid, or that he was curious about it, or any of a hundred reasons. Which might all be true. And yet was any of them the truth?
And why, Maclaren wondered, did man, the race, spend youth and blood and treasure and all high hopes upon the sea and the stars? Was it only the outcome of meaningless forces— economics, social pressure, maladjustment, myth, whatever you labeled it—a set of chance-created vectors with the sardonic resultant that man broke himself trying to satisfy needs which could have been more easily and sanely filled at home?