making me think more and more of the sea as a . . . not a
friend, I suppose. But hope and life and, oh, I don’t know. I
only know, I’d like to take that cruise with you.”
“By all means,” said Maclaren. “I didn’t mean I’d become afraid of the water, just that I’ve looked a little deeper into it. Maybe into everything. Hard to tell, but I’ve had a feeling now and then, out here, of what Seiichi used to call insight.”
“One does learn something in space,” agreed Ryerson. “I began to, myself, once I’d decided that God hadn’t cast me out here and God wasn’t going to bring me back, it wasn’t His part
—Oh, about that cruise. I’d want to take my wife, but she’d understand about your, uh, companions.”
“Surely,” said Maclaren. “I’d expect that. You’ve told me so much about her, I feel like a family friend.”
I feel as if I loved her.
“Come around and be avuncular when we’ve settled— Damn, I forgot the quarantine. Well, come see our home on Rama in thirty years!”
No, no, I am being foolish. The sky has crushed me back toward child. Because she has gallant eyes and hair like a dark flower, it does not mean she is the one possible woman to fulfill that need I have tried for most of my life to drown out. It is only
that she is the first woman since my mother’s death whom I realize is a human being.
And for that, Tamara, I have been slipping three-fourths of my ration back into the common share, so your man may innocently take half of that for his. It is little enough I can do, to repay what you who I never saw gave to me.
“Terangi! You are all right, aren’t you?”
“Oh. Oh, yes, of course.” Maclaren blinked at the other armored shape, shadowy beside him. “Sorry, old chap. My mind wandered off on some or other daisy-plucking expedition.”
T’S an odd thing,” said Ryerson. “I find myself thinking more and more frivolously. As this cruise of yours, for
instance. I really mean to join you, if you’re still willing, and we’ll take that champagne along and stop at every sunny island and loaf about and have a hell of a good time. I wouldn’t have expected this . . . what has happened . . . to change me in that direction. Would you?”
“Why, no,” said Maclaren. “Uh, I thought actually you—”
“I know. Because God seemed to be scourging me, I believed the whole creation must lie under His wrath. And yet, well, I have been on the other side of Doomsday. Here, in nightmare land. And somehow, oh, I don’t know, but the same God who kindled that nova saw equally fit to . . . to make wine for the wedding at Cana.”
Maclaren wondered if the boy would regret so much self-revelation later. Perhaps not if it had been mutual. So he answered with care, “Oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, my thinking has drifted in the other direction. I could never see any real reason to stay alive, except that it was more fun than being dead. Now I couldn’t begin to list all the reasons. To raise kids into the world, and learn something about the universe, and not compromise with someone’s version of justice, and— I’m afraid I’m not a convert or anything. I still see the same blind cosmos governed by the same blind laws. But suddenly it matters. It matters terribly, and means something. What, I haven’t figured out yet. I probably never will. But I have a reason for living, or for dying if need be. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of life: purpose itself. I can’t say. But I expect to enjoy the world a lot more.”
Ryerson said in a thoughtful tone: “I believe we’ve learned to take life seriously. Both of us.”
The grinder chuted its last. dust into tl~e receptacle. The gasifier was inboard; and the cold, not far from absolute zero, was penetrating the suit insulators. Ryerson got up. Shadows lapped his feet. “Of course,” he said, his voice suddenly cracked, “that doesn’t help us a great deal if we starve to death out here.”