“And you . . . and you . . . won’t even let me put up his picture,” she whispered.
“It’s in the album, with my other dead sons. I’ll not have it on the wall for you to blubber at. Our part is to take what God sends us and still hold ourselves up on both feet.”
“Do you know—” Tamara stared at him with a slowly rising sense of horror. “Do you know, I cannot remember just what he looked like?”
She had had some obscure hope of provoking his rage. But the shaggy-sweatered broad shoulders merely lifted, a little shrug. “Aye, that’s common enough. You’ve the words, blond hair and blue eyes and so on, but they make not any real image. Well, you didn’t know him so very long, after all.”
You are telling me I am a foreigner, she thought. An interloper who stole what didn’t belong to me.
“There’s time to review a little English grammar before tea,” said the old man. “You’ve been terrible with the irregular verbs.”
He put his book on the table—she recognized the title, Kipling’s Poems, whoever Kipling had been—and pointed at a shelf. “Fetch the text and sit down.”
Something flared in the girl. She doubled her fists. “No.”
“What?” The leather face turned in search of her.
“I am not going to study any more English.”
“Not—” Magnus peered as if she were a specimen from another planet. “Don’t you feel well?”
She bit off the words, one after another: “I have better ways to spend my time than learning a dead language.”
“Dead?” cried the man. She felt his rage lift in the air between them. “The language of fifty million—”
“Fifty million ignorant provincials, on exhausted lands between bombed-out cities,” she said. “You can’t step outside the
British Isles or a few pockets on the North American coast and have it understood. You can’t read a single modern author or scientist or . . . or anybody . . . in English—I say it’s dead! A walking corpse!”
“Your own husband’s language!” he bawled at her, half rising.
“Do you think he ever spoke it to anyone but you, once he’d he’d escaped?” she flung back. “Did you believe . . . if
David ever returns from that ship you made him go on .
and we go to Rama—did you imagine we’d speak the language of a dying race? On a new world?”
S
HE felt the tears as they whipped down her face, she gulped after breath amidst terror. The old man was so hairy, so huge. When he stood up, the single radiglobe and the wan firelight threw his shadow across her and choked a whole corner of the room with it. His head bristled against the ceiling.
“So now your husband’s race is dying,” he said like a gun. “Why did you marry him, if he was that effete?”
“He isn’t!” she called out. The walls wobbled around her. “You are! Sitting here in your dreams of the past, when your people ruled Earth—a past we’re well out of1. David was going where . . . where the future is!”
“I see,” Magnus Ryerson turned half away from her. He jammed both fists into his pockets, looked down at the floor and rumbled his words to someone else—not her.
“I know. You’re like the others, brought up to hate the West because it was once your master. Your teacher. The white man owned this planet a few centuries ago. Our sins then will follow us for the next thousand years . . . till your people fail in their turn, and the ones you raised up take revenge for the help they got. Well, I’m not going to apologize for my ancestors. I’m proud of them. We were no more vicious than any other men, and we gave . . . even on the deathbed of our civilization, we gave you the stars.”
His voice rose until it roared. “And we’re not dead yet! Do you think this miserable Protectorate is a society? It isn’t! It’s not even a decent barbarism. It’s a glorified garrison. It’s one worshipping the status quo and afraid to look futureward. I