Port Bowen had gained a few amenities, among them L’Étoile de Diane. The restaurant’s menu was limited, but that was because all vegetables and fruit were fresh, raised in its own agro unit. Lately, as excavation and outfitting continued, it had become able to add fish and poultry. The proprietor spoke of wine which wasn’t bruisingly shipped from Earth, beginning fairly soon. Dagny, who could ill afford the place, rejoiced when Edmond Beynac invited her. She recognized that that wasn’t entirely on account of the dinner.
“Not bad,” he said of his roast duck. “But if we chance to have Earthside leave at the same time, let me introduce you to a real confit d’oie. I know an inn at Les Eyzies where they make the best in the universe.” He sipped from his glass and chuckled. “They should, by hell. They have been doing it for centuries.”
Earthside together? Dagny told her pulse to behave itself. “Everything in those parts is old, isn’t it?” she asked for lack of a brilliant response.
“No, no, we are living people, not museum exhibits or tourist shows.” The broad shoulders shrugged. “But yes, that is an ancient land, and more survives than castles and archaeological sites. Most of my ancestors, they doubtless trace back to Crô-Magnon Man.” He grinned. “Or further, if those geneticists are right who think Neandertal blood is in us too. I would not mind that, being descended from a little fellow who stayed alive in the face of the glacier and the cave bear.”
She recalled a picture in a book, a hunter on those primeval barrens, and thought Edmond resembled him. Maybe the setting helped her impression along—not this small, warm, food-fragrant room where conversation buzzed low and music (Debussy?) breathed from the speaker—but the view in the ports and in the clear cupola. By day you dined underground; at night the topside section was opened for patrons who didn’t worry about a bit of added radiation. Candles on the tables scarcely dimmed the splendor of Earth near the full; ever some of the brighter stars gleamed through, unwinking and wintry. The ground was no longer bare and somber, it reached in a dream of luminance and shadows, as if every stone were alive and every craterlet a well where the spirits might give you your wish. Such works of humankind as stood in view became themselves magical, like shapes in a painting by a man who had slain mammoths. Edmond sat poised against a cold wilderness through which he pursued bigger game than ever walked the tundra.
“You’re interested in prehistory?” Dagny ventured. “You sure keep a zoo of interests.”
He had a smile that came and went quickly but brightly. “Well, my father is professor of the subject at the University of Bordeaux. Me, I thought I might go into the same science, but then I decided most of the great discoveries in it have been made, and—Fireball was giving us the space frontier.”
She couldn’t resist: “Not exactly giving, as Anson Guthrie would be the first to admit.”
He grinned. “Touché! His prices, however, they are no more than the traffic will bear, and we do not have to deal with mole-eyed, lard-bottomed bureaucrats, we can simply pay and go. I envy you that you know him so well.”
She had told him about her past, what parts seemed appropriate, in the course of their developing acquaintance. “I rarely see him any more. He and his wife put me in a good school, and they paid my expenses at the academy, but I had to qualify for it on my own and since I’ve graduated they’ve never shown me any partiality.”
“I know.”
She remembered she had already emphasized this to him, and flushed. A gulp of wine lent sufficient assurance for her to dangle bait. “Of course, we’ve stayed in touch, and I visited them on my last vacation and expect I will again occasionally.” With a companion? Better swing the subject back. “We were talking about you, though, for a change. You mentioned something earlier about not having gone directly into your profession.”
“I bounced about.” His tone softened. “We had a summer cottage in the upper Dordogne. In my childhood I got so familiar with the local farmers they nicknamed me Jacquou le croquant, Jacques the peasant, from a famous novel. I believed I would become a farmer too, until I found out that technology long ago made the family farm extinct and my friends were just administrators. Besides, my father’s work, it soon had more romance for me. But then my mother, she has an export-import business, textiles and artwork, through her I came at age sixteen to spend a year in Malaysia. That made me restless to see more of the world than tourists do, and at age eighteen I enlisted in the French section of United Nations forces.” Could an unlucky love affair have given impulse? “We were sent to the chaos in the Middle East—you know, when Europe was establishing the Befehl there.”
“You saw action?” Dagny dared ask, low.
“Oh, yes,” he answered grimly. “Too much. Any amount of combat is too much. In between, I began really thinking. After two years I was wounded badly enough for discharge.” So he’d stuck it out that long, having pledged his word, in spite of hating it, and must have been brave, because a man that smart could wangle a rear-echelon assignment if he tried. “The physicians fixed me all right, I carry only some scraps of metal in me and they do not bother. But I was quite ready for civilian life, studies, field work on Earth, my degree, and then, four years ago, a postdoctoral fellowship on Luna.”
As he talked, he cheered up afresh “Here I am happy,” he finished. “True, it is not perfect. Those hours per daycycle in the bloody centrifuge, we could very well do without them, hein? How do you spend that time?”
“Going through the standard exercises,” Dagny said. “Doesn’t everybody? Otherwise, read, write letters, watch a show, whatever. In a big unit, I mean. Not much choice on a field platform.”
“On one of those, when I am alone except for a counterweight, I turn off my transmitter and sing,” he confessed. “Then nobody else must suffer my voice.”
She laughed. “You see, the necessity isn’t a total nuisance!”
“It is not too bad,” he agreed, “not too high a price. When they begin to study Mars and the asteroids in earnest, I would like to go. But there is no limit yet on what is to do here.” He regarded her. “Nor, I find, is there lack of good company.”
Her heartbeat refused flat-out the order to quiet down.