Here the sun was only first among the stars, a hundred-thousandth as bright as over Luna, less than a tenth of full Earth. Still, when lights had been turned off in the observation cabin, eyes adapting to dusk saw shadows cast, faint and shifty. On the little world that crowded the primary viewscreen, peaks and crags reared gauntly forth, while glints and shimmers showed where metal lay naked. Dark vision was needful to make the rock surfaces something other than a mottled murkiness. It found a scene like a delirium, mountains, plains, valleys, cliffs, rilles, pits, crevices, flows frozen in their final convulsions, things less identifiable, wildly scrambled together.
After months under thrust, acceleration and deceleration at a steady Lunar gravity, weightlessness came strange even to this crew. Brandir and Kaino floated, gazing, in silence. Air currents seemed to rustle no louder than their blood. Low and slow, torchcraft Beynac orbited her goal. It turned faster than she revolved, a rotation each nine and a half hours. Feature after feature crept over the leading horizon.
“Behold!” cried Kaino.
He pointed to a sootiness not far below the north pole, as it hove in sight. From a distance they had seen that it spread halfway around the globe. This close, they picked out the foothills and steeps of it. Where the range was tumbled or riven, they saw depths that gleamed bluish white. “What is that?”
“A comet smote,” Brandir judged. “This is the debris. Radiation caused exposed organic material from the comet to form larger molecules.” He was quiet a few seconds, as if quelling a shiver. How long had that taken, in these outskirts of the Solar System?
The lines in his countenance deepened. He forced matter-of-factness into the melodious Lunarian language: “Belike most is water ice.”
Kaino nodded eagerly. His question had been unthinking; he knew as well as his brother what the sight probably meant. “A hoard of it! And if that prove not enough, why, I’ve observed another comet within a few hundred astronomical units.” He gestured at auxiliary screens full of stars, Milky Way, nebulae, night. “A fortunate happenstance, amidst all this hollowness.”
“Should we want it. We have tracked down our father’s dream; we know not what new dreams may spring forth.” Brandir spoke curtly. His mood was harsher than fitted this terminus of their expedition. He returned his attention to what he had been studying before Kaino exclaimed.
He forsook it again, and glared, when Ilitu entered. The geologist’s brown hair was rumpled, his clothes carelessly thrown on. He checked his flight at the main screen and the contentment on his thin face flared into joy.
“So your heed is back upon science,” Kaino greeted. Ilitu and Etana had gone off together, exultant, while Beynac was completing the approach.
The younger man ignored the jape, or pretended to. “Have you obtained a good value for the mass?” he asked breathlessly.
Kaino nodded. “Twenty-nine and three-fifths percent of Luna’s.”
“A-ahh. Then indeed the body is chiefly iron. The core of a larger one, shattered in some gigantic collision, just as my mentor believed.” Ilitu stared and stared. “But he could not foresee everything,” he went on, almost as if to himself. “It is a chaos, like Miranda. It must itself have been broken in pieces, many of them melted, by that fury … and then shards of both rained down upon each other, fusing—Yes.” A fingertip trembled across the images of a scarp two hundred kilometers long, a gash that gaped for three hundred, a highland that was a jumble of diverse huge blocks, chunks, and rubble. “The welding could not be total. The interior is surely veined with caverns and tunnels between ill-fitting segments. Sustained heavy bombardment would have collapsed them, making the spheroid still rougher than we see. Hence we know that Jupiter cast it afar soon after it formed. We have found a remnant of the primordial.”
“There have been strikes since then,” Brandir snapped. “Any witling could tell.” He chopped a hand at the sight that had particularly interested him. Though craters were few, a big one with a central peak loomed in the southern hemisphere, receding from view as ship and planetoid wheeled.
“True,” Ilitu agreed, conciliatory. “No matter how sparse, bodies must meet on occasion, in the course of four billion years or more. Yon great meteoroid, and the comet, and others; but seldom, and of scant geological consequence.”
“Not to a man who can think. Piss about as you wish, groundside. I know what I will seek.”
Ilitu’s slender frame tensed. “Best we plan our field work before we start it,” he said.
“When I desire your opinion, I will inform you,” Brandir retorted.
Kaino plucked his sleeve. “Come,” the pilot murmured. “I’ve need of you aft.”
Brandir bridled. “I’m scanning the terrain.”
“The cameras will do that better. Likewise Ilitu. Come.” Kaino put a slight metallic ring into his voice. Sullenly, Brandir accompanied him from the cabin. In space, the pilot was master.
They did not push off and fly, but used handholds to pull themselves along the passage beyond, side by side. “What do you intend?” Brandir demanded.
“To calm you, brother mine. I smelled a fight brewing, and we cannot afford it. Relations have grown too strained already.”
Brandir cast a sharp glance at the redhead. “You speak thus?”
Kaino finger-shrugged and grinned lopsidedly. “After a person has crossed the half-century mark, the fires damp down a little. I should have thought yours were cooler from the outset—and you my senior, and Etana companionate with me, not you.”
Brandir flushed below his thinning ashen hair. “Do you suppose me jealous? Nay, it’s his insolence.”
“It’s that, sitting in your castle, you’ve become too wont to have what you want when you want it. Yes, my own self-importance was stung. But we’ve both had plenty of women, inside our group or outside it. If Etana’s come to favor a new man above me—I suspect his mildness appeals to her—why, there will be no lack of others to welcome me home. Meanwhile, Etana does not disdain either of us two, does she? Ease off, you. We should both carry too much pride to leave room for vanity.”
Brandir parted his lips, clamped them shut again, and shook his head angrily.
The copilot emerged from a companionway, spied them, and drew near. She was in her thirties, dark, fuller-bodied than usual among Lunarians. Like Ilitu, she had dressed hastily, and the black locks floated unkempt about a face that remembered Oceanian ancestors. A faint muskiness clung to her skin.
The three poised in confrontation. She recognized the ill humor in Brandir and offered him a smile. “I was bound forward to see what we’ve found,” she said.
“You felt no urgency earlier,” he answered.
Resentment kindled. “Off duty, I choose my trajectory for myself.”
Kaino meowed. They gave him a surprised look.
“R-r-rowr,” he voiced. “S-s-s-s. Pity that you’ve neither of you the fur to bristle or the tails to bottle.”
After a moment, Etana laughed. Brandir’s mouth twitched upward. “Touché,” he muttered.
“I meant no offense, my lord,” the woman told him softly. Never hitherto had she used that honorific. Her only allegiances were to the companionate she shared with Kaino and to this ship; she could and would leave either when she saw fit. “I did not suppose you especially cared.”
“I ought not,” Brandir replied with some difficulty. “You are a free agent.”
Comprehension flickered into Kaino’s eyes, and perhaps as much compassion as he was capable of. He drifted aside and kept quiet.
Etana touched Brandir’s hand. “We shall be here for a span, and then it’s a long voyage home,” she said. “There will be time for talk and for other things.”
“You are … kinder than I knew.” He put on the reserve of the aristocrat. “I’ll seek to arrange matters as may best please you, my lady.”
Groundside, he, the major partner in Selene Space Enterprises and the most experienced leader aboard, would be in command.
He stood on that height he called Meteor Mountain and rejoiced.
As small as this world was, from here he could barely see parts of the crater ringwall, thrusting above the horizon. Under his feet the dark, lumpy mass went down to a plain of almost glassy smoothness, its gray-brown webbed with cracks and strewn with boulders. Over his head and around him gleamed the crowded constellations. Though night had fallen, they gave sufficient light for a person accustomed to Lunar Farside after sunset. Beynac was in the sky, free of the shadow cone, a spark gliding through Auriga toward the galactic belt.
Below him on the slope, he spied one of his robots at work, cutting loose a sample for analysis. The task was essentially finished, however. Soon he could seek his van and take the crew back to camp. He transmitted, for the ship to receive and relay:
“It’s established now beyond doubt. The impactor was ferrous, probably itself a remnant of the original body, which went out on an orbit close to this and eventually collided. Between its composition and the material forced up from the interior, the central peak is a lode of industrial metals, both light and heavy, even more easily recoverable than they are at other locations.”
“That makes two treasures, then!” rang Kaino’s response. He meant the cometary glacier which he and Ilitu had been exploring. Not only had they found immense quantities of water ice and organic compounds, they had identified ample cyanide and ammonia intermingled, frozen or chemically bound. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen: the fundamentals of life. “Never before, anything like! I could well-nigh believe in a god who meant it for us.”
“That is not a necessary hypothesis,” Ilitu said in his gentle, precise fashion. “Nor has coincidence been involved. Given Edmond Beynac’s idea—a planetoid massive enough to form a core, smashed, then most of the pieces perturbed into Kuiper-Belt paths—the rest seems probable, perhaps inevitable. There were bound to be further encounters during gigayears, with rich fragments and with comets. This, the largest body, would attract more than its share. Weak irradiation and ultra-low ambient temperatures preserve volatiles as they cannot be preserved in the inner System.”
“Thus speaks the savant,” chuckled Etana affectionately from the ship.
“When will you be done where you are?” Brandir asked the men. Discoveries and what they would require were wholly unpredictable; and he had been too engaged with his to follow theirs in any detail.
“We prepare to depart,” Kaino answered. “Let our successors trace out everything that’s here. After a short rest and resupplying, Ilitu wants to investigate the Great Scarp and the Olla Podrida. That’s good in my mind, if we can go by way of Iron Heath.” Those were features noted before anyone had landed, but not yet betrodden.
“Well, we’ll talk of it in camp,” Brandir said. “We near our limits of accomplishment in the while that we have left to us.”
“I’ll trust Ilitu to persuade you,” Kaino laughed. Brandir heard the click of signoff.
Etana’s voice stormed at him: “How’s this? They wander straightway to a new land, and I remain caged?”
Doctrine. A qualified pilot must always be on standby. Tiny though the chance was of a meteoroid strike in these parts, and the solar flare hazard nonexistent, Brandir chose to abide by the rule. “It would be a long walk home,” he had said. Besides, when they were just three persons and a few robots on the ground, it was well to have a watcher aloft, ready to mount a rescue.
“Let Kaino take his turn here,” she said. “He promised me. You all did.”
“Khr-r, he has done rockjack work in the asteroids, you know,” Brandir pointed out.
“And I have not? Admitted. But this is no asteroid. Not in truth. It’s more akin to Luna. And I have ranged the outback at home as much as ever he or you.”
“Y-yes—”
She laid rage aside. “It’s merely fair,” she argued. “You have spirit, Brandir. Would you care to sit idled week upon week, in the ghost-companionship of recorded screenings, while your mates roved free?”
“Later, yes, certainly you shall.”
“Now! The hour is ripe, two surveys completed, the next to be readied for.” Etana’s tone sweetened. “It could be you I fare with, could it not? Ilitu has scant need of more than the robots to help him do his science. You and I are aimed toward whatever may prove useful to the future.”
“I must think on that.”
“Must you? Is it not star-clear? And … Brandir, I’ve grievously misliked our being at odds. You kept yourself so masked. We should find our way to something better.”
In the end he yielded. Knowing this, he spoke more stiffly than might have been necessary when he called the other pair.
The sun burst into sight. Farther stars vanished around it. Westward they still gemmed a majestic darkness, for the solar radiance was wan where no heights reflected it. This country was not altogether a plain of dull-colored rock, though. In places it sheened amidst the shadows that puddled in its roughness. Here and there the shadows reached long from formations whose laciness came aglitter and aglisten.
The anomalous region bordered rather sharply on the sort of terrain common on the lowlands of this world—coarse regolith, like shingle, virtually dustfree. A field van rolled to the marge and stopped. Two spacesuited forms climbed out. A robot followed, four-legged, four-armed, thickly instrumented, burdened with gear. For a minute they stood looking across the strangeness ahead of them.
Then: “Come!” rapped Kaino, and started forth afoot.
“Is this wise?” wondered Ilitu. “Send the robot first.”
“We’ve no hours to squander on probing and sounding. Would you see what we’re here to see? Get aflight!”
After an instant’s hesitation, the geologist obeyed. The machine lumbered behind. While Kaino was furious at Brandir’s decision, his haste also had an element of reason. He had insisted on detouring, and Ilitu backed him, in order that he might be sure of visiting Iron Heath before he arrived at camp and took a flitsled up to Beynac. Otherwise he, at least, probably never would, given everything else there was to do in the limited time remaining for it and the unlikeliness of another expedition here soon. The roundabout route overland stretched both food and fuel cells thin; the men were on half rations, which doubled his impatience. They could not dawdle.
After they had long been cramped in their vehicle, freedom to move brought exuberance as abrupt as the sunrise. “Hai-ah!” Kaino shouted. Forward he went in panther leaps. His spacesuit, state of the art, flexed around him, almost a second skin. Powerpack and life support scarcely weighted him. The dense globe pulled with a force 86 percent that of home, ample for Lunarian health and childbirth, liberating in its lightness. Landscape rivered from the near horizon to flow away beneath his feet. Breath sang in his nostrils, alive with a pungency of sweat.
He halted at the nearest formation. Ilitu joined him. They gazed. The robot trailed forlornly in their direction. It was built and programmed for a certain class of scientific tasks; at everything else, if it was capable at all, it was weak, slow, and stupid.
“What is this?” Kaino whispered.
From space, the travelers had simply become aware of curious protrusions on an unfamilar sort of territory. They could not untangle the shapes. Seen close up, the thing was sheerly weird.
An Earthdweller would have thought of coral. Lunarians knew that marvel only in books and screens. An intricate filigree rose from the ground, thin, its topmost spires some 150 centimeters high, its width variable with a maximum of about 100. Variable too was the brightness of strands, nodules, and rosettes; but many gleamed in the hard eastern light.
Ilitu walked around it, leaned close, touched, peered, hunkered, rose, took a magnifying glass from his tool pouch and went over the irregularities bit by bit. When the robot reached him, he ignored it. The sun climbed higher, breakneck fast to a Lunarian. More stars disappeared.
Kaino began to shift about and hum a tune to himself.
“A ferrous alloy, I think,” Ilitu said at length. “You observe whole metallic sheets strewn across the regolith. I deem they’re overlays, not the inner iron bared, although we must verify that. I would guess that this and its fellows are spatter formations. An upheaval flung molten drops and gobbets about. When they came down in a group, they welded together as they solidified, which they would have done very quickly.”
Kaino went alert. “A meteoroid strike? We’ve no sign of a crater.”
“It may have happened when the planetoid was forming out of fragments, itself hot and plastic. … Hai, that suggests the original, catastrophic collision occurred near Jupiter, because I should think a strong magnetic field was present to urge so many gouts along converging arcs. And that suggests enormously about the origin of this body and its orbit … about the early history of the asteroid belt, the entire Solar System—” Ilitu beat fist in palm, over and over. He stared outward at the fading stars.
“If Father could have known!” broke from Kaino.
“Yes. I remember. He would have jubilated.” Ilitu’s softness went thoughtful again. “This is but a preliminary, crude hypothesis of mine. It could be wrong. Already I wonder if this unique planetoid may not have had, in the past, a kind of vulcanism special to itself. It does possess a significant magnetic field of its own, you recall, and the formation here has several resemblances to the Pele’s Hair phenomenon on Earth.”
“Eyach, we can take a few hours,” Kaino said. “Gather more data.”
Ilitu raised his upper lip off the front teeth. His parents would have grinned differently. “I will.”
He took out a reader, keyed a map onto the screen, and studied it. His eyes darted about, correlating what he saw with the cartography done in orbit. Iron growths were scattered across the plain. About two kilometers hence, close to the southern horizon, a metallic band glistered from edge to edge of vision, some three meters wide. On the far side of it reared a whole row of coraloids, up to five meters tall.
“We’ll go yonder,” he said, pointing.
Kaino laughed. “I awaited no less. Ho-hah!”
They set forth, as swiftly as before. In a few minutes Kaino veered. “Where go you?” asked Ilitu without changing course.
“That bush there.” It was small but full of sparkles.
“I’ll study the major objects first. If time remains and you’ve found this one interesting, I’ll come back to it.” Ilitu continued.
Kaino squatted down by the pseudo-shrub. Particles embedded in the darker iron caught sunlight and shone like glass. Maybe that was what they were, he decided after examination: fused silica entrained in the drops that had made the thing. Or they could be another mineral, such as a pyrite. He was no expert. Clearly, though, the geologist’s intuition had been right. Here was nothing notable, merely beautiful. Kaino straightened and started off to rejoin his comrade.
Ilitu had just reached the metallic strip in front of his destination. A leap brought him onto it.
It split asunder. He fell from sight.
“Yaaaa!” screamed Kaino. He went into full low gravity speed. Barely did he check himself at the border of the ribbon.
Ribbon indeed, he saw. This part of it, if not all, was no deposit sprayed across the rocks. It was, or had been, a cover for a pit—a cavern, a crevasse, or whatever—one of the emptinesses that seismic sounding had shown riddled the planetoid, as Ilitu predicted.
It must have been a freak, a sheet of moltenness thrown sidewise rather than downward in those moments of rage when Iron Heath took form. Low weight let it solidify before it dropped into the hole—unless the hole had appeared simultaneously, the ground rent by forces running wild—The layer was thin, and the cosmic rays of four billion years, spalling, transmuting, must have weakened it further—
Kaino went on his belly, crept forward, stuck his helmet over the gap. He failed to notice how the shingle slithered underneath him. Blackness welled below. “Ilitu,” he called. “Ilitu, do you receive me? Can you hear me?”
Silence hummed in his earplugs.
He got a flashlight from his kit and shone it downward. Light returned dim, diffused off a huddled whiteness. Kaino played the beam to and fro. Yes, a spacesuit. Still no response. It was hard to gauge the distance when murk swallowed visual cues. He passed his ray slowly upward. The little pool of undiffused illumination wavered among shadows. An inexperienced man would have been nightmarishly bewildered.
Kaino, intimate with the Moon and certain asteroids, interpreted what he saw. He couldn’t tell how long the fissure was, nor did he care, but it was about 175 centimeters broad here at the top and narrowed bottomwards. Ilitu lay forty or fifty meters below him. A nasty fall, possibly lethal, even in this gravity; but friction with the rough walls might have slowed it. There seemed to be depths beyond the motionless form. Ilitu might be caught on a ledge.
So.
Kaino got his feet and aimed his transmission aloft. The ship was not there at the moment, but her crew had distributed relays in the same orbit. “Code Zero,” he intoned. Absolute emergency. “Kaino on Code Zero.”
Etana’s voice darted at him: “What’s awry?”
Tersely, he explained. “Raise Brandir,” he finished. “We’ll want equipment for snatching him out—a cable and motor to lower a pallet, I’d guess—as well as the full medical panoply.”
“Can’t your Number One robot rescue him?”
Kaino glanced at the machine, which had arrived and stood awaiting his orders. “Nay,” he said, “it’s useless.” That body could not clamber down, and the program could not cope with the unknowns hiding in the dark.
“You may need to haul me up too,” he said. “I’m going after him.”
“No!” she yelled, “Kaino, you—” He heard the gulp. “At least fetch a line for yourself and have the robot hold it.”
“That may well take too long. Ilitu may be dying.”
“He may be dead. Belike he is. You don’t hear him, do you? Kaino, stay!”
“He is my follower. I am a Beynac. Raise Brandir, I told you.” The pilot switched off his widecaster.
He did take a minute to instruct the robot: Go back to the van, bring that wire rope, lower it to him if he was still down in the hole. Meanwhile he removed the bulky pack that held food, reserve water, and field equipment. Having activated his head and breast lamps, he went on all fours to the edge of the gap and set about entering it.
Stones kept skidding around. Twice he nearly lost his hold and tumbled. That made him laugh, low, to himself. On the third try he succeeded, bootsoles braced against one wall, life support unit against the opposite side. He began to work his way downward.
It was wicked going. He could not properly feel the surfaces through his outfit. The lights were a poor help, sliding off lumps, diving into cracks, mingling with shadows that dashed about like cat’s paws of the gloom. Often he started to slip. Only low gravity and quick reflexes let him recover. As he descended and the crevice contracted, his posture made him ever more awkward. Stressed muscles hurt. Sweat soaked his undergarb and stung his eyes. Breath rasped a throat gone dry. He toiled onward.
Wait. Had it grown a touch easier? More flex in the legs—He realized what he had been unable to see from above, that on the side where his feet were, the rift was widening again. If it broadened too much, he could fare no deeper. Unless—
Somehow he maneuvered about until by twisting his neck he could look the way he was bound. Light picked out the sprawled form there and sheened off jagged pieces of the broken roof. Ilitu had indeed fallen onto a narrow shelf projecting from the wall at Kaino’s back. Its ends vanished in the same darkness that gaped beside it. Pure luck. … No, not quite. That being the wall which slanted inward the whole way, and nearer to where the geologist fell through, it must have acted as a chute, its ruggedness catching at spacesuit and pack, slowing and guiding him.
Now that Kaino saw his objective half clearly, he could estimate dimensions and distances. The ledge was about ten meters below him, an easy drop in this weight, but it was less than a meter wide, and next to it yawned a vacantness a full two meters across. Low acceleration would give him a chance to push or kick at the iron, correct his course, but he’d have just three or four seconds, and if he missed his landing, that would doubtless be that.
“Convenient, being 98 percent chimpanzee,” he muttered. After a moment’s study he thrust and let go.
His drop was timeless, utter action. But when impact jarred through his bones and he knew himself safe, he glanced upward, saw the opening high above him full of stars, and laughed till his helmet echoed.
To work. Carefully, lest he go over the rim, he knelt. Ilitu lay on his back. A sheetlike piece of metal slanted across the upper body. It had screened off transmission. Kaino plucked it away, tossed it aside, and heard wheezing breath. He leaned forward. Because he had come down at Ilitu’s head, he saw the face inverted, a chiaroscuro behind the hyalon, lights and shadows aflicker as his lamps moved. The lids were slit-open, the eyeballs ghastly slivers of white. Saliva bubbled pink on the parted lips. “Are you awake?” he asked. The breathing replied.
His search found the telltales on the wrists. “Eyach,” he whispered. Temperature inside the suit was acceptable, but oxygen was at 15 percent and dropping, carbon dioxide and water vapor much too thick. That meant the powerpack was operative but the air recycler knocked out and the reserve bottle emptied. “Hu,” Kaino said, “I came in time by a frog’s whisker, nay?”
He couldn’t make repairs. However, accidents to recyclers were known and feared. There was provision. He reached around his shoulder and released the bypass tube coiled and bracketed on his life support module.
More cautiously, hoping he inflicted no new injury, he eased Ilitu’s torso up. His knee supported it while he deployed the corresponding tube, screwed the two free ends together, and opened the valves. Again he lowered his companion. They were joined by a meter of umbilicus, and his unit did duty for both.
He wrinkled his nose as foul air mingled with fresh. That took a while to clear. Thereafter, as long as neither exerted himself—and neither was about to!—the system was adequate.
He could do nothing more but wait. Curiosity overwhelmed him. Although the surface was metalslippery and sloped down, he put his head over its verge and shot his light that way. A whistle escaped him. Somewhat under the ledge, the opposite wall bulged back inward and the two sides converged. He could not see the bottom where they met, because fifty or sixty meters below him, where the gap was about one meter wide, it was choked with shards from above. Most, bouncing off the walls and this shelf, had gotten jammed there. Some were pointed, some were thin and surely sharp along their broken edges. Even here, to fall on them would be like falling into an array of knives. Space armor could fend them off. His flexible suit could not. Kaino withdrew to a sitting position.
Ilitu’s breath rattled. The minutes grew very long.
A motion caught Kaino’s eye. He flashed his beams at it and saw a line descending. The robot had been obedient to his orders. The line slithered across the ledge and onward before it stopped. With limited judgment, the robot had paid out all.
Kaino saw no stars occluded. Nevertheless the machine must be at the rim of the chasm and thrusting an antenna over, for he received: “Your command executed. Pray, what is next?” On a whim, he had had the synthetic voice made throaty female. He wished now he hadn’t.
“Drag the cable, m-ng, north,” he directed. Inclined though its orbit was, the planetoid had a pole in the same celestial hemisphere as Ursa Minor. “I can’t reach it. … Ah. I did. Stop.” He secured bights around his waist and, with an effort, Ilitu’s, precaution against contingency.
The program had a degree of initiative. “Shall I raise you?”
“No. Stand by.” No telling what the damage to Ilitu was. A major concussion at least, a broken back or rib-ends into the lungs entirely possible. Rough handling might well kill him. That would be the end. The expedition had no facilities for cellular preservation, let alone revival. Better wait for a proper rig, trusting that meanwhile he wouldn’t die or that cerebral hemorrhage wouldn’t harm his brain beyond clone regeneration.
Again Kaino composed his mind. Time trudged. He remembered and looked forward, smiled and regretted, sang a song, said a poem, considered the wording of a message to somebody he cared about. Lunarians are not that different from Earth humans. Often he looked at the stars where they streamed above him.
And ultimately he heard: “Kaino!”
“I am here,” he answered. “Ilitu lives yet.”
“Etana loaded a flitsled with medical supplies, took it down to camp, and returned to the ship,” Brandir said. “I’ve brought it here. She thinks she can land nearby if need be.”
“Best get Ilitu to our van, give him first aid, and then decide what to do.” Kaino explained the situation. “Can you lower a pallet?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ll secure him well, then you winch him aloft, gently. Lest we bump together, I’ll abide until you have him safe.”
“Once you were less patient, little brother,” Brandir laughed.
“I will not be if you keep maundering, dotard,” Kaino retorted. A wild merriment frothed in him too.
The pallet bumped its way down the slanting wall, out of blackness and onto the ledge. Kaino took advantage of weak gravity to hold Ilitu’s back fairly straight as he moved him. He undid the bight, closed and disconnected the air tubes, fastened the straps. “Haul away,” he called. The hurt man rose from his sight.
“I have him,” Brandir transmitted after a few minutes.
“Then let the robot reel me in,” Kaino whooped, “and we’ll go—go—go!”
The cable tautened, drawing him toward the stars.
Afterward Brandir determined what happened. He had rejoined his machinery, which rested well back from the crevasse rim. The robot was very close to it. At the moment of catastrophe, four billion-odd years ago, rocks as well as metal were thrown on high. The horizontal gush of molten iron that made the deck over the crack had a mistlike fringe that promptly congealed into globules along the verge. The stones dropped back on these and hid them. The planetoid swung out into realms where meteoroids are fugitively few. None ever struck nearby to shake this precarious configuration.
Low gravity means low friction with the ground, and here the shingle rested virtually on bearings. The weight at the end of the line tugged at the robot. The regolith underfoot glided. The robot lurched forward. It toppled over the edge and fell in a rain of stones.
Below it, Kaino tumbled back to the shelf, skidded off, and plunged into the lower depth. The knives received him.
In the big viewscreen, surf crashed on a winter shore. The waves ran gray as the sky, burst into white, sent water hissing up the sand almost to the driftwood that lay bleached and skeletal under the cliffs. Wrack flew like smoke low above; spindrift mingled with rainspatters; the skirl and rumble shook air which bore a tang of salt and a breath of chill. It was as if Dagny Beynac’s living room stood alone within that weather.
She thought that maybe she shouldn’t have played this scene. It fitted her mood, she’d had it going since dawnwatch, but it was altogether alien to the young woman before her. Might Etana read it as a sign of hostility, of blame?
“Won’t you be seated?” she asked. Unusual on the Moon so early in a visit, that was an amicable gesture. Besides, her old bones wouldn’t mind. She’d been pacing overmuch lately,, when she wasn’t off on a long walk, through the passageways and around the lake or topside across the crater floor. High time she started returning to everyday.
The guest inclined her head, more or less an equivalent of “Thanks,” and flowed into a chair. Dagny sat down facing her and continued, “Do you care for tea or coffee, or something stronger?”
“Grace, nay.” Etana looked at the hands tightly folded in her lap. “I came because—I would be sure you understand—” Lunarians were seldom this hesitant.
“Go ahead, dear,” Dagny invited softly.
The dark eyes lifted to meet her faded blue. “We thought of how we could leave him … in his honor … beneath a cairn on Iron Heath. Or else we could bring him home, that his kinfolk cremate him and strew his ashes over his mountains. But—”
Dagny waited, hoping her expression spoke gentleness.
“But a freeze-dried mummy!” Etana cried. “What use?” More evenly: “And although we must perforce lie about where and how he ended, to do it at his services were unworthy of him, nay?”
“You’d have attended?” wondered Dagny, taken unawares. Lunarians didn’t bother to scoff at Earth ceremonies, they simply avoided them. Christmas without grandchildren got pretty lonesome.
“Ey, your friends would have come and misliked it did his siblings and companionates hold away.” Etana paused. “But without a body to commit to its rest, our absence is of indifference, true?”
“Actually, I wouldn’t have staged a funeral,” Dagny said. “My man didn’t want any. I don’t for myself. It’s enough if you remember.”
“Nothing else? His companionates will—No matter.”
Dagny didn’t inquire about those rites, or whatever they were. The younger generations weren’t exactly secretive; they just didn’t share their customs with outsiders, in word or deed. Recalling the frustration of several anthropologists, she felt a smile skim her lips, the first since she got the news.
Etana went on: “In the end, Brandir and I did what we judged was due his honor and ours.”
Dagny nodded. “I know.” The brother had told her. When the velocity of the homebound ship was optimal for it, Kaino departed, lashed to a courier rocket, on a trajectory that would end in the sun.
Etana struggled further before she could get out: “I feared Brandir might not have made clear how—I felt—and therefore I have come to you.”
“Thank you,” Dagny said, genuinely moved. They weren’t heartless, the Lunarians, her children, their children. They weren’t, not really. But wisest to steer clear of anything this personal. “How is Ilitu?”
She had been too busy to inquire, after learning that he returned alive but in need of spinal cord regrowth and lesser biorepair. Too busy with grief, and handling condolences, and blessed, blessed work.
Etana brightened. “He fares well, should soon be hale. Thus he becomes a memorial unto Kaino.”
That sounded rehearsed. However, the girl’s happiness about the fact appeared sincere, so probably her gratitude was also. “You care for him, then?”
Etana went masklike.
Dagny made haste to change the subject. “That world my son helped explore, I’d like to think he’ll be remembered there as well. If only—” No, better not pursue this either.
Etana did, turning sympathetic while remaining firm. “Nay, you realize it must wait in the knowledge of a chosen small few. Else would Earth close it to us.”
Paranoia? Maybe, maybe not. Temerir’s discovery did have the potential of a colony—for Lunarians. The gravity was right; the minerals were abundant and easily available, not buried under many kilometers of ice as in comets; water, ammonia, and organics were present, with more to be had in the same general region of space.
Who, though, would want to dwell that far from the sun, in a cold close to absolute zero?
Dagny supposed Brandir and his confederates were being cagey. After all, today Lunarians weren’t forbidden, but neither were they encouraged to prospect and develop the asteroids of the Belt and the lesser moons of the outer planets. And that was in spite of their being far better suited for the conditions than Earthtype humans, in some respects possibly superior to robots.
She couldn’t resist probing a bit: “When will you open it to yourselves?”
“When the time is befitting. That may well be long after we today are dead.”
It was inhuman to think so far ahead, and to feel assured the secret would stay inviolate. Dagny sighed. “Yes, Brandir, Temerir, Fia, they’ve discussed it with me. Never fear, I’ll keep my promise, I won’t betray you.”
“Honor shall be yours,” said Etana with rare warmth.
She clearly didn’t want to talk about Kaino, she who had shared him. What now was in the breasts of his other mates? It had been good of this one to come speak, however briefly, with his mother. Dagny wouldn’t risk pushing her any further. Just the same, here was a chance to set forth something that could be … his invisible cenotaph.
“I do have a suggestion,” Dagny began. “Have you decided on a name for your little planet?”
Etana showed surprise, which was gratifying. “Nay. Brandir and I touched on it once during the voyage, but reached no idea. Nor have others considered it since, to my knowledge.” And that wasn’t quite human either. The young woman sat still for a bit. “A name will be useful, yes.”
“Proserpina,” Dagny said.
“Hai?”
“As distant and lonely as it is, out beyond Pluto, who was the god of the underworld and the dead—his queen sounds right to me.”
“Have we not already a Proserpina?”
Dagny shrugged. “Probably. An asteroid? I haven’t checked. Never mind. Duplications exist, you know.”
“What suppose your children of this?”
“I haven’t asked them yet. It only occurred to me yesterday. What do you think?”
Etana cradled her chin and gazed into air. “A musical name. The goddess of the dead—because you lost a son to her?”
The sea noises roared and wailed.
Dagny sat straight as she said, “And because every springtime Proserpina comes back to the living world.”