Poul Anderson: Star of the Sea

And maybe that is all, Everard thought. Maybe those variations in text have a safe origin that the Patrol detectives missed, and we’re chasing shadows. Certainly we have no evidence of anybody trying to monkey with events. Well, whatever the answer, we’ve got to find it.

On the third day he phoned Floris from his hotel and proposed dinner, as they had had on their first meeting. “We’ll relax, talk small talk, touch on our mission lightly if at all. Tomorrow we’ll lay our plans. Okay?” At his request, she named the restaurant and met him there.

The Ambrosia dealt in Surinam-Caribbean food. On Stadthouderskade, in a quiet neighborhood near the Museumplein, it was intimate, right on a canal. Besides the pretty waitress, the black cook came forth to discuss their meal with them beforehand in fluent English. The wine was just right, too. Maybe the sense of evanescence, this warmth and light and savor no more than a moment in an unbounded darkness, something that could come to never having been, gave depth to pleasure.

“I will walk back,” said Floris at the end. “The evening is so beautiful.” Her place was a mile or two distant.

“I’ll see you to your door, if I may,” Everard replied gladly.

She smiled. Her hair shone against the dusk in the windows like remembered sunlight. “Thank you. I hoped.”

They went out into mild air. It smelled of spring, for rain had cleansed it earlier and traffic was rather thin, mostly a background pulsing. A canal boat chugged by, wake a-glisten. “Thank you,” she repeated. “That was delightful. Exactly what would cheer me up.”

“Well, good.” He took tobacco pouch from pocket and started filling his pipe. “Though I’m sure you’d have rebounded quite fast in any case.”

They turned from the water and passed between old facades. “Yes, I have met terrible things before,” she assented. The mood at dinner, which they had both carefully maintained carefree, was slipping off, though her tone stayed level and her expression calm. “Not violence on that scale, no, but men dead or wounded after fights, and mortal sickness, and—many cruel fates.”

Everard nodded. “Yeah, this era of ours has seen all hell let out for noon, but scarcely more than others. The main difference is, nowadays they imagine it could be better.”

Floris sighed. “At first it was romantic, the living past, but then—”

“Well, you did pick a mighty rough milieu. At that, though, the real guignol was in Rome.”

She gave him a close look. “I cannot believe you harbor any illusions about the barbarians being nature’s noblemen. I soon lost mine. They were every bit as ruthless. They were simply less efficient.”

Everard struck match to bowl. “Why did you choose them for your specialty, if I may ask? Sure, somebody had to do the job, but with your capabilities you could have taken your pick of a lot of societies.”

She smiled. “They tried to persuade me of that, after I graduated from the Academy. One agent spent hours telling me how I would like his Duchy of Brabant. He was sweet. But I was stubborn.”

“How come?”

“The more I think back, the less clear to me my motives are. It seemed at the time that—Yes, if you don’t mind, I would like to tell you.”

He held his arm toward her. She took it. Her stride easily matched his and was more supple. His free hand cradled the little hearth of his pipe. “Please do,” he said. “I haven’t pried into your records beyond the indispensable minimum, but I can’t help feeling curious. They wouldn’t contain the true explanation anyway.”

“I suppose it goes back to my parents.” She was gazing beyond them both, the tiniest line between her brows. Her voice flowed almost dreamily. “I am their only child, born in 1950.” And by now a good deal older, along your world line, than the calendar shows, he knew. “My father grew up in what was the Dutch East Indies. Do you recollect, we Dutch founded Jakarta, and our name for it was Batavia? He was young when first the Nazi Germans invaded the Netherlands, then later the Japanese overran Southeast Asia. He fought them as a sailor in what navy we had left. My mother, at home, a schoolgirl, was involved with the resistance, the underground press.”

“Proud people,” Everard murmured.

“My parents met and married after the war, settled in Amsterdam. They are still alive, retired, he from his business, she from teaching history, Dutch history.” Yes, he thought, you return from each expedition to the day you left, because you don’t want to miss time you can see them in before they die, never knowing what you truly do. Bad enough that they’re disappointed of grandchildren. “They did not boast about their parts in the war. But I was . . . was bound? . . . yes, bound to live always with the knowledge of it, and with the whole past of my country. Patriotism? Call it what you like. These are my folk. What made them what they are? What seed, what roots? The origins fascinated me, and at the university I studied to be an archaeologist.”

Everard knew that already, as well as the fact that she had been an athlete at close to championship standards and had traveled off the tourist routes into a couple of difficult, somewhat dangerous places. It caught the attention of a Patrol recruiter, who got her to take the tests and, when she passed, revealed their meaning. His induction had gone similarly.

“Just the same,” he said, “you elected a culture where a woman is badly hampered.”

She responded a little sharply. “You must at least have seen a résumé showing that I managed. You must know about Patrol disguises.”

“Sorry. No offense. They’re fine for short visits.” It wasn’t far uptime from this year that things like whiskers and vocal registers could be faked to near perfection. Coarse, baggy fabrics, suitably padded, hid curves. Hands might be a giveaway, but hers were big for a woman and if she claimed youthfulness, their shape and lack of hair need not excite comment. “But—” Occasions could too readily arise when clothes should come off among companions, as when bathing. Or something like a fight could, perhaps brought on by a countenance that remained inescapably muliebral-effeminate, barbarians would think. No matter how well trained, a woman, in a situation where high-tech weapons were forbidden, lacked the upper-body musculature and surge strength of a man.

“Limited uses,” she admitted. “It was often frustrating. I actually considered—” She broke off.

“Changing your sex?” he inquired gently after half a minute.

Her nod was stiff.

“It needn’t have been permanent, you know.” Future operations didn’t involve surgery or hormone shots; they took place at the molecular level, rebuilding the organism from the DNA up. “Of course, it’s a pretty big deal. You’d only do it for a mission years long, at a minimum.”

Her glance challenged him. “Would you?”

“Hell, no!” he exclaimed. Thereupon he thought, Was that too strong a reaction? Intolerant? “But remember, I was born in Middle America, 1924.”

Floris laughed and squeezed his arm. “I doubted my mind, my basic personality, could change. Male, I would be a complete homosexual. In that society, a worse handicap than being a woman. Which, furthermore, I like.”

He grinned. “That’s been obvious right along.”

Down, boy. No personal involvement on the job. It could prove lethal. Intellectually, I wish she were a man.

Her feeling must have corresponded, for she shied off as well and they went on a while without speaking. It was a companionable silence, though. They were crossing the park, greenness fragrant around them, lamplight falling through leafage to dapple the path, when he broke it: