Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Smith suggested “pessimistic.”

“No, that’s not on. Not ‘sad,’ either. ‘Melancholy.’ That’s the one. Are you all melancholy?”

“Not at all. For example, I’m a quite cheerful person, but I don’t demonstrate that I am in such ways as you might. We have different vocabularies of emotion.”

“So we’d need a translator.”

“I doubt that there is one. We’ll have to devise our own mutual glossary.”

“Who wants more coffee?” Smith asked.

Kalkas never learned the exact ratio of his success to Smith’s in the contest that Smith never realized had been joined, but he was confident that Strode came more often to him than she went to the Marsman. He was glad she was active; he would have found it tedious to hunt.

Kalkas became acquainted with the other passengers and staff; he found a bridge game, and during the rest of the transfer he spoke to Smith no more than half a dozen times. The Marsman’s couch was too far around the curve of the supercargo gallery from the Earthman’s to allow Kalkas to mount even an informal watch. Thus he had to infer from irregular observation and tangential conversations with Strode the state of affairs between Marsman and Moonwoman. The triangle bore some resemblance to the one he had made with the Troyants. Kalkas was Kalkas, Ed Smith was not unlike Ferenc Troyant, but Nadya Strode had little in common with Macky. Even had Macky ever traveled, she would have been no player; her loyalty to Ferenc, bound up as it was with her dedication to Mars, had never broken, no matter how the stress of her passions distorted it. Occasionally Kalkas had wondered if her desire for him was anything but some oddly mutated element of her diplomacy; certainly his own involvement had proceeded as much from his exasperation with Ferenc as from his taste for Macky.

Often enough he had regretted that the involvement had ever grown past that early duplicity, for he had learned that he could purchase joy only with detachment. The execution of no other duty had hurt him so much as retiring from Mars, yet even as he departed from his last hour with Macky he felt relief at the completion of the affair. The news, eight years later, of her death had struck him as hardly more than a fact.

When Kalkas saw his daughter for the first time in fifteen years, she was seated at a programming console making patterns flash in a readout globe; he scarcely glanced at her. Neither did she look up from her work as the Executive Engineer explained how the tunneling machines and, indeed, all the robots were directed by the procomps arrayed here. The Instruction Center was the third stop on the tour Kalkas was being given, following a quick hike along the primary tunnel and a glance into the main extension in progress, preceding a more leisurely inspection of the slag dumps, the labs, and, as a climax, the surface dome. Kalkas had no need to pretend interest; the factitiousness of the Blushing Tunnels absorbed and disquieted him. Alone of the permanent settlements, Blushing began and continues with neither a political nor an economic purpose. The four older colonies expend energy and capital materiel, Libya Dome and Boilerplate contributing some of their people, for an enterprise from which none can expect any goods in return. Blushing is the most permanent research station ever established. The United States at their grandest never ventured such a pure extravagance.

“I hesitate to open an unpleasant subject,” Kalkas said, “but do you have contingency plans in case the inner spaceworlds discontinue their support?”

The Executive Engineer seemed to be surprised by the notion. “There’d be no reason for ‘em to do that. Jupiter’s got to be the biggest thing this side of the sun.” Then he shrugged and made the qualification pro forma: “Well—star flight.”

“Whether or not it ever needs to be, could Blushing become self-sustaining?”

“I doubt it. There’s probably no recoverable iron in the whole ball. I random we’d move to Io.”

“You wouldn’t petition Luna for immigration?”

“What damn for? Our rationale’s Jupiter studies.”

By the time they reached the conveyors that rose to the dumps, Kalkas was certain that he wanted to secure his passage home on Vega; the tedium of a three-month transfer could not be worse than a seven-month confinement among these appalling epistemophiles. But first he must devise a meeting with his daughter. He wished he knew what she looked like.

The Executive Engineer had hinted, very broadly, that the vision of Jupiter from the surface dome would be entrancing; he was prepared, he implied, to allow Kalkas an hour or so of contemplation before dragging him down again. In the event, it was Kalkas who suggested after fifteen minutes that they go below and who had twice to repeat the suggestion. The colors, the banded clouds, the rather foreshortened Red Spot, the visible moils of the deepest, most agitated planetary atmosphere in the System, all combined into a handsome display, but Jupiter was no more imposing than any other planet seen from a close orbit. The violet blush along the horizon was more interesting but no more seductive, since it reminded Kalkas of the energies and ingenuity required to insulate this place.

As they descended in the elevator Kalkas tried to lighten the Executive Engineer’s disappointment by asking questions about the progress of the Jovian researches. The Ganyman turned out to be a competent popularizer; Kalkas learned about gas-giant tectonics, quasi-phoenix reactions, and ammonia organics. It was not information that Kalkas cared to retain beyond the moment, but the Executive Engineer’s enthusiasm for it suggested a minor cultural puzzle.

“I should have thought,” Kalkas said, “that Jupiter would allure you more as studied through procomp readouts than by unaided vision.”

The Executive Engineer was silent a few seconds. “I never thought about it,” he said. “Maybe we respond to it directly because we know what it means.”

Having wearied of science reportage, Kalkas did not ask what it meant. Although he wondered if such mysticism could have drawn Cris Troyant to Ganymede, her motives scarcely concerned him. Yet he needed, for the sake of his errand, to know more about her, so, over coffee in the canteen, he turned the conversation to the staffing of the Tunnels. The Executive Engineer would rather have talked of squirms or grazers or scaphes, perhaps, but he accommodated himself to his guest’s wishes.

“More from Libya Dome than Boilerplate, pos, more to give. But that makes no problems. Most Mercuryfolk’re only a generation, two, away from Mars. I random there’ll never be real difference. Possibly a little in the musculature.”

“You’re a Mercuryman, aren’t you?”

“Pos, how’d you random? But I’m a Ganyman now.”

When the Executive Engineer’s great-grandchildren thus named themselves, Kalkas thought, they would be no less than morphogenetically precise.

“Do you, perhaps, know a young Ganywoman, who used to be a Marswoman, named Troyant?”

The Ganyman did, identifying her as one of the best procomp handlers in Blushing, and Kalkas explained that she was the daughter of a Martian acquaintance. Since the Executive Engineer was not curious about the connection, Kalkas did not bother to lie about it; he turned his attention, instead, to persuading the Engineer that the notion of asking Cris to join them for dinner was the Engineer’s own. They spent the rest of the afternoon in preliminary discussion of trade ratios: so many tons of unprocessed europium oxide for so much cloth, so much paper, so much liqueur, and so forth. Kalkas had been prepared to invent minor difficulties in the interest of plausibility, but the lack of any standard medium of exchange or any precedent for this transaction made that unnecessary. The Ganyfolk— two others had joined the Executive Engineer—were hard bargainers, and so Kalkas had two motives for agreeing that business talk should be forbidden during dinner.