Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

Gretana felt an unexpected flicker of gratification which had the effect of reawakening all her doubts. “Look, this is wrong. I really don’t want to go on with it.”

“There’s nothing to go on with ,” Keith said. “We have already committed the ghastly, monstrous, unspeakable crime of saying hello to each other, so we might as well relax for one day and practise the lost art of conversation. I’ll tell you what I’ll do…” Keith showed signs of being overtaken by one of his unmanageable laughs. “…for every hour that you listen to me I’ll listen to you for two. How’s that?”

Gretana felt a similar urge to laugh and knew it had sprung from a preliminary easing of tension, a foretaste of what it would be like to lay down the burden of constantly being an alien among aliens. The idea was so appealing, her emotional defences so low, that she was predisposed to like and trust the tall man even though he was a stranger to her. Or was he? Looking at Keith’s face as he coped with the task of not laughing, she wondered if they could have met before they left Mollan.

“Do you come from Karlth?” she said, uncomfortably aware that asking the question signified acceptance of his proposal.

“Keith of Karlth?” He smiled and shook his head. “That sounds ridiculous. No, I’m from Eyrej province, beautiful home of the dewberry and the snowcake. I’ll tell you all about it in boring detail if you like.”

“We’d better go to my apartment.”

“Your apartment!” Keith allowed his jaw to sag. “What sort of a person do you think I am?”

Gretana laughed aloud from the sheer pleasure of being party to an exclusive joke, a private communication from one Mollanian to another which meant, for once, that it was the Terrans who were the outsiders. Keith had been contrasting the frenetic sexual activity of Earth to that of Mollan and giving her an unnecessary assurance that he would honour the behavioural codes of their own culture.

“You know,” she said warmly, “I’d almost forgotten how to laugh.”

“Sounds as though you suffer from either a bad memory or bad jokes.”

“My memory is excellent,” Gretana replied, wondering why she had experienced yet another flicker of uneasiness as she glanced up at her new companion. She was inherently law-abiding, so the most likely explanation was that her conscience was troubled over the breaking of the Bureau’s non-association rule—but the idea that she had seen Keith somewhere lingered in her mind. She was toying with it, preparing to question him further about his past, when there came a thought which perhaps had been too obvious to occur earlier. Keith, as a Mollanian, must have undergone surgery to enable him to work on Earth. His present appearance was substantially different to what it had been on Mollan, therefore her memory had to be playing tricks.

Relieved at having untangled a mental knot, she relaxed and began to anticipate the comfort of a day without loneliness.

Keith had stated his intention to leave at eight in the evening, and Gretana timed the meal for 6.30 so that they could continue talking at a leisurely pace while they ate. The global food shortages had had one benefit as far as she was concerned—a wide variety of vegetable proteins were available in the stores, and she could look after her nutritional needs without resorting to animal products. She planned a menu which in many respects was similar to what they would have had on Mollan, and even—by marinating small grapes in a peach liqueur—managed to approximate Keith’s beloved dewberries. He remained in or near the kitchen while the meal was in preparation and they talked continuously, obsessively, about all things Mollanian—deliberately concentrating on homely trivia—with Keith breaking into his infectious whole-body laughs each time they touched on a subject that particularly appealed to him.

With the passage of the hours Gretana’s conscience had ceased its murmurings, and by the time they sat down to eat she felt happier than at any time since her arrival on Earth. The starter dishes were good and the surroundings pleasant, she was mildly intoxicated by the conversation, and the darkness beyond the triple glass could have been that of a peaceful Mollanian evening, except for…She glanced towards the window on the east side of the room, knowing exactly where to look, and saw that a grain-coloured full moon was rising over the islands of Chesapeake Bay. Repressing a shiver, she went to the window and closed the Venetian blind. Keith’s heavy-lidded eyes were intent on her as she returned to the table and sat down.

“That won’t change anything,” he said perceptively. “It’s still there.”

“I know—but I’m practising being as blind as a Terran.” Aware that she had sounded callous, she lowered her gaze and stirred whorls of Creemette into her soup.

“These people are every bit as human as we are,” he said gently. “They’ve just been unlucky.”

“I know that.” Annoyed at her own verbal clumsiness, she was unwilling to back down. “I know they can’t help being blind.”

“The point is that they would be just as aware of third-order forces as members of any other race if it wasn’t for…” Keith paused. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to lecture you.”

“It’s all right.”

“Here I am—a first-time guest at your table—and I begin acting as if you were one of Old Father Vekrynn’s Preservationist puppets.”

“I told you it’s quite all right.” Gretana smiled, determined to hide the fact that she had been disturbed by Keith’s remarks. He appeared to have set out to make it obvious that he had little respect for Warden Vekrynn or the Bureau’s central policy, possibly with the intention of sounding out her own views, and her political naivety was such that she had no idea how to deal with the situation. Could he have been joking? Or masking loyalty with cynicism?

“Anyway, I expect you’ll have noticed by this time that Terrans aren’t totally insensitive to third-order forces,” Keith said, his interest apparently shifting.

“I’ve seen books on astrology.”

“That’s pure mumbo-jumbo, except that they’ve almost got it right when they talk about the influence of planets when they’re in square or trine, but I’m talking about the direct sensing of skord lines. I’ve travelled quite a bit in Europe and I’ve seen too many ancient megaliths placed directly on lines for it to have been coincidental. Also, it’s amazing how many times you’ll find that an old tavern or church has been built squarely on a minor node. They didn’t consciously realise what they were doing, of course. They must have looked over an area and decided that one particular place felt right for a particular kind of building, without ever knowing what influenced their decisions.

“And you get the opposite effect with modern developments which have been laid out by impersonal planning authorities. You’ll get a pub which has been sited way off a line or a node, and the local residents don’t want to patronise it, but they can’t tell you why. All they know is that it is somehow out of place. There was an eighteenth century English poet called Pope, who was interested in garden layout and architecture, and his advice to planners was ‘consult the genius of the place’. Now, if that doesn’t indicate an…” Keith stopped in mid-sentence and blinked apologetically over a poised spoonful of soup.

“I’m afraid you pressed my starter button,” he said. “When anybody presses my starter button—off I go.”

Gretana shook her head, denying the need for an apology. “I was interested.”

“Really? I’m glad about that. I’ve developed a great respect for the people of this planet, you see, and it sickens me the way they’re regarded as freaks. It’s so unfair .”