Poul Anderson: A Stone in Heaven

“You should have come here more often,” Runeberg said.

“You know I could hardly drag myself away from my work, ever, and then mostly to visit my parents,” Banner replied. “Since Dad’s death—” She broke off.

The big blond man regarded her carefully. She stood profile to, so that he saw the curve of her nose below the high forehead, the set of her wide mouth and the jut of her chin and the long sweep of her throat down to the small bosom. Clad in a shimmerlyn gown—for practice at being a lady, she had said—she stood tall and slim, athletic despite the scattered silver in a shoulder-length light-brown mane. Then she turned around, briefly silhouetting a cheekbone ivory against the sky, and her eyes confronted his. They were perhaps her best feature, large and luminous green under dark brows.

“Yes,” he blurted, “you’ve let yourself get crazily wrapped up in those beings. Sometimes I’d find you slipping into styles of thought, emotion, that, well, that weren’t human. It must have gotten worse since I left. Come back, Miri.”

He disliked calling me Banner, she remembered. “You imply that involvement with an intelligent, feeling race was bad in the first place,” she said. “Why? On the whole, I’ve had a wonderful, fascinating, exciting life. And how else can we get to understand them? A different psychology, explored in depth … What can we not learn, also about ourselves?”

Runeberg sighed. “Who is really paying attention? Be honest. You’re studying one clutch of sophonts among countless thousands; and they’re barbarians, impoverished, insignificant. Their planet was always more interesting to science than they were, and it was investigated centuries back, in plenty of detail. Xenology is a dying discipline anyway. Every pure science is; we live in that kind of era. Why do you think your foundation is marginally funded? Hai-ah, it’d have been closed down before you were born, if Ramnu didn’t happen to have some value to Hermetian industry. You’ve sacrificed every heritage that was yours—for what, Miri?”

“We’ve wasted time on that battleground in the past,” she snapped. Her tone softened. “I don’t want to quarrel, Sten. You mean well, I know. From your viewpoint, I suppose you’re right.”

“I care about you, my very dear friend,” he said. And it hurt you from the start to learn what I’d lost , she did not answer aloud. My marriage— Already established in the profession when he took a fresh graduate from the Galactic Academy for his bride, Feodor Sumarokov had seen their appointments to Ramnu as a steppingstone to higher positions; when he left after three years, she would not. My true love —She had never wedded Jason Kamunya, because they wanted to do that back on Dayan where her parents were, and somehow they never found a time when so long an absence wouldn’t harmfully interrupt their research, and meanwhile they could live and work together … until that day in their fourth year when a stone falling from a height under seven gravities shattered his air helmet and head … My chance for children —Well, perhaps not yet. She was only forty-four. But not all the gero treatment known to man could stave off menopause for more than a decade, or add more than two or three to a lifespan; and where she was, she had had access to nothing but routine cell therapy. My home, my kindred, my whole civilization—

Ramnu is my home! Yewwl and her folk are my kin in everything but flesh. And what is Technic civilization worth any longer? Unless I can make it save my oath-sister’s world.

Banner smiled and reached out to stroke the man’s cheek. “Thank you for that,” she murmured. “And for a lot else.” Raising her glass: “ Shalom.”

Rims clinked together. The liquor was cold and pungent on her tongue. She and he reclined facing each other. Twilight deepened.

“You completed your business today?” he inquired.

“Yes. Inconspicuously, I hope.”

He frowned. “You really are obsessive about secrecy, aren’t you?”

“Or forethoughtful.” Her voice wavered the least bit. “Sten, you did do your best to handle my reservation and such confidentially, didn’t you?”

“Of course, since you asked. I’m not sure why you did.”

“I explained. If the Duke knew, he might well decide to stop me. And he could, in a dozen different ways.”

“Why would he, though?”

Banner took a protracted sip. Her free hand fumbled in her sash pocket for a cigarette case. “He’s neutronium-solid set against any project to reverse the glaciation on Ramnu.”

“Hoy? … True, true, you complained to me, in person and afterward in those rare letters you sent, that he won’t consider Hermes making the effort.” Runeberg drew breath for an argument. “Maybe he is being ungenerous. We could afford it. But he may well deem—in fact, you’ve quoted him to me to that effect—that our duty to ourselves is overriding. Hermes isn’t poor, but it’s not the rich, powerful world it used to be, either, and we’re developing plenty of problems, both domestic and vis-a-vis the Imperium. I can understand how Duke Edwin may think an expensive undertaking for the sake of aliens who can never pay us back—how that might strain us dangerously, rouse protest, maybe even provoke an attempt at revolution.”

Banner started her smoke before she said bitterly, “Yes, he must feel insecure, yes, indeed. It’s not as if he belonged to the House of Tamarin, or as if constitutional government still existed here. His grandfather was the latest in a string of caudillos, and he himself eased his elder brother off the throne.”

“Now, wait,” Runeberg protested. “You realize I’m not too happy with him either. But he is doing heroic things for Hermes, and he does have ample popular support. If he has no Tamarin genes in him, he does carry a few Argolid ones, distantly, but from the Founder of the Empire just the same. It’s the Imperium that’s jeopardized its own right to rule—Hans Molitor seizing the crown by force—later robbing us of Mirkheim, to buy the goodwill of the money lords on Terra—” He checked himself. It was talk heard often nowadays, in private. But he didn’t want to speak anger this evening. Moreover, she was leaving tomorrow in hopes of getting help there.

“The point is,” he said, “why should the Duke mind having your project financed and organized from outside? He ought to welcome that. Most of the resources and labor could come from our economic sphere. We’d get nice jobs, profits, contacts, every sort of benefit.”

“I don’t know why he should object,” Banner admitted. “I do know he will, if he finds out. I’ve exchanged enough letters and tapes with his immediate staff. I’ve come in person, twice, to plead, and got private audiences both times. Oh, the responses were more or less courteous, but always absolutely negative; and meeting with him, I could sense outright hostility.”

Runeberg gulped from his drink before he ventured to say: “Are you sure you weren’t reading that into his manner? No offense, fairling, but you are not too well acquainted with humankind.”

“I’ve objective facts in addition, in full measure,” she retorted. “My last request was that he ask the Emperor to aid Ramnu. His answer, through an undersecretary, was that this would be politically inadvisable. I’m not too naive to recognize when I’m being fobbed off. Especially when the message closed by stating that they were tired of this business, and if I persisted in it I could be replaced. Edwin Cairncross is quite willing to use his influence on Terra to crush one obscure scientist!”

She drew hard on her cigarette, leaned forward, and continued: “That’s not the only clue. For instance, why were you discharged from General Enterprises? Everybody I talked to was astounded. You’d been doing outstanding work.”