Poul Anderson - We Have Fed Our Sea

“Yes. Of course he did.”

“Then that’s what matters. I’ll think of a few questions later, if you give me time. But that was the only important one.”

Maclaren looked around the room. Through its shadows he saw pilot’s manuals on the shelves, stones and skins and gods brought from beyond the sky; he saw the Sirian binary like twin hells upon darkness, but they were very beautiful. He offered: “Your son was in your own tradition.”

“Better, I hope,” said the old man. “There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers.”

Tamara stood up. “But that’s what there isn’t!” she cried all at once. “There’s no sense! There’s just dying and dying and dying. What for? So that we can walk on another planet, learn another fact? What have we gained? What have we really done? And why? What did we do that your god sends our men out there now?”

She clamped her hands together. They heard how the breath rasped in her. She said at last, “I’m sorry,” and sat back down.

Magnus Ryerson looked up. And his eyes were not old. He let the surf snarl on the rocks of his home for a while. And then he answered her: “ For that is our doom and our pride.”

“What?” She started. “Oh. In English. Terangi, he means—” She said it in Interhuman.

Maclaren sat quite still.

Ryerson opened his book. “They have forgotten Kipling now,” he said. “One day they will remember. For no people live long, who offer their young men naught but fatness and security. Tamara, lass, let your son hear this one day. It is his song too, he is human.”

The words were unknown to Maclaren, but he listened and thought he understood.

When Ryerson had finished, Maclaren stood up, folded his hands and bowed. “ Sensei,” he said, “give me your blessing.”

“What?” The other man leaned back into shadows, and now he was again entirely old. You could scarcely hear him under the waves outside. “You’ve naught to thank me for, lad.”

“No, you gave me much,” said Maclaren. “You have told me why men go, and it isn’t for nothing. It is because they are men.”