“We haven’t got a thermal unit. Quick! Unroll your sleeping bag, open it fully, spread it out.” Lissa released her backpack, dropped it, squatted to pluck at the fastenings of her sack.
He followed suit while he asked, “What’ve you got in mind?”
“Warming him, of course. Putting him between the padded fabrics and ourselves.” She glanced about, saw a spot that wasn’t truly level but was not so canted that they would roll off, and brought her bag there. Returning, she said, “It’ll take both of us to carry him. Susaians are massier than you’d think.”
Hebo had the strength to be gentle as he hauled the limp form up across his shoulders. Lissa took the head end. Grunting with effort, they bore Orichalc over and laid him down on her bedding, stretched out. Hebo fetched his and put it above. “Now what?” he inquired.
“Clothes off,” Lissa directed. He gaped. “Strip, I said! To chaos with modesty.” She ripped at her garments.
He removed his more slowly, eyes at first locked on her. Then, doubtless realizing how he stared, he swiveled his head away. A moment later he turned his back while he completed the task. She was already between the bags. As he faced her again, he tried to cover himself with one hand. Though big, it wasn’t quite enough.
Lissa couldn’t help herself. Laughter pealed. “Oh, fout, don’t worry!” she called. “I’d feel slighted if you did not react. C’mon, join the party.”
He grinned and obeyed. They snuggled close on either side of Orichalc. That put their arms in contact across the Susaian while glance met glance over his head. The chill made them shiver too. Then as heat flowed from them, replenishing itself within, and the victim’s blood began to respond, they felt a growing voluptuous comfort.
“Yeah, I recall hearing of this trick,” he said. “Never had to use it before, and I doubt I’ll ever do it again with so shapely a trailmate.”
Respond amicably, but don’t be too encouraging, Lissa warned herself. “Thank you, kind sir. We’ll be here a fairish while. May as well relax and enjoy it, now that we know it’s working.”
“It does feel good, saving a life. Uh, that sounds smug, doesn’t it? Wasn’t meant to be.”
“You mean it doesn’t fit your rough-and-tough image. Well, I admit to a touch of smugness in me, and consider it well-earned. Relax, I said.”
“How to pass the time? Not with more wrangling, I hope.”
“Me too. We must both have a lot of stories from our pasts that we haven’t swapped.”
“Good idea. Want to start?”
“What?” she teased. “A man doesn’t snatch at a chance to talk about himself?”
“I know my biography.” A shadow passed over his face. He could not yet be quite sure how much of it was gone from him. He lightened again, but she decided to steer clear of talk about Earth. “Yours is new.”
“No, do go first, please.”
He regarded her for a moment. “You want something to get your mind off fretting about your friend, don’t you?” he asked softly. “All right, I’ll try.”
So he has that much sensitivity, she thought. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Still, it’s good to know. She let her hand brush across his. “Thank you.”
“Um-m-m, something really different from right now.… This happened maybe fifty years ago, to a fellow I knew. You not being a girl fresh out of convent school,” whatever that meant, “it shouldn’t offend you too much.”
The anecdote was bawdy and funny. Two hapless lovers, stranded on an asteroid with supplies and equipment but otherwise only their two spacesuits, and nothing else to do until the relief ship would arrive and rescue them, weeks hence, applying their engineering ingenuity to the problem—Lissa whooped laughter. Only later did she wonder who the man was to whom the incident had really happened.
As if in response, Orichalc writhed a bit, raised his head, let it sink again but whispered a few words. Lissa’s trans was in her pack. However, by now the Susaian understood Anglay. “Everything is well,” she said gladly. “Rest. Get warm. We’ll soon take you home.”
“To New Halla?” Hebo asked.
“To our base on the coast,” Lissa replied. “From there, we can call for further transportation if need be, but I don’t think we’ll have to. A couple of days’ relaxation ought to put Orichalc in fine fettle.”
“What’ll he do with it? Isn’t the upland project spoiled?”
“Not permanently. First he can join another group, maybe my river cruise—”
The muzzle brushed her cheek. “S-s-s,” she heard, and words that must mean something like, “I would enjoy that, your company, darling comrade.” She patted the big bald head.
“Meanwhile somebody can talk with Uldor at Forholt,” she continued. “If he’s up to it, and I bet he soon will be, we can arrange audiovisual transmissions, so a new expedition can have the benefit of his advice till he’s recovered himself. I can lead it, once we’ve taken care of my canoers, if nobody better is available.”
He studied her for a spell before he murmured, “My God, you’re a hopeful one still. But just what is it you’re so hopeful for?”
“I’ve tried to tell you.”
“In snatches. We keep being interrupted.” He smiled ruefully. “Or interrupting ourselves. I only got from you what I’d heard about in a fuzzy, general way. It’d always seemed too far-fetched to me to bet the store on. Maybe, while we wait here, you could rightfully explain.”
Now she was happy, yes, eager to discuss immediate reality. “It hasn’t been a secret, but it hasn’t been publicized either, so I suppose I can’t blame you for not knowing more. Partly that’s because the people working on it don’t want to make overblown promises. They, we need more scientific evidence, more data on the Freydisan biosphere and its ecologies, before we can draw up a comprehensive scheme.”
Go ahead, take the risk. “Also, if we raise premature expectations, they’d be bound to cause public disappointment and disbelief. This is a long-range, gradual thing. And there are those, even on New Halla, who’d take advantage of that disappointment to undermine support and build opposition. No offense, Torben. Honestly, none. We know full well the colony needs a base of conventional industries to start from, to build on. What we want to prevent is them becoming much larger and more widespread than they are. That leads toward over-commitment, outright dependency, and the end result—I’ve spoken already of the end result. Certain interests want exactly that to happen. They stand to profit hugely. Not just in return on their investments, but in the power that control of such a system will give them.” In a rush: “I believe as independent a spirit as you would stand against that.”
He nodded, showing no resentment. “In principle, sure.” He grinned a bit. “I don’t care for fat cats. Keep ’em lean and hard, I say.” Soberly: “I’m here to make money, but within decent limits. Trouble is to figure out what they are.”
Yes, she thought, he is looking toward something else. And dropping no hint about it.
“What is your alternative, anyway?” he went on. “How much chance has it got of working?”
“The basic concept is almost ridiculously simple and obvious,” she told him with mounting enthusiasm. “It went far toward rehabilitating Earth, till Earth civilization became so—so ethereal that industry and commerce are irrelevant. It’s used in different ways and degrees on several other planets, including Asborg. It isn’t striking there, because the settlers began with a remarkably Earthlike world and with state-of-the-art technology, nano, robotic, self-recycling, that doesn’t need to draw heavily on the environment. Besides, huge territories are still held as preserves by the Houses.”
“You mean gene-modification. Sure. Can you do it on the scale you’ll need for a global civilization?”
“That’s what we’re working toward. It’ll take a tremendous lot of research, sequencing and reading the genetic codes of millions of species, detailing their biochemistry, working out their evolutionary histories, understanding how they interact, everything, on a world that is
“What’ll that do to your beloved wilderness? Sounds to me sort of like the nightmare you were laying out yesterday.”
“No, not truly, not at all if things work out the way we hope. Of course there’ll be some conventional artifacts and processes, but minimal. Besides, ‘wilderness’ is a relative concept. It doesn’t mean chaos. The life you see around you is in balance, though it does change with changing conditions. What we dream of is a civilization not opposed to nature, but integrated with it, both in and of it. Something altogether new. No telling how it will develop, what shapes it will take, what the rest of the galaxy might learn from it.”
