natural limit to such a process. In time, carried out on the scale that’d be required when population has grown… it’s be releasing so much heat that planetary temperature would be affected.”
“That sounds farfetched.”
“No. A simple calculation will prove it. According to historical records, Earth herself ran into the problem, and not terribly long after the industrial era began. However, quite aside from remote prospects, people will want to mine these cluster worlds immediately. True, it’s a long haul, and operations will have to be totally, automated. But the heavy elements that are rare elsewhere are so abundant here as to more than make up for those extra costs.” He smiled. “I’m afraid you can’t escape your fate. You’re going to be… not wealthy. To call you ‘wealthy’ would be like calling a supernova ‘luminous.’ You’ll command more resources than many whole civilizations have done.”
Her look upon him remained grave. “You did this for us? You should not have. What use would riches be to us if we lost you?”
He remembered that he couldn’t have expected her to carol about this. In her culture, money was not unwelcome, but neither was it an important goal. So what she had just’said meant less than if a girl of the Commonalty had spoken. Nevertheless, joy kindled in him. She sensed that, laid her hand across his, and murmured, “But your thought was noble.”
He couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He laughed aloud. “Noble?” he cried. “I’d call it clever. Fiendishly clever. Don’t you see? I’ve given you Kirkasant back!”
She gasped.
He jumped up and paced exuberant before her. “You could wait a few years till your cash reserves grow astronomical and buy as big a fleet as you want to search the cluster. But it isn’t needful. When word gets out, the miners will come swarming. They’ll plant beacons, they’ll have to. The grid will be functioning within one year, I’ll bet. As soon as you can navigate, identify where you are and where you’ve been, you can’t help finding your home —in weeks!”
She joined him, then, casting herself into his arms, laughing and weeping. He had known of emotional depth in her, beneath the schooled reserve. But never before now had he found as much warmth as was hers.
Long, long afterward, air locks linked and she bade him good night. “Until tomorrow,” she said.
“Many tomorrows, I hope.”
“And I hope. I promise.”
He watched the way she had gone until the locks closed again and the ships parted company. A little drunkenly, not with alcohol, he returned to the saloon for a nightcap.
“Turn off that color thing,” he said. “Give me an outside view.”
The ship obeyed. In the screen appeared stars, and the cloud from which stars were being born. “Her sky,” Laure said. He flopped on to the couch and admired.
“I might as well start getting used to it,” he said. “I expect I’ll spend a lot of vacation time, at least, on Kirkasant.”
“Daven,” said
She was not in the habit of addressing him thus, and so gently. He started.
“I have been—” Silence hummed for a second. “I have been wondering how to tell you. Any phrasing, any inflection, could strike you as something I computed to produce an effect. I am only a machine.”
Though unease prickled him, he leaned forward to touch a bulkhead. It trembled a little with her engine energy. “And I, old girl,” he said. “Or else you also are an organism. Were both people.”
“Thank you,” said the ship, almost too low to be heard.
Laure braced himself. “What did you have to tell me?” She forgot about keeping her voice humanized. The words clipped forth: “I finished the chromosome analysis some time ago. Thereafter I tried to discourage certain tendencies I noticed in you. But now I have no way to avoid giving you the plain truth. They are not human on that planet.”
“What?” he yelled. The glass slipped from his hand and splashed red wine across the deck. “You’re crazy! Records, traditions, artifacts, appearance, behavior—”
The ship’s voice came striding across his. “Yes, they are human descended. But their ancestors had to make an enormous adaptation. The loss of night vision is merely indicative. The fact that they can, for example, ingest heavy metals like arsenic unharmed might be interpreted as simple immunity. But you will recall that they find unarsenated food tasteless. Did that never suggest to you that they have developed a metabolic requirement for the element? And you should have drawn a conclusion from their high tolerance for ionizing radiation. It cannot be due to their having stronger proteins, can it? No, it must be because they have evolved a capacity for extremely rapid and error-free repair of chemical damage from that source. This in turn is another measure of how different their enzyme system is from yours.
“Now the enzymes, of course, are governed by the DNA of the cells, which is the molecule of heredity —”
“Stop,” Laure said. His speech was as flat as hers. “I see what you’re at. You are about to report that your chromosome study proved the matter. My kind of people and hers can’t reproduce with each other.”
“Correct,”
Laure shook himself, as if he were cold. He continued to look at the glowing fog. “You can’t call them nonhuman on that account.”
“A question of semantics. Hardly an important one.
Except for the fact that Kirkasanters apparently are under an instinctual compulsion to have children.”
“I know,” Laure said.
And after a time: “Good thing, really. They’re a high-class breed. We could use a lot of them.”
“Your own genes are above average,”
Her voice turned alive again. “I’d like to have grandchildren,” she said wistfully.
Laure laughed. “All right,” he said. “No doubt one day you will.” The laughter was somewhat of a victory.
And now a new cycle turns on Fortune’s cosmic wheel. Another brilliant era races to its apogee. What hidden flaws will send the Commonalty spinning downward into darkness like the Empire and the League before it? Let its free and lively people prosper while they may, for as a proverb handed down from Old Earth puts it,
