Chapter 19

Dis was a floating golden ball, looking like a schoolroom globe in space. No clouds obscured its surface, and from this distance it seemed warm and attractive set against the cold darkness. Brion almost wished he were back there now, as he sat shivering inside the heavy coat. He wondered how long it would be before his confused body-temperature controls decided to turn off the summer adjustment. He hoped it wouldn’t be as sudden or as drastic as turning it on had been.

Delicate as a dream, Lea’s reflection swam in space next to the planet. She had come up quietly behind him in the spaceship’s corridor, only her gentle breath and mirrored face telling him she was there. He turned quickly and took her hands in his.

“You’re looking infinitely better,” he said.

“Well, I should,” she said, pushing back her hair in an unconscious gesture with her hand. “I’ve been doing nothing but lying in the ship’s hospital, while you were having such a fine time this last week. Rushing around down there shooting all the magter.”

“Just gassing them,” he told her. “The Nyjorders can’t bring themselves to kill any more, even if it does raise their own casualty rate. In fact, they are having difficulty restraining the Disans led by Ulv, who are happily killing any magter they see as being pure umedvirk.”

“What will they do when they have all those frothing magter madmen?”

“They don’t know yet,” he said. “They won’t really know until they see what an adult magter is like with his brain-parasite dead and gone. They’re having better luck with the children. If they catch them early enough, the parasite can be destroyed before it has done too much damage.”

Lea shuddered delicately and let herself lean against him. “I’m not that sturdy yet; let’s sit down while we talk.” There was a couch opposite the viewport where they could sit and still see Dis.

“I hate to think of a magter deprived of his symbiote,” she said. “If his system can stand the shock, I imagine there will be nothing left except a brainless hulk. This is one series of experiments I don’t care to witness. I rest secure in the knowledge that the Nyjorders will find the most humane solution.”

“I’m sure they will,” Brion said.

“Now what about us?” she said disconcertingly, leaning back in his arms. “I must say you have the highest body temperature of any one I have ever touched. It’s positively exciting.”

This jarred Brion even more. He didn’t have her ability to put past horrors out of the mind by substituting present pleasures. “Well, just what about us?” he said with masterful inappropriateness.

She smiled as she leaned against him. “You weren’t as vague as that, the night in the hospital room. I seem to remember a few other things you said. And did. You can’t claim you’re completely indifferent to me, Brion Brandd. So I’m only asking you what any outspoken Anvharian girl would. Where do we go from here? Get married?”

There was a definite pleasure in holding her slight body in his arms and feeling her hair against his cheek. They both sensed it, and this awareness made his words sound that much more ugly.

“Lea--darling! You know how important you are to me--but you certainly realize that we could never get married.”

Her body stiffened and she tore herself away from him.

“Why, you great, fat, egotistical slab of meat! What do you mean by that? I like you, Lea, we have plenty of fun and games together, but surely you realize that you aren’t the kind of girl one takes home to mother!”

“Lea, hold on,” he said. “You know better than to say a thing like that. What I said has nothing to do with how I feel towards you. But marriage means children, and you are biologist enough to know about Earth’s genes--”

“Intolerant yokel!” she cried, slapping his face. He didn’t move or attempt to stop her. “I expected better from you, with all your pretensions of understanding. But all you can think of are the horror stories about the worn-out genes of Earth. You’re the same as every other big, strapping bigot from the frontier planets. I know how you look down on our small size, our allergies and haemophilia and all the other weaknesses that have been bred back and preserved by the race. You hate--”

“But that’s not what I meant at all,” he interrupted, shocked, his voice drowning hers out. “Yours are the strong genes, the viable strains--mine are the deadly ones. A child of mine would kill itself and you in a natural birth, if it managed to live to term. You’re forgetting that you are the original homo sapiens. I’m a recent mutation.”

Lea was frozen by his words. They revealed a truth she had known, but would never permit herself to consider.

“Earth is home, the planet where mankind developed,” he said. “The last few thousand years you may have been breeding weaknesses back into the genetic pool. But that’s nothing compared to the hundred millions of years that it took to develop man. How many newborn babies live to be a year of age on Earth?”

“Why ... almost all of them. A fraction of one per cent die each year--I can’t recall exactly how many.”

“Earth is home,” he said again gently. “When men leave home they can adapt to different planets, but a price must be paid. A terrible price is in dead infants. The successful mutations live, the failures die. Natural selection is a brutally simple affair. When you look at me, you see a success. I have a sister--a success too. Yet my mother had six other children who died when they were still babies. And several others that never came to term. You know about these things, don’t you, Lea?”