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around Gerswin.
"Firien's Star?"
"He could have escaped, but he covered the Sinta Mare . . . and the others.
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The Emperor's Cross . . . upstairs with my jewels." She shrugged, as if trying
to lift a burden off her shoulders and not quite succeeding. "Now, once in a
while, I can look at it."
Again, silence cupped the room in its unseen hands.
What could he say? He caught himself before he started to shake his head.
"Lieutenant ... I mean. Commander, we all have our chains to the past. I am
not asking you to share mine, nor would I trade anything that has been, and
that includes you. At times, I have wondered, but I would not. Martin's
childhood was one of the most wonderful times of my life, but that time had
passed already when he died, and I had not understood that. All parents die a
little when their children become real."
She smiled, and while the smile was faint, the warmth brought a benediction
to Gerswin.
"Young Jane made up for it, later, some, but neither Analise nor Jerzey
were comfortable here. Jane liked to visit, and who could deny her? She had
Martin's eyes, and saw everything. She still cubes me, but they come in
batches, now that she's on the Rim expedition."
Gerswin felt more lost at each word, and concentrated on trying not to
shake his head at all the implications that tumbled from her words. If Analise
had been Martin's wife or the woman who had his child, who was Jerzey?
"Jane? Jerzey?"
"Jerzey was Analise's husband. I've lived with it all for so long it's
really quite clear. Lieutenant . . . pardon me, but, you know, dear Commander,
I still think of you as that dashing young lieutenant." She cleared her
throat, softly, and took another sip of the liftea. "Like his father, Martin
fascinated the ladies, but he never even knew he had a daughter. Neither did
we. I found that was a possibility several years later, well after Firien,
from his friend Torvye, who brought it up to console me."
She held up her hand. "No need for details, but Analise was adopted out,
and by the time I found her, had married Jerzey, a decent sort, if a rather
mundane barrister on Herkimer. Jane found it too mundane as well."
"So she joined the Service?"
"A familial weakness, I would guess," suggested Her Grace, her mouth
upturned slightly at the comers. "She also took her grandfather's name, but,
enough of the history. You'do well to humor an aging lady."
"Not humoring," he protested. "Not at all."
Martin a grandfather? What did that make him? Or Carol-Joy?
"You've been most kind," he began hesitatingly, "particularly in view ...
of everything . . ." This time, he did shake his head. There were no words to
express the conflicting feelings ricocheting back and forth under the black
undress armor he wore.
"No," she answered with a smile best described as sad, "I am not kind. I
had always wondered, but never had the will to search you out, to leam whether
you had survived the deserts of Old Earth and intricacies of the I.S.S. I'm
the type who always wants to know how the story ends, even my own story, but
not at too great a cost. . . . You should understand . . . those of us who are
weak, dear Commander."
Weak? While he could understand, weak was not a word he would have applied
to the woman beside whom he sat. He touched her hand again, grasped it gently.
He could not ask the favor for which he had come, not for Old Earth, but,
most of all, not for himself.
Instead, he glanced at the glowstone floor tiles once more, then around the
study, finally settling his eyes on the small flower bed visible straight
through the armaglass and centered in the lawn ten meters out from where the
two of them sat.
"You hold your keepsakes in your thoughts, don't you?" he asked.
Gerswin suspected that from the villa itself, from a hundred little signs,
from the lack of solideo cubes on display, from the simplistic lack of
omateness that surrounded him. Only the oil painting in the main hall that
would someday be acclaimed a masterpiece was an exception to that pattern, and
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even the deep feelings behind the painting were cloaked in simplicity.
What else could he say? Except his good-byes, and he was not ready for
those. Not quite yet, not when he had just discovered he had lost two precious
things he had never known he had had.
Instead, he picked up the Djring cup and sipped the single cold drop of
liftea left in the bottom. That single drop was no more pungent than the
first, but held a hint of bitterness that he welcomed.
"That is where they mean the most. Most keepsakes, I have found, are
displayed for the impact on others. For memorials, that is suitable, but not
for one's self."
"The painting?"
"Martin deserved that, and more. Every spacer who sees it will never forget
it,i and what else is a memorial for? The sorrow is mine, and, now, perhaps a
small bit of it will be yours."
The senior commander nodded to the Duchess, Her Grace, as if to acknowledge [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]