The Ceres Solution

Epilogue

It was late afternoon in mid-winter, and a hard clear darkness had moved in over Carsewell and the neighbouring borough of Star City.

Gretana paused on the steps of the Mollanian Embassy to button up the collar of her overcoat, her gaze drifting across the electrically-jewelled architecture of the diplomatic and trade buildings of more than thirty worlds. They were arranged in sweeping crescents around a park containing the low hill which had once been known locally as Cotter’s Edge. In some respects it would have been more convenient to have Star City close to Washington, D.C., but new priorities had dictated that it be built around a major east coast node. Gretana found the ambience of the scene reassuring and, as always, she was prompted to look for a moment at the sky.

The stars were only faintly visible through the wash of urban radiance, but the swarms of irregular moonlets that formed the horizon-to-horizon band across the heavens shone with undimmed lustre. Dissolution of the old Moon had been accelerated by enlightened U.N. policies—all companies to whom mining franchises were awarded had to assist in equalising the orbital distribution of the lunar mass. As a result, even a Mollanian with Gretana’s perceptiveness could sense no real disturbance in the matrix of third-order forces. It was now possible for embryos to grow in peace, for babes to be born in peace.

She turned up her collar against the cold and was about to go down the remaining steps when she saw a figure in a grey one-piece heatsaver ascending towards her. For an instant she thought he was an exceptionally tall Terran, then—with a tingling shock of recognition—she noticed the lean, beard-shadowed face and the sculpted black hair. She stopped abruptly, taken unawares by a conflict of emotions.

“Gretana!” Lorrest’s face registered surprise and pleasure. “I was hoping to get here before you left. How are you?”

“That’s an Earth-style greeting,” she said, with greater coolness than she had intended. “You know a Mollanian is always in peak condition. You’re supposed to say ‘Fair Seasons’.”

“I thought you might have gone native by this time.” He gave her a candid stare, his expression changing to one of seriousness. “Gretana, I’ve just arrived on Earth, and I’ve got to get this out of the way first—do you know the murder charge against me was dropped? My cerebric deposition showed I acted only to save you.”

She avoided his gaze. “I heard that. It was just that actually seeing the…Can’t we forget all about it?”

“Please do. That’s what I had to do to live with myself, and it wasn’t easy. I’ve been doing four decades of rather boring community service on Mollan for my other misdeeds—and there weren’t too many distractions.”

“I knew you’d been sentenced.”

Lorrest shrugged. “I was lucky enough. It would have been ten times as long if Vekrynn’s case hadn’t set off all the changes back there.”

“I haven’t been back to Mollan even once,” Gretana said. “With one thing and another, I haven’t even considered it.”

“Very cosmopolitan,” Lorrest said, looking impressed. “What sort of work do you do?”

“Emigration counselling mostly. Now that we’re pumping longevity agents into the biosphere the population problem is going to get worse for a while. The birth rate is dropping like a stone, as you would expect, and most of the people born here within the last forty years have the ability to skord out—but there’s a lot of work to do.”

“I can imagine,” Lorrest said. “It’s going to be funny to see these people spreading out to other worlds.”

“Funny?” Gretana thought about the way in which the Terrans had been moving out into space for only a few decades, and the demands they had already begun to make, starting with the Earth-type world Vekrynn had found far inside the Attatorian sector. “They’re already a bit restless with the sector system.”

“That’s all right—all systems must adapt to change.”

“Yes, but nobody knows how it’s going to end.”

“That’s good, too.”

“This isn’t a good place to talk,” Gretana said, shivering slightly. “The cafeteria here has quite acceptable Eyrej dewberry juice, if you’ve got time.”

“You remembered my favourite!” Lorrest gave an exaggerated leer. “Does that mean…?”

“It means I’ve got a good memory,” she cut in, indicating the way to the cafeteria at the rear of the building, and wondering why it was that Lorrest was able to disturb her composure with the most casual remark. When they were seated in a booth, with beakers of hot amber-coloured juice before them, she resolved to take a less passive part in the conversation, to give Lorrest less chance to be disconcerting.

“I see,” she said, glancing at him over the rim of her beaker, “that you haven’t had reversal surgery.”

Lorrest toyed with his glass. “I was offered it, but I said no, mainly because I knew I’d be coming back to Earth, and I really want to work with these people. Anyway, things are really changing on Mollan—you can quite often see a Terran on a city street and hardly anybody stares at him. How about you?”

“I had the offer, too, but by then I’d proved to myself that the Lucent Ideal is a parochial concept.” Gretana stared down at the vapour patterns swirling on the surface of her drink. “Besides, I didn’t want a certain character calling me Big-head.”

“I doubt if he’d have been as polite as that.” Lorrest’s face became solemn, childishly wistful. “I’ve got to find out about Denny. How long did…?”

“He lived almost another three years.”

“Did you stay with him?”

“Yes. In fact, we got married. When he came out with the suggestion I was so astonished that I said yes before I realised what was happening.” Gretana tried to smile. “You should have heard the proposal—he ended up by saying he wouldn’t be able to consummate the marriage, only he didn’t put it as delicately as that, but it shouldn’t matter to somebody from a race of undersexed bean-poles.”

“Perfect,” Lorrest said, his eyes growing thoughtful. “You know, the worst thing about having to stand trial was that they wouldn’t let me come back to see Denny. I was pretty mad at him when we parted company. I had no idea…”

“He understood.”

“I’m really glad. I suppose he kept on trying to skord?”

“For a while, then he pretended it wasn’t worth the effort when I was around all the time to do it for him. It’s hard to believe, but we visited more than eighty worlds. Even at the very end—when he couldn’t move his arms and needed servo assistance to breathe—we made a trip every few days, always to a planet he’d never been on before.”

“His personal mathematics.”

“Yes.”

“I can believe it.” Lorrest pushed his drink away, almost untouched. “I’ve got to go, Gretana. I’ve got myself a brand-new job, designing educational imprints in the Hamito-Semitic languages group, and I haven’t even reported in yet. I wanted to see you first.”

“I’m pleased that you did,” Gretana said, watching Lorrest get to his feet. “Will we be seeing each other?”

“Do you want to?”

Gretana sighed impatiently. “Would I have asked?”

“Relax,” Lorrest said, his shoulders giving a preliminary heave. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”

Watching him hurry away through the peachy twilight of the cafeteria, Gretana realised he was struggling to suppress one of his laughs and she found herself unable to stop smiling. She finished her drink at a leisurely pace and went out through the building and down the bowed steps of the Embassy’s main entrance.

The darkness of the park was split into many wedge-shaped sections by the glowing paths which converged on the floodlit nodal point at its centre. Because of the high density of the traffic between Star City and the other worlds in the new Federation, it had been necessary to clear away the maples and other vegetation that had once screened the node. Gretana gazed at the spot for a moment, newly-awakened memories causing her to wish that at least one tree could have been preserved, then she recalled that Denny Hargate had never had any use for symbolism.

Concentrate on the real thing while you have the chance, he would have said.

She nodded once, no longer smiling, and walked away in the direction of the future.

Observe!

The planet falls away beneath us, then its sun, then the other stars in that part of an undistinguished galaxy. Now we see the star clouds shrinking, condensing into a spiral of light, and other island universes crowd into our field of view.

Let us consider important questions.

Have we—whose lifespans compare to those of Mollanians as those of Terrans do to their mayflies—learned anything from the example of Denny Hargate?

Have we profited from the association?

If not, let us hope that we will fare better on the million worlds we must visit before childhood ends.

Let us hope!