The Avatar (58 page)

Lis crossed to the hearth and leaned an elbow against the mantel above. Thereon rested a few souvenirs-heirloom candlestick from her parents, a rack of his pipes, a trophy from a figure skating contest which they had won together, the kind of
things that belong in a home. Secure beside them, Lis demanded, “Why have you come?”

Hancock started trembling. “To, to ask for your help, your forgiveness, and—”

Lis raised her brows. “What do you suppose I can do? The news is out. The provisional governor ought to come through the gate in another day or so, and the investigating committee won’t be far behind. I’ve no official standing.”

“But you’re Dan Brodersen’s wife!”

“The man you did your best to get killed.” Lis struck fist on stone. “No. I shouldn’t have said that, maybe. I’ll believe what you told me before, over the phone, that you’d no such intention, that events got out of hand. Just the same, Aurie, you assumed a responsibility and you’ll have to bear the consequences.”

Head bowed, Hancock drew forth the cigarette she had been after, but instead of kindling it, she shredded it with shivery fingers. “You don’t understand,” she mumbled. “I’m not asking anything for myself. I’m asking you take pity on Ira Quick.”

Lis grew stiff in surprise. “What?”

Again Hancock made herself look up. “You see him as a monster, the one who did in fact try to do away with your husband and, and choke off everything you and Dan hoped for.” Her voice gathered force. “But he isn’t. He’s made some terrible mistakes, no doubt—though we’ll never know what might have happened if he’d won, will we? He’d’ve gone down in history as a statesman, a hero…. Never mind. He lost, that’s all. But can you possibly realize, he didn’t do what he did because of being evil? Ambitious, vainglorious, yes; he’s human. But he honestly thought he was doing what must be done.”

“I’m not too sure of that,” said Lis.

“Never mind,” Hancock repeated. She was crying now. “Only ask yourself, what purpose would revenge serve? Wouldn’t it be better for everybody—wouldn’t it start this new age of yours off right—if you forgave?”

Lis was silent a few seconds before she said, “I asked you what you expect I could do, supposing I wanted to.”

“Everything!” the visitor cried. Lower: “Grant me that I, I do know politics. Dan himself, he’s the man of the hour, the man of the century, but he does need to have charges against him dismissed, illegal actions that led to homicide and—If he made a public request for a general amnesty, who could refuse?” She
knuckled her eyes. “You can get him to do it. He’s not a vindictive man, and…I told you, wouldn’t it be a hopeful gesture? No matter me. I’ll take whatever’s coming to me. I was a pawn anyway, it turns out. And no matter the rest of the conspirators, either. But Ira—” She sank to the floor, half curled up, weight rested on arms. “Ira, please, Ira!”

Lis stood for a time in her own long-legged strength. Darknesses and brightnesses crossed her face. At last she murmured, mostly to herself: “They’re finished in public life, the lot of them. Dare they walk abroad any more on Earth? But Demeter still has whole continents for people to make a fresh beginning.”

She would not touch the huddled form before her, but she said, “Yes, Aurie, I’ll put in the word you want. On your behalf also.”

When she was alone except for the sleeping children, Lis returned to her study. That was a fair-sized chamber, efficiently laid out, full of up-to-date office equipment; but above the desk stood a hologram of Mt. Lorn and the undying snows. She paused, frowning at a comset, until she flipped its playback switch. Once more she reviewed the latest message from Brodersen in Lima. Image and voice alike registered weariness: “—just such a hellish lot of utter nonsense to wade through. No end in sight, either. You’d cope better than I’m doing, honey. And wouldn’t it be grand to have you here! I keep telling myself that isn’t really practical, then looking for ways to prove myself wrong—”

Soon, however, he mentioned Caitlín. At first Lis skipped that part, then she bit her lip and played it over, twice. Thereafter she sat down and pondered. Finally she ran through the reply that she had been composing when Aurelia Hancock interrupted. She now had considerable to say that was new and important. Before she did, something remained which might matter a great deal more.

Her electronic
Doppelgänger
looked out of the screen and declared: “—Your news is almost scary. Let me talk to her. The next few minutes of this are for her.”

An awkward clearing of throat and shifting of position, followed by: “Caitlín, dear, hello.
Salud
. What Dan tells me about you does not sound good. Not that he says much, I think
in part because he hasn’t much to say. Apparently you go about your life in a more or less normal fashion. But, well, for instance, he hasn’t mentioned any jokes between you and him, and he usually shares those with me. Or—” The tape recorded a doorchime and stopped.

Lis considered, started the machine again, and spoke into the light-years behind it.

“Dan, this is for Caitlín. Her alone. Switch off and let her have the rest. I’ve more to give you, but I’ll put that on the next track.” She knew he would honor the request.

“Caitlín, I don’t think you’d better show this to Dan. Tell him it’s girl talk. God knows he has worries enough. You, your grief, that’s the heaviest of them.

“Please,” Lis said, suddenly fighting for breath, “can you see I don’t want to make you feel guilty or anything? What you’ve been through, I’ll never be able to imagine. Or what you’re longing for—that’s more nearly the trouble, isn’t it? You’re lost in a dream of what was, and he senses you are, and—”

She marshalled her thoughts. “You have to come back. For your own sake, and his, and, yes, mine. Mine, not only through him. I could book passage to Earth, Caitlín, since he’s going to be there for months yet. I would, except that you need all he can give. He mustn’t lose you to the half-life you’re in. I mustn’t either. I’ve discovered how much you are to me.”

She sighed. “Oh, yes, I’ve been envious of you, and no doubt I will be once in a while in future. But not jealous. Not any longer. We both love him, and he loves both of us. Well, shouldn’t we care for each other?” A chuckle. “Could be the day will come when he envies me a little… or feels a little jealous. Which wouldn’t hurt him!

“Caitlín, come home.

“I’ve not been where you’ve been, but I am older than you and I have seen parts of life that you maybe haven’t. Let me suggest, let me call to you—”

—When she was done, Lis rose and stretched, muscle by muscle. She’d scan her speech tomorrow, perhaps edit it, though merely for clarity; she knew what the counsel was, and hoped it might help. Meanwhile, how about a nightcap, some Sibelius, and bed? She’d want her full energy in the morning.

To hell with being Griselda or even Penelope. She had work to do.

S
PRING CAME EARLY
that year to Ireland. On a morning thereof, Brodersen and Caitlín set out on a day-long ramble.

This was in County Clare. Five centuries old, long abandoned, lately restored for renting to visitors, their cottage nonetheless held remembrances of generations who had been born within its walls, grown up, fallen in love, begotten and raised children, toiled, suffered, sorrowed, laughed, sung, dreamed, grown aged, died and been keened over. Low and whitewashed beneath a mossy thatch roof, it stood alone on a height overlooking the sea; they who dwelt here had mostly kept sheep. Several kilometers off, a village in a cove still housed fisher folk. Their manners being of an ancient kind, they did not rush to inform the world who was staying close by, but honored a wish for privacy that their priest had told them of. Meeting the famous pair in street or store, taking them out in a boat, drinking with them in the pub, the villagers were content to be friendly.

“A fine day for sure,” Brodersen said. He put the knapsack that held lunch on his back while he looked around.

Westward, gorse and bracken came to an abrupt end at a cliff edge. Afar, the waters shone tawny, emerald, quicksilver, in a shiver of small waves. Closer in, they burst in surf, white fountains, on rocks and skerries and steeps. This high up, he heard the roaring. Southward the land was likewise rugged, northward more so. Eastward it rolled in verdancy toward the blue bulk of a mountain whose top was the goal of his and Caitlín’s hike. Hawthorn hedges bloomed snowy along winding lanes. Scattered farmhouses sent chimney smoke into a sky where a few clouds wandered. Closer stood the grassy slopes of a rath, a circular earthwork which had guarded a homestead before St. Patrick walked through Erin; deserted at last, it
became known as a haunt of the Sidhe, of whom the first tales were told before Christ walked through Galilee.

A cool breeze bore odors of sea and soil and growth. High overhead, a lark sang.

“Aye,” Caitlín said. “As if the country would bid us goodbye with a blessing.”

He turned his gaze on her. Heavy shirt, slacks, and brogans could not hide erect slenderness or take away free-striding gracefulness. Bronze hair fell below a headband; a stray lock above fluttered. In the sun-touched, lightly freckled face, her eyes were more green than the quickening fields, and her smile held a merriment he had not seen from the time she left his ship for the Others to the time when they had for a while been by themselves in this place.

“She, uh, she gave me the best blessing she can, way off on Demeter,” he said. “You.”

Caitlín laughed. “Why, Dan, is it a bard you’d be?”

“No. Hardly my line of work. But—oh, rats—I’m forever wanting to say how I feel about you, and never able.”

“You’ve a better way than words for that, and you might consider a demonstration when we’ve rested on yonder peak. But first we must get there. Come.” She led him by the hand down a path to a narrow dirt road that rambled between its flowering hedges, now right, now left, more or less in the direction they wanted to go.

When they had fallen into a steady pace—flex of muscles, swing and soft thud of shoes, lungs full, blood coursing—he ventured, “Another thing I can’t figure out how to tell, Pegeen, is how glad I am to see you back to your real self. Glad? Huh! I’d have died to bring it about.”

Gravity descended upon her. “Was I that mournful?”

“Oh, no. Somebody who hadn’t met you before would never guess anything strange had ever happened to you.”

“I should hope not.” Her tone held a touch of grimness. The one secret that they of
Chinook
preserved was the fact of the avatars.

“I lay on you a geas that you keep silent about this,” she had told her shipmates, “for my sake, and the sake of the Others, and likely the sake of many more.” Brodersen had added weight to that last by pointing out what lunacies, deceptions, and empty hankerings the knowledge would inspire, with no benefit to anybody. Doubtless a judgment that his crew would give and
abide by the promise had been a factor in the decision to let them go home. Elsewhere it sufficed to say that the Others had, after study, made that decision.

Walking beside Caitlín, Brodersen went on: “You didn’t go around openly brooding or acting important or any such childishness. In fact, the child in you seemed to have died. You didn’t joke or tease or skip down a corridor or, oh, the million things you used to. You never sang unless we asked, and they were never happy songs, and you didn’t make new ones. In bed with me—well, sure, you took pleasure, in a way, but there was
no fun
about it. And sometimes I’d catch you crying, like at night when you thought I was asleep, or I’d see the signs on you afterward. But you shied off from telling me why, till I figured I’d better pretend not to notice.”

She caught his arm, hard. “Dan, my darling, why didn’t you tell me how much I was hurting you?”

“That might’ve made matters worse.”

“Ochone! The dream of the Others had me, and naught could I do but try to live, day by day, while finding my way back from—it. Yet if I’d had the wit to look from what was gone to what was around me, and who—”

“Shucks, honey, everything worked out okay. Didn’t it? Meanwhile we were both lucky to be kept as busy as were, on Beta and Earth.”

Well, Earth I’m not certain about
. Brodersen scowled and spat.
The executive pardon for our actions, a formality, but long-drawn and embarrassing. Crowds, speeches, ceremonies, conferences, banquets, receptions, Worthy Causes, mail by the ton, calls by the thousands, and always the bloody newspeople, never a minute of ours unwatched till at last Pegeen and I managed to sneak off to here. That hullabaloo may have delayed her recovery…. Is “recovery” the right word? I don’t dare ask
.

Change the subject
. “And shortly, ho for Demeter,” he said.

Their task was done. Amidst all the dismal nonsense had been these past months’ jobs, duties that one could not decently shirk: helping and counselling the Betans, taking part while plans and procedures were hammered out for establishing regular relations between the two races, conveying to scientists the trove of information aboard
Chinook
and in the heads of her crew—and he had to admit that some causes were genuinely worthy. The hero of billions could raise money for ocean conservation, give politics a shove in the direction of common
sense and liberty, brighten an hour for a lot of hospitalized children.

But finally, except for Joelle,
Chinook
was about to bear her wanderers home. (Carlos and Susanne wanted to greet her parents. Frieda and the husband she’d found on Earth wanted to emigrate.) The Betans had not gotten enough data for calculating how to play chronokinetic tricks in that gate. Probably no humans should anyway, at least until humans were wiser. The span of Brodersen’s absence from Phoebus would therefore be approximately equal to the span of his presence at Sol.

Would Barbara and Mike have changed much? According to letters and tapes from Lis—who had agreed with him she should stay put, take care of them and the business, not let herself in for the harassment he was under—they’d mainly just gained a few skills, which they were anxious to show Daddy. However, at their ages, the time between late winter and early spring could be as long as the time to go to the end of the universe and back.