said that they needed another excuse to let their hair down, but on the other hand, when you’re so many millions of miles from home, who can say that they didn’t need it?
As always, they took the partition walls down to increase the size of the common room and make room for a dance floor. Out there, the lights were dim and colored, and they had a couple of strobes set up. I decided that I wasn’t going near them. It was unlikely that my blackout had been caused by strobes interfering with my alpha rhythms, but I was damn certain that I wasn’t going to take the chance. I elected to stay in the brightly lit space behind the bar area, sipping the indigenous brew that the non-pedantic members our fraternity were pleased to call “wine.” I tried to look as if I was enjoying myself, just in case anybody cared. If challenged, I reckoned that I could always excuse my unease by explaining how sorry I was to leave good old Sule, which was a home from home to me.
A few people drifted up to me to offer me their good wishes and ask polite but inquisitive questions about where I might be going and why. They weren’t upset when I explained why I couldn’t answer them.
I was just wondering how long I ought to stick it out before tendering my apologies and pleading lack of sleep, when I was accosted by a woman I didn’t know. She was about fifty, with short-cropped grey hair, and looked rather like my mother’s older sister.
“Dr. Caretta?” she asked.
“I’m Lee Caretta,” I confirmed. There was something about the situation which was vaguely alarming, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.
“I’m Catherine d’Orsay,” she said.
I nodded vaguely, and it wasn’t until a half-frown crossed her face that it sunk in.
“D’Orsay!” I exclaimed. “You’re the Captain of the....”
“Not anymore,” she said, swiftly and flatly. “I handed over the command.”
My mouth was still open and moving, but no sound came out. It was easy to see that she didn’t want to pursue the matter. I cast around for some other approach.
“You don’t look old enough to be my fourteen times great-grandmother,” I observed, wishing after I said it that it didn’t seem so snide.
She was up to it, though. “You don’t look old enough to be one of the top men in your field,” she countered.
“You know how it is,” I said, piling gaffe upon gaffe. “These days, if you don’t make your mark before you’re thirty, you never will.”
She let that one die the death it deserved. After a suitable pause, she said, “Do you mind if I talk to you—somewhere where we don’t have to compete with the music?”
I put my plastic cup down on a shelf, and wiped my hand on the back of my trousers because a little of the fluid had somehow spilled on to my fingers.
“Sure,” I said. “We can slip into sick bay. It’s just down the corridor and it’s always quiet when nobody’s ill.”
There was a half-frown again, as if she didn’t think the sick bay was entirely appropriate, but she nodded. As we went out of the door I inclined my head back in the direction of the frenetic festivity.
“Hasn’t changed much since your time, I guess?”
“No,” she said. “That’s the most alarming thing about these last few days. Everything is so tediously familiar.”
“Wouldn’t have been too different if it were seven hundred years ago,” I observed. “Except that we wouldn’t be on a space station and we’d have funny costumes on. Dancing and drinking are the hardy perennials of human behavior.”
“And sex,” she added dryly.
“Yes,” I answered. “That too.”
“If I’d stepped out of 1744 into the twenty-first century,” she said, “I’d notice plenty of differences. But from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth...I keep on looking, but I’m damned if I can find them.”
I opened the door of the sick bay, and stood aside to let her go through. She looked at the beds draped with plastic curtains, and moved to the main desk. She took the chair from behind it; I borrowed one from beside the nearest bed.
“There are reasons for that,” I said, referring to the lack of perceptible changes in the human condition.
“So I’ve heard,” she replied.
“What can I do for you?”
“You can help me out with a few explanations.”
I raised my eyebrows, signaling: Why me?
“I’ve already tried Harmall,” she said. “I’ve also talked to your boss, Schumann. I keep getting stalled. The secretive voice of authority.”
“What makes you think I’ll tell you anything they won’t? What makes you think I can?”
“I daresay you can’t,” she said. “And that might be the advantage I need. If you don’t know, you have to guess—and guesses aren’t secret, are they?”
“For the very good reason that they might not be right.”
She shrugged. “Why won’t they let me go to Earth?” She fired the question at me like a rifle shot.
“Maybe they need you aboard the Earth Spirit on the trip back to your brand new HSB,” I suggested. “Harmall did sort of promise us a fuller briefing on the situation as viewed from the Ariadne.”
“There are plenty of people aboard the Ariadne who could brief you on arrival,” she said. “You’d want to look over the data yourselves, anyhow. I wasn’t planning to go back; I was planning to carry the news all the way home. And I was planning to do my talking to a lot more people—and a lot more important people—than Jason Harmall. As things stand, I don’t even know if anyone on Earth even knows that the Ariadne reached her target.”
“They’ll know,” I assured her. “They just might not want it to become common knowledge. Information control.”
“That,” she said, “is what needs explaining. You’re telling me that the finding of Naxos isn’t going to be publicized—that the whole affair is going to be handled in secret by a select group of politicians and scientists?”
“That’s right,” I told her. “Does that surprise you?”
“Not really,” she answered, with the ghost of a sigh. “But I was rather hoping that I might be surprised, if you see what I mean.”
I nodded.
“Tediously familiar,” she said. “Every way I turn. There’s still a Soviet bloc, I hear, and they’re still ‘they’ while we’re ‘us.’ I really do find that very hard to swallow, after all this time. It seems as though the whole solar system has been in suspended animation, right along with me.”
I found a paper clip, and began studiously unwinding it. Rumor has it that paper clips go all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire, except that
