The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “Oh, yes,” he ended, “maybe I am being too apocalyptic. I said I try to steer clear of fanaticism. Maybe they’ll muddle through somehow. But I know for certain, if I know nothing else, that Earth won’t get any new ideas except from the stars, and meanwhile the old ideas are killing people. Same as they killed my first wife.”

  He stopped, exhausted.

  “Dan, you bleed,” she half wept, and cradled him as best she was able.

  At last: “You’ve never really told me what happened with Antonia. You loved her, and married her, and she died a bad death. Would you tell me the whole story this night?”

  He stared before him. “Why saddle you with it?”

  “So I can understand, my most dear. Understand you and what is in you; for sure it has become to me that this is your great wound and the reason why you could not stay quiet about Emissary.”

  “Perhaps,” he mumbled. “You see, it was a political assassination, and the politics wouldn’t have existed if we weren’t stuck in these two miserable planetary systems.”

  “Speak, Dan. About your Antonia. I’d make a song in honor of her memory, if you would like that.”

  “I would. I would.”

  “Then first I must know.”

  He was merely average articulate, and full of grief; he groped and croaked:

  “Okay, to start, how we met. After my discharge from the Peace Command, I wanted to go into spatial engineering, and had the luck to be accepted for the academy that the Andean Confederacy runs. When I’d graduated, I went to work for Aventureros Planetarios—the big corporation, you know, that the Rueda clan dominates. I did pretty well, got invited to some parties they threw, and there was Toni.

  “She herself said she’d be damned if we sucked the timocracy’s tit. She was into astrography, and good at it, too. We wangled locations for us both at Nueva Cibola. That’s an Iliadic satellite, you may recall, but an office of Aventureros is there, and so is Arp Observatory.

  “Six Earth years… I traveled a lot, necessarily, as far afield as Jupiter; but you know, Pegeen, though women were usually along on our jobs, through that whole time I really was a monogamist. Not that Toni’d have disowned me; but she was, and that settled the matter.”

  He fell mute, while Caitlín held him.

  “At last we decided to start a family,” he resumed. “She loved children. And animals and…everything alive. She wanted to have the baby at home, in the Rueda mansion, for the sake of her grandparents. They were too frail to leave Earth, but it’d mean a cosmos to them to see the next generation arrive.

  “Why not? I had an assignment ahead of me on Luna, which’d keep me away for several weeks. She might as well return to the clan at once and enjoy them. They’re grand folk. I expected I’d finish before birthtime, take leave of absence, and join her.

  “Well—Quite soon after she landed, the residencia got bombed. By terrorists. They issued an anonymous announcement that they were protesting the Ruedas’ hogging the benefits of space development from the masses. It was an incident in a wave of revolutionary violence going through South America.

  “That’s faded out. Temporarily. It’s rising again. The Ruedas are still targets. Yes, of course they’re rich, because their ancestors had the wit to invite private space enterprise to Peru. But hogging the wealth? Why, suppose that money was divided equally among the oprimidos. What sum would each person get? And where’d the capital come from for the next investment? Pegeen, Pegeen, when will these world savior types learn some elementary economics?

  “Anyway… this bomb didn’t do much. Destroyed a wing of the house, and three servants who’d been around for most of their lives—and, aye, aye, Toni and her baby.

  “She didn’t die immediately. They rushed her to a hospital. She asked if she could see the Moon in the sky—the last thing she asked—but the phase wasn’t right. And I was off on Farside in a lunatrac, and a solar flare lousing up communications—

  “Well. That’s the story. I went on the bum for a year, but the Ruedas bore with me, and helped me straighten out, and staked me when I decided to go to Demeter and start a business like theirs. You see why I worry about Carlos aboard Emissary?”

  Brodersen and Caitlín sat silent together. The night waned.

  Finally he said, “Toni was a lot like you.”

  Being a bard, she knew when not to speak. She only gave him whatever was hers to give. At first he was passive, then he tried to respond and she let him understand that that was not needful, then slowly he realized with his whole being that the past was gone but she was here.

  Later they did sleep a while.

  She woke before he did. Rousing, he saw her seated in the cave mouth, limned against the mysterious blueness that on Earthlike planets comes just before sunrise: She had programmed her sonador for unaccompanied guitar, making the instrument ring. Most quietly, she gave forth the last of the many stanzas in her festival song:

  The peaks grow gold, the east grows white,

  A breeze pipes the end

  Of the summer night,

  And wide across a widespread land

  The dancers turn homeward with

  Hand laid in hand.

  Go gladly up and gladly down.

  The dancing flies outward like laughter

  From blossomfields to mountain crown.

  Rejoice in the joy that comes after!

  VI

  I WAS A CATERPILLAR that crawled, a pupa that slumbered, a moth that flew in search of the Moon. The changes were so deep that my body could not remember what it had formerly been; I was as if reborn to wings. Nor had I the means to wonder at this. I simply was. Yet how bright was my being!

  Even my infant self, a hairy length of hunger, lived among riches: juice and crisp sweetness in a leaf, sunlight warm or dew cool or breezes astir over his pelt, endless odors with each its subtle message. Then at last dwindling days spoke to his inwardness. He found a sheltered branch and spun silk out of his guts to make himself a place alone, and curled within its darkness, he died the little death. For a season his flesh labored at its own transformation, until that which opened the cocoon and crept forth belonged to an altogether new world. Soon my outer skin sloughed off me, my freed wings grew dry and strong, and I launched myself upon heaven.

  Mine was the night. In my eyes it glowed and sparkled, full of vague shapes that I knew best by their fragrances. My food was the nectar of flowers, taken as I hovered on fluttery wingbeats, though sometimes the fermented sap of a tree set me and a thousand like me dizzily spiraling about. Wilder was it to strive as high as might be after the full Moon, more lost in its radiance than in a rainstorm. And when the smell of a female ready to mate floated around me, I became flying Desire.

  Another blind urge set our flock on a journey across distance. Night by night we passed over hills, valleys, waters, woods, fields, the lights of men like bewildering stars beneath us; day by day we rested on some tree, decking it with our numbers. While I was thus breasting strange winds, One gathered me up, taking me back into Oneness, and presently We knew what my whole life had been since I lay in the egg. Its marvels were many. I was Insect.

  VII

  COLD AND EMPTY, Emissary orbited Sol a hundred kilometers behind the San Geronimo Wheel. Dwarfed by remoteness, the sun gave her only a wan light, and she seemed lost among the stars. The Wheel was more impressive, two kilometers across, majestically rotating to provide Terrestrial weight for the workshops and living quarters around its rim. The hub, at the middle of the spokes which were passageways, could readily have accommodated the ship in its dock. Its radiation sheilding aluminum-plated, the whole structure shone as if burnished.

  Yet it was a failure. Men had constructed it a century ago, to serve as a base for operations among the asteroids. Thinly scattered though those remnants of a stillborn world are, they could profitably be worked by robots, as could the Jovian moons at times around inferior conjunction. Soon improved spacecraft made that whole idea obsolete. It
grew cheaper, as well as more productive, for men to go in person, boosting continuously at a gee or better, directly between these regions and the industrial satellites of Earth. The Wheel became a derelict. There was talk of scrapping it for the metal, but incentive was insufficient. Already then, the price of every metal was tumbling. Eventually title went to the Union government, which had it refurbished and declared it a historical monument. It got few visitors.

  When Ira Quick, Council Minister of Research and Development, authorized its occupancy, nobody paid much attention. He declared that it was well suited for studies of interplanetary gas. This would be the merest detail work, with nothing fundamental to be learned, but presumably worthwhile; besides, a private institution was underwriting the project. The measurements being delicate, the Wheel and its vicinity must be barred to outsiders for some weeks or months. This would scarcely inconvenience anyone, least of all the custodial staff, who would enjoy a salaried leave of absence. The item rated a line or two in various astronautical journals, and about thirty seconds on perhaps a dozen newscasts.

  A port in Joelle Ky’s apartment showed her the heavens, the view rendered vertical by a set of prisms. They did not stream by too fast to watch, for a turn took almost three hours, and the sight was glorious. But she soon wearied of it and would have spent most of her time in the holothetic state, had the equipment been on hand. Thus far her prisonkeepers had declined to remove it from the ship or take her there.

  They were apologetic, explaining that they dared not act without orders. The twenty men who guarded Emissary’s crew and passenger were decent enough in their fashion, North American secret service agents on special detail. They sincerely believed that what they did was right and necessary. But then, they were hand-picked, raised in the cult of discipline and obedience which had prevailed in the former military régime. Their chief, who presided over interrogation and exhortation of the captives, was less simpático. He was no brute, though, and when he told Joelle that Quick himself was coming to see them, he promised to request permission to fetch the apparatus over for her.

  “Of course, Dr. Ky,” he added, “if you’d cooperate better, if you’d appreciate what your duty is, why, you should go free altogether.” She felt too weary to respond.

  She had withdrawn into books, recorded visual art, and music. The director had not refused to have the vessel’s enormous bank of references, recreational material, and data transferred—especially since the major part of his task was to find out what the explorers had done and learned in their eight years agone. Except for meals, Joelle virtually abandoned social life.

  Her former companions remained more outgoing. While Captain Langendijk was icily correct toward the agents, Rueda Suárez calculatedly condescending, and Benedetti sometimes abusive, the rest fraternized in varying degrees. Frieda von Moltke even found a long-desired sexual newness among them. The other women disdained that, keeping their favors for their friends, but were not above a game of cards or handball.

  Lonelier still, not in quite the same way that a human among nonhumans would have been, Fidelio first sought Joelle’s kind of solace, then increasingly sought her. He asked for elucidations of things that bewildered him. He had studied Spanish before embarking, but not the thousand cultures of a foreign species. She could best help, because she had been most engaged in learning his two languages, originally using holothetics to assist Alexander Vlantis, then taking over leadership of the research after a tidal bore drowned the linguist.

  She was screening Swinburne on a particular daywatch when the Betan called. Much fiction and poetry left her unmoved, or else puzzled; she had too limited an experience of ordinary emotional relationships, too wide an experience of that which underlay the universe. However, the romantic sensualists appealed to her viscera, as the precisionists did to her cerebrum. She believed she understood—

  —Time and the Gods are at strife: ye dwell in the midst thereof,

  Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.

  I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,

  Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.

  Her thoughts drifted from the text, as they had been doing since she began to read. The impulse behind both was the same; she had shown these words to Dan Brodersen, the last time they were together. In this her present isolation, his image often arose, ever more vividly until she could smell his pipe and almost count the crow’s-feet around his eyes. She wondered if that was because he was alive (oh, he must be alive!) while Christine was dead, or because his maleness was somehow safer than the memory of her, or—Forgive me, Chris, passed through her as she surrendered to what had been.

  “Well,” he said, “It’s pretty. No, more than that. He was tackling something real.” He paused. “Excuse me, though, isn’t it kind of longwinded? Kipling would’ve gotten the same across in one page at the most.”

  “Perhaps that is why I have never managed to appreciate Kipling,” she answered.

  He cocked a brow at her. “Not even the poems about machinery? And yet you, the holothete, whose soul is supposed to be a computer program, you enjoy Swinburne?” With a shrug: “Well, people are paradox generators.”

  Suddenly, irrationally hurt, she blurted, “I don’t quite understand you, for sure. But I assumed you normal types sometimes resonate with each other. Do you mean you can’t either?”

  For an instant she imagined she did comprehend an ancient myth. It felt indeed as if the daimon of this place possessed her. They were spending the few days they could arrange to be together on an island in the Tuamotu Archipelago which he knew of old (yes, with another woman, he admitted unabashed). From the verandah where they stood, her gaze went past a red-and-green riot of hibiscus, down a path to the beach, which curved around a lagoon. Ranked palms nodded and whispered in answer to a blowing mildness. The water was lapis lazuli strewn with stars, save out on the reef where it creamed and thundered. The only clouds stood opposite the sun, a wall with a rainbow for portal. She had no names for the sweetnesses and pungencies the air cast at her. This morning she and Brodersen had wandered hand in hand along the shore, stripped (save for sneakers against the beautiful sharp coral) to go swimming, afterward lounged about—the light soaked through her skin to the marrow—until he warned against burns and they dressed. On the way back they encountered a brown man who smiled, chatted in broken Spanish, invited them to his nearby home for a bite to eat, and later fetched out a guitar and swapped a few songs with Brodersen. The rain which came along about then was like sky and Earth making love.

  Now he who had come to her from Demeter implied that he too dwelt forever within walls. The daimon knew horror. The pain mounted.

  “Oh, well, I dunno, never worried about it to speak of—” He broke off. “Hoy, what’s the matter? All at once, you look sandbagged.”

  She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut. “It’s nothing,” her tongue formed.

  He trod forward, took her by both arms that trembled just a little, and growled, “The hell it’s nothing. Anything that can shake you, Joelle—”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she answered before she could stop herself. Control returned. “I … have my… irrational moments too.” Observing his shock: “Didn’t you realize that?”

  He gulped, which astonished her. Surely he’d experienced enough women and their vagaries. After a while he said slowly, “Well, yes, you must enjoy my company—aside from bed, I mean—which doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  She saw that, beneath the easy manner he’d acquired with her over the years, he was still wonder-smitten by her intellect.

  “But if you also have a real weakness—” He lost his words as she cast herself against him.

  “Hold me close, Dan,” she begged and commanded, for she did not want to be reminded of the contemptible psyche beneath her aware mind. “Let’s go inside.” Let’s appease the animal part.

  —But this time she c
ouldn’t make it work. He was as kind and strong as always, and there was some relief in it, and afterward more in reassuring him that she was merely out of sorts and everything would soon be fine again: which was doubtless true.

  Still—None of us escape the fact that it’s often difficult, too often impossible for us, thought Joelle in the Wheel. Worse for the Betans, of course. What can it he like, having to pin your hopes for love on an alien and barely half-civilized race? Is that part of the reason, quite aside from our shared holothesis, why I feel so close to Fidelio?

  The door chimed. “Come in,” she said, and was more than pleased when it proved to be him. Not only had she been thinking of him. Against the bleakly functional room, which pastel paint did nothing to make cheerful, he stood like a solid avowal that there was more to reality.

  “Buenos días,” he greeted in the harsh, guttural voice of his breed upon land. Whistling overtones made the words hard to follow.

  “Bienvenido, “she replied, and suggested he employ his native speech, the one intended for air. She would stay with Spanish. Without computerized voder equipment, she could not render Betan vocables, and she didn’t feel like taking him down to the lab and talking under the eyes of the guard posted in the hall, who would come along. If the conversation required phrases of his, she could write them. To be sure, lacking her holothetic assembly, she had but limited knowledge. The languages held more nuances strange to her than an unaided brain could master. (The underwater “tongue” was worse, from the standpoint of pronunciation and comprehension both.) However, if things didn’t get complicated today, she could manage.

  “Are you engaged, female of intellect?” he asked politely. “I would not interrupt a dream-logic.” That was her rendition of a certain concept, not very satisfactory but doubtless better than “meditation” or “philosophical thought” or “purposeful daydreaming.”