“I’m sorry,” Nicol said to Venator. “No.”
Jubilation flashed over Falaire. She curbed it and stayed watchful. “Ah-h-h,” Lirion sighed.
“You realize I can’t trust you,” Nicol told them. “After everything you’ve done and everything that’s at stake. And from time to time I’ll have to sleep.”
“Your danger from us depends on what your aim is,” Falaire said.
“Not quite. Also, I’m putting an added price on my services, Venator.”
“Why?” asked the download and the woman together. Eyestalks turned to meet eyes. His brief laughter barked, hers trilled.
“I don’t want him . . . tortured, mutilated, dissected, scrapped—or kept forever from his Oneness,” Nicol said. “No, I couldn’t live with that.”
Lirion finger-shrugged. “Eyach, we can readily cede you him, if what you further desire is what we need not die to prevent.”
“It isn’t. I do want to go to Proserpina with you, and, and live among you, your people—”
Falaire’s cry of joy quivered for an instant.
“But you can’t be sure of that, can you?” Nicol went on, largely to Lirion. “I might change my mind, on this voyage or in the years to come. And so I in my turn can’t be sure of you.”
“Unless you have an ally,” Venator put in.
Nicol nodded. “Correct. You.”
“Leagued with a criminal, a traitor?”
“Set those judgments aside. Think.”
“Oh, I can do both. I see your strategy. If we stay together, standing watch and watch, it’s not too likely we can be taken by surprise. In the end, when Proserpina has the antimatter secure beyond regaining, you’ll arrange for my return to Earth.”
“Yes. We need each other.”
“A strong glue,” Venator said wryly. “I have nothing to gain by refusing you. So to save myself, for whatever that may be worth, I, an officer of the Federation, shall be always at the side of a robber.”
Even then, Falaire’s grin flickered. “Always?”
In the depths of defeat, Venator kept his own humor. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m only a consciousness in a box, indifferent to biology. At the appropriate moments I can turn my optics elsewhere.” He directed them toward Nicol. “The experience will admittedly be interesting. You’re a complex devil. I think I’ll enjoy your company. I hope mine doesn’t become tedious to you.”
“You need not forever be on guard,” Lirion promised, perhaps honestly. “If you have not summoned Earth by the time we reach Proserpina, belike you never will.”
“I’ll keep trying to persuade him, you know,” Venator said.
“Don’t bother,” Nicol told the download.
“What reason will we have to attack you?” Lirion argued.
“Yes, I daresay trust will come, however slowly,” Nicol said.
“Maychance not too slowly,” Falaire hinted.
“We’ll see. For now, let’s call this a truce.” Nicol put the pistol in his belt, though he kept a hand near it.
Venator addressed him: “But I don’t understand. I genuinely don’t. Are you demented? Instead of a triumphant homecoming—justice done on this precious pair and their confederates, who deceived and used and all but broke you—or we could let them go, if you insist— you choose to give them their plunder and risk assassination, following them to exile. Do you know what it’s like where you’re bound? You’ll be more foreign than any man ever was at the uttermost ends of Earth; and it’s always night.”
Nicol bit his lip. “I can’t explain in so many words. Maybe as we get acquainted it’ll become clear to you.”
“Will you help me see?” Falaire asked most quietly. “For I too am bewildered, Jesse.”
Lirion looked expectant. Given an idea of the space-farer’s motive, he would know better what to await and thus be less inclined to plan some treachery. But Nicol spoke wholly to the woman.
“Yours is a new world, in a heroic age. Its bards are singing. I can hope to be one of them.”
“You, a total outsider?” protested Venator.
Yes, Nicol thought, he knew full well how alone he would be; yet out of the pain he might win a meaning for his life. “Homer sang of a bygone age,” he said. “Shakespeare treated of Cleopatra and Macbeth. Fitzgerald drew on Omar Khayyam. Kipling told about India. I—I don’t even necessarily need human things. The inhuman may be what’s mine, stars, comets, hugeness, a universe that doesn’t know or care but simply and gloriously is— but humans are there—I realize it’s crazy, and I can’t explain.”
Venator spoke in sudden gentleness. “However, I think now I understand.”
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