“Um.” He fell silent.

“Look at it,” he said at last. “Earth. Hanging there like some sort of nondenominational angel.”

“Careful. Call it that and the New Sons will claim they thought of it first.”

“They would. Quite their style.”

“Why can’t they stick to one world at a time? Why pull the strings here?”

“They like to muck about. Power, you know—it’s an addictive drug.”

They watched their planet, half of it visible over the mottled horizon. Nikka pitched a stone down the baked hillside. The only sound was a whirring of air circulation in their suits.

“Incredible,” Nigel said intently. “Nobody’s noticed, but this is going to be the first true moon colony. The wreck will always have a covey of scientists poking into it, decade after decade.”

“The cylinder cities will have their own base. Probably bigger.”

“That electromagnetic gun of theirs? If we build it at all.”

“Don’t you think they will?”

“Maybe. The media are certainly singing about the idea.”

“Shouldn’t we?”

“Oh—” Nigel shrugged and then realized it was invisible inside the suit. “Probably. The cylinder cities will be good manufacturing sites, I’ll give you that. And they’ll sop up sunlight, then beam power down in microwaves. Photovoltaic conversion, the lot. That’ll be a big help— the coal liquefaction plants are being closed, you know, now that benzopyrene is proving to be a carcinogen. The Europeans are getting desperate for energy sources again.”

“Can’t they buy enough alcohol fuel? Brazil’s sugar cane crop is immense this year.”

“Not enough; they’re streets behind the worldwide demand.”

“Then we’d best build cylinder cities and more solar collectors as quickly as possible.”

“Ummm, yes, I suppose. But that’s not why the space community idea is being brushed off and taken out of the closet.”

“Why is it?”

“The New Sons. I think they’re using this as a smoke screen.”

“I heard there is widespread support.”

“Oh yes, they’re thick on the ground—and the pun is intentional.”

“A smoke screen? For what?”

“Not for what, against what. Against us. To deflect attention and money from the program here.”

“Oh. You’re certain?”

“No.” Nigel kicked at a rock. They watched it tumble downhill, flinging up a silvery cloud of dust in its wake that rose and fell with ghostlike smoothness. “No, that’s the hell of it. I must guess at all this. But I know that congressional committees don’t suddenly take up big spending bills, putting them on the top of the docket, for no reason whatever. Something’s happening.”

“I feel quite naive.”

“Don’t. See, the games played up at the top of the pile—they’re still merely games. Politics, public relations, oneupmanship, showbiz—those words have gotten to be synonyms.”

“Competition is fun.”

“Of course. ‘This show was brought to you through the miracle of testosterone.’ But there’s got to be more to it than that. More than another zero-sum game.”

“That’s why you never went into the higher echelons? So you could be free to use your influence for what you truly wanted—to come out here and turn your back on all that?”

“Eh?” Her tone took him by surprise. “Turn my back? No, look—look at that sherbet planet of ours. Here we are, the furthest out. Nothing but night beyond us. And still the view dominating the sky is bloody old Earth. Turn my back? We’re still looking at ourselves.”

That evening, after a grueling session at the consoles, she came again to his room. Their lovemaking had a more desperate edge to it, Nigel sensed. He felt himself pressing her to him with a furious energy, and wondered at himself. The silken movements, so electric, had their own life. Considered as a designed act, it was in the mind’s eye a slow churning of bloated and gummy organs, dumb to the ethereal, a rising with involuntary spasms from ancient ooze. But beyond that lay joy, an airy joy, with a burning pressure that lifted away the convenient carapace of mannerisms he wore. It took place in a spherical space so intense that people had to go in pairs; one could scarcely bear to go alone.

Yet, even lying at the place where all the lines of her converged, his head cradled between her thighs, Nigel felt himself slipping away from her, from the gliding moment, and into the riddles that chipped away at his focus. He felt a lazy peace with Nikka, a sensation he hadn’t had since Alexandria, but the stretching tension remained, a double pull both toward this woman and to the ruined ship outside, as though both were links in an unseen circle. He fumbled with these thoughts and the knot they made inside him, and in the act fell asleep, with Nikka’s salty musk in his nostrils, his arms heavy and sluggish as though they had supported an unseen weight.

He awoke in the middle of the night. He took elaborate pains to slide out of the bed without waking her and switched on only the small reading lamp in the corner.

The mass of material from Kardensky was imposing but he worked at it steadily, reading as fast as he could. The riddles of the past had an annoying habit of slipping away as he tried to pin them down. Much was known, but it was for the most part a collection of facts with the interrelationships only implied. It is one thing to find a wide variety of tools, mostly stone, chipped or polished for some particular use. But how to put flesh on these bones? How, from a chipped flint, to deduce a way of life?

He rather wished he had paid more attention to such matters at University, rather than swotting up the readings just before term examinations.

There was a lot of talk and data about apes, but the evidence was quite strong—man’s prehuman ancestors didn’t look or act like the present great primates. Just because Fred is your cousin doesn’t mean you can learn much about your grandfather by studying Fred’s habits. It was all so interwoven, so dense. There was a jungle of theories and test mechanisms that were supposed to explain man—big game hunting, fire, then selection for bigger brains. And that implied prolonged infant and female dependency; loss of the estrous cycle so the woman was always available and interested; the beginnings of the family; taboos; tradition. All factors, all parts of the web.

The Hindu temple monkeys are ordinarily peaceful in the jungle. But once they become pets, take to living in the temples, they multiply freely and form large troops. One troop, stumbling on another, suddenly flies into a fierce rage and attacks. They are animals with time on their hands; deprived of the need to hunt, they have invented warfare. As man did.

Nigel sighed. Analogies with animals were all very well, but did this mean man followed the same path? Admittedly, men were the cleverest prey one could find. War has always been more exciting than peace, robbers than cops, hell than heaven, Lucifer than God.

When asked why they live in small groups, the Bush-men of the Kalahari reply that they fear war.

Tribes, clans, pacts. Africa the cauldron, Africa the crucible. Olduvai Gorge. Serengeti Plain. The Great Rift that circled the planet, a giant baseball seam, splitting, twisting, churning the dry, dusty plains of Africa. Earthquakes and volcanoes that forced migration and pushed the hunter onward in search of game.

Here is where ritual began, some said: the great peace that comes of doing a thing over and over again, every step spelled out in fine detail. The numbing, reassuring chant, the prescribed steps of the dance—creating a system where all is certain, all is regular, a substitute pocket universe for the uncertain and unpredictable world outside.

A dry rattle of turning pages cut the silence of the room as he read. He skimmed through an analysis of ritual as the social cement. Running living leaping soaring. Nigel made a small bitter laugh. Only once and all together. Joyful singing love forever.