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"You'll make it better."
"No, wait. I'm no hero or savior or any such fool thing."
Her voice calmed. "Maybe not. But you are a tough, smart, overly brave man, and I expect our sons will
be absolute hellions."
"You're getting too far ahead of today, makamaka." The Lahui endearment, impulsively uttered,
unleashed memories. He felt worthless, rammed the feeling down, but said more starkly than he had
intended: "Don't invest in me. Not yet."
Immediately grave, she regarded him through several pulsebeats before she said, "You have something
dan-gerous to do soon, don't you?"
His usual decisiveness failed him. "Well "
"What is it?"
"I can't tell you."
"You jolly well can and will." She paused. "Not right away. Tomorrow, later today, is soon enough. We
have this hour for our own."
"We aren't casual about our relationships," David Ronay had warned. "In fact, we're seldom impulsive
about them. My daughter can roam freely with anyone she wants to because everybody who knows her
knows she's our kind of person."
The father had been right, Fenn learned, and it was right to respect that code, because it was Kinna's
too. It didn't seem easy for her either. But when he left, the false sky above the passage ruddy with
sunrise, and the last thing she whispered to him in the doorway was, On top of everything else, you're
honorable," he had never been more victorious.
They met in the afternoon as agreed, each wholly awake though neither had slept. Skinsuited, they left
the city and hiked up to the crater rim and thence along it, mostly mute, mostly glancing at one another.
They, had the trail to themselves. Crommelin was busy and, in spite of the low latitude, winter vacationers
were few. From the heights they looked down on human work and across to distant, abiding desolation:
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dunes, boulders, pockmarks, a scud of yellow dust and the sun blurred by a salmon haze. Audio
amplifiers brought them the thin wind-skirl. Louder was the scrunch of grit beneath their boots.
"This is my kind of country," she said once, most softly. "And nevertheless, I'd like to live, alongside you,
to see it growing green and blue, a lake down in the bowl and an ocean yonder, your kind of country,
Fenn."
Thirty or forty minutes' march brought them to a shel-ter, a little dome with basic life-support. They
cycled through the airlock, took off their helmets, and drew to-gether. The smell of her hair brought
summer meadows on Earth back to him.
After a while they let go. He wondered bemusedly what to call her eyes: pearl-gray, smoke-gray, the
gray of northern seas? till she spoke in her straightforward fashion and hauled him back to facts.
"You said you're not coming to Sananton." Be careful! he thought. "Not at once. Later, sure."
"You're not sure." She can tell, he thought. She's too flapping observant. "Why not? You know you're
always as welcome as the flowers in spring," the man-created flowers at the end of the long, long Martian
winter. "And you know how I'd love to come." That didn't fend her off. "Then why not? You've
ex-plained you're here on a special survey mission. I can't imagine a better place to start than Sananton.
Dad and Mother know just about everybody on the planet who counts."
"That's not what I'm after," he must admit. "Not at first, anyway."
"So what are you after?"
"I'm sorry. I can't tell you that... darling."
Her lips tightened, "Do I have to keep saying, 'Why not?' "
"It's confidential. I've promised."
"Have you? Truly?"
"Yes "
"As a liar, you're no doubt an excellent spaceman." Kinna sighed and clicked her tongue. "Fenn, Fenn,
did you suppose I haven't thought about you, studied you,played every scenario that I could imagine with
you in my head in my whole body? I know full well you're lying to me, and about something that
concerns me where I live. Don't."
"Slag and slaughter!" he roared. Urgently: "Listen, you mustn't know. It wouldn't be safe for you to.
Later, later."
"If there is a later," she said.
"There will be."
"You're not one hundred percent convinced of that."
"In death's name, woman, be reasonable! Every time we take a breath, we take a risk."
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"Fenn," she said, unrelenting, "I love you and I un-derstand you're trying to protect me, but you are not
going to squirm free of this. You understand will you? I'm no Earthside softling. We can't make a life
together if one underrates the other. Give me the trust you owe me."
Overrun, he thought in turmoil that she could indeed provide the kind of advice he needed, and so far he
hadn't sniffed out where else he might reliably get it, and
"Well, you win," he said. "But it has to be a zero-kelvin secret. No word, no hint to your parents, to
anybody, no, not to Taffimai Metallumai or the wind."
She made a curious gesture, right forefinger flitting from left to right shoulder, then from brow to breast.
"None. You scare me, but " Her smile broke forth. "You make me sunburst-happy too. An odd mix."
The smile died. She shivered.
Almost relieved, almost liberated, he plunged ahead. "It's about the secrecy of the cybercosm. I don't
say Synesis; I say cybercosm. You've heard me aplenty on the subject. No sense in fuming about it now.
But that thing the solar lenses have found out, whatever it is the data they've got archived on Pavonis
Mons, where the Inrai died why won't they tell us? It has to be some-thing huge. Doesn't it? Something
cosmic. My interview with Chuan yesterday clinched this for me."
Great cosmos! Only yesterday?
"We, the Lahui Kuikawa, we can't lay any more plans, we can't go any further, before we know," he
went on. "And if we don't start soon, we'll never be able to. Is that one reason the cybercosm's
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