She was at the conference, too, where the Major Officers met to discuss acquiring some more children. The Poohbears, having no little ones left in Nursery, were all in favor of it. Gilmerritt’s was the first voice raised against it.

  “I think we must wait,” she said. “We are going to be here at least a year, perhaps more. We cannot make the DNA modification until shortly after we take off. With the techniques we are using now, the child must be raised in free fall and deep space to develop the full Explorer mutation. If we take newborn or new-hatched infants now, they will be too old for the DNA change by the time we leave here.”

  Gilrae glanced at the chief Medic. “Gilban?”

  “With our present technology, Merritt is right,” he said. “I heard on Host that the Spray, bring short-handed, took a group of five-year-olds, hoping to diminish the time before they would be old enough to work ship. Not a single one survived.”

  Gilrae said quietly “We needn’t wait. I promised to put it to you. The crew of the Spray wants to join us—and there are twenty-nine of them. This would give us a crew of more than sixty. We could be off again next month, if we wished—with a crew of children for the Nursery—and be fully operational again for the first time in years.

  To the murmur of voices—half approving, half in protest—that rose at once, she raised a hand. “We don’t have to decide now,” she said, “It must be put to vote. Think it over. We’ll call another meeting and decide. But remember before you decide that the alternative is probably decommissioning. The Councillor’s formal reception is tonight. It’s not compulsory, but the Laszlans have been very kind to us, so please don’t absent yourselves without some good reason.”

  Ramie caught up with him in the corridor. “Doran, did you hear this about the Spray? You didn’t look particularly surprised when Rae brought it up.”

  “I heard it on Host,” Gildoran said.

  “It could be the answer,” Ramie said. “We could all stay together, that way.”

  “But strangers—on Gypsy Moth.…”

  “They wouldn’t be strangers. They’re Explorers. Like us.”

  ‘It would be better if they were strangers,” Gildoran said helplessly, “We could learn to adapt to them—and they to us—as we do when we’re downworld. But the crew of another Explorer ship—with its own traditions— of us and still not of us—I honestly don’t think it would work, Ramie.”

  “No, not if it split us into warring factions,” Ramie said. “I see your point. I’ve often thought the perfect solution would be to be able to sign on adult volunteers whenever we needed them. Then there wouldn’t be so much difference between Explorers and downworld people. We wouldn’t be freaks to them, and they wouldn’t be alien races to us. It wouldn’t be any more of a difference than transferring from Nursery to Transmitter Crew. We’d all just be people together.” She considered a moment, her pretty pale face pensive. “Maybe we could do that with another Explorer crew. But it would be hard, because we’d expect them to be just like us. And they couldn’t be.” She sighed and shook her head. “Well, maybe the right answer will turn up.”

  ‘If we have to join with the Spray,” Gildoran said harshly, “I’ll go earthworm! Better live here among strangers I know are strangers, than try to pretend they’re not”

  Ramie looked startled and shocked. “Could you do that to us, Gildoran?”

  He turned away, saying harshly “I wouldn’t be the first, and I won’t be the last.”

  He thought about that as he was pulling himself, with an ill grace, into dress clothes for the Councillor’s formal reception.

  Maybe I would be the last. What did they say on Host—that perhaps they were going to cut off the Explorer ships? Well, I’m, sure the Cosmos will survive very nicely without them, for the next few million years at least. By then, maybe they’ll have something better.

  Gilmerritt, in a slim green sheath the color of her eyes, stepped up behind him. “You’re going to the Councillor’s reception?”

  “I don’t suppose I could get out of it,” Gildoran said. “Rae asked everyone to go. Aren’t you?”

  “I’d rather not. But I will, if you’re going,” she said. “Who is the Councillor?”

  “How would I know? Some important politician, I suppose, who has a thing about Explorers. I don’t know whether he romanticizes us, or whether he just wants to know whether we really do kill and eat the children we steal or buy.”

  Gilmerritt made an expressive face of disgust. “Are there really people who still believe that?”

  “Merritt, there are people who will believe anything,” Gildoran said.

  “Then maybe we’d better take Gilmarina with us. To prove otherwise,” Gilmerritt said, and Gildoran shrugged. “If she wants to go, I’m perfectly willing. But it seems a shame. She’s really too young to have to be let in for these wretched formal affairs.”

  Gildoran found Gilmarina with Rae, playing a tall electronic harp in one of the Recreation rooms. Marina had recently been released officially from the Nursery and had a room of her own, which she shared with Gilrita.

  The Nursery’s empty now. Strange how dead the Ship feels without babies aboard. And the children are the only future we have.

  Gildoran stood, silent and unmoving, listening to the woman and the girl playing an elaborate duet. It was Gilrae who saw him first and broke off in the middle of an arpeggio.

  “I see you’re dressed for the Councillors reception. Shall we all go together, then?”

  Gilmarina looked astonished and delighted. “Can I really go, Rae?” n,

  “Of course, darling, if you want to,” Rae said, and Gilmarina smiled. She had deep dimples in each cheek. “I’d better go and dress! I can imagine that it would hardly be protocol to turn up in Ship uniform!”

  Gilmerritt laughed. “I doubt if the Laszlans would know the difference,” she said, “they surely don’t expect us to know, or abide by, their dress codes. Dress codes follow such subliminal cues anyhow. In worlds with the Transmitter, I doubt if anyone pays much attention any more. But it must have been a full-time occupation, to stay appropriately dressed, in the days when that was an important consideration.”

  “It was,” Gilrae said. “I spent my twenties helping open up a world which became a pleasure resort, and it amused me to learn something about the psychology of appropriate dress there, and to compare it with the other worlds I visited. Of course, on a pleasure-world it’s a deliberate thing—and quite artificial.”

  “Isn’t it artificial everywhere?” Merritt asked. “Except, that is, on world with extremes of climate, where you’d freeze or get sunstroke in the wrong clothing?”

  “I don’t know,” Gilrae said. ‘It’s a matter of subtle cues given and received, and if you give the wrong ones for the society, you may be in trouble.”

  ‘I imagine that’s why Travel Cloaks were invented,” Gildoran said. ’Imagine an ordinary woman on one planet going out for a day’s shopping, stepping just a few light-years away for something a little different to wear, and discovering she’s suddenly subject—in her ordinary house-dress—to being sexually accosted.”

  Gilmerritt shrugged. “I’m sine it happens,” she said, “but unless she’s terribly neurotic, surely she wouldn’t mind. She could always say no, or pretend not to understand his language.”

  Gilmarina returned, in close-fitting tights and a brief flared tunic of brilliant crimson, her pale hair tied into a glittered scarf.

  She’s a woman, and a pretty one. But she’s still a baby, to me. She always will be.

  The women admired Gilmarina’s dress and they all started down toward the Transmitter. Gildoran was wearing ordinary dress uniform, silver and blue—the Councillor, confound him, wanted them not as guests but specifically as Explorers, so why not? Rae, as befitted an Elder, wore pale draperies, with artificial snowflakes in her snowy hair. Gilmerritt, in her green sheath, and Gilmarina in her brilliant tunic, were pretty women who might have’ come from any world of the millions who surrounded them.

  “I suppose any attention to dress will wear off in a few years,” Gilrae said, as they set the Transmitter coordinates for the destination of the Councillor’s Residence, “No one alive could possibly learn all those subliminal cues for more than one or two planets—four or five, if anyone wanted to make it a lifetime study or specialty.” “And what a waste of time,” Gilmerritt laughed, as the brief sparkling darkness surrounded them.

  Do we go through the Transmitter all together? Are we somehow intermingled, atoms mixing in the interspace between the Terminals. How do we know that each of us gets our own flesh and blood back? Am I part of everyone I’ve ever shared a Transmitter booth with?

  He briefly considered signing up for Transmitter crew on their next voyage. But the possibility that the Gypsy Moth might never take another voyage caused black depression to settle down on him like a blanket.

  “You don’t look very festive, Gildoran.” Gilrae slid her arm through his. ’This is a party. Cheer up!”

  He didn’t feel at all festive. But for Gilrae’s sake he let a smile cover his face like a mask.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. “I imagine that must be the Councillor’s Residence over there, with all the lights and floating balloons around it. I’m glad it’s not far—this must be in the Polar regions!”

  They crossed the paved square through lightly falling snow, and went into the brightly-lit Official Residence.

  IV

  What Gilrae had said about clothes could equally well apply to entertainments, Gildoran thought as they paused in the outer, marbled hall of the Residence to be divested of their Travel Cloaks by noiselessly moving servomechanisms. Formality in some places was random informality in another. An official reception on one world might mean that you stood quietly in line and listened to speeches by dignitaries; on another it might mean that you lolled about on cushions and sang drinking songs. It had been years since Gildoran had attended any formal entertainment—or for that matter had mixed in large groups except with his own shipmates.

  The most formal thing I’ve attended in thirteen years is the yearly Captain-choosing.

  He murmured something of this to Rae as they went below lines of overhead crystal chandeliers, and she nodded. “Some day—any millennia now,” she said, “some group or other will attempt to create guides for intercosmic etiquette. I believe they have something like that already but only in high diplomatic interplanetary political circles. When customs gets homogenized all the way down the social scales, decadence starts.” She chuckled a little. “But as long as the Explorers keep opening up new worlds, decadence can be indefinitely delayed. Maybe were the little leaven that leavens the whole Galaxy.”

  “Citizens of Laszlo and Honored Guests,” the abnormally sweet, mechanical voice of a servomech proclaimed, ’The ship’s officers of the Explorer ship Gypsy Moth. Gildoran; Gilrae; Gilmarina; Gilmerritt.”

  A fat little woman close to them murmured audibly “Oh, they’re the Explorers! Councillor Marik is simply mad on the subject, you know!” She smiled up sweetly at Gildoran and asked “Could you tell me, why your names are all so much alike?”

  Gildoran couldn’t see that their names all were that much alike, but he replied courteously, explaining that every Explorer ship had a specific coded identification which was made into a single syllable—Gil in the case of Gypsy Moth—and given as the first syllable of the name of every person on that ship, so that from the name of the Explorer, any Explorer in the fleet could immediately identify him by the ship he came from.

  “And how many ships are there in the Explorer fleet?” the woman asked.

  “I really couldn’t say. Perhaps Gilrae could tell you,” Gildoran said, carefully not looking at the other woman.

  Another man in the crowd around them said, “The ships have such strange and romantic names. Where do they come from?”

  ’The ships? Most of them were built on Host,” Gildoran replied.

  “No, the names! Where do the names come from?”

  “They are names of ships sailed by explorers on mankind’s original world,” Gildoran replied, “or at least that’s what the legends say. Ships were a form of land transit, I believe, and in those days explorers went out to find out all they could about their own world before they went into space. The names of some of those ships have been preserved in legend, or as far as we know that is true. Of course, after so many years, who can tell?”

  A servomechanism glided up to him and attracted his attention by a discreet tug at his uniform sleeve.

  “Gildoran of the Gypsy Moth? Councillor Marik wishes to speak to you personally, if you will be so good,” it murmured.

  Just about the last thing Gildoran wanted was to go and chat with some higher-up political biggie who romanticized the Explorers, but he couldn’t think of a single polite way to refuse. He followed the servomech to the Councillor’s raised thronelike chair.

  Councillor Marik was a shrivelled little figure, dark-skinned, but his hair was white as Gildoran’s own. He looked up as Gildoran came close, and said:

  “You don’t remember me, do you, Gildoran? No, how could you, after—how many years has it been? More than a hundred, for me. You said you wouldn’t come back, because I’d be sure to hate you…”

  Something in the voice touched a string of memory in Gildoran. He said “Merrik!” with a curious sense of warmth.

  Was this why I felt this world was home, because I found a friend here I would never forget?

  “You don’t shoot escaped snakes in the forestry preserve any more, then?”

  The old man chuckled. “You do remember, then. As for you—it’s true, you don’t look a day older. No, I take that back,” he said, scanning the other man’s face. “What’s happened? I understand your ship’s in trouble. But it’s good to have you as a guest here.”

  It was with a curious sense of things falling into place that Gildoran took a seat beside the Councillor and began to tell him what had befallen the Gypsy Moth in the years between.

  If I choose to stay here as an earthworm, at least 1 shall begin with a friend. Not wholly as a stranger, then. And a friend, after all, in high places. Certainly I shall be able to find something worthwhile here.

  Marik listened to Gildoran’s tale in silence, seeming fascinated. Finally, when he heard of the choice facing them—to join with another Explorer ship or decommission—he said seriously, “But that is terrible! Not that you wouldn’t be welcome here, any or all of you. But every Explorer ship we lose—”

  “Even Head Centre seems to think we’re a luxury the Galaxy can dispense with,” Gildoran said.

  “Head Centre likes playing God,” Marik said, “but this thing is too big for politics on this scale. I don’t think you realize what the Explorers mean to us, Gildoran. You’re too close to the problem—what’s the old saying, you can’t see the Ocean for the surf?”

  Gildoran said “I’d be curious to know what you think the Explorers mean. To most of the people of most planets, were either freaks, or a dangerous strangeness, a legend people hate.”

  “You’re our safety valve,” Marik said. “Our permanent frontier, our endless open end. As long as the Explorers are finding and opening new worlds, we can all be different, keep our individuality. Once the discovery of new worlds ends, once everything is known, we begin to stagnate; we begin to die. It’s like a race gone sterile; with nothing new beginning, that race, or that world, begins to die. When life is simply repeating the known, when nothing new enters the equation, we find first a loss of new ideas, then of creativity in general, then general decadence. It’s happened, historically, to every new planet when it’s been entirely explored and mapped; from that moment it begins to the and go decadent. Man can’t live, psychologically, without a frontier. And even if we—all of us—can’t go exploring, we can survive, psychologically, knowing that new worlds are being found, that someone can go and find them.”

  It reminded him, a little, of what Gilrae had been saying—about homogenizing of manners being the beginning of decadence. But he asked, bitterly, “Why do so many people ban us from their worlds, then? Why do they deny us children?”

  “Because they don’t understand,” Marik said quietly. “I’ve spent my life, Gildoran, trying to make sure that Laszlo will understand. I think you’ll find you can have all the children you want, here.” He smiled a little wistfully and said “I myself would be happy to know that someone of my blood would be exploring the stars, a thousand years after my old bones were dust. And I’m sure there are millions who feel just as I do. Here and elsewhere.”

  That would be the answer, perhaps, Gildoran thought as the crew of the Gypsy Moth left the Residence much later that night, and walked toward the Transmitter Terminal. A world where the Explorers were not freaks and hated aliens, but an Explorer homeworld, where they could come each time they opened a new world; where they could return for their children instead of buying or stealing, where every family on this planet had a child on the Explorer ships—apd if Head Centre chose to close down Host, and phase out their support of the Explorers, Laszlo could remain as their home base…

  But as they entered the Transmitter he turned and said to Gilrae, ’Take the girls home, will you? I’m going out for a while—”

  “I’ll go with you,” Gilmerritt said, “unless you really want to be alone.”

  “I think I do. Thank you, darling, but you go home with Gilmarina. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He stepped into a booth and pressed the coordinates for the main Transmitter Terminal on Laszlo. Here, in this terminal, he and Ramie had nearly been killed. Now they were honored guests.

 

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