Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space colonies -- Fiction
Saari sat watching her, and nodded. "You're different, aren't you? From
us, and from them too." She looked over at Max and Bernard and the
others, and then she looked at Curt Elias, who sat clenching and
unclenching his hands, saying nothing.
"Yes, we're different," Trina said.
Max Cramer's voice broke incisively into the silence that lay between
them then. "I don't see why," he said, "we didn't all know about this
world. Especially if more than one ship came here."
Saari's father laughed softly. "It's not so strange. The ships all
belonged to one clan. The MacGregors. And eventually all of them either
were lost in space somewhere or else grew tired of roaming around and
settled down. Here." He smiled again, and his high cheekboned face
leaned forward into the light. "Like me...."
Night. Cloudless, black, but hazed over with atmosphere and thus
familiar, not like the night of space. The two small moons, the stars in
unfamiliar places, and somewhere, a star that was her world. And Trina
sat and listened to the planet men talk, and to the spacemen among them
who could no longer be distinguished from the native born. Outside, in
the narrow street, wind murmured, skudding papers and brush before it,
vague shadows against the light houses. Wind, rising and moaning, the
sound coming in over the voices and the music from the cafe singers.
It was a stronger wind than ever blew on the world, even during the
winter, when the people had to stay inside and wish that Earth tradition
might be broken and good weather be had the year around.
"We'd better get back to the ship," Elias said.
They stopped talking and looked at him, and he looked down at his hands,
embarrassed. "They'll be worried about us at home."
"No, they won't," Max said. Then he saw the thin, blue-veined hands
trembling and the quiver not quite controlled in the wrinkled neck.
"Though perhaps we should start back...."
Trina let out her breath in relief. To be back in the ship, she thought,
with the needle and its forgetfulness, away from the noise and the crowd
and the nervousness brought on by the rising wind.
It would be better, of course, when they had their place in the country.
There it would be warm and homelike and quiet, with the farm animals
near by, and the weather shut out, boarded out and forgotten, the way it
was in winter on the world.
"You're coming with us?" Captain Bernard was saying.
"Yes, we're coming." Half a dozen of the men stood up and began pulling
on their long, awkward coats.
"It'll be good to get back in space again," MacGregor said. "For a
while." He smiled. "But I'm too old for a spaceman's life now."
"And I'm too old even for this," Elias said apologetically. "If we'd
found this planet the other time...." He sighed and shook his head and
looked out the window at the shadows that were people, bent forward,
walking into the wind. He sighed again. "I don't know. I just don't
know."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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