We Have Fed Our Sea

18

The North Atlantic rolled in from the west, gray and green and full of thunder. A wind blew white manes up on the waves. Low to the south gleamed the last autumnal daylight, and clouds massed iron-colored in the north, brewing sleet.

“There,” pointed Tamara. “That is the place.”

Maclaren slanted his aircar earthward. The sky whistled around him. So Dave had come from here. The island was a grim enough rock, harshly ridged. But Dave had spoken of gorse in summer and heather in fall and lichen of many hues.

The girl caught Maclaren’s arm. “I’m afraid, Terangi,” she whispered. “I wish you hadn’t made me come.”

“It’s all we can do for David,” he told her: “The last thing we’ll ever be able to do for him.”

“No.” In the twilight, he saw how her head lifted. “There’s never an end. Not really. His child and mine, waiting, and — At least we can put a little sense into life.”

“I don’t know whether we do or whether we find what was always there,” he replied. “Nor do I care greatly. To me, the important thing is that the purpose — order, beauty, spirit, whatever you want to call it — does exist.”

“Here on Earth, yes,” she sighed. “A flower or a baby. But then three men die beyond the sun, and it so happens the race benefits a little from it, but I keep thinking about all those people who simply die out there. Or come back blind, crippled, broken like dry sticks, with no living soul the better for it. Why? I’ve asked it and asked it, and there isn’t ever an answer, and finally I think that’s because there isn’t any why to it in the first place.”

Maclaren set the car down on the beach. He was still on the same search, along a different road. He had not come here simply to offer David’s father whatever he could: reconciliation, at least, and a chance to see David’s child now and then in the years left him. Maclaren had some obscure feeling that an enlightenment might be found on Skula.

Truly enough, he thought, men went to space, as they had gone to sea, and space destroyed them, and still their sons came back. The lure of gain was only a partial answer; spacemen didn’t get any richer than sailors had. Love of adventure… well, in part, in some men, and yet by and large the conquerors of distance had never been romantics, they were workaday folk who lived and died among sober realities. When you asked a man what took him out to the black star, he would say he had gone under orders, or that he was getting paid, or that he was curious about it, or any of a hundred reasons. Which might all be true. And yet was any of them the truth?

And why, Maclaren wondered, did man, the race, spend youth and blood and treasure and all high hopes upon the sea and the stars? Was it only the outcome of meaningless forces — economics, social pressure, maladjustment, myth, whatever you labeled it — a set of chance-created vectors with the sardonic resultant that man broke himself trying to satisfy needs which could have been more easily and sanely filled at home?

If I could get a better answer than that, thought Maclaren, I could give it to Tamara. And to myself And then we could bury our dead.

He helped her out of the car and they walked up a path toward an ancient-looking cottage. Light spilled from its windows into a dusk heavy with surf. But they had not quite reached it when the door opened and a man’s big form was outlined.

“Is that you, Technic Maclaren?” he called.

“Yes. Captain Magnus Ryerson?” Maclaren stepped ahead of Tamara and bowed. “I took the liberty, sir, of bringing a guest with me whom I did not mention when I called.”

“I can guess,” said the tall man. “It’s all right, lass. Come in and welcome.”

As she passed over the uneven floor to a chair, Tamara brushed Maclaren and took the opportunity to whisper: “How old he’s grown, all at once!”

Magnus Ryerson shut the door again. His hands, ropy with veins, shook a little. He leaned heavily on a cane as he crossed the room and poked up the fire. “Be seated,” he said to Maclaren. “When I knew you were coming, I ordered some whiskey from the mainland. I hope it’s a good make. I drink not, you see, but be free to do so yourself.”

Maclaren looked at the bottle. He didn’t recognize the brand. “Thank you,” he said, “that’s a special favorite of mine.”

“You’ve eaten?” asked the old man anxiously.

“Yes, thank you, sir.” Maclaren accepted a glass. Ryerson limped over the floor to give Tamara one.

“Can you stay the night? I’ve some extra beds in the garret, from when the fisher lads would come by. They come no more, there’s no reason for it now, but I’ve kept the beds.”

Maclaren traded a look with Tamara. “We would be honored,” he said.

Magnus Ryerson shuffled to the bob, took the tea kettle, poured himself a cup and raised it. “Your health.” He sat down in a worn chair by the fire. His hands touched a leather-bound book lying on its arm.

There was silence for a while, except that they could all hear the waves boom down on the strand.

Maclaren said finally: “I… we, I mean… we came to — offer our sympathy. And if there was anything I could tell you… I was there, you know.”

“Aye. You’re kind.” Ryerson groped after a pipe. “It is my understanding he conducted himself well.”

“Yes. Of course he did.”

“Then that’s what matters. I’ll think of a few questions later, if you give me time. But that was the only important one.”

Maclaren looked around the room. Through its shadows he saw pilot’s manuals on the shelves, stones and skins and gods brought from beyond the sky; he saw the Sirian binary like twin hells upon darkness, but they were very beautiful. He offered: “Your son was in your own tradition.”

“Better, I hope,” said the old man. “There would be little sense to existence, did boys have no chance to be more than their fathers.”

Tamara stood up. “But that’s what there isn’t!” she cried all at once. “There’s no sense! There’s just dying and dying and dying. What for? So that we can walk on another planet, learn another fact? What have we gained? What have we really done? And why? What did we do that your god sends our men out there now?”

She clamped her hands together. They heard how the breath rasped in her. She said at last, “I’m sorry,” and sat back down.

Magnus Ryerson looked up. And his eyes were not old. He let the surf snarl on the rocks of his home for a while. And then he answered her: “For that is our doom and our pride.”

“What?” She started. “Oh. In English. Terangi, he means—” She said it in Interhuman.

Maclaren sat quite still.

Ryerson opened his book. “They have forgotten Kipling now,” he said. “One day they will remember. For no people live long, who offer their young men naught but fatness and security. Tamara, lass, let your son hear this one day. It is his song too, he is human.”

The words were unknown to Maclaren, but he listened and thought he understood.

When Ryerson had finished, Maclaren stood up, folded his hands and bowed. “Sensei,” he said, “give me your blessing.”

“What?” The other man leaned back into shadows, and now he was again entirely old. You could scarcely hear him under the waves outside. “You’ve naught to thank me for, lad.”

“No, you gave me much,” said Maclaren. “You have told me why men go, and it isn’t for nothing. It is because they are men.”