Free The Avatar by Poul Anderson Page B

in sight.
    “Except… I guess when we get right down to bedrock, I can no more set my strongest beliefs on a shelf to wait for a convenient moment than anyone else can.”
    Briefly, a part of him wondered if she noticed the mixed metaphor. Probably. But she kissed him and requested, “Tell me them. How I wish you had earlier.”
    He heard how strained his voice was but couldn’t amend that: “This is what I’m afraid of. If the human race doesn’t take off soon for the stars, it dies.
    “The Union is in bad trouble. I thought, when I quit the Peace Command as a young fellow, that we’d pretty well worked ourselves out of a job. Earth looked orderly and sane. Well, I was wrong. Too many two-legged animals are jammed onto the planet. More and more lunacies keep boiling up. Religions like Transdeism. Heresies like New Islam. Political faiths like Asianism. Nations where mobs, or cabinet ministers, scream forsecession if they can’t get what they want when they want, no matter if it’s feasible. And the worst is, a lot of those grudges against the Union are legitimate. More and more, the world government is trying to run everything—everything—from the center. As if an Oceanian mariculturist, a Himalayan knight, a businessman in Nairobi, and a spaceman working out of an Iliadic base didn’t know best what their special problems are and what to do about them. Judas priest, are you aware that dead-serious talk is going on in the Council about resurrecting Keynesian fiscal policies?
    “I suppose you’ve been spared the knowledge of what those were.
    “The point is, whenever I visit Earth, I see it more sick. A lot of sociologists claim that the revelation about the Others, a completely superior race of beings, had considerable to do with bringing on the nuttiness that led to the Troubles. I dunno. Maybe. But if that’s correct, then the Covenant didn’t buy us anything except a breathing spell. We haven’t yet come to terms with the fact of the Others. We never will, either, unless we can get out there. No, I’m sure that the way things are going, Earth will explode pretty soon. The best result of that would be a kind of Caesar; and the Caesars weren’t really very durable. The worst that can happen—the worst doesn’t bear thinking about, Caitlín.
    “And don’t suppose we can safely sit out the disaster here. My personal experience, these past several weeks, says different. Demeter may be two hundred and twenty light-years from Earth—the latest estimate I’ve seen from the astronomers—but that’s just a skip through the gate for a ship armed with fusion missiles.
    “Oh, yes,” he ended, “maybe I am being too apocalyptic. I said I try to steer clear of fanaticism. Maybe they’ll muddle through somehow. But I know for certain, if I know nothing else, that Earth won’t get any new ideas except from the stars, and meanwhile the old ideas are killing people. Same as they killed my first wife.”
    He stopped, exhausted.
    “Dan, you bleed,” she half wept, and cradled him as best she was able.
    At last: “You’ve never really told me what happened with Antonia. You loved her, and married her, and she died a bad death. Would you tell me the whole story this night?”
    He stared before him. “Why saddle you with it?”
    “So I can understand, my most dear. Understand you and what is in you; for sure it has become to me that this is your great wound and the reason why you could not stay quiet about
Emissary.”
    “Perhaps,” he mumbled. “You see, it was a political assassination, and the politics wouldn’t have existed if we weren’t stuck in these two miserable planetary systems.”
    “Speak, Dan. About your Antonia. I’d make a song in honor of her memory, if you would like that.”
    “I would. I would.”
    “Then first I must know.”
    He was merely average articulate, and full of grief; he groped and croaked:
    “Okay, to start, how we met. After my discharge from the Peace Command,