2010 Odyssey Two

THE TRIAL Chapter 5: A CHILD OF THE STARS Chapter 37 Estrangement
'I'm truly sorry, old friend, to be the bearer of such bad news, but Caroline has asked me, and you know how I feel about you both.

'And I don't think it can be such a surprise. Some of the remarks you've made to me over the last year have hinted at it... and you know how bitter she was when you left Earth.

'No, I don't believe there's anyone else. If there was, she'd have told me... But sooner or later - well, she's an attractive young woman.

'Chris is fine, and of course he doesn't know what's happening. At least he won't be hurt. He's too young to understand, and children are incredibly... elastic? - just a minute, I'll have to key my thesaurus... ah, resilient.

'Now to things that may seem less important to you. Everyone is still trying to explain that bomb detonation as an accident, but of course nobody believes it. Because nothing else has happened, the general hysteria has died down; we're left with what one of your commentators has called the "looking-over-the-shoulder syndrome".

'And someone has found a hundred-year-old poem that sums up the situation so neatly that everybody's quoting it. It's set in the last days of the Roman Empire, at the gates of a city whose occupants are waiting for invaders to arrive. The emperor and dignitaries are all lined up in their most costly togas, ready with speeches of welcome. The senate has closed, because any laws it passes today will be ignored by the new masters.

'Then, suddenly, a dreadful piece of news arrives from the frontier. There aren't any invaders. The reception committee breaks up in confusion; everyone goes home muttering disappointedly, "Now what will happen to us? Those people were a kind of solution."

'There's just one slight change needed to bring the poem up to date. It's called "Waiting for the Barbarians" - and this time, we are the barbarians. And we don't know what we're waiting for, but it certainly hasn't arrived.

'One other item. Had you heard that Commander Bowman's mother died only a few days after the thing came to Earth? It does seem an odd coincidence, but the people at her nursing home say that she never showed the slightest interest in the news, so it couldn't possibly have affected her.'

Floyd switched off the recording. Dimitri was right; he was not taken by surprise. But that made not the slightest difference; it hurt just as badly.

Yet what else could he have done? If he had refused to go on the mission - as Caroline had so clearly hoped - he would have felt guilty and unfulfilled for the remainder of his life. That would have poisoned his marriage; better this clean break, when physical distance softened the pain of separation. (Or did it? In some ways, it made things worse.) More important was duty, and the sense of being part of a team devoted to a single goal.

So Jessie Bowman was gone. Perhaps that was another cause for guilt. He had helped to steal her only remaining son, and that must have contributed to her mental breakdown. Inevitably, he was reminded of a discussion that Walter Curnow had started, on that very subject.

'Why did you choose Dave Bowman? He always struck me as a cold fish - not actually unfriendly, but whenever he came into the room, the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.'

'That was one of the reasons we did select him. He had no close family ties, except for a mother he didn't see very often. So he was the sort of man we could send on a long, open-ended mission.'

'How did he get that way?'

'I suppose the psychologists could tell you. I did see his report, of course, but that was a long time ago. There was something about a brother who was killed - and his father died soon afterward, in an accident on one of the early shuttles. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but it certainly doesn't matter now.'

It didn't matter; but it was interesting. Now Floyd almost envied David Bowman, who had come to that very spot a free man unencumbered by emotional ties with Earth.

No - he was deceiving himself. Even while the pain gripped his heart like a vice, what he felt for David Bowman was not envy, but pity.