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end of a mine shaft to go in at!" She saw him grin, caught her breath, and asked quietly, "Is this real, not
some kind of joke? Then you're dement."
"Nay," he answered as low. "I seek for freedom. It is not something many Terrans care about but I
thought you might, in your fashion."
"We've argued that before, and never gotten liftoff."
"Where talk has failed, sight may succeed."
Indecision drained from Kinna. An adventure, oh, yes! Curiosity seethed. She gripped the arms of
her seat as if they were common sense. It was faintly surprising how steady her voice became.
"You won't convert me, you know. Of course I'll be interested no, that isn't honest. I'll be
fascinated. But why me? How did you get them to agree to this, and whatever for?"
Unwontedly grave, he replied, "The idea was mine, and much time flowed before I persuaded
Scorian. I am ... new to the resistance, and marginal. Yet I have come to know you well and, through
you, other Terrans, and a few among them have some small force in affairs pub-lic. Thus I feel more
sharply than most of us, who are so alienated and cut off, how little the outer world also among my
race understands our reason for being. Even you call it dement.
"We lose naught, and we may gain somewhat, if the truth goes widely forth that it is ... douris." The
Lunar-ian word he put into his Anglo did not really mean "just" or "righteous." Those were not really
Lunarian concepts. "Natural" or "unwarped" came closer. "Ey, as you said, we can make no converts.
And simply for the ... clarification, you by yourself are the barest of be-ginnings. But a good beginning.
Your father will listen to you, and maychance through him others will who mat-ter a little. Surely at the
university you have many friends among the students, who have friends of their own; and surely, there are
those among the preceptors who will not altogether toss your words aside. And you tell me you-often
visit the synnoiont. Who better than you could speak on our behalf?"
Despite the thrumming in her, his assumption that David Ronay, and humans in general, possessed
almost negligible influence nettled her, as it had in the past. "Don't take me for granted," she warned.
"I'll report what I see as I see it."
His smile approached being warm. "I foreknew that. Ever were you an awkward liar."
Silence fell, apart from the slight murmur and shiver of the vehicle. Outside reached a wanly roseate
sky. A dust storm loomed above the northern horizon like a bank of yellowish-gray thunderheads; but
Mars had not- heard thunder for a billion years or more. Dunes rolled ocher-ous, boulder-strewn,
around craters that the sun limned with shadows. Closer below, the land grew rugged, ridges, cliffs,
canyons, until it plunged into the tremen-dous deeps of the Valles. Through the bubble, Kinna traced a
descending massiveness of mesas, crags, weird wind-sculptures, black, red, umber, streaked soft green
and blue with mineral veins, until depth swallowed sight.
"Look," she said after a spell, pointing to a formation. "Guthrie Head. Do you remember?"
"I could ill forget." He laughed.
Camped there on one of their first jaunts together they were just five, and her mother accompanied
them they had gotten into an hours' long game of hide-and-seek through the crevices and over the talus
slopes. Helen Ronay lost all track of them and was desperate by the time they somehow found their
separate ways back. She confined them to the tent with bread, water, and a cal-culator, and did not let
them out till they had memorized and recited the sine of every angle from one to forty-five degrees, at
one-degree intervals, to four decimal places. But when Elverir's father, in Belgarre, later heard about the
escapade, he laughed, which he seldom did, and gave them the first glass of wine Kinna had ever tasted.
When the Sisters passed beneath them, she said noth-ing. There, age seven, they had had awhile
alone in the tent and started kissing. Already then he was tigerish, Durrine amidst fierceness. No more
than that happened, but she never risked it again, and no Terran youth since then had so aroused her.
The landmarks dropped behind like time itself and they flew over spectacles they knew only from
pictures, if at all. It would be long before they crossed the farther regions that, leapfrogging, they had also
explored.
"What is ... your connection ... with the Inrai?" she asked at last.
His answer came slow but less hesitant. "I may not reveal anything. Besides, you know there is scant
to re-veal. The siamos" disdainful word for the authorities "do not pursue the matter, for it leaves no
tracks they could find. Yet the knowledge is common that some Lu-narians around the planet give what
they are able when it is requested, supplies, shelter, transport, information, help; and not all traffic in and
out of the Threedom takes trails that satellites can watch."
Kinna nodded. Her neck felt stiff. "So you've become a, a reservist, now and then a courier or, oh, a
purchasing agent or something like that?"
"Correct. You'll not tell anyone." It wasn't a ques-tion.
"No, no." She groped for an argument that might per-suade. "What difference would it make, except
to us? What difference does your whole movement make, ac-tually?"
Fragments of the history blew past her like dust on the wind. The settlers of Mars had not been
exclusively peo-ple in search of profit, honor, and achievement. Some were Terrans dissenting from their
Earthside govern-ments; some were Lunarians in blood-feud trouble on Earth's Moon. Whatever their
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