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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (37)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 15:11:51 1999), 转信

                        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 com-
mittee breaks up in confusion; everyone goes home mutter-
ing 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 Bow-
man'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 dif-
ference; 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 separa-
tion. (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 break-
down. 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.

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