Imperial Earth

Assistant Administrator Colin Makenzie, as he was then, had selected one of the homeless wafes for temporary adoption.

And so Calindy had come into Duncan’s life-and into Karl’s.

THE FATAL GIFT

Catherine Linden Ellerman had celebrated her twenty-first birthday just before Mentor reached Saturn. By all accounts, it had been a memorable party, giving the final silvery gloss to the captain’s remaining hairs.

Calindy would have sailed through untouched; next to her beauty, that was her most outstanding characteristic. In the midst of chao seven chaos that she herself had generated-she was the calm center of the storm.

With a self-possession far beyond her years, she seemed to young Duncan the very embodiment of Terran culture and sophistidation. He could smile wryly, one and a half decades later, at his boyish naievete but it was not wholly unfounded. By any standards, Calindy was a remarkable phenomenon.

Duncan knew, of course, that all Terrans were rich. (How could it be otherwise, when each was the heir to a hundred thousand generations?) But he was overawed ‘by Calindy’s display of jewels and silks, never realizing that she had a limited wardrobe which she varied with consummate skill.

Most impressive of all was a stunningly beautiful coat of golden fur-the only one ever seen on Titan-made from the skins of an animal called a mink.

That was typical of Calindy; no one else would have dreamed of taking a fur coat aboard a spaceship. And she had not done so—as malicious

rumor pretended-because she had heard it was cold out around Saturn. She was much too intelligent for that kind of stupidity, and knew exactly what she was doing; she had brought her mink simply because it was beautiful.

Perhaps because he could see her only through a mist of adoration, Duncan could never visualize her, in later years, as an actual person. When he thought of Calindy, and tried to conjure up her image, he did pot see the real girl, but always his only replica of her, in one of the bubble stereos that had become popular in the ‘50’s.

How many thousands of times he had taken that apparently solid, yet almost weightless sphere in his hands, shaken it gently, and thus activated the five second loo pI Through the subtle magic of organized gas molecules, each releasing its programmed quantum of light, Calindy’s face would appear out of the swirling mists-tiny, yet perfect in form and color. At first she would be in proffle; then she would turn and suddenly-Duncan could never be sure of the moment when it arrived-there would be the faint smile that only

Leonardo could have captured in an earlier age. She did not seem to be smiling at him, but at someone over his shoulder. The impression was so strong that more than once Duncan had looked back, startled, to see who was standing behind him.

Then the image would fade, the bubble would become opaque, and he would have to wait five minutes before the system recharged itself. It did not matter; he had only to close his eyes and he could still see the perfect oval face, the delicate ivory skin, the lustrous black hair gathered up into a toque and held in place by a silver comb that had belonged to a

Spanish princess, when Columbus was a child. Calindy liked playing roles, though she took none of them too seriously, and Carmen was one of her favorites. when she entered the Makenzie household, however, she was the exiled aristocrat, graciously accepting the hospitality of kindly provincials, with what few family heirlooms she had been able to save from the

Revolution. As this impressed no one except Duncan, she quickly became the studious anthropologist, taking notes for her thesis on the quaint

habits of 46 primitive societies. This role was at least partly genuine, for Calindy was really interested in differing life styles; and by some definitions, Titan could indeed be classed as primitive—or, at least, undeveloped.

Thus the supposedly unshockable Terrans were genuinely horrified at encountering families with three—and even fourl–children on Titan. The twentieth century’s millions of skeleton babies still haunted the conscience of the world, and such tragic but understandable excesses as the “Breeder Lynching” campaign, not to mention the burning of the Vatican, had left permanent scars on the human psyche. Duncan could still remember

Calindy’s expression when she encountered her first family of six: outrage contended with curiosity, until both were moderated by Terran good manners.

He had patiently explained the facts of life to her, pointing out that there was nothing eternally sacred about the dogma of Zero Growth, and that

Titan really needed to double its population every fifty years. Eventually she appreciated this logically, but she had never been able to accept it emotionally. And it was emotion that provided the driving force of

Calindy’s life; her will and beauty and intelligence were merely its servants.