And so Calindy had come into Duncan's life — and into Karl's.
9
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 chaos — even 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 sophistication. He could smile wryly, one and a half decades later, at his boyish naïveté; 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 I 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 not see the real girl, but always his only replica of her, in one of the bubble stereos that had become so 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 loop! 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 profile; 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 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 by classed as primitive — or, at least, undeveloped.
Thus the supposedly unshockable Terrans were genuinely horrified at encountering families with
three — and even four! — 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.
For a young Terran, she was not promiscuous. She once told Duncan — and he believed her — that