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  “Do sit down.”

  We settled into stuffed chairs. This could almost have been a room in Victorian England of Earth, some seven or eight hundred years ago.

  “So you knew Uncle Mason,” she said.

  “Only briefly,” I said, surprised. Evidently we were not complete strangers to her. Perhaps the scientist had mentioned the episode before he died. “I was with—Helse. She—looked like you.”

  “Of course,” Megan said, as if it could have been no other way. She had that certain presence that facilitated this. “But that was some time ago.”

  “It’s still true,” I said, gazing at her. Indeed it was true, in my vision. The sight of Megan was casting a spell over me, as I had known it would.

  “Where did you learn your song?”

  “Among the migrant harvesters,” I said. “I spent a year with the pickers, going from one agricultural bubble to another. The migrants took me in, and I remember their ways.”

  “You still identify with the working class?”

  “I do.”

  She nodded. As a politician she had sponsored social legislation; she was a friend of the working class, though she had never been part of it herself.

  “Yet you achieved a certain notoriety as an officer in the Navy, I believe.”

  “I helped make peace between the migrants and the farmers,” I said defensively.

  “Indeed you did,” she agreed. “At one stroke you forged a settlement and set a precedent none of the rest of us had been able

  to arrange in years.”

  I was surprised again. “You—were watching that?”

  She laughed, her animation making her steadily more lovely. “My dear Captain, it was the headline of the day! I knew that you would be going far.”

  I was trying to read her as we conversed, but it was difficult because my own burgeoning emotion got in the way. I had known that she was beautiful and intelligent and motivated; now I had the confirmation, and it was like color holography compared to a black-and-white still picture. Megan was, indeed, all the woman I had ever desired on every level. My talent was rapidly being blunted, and I had to depend on relatively obvious signals. She was relaxing, beginning to enjoy herself, and it was evident that my record was no stranger to her. “You were aware of me before then,” I said.

  “Uncle Mason had mentioned you,” she said, confirming my supposition. “He said it was like seeing me again, as I had been in my youth ... that girl with you. I was then in my early twenties.”

  Spirit made a half-humorous sigh of nostalgia: the notion that a woman in her twenties was beyond her prime. Megan responded with a smile, and it was evident that the two women were coming to like each other.

  “Then when you showed up at Chiron,” Megan continued, “which I know was a very ticklish situation, I recognized you. Naturally I was curious. But I hardly thought you were aware of me. You caught me quite by surprise, coming here like this. Perhaps I should have realized that a military man normally takes direct action.”

  “But if you recognized my name why did you refuse my letter?”

  “Did you write? I’m so sorry. I refuse all letters from strangers because of the hate mail.”

  “Hate mail?” Spirit asked, surprised.

  “Let’s hope you never have occasion to understand about that,” Megan said. “I knew I had no acquaintances in Ybor. I’m afraid I didn’t really look at the name.”

  “But you recognized it when it was announced just now,” I persisted. “Yet you refused to see me.”

  “Captain Hubris, I have put that life behind me,” she said firmly. “I knew the moment I heard your name that you were here on a political errand. I shall not suffer myself to be dragged into that mire again.” She grimaced in a fetching manner. “Then you sang, and it was a song of the working class ...”

  “But you were wronged!” I protested. “You should not let one bad experience deprive you of your career!”

  “Didn’t you, Captain?” she asked.

  I had to smile ruefully. I had just lost an extremely promising military career because of political machinations within the Navy. “But I have retired only from the Navy, not the fray,” I said. “I had already done most of what I could do in space. Now I want to see what I can do planetside in the political arena. I need your help.”

  She frowned. “Setting aside for the moment the fact that I have absolutely no intention of getting involved, what makes you suppose that a discredited former congressperson has anything to offer you in that arena?”

  “First,” I said seriously, “I know next to nothing about planetary politics and will surely fail badly if I don’t have competent guidance from the outset. Second, you have had the experience I lack, and you are not otherwise engaged at the moment. You can guide me as well as any person can, and I hope you will. It will be a full-time occupation.”

  “My dear man, whatever makes you suppose I would do such a thing?”

  “I’m sure you are loyal to your principles and your family. Therefore—”

  “But we are not related!”

  “Not yet,” I murmured.

  She looked at me directly, and I warmed to the glory of her gaze. “What are you trying to say, Captain?”

  “I want to marry you, Megan.”

  Her mouth actually dropped open. “Have you any idea what you’re saying?”

  “You are the only living woman I can love,” I said.

  She was stunned but rallied quickly. “Because I once resembled your childhood sweetheart? Surely you know better than that!”

  “It is not precisely a logical thing,” I said carefully. “I have had three pseudowives in the Navy, and they were all excellent women in any capacity you might care to define, but I did not truly love them. They were worthy of love without question, and I think they loved me, but for me there was a certain barrier, so that while perhaps at times I thought I loved, in retrospect I know it was not so. I can love no one except Helse—and you. This is the way I am structured.”

  Megan looked at Spirit. “You are his sister, and you love him more than any other. What do you make of this?”

  Spirit shook her head. “I’m not sure you would understand.”

  “I suspect I had better understand! Describe to me his nature as you appreciate it.”

  Spirit dropped her gaze, frowning.

  “Tell her, Spirit,” I said.

  She sighed. “Hope Hubris is a specially talented person. He reads people. He is like a polygraph, a device to record and interpret the physical reactions of people he talks with. He knows when they are tense, when they are easy, when they hurt or are happy, when they are truthful and when lying. He uses his insight to handle them, to cause them to go his way without their realizing this. He—”

  “You are describing the consummate politician,” Megan exclaimed.

  “So we understand,” Spirit agreed. “But that’s not what I’m addressing at the moment. Hope—is loved by others because he understands them so well, in his fashion. The men who work with him are fanatically loyal, and the women love him, though they know he can not truly return their love. But he—his talent perhaps makes him inherently cynical, emotionally, on the deep level. On the surface he is ready to love, but below he knows better, so he can not. Except for his first love, Helse. She initiated him into manhood, and there was no cynicism there. But having given his love to her, he could not then give it elsewhere—with one exception.

  “He was with Helse when he saw your picture, which so resembled her. She saw it, too, and your Uncle Mason helped them both; helped our whole bubble to survive when he really didn’t have to. Mason was a generous man, and we owe our lives to him and will never forget the debt we owe him. He is dead now, so we can never repay him directly. But you are his kin. He loved you as his niece, and he helped Helse, perhaps because she seemed to resemble you. In Hope’s emotion there is a connection, and I cannot say it is a wrong one. His happiest time with Helse was also with your u
ncle. So the cynicism of his talent does not apply; it is preempted by the love he bears, which has no other place to go. You are the symbol of his onetime happiness; he believes, emotionally, that he can recreate his love of Helse only through you.”

  Megan dabbed at her forehead with a dainty handkerchief, as if becoming faint from overexertion. “But he doesn’t even know me.”

  “He doesn’t need to,” Spirit said. “This has nothing to do with knowledge. It has to do with faith.”

  Faith—coincidentally, the name of our older sister, lost among pirates. The most beautiful member of our family.

  Megan shook her head. “You were right. I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do,” Spirit said.

  For answer Megan quoted from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe:

  I was a child and she was a child,

  In this kingdom by the sea:

  But we loved with a love that was more than love—

  I and my Annabel Lee

  That time at the scientific station on Io—a kingdom by the sea. Helse and I, children, with love that was more than love. How aptly it fitted! Megan did understand, and I had to have her.

  “It is also true that I need your expertise in politics,” I said. “So there is a practical foundation. Marry me and it will make sense.”

  Megan dabbed again. “Captain, this is not the way!” she protested. “This is not your Navy! This is civilian life! You have to consider the needs and feelings of others. You can’t just toss aside wives as they become inconvenient.”

  “Here marriage is permanent,” I agreed.

  “And not entered into capriciously.”

  “This is not caprice,” I said. “You are the perfect diamond I have finally found. The last fifteen years of my life have developed toward this union.”

  “Well, the last fifteen years of my life have not,” she said with some asperity. She was a trifle angry now, and this, too, became her.

  I understood her increasingly well, but understanding is not always the same as management. Megan was no creature of casual influence. I was at a loss about how to approach her.

  So I turned it over to Spirit again. “Convince her,” I told my sister.

  Spirit smiled as if she had expected this, which was true. She focused on Megan and took a breath.

  “Surely you—his sister—are not going to play John Alden in his presence!” Megan exclaimed indignantly.

  I had to reach far back into the recesses of my memory to place that reference. Megan’s literary background, so readily applicable, was another delight. John Alden was the name of a man who was required to plead for the favor of a young woman, in the name of another man who lacked the social courage to propose to her directly. Unfortunately John Alden was enamored of the woman himself, as she understood. She at length interrupted him with the inquiry, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” I hesitate to conjecture the implications of that reference in this present situation.

  At any rate Spirit took it in stride. “Megan—may I call you that?—I must argue that your life has indeed developed toward this union. You are a fine person, an outstanding political figure, and a lovely woman, though my brother would have come for you had you been otherwise. You deserve better than what the maelstrom of Jupiter politics has given you. You deserve to wield power, for you do know how to use it, and you have a social conscience unrivaled in the contemporary scene. You did not lose your last campaign because you were inadequate but because you were superior. You refused to stoop to the tactics your opponent used. As with money, the bad drove out the good, and you lost your place in the public eye, while your opponent flourishes like a weed. But whatever the politics, the bad remains bad and the good remains good, and this my brother understands.”

  Megan spread her hands. “He seems to be not the only one who understands. You certainly know how to make a person listen.” I could tell she was alert for the kicker; she was sure that Spirit was flattering her for a purpose. As indeed she was.

  “As a practical result, that man Tocsin now holds the office that should have been yours,” Spirit continued. “He will use it merely as a stepping-stone to higher office. You would have served your constituency loyally and well; his only real interest is himself. You cannot view his victory as merely a loss for you; it is a loss for the State of Golden and very likely for the United States of Jupiter as well. When you lost, you retired to a comfortable private life; those whom you should have served cannot do the same. They must endure the machinations of the callous and perhaps evil man who played upon their ignorance and baser motives. You owe it to those people to return to the political arena and defend the causes you know are—”

  “No!” Megan cried, wincing as if in physical pain. “I will never again expose myself to that—”

  “There is another avenue,” Spirit said. “Naturally you do not wish to become another target for completely unscrupulous opportunists. But you need not be the target; you have only to advise the one who is ready to be the target, to guide him so that—”

  “I would not foist on another person the contumely I would not bear myself!”

  “He can be properly prepared to counter it,” Spirit continued. “My brother is not a delicate flower; he has survived the most brutal situation any person can experience.”

  “As have you.”

  “He is a cutting knife. Had he run against Tocsin, knowing what you know now, he would have found a way to impale that ugly man on his own spit. As an officer in the Navy my brother demonstrated his capacity to—”

  “You were his chief of staff.”

  “—prevail in difficult situations. He has courage and ability; all he needs is competent guidance and advice. He has always accepted the best advice. This is what you can provide.”

  “If I ran my last campaign over, knowing what I now know, I still would not be able to handle the scurrilous slanders that man hurled at me!” Megan exclaimed. “I don’t see how any ethical person could. How could an inexperienced—”

  “My brother is excellent at delegating tasks and yielding to necessity,” Spirit said. “If he does not know the proper course he will consult with someone who does, and consider the alternatives with an open mind. This is how he won battles in the Navy, both physical and diplomatic.”

  Megan nodded. “Do you mean to say it was not Hope Hubris who devised that farm-bubble compromise that so benefited the workers?”

  “He presented it, but he did not devise it alone. His staff worked it out. Because he had the most competent personnel it was feasible to assemble, and he implemented their program—”

  Megan nodded again, seeing the confirmation of her conjecture. She did have a good grasp of the realities of organization. “I really wasn’t good at selecting a staff. I can appreciate that better in retrospect. Oh, they were fine people, individually, but the dynamics—”

  “My brother is matchless at this,” Spirit said with conviction.

  Megan shook herself, as if fighting free of a morass she was unwittingly stepping into. “Still, it is presumptuous—a preposterous leap to assume that if Captain Hubris needs my advice I must marry him!”

  Spirit smiled. “You are no common staff member, Megan. A staff member may be hired and fired at the whim of the employer. An independent consultant may be ignored. But a spouse is permanent. Marry him and you have power over him—not only legally, but also because he will listen to you first, last, and always. That is important for the realization of your programs. Through him you can implement them all.”

  “You tempt me most foolishly,” Megan said. “You offer me a reward for a service to be rendered, as you would a biscuit to a performing dog. This is not the manner in which I bargain. I will sell myself neither for money nor for a program; that is prostitution.”

  “It is not selling so much as coming to terms with the situation,” Spirit said. “It is the political way. One must deal for what one wants, and compromise, and indulge in the quid pro quo. Th
ere is no stigma in this; it is true in more subtle fashion for all of life. An honest compromise can benefit all parties, like a good contract.”

  “True,” Megan agreed. I could tell she was intrigued by this discussion; she had been reclusive for two years and had had enough isolation. “But one does not bargain with marriage.”

  “Oh, but one does!” Spirit said. “Historically that was standard. Kingdoms formed alliances by intermarriage. It fostered cooperation and helped prevent wars between them. If one marriage prevented one war, surely it was worthwhile.”

  “Are you suggesting that we are at war?” Megan inquired with a wry flash of humor.

  Spirit smiled. “Not exactly. But the importance of a liaison remains. It is better to have direct input into a force than to allow it to proceed randomly. A spaceship would not be useful without a pilot. My brother is going into politics, and he will be a considerable force because he has, as you pointed out, the ideal attributes for this business. He will seek advice where he can find it. The question you must ask yourself is whether you will exert your considerable influence on him as he rises, insuring that your ethics govern his campaigning and his actions in office, or whether you will turn him loose to seek other influences and go another course.”

  “Well, I hardly think that my input would make any significant difference! The planet is large, and no single person affects more than a tiny bit of it.”

  “So thought the pirates of the Belt,” Spirit replied.

  “Touché!” Megan agreed. “I confess I cheered with the majority when their power was destroyed, though I oppose war on principle. I do have, as it were, some weakness of the flesh. But politics is not a matter of sending a fleet of ships to—”

  Spirit stared her in the eye. “When my brother becomes President of the United States of Jupiter, where will you be?”

  Again Megan’s jaw dropped. “President! You can’t possibly be serious!”

  “I am serious,” I said. “I have things to do that can be done only from the top. I hope to do them with your help and guidance, but I will do them any way I can. I think I can be a much more effective force for good on this planet if you are with me, but if I cannot have you with me I will still do what I can.”