Moon Flower by James P. Hogan

Author:James P. Hogan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781416555346
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2008-04-01T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Chev had taken the apartment’s spare room, which could sleep only one person. For Shearer and Uberg, Antara had swept out an attic and cleared enough space between the boxes and bales of cloth that had been stored there to lay two mattresses on the floor. Jerri had done a little better, taking a spare bed in Evassanie’s room. This arrangement delighted Evassanie, for besides having the Terran lady to herself to interrogate with endless questions about Earth and its peculiar ways after the household had finished supper and retired for bed, it meant that she had Nim in there with them too.

The room was rich with life and color, testifying to a busy mind with many interests and expressing the emerging individuality of young teenagers’ personalized pads just about anywhere. Embroidered cushions with tassels and fringes lay scattered on the beds, lined the window seat, and filled a small armchair standing by a worktable beneath a wall covered with shelves and cabinets. A tailor’s dummy stood in one corner, draped with a partly made garment; a narrow table beside it carried a litter of bowls, implements, and pieces of what looked like sculpture or pottery; and the walls were covered in tapestries and paintings, some framed, others just attached with pins, amid a miscellany of notes, ribbons, a couple of hats, and other ornaments. The shelves bore numerous books, along with an assortment of pots and vases, decorated boxes, and several dolls evidently carried over from childhood.

Evassanie’s fascination with the NIDA hadn’t abated, and she insisted on showing Jerri her collections of jewelry and spice bottles, favorite dresses in the hanging closet, selected books, contents of her needlework basket, and other treasures. Her ambition, she confided, was to paint landscapes and outdoor scenes, which offered endless scope in all kinds of decorative fields, making it an “honored” profession. Jerri would have liked to let her see some scenes of Earth from the ship’s library through broad-field phone spectacles, but they had left all their trackable electronic devices behind. Then came the inevitable question of, “What do you do?”

Jerri did her best to describe the functions of an anthropologist. Evassanie listened with evident interest. A profession devoted to the study of people’s origins and how different societies behaved and lived was a new concept to her. Earlier Terran researchers had reported on the conspicuous absence of much in the way of religious conviction among the Cyreneans, contrasting sharply with its universality on Earth. Evassanie didn’t appear to find it a subject of great importance when Jerri asked her about it. The general Cyrenean view seemed to be that life and the universe were expressions of a powerful creative principle that was echoed in individual vision and inventive abilities, but what and why were not matters that they felt equipped to furnish answers on — and so didn’t try to.

It was the same disinclination to bind themselves to chains of reasoning derived from assumptions that might be questionable, that Uberg had described.

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