Seed of Stars by Dan Morgan, John Kippax Page A

the empty cabin.

    Back in his own cabin after the end of his duty stretch, Piet Huygens sat on the edge of his bed, staring unseeingly at the blank gray wall opposite. There, in the metal womb of Venturer Twelve, despite the near presence of nearly five hundred others of his own kind, Corps people, he was conscious of a dreadful feeling of isolation such as he had never experienced before.
    The direct, impersonal order to murder his own child had been a tearing aside of the golden veil of illusion; a destruction of the hazy, inspired dream that Mia had so carefully nurtured in his mind. Now with the ruins of that dream dissipated in the bleakness of space, he sat and tried to grapple with the reality of his situation, and the shadows of hitherto-suppressed doubts crept in on him like grinning specters, mocking his foolishness.
    There was no consolation in the tapes Ichiwara had so gladly loaned him. They painted a picture of a civilization so strange, so alien, whose values, whose very manner of thought was completely different from those he had learned from birth. For Mia, life on Kepler III would be like walking back again into her own past; but for him he had the feeling that, whatever cosmetic changes were made in his outward appearance, he would always be a strange dog, unable to fit in with the ways of his newly-adopted pack. Mia took it for granted that he would accept and be accepted into the social setup on Kepler III, but he was far from being as confident And yet, once he and Mia had deserted the ship, there would be no turning back, he would be irrevocably committed to spending the rest of his life among these people with their ritualistic tea ceremonies, their cherry-blossom viewing, their delicate art, and their incomprehensible brutality.
    The alternative. ... To tell Mia now that her plan was a mad, impossible one, and that it must be abandoned; to tell her that he and she were still, despite their secret rebellion, members of the Space Corps, and that they owed their loyalty and their work to that great organization; to tell her that despite all the sophistries of lovers, the oaths of allegiance they had taken were still binding.
    There was no reason why they shouldn't change their minds at this stage, before any irrevocable step had been taken. Trudi was the only person who knew about their relationship, and she wouldn't talk, not now.
    Trudi. He found himself thinking of her almost with fondness, remembering the times they had each surfeited the hunger of the other. With Trudi, sex had been just that, an uncomplicated satisfying of an appetite, a welcoming, unthinking oblivion. God! What would he give to be able to plunge into just that kind of oblivion now, instead of being crushed in the iron maiden of his present torment.
    Because, beyond everything, deep in the soul, he knew that without setting a foot on the soil on Kepler III, the irrevocable step had already been made; it had been made at the moment, nearly four months ago, when his searching sperm had fused with the fertile egg of Mia, and their child had begun to grow. It had been pure chance that Maseba should detail him for the job of killing that child; but whether he, De Witt, or Maseba himself did the job, the result must surely be the same; with the removal of the fetus from her womb, Mia's love for him must also die. He knew that this must be so, because he himself already knew that he could never bring himself to lie with her again after such a violation, and the effect on her must surely be even deeper.
    Believing himself damned from every possible angle he found that he was drawn to a positive conclusion at last. The sooner the affair was settled, the better. It could be arranged quite simply. If he gave instructions to Caiola to have Mia brought into the operating theater and anesthetized before he arrived, then she need never know who performed the abortion. Before she came to, he would be gone, and that would be an end to it
    And