The Diamond Moon by Paul Preuss Page A

upon it like delicate waterbugs, across the ruins of Brooklyn in the midst of the greenbelt, to a gray urban mass beyond, barely visible in the smog. One morning she watched through the murk as an orange-purple sun wobbled into the sky, and she knew the moment had come; she was fit and ready.
The door chimed softly. She saw on the flatplate that the commander was standing outside in the hall. “Open,” she told the door.
    He was wearing his blue Space Board uniform, with the insignia of rank and the thin rows of ribbons and the collar pips that signified the Investigations Branch; its reflected blue made the hard eyes that studied her even bluer. His expression softened. “You look good, Troy. They tell me no complications.”
She nodded.
    He looked as if he wanted to say something more. But he’d never been one to make speeches. And their relationship had changed, even if she was still officially Inspector Troy of the Board of Space Control and he was still officially her boss.
“Chopper’s ready when you are. Your parents should be on the way to the lodge.” “Let’s go.”
    Wordlessly, he stood aside. She walked through the door without looking at him. She knew the pain she caused him, but it had been a year at least since she had allowed herself to show any outward sign that she cared what he or the rest of them felt.
    After thirty-five years of marriage, Jozsef Nagy still sometimes behaved toward his wife like the youthful stu-dent he had been when they met. In those days, meeting his new beloved under the spring trees in Budapest, the mode of transportation had usually been bicycles. Today he’d called a gray robot limousine to their retreat in the North American forest.
    He held the door open for Ari while she got in and ar-ranged herself on the leather cushions, just as formally as if it were a horse-drawn cab he’d rented with a month’s allowance to take them to the theater. The day was cold and fresh, the sunlight bright, the shadows crisp on the dewy branches. For several minutes the car rolled down the nar-row paved roadway that looped through the springtime woods before she spoke. “So she has agreed to see us at last.”
“It’s a sign, Ari. Her recovery has been gradual, but I think it is now almost complete.”
     
“She talks to you. Do you know something you haven’t told me?”
     
“We talk about the past. She keeps her plans to herself.”
     
“It can only mean that she has come to her senses.” Ari spoke with determined confidence, refusing to acknowledge doubt.
     
Jozsef looked at her with concern. “Perhaps you should not assume too much. After all, she could be planning to quit. Perhaps she merely feels she should tell us in person.”
     
“You don’t believe that.”
     
“I don’t want to see either of you hurt.”
     
Suddenly her voice was edged with anger. “It is your exaggerated concern for her feelings , Jozsef, that has cost us this past year’s time.”
    “We must agree to disagree upon that point,” Jozsef said calmly. His wife had been his professional colleague for most of their married life; he had acquired the knack of keeping their strategic differences separate from their per-sonal ones early on, but it was a discipline she had never bothered to try. “I worry about you ,” he said. “What if you learn that she will not do what you expect of her? And about her —what if you refuse to accept her as she is?”
“When she accepts herself as she is, she and I cannot help but agree.”
“I wonder why you continue to underrate our daughter, when she has never failed to surprise us.”
    Ari stifled the tart reply that came naturally to her tongue; for all her ways—the ways of that intelligent, too-pretty, spoiled young woman Jozsef had fallen in love with four decades ago—she was fair-minded, and what Jozsef said was true. However much Ari might be irked by her daughter’s unorthodoxy, Linda had never failed to surprise them, even when she was