Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [377]
Conversation died, and they sat in silence for half an hour or so, watching darkness fill the hollows below, an invisible tide that crept higher by the minute, engulfing the trunks of the trees so that the green canopies seemed to float on a lake of darkness.
At last she cleared her throat, feeling that she must say something.
“Won’t Mama be worried about us, coming back so late?”
He shook his head, but didn’t answer; only sat, a grass blade drooping idle in his hand. The moon was edging its way above the trees, big and golden, lopsided as a smudged teardrop.
“Your mother did tell me once that men meant to fly to the moon,” he said abruptly. “They hadna done it yet, that she knew, but they meant to. Will ye know about that?”
She nodded, eyes fixed on the rising moon.
“They did. They will, I mean. She smiled faintly. “Apollo, they called it—the rocket ship that took them.”
She could see his smile in answer; the moon was high enough to shed its radiance on the clearing. He tilted his face up, considering.
“Aye? And what did they say of it, the men who went?”
“They didn’t need to say anything—they sent back pictures. I told you about the television?”
He looked a little startled, and she knew that like most things she had told him from her time, he had no real grasp of the reality of moving, talking pictures, let alone the notion that such things could be sent through thin air.
“Aye?” he said, a little unsurely. “You’ve seen these pictures, then?”
“Yes.” She rocked back a little, hands clasped around her knees, looking up at the misshapen globe above them. There was a faint nimbus of light around it, and farther out in the starlit sky, a perfect, hazy ring, as though it were a big yellow stone dropped into a black pond, frozen in place as the first ripple formed.
“Fair weather tomorrow,” he said, looking up at it.
“Will it be?” She could see everything around them, almost as clearly as in the daylight, but the color had fled now; everything was black and gray—like the pictures she described.
“It took hours, waiting. No one could say exactly how long it would take them to land and get out in their space suits—you know there isn’t any air on the moon?” She raised a questioning brow, and he nodded, attentive as a schoolboy.
“Claire told me so,” he murmured.
“The camera—the thing that made the pictures—was looking out of the side of the ship, so we could see the foot of the ship itself, settled in the dust, and the dust rising up over it like a horse’s hoof when it puts its foot down.
“It was flat where the ship came down; covered with a soft, powdery kind of dust, with little rocks scattered on it here and there. Then the camera moved—or maybe another one started sending pictures—and you could see that there were rocky cliffs off in the distance. It’s barren—no plants, no water, no air—but sort of beautiful, in an eerie kind of way.”
“It sounds like Scotland,” he said. She laughed at the joke, but thought she heard under the humor his longing for those barren mountains.
Wanting to distract him, she waved upward at the stars, beginning to burn brighter in the velvet sky.
“The stars are really suns, like ours. It’s only that they’re so far away from us, they look tiny. They’re so far away that it may take years and years for their light to reach us; in fact, sometimes a star has died and we still see its light.”
“Claire told me that, long ago,” he said softly. He sat a moment, then got up with an air of decision.
“Come then,” he said. “Let’s take the hive, and be off home.”
The night was warm enough that we had left the hide window-covering unpinned and rolled aside. Occasional moths and June bugs blundered in to drown themselves in the cauldron or commit fiery suicide on the hearth, but the cool leaf-scented air that washed over us was worth it.
On the first night, Ian had gallantly given Brianna the trundle bed