After the verdict Quella felt a curious sense of anticlimax and a certain indecision. The company representative was most sympathetic.

“We’d like you to continue to work for us,” he said. “Mr. Big Eye understood the truth. We have preliminary results from Core World opinion polls. They’re fascinating. It may seem unbelievable but we’re going to come out of this all right…”

He sensed her hesitation.

“I understand you might not want to captain the Kalindy. The job is still yours if you do but we can offer you an alternative. We have a supervisory post in charge of the Bookers for the Westpole region."

"But don’t give me an answer now. You must have a holiday,” he told her. “You need one. You haven’t seen much of Earth have you? I know you’ve probably had your fill of travel but you’re free now to do what you like. You must take your time and experience the Confederacy capital properly. And to start with why don’t I take you to an important cultural event which isn’t on the standard tourist itineraries?”

His smile was warm and friendly and he was obviously attracted to her. She shrugged, thinking, “why not?”

They descended in the ‘A’ Space Elevator to Sri-Lanka, then went north by aeroplane and train, finally taking a Speed Bus across the Channel Bridge to London and a boat down the old river Thames. And so they found themselves in an obscure town called ‘Southend-On-Sea’ on the coast of the island which had given the Confederacy Standard English. A large sports stadium was built on the edge of an estuary with tiers of seats rising into a floodlit night.

They took their place high in the North Bank from where they could see the light of old Luna, the moon, tracing a pathway across the expanses of the river. There was a sense of enormous excitement and a score board showing the numbers passing through the turnstiles indicated that there were already more than a hundred thousand in the growing crowd.

“Is this an important game?” Quella asked.

“It’s the European Cup Final. Southend United have won the right to play on their home ground,” her companion replied.

Quella didn’t really understand what was going on. She knew that football was the most widely played regular game but she’d never been particularly interested in it before. Still, the rules were fairly simple and the atmosphere in the crowd communicated all she needed to know. When the home side scored a ‘goal’ in the closing seconds of extra time to make the final score 3-2, she jumped in unison with the fanatical supporters chanting around her.

We love you Southend, we do,
We love you Southend, we do,
We love you Southend, we do,
O Southend we love you!

A great roar rang round the sky as the goal scorer lifted the giant silver trophy, then the crowd burst onto the streets in a joyful flood, still singing and shouting. The company representative took Quella’s arm and led her through the turmoil to a quieter part of town. There seemed to be nowhere that was untouched by the euphoria of the result but he had booked a restaurant in Old Leigh which was decorated in the style of a “cockle boat” (whatever a “cockle boat” was). From the wide bay windows they looked out on the rising tide which lifted a small flotilla of fishing vessels.

Half way through the meal they were joined by a couple her companion introduced as his friends. Quella wasn’t excluded from the conversation but the focus shifted away from her and she began to reflect again on the events of the last few months.

They took some drinks outside and sat on a low concrete sea wall facing the busy river. The others were a little drunk and were animated by talk of the game and of memories of previous triumphs and disasters, supremely vindicated tonight. But Quella’s head was clear. She had declined the strange alcoholic drinks of Earth.

In the cooling night breeze she felt that sort of peculiar solitude which can only come in the presence of others. It was not uncomfortable. The distant sound of carousing came from the dark streets and would obviously continue all night. The torpid waters in front of her rolled lazily and splashed lightly against the sea wall, as though disturbed in their sleep by all the excitement.

Quella fingered the letter in her pocket. It was from Malchior. He’d been following the increasingly public story of her ill fated voyage through the news and he wanted to know how much of it was true and what she felt about it all. He’d started his farm and he still had a place for her.

She thought about Vega and the Quiet People. She had never been more certain that they were wrong but at the same time she knew that she had finished with travelling. She didn’t want to become another Vis Ulman.

Inside she felt (or imagined that she felt) the first stirring of the life within her. She was pregnant. She carried Vega’s child.

And that had been the most hurtful thing… When she had told him, he wasn’t interested. The scene replayed itself in her mind with horrible clarity: the grey walls of the prison cell and the bleak eyes of the deceitful agent betraying all her misplaced emotions. She’d wanted to hate him but she couldn’t. He was poisoned with the sense of his own defeat and at that moment cared nothing for those he had used so cruelly. She remembered something he had said a long time ago in another place when he had seemed to care for her,

“Descendency is for races not for people.”

Hmm, she thought almost as though it were an echo of Mr. Big Eye’s response to a different question. So why had he fought so hard against that truth?

You were right Vega, she thought. But you didn’t understand. You really, really didn’t understand.

Despite everything she knew that there had been a valid bond between them. Part of her wished only that she could have won him away from his destructive course and freed him from his self imposed isolation. And there was a bitterness with the thought that hurt her like a fresh bruise before the colour rises to the skin.

Vega had lost and that made her sad now, not angry. His cause was lost and he had lost her too. And unlike his victims he must live with the consequences. The Confederacy would move on as it always did, using the symbol its enemies had provided for its own strength. She had a chilling vision of the future in which tourists paid to take a final death ride on the Kalindy - a permanent suicide run. Her grim ship would bind the galaxy together with its universal emblem of death. But that was not for her.

The moon emerged from behind the ragged edges of a grey cloud and the thin breeze made ghostly ringing sounds where it passed through the metal rigging of the boats.

Quella was going to affirm that other universal truth. The truth that life always goes on. She would stop wandering and raise her child. She would go to Malchior and he would love her; and he would love her child. She knew that now with a certainty she could not explain.

She breathed deeply, tasting the salty tang of the Thames, like an ancestral kiss. The long voyage of the galactic tourists was over.

DMFW - 8/7/97