"I gotta explain," he said, the liquor swirling in his mind.
She waited, cow-eyed.
"Ernest Dowson. Man's name. He wrote a poem—Beata Solitudo. I wanna explain this. Man lived long, long, long, long time ago. You listenin'? Okay. That's good. That's fine. He said—it's ver' importan' you should unnerstan' this—he said how you put honor and labor out of your mind when you ... you're out here. What he meant, it's ... it's ... you see.... Now I gotta make you see all this. So you listen real close while I tell it to you. There was a man named...."
He wanted to explain how the frontier does things to people. He wanted to explain how society is a tight little box that keeps everything locked up and hidden, but how society breaks down and becomes fluid in the stars, and how people explode and forget what they learned in civilization, and how everything is unstable.
"This man, his name's—" he said.
He wanted to explain how the harsh elements and brute nature and space, the God-awful emptiness and indifference and the sense of aloneness and selfishness and....
There were a thousand things he wanted to tell her. They were all the things he had thought about as he followed the frontier. If he could get it all down right, he could make her see why he had to follow the frontier as long as there was anything left inside of him.
Maybe the rest of the people out here were that way, too. Maybe he had seen it in Doris' eyes tonight. Maybe that was why society broke down in the stars and civilization came only when men and women like him were gone.
He did not want to know how the rest felt. He did not know whether it would be more terrifying to learn that he was alone, or that he was not alone.
But just for tonight, he could tell the alien creature beside him. It would be safe to tell her—if the idea had not rusted inside of him so long that there were no longer any words to fit it.