FOURTEEN

Far under the spaceboat the clouds of Saturn lay like a continent, plains, mountains, canyons, slow smoky rivers.

They were white and dim gold, the shadows upon them were royal blue, and off the brightest was reflected a ghost of the rings above. Yvonne kept her gaze mainly on the rings themselves. Against blackness and stars they soared, gigantic rainbows sparked with moving, twinkling points of prismatic light, overwhelmingly awesome, impossibly lovely.

'I am reluctant,' Wang said into the silence. 'But we had better return.'

She nodded. He glanced at the instrumental displays which hovered above the control cubicle and moved his fingers beneath them. Acceleration pushed bodies back into seats, and the continent dwindled towards a spheroid.

Wang activated the broadcast transmitter. 'Hello, ship,' he said. 'We are bound back. How shall we rendezvous?'

A monitor was set to notify Skip, and radio outlets were everywhere in the mother vessel. His voice came in a minute: 'Hi. Did you have a good time?'

'"Good" is a poor little word,' Yvonne answered mutedly.

'Yeah. How well I know,' Skip said. 'Not that I'm sorry I stayed aboard. Tell you 'bout it when you arrive… Lemme check, uh, with Ahasuerus… Simplest is if you make for Titan. At one gee. We'll intercept. Can do?'

'Yes.' Wang repeated the plan and signed off. His hands called for a projection of the local system. In its alien style it resembled a schematic drawing. He identified the largest moon and indicated that he wished to go there at the specified acceleration. The boat turned its nose through an arc and lined out.

When he learned that Skip had been taught to operate the tenders—as he did on the first trip into this atmosphere —Wang had insisted on the same privilege. There wasn't much to convey. A computer (?) did nearly everything. Crossing space in such a vehicle was safer and easier than piloting a car manually on an empty highway.

Then Ahasuerus made known that it wished to shuttle around the planet, presumably to view at various angles and distances, for some hours before starting sunward. Yvonne and Wang wanted to repeat the near-religious experience of seeing the rings from below. They had already observed them afar, and superb though that had been, it was not the same. Skip thought likewise, but the Sigman was insistent he remain. It raised no objection to the proposal that his companions revisit the primary. Saturn was perfectly safe, at any rate if you stayed in the upper stratosphere. Receiving less than a third of the slight solar energy that Jupiter gets, those layers are calm, and at their height the force of gravity is scarcely more than on Earth.

Yvonne stirred. 'If we could tell them when we get home,' she said. 'Tell them in a way to make them believe. How little we are, we humans; how big we could be; how squalid our intrigues and quarrels.'

'I think they already know,' Wang replied, 'apart from a few monsters. Unhappily, a number of the monsters are at the levers of power, which requires honest men to respond in kind.'

Yvonne felt a sad smile cross her. 'Nobody can agree which is which.' She spoke no further. Her wistfulness could not last, beneath that bridge to the gods.

They stood in the observation chamber and watched the world recede. Wang and Ahasuerus occupied one end of the bridge. He was making a poem about it, and the Sigman was keeping an eye of its four on the characters he drew. Yvonne moved to the opposite end in order that she not distract or be distracted.

Still the planet was vast and radiant. The light was less than from Jupiter, more argent than aureate, though also equalling many terrestrial moons. The cloud bands were not spectacularly coloured or turbulent. But the rings! And ahead, near the tiny sun, arched an immense white bow, Titan; she had stood on its eternal snows, looked through the dusk-blue of its thin air at Saturn hanging above a mountain range, and cried.

A hand fell over hers where it lay on the rail. She felt the smoothness and warmth of skin that brushed her arm, and through the myriad Sigman scents drifted an odour of humanness. 'Mind if I join you?' Skip asked quietly. 'I won't burble the way I did when you came aboard.'

Her heart knocked. 'Please do stay. You never told me what happened while I was gone.'

He hesitated. 'Well… we had an interesting time. We'd orbit first here, next there, and do renderings and— Let's not talk shop. This place has really put you on trajectory, hasn't it?'

'Hasn't it you?'

'What else?'

She turned to face him. In the faerie light he stood as if cast in silver and crowned with stars. 'And we can come back,' she jubilated. 'Ahasuerus wants us in the universe. Doesn't it?'

Again he took a moment to answer. 'Yes. Very much.' When he moved, shadows flowed among the muscles of arm and belly.

'We can come back,' she repeated. 'We can go on. Every dream our race has ever dreamed— It's like, for me it's like when I was newly married— No. That was always alloyed with dailiness. This… Do you remember the turn of the century?'

'Sure. My gang, neighbourhood boys, we got hold of some highly illegal fireworks and shot them off.

Police and parents didn't do more than scold us. It was that kind of night.'

'You were pre-adolescent, though. I was in my late teens. An age when the awkwardness is outlived, the hopefulness new-born, everything a miracle. And there the new century—the new millennium! —stood before us. A portal, where we'd leave all that was bad, worn-out, sordid, and run through the gate unburdened, clean, free. Into a land nobody had spoiled, the promised land. This is the same. Only it's not a youthful illusion now, it's real. It's forever!'

She embraced him. 'And Skip, you won it for us. You, none but you.'

He was holding her. She pulled back. He did not let go. She raised her cheek from his breast and found his mouth waiting. After a minute that whirled, she broke free and cast an apprehensive glance past him, down the invisible bridge. Silhouetted athwart the Milky Way, as if hovering free among clustered stars, Ahasuerus' pine-cone bulk still screened her from Wang. Skip took her by the hair and gently, irresistibly recalled her to him. His hand travelled on down her back. His other hand— Hers were over his neck, his shoulders, his ribs. 'No… please… o-o-oh… Why not? Why have I been this slow?

'Come on, darling, darling. Saturn can wait. We'll be back. My cabin—' Between laughter and tears: 'I came prepared. I didn't think to, but when I unpacked my personal kit I found— Rings are for lovers.'

The Sigman intended to stop at innermost Mercury. Orbit to orbit, that would require about fifteen days.

From there, swinging still nearer the sun, it would return to Earth. (Evidently it found Venus as unattractive at close quarters as men did.) 'And we'll be let off,' Skip said.

Yvonne snuggled into the curve of his arm. 'I won't know whether to be glad or sad,' she told him. 'Both, I suppose.' Her fingers at the base of his spine said, Always glad while we are together.

Wang ignored her. He had made no comment on what had clearly been happening between them. An average Westerner would have offered congratulations. / suppose the poor prim dear thinks we're awful, Yvonne reflected, and pressed closer against Skip.

'Will we be allowed to take a ship's boat?' Wang asked.

They were seated on temporarily extruded couches in what had been the original reception area for humans. The scientific apparatus remained there, making it a natural meeting place. (And we really should instigate regular dining here. Skip and I share our meals, from the planning and making to the last bite and a kiss for dessert. Wang eats all alone.) Ahasuerus was not present. The open dome, the rustling fragrant garden beyond, reminded of the being who, Skip said he had learned, came eighteen light-years to renew on behalf of its people the sense of marvel their distant ancestors had brought back from Sol.

Wang had replied: 'Do you not think the time is overpast for you to share with us—with me—the knowledge you have gained in your special sessions? This project was supposed to exemplify the ideal of international cooperation.' And thus the conference had been arranged.

Skip creased his brows. 'Well?' Wang urged.

'Okay, I'll speak frankly,' Skip said. 'I'm not certain. Ahasuerus and I haven't got a secret code that we sent away our box tops for, as you imagine.'

Wang stiffened yet more, and Yvonne thought, I must persuade my darling to act respectful. He doesn't mean harm—usually— but Wang can't understand banter, takes it for insult and replies in kind, and then Skip gets angry, and the feedback goes on and on till now they raise hackles at sight of each other.

Maybe the sigaroon noticed, for he continued in an ordinary tone: 'Not knowing the use of the sound synthesizer, I can't do Sigman imitations. We swap some words, but mainly we draw pictures. We've arrived at a lot of conventional signs, yes, and I'll make a dictionary of them if you wish. I will for sure in my official report. On the whole, though, we depend on intuition for understanding. It's like trying to read a comic strip where most of the words didn't get printed.'

'You have explained that before,' Wang said, not quite implying disbelief. 'I asked what your impression, if you will—what your impression is of our being given or lent a tender for our descent to Earth.'

'My impression is we could have one if we asked. Or if I asked. Let's talk plain: Yvonne first learned how to speak with Ahasuerus, but I'm its lodge brother.' Skip fondled her. 'That it prefers my company to hers proves how alien it is.' He dropped back to seriousness. 'I don't think we should ask. I won't make the request. Our astronauts can take us off same as before.'

Wang kept motionless. Yvonne looked into Skip's face, which had stopped being boyish, and inquired, troubled, 'Why?'

'You know why,' he answered. 'Too tempting for governments. I believe the catchword is

"destabilization".'

'You may be right, Mr Wayburn,' Wang said slowly.

Skip raised himself on an elbow. The forearm was under her neck, the hand on her farther side. His free hand and a foot moved along her, lingering. The light in the cabin was set low and rosy. 'You're an angel,'

he whispered.

She reached up to stroke him in return. 'I'm happy enough to be,' she said, no louder. 'A fallen angel, though.'

His lips quirked. 'Fallen, or tumbled?'

'Both. Damn well tumbled.'

'Fallen souls together, then. Free falling… hey, how 'bout that sometime?… falling free forever and ever.'

He lowered himself to nuzzle the hollow where throat met shoulder. And the delicious leisurely rearousing from drowsiness went from her, swift as a knife stab. She gripped him and said in her terror, 'Do you mean that? Do you?'

'Yes,' he said into her hair. 'Here beside you, I finally mean it for good.'

'So you've felt the same about others?'

He caught the raw note, released her, and sat up. His eyes rested grave upon her. 'I catch. Yes, once in a while before, I've just as honestly supposed it was for always. Only you're different, Vonny. Nobody's like you.'

She joined him, resting her back against the headboard they had shaped on to the dais when they doubled its width. She clung to his hand with her entire strength, but stared straight forward. Her voice ran quick and uneven:

'Oh, yes, I have education, position— No, please don't misunderstand, I realize you want absolutely nothing from me except myself. We work and talk well together. Probably I'm the brightest woman you've met. You're bright too, you like to learn and think. I teach you things and challenge your mind.'

Her head drooped. 'What else? I'm not the best-looking. Don't flatter me. I'm striking. Maybe I first began to fall in love when you showed me how striking I am, ages ago on that ocean ship. But I'm no beauty queen. I'm barely on the good side of skinny. I'm trying to learn how to please you, but you must have had pupils more apt. And… when I'm forty, you'll be thirty-two. When you're forty-two, I'll be fifty.'

'Won't matter,' he said.

'Because you'll be long gone? That often keeps me awake after you've fallen asleep. I lie there listening to you breathe and I think, "Under the best circumstances we're bound to have a hard go of it. But he's an eagle and I'm a dove."'

'Now you romanticize,' he drawled. 'Why not call me a goose and you chicken?' < She fought the tears and lost. He held her. 'I'm sorry,' he told her again and again. 'I shouldn't've joked.

It's my way, not my wish. I'd not hurt you for… for this whole flinkin' starcraft.'

When at length she rested more calmly, he gave her a quizzical regard. 'Wrong time of month coming on?' He asked.

She gulped and nodded. 'Feels like it.'

'Doesn't make what you said less important, no. But might make it more miserable than needful.'

'Uh-huh.' She attempted a smile. 'Curses, how I wish we had cigarettes along! Next trip we'll know.'

'Atta girl.' He stroked her cheek a while. Then, seating himself on the edge of the bed so he could look into her eyes while he held her hands, he said:

'Vonny, if I were in the habit of fretting about the future like you, I'd for sure be afraid. Seems to me you're likelier to get tired and kick me out than I am to drift off. But we'll just have to try it and see. I do want to try, try my utmost to make this thing last. You are wonderful.' He drew breath. 'To prove it, I'll tell you something I hadn't made up my mind to tell anybody. Maybe I shouldn't, I dunno, but I want to give you everything I have.'

For an instant she was reminded of her youngest brother, who when he was five and she was having her fourteenth birthday had come shyly, adoringly to press on her a smudged and skewed model rocket glider he had assembled himself.

'I know how this vessel works,' Skip said.

She straightened.

He nodded. 'Yeah. When Ahasuerus and I were batting around Saturn. It wanted me to conn while it took a boat outside a while. I think it's sensitive to the Doppler shift and wanted to incorporate it in a painting, but I couldn't swear to that. Anyway, it gave me the lesson. Easy. The single real trick is getting into the control room. You have to semaphore exactly right or the wall won't open. There's another special set of signals to activate the engines. Failsafe precaution. I imagine. Otherwise it's hardly different from operating a tender. You stand in a miniature version of the viewroom and use a scaled-up version of the navigator displays. Then you can leave her on automatic till you get where you're bound. Shucks, I could take us interstellar. The material's on file for this entire galactic neighbourhood. Just start the Bussard intake when you're up to ram scoop speed and kick in the photon drive when you're sure it won't harm anything local.'

'Ahasuerus must really trust us,' she breathed.

His mouth stretched his face into lumps and gullies. 'That's the trouble,' he said. 'It takes for granted we're as… innocent… as the few other atomic-era species it knows of. Could the rest have wiped themselves out?'

'I see why you're keeping silence.'

'Uh-huh. I was bubbling over at first, you may recall. Mainly I figured I'd better not let on to Wang.

Since, I've been thinking, and the more I think the more doubtful I am. He himself agrees it'd be unwise to give our military types a tender, even though they prob'ly couldn't duplicate it any more than Marconi could've duplicated a transistorized TV set. But the ship I You don't need to build a fleet. This one is plenty. You send a delegation here—and Ahasuerus is going to welcome delegations from now on, if they bring artwork—and the delegation takes Ahasuerus prisoner or kills it, and there they are, the owners of humanity.'

She thought, He loves me enough to share his fears. She said, 'Can't you convince the Sigman it must never tell anyone else?'

'I've been trying. Not easy to make clear a message like that.'

'And you— Thank mercy you're the one, Skip!' She reached for him. He remained where he was and said:

'If you mean we're lucky because I'll keep the whole matter secret, don't make book, Vonny. Should I?'

'What? Of course—'

'Is it that "of course"? Suppose the power did fall to America. I'm no flagnapper, but I don't despise my coun try either. Seems to me, by and large America's more decent than most, and has the size and strength to maintain peace. I'm not convinced those rickety international arrangements we've got will last much longer. Look how they're starting to come apart already. Pax Americana— is a lousy solution like that better'n no solution? Or would it work at all?' He shook his head. 'I don't know. Do you?'

'No,' she said. 'But I have faith—

'Is faith good enough? Think, please, Vonny. Use that well-oiled brain of yours.' Impudence could not help flickering forth in a grin. 'Along with a well-oiled body, hm-m-m?' Bleak again: 'I want your advice.

However, in the end, you realize, I'll have to decide. Me, alone with myself.'

Mercury was crags and craters under a black sky, by day a giant sun whose light ran like wildfire, here and there pools of molten metal that congealed by night and sheened with starshine—tormented grandeur.

Yvonne thought she understood how the boat's hull protected her from glare and maybe from short-wave radiation. Its transparency was self-darkening in proportion to need. She did not know how she stayed no warmer than usual, when the outside temperature neared 700 degrees Kelvin. Well, if they meant to skirt Sol— Could the right interplay of electric and magnetic fields control, not only charged particles but neutral ones and quanta? She wasn't sure if that was theoretically possible. She was, though, sure that the theories of Earthside physicists were not the last word.

Her speculation was a vague rippling across the un-happiness which filled most of her.

At the rear of the boat, Skip and Ahasuerus excitedly collaborated on a rendition in oils and Sigman pigments of a glitterstorm. Blown on the wisp of air that remained to this world, the fine micajike particles brought out the brutal mass of a cliff behind them.

How can he be merry when fate has touched him? — I grow hourly more aware of the guilt which is ours, no matter what course we choose. And that awareness makes me less and less his kind of woman, and he feels rebuffed, and I don't pretend very well, and so he may leave me as soon as his foot touches Earth, and might that be for the best? And I pray, how I pray he won't.

Beside her in the bows, Wang lowered the movie camera he had borrowed from their regular scientific equipment. 'I must have private copies of this sequence, if of nothing else I have taken,' he said. 'My daughter loves fireflies.'

The other day, for the first time, he showed me her picture. 'I'd like to meet your daughter,' Yvonne said.

'Do.' He sounded as if he meant it. 'We will be honoured to receive you in our home.'

Will you? After my country has seared a city or two of yours into slag, to prove it can melt and burn everything that four thousand years of China has given us, if you don't let in its occupation troops?

'And I am hopeful that in due course we can return the visit,' Wang was saying. 'Already she has heard about Disneyland.' He sighed. 'I went there once and found it frivolous. But that is what our past two or three generations have laboured for since the Revolution, that P'ing's shall have time for the fullness of culture, self-development, and, yes, a little frivolity.'

If you're still living on promises after two or three generations, won't she too? You, can't simply bring her to see me, because if you go abroad your family has to stay hostage behind. Dare I tell Skip such a government ought not to be obliterated for the safety, the very survival of mankind?

— But dare I say it cannot evolve, that it has not already evolved, that it will never give us a better gift than Caesar's ignoble peace?

Would such a peace even last? Rome tore itself apart. Byzantium decayed.

Have I no faith in my countrymen? What if we tell Andy Almeida that we, Skip, can run the starship? Will Andy have irons clapped on Skip, and drug and torture him till he shows how? Will Andy's superiors? I voted for President Braverman. He sits in the house of Thomas Jefferson. —

But Hitler started in gemiltlich old Bavaria, didn't he? —What to do, what to do?

The surface pull of Mercury gave slightly less weight than the normal acceleration of the ship. Yet it was as if already Yvonne could feel Earth's heaviness upon her.

You had read the figures: Photosphere diameter 1,390,000 kilometres, mass 329,390 times the terrestrial, energy output converting 560,000,000 tons per second of matter into radiation, prominences rising to more than 150,000 kilometres, corona extending several times as far, solar wind blowing to the remotest planetary orbit and beyond. You had seen photographs, astronomical cinema, transmissions from unmanned probes. It was interesting. It was gossip about your old friend Sol, that altogether ordinary yellow dwarf star which was expected to keep reliably lighting the world for another five billion years. You had to watch yourself with Sol, of course. He was boisterous. He could garble your favourite television programme or give you a red and peeling nose. When he got really rough, if you weren't careful he might strike you dead. But at heart he was a good fellow, steady old Sol.

Then you found that none of this had anything to do with that which, no matter how stepped down and baffled and buffered, flamed before you.

Sunward of Mercury, you saw at first an unutterable white splendour, swirled with storms, maned with a huge lacy rain that fountained outwara and intricately down again, surrounded by an effulgence that shimmered pearl and mother-of-pearl among the stars—there are no words. But you ran nearer, and it grew, it ate the sky, its burning, burning, burning became everything that was, fire roared around, somehow a part of the fury came through and the ship rang to it, bellow and shriek and whistle and high sweet singing; a gout of red and yellow and green and hell-blue that could cremate your planet came brawling towards you, you couldn't help yourself but had to shut your eyes and cover your ears, and the torrent raged past, engulfing you, its rumble in'your marrow to fill you with fear—

And through those hours he would not hold you, he shouted you should hide in your cabin if you didn't like the show, well, he had been angry with you and you had to prove you weren't a coward so you stayed, but he and his friend didn't want you near, they were ripping forth lines, splashing gobs of colour on surfaces, they were wild as the Ragnarok around them—

But the stiff grey man who loved his small daughter, he stood by, he let you cling to him and gave you the touch of his hands and when the noise of doomsday receded for a moment, as the sea recedes before a tidal wave, he would speak to you—

'We are quite safe. This ship has been here before. You have nothing to fear.'

'I know, I know. Then wh-wh-why am I afraid?'

'The sight, the sound, the, being in the middle of an ultimate reality… they stupefy. The senses are overloaded and the mind retreats for its own protection. Those artists are accustomed to an abnormally high data input. They are born for it. And I—I admit I flinch, I am daunted; but life has made me rigid, I have learned how to exclude. You are shielded in neither way. It is nothing to be ashamed of, and it will pass. You should not be here watching.'

'I must, I must.'

'I can guess why. And you have been anxious of late, gnawing on your own nerves. That too has lowered your defences against this—this spectacle which is at once psychedelic and terrorizing. I do not know why you should be unhappy, when everything seems to be going well for you—for the entire human race—'

A fire-fall thunders past. You hold to your solitary friend and babble, it matters not what, you reach out to him and you share.

For an instant he is like an iron bar. Afterward he eases, he continues to soothe, until the ship has rounded the sun and your lover can take you back to your cabin.

His room was so quiet that he could hear how his ears still rang from the violence he had survived. The room "was empty, too, a cell for sleeping and nothing else, except that he had propped her picture before him as a tiny brave splash of colour against bareness. His tunic stank from sweat, was hot and rough and tight around his neck. He wanted to take it off, wash it, and not put it back on; but he didn't.

He moistened his brush, passed the tip across an ink-block, and wrote, taking as much time over the calligraphy as the composition:

My beloved daughter,

When you read this, if ever you do, you will be a young .lady, beautiful, gracious, generous with laughter, everywhere creating for yourself a world of dear friends. And I will be dead, or I will be old and still more dour and unbending than I am now. What will I have to do with you? I am the daddy of little P'ing, who will have no other way to welcome me when I come home than to seize my thumb and stump off into the garden and maybe, maybe call me a great big bag of love. But of Mademoiselle Wang, what can I hope to be except the honourable father who once in the .past did a thing that is remembered? And this is natural and right. In fact, I do not think of myself as anything more than a beast of burden which has to carry certain loads in order that the new world may be built.

Please understand, I feel no self-pity. When I look upon the poor hollow people of the West, who have nothing to live for beyond their own lives, I know how fortunate I am. After you have had children of your own, you will understand. Nevertheless, may I reach across time for a moment and touch you?

If ever you read this, you will have read the histories. I want you, and you alone, to know how behind the platitudes was a man, who did not know what he really was but who knew loneliness, confusion, fright, weakness—I would like for you to know me. Therefore I have vowed neither to amend nor destroy these words, crude though they are, but leave them for you to have when you come of age.

At this hour, the entire purpose of my being is that you shall live that long.

Today we traversed hell. You will have read about our voyage. Quite likely, to you the solar passage will be commonplace, a thing one does, hand in hand with a sweetheart on a passenger liner to Saturn. But I saw hell. Creation also, and that which calls the first foolish snowdrop into bloom before winter has ended. But hell, I say hell, the same that could in a single fire-tongue lick devour my Blossom… though it might as easily carry her to the enlightenment, of beauty which has been mine.

Stunned, in panic, a person whom I sought to help let slip to me—I do not believe she remembers she did—that now the imperialists have this power to destroy you. I had hoped— No matter. Twice they have broken their most solemn oath. There shall not be a third time. I go to do whatever is necessary.

That is my duty to mankind. My clumsy confession, Ping, is that this is only a pretence, and what I do is really my love-gift to you.

He wondered whether to sign 'Daddy' or 'Your Father', decided on the more dignified form, read the page through, folded and sealed it. Meanwhile he thought, nausea binding his throat: Is there any reasonable doubt that my government is the one which hunted Yvonne Canter?

From his baggage he extracted the recoilless magnum automatic that General Chou had insisted he bring.

Chou had been right.

Perhaps Wayburn and Canter would decide to do nothing, say nothing. It was not a chance to be taken.

The fact was that they had said nothing to him. The single certainty was that Chou had no reason to pass the sun's flame across Peking.

Wang checked magazine and action, put the gun in a shoulder holster beneath his tunic, and left the gripper on the garment loose so he could quickly reach inside. He stowed the letter among his sparse effects and went forth to spy out the situation.