The descent took her belowground, into a small, bare anteroom. Rinndalir stood alone.
She jarred to a halt. He advanced to take her hand. “Welcome, my lady,” he said, and smiled. “Far too long have I awaited you.”
Palm and fingers were cool around hers. Did she feel calluses? “I, I’d have liked to come sooner,” she heard herself falter. “Fascinating place, from what I could gather. But once I had my ship, I needed to get back in training, and then—so much to do—”
“Between your times at home with your child. I understand.”
Did he? she wondered. If not, did he know he didn’t?
“Accept lodgment, I pray you,” he purred on. “It is less than lavish, but I have striven to prepare it as worthy of you.”
Heat and cold again passed through her. Why in MacCannon’s name was she reacting like this? Stop it, pronto! He had been a delightful companion, an incomparable lay, a moral monster, and what the hell further concern of hers was any of that?
She summoned a mantra. Self-command flowed into her. Studying him, she saw that time had graven deeply. Toil, hardship, and what else? Between wings of hair gone ashen, his countenance was furrowed, the gray eyes enormous in its gauntness. Yet he stood as erect as she, moved more lithely, and in his argent and sable, beneath a diamond-frosted headband, was elegance incarnate.
“Your colleagues, your officers?” she asked. True humans would have met her in a group. Merlin was just the fifth Demetrian vessel to visit Perun.
“We will foregather with them when we choose,” he said indifferently.
So he remained an overlord, she thought. Communications between his breed and hers, sparse as they were, hadn’t made their new social structure at all clear. Did Rinndalir reign supreme over this one settlement, or over his entire, wide-strewn people?
“First you and I have years to exchange,” he went on, his voice turning melodious. “I will dispatch men to bring your baggage, remote-directed by you, whenever you like. Now come, I pray you.”
He did not offer an arm for her to touch, nor bring fingertips to her hand. The omission suggested they were equals. Bemused, willy-nilly almost captivated, she accompanied him. He moved at the same easy low-g lope as she. About half Lunar, the weight sufficed to keep his kind healthy, but she guessed they must spend time exercising in centrifugal to stay fit. Or maybe not, given all their activity on the ground and in space.
Moving along, she found ample evidence of it. A high, ogive-vaulted passage led from the entry, carved out of rock which had thereafter been polished glass-smooth.
Fluorotubes lighted it in changeable colors and intensities. Otherwise no illusions livened the murky-red length, only occasional inset panels of other minerals, green, blue, mica-sparkly. At intervals were pillars sculptured in fluid curves and foamlike laciness, studded with gems and crystals. The variable light animated them. Barely audible to Kyra, sounds as of flute and violin twined among bittersweet odors. Where doors stood open she glimpsed a cafe whose patrons sat on rugs playing chess or go, a foodstore, a laboratory, an atelier, a wizardly little workshop. Traffic was scant; these caverns had been dug for a population that was to grow. Such males, females, and their young as went by moved fast, intent, seldom talking. Loose indoor garb flapped and streamed, multiply colored.
“Like wings on birds,” Kyra remarked.
“In future birds will fly free among us, gaudy moths, perhaps frolicsome bats,” Rinndalir said. “In passages less ornate than here will grow flowering vines.”
“Not much like what Luna was.”
He turned solemn. “We are becoming other than what we were. More than you on Demeter, it may be.”
An equal seriousness came upon her. “I don’t know about that.” Landscape and life—“Did you expect it would happen?”
“In truth. Ice that melts freezes again, but we are alive, your kindred and mine.” Rinndalir was silent a while. The corridor slipped away behind Kyra, half unseen. “It is a reason why my lady Niolente chose to stay home.”
She searched for tactful words. “My impression was she wanted to fight for the old order of things there, keep it going as long as possible. Doesn’t—didn’t she despise Earthlings?”
Looking sideways, she saw what might be pain flicker across him. He kept his own eyes forward. “Certain kinds of them,” he replied slowly. “The great ones she thanked and honored in her spirit, for they were adversaries to call forth all that she was. Intrigue and strife against them appealed more to her than any struggle with insensate matter.” He smiled. She could not tell if it was sadly or lovingly or what. “That was the more so after she knew beyond doubt that her cause was lost. Now might she make whatever wager she fancied, and at least leave her mark upon destiny. I will never be sure, from what has come filtered to us out of Earth, but I suspect it was she who forced the bargain that the last Selenarchs would reign over their holdings until death invaded. The new powers must have misliked that; it hampered their reconstructions for decades. Yes, I elect to imagine that my Niolente took the lead in finding means to threaten them—oh, most covertly—with what was worse.”
Kyra gathered courage to say, “I’ve wondered why you didn’t stay in the game.”
The luminous glance swept over her and back to the distances ahead. “The answer to that is less to be told than to be lived.”
At the mouth of a shaft they turned downward, springing from platform to platform staggered at seven-meter intervals. A fall attained barely more than three meters per second. Soon Rinndalir laughed and made a single three-stage jump. Taking hold of his cloak, he spread it from his shoulders. It was cut so as to billow out and catch the air; he floated down whirling like a wind-blown leaf. The Lunarians weren’t altogether changed, Kyra thought.
On a wider landing he stopped, beckoned, and conducted her into another horizontal tunnel. It had a rough, unfinished appearance, more ventilators than doors, and a trench in the middle of the floor. “This will be an arbor through which a stream runs,” he explained.
“You really have gotten ardent about biology, haven’t you?” Kyra said.
“From Luna we could behold living Earth,” he replied. “Here Demeter is but a spark in the sky, and another is Phaethon.”
After what Kyra estimated as ten klicks, a short side passage ended at a bronze portal decorated with geometric bas-reliefs. Rinndalir ordered it to open and guided her through. Mosaics decked the walls of an anteroom. She saw they were copied from the Byzantine church in Ravenna. If he desired a reminder of what he had abandoned, this was a strange one. Or was it? Theodora’s great eyes were fixed on eternity.
Beyond, she entered a spacious chamber, black and white, its ceiling a viewdome which showed the heavens above. A had set but B shone among the stars, a deep-yellow point bright as several hundred Lunas full over Earth. That sky was the room’s sole illuminator. Flask and goblets sheened mystical on a darkling table. Music trilled more clearly than before, and a perfume as of jasmine with the least undertone of musk swirled in the air.
Memory struck alarm. “Your quarters?” Kyra demanded.
Rinndalir smiled. In this light he became unaged, timelessly beautiful. “What else? A poor thing, but mine own.”
She grabbed after conversation. “I wouldn’t call it poor. Oh, not what you had before, no.”
“That will never come again. We are a-building toward a morrow unknowable, even as you on Demeter, albeit they will be foreign to one another.”
That he spoke not seductively but seriously brought a wave of relief. “Yes, I s’pose. Hadn’t thought much about it till now, but at Sol—no matter how independent you acted, you Lunarians were an offshoot of Earth.” Like ancient nomads, she reflected in passing: folk displaced to the steppes, tempered into strength and fierceness until sometimes they became the conquerors of the civilizations they fringed, yet always dependent on those for much of what kept them alive, always in the end overcome by them. “No more.”
He t
ook her elbow, she felt the soft touch acutely, and urged her to the table. “Be at ease, my lady. Our biosystems produce what are not the worst vintages in the galaxy.” He filled goblets, gave her one, and raised his. “Uwach yei,” he toasted. “That means, approximately, ‘Aloft.’”
Kyra touched rims, a clear ringing. “Happy landings,” she responded. They sipped. The wine was tartly spicy.
“There we have uttered a hint of the differences between us,” Rinndalir said.
“Maybe.” Kyra searched for words. “Your people don’t go in for manifestos or five-year plans or anything like that, but it does seem to us on Demeter that your aim is to create the first truly spaceborne society.”
“A calculated aim would be blind, but a dream need not be. Surely many among you bear the same. You cannot be resigned to your descendants perishing with your planet.”
“That’s what I’ve come about, of course. My mission.”
“Yours and mine.”
Wine slopped as her glass jerked in Kyra’s hand. She peered through the amber dusk. Rinndalir smiled calmly back. “What?” she gasped. “Wait a minute! I expected I’d take a specialist or two.”
“They can fare later, if we find cause for it. On this early voyage, I will be your partner.”
“In MacCannon’s name, why?”
Rinndalir shrugged his shoulders—gracefully, which she had never seen a man of her kind achieve. “I am not incompetent, also in planetary science. These years have made a workman of me.” He fixed his regard on her. Quiet and steely, command declared: “But I am still a Selenarch, and I have chosen to companion you.”
Kyra set down her glass, stiffened her back, and snapped, “I’ll have something to say about that, por favor.”
He arched his brows. “Does your horror of me abide?” he murmured. “I think not unamendably.”
“What you brought about—”
“Do you very bitterly regret it?”
“That last time in your castle—”
“Hark you, my lady.” Rinndalir’s voice tolled. “I repent me of naught. I was what I was. In large, I remain thus, and hold no wish to be otherwise. But in the light of these suns I have come to see more and farther than erstwhile.”
“You listen,” Kyra answered, angry and bewildered. “I didn’t have to pilot this mission. I can resign from it and they’ll get someone else.” A Demetrian, an Earthling born or of Earthling stock. The Lunarians had visited Phaethon, but could not long endure its three-fourths Terrestrial gravity. Nor could they practicably direct robots from orbit. Joint expeditions made sense, now that the planetdwellers were launching their own manned spacecraft. “I’d be sorry to, I wanted it awfully, but if you’ve appointed yourself my shipmate, I quit.”
He showed no resentment. “I ask anew, why?”
“Damnation, how round do you believe my heels are?”
Had he laughed or even smiled, she would have walked out. Instead he said soberly, “Yes, you have doubtless made your alliance with whomever fortunate it be, and would not betray. But must it bind you? I am capable of chastity, Kyra. Has your man no trust in you or you in him?”
Her men, she nearly corrected him; and, yes, they abjured jealousy, because she would not let herself be bound; and the problem on a cruise with Rinndalir might not be his chastity but would certainly be hers. “We’re too unlike,” she mumbled.
He nodded. “Ever sundered. Can you comprehend that that is a wound in me? That you are a reason I departed the life that was mine?”
He couldn’t mean it! Could he? “On what acquaintance we had? Is this a joke?”
“Nay. Nor an infatuation.” Wryly: “An attraction perverse, it may be, of the raven for the wild mare.” The eagle, Kyra thought amidst hammering blood, the eagle who rides the wind that strokes the mare in her mane. And she is powerful and smells sweetly of sun-warmed earth. “Or is it unnatural? What do you feel for a pet or a ship or a mountain against sunset or the phantom of Anson Guthrie?”
“That’s … different.”
“How?”
“You said it yourself. We’re unbridgeably divided.” A gulf between them, Kyra thought, into which she could fall and never climb back out, and—and the metaphors were getting as mixed as the emotions.
“Yet when we meet,” Rinndalir said, “we can reach across to touch hands.”
Abruptly it was her laughter that shouted forth. “More than hands, you’re thinking!” she cried. Impudence flew free. “Are you not?” After that, hour by hour, things got better and better.
53
WHEN ITS ORBIT, retrograde, unstable, and comet-eccentric, brought it close to A, Phaethon went mad. Frozen gases exploded in geysers and clouds, ice melted in cataracts and floods, hurricanes drove rainstorms full of lightning, seas drowned coastlands and mountainsides shed torrents of stone. Meanwhile light blazed and hard radiation seared. Those who would study the interior of the planet must seek it when it had swung afar, into the winter of its fourteen-year cycle.
Airsuited, Kyra stood on a white crust of snow. At her back it had been cleared away to the rock, making room for the shelters that had housed her and her equipment. On either side the terrain rolled pallid and shadowful beneath its cover. Ahead, a glacier spilled down steeper hills. Clean of dust, it shimmered a faint mysterious blue. Both suns were in the purple-black heaven. A, the captor, was shrunken to a lurid star, B showed a tiny disc; Proxima continued a red spark. Wind, a remnant of air not gone hard, shrilled thinly around her helmet.
Merlin was above the horizon. She watched her last geologist rolling back to camp while she spoke into her transmitter: “How can you be so positive?”
“The interpretation of your findings is unambiguous,” ’cast Rinndalir from the ship. “The program has considered every possibility and found none of diverting or destroying this world.”
“In eight-hundred-odd years?” It struck Kyra how fully she had come to think in terms of Demeter’s calendar. On Earth she would have said a thousand. “That’s time to drill a lot of holes and plant a lot of antimatter detonators.”
“You must be wearied in truth, my dear, that you let wishfulness ride so free over knowledge. Phaethon is no asteroid or comet. Its core is molten. No more can one tunnel into it than into a sea. Thus, there can be no foundation firm enough for the kind of engine that would change the orbit. Nor could we blow off any but the outer layers of crust. Even were the globe broken apart—and the program does not foresee producing sufficient antimatter for that in the time that is left—even then, the wreckage would expunge every trace of you on Demeter.”
Kyra sighed. “No surprise, I guess. This was such a loco little hope.” Nevertheless its death made a heaviness within her.
“Let us and our descendants think how better we can spend our efforts toward outliving doomsday,” Rinndalir said.
He really had changed, she thought. And, heartening: She herself would have plenty to do. Fragments of unborn planets tumbled countless in the chaotic regions where their coalescence had been forbidden; often the two suns flung them inward; a meteoroid patrol was needed, still more than around Sol.
That made her say, “Our descendants? This generation will do well to carve out a bare foothold for them.”
“And to live our lives,” Rinndalir insinuated.
He hadn’t changed too much. At accelerations he could tolerate, the trip home would take a spell. Disappointment faded from Kyra—nobody had really expected any other outcome—as she found herself looking forward.
54
Responding to concerns expressed by Her Holiness the Elimite Bhairagi after the Lyudov Rebellion, Prescriptor Juang-ze Mendoza stated in an address to the world: “Fear of artificial intelligence with full consciousness is perhaps understandable as emotional atavism, but has no more rational justification than any other neurosis. These beings—yes. I call them beings, not machines—bring nothing but limitless promise. Where they replace humans, as in space operations, it is because they
are better suited; they arrive as liberators. Yet they will never be slaves, abjectly serving us that we may pass lives of meaningless idleness. That would be an equal misuse of robot and human. They will be, they are already becoming, our partners in an immeasurably great destiny. Let us cease calling them artificial. Are electronic, photonic, nucleonic, or magnetohydrodynamic processes less natural than the chemistry of organic colloids? I propose for these beings the name Sophotect.”
THUS FAR THE weather service had no reliable way of predicting fogs in Hollowland. That enormous swamp country, filling a quarter of tropical Aetolia, was too little known; conditions within it were altering too fast and radically. Even a satellite could often give no more than one or two hours’ warning before hundreds of square kilometers were shrouded.
Such a cloud rose and rolled over Nero Valencia and Hugh Davis as they were bound back to camp after several days of survey—cruising about, observing, sampling, testing, charting how well the new-made wilderness fared, seeking to learn what the latest turns were that its development had taken. All at once they must creep and grope, engine down to a whisper, eyes well-nigh blinded.
Vision barely reached from end to end of the boat. Sometimes a thick tendril of mist drifted across to hide that much. Just enough light sneaked from above to shimmer off wet deck and cabin. Everywhere around, formlessness eddied gray, murk behind it. A glance overboard caught the leaves, broad and dark green around rosy flowers, between which the prow cut. Now and then a fish slipped past. The plants covered most of the brown water, whose clucking against the hull was the single sound from outside it. Occasionally a specter appeared, a hummock fringed with rushes or a mangrove glooming over shallows, but sight quickly lost it again. Heat had given way to raw and sullen chill; odors of growth and blossom had gone rank.
“Sir,” called Hugh from the wheel, “trouble!”
“What now?” asked Valencia, crouched at the bows for whatever he might do as a lookout.
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