The Rape of The Sun Page 6

  There fell a silence over dessert wine; Dhurk, sipping, saw the Horn look at his granddaughter, saw the High Priestess nod most subtly. Now what did that mean? especially since Hréda immediately said: “Dear Grandfather, I know that you and the ultrasuperior have men’s business to discuss; may I be excused?” At the Horn’s nod, she arose (and so did Dhurk), said a few pretty words to the guest, and departed.

  Dhurk looked at his host. “Sit down,” he was told, “and enjoy your wine. I know better than to ask you any technical questions immediately after these cabinet decisions, you will have a great deal of thinking to do, you will be telling the ultramax and he will be reporting to me. My mood is to be personal. You know, my boy, I am an old man—”

  ‘Wo, sir!” Dhurk meant it.

  “Yes, sir. I am an old man, and I have so many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on that I forget many things about them. In your case, Dhurk—are you not my great-great-great-grandson in the Herder line of my progeny?”

  “Precisely, sir.”

  “I think you are an eldest son.*’ ' ‘

  “An only son, in fact. But I have two good sisters.”

  “I shall hope to meet them in due course. I think your father is the present head of the line, is he not?”

  “Yes, sir. He is also chief of your army staff.”

  “That is how I remembered it,” the Horn asserted, reflecting that the army’s occupational role in his interplanetary hegemony was vital. “I find it marvelous how you Herder men, who can so easily afford lives of luxurious indolence, nevertheless give your lives to careers of high service.”

  “I thank you, sir. On behalf of my father and myself.”

  “How old are you, Dhurk?”

  “Sir, thirty-seven cycles.”

  “Well past your silly youth, but still young, with at least a hundred good cycles left in you—perhaps several hundred, depending on the turn of your fortunes. Has it not sometimes occurred to you, Dhurk, that perhaps you ought to think about marrying someone of your station—someone with whom you could sire many fine generations, as I have done?” Dhurk had to flush; the flush yellowed his green. He said crisply: “It has occurred to me.”

  “And how do you feel about it?”

  “In candor—favorably enough to entertain the idea pleasurably, but not strongly enough to set out upon a quest.” Leaning toward Dhurk, the Horn refilled his guest’s glass from the ornate crystal decanter which the steward had left on the table. “Just between men, tell me, Dhurk—is there any one woman who has caught your serious fancy?”

  Dhurk frowned; the situation demanded a confession, part of which he was not ready to give. He said with care, “There is one who—has quite captivated me.”

  “In a marrying way?”

  “I would refuse to give thought to any other sort of pursuit in her case.”

  “Is she equal to your station, Dhurk?”

  “At least.” With those two words he had bitten part of the bullet. He hoped the Horn would grow bored with this line of conversation, which was lacerating and could lead to nothing fruitful. Dhurk had reconciled himself to adoring his unattainable princess at a chivalric distance.

  However, the Horn’s interest seemed heightened. “Then,” he demanded, “why have you not proposed marriage?”

  Suddenly Dhurk went fatalistic; already he had been accorded high honor, he might as well go on and get demoted and banished to some outlying planet. He said faintly, “Because—in fact, she is higher than my station.”

  The seated Horn seemed almost to hover over his guest. ‘That eliminates ail except a very few women. How much higher, Dhurk?”

  His hand was now forced. Dhurk tried one last evasion which was no evasion at all. Just audibly, he replied: “Two generations higher.” And waited for sudden death.

  The Horn leaned back in his chair; Dhurk, shooting a glance at him, was astonished to see that his host’s face wore a tight little smile. “So it goes that way,” softly said the Horn. “And is she married now?”

  Dhurk emitted: “No.” It nailed down the identification. “And yet,” the Horn queried, “you have said nothing to her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Does her—greater age trouble you?”

  Shocked, Dhurk gazed into the Horn’s face and exclaimed with passion: “Oh no, sir! Excuse me, but that would be so silly of me! She looks and acts like a mere budding child, and

  I have no doubt that she is vigorously fertile and will not change before I begin to change—” He checked his outburst, studied his wine, quaffed a lot of it.

  Benignly the Horn told him: “Finish your wine, my son, and then go pay a visit to Hréda, you will find her in her Temple Museum, I’m sure that you will want to swim there alone. I can reveal that you will not be unwelcome. Say to her whatever you may wish, and I will give my blessing to any outcome that Hréda may choose.”

  Altogether losing self-posesssion, Dhurk leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair and spilling his wine; it was wafted away by the medium. Laughing, the Horn arose also, and came and put his arm about Dhurk’s shoulders. “Come with me to the rail, my son,” the Horn invited. “It is clear that you need a bit of calming before you go to her, and I have just the story to calm you with.”

  At the high terrace rail, the Horn swept his right arm and hand wing-ripplingly across the sky toward the high stars; silently Dhurk surveyed the stars. The Horn pointed to a black space among stars, and he told his guest: “Right there, my son, is our star.”

  “I know, Dear Ancestor.” Again Dhurk was caught up in his evolutionary meditations. “Long ago that invisible dark star was a bright shining star like the others, and it brought light and warmth to this world before it was ours. But there were no living creatures on this world, it was dead, it had blown itself out; and so our star grew discouraged and flared out and collapsed into itself. It did not die, it is only sleeping; but it will not awaken, the sleep is forever.”

  “Meanwhile, Dhurk, the original dry-sea world of our ancestors was dying. Ultimately the best of us mounted all our skills and produced a spaceship in which Hréda’s grandmother and I departed our old world, attended only by robots, and set forth to find a new one. We saw the possibilities of this Dhorn, although there was no atmosphere for our breathing and swimming. We saw the possibilities of its dark neutron star, and we used its energy to shell this world with a transparent force-field. Then into this world we pumped the atmosphere which our original planet could no longer hold; into this planet’s blow-holes we pumped it, filling and surrounding it with our lovely blue swimmable atmosphere. We brought undulant plants and animal-swimmers to this world. And then, between us, loving each other indefatigably, I and my wife, Hréda’s grandmother, gave people to this world.

  “During generations, my son Dhurk, thanks to the longevity and the fecundity of our kind, we transformed this planet Dhom into the wonderful world that you know, brightly luminous by artificial day and mutedly luminous by natural night, teeming with plant and animal species, with ten thousand people and a hundred thousand artificial people, exercising dominion over many planets of several stars, using always the abounding energy of our. neutron star.

  “My son Dhurk, indeed it is true that I am aging. I need you to ensure the endless welfare of my granddaughter Hréda after I am gone: to foster her high priestesshood, to beget noble sons upon her; perhaps even, if your peers approve, to succeed me as Horn. That is why I hope for your acceptance by Hréda.”

  Profoundly moved, Dhurk told his Dear Ancestor: “My dear lord, never could I have hoped for so much. Quite apart from your promises of exaltation, the idea of having Hréda was never more than the stuff of my dreaming. Pray do not tell me that I am dreaming now.”

  Fixing Dhurk with glittering eyes, the Horn observed: “You realize, of course, that a prince can be proved only by a princely test.”

  Dhurk stiffened. Evenly he said: “I think you are telling me that if I do not bring home
the ladiolis, I lose everything.”

  The Horn shrugged grandiloquently. “Look upon it affirmatively, my son. In any event, today, now, if Hréda agrees, you are betrothed to her. And if ultimately you marry her, your succession follows as the vogler the hofnich. And of course it is essential that your marriage be blessed by your gift of a ladiolis.

  Dhurk straightened. “I am sure that my Dear Ancestor will forgive my natural impatience. Did you say that I could find her in her Temple Museum?”

  The Horn grew sober, and his voice almost pleaded: “Just one thing, my son. If you marry her, you will not entirely deprive her grandfather of her occasional company, will you?”

  “But naturally not—”

  “In privacy, I mean, so that she and I can be granddaughter and grandfather together. You must have her dance for you, my son; but when she dances for me alone, it is so utterly charming a thing for an old man.”

  6

  Dhurk came in from aloft upon her Temple Museum, the shrine of Dhorn shrines; an architectural masterpiece, a million square meters of irregular transparency, decorously bulging with animals and artifacts from a thousand cultures on a hundred planets in half a hundred star-systems. Child though she appeared, Hréda had devoted many decades of cycles to the building and selective stocking of her Temple Museum, endlessly financed by her endlessly indulgent grandfather, making it the religious marvel of her grandfather's planet.

  To the divine glory of this museum, Dhurk would now be contributing a ladiolis.

  Through the total-window wall of the front facade, swimming, he saw her within, idly buoyant-drifting on a balcony, gazing at her museum’s interior.

  Entering the museum, he heavy-floated down to that balcony, moved along it with the slow-motion loping stride of a nobleman, and paused a little way behind her. Allowing her feet to sink floorward, she straightened and waited with her back to him*.

  He cleared throat, he tongue-touched his lips, he required himself to declare: “High Priestess, I am nothing with words, I will come to the point. I am permanently in love with you, I want you for my wife.”

  She wheeled, making a swirl of gas-bubbles, and she cried: “Yes, Dhurk, yes!" All femininity, she came to him in little feet-together toe-thrusting submarine leaps; he went to her with a man’s pace, one foot at a time, thrusting himself only a little above the floor with each step.

  They embraced. Passion sang. They .clung....

  She thrust herself away from him just before it became critical. Enchanted, she caroled: “I shall dance for you, my Dhurk; watch me dance for you!” In a gazelle-bound she sprang to the rail of the balcony and dove headlong down.

  Leaning entranced on the rail, he watched her swinging on lofty spars of metal sculpture, diving with dolphin-grace through the vibrant-live electronic rings of gigantic atoms, undulating on the rampant trunk of a stuffed elephantoid massurus and then wriggling mock-terrorized on her back beneath his forever-upraised hoof, playing dead in a mega-lithic sarcophagus from ancient Thanosere and then arising like Amaterasu out of the sea to walk the sarcophagus-edge on her hands with legs lithely writhing aloft and tunic-skirt down over her little breasts----

  It was too much for Dhurk: he vaulted the balcony rail, swam powerfully down to her, clasped her aloft-legs in his arms, pressed his open mouth against the tender underside of her knee. Reaching up, playfully she slapped Dhurk’s arm; he released her, she righted herself, she clasped his arm, she whispered: “It is time for us to pray in the Holy of Holies.”

  Submissive, he allowed himself to be led by her to the approach: the Sanctified Avenue of Our Ancestry. In slow dignity they passed between male-female pairs of their ancestors beginning with the primordial long-tailed dragon-ray and swimming gradually upward between a long series of evolving generations. At the great door of the Holy of Holies, they knelt with bowed heads and clasped arms between effigies of the culminative pair: the Horn and his consort, Hréda’s grandmother.

  Arising, they entered. And great doors slid shut behind them.

  For Collins, there was no further sighted vision other than the mighty closed doors. But through them came to him a sense of what transpired beyond them. It was that, deep within, High Priestess Hréda stood high on the chancel of the sanctuary and worshipfully bared herself wholly to her betrothed; while below, he bared himself wholly to her and knelt and adored. But neither touched the other in that sanctuary; for as yet they were only betrothed.

  Collins—they come for US!

  Part Three

  DARK FOAM ON THE RADIANT BEER

  7

  From January 1995 onward, Sven commuted between Houston and Sylvanopolis; his status had become not NASA employee but Southeastern Power employee attached as our liaison to NASA. I saw to it that his salary was respectable. You may correctly infer that his acceptance”by NASA personnel continued undiminished, with every request honored. It made our progress enormously easier. I was proud of Sven, although I thought it dangerous to admit this to myself.

  There were status changes for Wel, ' too. Although as yet he was unable to release for publication the sensational new story about our solar satellites, he had discussed the matter at length with his managing editor and the owner; they had agreed that the scoop he could eventually produce—not only the big news story, but also a series of exclusives filed from space—justified alteration of his hours without diminution of pay. Also, at the semester break, he arranged to teach only on Tuesday evenings. This allowed him to fly to Houston most Wednesday mornings for refresher space training, returning Thursday evenings; not always possible from his newspaper’s viewpoint, but frequently so.

  As for me, J.C. told me to arrange my own schedule— which I mostly did anyway. My major problems at home were to supervise production and equipping of our four satellites and our command capsule, and to break in Hugo Graben and Bob Mullett as interim co-chiefs of my division. This was the compromise that I had finally reached, with J.C.’s approval: over the long haul, he wanted me in sole divisional command; but for a short haul, a duumvirate he could control. Working around these restrictions, I got to Houston one or two days a week for retraining—sometimes with Wel, sometimes not.

  Oboy! what that led to!

  Sven was our instructor, of course. Christ, did he put us through wringers! Invariably afterward he would be crocodile-apologetic: “You know how it is, it’s for your own good, your own safety: you have to be combat-ready.” In my heart, I knew that this consideration was only part of his motive; the other part, perhaps the main part, was that he wanted to develop an absolutely crack sun-team for his own good. And that was all right, too. I applaud competent ambition, he had it, he was justified in eliminating personnel bugs from the project; besides, he was working for us.

  Early in March, Wel and I brought Bill Haley to Houston as the fourth member of our sun-team. Wel had suggested his colleague Dr. Haley, who was Chairman of Astrophysics at Sylvania U., was also chairman of half a dozen national and international astronomical committees, and had three books and eleventy-seven papers to his credit. Bill, a tall, skinny, sober, balding logician, was seized-upon by Sven and put into the centrifuge the first day. When the whirlygig stopped and Bill dragged himself out, Sven hurried to help him, consoling: “Look, Bill, I made it easy on you for this first time, and I won’t let it get tougher until you are ready.” Dazed, Bill nodded and went to a rest couch, but half an hour later he labored to his feet and demanded: “What’s next?” Bill would be aboard as our crew scientist, and he simply couldn’t wait for this chance to see the sun up close. He would study it, not merely as Sun, but as one member of Sun’s class of stars.

  Still we had not picked a fifth member for our crew. Sven and Wel and I had discussed qualifications for such a member: he should be a competent medic, and otherwise he should have enough space experience to be an effective substitute for any of us in an emergency. By now, much of NASA knew what we were up to, and Sven had mentioned the mission to several space medics, a
ll of whom were dying to be selected. But the* decision was tabled, and for a while it would rest.

  As for Sven and me, off duty we stayed friendly, spending many evenings together with or without Wei. When Wel was absent, both of us were on guard. I stayed out of Sven’s apartment, he didn’t invite me; he stayed out of my quarters, I didn’t invite him. But there was electricity, and both of us felt it, and both of us knew that it was mutual.

  On a Saturday evening early in April, Wel and I sat apart in lounging clothes, going over the guest list for our solar housewarming; we’d scheduled it for Friday evening, April 28, a date which in our southern clime figured to be warm and fair, according to Southern Living; I planned to get to the invitations tomorrow. Oho, weren’t we soul-close then! For instance, Wel suggested that we’d have to abandon our satirical guest list, and I agreed, and there were quips back and forth about that, and presently we were laughing so hard that Wel broke out the Courvoisier to quiet us down. Somewhat later, we raised the question of a Special Guest, a sleeper-affair which we enjoyed introducing at our parties; I proposed that I take on the responsibility so that even Wei would be surprised, and we got laughing again, and there was more Courvoisier, and after a bit he and I were musing over each other across 4he ten feet of space that separated our easy chairs.

  Wel suddenly arose, saying: “Come on out on the balcony, Hel, I want to show you something.” Obediently I went with him while he opened a patio door and led me out into the mild night.

  The sky was clear, and the stars were extra-brilliant; more, they seemed to water-shimmer in a purplish field of sky. With Wel clasping my waist, I gazed up at the marvelous-weird display. Wel said quietly: “Have you perhaps noticed how the brightness of the stars has kept growing lately?”