by Mari Wolf
in the legends.
"You've brought your people?" the tall man who stood in the forefrontsaid to Captain Bernard.
"They're up there." Bernard pointed up at the sky, and the people lookedup. Trina looked up too. One of the planet's moons was almost fulloverhead. But the world was invisible, shut off by the sky and theclouds and the light of the earthlike sun.
"They'd like some of you to come visit their world," Bernard said. "Ifany of you are willing."
The tall man nodded. "Everyone will want to go," he said. "Very fewships ever land here. Until you came, it had been years."
"You'd go out in space?" Trina said incredulously.
Again the man nodded. "I was a spaceman once," he said. "All of usMacGregors were." Then he sighed. "Sometimes even now I want to go outagain. But there've been no ships here, not for years."
Trina looked past him, at the women and the children, at the lush fieldsand the little houses far in the distance. "You'd leave this?"
MacGregor shook his head. "No, of course not. Not to live in spacepermanently. I'd always come back."
"It's a fine world to come back to," Max said, and he and the tall mansmiled at each other, as if they shared something that Trina couldn'tpossibly understand.
"We might as well go into town," MacGregor said.
They walked over to the cars. MacGregor stopped beside one of them, hishand on the door button.
"Here, let me drive." The girl stepped forward out of the crowd as shespoke. She was tall, almost as tall as MacGregor, and she had the samehigh cheekbones and the same laughter lines about her eyes.
"Not this time, Saari," MacGregor said. "This time you can entertain ourguests." He turned to Max and Trina and smiled. "My daughter." His facewas proud.
They climbed in, Trina wedging herself into the middle of the back seatbetween Max and the planet girl. The car throbbed into motion, thenpicked up speed, jolting a bit on the rough country road. The groundrushed past and the fields rushed past and Trina leaned against Max andshut her eyes against the dizzying speed. Here, close to the ground, soclose that they could feel every unevenness of its surface, it was farworse than in the windmill like craft the spacemen used on the worlds.
"Don't you have cars?" Saari asked.
"No," Trina said. "We don't need them."
A car like this would rush all the way around the world in half an hour.In a car like this one even the horizons wouldn't look right, rushing tomeet them. Here, though the horizons stayed the same, unmoving while thefence posts and the farmhouses and the people flashed past.
"What do you use for transportation then?"
"We walk," Trina said, opening her eyes to look at the girl and thenclosing them again. "Or we ride horses."
"Oh."
A few minutes later the car slowed, and Trina opened her eyes again.
"We're coming into town," Saari said.
They had climbed up over the brow of a small hill and were now droppingdown. At the bottom of the hill the houses clumped together, sparsely atfirst, then more and more of them, so that the whole valley was filledwith buildings, and more buildings hugged the far slopes.
"There are so many of them," Trina whispered.
"Oh, no, Trina. This is just a small town."
"But the people--all those people...."
They crowded the streets, watching the cars come in, looking with opencuriosity at their alien visitors. Faces, a thousand faces, alldifferent and yet somehow all alike, blended together into a greatanonymous mass.
"There aren't half that many people on the whole world," Trina said.
Saari smiled. "Just wait till you see the city."
Trina shook her head and looked up at Max. He was smiling out at thetown, nodding to some men he apparently knew, with nothing but eagernessin his face. He seemed a stranger. She looked around for Curt Elias, buthe was in one of the other cars cut off from them by the crowd. Shecouldn't see him at all.
"Don't you like it?" Saari said.
"I liked it better where we landed."
Max turned and glanced down at her briefly, but his hand found hers andheld it, tightly, until her own relaxed. "If you want to, Trina, we canlive out there, in those fields."
For a moment she forgot the crowd and the endless faces as she looked upat him. "Do you mean that, Max? We could really live out there?"
Where it was quiet, and the sun was the same, and the birds sang sweetlyjust before harvest time, where she would have room to ride and plentyof pasture for her favorite horse. Where she would have Max, there withher, not out somewhere beyond the stars.
"Certainly we could live there," he said. "That's what I've been sayingall along."
"You could settle down here?"
He laughed. "Oh, I suppose I'd be out in space a good deal of the time,"he said. "The ships will come here now, you know. But I'll always comehome, Trina. To this world. To you."
And suddenly it didn't matter that the girl beside her chuckled, northat there were too many people crowding around them, all talking atonce in their strangely accented voices. All that mattered was Max, andthis world, which was real after all, and a life that seemed like anendless festival time before her.
* * * * *
Evening came quickly, too quickly, with the sun dropping in an unnaturalplunge toward the horizon. Shadows crept out from the houses of thetown, reached across the narrow street and blended with the walls of thehouses opposite. The birds sang louder in the twilight, the notes oftheir song drifting in from the nearby fields. And there was anothersound, that of the wind, not loud now but rising, swirling fingers ofdust in the street.
Trina sat in front of the town cafe with the planet girl, Saari. MaxCramer was only a few feet away, but he paid no attention to her, andlittle to Elias. He was too busy telling the planet people about space.
"Your man?" Saari asked.
"Yes," Trina said. "I guess so."
"You're lucky." Saari looked over at Max and sighed, and then she turnedback to Trina. "My father was a spaceman. He used to take my mother up,when they were first married, when the ships were still running." Shesighed. "I remember the ships, a little. But it was such a long timeago."
"I can't understand you people." Trina shook her head. "Leaving all ofthis, just to go out in space."
The room was crowded, oppressively crowded. Outside, too many peoplewalked the shadowed streets. Too many voices babbled together. Thepeople of this planet must be a little mad, Trina thought, to livecooped together as the spacemen lived, with all their world around them.
Saari sat watching her, and nodded. "You're different, aren't you? Fromus, and from them too." She looked over at Max and Bernard and theothers, and then she looked at Curt Elias, who sat clenching andunclenching his hands, saying nothing.
"Yes, we're different," Trina said.
Max Cramer's voice broke incisively into the silence that lay betweenthem then. "I don't see why," he said, "we didn't all know about thisworld. Especially if more than one ship came here."
Saari's father laughed softly. "It's not so strange. The ships allbelonged to one clan. The MacGregors. And eventually all of them eitherwere lost in space somewhere or else grew tired of roaming around andsettled down. Here." He smiled again, and his high cheekboned faceleaned forward into the light. "Like me...."
Night. Cloudless, black, but hazed over with atmosphere and thusfamiliar, not like the night of space. The two small moons, the stars inunfamiliar places, and somewhere, a star that was her world. And Trinasat and listened to the planet men talk, and to the spacemen among themwho could no longer be distinguished from the native born. Outside, inthe narrow street, wind murmured, skudding papers and brush before it,vague shadows against the light houses. Wind, rising and moaning, thesound coming in over the voices and the music from the cafe singers.
It was a stronger wind than ever blew on the world, even during thewinter, when the people had to stay inside and wish that Earth traditionmight be broke
n and good weather be had the year around.
"We'd better get back to the ship," Elias said.
They stopped talking and looked at him, and he looked down at his hands,embarrassed. "They'll be worried about us at home."
"No, they won't," Max said. Then he saw the thin, blue-veined handstrembling and the quiver not quite controlled in the wrinkled neck."Though perhaps we should start back...."
Trina let out her breath in relief. To be back in the ship, she thought,with the needle and its forgetfulness, away from
