He held her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes. They mirrored sorrow, and also sincerity. She really believed what she was saying, Leon told himself. For the first time, his conscience smote him. He had forgotten – or chosen not to remember – how much more serious these things could be to a woman than to a man.
He had never intended to hurt Lora; he was very fond of her, and would remember her with affection all his life. Now he was discovering, as so many men before him had done, that it was not always easy to say goodbye.
There was only one thing to do. Better a short, sharp pain than a long bitterness.
‘Come with me, Lora,’ he said. ‘I have something to show you.’
They did not speak as Leon led the way to the clearing that the Earthmen used as a landing ground. It was littered with pieces of enigmatic equipment, some of them being repacked while others were being left behind for the islanders to use as they pleased. Several of the anti-gravity scooters were parked in the shade beneath the palms; even when not in use they spurned contact with the ground, and hovered a couple of feet above the grass.
But it was not these that Leon was interested in; he walked purposefully toward the gleaming oval that dominated the clearing, and spoke a few words to the engineer who was standing beside it. There was a short argument; then the other capitulated with fairly good grace.
‘It’s not fully loaded,’ Leon explained as he helped Lora up the ramp. ‘But we’re going just the same. The other shuttle will be down in half an hour, anyway.’
Already Lora was in a world she had never known before – a world of technology in which the most brilliant engineer or scientist of Thalassa would be lost. The island possessed all the machines it needed for its life and happiness; this was something utterly beyond its ken. Lora had once seen the great computer that was the virtual ruler of her people and with whose decisions they disagreed not once in a generation. That giant brain was huge and complex, but there was an awesome simplicity about this machine that impressed even her nontechnical mind. When Leon sat down at the absurdly small control board, his hands seemed to do nothing except rest lightly upon it.
Yet the walls were suddenly transparent – and there was Thalassa, already shrinking below them. There had been no sense of movement, no whisper of sound, yet the island was dwindling even as she watched. The misty edge of the world, a great bow dividing the blue of the sea from the velvet blackness of space, was becoming more curved with every passing second.
‘Look,’ said Leon, pointing to the stars.
The ship was already visible, and Lora felt a sudden sense of disappointment that it was so small. She could see a cluster of portholes around the centre section, but there appeared to be no other breaks anywhere on the vessel’s squat and angular hull.
The illusion lasted only for a second. Then, with a shock of incredulity that made her senses reel and brought her to the edge of vertigo, she saw how hopelessly her eyes had been deceived. Those were not portholes; the ship was still miles away. What she was seeing were the gaping hatches through which the ferries could shuttle on their journeys between the starship and Thalassa.
There is no sense of perspective in space, where all objects are still clear and sharp whatever their distance. Even when the hull of the ship was looming up beside them, an endless curving wall of metal eclipsing the stars, there was still no real way of judging its size. She could only guess that it must be at least two miles in length.
The ferry berthed itself, as far as Lora could judge, without any intervention from Leon. She followed him out of the little control room, and when the air lock opened she was surprised to discover that they could step directly into one of the starship’s passageways.
They were standing in a long tubular corridor that stretched in each direction as far as the eye could see. The floor was moving beneath their feet, carrying them along swiftly and effortlessly – yet strangely enough Lora had felt no sudden jerk as she stepped onto the conveyer that was now sweeping her through the ship. One more mystery she would never explain; there would be many others before Leon had finished showing her the Magellan.
It was an hour before they met another human being. In that time they must have travelled miles, sometimes being carried along by the moving corridors, sometimes being lifted up long tubes within which gravity had been abolished. It was obvious what Leon was trying to do; he was attempting to give her some faint impression of the size and complexity of this artificial world that had been built to carry the seeds of a new civilisation to the stars.
The engine room alone, with its sleeping, shrouded monsters of metal and crystal, must have been half a mile in length. As they stood on the balcony high above that vast arena of latent power, Leon said proudly, and perhaps not altogether accurately: ‘These are mine.’ Lora looked down on the huge and meaningless shapes that had carried Leon to her across the light-years, and did not know whether to bless them for what they had brought or to curse them for what they might soon take away.
They sped swiftly through cavernous holds, packed with all the machines and instruments and stores needed to mould a virgin planet and to make it a fit home for humanity. There were miles upon miles of storage racks, holding on tape or microfilm or still more compact form the cultural heritage of mankind. Here they met a group of experts from Thalassa, looking rather dazed, trying to decide how much of all this wealth they could loot in the few hours left to them.
Had her own ancestors, Lora wondered, been so well equipped when they crossed space? She doubted it; their ship had been far smaller, and Earth must have learned much about the techniques of interstellar colonisation in the centuries since Thalassa was opened up. When the Magellan’s sleeping travellers reached their new home, their success was assured if their spirit matched their material resources.
Now they had come to a great white door which slid silently open as they approached, to reveal – of all incongruous things to find inside a spaceship – a cloakroom in which lines of heavy furs hung from pegs. Leon helped Lora to climb into one of these, then selected another for himself. She followed him uncomprehendingly as he walked toward a circle of frosted glass set in the floor; then he turned to her and said: ‘There’s no gravity where we’re going now, so keep close to me and do exactly as I say.’
The crystal trap door swung upward like an opening watch glass, and out of the depths swirled a blast of cold such as Lora had never imagined, still less experienced. Thin wisps of moisture condensed in the freezing air, dancing around her like ghosts. She looked at Leon as if to say, ‘Surely you don’t expect me to go down there!’
He took her arm reassuringly and said, ‘Don’t worry – you won’t notice the cold after a few minutes. I’ll go first.’
The trap door swallowed him; Lora hesitated for a moment, then lowered herself after him. Lowered? No; that was the wrong word; up and down no longer existed here. Gravity had been abolished – she was floating without weight in this frigid, snow-white universe. All around her were glittering honeycombs of glass, forming thousands and tens of thousands of hexagonal cells. They were laced together with clusters of pipes and bundles of wiring, and each cell was large enough to hold a human being.
And each cell did. There they were, sleeping all around her, the thousands of colonists to whom Earth was still, in literal truth, a memory of yesterday. What were they dreaming, less than halfway through their three-hundred-year sleep? Did the brain dream at all in this dim no man’s land between life and death?
Narrow, endless belts, fitted with handholds every few feet were strung across the face of the honeycomb. Leon grabbed one of these, and let it tow them swiftly past the great mosaic of hexagons. Twice they changed direction, switching from one belt to another, until at last they must have been a full quarter of a mile from the point where they had started.
Leon released his grip, and they drifted to rest beside one cell no different from all the myriads of others. But as Lora saw the expression on Leon’s fa
ce, she knew why he had brought her here, and knew that her battle was already lost.
The girl floating in her crystal coffin had a face that was not beautiful, but was full of character and intelligence. Even in this centuries-long repose, it showed determination and resourcefulness. It was the face of a pioneer, of a frontierswoman who could stand beside her mate and help him wield whatever fabulous tools of science might be needed to build a new Earth beyond the stars.
For a long time, unconscious of the cold, Lora stared down at the sleeping rival who would never know of her existence. Had any love, she wondered, in the whole history of the world, ever ended in so strange a place?
At last she spoke, her voice hushed as if she feared to wake these slumbering legions.
‘Is she your wife?’
Leon nodded.
‘I’m sorry, Lora. I never intended to hurt you …’
‘It doesn’t matter now. It was my fault, too.’ She paused, and looked more closely at the sleeping woman. ‘And your child as well?’
‘Yes; it will be born three months after we land.’
How strange to think of a gestation that would last nine months and three hundred years! Yet it was all part of the same pattern; and that, she knew now, was a pattern that had no place for her.
These patient multitudes would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life; as the crystal trap door closed behind her, and warmth crept back into her body, she wished that the cold that had entered her heart could be so easily dispelled. One day, perhaps, it would be; but many days and many lonely nights must pass ere that time came.
She remembered nothing of the journey back through the labyrinth of corridors and echoing chambers; it took her by surprise when she found herself once more in the cabin of the little ferry ship that had brought them up from Thalassa. Leon walked over to the controls, made a few adjustments, but did not sit down.
‘Goodbye, Lora,’ he said. ‘My work is done. It would be better if I stayed here.’ He took her hands in his; and now, in the last moment they would ever have together, there were no words that she could say. She could not even see his face for the tears that blurred her vision.
His hands tightened once, then relaxed. He gave a strangled sob, and when she could see clearly again, the cabin was empty.
A long time later a smooth, synthetic voice announced from the control board, ‘We have landed; please leave by the forward air lock.’ The pattern of opening doors guided her steps, and presently she was looking out into the busy clearing she had left a lifetime ago.
A small crowd was watching the ship with attentive interest, as if it had not landed a hundred times before. For a moment she did not understand the reason; then Clyde’s voice roared, ‘Where is he? I’ve had enough of this!’
In a couple of bounds he was up the ramp and had gripped her roughly by the arm. ‘Tell him to come out like a man!’
Lora shook her head listlessly.
‘He’s not here,’ she answered. ‘I’ve said goodbye to him. I’ll never see him again.’
Clyde stared at her disbelievingly, then saw that she spoke the truth. In the same moment she crumpled into his arms, sobbing as if her heart would break. As she collapsed, his anger, too, collapsed within him, and all that he had intended to say to her vanished from his mind. She belonged to him again; there was nothing else that mattered now.
For almost fifty hours the geyser roared off the coast of Thalassa, until its work was done. All the island watched, through the lenses of the television cameras, the shaping of the iceberg that would ride ahead of the Magellan on her way to the stars. May the new shield serve her better, prayed all who watched, than the one she had brought from Earth. The great cone of ice was itself protected, during these few hours while it was close to Thalassa’s sun, by a paper-thin screen of polished metal that kept it always in shadow. The sunshade would be left behind as soon as the journey began; it would not be needed in the interstellar wastes.
The last day came and went; Lora’s heart was not the only one to feel sadness now as the sun went down and the men from Earth made their final farewells to the world they would never forget – and which their sleeping friends would never remember. In the same swift silence with which it had first landed, the gleaming egg lifted from the clearing, dipped for a moment in salutation above the village, and climbed back into its natural element. Then Thalassa waited.
The night was shattered by a soundless detonation of light. A point of pulsing brilliance no larger than a single star had banished all the hosts of heaven and now dominated the sky, far outshining the pale disc of Selene and casting sharp-edged shadows on the ground – shadows that moved even as one watched. Up there on the borders of space the fires that powered the suns themselves were burning now, preparing to drive the starship out into immensity on the last leg of her interrupted journey.
Dry-eyed, Lora watched the silent glory on which half her heart was riding out toward the stars. She was drained of emotion now; if she had tears, they would come later.
Was Leon already sleeping or was he looking back upon Thalassa, thinking of what might have been? Asleep or waking, what did it matter now …?
She felt Clyde’s arms close around her, and welcomed their comfort against the loneliness of space. This was where she belonged; her heart would not stray again. Goodbye, Leon – may you be happy on that far world which you and your children will conquer for mankind. But think of me sometimes, two hundred years behind you on the road to Earth.
She turned her back upon the blazing sky and buried her face in the shelter of Clyde’s arms. He stroked her hair with clumsy gentleness, wishing that he had words to comfort her yet knowing that silence was best. He felt no sense of victory; though Lora was his once more, their old and innocent companionship was gone beyond recall. Leon’s memory would fade, but it would never wholly die. All the days of his life, Clyde knew, the ghost of Leon would come between him and Lora – the ghost of a man who would be not one day older when they lay in their graves.
The light was fading from the sky as the fury of the star drive dwindled along its lonely and unreturning road. Only once did Lora turn away from Clyde to look again at the departing ship. Its journey had scarcely begun, yet already it was moving across the heavens more swiftly than any meteor; in a few moments it would have fallen below the edge of the horizon as it plunged past the orbit of Thalassa, beyond the barren outer planets, and on into the abyss.
She clung fiercely to the strong arms that enfolded her, and felt against her cheek the beating of Clyde’s heart – the heart that belonged to her and which she would never spurn again. Out of the silence of the night there came a sudden, long-drawn sigh from the watching thousands, and she knew that the Magellan had sunk out of sight below the edge of the world. It was all over.
She looked up at the empty sky to which the stars were now returning – the stars which she could never see again without remembering Leon. But he had been right; that way was not for her. She knew now, with a wisdom beyond her years, that the starship Magellan was outward bound into history; and that was something of which Thalassa had no further part. Her world’s story had begun and ended with the pioneers three hundred years ago, but the colonists of the Magellan would go on to victories and achievements as great as any yet written in the sagas of mankind. Leon and his companions would be moving seas, levelling mountains, and conquering unknown perils when her descendants eight generations hence would still be dreaming beneath the sun-soaked palms.
And which was better, who could say?
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Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 Page 20
