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I don’t know. Nobody tells me anything. Perhaps because I never ask. I don’t know how to. Or much of anything that involves people
.

Eric made me wholly human for a short while
—
made me, wholly human
—
but then I went too far beyond him into a Reality too enthralling. I became Cartesian. A few subsequent lovers who were holothetes had bodies attached to their minds, but merely attached, as far as I was concerned. The rest were hardly more than bodies, conveniences, pets at best
.

Did that leave me vulnerable to Chris, beautiful sweet Chris?
To love is to be vulnerable, I suppose. Argh! Nothing could have come of it. True?

As for Dan
—

Her feet took her up a companionway toward the scientific level, where the computer room was. Metal enclosed her in narrowness. A phrase came back from her Tennessee girlhood. Though she might be part of Project Ithaca, at the frontiers of human knowledge, her foster parents had sent her to Sunday school. There the Protestant chaplain of the military reservation used to read from the Book of Common Prayer as well as the Bible. The whole scene came back, whitewashed walls, banal picture of Jesus blessing the children, windows open to clover smell and hum of bees, her class sitting, primly clad on straight wooden chairs while the big man’s bass rolled over them, “—fast bound in misery and iron—”

You know, he looked and sounded a lot like Dan. He impressed me tremendously, at my small age. I wonder, in spite of his being pious, I wonder if he may have been as good in bed
.

Stop that!

Joelle achieved a smile at her own expense.
Why? Is it blasphemous?

No,
she realized.
It’s dangerous. I dare not get obsessed with Dan, as I fear I am tending. That would be Chris all over again. He’s Mulryan’s. Oh, she’ll let me borrow him once in a while if I wish, and he’ll be considerate, but I know he’ll begrudge the time he could have been with her, out of these few years we have left. And that will feel so lonely, so lonely
.

I dare not admit Descartes (as a maker of symbols which have no more scientific meaning left in them than does the Last Judgment) was wrong
.

Reaching the passage she wanted, she took a route which brought her by the astrolab. Its door stood retracted on a darkened interior and she heard speech. Surprised anew, she halted.

Carlos Rueda Suárez: “—Yes, I grant you the government of Demeter needs sweeping reform, and probably the planet as a whole needs more say in policies that affect it. But autonomy? Independence? Why, it isn’t the germ of a nation.”

Haven’t I had vague designs on him?
Joelle stood where she was.

Susanne Granville: “What do you mean by ‘nation’? Is Peru homogeneous? The Andean Confederacy? Why cannot our
separate colonies make a little World Union of their own?” Almost accent-free in Spanish, she did not speak timidly but with spirit and, it seemed, a certain relish.

Rueda: “You sound like Daniel Brodersen.”

Granville: “I have listened to him and learned.”

Rueda: “And thought for yourself as well, I notice.” A sad laugh. “Why are we arguing? What can politics matter to us? We’re adrift in space-time. Quite conceivably Earth and Demeter and the whole human race don’t exist any more, if that isn’t a nonsense phrase. We’ll never be sure.”

Granville: “Maybe we will be.” In English: “We ain’t licked yet, my friend.”

Rueda: “Daniel again, I hear. Ah, well, Su, we’ve talked about a great deal in these past hours, haven’t we? Life and fate and God and little things that are big to us—why not Demeter? But when we’re less tired.”

Granville, softly: “You have reason, Carlos. Also, the view is too lovely for disputations. Look.”

Dan would rack me back for eavesdropping,
Joelle knew. I
could go around in the reverse direction, but he might want them warned I’ve noticed them
. It was an effort to louden her footfalls, halt in the doorway, and call, “Hello, there.”

The room was full of shadowed bulks. Light from the hall picked Rueda and Granville out dimly, where they sat at the farther bulkhead, facing each other at knee-touch distance. A single viewscreen behind them brimmed with clear darkness, stars, Milky Way, the planet a yellow-green brilliance and near it a golden point that was its moon. Caitlín had proposed naming it Pandora, since no one knew what it might hold for them, trouble or hope or both.

Rueda sprang up to deliver a courtly bow. “Ah, Dr. Ky. What brings you here?” Neither he nor the linker seemed flustered, though Joelle suspected the interruption annoyed them.

“I… I wanted to inspect some readouts,” the holothete said.
Why the devil do I feel embarrassed? “You
two?”
Wait, I didn’t need to bark that question at them
.

“No secret. I thought everybody knew. Su and I have become deadwood, or at most very marginal assistants. We’ve decided to learn specialties the ship needs, but we’ve scarcely begun to explore what we might be best at. So we came here to play with the apparatus when it wasn’t in demand.”

And fell into conversation which went on the whole nightwatch. How warm your voices sounded
. Joelle shivered a bit in the cold of a clockwork dawn. “I see. Well, good luck.” She walked stiffly from them, toward her computers.

Orbiting Pandora at twenty-five thousand kilometers, the travelers of
Chinook
saw it big in a screen in their common room. Under the glare of the dying sun, which burned opposite, the shrunken oceans were aquamarine and continents stood forth as brownish blots, sharply defined. A few water clouds were tinted pale olive; larger were the buff-colored dust storms. There was no sign anywhere of ice or snow, but vast salt beds gleamed livid. Beyond one limb was the moon, scarred crescent, half the apparent size of Luna seen from lost Earth or Persephone from lost Demeter. Elsewhere shone the universe.

Floating in front of his crew, Brodersen growled, “Blast it, we’ve got to send a party down, or admit we’re not serious about wanting help to get home. It may not look promising, but how can we tell? Beta wouldn’t look promising either if we didn’t know better. Right, Fidelio?”

The alien made a noise of concurrence. His eyes caught luminance from a world as foreign to him as it was to the humans.

Once Pandora had been of the proper mass at the proper distance from the proper kind of star to bring forth life. Plants freed oxygen into its air, conquered the land, drew a rich diversity of animals after them; the yeast of evolution worked through hundreds of millions of years until a creature existed that thought and wrought.

But now the globe was raddled with age. Wearied by tides, it turned on its axis in almost a month. Its nearer moon had drifted far off. Another, a small body on its own path, appeared to have been stolen away. Long since spent, radioactives in the core gave no more heat to drive crustal plates about and raise new mountains; erosion had worn the last ranges down to hills. Nevertheless huge drops occurred, where continental shelves tumbled down to the bottoms of dead seas, to crusted wastes and brine marshes.

Waxing toward extinction, the sun had already forced much of the atmosphere off into space by heating and by solar wind, against which Pandora no longer had a strong magnetic field for
shelter. Water had followed. The drying oceans gave up dissolved carbon dioxide, and greenhouse effect-sent temperatures soaring.

Though furious rainstorms might still take place in some regions, especially around sunset and dawn, most land was parched and its winds gritty. The tropics might be seared to death; at least, searchers found no trace of life in them. Sparse vegetation survived in what had been the temperate and polar zones. There, winters as long as Earth’s and nights twenty-five times as long grew bitterly cold. Day was always an inferno.

And this would worsen for some two billion years, until at last the red giant filled the sky and devoured its child, before sinking down to black dwarf oblivion.

“We’ve identified what may be ruined cities,” Brodersen continued. “We’ve positively spotted what could be a large ground base, which emits steady beeps, and we’ve inspected the broadcasting satellite, which is probably to simplify navigation for visitors after they come through the gate.”

He and Weisenberg had flitted in spacesuits to examine the latter. It was a metal sphere about the diameter of
Chinook,
featureless except for pitting by micrometeoroids. (That suggested how ancient it was, in this system where few small bodies were left.) The men had guessed that transducers in the alloy turned solar energy into radio-frequency code. While effective, it didn’t fit Brodersen’s notion of what the Others would have done. More disappointing was the failure of any beings to come welcome the new arrivals or respond to repeated signals.

He thrust his jaw forward. “Well, you know this,” he said. “The question before the house is what we do about it. I claim we should send
Williwaw
for a sniff-around. Somebody must call here occasionally, or somebody may be on hand, waiting to see what we’re like. Agreed?”

It was.

He put on his most genial manner. “Fine, fine. Okay, next we decide who of us goes. First off, me…. Hold on! Listen!

“This is not a Danu situation. There the boat mainly had atmosphere and gravity to cope with—nature. Here the crew will have to disembark, or what’s the point of the whole maneuver? We may need a soldier, a diplomat, a woodsman, anything. With due modesty, which is mighty little, I remind you that I’ve handled a lot of such-like jobs.

“Shut up, Phil! Could be you were right earlier about the captain being indispensable; but we’ve been shaking down since. I can name three or four of you who could take over from me and soon be running things as well. Besides, if I can’t exercise my
machismo
once in a while, I’ll go all soggy.

“I have spoken. Let’s consider who else we can best send.”

Debate converged faster than Brodersen had expected. Dozsa, again, for chief pilot; Rueda, again, for co-pilot and general backup (Su Granville looked still more anguished than when the skipper had appointed himself); Fidelio for his experience with xenosophonts (the Betan gravely assented); Caitlín, this time for medical help should that be needed (Leino stood locked into silence).

Pegeen
—
oh, no, no! I really let things get out of hand, didn’t I
? She bounced about, caroling.
Pegeen, what if things go wrong on yonder hellhall?

Chinook
DROPPED INTO
a low orbit, canted in such wise as to make it easiest for
Williwaw
to reach her goal. The boat came forth, vapor gushed, she fell toward the planet. Its darkling shield swelled to fill the view; it was no longer ahead but below.

Strapped behind Dozsa and Rueda, helpless, Brodersen reached for Caitlín beside him and caught her hand. She gripped back, hard. The next minutes would be the tough and perhaps fatal ones. Intensively though the atmosphere had been studied from space, it was not familiar. It might have any number of tricks in it to send a craft flaming. There was no ground control to talk her down. The mother ship couldn’t help, outside of brief and widely separated whiles, until she had climbed back up to a synchronous position. She had had to descend for the launch because of the radiation that seethed from the sun, against which the boat had no electrostatic protection.

Brodersen’s palm was so sweaty he couldn’t tell whether Caitlín was dry or not. She gave him a grin and a thumbs-up sign. Abruptly she twisted around to stroke her free hand across Fidelio, who squatted aft in a specially rigged harness. The Betan laid claws on her head for a moment, most gently: a blessing?

They pierced the sky. A thin whistle grew slowly to a roar, while impacts shocked through the hull and it often lurched. After a time, though, Dozsa glanced back, his own countenance streaming, and called, “Okay, we’ve made it.”

Brodersen cheered.
Damn!
he thought ungratefully.
Why do we have to be cocooned in so I can’t reach Pegeen to kiss her? Well just you wait till we land, my girl, just you wait
.

On a long, heat-dissipating slant,
Williwaw
glided downward across the world. Brodersen stared, fascinated, eerily aware that he would set foot on it.
(How did Armstrong really feel? He was
such a private man.)
A night sea rolled thickly under the small moon; a ghastly stretch of salt flats ended at an escarpment kilometers high; beyond lay the plateau which had been a continent; sunrise revealed it bare, ocherous, soil baked into brick, cracked and scored; a dust storm was momentarily blinding; along a dry canyon reared a few sharp, brightly colored tall snags above mounds of rubble. Had they been a city?

Dozsa started the airjets. Rueda navigated for him, at first by the sun according to calculations made in advance, eventually by homing on the transmissions from their destination.

As they traveled northeast, the land rose; the season helped too, fall in the northern hemisphere; temperatures dropped and more and more life came in sight. Scattered shiny-leathery shrubs and isolated large plants, vaguely suggestive in their grotesqueness of saguaros or Joshua trees, grew closer together; streams flowed into pools; a reddish sward strengthened from patches to ground cover; stands of dendriforms became a forest, whose gleaming brown-violet fronds rippled in the wind. Overhead, heaven was cloudless, purple rather than blue, with a tinge of green from the sun, which stood well-nigh motionless behind the spacecraft.

Fidelio spoke. Brodersen must concentrate to follow his hoarse, wheezy Spanish: “I think the seasons are more extreme here than on any of our planets, biologically as well as in weather. Nothing grows in the long nights, nor in the winter that is approaching, nor, I would suppose, at the terrible height of summer. Animals must needs be adapted to this. We have likely arrived at a time of ingathering and feverish making ready.”