Even for a lady of the stars, the Lady Berenice was beautiful. Her short blonde hair made Cross think of Martian maize, and her blue eyes, set wide apart in her tanned, oval face, reminded him of the ice lakes of Frigidia. Her tall, Junoesque body put to shame the pornographic photographs he had seen of it, cheapened the lurid passages he had read about it; betrayed, as yet, no evidence of her apostasy.
He wondered who her lover was, and why she had refused to reveal him.
When the Jacob’s lift matched levels with the Pandora’s lock, she stepped lightly into the ship beside him. The corporation officer who had accompanied her, handed him her papers, then signalled to the longstarmen below. After a moment the lift and its sole occupant sank from sight.
“How soon do we blast?” the Lady Berenice asked.
She was looking at Cross intently, as though trying to probe beyond the bleak grayness of his eyes. “In about fifteen minutes, my lady,” he said.
She nodded, stepped into the ship proper. He sealed the lock and escorted her up the spiral companionway to her cabin.
She paused in the doorway. “I’d like my luggage, please.”
“I’ll bring it up as soon as we’re in A Priori, my lady. Right now, I’ll have to insist that you strap yourself on the acceleration couch.”
He watched as she did his bidding. “You can get up as soon as the ‘all clear’ signal sounds,” he said presently.
She nodded again, not in the least perturbed. He wondered if she’d be equally calm if “acceleration couch” was something more than a hand-me-down term from pre-degravitation days; if she’d be equally composed if she had to contend with 3 or 4 g’s, instead of just the temporary instability of blast-off.
She probably would be, he decided. A miscarriage would not affect her banishment to Gomorrah, but it would save her the unpleasantness of having to give birth to a mutant.
He excused himself and headed for the control room.
A Priori drive, once activated, required no supervision except in cases of emergency. The Pandora was only a one-passenger-one-pilot job, but Falcon Lines, Inc., had a reputation throughout the civilized sector of the galaxy for fast, efficient service, and even its smallest ships boasted the latest in automatic equipment.
Cross secured the control room door behind him, made his way leisurely down the spiral companionway to the hold, where the WineWomenandSong longstarmen had deposited the Lady Berenice’s luggage. Even in the artificial ½ g, the two bags were heavy, and he was breathing a little hard when he halted before her door.
He knocked. “Yes?” she answered, her voice muffled by the sound of running water.
“Your luggage, my lady.”
The sound of running water ceased, and presently she opened the door. She had wrapped a ship’s towel deftly around her torso. It was a white towel that enhanced the hue of her clear, tanned skin. Water glistened on her golden shoulders, ran in twinkling rivulets down her coppery thighs and calves. “Set them inside, please.”
Cross complied. She did not move an inch, and his arm, despite his efforts to avoid touching her, brushed her thigh. He withdrew quickly. His arm tingled and his hands were trembling. He kept his eyes averted because he knew what she would read in them. “If you wish anything further, I’ll be in my cabin,” he said. He turned to go.
“Wait,” she said.
“Yes?”
“How—how long will we be in A Priori?”
“A little over four hours, ship’s time.”
“Is—is there any likelihood of a time storm?”
The question surprised him. Passengers, especially passengers of the Lady Berenice’s status, did not usually concern themselves with the exigencies of space travel. They took it for granted, unless otherwise apprised, that such exigencies did not exist. “There is always a chance of a time storm,” he said. “But don’t worry, my lady. If the conditions for one are present, we will be contacted by the port authority in time to avoid it.”
“But suppose something should go wrong. Suppose we weren’t informed in time and did get involved in one. What would happen then?”
He could not keep his eyes averted forever, and he forced himself to meet her gaze. He was mildly shocked to see that a quantity of her composure had left her, that there was a certain diffidence in the expression on her face.
Presently: “As you may know, my lady,” he said, “A Priori is merely the result of the separation of pure space and pure time from the thing-in-itself, or from basic reality. Once separated, pure space can be contracted to the extent where a parsec equals .59 kilometers. Usually pure time contracts accordingly, but sometimes there is a slight discrepancy, and certain phases of A Priori contain more time than space. If we should become involved in one of these phases—or storms, if you like—we would lose our awareness of our objective reality and proceed to relive a subjective and sporadic playback of our pasts. So all that could happen to us, actually, are the things that have already happened to us—with the difference that we would relive not only our own experiences, but one another’s as well; in pure time, individuality does not exist.”
“But wouldn’t our objective reality be affected?”
He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real passage of time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in our pasts, which might force it into a different time plane altogether.”
She dropped her eyes. “Then—then in spite of what you said before, something could happen after all—something that hasn’t happened before.”
“I suppose so, my lady ... Will that be all?”
“Yes—for now.”
“I’ll be in my cabin....”
“Cabin” was a euphemism for “cubicle.” The cramped compartment adjoining the control room contained a couch, a desk, a small microfilm library and a well-stocked liquor cabinet, but that was about all. Cross opened the cabinet and poured himself a generous brandy. He drank it fast, then he lay down on the couch and tried to sleep. He always slept out the A Priori phases of his runs if they were under eight hours, but he had a good idea that he was going to have a hard time sleeping this one out. He was right. The minute he closed his eyes he saw a white towel and a golden sunrise of shoulders; two breath-taking colonnades of tanned, glistening flesh—There was no sleeping after that.
He swore aloud. Surely she must realize that an ordinary pilot like himself couldn’t afford her. Then why had she deliberately exhibited her de luxe charms? Why had she deliberately delayed him at her door with so obviously false an excuse as a discussion of the unstable phase of A Priori? He was certainly not naive enough to think that, just because she was a fallen lady of the stars, she would waive her fee. If fourteen years in space had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that any extraterrestrial act of love was a business transaction and nothing more.
Still—
He turned angrily on his side, tried to shut her from his mind. She can go to hell, he thought—
But she didn’t. She went to New America, instead. He accosted her on a sunny avenue in Little Chicago and they turned, hand in hand, down a narrow street lined with transplanted maples. The season was spring, and the warm air had activated the thermostatically controlled Hi-Fi’s hidden in the foliage, and the air was filled with the singing of robins. After a while they came to a shaded walk that wound up to a secluded cottage, and they walked through scented coolness to the door. He noticed, then, that all the while they’d been walking, she’d been wearing nothing but a towel; and it must have been raining, too, despite the sunshine, for her shoulders were glistening with raindrops, and raindrops twinkled on her long, tanned legs—
He was sitting up on the couch. He was sweating. “I’ll be damned!” he said. There was a persistent bell-like sound in his ears, and presently he recognized it as the beeping of the communicator. He got up, then, and went into the control room and picked up the neatly typed message which the receiver had emitted:
From: Port Authority, WineWomenandSong, Thais
To: Nathaniel Cross, Pandora
A Priori disturbance reported building up in path of your reality-flow. Emerge into normal space at once and await further instructions. Acknowledge.
Cross stared at the words. Was the Lady Berenice clairvoyant? Had she known there was going to be a storm?
He hurried toward the control panel. Suddenly he thought of the towel again, the towel and the deliberate shower. He tried to tell himself that there was nothing unethical in a lady of the stars trying to work off her passage, but it didn’t do any good, and his anger kept intensifying till it superseded his common sense, till it transformed him from a seasoned pilot into a frustrated schoolboy. The control panel simply hadn’t been designed to be operated by a frustrated schoolboy, and when his fingers sought to punch out the pattern that would snap the Pandora back into normal space, they punched, instead, a set of symbols sufficiently unintelligible to activate the alarm.
The alarm performed a two-fold function: it alerted authorized persons and, at the same time, it temporarily incapacitated the particular unauthorized person who had triggered it. Cross staggered back against the bulkhead, his fingers tingling from the automatic shock, his body going numb. He slid slowly to the deck, still conscious but unable to move his limbs.
The first wave of the storm struck, and the ship began to shimmer. Lying there, watching the room dissolve around him, he experienced a strange interval of detachment, and he wondered curiously how much he really knew about himself: whether the outrageous mistake he had just made had been the result of his anger, or whether his anger had merely been a trumped-up excuse for making the mistake; whether the entire action had not resulted from a masochistic desire to participate in the Lady Berenice’s past....
The tree was much taller than he had thought, and he wished now that he hadn’t been in such a hurry to join the club. He had swum the river all right, and he had gone through Devil’s Cave without flinching. But you could conquer your fear of water. You could conquer your fear of darkness—
Height was something different.
He shinnied a little higher on the trunk, gazed yearningly up to the last fork, where the highest limb began its graceful journey into the summer sky. He heard the taunts of the other boys from the meadow below. They did not think he could make it. In a way, they didn’t want him to make it. If he made it, they wouldn’t have anyone to pick on till another new boy moved to town.
Well, he’d show them!
He shinnied furiously for several seconds, then paused again. He was tired, and his chest hurt. His shins smarted from repeated scraping against the trunk.
He looked up at the fork again. It was quite close now, perhaps close enough. He reached up with one arm, managed to wrap it around the larger of the two limbs. After a moment he reinforced his hold with his other arm. He started to pull his body upward, shinnying with his legs. For a while he thought he was going to make it, then his left arm cramped and his right, unable to support his weight, began to slip.
He screamed as he started to fall, but in his desperation he managed to transfer his good arm back to the trunk and keep his legs in position, so that he didn’t really fall, he slid, instead, down the trunk to the limb he had left a short time before. He glimpsed the ground, far below, and the height caught up to him once and for all, and he locked his body around the limb and clung there, whimpering.
Presently, he saw one of the other boys start climbing the tree to bring him down, and he heard his new nickname being bandied about on the meadow—
“Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross!”
“Gee, Dad, are you going on another trip?”
“Sure thing,” her father said, looking up from his open suitcase.
“But—but you just got back.”
His face looked funny, the way it always did after he and mother had been mouth-fighting—as though he wanted it to look one way and his muscles wanted it to look a totally different way, and he had had to settle for an expression halfway in-between. “Sorry, Berenice, have to go again.”
“But—”
“Now, don’t cry, darling. Please don’t cry.”
But she cried anyway, she had to. What else could you do when you’d planned all spring for the halcyon summer days and the treks through the woods, the fishing and the campsite, the little fire burning brightly and your father sitting beside you in the serene summer night?
He was on his knees and he was holding her close, and now his face made her think of one of those balloons with faces painted on them that you blew up and twisted into different shapes, only not quite the same, because balloons couldn’t cry—
“I’ll write you, darling. Be a good girl now, and mind your mother.”
The other boys were standing on the corner, waiting for him to pass. He gripped his galactic geography book tightly and he held his mouth firm, and he made his legs behave as though he wanted them to keep right on walking, as though the thought of flight was remote from his thoughts.
“Here comes Eberhardt Cross!”
“Hi, Eberhardt!”
“Climb any trees lately, Eberhardt?”
“Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross!”
He kept right on walking. If he stopped it would be worse. They wouldn’t settle for mere words then—and there were five of them, and he was only one, and not much of a one at that.
But he thought: I’ll show them. I’ll show them if it takes me the rest of my life!
“Come in,” her mother said, and the tall, handsome man stepped out of the summer night and into the scented living room. “I’m so glad you could drop by.... Run out and play now, Berenice, like a good little girl. You’ve been cooped up in the house all day....”
Miss Tenthyear’s android eyes beamed brightly as she assumed her lecture-posture by the desk. “Our final subject for today, class,” she said, “will be the story of Captain Alexander Eberhardt.
“Your mothers and fathers have probably mentioned his name many times, and they’ve probably told you about how he piloted the first spaceship to the moon, had a nervous breakdown after he crashed there, and babbled for days over the world-wide radio hook-up, begging for someone, anyone, to save him. All of this is true, and Captain Eberhardt, in the eyes of the public, has never been considered a credit to his countrymen. But the bravest of men can collapse when sufficient pressure is applied, and Captain Eberhardt actually died a hero’s death. We are all of us merely human, and we should keep this in mind when we pass judgment on our fellow men—”
He was conscious of the other kids looking at him out of the corners of their eyes, and he kept his own eyes focused on his desktop. Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross! he could hear them calling him after the bell had sounded, after Miss Tenthyear had retired to her case behind the desk and had turned herself off. And he could hear his own voice now, his own voice deep inside him, silently shouting the old refrain, but with something added this time: “I’ll show them! Space is a tree, in a way. Space is a tremendous tree reaching up into infinity, and I’ll climb as high into it as I can get and I’ll laugh back down at them in their silly suburban houses and I’ll gather a handful of stars and throw them down to Earth like shining acorns....”
Her tears had smeared the purple ink, making the passages of the letter illegible. But she had read them once, and once was enough to tell her that her father was never coming back, that his promises were the same old lies, his cheerful phrases the same old clichés, she had read a dozen—a hundred—times before.
How strange that she should remember him so well after eight interminable years, that she should still want him to come back. She had been a gawky girl of 10 when he had gone away for the last time; now she was a worldly young woman of 18—old enough, surely, to be above such childish needs as parental attachments—
She heard the doorbell ring downstairs, and the sound of male voices on the doorstep, and she knew her mother was in business again. She got up from her vanity and went over to the window and looked out at the summer night. There was an apple tree growing beside the house and the apple tree was in blossom. She turned off the electronic screen, reached out and broke off a nearby bough. She held it to her nostrils, rejoicing in the sweetness and the purity of the blossoms.
She raised her eyes and saw the summer stars pulsing in the black immensity of the sky. She picked out the patterns of the constellations—the long straggling line of Scorpius, the riotous burgeoning of Sagittarius, the tetrahedron of Libra, the filmy blur of Coma Berenices.... Subtly, what she breathed and what she saw, what she needed and what she had been denied, blended into a single impression, and she thought: A lady of the stars—that’s what I’ll be. A lady of the stars.... And she saw herself, brightly-gowned and glamorous, stepping from star to star, the legions of her lovers following worshipfully behind her. She paused on a global cluster and glanced disdainfully down to the blue-green mote of Earth, and she thought contemptuously of her prosaic mother carrying on her petty assignations in her petty parlor, of her father absconding again and again from reality; then she laughed, and leaped lightly to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, where the Emperor of the Universe humbly awaited her....
“But don’t you see?” his father said. “Space is for misfits. A normal man simply doesn’t give up his rights as an Earth citizen, his right to marry and have children, just for the privilege of traveling to far-off places.”
Cross shifted uncomfortably on the front steps. It was a clear night in August, and the stars were so bright and close that they seemed to brush the topmost branches of the maples lining the suburban street.
“Think about it, Nate,” his father went on, puffing self-righteously on his suburban pipe. “You’re still young. You’re only 19. Why don’t you wait for a while—a year, anyway. Maybe you’ll change your mind by then.”
Cross shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t understand. It’s something I have to do.... Something ... I ... have ... to ... do ....”
Cross massaged his limbs, got slowly to his feet. The control room had regained solidity, but he was not fooled. The Pandora had merely reached the relatively stable center of the storm—the eye—and any attempt to throw her back into normal space now would tear her apart, along with everything and everyone on board, and the resultant particles, both inanimate and animate, would be scattered irretrievably throughout the space-time continuum.