Gordon at the doorway, and the two were alone. It was quiet there. She turned from the window to look at him and he stood where he was, afraid to move, afraid to speak. She was as lovely as he remembered, tall and slim and graceful, with her ash-blonde hair and her clear gray eyes. And now finally Gordon knew once and for all that this was true and no dream, because no man could imagine what he was feeling in his heart 'Lianna,' he whispered. And again, 'Lianna...'
'You are John Gordon.' She came toward him, her eyes searching his face as though for some tiny scrap of familiarity by which she might know him. He wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her and touch her and kiss her with all the stored-up hunger of the lonely years, but he did not dare. He could only stand rigid and miserable while she came closer, searching, and then she stopped. Her gaze dropped and she turned away a little, her red mouth uncertain.
Gordon said, 'Is it so much of a shock?'
'Zarth Arn told very truly how you would look.'
'And you find me...'
'No,' she said quickly, and turned to meet his gaze again. 'Please don't think that.' She smiled, rather tremulously. 'If I were meeting you for the first time... I mean, really for the first time, I would think you a most attractive man.' She shook her head. 'I mean, I do find you attractive. It isn't that at all. It's just that I will have to learn to know you all over again. That is,' she added, her eyes very steady on his, 'if you still feel toward me as you did.'
'I do,' he said. 'I do,' and he put his hands on her shoulders. She did not draw away, but neither did she yield toward him. She only smiled uncertainly and repeated Zarth Arn's words to him. 'Be patient with me.'
He took his hands away and said, 'I will,' trying to keep all trace of bitterness out of his voice. He went over to the window. The flaming peaks had darkened and the snowfields were turning to pure blue, as the first stars pricked the sky. He felt as cold and empty and forlorn as the wind that scoured those snows.
'Zarth Arn tells me that you have trouble at home.'
She brushed it aside. 'Nothing of importance. He wants you to tell me to go home, doesn't he?'
'Yes.'
'And I will, tomorrow, on one condition.' She was close beside him again, the last of the daylight showing her face pale and clear as a cameo in the dusk. 'You must come with me.'
He looked at her and touched his arm. 'I've hurt you,' she said softly. 'And I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. Can you forgive me?'
'Of course, Lianna.'
'Then come with me. A little time, John Gordon-that's all I need.'
'All right,' he said. 'I'll come.' I'll come, he thought fiercely, and if I have to woo and win you all over again, I'll do it so good and damn well that you'll forget there was ever a time when I looked like somebody else.
3
The royal star-cruiser with the White Sun of Fomalhaut glittering on her bows lifted from the star port, beyond which lay the greatest city of latter-day Earth. It was a city of wide space and lifting beauty. Flared and fluted pylons towered at the intersections of the grid of roadways. Down through the yellow sunshine flocked the local Terran flyers, skimming like birds to roost on the pylons' landing pads. It was not like the cities that Gordon remembered.
The starship left all this behind and plunged back into her true element, the glooming tideless seas of space that run so deep between the island suns. The yellow spark of Sol, and the old green planet from which the human race had spread through a universe, dropped back into obscurity. Now once more the ranked stars shone before Gordon, in all their naked splendor. No wonder, he thought, that he had been smothered by the cramped horizons of twentieth-century Earth, after having once seen this magnificence.
Across the broad loom of the galaxy, the nations of the star-kings were marked in many-colored fire, crimson and gold and emerald green, blue and violet and diamond white... the kingdoms of Lyra, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Polaris, and the capital of the great Mid-Galactic Empire at Canopus. The Hercules Cluster blazed with its baronies of swarming suns. To the south, as the cruiser beat westward toward Fomalhaut, the Orion Nebula sprawled its coiling radiance across the firmament. Far northward lay the black blot of the Cloud, where drowned Thallarna lay now in peace.
Once, as the cruiser altered course to skirt a dangerous bank of stellar drift, Gordon caught sight of the Magellanic Clouds, the as yet unknown and unexplored star-clouds lying like offshore islands in the inter-galactic gulf. He remembered that there had once been an invasion of the alien Magellanians into the then-young Empire, an invasion crushed for all time by an ancestor of Zarth Arn's who had for the first time used that terrible secret weapon of the Empire, the thing called the Disrupter.
Gordon thought of Keogh and his detailed psychological explanation of what he had called 'the Disrupter fantasy.' He smiled, shaking his head. A pity Keogh was not here with him. Keogh could explain the cruiser as a womb symbol, and he could explain Lianna as the unattainable dream-girl, and Gordon's romance with her wish fulfillment. But he wondered just how Keogh would explain Korkhann, Lianna's Minister of Nonhuman Affairs.
His first meeting with Korkhann, which took place the night before take-off, had been a shock to Gordon. He had known that there were nonhuman citizens in the kingdoms of the stars, and he had even seen a few of them, briefly and more or less distantly, but this was the first time he had actually encountered one face to face.
Korkhann was a native of Krens, a star-system on the far borders of Fomalhaut Kingdom. From it, Korkhann said, one might look out across the vast wilderness of the Marches of Outer Space, as though perched precariously on the last thin edge of civilization.
'The counts of the Marches,' Zarth Arn had explained to Gordon, 'are allied to the Empire, as you remember. But they're a wild lot, and apparently determined to remain that way. They say their oath of fealty did not include opening their borders to Empire ships, and they refuse to do so. My brother often feels that we might be better off to have the counts as enemies rather than friends.'
'Their time will come,' Korkhann said. 'Just now, my immediate problems are closer to home.' And he had bent his severe yellow gaze upon Lianna, who reached out and placed her hand affectionately on his sleek gray plumes.
'I have been a trial to you,' she said, and turned to Gordon. 'Korkhann came here with me and he has been in touch with Fomalhaut almost constantly by stero communicator, doing his best to deal with affairs at long distance.'
And Korkhann turned his round unwinking eyes and his beaked nose to Gordon and said in his harsh whistling voice, 'I'm glad you have been safely delivered here at last, John Gordon, while Her Highness still has a kingdom to go back to.'
Lianna had made light of that, and Gordon had been still distracted by this sudden confrontation with a five- foot-high creature who walked erect, clothed in pride and his own beautiful feathers, who spoke the English-derived language of the Empire, and who gestured gracefully with the long clawed fingers that terminated his flightless wings. But now, on the voyage, Gordon remembered.
They were alone, the three of them, in the cruiser's small but lavishly fitted lounge, and Gordon had been looking forward to the hour when Korkhann would finish his impossibly complicated chess game with Lianna and retire to his own cabin. He sat pretending to scan a tape from the cruiser's library, covertly watching Lianna as she bent her head over the board, thinking how beautiful she was and then glancing at Korkhann and trying to stifle the inner qualm of revulsion he had been fighting ever since that first meeting. And suddenly he said, 'Korkhann...'
The long slim head turned, making the neck-plumage shift and shine in the lamplight. 'Yes?'
'Korkhann, what did you mean when you said you were glad I had come while Lianna still had a kingdom to go back to?'
Lianna said impatiently, 'There's no need to go into all that now. Korkhann is a loyal friend and a devoted minister, but he worries too...'
'Highness,' said Korkhann gently. 'We have never had even small falsehoods between us, and this would be a bad time to begin. You worry Just as much as I do about Narath Teyn, but because of another matter you have set
