Closed System

consisted of privies built from rough, unpaintedplanks. And yet the people seemed to be uniformlyhealthy. And they were all much too uniformlybeautiful. And where were the children? Only afew, not more than a half-dozen, ranging in agefrom a babe in arms to a young girl in her earlyteens, were in the square.

When the dancing ended, the impromptu festi­val over, Pat told Gorben that he wanted to walk.Gorben offered to accompany him. Pat nodded.They walked the road to the next village, wherePat found similar conditions. Apparently, his pres­ence was known, for the people of the village wereout en masse to bow low, some to fall on theirfaces in worship.

As the hour grew late, he walked with Gorbenback to Gorben's village. 'I will stay here tonight,'he said. He'd been thinking about that voice onthe communicator. If they wanted him before hechose to go to the temple, which he had suspectedto be the stone building at the hub of the spokelike roads connecting the villages, they could come andget him.

He took food with the elder, and was escorted,after beer and more talk, which did little to an­swer any of his persistent questions, to a neatlyfurnished bedroom.

He awoke before dawn, awakened by movementin the house. He dressed quickly. Kleeper andGorben were at table.

'We thought to let you sleep, Honored One,' Gorben said.

It wasn't coffee they were drinking, but it had atang, and a pleasant taste. Hen's eggs and baconmade up the main meal, with a chewy, tasty bread.And, breakfast over, one of Pat's unstated ques­tions had an answer.

'Perhaps you will honor us,' Kleeper said, hav­ing taken a carved wooden chest from a cabinet,'by

distributing the morning prayer tablets.'

'My honor,' Pat said.

The sun was just above the horizon. All the in­habitants of the village were assembled in thesquare. They looked just too damned bright and cheerful for early morning, and Pat had to force himself to smile.

'One tablet each, of each individual color, toeach person, Honored One,' Kleeper said, as a lineformed quickly in front of the low steps to theelder's cabin.

Inside the carved wooden box, five compartmentsheld the latest in food-supplement tablets, some marked with the brand name of a Zedeian nutri­tional firm. And Pat recognized one of the tabletsas a shotgun disease preventive, good for keepingthe human system free of just about every known disease-causing organism. Mystery number onesolved. The people of Dorchlunt were physicallybeautiful and unbelievably healthy because, eachmorning, they received dosages of the best preven­tive medicine and the finest in food supplements.

'Now, Honored One,' Gorben said, when thelittle ceremony was over and everyone except thebabe in arms had been pilled and tableted, 'Iimagine you will leave us.'

Pat looked at him quickly to see if Gorben hadbeen detailed to be sure he obeyed orders. Theyoung man showed no signs of it.

'Yes, it is time I paid my respects,' he said.

He walked alone through three villages towardthe stone building. The people bowed, greeted him respectfully. It was a lovely morning. Althoughrain was unknown on Dorchlunt, there had beenmorning dew, and in the field alongside the roadmen were busy pumping water from the deep wells. A sophisticated system of irrigation ditches distri­buted the water to crops, which, in the year-roundgrowing season, were at various stages of maturity.

The earthen road changed to a stone-paved ave­nue as he neared the temple. The grounds werewell landscaped. Patches of flowering plants, somefamiliar, some not, made for a pleasant vista. Thenative trees of Dorchlunt were squat and thick oftrunk, and had leathery, large leaves.

Two young men in short leather skirts, armedwith well-decorated longbows, guarded the stone temple gates. The guards, Pat felt, were purelyceremonial, since anyone could step over the lowwall at any point and approach the temple bywalking pathways through flowering patches ofvegetation.

There were no guards at the temple door. Hewalked into a large room, lit by skylights, andhalted. The room was at least fifty feet in width,and quite long. The walls were lined with objects obviously taken from the abandoned colony ship.Spacesuits had been stuffed with something sothat they stood alone. Control panels, with buttonsand switches, had been rather artfully built intothe stone walls. And on the wall there were paint­ings, all of them in deplorable condition with flak­ing paint and large areas of damage. They wereportraits, likenesses of people dressed in the stylesof long ago, a thousand years ago.

Pat walked through an archway and was stunnedby an array of sculpture along the walls. The me­dium was stone in various colors. An almost nudewoman posed with an antique projectile hand weapon. A handsome man wore a military uni­form painted on the stone statue with great skill,but with the paint fading, flaking. There was anameplate for each statue, and upon close exami­nation Pat saw that they were called gods. TheGod Schmidt. The Goddess Helga.

In a display of conspicuous waste on a planetwith no surface water, a fountain bubbled andsang in the center of the second area. Pat walkedaround it. A man in a dark robe stood quietly inthe next archway, hands folded in front of him.

'The goddess has been expecting you,' he said, with respect in his voice. He turned, and Pat fol­lowed him through a door which closed behindthem. Then another door, which was plated in hammered gold. The inner sanctum was window-less, light coming from one skylight and two oillamps on columns set on either side of two 'thrones.'The thrones were also from the abandoned ship,the command chairs from the control bridge. Theywere still mounted on their swivels, and their backswere to Pat.

He glanced around. Most of the gold from theshielding of the blink generator had been utilizedin the inner sanctum. The walls were armoredwith light metal from the ship. Silent, lifeless viewscreens had been built into the walls as deco­ration. Ship's instruments were grouped around thescreens in neat patterns.

The priest who had led Pat into the closed throneroom bowed to him, backed away, and went out, shutting the gold-clad door behind him.

'Anybody home?' Pat asked, speaking to thehigh backs of the command chairs. One chair be­gan to turn. 'Ha?' Pat said, for there was thequiet purr of an electric motor. In the temple, atleast, there was power. And this brought a quickthought. The power source was damned wellshielded, for he'd flown right over the templeinSkimmer and had been unable to detect any­thing.

The motor hummed, and the command chair turned slowly. He saw her profile first. Her hair had been swept up into a neat, shimmering, au­burn mass, and the mass was topped by a diademof gold and jewels. She was dressed in flowing royal purple, and the material was definitely notthe homespun vegetable fibers of the clothing wornby the villagers.

Literally stunned by her beauty, Pat was unable to speak. The command chair turned to face him.She looked down at him with a smile which seemedto enlarge her mouth.

'Hello, Pat,' she said.

He had to swallow, then moisten his lips. 'Hello,Corinne.'

'Now that you're here, you'll have to stay, you know.'

'With you?' he asked.

'Yes,' she whispered, rising, gathering her long,purple skirt in one hand to run down the steps ofthe throne dais toward him.

EIGHT

The purple material, of Corinne's long gown wassilky-smooth. It clung to her, and allowed the soft warmth of her to come through to Pat's hands.Her lips were more than he had remembered, andthere was an urgency in her kiss which sent asurge of elation through him. Something of valuelost, then reattained, increases in value. With herin his arms he forgot, for the moment, all that hadhappened between them in the past.

After a long, delicious time, she pushed him away,her small hands against his chest. 'You shouldn't be here,' she said.

Sanity returned to him. This small, exquisitely constructed lady had drugged him, had comman­deered his ship and altered restricted computertapes in a way which had almost cost him his shipand his license. She'd stolen Murphy's Stone. Beau­tiful she was, and he loved her. He knew that now,his mouth still tasting her kiss, but she had someexplaining to do.

'Come,' she said, taking his hand. 'It wouldn'tdo for the priests to see their goddess being sohuman.'

'Just what goddess are you?' he asked.

'I am Hera, Queen of Heaven, and Inana, Astarte,Isis, plus a few others.'