something to do with that. Their curving trunks did not look sturdy. He suspected that an external woody layer no thicker than a fingertip surrounded a broad core of soggy pulp. The cap-like crowns of the trees met in a nearly continuous canopy overhead, cutting almost all light from the forest floor. Since the planet’s cloud layer permitted only a hazy pearl-colored glow to come through, and even that was intercepted by the trees, a maroon darkness prevailed below.
When he encountered the aliens he was surprised to find that they were about three meters tall. Not since childhood had he felt so diminished; he stood ringed by them, straining upward to meet their eyes. Now it was time for his exercise in applied hermeneutics. In a quiet voice he said, “My name is Richard Muller. I come in friendship from the peoples of the Terran Cultural Sphere.”
Of course they could not understand that. But they remained motionless. He imagined that their expressions were not unfriendly.
Dropping to his knees, Muller traced the Pythagorean Theorem in the soft moist soil.
He looked up. He smiled. “A basic concept of geometry. A universal pattern of thought.”
Their vertical slitlike nostrils flickered slightly. They inclined their heads. He imagined that they were exchanging thoughtful glances. With eyes in a circlet entirely around their heads, they did not need to change posture to do that.
“Let me display some further tokens of our kinship,” Muller said to them.
He sketched a line on the ground. A short distance from it he sketched a pair of lines. At a greater distance he drew three lines. He filled in the signs. 1 + 11 = 111.
“Yes?” he said. “We call it addition.”
The jointed limbs swayed. Two of his listeners touched arms. Muller remembered how they had obliterated the spying eye as soon as they had discovered it, not hesitating even to examine it. He had been prepared for the same reaction. Instead they were listening. A promising sign. He stood up and pointed to his marks on the ground.
“Your turn,” he said. He spoke quite loudly. He smiled quite broadly. “Show me that you understand. Speak to me in the universal language of mathematics.”
No response at first.
He pointed again. He gestured at his symbols, then extended his hand, palm upraised, to the nearest Hydran.
After a long pause one of the other Hydrans moved fluidly forward and let one of its globe-like foot- pedestals hover over the lines in the soil. The leg moved lightly and the lines vanished as the alien smoothed the soil.
“All right,” said Muller. “Now you draw something.”
The Hydran returned to its place in the circle.
“Very well,” Muller said. “There’s another universal language. I hope this doesn’t offend your ears.” He drew a soprano recorder from his pocket and put it between his lips. Playing through the filtration sheet was cumbersome. He caught breath and played a diatonic scale. Their limbs fluttered a bit. They could hear, then, or at any rate could sense vibrations. He shifted to the minor, and gave them another diatonic scale. He tried a chromatic scale. They looked a trifle more agitated. Good for you, he thought. Connoisseurs. Perhaps the whole- tone scale is more in keeping with the cloudiness of this planet, he decided. He played both of them, and gave them a bit of Debussy for good measure.
“Does that get to you?” he asked.
They appeared to be conferring.
They walked away from him.
He tried to follow. He was unable to keep up, and soon he lost sight of them in the dark, misty forest; but he persevered, and found them clustered, as if waiting for him, farther on. When he neared them they began to move again. In this way they led him, by fits and starts, into their city.
He subsisted on synthetics. Chemical analysis showed that it would be unwise to try local foods.
He drew the Pythagorean Theorem many times. He sketched a variety of arithmetical processes. He played Schonberg and Bach. He constructed equilateral triangles. He ventured into solid geometry. He sang. He spoke French, Russian, and Mandarin, as well as English, to show them the diversity of human tongues. He displayed a chart of the periodic table. After six months he still knew nothing more about the workings of their minds than he had an hour before landing. They tolerated his presence, but they said nothing to him; and when they communicated with one another it was mainly in quick, evanescent gestures, touches of the hand, flickers of the nostrils. They had a spoken language, it seemed, but it was so soft and breathy that he could not begin to distinguish words or even syllables. He recorded whatever he heard, of course.
Eventually they wearied of him and came for him. He slept.
He did not discover until much later what had been done to him while he slept.
2
He was eighteen years old, naked under the California stars. The sky was ablaze. He felt he could reach for the stars and pluck them from the heavens.
To be a god. To possess the universe.
He turned to her. Her body was cool and slender, slightly tense.
He cupped her breasts. He let his hand move across her flat belly. She shivered a little. “Dick,” she said. “Oh.” To be a god, he thought. He kissed her lightly, and then not lightly. “Wait,” she said. “I’m not ready.” He waited. He helped her get ready, or did the things he thought would help her get ready, and shortly she began to gasp. She spoke his name again. How many stars can a man visit in one lifetime? If each star has an average of twelve planets, and there are one hundred million stars within a galactic globe X light-years in diameter… Her thighs opened. His eyes closed. He felt soft old pine needles against his knees and elbows. She was not his first, but the first that counted. As the lightning ripped through his brain he was dimly aware of her response, tentative, halting, then suddenly vigorous. The intensity of it frightened him, but only for a moment, and he rode with her to the end. To be a god must be something like this.
They rolled over. He pointed to the stars and called off their names for her, getting half of them wrong, but she did not need to know that. He shared his dreams with her. Later they made love a second time, and it was even better.
He hoped it would rain at midnight, so they could dance in the rain, but the sky was clear. They went swimming instead, and came out shivering, laughing. When he took her home she washed down her pill with Chartreuse. He told her that he loved her.
They exchanged Christmas cards for several years.
3
The eighth world of Alpha Centauri B was a gas giant, with a low-density core and gravity not much more troublesome than that of Earth. Muller had honeymooned there the second time. It was partly a business trip, for there were troubles with the colonists on the sixth planet; they were talking of setting up a whirlpool effect that would suck away most of the eighth world’s highly useful atmosphere to use as raw materials.
Muller’s conferences with the locals went fairly well. He persuaded them to accept a quota system for their atmospheric grabs, and even won their praise for the little lesson in interplanetary morality he had administered. Afterward he and Nola were government guests for a holiday on the eighth world. Nola, unlike Lorayn, was the traveling sort. She would be accompanying him on many of his voyages.
Wearing support suits, they swam in an icy methane lake. They ran laughing along ammonia coasts. Nola was as tall as he, with powerful legs, dark red hair, green eyes. They embraced in a warm room of one-way windows overhanging a forlorn sea that stretched for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
