Patron of the Arts

As I cut open some fruit with a fish-bone knife I had time to inspect Madelon, who was fixing a small fire to grill the morning fish. She was deeply and evenly tanned and looked very fit. “This life in Eden seems to agree with you,” I said.

She shrugged and smiled wanly. “It’s nicely primitive, nicely perfect.”

“In other words, you’re tired of it,” I said.

“We have everything here,” she protested. “Privacy, food, beauty, security. For someone raised in archos of three-quarters of a million and up, this is privacy.”

“Nice to visit, but you don’t want to live here.”

Madelon looked at me over her tanned shoulder. “You always could read me.” She placed another stick full of food on the fire and stood up, brushing her hands together. She looked around, and sighed deeply, “It’s beautiful, Brian. Alien, and yet—familiar. When Mke found it in the sensatron it seemed perfect. We had to try to go. We didn’t know we couldn’t go back.”

“How do you know you can’t? Have you tried?”

“When we came through there was this square of space—black space—behind us, just the size of the sensatron. It just hung there in the air, a hand’s width above the grass. We started down the hill and I looked back. It was higher—about at knee-level. Mike started running toward it, yelling at me to follow, but it slowly drifted up and eastward. By the time we got there we couldn’t reach it. Then it started graying . . . drifting . . . and it was translucent. Then it was gone. Mike said it must have lost focus or we were too far away to keep a lock on it. Anyway, it was gone and we were here.”

“I didn’t move the sensatron and I kept it powered. There was still an image, cycling—”

“Maybe things just got too far out of phase. After all, we don’t know where we are. We could be anyplace.”

“But we aren’t anyplace. We’re here.” As soon as I had need for it, I realized I had a perfect image of the Martian mural, stored back in my mind, where the outside world never goes. As I needed the contact I felt it reestablish, in nanoseconds, the time delay somehow measuring the distance from my mind to the Star Palace.

I jumped up. “We can do it!” I said. “We can go back!” I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s find the others!”

We ran from the rocks out onto the sand and I saw two figures hip-deep in water up the shoreline. They waved, then started wading out as they saw us running, kicking up spurts of golden sand. We ran into each other, breathlessly. “What’s the matter?” Mike said, scanning the rocks behind us.

“We can do it,” I said, looking at Nova. “I’m linked . . . you’re linked . . . all we have to do is want to! That’s what the computer is for, to help!” They were looking at me, all touching, and I willed the push. There was a shifting . . .

The full-space-around us thinned.

We pulsed . . .

flowed . . .

Here became there, and then there was here.

“My god!” Mike gasped.

The four of us, still naked, hung in a cluster in space, millions of miles above a blazing yellow-orange sun. We were neither hot nor cold, and breathing normally. A safe environment was needed, so it was automatically provided.

With a kind of clarity beyond the senses we could all see the Solar System around us. The hot blob of rock near the sun, the mist-shrouded second planet, the blue-green-brown ball of Earth, distant Mars, then the great planets, majestic and unique, and further out the frozen balls of methane and rock. The dust, the asteroids, a comet coming into the plane, the primitive ships, debris and radiation, ions and sunwind. It was all there, every atom tagged and logged. And beyond, the most beautiful thing of all, the many-armed spiral of our galaxy, and other galaxies, the pliant fabric of space stretching around, bursting stars, glowing nebulae, life, time and non-time. This is what the Martians have left us, I said in my mind and the others heard. A tool. The tool. We will take it and use it and make it ours. Someday, we will meet them . . . and learn how science can become art, and art become science.

Nova spoke. “It could be years—centuries—since we . . . shifted.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mike said.