The Long Night

And the choice of wines was considerable. What was said and laughed at over the table had no relevance to anyone but Laure and Graydal.

Except that, at the end, with immense and tender seriousness, she said: “If you want a cell sample from— me… for analysis… you may have it.”

He reached across the table and took her hand. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything you might regret later,” he said.

She shook her head. The tawny eyes never left him. Her voice was slow, faintly slurred, but bespoke complete awareness of what she was saying. “I have come to know you. For you to do this thing will be no violation.”

Laure explained eagerly: “The process is simple and painless, as far as you’re concerned. We can go right down to the lab. The computer operates everything. It’ll give you an anesthetic spray and remove a small sample of flesh, so small that tomorrow you won’t be sure where the spot was, Of course, the analysis will take a long while. We don’t have all possible equipment aboard. And the computer does have to devote most of her—most of its attention to piloting and interior work. But at the end, we’ll be able to tell you—”

“Hush.” Her smile was sleepy. “No matter. If you wish this, that’s enough. I ask only one thing.”

“What?”

“Do not let a machine use the knife, or the needle, or whatever it is. I want you to do that yourself.”

“…Yes. Yonder is our home sky.” The physicist Him Oran’s son spoke slow and hushed. Cosmic interference seethed across his radio voice, nigh drowning it in Laure’s and Graydal’s earplugs.

“No,” the Ranger said. “Not off there. We’re already in it.”

“What?” Silvery against rock, the two space-armored figures turned to stare at him. He could not see their expressions behind the faceplates, but he could imagine how astonishment flickered above awe.

He paused, arranging words in his mind. The star noise in his receivers was like surf and fire. The landscape overwhelmed him.

Here was no simple airless planet. No planet is ever really simple, and this one had a stranger history than most. Eons ago it was apparently a subjovian, with a cloudy hydrohelium and methane atmosphere and an immense shell of ice and frozen gases around the core; for it orbited its sun at a distance of almost a billion and a half kilometers, and though that primary was bright, at this remove it could be little more than a spark.

Until stellar evolution—hastened, Laure believed, by an abnormal infall of cosmic material—took the star off the main sequence. It swelled, surface cooling to red but total output growing so monstrous that the inner planets were consumed. On the farther ones, like this, atmosphere fled into space. Ice melted; the world-ocean boiled; each time the pulsations of the sun reached a maximum, more vapor escaped. Now nothing remained except a ball of metal and rock, hardly larger than a terrestrial-type globe. As the pressure of the top layers were removed, frightful tectonic forces must have been liberated. Mountains—the younger ones with crags like sharp teeth, the older ones worn by meteorite and thermal erosion—rose from a cratered plain of gloomy stone. Currently at a minimum, but nonetheless immense, a full seven degrees across, blue core surrounded and dimmed by the tenuous ruddy atmosphere, the sun smoldered aloft.

Its furnace light was not the sole illumination. Another star was passing sufficiently near at the time that it showed a perceptible disk… in a stopped-down viewscreen, because no human eye could directly confront that electric cerulean intensity. The outsider was a Be newborn out of dust and gas, blazing with an intrinsic radiance of a hundred Sols.

Neither one helped in the shadows cast by the pin-meted upthrust which Laure’s party was investigating. Flashcasters were necessary.

But more was to see overhead, astride the dark. Stars in thousands powdered the sky, brilliant with proximity. And they were the mere fringes of the cluster. It was rising as the planet turned, partly backgrounding and partly following the sun. Laure had never met a sight to compare. For the most part, the individuals he could pick out in that enormous spheroidal cloud of light were themselves red: long-lived dwarfs, dying-giants like the one that brooded over him. But many glistened exuberant golden, emerald, sapphire. Some could not be older than the blue which wandered past and added its own harsh hue to this land. All those stars were studded through a soft glow that pervaded the entire cluster, a nacreous luminosity into which they faded and vanished, the fog wherein his companions had lost their home but which was a shining beauty to behold.

“You live in a wonder,” Laure said.

Graydal moved toward him. She had had no logical reason to come down out of Makes orbit with him and Hini. The idea was simply to break out certain large ground-based instruments that Jaccavrie carried, for study of their goal before traveling on. Any third party could assist. But she had laid her claim first, and none of her shipmates argued. They knew how often she and Laure were in each other’s company.

“Wait until you reach our world,” she said low. “Space is eldritch and dangerous. But once on Kirkasant—we will watch the sun go down in the Rainbow Desert; suddenly, in that thin air, night has come, our shimmering star- crowded night, and the auroras dance and whisper above the stark hills. We will see great flying flocks rise from dawn mists over the salt marshes, hear their wings thunder and their voices flute. We will stand on the battlements of Ey, under the banners of those verylcnights who long ago rid the land of the firearms, and watch the folk dance welcome to a new year—”

“If the navigator pleases,” said Hirn, his voice sharpened by an unadmitted dauntedness, “we will save our dreams for later and attend now to the means of realizing them. At present, we are supposed to choose a good level site for the observing apparatus. But, ah, Ranger Laure, may I ask what you meant by saying we are already back in the Cloud Universe?”

Laure was not as annoyed to have Graydal interrupted as he might normally have been. She’d spoken of Kirkasant so often that he felt he had almost been there himself. Doubtless it had its glories, but by his standards it was a grim, dry, storm-scoured planet where he would not care to stay for long at a time. Of course, to her it was beloved home; and he wouldn’t mind making occasional visits if—No, chaos take it, there was work on hand!

Part of his job was to make explanations. He said: “In your sense of the term, Physicist Hirn, the Cloud Universe does not exist.”

The reply was curt through the static. “I disputed that point on Serieve already, with Vandange and others. And I resented their implication that we of Makt were either liars or incompetent observers.”

“You’re neither,” Laure said quickly. “But communications had a double barrier on Serieve. First, an imperfect command of your language. Only on the way here, spending most of my time in contact with your crew, have I myself begun to feel a real mastery of Hobrokan. The second barrier, though, was in some ways more serious: Vandange’s stubborn preconceptions, and your own.”

“I was willing to be convinced.”

“But you never got a convincing argument. Vandange was so dogmatically certain that what you reported having seen was impossible, that he didn’t take a serious look at your report to see if it might have an orthodox explanation after all. You naturally got angry at this and cut the discussions off short. For your part, you had what you had always been taught was a perfectly good theory, which your experiences had confirmed. You weren’t going to change your whole concept of physics just because the unlovable Ozer Vandange scoffed at it.”

“But we were mistaken,” Graydal said. “You’ve intimated as much, Daven, but never made your meaning clear.”

“I wanted to see the actual phenomenon for myself, first,” Laure said. “We have a proverb—so old that it’s reputed to have originated on Earth—‘It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the data.’ But I couldn’t help speculating, and what I see shows my speculations were along the right lines.”

“Well?” Him challenged.

“Let’s start with looking at the situation from your viewpoint,” Laure suggested. “Your people spent millennia on Kirkasant. You lost every hint, except a few ambiguous traditions, that things might be different elsewhere. To you, it was natural that the night sky should be like a gently shining mist, and stars should crowd thickly around. When you developed the scientific method again, not many generations back, perforce you studied the universe you knew. Ordinary physics and chemistry, even atomistics and quantum theory, gave you no special problems. But you measured the distances of the visible stars as light-months—at most, a few light-years—after which they vanished in the foggy background. You measured the concentration of that fog, that dust and fluorescing gas. And you had no