But he was trembling a little when Mme. Storm came into the side room where she had placed him.
“I didn’t want her to know you were here,” she explained. “It might have made her either very much above or very much below her usual form.”
“I don’t see why,” he asserted argumentatively.
“Don’t fish!” snapped Mme. Storm—and then answered his fishing with an odd little smile that could have made her even greater than she was in her youthful career as soubrette. “But what did you think?”
“Astonishing,” he answered soberly. “She’s not only singing . . . she’s living and feeling and . . . and being. She’s cut the duralloy cord that tied her to Weddergren and Marchesi.”
Mme. Storm looked smug. “I don’t think,” she said, “that the President is going to like me.”
Gradually the night began to clear. Music meant something more than the surf. And there might be meaning even in a life without Kleinbach, even in a life under the Academy.
And there was Faustina.
Most of her nonworking time they now spent together. Casually they ignored the fact that he was no longer the Great Critic who could build her career. They talked as fellow workers in music, planning productions, discussing repertory, making notes on the new translations he would prepare for some of her roles.
Fie decided to move from the hut to the Resident Laboratory when Mme. Storm asked him to give her pupils a series of lectures in music history. It was by then quite natural that Faustina should help him move such few possessions as he had.
And afterwards when they were sitting on the cliff she said, “I listened today to some of the tapes I made when I first came here. You know, I don’t think I like that girl.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “I was in love with her, in a way.”
“She’s too much like Mar— You were what?”
“In love with her.”
“I must say this is a fine time to mention it!”
“Hardly realized it myself till now. Of course it wasn’t anything comparable to being in love with you.”
She took both his hands in hers. “And you are, aren’t you?” she said gravely. “You’d better be . . . It’s ridiculous, I’ve learned so much from Mme. Storm, I think I’ve even learned how to be me from her, but I haven’t learned how to flirt.” He kissed her hands gently. “So I’d better,” she went on, “just plain say I love you, and we’ll both know where we are.”
“We are,” he said quietly, “on a cliff on Venus which might well be the Big Sur on that blue star up there. That far an Academist might go. But of course the correct answer is simply We are, period.”
After a long time, when her mouth was finally not otherwise occupied, she began to sing. She started with Plaisir d’amour: “Love’s pleasure lasts but an instant, love’s regrets for a lifetime . . .”
There is such a voluptuous sweetness to sad songs when you are unbearably happy.
And she sang this and that, and Greensleeves and Stardust. And the beauty of her voice and the beauty of her body and the beauty of her love were one.
That night had ended the night.
The next day Jon Arthur knew what he must do, and it was not to give a series of lectures on the history of music.
Mme. Storm protested. “You, yes, young man. Do what you will. But not Parva. I’m not through; she’s only great, she—” But she capitulated finally. “If you promise to bring her back—and as many other robots that well trained as you can find. I’ll make wonderful people of them too.” And the invisible fan bestowed a parting benediction.
The spaceliner office protested. “Last minute reservations are just impossible. Two cabins— We might be able to arrange one double . . .”
The captain protested. “Never heard of performing a ceremony on the first day out! I don’t care if you can’t go to your cabin without it . . . !” But he capitulated too, after a jocular suggestion that Faustina could stay respectable by occupying her old air lock.
They themselves protested, both of the Arthurs, against the inactive three months forced upon them by Space. But they too capitulated; a honeymoon is a honeymoon.
Steele Morrison protested, shooting himself around Headquarters like a schizophrenic yo-yo. “You’ll never even get in to see him! And you’ll do no good if you do. The idea’s crazy; drop it and try to make the best of what we have!”
A series of domestic technicians and secretarial technicians protested. But once the message reached him, President Weddergren eagerly insisted on an immediate interview with Faustina Parva Arthur.
Excellent journalist though he was, Jon Arthur would never have attempted a description of the reactions of Weddergren as he listened to his pupil—for of course his first desire, before any such trifles as felicitations on marriage, was to hear her after her sojourn with Storm.
Surprise, resentment, perplexity—those were certainly, in order, the first reactions to this blend of Weddergren perfection with Storm humanity. After that the emotions were more complex . . .
At the end of the brief recital there was a pause. Then the President observed, “My dear, I sent you to Venus as the greatest voice in the system. You have returned as the greatest singer.”
And that was all.
It was the next day that the letter came—addressed not to Faustina but to Jon Arthur.
Their tenth reading of it was to Steele Morrison, who actually hung immobile for its duration:
Dear Mr. Arthur:
You are indeed a clever man, to realize the one thing that means so much to me that I can even, in its terms, understand an allegory that goes against my beliefs.
Yes, your nonallegoric suggestion is agreeable to me. The pressures of
