He woke refreshed, though, unharnessed, balanced himself against the lurching while he stretched his muscles and used the sanitor, ate more of the cold rations, and settled back down. When he called for a revised estimate of arrival time, the vehicle said “About another three hours” in its flat voice.
He frowned. That wouldn’t be long before sunrise. Well, he’d known when he started that this was the best he could hope for. And … the swollen solar disc would take fifteen hours to clear the horizon.
He looked outward. Direct vision was impossible when he sat in the middle of thick armor, but the electronics that he activated gave him a simulacrum as good. Suddenly it was as if everything above the deck were gone and he directly beneath the sky, naked, alone, invulnerable. So might an angel have seen.
No, only a man. He did not now share the more than human senses of his partner. But for a while he lost himself in unaided vision.
A kind of dawn was breaking in the northeast, zodiacal light strengthened by the nearness of the sun. It lifted above rocks and craters like a huge wing, softly pearl-hued, a quarter of the way to the zenith before it faded among stars. The galactic belt outshone it, an ice-bright river from worldedge to worldedge. Everywhere else the stars themselves gleamed and glittered, their thousands overwhelming the crystalline blackness behind. Though Christian had beheld them oftener than he could recall, for a moment he felt his spirit fall free, upward and upward forever into the majesty of their silence.
A glimpse drew him back. Low over a northwesterly ridge stood a blue diamond. He could just espy a mote beside it, ashen-gold. Earth, he knew, and Earth’s moon. Home.
Did that moon tonight throw a glint off a bit of Ellen’s windborne dust?
Sometimes, without warning, the memory of her overtook him. He had long since healed himself of grief. There had been women before her, there had been women afterward. But she was the one for whom he left space and settled down to groundside engineering, because nothing was worth leaving her for months or years on end. When she died—robotic controls could not yet prevent every senseless accident—and he had scattered the contents of the urn across the countryside she loved, he returned to space. Their son was grown and didn’t need him any longer. He took up the new technology of human-machine linkage, and seldom came back for a visit. But from time to time he remembered, and it hurt.
Maybe, selfishly speaking, he was otherwise better off. Of course, he’d been happy to pay the price. Nevertheless, on Earth he had always felt trapped. The stars—
Again he looked aloft. A deeper longing shook him. He had fared and wrought across the Solar System. Beyond waited a universe.
Half angrily, he dismissed the emotion. Self-pity. They were going to the stars, yes, but it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, and they wouldn’t be flesh and blood, they would be machines. Oh, sentient, sensitive, bearing with them all the heritages of history, but not really human.
Her ghost lingered. It made the cabin too quiet.
He was not mawkish. In his job, he couldn’t be and survive. Yet you couldn’t survive either if you were a dullard. That meant you found ways to occupy long, empty stretches of time—not merely games and recorded shows, but anything from acquiring a language or mastering calligraphy to creating an artwork or maturing a philosophy. Christian Brannock was, among other things, a ballad singer who had composed several of his own.
He had taken his guitar along. The optics of total outervision obscured his immediate surroundings, but he knew where it was racked. He reached and pulled it free. Sound-board and strings glimmered into sight as he laid it over his lap. He struck a chord and began to sing.
“Once upon a hearth
We lit a little fire
To warm our winter hands
And kindle our desire,
Which never needed this;
But still, we found it good
To see the flames seduce
The dry and virgin wood.—”
No. The music clanged to a halt. He had made the song in his Earthside youth, later Ellen enjoyed it, a while ago he revived it on Mars, where no true flame had ever danced. Doing it here felt somehow wrong.
Why was he so churned up inside? Because he was in danger of losing Gimmick? But Gimmick was only a machine, wasn’t he—wasn’t it? Well, maybe not “only.” …
Christian had work to make ready for. Defiantly, he launched into something older and bawdier.
“Oh, a tinker came a-strolling,
A-strolling down the Strand—”
4
Already the solar corona was well over a ridge in the northeast. Its opalescent glory drowned the zodiacal light and cast a wan, shadowful glow across pocks and scars beneath. A crimson tongue of prominence heralded the oncoming disc. Elsewhere the stars still ruled. Earth no longer beckoned. The scarp blocked sight of it.
That cliff sheered from horizon to horizon, filling nearly half the sky. Christian remembered ledges, pinnacles, steeps, mineral streaks, the mark of meteorite strikes through billions of years. But he had seen those together with Gimmick. To his unaided eyes the heights were one vast darkness.
He might have imagined they were a storm front—on its own timescale the cosmos is neither enduring nor peaceful, it is appallingly violent—except that the wreckage on the rubble slope at the foot gripped his attention. His partner lay below that heap of broken stone. The communication disc poked above. He couldn’t make out exactly what damage it had suffered. Besides, lacking the necessary connectors, he was cut off from it. However, the intelligence back at Clement Base had no such limitations.
“Are you in touch?” he cried to it through the
