“Wolruf said that it was the nearest place to everywhere,” Derec said. “It feels more like the farthest place from anywhere.”
Katherine twisted her head around, looking. “Where is she?”
“Back on Rockliffe Station, I guess. Left behind.”
“Why didn’t the key bring her with us?”
“Maybe for the same reason it wouldn’t work for her,” Derec said. “Maybe because she was too far away from us. Maybe you have to be touching it, or touching someone who’s touching it. I don’t know. But we have to go back and get her.”
“But the robots-”
Derec shook his head. “It was Alpha. You didn’t even look. It was Alpha.”
“I didn’t know,” Katherine whispered. “Press it again. Let’s go back.”
“How do we know we will?”
“I was thinking about escape when I pushed it. Think about going back.”
Wordlessly Derec complied. The button appeared as before. There was another flash of color, and another few seconds of adjustment. Then their returning vision told them something that should not be, could not be. They were not at Perihelion, but neither were they back in Rockliffe Station.
They were standing in open sunlight atop a great pyramidal tower, looking down at a still greater city spread out before them. The tower they were on was taller by half than any other building in sight. It was like standing on top of the world, like looking down from an eagle’s eyrie.
“What is this?” Katherine hissed. “Where did you send us?”
Derec stared unbelievingly at the towers, cubes, and spires stretching from the base of the pyramid to the horizon. “I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I had Rockliffe Station in my mind.”
She released her grip on the key and grabbed tight to his arm. “Are we on Earth?” She asked it as though the prospect frightened her.
Derec looked west at the low-hanging disc of the sun. “No,” he said. “The star is too white and too small.” But he knew why she had asked. No Spacer world had a city this vast. Only on Earth had city-building ever been practiced on this scale, and they were not cities but Cities, enclosed and largely underground. “You don’t recognize it?”
“I’ve never seen such a thing before,” she whispered. “Is it Wolruf’s homeworld? Or Aranimas’s?”
“I don’t know,” Derec said. “We can find the answer easily enough, though.”
“How?”
“By going down there.” He gestured toward the city spread out below them.
“No,” she said with a shudder. “Send us back.”
Derec realized that he was still gripping the key in his unfeeling hands. “I don’t know if I can,” he said.
“Try,” she urged. “Or let me try.”
“We’ll try,” he agreed.
Holding an image of the gray emptiness of Perihelion in his mind, Derec called up the control button and pressed it. This time, nothing happened. “What it did has to take a lot of power. Maybe it has to recharge-or be recharged,” he said. “Either way, it looks like we’re here for a while at least.”
“I don’t want to go down there,” Katherine said. “It’ll be night soon. Let’s stay here until morning and then try the key again.”
The sun had indeed slipped a fraction of a degree toward the horizon, lengthening the already long shadow of the tower on the city below. “Aren’t you afraid of going over the side in your sleep?” he asked. There was no railing or football enclosing the table-flat top of the pyramid.
“I don’t expect to be able to sleep,” she said soberly.
As the sun descended toward the horizon, a breeze kicked up, teasing at their hair and clothing. It carried with it no scent Derec knew. In fact, for a world so obviously teeming with life, it carried remarkably little scent at all.
Below them, the city was becoming alive with lightlight cascading down the sides of buildings, light puddling in the streets. In those streets, hundreds of other lights were in restless motion, reminding Derec of the bustle within a colony of bees or ants.
Too emotionally numbed even to be afraid, they avoided talk. Katherine withdrew into herself, sitting in the lotus position near the center of the tile-covered plaza. Derec wandered near the edges, looking out and trying to abstract the pattern on which the city had been built.
When the stars came out, he studied them, hoping against hope to recognize their patterns. There was a red star as bright as a planet that might have been Betelgeuse, and a fierce white one that might have been Sirius.
But each could just as easily be any of a thousand other stars named or merely numbered. There was no way to tell without a spectrometer to take the optical fingerprint of each suspect and a general astrographical catalog in which to search for matches.
“Do you remember what the stars look like from Aurora?” he called across to Katherine, sitting huddled against herself on the other side of the plaza.
“I never knew,” she admitted. “I wasn’t interested.”
Giving up, he went and sat facing her. She was idly rubbing her right bicep through the sleeve of her Lindbergh blouse.
“Having trouble with the pump?”
“That’s not what hurts,” she said, tugging the sleeve up and showing him a purple crescent bruise.
“Nice.”
“My most convincing scream,” she said with a rueful smile.
“Wolruf?”
“She got carried away and bit me. She’s not as harmless as she wanted us to think.”
“Anything living knows how to defend itself,” he said, then added wistfully, “I wonder what’s happened to her.”
“I don’t understand why you liked her.”
“She’s a victim-a prisoner-just like us.”
“I have trouble thinking of her that way.”
Derec sighed. “Doesn’t matter now, I guess. I’ve abandoned her again.”
Conversation lapsed after that. “I don’t understand why it was Alpha that came after us,” Katherine said finally. “It can’t have been roaming free like Wolruf since we came to the station, can it? Looking for us?”
“Just another one of Jacobson’s tricks,” Derec said. “He knew we wanted the robot back. What better bait to draw us out?”
They were silent together for a while, sitting close but not touching. “Your first name is David,” she said unexpectedly.
Hearing the name brought no sudden revelations, and caution born out of experience kept him from feeling any gratitude. “Why tell me now?”
“So I can stop the mental gymnastics every time I start to talk to you. Because I thought you’d want to know.”
“And because we don’t know what’s going to happen to us?”
“I won’t think like that,” she said. “I don’t believe in it.”
“I should have known better,” Derec said with a faint smile. “Are you going to drop more than one crumb? How is it you know me? Where did we meet?”
She turned her head to look at him. “You were the engineer’s mate on a Settler merchantman-theDaniel O’Neill, I think it was called,” she said. “Does it sound familiar?”
“No,” he said unhappily. “What else can you tell me?”
She hesitated. “I’m afraid I don’t know you as well as I let you think. We crossed paths in the spaceport.”
“If I’m a Settler drudge and you’re a Spacer topcrust-”
“Your captain was having trouble with Customs coming in and we were delayed going out by mechanical problems. We ended up in the same waiting area. We talked for a while.” She hesitated, then added, “You were funny. You made me laugh.”
“Did I talk about my family-my home-”
“You don’t remember any of it, do you? Meeting me-theO’Neill -”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “Even so, I thought you’d be happier, knowing.”
“I’d be happier remembering,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “Anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter as much at the moment. I don’t know a thing about this David. At least I know a little about Derec. I think I’ll just stay Derec for the time being.”
“I didn’t tell you everything,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about-”
“Don’t,” he said. “If my name didn’t bring it back, nothing will. Save the rest. You’ll be able to tell me whether I’m remembering or inventing.”
“I know your memory will come back. It has to.”
He nodded absently, acknowledging her words without accepting them. “If you want to try to sleep, I’ll watch to make sure you don’t get restless and try to air-walk.”