Norrey and I shared all of this in a smile and a glance, and then she said, “That’s great, you two. See you at the Garage,” and cleared the screen.
She drifted round in space, her lovely breasts majestic in free fall, till she was facing me. “Tom and Linda will be good partners for us,” she said, and was silent.
We hung at opposite ends of the room for a few seconds, lost in each other’s eyes, and then we kicked off at the same instant and met, hard, at the center of the room. Our embrace was four-limbed and fierce, a spasmodic attempt to break through the boundaries of flesh and bone and plastic and touch hearts.
“I’m not scared,” she said in my ear. “I ought to be scared, but I’m not. Not at all. But oh, I’d be scared if I were going into this without you!”
I tried to reply and could not, so I hugged tighter.
And then we left to meet the others.
Living in Siegfried had been rather like living below-decks in a luxury liner. The shuttlecraft was more like a bus, or a plane. Rows of seats with barely enough room to maneuver above them, abig airlock aft, a smaller one in the forward wall, windows on either side, engines in the rear. But from the outside it would have appeared that the bus or plane had rammed a stupendous bubble. The bow of the craft was a transparent sphere about twenty meters in diameter, the observation globe from which the team of diplomats would observe our performance. There was extremely little hardware to spoil the view. The computer itself was in Siegfried and the actual terminal was small; the five video monitors were little bigger, and the Limousine’s own guidance systems were controlled by another lobe of the same computer. There would be no bad seats.
There had, inevitably, been scores of last-minute messages from Earth, but not even the diplomats had paid any attention to them. Nor was there much conversation on the trip. Everyone’s mind was on the coming encounter, and our Master Plan, insofar as we could be said to have one, had been finalized long since.
We had spent a year studying computer analysesof both sides ofthe Stardance, and we believed we had gotten enough out of them to prechoreograph an opening statement in four movements. About an hour’s worth of dance, sort of a Mandarin’s Greeting. By the end of that time we would either have established telepathic rapport or not. If so we would turn the phone over to the diplomats. They would pass their consensus through DeLaTorre, and we would communicate their words to the aliens as best we could. If, for some reason, consensus could not be reached, then we would dance that too. If we could not establish rapport, we would watch the aliens’ reply to our opening statement and we and the computer would try to agree on a translation. The diplomats would then frame their reply, the computer would feed us choreographic notation, and we’d try it that way. If we got no results by the end of nine hours—two air changes—we’d call it a day, take the Limo back home to Siegfried and try again tomorrow. If we got good or promising results, we had enough air cans to stay out for a week—and the Die was stocked with food, water and a stripped-down toilet.
Mostly we all expected to play it by ear. Our ignorance was so total that anything would be a breakthrough, and we all knew it.
There was only one video screen in the passenger compartment, and Cox’s face filled it throughout the short journey. He kept us posted on the aliens’ status, which was static. At last deceleration ended, and we sank briefly in our seats as the Limousine turned end over end to present the bubble to the aliens, and then we were just finally there, at the crossroads. The diplomats unstrapped and went forward to the bubble’s airlock; the Stardancers went aft to the big one. The one that had the Exit light over it.
We hung there together a moment, by unspoken consent, and looked around at each other. No one had a moving, Casablanca-ending speech to deliver, no wisecracks or last sentiments to exchange. The last year had forged us into a family; we were already beginning to be mutually telepathic after a fashion. We were beyond words. We were ready.
What we did, actually, we smiled big idiotic smiles and joined hands in a snowflake around the airlock.
Then Harry and Raoul let go on either end, kissed each other, seated their hoods, and entered the airlock to go build our set. There was room for four in the airlock; Tom and Linda squeezed in with them. They would deploy the Die and wait for us.
As the door slid closed behind them, Norrey and I shared our own final kiss.
“No words,” I said, and she nodded slightly.
“Mr. Armstead,” from behind me.
“Yes, Dr. Chen?”
He was half in his airlock, alone. Without facial or vocal expression he said, “Blow a gasket.”
I smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
And we entered the lock.
There is a kind of familiarity beyond deja vu, a recall greater than total. It comes on like scales falling from your eyes. Say you haven’t taken LSD in a long while, but you sincerely believe that you remember what the experience was like. Then you drop again, and as it comes on you simply say, “Ah yes—reality,” and smile indulgently at your foolish shadow memories. Or (if you’re too young to remember acid), you discover real true love, at the moment when you are making love with your partner and realize that all of your life together is a single, continuous, and ongoing act of lovemaking, in the course of which you happen to occasionally disengage bodies altogether for hours at a time. It is not something to which you return—it is something you suddenly find that you have never really left.
I felt it now as I saw the aliens again.
Red fireflies. Like glowing coals without the coals inside, whirling in something less substantial than a bubble, more immense than Siegfried. Ceaselessly whirling, in ceaselessly shifting patterns that drew the eyelike the dance of the cobra.
All at once it seemed to me that the whole of my life was the moments I had spent in the presence of these beings—that the intervals between those moments, even the endless hours studying the tapes of the aliens and trying to understand them, had been unreal shadows already fading from my memory. I had always known the aliens. I would always know them, and they me. We went back about a billion years together. Like coming home from school to Mom and Dad, who are unchanging and eternal. Hey, I wanted to tell them, I’ve stopped believing I’m a cripple, as a kid might proudly announce he’s passed a difficult Chem test... .
I shook my head savagely, and snapped out of it. Looking away helped. Everything about the setting said that something more than confused dreams had occurred since our last meeting. Just past the aliens mighty Saturn shone yellow and brown, ringed with coruscating fire. The Sun behind my back provided only one percent of the illumination it shone on Terra—but the difference was not discernible: the terrestrial eye habitually filters out 99% of available light (it suddenly struck me, the coincidence that this meeting place the aliens had chosen happened to be precisely as far away from the Sun as a human eye could go and still see properly).
We were “above” the Ring. It defied description.
To my “right,” Titan was smaller than Luna (under a third of a degree), but clearly visible, nearly three-quarters full from our perspective. Where the terminator faced Saturn the dull red color softened to the hue of a blood-orange, from the reflected Saturnlight. The great moon still looked smoky, like a baleful eye on our proceedings.