“I think we should make camp down there.” Moon pointed; he saw her shiver as an ice-barbed lash of wind struck the spine of the hill. “The suns are setting already.” She looked out across the infinity of hills falling toward the distant sea, looked up into the deepening indigo sky. “It’s getting too cold for you to travel.” He heard her sudden indrawn breath, louder than the wind’s sigh. “BZ!”
He looked up, following her hand, not knowing what he expected, but only that it was not what he found.
Out of the blue-black zenith stars were falling. But not the broken-glass stars of this winter world — these were the stars that shone in dreams, stars that a man would die for, the stars of empire, grandeur, glory… the impossible made real.
“What — what are they?” He heard in Moon’s voice the awe and the dread of countless natives on seven separate worlds down through a millennium, as they witnessed what she was witnessing now.
The five starships grew against the sky with every heartbeat, the harmonies of color and intensity shifting and reordering as parallaxes changed, building complexity on complexity like light poured through prisms of flowing water. He watched the five ships slowly realigning, moving into a cross pattern; saw the lightning-play of their cold fire spreading, coalescing, into one immense star, the sign of the Hegemony. The colors blazed with a music he could almost hear, filling the sky with all the hues, all the impossible permutations of an aurora-filled night sky on his homeworld…
“The Prime Minister? Is it the Prime Minister?” Moon’s words came to him muffled by her protective face mask, and her upraised hand.
He swallowed, and swallowed again, unable to answer.
“They’re ships!” She went on answering her own questions. “They’re only ships. How can they be real, and be so beautiful?”
“They’re Kharemoughi.” He might have said “the Empire”; he might have said “gods.” He did not say that they were only coin ships wrapped in cloaks of hologrammic projection to astound a subject world. He looked back at her, glory blind, and took her smile at face value.
“Are they?” She touched his cheek, turned back to the sky as the formation split apart again, the flames died away and embers fell to earth… behind the hills, scarcely two ridges away. “Look!” She shook off her wonder. “That must be the star port BZ, we’re almost there. We could reach it tonight.” Frost clouds feathered around her cheeks. “We’re on time!”
“Yes.” He took a deep breath. “Plenty of time. Thank the gods.”
He watched the last of the ships snuff out behind the snowy hills. Tonight… “There’s no need to push on tonight. One more day won’t matter. Tomorrow is soon enough.”
She glanced at him, surprised. “It’s only a couple of hours. It’s as easy as if I set up camp.”
He shrugged, still looking into the distance. “Maybe so.” He began to cough, smothered it behind his hand.
She put a mitten to his forehead, as though she were feeling for a fever. “The sooner you see a healer — a medic — the better,” firmly.
“Yes, Nanny.”
She poked him. He grinned, eagerness coming back into him, as she started the power unit. The snow skimmer slipped quietly over the ridge and into the valley, blotting out even the afterglow of the ships’ landing. Hours… only hours, until he would rejoin the living, regain the life he had almost lost forever, the only life worth living. Gods, yes, he wanted to reach the star port tonight!
Then why had he said “tomorrow” to her? Tomorrow is soon enough. He moved his hands under the blankets, shifting Blodwed’s caged pets that shared the warmth of his body — only two of them now. The green bird had died, three or four nights ago. In the morning they had made a small grave in the crusted snow. There but for you go I… He had spoken those words aloud to her, kneeling in the snow beneath the silent witness of heaven.
And he had spoken them with his eyes at every new dawn’s light, when he woke to find himself a free man, and see her beside him in the bubble tent — close enough to touch, but never touching, since that one night. He had watched her unguarded sleep, the dreams that moved across her face… the fair face and the snowy tumbled hair, the wild, unnatural paleness of her, more familiar to him now than his own darkness, suddenly grown beautiful and right. In his mind he had held her again, kissed her lips to wake her to the day… and in this timeless wilderness he was free in a way that he had never been free, from his past and his future, the rigid codes that defined his existence. Here he drifted formlessly, an embryo, and he felt no shame at his yearning for a barbarian girl with eyes like mist and agate.
And he had seen her wake from troubled dreams to his imaginary kiss, lie looking back at him with a drowsy smile. He had seen the awareness fill her eyes, knew the hesitant answering desire that filled her, too. But only his eyes had asked, and only her eyes had answered him. And now there would never be one more morning…
They crested a final hill, cold and aching, and the star port muted dawn-glow opened out before them like a midnight sun rising. The low dome of the subterranean complex was a vast bruise on the seaward plain, almost a city in its own right; unearthly light suffused its curving surface. There was no sign now of the starships’ landing: the dome’s impervious surface was unbroken by any opening. Away on the sea’s horizon he saw the winking shell-form of unsleeping Carbuncle.
Gundhalinu sighed, easing the painful tightness in his chest. Moon sat silently behind the controls; he wondered whether awe at the sight of the first star port she had ever seen had put her into stasis-until he remembered that it was not her first star port Her hand reached out suddenly and pressed his shoulder, in a gesture that asked reassurance more than offered it. He lifted his own hand to cover hers; found that it would not close. He dropped it again. “Don’t worry,” woodenly, inadequately. “We’d better angle left, make the approach toward the main entrance. Security will be upped a mag for the state visit — I don’t want to be a casualty to caution.”
She obeyed, still without answering him. Caught in his own sudden inability to reach her, to reassure her or even himself, he watched the dome grow ahead.
They were still a hundred meters out from the maIN surface entrance when light flooded around them and a disembodied voice ordered them to a halt. Four men wearing the blue uniform he’d almost forgotten the look of approached cautiously; he knew that more were observing the snow skimmer from inside. The face shields on their helmets were down; he couldn’t recognize any of them. But the knowledge that they were his own people did not comfort or reassure him. Instead he sat frozen with guilty unease, as though he had been a criminal and not a victim.
“You’re trespassing in a restricted area.” He recognized a sergeant’s insignia, but not the voice. “Clear out, Mother lovers, and if you brought more of your thieving clan along, take ‘em with you, before we use you for target practice.”
Gundhalinu stiffened. “Who the hell taught you procedure, Sergeant?”
The sergeant drew back in mock surprise. “Who the hell wants to know?” He gestured with his hand. Two of his men closed in around Moon, the third dragged Gundhalinu up from his place on the sledge. His legs gave way and he sat down unceremoniously in the snow.
“Leave him alone, damn you!”
“Get your hands off her!” His own angry protest overran Moon’s as she started toward him and the two men jerked her back. He pushed down his hood, peeled off the scratchy weather mask that disguised his face. He spoke deliberately in Klostan, the primary language of Newhaven: “I tell you ‘who wants to know,” Sergeant. Police Inspector Gundhalinu wants to know.”