“Oesterreich?”
“That is the name, yes.”
Can you tell me any more about him than that?”
“What I have told you is all that I know.”
He stares at me truculently, as if defying me to show that he is lying. But I believe him.
“Even for that much assistance, I am grateful,” I say.
“Yes. Never let it be said that we have failed to offer aid to the Order.” He smiles again. “But if you ever come to this world again, you understand, we will know that you were a spy after all. And we will treat you accordingly.”
Marfa Ivanovna is in charge of the Velde equipment. She positions me within the transmitting doorway, moving me about this way and that to be certain that I will be squarely within the field. When she is satisfied, she says, “You know, you ought not ever come back this way.”
“I understand that.”
“You must be a very virtuous man. Ilya Alexandrovitch came very close to putting you to death, and then he changed his mind. This I know for certain. But he remains suspicious of you. He is suspicious of everything the Order does.”
“The Order has never done anything to injure him or anyone else on this planet, and never will.”
“That may be so,” says Marfa Ivanovna. “But still, you are lucky to be leaving here alive. You should not come back. And you should tell others of your sort to stay away from Zima too. We do not accept the Order here.”
I am still pondering the implications of that astonishing statement when she does something even more astonishing. Stepping into the cubicle with me, she suddenly opens her fur-trimmed jacket, revealing full round breasts, very pale, dusted with the same light red freckles that she has on her face. She seizes me by the hair and presses my head against her breasts, and holds it there a long moment. Her skin is very warm. It seems almost feverish.
“For luck,” she says, and steps back. Her eyes are sad and strange. It could almost be a loving look, or perhaps a pitying one, or both. Then she turns away from me and throws the switch.
Entrada is torrid and moist, a humid sweltering hothouse of a place so much the antithesis of Zima that my body rebels immediately against the shift from one world to the other. Coming forth into it, I feel the heat rolling toward me like an implacable wall of water. It sweeps up and over me and smashes me to my knees. I am sick and numb with displacement and dislocation. It seems impossible for me to draw a breath. The thick, shimmering, golden-green atmosphere here is almost liquid; it crams itself into my throat, it squeezes my lungs in an agonizing grip. Through blurring eyes I see a tight green web of jungle foliage rising before me, a jumbled vista of corrugated-tin shacks, a patch of sky the color of shallow sea-water, and, high above, a merciless, throbbing, weirdly elongated sun shaped like no sun I have ever imagined. Then I sway and fall forward and see nothing more.
I lie suspended in delirium a long while. It is a pleasing restful time, like being in the womb. I am becalmed in a great stillness, lulled by soft voices and sweet music. But gradually consciousness begins to break through. I swim upward toward the light that glows somewhere above me, and my eyes open, and I see a serene friendly face, and a voice says, “It’s nothing to worry about. Everyone who comes here the way you did has a touch of it, the first time. At your age I suppose it’s worse than usual.”
Dazedly I realize that I am in mid-conversation.
“A touch of what?” I ask.
The other, who is a slender gray-eyed woman of middle years wearing a sort of Indian sari, smiles and says, “Of the Falling. It’s a lambda effect. But I’m sorry. We’ve been talking for a while, and I thought you were awake. Evidently you weren’t.”
“I am now,” I tell her. “But I don’t think I’ve been for very long.”
Nodding, she says, “Let’s start over. You’re in Traveler’s Hospice. The humidity got you, and the heat, and the lightness of the gravity. You’re all right now.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you can stand?”
“I can try,” I say.
She helps me up. I feel so giddy that I expect to float away. Carefully she guides me toward the window of my room. Outside I see a veranda and a close-cropped lawn. Just beyond, a dark curtain of dense bush closes everything off. The intense light makes everything seem very near; it is as if I could put my hand out the window and thrust it into the heart of that exuberant jungle.
“So bright—the sun—” I whisper.
In fact there are two whitish suns in the sky, so close to each other that their photospheres overlap and each is distended by the other’s gravitational pull, making them nearly oval in shape. Together they seem to form a single egg-shaped mass, though even the one quick dazzled glance I can allow myself tells me that this is really a binary system, discrete bundles of energy forever locked together.
Awed and amazed, I touch my fingertips to my cheek in wonder, and feel a thick coarse beard there that I had not had before.
The woman says, “Two suns, actually. Their centers are only about a million and a half kilometers apart, and they revolve around each other every seven and a half hours. We’re the fourth planet out, but we’re as far from them as Neptune is from the Sun.”
But I have lost interest for the moment in astronomical matters. I rub my face, exploring its strange new shagginess. The beard covers my cheeks, my jaws, much of my throat.
“How long have I been unconscious?” I ask.
“About three weeks.”
“Your weeks or Earth weeks?”
“We use Earth weeks here.”
“And that was just a light case? Does everybody who gets the Falling spend three weeks being delirious?”
“Sometimes much more. Sometimes they never come out of it.”
I stare at her. “And it’s just the heat, the humidity, the lightness of the gravity? They can knock you down the moment you step out of the transmitter and put you under for weeks? I would think it should take something like a stroke to do that.”
“It is something like a stroke,” she says. “Did you think that traveling between stars is like stepping across the street? You come from a low-lambda world to a high-lambda one without doing your adaptation drills and of course the change is going to knock you flat right away. What did you expect?”
High-lambda? Low-lambda?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say.
“Didn’t they tell you on Zima about the adaptation drills before they shipped you here?”
“Not a thing.”
“Or about lambda differentials?”
“Nothing,” I say.
Her face grows very solemn. “Pigs, that’s all they are. They should have prepared you for the jump. But I guess they didn’t care whether you lived or died.”
I think of Marfa Ivanovna, wishing me luck as she reached for the switch. I think of that strange sad look in her eyes. I think of the voivode Ilya Alexandrovitch, who might have had me shot but decided instead to offer me a free trip off his world, a one-way trip. There is much that I am only now beginning to understand, I see, about this empire that Earth is building in what we call the Dark. We are building it in the dark, yes, in more ways than one.
“No,” I say. “I guess they didn’t care.”
They are friendlier on Entrada, no question of that. Interstellar trade is important here and visitors from other worlds are far more common than they are on wintry Zima. Apparently I am free to live at the hospice as long as I wish. The weeks of my stay have stretched now into months, and no one suggests that it is time for me to be moving along.