She woke before he did. Rousing, he saw her seated in the cave mouth, limned against the mysterious blueness that on Earthlike planets comes just before sunrise. She had programmed her sonador for unaccompanied guitar, making the instrument ring. Most quietly, she gave forth last of the many stanzas in her festival song:
The peaks grow gold, the east grows white,
A breeze pipes the end
Of the summer night,
And wide across a widespread land
The dancers turn homeward with
Hand laid in hand.
Go gladly up and gladly down.
The dancing flies outward like laughter
From blossom fields to mountain crown.
Rejoice in the joy that comes after!
VI
I was a caterpillar that crawled, a pupa that slumbered, a moth that Side 26
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The
flew in search of the Moon. The changes were so deep that my body could not remember what it had formerly been; I was as if reborn to wings. Nor had I the means to wonder at this. I simply was. Yet how bright was my being!
Even my infant self, a hairy length of hunger, lived among riches: juice and crisp sweetness in a leaf, sunlight warm or dew cool or breezes astir over his pelt, endless odors with each its subtle message. Then at last dwindling days spoke to his inwardness. He found a sheltered branch and spun silk out of his guts to make himself a place alone, and curled within its darkness, he died the little death. For a season his flesh labored at its own transformation, until that which opened the cocoon and crept forth belonged to an altogether new world. Soon my outer skin sloughed off me, my freed wings grew dry and strong, and I launched myself upon heaven.
Mine was the night. In my eyes it glowed and sparkled, full of vague shapes that I knew best by their fragrances. My food was the nectar of flowers, taken as I hovered on fluttery wingbeats, though sometimes the fermented sap of a tree set me and a thousand like me dizzily spiraling about. Wilder was it to strive as high as might be after the full Moon, more lost in its radiance than in a rainstorm. And when the smell of a female ready to mate floated around me, I became flying Desire.
Another blind urge set our flock on a journey across distance. Night by night we passed over hills, valleys, waters, woods, fields, the lights of men like bewildering stars beneath u~ day by day we rested on some tree, decking it with our numbers. While I was thus breasting strange winds, One gathered me up, taking me back into Oneness, and presently We knew what my whole life had been since I lay in the egg. Its marvels were many. I was Insect.
VII
Cold and empty, Emissary orbited Sol a hundred kilometers behind the San Geronimo Wheel. Dwarfed by remoteness, the sun gave her only a wan light, and she seemed lost among the stars. The Wheel was more impressive, two kilometers across, majestically rotating to provide Terrestrial weight for the workshops and living quarters around its rim. The hub, at the middle of the spokes which were passageways, could readily have accommodated the ship in its dock. Its radiation shielding aluminum plated, the whole structure shone as if burnished.
Yet it was a failure. Men had constructed it a century ago, to serve as a base for operations among the asteroids. Thinly scattered though those remnants of a stillborn world are, they could profitably be worked by robots, as could the Jovian moons at times around inferior conjunction. Soon improved spacecraft made that whole idea obsolete. It grew cheaper, as well as more productive, for men to go in person, boosting continuously at a gee or better, directly between these regions and the industrial satellites of Earth. The Wheel became a derelict. There was talk of scrapping it for the metal, but incentive was insufficient. Already then, the price of every metal was tumbling.
Eventually title went to the Union government, which had it refurbished and declared it a historical monument. It got few visitors.
When Ira Quick, Council Minister of Research and Development, authorized its occupancy, nobody paid much attention. He declared that it was well suited for studies of interplanetary gas. This would be the merest detail work, with nothing fundamental to be learned, but presumably worthwhile; besides, a private institution was underwriting the project. The measurements being delicate, the Wheel and its vicinity must be barred to outsiders for some weeks or months.