CRADLE OF SATURN BY JAMES P. HOGAN

“Was Earth really so much stranger than you expected?” Vicki asked curiously.

“I’m still awed by the sheer numbers of people wherever you go,” Sariena replied. “We all are. Nothing in Kronia prepares you for that. You see the pictures, yes, but there’s a . . . a mood created by so many being present all together in the same place, that you feel only from being there. . . . And the ocean! Hour after hour of it. I never imagined so much water existed in the universe. The waves at the beach in Hawaii were terrifying.”

“Was the gravity very tiring?” Keene asked her.

“Well, I won’t pretend it isn’t nice to be back up in the ship. But I’ve had an easier time than some of us. I think that having been born on Earth must make a difference.”

“Do you find you’ve remembered much?” Vicki asked.

“Not as much as I thought I had. A lot of what I thought I remembered must have been imagination.” Sariena moved a few paces away and turned, flexing her arms and stretching her head back as if exhilarated by not being weighed down anymore. “I also have feelings that the talks with your governments will go well. The people we’ve met had a lot of questions. The preliminary tour was a good idea, even if a bit exhausting.”

Keene frowned as he listened. No doubt the people asking the questions had been informants placed close to the Kronians in the way Cavan had described. The Kronians didn’t seem to be picking up on the negative rumblings sounding in the media, or else they were being shielded from them. He couldn’t see them dealing adeptly with Earth-style politics. It wasn’t that they were incapable, so much as never having needed to learn how. Their politics back home—or whatever word better described the managing of Kronian social affairs—presumably worked differently.

“How are those orbital calculations going?” Sariena asked.

“What’s the latest from Judith?” Keene asked Vicki.

“There were a few delays, but the last I heard was that we could be seeing some of the results anytime,” she replied.

Sariena looked around. “We don’t have to stay here among things that you see every day. Come on. Let me show you more of the Command Module . . . and something spectacular.”

They left the messroom to reenter the Control Deck and walked along one side, past a row of empty crew stations. Sariena described the functions briefly, giving Keene and Vicki an idea of the Osiris’s operating procedures. At the far end was a cross-passage with metal stairwells leading to levels above and below. Beyond, they descended some steps into a recess containing low tables with padded seats set around and against the wall, where the low lighting contrasted abruptly with the brightness they had just left. It seemed to be a kind of viewing gallery, perhaps a rest area, with one wall of glass looking out at the slowly wheeling stars. The window was on the module’s forward side, with no other part of the Osiris’s structure in sight.

“I don’t know how much you got to see from the shuttle,” Sariena said. “But this has only become visible in the last few hours. Wait . . .” The sky turned for about a quarter of a minute. Then, the shadows inside the gallery sharpened as the Sun came into view low on the right. The window material darkened to suppress the glare as the light intensified, revealing the sharp edge of the solar disk. One side of it had what appeared to be a bump, from which a finger of whiteness streamed away fully half the width of the window, pointing almost horizontally left. “Athena, just emerging,” Sariena said. “The tail is over thirty million miles long now.”

Keene and Vicki stared, spellbound. After the close pass at perihelion the tail would be at its longest. They were seeing it virtually from the side as it pointed away from the Sun. In the following month its tip would sweep past Earth like a searchlight as Athena swung into its return path, growing even more spectacular as it crossed Earth’s orbit fifteen million miles ahead.

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