“Right.” Her smile was fainter than usual. They left.
Wanderer and Svoboda seemed aroused. Their gazes came aglow. She reddened. His breast rose and fell. They also departed.
Hanno took care not to watch. Aliyat had clasped his hand. Now she let go. He spoke dully. “Well, how was it for you?”
“Terror and ecstasy and—a kind of homecomjng,” she said, barely audible.
He nodded. “Yes, even though you started life as a Christian, it wouldn’t be totally foreign to you. In fact, I suspect the program used some memories of yours as input where mine weren’t sufficient.”
“Weird enough, though.”
He stared beyond her. “A dream within a dream,” he murmured, as if to himself.
“What do you mean?”
“Svoboda would understand. Once she and I imagined what kind of future it might be where we dared reveal what we were.” Hanno shook himself. “Never mind. Goodnight.”
She caught his arm. “No, wait.”
He stopped, lifted his brows, stood alert in a fashion weary and wary. Aliyat grasped his hand again. ‘Take me along,” she said.
“Eh?”
“You’re too lonely. And I am. Let’s come back together, and stay.”
Deliberately, he said, “Are you tired of subsisting on Svoboda’s and Corinne’s leavings?”
For a moment she lost color. She released him. Then she reddened and admitted, “Yes. You and me, we’re neither of us the other’s first pick, are we? And you’ve never forgiven me for Constantinople, not really.”
“Why,” he said, taken aback, “I’ve told you I have. Over and over I’ve told you. I hoped my actions proved—”
“Well, just don’t let it make any difference that counts. What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little? Hanno, I’m offering you what nobody else in this ship will, yet. Maybe they never will. But we are getting back something of what we had. Between us, you and I could help that healing along.” She tossed her head. “If you aren’t game to try, to give in your turn, okay, goodnight and to hell with you.”
“No!” He seized her by the waist. “Aliyat, of course I— I’m overwhelmed—”
“You’re nothing of the sort, you calculating old scoundrel, and well I know it.” She came to him. The embrace went on. ,
Finally, flushed, disheveled, she said against his shoulder, “Sure, I’m a rogue myself. Always will be, I guess. But—I learned more about you than I’d known, Hanno. It wasn’t a dream while we were there, it was as real to us as—no, more real than these damned crowding walls. You stood up to the gods, outsmarted them, made them take us in, like nobody else alive could have. You are the skipper.”
She raised her face. Tears were on it, but a grin flashed malapert. “They didn’t wear me out. That’s your job. And if we can’t entirely trust each other, if the thing between us won’t quite die away, why, doesn’t that add a pinch of spice?”
28
THROUGHOUT THE final months, as Pytheas backed ever more slowly down to destination, the universe again appeared familiar. Strange that a night crowded with unwinking brilliant stars, girded by the frost-road of the galaxy, where nebulae querned forth new suns and worlds while energies raged monstrous around those that had died and light that came from neighbor fire-wheels had left them before humanity was—should feel homelike. Waxing ahead, Tritos had barely more than half the brightness of Sol, a yellow hue that stirred memories of autumns on Earth. Yet it too was a hearth.
Instruments peered across narrowing distance. Ten planets orbited, five of them gas giants. The second inmost swung at somewhat less than one astronomical unit’s radius. It possessed a satellite whose eccentric path indicated the primary mass was slightly over two and a third the terrestrial. Nevertheless that globe, though warmer on the average, was at reasonable temperatures, and its atmospheric spectrum revealed chemical disequilibria such as must be due to life.
Week by week, then day by day, excitement burned higher within the ship. There was no quenching it, and presently even Tu Shan and Patulcius stopped trying. They were committed; magnificent things might wait; and here was, for a while at least, an end of wayfaring.