“Couldn’t you come home . . . every night?” she murmured.
“Don’t tempt me,” he groaned. “I can’t. One month is the standard minimum watch on an interstellar vessel, barring emergencies. You see, every transmission uses up a Frank tube, which costs money.”
“Well,” she pouted, “if you think so much of an old dead star—”
“You don’t understand, your gorgeousness. This is the first chance anyone has ever had, in more than two centuries of space travel, to get a close look at a truly burned-out star. There was even some argument whether the class existed. Is
the universe old enough for any sun to have used up its nuclear and gravitational energy? By the ancestors, it’s conceivable this one is left over from some previous cycle of creation!”
He felt a stiffening in her body, as if she resented his talk of what she neither understood nor cared about. And for a moment he resented her. She didn’t really care about this boat either, or him, or anything except her own lovely shell. Why was he wasting time in the old worn routines, when he should be studying and preparing? He knew precisely why.
And then her rigidity melted in a little shudder. He glanced at her, she was a shadow with a palely glowing mane, in the deep blue twilight. The last embers of sun were almost gone, and one star after another woke overhead, soon the sky would be crowded with their keenness.
Almost, she whispered: “Where is this spaceship, now?”
A bit startled, he pointed at the first tracing of the Southern Cross. “That way,” he said. “She was originally bound for Alpha Crucis, and hasn’t been diverted very far off that course. Since she’s a good thirty parsecs out, we wouldn’t notice the difference if we could see that far.”
“But we can’t. Not ever. The light would take a hundred years, and I . . . we would all be dead—No!”
He soothed her, a most pleasant proceeding which became still more pleasant as the night went on. And they were on his yacht, which had borne his love from the first day he took the tiller, in a calm sea, with wine and small sandwiches, and she even asked him to play his guitar and sing. But somehow it was not the episode he had awaited. He kept thinking of this or that preparation, what had he overlooked, what could he expect to find at the black sun; perhaps he was indeed under the subtle tooth of age, or of maturity if you wanted a euphemism, or perhaps the Southern Cross burned disturbingly bright overhead.
II.
INTER lay among the Outer Hebrides. Day was a sullen glimmer between two darknesses, often smothered in
snow. When it did not fling itself upon the rocks and burst in freezing spume, the North Atlantic rolled in heavy and gnawing. There was no real horizon, leaden waves met leaden sky
and misty leaden light hid the seam. “Here there is neither land nor water nor air, but a kind of mixture of them,” wrote Pytheas.
The island was small. Once it had held a few fishermen, whose wives kept a sheep or two, but that was long ago. Now only one house remained, a stone cottage built centuries back and little changed. Down at the landing was a modern shelter for a sailboat, a family submarine, and a battered aircar; but it was of gray plastic and fitted into the landscape like another boulder.
David Ryerson put down his own hired vehicle there, signaled the door to open, and rolled through. He had not been on Skula for half a decade: it touched him, in a way, how his hands remembered all the motions of steering into this place and how the dank interior was unaltered. As for his father— He bit back an inward fluttering, helped his bride from the car, and spread his cloak around them both as they stepped into the wind.
It howled in from the Pole, striking them so they reeled and Tamara’s black locks broke free like torn banners. Ryerson thought he could almost hear the wind toning in the rock underfoot. Surely the blows of the sea did, crash after crash through a bitter drift of flung scud. For a moment’s primitive terror, he thought he heard his father’s God, whom he had denied, roar in the deep. He fought his way to the cottage and laid numbed fingers on the anachronism of a corroded bronze knocker.