Damon Knight - Orbit 21

Captain Pada, over the intercom, called me to the transfer room. We were docking.

While crossing the ship I felt the bump of docking, and I stopped and tried to quell my excitement. Just an old woman, I thought, a rich old lady. The ancient epithets had little effect, however, and I was nervous as I floated into the transfer room.

The locks were already open. Captain Pada was there, and she shook my hand. “Nice having you aboard,” she said, and waved me forward.

I passed through the docking sleeve and was in Holmes’s satellite. A man dressed in red and gold was waiting. He smiled. “My name is Charles, Mr. Doya. Welcome to Sas Four. I’ll show you your rooms and you can arrange your belongings. Caroline will receive you after that.”

He took off with a neat leap and I hurried after him. We dropped down a hall with clear walls, in which terrestrial sea-shells were embedded (I thought again of the bathysphere), then took a long elevator ride. The room we entered was walled with reddish Persian rugs, and the ceiling and floors were a light wood. The floor was on several levels, with broad steps separating them.

“This is your room,” said Charles. “That control panel over there will produce whatever furniture you need—wardrobe, bed, screens. The robots will obey you.” He indicated a box on wheels.

“Thank you.”

Charles left. I went to the control panel, which I found behind a tapestry, and pushed Bed . A circular section of floor slid away and a circular bed rose. I traversed the room to it, flopped down and waited for my things to arrive. And wondered what I would say to her. My stay there was going to be conducted entirely on her terms, I could tell; and that frightened me. I had a thought: I was about to meet Emma Weil.

I sat on the bed and waited—lying down to nap more than once —for what seemed like hours. There was no way of measuring the passage of time in the room; there were no buttons on the control panel labeled Clock . Presumably I could call somebody on the intercom, but I didn’t know whom. Eventually I became hungry, and that, combined with growing irritation, drove me into the hallways. I tried to find my way back to the docking bay; my hope, though there was not much to support it, was that Charles would be there.

I got to the hallway with the clear walls and the hundreds of seashells. As I drifted down it I could see a wavery dark image moving down the hall with me, which I thought to be my reflection; but when I stopped for a moment to inspect a huge nautilus, the form continued to move. In surprise I caught up with it and pressed my face against the wall, but its thickness, and some ripples in it, reduced the image on the other side to a brown blob. The blob, however, had stopped across from me. It moved again, in the same direction, and I stayed across from it until the wall turned to wood. I stood there for a moment, and suddenly—back the direction I had come—a figure appeared in my hallway and approached me.

It was Holmes. She stopped when she saw me, and looked at me curiously for some time.

She was tall and had brown hair. Thick hair, tied back in a single knot and then let fall in a round stream down her back. She wore a long dress of simple design and plain brown material. She looked thin. Her face was handsome: lined, slightly tanned, with the finest of silky hairs just visible on her cheeks and upper lip. The line of her jaw, her cheekbones, nose and forehead, were all sharply defined, giving her an ascetic look. Her eyes were a rich brown.

Finally she moved up to me. “Hello,” she said, in a well-modulated alto voice. “It’s good to meet you. I’ve been reading your articles with interest.”

“I’m glad,” I said, and searched for more words, stupidly fumbling in a moment I had imagined many times. “Hello.”

She said: “Why don’t we go to one of the observation decks and have some food sent there.”

“Fine.” She had a long stride, one that revealed bare feet.

We went to a large dim room, walled and ceilinged in wood. The floor was clear; one of the windows I had seen while approaching. In the center of it Saturn shone like a lamp-globe. It was our only illumination. There were couches arranged in a small square near the middle of the room. Holmes sat on one, leaned forward and looked down at the planet. She appeared to have forgotten me; I sat down opposite her and looked down.

We were over one of the poles, looking at Saturn and its rings from a perspective none of its natural satellites ever had. The bands crossing Saturn (half of it was dark, though slightly illuminated by light reflected from the rings) were light greens and yellows, with streaks of orange. Seen from above they were full semicircles: bright cream in the equatorial bands, clearly defined streaks of yellow in the higher latitudes; a dusky green area at the Pole.

Outside the planet were the rings. The inner rings were a charcoal color, but quite visible. The outer rings were broad, pristine white bands, perfectly smooth and circular, as if drawn with a compass. The entire sight reminded me of a target, an archery target; the Pole the bull’s-eye, the rings the outer circles; but it was impossible to imagine Saturn flat, because of its dark side, and the black bullet of its shadow, erasing part of the rings behind it.

This uncanny sight filled almost half of our floor-window. Around it a few bright stars gleamed, and seven of Saturn’s moons were visible, all of them perfectly aligned half-moons. As we sat there silently and watched, the scene shifted perceptibly. Saturn’s shadow on the rings was shortening, the moons were becoming crescent, the rings were tilting and becoming huge ellipses; all slowly, slowly, as in some inhuman, natural dance.

“Always the same but always different,” I said.

“The landscape of the mind,” she replied, after a long pause. I became aware of the profound silence in which we were speaking, “There are more beautiful places on Terra, but none that is so sublime.”

“Perhaps that is because space itself has many attributes of sublimity—vastness, simplicity, mystery, that which causes terror—“

“It exists only in the mind, you must remember that. But space provides much that reminds the mind of itself, yes. . . .”

After a time I said: “Do you really think that if we did not exist, Saturn would not be sublime?”

I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then: “Who would know it?”

“So it is the knowing,” I said.

She nodded.

Then she sat back and looked across at me. “Would you like to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Alaskan king crab?”

“That would be fine.”

She turned, and called out, “We’ll have dinner in twenty minutes.”

A small tray covered with crackers and blocks of cheese slid out of a new aperture in her couch. I blinked. A bottle of wine and two glasses were presented on individual glass trays. She poured wine and drank in silence. We leaned forward to look down at the planet. In the odd illumination—dusky yellow light, from below —her eye sockets were in shadow, and looked very deep. We leaned back to attend to the meal, which to my relief was brought in by Charles. Below us Saturn and its billion satellites still wheeled, a stately art-deco lamp. . . .

After the meal Charles took away our dishes and utensils. Holmes leaned forward on her side of the couch, and stared down at the planet with an intensity that discouraged interruption. Between watching Holmes and Saturn, I was kept busy enough.

Holmes remained in her contemplative position until the ringed ball was completely out of our floor-window and the room was quite dark. Then she stood up, said “Good night,” in a companionable tone—as if this were a routine we had established through years of dining together—and walked out of the room. Filled with confusion, I sat in the dark room and looked down at the stars for quite some time; then I made my way without much difficulty back to my rooms.