Пол Андерсон - Explorations

INTRODUCTION

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the hide of Mother Earth. We should have industries moving to locations where they cannot harm her, and entire new industries coming into existence. We should become able to abolish poverty, if not the other ills that our race keeps visiting upon itself, and abolish poverty not only in America but throughout the world. What this would mean to the spirit is incalculable.

As for the falsehood that the public has lost interest, the popularity of science fiction suffices to disprove that. We have, besides, the many thousands who undergo expense and discomfort to watch space events in person, the many millions who breathlessly follow every one on television and in the newspapers. We have a large and growing volume of mail to Washington, urging a revitalized program. (It would help mightily if you would send such letters, brief and respectful, to your national legislators and the President.) Oh, yes, the people care.

And so we return to the theme with which we began, love and its indivisibility. Maybe the reason why some cannot imagine what we have to gain beyond Earth is that they have not let heaven touch their hearts.

I say to them, "Go out, the next clear night. Look up."

THE SATURN GAME

If we would understand what happened, which is vital if we would avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future, we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it crossed a threshold of human experience. — Francis L. Minamoto, Death Under Saturn: A Dissenting View (Apollo University Communications, Leyburg, Luna, 2057)

"The City of Ice is now on my horizon," Kendrick says. Its towers gleam blue. "My griffin spreads his wings to glide." Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions. His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air strikes through his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. "I lean over and peer after you." The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. Its head flickers palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith

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THE SATURN GAME

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hammered into the steel.

"Yes, I see the griffin," Ricia tells him, "high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my sleeve, but I tear the spider-silk apart and dash forth into the open." The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, "Is it in truth you, my darling?"

"Hold, there!" warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana ten thousand leagues away. "I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you off beyond-any chance of rescue. Go back. Princess of Maranoa. Pretend you decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words."

"I stay far aloft," Kendrick says. "Save he use a scrying stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast has a rider. From here I'll spy out city and castle." And then—? He knows not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King's embrace?

"I thought you were supposed to spy out lapetus," Mark Danzig interrupted.

His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Col in Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the universe.

To help observation, all tights were out except a few dim glows at instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half

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EXPLORATIONS

phase, dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, nightside wanly ashimmer with starlight and moonlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.

Forward was lapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.

"I'm sorry," Jean Broberg whispered._"It's too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and… almost like the place where our game had brought us— Took us by surprise—"

"Huh!" Mark Danzig said. "You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don't tell me any different. I've watched these acts for eight years."

Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight. His movement sent him through the air, across the crowded cabin, until he checked himself by a handhold just short of the chemist. "Are you calling Jean a liar?" he growled.

Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness, "Please!" Broberg exclaimed. "Not a quarrel,

Colin."

The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two,

THE SATURN CAME

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despite longevity treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were engraved around large gray eyes. "Mark is right," she sighed. "We're here to do science, not daydream." She reached forth to touch Scobie's arm, smiled shyly. "You're still full of your Kendrick persona, aren't you? Gallant, protective—" She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced a laugh. "But I'm just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy."

Her glance went Saturnward, as if seeking the ship where her family waited. She might have spied it, too, as a star that moved among stars, by the solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision could not find even such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.

Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot's chair: "What harm if we carry on our little commedia dell' arte?" His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. "We won't be landin' for a while yet, and everything's on automatic till then." He was small, swart, deft, still in his twenties.

Danzig twisted the leather of his countenance into a frown. At sixty, thanks to his habits as well as to longevity, he kept springiness in a lank frame; he could joke about wrinkles and encroaching baldness. In this hour, he set humor aside.

"Do you mean you don't know what's the matter?" His beak of a nose pecked at a scanner screen which magnified the moonscope. "Almighty God! That's a new world we're about to touch down on — tiny, but a world, and strange in ways we can't guess. Nothing's been here before us except one unmanned flyby and one unmanned

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EXPLORATIONS

lander that soon quit sending. We can't rely on meters and cameras alone. We've got to use our eyes and brains." He addressed Scobie. "You should realize that in your bones, Colin, if nobody else aboard does. You've worked on Luna as well as Earth. In spite of all the settlements, in spite of all the study that's been done, did you never hit any nasty surprises?"