Bob Shaw: Orbitsville Departure

They had decided to spend the few hours that remained to them walking in Garamond Park.

Dallen had been there several times before, but on this occasion his senses were heightened by a blend of excitement and apprehension. The sunlight was almost painful and colours seemed artificially intense. Beyond screens of trees the coppery roofs of the city shone with a spiky brilliance, and the nearby shrubs and flowers — gaudy as tropical plumage — seemed to burn in the sun's vertical rays. Lime-green lawns sloped down to the only feature of the scene which gave relief to the eye — a circular black lake roughly a kilometre across. Its nearer edge was obscured in part by low mounds of masonry and metal which were all that remained of an ancient fortification. Small groups of sightseers, their hats shifting ellipses of colour, sat among the ruined walls or wandered on the lake's perimeter path.

"Let's go down there and have a look," Dallen said to his wife, impulsively taking her arm. Cona Dallen held back. "What's wrong? Can't you wait?"

"We're not going to start all that again, are we?" Dallen released her arm. "I thought we had agreed."

"It's ail right for you to…" Cona paused, eyeing him sombrely, then in an abrupt change of mood she smiled and walked down the slope with him, slipping one arm around his waist. She was almost as tall as Dallen and they moved in easy unison. The feel of her body synchronising with his made him think of their prolonged session of love-making that morning. It occurred to him at once that she was deliberately working on him, reminding him of what he was giving up, and he felt a stirring of the resentment and frustration which had periodically marred their relationship for months. He repressed the emotions, making a resolution to get all he could from the hours they had left.

They reached the path, crossed it together and leaned on the safety rail which skirted the dark rim. Dallen, shading his eyes, stared down into the blackness and a moment later he was able to see the stars.

The surrounding brightness affected his vision to the extent that he could pick out only the principal star groupings, but he was immediately inspired with a primeval awe. He had lived all his life on the inner surface of the Orbitsville shell and therefore his only direct looks at the rest of the galaxy had come during his rare visits to this aperture. When I get to Earth he told himself, marvelling, I’ll be able to drink my fill of stars every night…

"I don't like this," Cona said. "I feel I'm going to fall through."

Dallen shook his head. "No danger. The diaphragm field is strong enough to take anybody's weight."

"Meaning?" She gave him a playful shunt with her hips. "Are you suggesting I'm too heavy?"

"Never!" Dallen gave his wife a warm glance, appreciating the good humour with which she faced her weight problems. She was fair-haired and had the kind of neat, absolutely regular features which are often associated with obesity. By careful theting she had usually kept her weight within a few kilos of the ideal, but since the birth of their son three months earlier her struggle had been more difficult.

The thought of Mikel and of leaving him disturbed Dallen's moment of rapport. It had taken him the best part of a year to secure the transfer to Earth, with its consequent promotion to Grade IV officer in the Metagov civil service. Cona had been aware of his plans throughout her pregnancy, but not until after the birth had she revealed her determination to remain behind on Orbitsville. Her overt reason for not accompanying him had been that Mikel was too young for the journey and the drastic change of climate, but Dallen suspected otherwise and his pride was hurt. He knew she was reluctant to leave her ailing father, and also that — as a professional historian — she was deeply committed to her current book on Orbitsville's Judean settlements. The former had allowed no scope for recrimination, but the latter had been the source of many arguments which had been none the less corrosive for being disguised as rational discussion or banter. Being Jewish is like a religion with some people…

Something huge moved in the black depths below Dallen, startling him and causing Cona to jump backwards from the rail. After a second he identified it as an interportal freighter slipping through space only fifty metres or so beneath his feet, like a silent leviathan swimming for the opposite shore of a black lake. His gaze followed the ship until it was lost in the mirages which overlay the more distant parts of the diaphragm field. At the far side of the kilometre-wide aperture was the space terminal where he would soon embark for Earth. Its passenger buildings and warehouses were a dominant feature of the scene, even though the principal installations — the giant docking cradles for starships — projected downwards into the void and were not readily visible.

"This place bothers me," Cona said. "Everything's more natural in Bangor."

Dallen knew she was referring to the fact that their home town of Bangor, 16,000 kilometres into Orbitsville's interior, was situated in Earth-like hilly terrain. Its official altitude was close to a thousand metres, which meant that amount of sedimentary rock had accumulated there in the Orbitsville shell, but Dallen understood that the geological structure counted for little. Without the enclosing skin of ylem, the enigmatic material of which the vast sphere was formed, the inner layer of rock, soil and vegetation would quickly succumb to instabilities and fly apart. It was an uneasy thought, but one which disturbed only visitors and newly arrived settlers. Anybody who had been born on Orbitsville had total faith in its permanence, knew it to be more durable than mere planets.

"We don't have to stay here," Dallen said. "We could try the rose gardens."

"Not yet." Cona fingered the jewel-like recorder which was clipped to her saffron blouse. "I'd like toget some pictures of the Garamond monument. I might want to include one in the book.

You're supposed to be seeing me off — not working, Dallen objected inwardly, wondering if she had brought in the mention of the book to trigger precisely that reaction. Among the things which had attracted him to Cona in the first place was her independence, and he could see that he had no right to try changing the rules of their relationship. It was good that she was self-willed and self-reliant, but — the thought refused to be dismissed — how much better everything would have been had they been going to Earth together, sharing all the new experiences the journey had to offer.

There was, of course, an alternative to his present course, the alternative repeatedly put forward by Cona. All he had to do was delay his transfer by a couple of years, by which time Mikel would be bigger and stronger. Cona would have finished her book by then and would be mentally primed and prepared to enter an exciting new phase of her life.

Dallen was surprised by a sudden cool tingling on his spine. A radical idea was forming in his mind, thrilling him with its total unexpectedness. There was, he had just realised, still enough time in which to change his plans! He could get out of going to Earth merely by not showing up when the flight was called.

Bureaucratic though Metagov departments were, they all recognised- and accepted one fact of human nature — that some people simply could not face the psychological rigours of interstellar travel. Backing down at the last minute and running away so commonplace that there was a slang term for it — the funkbunk — and no passenger's baggage was ever loaded until after he or she had gone aboard.

There was no shame in it, Dallen told himself. No shame in being flexible, in adapting to circumstances the way other people did. He had the opportunity to make a grand, romantic gesture of unselfishness, and there was no need to reveal to anybody, least of all to his wife, that it was actually a supremely selfish act in that it would enable him to hold on to what he cherished.