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Caitlín laughed softly. “Och, hear me preach! Martti, I must soon be about making breakfast. But first, if you’re not over-wearied—which well you might be sure, and many and
would—if you’re not, I’d like to begin proving to you what I mean.”

Presently, amidst more laughter from them both, she said: “Ah, well, it will do no harm if just this once breakfast is an hour or two late, will it, now?”

Elsewhere aboard, folk slept, Frieda and Dozsa together, the rest by themselves: Brodersen and Weisenberg peacefully; Joelle heavily, under sedation; Rueda rolling about; Susanne with a smile that came and went and came again. Under robot control,
Chinook
drove on toward the transport engine.

I
WAS A CHILD
of the People, my father a man of the Corn Society, a respectable man who would never in any way seek to thrust himself above others. Yet in the tenth month before I was born, on a night when he and his fellows were in the kiva blessing their dead, my mother dreamed a strange dream. It seemed as if the kachinas came and gently bore her down to their beautiful world below the world. Therefore, as she knelt on a mat, upheld by her sisters, and brought me forth, the men of my father’s Society—having been duly purified—danced certain measures, blew sacred smoke from their pipes, and prayed.

They got no sign, good or ill, and so took me for what I was, another boy baby, and presented me to the sun. Later I wailed and crowed and kicked and slumbered, was rocked in the arms of my parents and kin, drank life from my mother’s breasts. She bore me on her back strapped to a cradle board while she worked in the patches of beans, squash, and cotton. At those times my head was tightly bound against the wood, to flatten my skull and make me handsome. Soon, though, I was toddling about in care of older children. We infants played many happy games, seldom broken by a tear-squall. However, my earliest memory is of a raven winging by. I stood near the cliff edge; across from me, the far wall of the canyon climbed from depths of willow, through juniper and cactus, to rise at last naked; amidst those greens deep or dusty, the tawny blue-shadowed rock, the heat and light and stillness and resiny smells, all under a sky where sight could lose itself forever oh, there went that proud bright blackness, flying!

Our pueblo was built halfway up the canyonside, on a ledge. The heights above gave shade when summer afternoon blasted. We had neither the greatest nor the least community on that mesa where the People dwelt. Adobe walls were thick and
strong, their roughness pleasant to touch; rooms within were dim but comfortable at every season; ladders went from level to level, and we were always using them, to go work or go visit. Though we set store by proper manners, I remember much merriment.

Possessing a nearby spring, we took the trail down to the river for fishing or purification or the gathering of herbs—or, in hot weather, coolness, when the young romped on sandbars while the elders sat in grave cheerfulness. Other trails led to the top, where our crops grew and we cut wood (having first explained our need to the trees), hunted, hiked to different pueblos, sought oneness with the spirits in dream or meditation. There, on a clear night, as most nights were, a man saw stars past counting, more stars than darkness, thronged around the Backbone of the World. A full moon blurred that splendor but set the land mysteriously aglow.

Yes, Creation was full of light. Even the mightiest rainstorms, cloudbursts, blazed as well as crashed. Even our dead, for whom we broke our finest pottery to bury with them, even our dead saw shiningness, in the world below the world or when they came back to us unseen.

I grew, duty by duty. For a start, I helped keep watch on weanlings. Later I helped cultivate the corn, that being a right of males. Later still I carried burdens and wielded tools too heavy for women. Led by my seniors, I went hunting, woodcutting, traveling; I partook in ceremonies suitable to my years; in this wise I learned what a man ought to know.

Apart from a few tasks that were overly hard or dull, we enjoyed whatever we did. As for those which nobody liked, besides the reward of knowing we kept the pueblo alive thereby, we made them as gladsome as might be. Thus, to name a single one, when the women ground the corn the men had brought in (after we had cleaned our buildings in order that the corn would feel happy to enter) they made a party of it, chattering away over the metates while a man stood in the door playing the flute for them.

As my limbs lengthened, everybody marked how I took after my mother in looks, nothing of my father about me. This caused some gossip among the low-minded. It died out, because the People take doings between man and woman as ordinary rather than sacred. (Yet nothing good is not sacred.) My father simply agreed this was a token I should not join his Society when I came
of age, but my uncle’s. It would have been the usual outcome anyhow, since we reckon descent and inheritance through the female line.

No matter what has happened since, I may not and will not tell of my initiation rites, save that they ended down in the kiva when the spirits rose from the sipapu to bless us. There I joined the Herb Society. This caused me to spend years studying which plants can heal, which hurt, which numb pain, which lend flavor, which cause weird dreams and are to be avoided, and how to talk to each kind of plant in respect and love.

Meanwhile I married, founded a household, carried on the work of a husband. My wife was an upright lass who quickly became more winsome to me than moonrise or yucca blossoms. And when she gave me my first child, to carry forth and show to the sun—!

We knew more than joy, of course. Some of us got crippled, some took sick and we could not make them well, many died young, and at best we would grow old, teeth worn to the gums, flesh wasted, blindness and deafness closing in, till we were no longer of use. However kindly children and grandchildren cared for the old, reminding them of how they had cared for the newborn, perhaps this hurt worst.

More and more, we suffered raids from the nomads below the mesa. There lopers in sagebrush, brothers of the coyote, had bows more powerful that ours, and lived for war. In my day they captured a pueblo, tortured to death what men they had not killed, outraged the women before bearing them off, and left the children to wither. This recalled to us ancient means of defense we had been neglecting; after such a punishment, we learned how to stand siege till hunger drove the wild packs off. Nevertheless I remember dreadful battles.

Their fanged souls alone did not make them assail us. Want likewise did. In my day the drought stuck. We knew of two rainless years in a row, and the legends said they had been plenty bad. Now we counted three, four, five…. Our crops shriveled, our seeds failed in the hard-baked soil, unless we endlessly lugged water…. Six, seven, eight…. Our sun smote us from a sky gone pale; and land shimmered in summer heat. Winters were dry, quiet, gnawingly cold…. Nine, ten, eleven…. We doled out what food we could scrabble together. The aged and the very young were perishing. Four of my children did, two as I watched, two while I was off helping pray….

The Summoner came to me. I was borne to the world which is not below the world, nor above, nor beyond, but which is the whole world.

For that which followed, there are no words. Far less than for a night with a dearest woman, or a night in the kiva, or a night when your mother dies in your arms, there are no words. I was every god who had ever been, and understood everything that was. It is beautiful and terrible beyond any dreaming. More I cannot in this body remember.

At the end, One said that which I can only know as: “You will return to your life. If you wish, you may forget what has been Here. Think well.”

Afloat in a mighty peace, I thought, until at last I said: “No, take not from me more than must be.” Do I recall a cherishing laughter, which may also have been a weeping?

I rejoined the People. They did not realize I had been gone. I had no way to tell them. I was still a man, who rejoiced in his wife and living children and friends, who grieved for his hurt and dead. They did find me strange because of the long times I now spent apart from them, under the stars.

Twelve years, thirteen…. We clung to the ancestral homes, the ancestral graves, as lichen does to a rock. But we are not lichen, it came to me. We are the People. And this is not a world forever fixed in a single harmony, which nothing but black magic can change. We do wrong to hang by the thumbs, for witchcraft, men and women who are merely ill-mannered. I have learned that the world eternally changes, and is more vast and various than we can imagine. That may be good, that may be bad, but that is true.

If we stay where we are, we die. We must move to better country.

I talked, I prophesied, I raged, I thrust myself above others, and was scorned for it. I fared off by myself and gathered knowledge of lands where we might go. With this in hand, I could reason among the People. I became a great healer too, which showed I had the favor of the kachinas.

Finally I led them away.

Now we are prospering, each year we build further on our new pueblo, in a place where summer is green and a river runs bright between the cottonwoods. I shun honors they would give me, but I do claim the right to walk solitary whenever I wish, which is often, and free my soul to the stars. Yonder lies
Oneness. Will the Summoner call me there again before I die, or shall I enter the earth? My strength is gone and my eyes grow dim. Soon I shall be no more what I am, but something else, whatever it may be. Let me thank life for all that it gave. I was Man.

J
UMP.

There was a whirling sword of light; there was a T machine, and a wondrous pair of moons for it; there was a stellar background. There was no sun to be seen.

Slowly—it took whole seconds—Joelle drew her awareness back from the transcendence of a space-time crossing under holothesis. She need not focus vision on the spectacle in the screen; she could perceive directly through any scanner aboard. Her ears brought her Brodersen’s awed, “Jesus Christ, oh, Christ, what
is
that?” from the intercom. Otherwise the computer room was silent. Weightless in her harness, she might almost have been disembodied. Yet none of the rest could conceive how fully she was in and of the universe. Data overflowed her; a gamma ray photon or a magnetic field was as real, as immediate as any sight or touch. Like a person suddenly put in an unknown setting, she turned manifold senses and magnified intellect on her surroundings and sought comprehension.

“Joelle,” Brodersen begged, “have you got some idea of where we’re at?”

“Yes,” replied a minute fraction of her. “A pulsar. I’ll need much more information, of course. Don’t start linear acceleration. It may well be unsafe to leave the neighborhood of the machine. Put us in orbit around it and stand by for further orders.”

“Aye. You hear, everybody? Keep your stations. Prepare to maneuver.” The captain spoke shakenly.

They didn’t need her for the simple task. Navigational instruments and a computer in the command center, operated by Susanne, sufficed. Joelle gave herself back to the cosmos.

Knowledge came slowly, over hours, in that unearthly
environment. She made repeated mistakes, analogous to those made by ordinary humans in a room designed to foster optical illusions. Forces, energies, free atoms and ions and subnuclear particles, were bewilderingly different in configuration and behavior from everything she was used to. The very beam of radiance, narrow, sweeping across night and stars in a blink of time, was hypnotic. The challenge made her undertaking thrice marvelous.

And: in the programs, the data banks, her own memories, was a legacy from Fidelio. Best would have been to have him in linkage with her. But as she began to learn how the information should be employed which he had left for her, she began to feel she would become the equal of the partnership they two had been. In a way, he was still aboard, a ghost within the machine and within her. That gave strength and peace such as nothing and nobody else could have done.

Concept by concept, Joelle built a recognition of what lay around the ship.

Chinook
had come far through the galaxy, in the same spiral arm but thousands of light-years closer to its cloud-veiled core. She had traveled futureward also by some millions of years; where S Doradus had been, in the larger Magellanic Cloud, there was a glowing nebula. The body here had exploded, itself a supernova, but long before she left home—back when dinosaurs walked on Earth, if that statement had any physical meaning.

Rather, a giant sun had burst, strewing most of its substance into space for the nourishment of suns and worlds later to be born. The neutron star was a remnant, two-thirds the mass of Sol. Gravity had collapsed it until the diameter was a bare twenty kilometers. Few atoms existed within it. Instead was an ocean of elementary particles, as close together as quantum mechanics allowed, mercurially interchanging natures with each other, at densities which men could measure but never conceive.

A little of the star’s material, caught up in the monstrous magnetic field which its spin generated, was cast outward through a pair of spirals until the speed approached that of light. Thereupon this matter gave off synchrotron radiation, in thin beams with small dispersion, whose ardor equalled that of an entire Sol. Most was at radio frequencies; the visible light was a tiny fraction of it. Astronomers with suitably tuned and sensitive receivers, on distant planets which happened to lie in the path of the ray, would mark a pulsar blinking.

The Others had built their engine to orbit in a plane normal to those energy torrents, at a distance of about seventy-five million kilometers. Closer, conditions would have been lethal, where infalling gas from space and the star’s own chained violence created a maelstrom of hard radiation. Joelle wondered why the radius vector was not longer, much longer. As was, throughout its 157-day “year” the construct must repeatedly be smitten by a fury that ought to be ruinous to it, that would surely vaporize any ship which chanced to emerge just then.