“I haven’t decided yet.”
It fell silent. Air currents flowed, grew cooler. It withdrew from him. Something long, and lithe, rose into the night. The moon, visible through a break in the trees, seemed to lose some of its clarity. It was as if a mist drifted in front of it. The mist drifted out over the river. It was graceful and sinuous, and, as Arnold watched, it rose into a living fountain. It swirled away across the dark water and reformed on the opposite shore.
“Traveler,” he called. “Don’t leave.” He tried to get up, but the pain in his ankle pierced him again and he cried out. The lights eddied around him, and closed in an ethereal embrace. In that moment, on the shoreline, among the narrow screen of box elders and bushes, its sweet warm breath played over him, and it clung to him.
She clung to him. Arnold assigned it a new gender.
“I will not forget you,” he said.
“Nor I you.”
“Will you come back?”
The wind moved around him. “It’s unlikely, Arnold.”
“Ships in the night.”
“Please explain.”
“Linda could probably handle it better. People who meet, become emotionally entangled, and pass on. Nothing happens.”
“I would like to think we have done better.”
Cars were coming. Brakes screeched and doors slammed. He heard a siren.
“Traveler—”
“Yes?”
“Thanks.”
“You, too.” The air pressure began to lessen. “One other thing you should know. You succeeded with Linda on your own. I did not intervene.” He felt her withdraw, felt the warm currents turn cool. Felt the pain return to his ankle.
“Traveler?” He did not know whether she could hear him any longer. “I love you.”
The trees swayed. Along the path, he could see the lights of the rescue party.
By the end of the week, a wind chime had appeared outside Arnold’s bedroom window. It was a magnificent wind chime, whose flight of pewter eagles collided musically with each other and with an ivy-encrusted pewter arch. Late-evening strollers along Bannister Avenue often paused to listen to the exquisite notes blown across the rooftops.
Years later, when Arnold and Linda and their family moved from Fort Moxie to open a hardware discount house in Fargo, he took the wind chime with him.
THE PEGASUS PROJECT
I was sitting on the porch of the End Times Hotel with Abe Willis when the message from Harlow came in: Ronda, we might have aliens. Seriously. We picked up a radio transmission yesterday from the Sigmund Cluster. It tracks to ISKR221/722. A yellow dwarf, 7,000 light-years out. We haven’t been able to break it down, but it’s clearly artificial. You’re closer to the Cluster than anybody else by a considerable distance. Please take a look. If it turns out to be what we’re hoping, try not to let them know you’re there. Good luck. And by the way, keep this to yourself.
“What is it?” asked Abe.
“Aliens.”
He laughed. “Okay. I understand you don’t want to tell me.” The black hole was setting behind the mountains. “People are going to love this place. How long can you give me?”
We were munching pizza. The sun was on the other side of the sky, floating serenely above the ocean. “Eleven years,” I said.
Abe was one of those guys who never got a response he liked. Eleven years had to be better than anything he’d expected. Nevertheless he scratched his cheek and looked into his beer as if I’d surprised him with news that would shut down his project. “Last week you were saying fifteen.”
“Last week I was saying how much time you’d have before this place gets swallowed. But you don’t want to be here during the last few years. There’ll be quakes and incoming rocks and God knows what else. You should be safe for eleven. If you want to argue with me, I can cut it back to ten.”
“No. Please, Ronda. I wasn’t trying to create a problem.”
“We don’t want anybody getting killed, Abe. I can’t certify you beyond that point.”
“Of course. I understand.” He showed me a sad smile. Poor guy never got a break. “We can live with it.” Somehow the limits imposed by the black hole had become my fault.
I stared at him. “When are you going to install the other hotels?”
“By Friday. Reservation requests are already an avalanche.” He gives me another smile and suddenly we were living in a happy world again. Abe was a planner for Interstellar Odysseys, which provided deep space vacations for people who were seriously interested in getting away from routine visits to sea shores, gambling casinos, and planetary ring systems. The planet, which had been named Harmony by someone with a serious sense of humor, had vast mountain ranges, wide sweeping plains, and broad oceans. It looked beautiful. “I wish,” Abe continued, “that the sun wasn’t going to come apart so quickly. I’m glad we’ll get to see it, but it would have been helpful if we’d been able to keep the cheerful skies a bit longer.”
The K-class sun had three years left.
The black hole was KR-61, the only one within reasonable range that was currently doing some damage.
I’d been assigned to certify the project as safe. That had meant spending several weeks in the area, measuring orbits and trajectories of thousands of objects to determine whether a vacation site on Harmony would be in any immediate danger. The fact that the planet itself was doomed, Abe had explained, increased the interest. They’d already begun the commercial pitch. ‘Everybody wants to come to Harmony.’
We finished the pizza and the beer, signed the documents, and shook hands. “Thanks, Ronda,” he said. “Have a pleasant trip home. And say hello to Aiko for me.” Aiko was my pilot. “If you’d like to come back for a few days, we’d love to have you. No charge. Just give me a call.”
I told him I wasn’t much of a black hole person, and retreated to the launch area. Aiko was waiting beside the lander. “You read the message?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We going to follow up?”
I climbed inside. “He doesn’t give us much choice.”
“It’s a waste of time.” Aiko got in behind me. She was only on her second mission but no one would ever accuse her of being reticent. Technically, on board, she was in charge, and her tone tended to change as she closed the hatch. “There’s nothing out there.” She was attractive, with black hair, blue eyes and animated features, with better things to do than charge around the galaxy on bogus missions.
“Hello, Ronda,” said Bryan. He was our ship’s AI.
“Hi, Bryan. How you doing?”
“To be honest, I’ll be happy to get away from here. I don’t like black holes.”
“I assume,” said Aiko, “that Abe’s happy with the results.”
“He’s fine. He’s complaining, but it couldn’t have worked out better.”
“Why’s that?”
“Having the catastrophe more or less imminent increases the sales value. If the end of the world is too far away, people lose interest. He’s pretending to be unhappy that he didn’t have more time, but actually he’s fine with it.”
The overhead opened. Aiko sat down in the cockpit and we lifted off. A light breeze was blowing in across the ocean. Take the black hole out of the equation and add some native life and some engineering and Harmony could be converted into a garden world.
We rose through a clear sky. Below, the dome enclosing the hotel gleamed in the sunlight. The other units would be installed in the same general area, one on a mountaintop, the other on the edge of the ocean.