The monitors showed the sky a deeper blue-purple than it looked even aboard the Concorde. As Irv watched, stars began coming out. “Seventy thousand feet,” Louise said.
“And Mach two,” Emmett echoed. “Still doesn’t fly like a Phantom, but we’re haulin’.” He flicked switches. The turbines’ roar died, to be replaced by a high, fierce whine. “Ramjet running.”
“Readings within parameters,” Louise said. Now the monitors that looked up and ahead showed starflecked black; below, the Minervan surface looked more as it did in orbital photos than as if from a plane. The engine noise changed again, a little. “Computer adjusting ramjet opening for optimum combustion,” Louise reported.
“Pretty soon it can adjust till it turns blue and there still won’t be any oxygen out there to bum,” Emmett grunted.
“Two hundred twenty thousand feet,” Louise said, which was a more prosaic way of announcing the same thing. “Two hundred thirty thousand…, two hundred forty thousand… commencing inboard rocket ignition sequence.” “Go for it, hon,” Emmett agreed.
Irv didn’t see Louise press the button. He just felt as though something kicked him in the ass even harder than he had been kicking himself lately. “Aren’t you supposed to count down first.’?” he wheezed indignantly. He couldn’t see the gorilla lying on his chest, but it was doing its damnedest to cave in his ribs.
In spite of acceleration, Emmett Bragg’s voice never wavered. Irv remembered resenting the mission commander for that when they landed on Minerva. He tried not to listen. Then Emmett exclaimed, “Orbital velocity achieved!”
The inboard rockets died. Suddenly Irv weighed nothing at all. After that imaginary gorilla, he should have felt wonderful. Instead he gulped and swallowed spit-his stomach was certainly weightless.
“I have the external rocket pack on radar, bearing zero-zero two degrees, range twenty-seven miles and closing,” Louise announced. “Nice burn, Emmett.”
“Thanks, hon. Commencing docking maneuver. People, it’s official-we’re on our way home.”
“Wonderful,” Irv said. “Anybody have a Dramamine?”
“Right here.” Sarah handed him one.
He swallowed it dry-she had pills handy, but no water. After a while, his stomach decided it was under control after all. By then, the big bells of the orbiting rocket motors half-filled the VIEW FORWARD screen. “Home,” Irv breathed, and started to believe it.
“It moves!” Lamra exclaimed through thunder as the flying house-walked through the fields. She hung on tight to her toy runnerpest. The din was terrifying, but somehow she was not terrified, maybe because she was too interested in what the flying house was doing.
“It goes up!” This time she could hear the disbelief in her voice. “And up and up and up!” Her eyestalks followed the flying house as it turned and dwindled in the sky. The roar dwindled, too. The long, thin white cloud the flying house left behind began to fray and blow apart, just like any other cloud.
“I saw it come down before.” Reatur spoke louder than he needed to; Lamra supposed he was partly deafened, too, as she was. “I suppose I always thought that meant it could also go up again, but seeing it is a lot more impressive.”
“I never saw it come down. I was still cooped up in the mates’ quarters,” Lamra said, a little indignantly. She thought back. “But I remember the noise! Nobody knew what it was. We all thought the castle was falling down.”
“So did I, little one, so did I.” Reatur turned a couple of eyestalks from the daytime star that was all that was left of the flying house to Lamra. “That would have been a little while after I planted your buds on you.”
“So it would, Reatur,” she agreed, consciously imitating his turn of phrase. She looked down at herself. She still didn’t look the way other mates did, but the bud bulges were hardly bulges any more, and the scars that showed where the raw edges of skin had healed together were only light-colored ridges above her feet.
“All your budlings are doing well, I’m told,” Reatur said. “Good,” she answered indifferently. She still did not care a lot about budlings. Seeing how grown males behaved was much more interesting: that was how she wanted to learn to act.
When Reatur spoke again, he sounded oddly diffident. “Do you think you would be interested in bearing another set of budlings?”
She started to answer, then stopped. One thing grown males sometimes did, she had noticed, was to think before they spoke instead of saying the first thing that popped into their minds. “I don’t know,” she answered at last. “Do you think you would be able to keep me from ending, the way the humans did?”
“I hope so. I think so,” the domain master said. “We’ll have had a lot of practice by the time your budlings would be ready to drop.”
“That’s true,” Lamra said. “Maybe we’ll have more clamps by then, too. Do you think we could find some springy wood, say, that we can carve new ones out of?” She didn’t know if there was any such wood, but the outside world, she was finding, had all sorts of things in it that she didn’t know about.
“Maybe,” Reatur said. “I’ve thought about that, too. Sooner or later, I guess we will need to see if we can make our own. Why don’t you take a clamp and show it to one of our carvers?”
“Me?” Lamra squeaked in alarm. “He wouldn’t listen to me!”
“To whom would he be more likely to listen than to the only mate in all the world who dropped her budlings but lived?”
“Well-“ She hadn’t thought about it like that. “All right, Reatur, I will.” “Good.”
Lamra came back to the question Reatur had asked before. She had hardly thought about budding at all since Reatur planted these last six on her; she certainly hadn’t thought about it since she had dropped them. But now, reminded, she recalled the way her body had driven her toward it. She searched herself for that same feeling.
She did not expect to find it. But she did-not with the urgency she had had before, perhaps, but with enough to be partial to the idea. “I suppose we can make budlings again,” she said. “From what I remember, it was fun.”
Reatur’s eyestalks wiggled. “For me, too, Lamra.”
“Well, then, let’s go find someplace quiet and do it,” she said, brisk once her mind was made up.
“Now?” Reatur sounded startled. Then he laughed some more. “Why not? There have to be a good many rooms in the castle that don’t have anyone in them right now. Shall we find one?” They walked back together.
Afterward, the domain master was not laughing at all. He widened himself to Lamra. “What’s that for?” she demanded; she was still uneasy whenever he did it.
“Because over the years, I’ve planted buds on many eighteens of mates, probably more, and I’ve never felt sensations as strong as I just did with you.” He mimed tying his eyestalks into knots.
“Oh.” Lamra thought about that. “I was only remembering what! liked last time and trying to do more of that now.”
It was Reatur’s turn to say, “Oh.” Then he asked, “Do you suppose it will be better still after you’re healed from your next set of budlings?”
“I don’t know,” she said, flustered. That was further ahead than she’d thought.
Reatur was not listening to her, anyhow. He said dreamily, “Human males and mates both live to grow up all the time. What must planting buds be like for them, with so much practice on both sides?”
“When they come back, why don’t you ask them?” Lamra said.
“If I live until they come back, I will. And if I don’t live that long”-he looked at her with four eyes, “maybe you’ll ask them yourself.”
She thought it over. “Maybe I will,” she said.