"Zarth Arn tells me that you have trouble at home."
She brushed it aside. "Nothing of importance. He wants you to tell me to go home, doesn't he?"
"Yes."
"And I will, tomorrow, on one condition." She was close beside him again, the last of the daylight showing her face pale and clear as a cameo in the dusk. "You must come with me."
He looked at her and touched his arm. "I've hurt you," she said softly. "And I didn't mean to, I didn't want to. Can you forgive me?"
"Of course, Lianna."
"Then come with me. A little time, John Gordon-that's all I need."
"All right," he said. "I'll come." I'll come, he thought fiercely, and if I have to woo and win you all over again, I'll do it so good and damn well that you'll forget there was ever a time when I looked like somebody else.
3
The royal star-cruiser with the White Sun of Fomalhaut glittering on her bows lifted from the star port, beyond which lay the greatest city of latter-day Earth. It was a city of wide space and lifting beauty. Flared and fluted pylons towered at the intersections of the grid of roadways. Down through the yellow sunshine flocked the local Terran flyers, skimming like birds to roost on the pylons' landing pads. It was not like the cities that Gordon remembered.
The starship left all this behind and plunged back into her true element, the glooming tideless seas of space that run so deep between the island suns. The yellow spark of Sol, and the old green planet from which the human race had spread through a universe, dropped back into obscurity. Now once more the ranked stars shone before Gordon, in all their naked splendor. No wonder, he thought, that he had been smothered by the cramped horizons of twentieth-century Earth, after having once seen this magnificence.
Across the broad loom of the galaxy, the nations of the star-kings were marked in many-colored fire, crimson and gold and emerald green, blue and violet and diamond white... the kingdoms of Lyra, Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Polaris, and the capital of the great Mid-Galactic Empire at Canopus. The Hercules Cluster blazed with its baronies of swarming suns. To the south, as the cruiser beat westward toward Fomalhaut, the Orion Nebula sprawled its coiling radiance across the firmament. Far northward lay the black blot of the Cloud, where drowned Thallarna lay now in peace.
Once, as the cruiser altered course to skirt a dangerous bank of stellar drift, Gordon caught sight of the Magellanic Clouds, the as yet unknown and unexplored star-clouds lying like offshore islands in the inter-galactic gulf. He remembered that there had once been an invasion of the alien Magellanians into the then-young Empire, an invasion crushed for all time by an ancestor of Zarth Arn's who had for the first time used that terrible secret weapon of the Empire, the thing called the Disrupter.
Gordon thought of Keogh and his detailed psychological explanation of what he had called "the Disrupter fantasy." He smiled, shaking his head. A pity Keogh was not here with him. Keogh could explain the cruiser as a womb symbol, and he could explain Lianna as the unattainable dream-girl, and Gordon's romance with her wish fulfillment. But he wondered just how Keogh would explain Korkhann, Lianna's Minister of Nonhuman Affairs.
His first meeting with Korkhann, which took place the night before take-off, had been a shock to Gordon. He had known that there were nonhuman citizens in the kingdoms of the stars, and he had even seen a few of them, briefly and more or less distantly, but this was the first time he had actually encountered one face to face.
Korkhann was a native of Krens, a star-system on the far borders of Fomalhaut Kingdom. From it, Korkhann said, one might look out across the vast wilderness of the Marches of Outer Space, as though perched precariously on the last thin edge of civilization.
"The counts of the Marches," Zarth Arn had explained to Gordon, "are allied to the Empire, as you remember. But they're a wild lot, and apparently determined to remain that way. They say their oath of fealty did not include opening their borders to Empire ships, and they refuse to do so. My brother often feels that we might be better off to have the counts as enemies rather than friends."
"Their time will come," Korkhann said. "Just now, my immediate problems are closer to home." And he had bent his severe yellow gaze upon Lianna, who reached out and placed her hand affectionately on his sleek gray plumes.
"I have been a trial to you," she said, and turned to Gordon. "Korkhann came here with me and he has been in touch with Fomalhaut almost constantly by stero communicator, doing his best to deal with affairs at long distance."
And Korkhann turned his round unwinking eyes and his beaked nose to Gordon and said in his harsh whistling voice, "I'm glad you have been safely delivered here at last, John Gordon, while Her Highness still has a kingdom to go back to."
Lianna had made light of that, and Gordon had been still distracted by this sudden confrontation with a five-foot-high creature who walked erect, clothed in pride and his own beautiful feathers, who spoke the English-derived language of the Empire, and who gestured gracefully with the long clawed fingers that terminated his flightless wings. But now, on the voyage, Gordon remembered.
They were alone, the three of them, in the cruiser's small but lavishly fitted lounge, and Gordon had been looking forward to the hour when Korkhann would finish his impossibly complicated chess game with Lianna and retire to his own cabin. He sat pretending to scan a tape from the cruiser's library, covertly watching Lianna as she bent her head over the board, thinking how beautiful she was and then glancing at Korkhann and trying to stifle the inner qualm of revulsion he had been fighting ever since that first meeting. And suddenly he said, "Korkhann..."
The long slim head turned, making the neck-plumage shift and shine in the lamplight. "Yes?"
"Korkhann, what did you mean when you said you were glad I had come while Lianna still had a kingdom to go back to?"
Lianna said impatiently, "There's no need to go into all that now. Korkhann is a loyal friend and a devoted minister, but he worries too..."
"Highness," said Korkhann gently. "We have never had even small falsehoods between us, and this would be a bad time to begin. You worry Just as much as I do about Narath Teyn, but because of another matter you have set aside that worry, and in order to salve your conscience you must deny that there is anything to worry about."
Gordon thought, 'He sounds exactly like Keogh.' And he waited for the explosion.
Lianna's mouth set and her eyes were stormy. She rose, looking imperious in a way that Gordon remembered, but Korkhann continued to sit and bear her angry gaze quietly. Abruptly she turned away.
"You make me furious," she said, "so what you say is probably true. Very well, then. Tell him."
"Who," asked Gordon, "is Narath Teyn?"
"Lianna's cousin," Korkhann said. "He is also the presumptive heir to the crown of Fomalhaut."
"But I thought Lianna..."
"Is the legal and undoubted ruler. Yes. But there must always be a next in succession. How much do you know about the kingdom, John Gordon?"
He indicated the tape. "I've been studying, but I haven't had time to learn too much." He frowned at Korkhann. "I could wonder why this would concern the Minister of Nonhuman Affairs."
Korkhann nodded and rose from the forgotten chess game. "I can show you." He dimmed the lights and touched a wall stud. A panel slid back, revealing a three-dimensional map of Fomalhaut Kingdom, a spatter of tiny suns in the simulated blackness of space, dominated by the white star that gives the area its name.
"There are many nonhuman races in the galaxy," Korkhann said. "Some are intelligent and civilized, some are brutish, some are making the change from the one to the other, some probably never will. In the early days there were some unfortunate confrontations, not without reason on both sides. You find me repellent..."