“Because what?”
“Look ahead.”
There was a point of light, far ahead, beyond Spinner’s cage: a point that ballooned, now, exploding at her face -
Saturn, plummeting out of emptiness at her.
Louise cried out and buried her face in her hands.
“Because,” Spinner said softly, “we’re there. I thought you’d enjoy watching our arrival.”
Louise opened her fingers, cautiously.
Steady, orange-brown light shone into her cabin: the light of a planet, illuminated by the bloated body of its Sun.
Spinner was laughing softly.
Louise said slowly, “Spinner — if this is Saturn — where are the rings?”
“Rings? What rings?”
The planet itself was the same swollen mass of hydrogen and helium, with its core of rock twenty times as massive as Earth intact, deep within it. Elaborate cloud systems still wound around the globe, like watercolor streaks of brown and gold, just as she remembered. And the largest moon, Titan, was still there.
But the rings had gone.
Louise hurried to her data desk.
“…Louise? Are you all right?”
From the surface of the city-world of Titan, the rings had been a line of light, geometrically precise, vivid against the autumn gold of Saturn…
Louise made herself reply. “I think I’m mourning the rings, Spinner. They were the most beautiful sight in the Solar System. Who would smash up such harmless, magnificent beauty? And, damn it, they were ours.”
“But,” said Spinner, “there is a ring here. I can see it. Look…”
Following Spinner’s directions, Louise studied her data desk.
The ring showed up as a faint band across the stars, a shadow against the swollen, imperturbable bulk of the planet itself.
Once, three ice moons had circled outside the orbit of Titan: Iapetus, Hyperion and retrograde Phoebe. All that was left of those three moons was this trail of rubble. Thin, colorless, with no evidence of structure, the ring of ice chunks, glowing red in the light of the dying Sun, circled the planet at about sixty planetary radii, a pale ghost of its glorious predecessor.
And where were the other moons?
Louise paged through her data desk. Once, Saturn had had seventeen satellites. Now — as far as she could tell from their orbits — only Titan and Enceladus remained. And there wasn’t much left of Enceladus at all; the little moon still swung through an orbit around four planetary radii from Saturn, but its path was much more elliptical than before. Its surface — always broken, uneven — had been left as rubble. There was no sign of the small human outposts which had once sparkled against the shadows of its curved ridges and cratered plains.
The rest of the moons — even the harmless, ten-mile-wide islands of water ice had gone.
Louise remembered the ancient, beautiful names. Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus… Names almost as old, now, as the myths from which they had been taken; names which had outlived the objects to which they’d been assigned.
“Louise?”
“I’m sorry, Spinner.”
“Still mourning?”
…Janus, Mimas, Tethys, Telesto…
“Yes.”
“I guess somebody has to.”
“Spinner, what happened here?”
“A battle,” Spinner said quietly. “Obviously.”
Calypso, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe…
The nightfighter spread its hundred-mile wings, eclipsing the debris of the shattered moons.
Milpitas sat in his office. From throughout the Temple, there were the sounds of shouting, of screams, of yelled words too indistinct for him to hear.
The shouting seemed to be coming closer.
He cleared his magnetized desk top, putting his paper, pens, data slates away into drawers. He folded his hands and held them over the desk.
The door to his office was opened.
The renegade from — outside — hovered there in the air. He was almost horizontal from Milpitas’ point of view: as if he were defying the Planner to fit him into his orderly, gravity-structured Universe.
The renegade spread his empty hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“I know you,” Milpitas said slowly.
“Perhaps you do.” The renegade was tall, quite well-muscled; he wore a practical coverall equipped with a dozen pockets which were crammed with unidentifiable tools. He wore his hair short, but not shaven-clean; his look was confident, even excited. Milpitas tried to imagine this man without the hair — and with a little less of that damnable confidence, too — in standard, drab Superet coveralls, and with a more appropriate posture: stooped shoulders, perhaps, hands folded before him…
“My name’s Morrow. You had a certain amount of — trouble — with me.” The renegade glanced around at the office, as if recalling some sour experience. “I was in here several times, as you tried to explain to me how wrong I was in my thinking…”
“Morrow. You disappeared.”
Morrow frowned. “No. No, I didn’t disappear. Milpitas, you sound like a child who believes that as soon as an object is out of sight, it no longer exists…”
Milpitas smiled. “What do you know of children?”
“Now, a lot,” Morrow said. He smiled, in turn, quite in control. “I didn’t disappear, Milpitas. I went somewhere else. I’ve done extraordinary things, Planner — seen wonderful sights.”
Milpitas folded his hands and settled back in his chair. “How did you get in?”
“Past your sentries?” Morrow smiled. “We came in from above. It took seconds, and we were quite silent. Your sentries were positioned to watch for an approach across the Deck; they didn’t imagine anyone would come in over their heads. They didn’t even know we were in the building, before we took them out.”
“Took them out’?”
“They’re unconscious,” Morrow said. “The forest people use a certain type of frog sweat, which… well, never mind. The sentries are unharmed.”
Milpitas tried to think of something to say — some words with which he could regain control of the situation. He felt a rising panic; suddenly, his orders had failed to be executed. He felt as if he were at the heart of some immense, dying machine, poking at buttons and levers which were no longer linked to anything.
Morrow’s voice was gentle. “It’s over. I know you believe what you’re doing is right, for the people. But this is for the best, Milpitas. More deaths would have been — inexcusable. You see that, don’t you?”
“And the mission?” Milpitas asked bitterly. “The goals of Superet? What of that?”
“That’s not over,” Morrow said. “Come back with me, Milpitas. There are remarkable things out there. The mission is still alive… I want you to help me — help us — achieve it.”
Milpitas closed his eyes again; suddenly he felt immensely old, as if the energy which had sustained him for the best part of a thousand years were suddenly drained away.
“I don’t know if I can,” he said honestly. Someone, in the depths of the Temple, stilled the klaxon at last; the final, chilling echoes of its wail rattled from the close, claustrophobic metal sky.
20
The pod slid, smooth and silent, down toward Titan.
Louise clutched at her seat. The hull was quite transparent, so that it felt as if she — swathed in her environment suit, with a catheter jammed awkwardly inside her — were suspended helplessly above the pale brown clouds of Titan.