The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.
My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.
I knew then that we were in for something.
I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen's at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another, I sent straight up, skywards, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.
I entered the Mayor's outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist, and glanced at the inner door.
"Mayor in?" I asked.
I got an occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy, but well-rounded girl of indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this wasn't one of the occasions.
"Yes," she said, returning to the papers on her desk.
"Alone?"
She nodded, and her earrings danced. Dark eyes and dark complexion, she could have been kind of sharp, if only she'd fix her hair and use more makeup. Well...
I crossed to the door and knocked.
"Who?" asked the Mayor.
"Me," I said, opening it, "Godfrey Justin Holmes--`God' for short. I want someone to drink coffee with, and you're elected."
She turned in her swivel chair, away from the window she had been studying, and her blonde-hair-white-hair-fused, short and parted in the middle, gave a little stir as she turned--like a sunshot snowdrift struck by sudden winds.
She smiled and said, "I'm busy."
`Eyes green, chin small, cute little ears--I love them all'--from an anonymous Valentine I'd sent her two months previous, and true.
"...But not too busy to have coffee with God," she stated. "Have a throne, and I'll make us some instant."
I did, and she did.
While she was doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I'd borrowed from her canister, and remarked, "Looks like rain."
"Uh-huh," she said.
"Not just making conversation," I told her. "There's a bad storm brewing somewhere--over Saint Stephen's, I think. I'll know real soon."
"Yes grandfather," she said, bringing me my coffee. "You old timers with all your aches and pains are often better than Weather Central, it's an established fact. I won't argue."
She smiled, frowned, then smiled again.
I set my cup on the edge of her desk.
"Just wait and see," I said. "If it makes it over the mountains, it'll be a nasty high-voltage job. It's already jazzing up reception."
Big-bowed white blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure. She'd be forty in the fall, but she'd never completely tamed her facial reflexes--which was most engaging, so far as I was concerned. Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon. I could see the sort of child she'd been by looking at her, listening to her now. The thought of being forty was bothering her again, too, I could tell. She always kids me about age when age is bothering her.
See, I'm around thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior by a bit, but she'd heard her grandfather speak of me when she was a kid, before I came back again this last time. I'd filled out the balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta's first mayor, Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born about five hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five hundred sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts between the stars. I've made a few more trips than a few others; consequently, I am an anachronism. I am really, of course, only as old as I look--but still, people always seem to feel that I've cheated somehow, especially women in their middle years. Sometimes it is most disconcerting...
"Eleanor," said I, "your term will be up in November. Are you still thinking of running again?"
She took off her narrow, elegantly-trimmed glasses and brushed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.
"I haven't made up my mind."
"I ask not for press-release purposes," I said, "but for my own."
"Really, I haven't decided," she told me. "I don't know..."
"Okay, just checking. Let me know if you do."
I drank some coffee.
After a time, she said, "Dinner Saturday? As usual?"
"Yes, good."
"I'll tell you then."
"Fine--capital."
As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both.
She smiled at whatever it was she finally saw.
"A bad storm?" she asked me.
"Yep. Feel it in my bones."
"Tell it to go away?"
"Tried. Don't think it will, though."
"Better batten some hatches, then."
"It wouldn't hurt and it might help."
"The weather satellite will be overhead in another half hour. You'll have something sooner?"
"Think so. Probably any minute."
I finished my coffee, washed out the cup.
"Let me know right away what it is."
"Check. Thanks for the coffee."
Lottie was still working and did not look up as I passed.
Upstairs again, my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its tail and collected a view of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint Stephen's. The mountain range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a rocky shoreline. Beyond it, the waters were troubled.
My other eye was almost in position. I waited the space of half a cigarette, then it delivered me a sight:
Gray, and wet and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside, that's what I saw.
...And advancing.
I called Eleanor.
"It's gonna rain, chillun," I said.
"Worth some sandbags?"
"Possibly."
"Better be ready then. Okay. Thanks."
I returned to my watching.
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan--delightful name. It refers to both the planet and its sole continent.
How to describe the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size; actually, a bit smaller, and more watery. --As for the main landmass, first hold a mirror up to South America, to get the big bump from the right side over to the left, then rotate it ninety degrees in a counter-clockwise direction and push it up into the northern hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull. Stretch it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the middle as you do, and let the last five or six hundred fall across the equator. There you have Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics, partly not. Just for the sake of thoroughness, while you're about it, break Australia into eight pieces and drop them after the first eight letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each pole, and don't forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before you leave. Thanks.
I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen's until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven's artillery. But then there are the bad ones--sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.