But now it was “time” and the space ship was sent out.
Inside it were eleven men and women, along with a few other, very different living things.
These were not exactly passengers. “Fittings” was a better word. Since they had long since lost any awareness of language, or even of self, words did not concern them.
Centuries ago, other human beings had lalumphed across the Moon in clumsy space-suits, radioing congratulatory messages back to Earth like happy tourists. In the two hundred years and more since human beings had last been able to get into space under their own power, many hundreds of humans (and others) had visited the satellite. None of those had been tourists, either. They had done just what the present batch did.
They restarted the nuclear fires which turned the Moon into an almost-star. To do this was quite difficult, even with the machines and instruments that had accompanied them from the binary planet. Among other things, it was necessary for them to die.
Even for the instruments of the Pyramids, kindling a nuclear fire on the surface of the Moon was not easy. There was really nothing there to burn. The Moon was made out of rock and dust—and now of slag as well; its elements were not the kind that would readily fission or fuse. But when the devices of the Pyramids had sufficiently taken-apart-and-shoved, neutrons crowded protons out of cores, nuclei crumbled, energy was released. Enough energy so that the new Sun would burn for five years or so before it needed relighting.
So the space ship touched down, briefly, on a hillock on the Moon that was no longer burning, but only intolerably hot.
The space ship deposited a detachable capsule containing the eleven human beings (and others) and the necessary machinery for taking apart and shoving. Then the space ship quickly departed, to avoid what would follow.
Where the capsule touched the hot slag, heat flowed in. The human beings did not notice. They were only aware that their tasks must be performed very quickly now.
They performed them, racing against the mounting heat that would soon cook them to a point where they could no longer function; and the New Sun was re-created.
A point of new flame appeared on the sunlet’s surface. The eleven human beings had time to scream briefly before they died. Then the point of flame went from cherry through orange into blue-white, and began to spread.
At the moment of the Re-Creation of the Sun there was general rejoicing on the Earth. Wherever people survived, in shadowy remnants of cities called Khartoum and Chicago and Beijing, the Citizens smiled with controlled joy at the sky.
Not quite everywhere, though. In Wheeling’s House of the Five Regulations, Glenn Tropile waited unquietly for death. Citizen Boyne, who had run amok and slaughtered the baker, shared Tropile’s room and his doom, but not his rage. Boyne with demure pleasure was composing his death poem.
“Talk to me!” snapped Tropile. “Why are we here? What did you do, and why did you do it? What have I done? Why don’t I pick up a bench and kill you with it? You would’ve killed me two hours ago if I’d caught your eye!”
There was no satisfaction in Citizen Boyne. The passions were burned out of him; he politely tendered Trophile a famous aphorism: “Citizen, the art of living is the substitution of unimportant, answerable questions for important, unanswerable ones. Come, let us appreciate the new-born Sun.”
He turned to the window, where the spark of blue-white flame in what had once been the crater of Tycho was beginning to spread across the charred moon.
Tropile was child enough of his culture to turn with him almost involuntarily. He was silent. That blue-white infinitesimal up there growing slowly—the one-ness, the calm rapture of Being in a universe that you shaded into without harsh discontinua, the being one with the great blue-white gem-flower blossoming now in the heavens that were no different stuff than you yourself—
He closed his eyes, calm, and meditated on connectivity.
He was being Good.
By the time the fusion reaction had covered the whole small disk of the sunlet, a quarter-hour at the most, his meditation began to wear off, as it generally did for Glenn Tropile. That was good, he thought, as it seemed to exempt him from the worrisome possibility of Translation. He had no desire simply one day to disappear.
All the same, he sometimes felt just a touch of regret.
Tropile shrugged out of his torn parka, not bothering to rip it further. It was already growing warm in the room. Citizen Boyne, of course, was carefully opening every seam with graceful rending motions, miming great smooth effort of the biceps and trapezius.
But the meditation was over, and as Tropile watched his cellmate he screamed a silent Why? Since his adolescence that wailing syllable had seldom been far from his mind. It could be silenced by appreciation and meditation. Tropile was so good at his specialty of Water Watching that several beginners had asked him for instruction in the subtle art, for all his notorious oddities of life and manner. He enjoyed Water Watching. He almost pitied anybody so single-mindedly devoted to, say, Clouds and Odors—great games though they were—that he had never even tried Water Watching. And after a session of Watching, when one was lucky enough to observe the Nine Boiling Stages in classic perfection, one might slip into meditation and be harmonious, feel Good.
But what did one do when the meditations failed—as they had failed him? What did one do when they came farther and farther apart, became less and less intense, could be inspired, finally, only by a huge event like the renewal of the Sun?
One went amok, he had always thought.
But he had not; Boyne had. He had been declared a Son of the Wolf, on no evidence that he could understand. But he had not run amok.
Still the penalties were the same, he thought, uncomfortably aware of an unfamiliar itch—not the inward intolerable itch of needing-the-advantage, but a realized sensation at the base of his spine. The penalties for all gross crimes—Wolfhood or running amok—were the same, and simply this: They would perform the Lumbar Puncture. He would make the Donation of Fluid. He would be dead.
The Keeper of the House of the Five Regulations, an old man, Citizen Harmane, looked in on his charges—approvingly at Boyne,. with a beclouded expression at Glenn Tropile. It was thought that even Wolves were entitled to the common human decencies in the brief interval between exposure and the Donation of Fluid. The Keeper would not have dreamed of scowling at the detected Wolf or of interfering with whatever wretched imitation of meditation-before-dying the creature might practice. But he could not, all the same, bring himself to offer even an assurance-of-identity gesture.
Tropile had no such qualms.
He scowled at Keeper Harmane with such ferocity that the old man almost ran away. Tropile turned an almost equally ugly scowl upon Citizen Boyne. How dared that knife-murderer be so calm, so relaxed!
Tropile said brutally: “They’ll kill us! You know that? They’ll stick a needle in our spines and drain us dry. It hurts. Do you understand me? They’re going to drain us, and then they’re going to drink our spinal fluid, and it’s going to hurt.”