He turned angrily on his side, tried to shut her from his mind. She can
go to hell, he thought--
But she didn’t. She went to New America, instead. He accosted her
on a sunny avenue in Little Chicago and they turned, hand in hand,
down a narrow street lined with transplanted maples. The season was
spring, and the warm air had activated the thermostatically controlled
Hi-Fi’s hidden in the foliage, and the air was filled with the singing
of robins. After a while they came to a shaded walk that wound up to
a secluded cottage, and they walked through scented coolness to the
door. He noticed, then, that all the while they’d been walking, she’d
been wearing nothing but a towel; and it must have been raining, too,
despite the sunshine, for her shoulders were glistening with raindrops,
and raindrops twinkled on her long, tanned legs--
He was sitting up on the couch. He was sweating. “I’ll be damned!” he
said. There was a persistent bell-like sound in his ears, and presently
he recognized it as the beeping of the communicator. He got up, then,
and went into the control room and picked up the neatly typed message
which the receiver had emitted:
_From: Port Authority, WineWomenandSong, Thais_
_To: Nathaniel Cross, Pandora_
_A Priori disturbance reported building up in path of your
reality-flow. Emerge into normal space at once and await further
instructions. Acknowledge._
Cross stared at the words. Was the Lady Berenice clairvoyant? Had she
_known_ there was going to be a storm?
He hurried toward the control panel. Suddenly he thought of the towel
again, the towel and the deliberate shower. He tried to tell himself
that there was nothing unethical in a lady of the stars trying to
work off her passage, but it didn’t do any good, and his anger kept
intensifying till it superseded his common sense, till it transformed
him from a seasoned pilot into a frustrated schoolboy. The control
panel simply hadn’t been designed to be operated by a frustrated
schoolboy, and when his fingers sought to punch out the pattern that
would snap the _Pandora_ back into normal space, they punched, instead,
a set of symbols sufficiently unintelligible to activate the alarm.
The alarm performed a two-fold function: it alerted authorized persons
and, at the same time, it temporarily incapacitated the particular
unauthorized person who had triggered it. Cross staggered back against
the bulkhead, his fingers tingling from the automatic shock, his body
going numb. He slid slowly to the deck, still conscious but unable to
move his limbs.
The first wave of the storm struck, and the ship began to shimmer.
Lying there, watching the room dissolve around him, he experienced a
strange interval of detachment, and he wondered curiously how much he
really knew about himself: whether the outrageous mistake he had just
made had been the result of his anger, or whether his anger had merely
been a trumped-up excuse for making the mistake; whether the entire
action had not resulted from a masochistic desire to participate in the
Lady Berenice’s past....
* * * * *
The tree was much taller than he had thought, and he wished now that
he hadn’t been in such a hurry to join the club. He had swum the river
all right, and he had gone through Devil’s Cave without flinching. But
you could conquer your fear of water. You could conquer your fear of
darkness--
Height was something different.
He shinnied a little higher on the trunk, gazed yearningly up to the
last fork, where the highest limb began its graceful journey into the
summer sky. He heard the taunts of the other boys from the meadow
below. They did not think he could make it. In a way, they didn’t want
him to make it. If he made it, they wouldn’t have anyone to pick on
till another new boy moved to town.
Well, he’d show them!
He shinnied furiously for several seconds, then paused again. He was
tired, and his chest hurt. His shins smarted from repeated scraping
against the trunk.
He looked up at the fork again. It was quite close now, perhaps close
enough. He reached up with one arm, managed to wrap it around the
larger of the two limbs. After a moment he reinforced his hold with
his other arm. He started to pull his body upward, shinnying with his
legs. For a while he thought he was going to make it, then his left arm
cramped and his right, unable to support his weight, began to slip.
He screamed as he started to fall, but in his desperation he managed to
transfer his good arm back to the trunk and keep his legs in position,
so that he didn’t really fall, he slid, instead, down the trunk to
the limb he had left a short time before. He glimpsed the ground, far
below, and the height caught up to him once and for all, and he locked
his body around the limb and clung there, whimpering.
Presently, he saw one of the other boys start climbing the tree to
bring him down, and he heard his new nickname being bandied about on
the meadow--
“Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross!”
* * * * *
“Gee, Dad, are you going on _another_ trip?”
“Sure thing,” her father said, looking up from his open suitcase.
“But--but you just got back.”
His face looked funny, the way it always did after he and mother had
been mouth-fighting--as though he wanted it to look one way and his
muscles wanted it to look a totally different way, and he had had to
settle for an expression halfway in-between. “Sorry, Berenice, have to
go again.”
“But--”
“Now, don’t cry, darling. Please don’t cry.”
But she cried anyway, she had to. What else could you do when you’d
planned all spring for the halcyon summer days and the treks through
the woods, the fishing and the campsite, the little fire burning
brightly and your father sitting beside you in the serene summer night?
He was on his knees and he was holding her close, and now his face made
her think of one of those balloons with faces painted on them that you
blew up and twisted into different shapes, only not quite the same,
because balloons couldn’t cry--
“I’ll write you, darling. Be a good girl now, and mind your mother.”
* * * * *
The other boys were standing on the corner, waiting for him to pass. He
gripped his galactic geography book tightly and he held his mouth firm,
and he made his legs behave as though he wanted them to keep right on
walking, as though the thought of flight was remote from his thoughts.
“Here comes Eberhardt Cross!”
“Hi, Eberhardt!”
“Climb any trees lately, Eberhardt?”
“Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross!”
He kept right on walking. If he stopped it would be worse. They
wouldn’t settle for mere words then--and there were five of them, and
he was only one, and not much of a one at that.
But he thought: I’ll show them. I’ll show them if it takes me the rest
of my life!
“Come in,” her mother said, and the tall, handsome man stepped out of
the summer night and into the scented living room. “I’m so glad you
could drop by.... Run out and play now, Berenice, like a good little
girl. You’ve been cooped up in the house all day....”
* * * * *
Miss Tenthyear’s android eyes beamed brightly as she assumed her
lecture-posture by the desk. “Our final subject for today, class,” she
said, “will be the story of Captain Alexander Eberhardt.
“Your mothers and fathers have probably mentioned his name many
times, and they’ve probably told you about how he piloted the first
spaceship to the moon, had a nervous breakdown after he crashed there,
and babbled for days over the world-wide radio hook-up, begging
for someone, anyone, to save him. All of this is true, and Captain
Eberhardt, in the eyes of the public, has never been considered a
credit to his countrymen. But the bravest of men can collapse when
sufficient pressure is applied, and Captain Eberhardt actually died a
hero’s death. We are all of us merely human, and we should keep this in
mind when we pass judgment on our fellow men--”
He was conscious of the other kids looking at him out of the corners
of their eyes, and he kept his own eyes focused on his desktop.
_Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross!_ he could hear them calling him
after the bell had sounded, after Miss Tenthyear had retired to her
case behind the desk and had turned herself off. And he could hear his
own voice now, his own voice deep inside him, silently shouting the old
refrain, but with something added this time: “I’ll show them! Space is
a tree, in a way. Space is a tremendous tree reaching up into infinity,
and I’ll climb as high into it as I can get and I’ll laugh back down at
them in their silly suburban houses and I’ll gather a handful of stars
and throw them down to Earth like shining acorns....”
* * * * *
Her tears had smeared the purple ink, making the passages of the letter
illegible. But she had read them once, and once was enough to tell her
that her father was never coming back, that his promises were the same
old lies, his cheerful phrases the same old clichés, she had read a
dozen--a hundred--times before.
How strange that she should remember him so well after eight
interminable years, that she should still want him to come back. She
had been a gawky girl of 10 when he had gone away for the last time;
now she was a worldly young woman of 18--old enough, surely, to be
above such childish needs as parental attachments--
She heard the doorbell ring downstairs, and the sound of male voices
on the doorstep, and she knew her mother was in business again. She
got up from her vanity and went over to the window and looked out at
the summer night. There was an apple tree growing beside the house and
the apple tree was in blossom. She turned off the electronic screen,
reached out and broke off a nearby bough. She held it to her nostrils,
rejoicing in the sweetness and the purity of the blossoms.
She raised her eyes and saw the summer stars pulsing in the
black immensity of the sky. She picked out the patterns of the
constellations--the long straggling line of Scorpius, the riotous
burgeoning of Sagittarius, the tetrahedron of Libra, the filmy blur of
Coma Berenices.... Subtly, what she breathed and what she saw, what she
needed and what she had been denied, blended into a single impression,
and she thought: A lady of the stars--that’s what I’ll be. A lady of
the stars.... And she saw herself, brightly-gowned and glamorous,
stepping from star to star, the legions of her lovers following
worshipfully behind her. She paused on a global cluster and glanced
disdainfully down to the blue-green mote of Earth, and she thought
contemptuously of her prosaic mother carrying on her petty assignations
in her petty parlor, of her father absconding again and again from
reality; then she laughed, and leaped lightly to the Greater Magellanic
Cloud, where the Emperor of the Universe humbly awaited her....
“But don’t you see?” his father said. “Space is for misfits. A normal
man simply doesn’t give up his rights as an Earth citizen, his right to
marry and have children, just for the privilege of traveling to far-off
places.”
Cross shifted uncomfortably on the front steps. It was a clear night
in August, and the stars were so bright and close that they seemed to
brush the topmost branches of the maples lining the suburban street.
“Think about it, Nate,” his father went on, puffing self-righteously
on his suburban pipe. “You’re still young. You’re only 19. Why don’t
you wait for a while--a year, anyway. Maybe you’ll change your mind by
then.”
Cross shook his head. “No,” he said. “You don’t understand. It’s
something I have to do.... Something ... I ... have ... to ... do ....”
* * * * *
Cross massaged his limbs, got slowly to his feet. The control room had
regained solidity, but he was not fooled. The _Pandora_ had merely
reached the relatively stable center of the storm--the eye--and
any attempt to throw her back into normal space now would tear her
apart, along with everything and everyone on board, and the resultant
particles, both inanimate and animate, would be scattered irretrievably
throughout the space-time continuum.
[Illustration: Amidst the storm and confusion she beckoned to him.]
Suddenly he remembered his passenger, remembered her apprehension about
time storms. He hurried toward her cabin, telling himself that it was
his responsibility to be with her during the danger period, that it was
his duty to protect her; and all the while he told himself, he knew
that he was lying in his teeth, that there was no danger--only the
embarrassment of having to share one’s most intimate experiences with
another--and that his presence was totally uncalled for.
* * * * *
She opened the door at his knock. One look into her eyes told him that
she had been expecting him; one glance at her magnificent body, bereft,
now, even of a towel, told him that he had to have her, no matter what
the cost. She drew him into the room and closed the door, and suddenly
he knew that this was no ordinary business transaction, that she wanted
him as desperately, almost, as he wanted her. He tried to understand,
and a glimmering of the truth touched him; then he felt the warmth of
her flesh, and then the moistness of her mouth on his, and he seemed to
melt, to dissolve, even as the room dissolved around him--the room and
the ship and the present....
* * * * *
“Before approving your application, I’m required to brief you,” the
male interviewer for Camellias, Inc., said. “We don’t want any of our
future ladies of the stars to look back some day and accuse us of
coercing her into Camellia-activity.... Do you know anything about the
profession at all?”
“A little,” Berenice said, nervously.
“A very little, I suspect.... First of all, you must erase from your
mind whatever detrimental associations you may have with your future
calling. The ancient attitude towards prostitution still prevails on
Earth, and probably will continue to prevail for centuries to come; but
in space, even a common house-worker is a respected individual, while
a full-fledged lady of the stars is the equivalent of a princess or a
president’s daughter. The ‘World’s Oldest Profession’ has become the
‘Galaxy’s Noblest Profession’.
“Cosmic radiation, undistilled by the Earth’s atmosphere is quite a
different proposition from the distilled radiation which has bombarded
mankind since birth. Prolonged exposure to it causes certain genic
changes in both male and female chromosomes. Interplanetary travel,
thanks to _A Priori_, occasioned only relatively brief periods of
exposure; but interstellar travel is something else. Even with _A
Priori_, the journeys between the stars sometimes require weeks, even
months. As a result, no woman can ever enter interstellar space without
first forfeiting her function as a woman--unless she wants to give
birth to a mutant, or, to call a spade a spade, a monster.
“You are probably familiar with the Earth Council’s famous Dual
Decision of two generations ago: the decision to confine all
interstellar personnel, during their sojourn on Earth, to the port
areas; and the decision to set aside Polaris 2 as a haven for the
monsters that had already been born and for those that might yet be
born. But, however commendable it might have been in other respects,
the Dual Decision evaded the most vital aspect of the problem--the need
of men in space for the women they could no longer have.
“There was only one solution, and it was obvious from the first. But
it was a solution which a sex-conscious, sex-ridden, sex-frightened,
sex-bewildered people, whose various religious credos classified sex,
per se, as a sin, could not accept--except by degrees.”
* * * * *
“The first freelance ladies of the stars were of French, Swedish and
Japanese descent. They were followed by most of the other racial
strains. Eventually their numbers increased to a point where the Earth
Council could no longer ignore their activities and was forced either
to combat the star-wide spread of the profession, or to legalize it and
to encourage its function along with the timehonored lines of private
enterprise. Legalization was inevitable, but still, had it not been for
the lobbyists, it might have been irreparably delayed. I am proud to
say that the founder of Camellias, Inc., was one of the most articulate
and influential of those lobbyists, and it was probably due more to his
efforts than to the efforts of the others, that the Prostitution Act of
2340 finally became a reality.
“The creation and maintenance of an interstellar red light system was
a complex undertaking, but we need not go into it here. You’ll be
adequately schooled in our history at our Martian convent--provided, of
course, that you decide to join us. There are, however, two important
details which I must call to your attention.
“The first is our caste system. The convents, which the various
corporations have set up on Mars, have a common standard, based upon
aptitude, personality and technique-achievement, that each prospective
lady of the stars must attain in order to graduate. The degree to
which she excels in these qualities, together with her physical
qualifications, determines her classification, which in turn determines
the rates she is allowed to charge for her future services.
“The second is pregnancy. Upon leaving Earth, you will be given a
Farbes and Donniger contraceptor-field, guaranteed for life by its
manufacturers. _Keep it with you at all times_. There is no excuse
for any lady of the stars to suffer the ignominy of giving birth to a
monster. The Earth Council has granted us, and the other corporations,
the right to banish all our pregnant personnel, together with their
lovers, to Polaris 2, and also has permitted us to give the planet the
much more appropriate name of ‘Gomorrah’.
“As soon as you leave Earth, you will be required to take bi-monthly
physicals. Don’t try to avoid them; I assure you that you’ll be
apprehended immediately. However, you’ll have nothing to worry
about--provided you _keep your field with you at all times_. Do you
have any questions?”
Berenice shook her head. “No. No questions.”
“Then I assume that you still wish to become a lady of the stars.”
She wanted to run away, and then she remembered that she _was_ running
away. She nodded. Numbly. Miserably. “Yes,” she said.
The interviewer beamed. “Splendid!” he said. “Your rating on the
aptitude test was very high, and Camellias, Inc., will be delighted to
welcome you into its fold....”
“So you want to be a spaceman,” the captain of the _Perseus_ said.
“What makes you think that stowing away on board my ship is going to
help you?”
“Well,” Cross said, “you can’t very well take me back to Earth, so
you’ll have to do something with me, and I understand that most ships
are short-handed.”
“Maybe I can’t take you back to Earth personally, but I can throw you
in the brig till we reach our first port and _send_ you back to Earth.
And you wouldn’t be able to get out of the quarantine area as easily as
you got in, I can assure you of that. You’d be stuck there for the rest
of your life as a longstarman.”
“Not if I stowed away on another ship,” Cross said.
The captain glowered at him for a moment, then: “Why in hell didn’t you
apply for a berth legally?”
“I couldn’t raise the bond,” Cross said.
“You mean you were too impatient to go to work long enough so that you
could raise it, don’t you?”
“That’s about the size of it ... I understand that ship masters have
ways and means of getting around such matters.”
A dark cloud settled on the captain’s face and for a while it looked
as though a storm were going to break. Presently, however, the sun
broke through and the cloud faded away. “It so happens that I _am_
short-handed,” he said. “In the galley.”
Cross brightened. “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got to start
somewhere.”
“Report to Obronski on the after deck.... Ever operate a refuse
disposal unit?”
“No, sir.”
“You’ll learn....”
* * * * *
“For God’s sake,” the drunken space marine said. “You act like you
never saw a real he-man before. You afraid of me, or something? Come
on, smile!”
Her shoulders had touched the wall of the convent’s recreation room,
and she knew she could delay no longer. She forced herself to relax,
forced a warm smile to her lips. “No,” she said softly. “I’m not
afraid.”
The space marine’s eyes grew more glazed than ever. “Thash good,” he
said. “Thash what I wanted to hear.” He stepped closer to her, his arms
outstretched, his face grotesque with lust.
She waited till he had nearly touched her, then she moved in without
warning, brought her knee up sharply and, when he doubled forward,
chopped him viciously on the back of the neck with the edge of her
palm. He dropped, writhing, to the floor, and she proceeded to kick
him deftly with her pointed shoes. She did not stop till he lay still,
till the tips of her shoes were crimson, and then she stood, sick and
trembling, in the harsh fluorescent light.
“Excellent!” the female instructor said, entering the room. “A splendid
performance, Berenice. It may seem cruel, at first, to employ real
victims in our exercises, but there’s no other way to learn how to
defend yourself effectively--and beasts like this marine here are just
the sort of creatures that forget, in their drunkenness, the inflexible
rules of our profession, and the sanctity of a lady of the stars. We
did not invite him here, you remember. We merely left the force-fence
deactivated long enough for him to enter of his own accord, the door
ajar, the light burning, so he could see it.”
Berenice shuddered. She saw the ecstatic expression on the instructor’s
ancient, raddled face and she remembered that she herself would be an
instructor some day--or a house-mother or a liaison lady--when her
beauty had dimmed and her flesh had lost its firmness and not even the
lowliest longstarman would want her. She shuddered again. “Isn’t--isn’t
that an invitation, in a way?” she asked.
“Of course not!” the instructor said. “Come, we’ll call his ship
and have him removed. He should be sober by the time he gets out of
sickbay--if he ever does....”
“But where are the monsters?” Cross asked, leaning over the rail of the
observation platform and gazing across the tarmac.
“There’s a settlement of them on the other side of the mountains,”
Obronski said. “They’re not permitted inside the port area.”
“And we’re not permitted outside--”
“That’s right. So forget about them.”
“But there must be some way to see them.”
“Sure, there is. If you had your own ship you could land near the
settlement. But the port authority would be pretty tough on you if
you got caught. Besides, why should you want to see them? I know I
wouldn’t.”
“I guess I wouldn’t either,” Cross lied.
He lowered his eyes, idly watched the payload of fallen ladies of the
stars filing out of the lock, accompanied by their lovers.
“I keep wondering,” Obronski said. “You’d think they’d have more sense.”
“Who?”
“The ladies of the stars, who else? They’ve got the whole galaxy at
their fingertips and they go and let some space bum knock them up! Why?”
“Maybe they fall in love,” Cross said.
“Love!” Obronski spat. “You’ve got a lot to learn, boy, even if you did
make Second Mate on your fourth run. There’s no love in space, and the
only woman you’ll ever have is the one you’ve got money enough to pay
for!”
“Sure, I know,” Cross said. He raised his eyes from the gangplank,
looked out across the tarmac to where the rumpled hills formed green
and purple preludes to the majestic line of mountains. I wonder what
they’re really like, he thought.... Some day I’ll find out.
* * * * *
“The Plenipotentiary from New Jericho presents his compliments, my
lady,” the house-mother said. “He was quite intrigued by her ladyship’s
film sequence and begs the honor of her company.”
“For how long?” the Lady Berenice asked wearily.
“For tonight only. He is leaving WineWomenandSong in the morning.”
“Very well.”
The house-mother withdrew, and after a moment the Lady Berenice heard
the lift door sigh closed. She sat down to wait, wondering if she would
hate this one as much as she had hated all the others, if she would
hate herself tomorrow as much as she had hated herself on all the other
tomorrows.
Presently, she heard the lift door sigh open, and then foot-steps in
the corridor. The knock--
She got up and opened the door. The Plenipotentiary from New Jericho
was in his late nineties; toupéd, and refurbished to pass for a man of
fifty. He was a far cry from the Emperor of the Universe.
The Lady Berenice repressed a shudder. “Come in,” she said....
* * * * *
New Tokyo was off the beaten path of the regular runs, but his new job
with Falcon Lines took him to many of the out of the way places. He
walked through the narrow streets of Rakuen, past the tile façades of
the enchanting houses, past the foyers where the mama sans sat, wearing
their timeless smiles. Pretty kimonoed girls leaned out over low
balconies, laughing down with starlight in their hair.
He remembered a passage he had read a long time ago, when he was a
cabin boy on the _Perseus_, and he welcomed the words into his mind,
let them flow softly through his thoughts--
_I am lonely with the loneliness that comes to all men in womanless
ships, whether they be ships at sea or ships in space; and if there
be no woman to greet me when my ship reaches continent or planet,
then I shall be lonely beyond all loneliness, beyond all capacity to
endure...._
A girl standing on the balcony just above caught his eye, perhaps
because of the way the starlight touched her face, perhaps because of
her wistful smile. He paused in the street, in the cool night, looking
up at her. Her hair was black, and deftly piled into an elaborate
coiffeur. Her eyebrows made him think of birds in flight. She touched
her breast. “Hisako,” she said softly, and he went back to the foyer he
had just passed and told the mama san whom he wanted.
* * * * *
She could tell by the coldness of her cheeks that her face had gone
white, and she could tell by the look in the examiner’s eyes that it
would be futile to protest his indictment, that no matter what she
said, Gomorrah was going to be her next--and last--port of call.
But the charge was so monstrous, so untrue, that she _had_ to dispute
it. “You must be mistaken,” she said. “I can’t possibly be--be that
way!”
“Who is your lover?” the examiner asked coldly.
“But I have no lover. I’m trying to tell you that. I’ve _always_ used
my field!”
The examiner shrugged. “Be a fool and protect him then, if you want to.
I should think, though, that you’d want to expose him, that you’d want
him to share the responsibility.”
“But I’m _not_ protecting him. There simply isn’t any such person. You
_must_ be mistaken, or else my field is defective.”
“I’ve been in this business a long time,” the examiner said. “I
don’t make mistakes. And I’ve never heard of a defective field.” He
opened the door. “Book passage to Gomorrah for the Lady Berenice and
confiscate her C-field,” he told his assistant. “And put her in custody
till her ship leaves.”
“Passage for one?”
The examiner looked at the Lady Berenice. “Well?”
She returned his gaze defiantly. “One,” she said.
The evangelist had set up his portable pulpit just outside the
spaceport, and Cross wandered over to the fringe of the crowd to
listen. The _Pandora_ didn’t have clearance till tomorrow, and his
passenger wouldn’t be coming on board till shortly before blast-off. In
a way, he was glad of that. He had always felt guilty about escorting
fallen ladies of the stars to Gomorrah, and this time it would be
worse, for, on his last stop there, he had visited the settlement
beyond the mountains and seen the monsters....
* * * * *
The evangelist was an emaciated young man with dark, tortured eyes. As
he talked, he waved his arms and paced back and forth. The night sky of
Thais arched incongruously above him, and the ithyphallic structures of
WineWomenandSong formed an ironic backdrop for his imprecations.
“They brazenly walked the streets of Earth, and now they brazenly
walk the streets of the new worlds--and you, you scum, you dregs of
humanity, fawn at their feet like dogs, waiting for their meretricious
favors, waiting for the contemptible privilege of spending your
hard-earned dollars in order to experience the appetites they feed but
never satisfy--”
“How do _you_ know?” someone in the crowd shouted.
There was a scattering of laughter, but the evangelist continued,
unperturbed: “I tell you that happiness does not lie in such lascivious
pursuits, that nothing but misery can result from consorting with
the ladies of the stars! They have come to you, not to heal your
loneliness, but to deprive you of your earnings, your respect, your--”
“But at least they came!” the heckler shouted again. “That’s more than
you can say for the women sitting self-righteously in their suburban
houses back on Earth, patting themselves on the back for having given
birth to the children they were afraid _not_ to have!”
“But let me ask you this,” the evangelist said, singling out his
antagonist and pointing at him with his finger. “_Why_ did they come?”
“First I’ll tell you why _we_ came,” the heckler answered. “We came
because we were basically insecure and needed to prove to others that
we were something more than they thought us to be, and thereby prove to
ourselves that we are something more than what we really are. And yet,
for all our bravado, we remain mere men, terrified, in our hearts, of
the abysses we claim to have conquered, alone, afraid, unwanted--Now
is it wrong for a woman to feel the same as a man, to have the same
frustrations, the same needs? And is it wrong if she fulfills herself
in the only way modern society has left open for her, especially when
by so doing she supplies a factor without which there could be no space
travel, no raw materials for the stay at homes on Earth to turn into
mechanical gadgets, ornate wigwams and four-wheel golden calves--”
“But they’re prostitutes!” the evangelist screamed. “_Prostitutes!_”
“Sure, they’re prostitutes--to you, and to the people on Earth. But to
us, they’re women, the only women we can ever know, can ever have. And
if you must have something to condemn, then condemn the prostitution
corporations, for they, and they alone, are responsible for the cold,
loveless efficiency of their products!”
“Prostitutes--”
An ugly murmur began in the crowd, rose swiftly into a roar. Cross felt
himself being drawn into the maelstrom, heard his own voice blending
with the voices of the others. He saw the whiteness of the evangelist’s
face, saw the silhouette of the descending police copter, and then
the frightened figure on the shaking pulpit fumbling for the lowered
rope ladder. When he was firmly secured on the ladder, and the copter
was rising, the evangelist shook his fist at the mob he had created,
shouting: “Armageddon is on hand, and every sinning one of you, every
glorified streetwalker and her lover, shall perish in the flames!”
* * * * *
There were some things you knew without quite knowing how you knew
them, and the moment she had seen him standing in the lock of the
_Pandora_ she had known that he was the one.
But it was impossible, she had kept telling herself. Utterly
impossible. And then, after escorting her to her cabin, he had
mentioned _A Priori_, and she had remembered a spaceman telling her
once that, in _A Priori_, almost _anything_ was possible, and that,
during an _A Priori_ storm, _everything_ was possible.
She still didn’t quite understand, standing in the shower now, the
misted spray gently bombarding her skin. But she had acted, and would
continue to act, on the assumption that what the spaceman had told her
was true, and on the additional assumption that the impossible would be
less impossible if she cooperated with it. She felt perfectly justified
in what she was doing and in what she intended to do: after all, even a
monster was entitled to a father, and anyway, what was going to happen
had already happened weeks ago.
“Yes?” she answered, when the knock sounded on the door.
“Your luggage, my lady.”
* * * * *
She turned off the shower and wrapped the ship’s towel she had selected
earlier, around her body. Then she crossed the room and opened the
door. His eyes widened slightly at the sight of her, but his lean face
remained impassive. “Set them inside, please,” she said.
It was impossible for him to avoid touching her, and the contact,
according to everything she had been taught, should have precipitated
the first advance. It did not. He withdrew hurriedly, keeping his eyes
averted.
“If you wish anything further, I’ll be in my cabin,” he said. He turned
to go.
At first she was bewildered. Then, suddenly, she remembered that he was
only a pilot, and that a lady of the stars was probably as far beyond
his aspirations as she was beyond his pocketbook.
Some of her recently acquired assurance left her.
“Wait,” she said.
“Yes?”
“How--how long will we be in _A Priori_?”
“A little over four hours, ship’s time.”
“Is--is there any likelihood of a time storm?”
“There’s always a chance of a time storm,” he said. “But don’t worry,
my lady. If the conditions for one are present, we’ll be contacted by
the port authority in time to avoid it.”
“But suppose something should go wrong. Suppose we weren’t informed in
time and did get involved in one. What would happen then?”
He raised his eyes, finally, and looked directly into hers. An
expression of surprise touched his face. Presently: “As you may know,
my lady,” he said, “_A Priori_ is merely the result of the separation
of pure space and pure time from the thing-in-itself, or from basic
reality. Once separated, pure space can be contracted to the extent
where a parsec equals .59 kilometers. Usually pure time contracts
accordingly, but sometimes there is a slight discrepancy, and certain
phases of _A Priori_ contain more time than space. If we should become
involved in one of these phases --or storms, if you like--we would
lose our awareness of our objective reality and proceed to relive a
subjective and sporadic playback of our pasts. So all that could happen
to us, actually, are the things that have already happened to us--with
the difference that we would relive not only our own experiences, but
one another’s as well; in pure time, individuality does not exist.”
“But wouldn’t our objective reality be affected?”
He nodded. “It could be,” he said, “since, in the absence of any real
passage of time, it would be in temporal ratio to our involvement in
our pasts, which might force it into a different time plane altogether.”
She dropped her eyes. “Then--then in spite of what you said before,
something could happen after all--something that hasn’t happened
before.”
“I suppose so, my lady.... Will that be all?”
“Yes--for now.”
“I’ll be in my cabin....”
After he had gone she closed the door but did not lock it, then she let
the towel slip to the floor and went over and lay down on the couch.
He would be back, she knew--there was no other answer--and when he
returned she would welcome him the way she had welcomed all the others--
No, not quite the same, she thought, frowning. He was, after all, the
father-to-be of her child-to-be, her--her monster-to-be. But, child or
monster, it was--would be--his flesh and blood as well as hers, and
that, she realized suddenly, was something quite unique--and quite
strangely wonderful.
She was disconcerted, at first, when the walls of the room began to
shimmer, not because she had doubted that there would be a time storm,
but because she had expected him to be in her arms when it broke. Then
she remembered something else she had heard about time storms.
Like hurricanes, they had eyes....
* * * * *
Cross stirred on the couch, sat up. The storm was over and gone. The
Lady Berenice’s eyes were closed. Her breathing was soft, almost
imperceptible. Her face, bereft now of all the hardness and the
cynicism civilization had imposed upon it, was like a little girl’s.