The long arc of deceleration was completed. The starship was cruising
now at planetary speed. Aldebaran had grown from a remote point of fire
to a giant sun, terrifyingly near at hand. The small companion was
visible only as a faint disc above the upper limb, its bluish light
drowned out in the flooding ruddy blaze of the larger star.
The Vardda had crowded up into the observation dome, eager for the
first glimpse of home. A heavy shield now covered the dome to sunward
and in its shadow the returning travellers pressed and chattered.
Trehearne stood among them, listening to their excitement and feeling
at a loss in it. Their talk was the talk of strangers, full of names
and references that were meaningless to him, strident with a joy he
could not share. They were coming home, and he was homeless, the
loneliest man in the galaxy. Before him loomed the imagined faces of
the Vardda Council, passing judgment, and beyond them in the desolate
wastes of space the dying world of Thuvis waited.
Shairn tugged at his sleeve. "There!" she cried. "There it is, Michael.
Llyrdis!"
He followed her pointing hand, squinting against the tawny glare, and
saw a golden planet wheeling toward them, bright and beautiful, with
a trio of circling moons. Suddenly the majesty and splendor of this
landing out of space swept over him, and drove away his fears. It was
an awesome, a godlike thing, to come into a solar system from outside,
drenched in the naked blazing of a foreign sun, and see the planets
from far off, no bigger than a child's ball, circling the parent star
in their slow eternal orbits. He became as excited as the Vardda, but
for a different reason. Presently he would stand on the soil of a
strange world, in the light of an alien sun, and the winds that blew
would come from far peaks nameless to him, and off of unknown oceans.
He watched with the others, as tensely as they.
Edri looked at his face, and smiled. "Mirris is on the other side of
the sun, but if you'll look hard off there to your right you'll see
Suumis, the outer one of our two immediate neighbors."
Suumis appeared against the farther reaches of space like a little red
apple, accompanied by a throng of sparkling motes that Trehearne knew
must be moons. He stared at it, trying to realize that the little red
apple was a world as big as Earth, gave it up, and turned back again to
Llyrdis. It had grown. It fairly leaped toward them as the ship swept
in upon it, and Trehearne began to make out misty continents and the
shadow-forms of oceans, wrapped in a cloud-shot atmosphere that burned
a reddish gold in Aldebaran's light. Then it was closer still, it
filled the sky, it spread out monstrously and began to fall....