"You remind me of Tasha," I said. "Inverted."
She smiled somewhat coolly and returned to her work. I retired to a book, but my mind was not on it. Forta had just become my mistress, as she had said at the outset she would. She had assumed another guise for the purpose, but it had been her body and her mind in reality. Tasha had sent me perpetual sexual signals, but turned killer when the connection was made; Forta sent me none, but was as spectacularly apt in the performance as I could imagine. Truly, it seemed I had been with Juana!
Yet if I could complete the act with a woman playing a role, why could I not do it with the woman as herself? I did not know, but knew I could not. I remained a fool, in the masculine way: Appearance was more important than reality.
Just as it had been with the General of Gaul. He had known that my secretary was not his daughter, yet the aspect of her was so compelling that, to please it, he had reversed himself. How could I call him a fool, when I understood the situation so much better than he did, and still was governed by the illusion? Forta's art of emulation had persuaded the General to do what was best for the System, and had persuaded me to accept her offering, despite my understanding.
Dear Daddy,
I must confess, that was some demonstration you did with the light drive! It wasn't broadcast on Jupiter holo for some reason, but the news got around. Turning an entire spaceship into light—just imagine! I understand that Uranus is all agog, but they are underplaying it here, saying that the reliability is uncertain and that you were lucky you weren't killed.
I wish you were back here, and not just because I am concerned for your welfare. But the present administration will never permit your return. Perhaps they will let me visit you at Uranus or somewhere; I'd like that. There is so much I could tell you!
Take good care of your tiger, Daddy....
Chapter 11 — TITANIA
Having done what we could on the Continent, as it was locally termed, we next tackled the islands. The most important of these were Umbriel and Titania, two moons about a quarter million and two-fifths of a million kilometers out from the residential band of the planet, respectively, and just below and just above a thousand kilometers in diameter. These were tiny, on the scale of the satellites of Jupiter, but physical size was no necessary indication of importance.
The fact is, there is a lot of area available on a solid moon. We become accustomed to the limitations of the city-bubbles in the atmospheres of the major planets, where space is always at a premium though distances between cities are vast. On an airless moon like Titania the cities still need to be enclosed by domes, but many, many domes can be set up in limited territory. They won't collide; the common anchorage makes it feasible. So an entire nation of several tens of millions of human beings resides on a moon that would fit inside the merest whorl in a major planet's atmosphere.
Titania, small as it seemed in space, had inherited the British Empire tradition. Indeed, at one time it had had major holdings all across the Solar System, including the entire planets of sparsely settled Neptune and densely settled Earth. Today the Titanian Commonwealth remained, but the political and economic power of Titania itself was much diminished and still waning. The System was simply too large to be dominated by one tiny moon! But the influence of the so-called Saxon culture remained, with English being perhaps the most prevalent second language in the System.
We landed at the monstrous city-dome of Don, situated in the channel of Tems, near the South Pole of the moon. Since the moon did not rotate on its own, one face being locked toward Uranus, there were no problems of adjustment; the near face could be treated in many respects like a flat terrain. All of the significant human habitations were on this face; the far face was left for mining and light-collection and special projects. Perhaps this was just as well, for the light lenses were monstrous, quadruple the diameter of those of Jupiter. There was no mystery about this; Uranus is almost four times as far from the sun as is Jupiter, so equivalently larger lenses are required to focus the sunlight to similar intensity. Truly is it said: If you want to know where you are in the System, look at the size of the light lenses. These ones had to gather sunlight from a region just about three hundred times as large as that to be covered by Earth-normal daylight. That left huge areas in shade.
I had, as I mentioned, become accustomed to the floating bubbles of the major planets in the course of the past thirty years. My youth had been spent on Callisto, where there were landbound domes. But there was little similarity to those domes here. Callisto was a much larger body than Titania, and used the gravity lens to focus the gravity of the planet and bring it up to Earth-norm in the cities. Thus the domes sat firmly and immobily on the surface.
These domes did not. They were mounted on firm bases, and were in the form of monstrous cylinders, spinning about their axes. They depended on centrifugal gee, exactly as did the bubbles floating in atmosphere. This was similar in principle to the domes of Jupiter military bases on moonlets or planetoids, but Don was of a completely different scale. It was one of the largest cities in the System, as populous as Jupiter's Nyork or Langel, though not as large as RedSpot City had become. Here in the ice-covered valley, it was phenomenally grand; the landscape gave it contrast.
We took the shuttle subway into the city proper, for entry was via the interior of the pedestal on which it rotated. There was so little gravity on the surface that it seemed almost like free-fall; we had to strap in to prevent sailing into the ceiling with every bump. I believe Titania's surface gee is about one-thirtieth Earth-norm, though I would have to look it up to be sure; certainly it is very slight. It becomes difficult to judge by mere physical sensation.
The subway capsule made a right-angle turn and carried us upward into the city. Then it descended, and we gained weight. Of course this was relative; we were actually facing straight up, away from the surface of the moon, but now it seemed like the horizontal.
We debouched at a station on a lower level; it was easy enough to tell by the higher gee. They were prepared for our arrival, for the section was cordoned off. I can't think why; I had Smilo on a leash. Our inprocessing was remarkably efficient, and before we knew it we had been assigned a nice cottage in the country, well up toward the Scot border. We did need a place to stay, as it was evident that formal negotiations were not going to be any more rapid here than they had been on the Continent. I knew better than to protest the glacial course of such things; I represented the interests of Saturn and Titan, and Titania's relations with either planet were not phenomenally good. Also, the fact that I had negotiated first with Gaul would not sit well here. But if I had come to Titania first, the General would have been totally intractable, and not even the ghost of his daughter would have swayed him.
We boarded a tram, which was a sealed travel-capsule that loaded itself onto a wheelbase and a set of tracks once it exited Don. It traveled swiftly northward across the frozen surface, guided by an old motorman. Smilo decided he liked this part of the journey; he prowled along the length of the tram and peered out the ports. The motorman seemed a bit nervous at first, but relaxed when it became clear that the tiger accepted him as one of the functionaries. Soon he was announcing the stations we passed.
It seemed that Titania was divided into many small counties, and at our velocity we crossed each one quickly. There was Hert and Bed and Hamp and Leic in the first hour. We saw the spinning domes of the cities of Wat and Bed and Hamp and Leic; evidently the counties were usually but not invariably named after their leading cities. The tramway tracks divided and crossed and merged throughout, and there were many other trams on them, speeding from city to city. This was a busy world!
The landscape itself, apart from the tracks, was completely barren. With no atmosphere there was no weather, just the rock ice. It reminded me of Callisto, when my family had gone out in quest of a bootleg bubble to Jupiter, seeking a better life. We had found, instead, betrayal and misery and death, and our own kind treated us more savagely than
did the barrenness of space. I had been but fifteen, then, naïve about the ways of man. I had not remained so. I have wondered whether I would have been better off had I never left Callisto. Certainly I would have for the short term, because then I would not have witnessed the brutal rape of my sister Spirit or the slaughter of my father, or suffered the privations of space. But neither would I have found my first love, Helse—or lost her. My military career would never have occurred, and my political rise to the Tyrancy would not even have been a dream. I had to conclude that my life, taken as a whole, had been correctly guided, despite the early horrors of it.
"Derby," the motorman announced. I began to see what was not there, outside: the green pastures, the picket fences, the cows and the gardens of the olde England that this world emulated, and I felt nostalgia for it though I had never been there. What a joy it must have been to live on Earth, shielded by its breathable atmosphere: an entire planet habitable without suits or domes or devices of gravity and light concentration!
We passed the industrial city of Manch, where freight lines converged, and on into the county of Lanc, and a mountainous region. Here the mountains were genuine; jagged crags rose up beside the tramway. One tends to think that small worlds should have small mountains, but the diminished natural gravity enables them to be rougher in outline than the larger ones.
At last we came into Cumber, relatively sparsely settled, where we were to stay. The authorities had wanted to get Smilo well away from temptation! The tracks wound about in an effort to avoid the rising contours, and finally gave up and climbed, passing over the heights. I suppose these mountains were minor compared to what could be found elsewhere in the System, or even elsewhere on Titania, but here in our tiny capsule they were quite impressive. I saw vertical rises I would have been afraid to climb, even in the fractional gee, and a chasm between peaks that looked right for a glacier.
"Scafell Crag," the motorman said, announcing the site the way he had the counties.
Then down into the valley, and on to our destination, Carl. There we had to leave the tram and take a limo to the cottage, which was a mini-dome east of the city. Here I became aware of another feature of the landscape, that had perhaps been present throughout, but missed because of the velocity of our tram travel. There were paired cords stretched across the terrain, each being set about a meter above the ground, supported at intervals by T-shaped structures. They connected to each separate dome, and divided and crossed in much the fashion of the tramway rails.
"Power lines?" I asked Spirit, perplexed.
"Ley lines," the limo driver said, with a private, knowing smile.
"What are they for?"
"For walking," he explained. "Use the rollers."
I had the impression that he enjoyed our perplexity, so I dropped the subject. But I watched the lines. Occasionally a set crossed the road we were on, and they did this by rising up on ramps to either side and crossing above the level of the traffic. I could see how a person in a suit, walking on the low-gee surface, might use the lines as a handhold—but why would he cling to them dangling above the road?
The driver deposited us at the cottage. This was based on the principle of the cities, being a disk that spun about its axis, with entry from below. The limo entered the garage, which was a kind of air lock, and when the pressure equalized we stepped down into the chamber. A lift conveyed us into the center of the disk above, and a ladder led down (again it was a horizontal "down") to the residential floor. Smilo was learning to navigate these contours, but he obviously felt better once normal gee returned. The driver departed, and we were on our own.
The first thing we did was rest. Travel is wearying, and Spirit and I were no longer young. We had been in trace gee for several hours, and that tends to disrupt the normal bodily processes. So the four of us settled down for a nap, and then another nap, and the night's sleep, and in due course our systems settled down and we were ready for food and work.
We ate sparingly the next day, and Smilo was content to gnaw on a pseudosteak and use the sandbox. Forta got on the phone and ascertained that it was a local holiday, so there would be no political activity for another day. This was just as well, for it gave us more time to adjust.
Smilo was getting restive, having been in confined quarters for some time. Normally I had taken him out for a walk or run somewhere, because a big cat lives not by snoozing alone; he needs exercise in a psychological as well as physical way. Here there were no halls to use, but we had prepared for this contingency by having a space suit made up for him. We hadn't used it before, and now seemed to be the time to try it.
I unpacked the suit. These things are very light, and fit the body so comfortably that they can be worn for prolonged periods. The material stretches just enough to allow circulation of air about the body, but not enough to interfere with motion. Its insulative properties are phenomenal; hardly any heat is lost, and that's important, because the temperature of this surface was in the neighborhood of 50°K, or considerably closer to absolute zero than to human living temperature. I'm sure the technology in a modern suit is about as sophisticated as that in a holophone, just of a different nature. There is of course oxygen-refreshing apparatus, and recondensation, and our suits were guaranteed for two hours before requiring the exchange of breathing cylinders.
"You're taking him out?" Forta asked. "Better review the ley system."
"The what?"
"I have researched it this past hour. Those ley lines are a joke, named after the old supposed lines of ancient monuments in England, Earth. Here they are merely cords used to hold walkers down to the planet, so they don't go flying with every step. The natives do a lot of walking, as many of them don't have cars—cars tend to fly, too, unless they have somewhat adhesive tires the way the limo did—and it's easy enough to get about when you know how. They use the rollers." She went to the wall, and there hung several devices that looked like antique paint rollers. She took one down. "You hook this under the line from the right, and hold it firm, and it rolls along the line and keeps you down."
I considered that. It seemed feasible. "Why not hook in from the left?"
"This is Titania; traffic travels on the left side of the road. So you are always on the left of the line, and when you return you come in on the other side, which is still your right."
I hefted the roller. Its operation seemed simple enough. "But how is Smilo going to use this?"
"I think he has a problem."
"Well, he needs his exercise, so we'll tackle that problem," I decided. I put the suit on the tiger, noting with approval that the extremities were reinforced to be impenetrable by claws. It would be a tragedy if Smilo extended his claws to get a good grip on something, and punctured his suit and died. As it was, I suspected he would have an uncertain time.
Finally I put the helmet over his head. It was completely clear, so he could see well, and sound would be conducted by the ground, as well as a mini suit radio locked on our mutual channel. "We have to wear these to go out," I explained, hoping he would understand enough to accept it. He did know that the outside was a region completely unlike the inside.
I donned my own suit, and the two of us used the personnel exit lock, emerging from the opposite side as the garage. There was no point in having to recompress such a large amount of air as was required for a car, when we were only two.
"Now, Smilo," I cautioned him as we emerged. "Take it easy on the leaping; I fear you could achieve escape velocity if you really tried, and that would be awkward indeed." I had no leash on him now; I would not be able to hold him down if he leaped anyway, and I wanted him to have the maximum freedom.
Smilo took a step—and drifted off the ground. Startled, he scrambled with all four feet, accomplishing nothing.
"Easy," I said, reaching out to catch him by a suited paw. I held on to the ley line that terminated here, anchoring myself, and drew him gently down. "Maybe if you hung on to the line—" I realized that I should have attached a s
afety line to him, similar to those used in space, though I wasn't sure how he would react to this.
He took another step, but this time did not sail. He was learning. Cats have a natural sense about motion, I think, and he was a cat. I urged him to the line, showing him how firm it was; he could hook on to it with a front paw or maybe his suited tail and stay down.
I set out, using the roller as prescribed. It worked well. Each step tried to send me up, because I hadn't learned to eliminate the automatic lifting component to my stride, but firm pressure on the roller and the line kept me down. There was a trick to using it; it would be easy to spin about the line if I got the leverage wrong. But I was mastering the trick.
I set off along the line, my roller rolling faster as I picked up speed. Smilo experimented, then achieved a kind of horizontal leap that had almost no lift. Soon enough he was outdistancing me, seeming to flow across the rock-ice. He was enjoying himself, and that was why I had risked this.
Before I knew it, we were far from the cottage. It was fun, zooming along the ley line with my roller buzzing; my vertical thrust was translated to horizontal thrust, provided I kept the angle right, because of the vectors. It might be likened to squeezing seeds between the thumb and forefinger: heavy pressure and small motion translates to fast motion in another direction. Leg and roller squeezed me forward at a velocity I could hardly have achieved, let alone maintained, in ordinary gee. Smilo seemed to have found similar leverage.
But a little went a long way. I did not want this to get out of hand. So after about twenty minutes I ducked under the paired lines and started back toward the cottage. As I did so, I happened to glimpse the road we had arrived on—and I saw the limo parked on it, behind a bluff, out of the line of sight of the cottage. Curious; had it stalled? I might have checked, but it was off the ley line, and I didn't quite trust myself to untethered navigation. The limo had a radio; it could call for help if it needed to. Probably the driver was simply taking a snooze between calls, out where no one would bother him.