Forta was gazing ahead, looking at Triton and the massive complex of the project on its surface. “You left your kidneys here,” she murmured.
And there was another thing to ponder. The beginning of the ending of my life had been here, too, as well as the beginning of the completion of it. Coincidence or design of fate—which was the more accurate description? I wasn’t sure I cared to know.
We landed and were ushered into the complex. The personnel were ready to answer any questions and had enormous stores of ready data, but I was tired already, and very soon Forta put me to bed and held my hand while I drifted like a disabled ship into the orbit of slumber.
I dreamed of flying, only I was not the flier, I was being carried, borne by a great fantasy creature, an ifrit. He brought me to a castle, and into a high tower of that castle, and laid me on a bed beside a truly lovely young woman. She was garbed in the robe of a princess, and a circlet of precious stones bound down her flowing hair. Then the ifrit changed into a bedbug and bit me on the rear, and I woke, startled, for the first time becoming aware of the damsel. In my dream this made sense, as it would not have in life; I had more than one level of awareness.
I gazed upon the damsel, and lo, she was the fairest creature I had ever seen, the image of my first love Helse, and I said to myself “Oh, if this be the princess my father wishes me to marry, I have been a fool to resist his wish!” Then I put my hand on the girl’s shoulder and tried to awaken her, but she slumbered on soundly. I stroked her body, moved to desire by the perfect rondure of her breast and the firmness of her thigh, but she would not wake and I would not rape her. So I lay back down beside, resolved to tell my father in the morning that I agreed after all to marry the one he had selected.
When I slept, the ifrit spoke to the ifritah, the female of his species. “Now do you wake your charge, and we shall see how she reacts to him.” And she became another bedbug and bit the princess on her plush behind, and she woke, slapping at the place, then spied me sleeping beside her. “Oh, what a charming prince!” she murmured, and it was true; I was as young and attractive for a male as she was for a female, and set onto my head was a thin crown of gold, and my robe too was encrusted with gems. But I remained asleep.
She put her hand on me, and shook me by the shoulder, as I had with her. “Oh, wake, Prince!” she whispered, but I did not.
“If this be the man my father wishes to betroth me to, surely I have been willful to deny him!” she exclaimed. Then she stroked my handsome face, and when I still did not wake, my arms and chest. She opened my robe and ran her hands down inside, and caressed my belly and my thighs and my member, but I slept on. She lay across me and kissed me, and finally returned to sleep, embracing me.
Then I woke, but the princess was gone, and I was myself again, old and frail and unhandsome. Ever has it been thus, in reality! I pondered the dream, and recognized it: It was from the depths of my childhood memory, a tale of sorcery, in which ifrits had had a beauty contest, each believing that the person he or she had discovered was the most beautiful in all the world. So they had brought the two together, and awakened them by turns, letting the young folk judge by their reactions which of them was the most attractive. The ifrit favoring the man had won because the woman reacted more to the man than the man had to the woman. Then the ifrits had returned the two human folk, sleeping, to their own residences and thought no more of the matter, leaving each longing with futility for the unknown other. A good, and frustrating, story.
Why had I remembered it now? Why had I dreamed it, as if I were a figure in it? I did not know.
“Forta,” I said.
She was there immediately. “Yes, Hope?”
And what did I want of her? That she be young and beautiful, like a princess, and I like a prince? Ludicrous! She would do it, I knew, if I asked her, but why should I put her to this trouble, just because of a foolish dream?
“Tell me, Hope,” she said.
So I told her. She nodded. “Be right back.”
But by the time she returned, I had fallen asleep again, and her emulation was wasted. Well, perhaps not entirely, for in the morning I found her sleeping beside me, garbed as a princess and resembling Helse. I kissed her on the mask, appreciating her effort; she tried so hard to please, me, and I hardly felt worthy of it.
In the day we talked with the officials of the Project, and ascertained that they could ship the first colony vessel at any time; it was not necessary to have facilities for the entire System before starting, as the complete process would take years or decades. The logistics of handling five billion living human beings guaranteed that.
But almost a third of the living people of the System were not yet committed to the project. That was because South Saturn— the Middle Kingdom—had not joined. I had invited that huge nation to participate, but a mistake I had made before haunted me. I had allowed my old enemy Tocsin to be exiled there, and, true to his nature, he had poisoned the people against my works. Short of conquest, which would have been ruinously expensive and risky, there had been no way to obtain their commitment, so I had let it go. Now I realized that I had to do something; we could not leave the Middle Kingdom behind. Those many hundreds of millions of people would overrun the remainder of the System unless they had their own quadrant of the galaxy to colonize.
So it was we traveled next to South Saturn. We were treated cordially there; it seemed that the officers had been watching the development of the Triton Project, and had increasingly desired to participate in the conquest of the galaxy, because the need of their nation was greater than that of any other except populous Earth. But it was difficult for them to reverse themselves; there was a matter of face.
Of course they did not state this directly; I read it in their reactions as they spoke, while Forta translated their words for me. They were ready to cast off the malign influence of Tocsin, who it seemed was wearing out his welcome, but they needed a suitable pretext to do so. Well, I was a statesman, which is a polite term for an executive who is out of power; surely I could devise such a pretext.
“How goes it with the rings?” I inquired.
There was a scowl. “The rings are rightly part of Saturn,” the Premier said. “But we lack the navy to do what should be done.”
“The rings are a far better place from which to launch colony ships than the surface of Saturn itself,” I reminded him. “If it were possible for you to join forces with Wan—” For that was the name of the Nation of the Rings. The former government of the Middle Kingdom had retreated to the rings when defeated on the planetary surface, and only the presence of the Jupiter Navy had prevented further action there.
“We should be glad to join forces by reuniting that territory with the planet, as is fitting,” he said grimly.
“Yet you hardly need the rings, other than as a station for departure,” I pointed out. “What use will they be to Saturn, after Saturn has colonized a major segment of the galaxy?”
He nodded. “You are clever, Tyrant,” he said via the translation. “We might settle for conquest in name only, provided there is no public denial, and the shipping facilities of the rings are made available to us.”
“Let me talk to Wan,” I said.
We traveled to the rings. I speak as though this happened in hours; actually I have greatly abridged these proceedings in this narrative. They took months, because we had to talk also with the several major provinces of the Middle Kingdom, a time-consuming process. But this was the essence.
I had never before been actually in the rings of Saturn, because they were proprietary territory; our ships had gone around them, and I had admired them in passing. Now that changed. For the first time I saw them at truly close range.
From a distance, as we know, the rings are beautiful, a gigantic halo around Saturn, perhaps the most dramatic sight in our System. Up close, it fuzzes somewhat, because it is composed of small separate stones or balls of ice, and they are not artistic individually. We nudged inside,
seeking the capital-bubble of Pei, and now the fragments seemed to float all about us. It was like being in a magnified fog, with each droplet of water expanded. It reminded me of a vision I had had, decades before, when I had been with Roulette, using poles to push away floating rocks so our ship could get through. That had been a dream; this was real. Why does so much of my present experience remind me of my past?
We pushed on, moving slowly through the pebbles and rocks and scattered boulders of the ring, noting how the system was not rigid, but liquid on the larger scale, the inner fragments orbiting faster than the outer ones. Perhaps this was not directly visible, but in my fancy it was; I saw the channeled soup of it, this living substance of the ring. I remembered also the time I had emptied the refuse containers of our little space bubble, as we drifted toward Jupiter; the stuff had gone into orbit, and surely remains there now. These rings of Saturn—could they be the refuse of some ancient alien spaceship, whose creatures needed to unload before departing for home? How ironic, that such beauty should come from such an origin! True, scientists had long since sampled and analyzed the substance of the rings, and pronounced it natural—but who can say what alien-refuse might resemble?
Thus my experience in passing through the rings was not the average, but it was worthwhile for me. Now I felt I understood the rings. Perhaps this would help me negotiate with the authorities of Wan.
The Generalissimo of Wan was courteous but firm: his nation would join forces with the Middle Kingdom only by conquering it, as it was his firm intention to do. Of course it had been his intention for thirty years, and his chances of success, should the Jupiter Navy even allow him to try, were practically nonexistent, but that was his attitude. It was a matter of face.
I broached the same argument I had made to the Premier of the Middle Kingdom: Suppose the conquest were in name, only, since the rings would need no use of the mainland once they had their own entire system elsewhere in the galaxy. He, too, appreciated the logic. “But,” he pointed out, “the usurper of the Middle Kingdom would never accede to that.”
All too true. But then my genius of insanity, or vice versa, struck. I remembered my dream, and applied it to reality. “If it is only the name that is in question, not the cooperation for mutual advantage—like a marriage for convenience, not for love or procreation—would it not be fair to put it to the decision of fate?” I inquired. Fate would not be precisely the term used here, but I trusted Forta to render it suitably.
“How do you mean?” he inquired.
“Suppose each nation chose a champion,” I said. “A representative, who would meet the champion of the other nation, and the decision of that encounter would bind the nations, without shame or loss of face?” I did not discuss the source of my notion, which was the dream of the ifrits’ beauty contest, because I did not believe that was relevant. The point was that the decision could be made vicariously, relieving the leaders of the onus of loss of face.
It took a while to persuade him, but persuasion is a thing I am talented at, and in due course he agreed. We then returned to the mainland of Saturn, and I broached the notion there. More time elapsed, but in due course we succeeded in hammering out the agreement. Each nation was to choose a champion; the two champions would then be memory-washed, so that neither knew anything of the broader situation, and placed together in a prison with limited supplies. It would be possible for only one to escape, and whichever nation that one represented would win the right to the name of the joint effort and symbolic conquest of the other. Holo cameras would be built into the prison, so that all that occurred within it would be a matter of continuous public record; there could be no cheating. Of course the two champions, their memories lost, would not know this. It promised to be a considerable vicarious adventure. All of the Middle Kingdom and Wan would be tuning in, surely.
The Middle Kingdom selected a champion martial artist: a husky man in his twenties who could kill swiftly in a hundred different ways, and kill slowly in a thousand more. Of course he would not remember this, but even mem-wash could not entirely eliminate the ingrained routines. In any event, he was extremely strong and agile and strong-willed, and it seemed unlikely that Wan could field a champion his equal.
But Wan was smarter than that. It selected a young woman, the fairest flower of her age, stunningly beautiful, skilled in the creative and performing arts and of an endearing disposition. Any man would welcome her as his bride, and probably would do anything for the mere favor of her smile.
“Foul!” cried the Premier, approximately, in Chinese; Forta would not translate the term he actually used. “There can be no fair combat!”
“Fair,” replied the Generalissimo. “Gender was not specified, only that we select a representative. Let your warrior smash her and take the victory; it is surely within his power to do so.”
The Premier wanted to abort the contest. But his ministers advised him that face could be lost if their side reneged, especially if it seemed that they were afraid to risk their champion against a mere girl. Also, news leaked to the public, together with a holo photo of the girl, and suddenly the imagination of the nation was caught up in the notion of their virile hero having total access to such a creature while they watched. Let him use her, then win the contest by escaping.
So it was set up. They used a honeymoon bubble: an enclosure with supplies for two for one week, rather luxuriously appointed, and a single jet-powered space suit. The two were placed within it unconscious; then the watch began.
It was stupid, I knew, but I found myself riveted to the holo broadcast. Perhaps it was because I knew that my own time was limited, the only question being whether I would accomplish the Dream before I died. It was easy to identify with the situation of the contest. There had to be a decision, and no one could know what it would be. Would the man use his strength to take the suit, and escape, or would he defer to the woman and sacrifice himself for her? Would he love her, and would he die for that love? It was his decision to make; he had the power, just as the Middle Kingdom had the power. The question was one of will.
The two woke together, as the equipment of the bubble bathed them in radiation that neutralized the sleep medication. I identified with the man, as I am sure other men did, while the women identified with the woman. I could almost fathom his thoughts, hardly needing my talent to read him.
They had names, and remembered these, though little else. He knew he was from the Middle Kingdom, and she knew she was from Wan, and they knew that these nations were not on friendly terms, but the rest had been taken by the wash. So I will call him King and her Wan, for this narration.
King found himself on a mat on the floor of a tiny bubble. He knew it was a bubble, because he could feel the change in gee as he stood; his head was lighter than his feet. But he could not remember how he had come there.
Quickly he explored. In the next chamber he encountered a beautiful young woman, garbed like a princess, with a jeweled diadem binding back her hair. She looked like Helse. Of course he did not know that; only I knew that. My image of early love is always Helse, just as my image of late love is always Megan. Bear with me; I’m an old man. She stared back at him, startled. “Do I know you?” she asked nervously.
“I don’t remember,” he replied. Her dialect differed from his, but they could understand each other.
“You don’t remember?” She glanced about. “I don’t remember—anything. How did I come here?”
King did a swift appraisal. “I suspect I have been mem-washed. I don’t remember anything since—since my fifth birthday. Is it the same with you?”
She considered. “Yes.” She was evidently uncertain whether she could trust him.
“You are of the rings,” he said.
“Yes. And you are of South Saturn. I can tell by your accent.”
“Our nations are not friends,” he said.
“I have no concern with politics,” she replied. “At least, not that I can remember.”
King loo
ked at her again, already smitten by her beauty. “There is no need for us to be enemies,” he said. “It seems that we have both been washed and left here. Perhaps there is a way out.”
She got lithely to her feet. “Then let us be companions, and see what we can learn of our situation.” She remained somewhat in awe of his evident physical power, deciding that it was the safest course to be polite.
“Perhaps,” he agreed.
They explored their confinement. It turned out to be a beautifully appointed bubble, with the very best in food and beverage and appointments. King surveyed the supplies with a practiced eye, though he could not remember the practice. “One week,” he said. “For two.”
“How much air?” she asked.
He checked the indicators on the bubble’s master control. “One week. And one week for power.”
“That means that even if we economize on the food and air, we will perish when the power dies,” she said. “We cannot survive in a sealed bubble without heat.”
“True,” he agreed grimly. “It seems we are prisoners, and our execution date has been set.”
“What could we have done to deserve this?” she asked plaintively.
“Treason?”
“We are of two different nations,” Wan protested. “Surely what would be treason for one would be patriotism for the other.”
“Not if we had a treasonous liaison.”
She turned on him a gaze of innocence and surmise. “Could we have been lovers?”
“I see you are fair,” King said carefully. “Had you been willing, we could have been.”
She lowered her gaze modestly. With the colonization of the System, many of the old ways had passed, but it was still considered a virtue for a woman to be chaste until marriage.