Between the Strokes of Night

“I don’t know.” It was one of Peron’s own worries. “If it is possible to travel faster than light, our theories of the nature of the universe must be wrong.” “That is possible,” said Sy slowly — with a tone of voice that said clearly, that is quite impossible. “But don’t you see the problem? If the Immortals can exceed light-speed, they must have improved on our theories. And if they are so friendly to us, why do they keep that better theory from us?”

Peron had shaken his head. Anything about the Immortals remained a mystery. “It is my personal belief that nothing can exceed light-speed,” said Sy at last. “I will mistrust anyone, Government or Immortal, man or woman, human or alien, who attempts to tell me otherwise without providing convincing evidence.” And he had moved quietly away, leaving Peron more puzzled than ever. Conversation with Sy often left that unsettling feeling. Lum had explained it in his offhand way — Sy was just a whole lot smarter than the rest of them. And Elissa had thrown in her own evaluation: Sy was not smarter, not if that meant either memory or speed of thought; but he could somehow see problems from a different angle from everyone else, almost as though he were located at a different point in space. His perspective was different, and so his answers were always surprising.

And if he weren’t so strange, she had then added irrelevantly to Peron, he would be really attractive; which had of course irritated Peron greatly. His thoughts moved inevitably back to Elissa and their last night on Pentecost. While Lum and Kallen had been working conscientiously to screen contestants, Peron had been subjected to a pleasant but intense cross-examination. He and Elissa had found a quiet place in the Planetfest gardens. They stretched out on the soft ground cover and stared up at the stars, and Elissa must have asked him a thousand questions. Did he have brothers and sisters? What was his family like? Were they rich? (Peron had laughed at the idea that his father could ever be rich.) What were his hobbies? His favorite foods? Did he have any pets back home? Had he ever been on a ship, across one of Pentecost’s saltwater seas. What was his birthdate? Do you have a girl friend, back in Turcanta?

No, Peron had said promptly. But then his conscience had troubled him, and he told Elissa the truth. He and Sabrina had been very close for two years, until he had to devote all his time to preparation for the trials. Then she had found someone else.

Elissa didn’t bother to disguise her satisfaction. She had quietly taken hold of Peron and begun to make love to him.

“I told you I was pushy,” she said. “And you were acting as though you’d never get round to it. Come on — unless you don’t want me? I’ve wanted to do this — and especially this — ever since I met you on the forest trial, back in Villasylvia.” They had done things together that Peron had never imagined — and he used to think that he and Sabrina had tried everything. Lovemaking with Elissa added a whole new dimension. They had stayed together through the night, while the fireworks of Planetfest celebrations fountained and burst above them. And by morning they seemed infinitely close, like two people who had been lovers for many months. But that, thought Peron unhappily, made Elissa’s comment about Sy much harder to take. If she thought Sy was attractive — hadn’t she said very attractive? — did that mean she thought Sy was more interesting than he was? He remembered the last evening on Pentecost as fabulous, but maybe she didn’t feel the same way. Except that everything since then suggested that she did feel that way, and why would she lie to him?

Peron’s suit gave a gentle whistle, bringing him back from his dreaming. He felt irritated with his own train of thought. No denying it, he was feeling jealous. It was exactly the kind of mindless romantic mushiness that he despised, the sort of thing for which he had so teased Miria, his younger sister. He looked straight ahead. No time for dreaming now. Here came Whirlygig, to teach him a lesson in straight thinking. He was within a couple of kilometers of the surface, travelling almost parallel to it but closing too fast for comfort. Seen through a telescope, Whirlygig was not an interesting object. It was a polished silver ball about two thousand kilometers across, slightly oblate and roughened at the equator. Its high density gave a surface gravity at the poles of a fifth of a gee, a bit more than Earth’s Moon. A person in a spacesuit, freefalling straight down to the surface of Whirlygig, would hit at a speed of two kilometers a second — fast enough that the object in the suit afterwards would hardly be recognizable as human.