On Sirius all the days seemed to melt together in a single formless three o’clock. The Keptin had been at the resort for the better part of two weeks, and in all that time he had acquired only one memory to speak of: an image of himself sitting in a chair at the edge of the plaza, sipping sapphire wine and basking in the light of the multiple suns. As soon as he had drained his glass, one of the drink girls would arrive to fill it back up for him, bending at the waist as she poured. He knew that if he brushed her wrist with the backs of his fingers, she would sink toward him like a blade of grass pooling over with water and forget to charge him for it. The Keptin was fully aware of the effect he had on women. Ever since boyhood, he had been blessed with a certain carelessly sensual charm, though he had never used it for anything other than to be charming.
It was late in the afternoon when he saw an unfamiliar person walking beneath the trees: a lady with a pet tribble. The light picked her out as she stopped to slide her fingers through the grass and then moved slowly across the plaza toward the public fountain. She was a vision — her long skirt belling out in the breeze, the tribble nestled delicately between her palm and her stomach. The Keptin had been sitting in his chair for so long that the blood rushed to his head when he stood. Thousands of exploding white holes appeared in the air around him, and by the time his eyesight cleared, the lady was gone. This was Sirius, though. He was certain he would see her again. He made up his mind that he would introduce himself to her at the first opportunity.
That opportunity came the very next evening, while he was dining in the open-air Sandorian restaurant by the Oxbow Lake. The lady with the pet tribble took a bench on the far side of the patio. After the Keptin had settled his bill, he approached her and asked if she would mind some company. She was no longer wearing the skirt he had seen her in the day before, but a bright yellow dress — something like a pinafore — that bared her arms and shoulders.
“Please,” she said, gesturing at the bench, and he sat down. The lady put her hands together on her knees and asked him, “What’s your name?”
“I’m James,” the Keptin said.
“I’m Raïssa.”
She had yet to meet his eyes. He watched her without speaking until she looked at him. A smile stole over one corner of her lips, making a comma-shaped dimple in her cheek, and though the expression vanished almost immediately, he knew right away that she would say yes to him when the time came. At the beginning of any relationship, there was a moment of flirtation when a woman either gave her assent or barred the door. The Keptin had become skillful at predicting which sort of woman was likely to be which. He could barely remember the last time he had heard a lock clicking.
“Are you here alone?” he asked.
“Yes. My husbands are back on Arcturus.”
“Husbands?”
“Two of them. My people practice multiple marriage.”
“I see. And are you enjoying your stay?”
She sighed. “The answer you’re supposed to give is ‘of course.’ But…well…I was going to say that this place makes me tired, but the truth is that every place makes me tired.” And though he had failed to notice it before, there was definitely a weariness in her manner, a fragile unbraided quality that reminded him of those stray plasma streamers he sometimes saw drifting slowly apart in the interstellar winds. “‘Sirius, the Pleasure Planet,’” she quoted. “‘Where life is one endless cocktail hour.’”
He smiled. “I like to think of it as the endless three o’clock.”
“‘The endless three o’clock,’” Raïssa said. And then, “James is a clever man.”
Her tribble was resting on a little pillow on her lap, purring, and a tremor passed through its pink fur as she stroked it.
They decided to take a stroll along the promenade, where he asked her about her husbands. The first one was a trader, gone for months at a time in his slow-moving mongrel cargo ship. She had married him mainly as a way of solidifying his relationship with her father’s import-export business. The second husband was a more complicated matter. She had been in love with him once, she said, when they were both young and thought they would never change, or at least that they would always change for the better — but then he had broken one of his legs in a climbing accident, and he had never fully recuperated, and slowly all the happiness had leaked out of him. Now he rarely spoke to her except to say that she was the only thing he had left in the world. She could hardly sit in the same room with him without feeling a sense of paralysis. But she could never leave him. And she could never marry again.
“Why not? Isn’t that one of the advantages of multiple marriage — that you can marry again?”
“Yes, but he would think I was abandoning him,” she said. “It’s complicated. He still loves me, you see, he just no longer loves himself.” For a moment she was lost in reflection. “You wouldn’t have guessed that would change the way I feel about him, but it does somehow. Strange.”
“And how is it that you’re not back on Arcturus with him now?”
“I wanted some time away, and he suggested I try Sirius. He said I should take as much time as I needed. I doubt he can do without me for more than another week or so, though.”
After that, they turned the conversation to more pleasant topics: the music they liked, the novels they had read, the smell of the breeze as it rose off the lake. He put his hand to the small of her back to guide her around a broken stone in the walkway, pressing a little bit harder than was strictly necessary, and felt her respond to his touch by jerking away in a moment’s surprise before she eased back against him. At the end of the evening she stopped at a grocer’s cart to buy some grain to feed her tribble. Then the two of them parted, promising to meet again the next day.
The Keptin had been a faithful officer for more than half his life. He was married to his job, his commission, and it was not the sort of career that encouraged multiple marriage. But the service had never frowned upon the occasional love affair. And in fact his duty to his ship and crew had always offered him a convenient escape hatch from his relationships with women, one that was less likely to hurt them when the mysteries of their personality dissolved and inevitably they became plain to him. That night as he lay in bed, he thought with satisfaction of Raïssa. She was a depleted soul, it seemed, locked in a pitiful marriage, but she was beautiful, with her long, vase-shaped legs and her perfect white skin, and he looked forward to seeing her again.
The poor thing, he said to himself. It was the last thought he had before he fell asleep.
Part Two
The Keptin spent much of the next day with Raïssa, and every day thereafter until his leave came to an end. They would meet in the late morning in one of Sirius’s many restaurants, where they would sit over cups of tea and plan their day together: hiking the resort’s nature trails or soaking in the reyamilk baths, picnicking on the lakeside or taking in a holoconcert. The Keptin ran his finger along her jawline every so often, took the soft crook of her arm as she sat down, rested his hand on her waist as they walked. Slowly she relaxed into his touch. She was so young, barely out of her childhood, and with her hair coiled into a chaplet she reminded him of one of the girls he had been involved with during his time at the academy.
“Why do you have that look in your eye?” Raïssa asked him.
“You make me think of someone I used to know, a long time ago,” he said, squeezing her hand, and when he told her about the girl he had in mind, Ruth, she blushed and then smiled. Her earrings swayed as she turned her head. She was young, and she made him feel young, too.
The two of them never separated until well after the suns fell. One evening, they were walking past the jamaharon center when Raïssa said, “You never talk about your work with me. What did you say the name of your ship was — the Endeavour?”
“I’m on Sirius to get away from my work. That’s why we never talk about it.” But he had to admit to himself he thought about his ship and his crew all the time. He wondered whether they had fought off any battle cruisers. He imagined all the new civilizations they might have encountered. He should have been there, on the bridge, watching the stars turn into white streaks in the main viewer. Why couldn’t he put the idea out of his mind? Why did he wake up every morning worrying about his crew? He knew how unnecessary it was. He had left the ship under the command of his science officer, Commander S., and if there was one thing you could say about him, it was that he knew how to keep his wits about him in a crisis. He was all logic and no emotion — duty stripped entirely of passion. He was like the speed of light in normal space: he never changed.
“And when you’re back onboard your ship,” Raïssa asked, “will you stop thinking of me, too?”
That was the Keptin’s intention. Instead of answering, though, he gave her his most appreciative smile, slipped his arm around her waist, and led her out of the trees into the plaza.
The sky was just beginning to dim. A gust of wind whipped through the air and made the fountain throw off a curtain of spray. They watched as a small boy who had been prodding a boat across the water caught the spray full in his face and staggered off crying, his arms held out like tree branches. The Keptin started to laugh, expecting Raïssa to join him, but instead she stopped mid-step and said passionately, “I don’t want to go back home. You don’t know what it’s like for me, James. I want to stay here with you, here on Sirius, but my husband, my husband…”
She leaned into him, and without thinking he kissed her, running his hands behind her ears and gripping the back of her head. It happened the same way every time: his legs became rooted to the ground, taking on an almost impossible heaviness, while his upper body seemed to thin out and rise into the air, as long and loose as a streamer, so that he had the peculiar sense that he was two separate people, two separate creatures, attached to each other by only the slightest thread. He let Raïssa go, then kissed her again. He watched as she looked around to make sure no one had seen them. The only person nearby was a trader with an Orion slave woman draped over his arm, her glossy green skin reflecting the last of the sunlight like the still water of an deep lake. The trader was paying no attention to them, of course. He had other things on his mind. And besides, the sight of two lovers kissing on the street was as common as grass on Sirius. “Take me back to your room,” the Keptin whispered, and he followed Raïssa across the city to her hotel.
She could be so terribly naive at times, like a little girl experiencing everything from the empty chamber of her own innocence, but then something would topple over or come together inside her– he was never sure which — and suddenly she would seem so perceptive, so worldly, like a woman twice her age. She gave herself over to him with that perfect mixture of purpose and abandon that could only be the product of long experience or unassailable instinct, but then, after they had dressed and the Keptin had borrowed her sink to wash his face and hands, she began to cry. He gave her a moment to compose herself. There was a basket of moba fruit on the table by her window. He sat down and slowly peeled the rind off a piece until he had unplugged the vent in the bottom and the fruit released its thick mist of red perfume. He spat the seeds out one by one into a small silver dish. The fruit was so good that when he was finished he peeled and ate a second one.
“My husband would never leave our house again if he knew that I had fallen in love with someone else. He would never leave his bed,” Raïssa said. The lines of her tears still glistened on her cheeks. “What are we going to do?”
In the long life of the Keptin, many women had declared their love for him, but he had always known that he could never jeopardize his commission with a long-term romance, and known that he had a lifetime of such commissions in front of him, and so even at those moments when he felt his heart stir at the sound of the word, he had never felt free to declare his love in return.
He sat beside Raïssa and took her in his arms. “What can we do?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You’re a good man. You’re kind to me. You try to pretend you’re some kind of rake, but I can see you more clearly than that. I know that it’s only a facade. But I — I don’t know what kind of woman I am anymore. I used to think my life was going to be so simple. But now I’m stuck. That’s the awful truth — I’m stuck. I hate what I’m doing to my husband. And if you could see what I’m doing to him, you would hate me, too.”
“I don’t hate you,” the Keptin said. But he didn’t understand her, either. Why was she so overturned by what had happened between them? Couldn’t she just accept their time together for what it was? He looked at the tribbles on her dressing table. There were eight of them now, piled together in a variety of colors, purring in the light of a small, dim table lamp. The day they met he had seen only the one. He could not remember her mentioning any others. Perhaps there was a tribble dealer somewhere on the planet.
“We’ll have to say goodbye in a few days,” Raïssa said. “We’ll have to say goodbye and never see each other again. It will make us so unhappy, but it’s the only answer.”
“Everything will be all right,” the Keptin told her, and he lay back on the bed with her head resting on his chest until gradually they both fell asleep.
Part Three
The next day they took a floater out to the waterfalls at the edge of the city, where they spent the afternoon following the paths that ran beneath the line of cascades. The light seemed to change as it traveled through the water, softening to a pale green and taking on hundreds of closely packed twists and folds that looked like spaghetti strands twined together inside an eggbeater. As soon as the two of them crossed back into the open air, everything looked just as it had before, fixed and steady, shining inside its own sharp outline. They might have been on a completely different planet. The sky was blue, the leaves were green, and the seams of clay that showed through the hillside were red and yellow. How many planets was any one planet likely to contain, the Keptin wondered? Hundreds probably, if not thousands.
Raïssa was tired that day — tired much of the time, in fact — and as they made their way down the hillside, she kept pulling him aside so that they could stop and rest for a while, commandeering this or that bench or outcropping of stone. Occasionally, some hidden reservoir of vitality would open up inside her and she would seem as vivacious as she had the first time he saw her, bending over to slip her fingers through the grass, but before long the reservoir would seal shut again, her limbs would go slack with exhaustion, and she would rub her temples or close her eyes, taking long, soft, slow, deliberate breaths of air. He was surprised to discover that it was not when she seemed so strong and full of energy that he was most attracted to her, but at those moments when she looked as though she were stifling some infinite sigh. There was something about her weakness, her fragility, that made him want to hold her in his arms and shore her up.
They were walking by the chain of pools next to the field where they had left the floater when she turned to him and said, “This is my favorite time of day on Sirius.”
“Why’s that?”
“Everything is so tranquil here when the suns are going down. On Arcturus, the longneedles come out at sunset. You have to wave your arms around the whole time to keep them from biting. You can never simply stop and enjoy yourself.”
The only insects the Keptin could see were making small circles on the surface of the pools, where the fish snapped at them and sucked them under. The insects made circles on the water, and the fish took them into the circles of their mouths, and then the birds ate the fish, and the wildlife ate the birds, and the soil consumed the wildlife, nourishing the plants that the insects ate. And so everything was a circle. He wondered how many people before them had stopped in that same place at the end of the day to watch the water trickling through the pools, thinking, as he was, about their moment in the circle, and how many people after them would do the same.
A Cossack in full military uniform stopped and glared at them, his eyes glimmering like drops of black oil beneath his cranial ridges. He didn’t say anything, just harrumphed and moved on, and as he vanished up the trail, the Keptin and Raïssa looked at each other and began to laugh. Soon one of the suns slipped below the horizon. Raïssa leaned casually over into an embrace. The Keptin could feel the curve of her rib-cage rising and falling beneath her shirt. “It’s getting late,” she said, and it was.
Two days later, shortly before his ship was scheduled to arrive back in orbit over Sirius, Raïssa received a brief transmission from her husband that made her decide to return home. The transmission was a simple low-frequency voice message, crackling with interference from the solar flares, that was waiting for her when she arrived in her hotel room: “Hello, dear. I missed the sound of your voice, and I was hoping to” — here the message either skipped or he repeated himself — “the sound of your voice, and I was hoping to hear it again. But there’s nobody there to talk to, you see. What a mess.” At that, he began to cough, and the transmission ended.
“It’s worse than I thought,” Raïssa said. “He’s been drinking.”
“How can you tell?” The Keptin was a skilled interpreter of tone and inflection, but he had been unable to determine anything about the man’s character through the popping and hissing of the signal.
All she said was, “I can tell.” Then she pulled out her suitcases and began to pack.
The Keptin had spent almost every minute of the last seven days with Raïssa. They had stayed in her room one night, in his the next, touching even while they slept. Over and over again she had told him how kind he was to her, how tender, and how she was failing them both, failing everybody, by being too weak to resist him and too guilt-ridden to leave her husband. “I don’t see how either one of you can love me like you do,” she said. But the Keptin knew that though he had been kind to her, and though he had been tender, he had never loved her. She had a duty to her husband, she claimed, and she was probably right, but he had a duty of his own, a duty to his commission, and he would not allow that duty to be frustrated.
A ship was leaving for the Arcturus System that afternoon. He stayed with Raïssa to help her pack, collecting her shoes from the closet and then folding her dresses for her as she knelt by the bedside cabinet stuffing dozens of tribbles into a suitcase. Together they walked to the transporter room. As they waited for the engineer to program the sequencers, she clasped his hands and said, “I’ll miss you, James. I’ll never see you again, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop missing you. The way things are, we didn’t stand a chance. In some other universe maybe, but not in this one.” Then she kissed him. Her eyes were glassed over with tears, and the Keptin could see the subtle tightening of her features as she tried to restrain herself from crying. The speech she gave had obviously been rehearsed, but he was touched by it in spite of himself, and because he was touched by it, he was also irritated. It seemed to him that she was making their separation more difficult than it ought to have been, that she was prodding him with the sharp edge of her own misery as a way of saying, “Remember me. Remember me.”
“We’re ready for you now, ma’am,” the engineer said, and Raïssa pressed one hand to the Keptin’s chest and let the other slip from his fingers. Then she stepped up onto the transporter pad. He felt a curious mixture of relief and sadness as her body turned to energy inside the confinement beam.
Afterward, he stopped for a drink of sapphire wine in the bar by the plaza. He had barely finished his first glass when Commander S. contacted him to tell him that the ship had arrived in orbit, and as he gathered his things at the hotel, he thought about Raïssa and the time they had spent together. Already she was receding into his past — just another episode in his life, just another romance. Soon his recollection of her would be stripped of all its living breath, like the cloud of gas cast off by a collapsing star, and he would think of her, when he thought of her at all, as only a glittering pinpoint of what she had really been, a speck glowing somewhere far in the distance of his memory. She was returning to the harness of her marriage, and he was returning to his ship and his crew, and that was the way it should be.
For the first time since he had arrived on Sirius, he felt a slight chill in the air. He flipped open the antenna grid on his communicator. “One to beam up, Commander S.”
Part Four
The Keptin resumed command of his ship, settling quickly back into his daily routine. Each morning, from his chair on the bridge, he directed the navigator to lay in a new set of coordinates and watched as the stars tunneled toward him in the main viewer, fixing into fresh constellations as the ship reached warp speed. He called down to the engine room at the top of every hour to make sure the propulsion system was running smoothly. Whenever he received a message from a passing starship, he told Lieutenant U. to patch it through to him on the intercom, and whenever he detected a bird of prey decloaking nearby, he initiated a red alert. He never knew who he was so surely as he did at such moments, with his tricorder in his palm and the bridge ticking like a clock all around him.
Nothing had changed while he was away. The science labs, the corridors, the onboard lighting — they were all the same. The Keptin ate his meals in the mess hall. He practiced his target shooting on the phaser range. He played cards in the recreation lounge. He knew exactly where he would find his crew when they were off-duty: his science officer would be meditating in his quarters, the doctor reading in the ship’s library, the helmsman pruning his plants in the botany lab. At night, as he lay with his head pressed against his pillow, he could hear the quiet, pulsing hum of the warp nacelles through the hull of the ship. The sound reminded him of the ocean waves along the California coastline, just a few blocks from the Academy. He would fall asleep imagining what it must have felt like to be one of those fish that lived in the shallows, sailing in and out with the changing of the tide.
In short, he became absorbed again in the details of his life. The weeks moved forward with a singular swiftness. One day he was surmounting a few minor difficulties to deliver a shipment of vaccine to the Tau Ceti system, and the next he was evading a fleet of battle cruisers on his way to a rendezvous with the starship Potemkin. He attended a performance of a Shakespeare play, led a landing party through the rocky cliffs of Planet M-220, and docked at a starbase for deflector repairs. He challenged Commander S. to a game of three-dimensional chess, and when the Keptin lost, as he usually did, he congratulated the Commander with a glass of spice tea, though in the privacy of his heart he had to admit that he found the look of joyless accomplishment on his face infuriating.
He was sure that he would stop thinking of Sirius soon, and yet, as the months passed, he realized he was dwelling on the memory of his visit there more and more. He would be riding the turbolifts or standing over the tactical console on the bridge, and suddenly he would hear the fountain trickling in the plaza, smell the strong vanilla scent of the perfumery, see the shadows of the trees swaying like the long necks of water birds, and it would seem to him that he was there again, on the Pleasure Planet. He knew that he had been bored for much of his stay there, bored and listless, slowly growing drunk as he drowsed in the heat of the multiple suns, but in his memory the resort was purged of all its tedium and hollow agreeability and it became something extraordinary. There was the Earth restaurant across the street from his hotel, for instance, which served the best grilled mushrooms he had ever eaten so far from home. There was the gentle breeze that cooled him as he walked along the beach. And most of all there was Raïssa. He thought of her constantly. He would look back on the afternoon they spent walking beneath the waterfalls together and remember how the mist had made her skin glisten when she crossed into the light, how her voice had sounded in the stillness of the mountain trail, how she had stopped by the chain of pools just to tell him that it was her favorite time of day. He would remember these things, and he would smile to himself. He couldn’t help it. He would smile again as he thought about the way she rose onto her toes the first time he kissed her, as though she wanted him to toss her into the air. Sometimes his collar would kink against the back of his neck when he turned his head, and he would imagine he felt the touch of her fingers there, tickling him from behind, her pet tribbles purring in the background as she gave him a massage. Could it really be that he was destined never to see her again? He had been so brusque with her, so unresponsive, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember why. When he thought of her now, he felt nothing but love. “You’re a good man,” she had said to him. “You’re so kind to me, so tender,” and he knew that it wasn’t true. She was the kind one, she was the good one. But now that she was gone, he wanted to be the man she had deluded herself into believing he was. He wanted a second chance.
He began to dream about her. He imagined they were married and raising two children, who were also named James and Raïssa, and the tenor of his dreams followed him into the waking world. Once he was on a shuttlecraft with his Chief Engineer, embarking toward a Federation vessel that was in need of transporter repair, when he found himself fantasizing about what it would have been like if he had never become an officer and she had never married her husbands back on Arcturus. The Engineer had to call his name several times before he heard him. “Sir? What are your orders, sir? Earth to James.”
The Keptin was embarrassed. “Full impulse, Commander. Maintain current heading.”
“Aye, sir,” the Engineer answered, and though he did not say anything more, the Keptin could tell that he was wondering what was wrong with him.
There was no one he could talk to about Raïssa. Sometimes, walking through the recreation lounge, he would overhear some of the ensigns bragging about their romantic conquests and he would long to join in, to say to them, “I met the most amazing woman on Sirius last summer. The way she looked in the morning, with her hair all in a tangle — my God, if only you knew,” but it would have been a breach of decorum to mention it, as well as a breach of integrity. He began to experience stomach cramps — hard, lancing pains that seemed to come from out of nowhere. He scheduled a visit to sickbay, but the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with him. He gripped the Keptin’s shoulder as he was leaving. “Jim?”
“What is it, Doctor?”
“I say this to you as the ship’s chief medical officer. You should take it easy on yourself.”
“Understood.”
What was wrong with him? He had experienced some of the finest moments of his life onboard his ship, and yet somehow it wasn’t enough. Everything seemed thinner than it had before, as insubstantial as tissue, as though he could take hold of the world he knew and with one good tug it would all fall apart. The whole of space was visible outside his window, and yet it was entirely without meaning.
So it was that when ordered to take his crew to a cometary cluster that was passing within a light year of the Arcturus System, he hesitated only a moment before directing the navigator to make a short detour. “Bearing 320 mark 15,” he ordered, and then, “At the helm, Lieutenant. Warp Seven.”
“You realize that if you follow that heading, you’ll be taking the ship to Arcturus,” the science officer told him.
“I’m aware of that, Mr. S.”
“Arcturus is not on a direct course with the cometary cluster, Captain.”
“We should have time to make a brief stop.”
The Commander raised an eyebrow but made no further comment.
The Keptin wasn’t sure what he would say to Raïssa. Perhaps there was nothing to be said at all. He knew only that he wanted to see her again.
She had given him her address before they parted on Sirius, saying, “I’ll never go anywhere, and you’ll never be able use it, but I’ll feel better if you know where I am,” so he was able to find her house without difficulty. It was constructed of a local stone he had never seen before, red with a powdery-looking texture, the blocks fragmented with dusky green veins that he mistook for creepers of moss at first, though they were actually streaks of clay. It was a carnival house, he thought, twice the size of the other buildings on the block, the house of a person who had a great deal of money to spend but very little taste — her first husband, the cargo trader, he presumed.
And yet the idea that she was there inside it somewhere, padding through the kitchen, perhaps, or sitting behind the yellow window on the second floor, gave the house an aura of mystery and fascination, as though some formative religious ritual were being enacted behind its walls, a sacrament from which centuries of observance would descend. To the Keptin it was the most important building in the city. He considered knocking on the door, but it occurred to him that one of her husbands might answer, and he didn’t know how he would explain himself if that happened. Also, he couldn’t help but think that simply arriving on her front porch after so long, waiting with his hands behind his back like a salesman or letter carrier, lacked the proper sense of drama. He wanted to see the changes that took place in her face when he appeared someplace she would never have expected to find him. Only then, he thought, would he know what to say to her.
As he stood across the street trying to decide what to do, a woman came out of the house hauling three large black plastic trash bags. A few tribbles fell out of the neck of one. She stooped over to jam them back inside. She was straightening onto her feet again when he approached her. “Excuse me. Can you tell me whether the lady of the house is in?”
“You don’t really think anyone would be at home on a day like this, now do you?”
“Why?” he asked. “What’s happening today?”
The trash bags were wiggling in her grip, and he could hear a faint gobbling noise coming from inside them. “It’s the first day of the festival, of course. Miss Raïssa is there along with the Misters. Nobody would miss the first day of the festival, only a poor cleaning woman like myself.”
He thanked the woman and set out at a brisk walk. At the end of the block, he caught a hovertrain that ferried him over the city and dropped him off at the festival gate. It was an outdoor event with rides and games and concession stands where craft vendors sold jewelry and clay pots from open-walled tents. Above him he could see rows of lights glowing by the hundreds, tied to thin white strings that crisscrossed over the pathways in a jiggling net. A man in a credit-exchange booth called out to the passing crowds. A barker in a striped red suit stood next to a wheel of fortune, spinning it round so that it clacked to a stop after one or two lazy rotations. A child ran past the Keptin licking a confection of bright yellow sap from a stick. All in all he was reminded of the state fairs he had attended as a boy in Iowa.
It took him more than an hour of wandering from tent to tent before he finally spotted Raïssa. She was standing between two men at a ring-tossing booth, an older gentleman with thin legs and a barrel-shaped chest who must have been her first husband and a younger one, with a wooden crutch under his arm, who must have been her second. While the first husband paid for a set of rings, the Keptin watched Raïssa take the other’s sleeve and point out something she had seen across the distance of the fairway. She leaned into him and smiled. For a moment the Keptin was convinced that she had fallen back in love with the man, that she had forgotten their time together and that he was now dead to her, but then her husband nodded dourly and turned away, and the tiredness seeped back into her posture. The effect was so familiar to him that he regained his confidence. He moved into Raïssa’s line of vision and winked at her. She brought her hand to her throat in astonishment, took a half-step back, and dropped the carved wooden sehlat she was carrying. She was about to say something, it seemed, but then she looked in terror at her two husbands and quickly back at the Keptin with a nervous, excited, bewildered, appraising glance.
He motioned for her to follow him. He kept walking across the lane, weaving past a cigarette trader and a group of Rigelian tourists. Then he stopped behind a refreshment booth. After a moment Raïssa came after him.
“What are you doing here? You can’t be here.”
His heart was pounding. “Don’t be angry with me. I had to see you.”
“Angry? I’m not angry.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she made a gesture he had never seen her make before, cupping his chin in her palm and shaking her head. “But if my husbands find out about you — if anyone sees me with you and tells them — oh God, what are you doing here?”
“I’ve asked myself the same question, believe me. I thought I would know what to say when I saw you, but now…”
“Where’s your ship? Your crew?”
“I left them waiting in orbit.”
She sounded crestfallen. “You’re not staying then. You’re going to leave me.”
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Yes, oh yes, James, but you can’t. It’s too hard. It would hurt too many people. I’ve wanted to see you again ever since the day we left Sirius. You’re the only thing I’ve thought about. A hundred thousand times I was sure I glimpsed you out of the corner of my eye, but it was always somebody else, just a trick of the light. Those have been the only meaningful moments in my life since I came home — the times when I thought I saw you and my heart started racing.”
It was late afternoon, and the longneedles were biting, but the Keptin hardly noticed them. As he stared at Raïssa, she seemed to become the still point of the swirling crowd, all those vendors and carnival barkers and endlessly moving families. In that same instant he understood that he was in love with her. He wondered how it had happened. She was no different from the thousands of other women he had known, or so it seemed, and yet the sound of her voice, the globe-shaped earrings that bumped against her neck when she turned her head too quickly, the split-second smile she gave whenever he said her name, meant everything in the world to him. To think that when they said goodbye on Sirius he had imagined he would soon forget her, and that he had greeted the prospect not with dread but a feeling of liberation. He kissed her, and once again he felt himself becoming two separate people — one infinitely heavy, the other as thin and light as air. But she broke the kiss and pulled away.
“We can’t. There are too many people.”
He felt a terrible cold sensation of emptying out, as though everything inside him, his heart and his blood and his bones, had been phased suddenly out of his body, dematerializing in a long stream of matter. “I don’t want never to see you again,” he said.
It was the closest he had ever allowed himself to come to a declaration of love.
“Then I’ll visit you. I’ll charter a ship, and I’ll visit you. But my husbands will be looking for me soon. You have to leave now,” she pleaded. She squeezed his hand, holding it to her chest for a second. “I don’t see how either one of us will ever be happy again. But I promise I’ll come, James. I promise,” and she hurried off into the motion of the fair.
For a moment the sunlight struck her orange dress from behind, and he could see her legs scissoring away beneath the fabric. He watched as she waded into the crowd, becoming a lifted neck and a curved wing of shoulder, the few stray pieces of her he was able to glimpse through the interspaces of all the other bodies. Then finally, inevitably, she disappeared.
Part Five
There was a part of him that had never returned from his visit to Sirius, a certain presence of mind he had never been able to recapture, and following his trip to Arcturus, he began to wonder if he would ever see that part again. For some reason he had imagined that it would be easier to rejoin his life onboard after he spoke to Raïssa again, but it soon became obvious to him that he was mistaken. The only time he was entirely at home with himself was when she was onboard the ship with him.
She was able to visit him a few weeks after he saw her at the fair, and again a month later, and after that whenever he was traveling close enough to the Arcturus System for her to make the trip without arousing the suspicion of her husbands. Though he could not conceal her presence from the crew, he made it clear that he was reluctant to discuss her with them. It was not that he was ashamed of their relationship, or uneasy about its consequences, but that she had become the most precious thing in his life on a foundation he only barely understood. He had adopted the habit of silence as a convenience when he believed he would never see her again, and he was afraid that changing that habit, changing anything at all, would tear down some secret bearing wall and leave the two of them in ruins.
He was always surprised by the feeling of loneliness that came over him after she left. She gave him one of her tribbles as a going-away present — to keep him company, she said — but though it was soft in his hands and it purred whenever he stroked it, it was a feeble substitute, and he shut it in his spare room along with a few large bags of grain and forgot about it. Whenever Raïssa was gone, he missed her, and whenever she was onboard the ship, he thought about her continuously, anticipating the moment when he could hand control of the bridge over to the duty officer and meet her in his quarters or the recreation lounge. What was she doing? he wondered. What was she doing right now? Was she painting in the art studio? Was she thinking of him?
These were the questions he was asking himself the afternoon an unusual energy jet appeared a few thousand kilometers off the ship’s port bow. He looked at the image in the main viewer. “It seems to be some kind of complex plasma pattern,” Lieutenant U. said.
“Or it could be a noncorporeal life form,” proposed Commander S.. “May I suggest we scan the phenomenon with an ionizing beam.”
The Keptin ordered his helmsman to make the scan. After the computer had completed its analysis, he told him, “Energy scan shows no sign of sentient activity, Captain,” and the Keptin said, “Nevertheless, we should exhaust every option. Lieutenant U., open a channel to the phenomenon on all hailing frequencies.”
And all the while he was wondering whether Raïssa was reading a book or watching the stars pass outside the window, napping in his bed or taking a sonic shower.
He had another life hidden beneath the surface of his life as an officer, and it seemed to him that that other life contained the best part of himself. He was a smaller man there and a better one — a man who experienced everything not with more depth but with more exactness, as though his ego had been polished away until it exhibited the world like a fine lens. And yet this better man was concealed from everyone around him, concealed even from Raïssa, though he was fastened to her by a thousand strings. The Keptin was someone other than who he appeared to be when he was striding through the ship with his phaser in his belt and his shoes tight on his feet, filling every corridor with the sound of his voice. His crew did not really know him. Neither did his family, and neither did his closest friends. He shone at his brightest only when no one was watching — and so, he presumed, did everyone else.
When he got back to his quarters that evening, Raïssa was laying out a meal of roast fowl and Senarian egg broth. Her face was pale, her features tight with sadness, and for a moment she would not meet his eye. She put the last plate on the table, came over to the bed where he was taking off his shoes, and embraced him. It was the third day of her visit, and they both knew she would be going home soon. “Oh, I wish I could stay with you,” she said, tightening her arms around him. “Why does it always have to be this way?”
And he said, “There, there, my dear,” resorting to the same helpless phrase every father in the world used to console his daughter after she scraped her leg or crushed her fingers in a door, because why did it have to be this way?
He began to stroke her hair. That was all it took. Experience had taught him that the longer he held her, the harder she would cry, and so he drew himself slowly away and finished changing out of his uniform. He sipped at the glass of wine she had left on the table and then went to the mirror to comb his hair. There were three gray strands above the temple. He plucked them out and examined them in the light. It was obvious to the Keptin that he had turned a corner in the past year. His eyes were dimmer than they used to be, his waist thicker, and just a few days ago he had discovered a small rough mark the size and color of a brown cherry on the underside of his arm. He had jettisoned his youth so suddenly. He had learned to love too late. Why couldn’t humans be like his science officer, he wondered, with a lifespan of centuries? Raïssa sat at the foot of the bed sniffing back a few last tears. She seemed so young, and yet soon her own eyes would grow tired, her skin would lose its luster, and there would be no going back for either one of them. If only they could have known each other as children, he thought, when a different sort of life might have been possible — or if only he could leave his commission, and she could leave her husbands, and they could make a different sort of life together now. But he knew that there would be no other life for the two of them. They had not been young together, and they would not be old together, either.
Yet still he went to the bed and kissed her and said, “Are you feeling better now? Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.”
“What, though? What?” she asked.
He did not have an answer, would never have an answer, and she looked at him and gripped his hand and gave a brokenhearted sigh. In the silence that filled the room, they could hear a purring sound, the same quietly rolling buzz the Keptin had been listening to as he fell asleep for weeks. After a while, Raïssa said, “Well, at least you have your tribbles to keep you company while I’m away.”
“Tribble,” he said. “You gave me only the one. And I’ve barely touched it.”
A straight line creased her brow. “Tribbles are born pregnant, and they reproduce exponentially. I thought you knew that.”
“I didn’t.”
The Keptin got up and opened the door to his spare room. Inside there were thousands of tribbles, maybe tens of thousands, heaped together in a single great pile that held the high, flat shape of the door for a second before spilling over onto his legs. There were so many tribbles that the air seemed to vibrate with their purring. He was astonished that they had been able to accumulate in such numbers without his awareness. He could not imagine how he would ever get rid of them all. And as Raïssa came up behind him and said his name, locking her arms around his waist, he understood that a long time of difficulty lay before them and their troubles were only just beginning.
–P. Chekov
Stardate 6823.6
