Werhner is lying on his back, staring at the ceiling in the cottage we have been assigned on Guam. The air is heavy, the light trade winds ripe. He is still wearing his bathing suit. Sweat beads on his chest, runs as he raises himself on his elbow.

“Somebody went through my things,” he says. “Somebody went through your things. Nothing missing, but somebody was in here.”

I have just returned from another series of encephalograms, kinesthograms, redundant examinations. My torpor dissipates. I fold through my clothes, my books, my papers…. “What the hell?” The cover of Dean’s Deep Space Transpositions is creased; my clothes are in disarray.

Werhner is sitting on the edge of the cot now, popping a pinkish pill into his mouth, swallowing it without water.

“I’m going to get out of here,” I tell him. “This is too much. We’ve been here three weeks.”

“Cooper’s the only one who’s left the base,” Werhner says flatly. “I don’t know what the hell is going on—these goons spend half their time questioning each other about procedure, the whole dome crew is still here on Guam—Tamashiro, Levsky, Dawes. I think… Look, Rawley, I think they’re trying to set us up, to stick the blow on us. What did your tests show?”

“Nothing abnormal. The same readings as last week. And the week before. And the day after we landed.”

“Still having those nightmares?”

“Werhner,” I say, “they go away. This is a nightmare, this place. Who can live this way? The same questions, steamed food, and look at that cot, that cot’s killing my back. I’m going to get out of here.”

“Me, too,” Werhner says—he is picking up his diving mask and snorkel and fins. “To the reef? Utama Bay?’

“Not now. I’ve got something to do.”

“No swim? Gonna watch the vidi?”

“I wish I were flying,” I tell him. “I didn’t think I’d ever miss it, but I do now. I need to get out of this place.”

“Good luck.” He smiles sardonically.

“Something is bothering you,” Collette says. We are sitting together as we sat the day before, knees up, looking into the woods. “You know I never logged the hike; nobody knows we’re here. Honest. Especially here.”

“It isn’t that,” I tell her, then go silent for a moment. “Let me describe to you a sequence,” I finally say. “Or maybe you’ll think I need a psychic screen.”

“No,” she says, “tell me.”

“All right. Listen to my… visions—I have visions, nightmares, hallucinations, I don’t know exactly what they are. Two especially: one is a woman floating in space, her arms outstretched. The other is a blue-black funnel, diamond points of stars in this kind of whirlpool—it lies in the direction of program—there’s a glowing object, a spinning sun, approaching, coming very close, fading at the same time. And I dream about a man, see things from the blow sometimes.”

“Happened on the ship?”

“Yes and no. Some are memories, but others aren’t memories, exactly; when they occur it’s as if I’m experiencing… very vivid memories, say. Or not memories at all. I know they’re associated with one another, but I can’t figure out how. I don’t know if the sequence is real or a hallucination. It’s very strange.”

“You’d know if they were all from the ship.”

“Yes and no again,” I tell her. “It was confusing when we blew—Werhner insists on a time distortion, but I don’t know. I’d say no, not exactly. The report says all the clocks agreed except one.”

Collette looks away for a long moment, into the woods. “What happens to the woman whom you see?”

“Happens? Happened,” I say. “She’s dead. Motionless, frozen.”

Collette turns to me, places her hand on my cheek, and pivots my face so that she is looking into my eyes, I into hers.

“Then don’t think of her,” she says. “Don’t think about any of those things. Think about me instead, think about where we are and what we’re going to do here. We can do anything, you know. We’re going to have a real time together.”

Anyone who knew me well enough, I think, would know of my hallucinations, would know I’d take the faint trail into this draw. Collette didn’t. There are some things, I think, that she doesn’t know after all, and that alone makes me feel infinitely better. Perhaps her depression had been affecting me. But when I look at her—into her half-sleepy eyes, her wide, liquid smile—she doesn’t seem depressed any more, and that makes me feel better, too.

DA6// The taxi lurches to a stop in the bright midday sun. “This is it,” the young driver says, pointing. “That warehouse, next to the grandstand.”

Erica steps out the opposite door, and I’m wondering just how discreet I have to be with her. We are on an industrial road off SectorBlue, but close to the automobile track. I can hear the whine of Formula E.

I try the door at the nondescript metal hangar whose address Massimo gave me. It is locked. I lead Erica into the grandstand to look over the side of the building—and the racing circuit opens up as we climb into the seating tier, a broad green expanse, a patch of woods, the track weaving out into the sector and back again. The seating tier angles along an S curve in the track, looks obliquely into the trackside of the warehouse: open hangar doors. Not a warehouse after all, but a cavernous garage whose business end is a series of busy pits, wide tires stacked four high, sleek cars. I decide to leave Erica in the third row, tell her she doesn’t have to stay if she doesn’t want to, then slip down through an unlocked gate to trackside.

Massimo, a big man, is easy enough to spot on the near side of the garage. At first glance I think he’s organized a cafe, but there he is behind canopies and tables, between two blood-red cars of immaculate presence. They are antiques, elegant cars without a blister of corrosion on their lacquer-smooth surfaces. The cars obviously aren’t Formula E, their design is so much older; one is a racer and the other a coupe. Massimo is talking with two technicians in red jump suits, his flushed face almost matching the color of the cars.

He grins when he sees me, opens his arms in greeting, then they open more broadly to the cars. Of course. They are the surprise he predicted the day before yesterday, what he’d had flown in.

“These come from Milano,” he says expansively, “only for these days.” The larger of the machines, he says, is the only surviving Ferrari Bianco del Guidici. It is low, combustion-powered by a V-16 slung between fat rear tires and topped by mirror-shiny exhaust stacks. The car radiates speed and quality, gives me a strange elation that seems to please Massimo as much as it pleases me. In this world of the videon, there is something familiar about the Ferrari, a world which seems more like home.

“And other,” he says, showing me the smaller but equally striking two-seater coupe, “is Lancia. Not the power, but with Lancia—ah, with Lancia you are making love with young Neapolitan woman,” he laughs. Massimo shows me the Lancia’s unique strut suspension, and we look under its hood as he describes its antiskid braking console. More than a coupe, it has run at Le Mans. He describes the Lancia’s ability to slide as a lover might describe the curves of his woman. The sculptured surface is so mirror-smooth that the Lancia reflects itself reflected in the Ferrari, translated through the Ferrari and transposed again into the parabolas and loops of its sleek lines. The technicians are sloping off the Ferrari’s tune; it takes another ten minutes for its thunderous rumble to meet the test of Massimo’s ear.

We wind up sipping Campari and waiting for lunch under a trackside canopy, my head finally coming right. I guess I hope Erica will just get bored and leave, though when I check she seems to be enjoying the show. Giroti’s pit is just at the beginning of the S curve, and from our folding chairs we can watch the new Formula E’s, looping the track in practice for the Energy West Grand Prix, whistle toward us, braking furiously, enter the chute, then chatter away. Massimo explains that, Formula E aside, with what his mechanics have been able to do, the Ferrari can hold its own on a track as tight and curvy as this one. His Bianco, as a matter of fact, held the standing lap record at Monza until a mere ten years ago.

Massimo wants to hear about Collette, he wants the story from its beginning. “With all sexy detail. Do not spare an old man.” He smiles. I begin telling him, and we soon get sidetracked in SciCom’s interest in me. So I tell him what I know about that, too, grateful that he’s willing to listen. In the shade of the canopy, eating a Roman squid salad, I relate my interview with Taylor yesterday, my confusion about Collette as well as my confusion about why they want me back on Guam.

He’s amused by my feelings for Collette, fascinated by our first meeting in what I had thought was the VIP lounge of the L.A. trans-port. A wonderful story; he smiles. He thinks Collette is probably not a malicious woman, but that I was a madman to trust her. The key, he tells me, to seeing her again, if that’s what I really want, is SciCom’s interest in her, which hinges back again on their deepest interest in me. So we loop even further back and I begin another story, the one which begins more than four years ago, out on range with the Daedalus.

I tell him how SciCom left us flying, for all practical purposes, blind; how the Committee Pilot, unable to decide on anything but the most general direction of our survey, left the tangent angle of event-horizon approach to the dome crew’s day-by-day response to prevailing macroweather. I tell him how we nervously sat out the lull, the circumstances I recall at the blow, the three who died, Maxine included.

“This is at black hole,” he says. “Fantastico.”

“Well off,” I tell him. “Theoretically, had we been near the event horizon, or blown there… well, I wouldn’t be telling the story. Of course we took precautions, we had a safety factor of more than ten. It’s only speculation, but do you know what the physicists say?”

“Yes, I know black hole. Prego, this is what I, Giroti, say—a star described by a poet, poeta romantico—where a traveler can lose his freedom in space and become trapped forever—where the traveler is given freedom in time instead. Amazing possibility.”

“We came as close as anyone has,” I tell him. “It was a pretty hairy trip—it’s still hairy.” I explain how Cooper, who had written up our report, became separated from us at recovery in the Pacific and later died, how the rest of us have been kept on Guam for a pointless month. Massimo is charmed by the way I managed to slip away, and we drink a toast to that day—for what it’s worth now, I think.

In the end, given the circumstances, he doesn’t think that Collette is a SciCom employee assigned to watch me from the beginning of the trip; rather, someone they’ve used, who used me in turn.

“But who can finally tell?” he wonders. “Only this woman knows, if she would tell you. If you could trust her.”

When I tell him that I’ve tried to get in touch with Collette by trying to get in touch with Eva Steiner, and that there is a barrier around that woman, whether it’s private sex or security, I don’t know—he lifts his hands palms upward and sighs.

“Both,” he says. “And then we come back to SciCom. After I talk with you I remember this woman’s name. She is well known. This woman is like a man, she walk like a man, she wear clothes like a man. She is Director of EnergyWest—but that is like saying SciCom, they are together like a hand which slide into fitted glove. Perhaps they are using her, I think, using the strangeness of this woman to see that you don’t talk with Collette. This is a circle we are making, now I see. I tell you I have seen things with SciCom which frighten me—things like this. I will give example how it works. We have plutonium plant in Brazil with terrible discharge for a week—one week, I tell you. The river entirely dead, the people downstream sick, for a hundred kilometers, some die. Why is this? SciCom data overrides discharge controls, everyone knows this is so. But investigation goes on for six years now. I give you another example. In Argentina, two thousand cattle die from a wrong inoculation; it is SciCom instructions again. That investigation is lasting eight years, this is joke to me, but it is not joke to SciCom. For yourself, they cannot question your competence, since you have flown your ship back. But if they have made a mistake, they will never take responsibility. They never admit mistake. You know what my agriculture man says in Argentina? ‘Until they have other explanation, they have only investigation.’”

“My navigator thinks they’re trying to set us up. I don’t know,” I say, rubbing my chin. “I would really like to talk to the woman.”

“Non pensarci piu,” Massimo says, waving a fly from its loop around the salad. “Forget this one—you will see, there are others. And in this place? The man who wrote your ship’s report, dead—ahhh. For your sake, I do not think it best you see this woman they take from you. Perhaps you will have luck with appeal—then, maybe. Almost always these people in SciCom are harmless, castrati—no, like men who play with themselves, masturbati. But if you catch them—ahhh. They do have… power,” Massimo says quietly, his hands flat on the table. “They protect themselves, like Mafiosi. They do what they want.”

A white Formula E whistles past as I lean toward Massimo; a shiver runs down my spine. For an instant I see Cooper’s face in Massimo’s, they share the same broad nose, the same thick hair. “You’re afraid of them, too?” I ask, thinking of my run-in with security last night. “Do you think Werhner’s right? He thinks that Cooper’s death…”

“All right.” Massimo nods, smiling to himself. “I exaggerate. A man dead—this frightens me. But yes, I exaggerate. This is only my advice, to leave them alone—what can you do, a pilot? Ah, Rawley, let us not think on these things for now, let us forget them for a time.”

“I’ve been…” I start to say, then notice Massimo is looking at the cars.

“You think you can handle Lancia?’

My pulse quickens, I tell Massimo I’d like to try.

“Well, come, I am going to run Ferrari. We shall see if perhaps you can drive, too.”

RAWLEY

DA9// In my dream state I see Werhner vividly, straight, sandy hair, biting his lower lip as he punches a sequence through the console. I can hear voices. I feel my body shift on satin, feel a change in my weight as I sense a massive relocation. In my half sleep I’m not sure what’s going on—a vivid memory of the Daedalus in the movement of this ship, in the metallic voices of dome control—I hear thruster corrections and vane angles traded between the bridge and propulsion, think this is not a liftoff but a course correction, a course change, vaguely think we launched yesterday, yes, remember the moving paintings. But there’s something else.

I can hear voices. As I open my eyes I am as sluggishly alert as a man coming up from underwater. I struggle to rise on the recliner, come awake, the sight of the cabin is a relief, though I don’t feel quite all here. Collette is at the foot in a white satin robe, her hair falling loose on her shoulders. Behind her is the window/wall’s display of the earth’s moon, it is moving onto the screen with the underwater motion of large bodies in deep space, it fills the screen. We are near enough to see the nested craters rising like islands in flat seas, near enough to distinguish volcanic masses from fields of thrown rubble.

Of course. Moonloop, day nine of the program. Through the fantasy co-op yesterday and overnight we have reached the tangent point for our orbit around the moon. The audio is traffic from theTube’s own dome, fixing the tangent angle. I am blinking awake to the sight of the full moon; we are close enough to see the large base at Tranquility, a gold-gray mass with a dull sheen punctuated by the amber double loops of SciCom’s insignia. What a vision—the huge, bright circle of the moon, blue-black deep space beyond, strange and familiar at once.

“Mornin’, lover,” Collette says as I sit up. “We have an orbit correction. Thought you’d like to watch.”

She runs her hand lightly over my thigh as she moves from the foot of the recliner toward me, moves her body, warm and soft, against mine. I look at the moon, the huge, luminous ball we are approaching, identify the vast seas: oceanus procellarum, mare nectaris, mare serenetatis. I realize with a start that it is not the vision which distracts me, not the way I came awake, but one of the voices which crackles through the cabin—yes, that’s it, the voice from propulsion sounds almost like Cooper’s. Its inflection, a slow American drawl, is smooth behind the static, and I can almost imagine Cooper speaking, his large frame leaning  over the program table, his headset almost lost in his wild black hair and bushy beard. But the voice is definitely older, its roughness a deepening from age, another body.

Initial on number three.

Comin’ right along.

Mark.

Roger. Mark one.

“Lover, are you all right?”

The confusion is not unpleasant, but that voice like Cooper’s shakes me, makes me wonder where I am, gives me the sensation of floating free without a point of reference. I wonder what he told SciCom before he died, what he said in that last Guam interview; now I’m wondering if he’s alive.

“You don’t look well,” Collette says. “I’ve got something to tell you   Rawley.  But it had better wait. What’s wrong?”

Clean burn.

Number three, number three.

I ask Collette if she minds my switching off the audio. She says no, it doesn’t matter; starts to rise. I put my hand on her shoulder, get off the recliner, lean over, and hit the toggle on the small console myself. The crackling and the voices disappear. Soft music in the unit, the tape has looped back to Bartok. I settle back on the recliner, concentrate on the music, and my mind mercifully shifts to the first time I heard this music on this ship.

I look into Collette’s liquid green eyes.

She seems a little shaken herself. She slides one hand across my chest, the other around to the back of my neck, and sidles up half behind me. I sigh and feel the relief of it, the light pressure, the sexy warmth of her touch. The weight of her breasts moves across my back, settles as she sighs.

The moon’s bright image is still on the window/wall, and in its silvery light I turn to her, watch her full lips part as she lies back. She is stroking my chest with long, thin fingers, her nail polish as silver as the moon. Tracing patterns with her fingertips, her touch is now so light she barely bristles the ends of the hair; the sensation is extraordinary.

“Better?” she asks. She takes my hand and moves it beneath her breasts, presses upward into its firm weight.

“Mmmm,” I say. “Let’s imagine we took the Lancia. We’re about three hundred kilometers south of LasVenus, alone in the desert, we haven’t seen another vehicle for an hour. We’ve made it.”

“Nice thought,” she murmurs. “Nice to think of it here. Well, at least we’re together.”

Why, I begin to wonder, does she say that? But I am lost already. I sink to her, my hand drifting to the undulating firmness of her thighs, her mons, as she rises to meet me.

Late in the evening we are lounging at the PastPacific Show, sitting on mats at long, low tables in the center of a mocked-up village of palm-thatched huts. A Balinese ceremony has just ended and the smell of incense hangs in the air, mingles with the odors of roast pig, fish, baked taro, fresh tropical fruits. A Polynesian troupe dances into the center circle, the men in mylar lava-lavas, the women’s hips furious and sensual to fast Tahitian drums, their long grass skirts small waves above their flower-circled feet. What a feast we have had, how it’s cleared my mind. Werhner reclines, nuzzling Erica. I haven’t felt so well in months. I lie with my head in Collette’s lap, among the layers of frangipani and pikake falling in strings from her neck, looking up into her face. She is illuminated by torchlight.

She is simply the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in this evening of beautiful women. Her high cheekbones, her sexy big lips, catch the light in ways that seem to me magical; she seems supernatural tonight. She looks down at me with a fine, tender smile, her eyes green-gold in the light. I mouth the words “I love you.” She is puzzled; I say the words. She understands and breaks into a wide grin. When she leans over to kiss my forehead, I am smothered in flowers for a delicious moment.

“You’ve been good to me,” I tell her, thinking back over this last leg of the trip.

“I’ve been trying my best,” she says. “Lover.”

“Tell me something I can do for you. Really. Take your turn for once, Collette. You show me yours.”

She laughs, looks away. The drums have shifted to a slower, sensuous rhythm, the light begins to flash as torches are whirled.

“There is something,” she says.

I ask her what.

“It’s something I’ve never done before, and I want to now, with you. It’s a marriage,” she says shyly. “Not a legal marriage, but a sort of wedding in the way of my ancestors. This place… well, this place makes me think of it. I have a few things my brother gave me, they’re very old. He told me what to do with them. Will you go through the ceremony with me, Rawley?”

“A tribal wedding?” I ask. I’m not quite certain what she means. “Here?”

“No, not here. I need the ocean, there isn’t anyone from my tribe. But you’ll be. We can go to the island, the island where we were this afternoon. That’d be perfect. I’d have to get some things from the ship—could we reach that island in the dark? We’d have to build a fire, I’ll need a fire. It’s such a nice night. Rawley?”

I look up through the smoky atmosphere and see the large moon poking through the fronds of coconut trees. Really, what Collette’s suggested thrills me to the bones. If we can get a Zodiac, I think, there’s no problem getting to the island in the moonlight. I look over at Werhner—both he and Erica are sound asleep, arms entwined, before a massive pile of pork bones and coconut pudding.

“It’s all right with me,” I say. “I’m ready to go.”

On the island’s beach, above lapping, low-tide waters, in the still beauty of the night, we make a small camp around the wide mats which Collette has brought along. Collette builds a small fire from scrub and hardwood she’s also brought along in the Zodiac. Once she lights it, we recline on the woven straw mat. She draws a diagram with a stick in the sand to show me what she’s done, where we find ourselves:

We are in the center of the four elements, the air above, the earth below, fire and water to either side.

She’s given me a loose thong, an animal-skin loincloth, to wear; she’s wearing a long, sheer embroidered robe, eggshell-white. She asks me to repeat a series of phrases in a language I’ve never heard before. I watch her bowed head as she speaks, her voice soft and guttural, as if she speaks from the origin of language itself. Her eyes are directed downward; as she lifts her face when she is finished, the fire behind me becomes an intense spot of light in her pupils.

Then she takes my hand, holds it palm upward in her lap, and makes a small, quick incision in my wrist with an old ivory knife. The blood comes. She cuts her own wrist, a precise centimeter cut, drops the knife, and firmly pulls our wrists together with her other hand. The sensation is warm, viscous; for a moment as I feel our pulses pounding in unison I experience a strange sense of oppression and joy at the same time.

After a minute Collette sprinkles a powder on both our wrists and the bleeding stops. As she does so she tells me that her people will stand by me until death, and I must stand by them; that with her people I will always find protection, food, drink, shelter, and warmth. Her people, I think… there is a sadness in her eyes as she speaks, but her smile is full and sexy when she finishes, the kind of wide smile that really shows her teeth. When we next make love, she says, we will be married.

I begin to reach for her, but she stops me with her hand. There is another step, she tells me, her eyes brightening. She removes a small drawstring pouch from the basket she is kneeling beside. She tells me she will speak the taala, a phrase she translates as “the words which must not be hesitantly spoken.” As she begins I have the feeling that she has known these words for a long time.

“This is the gift,” Collette says, her voice incantatory and distant, “given of the gods, which lets the eye see to behind the sun. It opens the ear to sounds which only the specters of the ancestors can hear. It opens the nose to smells which only the best of hunting dogs can smell, and, smelling, grow restless. This is the gift that gives wings to the feet for the journey to the unknown land where all totems are silent. Then shall the voice resound like the sound of the antelope and every gesture endure forever and the darkness shall be lifted and the great mysteries revealed….”

As she speaks I chew a powder that tastes of bone meal and seaweed, my mouth dry. I gesture to reach for her after a prolonged silence and she says, “Shut your eyes, Rawley. Shut your eyes.” When I open them again she has disappeared into the inky darkness; I didn’t hear her move. I sit absolutely still, listening, but I hear nothing. I close my eyes again.

My heart is pounding. I wait for minutes and the minutes stretch; I find myself wondering how long my eyes have been closed. I lose my grip on time, look up. The sky above is a vast well of darkness, a sea of stars, snow at the Milky Way. I see Vega, the first star of the evening, a star whose light I first saw appear through the ship’s dome as I talked with Taylor at sunset. And the first star of the navigator’s triangle. The points of light separate themselves, they lead me automatically to a search for the Crab nebula. It is directly overhead. I look, and in looking I begin to feel the sky widen and I begin to fall through it, falling among the stars as the infinity of space opens before me like a window, like a door. I can feel the blood coursing through my veins and arteries, the rhythm of my heart the rhythm of my body.

A sound nearby. Collette steps out of the dark, naked, glistening with oil, bright beads in her hair. She holds her arms close against her body, her breasts jutting out. She kneels before me and I loosen the loincloth. When I quickly thrust inside her, she wraps her arms around my head and only her fingers move through the hair on the back of my neck. A series of jolting shocks pass through my groin, a stream of delight which does not seem to belong to me but takes the last breath from my lungs. I make no sound, do not move. Within me, muscles relax and contract, I don’t even feel my breathing. Then Collette falls, lies by the fire, her eyes shut, the only sign of her orgasm an internal shudder.

After a long moment Collette rises to her feet, sends her arms outstretched to the stars. The posture resonates in my mind, brings back our first hours together. And my vision, the vision of a woman suspended in space, arms spread, enigmatic—she becomes all women, Maxine, Collette, the Spanish girl, Erica; the fright from Cooper means nothing to me now. The low fire gives Collette a golden glow, her skin glistening with the sheen of the fragrant oil as the light plays over the curves of her body. “Collette,” I say, my own voice slightly strange to me, as if from a distance, yet my mind so clear and my heart so taken with her that the voice speaks with affection and conviction. “Collette. You are a goddess.”

“A goddess,” she says softly, tenderly, looking at me with a gentle smile. “Yes. And you are a god, Rawley.”

I look down, gaze at the fire, watch it for a long moment. “I do feel like a new man.”

“You are a god, Rawley,” she laughs, holding out her hands. “You’ll see.”

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