"That sounds pretty ominous," I said, attempting lightness. I didn't want things getting too terribly earnest, not with Chloe standing here with me in the starlight.

She laughed. "Oh, not a last look. Just . . . well, you know what I mean.""Actually, I think I do. But won't we be seeing it-and Earth-in the view-aft as we're headed out?""Probably. But that won't be the same thing, will it?""No. I don't suppose it will."So I stood beside her and gazed out, trying to feel what she felt. No question about it, I reflected, it would be a while before I saw this view again.

I never dreamed how long.

CHAPTER SIX.

The gravity and the air weren't exactly those of Earth, and the lighting was a little dimmer than humans liked, for this was a Delkasu ship, operating out of Selangava's capital system of Antyova. A combination cargo and pa.s.senger carrier, she had dropped off some trade delegates at Farside Base on her return swing homeward, and the Project had negotiated pa.s.sage for us on her. (I still couldn't help thinking of a ship as female, even though the Delkasu had no such tradition.) Under interstellar shipping law, she was required to take on a local pilot-Dan Buckley, in this case-while maneuvering in- system. It was a regulation we were very much in favor of, as it gave our people valuable experience with up-to-date galactic technology. Of course, it left Dan somewhat underemployed afterwards. He would be attached to the Section Four spooks, to help a.n.a.lyze any goodies they obtained. I knew him well enough to know that would bore him to insensibility. I also knew it was a price he'd gladly pay, and throw in his immortal soul, for the opportunity to take the helm of a ship made of dreams, and guide her ten leagues beyond the wide world's end.

The environmental differences were barely noticeable, for the Delkasu had evolved on a planet very similar to Earth. And most of us soon got over the subtle psychological oppression of proportions and decorative motifs alien to those of any human culture. The main problem was the scale of things. It wasn't too bad for most of the women or even for the smaller men. But I was six feet one and a half. I soon learned from painful experience to bend down when going through hatches, and I could never get comfortable on the furniture.

But I forgot to notice the discomfort of a couch too small for me as I sat in the lounge and watched the Moon's surface fall away below us until the odd shift in perception occurred and it was no longer "below" but "behind." Then it was a globe, with the seemingly smaller blue globe of Earth peeking over its shoulder.

There were no Delkasu in the lounge. Departures like this one were routine from their standpoint, and this particular departure held no special significance for them. But I wasn't alone. Most of the other members of the mission were there as well, forgetting for once to squirm in a futile search for comfortable positions on the furniture. We watched in silence for a long time. With increasing distance, Earth and the Moon a.s.sumed their true relative size as they grew smaller and smaller. We could not take our eyes off that celestial doublet.

After a while, an announcement came over the intercom in the rapid Delkasu speech. A machine- generated voice followed with a translation in perfect but expressionless American English-no great trick for Delkasu computer systems-for the benefit of the human pa.s.sengers: "Stand by for activation of drive field."

"You can't feel a thing when it happens," said Chloe, who was sitting to my right.

"Yeah, so I've been told."

"But," she continued, refusing to leave well enough alone, "you still know, on some level, that

something is wrong. And, of course, the visual effects are pretty startling, at least when you're close enough to a planet for-"Even as she was in midsentence, the ship reached that distance at which the Earth/Moon system's gravity was no longer strong enough to prevent the formation of the drive field . . . and something occurred

which Earth's scientific consensus held to be impossible.It was, naturally, something I'd wondered about from the moment I'd learned what the Prometheus Project was all about. I wasn't a complete scientific ignoramus-almost, but not quite-and I knew what everybody knew, that Einstein's theory of special relativity said you can't travel faster than the speed of light. (To be perfectly accurate, it doesn't say that. What it says is that you can't reach the speed of light. Beyond that point, there's no problem. It's just that you can't get to that point. All of which is neither here nor there.) So how did the Delkasu do it? They might be advanced as h.e.l.l, but they still lived in the same universe as us primitives. And that universe has a top speed limit.

The solution to the problem is obvious: you just create your own universe.Okay, now that I've got your full attention . . . no, of course that's not really it. The idea is this: Einstein was right as regards normal s.p.a.ce-time, but an area of expanding s.p.a.ce-time (as, in fact, s.p.a.ce-time didexpand during the Big Bang) has no theoretical limits to how much faster it can move than the rest of s.p.a.ce-time. So you generate an asymmetric field of negative energy around your ship-a bubble in s.p.a.ce-time within which the ship "hitches a ride," moving faster than it could in the larger continuum . . . at least as viewed from that continuum.Once again, don't blame me if you don't understand all this. I don't understand it either, so my sympathy for you isn't exactly of the fulsome variety. And don't let your lack of understanding worry you; twentieth-century Earth was generations and generations away from the mere mathematics of the thing.

But it explained how the Delkasu and the other races who'd adopted their technology had been able to create a functioning interstellar society-or, at least, one that functioned about as well as human society had for most of history, when messages moved only as fast as ships or horses, for not even the Delkasu had an interstellar equivalent of radio.

It also explained something else I had wondered about. I'd seen all those wonderful old Chesley Bonestell paintings in Look magazine: enormous s.p.a.cecraft of seemingly impossible fragility being constructed in orbit, with no weight to impose limits on their size and no air to require aerodynamic streamlining. Why was it, I'd asked, that the star-travelers used ships that could be fitted into a hangar (admittedly a G.o.dd.a.m.ned big one) under Crater Korolev?

The answer lay in the physics of the drive field, whose power requirements were linked to the size and ma.s.s of the ship it was required to enclose. Above a certain tonnage the curve rose sharply to the point of diminishing returns. There were a number of factors involved, but as a general rule the practical limit for an interstellar s.p.a.cecraft was around fifty thousand tons.

You may well say that something the size of an Iowa-cla.s.s battleship is still a pretty good-sized s.p.a.cecraft. In fact, relatively few of them-mostly warships-reached this size. Galactic society had made a virtue of necessity where the drive field's limitations were concerned, using lots and lots and lotsof relatively small ships designed for atmospheric transit, thus avoiding the inconvenience of transshipment at orbital stations. Ours was typical: a twenty-thousand-ton lifting body.

All of which was very fortunate from the standpoint of the Prometheus Project. A hole in the back side

of the Moon was easy to conceal; some humongous...o...b..tal s.p.a.ce station would not have been.

Not that I was really thinking about any of this as Dan Buckley engaged the drive field, nor about anything at all except what I was seeing in the view-aft. I'd been warned to expect it. The warning did no good.

All at once the Earth and the Moon, which had been receding at a rate that was merely awe-inspiring, simply shot away, falling down an infinite well of star-blazing blackness. In an instant of soul-shaking brevity, the world of my birth was lost among the star-swarm as though it had never been. Then the sun followed it into oblivion, dwindling to just one bright star among the mult.i.tudes, leaving our eyes and minds with no reference point to cling to amid infinity. Around the outer edges of the display, the nearer stars were streaming impossibly past, visible only by grace of the computer, which edited out Doppler effects.

Without remembering having reached for it, I realized I was holding Chloe's left hand tightly in my

right. Some of the other people in the lounge sounded like they were going to be sick.

"No," said Chloe, speaking as much to herself as to me, and showing no inclination to let go of my hand.

"It never gets to be old hat."

* * * There was no scientific basis for the idea that time was in any way distorted within a drive field. And the lights in the quarters that had been leased for us were set for a homelike twenty-four-hour day/night cycle, unlike the thirty-seven-hour-plus period familiar to the Delkasu of Antyova.

Nevertheless, there was a quality of timelessness about that voyage that transcended anything science could measure. In retrospect, it seems too short to recall clearly. But at the time it was an endless faring into realms beyond imagination, with stars endlessly emerging from the starfields ahead to drift past and merge into the starfields astern. As time went by, the farther stars began to shift their patterns as well, and the familiar constellations dissolved as though they had never been. For us, each of those familiar configurations that vanished was yet another burning bridge.

When we departed our native Orion Arm, the only way to tell was a slight thinning-out of the procession of pa.s.sing stars. Ahead lay a deceptive blackness: the Sagittarius dust clouds that hid the star-crowded heart of the galaxy from Earthbound eyes. But then we proceeded beyond that veil, into regions of blazing star-birth. There, between the Triffid and Lagoon Nebulas, lay our goal.

Antyova was an undistinguished star, as are all the stars where life-bearing planets can exist. It was a little smaller, cooler and yellower than Earth's sun, and its second planet was, at a slightly smaller orbital distance, a trifle on the warm side for its Delkasu inhabitants but just right for us.

"Don't expect too much exoticism on strange planets," Dr. Fehrenbach had once cautioned us. "The things that make Earth the way it is are the very things that make it life-bearing. If a planet is too different from Earth, neither you nor the Delkasu nor anybody else will be able to live on it." From everything we had been told, Antyova II seemed likely to live down to that somewhat dampening a.s.sessment.

Or so we thought.

* * * The final approach happened to coincide with dinnertime. (We'd long since used up the food we'd brought, and were eating what the ship provided, with the vitamin supplements that enabled humans to stay healthy on Delkasu cuisine. We were even getting used to it.) So we brought our trays to the lounge with the idea of munching away while observing the proceedings with the blas detachment of the

sophisticates we by then fancied ourselves to be.

The food got cold. It's hard to chew with your mouth hanging open.

True, from a distance there were few obvious distinctions between the blue marble called Antyova II and

the one called Earth. The only immediately obvious differences were merely cosmetic. Two small

moons instead of one big one, for example. . . .

Only, it wasn't easy to tell those two natural satellites from some of the artificial ones, for those were too big to be artificial, as big as small moons.

The outermost ones were military bases, the smallest of them incomparably vaster than any structure ever wrought by humankind-sh.e.l.l after sh.e.l.l of them, surrounding the capital planet of an interstellar empire. The closer ones had other purposes, not all of which we ever learned. Most of the functions familiar to us-communications, surveillance, and so forth-could be handled perfectly well by small, automated satellites such as our own civilization was beginning to use. And we already knew that the efficient atmosphere transit provided by the impellers, combined with the tonnage limitations on interstellar craft, made orbital stations irrelevant as s.p.a.ceports. No, these Brobdingnagian constructs had purposes that were incomprehensible or-more likely, and even worse-frivolous. We didn't fully appreciate that until the largest of the lot appeared. Its size didn't register at first. It couldn't, surely, be appearing from behind the planet. Could it?

"That," came Renata Novak's dry voice, "is the orbital imperial palace."

We all looked around, for we hadn't known she was there. She generally wasn't given to socializing with the troops. But there she was, staring as fixedly as the rest of us at the viewscreen.Chloe cleared her throat nervously. "Uh . . . orbital imperial palace? Does that imply that there's another imperial palace?""Oh, there are several . . . even here in this system. Most notably, there is one held aloft over the capital city by gravitic technology. It's larger than a small town. We won't be landing there, by the way. Outside this system . . . well, there are several orbital palaces not much smaller than this one in provincial systems, maintained against the contingency-which occurs every few years, at most-that the emperor might pay a visit. Not that they call him or her an emperor, of course, nor Selangava and empire. The Vanaz is a const.i.tutional monarch, as in almost all Delkasu polities." Novak never took her eyes off the screen, and her voice remained strangely expressionless. "As a percentage of what we would call the GNP, the cost of these . . . residences is not particularly significant."

We all began to realize that there were magnitudes even harder to grasp than the five thousand light-

years of s.p.a.ce we had just crossed.

Then our ship began to swing into low orbit. We had approached Antyova II from its current dayside.

Next we curved around into the local night, expecting darkness pockmarked by the occasional lights of cities.

What we saw were dense cobwebs of light the size and shape of continents. Only the oceans were

dark . . . and even those were spangled with lights that must mark the locations of islands, both natural and artificial.

Novak ran her eyes over all of us, and spoke in a voice as tightly controlled as her features.

"Do you finally get it?"

We barely heard her as we watched the descent. Soon-too soon, impossibly soon-details began appearing as the inconceivable cityscape rushed up to meet us. There was too much to take in: towers that had to be miles high, transparent domes that could have covered whole Earthly cities, myriad aircars herded by traffic control into endless, orderly processions of fireflies. . . . Then we were down, at a field that must be on the outskirts of an urban center, for in the distance the incredible towers we had

glimpsed from above rose like a wall of light, blocking the night sky halfway to the zenith despite their remoteness. We looked hungrily out at an alien world, and wondered when we'd be allowed to explore it * * * It didn't take long, really. It just seemed long. The Project's deal with the shipping line included permission for us to use our living quarters on the ship during our planetside stay. Before we could venture off it, there were various formalities to be taken care of. One was quarantine. The similarity of human and Delkasu biochemistries was a two-edged sword: if we could eat it, it could eat us. So while we and the Delkasu could subsist on each others' food, we could also catch some of each others' diseases. The microorganisms in question wouldn't last long inside us, just as we couldn't live indefinitely on Delkasu food alone. But while they lasted, they could get revenge by inflicting some unpleasant symptoms. It wasn't a serious problem, for the first Delkasu in the Solar System had taken care to tailor wide-spectrum antibodies-mere routine for them, given their civilization's centuries of experience in such matters. Still, we had to verify that we were properly inoculated.

After that, Novak and her Section Five types had a round of meetings with various local pooh-bahs. The purpose was to arrive at the protocols for her later talks with representatives of industrial concerns in search of contracts. All very necessary, of course . . . and very frustrating for those of us who were cooped up in the ship.

In the course of those conferences, she learned something unexpected, and unsettling.

"It turns out," she informed us at group meeting, "that there's a delegation here from Khemava."

We all blinked and searched our overloaded memories. It was evening of the long day of Antyova, to

which Novak had insisted we start adapting, and we were all feeling something reminiscent of jet lag.

Chloe finally spoke up. "Uh . . . isn't that one of the other successor-states?""Yes-the one that's second only to Selangava in importance. And their relations have had their ups and downs." Novak activated a small portable display at the head of the little conference room we were packed into. It provided a smaller version of the astrographic display she'd shown us on the Moon. She indicated a three-dimensional yellow expanse. It was in the Orion Arm, but a little ways (Yeah, right!) to the left-hand side of the display, so it was at least as far from the Sun as was Antyova, at the other apex of a right triangle. So it was in regions that were relatively new to the Delkasu. But, I finally recalled, they had found a native civilization there-and conquered it. That had been about three centuries earlier, before the unwritten code of customary interstellar law that the Project relied on had fully come into its own. And the locals had only gotten as far as interplanetary flight, of a low-tech sort, although they'd been doing it for quite a while.

"This complicates things," Novak continued, sounding even more testy than usual. "Imagine a trade delegation from Liberia arriving in Washington at the same time one from the Soviet Union was in town . . . and trying to get noticed. It may also complicate our security problems, for we know the Tonkuztra is exceptionally strong in Khemava. Besides, the presence of some of the native Ekhemasu is a new factor; we're used to dealing with the Delkasu, but not with them." She gave me a look as overflowing with warmth as ever. "So, Mr. Devaney, it will probably be advisable for you to accompany me and the other Section Five personnel to the reception tomorrow."

"Very well." I couldn't help basking in the dirty looks I was getting from some of the people who were

still confined to the ship. I also caught a look from Chloe, but her eyes were twinkling; she would also be attending.

* * * The Akavahn was an official who dealt with foreigners on the level of economic matters (but not military or political ones, which were handled by an altogether different bigwig in the capital city, halfway around the planet in the shadow of the floating palace Novak had described). The reception was at his official residence, and one of the corporations-that wasn't really what it was, but it was the functional equivalent-with which we were dealing supplied an aircar to transport us there.

I remember little of that first trip through an unearthly city. There was too much to take in, and it was too hard to grasp-the mind kept sliding off the strange angles and proportions of an utterly alien architectural tradition. Presently a colossal structure loomed up ahead.

"It has to be big," Novak answered our unspoken question. "The Akavahn has to deal with various races, some of which are larger than the Delkasu.""Like us," someone put in.

"Also some that are larger still. It's considered bad form to make anybody stoop."