Departures (41 page)

“Well, wizardly sir, what do you have to say for yourself?” Jorj boomed.

The shaman blurted the first thing that came into his head: “Let’s eat!”

The hunters cheered again, louder than ever. Boys and girls came running to gape at the enormous catch. Among them was Hozay. Madyu was so full of triumph that gazing at his tormentor only made him wonder how much the tooth fairy would bring if he knocked all the little monster’s teeth down his throat.

The racket the hunters and children made brought the women in from the fields early. They stared at the young mountain of meat, too, and then sent up their own screams of joy. Jorj yelled, “We’re rich, do you know that, rich! We have more food than we know what to do with. We have so much, we can smoke some and sell it to tribes that aren’t lucky enough to have a shaman as clever and—what was that fancy word you used, Madyu?—as scientific, that’s it, as ours. We can—”

Madyu stopped listening about then, because Neena threw herself into his arms, kissed him, and exclaimed “Oh, Madyu, you’re wonderful!”

The shaman came up for air stunned and gasping, but his hands knew what to do. They grabbed Neena here and there. An instant later his idiot mind yammered that she would surely pull away—after all, hadn’t she said he was too skinny? But she didn’t. In fact, she snuggled closer. Off to one side, Hozay looked as if he were about to be sick. That felt almost as good to Madyu as Neena’s warm and yielding softness. By way of experiment—he
was
a scientific
man—he
kissed
her
this time. Not only did she return the kiss, but, he noticed dimly, Hozay looked even sicker. Since the experiment was successful, he repeated it.

Emboldened further still by the results of the second trial, he whispered, “Will you come to my tent tonight?”

“Of course I will,” she whispered back, her breath moist in his ear. Then she went on, “Why didn’t you ask me a long time ago?”

He stared at her. “I—I didn’t think—”

“Why ever not?”

“Well—well—” The more he pondered that, the more he wondered himself. He found only one answer that made any sense whatever: “After all, Neena, I know your secret name.”

“So what?” She tossed her head so her shining hair flipped back over her shoulder. Then she pointed to one of the gutted deer carcasses. “Did you use it in a spell on me, the way you did with those?”

“Of course not,” he said, indignant at the very suggestion. “I’d never do such a thing.”

“Well, then,” she said, as if that settled everything. By the way she was looking at him, maybe it did. Her premise wasn’t even slightly scientific; Madyu knew that. But however scientific he thought he was, he was a shaman first, and also knew logic sometimes didn’t matter. This felt like one of those times.

His arms tightened around Neena again. She sighed against his cheek. He nodded happily, pleased at the logical confirmation of his illogic. Sure enough, this
was
one of those times.

When I wrote this story in early 1984, I used as my guide to the names of the features on Mimas the map in the back of the NASA publication
Voyages to Saturn
. These names, however, had not yet been formally approved by the International Astronomical Union. Mimas’ biggest crater ended up being named for the moon’s discoverer rather than being based on the Arthurian theme that dominates the rest of its nomenclature. “Les Mortes d’Herschel,” however, doesn’t make much of a title, so I’ve decided to leave well enough alone.

THE SLOPE THE SPACESUITED RUNNER WAS
climbing would have been impossibly steep, even on Luna. The tracking camera relayed her image to the studio a few kilometers away. “Lovely, isn’t she?” murmured Rannveig Aasen.

“She certainly is,” Bill Bennett agreed. “Moving with grace on a very low gravity world is a skill few people have occasion to acquire.”

As if to prove his point, the runner made a slight misstep. Instead of gliding smoothly forward, she bounced a good five meters up off the ground. She had the presence of mind to hold her pose for the eleven seconds it took for her to return.

“That could happen to anyone,” Bennett said sympathetically. “Mimas’ surface gravity is only .008g. To put that in perspective for you folks back home, Luna pulls more than twenty times as strongly.” The transmitter flung his words and picture across one and a third billion kilometers toward Earth. At light speed, they would reach perhaps that many sets an hour and a half later with the slightly misleading legend “Live—from Saturn” superimposed.

The girl reached the summit without further mishap. She paused for a moment before the large bronze bowl there, then reached up and thrust the rod she carried in her right hand over the edge of the caldron. A great sheet of yellow-orange flame, twice as tall as a man, sprang into being.

“It’s a hologram, of course,” Rannveig said, “the same principle
that makes stereovision possible. Mimas is almost nothing but ice, and has no atmosphere at all. But it still makes me want to reach out and warm my hands over it.”

“Me, too,” Bennett said. “We’ll return to our coverage of the sixty-sixth Winter Olympic Games in a moment, but first these words.” Bennett disappeared from the monitor screen, to be replaced by the Interplanetary Broadcasting Company’s keynote symbol for this part of the games: an ancient black-and-white
Voyager
image of Mimas, with the great crater Arthur dramatically shadowed near the terminator.

When the commercial break was done, the camera cut away from the broadcasters to the icy plain at the foot of Arthur’s central peak for the opening parade of athletes. Bright blue eyes twinkling, Rannveig Aasen undid the belt that held her in her chair, pushed off, and caromed around the studio like an insane billiard ball with a cometary tail of long blond hair.

The director howled curses into her earphone, but she always managed to keep an eye on the monitor and did not miss a beat in her commentary. “The two men and two women at the head of the procession, the ones in the light blue and white spacesuits, are the Greek contingent,” she explained for her distant audience. “Greece has been part of United Europe for more than a hundred fifty years now, but still fields an independent team at every Olympic Games, in keeping with its place of honor as the homeland of the Olympic ideal.”

Bennett listened to her with nothing but admiration, a word also describing his feelings as he watched: the female form does not sag at all in .008g.

The terrestrial portion of the Winter Games was being held at Klagenfurt in United Europe that year, so the athletes crossed the ice in their national groups in French alphabetical order. That put the United States—or rather, États-Unis—near the front, just after the Chinese Empire, instead of toward the end.

“This is the first time in four Olympiads that the Americans have sent a team—if I can call one man and one woman a team- to Mimas,” Bennett remarked. “They haven’t had much low-g training and aren’t expected to contend for medals, but it’s good to see them competing here again. Private contributions raised enough money for two berths aboard the Arab World ship
Nasser.
”

Several larger groupings passed—Eastern Europe, the Anzac Federation, Japan, Luna. The team from the Arab World looked smart in spacesuits of green, white, and black. “Security is tight
here,” Bennett said, “thanks to threats from Israeli, Turkish, and Armenian nationalists.”

Moscow had fielded a strong group. So had Siberia. There were a couple of Swiss athletes in red suits with white crosses. They had traveled with the United Europeans in the same way the Americans had with the Arabs. United Europe, as the host nation, came last, just behind the contingent from Zaire.

Rannveig was finally back in her seat. “Personally,” she said, “I think the United European uniforms are busy.”

“So do I.” Bennett nodded. “But then, they almost have to be, since they’re blending so many sets of former national colors. Some of the rivalries that went with those old colors aren’t dead yet, either, and the newer one between United Europe and Eastern Europe is also no laughing matter, I’m afraid. You Europeans are a contentious lot,” he said to Rannveig, who came from Oslo.

“No, we’re not,” she replied in mock anger.

“You certainly are.”

They pythoned it back and forth for another minute or two before Rannveig started the wrap-up of opening-day coverage, remarking, “Our viewers may be wondering why only a relative handful of teams are represented here, as compared with Klagenfurt.”

“Cost is the villain,” Bennett said. “Fares from Earth to the Saturn system still run over fifteen hundred ounces of gold. That’s one of the major reasons we’ve seen so little from the United States in recent years, for example. If spaceflight were cheaper, we’d see many more nations participating.”

“Something to look forward to, perhaps, in games to come.” Rannveig closed out: “Thanks for joining us for the opening ceremonies from the Mimas Winter Olympic venue. Tomorrow we’ll be bringing you first-round coverage of the most spectacular of all Olympic events, the five-kilometer ski jump. Program your sets to ‘Olympics’ now, so you won’t miss a moment of the action. See you then.”

The old
Voyager
picture of Mimas reappeared on the monitor. This time, though, a bright red line superimposed on the image showed the ski-jump track descending from the summit of Arthur’s central peak—the largest athletic arena in the solar system. Ten kilometers away, a red oval showed the landing area.

“That went off very well,” the director said, adding, “all things considered,” with a pointed glower Rannveig’s way. She
paid no attention, leaning back in her chair to let a makeup man scrub her face clean.

Bennett did the same, enjoying the damp sponge on his forehead, cheeks, and chin. He was very little changed when the ministrations were over: an open-faced, light brown man in his early thirties; burnsides, popular after a lapse of fifty years, looked good on him.

So did his engaging smile, even if it was a touch smug at the moment. He had a right to feel self-satisfied. IBC did not hire many Americans; most were too parochial to do well outside their own small bailiwick, and few spoke anything but English or Spanish. But his French, once again the dominant international tongue, was fluent as any native speaker’s; to his own way of thinking, at least, he had a better accent than Rannveig did.

“Care for a drink?” he asked, and she gave an eager nod.

They swung hand over hand from the rings set in the hallway ceiling toward the bar. Brachiating was the easiest way to get around on Mimas; the gravity was really too weak for walking, especially indoors, but just enough to make free-fall-style gliding impractical, too. “I wonder why we ever came out of the trees,” Rannveig said, darting ahead.

The studio was part of the same complex that housed the Olympic athletes. The two broadcasters sped past pressure doors and spacesuits in niches: like any structure exposed to vacuum, the Olympic village was divided into hundreds of gaslight segments. The front door to every suite was a bulkhead in its own right.

Once she had hooked her feet under the brass rail, Rannveig ordered aquavit with a beer chaser. Bennett chose rum and Coke; since the rediscovery of the original formula in the ruins of Atlanta, Coca-Cola was all the rage again.

The drinks came in squeeze bulbs with nipples, as they would have in free-fall. An incautious lift would have sent the contents of glasses flying.

The monorail shuttle returned to the Olympic complex from the parade ground. Athletes and coaches began drifting into the bar. Most of the competitors, knowing they would have to be at their best tomorrow, were moderate. Their mentors had fewer compunctions. The Muscovite coach, in a red and gold sweater, and his Siberian counterpart, who wore his team’s snowy white, challenged each other to a duel of vodka. Empty squeeze bulbs accumulated in epic numbers around them.

The two of them argued more or less amiably as they drank.
The Muscovite spit Slavic consonants at his opposite number. The Siberian replied in French, letting Bennett follow his half of the conversation. For a czarist nobleman, Russian was fit only for talking with servants, infants, and pets.

“It seems hardly fair for peasant upstarts to have better accommodations than we do,” he said.

The Muscovite coach answered. The Siberian rolled his eyes. “ ‘All quarters are equal,’ indeed.
Merde—
why has the Olympic committee placed us where we cannot even see the competition area?”

No one could see the competition area; the window in the bar was the only one in the Olympic village. The Muscovite must have pointed that out, because the Siberian said, “It is the principle of the thing, though principle, I suppose, is something a Marxist cannot be expected to understand.”

The Muscovite’s only comment to that was a belch. He fell asleep a few minutes later. His counterpart’s triumphant smile also quickly dissolved in snores.

Except for one Jew, the members of the Arab World’s team were teetotalers. They sipped fruit juice and passed a pipe back and forth.

A ski jumper was turning cartwheels in midair. Rannveig touched Bennett’s hand. “Look at the loonie showing off.”

“You can hardly blame her. This is the only place where she can compete against Earth people on even terms—Mimas makes everyone strong.” He finished his drink. “Do you mind if I drift around a bit?”

“Heavens, no. Have a good time. I certainly intend to.” She looked at him archly. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t enjoy.”

He grinned. “That doesn’t leave much out.” They had ended up in bed a couple of times during the trip to Mimas, more out of boredom and simple propinquity than anything else. It had been fun, but nothing on which to build a grand passion.

The ski jumper from Luna landed on her head, laughing. “Was that half a turn too many or too few?” Bennett asked her.

“I sort of lost track up there,” she said. She looked at him curiously, trying to place him. Most of the athletes were still in the tight pullovers and hose they had worn under their spacesuits, which made his conservative green velvet doublet, tunic, and Paisley neck scarf stand out by comparison. “I know!” she exclaimed after a moment. “You’re from IBC!”