My sister—who also had a scarred face and hands. Spirit, as a child of twelve, had saved me from death at the hands of pirates by taking hold of a rocket-propulsion unit and firing it inside the bubble boat. She had wiped out the pirates, but had burned her hands and face, for the thing was no toy. Today she wore gloves in public to conceal the scars and the little finger she had lost in another aspect of that encounter, and could pass for a weather-beaten man when she showed her face but not her body. She had never had restorative surgery because she wore her marks with pride.
Forta was of this nature. She resembled my sister, though her scars were far more apparent. Evidently Megan had seen this in her, and believed that I would be pleased. Yet I did not care to take a woman like my sister as a mistress, and not merely because of the appearance or the implied sense of kinship. I preferred softer flesh for love, even when it was resisting me, as was the case with Tasha. I preferred a yielding, accommodating attitude, rather than a hard and challenging one. In short, I did not regard an Amazon as a suitable love object.
Then something strange happened. The face of the person before me blurred and changed, and so did the body. The contours rounded, the expression changed, and the body signals flowed into a different pattern. I had never observed this type of change in a person before; normally the unconscious signals that I read are fixed, varying only in intensity as the mood shifts. This one was becoming a different person, somewhat as Tasha did when her mole manifested.
Then I perceived the presence of Helse, the girl I had known when I was fifteen and she sixteen. The first of my two great loves. She had initiated me into sex and romance and set her stamp forever upon me. She had died, but lived on in my awareness, coming to me when I most needed her. I knew that I still faced the body of Forta, but it was Helse who faced me. Helse could assume the body of whatever woman I was with, and give me the joy of herself through that body. Helse, my love!
Then the signals changed again, and Helse faded. For a moment there was the confusion of mixed signals, like that of a palette whose colors have flowed into each other inartistically. Then they formed into a new presence.
Now it was Megan who met my gaze. Megan, my second great love, and my wife of more than a quarter century. She was older than I, and physically frail in her age, but her indomitable sense of decency and fair play shone through, and I still loved her. Had the separation not come upon us, I would never have touched another woman, as I have explained here, and this she knew. Technically, I was guilty of adultery, many times over, but she understood: I would return to her the moment I could. In that sense, each lesser woman was a complement to Megan: my effort to gain some partial share of her through sublimation. Megan, my love!
Finally that presence, too, faded, and I resumed my awareness of the original: Forta Foundling, whom Megan had sent. And of myself: my mouth had fallen open, and my eyes were glazing. For I knew that this had not been any idle vision of my own; I had not gone into any trance state or alternate awareness. I had experienced both often enough to know them when I chose to. I had been reading Forta—and the signals had changed. She had become each of my loves in turn—without speaking a word.
I spun my chair again, facing the front of the car, breaking the contact. Dazed, I stared into the atmosphere of Saturn as the bubble coursed along the netted channel, one of a line of such bubbles. Spirit glanced curiously at me, as if to inquire whether Forta had shown me her power.
Indeed, she had done so.
Chapter 7 — RISING SUN
Forta was what I must term a signal chameleon: She could emulate the facial and body signals of other people. Her talent was, in a fashion, akin to mine: she could generate the signals I could read. Thus she could emulate, in a rather subtle but fundamental manner, those people she had studied—and she had studied my two loves. Megan she had obviously examined firsthand; Helse she must have derived from scattered references. In retrospect, I concluded that her rendition of Megan had been superior to that of Helse, and that made sense. After all, how could anyone except me know Helse's signals, except in the sense that they were common to Hispanic girls of that age?
This helped explain why Megan had sent her. Forta could be all things to all men, in a fashion, and she could to an extent represent Megan for me. Except for the matter of her face. But even to this there was an answer.
When Forta unpacked, it turned out that her suitcase contained not a wide variety of clothing but a most versatile array of costumes and masks. These were not crude plastic masks; they were contour-clinging, lifelike things that could readily be mistaken for living flesh when animated by her expressions. In fact Forta was an accomplished mime: she could don mask and costume and mimic her chosen character so cleverly that the resemblance was startling. At my behest, she donned her Megan set, as she called it, and in a moment it was as though my wife entered the chamber. The mask-face, the hair-wig, the walk, the gestures, the subtle body signals—I was shaken despite my comprehension of the device. She was so very like Megan that I longed to embrace her.
Then she spoke—and with Megan's voice, complete with the nuances that I had thought only I appreciated. "Why, Hope—it is so good to see you again," she said, and extended her arms to me, in exactly the way Megan had done when our marriage was active.
I knew better, but I couldn't help myself. I stepped forward and took her in my arms. I kissed her—and did not even feel the mask. It seemed like a living face, despite my knowledge. Yet this was not my wife, but another woman acting her part. I knew that Forta could and would take that part as far as I cared to have it go, right through the sexual aspect, and would emulate Megan even in that. This was my closest possible approach to my wife, and it was offered with my wife's collaboration.
But that was not, I discovered, what I desired. If I could not have Megan herself, I did not want any imitation. I broke the contact and turned away, my emotions churning.
Forta understood. She returned to her chamber, and in a moment reappeared as herself. "Or any other form you prefer," she said simply.
Spirit had been present. She shook her head. "If I had not seen it..." she said.
I preferred to mull the matter over in my subconscious for a while. "We have a job to do on Saturn," I said. "How can you facilitate that?"
"I can serve in a secretarial capacity when required," she said. "I realize that you already have a secretary, but perhaps Spirit could use me. I can also emulate either of you, should you require doubles for safety."
"To become a target for assassination, in lieu of one of us?" I asked, appalled. "We would not ask that of you!"
"But I would do it at need," she said. "I can also serve as a courier, and as translator."
"You know other languages?" I asked, interested.
"Not exactly. I have translation apparatus that facilitates the limited ability I have in that regard."
"That I would like to see," I said.
She demonstrated. She had a pocket multitongue language computer, with capsules for the individual languages. An earplug enabled her to hear the ongoing translation in Afrikaans, her native language and the one she thought in. It developed that she had been using the translator for English, though she did speak that language, because it was easier for her to hear words in her own language, then translate her reply, than to deal completely in English.
"¿Español?" I inquired.
She smiled, checked through her file, brought out the Spanish capsule, and inserted it in the machine. "Sí," she said.
"But if you do not know it, how can you speak it?" I asked.
"I have a prompt," she explained. This was a plug in her other ear, that fed her the words she subvocalized. The unit had a receptor at her neck, so that she could in effect speak without being heard by others, and so her Afrikaans word for "yes" produced the prompt of the Spanish "sí." She understood phonetics, and knew the basic sounds of many languages, so that she could speak remarkably well despite the adaptation. I would have tho
ught she was a slightly slow Hispanic, had I not known. It was amazing how she could do this ongoing translation, with only slight pauses in her speech, ordinarily unnoticed in dialogue. This was a formidable skill.
"You can do this in Russian too?" Spirit asked.
Forta demonstrated the Russian capsule. I was impressed; she did speak with an accent, but intelligibly. She could make herself understood, and she could understand anything spoken to her in that language, provided she was prepared for it with the appropriate capsule. She had the dialects, too.
I don't want to oversimplify this. Language is more than a collection of words, and the syntax of a language may be the essence of it rather than the vocabulary. But Forta had made a study of the fundamental patterns of the major language trunks, and researched constantly to improve her skill, so that the actual words were most of what she needed to make sense of other tongues. It was an accomplishment that was on a par with her ability to do emulations.
I had occasion to meet with others who used unfamiliar languages, even within the Saturnine Union, as I had discovered in Kraine. Yes, Forta would be useful to my work here!
The heat did not let up; the nomenklatura remained determined to eliminate me. Khukov reluctantly concluded that I could not safely remain on the planet. If I showed my face in public, one of their assassins would go for me first, then if caught would commit suicide, and the body would have no ties to the employer. If I remained in hiding, eventually they would ferret out my location, and send in a bomb. They were no longer interested in being careful; I had to be eliminated, for it was obvious that they were otherwise doomed.
"But you have proven yourself," Khukov said on the private holophone. It looked just as if he were sitting in our chamber. "The procedures you have instituted will carry through to their completion, perhaps more slowly without you, but inevitably. You can now be spared for greater things."
I smiled wryly. What could be greater than the renovation of the planetary industrial base?
But he wasn't joking. "I want you to negotiate with Rising Sun."
"With who?"
"In your terms, Titan, our greatest moon. In the Solar System, Titan is a satellite of Saturn, and this does not accord with their social perspective, any more than their ancestors considered Japan to be an island satellite of the continent of Asia. So they prefer to call themselves the Empire of the Rising Sun. It would be well for a diplomat to remember that."
"Rising Sun," I agreed. "But can the occidental Tyrant speak for the oriental aspect of Saturn?"
"In many respects, that moon is closer to your planet than to mine," he reminded me. "Remember, it was Jupiter who occupied it, after System War Two, not Saturn. Now it is an industrial giant in its own right, and we would like to establish better trade relations."
"I'm sure Titan will trade," I said. "But it sells finished products, and your interplanetary credit is weak. What can you offer?"
He told me what the USR had to offer. I nodded. "I believe I can handle that."
"And it will keep you safely off-planet, while the disturbance here dies down," he concluded.
Thus we undertook our mission as liaison between Saturn and Titan. It promised to be an intriguing challenge.
Titan bore a certain resemblance to my planet of origin, Callisto. Khukov had termed it moon, but as he had noted, we of the satellites prefer to call them planets in their own right. Indeed, it was never more than a convention of convenience to call them moons; any such pair is actually a set of bodies in space orbiting each other. When one is larger, the perturbations of its orbit tend to be less, and so it is deemed to be the primary, but one might as readily term it the secondary mass. Certainly to us of Callisto, Jupiter seemed like a giant satellite.
Callisto was somewhat under two million kilometers out from Jupiter; Titan was somewhat over one million out from Saturn. As interplanetary distances go, that's a similar league, and it made Saturn appear larger from Titan than Jupiter did from Callisto. Callisto completed an orbit in under seventeen days; Titan in just under sixteen. Callisto had a diameter of just under five thousand kilometers; Titan just over. Their densities and masses were similarly close. They could have been sister planets, as far as I was concerned.
But there were differences. The surface temperature of Titan was fifty degrees Kelvin colder than that of Callisto, and while Callisto was airless, Titan had a substantial atmosphere; its solid surface was completely hidden from exterior view. Critics refer to that atmosphere as solid smog; the natives refer to it as the basic stuff of the origin of life. Certainly it represents a rich chemical environment from which the natives process many products, and its pressure of one bar (the same as Earth's) facilitates the operation of city-domes in the surface. It is the only planet besides Earth itself whose atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen.
Politically, it was another matter. Titan was colonized by the Japanese of Earth, and they maintained their rivalry and often enmity with huge Saturn. Because Titan's position in space is far superior for the direct launching of ships, Titan's Navy became more formidable than Saturn's. It was, as Khukov remarked, Jupiter, not Saturn, that took on that Navy during the Second System War, and reduced it to impotence, and occupied Titan itself. Thereafter, Titan was forbidden to manufacture arms, including fighting ships. Instead, she had turned her energies to commerce—and shortly became a System leader in the construction of merchant ships, and in computerized technology. It was a metamorphosis that perhaps the nominal winners of SWII had not anticipated. Titan had beaten its swords into plowshares, and was now stronger as an economic power than it had been as a military power. Jupiter itself imported so much from Titan that it had a sizable trade deficit with that planet. That is, Titan was making a lot more money than Jupiter was. Yet Jupiter was still committed by treaty to undertake the military defense of Titan. Today Titan was happy with the arrangement, but Jupiter was chafing somewhat. It was a nice irony.
Irony: which brings my thought to iron. There was Titan's problem. It had been able to mine its own iron, but its industrial base had expanded far beyond its natural resources, and it now required far more iron than it mined. Iron was of course the metal of power for the System, because it could be handled magnetically. Processed into contra-terrene iron, or CTI, it was the fuel for all major ships and all major cities and all industrial complexes. So the irony of Titan was that this source of natural iron was hungriest of all for imported iron.
This was a hunger I proposed to address on this mission.
Our party was transferred in space to a Titan—excuse me, Rising Sun—merchant vessel and conveyed to the surface of the planet. This was an interesting experience in its own right. The atmosphere was deep, and developed a brownish hue as we descended. It was not stormy, as I had half feared, but very thick; soon it obscured anything that might have been any distance. I began to feel claustrophobic, until I reminded myself that one bar was the pressure limit; there was no way that our ship would implode! Not when the internal pressure matched the external pressure.
We landed; the fractional gee, about one-sixth Earth-norm, made this feasible here. I had been so long in the atmospheres of the giants that I had lost the feel for "hard" landings. A car-bubble limousine carried us toward Kyo, the capital. This ride, too, was fascinating; Sprit and Tasha seemed as interested as I was, though Forta took it in stride. Perhaps the environment reminded her of that of Mercury. Smilo, who had submitted to the indignity of a cage for this part of the journey, snoozed.
We cruised along a highway that curved around mountains of methane ice, and beside ponds of liquid methane from which methane vapor ascended slowly back into the dark sky. Brown methane snowflakes drifted down to coat every solid surface. This just happened to be the spot in the System where the temperature was at the "triple point" of methane—where it could exist simultaneously in solid, liquid, and vapor states. I suppose that to the natives this was a matter of course, but it certainly impressed me.
Kyo loom
ed as a huge dome, girt by many lesser domes. I understand that the main city has more than ten million people, and the region as a population center is much greater. I was surprised to note that it was not a bubblene dome—bubblene being the material from which all floating city-bubbles are made, because it is one of the few substances tough enough to withstand the multibar pressures of the big atmospheres—but a comparatively flimsy plastic one. But again I reminded myself: With internal and external pressure nearly equal, the dome was not for pressure, but merely to contain breathable atmosphere and suitable residential temperature. Titan was fortunate indeed in this respect.
We entered the lock and were treated to another marvelous sight: the oriental splendor of the culture of Rising Sun. I saw a shrine with multileveled upward-curving roofs, diminishing in size as they ascended. I saw dwarf trees growing in a special little park. The civilians wore brightly colored sarongs or pajama-type suits, and the petite women had their hair ornately dressed. This was, indeed, the heart of the Orient!
But elsewhere the city was intensely settled, looking quite modern. Evidently the citizens of Rising Sun valued their cultural heritage but did not let it interfere with practical matters.
We were conducted to an elegant apartment complex, where we were abruptly left to our own devices. This of course was the oriental way; our hosts were not really ignoring us. They were preparing for our diplomatic encounter, without bothering us with the mundane details. We enjoyed ourselves at the heated pool-sized bath, and had a fancy multicourse banquet. Smilo, released to roam the sealed region of the suite, condescended to tear apart a realistic-looking steak. His presence, perhaps, was another reason we were being left alone.