“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.
II.
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 midstep 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 a 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 naïve 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 good-bye in a few days,” Raïssa said. “We'll have to say good-bye 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.
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 touc
hed 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.”
III.
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.