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Chapter 16

Her body against mine was warm and resilient, yielding—and then, at the finish, almost violently possessive. There was the flaring intensity of sensation, prolonged to the limits of endurance, and the long, long fall down into the soft darkness of the sweetest sleep of all.

And yet . . .

"Sandra . . ." I started to say, before my eyes were properly focused on the face beside mine on the pillow.

She snapped back into full consciousness and stared at me coldly.

"What was that, Peter? I've suspected that . . ."

"I don't know, Peggy," I muttered. "I don't know . . ."

I don't know, I thought. I don't know. But I remember . . . what do I remember? Some crazy dream about another ship, another lightjammer, with Sandra as the captain and myself as catering officer and Ralph as some sort of outsider. And I was married to Sandra in this dream, and I'd lost her, and I was trying to win her back with Peggy's help. There was something about a solid fuel rocket . . .

"What is it, Peter?" she asked sharply.

"A dream," I told her. "It must have been a dream . . ."

I unsnapped the elastic webbing that held us to the bunk and floated away from it and from Peggy to the center of the cabin. I looked around me, noting details in the dim light, trying to reassure myself of its reality, of our reality. It was all so familiar, and all so old. The ghosts of those who had lived here, who had loved here and hated here, generation after generation, seemed to whisper to me, This is Thermopylae. This is all the world you have ever known, ever will know . . .

It was all so unfamiliar.

And Peggy . . .

I turned to look at her as she lay on the bed, still held there by the webbing, the bands startlingly white against her golden skin. She was real enough. Her naked beauty was part of my memories—all my memories.

"Peter," she said. "Peter, come back."

From nowhere a tag of poetry drifted into my mind, and I murmured,

 
". . . and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair."

 

It made an odd sort of sense.

Thermopylae—the last stand of the Spartans, back in the early dawn of Terran history; Thermopylae—one of the great windjammers that sailed Earth's seas; Thermopylae—the last stand of the Spartacists . . .

"Come back," she called pleadingly.

"I'm here," I told her. "I'm here. It was just that I had a little trouble getting myself oriented."

Stretching my right leg I was just able to touch the bulkhead with the tip of my big toe, and I shoved gently. I drifted back in the general direction of the bed. Peggy extended her arm and caught me, pulled me to her.

"Born in the ship," she scolded, "raised in the ship, and you still haven't the sense to put your sandals on . . ."

"There was that . . . strangeness . . ." I faltered.

"If that's what I do to you, my boy, I'd better see about getting a divorce. There's nothing strange about us. I'm a perfectly prosaic plumber, and you're a prurient purser, and our names start with a P as well as our ratings, so we're obviously made for each other. At least, I thought so until just now . . . but when the bridegroom, on his wedding night, starts calling his blushing bride by another woman's name it's rather much!" She smiled tantalizingly. "Of course, I had quite a crush on Ralph once—not that he'd ever notice me. Plumbers are rather beneath the captain's notice. He reminds me so much of my father . . ." Her face sobered. "I wonder what it would be like to live on a real world, a planet, with ample living room and with no necessity to stash parents away in the deep freeze when they've lived their allotted span? I wonder if our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers, will ever be revived to walk on grass and breathe fresh air . . . I wonder if we shall ever be revived after we're put away to make room for our children . . ." She reached out for something from the bedside locker—and suddenly her expression was one of puzzlement and disappointment. She whispered, "I wanted a cigarette. I wanted a cigarette to smoke and to wave in the air as I talked . . ."

I asked, "What is a cigarette?"

"I . . . I don't know . . . I think it would be one of those tiny, white smoldering tubes that characters are always playing with in the old films . . . those men and women who played out their dramas on worlds like Earth and Austral and Caribbea, or aboard ships that could cross the Galaxy in a matter of months." She said intensely, "At times I hate the Spartacists. It was all very well for them, the disgruntled technicians and scientists who thought that they had become the slaves of capital and organized labor—whatever they were—and who staged their futile slave revolt, and built this crazy ship because they hadn't the money or materials to construct a Mannschenn drive job—whatever that was. It was all very well for them, the romantic Durnhamites, pushing out under full sail for the Rim Stars—but what about us? Born in this tin coffin, living in this tin coffin and, at the end, put to sleep in this tin coffin—unless we die first—in the hope of a glorious resurrection on some fair planet circling a dim, distant sun. And we've never known the feel of grass under our bare feet, never known the kiss of the sun and the breeze on our skins, making do with fans and UV lamps, taking our exercise in the centrifuge instead of on the playing field or in the swimming pool, subsisting on algae and on tissue cultures that have long since lost any flavor they once had. Why, even on Lorn . . ."

"Even on Lorn?" I echoed.

"What am I saying?" she whispered. "What am I saying? Where is Lorn?"

"Lorn, Faraway, Ultimo and Thule . . ." I murmured. "And the worlds of the Eastern Circuit—Tharn and Grollor, Mellise and Stree . . . Tharn, with the dirt streets in the towns, and the traders' stalls under the flaring gas jets as the evening falls, and the taverns with good liquor and good company . . . Mellise, and the long swell rolling in from half way across the world, breaking on the white beaches of the archipelago . . ."

"What's happened to us?" she cried. Then, "What have we lost?"

"How can we have lost," I asked, "what we have never known?"

"Dreams," she whispered. "Dreams . . . or the alternative time tracks that Claude is always talking about. Somewhere, or somewhen, another Peter and Peggy have walked the white beaches of Mellise, have swum together in the warm sea. Somewhen we have strolled together along a street on Tharn, and you have bought for me a bracelet of beaten silver . . ."

"Dreams," I said. "But you are the reality, and you are beautiful . . ." As I kissed her, as my caressing hands wandered over her compliant body, desire mounted. But there was a part of myself holding back, there was a cold voice at the back of my mind that said, You are doing this to forget. You are doing this to forget the worlds and the ships and the women that you have known. And, coldly, I answered myself with the question, Is there a better way of forgetting? And why should one not forget a foolish dream?

Her urgent mouth was on mine and her arms were about me, and forgetfulness was sweet and reality was all we need ever ask, and—

A giant hand slammed us from the bunk, snapping the webbing, hurling against the bulkhead. The single light went out. We sprawled against the cold, metal surface, held there by some pseudo-gravity, hurt, frightened, still clinging desperately to each other. Dimly I heard the incessant shrilling of alarm bells and somewhere somebody screaming. We felt rather than heard the thudding shut of airtight doors.

The pressure against us relaxed and, slowly, we drifted into the center of the cabin. I held Peggy to me tightly. I could hear her breathing, could feel her chest rising and falling against my own. She stirred feebly.

"Peggy, are you all right?" I cried. "Darling, are you all right?"

"I . . . I think so . . ." she replied faintly. Then, with a flash of the old humor, "Do you have to be so rough?"

There was a crackling sound, and then from the bulkhead speaker issued the voice of Ralph, calm as always, authorative.

"This is the captain. We have been in collision with a meteor swarm. Will all surviving personnel report to the control room, please? All surviving personnel report to the control room."

"We'd better do as the man says," said Peggy shakily, "even though it means dressing in the dark . . ."

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Framed