LADY SUNSHINE AND THE MAGOON OF BEATUS

by Alexei and Cory Panshin

1

This is a true story. Some stories are lies, or half-truths. This is a true story of those desperate days when men still confined themselves to the ninety planets of the Dispersion, in the nodding afternoon hours before Nashua summoned the nerve to declare herself an Empire.

This is the story of young Jen, who was as beautiful as you may dream and who was known as Lady Sunshine, and of how she became the partner of the Magoon of Beatus. Lady Sunshine was her own chosen name, but at the time of her meeting with the Magoon it was a true description only of her exterior. She did not radiate. She did not illuminate. She was not fit to be the partner of anyone.

The times were bad for mankind, as bad as any the race has ever known, and Lady Sunshine was a product of the times. Mankind lived on the Ninety Worlds of the Dispersion and did as they thought all the generations of men before them had done. They ruined each other in the name of business, politics, fashion, and fame.

But mankind was sick and horizonless. There was not a man alive who did not know that Earth, the source, the wellspring of man, was dead, ruined by man. Mankind lacked all commonality and purpose. Men whirled in the closed circle of the Ninety Worlds, seeking advantage wherever they could, grasping and seizing.

The universe was limited and life was short.

Lady Sunshine was taught this last lesson by her grandmother, who was Madame O’Severe. Yes, her. Lady Sunshine was the heir of Madame O’Severe and was taught by her to be cynical and treacherous, to deliver more blows than she took, to use power for advantage, and to stand alone.

Madame O’Severe taught Lady Sunshine so well that the day came when Lady Sunshine realized the limitations of their alliance. Whatever Madame O’Severe might say, Madame O’Severe stood alone—a unity sufficient unto herself. And what was Lady Sunshine’s place in that unity? She was being ripened to be eaten alive.

Lady Sunshine must flee from that to preserve her own unity. She laid a long plot of escape. She trained and prepared herself. She made herself a spaceship pilot. She used Madame O’Severe’s absorption in the busyness of real life to make her own secret plans.

As delicate and precious as she appeared, Lady Sunshine was strong and determined in pursuit of her own purposes. She fought Madame O’Severe, and never admitted that she fought her. She merely said that she was unfond of the planet of her birth, that O’Severe had bent her, and that she wished to travel to some one of the other worlds of men in her spaceship. And she fought so long and well that at last, in order to save her other interests, Madame O’Severe was forced to loose her grip.

Madame O’Severe said, “You disguise your rebellions against me as criticism of this planet.”

“But I am the very type of O’Severe,” said Lady Sunshine. “It has made me thin and fragile. I wish to see what I would be like elsewhere.”

“It is I who made you,” said Madame O’Severe, “not this planet. If I had raised you elsewhere than here, you would still be the same.”

“I wish to discover this for myself.”

“You will shortly enough. Your proper place is here with me, doing as I train you to do. It is only by following my direction that you will ever be a fit instrument to inherit my powers and position. But I am far too occupied at the moment to coerce you properly. So I will indulge you in your whim. You may go. I grant you permission to find out just where it is that your best interests lie. I guarantee that you will learn that they are with me and with O’Severe. Now thank me and go.”

“Thank you, good Madame O’Severe,” said Lady Sunshine.

“One last thing before you go,” said Madame O’Severe, halting her escape. “Remember well all the lessons I have taught you. You will find that you have need of them.”

Lady Sunshine ran in her trim white spacecraft to Amabile, which was one of the playground worlds of men. She had in mind to leave her planet and Madame O’Severe far behind her.

There was freedom and gaiety on Amabile, which there never was on O’Severe, and Lady Sunshine tumbled headlong into it. It looked like fun, sporting with rich and handsome men and lovely, carefree women. She threw herself into the whirl and let it do with her as it would.

She was stripped clean by Amabile. She was demeaned and debased by it. She played at pleasure, ever harder and harder, trying to find an end and never finding it. Instead she found that she had good use for every lesson she had ever learned from Madame O’Severe. She did many pointless and destructive things that you would not enjoy hearing about.

She discovered that the people of Amabile and the people who came to Amabile were as bent as the people of O’Severe. Was Madame O’Severe right? Was this life? Was this the entirety of life?

Lady Sunshine woke one day on Amabile. She was alone and she hated herself and what she had become. In desperation, she fled.

She ran again in her spaceship, desperately lunging from world to world in search of a planet that was not as monstrous as Amabile or O’Severe. She was strong in pursuit of her purposes, and it became her purpose to find somewhere among the Ninety Worlds of the Dispersion one world where she would not be bent.

But she did not find it.

She came to Beatus from the planet of Cromartie, which was her sixty-first planet. She was tired and hopeless. She had had small hope of Cromartie. It was for her not a place of search, but a place of retirement.

She had stayed at the home of Lord Brain, who was her grandmother’s Vassal on Cromartie. It was unnecessary for Lady Sunshine to encounter anything more of Cromartie than Lord and Lady Brain for her to know that this was not the planet she sought. It was more of the same.

Lord Brain had persisted in trying to amuse her with his minute knowledge of fashion that was new to him but that was irrelevant, not to mention old, to her. His manner was unctuous subservience, which made his matter all the more difficult to endure.

For her part, Lady Brain preferred to meditate aloud on her few well-savored moments of interaction with people of importance. (“My people.”) She spent much time in calculation of various stratagems by which the miracle might be repeated, and presented these to Lady Sunshine in hope of approval of the arithmetic.

They inflicted a house party upon her, when all she sought was a moment of peace in which to reorder her own priorities. And they pressed at her a ninny who styled himself the Count de Pagan. He was a pale shadow of the men of Amabile, but by the testimony of Lord and Lady Brain he was the best that Cromartie had to offer. He pursued her everywhere, urging her to allow him the privilege of harvesting her grapes ere winter’s deadly finger touched her vines with frost.

He did not know what she was. He did not know what she had been. He did not know how much his proposals sickened her, and he did not know what she truly sought. None of them knew.

They said to her:

“You are such an inspiration, my lady. It is enough to know there is one like you, a lovely butterfly, flitting from world to world, to give us hope.”

Or, “I have never traveled through space, and I have no intention of ever doing so. Cromartie is quite good enough. Whatever you may think of me, I do not care. I am quite satisfied with myself. So there.”

Or, “Forget your fantasies of escape, my sweet Jen. You have no need of other worlds. Reality is here. Find the world here in my arms.”

She said, “Jen is not a name for your use, Count. To you, I am Lady Sunshine.” And turned away.

At last, in desperation, she allowed herself to shock and bewilder them with a brief and partial glimpse of what she really was. In her ship she raced a pilot hired in a pool organized by the Count de Pagan. The pilot’s reputation was considerable on Cromartie. She scandalized the party by carelessly distributing the whole sum of the wagers she had won, and had insisted on collecting, to their various servants and mechanicals.

And even so, they did not understand that there had been no risk to her in the race. Even less did they understand that her demonstration of power was no pleasure to her, since it furthered her purposes in no regard. At best, it furthered the purposes of Madame O’Severe, who was pleased to see the power and repute of O’Severe spread farther abroad. To Lady Sunshine, it was a surrender to her own weakness.

She announced her intent to leave immediately for the planet of Beatus. That was a convenient name for her escape, snatched out of fleeting house party conversation.

Beatus, someone had said, was a place where for morale the people wore buttons that said “Beatus is not as bad as Beatans say it is.”

Everyone nearby but Lady Sunshine laughed familiarly. The man added, “Only it is. Who ever heard a Beatan speak ill of Beatus?” And everyone laughed again.

Lady Sunshine had heard of Beatus. It was one of the Ninety Worlds of the Dispersion, and it was not far from Cromartie. But she had never heard anything of Beatus to make her think it was the planet she sought where she would not be bent, and she had had no plans to visit the place. For Cromartie, however, Beatus was more than a miserable place. It was the local wellspring of humor.

“What is the difference between Old Earth and Beatus?”

That caught her attention. Lady Sunshine had an interest in Old Earth, the source of the varieties of man.

Several unacceptable answers were tried, to general amusement, before the proper answer was given:

“Nothing. Both are unfit for human habitation.”

She asked about Beatus.

Beatans, the jokesters said, were squat and unhealthy men who lived in a deadly blue murk and made machines that did not perform properly. They were guaranteed to operate only on Beatus or in the hands of Beatans, but Beatans did not travel well through the transitions of hyperspace and no one else would willingly live on Beatus.

“What is the difference between a fool and an idiot?”

“A fool is a man with a machine from Beatus. An idiot is a man who travels there.”

“Oh. You’ve heard it before.”

Lady Sunshine said: “But the men of Beatus are professional machinists?”

“Of necessity. It is only by virtue of their machines that men live on Beatus at all.”

It was small wonder that Lord and Lady Brain were frank enough to ask how they might have offended her, and the means by which they might repair their error. For Lady Sunshine proposed to ruin their house party entirely. Her distribution of the money she had won had shocked Lord Brain, but he had accepted it. He had placed his own wagers on her because that was where he thought his advantage lay whether she won or not, and he had been amazed and pleased by the result. But now this—desertion in mid-party for Beatus, of all places.

Lady Sunshine was politic. She did not inform Lord and Lady Brain that she preferred the blue fog of Beatus to the pleasures of their hospitality. No, she chose instead to tell them that she traveled to Beatus on the chance that it might supply her with a machine, a remote planetary analyzer, that she needed for her purpose.

“You travel to Beatus in search of a machine?”

“Yes, Lord Brain.”

“For a machine.”

“Yes, Lord Brain.” Lady Sunshine had nothing left to her but her purpose. She had no better place left than Beatus to search for a planetary analyzer.

“But what shall we tell your grandmother when she inquires?”

“If my grandmother should inquire after me,” said Lady Sunshine, “tell her that I have gone to Beatus.”

But she did not think that her grandmother would inquire. Madame O’Severe had given Lady Sunshine permission to find out where her best interests lay, and she did not interfere with her now. She was too busy otherwise to do that.

It was in discouragement that Lady Sunshine came to Beatus. Her purposes were come to nothing, and she feared that O’Severe and Madame O’Severe, waiting patiently for her, were the sum of greatest possibility that yet existed. She hated the thought. Even the transitions of hyperspace, usually a tonic bath, a stimulation of every nerve, were no answer for her discouragement and her lack of hope. The fight against hyperspace left her drained and weary.

When she was given leave to land on Beatus, and was brought down through the murk to a safe landing on a planetary grid, she discovered that the worst that Cromartie had to say of the place was understatement. The men of Beatus seemed hardly human. They were lumpish and hairy creatures, and they did wear buttons that said “Hang on, Beatans!” and “If you think it is bad here, you should see where the Munglies live.”

But Lady Sunshine had seen where the Munglies live, and Beatus was worse. It was the most unfortunate and minimal home of man that Lady Sunshine had ever visited.

The machines of Beatus pounded away eternally to keep the men of Beatus alive in their holes and warrens. The cold blue fog of Beatus penetrated even through the protective equipment that she wore. It was corrosive. It made her eyes sore and watery, her throat raw, her lungs painful. It confused her mind and upset her balances. Every moment she spent here demanded double the time elsewhere for recuperation.

But yet, she had come here for the sake of her search. The men of Beatus, whatever else might be said of them and their planet, were technicians and machinists. So down she went into their warrens, doing her best to ignore the seeping blue fog and the pulsing throb of the great machines. She made her usual inquiries and offered her usual inducements:

“I seek a machine by which I may inspect a planet such as Beatus from orbit without the necessity of landing on a grid. A remote planetary analyzer. I am prepared to bear whatever expense is involved.”

But all that she received was the usual response:

“My lady, why inspect Beatus remotely? We have a landing grid firmly in place. And, after all, here you are.”

“I mean to inspect planets that have no landing grids.”

“Pardon my laughter, my lady, but what reason could there be to inspect a planet that lacks a landing grid? If it was worth landing on at all, it would already have a grid so that ships might land there.”

And other familiar responses:

“How about another novelty just as good, my lady, but different?”

And, “It is not possible. Begging your pardon, but even to contain such a machine would require a naval vessel of unprecedented size. It is beyond your resources, whatever your willingness or ability to pay.”

And, slyly, “How much money might be advanced for preliminary researches into the matter?”

One answer was not usual. It came from a belligerent, lumpish little man who wore not one, but three buttons boosting Beatus:

“What do you suggest? As all Beatus knows, at the Dispersion men were settled on the best existing planets. If a better world than Beatus existed, we would be living within it today. Since we are not, it is hardly in my best interests to build a planetary analyzer, now is it? I am not the fool you take me for!”

But then one day, a man who was lumpish and hairy like other Beatans, but who had more seeming confidence than most Beatans since he wore no buttons, came to her and said, “Please follow me. The Envied One wishes to see you in his hole.”

“Who is the Envied One?”

The man was taken aback. “Why, Himself. The Magoon. The mirror in which Beatus sees its hopes reflected.”

Ah, the Magoon of Beatus. Lady Sunshine recalled him now by this title. The Magoon was not the mirror for all Beatans, but there were many on Beatus who surrendered the care of their hopes to him. He was a very mysterious figure, reputed to live in deeply dug seclusion.

“Why does he wish to see me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said the man. “I am but a messenger.”

There was no hope left in Beatus for Lady Sunshine, but no greater hope elsewhere, so she followed the messenger. She was passed from one pair of confident hands to another, deeper and deeper, until at last she was ushered into a room where the cold blue fog penetrated only in faint nauseating wisps, and there she met the Magoon himself.

The Magoon of Beatus was not beautiful. He was almost as queer and humorous as his title. Like less important men of Beatus, he had been bent by his planet and made squat, lumpish and hairy. He was short and brown. His hands and feet and nose were large. His eyes were sad. He was as ugly as a man may be and still be reckoned human. Lady Sunshine pitied and feared him in his awfulness.

Above the penetrating humble-mumble of great engines, the Magoon said to Lady Sunshine: “I understand that you seek a machine that would sense the nature of a planet at a distance.”

“That is true, Magoon,” she said, casually mangling his title to demonstrate their true relativity.

“Why do you have need of such a machine, Lady Sunshine? Why don’t you use a landing grid like everyone else? If a planet is inhabited, it does not need your analysis. If a planet is not inhabited, it hardly merits analysis. Do you mean to be some sort of spy whirling about our heads and peering down at us?”

“No,” she said.

“Then state your purposes.”

After a moment she said, “I mean to go to unsettled planets, planets unknown to men, and analyze their fitness for human habitation.”

“To what point?” he asked. “Are ninety planets not enough?”

“No,” she said. “Some planets are more desirable than others. I seek to find new planets and to distinguish between the more and the less desirable among them. I feel that somewhere there must be a planet more desirable than . . . say, this one.”

“But common sense says that if there were some planet beyond the worlds of the Dispersion that was preferable to any world among the Ninety, we would be living there now. Ergo, this planet is more desirable than the next best alternative.”

Lady Sunshine stared directly at the Magoon, even though it was impolite to gaze fixedly at what was so deformed.

“Will you not agree that in the haste of the Dispersion, somewhere a planet might have been overlooked that was preferable to Beatus?”

“I cannot believe so,” he said. “It would be disloyal.”

“Then contemplate this possibility. An error was made five hundred years ago. An agonizing, foolish error. Earth was about to breathe its last, and desperate men—poor clerks—overlooked some better place and condemned their fellows to endure the hell of the Mungly Planet forever.”

The Magoon contemplated the possibility. At last he said, “And for this search you need a planetary analyzer so that you may evaluate worlds without landing on them?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is essential, if I am to find a world better than the Mungly Planet.”

“But isn’t this properly the job of some planetary navy? A major vessel on an extended expedition of exploration and survey?”

“Properly, it is,” she said, “but no navy cares. Not even the great Navy of Nashua. The interests of Nashua are commerce and power, not search for a hypothetical planet better than that of the Munglies. It is, however, my chosen work. My computer spends all its available time mulling the probabilities of various candidates for my inspection.”

“I have asked my advisers,” the Magoon said, “and one and all they seriously doubt whether a ship smaller than a major naval vessel could adequately contain a planetary analyzer that meets your specifications.”

“Is this idle speculation, or could you build such a machine?”

“It is not idle speculation. I command the best resources of Beatus —the best advisers and the best technicians—and they give me good reason to believe that your desires are impossible. Unless you have a major naval vessel at your command?”

“No,” said Lady Sunshine. “Only a modified Podbjelski Model Seven.”

And she sighed.

The Magoon said, “However, other possibilities have occurred to me. If you will come—”

Lady Sunshine inhaled in wonder at the phrase “other possibilities,” but then coughed and choked on a wisp of blue. Still, she followed the Magoon as he led the way through the intricacies of his warren. As they passed great pulsing machines, Lady Sunshine held her ears against the noise. But the Magoon had been so bent by his planet that he did not even seem to notice the hulking black monsters.

At last they came to a deep interior room at the very heart of the warren, a child’s room with many toys and lathes, workbenches and small machines. It was equipped with an airlock. It was a strong room against the blue fog of Beatus, and none penetrated here. Lady Sunshine liked the room on that account.

The Magoon said, “When I was young, I lived my life here. My health did not permit me to leave this room, not even to play in the corridors of the warren. The machines you see about us were my only given playthings. This was my particular favorite. In fact, I have continued to use it until this day.”

He patted a metal bowl, polished and featureless, that hung suspended in the air. There was a seat beneath it. The Magoon sat, pulled the bowl over his head like a bucket, placed his hands in gloves, and positioned his feet in stirrups.

“I fail to understand,” Lady Sunshine said.

But the sad hillock of a man was wandering in his toy. He did not seem to hear her.

“I do not understand what you mean by this,” Lady Sunshine repeated.

There was a sudden rap at the door. Lady Sunshine looked again to the Magoon, but he was lost to the sound.

She answered the door herself. It slid back to reveal a subtle spidery little mechanical about one and a half feet high, crouching there in the airlock on its universal motivator.

It spoke.

“Lady Sunshine,” it said thinly, “it is I, the Magoon.”

“No,” she said. “Is it possible?”

“Indeed,” the queer little thing said. “I present you with an alternative to your planetary analyzer.”

“This?” she said, looking down at it.

The mechanical hoisted an eye on an extensor until it was on an equal height with her own eyes, and stared directly back. The lens of the extended eye flickered and altered.

“There is green in your eyes, as well as brown,” the small mechanical said. “How very strange.”

Lady Sunshine looked from the small mechanical to the Magoon, lost in the parent machine, and back again. The mechanical rolled into the room on its motivator and demonstrated its agilities before her.

It said, “I am suggesting that you send a small drone down to the worlds you propose to examine. On board the drone will be a mechanical such as this one. Then, just as I have experienced the surface of my planet of Beatus through my mechanicals, so may you experience the surfaces of these unsettled planets.”

“But what is it like?” Lady Sunshine asked of the mechanical circling about her. “What is it like? Permit me to test your system for myself.”

The Magoon withdrew his hands from the gloves and raised the large featureless helmet. Consciousness had fled from the mechanical, and it balanced lifelessly on its motivator, a mass of inert metals and plastics.

The Magoon said, “I constructed large parts of the original system myself, and made all of the later modifications, of which there have been many.”

“Very clever, Magoon,” she said, and was glad somehow that she was taller than he, and that he lacked the extensors of his little mechanical to make himself equal to her.

With his assistance, she put on the cumbersome helmet over her head and put her hands in the gloves. In spite of the fact that both were large enough to fit the Magoon comfortably, it seemed to her that her head was held in a vise and her hands in pinions. She felt loomed about. And she thought that it smelled bad there in the helmet.

But at the same time, she could hear with the little robot’s ears. She could see with its eyes.

She looked across the room and saw the Magoon standing over Lady Sunshine in the probe machine, placing her feet in proper position. And yes, she could feel her legs being moved. It was very strange and dissociating to be in two places at once.

But then, suddenly, she could feel the floor move beneath her motivator. She pressed with her right foot and swung right. She pressed with her left foot and wheeled.

“Ha, ha!” she cried, and heard her thin voice with her robot ears. “Wow!”

She tapped at a wall with an experimental extensor as she spun crazily by on her motivator. She felt the shock. She heard the sound, almost as though it were immediate.

“Magoon,” she said. “This is very shrewd. What is the price of your machine?”

Its possibilities were incalculable. It was everything the Magoon had said. It was a viable alternative. With this machine she might circle a planet in her trim white spacecraft and see and hear and feel and manipulate it at a distance. That was more than she asked.

The Magoon stepped in front of the progress of the mechanical. Lady Sunshine pulled up short.

“Do you propose to buy me?” he asked. “The wealth of O’Severe means nothing to me. I have wealth enough of my own.”

“Do you make me a gift of the machine?” she asked.

“No.”

Lady Sunshine moved backward on her motivator. Then she stopped again. She pulled her hands abruptly from the gloves with their fingertip controls. She freed her head and looked at the Magoon, his back to her, standing before the little mechanical.

“So there is a price,” she said. “What must I do to earn the use of your machine?”

He turned to face her. Lady Sunshine was amazed to see tears in his eyes.

He said, “I share your ends. I have the hope that there are other worlds where men may live in harmony, rather than in disharmony as here on Beatus. I do not believe that these worlds exist, but I dream that they might. Since I am the mirror of the hopes of Beatus, there are many who share this secret dream of mine. I have never been allowed to chance travel to other worlds. I do not know whether my dream is true.

“You may use my machine, Lady Sunshine, if you will find with it a world to exchange for Beatus. Not the Mungly Planet. Beatus first. The agony of my people must end.”

“I will,” she said. “You have my word, Magoon. You may have your choice of the worlds I find.”

But then she said, “There is one small problem that still concerns me. Your machines have a poor reputation on other worlds. How may I be certain that nothing will go awry at a crucial moment?”

The Magoon waved the criticism aside without rancor.

“There will be no problem,” he said. “I guarantee it. I will see the system installed in duplicate, and you have my word that it will work for you in crucial moments.”

“We will see,” she said. “We will test it on Beatus.”

“Agreed,” he answered. “Now satisfy my curiosity. You must have given considerable thought to the problem of search. What is your method?”

“I follow the best advice of my ship’s computer,” Lady Sunshine said.

“I understand,” he said. “But on what basis are your computer’s choices predicated?”

“Statistical inference,” she said.

“Ah, yes. There are interesting possibilities in statistical inference. But what about intuitional methods? Have they no part in your search?”

“No. Intuition plays no part in my search.”

“How did you come to land on Beatus?” the Magoon asked. “Was that recommended by your computer?”

“No,” she said. “It was an accident.”

But it was not an accident. In this universe, those things that are alike find each other out. Affinities gather, and computers be damned. What do computers know of true affinity? Only what they are told.

Computers are also weak in intuition. They cannot jump to wild conclusions and be justified.

* * * *

2

It took time to install the double system of planetary probe machines in Lady Sunshine’s white spaceship, and more time to make the necessary mechanicals and drone landing crafts. All the Magoon’s great resources were turned to the problem and he himself oversaw the installation of the probe machines in her ship.

Lady Sunshine meanwhile practiced operation of the mechanical until she was adept at manipulating it on its motivator and directing its various extensors. It was subtle to operate and she wished to be in control when the time came to actually explore another world.

She also asked her computer to devote its spare time to selection of a choice short list of near places of search for the new world she hoped to find. She was interrupted in this by the need of the Magoon to coordinate the probes with the computer. Computer rectification of imperfect data from the distant mechanicals was absolutely necessary.

No matter how directly and immediately one seemed to be in habitation of the mechanical now, the ship’s computer was an essential bridging link in exploration from space. Otherwise, what gaps in reality might appear? What blurring?

But there proved to be continuing problems of coordination.

“I don’t understand it,” said the Magoon.

He found it necessary to adjust the probes again and again, until at last they were in agreement with the computer. It was a long, slow and tedious process. But finally it became time to test the probe machine on Beatus from the spacecraft in orbit

The Magoon participated in the test. It was only his second opportunity to see his sickly fog-enshrouded world from space. He had never been allowed to travel when he was young, and his sense of responsibility and best advice had kept him confined to Beatus now that he was older and Himself. He was excited. Lady Sunshine beheld him calmly and did not comment on his antics. He was a queer and ugly hairy brown creature, Magoon was.

From orbit they sent a drone vehicle down to the surface of Beatus. All went well, to the Magoon’s great delight. When the safe landing of the drone was indicated, Lady Sunshine nodded to the Magoon and donned the probe helmet.

But all was not as it should be. It was not as it had been in all her occasions of practice.

The helmet did not work. The fingertip controls did not respond.

Lady Sunshine became overwhelmed by panic. She smothered. She drowned. She could not breathe in the close confines of the helmet. She could not escape from its grip. At last, she fought free of the probe machine.

She breathed deeply. She had found it frightening. It was all that she feared that was inert and dead.

Then she said, “This machine does not operate properly, Magoon. Will your duplicate machine serve any better, or have I wasted all this great time on Beatus, where the machines are untrustworthy?”

“Perhaps it is a matter of some small adjustment,” the Magoon said.

He assumed her place. He put his head in the helmet, his lumpish paws in the gloves, his feet in the stirrups. He was gone for a moment while Lady Sunshine waited, peering at his engulfed body.

But then he raised the helmet and said, “It operates quite satisfactorily for me. Try entering the other probe machine, Lady Sunshine.”

She took the other seat and after another deep breath donned the helmet. She found herself in the drone vehicle on the surface of Beatus. She rolled forward on her motivator out of the drone.

It was Beatus beyond question. It was horrid where she found herself. The ground beneath her motivators was spongy and uncertain. It was dotted with viscous purple pools that were vile and of unknown depth. They seethed.

Virulent deep blue roils of fog billowed about her. Lady Sunshine rolled forward tentatively on her motivator and found herself almost immediately surrounded by the pools of oily putrid purpleness, unable to proceed. She paused in the poisoned air and poisoned earth, unable to see, uncertain of her direction. She heard nothing but howling. For the first time in her experience of Beatus, there were no great throbbing machines to show where men made their truces with this awful place. Where to go? She poked a cautious extensor out to test the nearest pool, but paused again in fear that the vileness would dissolve her appendage.

Suddenly a great animal of a Beatan, a large misery, came running out of the fog at her. His protective devices were old and inadequate. He was eaten by sores and his hairiness was untended. He splashed through the purple pools and loomed large before her. She saw that he wore a great plate button.

It said, “I do not understand Beatus, but I accept it”

He cast himself down in the putrid purple slosh. He abased himself before her, coughing and choking and retching in the thick corrosive liquid. He rose and fell in it, thrashing and gasping, but always returning to it.

He cried, “Your pardon, O great Magoon! I have not been among your followers. Forgive me! I never thought to see you here in this solitary corner of mine. You are my one hope! Alter my life! Favor me with your blessing and I will be your faithful follower forever. I have never had a hope before!”

This pathetic creature attempted to paw at her. She rolled backward on her motivator to avoid the contact. With one eye she watched him; with the other she looked to her safe footing so that she would not join him by accident in the vile slop in which he wallowed.

“I am not the Magoon,” she said.

To her great relief, she saw the second mechanical then.

“I am the Magoon,” it said. It passed her by and rolled up to the Beatan, even into the slop, where it rode gently on the surface of the seething pool. “That is Lady Sunshine. It was a natural error. Now allow me to bless you.”

The mechanical soothed and comforted the man, who rose dripping from the rottenness into the poison roils of fog. The Beatan reached vainly toward her.

“Bless me, too, Lady Sunshine! Please bless me! My condition must alter!”

The Magoon looked to her. At last she rolled forward a little distance, reached an extensor out to the man, and touched him with it, as a rock might be prodded with a thin stick.

“Bless you,” she said.

The man stood and shook himself with happiness, like a wet dog.

“Oh, grace! Grace unforeseen! I do not deserve, but I will be worthy!”

He ripped off the poor remains of his protective devices and cast them away. He hurled his button into a purple puddle and ran into the fog, shouting and crying his joy.

Lady Sunshine said to the other spidery little mechanical: “Does this happen to you often?”

“Yes,” said the other mechanical that was the Magoon. “Often. Their hopes are my chief burden. Their condition must surely alter.”

When they faced each other again in Lady Sunshine’s orbiting spaceship, Lady Sunshine said, “After that initial difficulty, your machine did all that I could ask. I’m more than satisfied, but I must know—what went wrong?”

The Magoon shook his head. “All that went wrong was that you operated the machine alone. That is all. The machines of Beatus need Beatans to direct them. Otherwise they are uncertain.”

Lady Sunshine said, “Then you cannot guarantee the success of the probe when I put it to my own purpose?”

“I guaranteed that the probe would work for you,” the Magoon said. “And it will work if I am present. Therefore I propose to accompany you in your search.”

“Did you have this in mind from the beginning? Is that why you installed two probe machines?”

“Yes,” said the Magoon.

“You were not frank with me.”

“No.”

“Do you dare to make this journey of exploration?” she asked. “The best advice you have been given has been not to travel.”

“Do you dare to travel?” asked the Magoon of her in return. “Who has advised you to make these explorations?”

“No one,” Lady Sunshine said. “All have advised against it, but it is my chosen work. And I do not stand the dangers from hyperspace that you Beatans do.”

“Who knows what dangers I stand?” the Magoon asked. “I have never traveled through hyperspace. For that matter, who knows what strange and terrible things you may encounter in the course of your explorations? The unknown may be more frightening and dangerous than you can imagine. And yet you persist.”

“I have my reasons for persistence,” Lady Sunshine said, smiling.

“And I have mine,” said the Magoon.

She shook her head. “You may die,” she said.

It seemed to her that the Magoon was a frail being for all his gross bulk, and that any great shock might disinhabit this heapish ugly man as firmly and finally as the inert mechanicals they had just abandoned to the various poisons of Beatus.

“I may die tomorrow here at home, and what purpose will my death have served then? Better death in search, even fruitless search, than death in stagnation. I must alter the lives of my people, even though I die in the attempt. For good or for ill, I must cast the hopes of Beatus into the wind of the unknown. And no one may do this thing for me. No one may do this but me.

“So I ask: may I go with you on your journey of exploration?”

Lady Sunshine could not say no. She, too, would rather die in the search for an alternative to all that she had ever known than return to O’Severe to die and become her grandmother.

Moreover, if she were to persist at all, it was quite clear that she needed the Magoon to operate the probe machine.

“Yes,” she said, because she could not say no. But she did not like saying yes. It took away from her something that had been hers alone.

The Magoon smiled in great relief, and then he said, “Before we leave, I must alter your computer. It is your ship’s computer that has been at fault through all these days of adjustment and readjustment, and not my probe machines. Beatus as we just experienced it is no Beatus that I have ever known before. I have never seen it that blue and vile.”

Lady Sunshine asked, “Do you remember that you were not frank with me?”

“Yes.”

“I have not been frank with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have not told you my true purpose. I have not told you all.”

“Do you mean to say that your purpose is not to find somewhere a planet more hospitable to man than ... the Mungly Planet?”

“No,” she said. “Though I am sure that I will find such a place in the course of my search.”

“Then what is your true purpose?”

Lady Sunshine had confessed her full intent to no one. Who understood her progression from one planet of the Dispersion to another in her own spacecraft? Few. Very few. They called her a butterfly, admired and dismissed her. Who understood her desire to find new worlds outside the tight bounds of the Ninety Worlds? Only the Magoon, this singular foreign creature.

Who would understand her true intent?

She said, “My purpose is to find True Earth, and that is why you may not change the computer. It holds singular precious data.”

“I do not understand you, Lady Sunshine,” the Magoon said. “Earth was destroyed long ago. There is no Earth anymore. There are only the planets of the Dispersion. Or do you speak of New Earth? That is a fine world, I am told.”

“I have been there,” Lady Sunshine said. “And it is not the place for which I search. It is not True Earth. Let me tell you my heart. I believe that in the Dispersion men were not taken to the best planets that exist, but were scattered carelessly on first-found worlds. I have been on sixty-two planets, and I know what worlds are like. I have never found a straight one. They have bent us, everyone, every one. They have made us strange and separate. They have made us scrambled and aimless. They have made us hateful. I know. I have been everywhere, and it has been like that everywhere that I have been.”

“If New Earth is not True Earth, then for what do you search?” asked the Magoon.

“I search for the one planet where mankind will not be bent, but will grow straight and true. It will not be Beatus. It will not be O’Severe. It will not be New Earth, which is but a pale shadow with a name it does not deserve to bear. Until we find True Earth, we will never know what mankind really is. And I know what True Earth will be like. It will have the mountains of Aurora. It will have the forests of New Dalmatia. It will be made of Amabile, and O’Severe, and New Earth, and even Beatus. It will be all the best and more of sixty-two worlds. That is the standard by which my computer reckons.

“If Beatus was bluer and viler to your eyes than ever before, that is because for the first time in your fife you saw Beatus truly, and not as it has bent you to see it.”

The Magoon said: “Truer eyes do not improve Beatus.”

“No, I suppose they would not,” said Lady Sunshine. “But you must realize that by the standard of True Earth, every place looks the less. As the men of True Earth will outmatch the bent men of Nashua, or of anywhere else.”

“Your model of True Earth is composed of all the planets that you have visited?” the Magoon asked.

“Yes.”

“What of Beatus was added to the standard by which True Earth is to be known?”

“All that which is not blue and vile and lumpish, Magoon,” Lady Sunshine said. “Now, if you promise not to alter my computer but accept the truth, then you may still accompany me. You may still venture your adventure and by the way we will discover many worlds that are better than Beatus.”

“Your dream of True Earth seems a fancy to me,” said the Magoon. “I do not dare to dream your dream. I hardly dare to dream my own dream. But I agree. Let us travel together in search of our dreams, and discover what we may.”

The Magoon’s departure was opposed by his advisers and his dependents, but he would not be gainsaid. He dared to risk all for his dream, and he prevailed over men who did not. He addressed his people as a whole and named to them the purpose for which he meant to travel. And, as his hope was their hope, they responded as one, and his advisers must then change their advice.

So is it always, when all is risked for a dream.

And so the two set off together in search of a better world than Beatus.

But though they traveled together, Lady Sunshine and the Magoon of Beatus were not yet partners. Lady Sunshine traveled in search of her own purpose, not the Magoon’s. She searched for True Earth, the world where her unity would not be bent as it was bent and twisted on other planets.

The presence of the Magoon aboard her ship was no more than a means to this end.

* * * *

3

Lady Sunshine and the Magoon traveled through hyperspace to the nearest place of those selected for search by the computer. Hyperspace was a stimulation and a joy to Lady Sunshine, a welcome antidote to the debilitations of Beatus. For the Magoon, hyperspace was a shock that left his sad eyes even sadder. But that was an expected reaction. He seemed to survive it ably enough. Lady Sunshine asked if he were all right, and he said that he was.

They emerged from hyperspace near a sun that was living green fire. Lady Sunshine pursued the directions indicated by her ship’s computer, and found a planet! An unknown world! A candidate for True Earth.

She settled the ship into orbit around the planet and with the advice of the computer launched a drone. The Magoon looked down at the mystery that waited below them.

“This is more than I ever expected,” he said. “And so soon. At this moment, I can almost believe in your True Earth. But I will be more than satisfied if this world is the superior of the Mungly Planet.”

But what they discovered was not equal to the Mungly Planet. Not as a place of human habitation. It was not even to be preferred to Beatus.

The two mechanicals rolled forth from the drone. There was nothing to be seen in the somber green light of the distant sun that was not rock or shadow. The shadows were ripe violet in color and strangely cast. There were no clouds in the sky. No wind breathed. All was silence.

Lady Sunshine wheeled slowly on her motivator, looking all about them. The Magoon stood still, but slowly rotated an eye.

The rock that surrounded them was brown, and green, and red-black and gray. In some places these colors were separate. In others they were streaked and intermixed.

The texture of the rock also varied, independently of color. In some places it was delicately roughened, like the hide of a beast. In other places it was as smooth as though it had been finished. And yet, as they looked about them, each in his own separate way, they saw that in still other places it was slick and polished, like a natural glass in which they might see themselves reflected.

There were no straight lines anywhere. All was curves and undulations. The rock was rippled in places like the surface of a pond, and otherwhere it was waved like the surface of an ocean. It was molded in many ways.

In the absence of other life, rock had grown here after its own ways, unmodified. It had slowly fashioned itself. It had made itself into fairy spires, into private abstractions and unknown plastic shapes. Or it brooded through time, considering what it would become.

It was many, but it was all one, for there was nothing in this world but rock, and the shadow of rock. It was natural, but its nature was strange to them. As they were strange to this place.

As they looked about them, they saw that the drone had landed on top of a great singular rock formation, so that they looked at the world about them from a height among heights. They were very near the brink of a smooth and graceful swoop to destruction.

They did not speak to each other, these two mechanicals. How much time passed as they looked about them they did not know, for they did not reckon time.

If this world was strange, it was all the stranger for being judged by the standard of True Earth. That standard was not applicable here. No computer could rectify what the mechanicals perceived, but only make their perceptions more singular and unique. Nothing here could be judged by any human standard. It had its own reasons for being.

At last, Lady Sunshine said, “This is not the world I seek.”

She struck at the rock with an edged extensor. The rock gave forth a light hollow sound as though it were brittle. Then it chipped. Now there was a great visible mar in the perfect surface of the planet.

“Nor is it the world I seek, either,” said the Magoon. His voice rang thinly, overwhelmed by the towering rock about them.

“And yet,” he said, “to think that we stand here where no other sentient observers have ever stood before. Could there be a lonelier place than this? What we see now has never been seen before. When we leave, it will remain unchanged through the eons, never to be seen again.”

But the planet gave counterevidence. Where it had been chipped, the rock healed itself. Where it was marred, it slowly grew smooth again. Where fragments lay, they were absorbed by the mother rock.

And then something most strange and awesome happened. The rock face shrugged beneath them. A great blind ripple passed through the surface of the rock as the hide of an elephant might involuntarily shudder to dislodge a fly.

Lady Sunshine was nearer the edge of the formation, close to the long shattering swoop to the lower rock. The surface beneath her motivator was slick and she could not gain traction. The rock undulated again, and she was skidded against her will toward the great hurtling slope. She was helpless to stop her progress. She spun her motivator futilely.

The Magoon did not move to aid her. He watched her silently. And then as another wave passed, he fell over. She wondered why he made no effort to rise.

He was far away. She was helplessly sliding, falling, and destruction had her. It was like a slow and silent dream.

Then the helmet of the probe was lifted and she was free and safe. The Magoon, that brown and hairy creature with great large nose and deep sad eyes, looked down at Lady Sunshine. She was disoriented.

“I think the mechanicals were best abandoned,” he said. “That world is no place for us.”

“Yes,” she said, still falling. “Yes.”

And they did not discuss the world of rock further then. It was too strange a place to be lightly spoken of and their experiences were too much with them.

They put that world far behind them. They went immediately from there to the second place of search indicated by the computer. This was the solar system of a flawless and brilliant white sun.

But search as they might, they found no planet there in the place predicted by the computer. They paused while the computer reintegrated its data. And during that pause, they took silent thought. It was only when they were to leave that they finally were able to speak to each other about Eterna, the rock world.

In the meantime, it occurred to Lady Sunshine that her ship’s computer had failed in its first two attempts to find True Earth, or even a world preferable to Beatus. These failures were of course discountable. She had asked the computer for its nearest and best choices, and these had merely been nearest.

Nevertheless, the Magoon might have criticized the computer for its double failure, and had not. She liked him for that. And she liked him for not making an unnecessary fuss over the pains of hyperspace, which she suspected that he suffered and hid. She found that she thought of him as specifically ugly less often now than before.

At last the computer suggested rather abruptly that they had spent altogether too much time in this wasteland solar system where no hospitable planet was likely to be found. So they prepared to leave this sterile emptiness around the white sun.

“We have our release now,” Lady Sunshine said. “Let us strike out to see what better place we may find waiting for us at our third rendezvous.”

“There is no need to feel disappointment,” the Magoon said. “We have had a good beginning. One planet in two attempts is a good beginning. It is more than I expected.”

“And that planet was worthy of a visit,” said Lady Sunshine. “It was like a cathedral of some forgotten religion. It was awesome and majestic, but also incomprehensible and inhuman.”

“Did you think so?” asked the Magoon. “I felt the same, but I thought it must have been a disappointment to you, since it was so clearly not True Earth.”

“No,” said Lady Sunshine. “That visit was not one I would repeat, but I would not surrender it. The slow power of that place overwhelmed me. I think it has followed another road than ours, one far slower and less headlong, one less improvised, one more well-considered. Even before life arose on Old Earth, I believe that planet was making itself. It has never considered an alternative to being rock. If impetuous man and that which impetuous man becomes are not the true way of the universe, then the rock of that world may slowly demonstrate its own truth. It is an alternative to us. We may not criticize it, but only leave it abide.”

“I am sobered by such patience,” said the Magoon. “I wonder on what day we will communicate with that world?”

“And on what terms?” said Lady Sunshine.

“And to what ends?”

The third hyperspace transition was longer and more oblique than the first two they had made. Lady Sunshine had always accepted oblique and acute hyperspace transitions as much the same. Now, for the first time, she realized that there were qualitative differences between the two.

The sun of this new place was pink.

Lady Sunshine called the Magoon to view it. And he rose from his bunk once again when they were settled in orbit and she announced another new world in place beneath them.

“A new world! A new enigma!” exclaimed the Magoon. “It looks promising. I wonder what it will reveal to us.”

“It is an enigma better resolved with your probe than with the planetary analyzer I never found, Magoon,” Lady Sunshine said. “I would not like a remote and bloodless examination half so well as this direct engagement. With a mere analyzer, we would have known no more of the rock world than its unsuitability for human habitation.

“But are you certain you wish to explore so soon after travel? We may rest if you like. I feel a responsibility to your people for you.”

“You have no responsibility for me,” said the Magoon. “My fate is not in your hands, except now-and-then, and by-the-way. You are not one of my advisers, Lady Sunshine, but there are times when you sound like them.”

“I apologize,” said Lady Sunshine.

“And rightly so,” he said.

“Let us explore now, then.”

But as soon as Lady Sunshine saw the planet, she knew it was not True Earth, whatever else it might be. True Earth would have no room for a place as dull as this.

The drone had landed on a featureless gray plain. The sky above was a lighter shade of gray. Plain and sky met at a distant seamless horizon. A tired wind lifted a handful of dust and then let it settle in dribbles. As they silently looked about them at the new world they had found, a great furry-winged flying creature came flying ponderously near, and then was eventually gone, lost to sight in the grayness.

In great excitement, the Magoon said: “Why, this is fantastic! Look at the gauges! Perceive how habitable this world is! Why, it is my dream!”

Was this place better than Beatus? Lady Sunshine inspected her meters and then double-checked them against the Magoon’s readings. All readings were startlingly normal, as though this grayness were somehow a boring and temperate average, a mediocre mean. Indeed, seemingly this dusty flat would make a suitable location on which to place row on row of long houses.

Lady Sunshine said, “I wonder if your people of Beatus would be happy here. It seems monotonous after the varieties of your planet.”

The Magoon raised an eye on an extensor a great distance in the air and looked all about them. He fixed finally on the direction that the flying creature had flown.

“I see a grove of green in the distance,” said the Magoon. “Since you seek variety, let us go investigate it. As we travel, let us propose names for this world we have found.”

“Perhaps later, when we know it better,” said Lady Sunshine.

They rolled on their universal motivators over the dusty plain in the direction that the Magoon had indicated. The ground was so hard that they left no visible marks of their passage.

Lady Sunshine said: “Does this place delight your heart, Magoon?”

“Indeed it does,” he said. “It is living proof of my dreams! I can hardly believe in a world as habitable as this. If I were not within this mechanical and unable, I would hug myself.”

A strange reaction! Unless, of course, one had never known any world but Beatus.

“Do you not wonder why I have been so discouraging?”

“Have you been discouraging?” asked the Magoon. “I have not noticed that you have been.”

“Perhaps it is a failure in the perceptions of your mechanical,” said Lady Sunshine. “For I have been being discouraging. This planet may be better than Beatus, but it is not much of a planet. You would stop here, and rest content.”

“You would not?”

“Of course not! I have traveled more than you, Magoon, and I have never seen a planet more lacking in grace! It may be habitable, but it would bend you worse than Beatus has bent you. You would be very strange then, your bentness compounded. We have been here only briefly and distantly, and I feel oppressively bent already.”

The Magoon said anxiously, “But perhaps we have already been more than fortunate in finding two planets. How many more than this will we find?”

“Many. In the course of my search for True Earth, many. Worlds so almost perfect they will make you weep and your teeth ache. Take your people of Beatus there.

“Or take them here, if you still prefer. We will remember where this nameless temperate flat was. I will not forget, at any rate.”

“But what of this world’s groves of green?” asked the Magoon.

Lady Sunshine raised her own eye on its extensor. This gave her the peculiar experience of seeing both near and far simultaneously. With her lower eye, she looked at the Magoon. With her extended eye, she looked in their direction of travel across the gray plain.

She asked, “If there are other groves of green on this planet, are they also giant cabbages?”

“Giant cabbages, Lady Sunshine?” asked the Magoon. “I cannot believe that my grove is giant cabbages!”

“It is not,” Lady Sunshine said. “It is one single solitary giant cabbage. That is your grove entire. Do you wish to look for yourself?”

Slowly, in his piping voice, the mechanical that was the Magoon said, “I think you are testing my devotion to this world. I have always found cabbages peculiar.”

He rolled forward.

“Pull your eye in,” he said. “Let us continue. We will discover soon enough if you are testing me.”

Lady Sunshine looked at him with her extended eye, changing the magnification until she saw him whole and clear. He looked quite strange from this angle.

“Very well,” she said. “But I, for one, propose that we name this place Cabbage Flat.”

The ground under their motivators was now less hard. It was damper and darker. When the green grove was clearly visible to them, even at their proper minor height, the ground had turned to black mud, which tried to enmire them. But their universal motivators were more than equal to mud. Instead of rolling, they now slid smoothly over the top of the bog.

When they came closer, it became apparent that Lady Sunshine had not been testing the Magoon. The grove of green was indeed a single huge plant bearing a distant but distinct similarity to a gigantic cabbage.

It was the center of the local dampness. Indeed, close about it the mud was thick liquid, a sloppy black muck.

Though the great enfolding leaves of the massive vegetable were apparent to them at a distance, the Magoon did not admit its nature until they were close upon the enormous green-and-purple bulk. He stopped in the muck and studied his grove.

“You are right,” he said at last. “It is very like a giant cabbage.”

“Do you wish to examine it more closely?” asked Lady Sunshine.

“Or does it wish to examine us more closely?” asked the Magoon. “Does it seek to eat us?”

The black muck around the cabbage had begun to swirl slowly. As they rested on the slop, they were being pulled around in a spiral toward the cabbage. Around and around, and closer and closer they were brought to the plant. It looked much the same on all sides—a few leaves spread high and wide, the rest folded together in a central bolus.

They were closer than Lady Sunshine liked when the Magoon finally said: “I have seen as much of this peculiar vegetable as I care to see. Let us retreat a distance.”

The swirl on which they were carried seemed so inexorable that Lady Sunshine wondered if they could retreat, or whether they must again abandon their exploratory vehicles. But, in fact, their motivators propelled them easily across the spiraling tide of muck. They settled at a more comfortable distance.

The pull of the swirling current increased, but they resisted it, floating easily in place. It increased yet again, but never becoming more than a frantically stolid movement. They held their place against it lightly.

“Again you see the advantage of your probe to my analyzer,” said Lady Sunshine. “An analyzer would have given us a very different picture of this world. It would have reported that this place was temperate, but not that it was Cabbage Flat.”

The Magoon said, “If the planetary analyzer were properly made— and if you had a battleship to contain it—it would take such things as cabbages and flatness into consideration.”

Suddenly the mud around them ceased its churning. In moments, the face of the bog was still again, the last ripples fading away.

“Observe your meters,” said Lady Sunshine. “This planet is less habitable now than formerly. Its disharmony now exceeds that of Beatus.”

And, indeed, their gauges did show that the atmosphere around them had become radically altered. There was now an overconcentration of several potent chemicals.

“I suspect the source is the cabbage,” said the Magoon.

“Does it seek to attract us, to overcome us, or to repel us?” asked Lady Sunshine.

“How can one tell with a cabbage? Perhaps it is attempting to communicate with us.”

The bog began to swirl again, but this time in the opposite direction. Instead of the cabbage drawing them in, it was now doing its best to push them away from itself.

They resisted the movement of sludge and continued to hold their places to see what would happen next.

Then, without warning, the great central bolus of the cabbage fell apart. The overlapping leaves flapped back with the sound of ship’s canvas filling. They spread wide, opening the plant but still hiding its interior from their view.

A large furry-winged flying creature, perhaps the same that they had seen earlier, leaped into the air with a raw-voiced cry. It flew to them and seized the little mechanical that was the Magoon of Beatus. It carried him up into the air away from the cabbage with great effortful wing beats, and flew away into the grayness.

Lady Sunshine looked at the unfolded vegetable. She was too small to see over the great spread leaves into the mystery of its interior.

She looked with her other eye at the moving thing in the sky, now only a single undefined spot. She magnified the spot until she saw it clearly again as flying-creature-carrying-mechanical.

She did not know what to do.

Lady Sunshine abruptly pulled her hands from the gloves and raised the featureless metal helmet. It was quiet there in the ship in orbit. She might as well have been all alone.

She looked at the Magoon. She rose and went to him.

Should she rescue him from the machine, as he had rescued her? He was more experienced in its use than she. He might not be as lost as she had been. Would he not abandon the mechanical if he were dropped from a height?

She observed him until she was certain that the Magoon was still in voluntary control of his mechanical’s faculties. She saw his feet work his motivator with smooth and knowing precision, and she knew that he was well.

Lady Sunshine left him then and ran back to her probe machine. She had left her curiosity unsatisfied. She hurriedly resumed her place. She pulled the helmet back over her head.

The cabbage had managed to push the mechanical she inhabited to the very edge of the muck while she was gone. But she wished to penetrate its towering bulk. She wished to see from where the flying creature had come.

But the resources of her mechanical exploratory vehicle were insufficient. Lady Sunshine raised her extensible eye to its limit, but the green-and-purple plant would not let her see its unknown interior. It denied her. It lifted its leaves in a tremendous effort that cracked the air loudly, and folded itself together again.

Lady Sunshine looked all around her again. In the distant sky she saw the flying creature returning. She magnified her vision and saw that it was empty-handed. It was returning for her, but she would not let it have her.

She withdrew from the probe machine to save herself. She saw the Magoon rising and standing free of the other machine.

“Are you all right, Lady Sunshine?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “What happened to you, Magoon?”

“It was quite strange. The flying creature carried me back to the drone and set me down with another raucous cry. Then it flew off without looking back, returning again to the vegetable. What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” she said, as though she did not realize the limitations of the mechanical that had just been demonstrated to her. As though she had not been afraid.

Then she said, “While you were being carried, did you think of a better name for this planet than Cabbage Flat?”

“No,” said the Magoon. “Cabbage Flat it will be. This is not the planet to replace Beatus. I see now that your dream is a better dream than mine. Mine will produce nothing but Cabbage Flats. But in looking for your dream, perhaps we will find that world better than Beatus for which I and my people hope.

“Let us look on. What is the next place on your computer’s list?”

* * * *

4

The sun that Lady Sunshine saw before her when they emerged from hyperspace was radiant gold of a lustrous richness more orange than yellow. It glowed like her hair, or like a treasure house.

But the Magoon did not rise from his bunk to witness it, though it was lovely. He was not yet recovered from the hyperspace transition.

“Seek our new world, True Earth,” he said. “Don’t fix your attention on these pains of mine, which will pass.”

“You are a dear creature, Magoon,” said Lady Sunshine, and turned again to her piloting.

She followed the statistical inferences of her computer and found a planet not too very far from where one was predicted to be. She settled into orbit around it and allowed the computer to calculate the most probably optimal destination for the drone.

But when all was ready, the Magoon was still in pain.

He said, with great effort: “I have not been candid with you, Lady Sunshine. I have been more affected by hyperspace than I have allowed you to know.”

“You should have told me so that I might have returned you to Beatus,” she said.

“No. What is important is your dream of True Earth, and the fruits of that dream.”

“But are you sure that you can survive another transition?”

“No. But that does not matter. You need me, and now I have failed you.”

The Magoon ceased to speak then. He did not respond to Lady Sunshine. He was very sick, and she did not know what to do.

She found that he had armed himself with medicine, and that he had used it all. She spoke to him, but he did not answer. She touched him. She washed his face. She felt ashamed.

The Magoon’s motives and behavior had been so much nobler than her own. She had selfishly insisted on pursuit of her private goal at all costs. But what had been her true goal? To demonstrate to Madame O’Severe all that Madame O’Severe denied. To show her that there was a world somewhere in which Lady Sunshine could be someone else and not the creature that Madame O’Severe had made.

For this petty end, she had used the Magoon willfully, taking no notice of his pain. Discounting it. Ignoring it. She had not cared what he needed or suffered because she had required his services.

What were her choices in this moment of the Magoon’s collapse? She could take him to Beatus. She could take him by the easiest acute hyperspace transition to one of the Ninety Worlds.

But any hyperspace transition might kill him.

Then there was this new enigma, this unknown planet below them that might be more living rock, or more cabbages and flying creatures. This planet might be anything.

If, with all her great skill, she brought her trim white spacecraft down to the planet in the absence of a landing grid, then in spite of her great skill, they would never be able to leave this world again. They would be bound to it forever.

Lady Sunshine was lost in the twists of a great paradoxical knot. She had brought the Magoon to this place to operate the probe machine. Because she could not. Now, however, the Magoon could not operate the probe machine. Because she had brought him here through hyperspace to operate the probe machine. It was for the Magoon’s sake that the probe machine was necessary now, to explore the world below them. But without his ability to operate it, the probe machine was useless. Because Lady Sunshine had brought the Magoon through hyperspace to operate the machine. Because she could not.

It was a horrible knot. It made no sense.

She could not land on this planet. Neither could she fly elsewhere through hyperspace. Neither could she do nothing.

She cried in agony. She was alone, more alone than ever before in her life. She was a unity, a singularity, and it was not enough to be that.

She had but one temporization available to her. If she sent the drone down to the planet, the Magoon might recover sufficiently to activate the probe so that they might determine whether or not to land themselves on the secret world below, the unknown planet of the golden star.

She pressed the button to launch the drone. But when it had landed safely, the Magoon had not recovered.

The squat brown creature, ugly and dear, continued to lie unconscious in his bunk. While she looked, he suddenly cried and thrashed behind the glass. Then he became still.

Terror-stricken, she pulled the ship’s emergency unit from its private closet. The Magoon was still alive, but he was much worse. She strapped him in and attached the emergency unit. The computer monitored his functions. She could keep him alive in this fashion, but for how long?

For the first time her self-sufficiency failed her. Even in her worst moments on Amabile or in her most discouraging moments of search, she had not been this helpless. She had never needed aid before.

Aid? That was not the way of Madame O’Severe. That was not the way of mankind.

Each for himself. Above all, each for himself, until one stood alone atop the pyramid, master of all. Above all. One.

It suddenly occurred to Lady Sunshine that she had operated the mechanical on Cabbage Flat after the Magoon had quitted the system. He had been standing apart from the machine when she had raised her helmet. Was it possible for her to operate the probe without him?

“Poor Magoon,” she said, and touched him. He did not respond, but lay inert in the grip of the emergency unit.

She closed the glass. She checked the automatic functions of the ship.

“Mind your business well,” she said to the computer.

Then she went to the probe. She sat down, placed her feet in the stirrups, pulled the helmet over her head and put her hands into the gloves. And immediately it seemed to her like the first time she had tried to operate the machine around Beatus. She was aware of rigidity. Her head was gripped closely. Her hands were imprisoned. Her legs were dead.

But what did that matter? The machine operated!

She could see. She could hear. It was as though she were on the unknown world and not lost in a computer-rectified machine somewhere in orbit above it.

Lady Sunshine looked at the other mechanical beside her, still and silent. She looked out of the drone into the world that awaited her beyond.

It was amazing. It was seeming Arcadia. It was Eden.

It was trees and grass and brilliant golden sunshine. It was a jolly little brook and an alternation of perfect hills stretching to the horizon.

“Can this be True Earth?” she asked, but the other mechanical gave her no answer.

She would have to discover for herself. Amabile had been attractive at first appearance, and also other planets, before they revealed their bentness.

She labored her mechanical body out of the drone. It was an annoyance to labor, but somehow she was unable to work the mechanical smoothly. Her fingers had forgotten themselves. Her feet were asleep.

Was the difference the missing Magoon? Or was it somehow this planet?

Then suddenly she careened forth, ran in a desperate curve, spun helplessly on her motivator, and fell over. A wise little bluebird twittered mockingly at her. It watched her flail to rise and jeered again.

She watched it take to flight as she lay. It disappeared in midair, leaving nothing but a swimming mote of emptiness in her vision. She could not believe what she saw. Had she imagined that she saw the bird? Had she imagined that she saw it disappear?

She finally managed to lever herself upright. Her mechanical body seemed heavy and out-of-balance. Her control was uncertain. At any moment she feared that the mechanical would have a lurching fit, or suddenly refuse to answer her intended direction. She could only move at angles, not in direct forward progression, so she tacked one way and then another in order to proceed.

Was this True Earth? Lady Sunshine wondered why she did not love its golden perfection better.

But then she looked more closely. This was difficult because her mechanical eyes would not focus. But she saw that the world had a plasticene quality. It was overripe. It melted into itself in a way she did not like. Trees intertwined themselves blindly, groping at each other with long tendrils. There were strange distant animals in this pastoral land, moving together. As she watched, a doggish creature— not a dog, more than a dog—rubbed itself intimately against a tree and then urinated on it.

Not knowing why, she was again reminded of Amabile. But why?

She watched a creature that was like a golden-furred rabbit hopping idly on the hillside. It disappeared like the bird, and then appeared again.

There were strange spots of blankness in her vision. The colors of this world drooped and threatened to run together, to spill and mix and whirl. There were flickers at the edges of her eyes. She spun her eye around to catch them, but though she rotated it madly, they always managed to elude her.

She did not like this place. It made her uneasy. And yet to appearance it was perfect and golden like some California or Huy Brasil. Was the fault in the machine? Or was it this place?

She moved forward, tripped over something she didn’t see, skated wildly, fell, bounced fortuitously, and came to rest upright. It was so strange. She could not move properly. She could not see clearly.

Lady Sunshine felt the need of the Magoon. There were spaces in her expectations, and she was deeply disturbed.

She began to watch one particular area of blankness in her vision, a swimmingness that moved this way and then that, and could not be pinned down. She was determined to see through it.

She raised an eye on an extensor to see it from a height. She did this with all due carefulness lest she fall over, which she felt that she might do. She watched the mote with separate eyes and it did not go away.

She became certain then that it was not the computer that was at fault. It was not the mechanical. It was not herself. The source of strangeness lay in the planet.

She heard a piercing squeal which unnerved her. Then suddenly the blankness—that blankness—was no longer there.

Instead, she saw a black rabbit-creature mounted on the golden rabbit she had seen before. It turned its face to her as it thrust and pumped, and she saw that it had long sharp unrabbitlike teeth. Then it fell off and lay panting, its little pink penis extended from its furry sheath.

The golden doe tried vainly to hop away, but the black buck leaped up again. It seized the golden doe by the neck and bit down savagely. The doe squealed again and then its neck was broken.

It thrashed helplessly, exposing its underbelly. And then Lady Sunshine saw that it was not a doe at all, but another buck, and that it had an erection of its own in the throes of death. Even before it stopped moving, the black rabbit-creature fell to feeding on its warm body.

Lady Sunshine retracted her extended eye. She feared she could not move without falling with her vision radically split.

She moved forward carefully. She was successful except for one inadvertent reckless lurch.

The rabbit-thing continued to feed greedily on its fellow until she was close. Then it lifted its head, gave her a knowing look, hastily licked the blood from its black-furred mouth with a delicate pink tongue, and hopped away into an anomaly. It was gone into a swimming blur, disappeared again.

The look it gave Lady Sunshine remained with her. It had included her somehow in its crimes with that look, and the knowledge frightened her. She wanted to separate herself, but the golden corpse remained, bloody and mangled, lying on the hillside, as though it were hers. Her property.

Abruptly, a loud moan began, starting low, rising, breaking into howls. What was that? It was painful and intimidating. It unnerved her to hear. It came from nowhere and from everywhere. It surrounded her and filled her ears, filled her world. It was as though the whole uncertain planet were shrieking its pain at her.

Lady Sunshine wished that it would stop. When it became too much, she cried for it to stop.

It stopped.

Then two people suddenly appeared. They seemed to walk out of a bush with brown and crumbling leaves. One was a woman with long black hair and sharp foxy features. She led a man who was covered with overlapping triangular scales. Both were naked. Her muff hair was as golden as the dead rabbit-creature. His penis was slippery and wet, and dripped mucilaginous strings of gleet.

Lady Sunshine was amazed to see people here. This planet was not one of the Ninety Worlds of the Dispersion from Old Earth.

Naked people.

The woman saw Lady Sunshine first. She put one hand to her muff and the other to her mouth, sucking her fingers in a parody of concern. She prodded the man with an elbow and made a suggestive twaddle to Lady Sunshine with the fingers from her crotch.

Then the woman and the man walked through each other and were a place of emptiness. They were not visible. Gone, impossibly gone.

Lady Sunshine tried to calm her distress by placing the worlds of origin of the two naked people. They seemed definite types, as definite as the Magoon from Beatus. As definite as a lace-veil butterfly from O’Severe. These people were formed, malformed, bent into special shapes.

But Lady Sunshine could not remember any place where the people looked so vulpine. Or any place where men had evolved scales like a pineapple. And that was even more distressing.

In the emptiness about her head, there were suddenly tears, screams and silence. Silence. Then more screams.

She looked wildly about her. Nothing, nothing, nothing but golden sunshine and a sky as blue as the benighting fog of Beatus.

The planet uttered a final explosive raw-voiced agony, which turned to laughter and trailed away.

“There are those who need time to get used to it here,” someone said in an exquisite throaty voice.

The voice came out of nowhere.

“And then there are those who take to it right away.”

The voice seemed to come from above, out of a tree. A mass of creepers, tendrils and black writhing vines lowered itself. There was a flickering within the web, at times flashes of paleness, at other moments only writhing blackness. The squirming nest reached the ground and broke open. But there was nothing within the tentacles but unfocused shimmer, an anomaly.

Then a dryad stepped forth, out of the nothingness. She was fat, middle-aged, coy and horrid. She was naked and flabby and white as rice. She looked like an evil pig. A great festering wound, a gumma, had eaten away most of her nose and turned it into an open snout. A few of the black creepers broke away from the main mass and remained with her, winding and twining intimately about her body like snakes. Where they touched her they left welts on the whiteness like intense broken red veinlets.

The creature of the tree, this dryad, reached out to Lady Sunshine, who started back from her, nearly toppling.

“May I touch you?” the dryad asked pleasantly. “I want very much to touch you. May I? I like to be the first to touch new people. It is almost my only vice.”

The gumma seemed to shift on her face. Her nose was now there, where it had not been before. It was a red blobby thing. But now part of her forehead was eaten to the bone, which showed whitely through the open wound. And a lip was lifted high to reveal skeleton teeth smiling at Lady Sunshine.

“No!” said Lady Sunshine. She did not want to be touched. Above all, she did not want to be touched.

The dryad said, “I just thought that I would ask while it occurred to me. You mustn’t think I was insisting, just because it occurred to me.”

She walked in a circle around Lady Sunshine, while Lady Sunshine watched her with a wary rotating eye, ready to lurch if the dryad attempted to move in her direction. Then, suddenly, the dryad sat down beside her. She stroked and petted her various creeping companions, and moved a favored thick black tendril into her crotch where it curled itself around her leg and snuggled intimately.

The dryad licked her lips obscenely, tongue running over white teeth where she had no lip, and leaned toward Lady Sunshine. Lady Sunshine inched away.

“From what planet do you come, my dear?” she inquired.

“O’Severe,” Lady Sunshine said. “Originally.”

“O’Severe. That’s nice! That is such a distance to have come. Your need for us must have been very great. Why, that means that sooner or later I will see more of you, doesn’t it? But it would be so nice to be first. You are so sweet and fragile. I do like that in a girl.”

The dryad, that fat fountain of unknown delight, suddenly stood again.

“You must excuse me, really,” she said. “I have tarried too long with you. For here is someone new that has been sent to me. And I must not be selfish, must I?”

She turned and galloped off to intercept one of the distant animals that Lady Sunshine had seen, which now approached them. Or was it a man? Or a boy? Or was it a creature part human and part something other than human?

Lady Sunshine could not say. His genitals made him male. But he had the narrow-hipped, smooth-muscled body of an adolescent boy. His skin was mottled green and yellow, and seemed of different textures, smooth where it was yellow, pebbled like a turtle or lizard where it was green, everywhere hairless. His tiny head was bald and chinless and bobbed atop a neck fully two feet long as though it had a life of its own separate from its body.

This strange and improbable creature took no notice of the maiden of the tree come tripping to intercept him. He detached a bit of yellow from his green leathery body, tossed the gobbet into the air, and snapped it down with a lunge of his long neck.

Lady Sunshine realized then that the yellow patches on his skin were fleshy moving things like creeping leeches. He plopped another with great relish into his lipless mouth, and bulged his eyes hugely.

“Match for unity,” the dryad challenged him. She seized him by his limp dangling member, and her black-creeper familiars bound him to her otherwise.

He nodded and picked a yellow blob off his body. He squeezed it until it popped and ran like dripping custard. He smeared it on her face, and she gagged and sputtered.

“One for me,” he said, laughing. “Unity.”

They began to contend, to wrestle, to twine like the trees of this planet. The doggish creature that Lady Sunshine had seen earlier came trotting over as they swayed for advantage. It sniffed them closely, snapped at their genitals, and was slapped smartly by the thick tendril that the dryad wore as guardian of her privacy. The doggish one whined, and then deliberately urinated on them.

“Unity,” it said audibly, and trotted briskly away. Lady Sunshine was amazed to hear it speak.

The gross dryad never let go of the green boy’s penis. She ripped at it with her nails. She gnawed at it with her skeleton teeth. She rubbed and snorted it in her decayed nose. Lady Sunshine could hardly bear to watch.

The turtle boy whimpered and chittered at her attack, but in spite of all her painful work, he did not yield to her. He had weapons of his own. He bashed, nudged and butted her blindly with his small bald head on its long neck. He struck her again and again with great blows. With soft, nailless fingers he strove to pry away the thick black tentacle that protected her.

He suddenly broke away with a triumphant cry, holding the tendril. His neck grew stiff. His tiny head grew dark and engorged. He struck the dryad with her tendril and she screamed and loosed her grip on his penis.

The green boy-creature made the dryad bend and present her rear to him. He whipped her with the tendril and she screamed with each blow. Her body was a mass of red welts. He cried, “Louder! Louder!” and whipped her ever harder.

Then he penetrated her with his bald head on its long neck. He plunged into the dryad again and again, and she filled the world with the sound of her pleasure and agony. The tendrils that clung to her stood out from her body and writhed blindly.

And then, at the climactic moment when the green leather-skinned creature was about to expend himself within her, somehow the black tendril he used as a whip wrapped itself tightly around his neck. He was blocked, prevented. The tendril squeezed tighter and tighter, and the rising tide within him had no outlet.

He withdrew his lipless, chinless head. He was under stress. He was in dire straits. He pointed to his neck desperately. With his other hand he pried vainly at the thick tentacle. His green skin was almost black.

The dryad snapped his neck with sharp impertinent fingers. She slapped his cheeks. She prodded him in the gut. At last, she recovered her black companion and stood aside.

The boy rang the world with his howl. Then he vomited gouts of delayed yellow matter that had been blocked from ejaculation.

“One for me,” the dryad said. “Unity.”

“Unity,” everyone cried, and applauded her. They knew a winner when they saw one.

The poor sick boy looked at the great crowd that had gathered. He retched and cried. He flickered madly, and then disappeared.

The dryad showed her teeth in her most hideous smile, and then yawned elaborately. She passed her black familiar between her legs. It wrapped itself around her right leg and nestled into its home again.

Lady Sunshine looked at the many beings gathered around her. It was impossible to say how many there were because they became and they unbecame.

All of this awful world threatened to come unpinned about her now. There was more flicker than stability.

All the strange and naked people she saw standing around her in the dark rainbow drip and swirl were diseased. Or they were deformed. Or they were inhuman.

There was one being that looked like a baboon with immensely swollen genitals. It had the face of a lovely woman. It sat on the ground and played with crawling spiders.

A woman with skin like rough tree bark fondled a balloon-headed dwarf. A creature with the body of a man and the head of an elephant groped them both with its trunk. The woman seemed to be unaware of where she was, of what she did, and of what was done to her. The dwarf smirked.

Another woman with twin lines of dugs that stretched from chest to groin lay on her side on the ground while an assorted brood of squirming things fought each other for her tits. Two fought to the death. Their wet nurse picked up the parts of their bodies and tossed them to the sharp-toothed rabbit-thing, which savaged them.

Lady Sunshine whirled on her motivator, but everywhere she looked, it was the same. She felt dizzy. This place was not an accident It was intentional. It was directed at her. It was a trap for her.

She had a vision of this planet: plants, animals, humans, and creatures in between, all intertwined in one great rapacious, battling, steaming, creaming, moaning, sucking, fucking, slavering, groping, dying, crying, pyramidal unity.

The creatures whirled in a sickening flux around her and sang to her:

“Earth is dead.”

“Nothing matters.”

“Sufferance.”

“Desolation.”

“Pleasure.”

“Unity.”

“Forever and ever, amen.”

Lady Sunshine was bewildered and beset.

“Who shall initiate her into the mysteries?” the creatures asked.

The dryad stepped forward. She wriggled her wet and gaping snout.

“I saw her first,” she said. “I should have first turn.”

“You’ve had your first turns, darling,” said a filthy grandmother with a neck that hung in wattles like a turkey, and empty withered breasts. She gnawed on the leg bone of a child. “But I have experience, and experience counts.”

“Match experience,” said the dryad. “Match your unity against mine.”

“Very well,” said the grandmother. “Have a nibble,” she said, and handed her bone to the dryad.

“And you,” said the dryad, handing her black companion to the ancient.

The fat dryad munched at the leg bone. The filthy old woman tried to bite the wriggling creeper she held, but it evaded her and struck at her wrinkled neck.

The old woman snapped like a mongoose and the tendril was caught and bitten in two. It fell limp. The dryad shuddered and ululated. Then she flickered and was gone.

“One for me,” said the old one. “Unity.”

The crowd shuddered and cried, “One for you.”

“As you see, it is experience that counts. Oh, what I will teach this sweet child.”

But then a man stepped forward, naked except for black socks. In this company he was unusual, because he looked fully human. He did not flicker at all unless you watched him very closely, and his dark hair was neatly combed.

He said, “You forget me.”

“I did forget you, Dr. Wrongsong,” said the grandmother, “but only for the merest moment. Let us step aside and match ourselves one against one.”

Dr. Wrongsong smiled sincerely. “One against one,” he said.

“Unity,” said everyone. “Unity above all.”

They all disappeared, the man, the grandmother, and all the various creatures. The world around Lady Sunshine shattered, sharded, pinwheeled, blurred, spilled, swirled and ran. There was only one stability in all the chaos. That was the doggish creature.

It came sniffing up to Lady Sunshine. She tried to back away from it, but could not move.

“Try to leave,” said the doggish creature. “Just try to leave us. You will find that you cannot. We are yours, and you are ours. I will be last. I’m always last. But in the end there will be one for me.”

To her horror, it lifted its leg and urinated all over her, and she could not prevent being marked.

“Unity,” it said. Then it disappeared, too.

Lady Sunshine was helpless and alone, lost in lovelessness. She tried vainly to move, but her head was vise-gripped. Her hands were cuffed. Her fingers were paralyzed. She could not move her motivator. She could not extend her extensible eye. She could not rotate her rotatable eye.

She could not leave the mechanical. She could not retire from this place. She could not take her ship through hyperspace and escape as she wanted. She could not move at all.

She knew now why this place reminded her of Amabile. But it was far more terrible than Amabile had ever been.

She realized that Madame O’Severe was right.

She had hoped to remain aloof from corruption. She had longed to remain untouched. But now she was lost, eternally damned.

This was the entire universe, forever and ever. And it was the same everywhere:

Disease . . .

Decay . . .

Death . . .

Devolution . . .

O’Severe = Amabile = Beatus

As counterpoint to her thoughts, this planet played for her its single eternal song of ecstatic revulsion, of solitary abandonment and humiliation. It filled Lady Sunshine’s head and heart as the one real thing.

But no! There was a realer thing. There was one hope.

There was True Earth. Somewhere there was True Earth.

No matter what else, there was True Earth.

The awful keening stopped as abruptly as it had begun. There was silence. Long, empty silence.

Then the sincere man stepped into being through the swirling colorful dissolve. He was alone.

Dr. Wrongsong’s hair was still perfectly in place, but he was now missing a sock. Lady Sunshine saw that his bare foot was not human, but was other.

“Here I am at last,” he said, licking his lips and teeth clean of blood. “Have I kept you long?”

Lady Sunshine looked blindly at him and tried to hold onto her dream of True Earth.

“You think you understand now,” Dr. Wrongsong said, “but of course you don’t. You must be dominated. Experience is the only true teacher.”

She protested. “I don’t understand! I won’t understand!”

“No false innocence. You say you don’t understand, but of course you do. Deep in your heart, you do. You did not come here by accident. You sought us out. This is the place for which you have longed.”

“What do you mean?” she cried.

“This is True Earth.”

No! If this was True Earth, then there was no hope.

“And now you must be touched,” Dr. Wrongsong said.

He reached out, and she could not prevent him. She could not resist. She could not help herself. There was no escape.

Escape? To what? To where?

He touched her. He spun her ruthlessly on her motivator, and around and around she went. She spun in her mind. Helplessly.

Hopelessly she cried cried cried to be saved.

And then, all around Lady Sunshine the dissolving spinning world split apart and there was light. The helmet of the probe machine was lifted from her head and she lay open to the radiance of a new universe.

“Magoon,” she said. “It’s you.”

* * * *

5

He had come somehow. Out of his coma. Out of the grip of the emergency unit. From behind his closed doors.

The Magoon was naked and hairy. He dripped tubes, wires, and broken needles, but he took no notice of them. His eyes were for her, otherwise unseeing.

He said, “I heard you call for me, and I came.”

She hugged and kissed him desperately.

“Bless you, Magoon,” she said. “This is an awful place and we must get away from it.”

The Magoon looked at Lady Sunshine.

“This is the place,” he said. “I know it. There is no other.”

And he collapsed.

She cried, and laughed, and gasped because he was hurt and he was her love. She plucked the thorns and darts from him. With impossible strength, she carried him in her arms to her bed.

She had not yet thought of him when she said they must leave, but now she did think of him. She thought of him above herself.

The Magoon could not go elsewhere than this planet. And she must take him there, for his sake.

If this was True Earth, it did not matter. One place was like another. The one thing she was sure of was the Magoon, and if they were together, it did not matter where they traveled. The Magoon transformed the universe.

She kissed him and tenderly stroked his hairiness.

Then she turned to her piloting. With the aid of the computer and her own skill, she brought her white spaceship safely to land not far from the drone on this planet without landing grids, this awful world she had just quitted. And felt relief.

Not far distant, Lady Sunshine could see her former mechanical body. It stood alone. Abandoned. Inert.

But something was strange. She felt as she had never felt before in all her life, and she did not know what it meant. She glowed within herself. Her heart was lifted.

What did it mean?

This was not the way it had been when she inhabited the mechanical. That was remote and queer. And this might almost be a different world. Or was the difference in her?

This world was changed. It was not the same. She saw it differently.

She threw open the doors of the spaceship and stared about her in wonderment. The planet was lit from within itself. Colors were everywhere pure and luminescent. They glowed and streamed with inner life like the slowly pulsing breath of a stained glass dove.

The planet was filled with notes that hummed and fluttered and chimed. Occasional notes that came and went, or stayed, or changed. Rare harmonies. And the colors interplayed and shifted with the notes of the song the planet sang. All in goldenness and sunshine.

The Magoon joined her, risen from her bed, and she turned to him. He was well. He was healed. His eyes were no longer sad. He was beautiful.

He was beautiful, but at the same time no less the Magoon that had been. He was not altered. He was transfigured. And he smiled at her.

Lady Sunshine looked at him, and in him she saw enhanced all that was good in herself and all that was glorious in this strange planet. She loved him, not as ultimate truth, but for the ultimate truth that she saw within him.

And if he was made well, so was she. She, who had not even realized that she was sick.

A great oppression that had been with her always was now lifted. And it was only with its passing that she realized its existence.

She, who had been bent, was no longer bent.

“I love you, my dear Magoon,” she said. “In you, I see more than I can ever say.”

“And I love you,” he said.

It was then that they became partners. They were no longer solitary selfish unities, but were joined together in a Oneness that was more than either of them, that was more than their sum.

They exchanged names. Hers was Jennet. His was Lester, which means “lustrous.”

She had never told her true name to anyone before.

They turned to the planet again and went out into the world together, hand in hand. Lady Sunshine cast her white clothing from her and let herself be touched by the winds of color. They played on her body and she laughed in surprise. She was lifted into the air on a chiming note and became part of the dance of color and the song of songs. She was ecstatic. Her bare body sailed in the iridescent streaming rainbow swirl.

It was all so strange and wonderful. It was the same world that she had encountered before, but it was seen with transformed eyes.

As they played, knowledge came to them. It surrounded them. Knowledge was this world, and in their play they became knowledge. They knew truth.

There was no more bentness.

They saw the computer’s standard of “True Earth” as the poor, partial composite that it was. This planet could not be recognized by any sum of addition. It was of another order.

They saw the probe mechanicals in all their inadequacy. How could truth be perceived as truth by means of this fractional version of human perception? It could not.

And they saw themselves for what they had been: distorted, half-human creatures.

And they knew other things. Together Lady Sunshine and the Magoon laughed and shouted, rolling through the singing shafts of luminous color. They were together with each other and with this world. They were locked together in Oneness.

Love was experienced. Love was known to them.

This world was love, and love was knowledge. Knowledge, love, and knowledge this world.

And then suddenly the sounds and colors around them were altered to new orders of complexity, far beyond their range. They looked and found themselves in the presence of three people—a boy, a mature woman, and an old man, all clothed in reclarified light.

“Welcome,” they said. “Welcome. The celebration of your homecoming is in progress, and we have been sent to bring you. Array yourselves and come.”

Homecoming!

Lady Sunshine said, “Is this True Earth?”

They laughed.

The woman said, “No. True Earth is every human world.”

And Lady Sunshine suddenly perceived

O’Severe = True Earth = Beatus

The Magoon—Lester, the Lustrous One—said, “Yes! Yes! And now I know how to make the Ninety Worlds True Earth.”

“Of course,” the boy said. “That is what you came to learn.”

Lady Sunshine said, “But if this is not True Earth, what place is it?”

“This is Livermore,” the old man said. “This is the world where everything is possible to those who can perceive.”

* * * *

6

When it was fully time for Lady Sunshine and the Magoon to leave Livermore, there was another celebration. Then the others made a grid in their minds to hurl the white spaceship into space.

They went first to O’Severe by long passage. Hyperspace was no trial now to the Magoon, for he knew better.

Madame O’Severe said, “So you are returned at last. You took long enough about it.”

“You gave me permission to find out where my best interests lie,” Lady Sunshine said.

“And here you are. I should not have thought it would take you this long. Who is this grotesque that accompanies you?”

Lady Sunshine said, “This is the Magoon of Beatus. He is my love and partner.”

“You have never had good judgment,” said Madame O’Severe. “You have never known what was important and what was not. My patience with you is nearly at an end. You must rid yourself of this monster if you would be my instrument.”

“I will not be your instrument,” said Lady Sunshine. “I know now where it is that my best interests lie, and they do not lie with you.”

“I disown you,” said Madame O’Severe. “You are not a serious person.”

Lady Sunshine and her partner, the Magoon, traveled to Beatus. There they turned the mighty machines of the planet to new purpose. They changed the blue fog into dissipating mist, and performed other wonders.

Lady Magoon and the Sunshine of Beatus.

And that was not the last of what they did. They healed many worlds, among them O’Severe.

* * * *

Alexei and Cory Panshin write:

We were married in June 1969, just before the bright and hopeful days of the sixties that produced Sgt. Pepper and Lord of Light were declared officially dead by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and John Mitchell. Six months before Altamont.

Darkness and confusion hadn’t yet seized control. Woodstock, the last muddy flower of the counterculture, was still two months away. But signs were already in the air. In the week before we were married, Alexei finished his third Anthony Villiers story, Masque World, a book with a darkness of tone that wasn’t there in the two that came before it.

Both our apartment leases ran out that summer, Alexei’s in New York, Cory’s in Cambridge. We looked for a new place to live, but we could find no place for ourselves in the city. Then, in August, through a chain of circumstances totally strange, we found ourselves living in isolation on a farm in Elephant, Pennsylvania.

Do you know the story of the elephant in the dark? If you passed through Elephant, Pennsylvania, in the dark, you wouldn’t even know it was there.

The farm is on a hilltop. At night, the stars are bright overhead. People and society are only rumors, glows at the horizon.

But what is the center of things? And where is the periphery?

Elephant has been a place to think, a stillness in the midst of storms, a calmness in the midst of confusion. We have done a lot of thinking here, about who we really are and what we are doing. Our three-year series of columns in Fantastic, probing into the mysterious nature of science fiction, was a product of Elephant.

Elephant has also been a place in which to change. The greatest part of Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrow, a book of short stories about the possibility and necessity of change, was written in Elephant. So was our novel, The Son of Black Morca, which is about giving up one self-definition in favor of another.

So was “Lady Sunshine and the Magoon of Beatus.”

If the darkness and night of Masque World were an unconscious anticipation of the decadence and repression of the early seventies, then what have we unconsciously anticipated in “Lady Sunshine”?

A lifting of clouds? New brightness?