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IV

Under full hyperdrive, spaceship Muddlin' Through fared from the Solar System toward the sun that men had named Mogul. Pulsed Schrödinger waves drove her at a pseudovelocity equivalent to thousands of times the true speed of radiation; and in galactic terms those stars were near neighbors. Yet her clocks would have registered two and a half weeks when she reached her destination. So big is the universe. Sentient beings speak lightly of crossing light-years because they cannot comprehend what they are doing.

David Falkayn, Chee Lan, Adzel, and Muddlehead were in the saloon playing poker. Rather, the first three were. The computer was represented by an audiovisual sensor and a pair of metal arms. It was an advanced model, functioning at consciousness level, very little of its capability needed en route to maintain the systems of the ship. The live travelers had even less to do.

"I'll bet a credit," said Chee. A blue chip clattered to the middle of the table.

"Dear me." Adzel laid down his hand. "Can I fetch more refreshment for anyone?"

"Thanks." Falkayn held out an empty beer mug. "I'll raise." He doubled the bet. After half a minute during which the faint purr of engines and ventilators came through silence: "Hey, Muddlehead, what's keeping you?"

"The probabilities for and against me are calculable as being exactly balanced," said the flat artificial voice. Electronic brooding continued for a few seconds. "Very well," it decided, and matched Falkayn.

"Ki-yao?" wondered Chee. Her whiskers dithered, her tail switched the stool on which she sat. "Well, if you insist." She raised back.

Inwardly, the human jubilated. He had a full house. Outwardly, he pretended to ponder before he raised again. Muddlehead saw him. "Are you sure you don't need some readjustment somewhere?" Falkayn asked it.

"Whom the gods would destroy," said Chee smugly. Again she raised back. Meanwhile Adzel, his hoofs thudding on the carpet, returned with Falkayn's beer. The Wodenite himself refrained from drinking it on a voyage—no ship could have carried enough—and instead sipped a martini in a one-liter chillglass.

Falkayn raised another credit. Muddlehead saw. Chee and Falkayn peered its way, as if they could read an expression in the vitryl lens. Slowly, Chee added two chips to the pot. Falkayn suppressed a grin and raised once more. Muddlehead raised back. Chee's fur stood on end. "Damn your mendacious transistors to hell!" she screamed, and threw down her hand.

Falkayn hesitated. Muddlehead had implied its cards were mediocre, but—He called. His opponent revealed four queens.

"What the jumping blue blazes?" Falkayn half rose. "You said the probabilities—"

"I referred to the odds in favor of suckering you," explained Muddlehead, and raked in the pot.

"It appears that after our long hiatus, we will have to learn each other's styles of play ab initio," Adzel remarked.

"Well, listen." Chee shuffled the deck. "I'm growing tired of nothing but straight poker. Dealer's choice, right? I say seven card stud, low hole wild."

Falkayn grimaced. "That's a nasty thing to say."

"The odds in wild card games are precisely as determinable as those in the standard versions," declared Muddlehead.

"Yes, but you're a computer," Falkayn grumbled.

"You want to cut?" Chee asked Adzel.

"What?" The dragon blinked. "Oh—oh, my apologies. I was taking the opportunity to meditate." With astonishing delicacy, an enormous hand split the pack.

The beating he took in that round did not seem to disturb his feelings. But when the deal came to him, he announced placidly, "This will be baseball."

"Oh, no!" Falkayn groaned. "What's happened to you two in the past three years?" He soon folded and sat grimly drinking and thinking.

His turn arrived. "I'll show you bastards," he said. "This will be Number One. You know it? Seven card stud, high-low, kings and tens wild for low, sevens and deuces wild for high."

"Om mani padme hum," whispered Adzel shakenly.

Chee arched her back and spat. Settling down again on her cushion, she protested, "Muddlehead could blow a fuse."

"The problem is less complex than computing an entry orbit," the ship reassured her, "though rather more ridiculous."

The game went on, in a weird fashion. Falkayn took the whole pot, largely by default. "I hope we've all learned our lesson," he said. "Your deal, Muddlehead."

"I believe I am also permitted to call an unorthodox game," replied the machine.

Falkayn winced, Chee Lan bottled her tail, but Adzel proposed, "Fair is fair. However, let us thereafter confine ourselves to straight draw and stud."

"My assessment is that this one will confirm you in that desire," Muddlehead told them, shuffling. "It is played like draw except that there is no point in drawing. Players pick up their cards with the backs toward them, so that each can see the hand of everybody but himself."

After a shocked silence, Chee demanded: "What kind of perverts were they that gave you your last overhaul?"

"I am self-programming within the limits of the types of task for which I am built," the computer reminded her. "Thus whenever I am activated but idle, I endeavor to make that idleness creative."

"I think the Manichaean heresy just scored a point," said Adzel. Van Rijn would have understood the reference, but it went by Falkayn, though he was reasonably well-read.

At least play was mercifully short. At its end, the man rose. "Deal me out," he said. "I want to check on dinner." Gourmet cooking was among the hobbies with which he passed the time on voyages, as painting and sculpture were for Chee, music and the study of Terrestrial history for Adzel.

Having basted the roast, he did not immediately return to the saloon but lit his pipe and sought the bridge. His footfalls sounded loud. This was during the period of several hours per twenty-four when the ship's gravity generator was set at fifty-five percent above Earth's pull, to accustom the crew to what they would undergo on Babur if they landed there. An added forty-five kilos of weight did not unduly tire him. It was uniformly distributed over a body in good condition. What he and his mates had to adapt was chiefly their cardiovascular systems. Nonetheless he felt the heaviness in his bones.

On the bridge, optical compensators projected an exact simulacrum of whichever half of the sky they were set to show. Falkayn stopped at the control board. Beyond the glowing instruments, darkness roofed him in, housing a wilderness of stars. They gleamed at him from every side, sword-sharp swarms, the Milky Way an argent cataract, the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda galaxy made small and strange by distances he would never see overleaped. As if he felt the elemental cold between them, he cradled the bowl of his pipe in one fist, his campfire symbol. Beneath the susurrus of the ship lay an infinite stillness.

And yet, he thought, yonder suns were not quiet. They were appallingly aflame; and the spaces roiled with matter, seethed with energy, travailed with the birth of new suns and new worlds. Nor was the universe eternal; it had its strange destiny. To look into it was to know the sorrow and glory of being alive.

More than once Coya had gotten her wish that they make love here.

Falkayn's eyes sought in the direction of Sol, though it had long since dwindled from sight. His trained gaze could still find its way among constellations that had changed, some beyond recognition, and were nearly drowned in the number of stars that shone through airlessness. How are you doing now, darling? he wondered, knowing full well that "now" was a noise without meaning when cried across the interstellar reaches. I didn't expect to feel homesick on this trip. I forgot that home is where you are.

He recognized his regret as being partly guilt. He had not been frank with her. In his judgment, this journey held more dangers than he had admitted. (But then, she had tried to hide from him that she thought the same.) Regardless, when van Rijn broached the idea, the blood had leaped in him, after three staid years. Some lines passed through his head, from the archaic poetry which was a special interest of his:

 
"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life . . . ."

Consoling himself with smoke, he decided he might as well admit that he had a hopeless case of go-fever. Coya and, yes, the kids could come a-roving with him later. Meanwhile

 
"My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—"

A chuckle interrupted. Neither Adzel nor Chee Lan would take kindly to the idea of manning oars in a Grecian galley. Not but what they hadn't done equally curious things from time to time, and might again. He'd better get back to the game. After dinner, if their mood suited, he'd break out his fiddle and play for them. The sight of those two dancing a jig together never wearied him.

 

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Framed