And this last fact, the modern world’s dearth of experience with madness, is at the root of what happened. Although he could not have foreseen the exact outcome, a twentieth-century psychiatrist might have warned against spending eight years, an unprecedented stretch of time, in as strange an environment as the Chronos. Strange it certainly has been, despite all efforts—limited, totally man-controlled, devoid of countless cues for which our evolution on Earth has fashioned us. Extraterrestrial colonists have, thus far, had available to them any number of simulations and compensations, of which close, full contact with home and frequent opportunities to visit there are probably the most significant. Sailing time to Jupiter was long, but half of that to Saturn. Moreover, because they were earlier, scientists in the Zeus had much research to occupy them en route, which it would be pointless for later travelers to duplicate; by then, the interplanetary medium between the two giants held few surprises.

  Contemporary psychologists were aware of this. They understood that the persons most adversely affected would be the most intelligent, imaginative, and dynamic—those who were supposed to make the very discoveries at Saturn which were the purpose of the undertaking. Being less familiar than their predecessors with the labyrinth that lies, Minotaur-haunted, beneath every human consciousness, the psychologists expected purely benign consequences of whatever psychodramas the crew engendered.

  —Minamoto

  Assignments to teams had not been made in advance of departure. It was sensible to let professional capabilities reveal themselves and grow on the voyage, while personal relationships did the same. Eventually such factors would help in deciding what individuals should train for what tasks. Long-term participation in a group of players normally forged bonds of friendship that were desirable, if the members were otherwise qualified.

  In real life, Scobie always observed strict propriety toward Broberg. She was attractive, but she was monogamous, and he had no wish to alienate her. Besides, he liked her husband. (Tom did not partake of the game. As an astronomer, he had plenty to keep his attention happily engaged.) They had played for a couple of years, their bunch had acquired as many as it could accommodate in a narrative whose milieu and people were becoming complex, before Scobie and Broberg spoke of anything intimate.

  By then, the story they enacted was doing so, and maybe it was not altogether by chance that they met when both had several idle hours. This was in the weightless recreation area at the spin axis. They tumbled through aerobatics, shouting and laughing, until they were pleasantly tired, went to the clubhouse, turned in their wingsuits, and showered. They had not seen each other nude before; neither commented, but he did not hide his enjoyment of the sight, while she colored and averted her glance as tactfully as she was able. Afterward, their clothes resumed, they decided on a drink before they went home, and sought the lounge.

  Since evenwatch was approaching nightwatch, they had the place to themselves. At the bar, he thumbed a chit for Scotch, she for pinot chardonnay. The machine obliged them and they carried their refreshments out onto the balcony. Seated at a table, they looked across immensity. The clubhouse was built into the support frame on a Lunar gravity level. Above them they saw the sky wherein they had been as birds; its reach did not seem any more hemmed in by far-spaced, spidery girders than it was by a few drifting clouds. Beyond, and straight ahead, decks opposite were a commingling of masses and shapes which the scant illumination at this hour turned into mystery. Among those shadows the humans made out woods, brooks, pools, turned hoar or agleam by the light of stars which filled the skyview strips. Right and left, the hull stretched off beyond sight, a dark in which such lamps as there were appeared lost.

  Air was cool, slightly jasmine-scented, drenched with silence. Underneath and throughout, subliminal, throbbed the myriad pulses of the ship.

  “Magnificent,” Broberg said low, gazing outward. “What a surprise.”

  “Eh?” asked Scobie.

  “I’ve only been here before in daywatch. I didn’t anticipate a simple rotation of the reflectors would make it wonderful.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t sneer at the daytime view. Mighty impressive.”

  “Yes, but—but then you see too plainly that everything is manmade, nothing is wild or unknown or free. The sun blots out the stars; it’s as though no universe existed beyond this shell we’re in. Tonight is like being in Maranoa,” the kingdom of which Ricia is Princess, a kingdom of ancient things and ways, wildernesses, enchantments.

  “H’m, yeah, sometimes I feel trapped myself,” Scobie admitted. “I believed I had a journey’s worth of geological data to study, but my project isn’t going anywhere very interesting.”

  “Same for me.” Broberg straightened where she sat, turned to him, and smiled a trifle. The dusk softened her features, made them look young. “Not that we’re entitled to self-pity. Here we are, safe and comfortable till we reach Saturn. After that we should never lack for excitement, or for material to work with on the way home.”

  “True.” Scobie raised his glass. “Well, skoal. Hope I’m not mispronouncing that.”

  “How should I know?” she laughed. “My maiden name was Almyer.”

  “That’s right, you’ve adopted Tom’s surname. I wasn’t thinking. Though that is rather unusual these days, hey?”

  She spread her hands. “My family was well-to-do, but they were—are—Jerusalem Catholics. Strict about certain things; archaistic, you might say.” She lifted her wine and sipped. “Oh, yes, I’ve left the Church, but in several ways the Church will never leave me.”

  “I see. Not to pry, but, uh, this does account for some traits of yours I couldn’t help wondering about.”

  She regarded him over the rim of her glass. “Like what?”

  “Well, you’ve got a lot of life in you, vigor, sense of fun, but you’re also—what’s the word?—uncommonly domestic. You’ve told me you were a quiet faculty member of Yukon University till you married Tom.” Scobie grinned. “Since you two kindly invited me to your last anniversary party, and I know your present age, I deduced that you were thirty then.” Unmentioned was the likelihood that she had still been a virgin. “Nevertheless—oh, forget it. I said I don’t want to pry.”

  “Go ahead, Colin,” she urged. “That line from Burns sticks in my mind, since you introduced me to his poetry. ‘To see oursels as others see us!’ Since it looks as if we may visit the same moon—”

  Scobie took a hefty dollop of Scotch. “Aw, nothing much,” he said, unwontedly diffident. “If you must know, well, I have the impression that being in love wasn’t the single good reason you had for marrying Tom. He’d already been accepted for this expedition, and given your personal qualifications, that would get you in too. In short, you’d grown tired of routine respectability and here was how you could kick over the traces. Am I right?”

  “Yes.” Her gaze dwelt on him. “You’re more perceptive than I supposed.”

  “No, not really. A roughneck rockhound. But Ricia’s made it plain to see, you’re more than a demure wife, mother, and scientist—” She parted her lips. He raised a palm. “No, please, let me finish. I know it’s bad manners to claim somebody’s persona is a wish fulfillment, and I’m not doing that. Of course you don’t want to be a free-roving, free-loving female scamp, any more than I want to ride around cutting down assorted enemies. Still, if you’d been born and raised in the world of our game, I feel sure you’d be a lot like Ricia. And that potential is part of you, Jean.” He tossed off his drink. “If I’ve said too much, please excuse me. Want a refill?”

  “I’d better not, but don’t let me stop you.”

  “You won’t.” He rose and bounded off.

  When he returned, he saw that she had been observing him through the vitryl door. As he sat down, she smiled, leaned a bit across the table, and told him softly: “I’m glad you said what you did. Now I can declare what a complicated man Kendrick reveals you to be.”

  “What?” Scobie asked in honest surprise. “Come on! He’s a sword-and-shield tramp, a fellow who likes to travel, same as me; and in my teens I was a brawler, same as him.”

  “He may lack polish, but he’s a chivalrous knight, a compassionate overlord, a knower of sagas and traditions, an appreciator of poetry and music, a bit of a bard…Ricia misses him. When will he get back from his latest quest?”

  “I’m bound home this minute. N’Kuma and I gave those pirates the slip and landed at Haverness two days ago. After we buried the swag, he wanted to visit Bela and Karina and join them in whatever they’ve been up to, so we bade goodbye for the time being.” Scobie and Harding had lately taken a few hours to conclude that adventure of theirs. The rest of the group had been mundanely occupied for some while.

  Broberg’s eyes widened. “From Haverness to the Isles? But I’m in Castle Devaranda, right in between.”

  “I hoped you’d be.”

  “I can’t wait to hear your story.”

  “I’m pushing on after dark. The moon is bright and I’ve got a pair of remounts I bought with a few gold pieces from the loot.” The dust rolls white beneath drumming hoofs. Where a horseshoe strikes a flint pebble, sparks fly ardent. Kendrick scowls. “You aren’t with…what’s his name?…Joran the Red? I don’t like him.”

  “I sent him packing a month ago. He got the idea that sharing my bed gave him authority over me. It was never anything but a romp. I stand alone on the Gerfalcon Tower, looking south over moonlit fields, and wonder how you fare. The road flows toward me like a gray river. Do I see a rider come at a gallop, far and far away?”

  After many months of play, no image on a screen was necessary. Pennons on the night wind stream athwart the stars. “I arrive. I sound my horn to rouse the gatekeepers.”

  “How I do remember those merry notes—”

  That same night, Kendrick and Ricia become lovers. Experienced in the game and careful of its etiquette, Scobie and Broberg uttered no details about the union; they did not touch each other and maintained only fleeting eye contact; the ultimate goodnights were very decorous. After all, this was a story they composed about two fictitious characters in a world that never was.

  The lower slopes of the jökull rose in tiers which were themselves deeply concave; the humans walked around their rims and admired the extravagant formations beneath. Names sprang onto lips, the Frost Garden, the Ghost Bridge, the Snow Queen’s Throne, while Kendrick advances into the City, and Ricia awaits him at the Dance Hall, and the spirit of Alvarlan carries word between them so that it is as if already she too travels beside her knight. Nevertheless they proceeded warily, vigilant for signs of danger, especially whenever a change of texture or hue or anything else in the surface underfoot betokened a change in its nature.

  Above the highest ledge reared a cliff too sheer to scale, Iapetan gravity or no, the fortress wall. However, from orbit the crew had spied a gouge in the vicinity, forming a pass, doubtless plowed by a small meteorite in the war between the gods and the magicians, when stones chanted down from the sky wrought havoc so accursed that none dared afterward rebuild. That was an eerie climb, hemmed in by heights which glimmered in the blue twilight they cast, heaven narrowed to a belt between them where stars seemed to blaze doubly brilliant.

  “There must be guards at the opening,” Kendrick says.

  “A single guard,” answers the mind-whisper of Alvarlan, “but he is a dragon. If you did battle with him, the noise and flame would bring every warrior here upon you. Fear not. I’ll slip into his burnin’ brain and weave him such a dream that he’ll never see you.”

  “The King might sense the spell,” says Ricia through him. “Since you’ll be parted from us anyway while you ride the soul of that beast, Atvarlan, I’ll seek him out and distract him.”

  Kendrick grimaces, knowing full well what means are hers to do that. She has told him how she longs for freedom and her knight; she has also hinted that elven lovemaking transcends the human. Does she wish for a final time before her rescue?… Well, Ricia and Kendrick have neither plighted nor practiced single troth. Assuredly Colin Scobie had not. He jerked forth a grin and continued through the silence that had fallen on all three.

  They came out on top of the glacial mass and looked around them. Scobie whistled. Garcilaso stammered, “J-J-Jesus Christ!” Broberg smote her hands together.

  Below them the precipice fell to the ledges, whose sculpturing took on a wholly new, eldritch aspect, gleam and shadow, until it ended at the plain. Seen from here aloft, the curvature of the moon made toes strain downward in boots, as if to cling fast and not be spun off among the stars which surrounded, rather than shone above, its ball. The spacecraft stood minute on dark, pocked stone, like a cenotaph raised to loneliness.

  Eastward the ice reached beyond an edge of sight which was much closer. (“Yonder could be the rim of the world,” Garcilaso said, and Ricia replies, “Yes, the City is nigh to there.”) Bowls of different sizes, hillocks, crags, no two of them eroded the same way, turned its otherwise level stretch into a surreal maze. An arabesque openwork ridge which stood at the explorers’ goal overtopped the horizon. Everything that was illuminated lay gently aglow. Radiant though the sun was, it cast the light of only, perhaps, five thousand full Lunas upon Earth. Southward, Saturn’s great semidisc gave about one-half more Lunar shining; but in that direction, the wilderness sheened pale amber.

  Scobie shook himself. “Well, shall we go?” His prosaic question jarred the others; Garcilaso frowned and Broberg winced.

  She recovered. “Yes, hasten,” Ricia says. “I am by myself once more. Are you out of the dragon, Alvaran?”

  “Aye,” the wizard informs her. “Kendrick is safely behind a ruined palace. Tell us how best to reach you.”

  “You are at the time-gnawed Crown House. Before you lies the Street of the Shieldsmiths—”

  Scobie’s brows knitted. “It is noonday, when elves do not fare abroad,” Kendrick says remindingly, commandingly. “I do not wish to encounter any of them. No fights, no complications. We are going to fetch you and escape, without further trouble.”

  Broberg and Garcilaso showed disappointment, but understood him. A game broke down when a person refused to accept something that a fellow player tried to put in. Often the narrative threads were not mended and picked up for many days. Broberg sighed.

  “Follow the street to its end at a forum where a snow fountain springs,” Ricia directs. “Cross, and continue on Aleph Zain Boulevard, You will know it by a gateway in the form of a skull with open jaws. If anywhere you see a rainbow flicker in the air, stand motionless until it has gone by, for it will be an auroral wolf…”

  At a low-gravity lope, the distance took some thirty minutes to cover. In the later part, the three were forced to detour by great banks of an ice so fine-grained that it slid about under their bootsoles and tried to swallow them. Several of these lay at irregular intervals around their destination.

  There the travelers stood again for a time in the grip of awe.

  The bowl at their feet must reach down almost to bedrock, a hundred meters, and was twice as wide. On this rim lifted the wall they had seen from the cliff, an arc fifty meters long and high, nowhere thicker than five meters, pierced by intricate scrollwork, greenly agleam where it was not translucent. It was the uppermost edge of a stratum which made serrations down the crater. Other outcrops and ravines were more dreamlike yet…was that a unicorn’s head, was that a colonnade of caryatids, was that an icicle bower…? The depths were a lake of cold blue shadow.

  “You have come, Kendrick, beloved!” cries Ricia, and casts herself into his arms.

  “Quiet,” warns the sending of Alvarlan the wise. “Rouse not our immortal enemies.”

  “Yes, we must get back.” Scobie blinked. “Judas priest, what possessed us? Fun is fun, but we sure have come a lot farther and faster than was smart, haven’t we?”

  “Let us stay for a little while,” Broberg pleaded. “This is such a miracle—the Elf King’s Dance Hall, which the Lord of the Dance built for him—”

  “Remember, if we stay we’ll be caught, and your captivity may be forever.” Scobie thumbed his main radio switch. “Hello, Mark? Do you read me?”

  Neither Broberg nor Garcilaso made that move. They did not hear Danzig’s voice: “Oh, yes! I’ve been hunkered over the set gnawing my knuckles. How are you?”

  “All right. We’re at the big hole and will be heading back as soon as I’ve gotten a few pictures.”

  “They haven’t made words to tell how relieved I am. From a scientific standpoint, was it worth the risk?”

  Scobie gasped. He stared before him.

  “Colin?” Danzig called. “You still there?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “I asked what observations of any importance you made.”

  “I don’t know,” Scobie mumbled. “I can’t remember. None of it after we started climbing seems real.”

  “Better you return right away,” Danzig said grimly. “Forget about photographs.”

  “Correct.” Scobie addressed his companions: “Forward march.”

  “I can’t,” Alvarlan answers. “A wanderin’ spell has caught my spirit in tendrils of smoke.”

  “I know where a fire dagger is kept,” Ricia says. “I’ll try to steal it.”

  Broberg moved ahead, as though to descend into the crater. Tiny ice grains trickled over the verge from beneath her boots. She could easily lose her footing and slide down.

  “No, wait,” Kendrick shouts to her. “No need. My spearhead is of moon alloy. It can cut—”

  The glacier shuddered. The ridge cracked asunder and fell in shards. The area on which the humans stood split free and toppled into the bowl. An avalanche poured after. High-flung crystals caught sunlight, glittered prismatic in challenge to the stars, descended slowly and lay quiet.