The voice came dim in his earphones. “Why don’t you give up, Bo? I tell you, I don’t want to kill you.”

  “Yeh.” Bo panted wearily. “I’m sure.”

  “Well, you can never tell,” said Lundgard mildly. “It would be rather a nuisance to have to keep not only the fair Valeria, but you, tied up all the way to base. Still, if you’ll surrender by the time I’ve counted ten—”

  “Look here,” said Bo desperately. “I’ve got half the links. If you don’t give up I’ll hammer ’em all flat, and let you starve.”

  “And Valeria?” The voice jeered at him. He knew his secret was read. “I shouldn’t have let you bluff me in the first place. It won’t happen a second time. All right: one, two, three—”

  Bo could get off this asteroid with no more than the power of his own legs; a few jets from the emergency blow valve at the bottom of an air tank would correct his flight as needed to bring him back to the Sirius. He wanted to get up there, and inside warm walls, and take Valeria in his hands and never let her go again. He wanted to live.

  “—six, seven, eight—”

  He looked at his gauges. A lot of oxyhelium mixture was gone from the tanks, but they were big and there was still several atmospheres’ pressure in each. A couple of hours life. If he didn’t exert himself too much. They screwed directly into valves in the back of his armor, and—

  “—ten. All right, Bo.” Lundgard started moving up the slope, light and graceful as a bird. It was wide and open, no place to hide and sneak up behind him.

  Figures reeled through Bo’s mind, senselessly. Mass of the asteroid, effective radius, escape velocity only a few feet per second, and he was already on one of the highest points. Brains! he thought with a shattering sorrow. A lot of good mine have done me!

  He prepared to back down the other side of the hill, run as well as he could, as long as he could, until a bullet splashed his blood or suffocation thickened it. But I want to fight! he thought through a gulp of tears. I want to stand up and fight!

  Orbital velocity equals escape velocity divided by the square root of two.

  For a moment he lay there, rigid, and his eyes stared at death walking up the slope but did not see it.

  Then, in a crazy blur of motion, he brought his wrench around, closed it on a nut at one side, and turned.

  The right hand air tank unscrewed easily. He held it in his hands, a three foot cylinder, blind while calculation raced through his head. What would the centrifugal and Coriolis forces be? It was the roughest sort of estimate. He had neither time nor data, but—

  Lundgard was taking it easy, stopping to examine each patch of shadow thrown by some gaunt crag, each meteor scar where a man might hide. It would take him several minutes to reach the hilltop.

  Bo clutched the loosened tank in his arms, throwing one leg around it to make sure, and faced away from Lundgard. He hefted himself, as if his body were a machine he must use. Then, carefully, he jumped off the top of the hill.

  It was birdlike, dreamlike, thus to soar noiseless over iron desolation. Then sun fell behind him. A spearhead pinnacle clawed after his feet. The Southern Cross flamed in his eyes.

  Downward—get rid of that downward component of velocity. He twisted the tank, pointing it toward the surface, and cautiously opened the blow valve with his free hand. Only a moment’s exhaust, everything gauged by eye. Did he have an orbit now?

  The ground dropped sharply off to infinity, and he saw stars under the keel of the world. He was still going out, away. Maybe he had miscalculated his jump, exceeded escape velocity after all, and was headed for a long cold spin toward Jupiter. It would take all his compressed air to correct such a mistake.

  Sweat prickled in his armpits. He locked his teeth and refused to open the valve again.

  It was like endless falling, but he couldn’t yet be sure if the fall was toward the asteroid or the stars. The rock spun past him. Another face came into view. Yes, by all idiot gods, its gravity was pulling him around!

  He skimmed low over the bleakness of it, seeing darkness and starlit death sliding beneath him. Another crag loomed suddenly in his path, and he wondered in a harsh clutch of fear if he was going to crash. Then it ghosted by, a foot from his flying body. He thought he could almost sense the chill of it.

  He was a moon now, a satellite skimming low above the airless surface of his own midget world. The fracture plain where Lundgard had shot at him went by, and he braced himself. Up around the tiny planet, and there was the hill he had left, stark against Sagittarius. He saw Lundgard, standing on its heights and looking the way he had gone. Carefully, he aimed the tank and gave himself another small blast to correct his path. There was no noise to betray him, the asteroid was a grave where all sound was long buried and frozen.

  He flattened, holding his body parallel to the tank in his arms. One hand still gripped the wrench, the other reached to open the blow valve wide.

  The surge almost tore him loose. He had a careening lunatic moment of flight in which the roar of escaping gas boiled through his armor and he clung like a troll to a runaway witch’s broom. The sun was blinding on one side of him.

  He struck Lundgard with an impact of velocity and inertia which sent him spinning down the hill. Bo hit the ground, recoiled, and sprang after his enemy. Lundgard was still rolling. As Bo approached, he came to a halt, lifted his rifle dazedly, and had it knocked loose with a single blow of the wrench.

  Lundgard crawled to his feet while Bo picked up the rifle and threw it off the asteroid. “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bo. “I should just shoot you down, but I want you to surrender.”

  Lundgard drew his wrench. “No,” he said.

  “All right,” said Bo. “It won’t take long.”

  When he got up to the Sirius, using a tank Lundgard would never need, Valeria had armed herself with a kitchen knife. “It wouldn’t have done much good,” he said when he came through the airlock. She fell into his arms, sobbing, and he tried to comfort her. “It’s all over. All taken care of. We can go home now.”

  He himself was badly in need of consolation. The inquiry on Earth would clear him, of course, but he would always have to live with the memory of a man stretched dead under a wintery sky. He went aft and replaced the links. When he came back, Valeria had recovered herself, but as she watched his methodical preparations and listened to what he had to tell, there was that in her eyes which he hardly dared believe.

  Not him. Not a big dumb slob like him.

  GOAT SONG

  Three women: one is dead; one is alive; One is both and neither, and will never live and never die, being immortal in SUM.

  On a hill above that valley through which runs the highroad, I await Her passage. Frost came early this year, and the grasses have paled. Otherwise the slope is begrown with blackberry bushes that have been harvested by men and birds, leaving only briars, and with certain apple trees. They are very old, those trees, survivors of an orchard raised by generations which none but SUM now remembers (I can see a few fragments of wall thrusting above the brambles)—scattered crazily over the hillside and as crazily gnarled. A little fruit remains on them. Chill across my skin, a gust shakes loose an apple. I hear it knock on the earth, another stroke of some eternal clock. The shrubs whisper to the wind.

  Elsewhere the ridges around me are wooded, afire with scarlets and brasses and bronzes. The sky is huge, the westering sun wan-bright. The valley is filling with a deeper blue, a haze whose slight smokiness touches my nostrils. This is Indian summer, the funeral pyre of the year.

  There have been other seasons. There have been other lifetimes, before mine and hers; and in those days they had words to sing with. We still allow ourselves music, though, and I have spent much time planting melodies around my rediscovered words. “In the greenest growth of the Maytime—” I unsling the harp on my back, and tune it afresh, and sing to her, straight into autumn and the waning day.

  —You came, and the sun came after,

  And the green grew golden above:

  And the flag-flowers lightened with laughter,

  And the meadowsweet shook with love.

  A footfall stirs the grasses, quite gently, and the woman says, trying to chuckle, “Why, thank you.”

  Once, so soon after my one’s death that I was still dazed by it, I stood in the home that had been ours. This was on the hundred and first floor of a most desirable building. After dark the city flamed for us, blinked, glittered, flung immense sheets of radiance forth like banners. Nothing but SUM could have controlled the firefly dance of a million aircars among the towers: or, for that matter, have maintained the entire city, from nuclear powerplants through automated factories, physical and economic distribution networks, sanitation, repair, services, education, culture, order, everything as one immune immortal organism. We had gloried in belonging to this as well as to each other.

  But that night I told the kitchen to throw the dinner it had made for me down the waste chute, and ground under my heel the chemical consolations which the medicine cabinet extended to me, and kicked the cleaner as it picked up the mess, and ordered the lights not to go on, anywhere in our suite. I stood by the viewall, looking out across megalopolis, and it was tawdry. In my hands I had a little clay figure she had fashioned herself. I turned it over and over and over.

  But I had forgotten to forbid the door to admit visitors. It recognized this woman and opened for her. She had come with the kindly intention of teasing me out of a mood that seemed to her unnatural. I heard her enter, and looked around through the gloom. She had almost the same height as my girl did, and her hair chanced to be bound in a way that my girl often favored, and the figurine dropped from my grasp and shattered, because for an instant I thought she was my girl. Since then I have been hard put not to hate Thrakia.

  This evening, even without so much sundown light, I would not make that mistake. Nothing but the silvery bracelet about her left wrist bespeaks the past we share. She is in wildcountry garb: boots, kilt of true fur and belt of true leather, knife at hip and rifle slung on shoulder. Her locks are matted and snarled, her skin brown from weeks of weather; scratches and smudges show beneath the fantastic zigzags she has painted in many colors on herself. She wears a necklace of bird skulls.

  Now that one who is dead was, in her own way, more a child of trees and horizons than Thrakia’s followers. She was so much at home in the open that she had no need to put off clothes or cleanliness, reason or gentleness, when we sickened of the cities and went forth beyond them. From this trait I got many of the names I bestowed on her, such as Wood’s Colt or Fallow Hind or, from my prowlings among ancient books, Dryad and Elven. (She liked me to choose her names, and this pleasure had no end, because she was inexhaustible.)

  I let my harpstring ring into silence. Turning about, I say to Thrakia, “I wasn’t singing for you. Not for anyone. Leave me alone.”

  She draws a breath. The wind ruffles her hair and brings me an odor of her: not female sweetness, but fear. She clenches her fists and says, “You’re crazy.”

  “Wherever did you find a meaningful word like that?” I gibe; for my own pain and—to be truthful—my own fear must strike out at something, and here she stands. “Aren’t you content any longer with ‘untranquil’ or ‘disequilibrated’?”

  “I got it from you,” she says defiantly, “you and your damned archaic songs. There’s another word, ‘damned.’ And how it suits you! When are you going to stop this morbidity?”

  “And commit myself to a clinic and have my brain laundered nice and sanitary? Not soon, darling.” I use that last word aforethought, but she cannot know what scorn and sadness are in it for me, who know that once it could also have been a name for my girl. The official grammar and pronunciation of language is as frozen as every other aspect of our civilization, thanks to electronic recording and neuronic teaching; but meanings shift and glide about like subtle serpents. (O adder that stung my Foalfoot!)

  I shrug and say in my driest, most city-technological voice, “Actually, I’m the practical, nonmorbid one. Instead of running away from my emotions—via drugs, or neuroadjustment, or playing at savagery like you, for that matter—I’m about to implement a concrete plan for getting back the person who made me happy.”

  “By disturbing Her on Her way home?”

  “Anyone has the right to petition the Dark Queen while She’s abroad on earth.”

  “But this is past the proper time—”

  “No law’s involved, just custom. People are afraid to meet Her outside a crowd, a town, bright flat lights. They won’t admit it, but they are. So I came here precisely not to be part of a queue. I don’t want to speak into a recorder for subsequent computer analysis of my words. How could I be sure She was listening? I want to meet Her as myself, a unique being, and look in Her eyes while I make my prayer.”

  Thrakia chokes a little. “She’ll be angry.”

  “Is She able to be angry, anymore?”

  “I…I don’t know. What you mean to ask for is so impossible, though. So absurd. That SUM should give you back your girl. You know It never makes exceptions.”

  “Isn’t She Herself an exception?”

  “That’s different. You’re being silly. SUM has to have a, well, a direct human liaison. Emotional and cultural feedback, as well as statistics. How else can It govern rationally? And She must have been chosen out of the whole world. Your girl, what was she? Nobody!”

  “To me, she was everybody.”

  “You—” Thrakia catches her lip in her teeth. One hand reaches out and closes on my bare forearm, a hard hot touch, the grimy fingernails biting. When I make no response, she lets go and stares at the ground. A V of outbound geese passes overhead. Their cries come shrill through the wind, which is loudening in the forest.

  “Well,” she says “you are special. You always were. You went to space and came back, with the Great Captain. You’re maybe the only man alive who understands about the ancients. And your singing, yes, you don’t really entertain, your songs trouble people and can’t be forgotten. So maybe She will listen to you. But SUM won’t. It can’t give special resurrections. Once that was done, a single time, wouldn’t it have to be done for everybody? The dead would overrun the living.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “In any event, I mean to try.”

  “Why can’t you wait for the promised time? Surely, then, SUM will recreate you two in the same generation.”

  “I’d have to live out this life, at least, without her,” I say, looking away also, down to the highroad which shines through shadow like death’s snake, the length of the valley. “Besides, how do you know there ever will be any resurrections? We have only a promise. No, less than that. An announced policy.”

  She gasps, steps back, raises her hands as if to fend me off. Her soul bracelet casts light into my eyes. I recognize an embryo exorcism. She lacks ritual; every “superstition” was patiently scrubbed out of our metal-and-energy world, long ago. But if she has no word for it, no concept, nevertheless she recoils from blasphemy.

  So I say, wearily, not wanting an argument, wanting only to wait here alone: “Never mind. There could be some natural catastrophe, like a giant asteroid striking, that wiped out the system before conditions had become right for resurrections to commence.”

  “That’s impossible,” she says, almost frantic. “The homeostats, the repair functions—”

  “All right, call it a vanishingly unlikely theoretical contingency. Let’s declare that I’m so selfish I want Swallow Wing back now, in this life of mine, and don’t give a curse whether that’ll be fair to the rest of you.”

  You won’t care either, anyway, I think. None of you. You don’t grieve. It is your own precious private consciousnesses that you wish to preserve; no one else is close enough to you to matter very much. Would you believe me if I told you I am quite prepared to offer SUM my own death in exchange for It releasing Blossom-in-the-Sun?

  I don’t speak that thought, which would be cruel, nor repeat what is crueler: my fear that SUM lies, that the dead never will be disgorged. For (I am not the All-Controller, I think not with vacuum and negative energy levels but with ordinary earth-begotten molecules; yet I can reason somewhat dispassionately, being disillusioned) consider—

  The object of the game is to maintain a society stable, just, and sane. This requires satisfaction not only of somatic, but of symbolic and instinctual needs. Thus children must be allowed to come into being. The minimum number per generation is equal to the maximum: that number which will maintain a constant population.

  It is also desirable to remove the fear of death from men. Hence the promise: At such time as it is socially feasible, SUM will begin to refashion us, with our complete memories but in the pride of our youth. This can be done over and over, life after life across the millennia. So death is, indeed, a sleep.

  —in that sleep of death, what dreams may come—No. I myself dare not dwell on this. I ask merely, privately: Just when and how does SUM expect conditions (in a stabilized society, mind you) to have become so different from today’s that the reborn can, in their millions, safely be welcomed back?

  I see no reason why SUM should not lie to us. We, too, are objects in the world that It manipulates.

  “We’ve quarreled about this before, Thrakia,” I sigh. “Often. Why do you bother?”

  “I wish I knew,” she answers low. Half to herself, she goes on: “Of course I want to copulate with you. You must be good, the way that girl used to follow you about with her eyes, and smile when she touched your hand, and—But you can’t be better than everyone else. That’s unreasonable. There are only so many possible ways. So why do I care if you wrap yourself up in silence and go off alone? Is it that that makes you a challenge?”

  “You think too much,” I say. “Even here. You’re a pretend primitive. You visit wildcountry to ‘slake inborn atavistic impulses’…but you can’t dismantle that computer inside yourself and simply feel, simply be.”