“Are you afraid I’ll see you on the canvas in a way that you won’t like? Is that it? That I’ll get a different answer to my questions when I paint you?”

  “Please.”

  “Let me paint you.”

  “No.”

  “Give me a reason, then.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Then you can’t refuse.” He drew a canvas from his pack. “Here, in the meadow, now. Go on, Sarise. Stand beside the stream. It’ll take only a moment—”

  “No, Therion.”

  “If you love me, Sarise, you’ll let me paint you.”

  It was a clumsy bit of blackmail, and it shamed him to have attempted it; and angered her, for he saw a harsh glitter in her eyes that he had never seen before. They confronted each other for a long tense moment.

  Then she said in a cold flat voice, “Not here, Therion. At the cabin. I’ll let you paint me there, if you insist.”

  Neither of them spoke the rest of the way home.

  He was tempted to forget the whole thing. It seemed to him that he had imposed his will by force, that he had committed a sort of rape, and he almost wished he could retreat from the position he had won.

  But there would never now be any going back to the old easy harmony between them; and he had to have the answers he needed. Uneasily he set about preparing a canvas.

  “Where shall I stand?” she asked.

  “Anywhere. By the stream. By the cabin.”

  In a slouching slack-limbed way she moved toward the cabin. He nodded and dispiritedly began the final steps before entering trance. Sarise glowered at him. Tears were welling in her eyes.

  “I love you,” he cried abruptly, and went down into trance, and the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was Sarise altering her pose, coming out of her moody slouch, squaring her shoulders, eyes suddenly bright, smile flashing.

  When he opened his eyes the painting was done and Sarise was staring timidly at him from the cabin door.

  “How is it?” she asked.

  “Come. See for yourself.”

  She walked to his side. They examined the picture together, and after a moment Nismile slipped his arm around her shoulder. She shivered and moved closer to him.

  The painting showed a woman with human eyes and Metamorph mouth and nose, against a jagged and chaotic background of clashing reds and oranges and pinks.

  She said quietly, “Now do you know what you wanted to know?”

  “Was it you in the meadow? And the other two times?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You interested me, Therion. I wanted to know all about you. I had never seen anything like you.”

  “I still don’t believe it,” he whispered.

  She pointed toward the painting. “Believe it, Therion.”

  “No. No.”

  “You have your answer now.”

  “I know you’re human. The painting lies.”

  “No, Therion.”

  “Prove it for me. Change for me. Change now.” He released her and stepped a short way back. “Do it. Change for me.”

  She looked at him sadly. Then, without perceptible transition, she turned herself into a replica of him, as she had done once before: the final proof, the unanswerable answer. A muscle quivered wildly in his cheek. He watched her unblinkingly and she changed again, this time into something terrifying and monstrous, a nightmarish gray pockmarked balloon of a thing with flabby skin and eyes like saucers and a hooked black beak; and from that she went to the Metamorph form, taller than he, hollow-chested and featureless, and then she was Sarise once more, cascades of auburn hair, delicate hands, firm strong thighs.

  “No,” he said. “Not that one. No more counterfeits.”

  She became the Metamorph again.

  He nodded. “Yes. That’s better. Stay that way. It’s more beautiful.”

  “Beautiful, Therion ?”

  “I find you beautiful. Like this. As you really are. Deception is always ugly.”

  He reached for her hand. It had six fingers, very long and narrow, without fingernails or visible joints. Her skin was silky and faintly glossy, and it felt not at all as he had expected. He ran his hands lightly over her slim, practically fleshless body. She was altogether motionless.

  “I should go now,” she said at last.

  “Stay with me. Live here with me.”

  “Even now?”

  “Even now. In your true form.”

  “You still want me?”

  “Very much,” he said. “ Will you stay?”

  She said, “When I first came to you, it was to watch you, to study you, to play with you, perhaps even to mock and hurt you. You are the enemy, Therion. Your kind must always be the enemy. But as we began to live together I saw there was no reason to hate you. Not you, you as a special individual, do you understand?”

  It was the voice of Sarise coming from those alien lips. How strange, he thought, how much like a dream.

  She said, “I began to want to be with you. To make the game go on forever, do you follow? But the game had to end. And yet I still want to be with you.”

  “Then stay, Sarise.”

  “Only if you truly want me.”

  “I’ve told you that.”

  “I don’t horrify you?”

  “No.”

  “Paint me again, Therion. Show me with a painting. Show me love on the canvas, Therion, and then I’ll stay.”

  ***

  HE PAINTED HER DAY AFTER day, until he had used every canvas, and hung them all about the interior of the cabin, Sarise and the dwikka-tree, Sarise in the meadow, Sarise against the milky fog of evening, Sarise at twilight, green against purple. There was no way he could prepare more canvases, although he tried. It did not really matter. They began to go on long voyages of exploration together, down one stream and another, into distant parts of the forest, and she showed him new trees and flowers, and the creatures of the jungle, the toothy lizards and the burrowing golden worms and the sinister ponderous amorfibots sleeping away their days in muddy lakes. They said little to one another; the time for answering questions was over and words were no longer needed.

  Day slipped into day, week into week, and in this land of no seasons it was difficult to measure the passing of time. Perhaps a month went by, perhaps six. They encountered nobody else. The jungle was full of Metamorphs, she told him, but they were keeping their distance, and she hoped they would leave them alone forever.

  One afternoon of steady drizzle he went out to check his traps, and when he returned an hour later he knew at once something was wrong. As he approached the cabin four Metamorphs emerged. He felt sure that one was Sarise, but he could not tell which one. “Wait!” he cried, as they moved past him. He ran after them. “What do you want with her? Let her go! Sarise? Sarise? Who are they? What do they want?”

  For just an instant one of the Metamorphs flickered and he saw the girl with the auburn hair, but only for an instant; then there were four Metamorphs again, gliding like ghosts toward the depths of the jungle. The rain grew more intense, and a heavy fog-bank drifted in, cutting off all visibility. Nismile paused at the edge of the clearing, straining desperately for sounds over the patter of the rain and the loud throb of the stream. He imagined he heard weeping; he thought he heard a cry of pain, but it might have been any other sort of forest-sound. There was no hope of following the Metamorphs into that impenetrable zone of thick white mist.

  He never saw Sarise again, nor any other Metamorph. For a while he hoped he would come upon Shapeshifters in the forest and be slain by them with their little polished dirks, for the loneliness was intolerable now. But that did not happen, and when it became obvious that he was living in a sort of quarantine, cut off not only from Sarise—if she was still alive—but from the entire society of the Metamorph folk, he found himself unable any longer to dwell in the clearing beside the stream. He rolled up his paintings of Sarise and carefully dismantled his cabin and began the long and perilous journey back to civilization. It was a week before his fiftieth birthday when he reached the borders of Castle Mount. In his absence, he discovered, Lord Thraym had become Pontifex and the new Coronal was Lord Vildivar, a man of little sympathy with the arts. Nismile rented a studio on the riverbank at Stee and began to paint again. He worked only from memory: dark and disturbing scenes of jungle life, often showing Metamorphs lurking in the middle distance. It was not the sort of work likely to be popular on the cheerful and airy world of Majipoor, and Nismile found few buyers at first. But in time his paintings caught the fancy of the Duke of Qurain, who had begun to weary of sunny serenity and perfect proportion. Under the duke’s patronage Nismile’s work grew fashionable, and in the later years of his life there was a ready market for everything he produced.

  He was widely imitated, through never successfully, and he was the subject of many critical essays and biographical studies. “Your paintings are so turbulent and strange,” one scholar said to him. “Have you devised some method of working from dreams?”

  “I work only from memory,” said Nismile.

  “From painful memory, I would be so bold as to venture.”

  “Not at all,” answered Nismile. “All my work is intended to help me recapture a time of joy, a time of love, the happiest and most precious moment of my life.” He stared past the questioner into distant mists, thick and soft as wool, that swirled through clumps of tall slender trees bound by a tangled network of vines.

  TO THE DARK STAR

  The spring of 1966 was a busy time for me, even as it went in that very busy decade. I had just finished expanding a short story called “Hopper” into a novel for Doubleday; I was getting started on a vast non-fiction account of the quest for El Dorado for Bobbs-Merrill; I was sketching out the novella of distant prehistoric times that would become “Hawksbill Station” for Galaxy and later to be expanded into a novel. In the middle of all this, I somehow found time to write a story for Joseph Elder, who had been my agent for a while, but was about to begin his brief but distinguished editorial career. Joe was planning a book called The Farthest Reaches, original stories of galactic exploration, and in April 1966 I gave him “To the Dark Star”—one of the first explorations in science-fictional terms of the black hole concept. Black holes are old stuff by now—there was a photograph of one on the front page of my newspaper this very morning—but I was working on the cutting edge of science fiction when I wrote about one here, more than fifty years ago.

  WE CAME TO THE DARK star, the microcephalon and the adapted girl and I, and our struggle began. A poorly assorted lot we were, to begin with. The microcephalon hailed from Quendar IV, where they grow people with greasy gray skins, looming shoulders, and virtually no heads at all. He—it—was wholly alien, at least. The girl was not, and so I hated her.

  She came from a world in the Procyon system, where the air was more or less Earth-type, but the gravity was double ours. There were other differences, too. She was thick through the shoulders, thick through the waist, a block of flesh. The genetic surgeons had begun with human raw material, but they had transformed it into something nearly as alien as the microcephalon. Nearly.

  We were a scientific team, so they said. Sent out to observe the last moments of a dying star. A great interstellar effort. Pick three specialists at random, put them in a ship, hurl them halfway across the universe to observe what man had never observed before. A fine idea. Noble. Inspiring. We knew our subject well. We were ideal.

  But we felt no urge to cooperate, because we hated one another.

  The adapted girl—Miranda—was at the controls the day that the dark star actually came into sight. She spent hours studying it before she deigned to let us know that we were at our destination. Then she buzzed us out of our quarters.

  I entered the scanning room. Miranda’s muscular bulk overflowed the glossy chair before the main screen. The microcephalon stood beside her, a squat figure on a tripodlike arrangement of bony legs, the great shoulders hunched and virtually concealing the tiny cupola of the head. There was no real reason why any organism’s brain had to be in its skull, and not safely tucked away in the thorax; but I had never grown accustomed to the sight of the creature. I fear I have little tolerance for aliens.

  “Look,” Miranda said, and the screen glowed.

  The dark star hung in dead center, at a distance of perhaps eight light-days—as close as we dared to come. It was not quite dead, and not quite dark. I stared in awe. It was a huge thing, some four solar masses, the imposing remnant of a gigantic star. On the screen there glowed what looked like an enormous lava field. Islands of ash and slag the size of worlds drifted in a sea of molten and glowing magma. A dull red illumination burnished the screen. Black against crimson, the ruined star still throbbed with ancient power. In the depths of that monstrous slagheap compressed nuclei groaned and gasped. Once the radiance of this star had lit a solar system; but I did not dare think of the billions of years that had passed since then, nor of the possible civilizations that had hailed the source of light and warmth before the catastrophe.

  Miranda said, “I’ve picked up the thermals already. The surface temperature averages about nine hundred degrees. There’s no chance of landing.”

  I scowled at her. “What good is the average temperature? Get a specific. One of those islands—”

  “The ash masses are radiating at two hundred and fifty degrees. The interstices go from one thousand degrees on up. Everything works out to a mean of nine hundred degrees, and you’d melt in an instant if you went down there. You’re welcome to go, brother. With my blessing.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “You implied that there’d be a safe place to land on that fireball,” Miranda snapped. Her voice was a basso boom; there was plenty of resonance space in that vast chest of hers. “You snidely cast doubt on my ability to—”

  “We will use the crawler to make our inspection,” said the microcephalon in its reasonable way. “There never was any plan to make a physical landing on the star.”

  Miranda subsided. I stared in awe at the sight that filled our screen.

  A star takes a long time to die, and the relict I viewed impressed me with its colossal age. It had blazed for billions of years, until the hydrogen that was its fuel had at last been exhausted, and its thermonuclear furnace started to splutter and go out. A star has defenses against growing cold; as its fuel supply dwindles, it begins to contract, raising its density and converting gravitational potential energy into thermal energy. It takes on new life; now a white dwarf, with a density of tons per cubic inch, it burns in a stable way until at last it grows dark.

  We have studied white dwarfs for centuries, and we know their secrets—so we think. A cup of matter from a white dwarf now orbits the observatory on Pluto for our further illumination.

  But the star on our screen was different.

  It had once been a large star—greater than the Chandrasekhar limit, 1.2 solar masses. Thus it was not content to shrink step by step to the status of a white dwarf. The stellar core grew so dense that catastrophe came before stability; when it had converted all its hydrogen to iron-56, it fell into catastrophic collapse and went supernova. A shock wave ran through the core, converting the kinetic energy of collapse into heat. Neutrinos spewed outward; the envelope of the star reached temperatures upwards of 200 billion degrees; thermal energy became intense radiation, streaming away from the agonized star and shedding the luminosity of a galaxy for a brief, fitful moment.

  What we beheld now was the core left behind by the supernova explosion. Even after that awesome fury, what was intact was of great mass. The shattered hulk had been cooling for eons, cooling toward the final death. For a small star, that death would be the simple death of coldness: the ultimate burnout, the black dwarf drifting through the void like a hideous mound of ash, lightless, without warmth. But this, our stellar core, was still beyond the Chandrasekhar limit. A special death was reserved for it, a weird and improbable death.

  And that was why we had come to watch it perish, the microcephalon and the adapted girl and I.

  I parked our small vessel in an orbit that gave the dark star plenty of room. Miranda busied herself with her measurements and computations. The microcephalon had more abstruse things to do. The work was well divided; we each had our chore. The expense of sending a ship so great a distance had necessarily limited the size of the expedition. Three of us: a representative of the basic human stock, a representative of the adapted colonists, a representative of the race of microcephalons, the Quendar people, the only other intelligent beings in the known universe.

  Three dedicated scientists. And therefore three who would live in serene harmony during the course of the work, since as everyone knows scientists have no emotions and think only of their professional mysteries. As everyone knows.

  I said to Miranda, “Where are the figures for radial oscillation?”

  She replied, “See my report. It’ll be published early next year in—”

  “Damn you, are you doing that deliberately? I need those figures now!”

  “Give me your totals on the mass-density curve, then.”

  “They aren’t ready. All I’ve got is raw data.”

  “That’s a lie! The computer’s been running for days! I’ve seen it,” she boomed at me.

  I was ready to leap at her throat. It would have been a mighty battle; her 300-pound body was not trained for personal combat as mine was, but she had all the advantages of strength and size. Could I club her in some vital place before she broke me in half? I weighed my options.

  Then the microcephalon appeared and made peace once more with a few feathersoft words.

  Only the alien among us seemed to conform at all to the stereotype of that emotionless abstraction, “the scientist.” It was not true, of course; for all we could tell, the microcephalon seethed with jealousies and lusts and angers, but we had no clue to their outward manifestation. Its voice was flat as a vocoder transmission. The creature moved peacefully among us, the mediator between Miranda and me. I despised it for its mask of tranquility. I suspected, too, that the microcephalon loathed the two of us for our willingness to vent our emotions, and took a sadistic pleasure from asserting superiority by calming us.