that’s why you can’t remember if you made it to Earth and saved Seymour?”
“I may have, I may not have,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know. Probably I never will.”
I thought about it. “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t care about the others. Just stay with me and don’t break the link.”
“It’s not something I can control, Gregory,” she replied. “It’s strongest when you need me most. As you heal, as you need me less, then I’ll be drawn to someone or something that needs me more. Perhaps it will be another man, perhaps a Patrukan, perhaps something else. But it will happen, again and again.”
“Until I need you more than anyone else does,” I said.
“Until you need me more than anyone else does,” she confirmed.
And at that moment, I knew why Seymour and Daniels and the others had walked into what seemed near-certain death. And I realized what Captain Symmes and the Patrukan historian Myxophtyl didn’t know: that they hadn’t tried to get themselves killed, but rather to get themselves almost killed.
Suddenly I saw the ship overhead, getting ready to touch down a few hundred yards away.
“Does anyone or anything need you right now?” I asked. “More than I do, I mean?”
“Right this moment? No.”
“Then come with me for as long as you can,” I said.
“It’s not a good idea,” she said. “I could begin the journey, but you’re getting healthier every day, and something always needs me. We’d land at a spaceport to change ships, and you’d turn around and I’d be gone. That’s the way it was six years ago, with the human and Patrukan survivors.” Her face reflected her sorrow. “There is so much pain and suffering in the galaxy.”
“But I need you even if I’m healthy,” I said. “I love you, damn it!”
“And I love you,” she said. “Today. But tomorrow?” She shrugged helplessly.
The ship touched down.
“You loved each of them, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I would give everything I have to remember.”
“You’ll forget me too, won’t you?”
She put her arms around my neck and kissed me. “Don’t think about it.”
Then she turned and began walking away. The pilot approached me and picked up my gear.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, jerking a thumb in Rebecca’s direction—and I realized that he saw her as she truly was, that she was linked only to me.
“What did it look like to you?” I replied.
He shook his head. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
* * * *
It took me five days to get back to Earth. The medics at the hospital were amazed that I’d healed so quickly, and that all signs of infection were gone. I let them think it was a miracle, and in a way it was. I didn’t care; all I cared about was getting her back.
I quit my job at OceanPort and hired on with the police department. They stuck me behind a desk for a few months, until my limp disappeared, but yesterday I finally got transferred to the vice squad.
There’s a major drug deal going down tonight: alphanella seeds from somewhere out in the Albion Cluster, ten times as powerful as heroin. We’ll be mounting a raid in about four hours. The buyers and sellers both figure to have plenty of muscle standing guard, and it’s likely to get pretty hairy.
I hope so.
I’ve already locked my weapons away.
A BRIEF DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, by Michael Kurland
I have traveled this limitless universe for many tens of thousands of years, flitting where I wish at speeds that photons envy. I have moved backward through time and met myself coming and going, and explored the C 2 paradox as eagerly as others rummage through attic trunks full of old dreams. And I am not bored.
My name is Deradan, and I am immortal, and I am omniscient, or as omniscient as practical in this uncausal universe, and I used to be a man.
“Tell me how it was, Deradan. Tell me about the old days,” Thrayna said, perching on a silver crystal, her voice the tinkle of sapphire bells with ruby overtones. She was born after the transformation, and she loves the stories of the olden days, when we were mortal and the worlds were young.
“We lived on Earth,” I told her, “billions of us. All crammed together on a single planet.”
Her eyes enlarged and I could see galaxies reflected in their depths. “Earth,” she said. “Where is Earth?”
I thought. “That way,” I told her, pointing an arrow of chromed fire.
“And you all left one day, just like that—poof?” Her poof was an orange-yellow sparkle that bounced around the surface of the airless planetoid on which we sat, and evanesced as suddenly as it had appeared.
“Not so quick,” I told her. “Nor so thorough. They dribbed and drabbed along as they decided that changing was wiser than staying. Some took centuries to decide. Some, I Imagine, are there yet, unchanged.”
“People?” she asked. “With skin covering bone and blood coursing through muscle and organ? Delicate-gross, beautiful-ugly people?”
“So I imagine.”
She thought about this, allowing her thoughts to sparkle visibly in her corona. “Take me,” she said brightly. “Show me!”
I allowed the coordinates of Old Earth to form in my brain and then headed off through a cluster of newborn stars toward the withershins corner of the compact spiral galaxy that is our Milky Way. Thrayna followed, faster than light in diamonds, as fast as the essence of thought.
Earth was where it should have been, and still as it had been: a light-blue globe laced with puffy white. I had forgotten how painfully beautiful it was. We spiraled toward the surface.
“Greetings, Deradan!” The hollow nonsound thrummed strongly in my mind.
Thrayna bounced and blossomed with joy. “The planet is saying hello to you,” she giggled, whirling and condensing about a nucleus of mist and dust, forming a voluptuous feminine cyclone that enclosed a rainbow.
“Who speaks?” I asked aloud. There was no reply.
“Who speaks?” I projected the thought about me, darting it here and there among the ruins where we stood.
All was silent but for the wind that was Thrayna.
I lofted into the air and sought a sign of life in the tumbled stone, cracked concrete, and rotten metal ruins that lay about us for
