“It’s good to meet you,” she went on. “I’ve been reading your articles with interest.”

First probe. “I’m glad,” I said, and searched for more words, stupidly fumbling in a moment I had imagined many times. “Hello.”

She said, “Why don’t we go to one of the observation rooms and have some food sent there.”

“Fine.”

She let go of the railing, and drifted down the hallway to the main hall of the torus, where she led me. She had a long stride, one that revealed bare feet.

We left the hall and stepped down a broad spiral staircase into a large dim room, which was walled and ceilinged with wood. The floor was clear, it was one of the windows I had seen while approaching. To one side of it Saturn shone like a lamp globe. It was our only illumination. There were couches arranged in a small square near the middle of the room. Holmes sat on one, leaned forward, and looked down at the planet. She appeared to have forgotten me. I sat down on the couch opposite her, and looked down.

We were over one of the poles, looking at Saturn and its rings from a perspective none of its natural satellites ever had. The latitude bands marking the planet (half of it was dark, though slightly illuminated by light reflected from the rings) were light greens and yellows, with streaks of orange. Seen from above they were full semicircles; bright cream in the equatorial bands, yellow in the higher latitudes, dusky green at the pole.

Outside the planet were the rings, scores of them, all of them perfectly smooth and circular, as if drawn with a compass, except for three or four braided sets that were not so smooth. The entire sight reminded me of a dartboard: the pole was the bull’s-eye, the rings the outermost circles; but it was impossible to imagine Saturn flat, because of its dark side and its shadow erasing the rings behind it; so that it seemed a dartboard with an odd hemispherical center.

This uncanny sight filled one whole side of our floor-window. Around it a few bright stars gleamed, and seven of Saturn’s moons were visible, all of them perfectly aligned half moons. As we sat there like statues and watched, the scene shifted perceptibly. Saturn’s shadow on the rings appeared to shorten, the moons were becoming crescents, the rings were tilting and becoming huge ellipses; and all slowly, very slowly, as in some inhuman, natural dance.

“Always the same but always different,” I said.

After a long pause, she said, “The landscape of the mind.” I became aware of the profound silence in which we were speaking. “There are more beautiful places on Terra, but none that are so sublime.”

I know about your trip to Terra, I thought. And then I looked at her face and thought again. There were the centuries, written across it — and what could I say I really knew of her? She might have visited Terra a dozen times.

“Perhaps,” I said, “that is because space itself has many attributes of sublimity: vastness, simplicity, mystery, that which causes terror…”

“These exist only in the mind, you must remember that. But space provides much that reminds the mind of itself, yes.”

I considered it. “Do you really think that if we did not exist, Saturn would not be sublime?”

I thought she wasn’t going to answer. The silence stretched on, for a minute and more. Then: “Who would know it?”

“So it is the knowing,” I said.

She nodded. “To know is sublime.”

And I thought, that is true. I agree with that. But…

She sat back and looked across at me. “Would you like to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Alaskan king crab?”

“That would be fine.”

She turned and called out, “We’ll have dinner in twenty minutes,” to the empty room.

A small tray covered with crackers and blocks of cheese slid out of a new aperture in her couch. I blinked. A bottle of wine and two glasses were presented on individual glass trays. She poured wine and drank in silence. We leaned forward to look at the planet. In the odd illumination — dusky yellow light, from below — her eyesockets were in shadow, and appeared very deep; the lines in her face seemed chiseled by ages of suffering. To my relief the meal was brought in by Charles, and we leaned back to attend to it. Below us Saturn and its billion satellites still wheeled, a stately art deco lamp.

After the meal Charles took away our dishes and utensils. Holmes shifted on her couch and stared down at the planet with an intensity that completely discouraged interruption. Between watching Holmes and Saturn I was kept busy enough; but the longer the silence continued, the more disconcerted I became.

Holmes remained in her contemplation until the ringed ball was nearly out of our floor window, and the tight in the room was a murky brown. Then she stood and said, “Good night,” in a companionable tone, as if this were a routine we had established through years and years of dining together — and she walked out of the room. I stood, filled with confusion. What could I say? I looked down at the stars for quite some time, then I made my way without difficulty back to my room.

When I awoke the next morning I felt sure I had slept for an uncommonly long time. I showered in water as cold as I could stand, disturbed by dreams I couldn’t remember.

Apparently I was being left to my own devices again. After a long wait on my bed, wondering if I should be annoyed as I felt, I went to the control panel and called every destination on the intercom. No replies. I couldn’t even find out what time it was.

Remembering the previous night, I left my room and ventured into the hallway again. If I had never left my room, I wondered, would I ever have met Holmes?

Today she wasn’t in the room we had dined in, or behind the seashell wall. I circled the satellite entirely, checking room after empty room, and becoming slightly disoriented, as the central hallway of the torus often disappeared into short mazes of multiplicity. Quite a few doors on every level were locked. The silence on board — actually a pervasive, soft, electric whirrr — began to bother me.

I took an elevator up one of the spokes to the observatory in the hub, and tried the door; to my surprise it opened. Inside I heard a voice. I entered the weightless room and found it a tall cylindrical chamber, with a domed ceiling. The telescope, a long shiny silver and white thing, extended from a vertical strip in the curved ceiling to the center of the chamber, where a crow’s-nest arrangement with a leather and brass chair was welded to it.

Holmes stood behind that chair, leaning over it to look into the mask of the eyepiece. Every few seconds she called out a string of figures, her voice vibrant with intensity. Charles, seated at a console in the wall of the chamber (still in his red and gold), tapped at a keyboard and occasionally quoted a set of numbers back to Holmes. I pulled myself down the bannister of a short staircase into the room.

Holmes looked up, startled, and saw me. She nodded, said “Mr. Doya” in greeting, looked back into the eyepiece. She pulled away again and stared down at me; I was braced against a platform railing a meter or two below her. “So you think I built Icehenge, eh, Mr. Doya?”

And then she looked into the telescope again. I stared up at her, at a loss. She read off another string of figures, sounding as vitally interested as she had when I entered the room. Finally she called to Charles, “Lock it on the inside limit of ring forty-six, please,” and turned on me again.

“I’ve been reading your articles,” she said. “I’ve been a student of the Icehenge controversy for a long time.”

“Have you,” I managed to say.

“Yes, I have. I followed it from the beginning. In your last article in Shards I can see you are implicating me, and I want to know why.”

I looked away from her, over at Charles, down at the end of the telescope. Adrenaline flushed through me, preparing me for flight, but not for conversation.