Jorj, who as chief hunter did not have to haul prey, hurried into his tent. He came out with his necklace of silver quarters, which he proceeded to throw around Madyu’s neck.”Best magic since Old Time!” he shouted, loud enough to be heard in the next encampment. “The turkeys waddled right up to us, the deer just stood there waiting to be killed, just the way our great shaman said they would.”
Madyu hadn’t quite said anything like that. He hadn’t really expected to achieve anything like that; he thought he knew what magic could and couldn’t do. But I never made hunting magic with real secret names before, he thought dizzily. He let a big grin stretch itself over his face and did not bother setting the record straight.
“Well, wizardry sir, what do you have to say for yourself?” Jorj boomed.
The shaman blurted the first thing that came into his head: “Let’s eat!”
The hunters cheered again, louder than ever. Boys and girls came running to gape at the enormous catch. Among them was Hozay. Madyu was so full of triumph that gazing at his tormentor only made him wonder how much the tooth fairy would bring if he knocked all the little monster’s teeth down his throat.
The racket the hunters and children made brought the women in from the fields early. They stared at the young mountain of meat, too, and then sent up their own screams of joy. Jorj yelled, “We’re rich, do you know that, rich! We have more food than we know what to do with. We have so much, we can smoke some and sell it to tribes that aren’t lucky enough to have a shaman as clever and-what was that fancy word you used, Madyu?-as scientific, that’s it, as ours. We can-”
Madyu stopped listening about then, because Neena threw herself into his arms, kissed him, and exclaimed “Oh, Madyu, you’re wonderful!”
The shaman came up for air stunned and gasping, but his hands knew what to do. They grabbed Neena here and there. An instant later his idiot mind yammered that she would surely pull away-after all, hadn’t she said he was too skinny? But she didn’t. In fact, she snuggled closer. Off to one side, Hozay looked as if he were about to be sick. That felt almost as good to Madyu as Neena’s warm and yielding softness. By way of experiment-he was a scientific man-he kissed her this time. Not only did she return the kiss, but, he noticed dimly, Hozay looked even sicker. Since the experiment was successful, he repeated it.
Emboldened further still by the results of the second trial, he whispered, “Will you come to my tent tonight?”
“Of course I will,” she whispered back, her breath moist in his ear. Then she went on, “Why didn’t you ask me a long time ago?”
He stared at her. “I-I didn’t think-”
“Why ever not?”
“Well-well-” The more he pondered that, the more he wondered himself. He found only one answer that made any sense whatever: “After all, Neena, I know your secret name.”
“So what?” She tossed her head so her shining hair flipped back over her shoulder. Then she pointed to one of the gutted deer carcasses. “Did you use it in a spell on me, the way you did with those?”
“Of course not,” he said, indignant at the very suggestion. “I ‘d never do such a thing.’’
“Well, then,” she said, as if that settled everything. By the way she was looking at him, maybe it did. Her premise wasn’t even slightly scientific; Madyu knew that. But however scientific he thought he was, he was a shaman first, and also knew logic sometimes didn’t matter. This felt like one of those times.
His arms tightened around Neena again. She sighed against his cheek. He nodded happily, pleased at the logical confirmation of his illogic. Sure enough, this was one of those times.
LES MORTES D’ARTHUR
When I wrote this story in early 1984,I used as my guide to the names of the features on Mimas the map in the back of the NASA publication Voyages to Saturn. These names, however, had not yet been formally approved by the International Astronomical Union. Mimas’ biggest crater ended up being named for the moon’s discoverer rather than being based on the Arthurian theme that dominates the rest of its nomenclature. “Les Mortes d’Herschel,” however, doesn’t make much of a title, so I’ve decided to leave well enough alone.
The slope the spacesuited runner was climbing would have been impossibly steep, even on Luna. The tracking camera relayed her image to the studio a few kilometers away. “Lovely, isn’t she?” murmured Rannveig Aasen.
“She certainly is,” Bill Bennett agreed. “Moving with grace on a very low gravity world is a skill few people have occasion to acquire.”
As if to prove his point, the runner made a slight misstep. Instead of gliding smoothly forward, she bounced a good five meters up off the ground. She had the presence of mind to hold her pose for the eleven seconds it took for her to return.
“That could happen to anyone,” Bennett said sympathetically. “Mimas’ surface gravity is only.008g. To put that in perspective for you folks back home, Luna pulls more than twenty times as strongly.” The transmitter flung his words and picture across one and a third billion kilometers toward Earth. At light speed, they would reach perhaps that many sets an hour and a half later with the slightly misleading legend “Live-from Saturn” superimposed.
The girl reached the summit without further mishap. She paused for a moment before the large bronze bowl there, then reached up and thrust the rod she carried in her right hand over the edge of the caldron. A great sheet of yellow-orange flame, twice as tall as a man, sprang into being.
“It’s a hologram, of course,” Rannveig said, “the same principle that makes stereovision possible. Mimas is almost nothing but ice, and has no atmosphere at all. But it still makes me want to reach out and warm my hands over it.”
“Me, too,” Bennett said. “We’ll return to our coverage of the sixty-sixth Winter Olympic Games in a moment, but first these words.” Bennett disappeared from the monitor screen, to be replaced by the Interplanetary Broadcasting Company’s keynote symbol for this part of the games: an ancient black-and-white Voyager image of Mimas, with the great crater Arthur dramatically shadowed near the terminator.
When the commercial break was done, the camera cut away from the broadcasters to the icy plain at the foot of Arthur’s central peak for the opening parade of athletes. Bright blue eyes twinkling, Rannveig Aasen undid the belt that held her in her chair, pushed off, and caromed around the studio like an insane billiard ball with a cometary tail of long blond hair.
The director howled curses into her earphone, but she always managed to keep an eye on the monitor and did not miss a beat in her commentary. “The two men and two women at the head of the procession, the ones in the light blue and white spacesuits, are the Greek contingent,” she explained for her distant audience. “Greece has been part of United Europe for more than a hundred fifty years now, but still fields an independent team at every Olympic Games, in keeping with its place of honor as the homeland of the Olympic ideal.”
Bennett listened to her with nothing but admiration, a word also describing his feelings as he watched: the female form does not sag at all in.008g.
The terrestrial portion of the Winter Games was being held at Klagenfurt in United Europe that year, so the athletes crossed the ice in their national groups in French alphabetical order. That put the United States-or rather, Etats-Unis-near the front, just after the Chinese Empire, instead of toward the end.
“This is the first time in four Olympiads that the Americans have sent a team-if I can call one man and one woman a team-to Mimas,” Bennett remarked. “They haven’t had much low-g training and aren’t expected to contend for medals, but it’s good to see them competing here again. Private contributions raised enough money for two berths aboard the Arab World ship Nasser.”