The view swung. A curved edge of space showed, with curling hydrogen flames tracing arcs bigger than some suns. The star slid out of sight, and a dully glowing dot came into view. Still the view expanded, until we saw an eggshaped object in dead center of the window.
«The starseed,» said Margo via intercom. There was cool authority in her public-speaking voice. «This one appears to be returning to the galactic core, having presumably left its fertilized egg near the tip of this galactic arm. When the egg hatches, the infant starseed will make its own way home across fifty thousand light-years of space …»
The starseed was moving fast, straight at the sensing eye, with an immediacy that jarred strangely against Margo's dry lecture voice. Suddenly I knew what she'd done. She'd placed us directly in the path of the starseed. If this one was typical of its brethren, it would be moving at about point eight lights. The starseed's light image was moving only one-fifth faster than the starseed itself, and both were coming toward us. Margo had set it up so that we watched it five times as fast as it actually happened.
Quite a showman, Margo.
«… believe that at least some eggs are launched straight outward, toward the Clouds of Magellan or toward the globular clusters or toward Andromeda. Thus, the starseeds could colonize other galaxies and could also prevent a population explosion in this galaxy.» There were pinpoints of blue light around the starseed now: newsmen from Down, come to Gummidgy to cover the event, darting about in fusion ships. This specimen is over a mile in thickness and about a mile and a half in length.
Suddenly it hit me.
Whatinhell was the Kdatlyno watching? With nothing resembling eyes, with only his radar sense to give form to his surroundings, he was seeing nothing but a blank wall!
I turned. Lloobee was watching me.
Naturally. Lloobee was an artist, subsidized by his own world government, selling his touch sculptures to humans and kzinti so that his species would acquire interstellar money. Finagle knew they didn't have much else to sell yet. They'd been propertyless slaves before we took their world from the kzinti, but now they were building industries.
He didn't look like an artist. He looked like a monster. That brown dragon skin would have stopped a knife. Curved silver-tipped horns marked his knees and elbows, and his huge hands, human in design, nonetheless showed eight retractile claws at the knuckles. No silver there. They were filed sharp and then buffed to a polished glow. The hands were strangler's hands, not sculptor's hands. His arms were huge even in proportion to his ten-foot height. They brushed his knees when he stood up.
But his face gave the true nightmare touch. Eyeless, noseless, marked only by a gash of a mouth and by a goggle-shaped region above it where the skin was stretched drumhead taut. That tympanum was turned toward me. Lloobee was memorizing my face.
I turned back as the starseed began to unfold.
It seemed to take forever. The big egg fluttered; its surface grew dull and crinkly and began to expand. It was rounding the sun now, lighted on one side, black on the other. It grew still bigger, became lopsided … and slowly, slowly the sail came free. It streamed away like a comet's tail, and then it filled, a silver parachute with four threadlike shrouds pointing at the sun. Where the shrouds met was a tiny knob.
This is how they travel. A starseed spends most of its time folded into a compact egg shape, falling through the galaxy on its own momentum. But inevitably there come times when it must change course. Then the sail unfolds, a silver mirror thinner than the paint on a cheap car but thousands of miles across. A cross-shaped thickening in the material of the sail is the living body of the starseed itself. In the knob that hangs from the shrouds is more living matter. There are the muscles to control the shrouds and set the attitude of the sail, and there is the egg, fertilized at the Core, launched near the galactic rim.
The sail came free, and nobody breathed. The sail expanded, filled the screen, and swung toward us. A blue-white point crossed in front of it, a newsman's shit, a candle so tiny as to be barely visible. Now the sail was fully inflated by the light from behind, belling outward, crimped along one side for attitude control.
The intercom said, «And that's it, ladies and gentlemen and other guests. We will make one short hyperspace hop into the system of Gummidgy and will proceed from there in normal space. We will be landing in sixteen hours.»
There was a collective sigh. The Kdatlyno sculptor took his horn out of my sleeve and stood up, improbably erect.
And what would his next work be like? I thought of human faces set in expressions of sheer wonder and grinning incredulity, muscles bunched and backs arched forward for a better view of a flat wall. Had Lloobee known of the starseed in advance? I thought he had.
Most of the spectators were drifting away, though the starseed still showed. My tea was icy. We'd been watching for nearly an hour, though it felt like ten minutes.
Emil said, «How are you doing with Captain Tellefsen?»
I looked blank.
«You called her Margo a while back.»
«Oh, that. I'm not really trying, Emil. What would she see in a crashlander?»
«That girl must have hurt you pretty bad.»
«What girl?»
«It shows through your skull, Bey. None of my business, though.» He looked me up and down, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that my skull really was transparent. «What would she see? She'd see a crashlander, yes. Height seven feet, weight one sixty pounds — close enough? White hair, eyes blood-red. Skin darkened with tannin pills, just like the rest of us. But you must take more tannin pills than anybody.»
«I do. Not, as you said, that it's any of your business.»
«Was it a secret?»
I had to grin at that. How do you hide the fact that you're an albino? «No, but it's half my problem. Do you know that the Fertility Board of Earth won't accept albinos as potential fathers?»
«Earth is hardly the place to raise children, anyway. Once a flatlander, always a flatlander.»
«I fell in love with a flatlander.»
«Sorry.»
«She loved me, too. Still does, I hope. But she couldn't leave Earth.»
«A lot of flatlanders can't stand space. Some of them never know it. Did you want children?»
«Yeah.»
In silent sympathy Emil dialed two Bloody Marriages. In silent thanks I raised the bulb in toast and drank.
It was as neat a cleft stick as had ever caught man and woman. Sharrol couldn't leave Earth. On Earth she was born, on Earth she would die, and on Earth she would have her children.
But Earth wouldn't let me have children. No matter that forty percent of We Made It is albino. No matter that albinism can be cured by a simple supply of tannin pills, which anyone but a full-blooded Maori has to take anyway if he's visiting a world with a brighter than average star. Earth has to restrict its population, to keep it down to a comfortable eighteen billion. To a flatlander that's comfortable. So … prevent the useless ones from having children — the liabilities, such as paranoia prones, mental deficients, criminals, uglies, and Beowulf Shaeffer.
Emil said, «Shouldn't we be in hyperspace by now?»
«Up to the captain,» I told him.
Most of the passengers who had watched the starseed were now at tables. Sleeping cubicles induce claustrophobia. Bridge games were forming, reading screens were being folded out of the walls, drinks were being served. I reached for my Bloody Marriage and found, to my amazement, that it was too heavy to pick up.
Then I fainted.
I woke up thinking, It wasn't that strong!