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Title: Bruggil's bride

Author: Robert F. Young

Release Date: March 6, 2023 [eBook #70217]

Language: English

Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
             Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRUGGIL'S BRIDE ***





                            Bruggil's Bride

                          by ROBERT F. YOUNG

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                    Fantastic Universe March 1960.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


She came off the Androids, Inc., production line in September, 2241.
She was five feet, seven inches tall, weighed 135 pounds, had flaxen
hair and pale blue eyes. Her built-in batteries were guaranteed for
ten years, her tapes were authentic Kirsten Flagstad, and her name was
Isolde.

       *       *       *       *       *

She was shipped to New York via strato-freight, and late in October
she opened the season at the Metropolitanette in what the hundred or
so die-hard enthusiasts still holding the Wagnerian fort, called the
best Tristan ever. Afterwards, she was deactivated and stored away,
along with Tristan, Brangane, Melot, King Marke, Kurvenal, the shepherd
and the helmsman, and the various knights, soldiers, attendants, and
sailors that constituted the rest of the dramatis personae.

At that time the black market in androids was relatively new, and only
standard measures were taken to guard the Metropolitanette storeroom.
Operatic androids were not exactly the kind of merchandise the average
twenty-third century citizen liked most to find underneath his
Christmas tree, and to a Wagnerian aficionado, the idea of the average
music lover stealing one was as preposterous as the idea of a twentieth
century bobby soxer stealing a Caruso original. But an operatic
android was potentially capable of doing other things besides singing
recitative and arias--as a number of twenty-third century operators had
begun to realize some time before the beginning of this history. Hans
Becker was one of them.

You've seen Hans. You've seen him in bars and on airbusses, in waiting
rooms and in automats. He likes to sit in secluded corners and study
people through his cigar smoke. He has a penchant for ostentatious
blondes and dirty comic films. He has a passion for the quick credit.

You see him now. He is talking to a mousy little man in a decrepit bar
off Fifth Avenue. The little man nods every now and then, smiles a
satisfied smile every time Hans sets him up a beer. The little man is a
night watchman. He is a night watchman in the very building where the
Metropolitanette stores its deactivated androids. He is in his fifties,
and he too likes ostentatious blondes. But on a night watchman's pay,
the only ones he can afford are a little too ostentatious even for
him. He would like them to be a little less ostentatious, and, if
possible, a little younger. He smiles, nods his head again. He drinks
the fresh beer the bartender sets before him. He licks the froth from
his lips with the tip of his gray tongue. He pockets the sheaf of
credits which Hans slips him. He nods again. "Tomorrow night, then," he
says. "At the backdoor. I'll have her ready for you."

       *       *       *       *       *

Isolde's first stop, after her abduction, was at the house of a
converter Hans knew. The converter's name was Wisprey, and he was an
artist in his own right. By the time he finished with Isolde, you never
would have dreamed--unless you were a Wagnerian devotee--that once
upon a time she had been a bona fide reproduction of an Irish heroine
in a German opera. You would have sworn, instead, that she was a
Swedish-type maid of the kind Androids, Inc., specialized in, and which
retailed for 2500 credits. Her flaxen hair had been drawn back into
a little chignon, her period costume had been exchanged for a modern
servant's outfit, and her classic features had been subtly altered to
suggest sycophancy. As though that were not enough, she could scrub
floors, wash dishes, cook, and darn socks.

The only part of her the converter did not alter was the sealed-in unit
containing her voice tapes. That, he told Hans, would have involved
too intricate an operation. Besides, who cared if she sang instead of
talked, anyway, as long as she could work?

"That's right," Hans said. "Who cares? When they see how strong she is,
they'll buy her like sixty."

"Sure they will."

"And she's only the first. There's lots of other big ones where she
came from and I'm going to grab them off, too."

He didn't grab them off, though. A week later, he fell into his blonde
mistress' barbecue pit and was so drunk he couldn't get back out before
he was barbecued to the bone. Before this lamentable occurrence,
however, he sold his pilfered princess to an interstellar trader, and
thereby launched Isolde upon her odyssey.

The interstellar trader, whose name was Higgens, owned a Class B
merchant ship of the old photon-ejection variety. He stored Isolde in
the after-hold and left her there till his fourth planetfall--Sirius
21. Then he got her out, dusted her off, combed her hair and activated
her. He led her down the gangplank and stood her on the collapsible
auctioneer's block he'd set up at the ship's base. There were a number
of colonists gathered around the block already, but he saved her till
last, auctioning off the rest of his payload first. By the time he took
her hand and led her to the center of the block, word of her presence
had got around the nearby colony, and there was a near-maximum turnout.

"All right," Higgens said. "She's beautiful and she's strong and she's
sturdy. I don't need to tell you those things because you can see them
for yourself. I'm merely reminding you of them. But what you can't see
are the things she can do. So here's the way we'll work it: you name
something you'd like a servant of yours to be able to do, and I'll tell
you whether she can do it or not. Who's first?"

"Can she cook?" a thin-faced woman wanted to know.

"I knew you'd ask that one first. The answer is yes. Next?"

"Can she milk a milch bront?" This time the asker was a middle-aged
colonist of Dutch descent.

Higgens consulted a small notebook. "She can--if a milch bront is
enough like a cow," he said presently.

There was the inevitable drunk in the crowd. "Can she keep a man's bed
warm?"

Higgens played along. "She sure can, buddy, but you know the law as
well as I do."

"Can she scrub floors, lift, carry, wash clothes, do dishes and wait on
people?" It was the Dutch colonist again.

Higgens nodded. "Seems to me you've just about covered everything,
friend. Want to make the first bid?"

"200 credits," the Dutch colonist said.

"I have 200 credits," Higgens intoned, "which, if I do say so, is about
one tenth of what she's worth. Do I hear three?"

"300," the drunk said.

"350," the Dutch colonist said.

"450."

The Dutch colonist could outbid anybody in the crowd, and everybody in
the crowd knew it, including the drunk. But the drunk didn't give a
damn, and he went along to the one thousand mark before dropping out.
The Dutch colonist got her for 1100 credits, and the first stage of
Isolde's servitude began.

The Dutch colonist's name was Vanderzee. You've seen him, too. Forget
about his race: his race has nothing to do with it. All races have
their Vanderzees. This one was a bachelor, and made a prosperous living
buying seconds in large lots and selling them for firsts. The business
he happened to be in was the clothing business, but no matter what
business he had been in, he would have conducted it in the same way.
There were Vanderzees in the time of Gautama Siddhartha; there were
Vanderzees in the time of Christ; there were Vanderzees in the time of
FDR. There will always be Vanderzees.

This one took his purchase home in a ground skimmer. He looked at her
sideways as they skimmed along, a little awed by her classic features,
which even the converter's skill had been unable to destroy altogether.
By the time they reached the apartment above his store, the first
droppings of his sense of inferiority had already fertilized the
ground where his latent hatred lay, and when he asked her a simple
question, the hatred burst forth in twisted stems and ugly blossoms.
For, instead of answering the question with the simple "yes sir" or "no
sir" which was all it required, Isolde responded with the particular
recitative it most closely provoked, and the windows rattled in the
majestic blast from her Kirsten Flagstad tapes. Vanderzee, for all his
shrewdness, had neglected to make the most obvious inquiry of all from
Higgens, re his prospective purchase--i.e., _Can she talk?_

But Vanderzee didn't take her back. For one thing, he knew that Higgens
had already closed his lock and would be blasting off any second. For
another, taking her back would have been a tacit admission that he had
been outwitted by a business man sharper than himself, and this he
could not bear. No, Vanderzee had made a purchase, and he would stick
with it: but he would get his money's worth out of it if it took him
the rest of his life.

Isolde was put to work with a vengeance. Each dawn she milked the milch
bront Vanderzee kept in the shed behind his store. Each day she washed
dishes, cooked, scrubbed floors, waited on customers and unloaded
supplies for Vanderzee. Each evening she washed dishes, cooked,
scrubbed floors, waited on customers and unloaded supplies for Lanesce,
the local tavern keeper to whom Vanderzee sublet her for part time
work. But in this subsidiary attempt to get all he could out of her,
and in the getting of it, obtain his revenge on her for having deceived
him (by the end of the second week, Vanderzee actually had himself
believing that it was she, and not Higgens, who had put one over on
him), Vanderzee made a mistake.

It was a natural enough mistake. Who would have dreamed that an
android who screamed or sang gibberish (German was a dead language by
2241 in any but the most esoteric sense, and Vanderzee was generations
removed from his native tongue) could attain to any degree of
popularity whatsoever in any kind of an establishment whatsoever. But
taverns are not ordinary establishments, and frequently events come
to pass in them that could never have come to pass elsewhere. Isolde
became popular. She became so popular, in fact, that Lanesce's business
doubled. Tripled.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was nothing unprecedented about her popularity. Idiot waitresses
have always enjoyed an exalted place in taverns. They make ideal
patsies for jokes, for one thing, and are generally responsive to
gooses, for another. While Isolde was neither an idiot nor responsive
to gooses, the sounds she uttered whenever anyone said something to
her, obscene or otherwise, were suggestive enough of idiot rantings to
the ear of the average patron, for her to be classified as an idiot;
and while she may not have been responsive to gooses, neither was she
on her guard against them, taking them in her stride like everything
else. None of which bears directly on the nature of Vanderzee's
mistake. What does bear directly upon it is the fact that the variety
of men who frequent bars, is infinite. Sooner or later someone had to
come along who would recognize Isolde, either from her recitative or
from her arias, or from her appearance, for what she was--or what she
once had been. And presently someone did.

       *       *       *       *       *

Enter, Elwood Parkhurst. You've seen him, too. In bars, mostly.
But before he took exclusively to bars, you may have seen him in
_avantgarde_ ghettos where the philosophy of Rieder and Diems and
Ghent lay thick in smoke-fogged atmospheres, or in off-beat book stores
where the outre tomes of Cresniner and Hulp and Bredder pre-empted
the shelves. And you may have seen him, too, if you happened along at
the right time, standing impatiently in front of the Metropolitanette,
smoking concatenations of cigarettes 'till the doors opened and egress
to Verdi or Wagner could be obtained. And were you worldly enough, you
may have seen him waiting outside the stage door behind the old Libido
with a host of the macromammary Miranda's other pursuers, and you may
even have read about the short-lived marriage he and she embarked on
to the delight of the Sex Sheets and the Peeping Walters. After that,
though, if you saw him at all, you saw him in bars--or staggering
between them.

Parkhurst walked into Lanesce's, took one look at Isolde and knew her
instantly.

He was sobering up at the time, having hit Sirius 21 a week ago, and
the Spaceport Bar five minutes after arrival. Perhaps he would have
acted as he did even if he hadn't been sobering-up, but there is a
certain kind of remorse contained in the sobering-up process that makes
the sufferer more than normally susceptible to symbols of the higher
planes of civilization. In Isolde, Parkhurst saw the strength he needed
at the moment, and the _raison d'etre_ he would need later on to
straighten out permanently. Before he even heard her voice raised in
resounding recitative, as he did shortly when one of the good fellows
present, goosed her, he knew he had to have her.

He didn't have enough capital to buy her, but he did have enough to
abscond with her to Procyon 16 where a boom was in progress and where
you could practically name your job. As Vanderzee kept Isolde quartered
in the shed with his milch bront, abduction proved to be no problem,
and Parkhurst managed to smuggle her on board a Procyon-bound tramp
ship without any trouble.

On Procyon 16, however, misfortune awaited him: the ulwano herds which
the good colonists had been systematically slaughtering for years in
order that wealthy women all over the civilized sector of the galaxy
might know the secure feeling that accompanies owning an ulwano coat
or stole, and in order that the good colonists themselves might know
the secure feeling that accompanies owning acres of real estate and
scads of stock in interstellar banks, had perversely migrated into the
inaccessible northern barrens, thereby precipitating a depression. Jobs
were not merely scarce: they were non-existent. Even worse, Parkhurst
didn't have enough money to buy passage back.

       *       *       *       *       *

In common with most men of his kind, he could meet a crisis in one
way, and in one way only. He had not taken a drink since Sirius 21,
but as soon as the seriousness of his predicament got through to
him, he headed straight for the Star and Traveler--a thriving little
establishment convenient to the spaceport, dedicated to the enhancement
of human relationships via the congenial consumption of cut-rate gin.
The money he had left lasted him two days. His watch got him through
two more. His extra clothing was going for three more. By that time,
his physical thirst was sated; his emotional thirst, however, was
merely stimulated. He had only one item left to sell, besides the
clothes on his back, and so he sold Isolde--for one tenth of what she
was worth, and without ever having heard her sing the aria which he
loved above all others and which she had been created for most: the
_Liebestod_. Three days later, when he had sobered sufficiently to
realize what he had done, he hanged himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Isolde's new owner was a missionary named Newell. He was dedicated
to the task of bringing all the heathen in the known galaxy around
to seeing things in their proper perspective, i.e., the way he saw
them. He was a devout disciple of Neo-Christianity, popularly known
as FDRism, which had begun late in the twentieth century and which
proclaimed Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the real Christ. He owned his
own ship--the NRA--and he carried a collapsible chapel in the hold. As
he was unmarried and as most of the lands he visited turned out to be
lonely as well as hostile, he bought Isolde to keep him company--and,
of course, to keep the ship clean, do the cooking and darn his socks.

       *       *       *       *       *

His first--and last--stop after leaving Procyon 16 was Idwandana, a
primitive province on the southern-most continent of Gamma Bootis 4.
The natives were a rusty brown in hue, stood on an average of five feet
in height, used a glue-like mixture on their scarlet hair to make it
stand up straight, and lived off the pweitl--a cow-like creature whose
milk they drank, whose flesh they ate and whose hides they used for
lap-laps, tepees and gourds. Occasionally, they varied their diet by
eating each other.

The particular tribe Newell chose for his initial ministrations took
a dim view of FDRism right from the start. Taking from the rich
and giving to the poor was a practice they indulged in habitually,
providing that the "rich" were their enemies and the "poor" were
themselves; but they could see no religious connection in the matter.
Old Age Security they considered impractical, and sick benefits for
incapacitated members of the community, left them cold. When an
Idwandanan grew too old, he or she was cooked and eaten. If he or she
became a detriment to the tribe because of illness or accident, he or
she was also cooked and eaten. So it always was, so should ever be.
There was only one god, and he was Bruggil, the giant who lived in the
fire mountain and whose fiery breath you could sometimes see when he
went into a tantrum.

If the Reverend Newell had been a realistic person, he would have
folded up his chapel then and there, and took off for home. But then,
if he had been a realistic person, he wouldn't have been trying to
shove his credo down the throats of a race of savages who would just as
soon eat him as look at him.

He did not see the arrow till it was already protruding from his
chest, and then he saw it only briefly. He fell, appropriately enough,
in the doorway of the collapsible chapel he had come to love the way
some men love women and the way other men love wine. But here the
appropriateness ended: the Idwandanans streaked out of the surrounding
forest and quartered him neatly, whereupon they swarmed up the ladder
to the ship's lock in search of the creature whom they believed to be
his mate. Isolde was in the galley, fixing breakfast, and it was no
trick at all for the foremost Idwandanan to creep up behind her and
plunge his knife between her shoulder blades. It was a long knife, and
a sharp one--the best that the _beche-demer_ trader who supplied
the area, had in stock--and it went all the way through and came out
between her synthetic breasts. The Idwandanan felt pretty proud of
himself, till she turned around and confronted him, whereupon he ran
screaming from the room.

He returned presently with several of his fellows, among them
Skonsdoggugil, the chief. There was a prolonged palaver, after which
Isolde's would-be executioner approached her and withdrew the knife. It
had done no damage whatsoever, even missing the small bellows that kept
her chest rising and falling in a rhythmic and realistic imitation of
human breathing. As for the holes it had made, her skin-plastic was of
the self-sealing type, and grew together forthwith. The bodice of the
gingham dress Newell had outfitted her with, concealed this additional
miracle from the eyes of the Idwandanans, but Skonsdoggugil had seen
enough: here was Bruggil's Bride, sent down from the fire mountain by
ways incomprehensible to man, to test the mettle of his children.

They built a temple for her deep in the forest, laboriously quarrying
the stone and dragging it through underbrush and vine to the chosen
site. Isolde watched, or seemed to be watching, and every now and then
she gave forth with recitative or aria. The Idwandanans interpreted
these outbursts as admonitions to hurry, and because of them, the
temple was completed much sooner than it otherwise would have been.
After a lengthy ceremony, officiated by Skonsdoggugil, Isolde was
escorted inside and seated upon a crude throne, after which a guard of
honor was installed without. By now, her goddesshood was unquestioned
by even the most cynical. Was she not above such worldly necessities
as eating and drinking? Had anyone ever seen her sleep? Oh, she was
Bruggil's Bride all right, and woe to the Idwandanan male who failed to
make his obeisance at her feet each time he slaughtered a pweitl, and
woe to the Idwandanan female who failed to attend the fertility fete
which was held each night in the courtyard!

Isolde reigned in the temple for five Earth-years, and she probably
would have gone right on reigning there till her batteries gave out and
her tapes went dead and the little in-built motor of her heart ceased
to whir if a certain native labor recruiter named Jose Swenson had not
landed in the _Malaita_ to pick up a payload of Idwandanans. As it
was, her reign came to an abrupt end.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jose Swenson was a far cry from the Reverend Newell: his business was
selling souls, not saving them, and he knew his business well. He had
not been in Idwandana a week before he had his hold jam-packed with
"fireheads," and he would have been away and gone an hour hence if,
during one of his forays into the forest, he had not glimpsed the crude
stone temple.

In Swenson's mind, temples, even crude stone ones, were always
potential sources of treasure. After all, who really knew but what
there were gold mines in Idwandana? Perhaps even diamond mines? And
what more logical place was there for a race of superstitious savages
to store the bounty gleaned therefrom than in their temple?

So instead of departing, he set forth once more into the forest, with
six members of his crew, leaving the remaining three members to guard
the _Malaita_. This was a tactical blunder, arising from his
mistaken assumption that by now, all of the Idwandanans would be too
terrified of stun grenades to cause any serious trouble. As a matter of
fact, most of them were, but Skonsdoggugil wasn't, and reinforced by
several tribal units from the north, with whom his own tribe claimed
kinship, he attacked the _Malaita_ as soon as Swenson and his
party were out of earshot.

The attack went well, so well, in fact, that the three crew members
were neatly quartered on the deck before any of them had a chance to
radio Swenson of the disaster. Skonsdoggugil wasted no time: after
freeing the prisoners in the hold and instructing them to guard the
ship, he armed his warriors with stun grenades stolen from the arsenal,
and set out in pursuit of Swenson.

Swenson had made good time, and was already within attacking distance
of the temple. A stun grenade knocked out half the honor guard and
sent the other half streaking for the forest. Swenson headed for the
entrance. He could feel the diamonds trickling through his fingers. He
could taste the rich wine they would buy, and the luscious lips of the
lovely women they would give him access to. He burst into the throne
room, hardly able to contain himself--

And saw Isolde.

The Idwandanans had clothed her in their choicest of pweitl hides,
and she had gone back to combing her hair in its original style. Her
pale blue eyes were clear and unwavering. The classic body with which
Androids, Inc., had endowed her was unsullied by either time or the
elements, Swenson had been born in space and had spent most of his life
in space. He had never been to Earth, and he had never seen an android.
Consequently, he mistook Isolde for a real woman--a woman of heroic
proportions, perhaps, but a woman radiant with the beauty he had looked
for all his life and never found, till now.

Swenson forgot about the diamonds. He forgot about the gold. He stepped
forward, touched Isolde's arm. The normal human temperature which her
thermostat maintained, felt natural to his fingers. The softness of her
synthetic skin made his flesh tingle. "A white goddess," he said. "A
genuine honest-to-God white goddess!"

The burst of recitative which his remark provoked, disconcerted him
for a moment. He had heard many languages in his day, but he had never
heard one with such a violent intonation or such guttural syllables.
Isolde, he concluded, must come from a world he had never touched upon
in all his travels--a world remote from the ordinary pathways of man.
And he was right, too, though in a way he did not dream.

At this point, a dull explosion sounded in the courtyard without,
followed by another. Instantly alert, Swenson ran to the entrance--saw
the six men who had accompanied him, lying stunned on the flagstones.
Even as he looked, a horde of "fireheads" streamed out of the forest,
long knives glittering. The quartering was accomplished in a matter of
seconds.

Sickened, Swenson ran back into the temple. There was a wide aperture
in the rear wall, and the better part of valor, he knew, would be to
forget the white goddess, whom the natives would not harm anyway,
and gain the forest. The Idwandanans' possession of stun grenades
unmistakably indicated that they had taken the _Malaita_, but
perhaps he could eke out an existence till another ship came. In any
event, burdening himself with a woman, however robust she might be,
would be detrimental to his success.

Thus he reasoned, but thus he did not act. When the first Idwandanans
gained the temple, Bruggil's Bride was gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

The heavy underbrush fought their footsteps, and Swenson had to keep
a constant drag on Isolde's arm, else she would not have accompanied
him at all. The shouts of their pursuers grew louder by the second.
When they came to a river, he plunged into it unhesitatingly, pulling
Isolde after him. She could not swim, of course, but he was an expert,
and in a matter of minutes they were in midstream. If he had known that
for all her "breathing", she could not drown, their progress would
have been more rapid. Even so, they had nearly reached the opposite
bank when the first of the Idwandanans emerged from the forest. By the
time dugouts were brought up so that the chase could be resumed (the
Idwandanans could not swim), Swenson had scrambled up the bank and
pulled Isolde out of sight into the underbrush.

He ran straight ahead for about half a mile, clasping Isolde's hand
in his, urging her along beside him. Then he turned at right angles
and ran for another half mile. Finally he headed back for the river,
swam across with Isolde, and plunged into the forest again. He halted
for a moment to get his breath, then went on. As nearly as he could
figure out, his course of action had been the one they would have least
expected him to take, and the fact that no further sounds of pursuit
reached his ears indicated that he was right. Unless the Idwandanans
were better trackers than he thought they were, he and Isolde now had a
good chance of eluding them altogether.

They spent the night in a small clearing deep in the forest, sleeping
upon the ground. Swenson was exhausted and he took it for granted that
Isolde was too. In the middle of the night he awoke and was surprised
at how cold it was. Isolde lay motionless a few feet from him,
starlight pale on her flaxen hair. He sat up, took off his coat and
covered her arms and shoulders. He was startled to see that her blue
eyes were open, and for a moment he had the impression that she had not
slept at all. She looked up at him, as though trying to understand his
presence, or perhaps his actions. Swenson did an unprecedented thing
for him: he found her hand and pressed it in his. "Everything's going
to be all right," he whispered, and lay down on the ground beside her
and fell back to sleep.

In the morning they went on. Swenson was famished, but dared not eat
any of the berries and fruits they came across occasionally. Isolde
ignored them completely. In the afternoon they came to a large grassy
clearing, and Swenson was astonished to see a New Deal chapel sitting
in the middle of it. Beside the chapel stood a small but staunch
spaceship. By squinting his eyes, he was able to make out its name: the
NRA.

He could hardly contain his excitement, and started running across the
clearing, Isolde at his side. But Skonsdoggugil, remembering Bruggil's
Bride's connection with the ship, had gambled that she and her captor
would show up in its vicinity sooner or later, and his warriors were
ready and waiting in the New Deal chapel. They came pouring out as
soon as Swenson and Isolde reached the base of the ship, and charged,
waving their razor-edged blades.

Swenson started Isolde up the ladder, then turned and drew his
knife-ray. He cut furiously, and "fireheads" fell like flies. But one
of them managed to get through, and when Swenson finally ascended the
ladder, he was minus a forearm.

Half fainting, he activated the lock, which the Idwandanans had
accidentally closed and had been unable to reopen, and pulled Isolde
inside. At the forest's edge Skonsdoggugil was mustering another
contingent of warriors. Swenson pulled Isolde into the ship proper,
secured the outer and inner locks. With her help, he got a tourniquet
on the stump of his arm. Everything was swimming before his eyes by
then, but he managed to gain the control room and strap Isolde and
himself onto the two acceleration couches. He had one chance, and one
chance only: to reach civilization before he bled to death. Hastily he
calculated the co-ordinates of the nearest civilized planet, and fed
them into the automatic pilot. He activated the pilot just before he
blacked out.

It was his haste that was his undoing. The planet he had wanted was
Delta Bootis 11, and the NRA should have snapped out of transphotic
within orbiting distance in less than three objective days. On the
fourth day, however, they were still in f.t.l. drive.

Swenson knew by then that he was dying. What he did not know was that
Isolde was dying, too. Constant usage had depleted her batteries long
before their guarantee was due to run out, and there was very little
life left in them. But she showed no signs of her approaching demise,
preparing his meals in the galley each day and bringing them to the
control room where he still lay upon the acceleration couch. She even
fed him as he grew weaker, and once he roused briefly from a long
stupor to find her darning his socks.

Co-ordinates, once fed into an automatic pilot, could not be cancelled;
but automatic pilots were so constructed that whenever they received
non-planetary co-ordinates, they altered them to the co-ordinates of
the inhabitable planet which most closely corresponded to them. The
NRA, therefore, could not end up in planetless space.

As the days passed, Swenson began wondering what kind of a world they
were approaching, and whether he would ever see it or not. On the sixth
day, his questions were answered when the NRA emerged from transphotic
in the midst of a multiple sun system, near a gray and foreboding
sphere. He pretended as long as he could that there was life on it,
but when the a.p. put the ship into orbit, he could pretend no longer.
Inhabitable did not always mean inhabited, and those cold gray seas and
barren continents drifting past the viewport had been dead for ages.
Whoever had lived on this world had long since absconded to a warmer,
less hostile, milieu.

The a.p. brought them down to a gentle landing on a rocky coast near
one of the seas. It was night, but in the heavens the mother sun's
three distant sisters blazed in blue and beautiful splendor, drenching
the sea and the land, filtering through the viewport and filling the
control room with cold, unwavering light. In its radiance, Isolde's
face lost all of the sycophancy the converter had superimposed upon it
and became once more the classic face of the Irish-German heroine it
was meant to represent.

Looking at her, Swenson knew true beauty for the first and last time in
his life. He tried to sit up on the couch, sank back. The blue light
faded, and red light took its place. Gradually, that faded too, and
lightlessness tiptoed around him on silent feet.

Isolde knelt beside him, looked down into his tired face. Slowly, she
got up, and left the room. She touched the button that opened the locks
and stepped out upon the little platform Newell once had used for a
pulpit. She looked up at the stars.

Perhaps it was the expression that had come over Swenson's face just
before he died; perhaps it was the way he lay upon the couch. Perhaps
it was the kindnesses he had shown her, and the light that had come
into his eyes whenever she had brought him food, or held his hand, or
darned his socks. Perhaps it was the sound of the surf upon the forlorn
shore. Perhaps it was all of these things....

       *       *       *       *       *

Tristan lies dead now, in his castle by the sea. Brangane has made her
revelation. King Marke has cried out in anguish and despair. "_Todt
denn Alles--Alles todt!_"

Isolde presses her hands together on her breast. She drops them slowly
to her sides. The blue radiance of the distant suns has transformed
her coarse garment of hides into a robe fit for the princess that she
is. Her face, in her vast sorrow, has attained new pinnacles of beauty--

"_Tristan!_" The magnificent Flagstad voice rises into the
radiance of the blue suns.

Slowly, brokenly, Isolde begins the _Liebestod_--

"_So might we die as ne'er to part...._"

She hears the orchestra take up the themes of bliss, of parting; of
transfiguration. She blends her voice into the music. The poignant
colonnades of sound rise higher and ever higher into the stars, and
when the climax is reached on a heart-rending surge of sound, the blue
suns tremble in the sky.

Slowly, Isolde turns and re-enters the ship. She sinks down upon
Tristan's breast, just as the little armature in her heart makes one
final revolution and lies still. In the background of her fading
brain, the music returns briefly to the themes of her magic and of her
yearnings, dies gently away....

The curtain falls.

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