The Spheres of Heaven

“Bony, please don’t.”

“We must. I don’t know how long we may have to stay on Limbo, and we don’t want to have to live in space-suits indefinitely.”

Bony made sure that the neck seal was tight, so that the rest of the suit would remain inflated even when the helmet was cracked open. The air pressure inside most of the suit had to remain higher than outside. Otherwise he would sink like a stone when the helmet pressure equalized.

He found himself holding his breath as air hissed from the suit. That was ridiculous, about as sensible as a man being hanged trying to delay execution by jumping up into the air a moment before the trapdoor opened. The whole point was to get this over as fast as possible.

His ears were popping. As the air escaped he sank a few inches deeper into the water. Now air was entering his helmet. The smell of an alien sea was in his nostrils. Bony opened his mouth wide and gulped in the air of Limbo.

He felt a moment of dizziness and panic. He was panting, his vision blurred, and something was catching in his throat and burning at his lungs. He thought of Liddy’s worries about poisonous gases. Then he realized that the strange sensation was almost surely the effects of a high ozone level. That made logical sense. The blue giant sun delivered a sleet of ultraviolet light to Limbo, and UV had the effect of ionizing oxygen to form the triatomic molecule of ozone.

The act of rational thought had its own steadying effect. His breathing slowed. His vision cleared and he saw Liddy reaching up to seal his helmet.

“No.” He took her hands in his. “It’s all right. I can breathe. The air pressure is a bit lower but the oxygen content is higher. I’m not sure what the long-term effects might be, but provided we always go back and sleep in the ship I think we’ll be all right.”

Liddy said suddenly, “Fine. It’s my turn. I’m going to open my helmet and breathe it, too.”

“Wait a minute.” Another big wave was arriving. Lifted high, Bony for the first time was looking in the right direction at the right time. He saw a black mass bulging up from the sea, with a narrow band of sparkling white in front of it.

Land, and a line of breakers, no more than a few kilometers away.

“Hold off for the moment, Liddy. If we’re going ashore we won’t want open helmets while we’re doing it. I’m going to close mine, then I’ll show you how to use the thrustors.”

It took a couple of false starts. The first time, Liddy set the wrong thrust angle. She was driven under water and popped up forty meters away like the bloated corpse of some sea-monster. The second time Bony used too high a thrust setting. He skated helplessly across the surface at speed and was buffeted hard by waves. Over the suit radio he could hear Liddy laughing at him.

The seabed’s ascent as it approached the land formed a gentle incline. Waves began to break two hundred meters offshore, and with a hundred meters still to go Bony and Liddy could touch bottom.

The shore itself was a bleak shingle of black and brown stones. Bony waded the final ten meters and sank to his knees.

Liddy moved anxiously to his side. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just looking for something. If you want to open your suit now it ought to be all right. I suggest you sit down before you do it — I felt dizzy for a few moments.”

She flopped down at his side. Bony heard the hiss of escaping air, followed by Liddy’s calm voice, “You said looking. Looking for what?”

Apparently his own discomfort had mostly been nervousness. He would never make a hero. Bony said, “Looking for signs of life. Little crabs, shrimp, sand fleas, barnacles, stuff like that.” He turned over handfuls of pebbles. “I don’t see anything alive. Not even plants. Do you?”

“Nothing. But you saw all sorts on the seabed, didn’t you? Plants and animals. What does it mean?”

Bony stood up and gazed farther inland, to where black rocks rose to a jagged skyline. “If it’s the same up there, and it’s my guess it is, then regardless of what we find in the sea we won’t have to worry about danger on land. Remember I was saying that you ought not to find life on a planet around a blue giant star, because it wouldn’t have had enough time to develop?”

“And I pointed out that the theory is obviously wrong. There is life on Limbo.”

“But I think the astronomers are half right. Back on Earth, there was life in the sea for billions of years before it emerged onto the land. That’s what we have here on Limbo. Lots of plants and animals in the sea, nothing above the surface.” Bony leaned his head back and squinted up into the dazzling sky. “I wonder if there’s a moon? We might find out if we could stay here until dark, but long before that we’d better be back on the ship.”

“A moon . I thought you said it was the type of sun that makes the difference?”

“A moon causes tides. Plants and animals that live in shallow water close to the shore get stranded by the tides, and over time they evolve so that they can live on land or in water. At least, that’s the theory.”

“Do you know every useless piece of information in the universe?”

She was teasing him. Bony didn’t mind at all. They were on an alien world, in the middle of some God-know’s-where mystery region known as the Geyser Swirl. They had no idea how, when, or if they would return home — or even if they would get back safely to the Mood Indigo before dark. It ought to be quite impossible to relax. Yet here he was, ridiculously cheerful and gratified by the sight of Liddy laughing at his side.

“Not every useless thing, no.” He stood up, turning to gaze out beyond the breakers. “But when you’re alone a lot, learning helps to take your mind off it.”

She stood up, too. “Were you alone?”

“All the time, when I was a kid.” Bony had been searching the horizon for any sign of the great clover-leaf shape that had swept overhead when he was down on the seabed. Suddenly he realized the total lack of logic in his action. If life had yet to move out of the sea on Limbo, no winged creature could have taken to the air. Whatever he had seen was a sea-creature. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a look farther inland.”

“Why were you alone?” Liddy fell into step beside him. “And where were you alone?”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“I’ll decide that — after you tell me. Come on, Bony. I’d tell you anything.”

“I warn you, it’s not very interesting.” How much was he going to tell her, after so many hidden years? Well, the first part was safe enough. “You seemed surprised because I’d heard of the Leah Rainbow Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk. You shouldn’t have been. I was born on Earth. I was a Gallimaufries kid like you.”

“You didn’t tell me that! You said you’d just read about Earth and the Leah Rainbow Academy.”

“I know. It was a reasonable statement; almost everything else I know came through reading. I wasn’t like you. To get picked out and taken into the Academy, even back then you must have already been absolutely gorgeous. You know, people say about the Academy — at the Academy, did you — I mean, did they teach you how to—”

“None of your business. You may find out one day, but it won’t be through asking about it.” Liddy hooked her arm through his. “So we have lots in common. Both from Earth, both born as Gallimaufry kids.”

“I didn’t say that.” Bony wished they weren’t wearing suits. He couldn’t even feel Liddy’s grip on his arm. “I wasn’t born in the Gallimaufries, the way you were. And you must have been slim and beautiful. I was already fat and clumsy.”

“Lots of kids are. No big problem.”

“It was for me. My last name is Rombelle now; but when I was born it was Mirambelle.”

She stopped dead, her boots grating loud on the barren basaltic rock of the slope. “You’re a Mirambelle?”