Departures

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 ru

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 stu

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 ru

“She certainly is,” Bill Be

As if to prove his point, the ru

“That could happen to anyone,” Be

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,” Ra

“Me, too,” Be

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, Ra

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.”

Be

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,” Be