TRAVELERS
BY ROBERT SILVERBERG

"ARE WE ALL READY, THEN?" Nikomastir asks. He has fashioned a crown of 
golden protopetaloids for himself, and gleaming scarlet baubles dangle 
from his ears: the bright translucent shells of galgalids, strung on 
slender strands of pure gold. His long, pale arms wave in the air as 
though he is conducting a symphony orchestra. "Our next destination is-" 
and he makes us wait for the announcement. And wait. And wait.

"Sidri Akrak," says Mayfly, giggling.

"How did you know?" cries Nikomastir. "Sidri Akrak! Yes! Yes! Set your 
coordinates, everybody! Off we go! Sidri Akrak it is!"

A faint yelp of dismay comes from Velimyle, and she shoots me a look of 
something that might almost have been fear, though perhaps there is a 
certain component of perverse delight in it also. I am not at all happy 
about the decision myself. Sidri Akrak is a nightmare world where gaudy 
monsters run screaming through the muddy streets. The people of Sidri 
Akrak are cold and dour and inhospitable; their idea of pleasure is to 
wallow in discomfort and ugliness. No one goes to Sidri Akrak if he can 
help it, no one.

But we must live by our rules; and this day Nikomastir holds the right 
of next choice. It is devilish of Mayfly to have put the idea of going 
to Sidri Akrak into his head. But she is Eke that, is Mayfly. And 
Nikomastir is terribly easily influenced.

Will we all perish on hideous Sidri Akrak, victims of Mayfly's casual 
frivolity?

I don't think so, however nasty the visit turns out to be. We often get 
into trouble, sometimes serious trouble, but we always get out of it. 
We lead charmed lives, we four travelers. Someday Mayfly will take one 
risk too many, I suppose, and I would like not to be there when she does. 
Most likely I will be, though. Mayfly is my mask-sister. Wherever she goes, 
I go. I must look after her: thoughtful, stolid, foolish me. I must protect 
her from herself as we four go traveling on and on, spinning giddily across 
the farflung worlds.

Sidri Akrak, though--

The four of us have been to so many wondrous lovely places together: Elang-Lo 
and the floating isle of Vont, and Mikni and Chchikkikan, Heidoth and Thant, 
Milpar, Librot, Froidis, Smoor, Xamur and Iriarte and Nabomba Zom, and on and 
on and on. And now -- Sidri Akrak? Sidri Akrak?

WE STAND a circle in the middle of a field of grass with golden blades, making 
ourselves ready for our relay-sweep departure from Galgala.

I wouldn't have minded remaining here a few months longer. A lovely world 
indeed is Galgala the golden, where a myriad of auriferous microorganisms 
excrete atoms of gold as metabolic waste. It is everywhere on this planet, 
the lustrous pretty metal. It turns the rivers and streams to streaks of 
yellow flame and the seas to shimmering golden mirrors. Huge filters are 
deployed at the intake valve of Galgala's reservoirs to strain the silt of
dissolved gold from the water supply. The plants of Galgala are turgid in 
every tissue, leaf and stem and root, with aureous particles. Gold dust, held 
in suspension in the air, transforms the clouds to golden fleece.

Therefore the once-precious stuff has grievously lost value throughout the 
galaxy since Galgala was discovered, and on Galgala itself a pound of gold 
is worth less than a pound of soap. But I understand very little about these 
economic matters and care even less. Only a miser could fail to rejoice in 
Galgala's luminous beauty. We have been here six weeks we have awakened each 
morning to the tinkle of golden chimes, we have bathed in the golden rivers 
and come forth shining, we have wrapped our bodies round with delicate golden 
chains. Now, though, it is time for us to move along, and Nikomastir has 
decreed that our new destination is to be one of the universe's most disagreeable
worlds. Unlike my companions, I can see nothing amusing about going there. 
It strikes me as foolish and dangerous whimsy. But they are true sophisticates, 
untrammeled creatures made of air and light, and I am the leaden weight that 
dangles from their soaring souls. We will go to Sidri Akrak.

We all face Nikomastir. Smiling sweetly, he calls out the coordinate numbers 
for our journey, and we set our beacons accordingly and double-check the 
settings with care. We nod our readiness for departure to one another. 
Velimyle moves almost imperceptibly closer to me, Mayfly to Nikomastir. 

I would have chosen a less flighty lover for her than Nikomastir if matters 
had been left to me. He is a slim, elegant youth, high-spirited and shallow, 
a prancing fantastico with a taste for telling elaborate, fanciful lies. And 
he is very young: only a single rebirth so far. Mayfly is on her fifth, as am 
I, and Velimyle claims three, which probably means four. Sembiran is Nikomastir's 
native world, a place of grand valleys and lofty snow-capped mountains and 
beautiful meadows and thriving cities, where his father is a minor aristocrat 
of some sort. Or so Nikomastir has said, although we have learned again and 
again that it is risky to take anything Nikomastir says at face value.

My incandescent mask-sister Mayfly, who is as small and fair as Nikomastir is 
tall and dark, encountered him while on a visit to Olej in the Lubrik system 
and was immediately captivated by his volatile, impulsive nature, and they 
have traveled together ever since. Whither Mayfly goeth, thither go I: That is 
the pledge of the mask. So do I trudge along now from world to world with them, 
and therefore my winsome, sly, capricious Velimyle, whose psychosensitive 
paintings are sought by the connoisseurs of a hundred worlds but who belongs 
to me alone, has willy-nilly become the fourth member of our inseparable 
quartet.

Some people find relay-sweep transport unlikable and even frightening, but I 
have never minded it. What is most bothersome, I suppose, is that no starship 
is involved: You travel unprotected by any sort of tangible container, a mere 
plummeting parcel falling in frightful solitude through the interstices of the 
continuum. A journey-helmet is all that covers you, and some flimsy folds of 
coppery mesh. You set up your coordinates, you activate your beacon, and you 
stand and wait, you stand and wait, until the probing beam of some far-off 
sweep-station intersects your position and catches you and lifts you and carries 
you away. If you've done things right, your baggage will be picked up and transported 
at the same time. Most of the time that is so.

It is a stark and unluxurious mode of travel. The relay field wraps you in cocooning 
bands of force and shoots you off through one auxiliary space and another, kicking 
you through any convenient opening in the space-time lattice that presents itself, 
and while you wait to be delivered to your destination, you drift like a bauble afloat 
in an infinite sea, helpless, utterly alone, bereft of all power to override the sweep. 
Your metabolic processes are suspended, but the activity of your consciousness is not, 
so that your unsleeping mind ticks on and on in the most maddening way and there is 
nothing you can do to quiet its clamor. It is as though you must scratch your itching 
nose and your hands are tied behind your back. Eventually-you have no idea whether it 
has been an hour, a month, a century--you are plunked unceremoniously down into a 
relay station at the planet of your choice, and there you are. Relay-sweep transport 
is ever so much more efficient than any system requiring vast vessels to plow the 
seas of space from world to world; but all the same it is a disquieting and somewhat 
degrading way to get around.

So now we depart. May  fly is the first to be captured by the sweep-beam. Perhaps 
half an hour later Nikomastir disappears, and then, almost immediately after, Velimyle. 
My own turn does not arrive for many long hours, which leaves me fidgeting gloomily in 
that golden meadow, wondering when, if ever, I win be taken, and whether some disjunction 
in our routes will separate me forever from my three companions. There is that risk-not
so much that we would fail to arrive on Sidri Akrak at all, but that we might get there 
many years apart. I find that a melancholy thought indeed. More than that: It is terrifying.

But finally the dazzling radiance of the sweep aura engulfs me and hurls me out into the 
Great Dark, and off I go, moving freely across hundreds of fight-years with nothing but 
an invisible sphere of force to protect me against the phantoms of the auxiliary spaces 
through which I fall.

I hang in total stasis in a realm of utter blackness for what feels like a thousand 
centuries, an infinity of empty space at my elbow, as I go my zigzag way through 
the wormholes of the adjacent continuua.

Within that terrible passivity my hyperactive mind ponders, as it all too often does, 
the deep questions of life--issues of honor, duty, justice, responsibility, the meaning 
of existence, subjects about which I have managed to learn nothing at all, basically, 
either in this life or the four that preceded it. I arrive at many profound conclusions 
during the course of my journey, but they fly away from me as fast as I construct them.

I begin to think the trip will never end, that I will be one of those few unfortunate 
travelers, the one out of a billion who is caught in some shunt malfunction and is left 
to dangle in the middle of nowhere for all eternity, or at least for the ten or twenty 
thousand real-time years it will take for his metabolically suspended body to die. Has 
this actually ever happened to anyone? There are only rumors, unfounded reports. But 
there comes a time in every sweep-jump when I am convinced that it has happened to me.

Then I see a glare of crimson and violet and azure and green, and my mask-sister Mayfly's
voice purrs in my ear, saying, "Welcome to Sidri Akrak, darling, welcome, welcome, welcome!"

Nikomastir stands beside her. A moment later Velimyle materializes in a haze of color. The 
four of us have made a nearly simultaneous arrival, across who knows how many hundreds of 
light-years. We definitely do lead charmed lives, we four.

EVERYONE KNOWS about Sidri Akrak. The place was settled at least a thousand years ago, and 
yet it still has the feel of a frontier world. Only the main streets of the half-dozen big 
cities are paved; all the rest are mere blue dirt that turn into rivers of mud during the 
rainy season. The houses are ramshackle, slovenly, things, lopsided and drafty, arrayed 
in higgledypiggledy fashion as though they had been set down at random by their builders 
without any regard for logic or order. After all this time the planet is mostly jungle, 
a jungle that doesn't merely encroach on the settlements but comes right up into them. 
Wild animals of the most repellent sorts are permitted to rampage everywhere, wandering
about as they please.

The Akrakikans simply don't care. They pretend the animals--monstrous, appalling-aren't there. 
The people of Sidri Akrak are a soulless, bloodless bunch in the main, altogether indifferent 
to such things as comfort and beauty and proper sanitation. Primitive squalor is what they 
prefer, and if you don't care for it, well, you're quite free to visit some other world.

"Why, exactly, did we come here?" I ask.

It is a rhetorical question. I know perfectly well why: Because Nikomastir, clueless about our 
next destination, had opened a void that Mayfly had mischievously filled with one of the most
unappealing suggestions possible,  just to see what Nikomastir would do with it, and Nikomastir 
had as usual given the matter about a thousandth of a second of careful consideration before
blithely leaping headlong into the abyss, thereby taking the rest of us with him, as he has 
done so often before.

But Nikomastir has already rearranged the facts in what passes for his mind.

"I absolutely had to come here," he says. "It's a place I've always felt the need to see. My daddy 
was born on Sidri Akrak, you know. This is my ancestral world."

We know better than to challenge Nikomastir when he says things like that. What sense is there in 
arguing with him? He'll only defend himself by topping one whopper with another twice as wild, 
budding such a towering edifice of spur- of-the-moment fantasy that he'll end up claiming to be 
the greatgrandson of the Fourteenth Emperor, or perhaps the reincarnation of Julius Caesar.

Velimyle whispers at my side, "We'll just stay here two or three days and then we'll move along."

I nod. We all indulge Nikomastir in his whims, but only up to a point.

The sky of Sidri Akrak is a sort of dirty brown, broken by greasy, sullen green clouds. The sunlight 
is greenish too, pallid, tinged with undertones of dull gray. There is a sweet, overripe, mildly 
sickening flavor to the warm, clinging air, and its humidity is so intense that it is difficult to 
distinguish it from light rain. We have landed within some city, apparently -- in a grassy open space 
that anywhere else might have been called a park, but which here seems merely to be a patch of land no 
one had bothered to use for anything, vaguely square and a couple of hundred meters across. To our left
is an irregular row of bedraggled two-story wooden shacks; on our right is a dense clump of ungainly, 
asymmetrical trees; before and behind us are ragged aggregations of unpainted buildings and scruffy, 
unattractive shrubbery.

"Look," says Mayfly, pointing, and we have our first encounter with the famous wildlife of Sidri Akrak.

An ugly creature comes bounding toward us out of the trees: a bulky round-bodied thing, dark and furry, 
that rises to a disconcerting height atop two scrawny, hairless legs covered with bright yellow scales. 
Its face is something out of your worst dreams, bulging fiery eyes the size of saucers and dangling red 
wattles and jutting black fangs, and it is moving very quickly in our direction, howling ferociously.

We have weapons, of course. But it swiftly becomes apparent that the thing has no interest in us, that 
in fact it is fleeing an even more ghastly thing, a long bristle-covered, many-legged monster built 
close to the ground, from whose spherical head emerge three long hornlike projections that branch and 
branch again, terminating in scores of writhing tendrils that are surely equipped with venomous stingers. 
First one vile creature and then the other runs past us without seeming to notice us, and they lose 
themselves in the shrubbery beyond. We can hear wild shrieking and hissing in there, and the sound of 
cracking branches.

Nikomastir is smiling benignly. All this must be delightful him. Mayfly too looks entranced. Even Velimyle, 
who is closest to me in temperament, almost normal in her desires and amusements, claps her hands together 
in fascination. I alone seem to be troubled by the sight of such creatures running about unhindered on what
is supposedly a civilized world.

But it is ever thus in our travels: I am fated always to stand a little to one side as I follow these 
three around the universe. Yet am I linked irrevocably to them all the same. 

Mayfly was my lover once, two lives back. That was before we took the mask 
together. Now, of course, it would be unthinkable for anything carnal to 
happen between us, though I still cherish cheerful memories of her pixy 
breasts in my hands, her slim, sleek thighs about my hips. Even if we have 
forsworn the sexual part of our friendship, the rest is deeper than ever, 
and in truth we are still profoundly a couple, Mayfly and I, despite the 
rich and rewarding relationship I maintain with Velimyle and the frothy, 
sportive one Mayfly has built with Nikomastir. Above and beyond all that, 
there is also the bond that links us all. The lines of attraction go this 
way and that. We are inseparables. They are my world; I am a citizen only 
of our little group. Wherever we go, we go together. Even unto Sidri Akrak.

IN A LITTLE WHILE, two immigration officers show up to check us out. 
Sidri Akrak is an Imperium world, and therefore the local immigration 
scanners have been automatically alerted to our arrival.

They come riding up in a sputtering little snub-nosed vehicle, a man and 
a woman in baggy brown uniforms, and begin asking us questions. Nikomastir 
does most of the answering. His charm is irresistible even to an Akrakikan.

The questioning, brusque and hard-edged, is done in Imperial, but from time 
to time the immigration officers exchange comments with each other in their 
own dialect, which sounds Eke static. The woman is swarthy and squat and 
flat-faced and the man is even less lovely, and they are not at all obliging; 
they seem to regard the arrival of tourists on their planet simply as an 
irritating intrusion. The discussion goes on and on-do we plan to remain here 
long, are we financially solvent, do we intend to engage in political activity 
in the course of our stay? Nikomastir meets every query with glib, easy 
reassurances. During our interrogation a slimy rain begins to fall, oily pink 
stuff that coats us like grease, and a massive, many-humped, blue-green beast 
that looks like an ambulatory hill with purple eyes appears and goes lolloping
thunderously past us with utter unconcern for our presence, leaving an odor 
of decay and corruption in its wake. After a time I stop listening to the 
discussion. But finally they flash bright lights in our faces -- passports are 
validated retinally on Sidri Akrak-and Nikomastir announces that we have been 
granted six-month visas. Lodgings are available three streets away, they tell 
us.

The place they have sent us to turns out to be a dismal, rickety hovel, and 
our innkeeper is no more friendly than the immigration officials, but we are 
grudgingly allowed to rent the entire upper floor. The rooms I am to share 
with Velimyle face the rear garden, a patch of uncouth, tangled wilderness 
where some slow-moving shaggy monster is sluggishly browsing about, nibbling 
on the shrubbery. It lifts its head in my direction and gives me a cold glare, 
as though to warn me away from the plants on which it's feeding. I signal it 
that it has nothing to worry about and turn away from the window. As I unpack,
I see a procession of glassy-shelled snaillike things with huge bulbous red 
eyes crawling diagonally across the bedroom wall. They, too, stare back at 
me. They seem almost to be smirking at me.

But Nikomastir and Mayfly claim to be delighted to be here, and Velimyle 
seems to have no complaints. I feel outnumbered by them. Velimyle announces 
that she would like to do a painting of Nikomastir in the hotel garden. She 
only paints when she's in a buoyant mood. Buoyant, here? They run off together 
downstairs, hand in hand like happy children. I watch from above as Velimyle 
sets up her easel outside and goes about the task of priming the 
psychosensitive surface of her canvas. She and Nikomastir are as untroubled 
as any Akrakikan by the shambling shaggy thing that grazes noisily nearby. 
How quickly they have acclimated.

"Are you very miserable here, darling?" Mayfly asks, running her fingertips 
lightly along my cheeks.

I give her a stoic smile. "I'll be all right. We'll find things to amuse us, 
I'm sure. It's all for the best that Nikomastir brought us to this place."

"You don't mean that, do you? Not really."

"Not really, no."

Yet in some sense I do. I often tell myself that it's important not to live 
as though life is just a perpetual holiday for us, even though in fact it is. 
It would be too easy to lose ourselves, if we aren't careful, in the nightmare
that is perfection.

This is an era when all things are possible. We have godlike existences. We 
have every imaginable comfort close at hand. Beauty and long life are ours 
for the asking; we are spa-red the whole dreary business of sagging flesh 
and spreading waistlines and blurry eyesight and graying hair and hardening 
arteries that afflicted our remote ancestors. And all the incredible richness 
of the galaxy lies open to us: Key in your coordinates, snap your fingers, 
off you go, any world you choose to visit instantly available. Never in the 
history of the universe has any species lived such a life as ours.

I fear the terrible ease of this existence. I think sometimes that we'll 
eventually be asked to pay a great price for it. That thought engulfs me 
in secret terror.

Mayfly, who knows me almost as well as I know myself, says, "Think of it 
this way, love. There's something to be learned even from ugliness. Isn't 
it true that what we're trying to get out of all this travel is experience 
that has meaning? If that's what we want, we can't just limit ourselves to 
the beautiful places. And maybe a horrid place like Sidri Akrak has something 
important to teach us."

Yes. She's right. Is she aware that she's voicing my own most private thoughts, 
or is she just being playful? Perhaps it' all self-delusion, but I do indeed 
seek for meaning as we travel, or at least think that I do. These furtive 
broodings in which I indulge inside the hidden places of my soul are, so it 
seems to me, the thing that sets me apart from Nikomastir and Mayfly and 
Velimyle, who take life as it comes and ask no questions.

Velimyle and Nikomastir return from the garden a little while later. She puts 
the rolled canvas away without showing it to me. She has an uncharacteristically 
somber expression on her face, and even giddy Nikomastir seems troubled. Plainly 
something has gone awry.

I know better than to ask for details.

We eat at our hotel that night. The surly innkeeper slams the dishes down 
before us almost angrily: a thin, greenish gruel some sort of stewed shredded 
meat, a mess of overcooked vegetables. The meat tastes like cooked twine and 
the vegetables have a dank, swampy flavor. I pretend we are back on Iriarte, 
where food is the highest art and every meal is a symphony. I pretend we have 
returned to Nabomba Zom, to that wondrous palatial hotel by the shore of the 
scarlet sea, the water, of which at dawn would reverberate as if struck by a 
hammer as the first blue rays of morning fell upon it.

But no, no, we are on Sidri Akrak. I lie sleepless through the night with 
Velimyle breathing gently beside me, listening to the fierce honkings and 
roarings and screechings of the wild beasts that roam the darkness beyond 
our windows. Now and again the sounds of the lovemaking of Mayfly and 
Nikomastir come through the thin walls that separate our bedroom from theirs, 
giggles and gasps and long, indrawn sighs of pleasure.

In the morning we go out exploring.

This city, we have learned, is called Periandros Andifang. It has a population 
of just under one hundred thousand, with not a single building of the slightest 
architectural distinction and a year-round climate of clamminess and drizzle. 
The plant life is, generally, speaking, strikingly unsightly-a preponderance 
of gray leaves, black flowers-and the air is full of clouds of little stinging 
midges with malevolent purple beaks, and of course one has to deal with the 
fauna, too, the fiend's gallery of grisly monstrosities, seemingly, no two 
alike, that greet you at every turn: huge beasts with beady eyes and slavering 
fangs and clacking claws, things with pockmarked, pustulant skins or writhing,
furry tentacles or clutching, many-jointed arms. Almost always they appear without 
warning, galloping out of some clump of uttering banshee shrieks or ground-shaking 
roars. I begin to understand now the tales of unwary travelers who have total 
mental breakdowns within an hour of their arrival on Sidri Akrak.

It quickly becomes clear to us, though, that none of these horrendous creatures 
has any Interest in attacking us. The only, real risk we run is that of 
getting trampled as they go charging past. Very likely it is the case that 
they find human flesh unpalatable, or indigestible, or downright poisonous. 
But encountering them is an unnerving business, and we encounter them again 
and again and again.

Nikomastir finds it all fascinating. Painstakingly he searches out the 
ill-favored, the misshapen, the feculent, the repulsive -- not that they 
are hard to find. He drifts ecstatically from one eyesore of a building to 
the next, taking an infinite number of pictures. He adores the plants' sooty, 
foul-smelling blossoms and sticky, blighted-looking leaves. The rampaging 
animals give him even greater pleasure; whenever some particularly immense or 
especially abhorrent-looking loathsomeness happens to cross our path, he cries 
out in boyish glee.

This starts to be very irritating. His callow idiocy is making me feel old.

"Remember, sweet, he's not even seventy yet," Mayfly reminds me, seeing my 
brows furrowing. "Surely you were like that yourself, once upon a time."

"Was I? I'd like to think that isn't so."

"And in any case," says Velimyle, "can't you manage to find that enthusiasm of 
his charming?"

No. I can't. Perhaps it's getting to be time for my next rebirth, I think. 
Growing old, for us, isn't a matter so much of bodily decay--that is fended 
off by efficient processes of automatic bioenergetic correction -- as of 
increasing inward rigidity, a creakiness of the soul, a corrugation of 
the psyche, a stiffening of the spiritual synapses. One starts to feel sour 
and petty and crabbed. Life loses its joy and its juice. By then you begin to
become aware that it is time to clamber once more into the crystal tank where 
an intricate spiderweb of machinery will enfold you like a loving mother, and 
slip off into sweet oblivion for a while, and awaken to find yourself young 
again and ready to over. Which you can do over and over again, until eventually
you arrive at the annoying point, after the eleventh or twelfth rebirth, where the 
buildup of solar poisons in your system has at last become ineradicable under 
any circumstances, and that is the end of you, alas. Even gods have to die 
eventually, it would seem.

Nikomastir is a young god, and I am, evidently, an aging one. I try to make 
allowances for that. But I find myself fervently hoping all the same, that he 
will tire of this awful place very soon and allow us to go onward to some 
happier world.

HE DOES NOT tire of it, though.

He loves it. He is in the grip of what some ancient poet once called the 
fascination of the abomination. He has gone up and down every street of 
the city, peering at this building and that one in unstinting admiration 
of their imperfections. For several days running, he makes it clear that 
he is searching for some building in particular, and then he finds it: 
a rambling old ruin of great size and formidable ugliness at the very 
edge of town, standing apart from everything else in a sort of private park.

"Here it is!" he cries. "The ancestral mansion! The house where my father was born!"

So Nikomastir still clings to the claim that he is of Akrakikan descent. There 
is no way this can be true; the natives of this world are a chilly, bloodless 
folk with mean, pinched, hard souls, if they have souls at all and not just 
some clicking, chattering robotic mechanisms inside their skulls. Indeed, I 
have known robots with personalities far more appealing than anyone we have 
met thus far on Sidri Akrak. Nikomastir, bless him, is nothing at all like 
that. He may be silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but he also is 
sweet-natured and lively and amiable and vivacious, terms that have never 
yet been applied to any citizen of Sidri Akrak, and never will be.

Velimyle has tried to paint him again. Again the attempt was a failure. This 
time she is so distressed that I dare to breach the wall of privacy behind 
which she keeps her art and ask her what the difficulty is.

"Look," she says.

She unrolls the second canvas. Against the familiar swirling colors of a 
typical Velimyle background I see the slender, angular form of Nikomastir, 
imprinted there by the force of Velimyle's mental rapport with the 
psychosensitive fabric. But the features are all wrong. Nikomastir's 
perpetual easy smile has given way to a dreadful, scowling grimace. 
His lip curls backward menacingly; his teeth are the teeth of some predatory 
beast. And his eyes--oh, Velimyle, those harsh, glaring eyes! Where is his 
cheerful sparkle? These eyes are hard, narrow, fierce, and above all else sad. 
The Nikomastir of Velimyle's painting stares out at the universe with tragic 
intensity. They are the eyes of a god, perhaps, but of a dying god, one who 
knows he must give up his life for the redemption of his race.

"The first one was almost as bad," Velimyle says. "Why is this happening? 
This isn't Nikomastir at all. I've never had something like this happen."

"Has he seen either of the paintings?"

"I wouldn't let him. All I told him was that they didn't come out right, that 
they would depress him if I showed them to him. And of course he didn't want 
to see them after that."

"Something about this planet must be shading your perceptions," I say. "Burn 
this, Velimyle. And the other one, too. And forget about painting him until 
we've left here."

Nikomastir wants to have a look inside the crumbling, lurching pile that he 
say's is his family's ancestral home. But the place, ruinous though it is, 
happens to be occupied by Akrakikans, a whole swarm of them, and when he 
knocks at the front door and grandly introduces himself to the majordomo of 
the house as Count Nikomastir of Sembiran, who has come here on a sentimental 
Journey to his former paternal estate, the door is closed in his face without 
a word. "How impolite," Nikomastir says, not seeming very surprised. "But don't 
worry: I'll find a way of getting in."

That project gets tabled, too. Over the next few days he leads us farther and 
farther afield, well out into the uninhabited countryside beyond the boundaries 
of Periandros Andifang. The land out here is swampy and uningratiating, and of 
course there are the animals to contend with, and the insects, and the humidity. 
I can tell that Mayfly and Velimyle are growing a little weary of Nikomastir's 
exuberance, but they both are as tolerant of his whims as ever and follow him 
loyally through these soggy realms. As do I -- partly, I suppose, because we 
agreed long ago that we would journey everywhere as a single unit, and partly 
because I have been stung, evidently, by various hints of Mayfly's and Velimyle's 
that my recent crochetiness could mean I might be getting ready for my next rebirth.

Then he turns his attention once more to the old house that he imagines once belonged 
to his family. "My father once told me that there's a pool of fire behind it, 
a phosphorescent lake. He used to swim it when he was a boy, and he'd come up 
dripping with coot flame. I'm going to take a swim in it too, and then we can 
head off to the next planet. Whose turn is it to pick our next planet, anyway?"

"Mine," I say quickly. I have Marajo in mind-the sparkling sands, the City of 
Seven Pyramids. "If there's a lake behind that house, Nikomastir, I advise you 
very earnestly to stay away from it. The people who live there don't seem to 
look favorably on trespassers. Besides, can't you imagine the kind of nastinesses 
that would live in a lake on this world?"

"My father went swimming in that one," Nikomastir replies, and gives me a defiant 
glare. "It's perfectly safe, I assure you."

I doubt, of course, that any such lake exists. If it's there, though, I hope he 
isn't fool enough to go swimming in it. My affection for the boy is real; I don't 
want him to come to harm.

But I let the matter drop. I've already said too much. The surest way to prod him 
into trouble, I know, is to oppose him in one of his capricious fancies. My hope 
is that Nikomastir's attention will be diverted elsewhere in the next day or two 
and all thought of that dismal house, and of the fiery lake that may or may not 
be behind it, will fly out of his mind.

It's generally a good idea, when visiting a world you know very little about, 
to keep out of places of unknown chemical properties. When we toured Megalo 
Kastro, we stood at the edge of a cliff looking down into the famous living 
sea, that pink custardy mass that is in fact a single living organism of 
gigantic size, spreading across thousands of kilometers of that world. But it 
did not occur to us to take a swim in that sea, for we understood that in a 
matter of hours it would dissolve and digest us if we did.

And when we were on Xamur we went to see the Idradin crater, as everyone who 
goes to Xamur does. Xamur is the most perfect of worlds, flawless and serene, 
a paradise, air Eke perfume and water like wine, every tree in the ideal place, 
every brook, every hill. It has only one blemish-the ldradin, a huge round pit 
that reaches deep into the planet's primordial heart. It is a hideous place, 
that crater. Concentric rings of jagged cooled lava surround it, black and 
eroded and bleak Stinking gases rise out of the depths, and yellow clouds 
of sulfuric miasma belch forth, and wild red shafts of roaring flame, and 
you peer down from the edge into a roiling den of hot, surging magma. 
Everyone who goes to Xamur must visit the ldradin, for if you did not see 
perfect Xamur's one terrible flaw, you could never be happy on any other 
world. And so we stared into it from above, and shivered with the horror 
we were expected to feel; but we were never at all tempted to clamber down 
the crater's sides and dip our toes into that realm of fire below.

It seems unlikely to me that Nikomastir will do anything so stupid here. 
But I have to be careful not to prod him in the wrong direction. I don't 
mention the lake to him again.

OUR EXPLORATION of Sidri Akrak proceeds. We visit new swamps, new groves of 
fetid-smelling, malproportioned trees, new neighborhoods of misshapen and 
graceless buildings. One drizzly, disheartening day succeeds another, and 
finally I am unable to bear the sight of that brown sky and greenish sun 
any longer. Though it is a violation of our agreement, I stay behind at 
the hotel one morning and let the other three go off without me.

It is a quiet time. I spend the hours reflecting on our travels of years past, 
all the many worlds we have seen. Icy Mulano of the two suns, one yellow, one 
bloody red, and billions of ghostly electric life-forms glimmering about you in 
the frigid air. Estrilidis, where the cats have two tails and the insects have 
eyes Eke blue diamonds. Zimbalou, the sunless nomad world, where the cities are 
buried deep below the frozen surface. Kalimaka, Haj Qaldun, Vietoris, Nabomba Zom-

So many places, so many sights. A lifetime of wonderful experiences; and yet 
what, I ask myself, has it all meant? How has it shaped me? What have I learned?

I have no answers, only to say that we will continue to go onward, ever onward. 
It is our life. It is what we do. We are travelers by choice, but also by nature, 
by destiny.

I am still lost in reverie when I hear Velimyle's voice outside my window, 
calling to me, telling me that I must come quickly. "Nikomastir---" she cries. 
"Nikomastir!"

"What about him?"

But she can only gesture and wave. Her eyes are wild. We run together through 
the muddy streets, paying no heed to the bulky and grotesque Akrakikan monstrosities 
that occasionally intersect our path. I realize after a time that Velimyle is 
leading me toward the tumbledown house at the edge of town that Nikomastir has 
claimed as his family's former home. A narrow, grassy path leads around one 
side of it to the rear; and there, to my amazement, I see the phosphorescent 
lake of Nikomastir's fantasies, with Mayfly beside it, leaping up and down in 
agitation that verges on frenzy.

She points toward the water. "Out there-- there--" On this ugly world, even a 
phosphorescent lake can somehow manage to be an unlovely sight. I saw one once 
on Darma Barma that flashed like heavenly fire in rippling waves of cobalt and 
amethyst, magenta and gold, aquamarine and emerald and jade. But from this lake 
emanates the most unradiant of radiances, a dull, prosaic, sickly gleam, 
dark-toned and dispiriting, except in one place off toward the farther shore, 
where a disturbance of some sort is setting up whirlpools of glinting metallic 
effects, swirls of eye-jabbing bright sparkles, as though handfuls of iron 
filings are being thrown through a magnetic field.

The disturbance is Nikomastir. He-- his body, rather-- is tossing and heaving 
at the lake's surface, and all about him the denizens of the lake can be seen, 
narrow scaly jutting heads popping up by the dozens, hinged jaws snapping, 
sharp teeth closing on flesh. A widening pool of blood surrounds him. They,
whatever they are, are ripping him to shreds.

"We have to get him out of there," Mayfly says, her voice congested with 
horror and fear.

"How?" I ask.

"I told him not to do it," says trembling Velimyle. "I told him, I told him, 
I told him. But he plunged right in, and when he was halfway across they 
began to break the surface, and then-- then he began screaming, and--"

Mayfly plucks urgently at my sleeve. "What can we do? How can we rescue him?"

"He's beyond rescuing," I tell her hollowly.

"But if we can get his body back," she says, "there'll be a way to revive him, 
won't there? I know there is. Scientists can do anything nowadays." Velimyle, 
more tentatively, agrees. Some kind of scientific miracle, Nikomastir gathered 
up and repaired somehow by the regeneration of tissue--

But tissue is all that's left of him now, frayed sorry scraps, and the creatures 
of the lake, frantic now with blood lust, are devouring even those in furious 
haste.

They want me to tell them that Nikomastir isn't really dead. But he is: really, 
really, really dead. Dead forever. What has been played out on this shore today 
was not a game. There is nothing that can be saved, no way to regenerate. I 
have never seen the death of a human being before. It is a dizzying thing to 
contemplate: the finality, the utterness. My mind is whirling-, I have to fight 
back convulsions of shock and horror.

"Couldn't you have stopped him?" I ask angrily, when I am able to speak again.

"But he wanted so badly to do it," Mayfly replies. "We couldn't have stopped him, 
you know. Not even if we--"

She halts in mid-sentence.

"Not even if you had wanted to?" I say. "Is that it?" Neither of them can meet 
my furious gaze. "But you didn't want to, did you? You thought it would be fun 
to see Nikomastir swim across the phosphorescent lake. Fun. Am I right? Yes. I 
know I am. What could you have been thinking, Mayfly? Velimyle?"

There is no sign of Nikomastir at the surface any longer. The lake is growing still 
again. Its phosphorescence has subsided to a somber, tarnished glow.

For a long time, none of us is capable of moving. Silent, pale, stunned, we 
stand with bowed heads by the shore of that frightful lake, scarcely even able 
to breathe.

We are in the presence of incontrovertible and permanent death, which to us 
is a novelty far greater even than the living sea of Megalo Kastro or the blue 
dawn of Nabomba Zom, and the immense fact of it holds us rooted to the spot. 
Was this truly Nikomastir's ancestral world? Was his father actually born in 
that great old falling-down house, and did he really once swim in this deadly 
lake? And if none of that was so, how did Nikomastir know the lake was there? 
We will never be able to answer those questions. Whatever we do not know about
Nikomastir, that we have not already learned, we will never come to discover 
now. That is the meaning of death: the finality of it, the severing of 
communication, the awful unanswerable power of the uncompromising curtain 
that descends like a wall of steel. We did not come to Sidri Akrak to learn 
about such things, but that is what we have learned on Sidri Akrak, and we 
will take it with us wherever we go henceforth, pondering it, examining it.

"Come," I say to Mayfly and Velimyle, after a time. "We need to get away from 
here."

SO, THEN. Nikomastir was foolish. He was bold. He has had his swim, and now he 
is dead. And why? Why? For what? What was he seeking on this awful world? What 
were we? We know what we found, yes, but not what we were looking for. I wonder 
if we will ever know.

He has lived his only life, has Nikomastir, and he has lost it in the pursuit 
of idle pleasure. There is a lesson in that, for me, for Velimyle, for Mayfly,
for us all. And one day I will, I hope, understand what it is.

All I do know after having lived these hundreds of years is that the universe 
is very large and we are quite small. We live godlike lives these days, 
flitting as we do from world to world, but even so we are not gods. We die: 
some sooner, some later, but we do die. Only gods live forever. Nikomastir 
hardly lived at all.

So be it. We have learned what we have learned from Nikomastir's death, and 
now we must move on. We are travelers by nature and destiny, and we will go 
forward into our lives. Tomorrow we leave for Marajo. The shining sands, 
the City of Seven Pyramids. Marajo will teach us something, as Xamur once 
did, and Nabomba Zom, and Galgala. And also Sidri Akrak. Something. 
Something. Something.  

                           *******