ARIA, in the transparent cylinder, sinking down through the blue, like a leaf, settling gently to the earth a hundred feet away.
She crawled out and stood looking across the field of grass at him, a strange, smile on her face.
Thorus leaped from his ship and ran toward her. He ran silently. She held out her hands and he grasped them tenderly, as he would grasp the hands of a child. And all he could say was, "Aria. Aria."
"Thorus," she said, and there was courage and joy in her voice. "We've come back."
They stared into each other's eyes for a long moment and then they were close, and they held to each other and swayed.
"Do you know what's happened?" she said.
"Yes. You came back through hyper-space while I came back through the atoms." His voice was quiet. "Oh, Lord. Oh good and strange Lord. We forgot that one of the great men twenty thousand years ago, proved that space was curved."
"Yes." She stood away from him now, yet held to his hand. "We couldn't escape from our place in life or ourselves or the good and the evil that we have done. We came back to our earth and now we must do what we have left undone."
There was much to be done.