She looked down again and cried, ‘Quick! Come and see! He’s loose, he’s moved an inch. He’s waddling at breakneck speed. Now he’s got her, and she’s willing.’ After a pause she exclaimed, ‘What a world this pond is! Like the world that you are to plunge into so soon.’
Then she looked up at the fierce star, and the light in her face changed and chilled. She became like your Egyptian Sphinx, which looks across the desert and waits, for something unknown and terrible, but the appointed end.
Suddenly she laughed, sprang to her feet, ran down the rock-edge to the sea, and dived. I followed; and the rest of the morning we spent swimming, either far out in the bay or among the islets and fjords, chasing each other sometimes through submarine rock-arches, or clinging to a sunken tussock of weed to watch some drama of the sea-bottom.
At last, when the sun was high, we returned to the grassy place where we had slept, and took from the pockets of our flying-suits our meal of rich sun-products. Of these, some had been prepared in the photosynthesis stations on Jupiter, others came from the colonies on Uranus; but we ourselves had gathered the delicacies in our own orchards and gardens.
Having eaten, we lay back on the grass and talked of matters great and small.
I challenged her: ‘This has been the best of all our matings.’
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘because the shortest? Because after the richest experience in separation. And perhaps because of the Star.’
‘In spite of all your lovers,’ I exulted, ‘you come back to me. In spite of your tigers, your bulls, and all your lap-dog lovers, where you squander yourself.’
‘Yes, old python, I come back to you, the richer for that squandering. And you in spite of all the primroses and violets and blowsy roses and over-scented lilies that you have plucked and dropped, you come back to me, after your thousand years of roaming.’
‘Again and again I shall come back, if I escape from the Terrestrials, and if the Star permits.’