Tended with devotion, Earth life had spread widely across the estancia in the years of their absence. Again, after millennia, Nansen and Dayan rode out over a plain where grass rippled and groves rustled beneath the summer wind, light streamed long from a westering sun to lay gold over the green, and wild creatures ran and wild wings soared.

For a span they galloped, rejoicing in the surge of muscles between their thighs, flying manes, drumming hoofs, sweet horse odor mingled with smells of soil and growth. When they reined in, buildings were lost to sight. Alone within the horizon, under the enormous arch of sky, the riders continued at a walk. Saddle leather creaked.

"Freedom!" Nansen said.

Dayan glanced at him. "Freedom?" she asked.

A trifle abashed, because he didn't like dramatics and this had been an outburst, he explained, "To live our lives as we want."

Her brows lifted slightly. "Why, we've always had that, you and I." With a look aloft: "Maybe more than anybody else ever did."

"Not lately. I didn't think you enjoyed it much, either."

"M-m, true, I hadn't known how many duties being famous and celebrated involves. But the crowds meant terribly well." She grinned. "And we — you especially — put it to use."

"Not very efficient use on my part, I fear. Ceremonies and speeches and having hundreds introduced to me — not my kind of work."

His mood had lowered. He was dissatisfied with his address to the parliament and people of Harbor. Pieces of it came back to nag at him.

". . . Our first starships are ready, ships better than any known before, thanks to the union of human technology with the new knowledge brought from afar. The Fleetwing folk are here, ready to counsel, instruct, be officers aboard. More Kith will join with us as we meet with them, on this planet and others. But it will no longer be only they who go starfaring. Henceforward, all can who have the strength, the skill, and the wish. . . .

"From Fleetwing we have learned of two worlds where humans can make homes. Many more certainly exist, but these are a beginning for whoever has cherished the dream. . . . The planetary engineering systems that we are building will make settlement easy where once it was hard, and possible where once it was impossible. . . . Given capabilities like these, and the capital investment that the Venture League is prepared to make, starfaring will become profitable — not marginally, not for a few, but for everyone. Therefore it will go on, growing of itself.

". . . the revelations, the inspirations we will gain from other races than ours.... We will awaken those who wish to be awakened, to join us among the stars. . . .

". . . millions of years, so many starships flying that they weave universe and substrate together, making existence eternally sure. . . . What we have learned about communication across time suggests that the cosmos may have evolved us in order that we shall at last save it. Can this be true? It is imaginable....

"For us today, enough: that we are going back to the stars and will never forsake them."

"I didn't like the things I said," he confessed, "nor the way I did."

"What was wrong?" Dayan inquired. "I thought your talk went fine."

"Too florid."

She nodded. "Not your style. Well, it was written for you."

"I don't care to be a mouthpiece. And I spoke like a poorly programmed machine."

Dayan laughed low. "Rico, Rico. You had a job to do, you found it distasteful, and now you worry whether you did it right. Tell me, did that speech express your beliefs?"

"Of course. Otherwise I would not have given it."

"No, you wouldn't have. Very well, then, you were being honest. And as for your delivery, I assure you, darling, it didn't matter. You were you, the captain of captains. That was what they wanted and needed."

"But it's wrong," he protested. "I don't deserve that sort of prestige.

Nor do you, querida. We didn't lay the foundation or build the house" — the enduring house of the starfarers. "Wenji, Ajit, Mam, Selim," four comrades grown gray, "and those who worked with them, here on Harbor," diligently, patiently, sometimes fiercely, year by year by year, "while we were gone — they are the ones."

"In a way, yes," Dayan replied. "In another way, no, not entirely. Our mission, humans bound off to save humans, it... embodied everything.

It made people care, through all that time. Ajit's told me he thinks it made the crucial difference."

"But that doesn't make sense!"

Dayan shook her head, smiling. "Oh, Rico, when did anything human make real sense? Our race is crazy. Maybe that's why it's the race that's going to the stars. No, my dear, you'll never get away from being a symbol, a hero."

"Well," he grumbled, "at least you and I will have private lives again."

"Mostly, I trust," she agreed. "And raise lots of little Nansens."

He brightened. "They'll be Dayans, too."

The sun went low and the riders turned back. They had come farther than they noticed, and dusk found them still out on the plain. The sky was violet westward, dark eastward, where the lights of home glimmered remote. Above them the earliest stars were blinking forth.

Dayan murmured something.

Nansen glanced at her shadowy form, close beside him. "What?" he asked.

"Oh, I — I was just looking at those stars," she answered, her voice almost too muted for him to hear. "Some lines came to me. In English  —  um  —  'Have you curbed the Pleiades?' "

He nodded. "Yes. I remember. Job. In Spanish  —  But a traditional English version has stayed with me. . . . 'Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?. . . or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?' What put you in mind of that?"

"I got to thinking. If our children — surely some will — if they travel yonder, we'll lose them forever."

"Perhaps not," he said. "Once we've discovered how to build a holontic time communicator — it'll mean more than the future talking to the past, you know. It'll mean calling across the universe."

"And in that way also making the universe one." She sighed. "A grand vision. You and I won't live to see it, though." Mastering forces so mighty would take many human lifetimes. "Unless we do live on afterward. . . . No, I can't say what the limits are for us. That would be as arrogant as to say there are no limits ever. But —"

She was silent awhile. They rode toward the hearthlights. More stars appeared. The wind had gone cold.

"I only know," she said, "that whatever we may someday become, we will never be God." Suddenly her laugh rang forth. "But we can have fun trying!"