Part 2

The burst of recitative which his remark provoked, disconcerted him for a moment. He had heard many languages in his day, but he had never heard one with such a violent intonation or such guttural syllables. Isolde, he concluded, must come from a world he had never touched upon in all his travels--a world remote from the ordinary pathways of man. And he was right, too, though in a way he did not dream.

At this point, a dull explosion sounded in the courtyard without, followed by another. Instantly alert, Swenson ran to the entrance--saw the six men who had accompanied him, lying stunned on the flagstones. Even as he looked, a horde of "fireheads" streamed out of the forest, long knives glittering. The quartering was accomplished in a matter of seconds.

Sickened, Swenson ran back into the temple. There was a wide aperture in the rear wall, and the better part of valor, he knew, would be to forget the white goddess, whom the natives would not harm anyway, and gain the forest. The Idwandanans' possession of stun grenades unmistakably indicated that they had taken the _Malaita_, but perhaps he could eke out an existence till another ship came. In any event, burdening himself with a woman, however robust she might be, would be detrimental to his success.

Thus he reasoned, but thus he did not act. When the first Idwandanans gained the temple, Bruggil's Bride was gone.

* * * * *

The heavy underbrush fought their footsteps, and Swenson had to keep a constant drag on Isolde's arm, else she would not have accompanied him at all. The shouts of their pursuers grew louder by the second. When they came to a river, he plunged into it unhesitatingly, pulling Isolde after him. She could not swim, of course, but he was an expert, and in a matter of minutes they were in midstream. If he had known that for all her "breathing", she could not drown, their progress would have been more rapid. Even so, they had nearly reached the opposite bank when the first of the Idwandanans emerged from the forest. By the time dugouts were brought up so that the chase could be resumed (the Idwandanans could not swim), Swenson had scrambled up the bank and pulled Isolde out of sight into the underbrush.

He ran straight ahead for about half a mile, clasping Isolde's hand in his, urging her along beside him. Then he turned at right angles and ran for another half mile. Finally he headed back for the river, swam across with Isolde, and plunged into the forest again. He halted for a moment to get his breath, then went on. As nearly as he could figure out, his course of action had been the one they would have least expected him to take, and the fact that no further sounds of pursuit reached his ears indicated that he was right. Unless the Idwandanans were better trackers than he thought they were, he and Isolde now had a good chance of eluding them altogether.

They spent the night in a small clearing deep in the forest, sleeping upon the ground. Swenson was exhausted and he took it for granted that Isolde was too. In the middle of the night he awoke and was surprised at how cold it was. Isolde lay motionless a few feet from him, starlight pale on her flaxen hair. He sat up, took off his coat and covered her arms and shoulders. He was startled to see that her blue eyes were open, and for a moment he had the impression that she had not slept at all. She looked up at him, as though trying to understand his presence, or perhaps his actions. Swenson did an unprecedented thing for him: he found her hand and pressed it in his. "Everything's going to be all right," he whispered, and lay down on the ground beside her and fell back to sleep.

In the morning they went on. Swenson was famished, but dared not eat any of the berries and fruits they came across occasionally. Isolde ignored them completely. In the afternoon they came to a large grassy clearing, and Swenson was astonished to see a New Deal chapel sitting in the middle of it. Beside the chapel stood a small but staunch spaceship. By squinting his eyes, he was able to make out its name: the NRA.

He could hardly contain his excitement, and started running across the clearing, Isolde at his side. But Skonsdoggugil, remembering Bruggil's Bride's connection with the ship, had gambled that she and her captor would show up in its vicinity sooner or later, and his warriors were ready and waiting in the New Deal chapel. They came pouring out as soon as Swenson and Isolde reached the base of the ship, and charged, waving their razor-edged blades.

Swenson started Isolde up the ladder, then turned and drew his knife-ray. He cut furiously, and "fireheads" fell like flies. But one of them managed to get through, and when Swenson finally ascended the ladder, he was minus a forearm.

Half fainting, he activated the lock, which the Idwandanans had accidentally closed and had been unable to reopen, and pulled Isolde inside. At the forest's edge Skonsdoggugil was mustering another contingent of warriors. Swenson pulled Isolde into the ship proper, secured the outer and inner locks. With her help, he got a tourniquet on the stump of his arm. Everything was swimming before his eyes by then, but he managed to gain the control room and strap Isolde and himself onto the two acceleration couches. He had one chance, and one chance only: to reach civilization before he bled to death. Hastily he calculated the co-ordinates of the nearest civilized planet, and fed them into the automatic pilot. He activated the pilot just before he blacked out.

It was his haste that was his undoing. The planet he had wanted was Delta Bootis 11, and the NRA should have snapped out of transphotic within orbiting distance in less than three objective days. On the fourth day, however, they were still in f.t.l. drive.

Swenson knew by then that he was dying. What he did not know was that Isolde was dying, too. Constant usage had depleted her batteries long before their guarantee was due to run out, and there was very little life left in them. But she showed no signs of her approaching demise, preparing his meals in the galley each day and bringing them to the control room where he still lay upon the acceleration couch. She even fed him as he grew weaker, and once he roused briefly from a long stupor to find her darning his socks.

Co-ordinates, once fed into an automatic pilot, could not be cancelled; but automatic pilots were so constructed that whenever they received non-planetary co-ordinates, they altered them to the co-ordinates of the inhabitable planet which most closely corresponded to them. The NRA, therefore, could not end up in planetless space.

As the days passed, Swenson began wondering what kind of a world they were approaching, and whether he would ever see it or not. On the sixth day, his questions were answered when the NRA emerged from transphotic in the midst of a multiple sun system, near a gray and foreboding sphere. He pretended as long as he could that there was life on it, but when the a.p. put the ship into orbit, he could pretend no longer. Inhabitable did not always mean inhabited, and those cold gray seas and barren continents drifting past the viewport had been dead for ages. Whoever had lived on this world had long since absconded to a warmer, less hostile, milieu.

The a.p. brought them down to a gentle landing on a rocky coast near one of the seas. It was night, but in the heavens the mother sun's three distant sisters blazed in blue and beautiful splendor, drenching the sea and the land, filtering through the viewport and filling the control room with cold, unwavering light. In its radiance, Isolde's face lost all of the sycophancy the converter had superimposed upon it and became once more the classic face of the Irish-German heroine it was meant to represent.

Looking at her, Swenson knew true beauty for the first and last time in his life. He tried to sit up on the couch, sank back. The blue light faded, and red light took its place. Gradually, that faded too, and lightlessness tiptoed around him on silent feet.

Isolde knelt beside him, looked down into his tired face. Slowly, she got up, and left the room. She touched the button that opened the locks and stepped out upon the little platform Newell once had used for a pulpit. She looked up at the stars.

Perhaps it was the expression that had come over Swenson's face just before he died; perhaps it was the way he lay upon the couch. Perhaps it was the kindnesses he had shown her, and the light that had come into his eyes whenever she had brought him food, or held his hand, or darned his socks. Perhaps it was the sound of the surf upon the forlorn shore. Perhaps it was all of these things....

* * * * *

Tristan lies dead now, in his castle by the sea. Brangane has made her revelation. King Marke has cried out in anguish and despair. "_Todt denn Alles--Alles todt!_"

Isolde presses her hands together on her breast. She drops them slowly to her sides. The blue radiance of the distant suns has transformed her coarse garment of hides into a robe fit for the princess that she is. Her face, in her vast sorrow, has attained new pinnacles of beauty--

"_Tristan!_" The magnificent Flagstad voice rises into the radiance of the blue suns.

Slowly, brokenly, Isolde begins the _Liebestod_--

"_So might we die as ne'er to part...._"

She hears the orchestra take up the themes of bliss, of parting; of transfiguration. She blends her voice into the music. The poignant colonnades of sound rise higher and ever higher into the stars, and when the climax is reached on a heart-rending surge of sound, the blue suns tremble in the sky.

Slowly, Isolde turns and re-enters the ship. She sinks down upon Tristan's breast, just as the little armature in her heart makes one final revolution and lies still. In the background of her fading brain, the music returns briefly to the themes of her magic and of her yearnings, dies gently away....

The curtain falls.