tower and the sun tower. She saw no one. No one else rode this
early in the day in the pasture part of the world.

"I'm up here, Trina."

She looked up then and saw him, hovering some thirty feet off the ground
in the ridiculous windmill-like craft he and his people used when they
visited the world.

"Oh, hello, Max." No wonder she had known the voice. Max Cramer, down
from space, down to the world, to see her. She knew, even before he
dropped his craft onto the grass beside her, that he had come to see
her. He couldn't have been on the world for more than the hour she'd
been riding.

"You're visiting us early this year, Max. It's not festival time for
three months yet."

"I know." He cut the power to the windmill blades, and they slowed,
becoming sharply visible. The horse snorted and backed away. Max smiled.
"This world is very--attractive."

His eyes caught hers, held them. She smiled back, wishing for the
hundredth time since last summer's festival that he were one of her
people, or at least a worldling, and not a man with the too white skin
of space.

"It may be attractive," she said. "But you always leave it soon enough."

He nodded. "It's too confining. It's all right, for a little while, but
then...."

"How can you say that?" She shook her head sadly. Already they were
arguing the same old unresolvable argument, and they had scarcely
greeted each other. After all his months in space they met with the same
words as they had parted. She looked past him, up and out, toward the
horizon that seemed so many miles away, toward the morning sun that
seemed to hang far, far off in the vaulted blue dome of the sky.

"How can you even think it? About this?"

His lips tightened. "About _this_," he repeated. "A horizon you could
ride to in five minutes. A world you could ride around in two hours. A
sun--you really call it a sun--that you could almost reach up and pluck
out of that sky of yours." He laughed. "Illusions. World of illusions."

"Well, what do you have? A ship--a tiny ship you can't get out of, with
walls you can see, all around you."

"Yes, Trina, with walls we can see."

He was still smiling, watching her, and she knew that he desired her.
And she desired him. But not the stars.

"You have nothing like this," she said, knowing it wouldn't do any good.
She looked past him at the light tower, one of the many that formed the
protective screen about her world, that made it seem great and convex,