The Star Kings

Chapter XXVIII. Star-Rover's Return

GORDON awoke slowly. His head was aching, and he had an unnerving feeling of strangeness. He stirred, and then opened his eyes.

He was lying in a familiar room, a familiar bed. This was his little New York apartment, a dark room that now seemed small and crowded.

Shakily, he snapped on a lamp and stumbled out of bed. He faced the tall mirror across the room.

He was John Gordon again. John Gordon's strong, stocky figure and tanned face looked back at him instead of the aquiline features and tall form of Zarth Arn.

Gordon felt a sudden dazing wonder that shook him to the depths of his being.

“Was it all a dream? Could it all have been only dream born in my mind?”

He shook that thought from him. He knew better. Strange and eerie as it all had been, it was no dream.

He stumbled to the window and looked out on the starlit buildings and blinking lights of New York. How small, cramped, ancient, the city looked now, when his mind was still full of the mighty splendors of Throon.

Tears blurred his eyes as he looked up at the starry sky. Orion Nebula was but a misty star pendant from that constellation-giant's belt. Ursa Minor reared toward the pole. Low above the roof-tops blinked the white eye of Deneb.

He could not even see Canopus, down below the horizon. But his thoughts flashed out to it, across the abysses of space and time to the fairy towers of Throon.

“Lianna! Lianna!” he whispered, tears running down his face.

Slowly, as the night hours passed, Gordon nerved himself for the ordeal that the rest of his life must be.

Irrevocable abysses of time and space separated him forever from the one woman he had ever loved. He could not forget, he would never forget. But he must live his life as it remained to him.

He went the next morning to the big insurance company that employed him. He remembered, as he entered, that he had last left it weeks before, afire with the thrill of possible adventure.

The manager who was Gordon's superior met him with surprise on his face.

“Gordon, you feel well enough now to come back to work? I'm glad.”

Gordon had to speak carefully. He still did not know all that had happened to Zarth Arn in his body, during these weeks.

“Yes, I think I'd like to get back to work,” he said slowly.

“Doctor Willis will have to okay you first, of course,” said the other. “But he said when you left the hospital that it shouldn't take too long for you to recover completely.”

Gordon remembered Willis, the company's head physician, who rose with a welcoming smile on his face when he entered.

“Gordon, how are you feeling? Has your amnesia all left you?”

Gordon nodded. “It has. I can remember my past perfectly now.”

He gathered quickly that Zarth Arn's ignorance of this world and time had caused him to be placed in a mental hospital for a short time, and that Willis had treated him there for amnesia.

“I'm mighty glad,” Willis was saying. “I was afraid for a time that you'd end up like that woman in the hospital-room next to yours-you remember, the woman named Ruth Allen who'd lost her mind from shock and lay in permanent coma.”

“I'm all right now, doctor,” Gordon repeated steadily. “And I'd like to get back to work.”

Work was all that kept Gordon from despair, in the next days. He plunged into it as one might take a drug or drink. It kept him, for a little of the time, from remembering.

But at night, he remembered. He lay sleepless, looking out his window at the bright stars that to his mind's eyes were always mighty suns. And always, Lianna's face drifted before his eyes.

His superior commended him warmly, after a few days. “Gordon, I was afraid your trouble might have slowed you down. But you keep on like this, and you'll be an assistant-manager some day.”

Gordon could have shouted with crazy laughter, the suggestion seemed so fantastic. He might be an assistant-manager?

He, who as prince of the Empire's royal house had feasted with the star-kings at Throon? He, who had captained the hosts of the Kingdoms in the last great fight off Deneb? He, who had unloosed destruction on the Cloud and had riven space itself?

But he did not laugh. He said quietly. “That would be a fine position for me, sir.”

And then on an evening two weeks after his return as he sat sick with heartache in his rooms, there came a knock on his door.

Gordon was surprised when he found outside it a woman he had never seen before, a pale, dark-haired lovely woman who looked at him with strange shyness.

“My name is Ruth Allen,” she began hesitantly, her eyes not leaving his face.

“Ruth Allen?” he repeated surprisedly. He had heard the name somewhere before.

Then he remembered. This was the woman Willis had mentioned, whose mind had been lost by shock and who had been lying in permanent coma in the same hospital where Zarth Arn had been confined.

“Why, I thought that they said you would never recover-” Gordon began.

Then his voice trailed off as he stared frozenly into the woman's pale, beautiful face.

Somehow it was as though that face had become transparent, as though through its features and through the dark eyes he saw another face, other eyes, another woman.

It was mad, it was insane. But not for his, life could Gordon repress the hoarse cry that broke from his lips as he held out his hands toward the woman.

“Lianna.”

SHE stumbled forward, her arms went around his neck, her head was buried against his cheek as she sobbed.

“John Gordon. You recognized me, even in this body I-I knew you would!”

“Lianna, am I dreaming?” Gordon choked. “It can't be you, here in this time.”

“But it is!” she cried. Tear-glistening eyes looked up into his face-eyes that were different but that were Lianna's eyes.

“Zarth Arn did it, John Gordon!” she was crying. “He told me the whole story when he came back to Throon. Told me how it was you, in his body, whom I really loved.

“And when I told him that I still loved you, the real you, and always would, then Zarth Arn with his apparatus sent me back to your time as I begged. He had known of the woman here whose body was healthy but whose mind was lost forever. He sent me back into her body, so that I could come to you.”

Gordon was stunned, overwhelmed. “Good God, Lianna, you can't do this. Your own body-”

She smiled up at him-Lianna's smile. “The body of the Princess Lianna of Fomalhaut will lie forever in coma in a vault in Throon. What are differences of body to us who each love the real other?”

“I can't let you do it,” he said wildly. “You've got to go back!”

Her old imperiousness flashed. “I am here to stay, and I will not let you say any more about it.”

Tears came to his eyes, as he gathered her more tightly in his arms and pressed his cheek against her soft hair.

“Lianna. Lianna.”

Later, sitting by his window as twilight deepened to night, she told him of Zarth Arn's return to Throon, of his amazement and shaken gratitude when he learned of what Gordon had done in his body.

“He wept when he told me of it, John Gordon. He could not speak, when he learned how you had fought for the Empire.”

She looked up at the starry heavens. “They are there now at faraway Throon, Zarth and his Murn, Jhal Arn and Zora, all of them. What are time and space but distances?”

Gordon voiced the one doubt that still troubled his deep happiness.

“But Lianna, in that other age you were princess of a star-kingdom. This old Earth may seem dull and half-barbaric to you.”

She smiled up at him. “No, John Gordon. It is your world and mine, now. And it seems a quaint and quiet world for lovers, after the wars and intrigues of the star-worlds I knew.”

Gordon made no further protest. He was too content to sit with her in his arms, looking out across the lights of New York at the blaze of the galaxy across the sky.

He had sought adventure but he had found far more. Across two hundred thousand years he had found and won a bride, a daughter of distant suns, a princess of the star-kingdoms yet to be.