Bliss said, "Loving you, Pel, has its own delight. I look no farther than that."
"But it's not just a matter of you loving me. You aren't merely you. What if Gaia considers it a perversion?"
"If it did, I would know, for I am Gaia. And since I have delight in you, Gaia does. When we make love, all of Gaia shares the sensation to some degree or other. When I say I love you, that means Gaia loves you, although it is only the part that I am that is assigned the immediate role. You seem confused."
"Being an Isolate, Bliss, I don't quite grasp it."
"One can always form an analogy with the body of an Isolate. When you whistle a tune, your entire body, you as an organism, wishes to whistle the tune, but the immediate task of doing so is assigned to your lips, tongue, and lungs. Your right big toe does nothing."
"It might tap to the tune."
"But that is not necessary to the act of whistling. The tapping of the big toe is not the action itself but is a response to the action, and, to be sure, all parts of Gaia might well respond in some small way or other to my emotion, as I respond to theirs."
Pelorat said, "I suppose there's no use feeling embarrassed about this."
"None at all."
"But it does give me a queer sense of responsibility. When I try to make you happy, I find that I must be trying to make every last organism on Gaia happy."
"Every last atom-but you do. You add to the sense of communal joy that I let you share briefly. I suppose your contribution is too small to be easily measurable, but it is there, and knowing it is there should increase your joy."
Pelorat said, "I wish I could be sure that Golan is sufficiently busy with his maneuvering through hyperspace to remain in the pilot-room for quite a while."
"You wish to honeymoon, do you?"
"I do."
"Than get a sheet of paper, write 'Honeymoon Haven' on it, affix it to the outside of the door, and if he wants to enter, that's his problem."
Pelorat did so, and it was during the pleasurable proceedings that followed that the Far Star made the Jump. Neither Pelorat nor Bliss detected the action, nor would they have, had they been paying attention.
10.
IT HAD BEEN ONLY a matter of a few months since Pelorat had met Trevize and had left Terminus for the first time. Until then, for the more than a half-century ** (Galactic Standard) of his life, he had been utterly planet-bound.
In his own mind, he had in those months become an old space dog. He had seen three planets from space: Terminus itself, Sayshell, and Gaia. And on the viewscreen, he now saw a fourth, albeit through a computer-controlled telescopic device. The fourth was Comporellon.
And again, for the fourth time, he was vaguely disappointed. Somehow, he continued to feel that looking down upon a habitable world from space meant seeing an outline of its continents against a surrounding sea; or, if it were a dry world, the outline of its lakes against a surrounding body of land.
It was never so.
If a world was habitable, it had an atmosphere as well as a hydrosphere. And if it had both air and water, it had clouds; and if it had clouds, it had an obscured view. Once again, then, Pelorat found himself looking down on white swirls with an occasional glimpse of pale blue or rusty brown.
He wondered gloomily if anyone could identify a world if a view of it from, say, three hundred thousand kilometers, were cast upon a screen. How does one tell one cloud swirl from another?
Bliss looked at Pelorat with some concern. "What is it, Pel? You seem to be unhappy."
"I find that all planets look alike from space."
Trevize said, "What of that, Janov? So does every shoreline on Terminus, when it is on the horizon, unless you know what you're looking for-a particular mountain peak, or a particular offshore islet of characteristic shape."
"I dare say," said Pelorat, with clear dissatisfaction, "but what do you look for in a mass of shifting clouds? And even if you try, before you can decide, you're likely to be moving into the dark side.
"Look a little more carefully, Janov. If you follow the shape of the clouds, you see that they tend to fall into a pattern that circles the planet and that moves about a center. That center is more or less at one of the poles."
"Which one?" asked Bliss with interest.
"Since, relative to ourselves, the planet is rotating in clockwise fashion, we are looking down, by definition, upon the south pole. Since the center seems to be about fifteen degrees from the terminator-the planet's line of shadow-and the planetary axis is tilted twenty-one degrees to the perpendicular of its plane of revolution, we're either in mid-spring or mid-summer depending on whether the pole is moving away from the terminator or toward it. The computer can calculate its orbit and tell me in short order if I were to ask it. The capital is on the northern side of the equator so it is either in mid-fall or mid-winter."
Pelorat frowned. "You can tell all that?" He looked at the cloud layer as though he thought it would, or should, speak to him now, but, of course, it didn't.
"Not only that," said Trevize, "but if you'll look at the polar regions, you'll see that there are no breaks in the cloud layer as there are away from the poles. Actually, there are breaks, but through the breaks you see ice, so it's a matter of white on white."
"Ah," said Pelorat. "I suppose you expect that at the poles."
"Of habitable planets, certainly. Lifeless planets might be airless or waterless, or might have certain stigmata showing that the clouds are not water or** clouds, or that the ice is not water ice. This planet lacks those stigmata, so we know we are looking at water clouds and water ice.