The girl had always been called Taya.She propped her elbows on the sill below the window and rested her chin in her hands while she stared out at the stars. Her eyes, wide with a nine-year-old's wonder, mirrored a million jewels spilling endlessly across black infinity, and carpets of glowing nebulas painted by brushes softer than the yellow hair framing her face.
It was a pretty face, with clear skin and an upturned nose, and a mouth that could push itself out into a pout when she frowned, or pull itself back into dimples when she smiled. She was wearing just a simple dress of pale blue, which tightened as she leaned forward across the sill, outlining the curves just beginning to form on her body. And as she gazed out at the stars, she wriggled her toes in the soft pile covering the floor, and she wondered....
She wondered why everything she could see beyond the window that looked out of Merkon was so different from the things inside. That was one of the things she often wondered about. She liked wondering things ... such as why the stars never changed, as they should have if Merkon was really moving the way Kort said it was. Kort said it was moving toward a particular star that he called Vaxis. He had pointed it out to her in the sky, and shown it to her on the star pictures that they could make on the screens--as if there were something special about it. But it always looked the same as all the other stars to her.
Kort said that Merkon had always been moving toward Vaxis. But if that were true, why didn't Vaxis ever get any bigger? Outside the rooms in which Taya lived was a long corridor that led to the place where capsules ran in one of the tubes connecting to other parts of Merkon. When Taya walked along the corridor, the far end of it would at first be smaller than her thumb; but as she carried on walking it would grow, until by the time she got there it was bigger even than Kort. Kort said that Vaxis didn't seem to get any bigger because it was much farther away than the end of the corridor. But he also said that Merkon had been moving for years and years--longer than Taya could remember--and that it was moving even faster than the capsules did through the tubes. How could anything be so far away that it never got any bigger?
Kort didn't know why Merkon was moving toward Vaxis, which was strange because Kort knew everything. He just said that was the way things had always been, just as there had always been stars outside. When Taya asked him why there were stars outside, he always talked about gas clouds, gravitation, densities, and other "machine things" that had nothing to do with what she meant. She didn't want to know how the stars came to be out there, but why anything should be out there at all--or for that matter, why there should be an "out there" in the first place for anything to be in. Kort just didn't seem to share her kind of curiosity about things.
"We know what we mean, don't we, Rassie," Taya said aloud, turning her head toward the doll sitting on the sill, staring outward to share her contemplation of the universe. "Kort knows so many things.... But there are some things you just can't make him understand."
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