In the 'nineties of the last century, when Takatori Kaichi was taking classes at the College of Education in Luna City, Duo Maxwell was the only other person in the world who recognized him as a hero.

    The two men parted one day in the long, barren shuttleport in the Sea of Serenity and never saw each other again, yet their curious relationship persisted for the rest of their long lives.

    When Duo, who had started the classes before Kaichi but spaced them out far more widely, graduated, Kaichi wrote him from Montreal. The Japanese man, doubtless because of the gravity of the occasion, forbore to give more than a hint of his own doings. Even so, they seemed to have a slightly romantic and worldly flavor to someone accustomed, as Duo was, to reading between the lines of his friend's sparse reports.

    But when Duo wrote a couple of years later to the home address listed for Takatori Kaichi on L3, saying that he, after a period of odd jobs doing anything and everything, at last had found employment at the Paul Kircher Elementary School on the same colony where he had been living prior to the Dekim Incident ("why blame it on Mari-chan? She'll have problems enough without having that name chasing her all her life"), he received a longer and more enlightening letter in return a month or two afterwards.

    In his own note Duo had half-nervously mentioned his approaching marriage.

    "Hilde and I have decided to make a go of it," he had written, his energetic printing and flippant vocabulary betraying nothing of the tremendous emotional upheaval of his heart.

    "You remember her, don't you -- snuck onto Libra and nearly got herself killed, the idiot. Don't suppose you're related? Too bad you kept missing her the few times she visited at college (insert obligatory blech -- I can't imagine why YOU were there). One more reason why I'll probably spend the rest of my life here on the dark side of the moon, I guess. If you're ever in the neighborhood, be sure and drop by, there'll always be a couch or a clear spot of floor for you if you need it; Hilde will make sure of that, and will probably volunteer to whack me upside the head with a skillet if I forget to call you Kaichi (I just can't get used to thinking of you by that name, even if it is more technically yours than the other, and you certainly have reasons not to use the other anymore; guess first impressions linger. Well, maybe not for you, which is just as well, considering)."

    Kaichi's letter arrived when the Maxwells had settled down in their salvage yard at the tail end of one of the smaller colonies in the L2 cluster and as far from the world as if they had joined the terraforming project on Mars.

    "Of course I remember Hilde," he wrote, "and I expect you will give her my best wishes, as I give them to you. I admire your courage. To be honest, the idea of marriage terrifies me. You will understand why, especially with what I am doing now. I can't tell you that much about it -- not a good idea.

    "You will probably be surprised to know that not only have I been living in Berlin for the past six months and will be off to Belgrade in a day or so, I have been impressing one set of people as a quiet, well-spoken person and another set entirely as a dashing young man -- I have bettered my impersonation of you considerably. How did you explain away that presentation on the nature of war I tried to give for my oral introduction? I have also found that you are correct about the influence of one's reading material on one's writing and speaking style.

    "When I was in Germany, the task I was engaged in demanded that I should become for the time being a baker in the employ of a certain rather interesting restaurant-owner. When I wasn't doing that, I put on your gregariousness and Relena's manners and mingled with the sort of society that capitalizes itself.

    "I met Ria in the house of a certain Marschallin and sat out numerous dances with her -- Relena is a little like her, and so are you in a different sort of way, only there is something more. I do not know the words for it. Just when I was wondering if she were getting detrimental to the mission, her fiance, a stiff sort of captain who tries to imitate Lady Anne and misses all the good things, had the idea of following me home when I left the ball given in honor of Dorothy Catalonia -- she was over for the conference, and I did not see the point of unobtrusively avoiding her any longer. Fortunately, when he walked into the bakehouse and found me up to my elbows in dough, he seemed to think that that ended it; apparently the sort of people who bake are not supposed to come to that sort of party, unless Relena is giving it. Some of the elite, whatever that means, have been criticizing her for it, but I think that if anyone wants to go to that sort of party they should be allowed to. Except for Ria, you would not have liked it. I don't see how Relena does.

    "And that was the end of that. For a while I was perturbed, but I came to realize my fortunate escape. I think Satsuki, the program wizard, may have helped, but you are not that interested in the things that can be done with interfaces so I won't tell you about that."

    Mrs. Maxwell read the letter after her husband and choked at it.

    "Are you sure it's him and not a pod person?" she asked.

    "Well, he's obviously been reading the Good Stuff," her husband said with the mild obstinacy that reared up when prodded. "He probably didn't mean the last part the way you took it -- have I mentioned, love, that you have an incurably dirty mind?"

    "You didn't seem to mind last -- "

    "That's because I'm ME, hon. The same one, the only, the incredible frood whom Hii -- Kaichi's been imitating for the past six months; wear a mask long enough and your face starts molding to it. Besides, his new job seems to be a horizon-broadening one. He was an extraordinary guy, and remains so, it seems. A guy like Kaichi was destined to have adventures. We mustn't let ourselves get narrow, out here. According to Aoike, Fleming and Oppenheim, a man in one of the Secret Services has demands made upon him which are much greater than those put upon Muggles like me. Kaichi developing a certain worldliness is to be expected, and certainly not before time."

    "Muggles?" Hilde looked at her husband sharply, and her blue eyes were hurt and dubious. "I thought this was going to be our great adventure, Duo?"

    Duo swept aside the collective homework for the entire Paul Kircher third grade which littered his desk and took his wife in his arms, nuzzling her temple as the closest available bit of her.

    "I was speaking loosely, love," he said. "For me this life of ours is a tremendous adventure, the only one I'll ever really need now."

    And then because he was an honest man, albeit a tactful one, he added under his breath:

    "But there's no way in hell I'm ever going to be Hiiro Yui."

    Duo replied to Kaichi's letter in due course. He sent it to the old L3 address and marked it "Please forward." He wrote very simply, trying to keep any disloyal note of envy out of his sprawling paragraphs.

    "Kaichi, or whatever," he wrote, "I enjoyed your letter. It brought a dash of color into this quiet neighborhood. I hardly know what to tell you in return. My cat has built herself a nest like a starling twenty feet up on one of the colonial heating units, and it took three of us -- LaShondra, who takes care of what used to be my share of the salvage yard; Stan, who teaches English at the high school; and me -- to get her and her family to safety. There we were, risking our necks and trembling with conscious heroism, while my wife supervised from below and cursed her not being able to be both there and up with us at the same time in five different languages. This is the kind of excitement we get out here.

    "However, everything is relative.

    "Hilde and I don't get much company these days, which is perhaps just as well just now."

    Duo hesitated for a long time over this final sentence, his discretion fighting with his great pride and the secret emotional triumph which was consuming him. In the end he left it as it was, remembering that this was one of Hilde's sensitive spots.

    Kaichi's reply arrived nearly two years later.

    "I am in Montreal," he wrote on the thin foreign paper whose crackling sheets brought the very stuff of romance into the well-worn Maxwell family room.

    "Something unexpected happened. I met Ria again. She is now calling herself Myriad and is the wife of a man who seems to be becoming important in North American politics. Apparently the thing with the German officer and the bakery put a stop to her projected marriage with the stiff young Guardee (if that is the right term) and I was a little apprehensive at first because I had already heard most of the story.

    "However, she said it was all right and thanked me for what I'd done. What did I do? I like being around her. I danced with her at the Russian embassy last night and could not help noticing that most of the men in the room were looking at us as if I were a detachment of troops in the way of the current objective.

    "Her husband is clever but too old for her. He looks like most of the politicians I have seen, well-groomed for the cameras but all out of jars and bottles when you look closely. I saw him glance at her once or twice last night and the pattern seems disturbing.

    "Later. RN3824, LaGrange Point 3.

    "I put away this note meaning to finish it later, but a number of things happened. You know more about this sort of thing than I do -- I hope I did it right. You may have worked out that I saw Myriad a lot since the dance I mentioned, and one day she told me the whole story of her awful marriage. (I do not quite see why girls seem to want to hand me all their problems. Do I look as if I can handle them? I am glad I did not have some of Relena's problems, because I cannot see how she managed.)

    "The man was not a credit to the human race. I would have helped her run away, but she had some family obligations, so I had to go about digging up some dirt to send to the proper authorities so he could be de-fanged -- Myriad has a way with picturesque terms. However, he should not have detected what I was doing, so I do not know why her husband acted the way he did.

    "He insulted me in a public place in front of the sort of people who insisted that I fight a duel with him. I didn't want to break cover, so I did. What a ridiculous thing.

    "I was going to shoot him in the torso so that he would be hospitalized and I could get on with it, but it seems that the shock of being shot gave him a stroke, and he managed to die on the spot.

    "The whole thing was hushed up as much as possible, but I had to leave the country before embarrassing questions could be asked and my superiors were not pleased with my report.

    "They have now decided to send me to L4 and see if I can recoup matters there. I have heard nothing from Myriad and can get no word from her. If you can manage to write to such a plodding destructive self-willed bastard, write to the Summerhawk Textbook Project at this address and they will forward all letters."

    Duo raised his eyebrows at the mention of one of his school's newest and more prolific text suppliers, but he reread the letter several times, for it really was just like Kaichi.

    He wrote back the following spring when he was happier.

    "We have a son," he stated baldly in the midst of a spate of cheerful meanderings about his work, the persistant irregularity of the weather machines, and his neighbors. "I have called him Reinhardt Hiiro Maxwell. Reinhardt for Hilde's father, and Hiiro for you and not the other one, because we probably would have had to answer questions if we'd called him Kaichi and you wouldn't like that. Our first baby, also a son, died six hours after birth."

    It was the shortest paragraph of the letter and told nothing of the intense emotional drama of that mercifully far-off night when he had paced to and fro in the small hospital room for hours, braid slapping the wall every time he turned around, fingernails raking his arms as he listened to the hushed voices and low, heartrending sounds at the other end of the room.

    On that occasion the doctors and nurses had huddled between him and his wife until the grey morning had come, bringing bitterness and disillusion and despair with it.

    For a considerable time there was no reply from Hiiro-Kaichi, but one day a round lumpy parcel arrived containing a slightly worn but very well-crafted teddy bear, and with a card bearing the inscription "For Hiiro the Third, hopefully appropriate."

    There was also a brief note for Duo:

    "Relena and I have been passing the enclosed back and forth, through the Textbook Project cover address, until Chantal, a talented linguist of ours, has remarked that it must be stuffed with fruitcake. (This is apparently funny, because the entire department laughed.) I do not think it is, but if so, you can probably eat the fruitcake and restuff it with hair or something. If fruitcake is edible. You will know."

    After his muscles had stopped spasming, Duo wrote a suitable letter of thanks and set the toy in his son's room to be given into the boy's possession as soon as he was old enough for it, where it remained, an object of adoration, for over thirty years, only needing to be restuffed twice before it was given into the care of Reinhardt's own son.

    From these beginnings the correspondence continued a leisurely course down the years. Duo's letters remained cheerful, warmhearted chronicles of a quiet, useful life unstirred by any remarkable occurence. In his hands even the remarkable Weather Scandal, which began with a murder-suicide and ended with a round of convictions and the appointment of a new Meteorological Director, became a balanced, brief account of a long nuisance finally put right.

    And that much more personal disaster, the death of Stan, the English teacher, in the VO7465 Shell Breach while visiting family, which ended a deep friendship and saddened the warmth of the nearby red-brick high school forever for one of its feeder elementaries' third-grade teachers, was never mentioned at all.

    Kaichi, on the other hand, went on reporting his colorful experiences in language that could not hide their vibrancy. As the years went on he became a legendary figure, to both the Maxwell family and Mr. Maxwell's students.

    Myriad, too, became a heroine. Her daughter Miri turned up in Hegemony Mars and was miraculously saved from death by the intercession of her mother and the influence of Kaichi himself. His youth and vigor were perennial.

    The last letter from Kaichi to reach L2 arrived ten years later. It had all the old fire, if also some of the old stiff attempted floridness of style which the writer had never bothered to correct.

    "I am not seriously hurt," he wrote happily, "not even what you would call seriously, so you are not to get excited. I am writing this in the shuttle coming home from Tokyo.

    "My travels this time have taken me to Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Anchorage, where I think I can truthfully say I did useful work -- although my Portland experience was not satisfactory, and it worries me. Still, I reached everywhere I needed to and will leave for Helium in a week or two. I may no longer be able to push myself as far as I used to, but I can still make it count where it needs to.

    "I visited Victoria on my way out and stayed with Myriad in her summer house for a few days. I had forgotten how much better she makes me feel. Even at sixty-five she is still like a breath of fresh air, or the scent of fresh-cut grass, or the color of primroses -- you will be able to describe it better than I can, even now. And although I do not approve of the greasy-haired young sprats who visit her in her widowhood (her third husband the Conde da Cristamonte died two years ago, as I may have told you) and write 'terribly clever' verse about the Marimeian government -- the only one worth remembering called her 'Sulla come again, with a gentler hand,' and even so you know better than I do how far that misses the mark -- I found her a refreshing companion. Lots of cheer. Lots of youth.

    "She was kind enough to say that she still thought of me as a young man, and I think it is true.

    "When I left her I felt dissatisfied with my life for some reason. Maybe I should have settled down. I have lived, and I do not have much to show for it. Only my memories -- and then again, they are usually enough for me; you yourself know what it is to remember a job well done. You said that you have kept my letters, and they are not so bad a thing to leave behind -- certainly I prefer the memories I have written there to the memories I had when I was fifteen.

    "I don't really need a fortune, and I certainly don't need honors. It might have been nice to have had a companion for my old age, but -- I have a few friends, even if I have lost touch with some of them (such as Relena, or the Winners), and I have kept communication with you all this time. I said I had lived. I have, you know."

    Three months after this, and before Duo had found time to answer, an electronic message arrived from L3.

    "Takatori Kaichi is sinking," it said briefly. "We would greatly appreciate it if you could come." And it was signed "Myriad."

    The news struck a note of flat calamity, such as had not been sounded at the salvage yard or Paul Kircher Elementary School (and the schools it fed into) for many years. The hero was dying. It was the end of an era, the passing of Romance.

    As Duo stood helplessly by, watching Hilde pack his necessities, he found that he was reacting to the emergency in an unusual way. Kaichi's dying affected him as his living had done. Duo had not been to L3 for twenty years, and never to RN3824, and he contemplated the journey now with excitement.

    Nor was this the cold, blank sense of loss that Stan's death had brought. Kaichi's death was high tragedy: two friends parted for a lifetime, but still friends and united at a deathbed. It was poignant, almost exhilarating in its call to a part of him he had put aside with his Gundam and thought buried.

    As Hilde fastened the suitcase and gestured for him to pick up the heavy thing her eyes were shining.

    "I'm glad she went to him," she said.

    "Ah, Myriad," said Duo softly and shook his head.

    All through the long confusing journey, with its changes of shuttle and its long curving path around the Earth, he thought of Kaichi and he was ashamed of being so old. Any two years of Kaichi's memories would fill a column; his own life would barely manage one chapter for the age of eighteen and beyond.

    It was well into nocturnal schedule period when he arrived at the small "suburban" shuttleport, and the grim-faced boy who'd met him explained that there was very little time. After a ride that most non-Maxwells would have called terrifying, he climbed out onto a cement sidewalk and walked up two shallow steps to a faded grey door, which stood open.

    As he stood hesitating a light came on at the end of the front hall and a middle-aged woman came forward, fingers leaving the light switch.

    "Mr. Maxwell?" she said in a calm, respectful voice with the hint of an L3 drawl in it. "Will you come in here, please, sir?"

    He followed her into a dusty study and she turned on a table lamp. Her hair was a little lighter than his had once been and caught in a loose ponytail down her back, and her manner was grave and yet tinged with the consciousness of an inner joy which no outer grief could entirely subsume.

    "I didn't like to tell you at the door, sir," she said, "but Takatori-sensei's gone. He dropped off an hour ago."

    Duo nodded. It seemed he had expected the news. Yet he was conscious of a sense of deep disappointment. Kaichi was gone. The dramatic reunion was not to be. The woman (nurse? friend?) insisted on taking him upstairs to the big overcrowded bedroom where computers and medical equipment beseiged a narrow hospital bed.

    The old woman who sat beside it nodded respectfully as they entered and the younger one glanced respectfully at Duo.

    "This is my mother, Chantal Lawson," she said. "We've looked after sensei and the Project for years."

    Duo was puzzled.

    "I only knew Kaichi," he said. "I never knew this... project?"

    "The Summerhawk Textbook Project," Mrs. Lawson said placidly. "My husband would help put the text in such a way that it explained how to get to where you were going, whenever he had time left over from his teaching; sometimes I wished he'd spend more time on the Project, as it certainly gave better value. I translate the books into different languages, and Takatori-sensei was pretty much the rest of it."

    "Takatori-sensei's been a recluse all his life," her daughter added. "I don't think he's been outside of the house these twenty years -- not that he'd have been up to much if he had, poor old man. We took the liberty of sending for you, sir, because you were the only person he ever wrote to. He was a wonderful, quiet, thoughtful old man -- I don't think he'd been really well since before I was born, and more and more of his systems just... wore out over the last few years, so it was just as well that he could throw himself into writing those textbooks."

    Duo stood very still.

    "Kaichi... wrote the textbooks for the Summerhawk Textbook Project?" he inquired unsteadily. "How many of them?"

    Mrs. Lawson and her daughter blinked at him.

    "All of them," the older woman said. "Of course, as I said, my husband helped -- poor Takatori-sensei was never very good at the explaining part of teaching. It was a lifesaver to us when he met us in Montreal; he was starting to show the first signs of his -- he called it 'the expected result of overclocking,' and I gather it wasn't an illness or something one could treat; if he hadn't said once that the two of you were the same age, Mr. Maxwell, I'd never have believed it -- and told us that he wanted to write some textbooks, preferably in the colonies, and would pay someone to coauthor. My husband had always wanted to come back here, but even put together we couldn't afford it... we jumped at the offer."

    "Dad would be here, but he's gotten around the retirement age by volunteering to teach night school classes," the middle-aged woman added. "He was always more interested in the project than Takatori-sensei was -- sensei sat down and wrote them regularly, but it always seemed as if his thoughts were far away, whatever he was doing, except sometimes when he was talking to me."

    Duo had been looking at a photograph of a little girl with her arms full of wriggling puppy, and a great inspiration came to him.

    "You're Myriad, aren't you?" he said to the woman. "Is that you?"

    "Yes and no," she said, lips quirking. "The picture is of my Aunt Myriad, and I'm named for her; only I'm Miri and she was Ria. That's the last picture Dad had of her before she was killed."

    "Killed?"

    "Back before the wars, in, um... 192, 193, something like that. Dad's family lived on L1, and in with all the brouhaha before the war actually started, somebody blew up a nearby military base and some of the pieces came down smack on Dad's house. If he hadn't been at school on Earth at the time, he'd have been wiped out with the rest of his family." She picked up the photograph thoughtfully, turning it over and over in her hands. "Takatori-sensei would have been nearer her age than Dad's, and I had the impression he'd known her... Would you like to see sensei's face, sir? He was a very old man."

    "No," said Duo suddenly. "No. I'd rather think of him as I remember him."

    The women nodded at his very natural request.

    Hilde came to meet Duo at the shuttleport.

    "What a tragedy, missing him after all," she said. "Still, I'm really glad you went, hon. Did you see Myriad?"

    To the best of his knowledge Duo had never told a direct lie in his life, but truth is a graceful mistress, capable of many disguises.

    "Yes," he said softly. "I saw her. Only for a moment. She went away almost as soon as I recognized her."

    "What was she like?"

    Hilde's old eyes were bright and childlike in her excitement.

    Duo put his thin arm round her, gray braid hanging near snow-white feathery cap.

    "A creature of romance," he said, "but not the type who could ever have satisfied me."