Nova

Draco, Triton, Hell3, 3172

Katin, long and brilliant, shambled toward Hell3, eyes on the ground, mind on moons aloft.

“You, boy!”

“Huh?”

The unshaven derelict leaned on the fence, clutching the rail with scaly hands.

“Where you from?” The derelict’s eyes were fogged.

“Luna,” Katin said.

“From a little white house on a tree-lined street, with a bicycle in the garage? I had a bicycle.”

“My house was green,” Katin said. “And under an air dome. I had a bicycle, though.”

The derelict swayed by the rail. “You don’t know, boy. You don’t know.”

One must listen to madmen, Katin thought. They are becoming increasingly rare. And remembered to make a note.

“So long ago … so long!” The old man lurched away.

Katin shook his head and started walking again.

He was gawky and absurdly tall; nearly six foot nine. He’d shot to that height at sixteen. Never really believing he was so big, ten years later he still tended to hunch his shoulders. His huge hands were shoved beneath the belt of his shorts. He strode with elbows flapping.

And his mind went back to moons.

Katin, born on the moon, loved moons. He had always lived on moons, save for the time he had convinced his parents, stenographers for the Draco court on Luna, to let him take his university education on Earth at that center of learning for the mysterious and inscrutable West, Harvard, still a haven for the rich, the eccentric, and the brilliant—the last two of which he was.

The changes that vary a planet’s surface, Himalayan heights to gentle, blistering Sahara dunes, he knew only by report. The freezing lichen forests of the Martian polar caps or the raging dust rivers at the red planet’s equator; or Mercurian night versus Mercurian day—these he had experienced only through psychorama travelogs.

These were not what Katin knew, what Katin loved.

Moons?

Moons are small. A moon’s beauty is in variations of sameness, From Harvard, Katin had returned to Luna, and from there gone to Phobos Station where he’d plugged in to a battery of recording units, low-capacity computers, and addressographs—a glorified file clerk. On time off, in tractor suit with polarized lenses, he explored Phobos, while Demos, a bright hunk of rock ten miles wide, swung by the unnervingly close horizon. He finally got up a party to land on Demos and explored the tiny moon as only a worldlet can be explored. Then he transferred to the moons of Jupiter. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto turned beneath his brown eyes. The moons of Saturn, under the diffuse illumination of the rings, rotated before his solitary inspection as he wandered out from the land compounds where he was stationed. He explored the gray craters, the gray mountains, valleys, and canons through days and nights of blinding intensity. Moons are the same?

Had Katin been placed on any of them, and blindfold suddenly removed, petrological structure, crystalline formation, and general topography would have identified it for him immediately. Tall Katin was used to making subtle distinctions in both landscape and character. The passions that come through the diversity of a complete world, or a whole man, he knew—but did not like.

He dealt with this dislike two ways.

For the inner manifestations, he was writing a novel.

A jeweled recorder that his parents had given him when he won his scholarship hung from a chain at his waist. To date it contained some hundred thousand words of notes. He had not begun the first chapter.

For the outer manifestations, he had chosen this isolate life below his educational capacity, not even particularly in keeping with his temperament. He was slowly moving further and further away from the focus of human activity, which for him was still a world called Earth. He had completed his course as a cyborg stud only a month ago. He had arrived on this last moon of Neptune—the last moon in the Solar System—that morning.

His brown hair was silky, unkempt, and long enough to grab in a fight (if you were that tall). His hands, under the belt, kneaded his flat belly. As he reached the walkway, he stopped. Someone was sitting on the railing playing a sensory-syrynx.

Several people had stopped to watch.

Colors sluiced the air with fugal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse’s face. Electric arpeggios of a neo-raga rilled.

Perched on the railing, the Mouse looked between the images, implosions on bright implosion, and at his own brown fingers leaping on the frets, as light from the machine flowed on the backs of his hands. And his fingers fell. Images vaulted from under his palms.

Some two dozen people had gathered. They blinked, they turned their heads. Light from the illusion shook on the roofs of their eye sockets, flowed in the lines about their mouths, filled the ridges furrowing foreheads. One woman rubbed her ear and coughed. One man punched the bottom of his pockets.

Katin looked down over lots of heads.

Somebody was jostling forward. Still playing, the Mouse looked up.

Blind Dan lurched out, stopped, then staggered in the syrynx’s fire.

“Hey, come on, get out of there—“

“Come on, old man, move—“

“We can’t see what the kid’s making—“

In the middle of the Mouse’s creation, Dan swayed, head wagging.

The Mouse laughed; then his brown hand closed over the projection haft, and light and sounds and smells deflated around a single, gorgeous demon who stood before Dan, bleating, grimacing, flapping scaled wings that shifted color with each beat. It yowled like a trumpet, twisted its face to resemble Dan’s own, but with a third eye spinning.

The people began to laugh.

The spectre leaped and squatted to the Mouse’s fingers. Malevolently the gypsy grinned.

Dan staggered forward, one arm flailing through.

Shrieking, the demon turned its back, bent. There was a sound like a flutter valve and the spectators howled at the stink.

Katin, who was leaning on the rail next to the Mouse, felt embarrassment heat his neck.

The demon cavorted.

Then Katin reached down and put his palm over the visual inductance field and the image blurred.

The Mouse looked up sharply. “Hey—“

“You don’t have to do that,” Katin said, his big hand burying the Mouse’s shoulder.

“He’s blind,” the Mouse said. “He can’t hear, he can’t smell—he doesn’t know what’s going on …” Black brows lowered. But he had stopped playing.

Dan stood alone in the center of the crowd, oblivious. Suddenly he shrieked. And shrieked again. The sound clanged in his lungs. People fell back. The Mouse and Katin both looked in the direction Dan’s arm flailed.

In dark blue vest with gold disk, his scar flaming beneath the blaze, Captain Lorq Von Ray left the line of people.

Dan, through his blindness, had recognized him. He turned, staggered from the circle. Pushing a man aside, striking a woman’s shoulder with the side of his hand, he disappeared in the crowd.

Dan gone and the syrynx still, attention shifted to the captain. Von Ray slapped his thigh, making his palm on his black pants crack like a board. “Hold up! Stop yelling!”

The voice was big.

“I’m here to pick out a crew of cyborg studs for a long trip, probably along the inner arm.” So alive, his yellow eyes. The features around the ropy scar, under rust-rough hair, grinned. But it took seconds to name the expression on the distorted mouth and brow. “All right, which one of you wants a hand-hold halfway to the night’s rim? Are you sand-footed, or star steppers? You!” He pointed to the Mouse, still sitting on the rail. “You want to come along?”

The Mouse stepped down. “Me?”

“You and your infernal hurdy-gurdy! If you think you can watch where you’re going, I’d like somebody to juggle the air in front of my eyes and tickle my earlobes. Take the job.”

A grin struck the Mouse’s lips back from his teeth. “Sure,” and the grin went. “I’ll go.” The words came from the young gypsy in an old man’s whisky whisper. “Sure I’ll go, Captain.” The Mouse nodded and his gold earring flashed above the volcanic crevice. Hot wind over the rail struck down hanks of his black hair.

“Do you have a mate you want to make the run with? I need a crew.”

The Mouse, who didn’t particularly like anyone in this port, looked up at the incredibly tall young man who had stopped his harassment of Dan. “What about shorty?” He thumbed at surprised Katin. “Don’t know him, but he’s mate enough.”

“Right then. So I have …” Captain Von Ray narrowed his eyes a moment, appraising Katin’s slump shoulders, narrow chest, high cheeks and weak blue eyes floating behind contact lenses “ …two.” Katin’s ears warmed.

“Who else? What’s the matter? Are you afraid to leave this little well of gravity funneling into that half-pint sun?” He jerked his chin toward the highlighted mountains. “Who’s coming with us where night means forever and morning’s a recollection?”

A man stepped forward. Skin the color of an emperor grape, he was long-headed and full-featured. “I’m for out.” When he spoke, the muscles under his jaw and high on his nappy scalp rolled.

“Have a mate?”

A second man stepped up. His flesh was translucent as soap. His hair was like white wool. It took a moment for the likeness of feature to strike. There were the same sharp cusp lines at the corner of the heavy lips, the same slant below the bell nostrils, the same break far front on the cheekbones: twins. As the second man turned his head, the Mouse saw the blinking pink eyes, veiled with silver.

The albino dropped his broad hand—a sack of knuckles and work-ruined nails cabled to his forearm by thick, livid veins—on his brother’s shoulder. “We run together.”

Their voices, slow with colonial drawl, were identical.

“Anyone else?” Captain Von Ray looked about the crowd.

“You me, Captain, want to take?”

A man pushed forward.

Something flapped on his shoulder.

His yellow hair shook with a wind not from the chasm. Moist wings crinkled, stretched again, like onyx, like isinglass. The man reached up to where black claws made an epaulet on his knotted shoulder and caressed the grappling pads with a spatulate thumb.

“Do you have any other mate than your pet?”

Her small hand in his, she stepped out, following him at the length of their two arms.

Willow bough? Bird’s wing? Wind in spring rushes? The Mouse riffled his sensory store to equal her face in gentleness. And failed.

Her eyes were the color of steel. Small breasts rose beneath the laces of her vest, steady in breath. Then steel glittered as she looked about. (She’s a strong woman, thought Katin, who could perceive such subtleties.)

Captain Von Ray folded his arms. “You two, and the beast on your shoulder?”

“We six pets, Captain, have,” she said.

“As long as they’re broken to ship, fine. But I’ll jettison the first fluttering devil I trip on.”

“Fair, Captain,” the man said. The slanted eyes in his ruddy face crinkled with a smile. With his free hand now he grasped his opposite biceps and slid his fingers down the blond hair that matted each forearm, the back of each knuckle, till he held the woman’s hand in both of his. They were the couple who had played cards in the bar, the Mouse realized. “When you us aboard want?”

“An hour before dawn. My ship goes up to meet the sun. It’s the Roc on Stage Seventeen. How do your friends call you?”

“Sebastian.” The beast beat on his golden shoulder.

“Tyy.” Its shadow crossed her face.

Captain Von Ray bent his head and stared from beneath his rusty brows with tiger’s eyes. “And your enemies?”

The man laughed. “Damned Sebastian and his flapping black gillies.”

Von Ray looked at the woman. And you?”

“Tyy.” That, softly. “Still.”

“You two” Von Ray turned to the twins. “Your names?”

“He’s Idas—“ the albino said, and once more put his hand on his brother’s arm.

“—and he’s Lynceos.”

“And what would your enemies say if I asked them who you were?”

The dark twin shrugged. “Only Lynceos—“

“—and Idas.”

“You?” Von Ray nodded toward the Mouse.

“You can call me the Mouse if you’re my friend. You my enemy, and you never know my name.”

Von Ray’s lids fell halfway down the yellow balls as he looked at the tall one.

“Katin Crawford.” Katin surprised himself by volunteering. “When my enemies tell me what they call me, I’ll tell you, Captain Von Ray.”

“We’re on a long trip,” Von Ray said. “And you’ll face enemies you didn’t know you had. We’re running against Prince and Ruby Red. We fly a cargo ship out empty and come back—if the wheels of the machine run right—with a full hold. I want you to know this trip has been made twice before. Once it hardly got started. Once I got within sight of the goal. But the sight was too much for some of my crew. This time I intend to go out, fill my cargo hold, and come back.”

“Where we for running are?” Sebastian asked. The creature on his shoulders stepped from one foot to the other, flapping to balance. Its wingspan was nearly seven feet. “What out there, Captain, is?”

Von Ray threw up his head as though he could see his destination. Then he looked down slowly. “Out there …”

The Mouse felt the skin on the back of his neck go funny, as though it were cloth and someone had just snagged a loose end and raveled the fabric.

“Somewhere out there,” Von Ray said, “is a nova.”

Fear?

The Mouse for one moment searched for stars and found Dan’s ruined eye.

And Katin spun backward across the pits of many moons, his eyes bulged beneath the faceplate while somewhere, wombward, a sun collapsed.

“We’re hunting a nova.”

So that’s real fear, the Mouse thought. More than just the beast flapping in the chest, lurching into the ribs.

It’s the start of a million journeys, Katin reflected, with your feet stuck in the same place.

“We have to go to the flaming edge of that imploding sun. The whole continuum in the area of a nova is space that has been twisted away. We have to go to the rim of chaos and bring back a handful of fire, with as few stops as possible on the way. Where we’re going all law has broken down.”

“Which law do you mean?” Katin asked. “Man’s, or the natural laws of physics, psychics, and chemistry?”

Von Ray paused. “All of them.”

The Mouse pulled the leather strap across his shoulder and lowered the syrynx into its sack.

“This is a race,” Von Ray said. “I tell you again. Prince and Ruby Red are our opponents. There is no human law I could hold them to. And as we near the nova, the rest break down.”

The Mouse shook massed hair off his forehead. “It’s going to be a changey trip, eh, Captain?” The muscles in his brown face jumped, quivered, fixed finally on a grin to hold his trembling. His hand, inside the sack, stroked the inlay on the syrynx. “A real changey trip.” His woolly voice licked at the danger. “Sounds like a trip I’ll be able to sing about.” And licked again.

“About this … handful of fire we’re bringing back,” Lynceos began.

“A cargo hold full.” Von Ray corrected. “That’s seven tons. Seven slugs of a ton each.”

Idas said: “You can’t bring home seven tons of fire—“

“—so what are we hauling, Captain?” Lynceos finished.

The crew waited. Those standing near the crew waited.

Von Ray reached up and kneaded his right shoulder.

“Illyrion,” he said. “And we’re getting it from the source.” His hand fell. “Give me your classification numbers. After that, the next time I want to see you is on the Roc an hour before dawn.”

“Take a drink—“

The Mouse pushed the hand away and kept dancing. Music smashed over the metal chimes while red lights fled one another around the bar.

“Take a—“

The Mouse’s hips jerked against the music, Tyy jerked against him, swinging dark hair back from a glistening shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her lips shook.

Someone was saying to someone else: “Here, I can’t drink this. Finish it for me.”

She flapped her hands, coming toward him. Then the Mouse blinked.

Tyy was beginning to flicker.

He blinked again.

Then his saw Lynceos holding the syrynx in his white hands. His brother stood behind him; they were laughing. Real Tyy sat at a corner table shuffling her cards.

“Hey,” the Mouse said, and went over fast. “Look, don’t fool with my ax, please. If you can play it, fine. But ask me first.”

“Yeah,” Lynceos said. “You were the only one who could see it—“ “—it was on a directional beam,” said Idas. “We’re sorry.”

“That’s okay,” the Mouse said, taking his syrynx back. He was drunk and tired. He walked out of the bar, meandered along the glowing lip of Hell3, finally to cross the bridge that led toward Stage Seventeen. The sky was black. As he ran his hand along the rail, his fingers and forearm were lit orange from beneath.

Someone was leaning on the rail ahead of him.

He slowed.

Katin looked dreamily across the abyss, face devil-masked by underlight.

At first the Mouse thought Katin was talking to himself. Then he saw the jeweled contrivance in his hand.

“Cut into the human brain,” Katin told his recorder. “Centered between cerebrum and medulla you will find a nerve cluster that resembles a human figure only centimeters high. It connects the sensory impressions originating outside the brain with the cerebral abstractions forming within. It balances the perception of the world outside with the knowledge of the world within.

“Cut through the loose tangle of intrigues that net world to world—“

“Hey, Katin.”

Katin glanced at him as the hot air shook up from the lava.

“—ties star system to star system, that keeps the Sol-centered Draco sector, the Pleiades Federation, and the Outer Colonies each a single entity: you will find a whirl of diplomats, elected or self-appointed officials, honest or corrupt as their situations call for—in short, the governmental matrix that takes its shape from the worlds it represents. Its function is to respond to and balance the social, economic, and cultural pressures that shift and run through empire.

“And if one could cut directly through a star, centered in the flaming gas would be a bole of pure nuclear matter, condensed and volatile, crushed to this state by the weight of the matter around it, spherical or oblate as the shape of the sun itself. During a solar disturbance, this center carries vibrations from that disturbance directly through the mass of the star to cancel those vibrations racing the tidal shift on the sun’s surface.

“Occasionally something goes wrong with the tiny bodies balancing the perceptual pressures on the human brain.

“Often the governmental and diplomatic matrix cannot handle the pressures of the worlds they govern.

“And when something goes wrong with the balancing mechanism inside a sun, the dispersal of incredible stellar power dephases into the titanic forces that make a sun go nova—“

“Katin?”

He switched off his recorder and looked at the Mouse.

“What you doing?”

“Making notes on my novel.”

“Your what?”

“Archaic art form superseded by the psychorama. Alas, it was capable of vanished subtleties, both spiritual and artistic, that the more immediate form has not yet equaled. I’m an anachronism, Mouse.” Katin grinned. “Thanks for my job.”

The Mouse shrugged. “What are you talking about?”

“Psychology.” Katin put the recorder back in his pocket. “Politics, and Physics. The three P’s.”

“Psychology?” the Mouse asked. “Politics?”

“Can you read and write?” Katin asked.

“Turkish, Greek, and Arabic. But not too good in English. The letters don’t have nothing to do with the sounds you make.”

Katin nodded. He was a little drunk too. “Profound. That’s why English was such a fine language for novels. But I oversimplify.”

“What about psychology and politics? I know the physics.”

“Particularly,” Katin said to the flowing, glowing strip of wet rock that wound two hundred meters below, “the psychology and politics of our captain. They intrigue me.”

“What about them?”

“His psychology is, at this point, merely curious because it is unknown. I shall have a chance to observe that as we progress. But the politics are gravid with possibilities.”

“Yeah? What’s that mean?”

Katin locked his fingers and balanced his chin on a knuckle. “I attended an institution of higher learning in the ruins of a once great country. A bit across the quad was a building called the Von Ray Psycho-science Laboratory. It was a rather recent addition, from, I would guess, a hundred and forty years ago.”

“Captain Von Ray?”

“Grandpa, I suspect. It was donated to the school in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the grant of sovereignty to the Pleiades Federation by the Draco Courts.”

“Von Ray is from out in the Pleiades? He don’t talk like he is. Sebastian and Tyy, I could guess from them. Are you sure?”

“His family holdings are there, certainly. He’s probably spent time all over the universe, traveling in the style we would like to be accustomed to. How much would you bet he owns his own cargo ship?”

“He’s not working for some company combine?”

“Not unless his family owns it. The Von Rays are probably the most powerful family in the Pleiades Federation. I don’t know if Captain there is a kissing cousin lucky enough to have the same name, or whether he’s the direct heir and scion. But I do know that name is connected up with the control and organization of the whole Pleiades Federation; they’re the sort of family with a summer home in the Outer Colonies and a town house or two on Earth.”

“Then he’s a big man.” The Mouse spoke hoarsely.

“He is.”

“What about this Prince and Ruby Red he was talking about?”

“Are you dense, or are you merely a product of thirty-first-century over-specialization?” Katin asked. “Sometimes I dream about a return of the great renaissance figures of the twentieth century: Bertrand Russell, Susanne Langer, Pejt Davlin.” He looked at the Mouse. “Who makes every drive system you can think of, interplanetary or interstellar?”

“Red-shift Limited—“ The Mouse stopped. “That Red?”

“Were he not a Von Ray, I would assume he spoke of some other family. Since he is, it is very probable that he speaks of just those Reds.”

“Damn,” the Mouse said. Red-shift was a label that appeared so frequently you didn’t even notice it. Red-shift made the components for all conceivable space drives, the tools for dismantling them, the machines for servicing them, replacement parts.

“Red is an industrial family with its roots in the dawn of space travel; it is very firmly fixed on Earth specifically, and throughout the Draco system in general. The Von Rays are a not so old, but powerful family of the Pleiades Federation. And they are now in a race for seven tons of Illyrion. Doesn’t that make your political sensitivities quiver for the outcome?”

“Why should it?”

“To be sure,” Katin said, “the artist concerned with self-expression and a projection of his inner world should, above all things, be apolitical. But really, Mouse.”

“What are you talking about, Katin?”

“Mouse, what does Illyrion mean to you?”

He considered. “An Illyrion battery makes my syrynx play. I know they use it to keep this moon’s core hot. Doesn’t it have something to do with the faster-than-light drive?”

Katin closed his eyes. “You are a registered, tested, competent cyborg stud, like me, right?” On “right,” his eyes opened.

The Mouse nodded.

“Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge,” Katin intoned to the flickering dark. “Where did you get your cyborg training, anyway, Australia?”

“Um-hm.”

“Figures. Mouse, there is noticeably less Illyrion in your syrynx battery, by a factor of twenty or twenty-five, than there is, let’s say, radium in the fluorescent paint on the numerals of a radium dial watch. How long does a battery last?”

“They’re supposed to go to fifty years. Expensive as hell.”

“The Illyrion needed to keep this moon’s core molten is measured in grams. The amount needed to propel a starship is on the same order. To quantify the amount mined and free in the Universe, eight or nine thousand kilograms will suffice. And Captain Von Ray is going to bring back seven tons!”

“I guess Red-shift would be pretty interested in that.”

Katin nodded deeply. “They might.”

“Katin, what is Illyrion? I used to ask, at Cooper, but they told me it was too complicated for me to understand.”

“Told me the same thing at Harvard,” Katin said. “Psychophysics 74 and 75. I went to the library. The best definition is the one given by Professor Plovnievsky in his paper presented at Oxford in 2238 before the theoretical physics society. I quote: ‘Basically, gentlemen, Illyrion is something else.’ One wonders if it was a happy accident from lack of facility with the language, or a profound understanding of English subtlety. The dictionary definition, I believe, reads something like, ‘ …general name for the group of trans three-hundred elements with psychomorphic properties, heterotropic with many of the common elements as well as the imaginary series that exist between 107 and 255 on the periodic chart.’ How’s your subatomic physics?”

“I am but a poor cyborg stud.”

Katin raised a flickering brow. “You know that as you mount the chart of atomic numbers past 98, the elements become less and less stable, till we get to jokes like Einsteinum, Californium, Fermium with half lives of hundredths of a second—and mounting further, hundredths of thousandths of a second. The higher we go, the unstable. For this reason, the whole series between 100 and 298 were labeled—mislabeled—the imaginary elements. They’re quite real. They just don’t stay around very long. At 296 or thereabouts, however, the stability begins to go up again. At three hundred we’re back to a half-life measurable in tenths of a second, and five or six above that and we’ve started a whole new series of elements with respectable half-lives back in the millions of years. These elements have immense nuclei, and are very rare. But as far back as 1950, hyperons had been discovered, elementary particles bigger than protons and neutrons. These are the particles that carry the binding energies holding together these super nuclei, as ordinary mesons hold together the nucleus in more familiar elements. This group of super-heavy, super-stable elements go under the general heading of Illyrion. And to quote again the eminent Plovnievsky, ‘Basically, gentlemen, Illyrion is something else.’ As Webster informs us, it is both psychomorphic and heterotropic. I suppose that’s a fancy way of saying Illyrion is many things to many men.” Katin turned his back to the railing and folded his arms. “I wonder what it is to our captain?”

“What’s heterotropic?”

“Mouse,” said Katin, “by the end of the twentieth century mankind had witnessed the total fragmentation of what was then called ‘modern science.’ The continuum was filled with quasars and unidentifiable radio sources. There were more elementary particles than there were elements to be created from them. And perfectly durable compounds that had been thought impossible for years were being formed left and right like KrI4, H4XeO6, RrF4; the noble gases were not so noble after all. The concept of energy embodied in the Einsteinian quantum theory was about as correct, and led to as many contradictions, as the theory three hundred years earlier that fire was a released liquid called phlogiston. The soft sciences—isn’t that a delightful name? – had run amuck. The experiences opened by psychedelics were making everybody doubt everything anyway and it was a hundred and fifty years before the whole mess was put back into some sort of coherent order by those great names in the synthetic and integrative sciences that are too familiar to both of us for me to insult you by naming. And you—who have been taught what button to push—want me—who am the product of a centuries-old educational system founded not only on the imparting of information, but a whole theory of social adjustment as well—to give you a five-minute run—through of the development of human knowledge over the last ten centuries? You want to know what a heterotropic element is?”

“Captain says we got to be on board an hour before dawn,” the Mouse ventured.

“Never mind, never mind. I have a knack for this sort of extemporaneous synthesis. Now let me see. First there was the work of De Blau in France in two thousand, when he presented the first clumsy scale and his basically accurate method for measuring the psychic displacement of electrical—“

“You’re not helping.” The Mouse grunted. “I want to find out about Von Ray and Illyrion.”

Wings gentled the air. Black shapes settled. Hand in hand, Sebastian and Tyy came up the walkway. Their pets scuttled about their feet, rose. Tyy pushed one away from her arm; it soared. Two battled above Sebastian’s shoulder for perch. One gave, and the satisfied beast pulled his wings now, brushing the Oriental’s blond head.

“Hey!” the Mouse rasped. “You going back to the ship now?”

“We go.”

“Just a second. What does Von Ray mean to you? You know his name?”

Sebastian smiled, and Tyy glanced at him with gray eyes. “We from the Pleiades Federation are,” Tyy said. “I and these beasts under the Dim, Dead Sister, flock and master, born.”

“The Dim, Dead Sister?”

“The Pleiades used to be called the Seven Sisters in ancient times because only seven of them could be seen from Earth” Katin explained to the Mouse’s frown. “A few hundred B.C. or so, one of the visible stars went nova and out. There are cities now on the innermost of its charred planets. It’s still hot enough to keep things habitable, but that’s about all.”

“A nova?” the Mouse said. “What about Von Ray?”

Tyy made an inclusive gesture. “Everything. Great, good family is.”

“Do you know about this particular Captain Von Ray?” Katin asked.

Tyy shrugged.

“What about Illyrion?” the Mouse asked. “What do you know about that?”

Sebastian squatted among his pets. Wings shed from him. His hairy hand went soothingly from head to head. “Pleiades Federation none have. Draco system none either have.” He frowned.

“Von Ray a pirate some say,” Tyy ventured.

Sebastian looked up sharply. “Von Ray great and good family is! Von Ray fine is! That why we with him go.”

Tyy, more softly, her voice settling behind the gentle features: “Von Ray fine family is.”

The Mouse saw Lynceos approaching over the bridge. And ten seconds later, Idas.

“You two are from the Outer Colonies?”

The twins stopped, shoulder brushing shoulder. Pink eyes blinked more than brown.

“From Argos,” the pale twin said.

“Argos on Tubman B-12,” specified the dark.

“The Far Out Colonies,” Katin amended.

“What do you know about Illyrion?”

Idas leaned on the rail, frowned, then hoisted himself up so that he was sitting. “Illyrion?” He spread his knees and dropped his knotted hands between. “We have Illyrion in the Outer Colonies.”

Lynceos sat beside him. “Tobias,” he said. “We have a brother, Tobias.” Lynceos moved on the bar closer to dark Idas. “We have a brother in the Outer Colonies named Tobias.” He glanced at Idas, coral eyes netted with silver. “In the Outer Colonies, where there is Illyrion.” He held his wrists together, but with fingers opened, like petals on a calloused lily.

“The worlds in the Outer Colonies?” Idas said. “Balthus—with ice and mud-pits and Illyrion. Cassandra—with glass deserts big as the oceans of Earth, and jungles of uncountable plants, all blue, with frothing rivers of galenium, and Illyrion. Salinus—combed through with mile-high caves and canons, with a continent of deadly red moss, and seas with towered cities built of the tidal quartz on the ocean floor, and Illyrion—“

“—The Outer Colonies are the worlds of stars much younger than the stars here in Draco, many times younger than the Pleiades,” Lynceos put in.

“Tobias is in … one of the Illyrion mines on Tubman.” Idas said.

Their voices tensed; eyes stayed down, or leaped to one another’s faces. When black hands opened, white hands closed.

“Idas, Lynceos, and Tobias, we grew up in the dry, equatorial stones of Tubman at Argos, under three suns and a red moon—“

“-and on Argos too there is Illyrion. We were wild. They called us wild. Two black pearls and a white, bouncing and brawling through the streets of Argos—“

“—Tobias, he was black as Idas. I alone was white in the town—“

“—but no less wild than Tobias for his whiteness. And they say in wildness we, one night, out of heads on bliss—“

“—the gold powder that collects in the rock crevices and when inhaled makes the eyes flicker with unnamed colors and new harmonies reel in the ear’s hollow, and the mind dilate—“

“—on bliss, we made an effigy of the mayor of Argos, and fixed him with a clockwork flying mechanism, and set him soaring about the city square, uttering satirical verses on the leading personages of the city—“

“—for this we were banished from Argos into the wilds of Tubman—“

“—and outside the town there is only one way to live, and that is to descend beneath the sea and work off the days of disgrace in the submarine Illyrion mines—“

“—and the three of us, who had never done anything in bliss but laugh and leap, and had mocked no one—“

“—we were innocent—“

“—we went into the mines. There we worked in air masks and wet suits in the underwater mines of Argos, for a year—“

– a year on Argos is three months longer than a year on Earth, with six seasons instead of four—“

“—and at the beginning of our second, algae-tinted autumn, we made ready to leave. But Tobias would not go. His hands had taken up the rhythms of the tides, the weight of ore became a comfort on his palms—“

“—so we left our brother in the Illyrion mines, and came up among the stars, afraid—“

“—you see, we are afraid that as our brother, Tobias, found something that pulled him from us, so one of us may find something that will divide the remaining two—“

“—as we thought the three of us could never be divided.”

Idas looked at the Mouse. “And we are out of bliss.”

Lynceos blinked. “That is what Illyrion means to us.”

“Paraphrase,” Katin said from the other side of the walk. “In the Outer Colonies, comprising to date forty-two worlds and circa seven billion people, practically the entire population at one time or another has something to do with the direct acquisition of Illyrion. And I believe approximately one out of three works in some facet of its development or production his entire life.”

“Those are the statistics,” Idas said, “for the Far Outer Colonies.”

Black wings rose as Sebastian stood and took Tyy’s hand.

The Mouse scratched his head. “Well. Let’s spit in this river and get on to the ship.”

The twins climbed down from the rail. The Mouse leaned out over the hot ravine and puckered.

“What are you doing?”

“Spitting into Hell3. A gypsy’s got to spit three times in any river he crosses,” the Mouse explained to Katin. “Otherwise, bad things.”

“This is the thirty-first century we’re living in. What bad things?”

The Mouse shrugged.

“I never spit in any river.”

“Maybe it’s just for gypsies.

“I it kind of a cute idea is think,” Tyy said, and leaned across the railing beside Mouse. Sebastian loomed at her shoulder. Above them one of the beasts was caught in a hot updraft and flung into the dark.

“What that is?” Tyy frowned suddenly, pointing.

“Where?” The Mouse squinted.

She pointed past him to the canon wall.

“Hey!” Katin said. “That’s the blind man!”

“The one who busted up your playing!”

Lynceos pushed between them. “He’s sick.” He narrowed his blood-colored eyes. “That man there is sick.”

Demoned by the flickering, Dan reeled down the ledges toward the lava.

“He’ll burn up!” Katin joined them.

“But he can’t feel the heat!” the Mouse exclaimed. “He can’t see—he probably doesn’t even know!”

Idas, then Lynceos, pushed away from the rail and ran up the bridge.

“Come on!” the Mouse cried, following.

Sebastian and Tyy came after, with Katin at the rear.

Ten meters below the rim, Dan paused on a rock, arms before him, preparing an infernal dive.

As they reached the head of the bridge—the twins were already climbing the rail—a figure appeared at the canon’s lips above the old man.

“Dan!” Von Ray’s face flamed as the light fanned him. He vaulted. Shale struck from under his sandals and shattered before him as he crabbed down the slope. “Dan, don’t—“

Dan did.

His body caught on an outcropping sixty feet below, then spun on, out, and down.

The Mouse clutched the rail, bruising his stomach on the bar as he leaned.

Katin was beside him a moment afterward, leaning even further.

“Ahhh!” the Mouse whispered and pulled back to avert his face.

Captain Von Ray reached the rock from which Dan had leaped. He dropped to one knee, both fists on the stone, staring over. Shapes fell at him (Sebastian’s pets), rose again, casting no shadow. The twins had stopped, ledges above him.

Captain Von Ray stood. He looked up at his crew. He was breathing hard. He turned and made his way back up the slope.

“What happened?” Katin asked when they were all on the bridge again. “Why did he …?”

“I was talking with him just a few minutes before,” Von Ray explained. “He’s crewed with me for years. But on the last trip, he was … was blinded.”

The big captain; the scarred captain. And how old would he be, the Mouse wondered. Before, the Mouse had put him at forty-five, fifty. But this confusion lopped ten or fifteen years. The captain was aged, not old.

“I had just told him that I had made arrangements for him to return to his home in Australia. He’d turned around to go back across the bridge to the dormitory where I’d taken him a room. I glanced back … he wasn’t on the bridge.” The captain looked around at the rest of them. “Come on to the Roc.”

“I guess you’ll have to report this to the Patrol,” Katin said. Von Ray led them toward the gate to the take-off field, where Draco writhed up and down his hundred-meter column, in the darkness.

“There’s a phone right here at the head of the bridge—“

Von Ray’s look cut Katin off. “I want to leave this rock. If we call from here, they’ll have everybody wait around to tell his version in triplicate.”

“I guess you can call from the ship,” Katin suggested, “as we leave.”

For a moment the Mouse doubted all over again his judgment of the captain’s age.

“There’s nothing we can do for the sad fool.”

The Mouse cast an uncomfortable glance down the chasm, then followed along with Katin.

Beyond the hot drafts, night was chill, and fog hung coronas on the induced-fluorescent lamps that patterned the field.

Katin and the Mouse were at the group’s tail.

“I wonder just what Illyrion means to handsome there,” the Mouse commented softly.

Katin grunted and put his hands under his belt. After a moment he asked, “Say, Mouse what did you mean about that old man and all his senses having been killed?”

“When they tried to reach the nova the last time,” the Mouse said, “he looked at the star too long through sensory input and all his nerve endings were seared. They weren’t killed. They were jammed into constant stimulation.” He shrugged. “Same difference. Almost.”

“Oh,” Katin said, and looked at the pavement.

Around them stood star-freighters. Between them, the much smaller, hundred-meter shuttles.

After he’d thought awhile, Katin said: “Mouse, has it occurred to you how much you have to lose on this trip?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not scared?”

The Mouse grasped Katin’s forearm with his thin fingers. “I’m scared as hell,” he rasped. He shook his hair back to look up at his tall shipmate. “You know that? I don’t like things like Dan. I’m scared.”