Nova

Draco, Triton, Hell3, 3172

Some stud had taken a black crayon and scrawled “Olga” across the vane-projector face.

“Okay,” the Mouse said to the machine. “You’re Olga.”

Purr and blink, three green lights, four red ones. The Mouse began the tedious check of pressure distribution and phase readings.

To move a ship faster than light from star to star, you take advantage of the very twists in space, the actual distortions that matter creates in the continuum itself. To talk about the speed of light as the limiting velocity of an object is to talk about twelve or thirteen miles an hour as the limiting velocity of a swimmer in the sea. But as soon as one starts to employ the currents of the water itself, as well as the wind above, as with a sailboat, the limit vanishes. The starship had seven vanes of energy acting somewhat like sails. Six projectors controlled by computers sweep the vanes across the night. And each cyborg stud controls a computer. The captain controls the seventh. The vanes of energy had to be tuned to the shifting frequencies of the stasis pressures; and the ship itself was quietly hurled from this plane of space by the energy of the Illyrion in its core. That was what Olga and her cousins did. But the control of the shape and the angling of the vane was best left to a human brain. That was the Mouse’s job—under the captain’s orders. The captain also had blanket control of many of the sub-vane properties.

The cubicle’s walls were covered with graffiti from former crews. There was a contour couch. The Mouse adjusted the inductance slack in a row of seventy microfarad coil-condensers, slid the tray in to the wall, and sat.

He reached around to the small of his back beneath his vest, and felt for the socket. It had been grafted onto the base of his spinal cord back at Cooper. He picked up the first reflex cable that looped across the floor to disappear into the computer’s face, and fiddled with it till the twelve prongs slipped into his socket and caught. He took the smaller, six-prong plug and slipped it into the plug on the underside of his left wrist; then the other into his right. Both radial nerves were connected with Olga. At the back of his neck was another socket. He slipped the last plug in—the cable was heavy and tugged a little on his neck—and saw sparks. This cable could send impulses directly to his brain that could bypass hearing and sight. There was a faint hum coming through already. He reached over, adjusted a knob on Olga’s face, and the hum cleared. Ceiling, walls, and floor were covered with controls. The room was small enough so that he could reach most of them from the couch. But once the ship took off, he would touch none of them, but control the vane directly with the nervous impulses from his body.

“I always feel like I’m getting ready for the Big Return,” Katin’s voice sounded in his ear. In their cubicles throughout the ship, as they plugged themselves in, the other studs joined contact. “The base of the spine always struck me as an unnatural place from which to drag your umbilical cord. It better be an interesting marionette show. Do you really know how to work this thing?”

“If you don’t know by now,” the Mouse said, “too bad.”

Idas: “This show’s about Illyrion—“

“—Illyrion and a nova”: Lynceos.

“Say, what are you doing with your pets, Sebastian?”

“A saucer of milk them feed.”

“With tranquilizers,” Tyy’s soft voice came. “They now sleep.”

And lights dimmed.

The captain hooked in. The graffiti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.

“A shook up go game,” Katin said, “with iridescent stones.” The Mouse pushed his syrynx case beneath the couch with his heel and lay down. He straightened the cable under his back, beneath his neck.

“All secure?” Von Ray’s voice rang through the ship. “Open the fore vanes.”

The Mouse’s eyes began to flicker with new sight—

– the space port: lights over the field, the lavid fissures of the crust fell to dim, violet quiverings at the spectrum’s tip. But above the horizon, the ‘winds’ were brilliant.

“Pull open the side vane seven degrees.”

The Mouse flexed what would have been his left arm. And the side vane lowered like a wing of mica. “Hey, Katin,” the Mouse whispered. “Ain’t that something! Look at it—“

The Mouse shivered, crouched in a shield of light. Olga had taken over his breathing and heartbeat while the synapses of the medulla were directed to the workings of the ship.

“For Illyrion, and Prince and Ruby Red!” from one of the twins.

“Hold your vane!” the captain ordered.

“Katin look—“

“Lie back and relax, Mouse,” Katin whispered. “I shall do just that and think about my past life.”

The void roared.

“You really feel like that, Katin?”

“You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”

“You two, look up,” from Von Ray. They looked.

“Cut in stasis shifters.”

A moment Olga’s lights pricked his vision. And were gone; winds swept against him. And they were cartwheeling from the sun.

“Good-bye, moon,” Katin whispered.

And the moon fell into Neptune; Neptune fell into the sun. And the sun began to fall.

Night exploded before them.

Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3148

What were the first things?

His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in the big house up the hill: New Ark (NW. 73), Ark. That was what you told somebody on the street if you should get lost, and that person would help you find home. The streets of Ark were set with transparent wind shields, and the evenings from the months of April to Iumbra were blasted with colored fumes that snagged, ripped free, and writhed above the city on the crags of Tong. His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived … Those were the childish things, the things that persisted, the first learned. Ark was the greatest city in the Pleiades Federation. Mother and Father were important people and were often away. When they were home they talked of Draco, its capital world Earth; they talked of the realignment, the prospect of sovereignty for the Outer Colonies. They had guests who were senator this, and representative that. After Secretary Morgan married Aunt Cyana, they came to dinner and Secretary Morgan gave him a hologram map of the Pleiades Federation that was just like a regular piece of paper, but when you looked at it under the tensor beam, it was like looking through a night window with dots of light flickering at different distances, and nebulous gases winding. “You live on Ark, the second planet of that sun there,” his father said, pointing down where Lorq had spread the map over the rock table beside the glass wall. Outside, spidery tilda trees writhed in the evening gale.

“Where’s Earth?”

His father laughed, loud and alone, in the dining room. “You can’t see it on that map. It’s just the Pleiades Federation.”

Morgan put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I you a map of Draco next time bring.” The secretary, whose eyes were almond-shaped, smiled.

Lorq turned to his father. “I want to go to Draco!” And then back to Secretary Morgan: “I some day to Draco want to go!” Secretary Morgan spoke like many of the people in his school at Causby; like the people on the street who had helped him find his way home when he had gotten lost when he was four (but not like his father or Aunt Cyana) and Mommy and Daddy had been so terribly upset (“We were so worried! We thought you’d been kidnapped. But you mustn’t go to those cardplayers on the street, even if they did bring you home!”). His parents smiled when he spoke like that to them, but they wouldn’t smile now, because Secretary Morgan was a guest.

His father humphed. “A map of Draco! That’s all he needs. Oh yes, Draco!”

Aunt Cyana laughed; then Mother and Secretary Morgan laughed too.

They lived on Ark but often they went on big ships to other worlds. You had a cabin where you could pass your hand in front of colored panels and have anything to eat you wanted any time, or you could go down to the observation deck and watch the winds of the void translated to visible patterns of light over the bubble ceiling, flailing colors among stars that drifted by—and you knew you were going faster and faster than anything.

Sometimes his parents went to Draco, to Earth, to cities called New York and Peking. He wondered when they would take him.

But every year, the last week in Saluary, they would go on one of the great ships to another world that was also not on the map. It was called New Brazillia and was in the Outer Colonies. He lived in New Brazillia too, on the island of Sao Orini, because his parents had a house there near the mine.

Outer Colonies, New Brazillia, Sao Orini, 3149

The first time he heard the names Prince and Ruby Red it was at the Sao Orini house. He was lying in the dark, screaming for light.

His mother came at last, pushed away the insect netting (it wasn’t needed because the house had sonics to keep away the tiny red bugs that occasionally bit you outside and made you feel funny for a few hours, but Mother liked to be safe). She lifted him. “Shhh! Shhh! It’s all right. Don’t you want to go to sleep? Tomorrow is the party. Prince and Ruby will be here. Don’t you want to play with Prince and Ruby at the party?” She carried him around the nursery, stopping to push the wall switch by the door. The ceiling began to rotate till the polarized pane was transparent. Through the palm fronds lapping the roof, twin moons splattered orange light. She laid him back in the bed, caressed his rough, red hair. After a while she started to leave.

“Don’t turn it off, Mommy!”

Her hand fell from the switch. She smiled at him. He felt warm, and rolled over to stare through the meshed fronds at the moons,

Prince and Ruby Red were coming from Earth. He knew that his mother’s parents were on Earth, in a country called Senegal. His father’s great-grandparents were also from Earth, from Norway. Von Rays, blond and blustering, had been speculating in the Pleiades now for generations. He wasn’t sure what they speculated, but it must have been successful. His family owned the Illyrion mine that operated just beyond the northern tip of Sao Orini. His father occasionally joked with him about making him the little foreman of the mines. That’s what “speculation” probably was. And the moons were drifting away; he was sleepy.

He did not remember being introduced to the blue-eyed, black-haired boy with the prosthetic right arm, nor his spindly sister. But he recalled the three of them—himself, Prince, and Ruby—playing together the next afternoon in the garden.

He showed them the place behind the bamboo where you could climb up into the carved stone mouths.

“What are those?” Prince asked.

“Those are the dragons,” Lorq explained.

“There aren’t any dragons,” Ruby said.

“Those are dragons. That’s what Father says.”

“Oh.” Prince caught his false hand over the lower lip and hoisted himself up. “What are they for?”

“You climb up in them. Then you can climb down again. Father says the people who lived here before us carved them.”

“Who lived here before?” Ruby asked. “And what did they want with dragons? Help me up, Prince.”

“I think they’re silly.” Prince and Ruby were now both standing between the stone fangs above him. (Later he would learn that “the people who had lived here before” were a race extinct in the Outer Colonies for twenty thousand years; their carvings had survived, and on these ruined foundations, Von Ray had erected this mansion.)

Lorq sprang for the jaw, got his fingers around the lower lip, and started scrambling. “Give me a hand?”

“Just a second,” Prince said. Then, slowly, he put his shoe on Lorq’s fingers and mashed.

Lorq gasped and fell back on the ground, clutching his hand.

Ruby giggled.

“Hey!” Indignation throbbed, confusion welled. Pain beat in his knuckles.

“You shouldn’t make fun of his hand,” Ruby said. “He doesn’t like it.”

“Huh?” Lorq looked at the metal and plastic claw directly for the first time. “I didn’t make fun of it!”

“Yes you did,” Prince said evenly. “I don’t like people who make fun of me.”

“But I—“ Lorq’s seven-year-old mind tried to comprehend this irrationality. He stood up again. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

Prince lowered himself to his knees, reached out, and swung at Lorq’s head.

“Watch – !” He leaped backward. The mechanical limb had moved so fast the air hissed.

“Don’t talk about my hand any more! There’s nothing wrong! Nothing at all!”

“If you stop making fun of him,” Ruby commented, looking at the rugae on the roof of the stone mouth, “he’ll be friends with you.”

“Well, all right,” Lorq said warily.

Prince smiled. “Then we’ll be friends now.” He had very pale skin and his teeth were small.

“All right,” Lorq said. He decided he didn’t like Prince.

“If you say something like, ‘let’s shake on it,’” Ruby said, “he’ll beat you up. And he can, even though you’re bigger than he is.”

Or Ruby either.

“Come on up,” Prince said.

Lorq climbed into the mouth beside the other two children.

“Now what do we do?” Ruby asked. “Climb down?”

“You can look into the garden from here,” Lorq said. “And watch the party.”

“Who wants to watch an old party,” Ruby said.

“I do,” said Prince.

“Oh,” Ruby said. “You do. Well, all right then.” Beyond the bamboo, the guests walked in the garden. They laughed gently, talked of the latest psychorama, politics, drank from long glasses. His father stood by the fountain, discussing with several people his feelings about the proposed sovereignty of the Outer Colonies—after all, he had a home out here and had to have his finger on the pulse of the situation. It was the year that Secretary Morgan had been assassinated. Though Underwood had been caught, there were still theories going around as to which faction was responsible.

A woman with silver hair flirted with a young couple who had come with Ambassador Selvin, who was also a cousin. Aaron Red, a portly, proper gentleman, had cornered three young ladies and was pontificating on the moral degeneration of the young. Mother moved through the guests, the hem of her red dress brushing the grass, followed by the humming buffet. She paused here and there to offer canapes, drinks, and her opinion of the new realignment proposal. Now, after a year of phenomenal popular success, the intelligentsia had accepted the Tohu-bohus as legitimate music; the jarring rhythms tumbled across the lawn. A light sculpture in the corner twisted, flickered, grew with the tones.

Then his father let out a booming laugh that made everyone look. “Listen to this! Just hear what Lusuna has said to me!” He was holding the shoulder of a university student who had come with the young couple. Von Ray’s bluster had apparently prompted the young man to argument. Father gestured for him to repeat.

“I only said that we live in an age where economic, political, and technological change have shattered all cultural tradition.”

“My Lord,” laughed the woman with silver hair, “is that all?”

“No, no!” Father waved his hand. “We have to listen to what the younger generation thinks. Go on, sir.”

“There’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity, even on Earth, the center of Draco. The past half dozen generations have seen such movement of peoples from world to world, there can’t be any. This pseudo-interplanetary society that has replaced any real tradition, while very attractive, is totally hollow and masks an incredible tangle of decadence, scheming, corruption—“

“Really, Lusuna,” the young wife said, “your Scholarship is showing.” She had just taken another drink at the prompting of the woman with the silver hair.

“—and piracy.”

(With the last word, even the three children crouching in the mouth of the carved lizard could tell from the looks passing on the guests’ faces that Lusuna had gone too far.)

Mother came across the lawn, the bottom of her red sheath brushing back from gilded nails. She held her hands out to Lusuna, smiling. “Come, let’s continue this social dissection over dinner. We’re having a totally corrupt mangobongoou with untraditional loso ye mbiji a meza, and scathingly decadent mpati a nsengo.” His mother always made the old Senegal dishes for parties. “And if the oven cooperates, we’ll end up with dreadfully pseudo-interplantary tiba yoka flambe.”

The student looked around, realized he was supposed to smile, and did one better by laughing. With the student on her arm, Mother led everyone into dinner—“Didn’t someone tell me you had won a scholarship to Draco University at Centauri? You must be quite bright. You’re from Earth, I gather from your accent. Senegal? Well! So am I. What city …?” And Father, relieved, brushed back oak-colored hair and followed everyone into the jalousied dining pavilion.

On the stone tongue, Ruby was saying to her brother, “I don’t think you should do that.”

“Why not?” said Prince.

Lorq looked back at the brother and sister. Prince had picked up a stone from the floor of the dragon’s mouth in his mechanical hand. Across the lawn stood the aviary of white cockatoos Mother had brought from Earth on her last trip.

Prince aimed. Metal and plastic blurred.

Forty feet away, birds screamed and exploded in the cage. As one fell to the floor, Lorq could see, even at this distance, blood in the feathers.

“That’s the one I was aiming for.” Prince smiled.

“Hey,” Lorq said. “Mother’s not going to … “ He looked again at the mechanical appendage strapped to Prince’s shoulder over the stump. “Say, you throw better with—“

“Watch it.” Prince’s black brows lowered on chipped blue glass. “I told you not to make fun of my hand, didn’t I?” The hand drew back, and Lorq heard the motors—whirr, click, whirr—in wrist and elbow.

“It’s not his fault he was born that way,” Ruby said. “And it’s impolite to make remarks about your guests. Aaron says you’re all barbarians out here anyway, doesn’t he, Prince?”

“That’s right.” He lowered his hand.

A voice came over the loudspeaker into the garden. “Children, where are you? Come in and get your supper. Hurry.”

They climbed down and went out through the bamboo.

Lorq went to bed still excited by the party. He lay under the doubled shadows of the palms above the nursery ceiling, transparent from the night before.

A whisper: “Lorq!”

And: “Shhh! Don’t be so loud, Prince.”

More softly: “Lorq?”

He pushed back the netting and sat up in bed. Imbedded in the plastic floor, tigers, elephants; and monkeys glowed. “What do you want?”

“We heard them leaving through the gate.” Prince stood in the nursery doorway in his shorts. “Where did they go?”

“We want to go too,” Ruby said from her brother’s elbow.

“Where did they go?” Prince asked again.

“Into town.” Lorq stood up and padded across the glowing menagerie. “Mommy and Daddy always take their friends down into the village when they come for the holidays.”

“What do they do?” Prince leaned against the jamb.

“They go … well, they go into town.” Where ignorance had been, curiosity came to fill it.

“We jimmied the baby sitter,” said Ruby.

“You don’t have a very good one; it was easy. Everything is so old-fashioned out here. Aaron says only Pleiades barbarians could think it quaint to live out here. Are you going to take us to go see where they went?”

“Well, I …”

“We want to go,” said Ruby.

“Don’t you want to go see too?”

“All right.” He had planned to refuse. “I have to put my sandals on.” But childish curiosity to see what adults did when children were not about was marking foundations on which adolescent, and later, adult consciousness would stand.

The garden lisped about the gate. The lock always opened to Lorq’s handprint during the day, but he was still surprised when it swung back now.

The road threaded into the moist night.

Past the rocks and across the water one low moon turned the mainland into a tongue of ivory lapping at the sea. And through the trees, the lights of the village went off and on like a computer checkboard. Rocks, chalky under the high, smaller moon, edged the roadway. A cactus raised spiky paddles to the sky.

As they reached the first of the town’s cafes, Lorq said “hello” to one of the miners who sat at a table outside the door.

“Little Senhor.” The miner nodded back.

“Do you know where my parents are?” Lorq asked.

“They came by here,” he shrugged, “the ladies with the fine clothes, the men in their vests and their dark shirts. They came by, half an hour ago, an hour.”

“What language is he talking?” Prince demanded.

Ruby giggled. “You understand that?”

Another realization hit Lorq; he and his parents spoke to the people of Sao Orini with a completely different set of words than they spoke to each other and their guests. He had learned the slurred dialect of Portuguese under the blinking lights of a hypno-teacher sometime in the fog of early childhood.

“Where did they go?” he asked again.

The miner’s name was Tavo; for a month last year when the mine shut down, he had been plugged into one of the clanking gardeners that had landscaped the park behind the house. Dull grown-ups and bright children form a particularly tolerant friendship. Tavo was dirty and stupid; Lorq accepted this. But his mother had put an end to the relation when, last year, he came back from the village and told how he had watched Tavo kill a man who had insulted the miner’s ability to drink.

“Come on, Tavo. Tell me where they went?”

Tavo shrugged.

Insects beat about the illuminated letters over the cafe door.

Crepe paper left from the Sovereignty Festival, blew from the awning posts. It was the anniversary of Pleiades Sovereignty, but the miners celebrated it out here both in hope for their own and for Mother and Father.

“Does he know where they went?” Prince asked.

Tavo was drinking sour milk from a cracked cup along with his rum. He patted his knee and Lorq, glancing at Prince and Ruby, sat down.

Brother and sister looked at each other uncertainly.

“You sit down too,” Lorq said. “On the chairs.”

They did.

Tavo offered Lorq his sour milk. Lorq drank half of it, then passed it to Prince. “You want some?”

Prince raised the cup to his mouth, then caught the smell. “You drink this?” He wrinkled his face and set the cup down sharply.

Lorq picked up the glass of rum. “Would you prefer …?” But Tavo took the glass out of his hand. “That’s not for you, Little Senhor.”

“Tavo, where are my parents?”

“Back up in the woods, at Alonza’s.”

“Take us, Tavo?”

“Who?”

“We want to go see them.”

Tavo deliberated. “We can’t go unless you have money.” He roughed Lorq’s hair. “Hey, Little Senhor, you have any money?”

Lorq took out the few coins from his pocket. “Not enough.”

“Prince, do you or Ruby have any money?” Prince had two pounds @sg in his shorts.

“Give it to Tavo.”

“Why?”

“So he’ll take us to see our parents.”

Tavo reached across and took the money from Prince, then raised his eyebrows at the amount,

“Will he give this to me?”

“If you take us,” Lorq told him.

Tavo tickled Lorq’s stomach. They laughed. Tavo folded one bill and put it in his pocket. Then he ordered another rum and sour milk. “The milk is for you. Some for your friends?”

“Come on, Tavo. You said you’d take us.”

“Be quiet,” the miner said. “I’m thinking whether we should go up there. You know I must go plug in at work tomorrow morning.” He tapped the socket on one wrist.

Lorq put salt and pepper in the milk and sipped it.

“I want to try some,” Ruby said.

“It smells awful,” said Prince, “You shouldn’t drink it. Is he going to take us?”

Tavo gestured to the owner of the cafe. “Lots of people up at Alonza’s tonight?”

“It’s Friday night, isn’t it?” said the owner.

“The boy wants me to take him up there,” said Tavo, “for the evening.”

“You’re taking Von Ray’s boy up to Alonza’s?” The owner’s purple birthmark crinkled.

“His parents are up there.” Tavo shrugged. “The boy wants me to take them. He told me to take them, you know? And it will be more fun than sitting here and swatting redbugs.” He bent down, tied the thongs of his discarded sandals together, and hung them around his neck. “Come on, Little Senhor. Tell the one-armed boy and the girl to behave.”

At the reference to Prince’s arm, Lorq jumped.

“We are going now.”

But Prince and Ruby didn’t understand.

“We’re going,” Lorq explained. “Up to Alonza’s.

“What’s Alonza’s?”

“Is that like the places Aaron is always taking those pretty women in Peking?”

“They don’t have anything out here like in Peking,” Prince said. “Silly. They don’t even have anything like Paris.”

Tavo reached down and took Lorq’s hand. “Stay close. Tell your friends to stay close too.” Tavo’s hand was all sweat and callus. The jungle chuckled and hissed over them.

“Where are we going?” Prince asked.

“To see Mother and Father.” Lorq’s voice sounded uncertain. “To Alonza’s.”

Tavo looked over at the word and nodded. He pointed through the trees, dappled with double moons.

“Is it far, Tavo?”

Tavo just cuffed Lorq’s neck, took his hand again, and went on.

At the top of the hill, a clearing: light seeped beneath the edge of a tent. A group of men joked and drank with a fat woman who had come out for air. Her face and shoulders were wet. Her breasts gleamed before falling under the orange print. She kept twiddling her braid.

“Stay,” whispered Tavo. He pushed his children back.

“Hey, why—“

“We have to stay here,” Lorq translated for Prince who had stepped forward after the miner.

Prince looked around, then came back and stood by Lorq and Ruby.

Joining the men, Tavo intercepted the raffia-covered bottle as it swung from arm to arm. “Hey, Alonza, are the Senhores Von Ray …?” He thumbed toward the tent.

“Sometimes they come up. Sometimes they bring their guests with them,” Alonza said. “Sometimes they like to see—“

“Now,” Tavo said. “Are they here now?”

She took the bottle and nodded.

Tavo turned and beckoned the children.

Lorq, followed by the wary siblings, went to stand beside him. The men went on talking in blurry voices that undercut the shrieks and laughter from the tarpaulin. The night was hot. The bottle went around three more times. Lorq and Ruby got some. And the last time Prince made a face, but drank too.

Finally Tavo pushed Lorq’s shoulder. “Inside.”

Tavo had to duck under the low door. Lorq was the tallest of the children and the top of his head just brushed the canvas.

A lantern hung from the center pole: harsh glare on the roof, harsh light in the shell of an ear, on the rims of nostrils, on the lines of old faces. A head fell back in the crowd, expelling laughter and expletives. A wet mouth glistened as a bottle neck dropped. Loose, sweaty hair. Over the noise, somebody was ringing a bell. Lorq felt excitement tingling in his palms.

People began to crouch. Tavo squatted. Prince and Ruby did too. So did Lorq, but he held on to Tavo’s wet collar.

In the pit, a man in high boots tramped back and forth, motioning the crowd to sit.

On the other side, behind the rail, Lorq suddenly recognized the silver-haired woman. She was leaning on the shoulder of the Senegalese student, Lusuna. Her hair stuck to her forehead like confused and twisted knives. The student had opened his shirt. His vest was gone.

The pitman shook the bell rope again. A piece of down had fallen on his gleaming arm and adhered, even as he waved and shouted at the crowd; now he rapped his brown fist on the tin wall for silence.

Money was wedged between the boards of the rail. The wagers were jammed between the planks. As Lorq looked along the rail, he saw the young couple further down. He was leaning over, trying to point out something to her.

The pitman stamped across the mash of scales and feather. His boots were black to the knees. When the people were nearly quiet, he went to the near side of the pit where Lorq couldn’t see, bent down– A cage door slammed back. With a yell, the pitman vaulted onto the fence and grabbed the center post. The spectators shouted and surged up. Those squatting began to stand. Lorq tried to push forward.

Across the pit, he saw his father rise, streaming face twisted below blond hair; Von Ray shook his fist toward the arena. Mother, hand at her neck, pressed against him. Ambassador Selvin was trying to push between two miners shouting at the rail.

“There’s Aaron!” Ruby exclaimed.

“No!” from Prince.

But now there were so many people standing, Lorq could no longer see anything. Tavo stood up and began to shout for people to sit, till someone passed him a bottle.

Lorq moved left to see; then right when the left was blocked. Unfocused excitement pounded in his chest.

The pitman stood on the railing above the crowd. Jumping, he had struck the lantern with his shoulder so that shadows staggered on the canvas. Leaning against the pole, he frowned at the swaying light, rubbed his bulging arms. Then he noticed the fluff. Carefully he pulled it off, then began to search his matted chest, his shoulders.

The noise exploded at the pit’s edge, halted, then roared. Somebody was waving a vest in the air.

The pitman, finding nothing, leaned against the pole again.

Excited, fascinated, at the same time Lorq was slightly ill with rum and stench. “Come on,” he shouted to Prince, “let’s go up where we can see!”

“I don’t think we ought to,” Ruby said.

“Why not!” Prince took a step forward. But he looked scared.

Lorq barged ahead of him.

Then someone caught him by the arm and he whirled around. “What are you doing out here?” Von Ray, angry and confused, was breathing hard. “Who told you you could bring those children up here!”

Lorq looked around for Tavo. Tavo was not there.

Aaron Red came up behind his father. “I told you we should have left somebody with them. Your baby sitters are so old-fashioned out here. Any clever child could fix it!”

Von Ray turned briskly. “Oh, the children are perfectly all right. But Lorq knows he’s not supposed to go out in the evening by himself!”

“I’ll take them home,” Mother said, coming up. “Don’t be upset, Aaron. They’re all right. I’m terribly sorry, really I am.” She turned to the children. “Whatever possessed you to come out here?”

The miners had gathered to watch.

Ruby began to cry.

“Dear me, now what’s the matter?” Mother looked concerned.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Aaron Red said. “She knows what’s going to happen when I get her home. They know when they do wrong.”

Ruby, who hadn’t thought about what was going to happen at all, began to cry in earnest.

“Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow morning.” Mother cast Von Ray a despairing glance. But Father was too upset by Ruby’s tears and chagrined by Lorq’s presence to respond.

“Yes, you take them home, Dana.” He looked up to see the miners watching. “Take them home now. Come, Aaron, you needn’t worry yourself.”

“Here,” Mother said. “Ruby, Prince, give me your hands. Come, Lorq, we’re going right—“

Mother had extended her hands to the children.

Then Prince reached with his prosthetic arm, and yanked – Mother screamed, staggered forward, beating at his wrist with her free hand. Metal and plastic fingers locked her own.

“Prince!” Aaron reached for him, but the boy ducked away, twisted, then dodged across the floor.

Mother went to her knees on the dirt floor, gasping, letting out tiny sobs. Father caught her by the shoulders. “Dana! What did he do? What happened?” Mother shook her head.

Prince ran straight against Tavo.

“Catch him!” Father shouted in Portuguese.

And Aaron bellowed, “Prince!”

At the word, resistance left the boy; he sagged in Tavo’s arms, face white.

Mother was on her feet now, grimacing on Father’s shoulder. “ …and one of my white birds …” Lorq heard her say.

“Prince, come here!” Aaron commanded.

Prince walked back, his movements jerky and electric.

“Now,” Aaron said. “You go back to the house with Dana. She’s sorry she mentioned your hand. She didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Mother and Father looked at Aaron, astounded. Aaron Red turned to them. He was a small man. The only thing red about him Lorq could see were the corners of his eyes. “You see—Aaron looked tired—“I never mention his deformity. Never.” He looked upset. “I don’t want him to feel inferior. I don’t let anyone point him out as different at all. You must never talk about it in front of him, you see. Not at all.”

Father started to say something. But the initial embarrassment of the evening had been his.

Mother looked back and forth between the two men, then at her hand. It was cradled in her other palm, and she made stroking motions. “Children,” she said. “Come with me.”

“Dana, are you sure that you’re—“

Mother cut him off with a look. “Come with me, children,” she repeated. They left the tent.

Tavo was outside. “I go with you, Senhora. I will go back to the house with you, if you wish.”

“Yes, Tavo,” Mother said. “Thank you.” She held her hand against the stomach of her dress.

“That boy with the iron hand.” Tavo shook his head. “And the girl, and your son. I brought them here, Senhora. But they asked me to, you see. They told me to bring them here.”

“I understand,” Mother said.

They didn’t go down through the jungle this time, but took the wider road that led past the launch from where the aquaturbs took the miners to the undersea mines. The high forms swayed in the water, casting double shadows on the waves.

As they reached the gate of the park, Lorq was suddenly sick to his stomach. “Hold his head, Tavo,” Mother instructed. “See, this excitement isn’t good for you, Lorq. And you were drinking that milk again. Do you feel any better?”

He hadn’t mentioned the rum. The smell in the tent, as well as the odor that lingered around Tavo kept his secret. Prince and Ruby watched him quietly, glancing at one another.

Upstairs Mother got the sitter back in order, and secured Prince and Ruby in their room. Finally she came into the nursery.

“Does your hand still hurt, Mommy?” he asked from the pillow.

“It does. Nothing’s broken, though I don’t know why not. I’m going to get the medico-unit soon as I leave you.”

“They wanted to go!” Lorq blurted. “They said they wanted to see where you all had gone.”

Mother sat down on the bed and began to rub his back with her good hand. “And didn’t you want to see too, just a little bit?”

“Yes,” he said, after a moment.

“That’s what I thought. How does your stomach feel? I don’t care what they say, I still don’t see how that sour milk could be any good for you.”

He still hadn’t mentioned the rum.

“You go to sleep now.” She went to the nursery door.

He remembered her touching the switch.

He remembered a moon darkening through the rotating roof.

Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3162

Lorq always associated Prince Red with the coming and going of light.

He was sitting naked by the swimming pool on the roof, reading for his petrology exam, when the purple leaves at the rock entrance shook. The skylight hummed with the gale outside; the towers of Ark, vaned to glide in the wind, were distorted behind the glittering frost.

“Dad!” Lorq snapped off the reader and stood up. “Hey, I came in third in senior mathematics. Third!”

Von Ray, in fur-rimmed parka stepped through the leaves. “And I suppose you call yourself studying now. Wouldn’t it be easier in the library? How can you concentrate up here with all this distraction?”

“Petrology,” Lorq said, holding up his note-recorder. “I don’t really have to study for that. I’ve got honors already.”

Only in the last few years had Lorq learned to relax under his parents’ demand for perfection. Having learned, he had discovered that the demands were now ritual and phatic, and gave way to communication if they were allowed to ride out.

“Oh,” his father said. “You did.” Then he smiled. The frost on his hair turned to water as he unlaced his parka. “At least you’ve been studying instead of crawling through the bowels of Caliban.”

“Which reminds me, Dad. I’ve registered her in the New Ark Regatta. Will you and Mother go up to see the finish?”

“If we can. You know Mother hasn’t been feeling too well recently. This past trip was a little rough. And you worry her with your racing.”

“Why? I haven’t let it interfere with my schoolwork.”

Von Ray shrugged. “She thinks it’s dangerous.” He laid the parka over the rock. “We read about your prize at Trantor last month. Congratulations. She may worry about you, but she was as proud as a partridge when she could tell all those stuffy club women you were her son.”

“I wish you’d been there.”

“We wanted to be. But there was no way to cut a month off the tour. Come, I’ve got something to show you.”

Lorq followed his father along the stream that curled from the pool. Von Ray put his arm around his son’s shoulder as they started the steps that dropped beside the waterfall into the house. At their weight, the steps began to escalate.

“We stopped on Earth, this trip. Spent a day with Aaron Red. I believe you met him a long time ago. Red-shift Limited?”

“Out on New Brazillia,” Lorq said. “At the mine.”

“Do you remember that far back?” The stairs flattened and carried them across the conservatory. Cockatoos sprung from the brush, beat against the transparent wall where snow lay outside the bottom panes, then settled in the bloodflowers, knocking petals to the sand. “Prince was with him. A boy your age, perhaps a little older.” Lorq had been vaguely aware of Prince’s doings over the years as a child is aware of the activity of the children of parents’ friends. Some time back, Prince had changed schools four times very rapidly, and the rumor that had filtered to the Pleiades was that only the fortunes of Red-shift, Ltd., kept the transfers from being openly labeled expulsion.

“I remember him,” Lorq said. “He only had one arm.”

“He wears a black glove to the shoulder with a jeweled armband at the top, now. He’s a very impressive young man. He said he remembered you. You two got into some mischief or other back then. He, at least, seems to have quieted down some.”

Lorq shrugged from under his father’s arm and stepped onto the white rugs that scattered the winter garden. “What do you want to show me?”

Father went to one of the viewing columns. It was a transparent column four feet thick supporting the clear roofing with a capital of floral glass. “Dana, do you want to show Lorq what you brought for him?”

“Just a moment.” His mother’s figure formed in the column. She was sitting in the swan chair. She took a green cloth from the table beside her and opened it on the quilted brocade of her lap.

“They’re beautiful!” Lorq claimed. “Where did you find heptodyne quartz?”

The stones, basically silicon, had been formed at geological pressures so that in each crystal, about the size of a child’s fist, light flowed along the shattered blue lines within the jagged forms.

“I picked them up when we stopped at Cygnus. We were staying near the Exploding Desert of Krall. We could see it flashing from our hotel window beyond the walls of the city. It was quite as spectacular as it’s always described. One afternoon when your father was off in conference, I took the tour. When I saw them, I thought of your collection and bought these for you.”

“Thanks.” He smiled at the figure in the column.

Neither he nor his father had seen his mother in person for four years. Victim of a degenerative mental and physical disease that often left her totally incommunicative, she had retired to her suite in the house with her medicines, her diagnostic computers, her cosmetics, her gravothermy and reading machines. She—or more often one of her androids programmed to her general response pattern—would appear in the viewing columns and present a semblance of her normal appearance and personality. In the same way, through android and telerama report, she “accompanied” Von Ray on his business travels, while her physical presence was confined in the masked, isolate chambers that no one was allowed to enter except the psychotechnician who came quietly once a month.

“They’re beautiful,” he repeated, stepping closer.

“I’ll leave them in your room this evening.” She picked one up with dark fingers and turned it over. “I find them fascinating myself. Almost hypnotic.”

“Here.” Von Ray turned to one of the other columns. “I have something else to show you. Aaron had apparently heard of your interest in racing, and knew how well you were doing.” Something was forming in the second column. “Two of his engineers had just developed a new ion-coupler. They told us it was too sensitive for commercial use and wouldn’t be profitable for them to manufacture on any large scale. But Aaron said the response level would be excellent for small-scale racing craft. I offered to buy it for you. He wouldn’t hear of it; he’s sent it to you as a gift.”

“He did?” Lorq felt excitement lap above surprise. “Where is it?”

In the column a crate stood on the corner of a loading platform. The fence of Nea Limani Yacht Basin diminished in the distance between the guide towers. “Over at the field?” Lorq sat down in the green hammock hanging from the ceiling. “Good! I’ll look at it when I go down this evening. I still have to get a crew for the race.”

“You just pick your crew from people hanging around the spacefield?” Mother shook her head. “That always worries me.”

“Mom, people who like racing, kids who are interested in racing ships, people who know how to sail, they hang around the shipyards. I know half the people at Nea Limani anyway.”

“I still wish you’d get your crew from among your school friends, or people like that.”

“What wrong is with people who like this talk?” He smiled slightly.

“I didn’t say anything of that nature at all. I just meant you should use people you know.”

“After the race,” his father cut in, “what do you intend to do with the rest of your vacation?”

Lorq shrugged. “Do you want me to foreman out at the Sao Orini mine like last year?”

His father’s eyebrows separated then snarled over the vertical crevices above his nose. “After what happened with that miner’s daughter …?” The brows unsnarled again. “Do you want to go out there again?”

Lorq shrugged once more.

“Have you thought of anything that you’d like to do?” This from his mother.

“Ashton Clark will send me something. Right now I’ve got to go pick up my crew.” He stood up from the hammock. “Mom, thanks for the stones. We’ll talk about vacation when school is really over.”

He started for the bridge that arched the water.

“You won’t be too …”

“Before midnight.”

“Lorq. One more thing.”

He stopped at the crest of the bridge, leaning on the aluminum banister.

“Prince is having a party. He sent you an invitation. It’s at Earth, Paris, on the Ile St.-Louis. But it’s just three days after the Regatta. You wouldn’t be able to get there—“

“Caliban can make Earth in three days.”

“No, Lorq! You’re not going to go all the way to Earth in that tiny—“

“I’ve never been to Paris. The last time I was on Earth was the time you took me when I was fifteen and we went to Peking. It’ll be easy sailing down into Draco.” Leaving, he called back to them, “If I don’t get my crew, I won’t even get back to school next week.” He disappeared down the other side of the bridge.

Pleiades Federation/Draco (Caliban transit), 3162

His crew was two fellows who volunteered to help him unpack the ion-coupler. Neither one was from the Pleiades Federation.

Brian, a boy Lorq’s age who had taken a year off from Draco University and flown out to the Outer Colonies, was now working his way back; he had done both captaining and studding on racing yachts, but only in the co-operative yachting club sponsored by his school. Based on common interest in racing-ships, their relation was one of mutual awe. Lorq was silently agape at the way Brian had taken off to the other end of the galaxy and was beating his way without funds or forethought; while Brian had at last met, in Lorq, one of the mythically wealthy who could own his own boat and whose name had, till then, been only an abstraction on the sports tapes—Lorq Von Ray, one of the youngest and most spectacular of the new crop of racing captains.

Dan, who completed the crew of the little three-vaned racer, was a man in his forties, from Australia on Earth. They had met him in the bar where he had started a whole series of tales about his times as a commercial stud on the big transport freighters, as well as racing captains he had occasionally crewed for—though he had never captained himself. Barefoot, a rope around pants torn off at the knees, Dan was a lot more typical of the studs that hung around the heated walkways of Nea Limani. The high wind-domes broke the hurricane gusts that rolled from Tong across glittering Ark—it was the month of Iumbra when there were only three hours of daylight in the twenty-nine-hour day. The mechanics, officers, and studs drank late, talked currents and racing at the bars and the sauna baths, the registration offices and the service pits.

Brian’s reaction to continuing on after the race down to Earth: “Fine. Why not? I have to get back into Draco in time for vacation classes anyway.”

Dan’s: “Paris? That’s awful close to Australia, ain’t it? I got a kid and two wives in Melbourne, and I ain’t so anxious for them to catch hold of me. I suppose if we don’t stay too long—“

When the Regatta swept past the observation satellite circling Ark, looped the inner edge of the cluster to the Dim, Dead Sister, and returned to Ark again, it was announced that Caliban had placed second.

“All right. Let’s get out of here. To Prince’s party!”

“Be careful now …” His mother’s voice came over the speaker.

“Give our regards to Aaron. And congratulations again, son,” Father said. “If you wreck that brass butterfly on this silly trip, don’t expect me to buy a new one.”

“So long, Dad.”

The Caliban rose from among the ships clustered at the viewing station where the spectators had come to observe the Regatta’s conclusion. Fifty-foot windows flashed in starlight below them (behind one, his father and an android of his mother stood at the railing, watching the ship pull away), and in a moment they were wheeling through the Pleiades Federation, then toward Sol.

A day out, they lost six hours in a whirlpool nebula (“Now if you had a real ship instead of this here toy,” Dan complained over the intercom, “it’d be a sneeze to get out of this thing.” Lorq turned the frequency of the scanner higher on the ion-coupler. “Point two-five down, Brian. Then catch it up fast—there!”), but made up the time and then some on the Outward Tidal Drift.

A day later, and Sol was a glowing, growing light in the cosmos raging.

Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162

Shaped like the figure eight of a Mycenaean shield, De Blau Field tilted miles below the sweeping vans. Cargo shuttles left from here for the big star—port on Neptune’s second moon. The five-hundred-meter passenger liners glittered across the platforms. Caliban fell toward the inset of the yacht basin, coming down like a triple kite. Lorq sat up from the couch as the guide beams caught them. “Okay, puppets. Cut the strings.” He switched off Caliban’s humming entrails a moment after touchdown. Banked lights died around him.

Brian hopped into the control cabin, tying his left sandal. Dan, unshaven, his vest unlaced, ambled from his projection chamber. “Guess we got here, Captain.” He stooped to finger dirt between his toes. “What kind of party is this you kids are going to?”

As Lorq touched the unload button, the floor began to slant and the ribbed covering rolled back till the lower edge of the floor hit the ground. “I’m not sure,” Lorq told him. “I suppose we’ll all find out when we get there.”

“Ohhh no,” Dan drawled as they reached the bottom. “I don’t go for this society stuff.” They started from beneath the shadow of the hull. “Find me a bar, and just pick me up when you come back.”

“If you two don’t want to come,” Lorq said, looking around the field, “we’ll stop off for something to eat, and then you can stay here.”

“I … well, sort of wanted to go.” Brian looked disappointed. “This is as close as I’ll ever get to going to a party given by Prince Red.”

Lorq looked at Brian. The stocky, brown-haired boy with coffee-colored eyes had changed his scuffed leather work-vest for a clean one with iridescent flowers. Lorq was only beginning to realize how dazzled this young man, who had hitched across the universe, was before the wealth, visible and implied, that went with a nineteen-year-old who could race his own yacht and just took off to parties in Paris.

It had not occurred to Lorq to change his vest at all.

“You come on then,” Lorq said. “We’ll get Dan on the way back.”

“Just you two don’t get so drunk you can’t carry me back on board.”

Lorq and Dan laughed.

Brian was staring around at the other yachts in the basin. “Hey! Have you ever worked a tri-vaned Zephyr?” He touched Lorq’s arm, then pointed across to a graceful, golden hull. “I bet one of those would really twirl.”

“Pickup is slow on the lower frequencies.” Lorq turned back to Dan. “You make sure you get back on board by take-off time tomorrow. I’m not going to go running around looking for you.”

“With me this close to Australia? Don’t worry, Captain. By the by, you wouldn’t get upset if I should happen to bring a lady onto the ship?” He grinned at Lorq, then winked.

“Say,” Brian said. “How do those Boris-27s handle? Our club at school was trying to arrange a swap with another club that had a ten-year-old Boris. Only they wanted money too.”

“As long as she doesn’t leave the ship with anything she didn’t bring,” Lorq told Dan. He turned to Brian again. “I’ve never been on a Boris more than three years old. A friend of mine had one a couple of years back. It worked pretty well, but it wasn’t up to Caliban.”

They walked through the gate of the landing field, started down the steps to the street, and passed through the shadow from the column of the coiled snake.

Paris had remained a more or less horizontal city. The only structures interrupting the horizon to any great extent were the Eiffel Tower to their left and the spiring structure of Les Halles: seventy tiers of markets were enclosed in transparent panes, tessellated with metal scrollwork—it was the focus of food and produce for the twenty-three million inhabitants of the city.

They turned up Rue de Les Astronauts past the restaurants and hotel marquees. Dan dug under the rope around his middle to scratch his stomach, then pushed his long hair from his forehead. “Where do you get drunk around here if you’re a working cyborg stud?” Suddenly he pointed down a smaller street. “There!”

At the bend of the L-shaped street was a small cafe-bar with a crack across the window, Le Sideral. The door was closing behind two women.

“Fine,” Dan drawled, and loped ahead of Lorq and Brian. “I envy someone like that, sometimes,” Brian said to Lorq, softly.

Lorq looked surprised.

“You really don’t care,” Brian went on, “I mean if he brings a woman on the ship?”

Lorq shrugged. “I’d bring one on.”

“Oh. You must have it pretty easy with girls, especially with a racing ship.”

“I guess it helps.”

Brian bit at his thumbnail and nodded. “That would be nice. Sometimes I think girls have forgotten I’m alive. Probably be the same, yacht or no.” He laughed. “You ever brought a girl onto your ship?”

Lorq was silent a moment. Then he said, “I have three children.”

Now Brian looked surprised.

“A boy and two girls. Their mothers are miners on a little Outer Colony world, New Brazillia.”

“Oh, you mean you …”

Lorq cupped his left hand on his right shoulder, right hand on his left.

“We lead very different sorts of lives, I think,” Brian said slowly, “you and I.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Then Lorq grinned. Brian’s smile returned uneasily.

“Hold on, you there!” from behind them. “Wait!” They turned.

“Lorq? Lorq Von Ray?”

The black glove Lorq’s father had described was now a silver one. The armband, high on his biceps, was set with diamonds.

“Prince?”

Vest, pants, boots were silver. “I almost missed you!” The bony face beneath black hair animated. “I had the field call me as soon as you got clearance at Neptune. Racing yacht, huh? Sure took your time. Oh, before I forget; Aaron told me if you did come, I should ask you to give his regards to your Aunt Cyana. She stayed with us for a weekend at the beach on Chobe’s World last month.”

“Thanks. I will if I see her,” Lorq said. “If she was with you last month, you’ve seen her more recently than I have. She doesn’t spend much time on Ark any more.”

“Cyana …” Brian began. “ …Morgan?” he finished in astonishment. But Prince was already going on: “Look.” He dropped his hands on the shoulders of Lorq’s leather vest (Lorq tried to detect a difference in pressure between gloved and ungloved fingers), “I’ve got to get to Mt. Kenyuna and back before the party. I have every available bit of transportation bringing people down from all over everywhere. Aaron’s not co-operating. He’s refused to have anything more to do with the party; he thinks it’s gotten out of hand. I’m afraid I’ve been throwing his name around to get things I needed in a few places he didn’t approve. But he’s somewhere off on Vega. Do you want to run me over to the Himalayas?”

“All right.” Lorq started’ to suggest that Prince stud with Brian. But perhaps with his arm Prince might not be able to plug in properly. “Hey, Dan!” he shouted down the street. “You’re still working.”

The, Australian had just opened the door. Now he turned around, shook his head, and started back.

“What are we going for?” Lorq asked as they started back toward the field.

“Tell you on the way.”

As they passed the gate (and the Draco column ringed with the Serpent gleaming in the sunset), Brian hazarded conversation. “That’s quite an outfit,” he said to Prince.

“There’ll be a lot of people on the Ile. I want everybody to be able to see where I am.”

“Is that glove something new they’re wearing here on Earth?”

Lorq’s stomach caught itself. He glanced quickly between the two boys.

“Things like that,” Brian went on, “they never get out to Centauri till a month after everybody’s stopped wearing them on Earth. And I haven’t even been in Draco for ten months anyway.”

Prince looked at his arm, turned his hand over.

Twilight washed the sky.

Then lights along the top of the fence flicked on: light lined the folds on Prince’s glove.

“My personal style.” He looked up at Brian. “I have no right arm. This”—he made a fist of silver fingers—“is all metal and plastic and whirring doohickeys.” He laughed sharply. “But it serves me … about as well as a real one.”

“Oh.” Embarrassment wavered through Brian’s voice. “I didn’t know.”

Prince laughed. “Sometimes I almost forget too. Sometimes. Which way is your ship?”

“There.” As Lorq pointed, he was acutely aware of the dozen years between his and Prince’s first and present meetings.

Draco, Earth, Nepal, 3162

“All plugged?”

“You’re paying me, Captain,” Dan’s voice grated through. “Strung up and out.”

“Ready, Captain,” from Brian.

“Open your low vanes—“

Prince sat behind Lorq, one hand on Lorq’s shoulder (his real hand). “Everybody and his brother is coming to this thing. You just got here tonight, but people have been arriving all week. I invited a hundred people. There’re at least three hundred coming. It grows, it grows!” As the inertia field caught them up, De Blau dropped, and the sun, which had set, rose in the west and crescented the world with fire. The blue rim burned. “Anyway, Che-ong brought a perfectly wild bunch with her from somewhere on the edge of Draco—“

Brian’s voice came over the speaker. “Che-ong, you mean the psychorama star?”

“The studio gave her a week’s vacation, so she decided to come to my party. Day before yesterday, she took it into her head to go mountain climbing, and flew off to Nepal.”

The sun passed overhead. To travel between two points on one planet, you just had to go up and come down in the right place. In a vane-projector craft, you had to ascend, circle the Earth three or four times, and glide in. It took the same seven/eight minutes to get from one side of the city to the other as it did to get to the other side of the world.

“Che radioed me this afternoon they were stuck three-quarters of the way up Mt. Kenyuna. There’s a storm below them, so they can’t get through to the rescue station in Katmandu for a helicopter to come and pick them up. Of course, the storm doesn’t stop her from getting a third of the way around the world to tell me her troubles. Anyway, I promised her I’d think of something.”

“How the hell are we supposed to get them off the mountain?”

“You fly within twenty feet of the rock face and hover. Then I’ll climb down and bring them up.”

“Twenty feet!” The blurred world slowed beneath them. “You want to get to your party alive?”

“Did you get that ion-coupler Aaron sent?”

“I’m using it now.”

“It’s supposed to be sensitive enough for that sort of maneuvering. And you’re a crack racing captain. Yes or no?”

“I’ll try it,” Lorq said warily. “I’m a bigger fool than you are.” Then he laughed. “We’ll try it, Prince!”

Reticulations of snow and rock glided under them. Lorq set the loran co-ordinates of the mountain as Prince bad given them. Prince reached over Lorq’s arm and tuned the radio …

A girl’s voice tumbled into the cabin:

“ … Oh, there! Look, do you think that’s them? Prince! Prince, darling, have you come to rescue us? We’re hanging here by our little frozen nubs and just miserable. Prince …?” There was music behind her voice; there was a babble of other voices.

“Hold on, Che,” Prince said into the mike. “Told you we’d do something.” He turned to Lorq. “There! They should be right down there.”

Lorq cut the frequency filter till Caliban was sliding down the gravitational distortion of the mountain itself. The peaks rose, chiseled and flashing.

“Oh, look, everybody! Didn’t I tell you Prince wouldn’t let us languish away up here and miss the party?”

And in the background:

“Oh, Cecil, I can’t do that step—“

“Turn the music up louder—“

“But I don’t like anchovies—“

“Prince,” cried Che, “do hurry! It’s started to snow again. You know this would never have happened, Cecil, if you hadn’t decided to do parlor tricks with the hobenstocks.”

“Come on, sweetheart, let’s dance!”

“I told you, no! We’re too close to the edge!”

Below Lorq’s feet, on the floor screen, transmitting natural light, ice and gravel and boulders shone in the moonlight as the Caliban lowered.

“How many of them are there?” Lorq asked. “The ship isn’t that big.”

“They’ll squeeze.”

On the icy ledge that slipped across the screen, some were seated on a green poncho with wine bottles, cheeses, and baskets of food. Some were dancing. A few sat around on canvas chairs. One had scrambled to a higher ledge and was shading his eyes, staring up at the ship.

“Che,” Prince said, “we’re here. Get everything packed. We can’t wait around all day.”

“Good heavens! That is you up there. Come on, everybody, we’re on our way! Yes, that’s Prince!”

There was an explosion of activity on the ledge. The youngsters began to run about, picking things up, putting them in knapsacks; two people were folding the poncho.

“Edgar! Don’t throw that away! It’s ‘forty-eight, and you can’t just pick up a bottle any old where. Yes, Hillary, you may change the music. No! Don’t turn the heater off yet! Oh, Cecil, you are a fool. Brrrr! – well, I suppose we’ll be off in a moment or two. Of course I’ll dance with you, honey. Just not so close to the edge. Wait a second. Prince? Prince …!”

“Che!” Prince called as Lorq settled still closer. “Do you have any rope down there?” He put his hand over the mike. “Did you see her in Mayham’s Daughters where she acted the wacky, sixteen-year-old daughter of that botanist?”

Lorq nodded.

“That wasn’t acting.” He took his hand from the mike again. “Che! Rope! Do you have any rope?”

“Oodles! Edgar, where’s all that rope? But we climbed up here on something! There it is! Now, what do I do?”

“Tie big knots in it every couple of feet. How far are we above you?”

“Forty feet? Thirty feet? Edgar! Cecil! Jose! You heard him. Tie knots!”

On the floor screen Lorq watched the shadow of the yacht slip over the bergs; he let the boat fall even lower.

“Lorq, open the hatch in the drive-room when we’re—

“We’re seventeen feet above them,” Lorq called over his shoulder. “That’s it, Prince!” He reached forward. “And it is open.”

“Fine!”

Prince ducked through the doorway into the drive-room. Cold air slapped Lorq’s back. Dan and Brian held the ship steady in the wind.

On the floor screen Lorq saw one of the boys fling the rope up at the ship—Prince would be standing in the open hatchway to catch it in his silver glove. It took three tries. Then Prince’s voice came back over the wind: “Right! I’ve got it tied. Come on up!” And one after another they mounted the knotted rope.

“There you go. Watch it—“

“Man, it’s cold out there! Soon as you get past the heating field-“

“I’ve got you. Right in—“

“Didn’t think we’d make it. Hey, you want some Chateauneuf du Pape ‘forty-eight? Che says you can’t get—“

The voices filled the drive-room. Then:

“Prince! Luscious of you to rescue me! Are you going to have any nineteenth-century Turkish music at your party? We couldn’t get any local stations, but there was this educational program beaming up from New Zealand. Airy! Edgar invented a new step. You get down on your hands and knees and just swing your up and down. Jose, don’t fall back onto that silly mountain! Come in here this instant and meet Prince Red. He’s the one who’s giving the party, and his father has ever so many more millions than yours. Close the door now and let’s get out of the engine room. All these machines and things. It isn’t me.”

“Come inside, Che, and annoy the captain awhile. Do you know Lorq Von Ray?”

“My goodness, the boy who’s winning all those races? Why, he’s got even more money than you—“

“Shhhhh!” Prince said in a stage whisper as they came into the cabin. “I don’t want him to know.”

Lorq pulled the ship away from the mountain, then turned.

“You must be the one who won those prizes: You’re so handsome!”

Che-ong wore a completely transparent cold suit.

“Did you win them with this ship?”

She looked around the cabin, still panting from the climb up the rope. Rouged nipples flattened on vinyl with each breath.

“This is lovely. I haven’t been on a yacht in days.” And the crowd surged in behind her:

“Doesn’t anybody want any of this ‘forty-eight—“

“I can’t get any music in here. Why isn’t there any music—Cecil, do you have any more of that gold powder?”

“We’re above the ionosphere, stupid, and electromagnetic waves aren’t reflected any more. Besides, we’re moving too—“

Che-ong turned to them all. “Oh, Cecil, where has that marvelous golden dust got to? Prince, Lorq, you must try this. Cecil is the son of a mayor—“

“Governor—“

“—on one of those tiny worlds we’re always hearing about, very far away. He had this gold powder that they collect from crevices in the rocks. Oh, look, he’s still got lots and lots!”

The world began to spin beneath them.

“See, Prince, you breathe it in, like this. Ahhhh! It makes you see the most marvelous colors in everything you look at and hear the most incredible sounds in everything you hear, and your mind starts running about and filling in absolutely paragraphs between each word. Here, Lorq—“

“Watch it!” Prince laughed. “He’s got to get us back to Paris!”

“Oh!” exclaimed Che, “it won’t bother him. We’ll just get there a little faster, that’s all.”

Behind them the others were saying:

“Where did she say this goddamn party was?”

“Ile St-Louis. That’s in Paris.”

“Where – ?”

“Paris, baby, Paris. We’re going to a party in—“

Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162

In the middle of the fourth century the Byzantine Emperor Julian, tiring of the social whirl of the Cite de Paris (whose population, then under a thousand, dwelt mostly in skin huts clustered about a stone and wooden temple sacred to the Great Mother), moved across the water to the smaller island.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the queen of a worldwide cosmetic industry, to escape the pretensions of the Right Bank and the bohemian excesses of the Left, established here her Paris pied a terre, the walls of which were lined with a fortune in art treasures (while across the water, a twin-towered cathedral had replaced the wooden temple).

At the close of the thirty-first century, its central avenue hung with lights, the side alleys filled with music, menageries, drink, and gaming booths, while fireworks boomed in the night, the Ile St.-Louis held Prince Red’s party.

“This way! Across here!”

They trooped over the trestled bridge. The black Seine glittered. Across the water, foliage dripped the stone balustrades. The sculptured buttresses of Notre Dame, floodlit now, rose behind the trees in the park on the Cite.

“No one can come onto my island without a mask!” Prince shouted.

As they reached the bridge’s center, he vaulted to the rail, grabbed one of the beams, and waved over the crowd with his silver hand. “You’re at a party! You’re at Prince’s party! And everybody wears a mask!” Spheres of fireworks, blue and red, bloomed on the dark behind his bony face.

“Airy!’ squealed Che-ong, running to the rail. “But if I wear a mask, nobody will recognize me, Prince! The studio only said I could come if there was publicity!”

He jumped, grabbed her vinyl glove, and led her down the steps. There, on racks, hundreds of full-headed masks glared.

“But I have a special one for you, Che!” He pulled down a two-foot, transparent rat’s head, ears rimmed with white fur, eyebrows sequined, jewels shaking at the end of each wire whisker.

“Airy!” squealed Che as Prince clapped the shape over her shoulders.

Through the transparent leer, her own delicate, green-eyed face twisted into laughter.

“Here, one for you!” Down came a saber-toothed panther’s head for Cecil; an eagle for Edgar, with iridescent feathers; Jose’s dark hair disappeared under a lizard’s head.

A lion for Dan (who had come protesting at everyone’s insistence, though they had forgotten him the moment he had given his belligerent consent) and a griffon for Brian (whom everyone had ignored till now, though he’d followed eagerly).

“And you!” Prince turned to Lorq. “I have a special one for you too!” Laughing, he lifted down a pirate’s head, with eyepatch, bandana, scarred cheek, and a dagger in bared teeth, It went lightly over Lorq’s head: he was looking through mesh eyeholes in the neck. Prince slapped him on the back. “A pirate, that’s for Von Ray!” he called as Lorq started across the cobble street.

More laughter as others arrived at the bridge.

Above the crowd, girls in powdered, towering, twenty-third-century, pre-Ashton Clark coiffures, tossed confetti from a balcony. A man was pushing up the street with a bear. Lorq thought it was someone in costume till the fur brushed his shoulder and he smelled the musk. The claws clicked away. The crowd caught him up,

Lorq was ears.

Lorq was eyes.

Bliss filed the receptive surface of each sense glass-smooth. Perception turned suddenly in (as the vanes of a ship might turn) as he walked the brick street, mortared with confetti. He felt the presence of his centered self. His world focused on the now of his hands and tongue. Voices around him caressed his awareness.

“Champagne! Isn’t that just airy!” The transparent plastic rat had cornered the griffon in the flowered vest at the wine table. “Aren’t you having fun? I just love it!”

“Sure,” Brian answered. “But I’ve never been to a party like this. People like Lorq, Prince, you—you’re the sort of people I only used to hear about. It’s hard to believe you’re real.”

“Just between us. I’ve occasionally had the same problem. It’s good to have you here to remind us, Now you just keep telling us—“

Lorq passed on to another group.

“ …on the cruise boat up from Port Said to Istanbul, there was this fisherman from the Pleiades who played the most marvelous things on the sensory-syrynx. .

“ …and then we had to hitchhike all the way across Iran because the mono wasn’t working. I really think Earth is coming apart at the seams …”

“ …beautiful party. Perfectly air …”

The very young, Lorq thought; the very rich; and wondered what limits of difference those conditions defined.

Barefoot, with a rope belt, the lion leaned against the side of a doorway, watching. “How you doing, Captain?”

Lorq raised his hand to Dan, walked on.

Now, specious and crystal, was within him. Music invaded his hollow mask where his head was cushioned on the sound of his own breath. On a platform at a harpsichord a man was playing a Byrd pavane. Voices in another key grew over the sound as he moved further on; on a platform on the other side of the street, two boys and two girls in twentieth-century mod re-created a flowing antiphonal work of the Mommas and the Poppas. Turning down a side street, Lorq moved into a crowd that pushed him forward, till at last he confronted the towering bank of electronic instruments that were reproducing the jarring, textured silences of the Tohu-bohus. Responding with the nostalgia produced by ten-year-old popular music, the guests, in their bloated mache and plastic heads, broke off in twos, threes, fives, and sevens to dance. A swan’s head swayed to the right. Left, a frog’s face wobbled on sequined shoulders. As he moved even further, into his ear threaded the thirdless modulations that he had heard over the speaker of the Caliban, hovering above the Himalayas.

They came running through the dancers. “He did it! Isn’t Prince a darling!” They shouted and cavorted. “He’s got that old Turkish music!”

Hips and breasts and shoulders gleaming beneath the vinyl (the material had pores that opened in warm weather to make the transparent costume cool as silk), Che-ong swung around, holding her furry ears,

“Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We’re going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your—“

Lorq turned under the exploding night, a little tired, a little excited. He crossed the street edging the island and leaned on the stone near one of the floodlights that shone back on the buildings of the Ile. Across the water on the opposite quay people strolled, in couples or singly, gazing at the fireworks or simply watching the gaiety here.

Behind him a girl laughed sharply. He turned to her—

– head of a bird of paradise, blue feathers about red foil eyes, red beak, red rippling comb—

– as she pulled away from the group to sway against the low wall. The breeze shook the panels of her dress so that they tugged at the scrolled brass fastenings at shoulder, wrist, and thigh. She rested her hip on the stone, sandaled toe touching the ground, one inch above it. With long arms (her nails were crimson) she removed her mask. As she set it on the wall, the breeze shook out her black hair, dropped it to her shoulders, raised it. The water reticulated below them as under flung sand.

He looked away. He looked back. He frowned.

There are two beauties (her face struck the thought in him, articulate and complete): with the first, the features and the body’s lines conform to an averaged standard that will offend no one: this was the beauty of models and popular actresses; this was the beauty of Che-ong. Second, there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheekbones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face. Her chin was wide; her mouth, thin, red, and wider. Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind—and watching her, he became aware of the river’s odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of such a young woman. But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away. Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful gnaw the insides of their cheeks,

She looked at him: “Lorq Von Ray?”

His frown deepened inside his mask.

She leaned forward, above the paving that lipped the river. “They’re all so far away.” She nodded toward the people on the quay. “They’re so much further away than we think or they think. What would they do at our party?”

Lorq took off his mask and placed the pirate beside her crested bird.

She glanced back at him. “So that’s what you look like. You’re handsome.”

“How did you know who I was?” Thinking he might somehow have missed her in the crowd that had first come across the bridge, he expected her to say something about the pictures of him that occasionally appeared across the galaxy when he won a race.

“Your mask. That’s how I knew.”

“Really?” He smiled. “I don’t understand.”

Her eyebrows’ arch sharpened. There were a few seconds of laughter, too soft and gone too fast.

“You. Who are you?” Lorq asked.

“I’m Ruby Red.”

She was still thin. Somewhere a little girl had stood above him in the mouth of a beast—Lorq laughed now. “What was there about my mask that gave me away?”

“Prince has been gloating over the prospect of making you wear it ever since he extended the invitation through your father and there was the faintest possibility that you would actually come. Tell me, is it politeness that makes you indulge him in his nasty prank by wearing it?”

“Everyone else has one. I thought it was a clever idea.”

“I see.” Her voice hung above the tone of general statement. “My brother tells me we have all met a long time ago.” It returned. “I … wouldn’t have recognized you. But I remember you.”

“I remember you.”

“Prince does too. He was seven. That means I was five.”

“What have you been doing for the last dozen years?”

“Growing older gracefully, while you’ve been the enfant terrible in the raceways of the Pleiades, flaunting your parents’ ill-gotten gains.”

“Look!” He gestured toward the people watching from the opposite bank. Some apparently thought he waved; they waved back.

Ruby laughed and waved too. “Do they realize how special we are? I feel very special tonight.” She raised her face with eyes closed. Blue fireworks tinted her lids.

“Those people, they’re too far away to see how beautiful you are.”

She looked at him again.

“It’s true. You are—“

“We are …”

“—very beautiful.”

“Don’t you think that’s a dangerous thing to say to your hostess, Captain Von Ray?”

“Don’t you think that was a dangerous thing to say to your guest?”

“But we’re unique, young Captain. If we want, we’re allowed to flirt with Dan—“

The streetlights about them extinguished.

There was a cry from the side street; the strings of colored bulbs as well were dead. As Lorq turned from the embankment, Ruby took his shoulder.

Along the island, lights and windows flickered twice. Someone screamed. Then the illumination returned, and with it laughter.

“My brother!” Ruby shook her head. “Everyone told him he was going to have power trouble, but he insisted on having the whole island wired for electricity. He thought electric light would be more romantic than the perfectly good induced-fluorescence tubes that were here yesterday—and have to go back up tomorrow by city ordinance. You should have seen him trying to hunt up a generator. It’s a lovely six-hundred-year-old museum piece that fills up a whole room. I’m afraid Prince is an incurable romantic—“

Lorq placed his hand over hers.

She looked. She took her hand away. “I have to go now. I promised I’d help him.” Her smile was not a happy thing. The piercing expression etched itself on his heightened senses. “Don’t wear Prince’s mask any more.” She lifted the bird of paradise from the rail. “Just because he chooses to insult you, you needn’t display that insult to everyone here.”

Lorq looked down at the pirate’s head, confused.

Foil eyes glittered at him from blue feathers. “Besides”—her voice was muffled now—“you’re too handsome to cover yourself up with something so mean and ugly.” And she was crossing the street, was disappearing in the crowded alley.

He looked up and down the sidewalk, and did not want to be there.

He crossed after her, plunged into the same crowd, only realizing halfway down the block that he was following her.

She was beautiful.

That was not bliss.

That was not the party’s excitement.

That was her face and the way it turned and formed to her words.

That was the hollow in him so evident now because moments before, during a few banal exchanges, it had been so full of her face, her voice.

Trouble with all of this is that there’s no cultural solidity underneath.” (Lorq glanced to the side where the griffon was speaking to earnest armadillos, apes, and others.) “There’s been so much movement from world to world that we have no real art any more, just a pseudo-inter-planetary …”

In the doorway, on the ground, lay a lion’s head and a frog’s. Back in the darkness, Dan, his back sweating from the dance, nuzzled the girl with sequined shoulders.

And halfway down the block, Ruby passed up a set of steps behind scrolled iron.

“Ruby!”

He ran forward—“Hey, watch—“

“Look out. Where do you—“

“Slow down—“

“—swung round the banister, and ran up the steps after her, “Ruby Red!” and through a door. “Ruby …?”

Wide tapestries between thin mirrors cut all echo from his voice. The door by the marble table was ajar. So he crossed the foyer, opened it.

She turned on swirling light.

Beneath the floor, tides of color flowed the room, flickering on the heavy, black-in-crystal legs of Vega Republic furniture. Without shadow, she stepped back. “Lorq! Now what are you doing here?” She had just placed her bird mask on one of the circular shelves that drifted at various levels around the room.

“I wanted to talk to you some more.”

Her brows were dark arches over her eyes. “I’m sorry. Prince has planned a pantomime for the float that goes down the middle of the island at midnight. I have to change.”

One of the shelves had drifted toward him. Before it could respond to his body temperature and float away, Lorq removed a liquor bottle from the veined glass panel. “Do you have to rush?” He raised the bottle. “I want to find out who you are, what you do, what you think. I want to tell you all about me.”

“Sorry.” She turned toward the spiral lift that would take her up to the balcony.

His laughter stopped her. She turned back to see what had caused it.

“Ruby?”

And continued turning till she faced him again.

He crossed the surging floor and put his hands on the smooth cloth falling at her shoulders. His fingers closed on her arms. “Ruby Red.” His inflection brought puzzlement to her face. “Leave here with me. We can go to another city, on another world, under another sun. Don’t the configurations of the stars bore you from here? I know a world where the constellations are called the Mad Sow’s Litter, the Greater and Lesser Lynx, the Eye of Vahdamin.

She took two glasses from a passing shelf. “What are you high on anyway?” Then she smiled. “Whatever it is, it becomes you.”

“Will you go?”

“No.”

“Why not?” He poured frothing amber into tiny glasses.

“First.” She handed him the glass as he placed the bottle on another passing shelf. “Because it’s terribly rude—I don’t know how you do it back on Ark—for a hostess to run out on her party before midnight.”

“After midnight then?”

“Second.” She sipped the drink and wrinkled her nose (he was surprised, shocked that her clear, clear skin could support anything so human as a wrinkle). “Prince has been planning this party for months, and I don’t want to upset him by not showing up when I promised.” Lorq touched his fingers to her cheek. “Third.” Her eyes snapped from the brim of her glass to lock his. “I’m Aaron Red’s daughter and you are the dark, red-haired, high, handsome son”—she turned her head away—“of a blond thief!” Cold air on his fingertips where her warm arm had been,

He put his palm against her face, slid his fingers into her hair. She turned away from his band and stepped onto the spiral lift. She rose up and away, adding, “And you haven’t got much pride if you let Prince mock you the way he does.”

Lorq jumped onto the edge as the lift came around, She stepped back, surprised.

“What’s all this talk of thieves, piracy, and mocking mean?” Anger, not at her but at the confusion she caused. “I don’t understand and I don’t know if it sounds like anything I want to. I don’t know how it is on Earth, but on Ark you don’t make fun of your guests.”

Ruby looked at her glass, his eyes, her glass again. “I’m sorry.” And then his eyes. “Go outside, Lorq. Prince will be here in a few minutes. I shouldn’t have spoken to you at all—“

“Why?” The room revolved, falling. “Whom you should speak to, whom you shouldn’t; I don’t know what brings this all up, but you’re talking as if we were little people.” He laughed again, a slow low sound in his chest, rising to shake his shoulders. “You’re Ruby Red?” He took her shoulders and pulled her forward. For a moment her blue eyes beat. “And you take all this nonsense that little people say seriously?”

“Lorq, you’d better—“

“I’m Lorq Von Ray! And you’re Ruby, Ruby, Ruby Red!” The lift had already taken them past the first balcony.

“Lorq, please. I’ve got to—“

“You’ve got to come with me! Will you go over the rim of Draco with me, Ruby? Will you come to Ark, where you and your brother have never been? Or come with me to Sao Orini. There’s a house there that you’d remember if you saw it, there at the galaxy’s edge.” They rose by the second balcony, rotated toward the third. “We’ll play behind the bamboo on the stone lizards’ tongues—“

She cried out. Because veined glass struck the lift ceiling and rained fragments over them.

“Prince!” She pulled away from Lorq, and stared down over the lift’s edge.

“Get AWAY FROM HER!” His silver glove snatched another of the shelves from the inductance field that caused it to float around the room, and sailed it at them. “Damn you, you … “ His voice rasped to silence on his anger, then broke: “Get away!”

The second disk hissed by their shoulders and smashed on the balcony bottom. Lorq flung up his arm to knock aside the shards.

Prince ran across the floor to the stairway that mounted at the left side of the tiered chamber. Lorq ran from the lift across the carpeted balcony till he reached the head of the same stairway—Ruby behind him—and started down.

They met on the first balcony. Prince grasped both rails, panting with fury.

“Prince, what the hell is the matter with—“

Prince lunged for him. His silver glove clanged the railing where Lorq had been standing. The brass bar caved, the metal tore. “Thief! Marauder!” Prince hissed, “Murderer!” Scum—“

“What are you talking—“

“—spawn of scum. If you touch my—“ His arm lashed again.

“No, Prince!” (That was Ruby.)

Lorq vaulted the balcony and dropped twelve feet to the floor. He landed, falling to his hands and knees in a pool of red that faded to yellow, was cut by drifting green.

“Lorq – !” (Ruby again.)

He flipped, rolling on multichrome (and saw Ruby at the rail, hands at her mouth; then Prince cleared the rail, was in the air, was falling at him). Prince struck the place Lorq’s head had been with his silver fist.

Crack!

Lorq staggered back to his feet and tried to regain his breath. Prince was still down.

The multichrome had smashed under his glove. Cracks zagged a yard out from the impact. The pattern had frozen in a sunburst around the glaring point.

“You … “ Lorq began. Words floundered under panting, “You and Ruby, are you crazy – ?”

Prince rocked back to his knees. Fury and pain hooked his face up in outrage. The lips quivered about small teeth, the lids about turquoise eyes. “You clown, you pig, you come to Earth and dare to put your hands, your hands on my—“

“Prince, please – !” Her voice tautened above them. Anguish. Her violent beauty shattered with a cry.

Prince reeled to his feet, grasped another floating shelf. He flung it, roaring.

Lorq cried as it cut his arm and crashed into the French doors behind him.

Cooler air swept the room as the panels swung. Laughter poured from the street.

“I’ll get you; I’ll catch you, and”—he rushed Lorq—“I’ll hurt you!”

Lorq turned, jumped the wrought iron and crashed against the crowd.

They screamed as he barreled through. Hands struck his face, pushed his chest, grabbed his shoulders. The screaming—and the laughter—increased. Prince was behind him because:

“What are they …? Hey, watch out—“

“They’re fighting! Look, that’s Prince—“

“Hold them! Hold them! What are they—“

Lorq broke from the crowd and stumbled against the balustrade. For a moment the rushing Seine and wet rock were below. He pulled back and turned to see.

“Let go of me!” Prince’s voice howled from the crowd. “Let go of my hand! My hand, let go of my hand!”

Memories struck up, shaking. What was confusion before, was fear now.

Beside him stone steps led to the river’s walkway. He fled down, and heard others behind him as he reached the bottom.

Then lights ground on his eyes. Lorq shook his head. Light across the wet pavement, the mossy stone wall beside him—someone had swung a floodlight over to watch.

“Let go of my—“ He heard Prince’s voice, cutting through the others. “I’m going to get him!”

Prince raced down the steps, reflections glancing from the rocks. He balanced at the bottom, squinting by the floodlit river.

His vest had been pulled from one shoulder. In the scuffle he had lost the long glove.

Lorq backed away.

Prince raised his arm:

Copper mesh and jeweled capacitors webbed black metal bone, pullies whirred in the clear casing.

Lorq took another step.

Prince lunged.

Lorq dodged for the wall; the two boys spun around each other.

The guests crowded the rail, pushed at the banister. Foxes and lizards, eagles and insects joggled one another to see. Someone stumbled against the floodlight, and the inverted gallery in the water shook,

“Thief!” Prince’s narrow chest was in spasm. “Pirate!” A rocket flared overhead. The explosion thudded after. “You’re dirt, Lorq Von Ray! You’re less than—“

Now Lorq lunged.

Anger snapped in his chest, his eyes, his hands. One fist caught the side of Prince’s head, the other jabbed his stomach. He came with blasted pride, fury compelled by bewilderment, with dense humiliation breaking his breath against his ribs as he fought below the fantastic spectators. He struck again, not knowing where.

Prince’s prosthetic arm swung up.

It caught him under the chin, bright fingers flat. It crushed skin, scraped bone, went on up, opening lip and cheek and forehead. Fat and muscle tore.

Lorq screamed, bloody mouthed, and fell.

“Prince!” Ruby (struggling to see, it was she who had jarred the light) stood on the wall. Red dress and dark hair whipped behind her in the river wind. “Prince, no!”

Panting, Prince stepped back, back again. Lorq lay facedown, one arm in the water. Beneath his head blood slurred the stone.

Prince turned sharply, and walked to the steps. Someone swung the floodlight back up. The people watching from the quay across the Seine were momentarily illuminated. Then the light went up and over, fixing on the building.

People turned from the rail.

Someone started to come down the steps, confronted Prince. After a second he turned back. A plastic rat’s face left the rail. Someone took the transparent vinyl shoulder, led her away. Music from a dozen epochs clashed across the island.

Lorq’s head rocked by the dark water. The river sucked his arm.

Then a lion climbed the wall, dropped barefoot to the stone. A griffon ran down the steps and fell to one knee beside him.

Dan pulled off his false head and tossed it against the steps. It thumped, rolled a foot. The griffon head followed.

Brian turned Lorq over.

Breath caught in Dan’s throat, then came out whistling. “He sure messed up Captain, huh?”

“Dan, we’ve got to get the patrol or something. They can’t do something like this!”

Dan’s shaggy brows rose. “What the hell makes you think they can’t? I’ve worked for bastards with a lot less money than Red-shift who could do a lot more.”

Lorq groaned.

“A medico-unit!” Brian said. “Where do you get a medico-unit here?”

“He ain’t dead. We get him back to the ship. When he comes to, I get my pay and off this damn planet!” He looked over the river from the twin spires of Notre Dame to the opposite bank. “Earth just ain’t big enough for me and Australia both. I’m willing to leave.” He got one arm under Lorq’s knees, the other under his shoulders, and stood up.

“You’re going to carry him?”

“Can you think of another way to get him back?” Dan turned toward the steps.

“But there must be—“ Brian followed him. “We have to do—“

Something hissed on the water. Brian looked back.

The wing of a skimmer-boat scraped the shore. “Where are you taking Captain Von Ray?” Ruby, in the front seat, wore a dark cloak now.

“Back to his yacht, ma’am,” Dan said. “It doesn’t look like he’s welcome here.”

“Bring him on the boat.”

“I don’t think we should leave him in anybody’s hands on this world.”

“You’re his crew?”

“That’s right,” Brian said. “Were you going to take him to a doctor?”

“I was going to take him to De Blau Field. You should get off Earth as soon as possible.”

“Fine by me,” Dan said.

“Put him back there. There’s a pre-med kit under the seat. See if you can stop him from bleeding.”

Brian stepped on the swaying skimmer and dug under the seat among the rags and chains to bring out the plastic box. The skimmer doffed again as Dan stepped aboard. In the front seat Ruby took the control line and plugged it into her wrist. They moved forward, hissing. The small boat mounted above the spray on its hydrofoils and sped. Pont St.-Michel, Pont Neuf, and Pont des Arts dropped their shadows over the boat. Paris glittered on the shores.

Minutes later the struts of the Eiffel Tower cleared the buildings left, spotlighted on the night. Right, above slanted stone and behind sycamores, the last late strollers moved under the lamps along the Allee des Cygnes.

Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3162

“All right,” his father said. “I’ll tell you.

“I think he should get that scar … “ his mother’s image spoke from the viewing column. “It’s been three days, and the longer he lets the scar go …”

“If he wants to go around looking as though there was an earthquake in his head, that’s his business,” Father said. “But: right now I want to answer his question.” He turned back to Lorq. “But to tell you”—he walked to the wall and gazed out across the city—“I have to tell you some history. And not what you learned at Causby.”

It was high summer on Ark.

Wind tossed salmon clouds about the sky beyond the glass walls. When a gust was too strong, the blue veins of the irises in the windward wall contracted to bright mandalas, then dilated when the eighty-mile winds had passed.

His mother’s fingers, dark and jeweled, moved on the rim of her cup.

His father folded his hands behind his back as he watched the clouds torn up like rags and flung from Tong.

Lorq leaned against the back of the mahogany chair, waiting.

“What strikes you as the most important factor in today’s society?”

Lorq ventured after a moment: “The lack of a solid cultural – ?”

“Forget Causby. Forget the things that people babble to one another when they feel they have to say something profound. You’re a young man who may someday control one of the largest fortunes in the galaxy. If I ask you a question, I want you to remember who you are when you answer me. This is a society where, given any product, half of it may be grown on one world, the other half mined a thousand light-years away. On Earth, seventeen out of the hundreds of possible elements make up ninety per cent of the planet. Take any other world, and you’ll find a different dozen making up ninety to ninety-nine per cent. There are two hundred and sixty-five inhabited worlds and satellites in the hundred and seventeen sun systems that make up Draco.

“Here in the Federation we have three-quarters the population of Draco spread over three hundred and twelve worlds. The forty-two populated worlds of the Outer Colonies—“

“Transportation,” Lorq said. “Transportation from one world to the other. That’s what you mean?”

His father leaned against the stone table. “The cost of transportation is what I mean. And for a long time the biggest factor in the cost of transportation was Illyrion, the only way to get enough power to hurl the ships between worlds, between stars. When my grandfather was your age, Illyrion was manufactured artificially, a few billion atoms at a time, at great cost. Just about then it was discovered there was a string of stars, younger stars, much further out from the galactic center whose planets still possessed minute quantities of natural Illyrion. And it has only been since you were born that large-scale mining operations have been feasible on those planets that now make up the Outer Colonies.”

“Lorq knows this,” his mother said. “I think he should have—“

“Do you know why the Pleiades Federation is a political entity separate from Draco? Do you know why the Outer Colonies will soon be a separate political entity from either Draco or the Pleiades?”

Lorq looked at his knee, his thumb, his other knee. “You’re asking me questions and you’re not answering mine, Dad,”

His father took a breath. “I’m trying to. Before there was any settling in the Pleiades at all, expansion throughout Draco was carried on by national governments on Earth, or by corporations, ones comparable to Red-shift—corporations and governments that could afford the initial cost of transportation. The new colonies were subsidized, operated, and owned by Earth. They became part of Earth, and Earth became the center of Draco. At that time another technical problem that was being solved by the early engineers of Red-shift Limited was the construction of spaceships with more sensitive frequency ranges that could negotiate the comparatively ‘dusty’ areas of space, as in the free-floating interstellar nebulas, and in regions of dense stellar population like the Pleiades, where there was a much higher concentration of sloughed-off interstellar matter. Something like a whirlpool nebula still gives your little yacht trouble. It would have completely immobilized a ship made two hundred and fifty years ago. Your great-great-grandfather, when exploration was just beginning in the Pleiades, was very much aware of what I’ve just told you: the cost of transportation is the most important factor in our society. And within the Pleiades itself, the cost of transportation is substantially less than in Draco.”

Lorq frowned. “You mean the distances …?”

“The central section of the Pleiades is only thirty light-years across and eighty-five long. Some three hundred suns are packed into this space, many of them less than a light-year apart. The suns of Draco are scattered over one whole arm of the galaxy, almost sixteen thousand light-years from end to end. There’s a big difference in cost when you only have to jump the tiny distances within the Pleiades cluster as compared with the huge expanses of Draco. So you had a different kind of people coming into the Pleiades: small businesses that wanted to pick up and move themselves lock, stock, and barrel; co-operative groups of colonists; even private citizens—rich private citizens, but private nevertheless. Your great-great-grandfather came here with three commercial liners filled with junk, prefab hot and cold shelters, discarded mining and farming equipment for a whole range of climates. Most of it he’d been paid to haul away from Draco. Two of the liners had been stolen, incidentally. He also had gotten hold of a couple of atomic cannons. He went around to every new settlement and offered his goods. And everyone bought from him.”

“He forced them to buy at cannon point?”

“No. He also offered them a bonus service that made it worthwhile to take the junk. You see, the fact that transportation costs were lower hadn’t stopped the governments and big corporations from trying to move in. Any ship that came bearing a multimillon-dollar name out of Draco, any emissary from some Draco monopoly trying to extend itself into new territory—Grandfather blew them up.

“Did he loot them too?” Lorq asked. “Did he pick over the remains?”

“He never told me. I only know he had a vision—a selfish, mercenary, ego-centered vision that he implemented in any way he could, at anyone’s expense. During the formative years of its existence, he did not let the Pleiades become an extension of Draco. He saw in Pleiades’ independence a chance to become the most powerful man in a political entity that might someday rival Draco. Before my father was your age, great-grandfather had accomplished that.”

“I still don’t understand what that has to do with Red-shift.”

“Red-shift was one of the mega-companies that made the most concerted efforts to move into the Pleiades. They tried to claim the thorium mines that are now run by your school friend’s father, Dr. Setsumi. They attempted to begin harvesting the plastic lichens on Circle IV. Each time, Granddad blew them up. Red-shift is transportation, and when the cost of transportation goes down compared to the number of ships made, Red-shift feels its throat throttled.”

“And this is why Prince Red can call us pirates?”

“A couple of times Aaron Red the first—Prince’s father is the third—sent one of his more uppity nephews to head his expeditions into the Pleiades. Three of them, I believe. They never got back. Even in my father’s time the feud was pretty much a personal matter. There’d been retaliation, and it had gone on well beyond the declaration of sovereignty that the Pleiades Federation made in ‘twenty-six. One of my personal projects as a young man your age was to end it. My father gave a lot of money to Harvard on Earth, built them a laboratory, and then sent me to the school. I married your mother, from Earth, and I spent a lot of time talking with Aaron—Prince’s father. It wasn’t too difficult to effect, since the sovereignty of the Pleiades had been an accepted fact for a generation, and Red-shift had long since stopped teetering under any direct threat from us. My father purchased the Illyrion mine out at New Brazillia—this was back when the mining operations were just beginning in the Outer Colonies—mainly as an excuse to have some reason to deal formally with Red-shift. I never mentioned the feud to you, because I thought there was no need to.”

“Prince is just crazy then, breaking out an old grudge that you and Aaron settled before we were born.”

“I can’t comment on Prince’s sanity. But you have to bear in mind: what’s the biggest factor affecting the cost of transportation today?”

“The Illyrion mines in the Outer Colonies.”

“There’s a hand around Red-shift’s throat again,” his father said. “Can you see it?”

“Mining Illyrion naturally is much cheaper than manufacturing it.”

“Even if it takes plugging in a population of millions upon millions. Even if three dozen competing companies from both Draco and the Pleiades have opened mines all over the Outer Colonies and subsidized vast migrations of labor from all over the galaxy. What strikes you as different about the set-up of the Outer Colonies as opposed to Draco and the Pleiades?”

“It has, comparatively, all the Illyrion it wants right there.”

“Yes. But also this: Draco was extended by the vastly monied classes of Earth. The Pleiades was populated by a comparatively middle-class movement. Though the Outer Colonies have been prompted by those with money both in the Pleiades and Draco, the population of the colonies comes from the lowest economic strata of the galaxy. The combination of cultural difference—and I don’t care what your social studies teachers at Causby say—and the difference in the cost of transportation is what assures the eventual sovereignty of the Outer Colonies. And suddenly Red-shift is striking out at anyone who has their hands on Illyrion again.” He gestured toward his son. “You’ve been hit.”

“But we’ve only got one Illyrion mine. Our money comes from the control of how many dozen different types of businesses all over the Pleiades, a few of them in Draco now—the mine on Sao Orini is a trifle—“

“True. But have you ever noticed the businesses we don’t handle?”

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“We have very little money in shelter or food production. We are in computers, small technical components; we make the housing for Illyrion batteries; we make plugs and sockets; we mine heavily in other areas. The last time I saw Aaron, on this past trip, I said to him, jokingly of course: ‘You know, if the price of Illyrion were only at half the price it is now, in a year I could be making spaceships at less than half the price you manufacture them.’ And do you know what he said to me, jokingly?”

Lorq shook his head.

“’I’ve known that for ten years.’”

His mother’s image put her cup down. “I think he must have his face fixed. You’re such a fine-looking boy, Lorq, it’s been three days since that Australian brought you back home. That scar is just going to—“

“Dana,” his father said. “Lorq, can you think of any way to lower the price of Illyrion by half?”

Lorq frowned. “Why?”

“I’ve figured that at the present rate of expansion, in fifteen years the Outer Colonies will be able to lower the cost of Illyrion by almost a quarter. During that time, Red-shift is going to try to kill us.” He paused. “Knock everything out from under the Von Rays, and ultimately, the whole Pleiades Federation. We have a long way to fall. The only way we can survive is to kill them first; and the only way we can do that is to figure out a way to get Illyrion down to half price before it goes down to three quarters, and make those ships.” His father folded his arms. “I didn’t want to get you involved in this, Lorq. I saw the termination of the whole affair coming in my lifetime. But Prince has taken it on himself to strike the first blow at you. It’s only fair you be told what’s happening.”

Lorq was looking down at his hands. After a while he said, “I’ll strike a blow back.”

“No,” his mother said. “That’s not the way to handle this, Lorq. You can’t get back at Prince; you can’t think of getting back at—“

“I’m not.” He stood up and walked to the curtains. “Mom, Dad, I’m going out.”

“Lorq,” his father said, unfolding his arms, “I didn’t mean to upset you. But I just wanted you to know … “

Lorq pushed back the brocade curtains. “I’m going down to the Caliban. Good-bye.” The drape swung.

“Lorq—“

His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in Ark, the capital city of the Pleiades Federation. He walked beside the moving road. Through the wind shields, the winter gardens of the city bloomed. People looked at him. That was because of the scar, He was thinking about Illyrion. People looked, then looked away when they saw him look back. Here, in the center of the Pleiades, he himself was a center, a focus. He had once tried to calculate the amount of money that devolved from his immediate family. He was the focus of billions, walking along by the clear walls of the covered streets of Ark, listening to the glistening lichens ululate in the winter gardens. One out of five people on the street—so one of his father’s accountants had informed them—was being paid a salary either directly or indirectly by Von Ray. And Red-shift was making ready to declare war on the whole structure that was Von Ray, that focused on himself as the Von Ray heir. At Sao Orini, a lizard-like animal with a mane of white feathers roamed and hissed in the jungles. The miners caught them, starved them, then turned them on one another in the pit to wager on the outcome. How many millions of years back, those three-foot lizards’ ancestors had been huge, hundred-meter beasts, and, the intelligent race which had inhabited New Brazillia had worshiped them, carving life-sized stone heads about the foundations of their temples. But the race—that race was gone. And the offspring of that race’s gods, dwarfed by evolution, were mocked in the pits by drunken miners as they clawed and screeched and bit. And he was Lorq Von Ray. And somehow Illyrion had to have its price lowered by half. You could flood the market with the stuff. But where could you go to get what was probably the rarest substance in the universe? You couldn’t fly into the center of a sun and scoop it out of the furnace where all the substances of the galaxy were smelted from raw nuclear matter by units of four. He caught his reflection in one of the mirrored columns, and he stopped just before the turnoff to Nea Limani. The fissure dislocated his features, full-lipped, yellow-eyed. But where the scar entered the kinky red, he noticed something. The new hair growing was the same color and texture as his father’s, soft and yellow as flame,

Where do you get that much Illyrion (he turned from the mirrored column)? Where?

“You’re asking me, Captain?” From the revolving stage in the floor Dan lifted his mug to his knee. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be bumming around this field now.” He reached down, took the handle of the mug from his toes, and drank half. “Thanks for the drink.” With his wrist he scrubbed his mouth, ringed with stubble and mustached with foam. “When are you going to get your face put back together …”

But Lorq was leaning back on the seat, looking through the ceiling. The lights about the field left only the hundred brightest stars visible. On the ceiling, the kaleidoscopic wind-iris was shutting. Centered among the blue, purple, and vermilion vanes was a star.

“Say, Captain, if you want to go up in the balcony …”

On the second level of the bar, visible through falling water, the freighter officers and some of the liner crew mixed with the sportsmen discussing currents and cosmic conditions. The lower level was crowded with mechanics and commercial studs. Card games progressed in the corner.

“I got to get me a job, Captain. Letting me sleep in the back chamber of Caliban, then getting me drunk every night doesn’t help much. I’ve got to turn you loose.”

Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the star. “Dan, have you,” Lorq mused, “ever realized that every sun, as we travel between them, is a furnace where the very worlds of empire are smelted? Every element among the hundreds is fused from their central nuclear matter. Take that one there—“ He pointed at the transparent roof. “—or any one: gold is fusing there right now, and radium, nitrogen, antimony, in amounts that are huge—bigger than Ark, bigger than Earth. And there’s Illyrion there too, Dan.” He laughed. “Suppose there were some way to dip into one of those stars and ladle out what I wanted.” He laughed again; the sound caught in his chest, where anguish, despair, and fury fused. “Suppose we could stand at the edge of some star gone nova and wait for what we wanted to be flung out, and catch it as it flamed by—but novas are implosions, not explosions, hey, Dan?” He pushed the stud’s shoulder playfully. Drink sloshed from the mug’s rim.

“Me, Captain, I was in a nova, once.” Dan licked the back of his hand.

“Were you now?” Lorq pressed his head against the cushion. The haloed star flickered.

“Ship I was on got caught in a nova—must be about ten years ago.”

“Aren’t you glad you weren’t on it.”

“I was. We got out again too.”

Lorq looked down from the ceiling.

Dan sat forward on the green bench, knobby elbows on his knees; his hands wrapped the mug.

“You did?”

“Yeah.” Dan glanced at his shoulder where the broken lace on his vest was clumsily knotted. “We fell in, and we got out.”

Puzzlement surfaced on Lorq’s face.

“Hey, Captain! You look fierce, don’t you!”

Five times now Lorq had passed his face in a mirror, thinking it bore one expression, to discover the scar had translated it into something that totally amazed. “What happened, Dan?”

The Australian looked at his mug. There was only foam at the bottom of the glass.

Lorq pressed the order plate on the bench arm. Two more mugs circled toward them, foam dissolving,

“Just what I needed, Captain,” Dan reached out his foot. “One for you. There you go. And one for me.’

Lorq sipped his drink and stuck his feet out to rest on the sandal heels. Nothing moved on his face, Nothing moved behind it.

“You know the Alkane Institute?” Dan raised his voice above the cheers and laughter from the corner where two mechanics had begun wrestling on the trampoline. Spectators waved their drinks. “On Vorpis in Draco they got this big museum with laboratories and stuff, and they study things like novas.”

“My aunt’s a curator there.” Lorq’s voice was low, words clearing beneath the shouts.

“Yeah? Anyway, they send out people whenever they get reports of some star acting up—“

“Look! She winning is!”

“No! He her arm watch pull!”

“Hey, Von Ray, you the man or woman will win think?” A group of officers had come down the ramp to watch the match. One slapped Lorq’s shoulder, then turned his hand up. There was a ten-pound @sg piece in his palm.

“I not tonight wager make.” Lorq pushed the hand away.

“Lorq, I double this on the woman lay—“

“Tomorrow your money I take,” Lorq said. “Now you go.”

The young officer made a disgusted sound and drew his finger down his face, shaking his head to his companions.

But Lorq was waiting for Dan to go on.

Dan turned from the wrestling. “It seems a freighter got lost in a tidal drift and noticed something funny about the spectral lines of some star a couple of solars away. Stars are mostly hydrogen, yeah, but there was a big build-up of heavy materials on the gases of the surface; that means something odd. When they finally got themselves found, they reported the condition of the star to the cartographic society of the Alkane, who took a guess at what it was—the build-up of a nova. Because the make-up of a star doesn’t change in a nova, you can’t detect the build-up over any distance with spectranalysis or anything like that; Alkane sent-out a team to watch the star. They’ve studied some twenty or thirty of them in the last fifty years. They put up rings of remote-control stations as close to the star as Mercury is to Sol; they send televised pictures of the star’s surface; these stations burn the second the sun goes. They put rings of stations further and further out that send second-by-second reports of the whole thing. At about one light-week they have the first manned stations; even these are abandoned for stations further out soon as the nova begins. Anyway, I was on a ship that was supposed to bring supplies to one of these manned stations that was sitting around waiting for the sun to blow. You know the actual time it takes for the sun to go from its regular brightness to maximum magnitude twenty or thirty thousand times as bright is only about two or three hours.”

Lorq nodded.

“They still can’t judge exactly when a nova that they’ve been watching is going to go. Now I don’t understand it exactly, but somehow the sun we were coming to went up just before we reached our stop-off station. Maybe it was a twist in space itself, or a failure of instruments, but we overshot the station and went right on into the sun, during the first hour of implosion.” Dan lowered his mouth to sip off foam.

“All right,” Lorq said. “From the heat, you should have been atomized before you were as close to the sun as Pluto is from Sol. You should have been crushed by the actual physical battering. The gravitational tides should have torn you to pieces. The amount of radiation the ship was exposed to should have, first, knocked apart every organic compound in the ship, and second, fissioned every atom down into ionized hydrogen—“

“Captain, I can think of seven more things without trying. The ionization frequencies should have—“ Dan stopped. “But none of them did. Our ship was funneled directly through the center of the sun—and out the other side. We were deposited safely about two light-weeks away. The captain, as soon as he realized what was happening, pulled his head in and turned off all our sensory-input scanners so that we were falling blind. An hour later he peeked out and was very surprised to find we were still—period. But the instruments recorded our path. We had gone straight through the nova.” Dan finished his drink. He looked sideways at Lorq. “Captain, you’re looking all fierce again.”

“What’s the explanation?”

Dan shrugged. “They came up with a lot of suggestions when Alkane got hold of us. They got these bubbles, see, exploding on the surface of any sun, two or three times the size of medium-sized planets, where the temperature is as low as eight hundred or a thousand degrees. That sort of temperature might not destroy a ship. Perhaps we were caught in one of those and carried on through the sun. Somebody else suggested perhaps the energy frequencies of a nova are all polarized in one direction while something caused the ship’s energies to polarize in another so that they sort of passed through one another just like they didn’t touch. But other people came up with just as many theories to knock those down. What seems most likely is that when time and space are subjected to such violent strains like you got in a nova, the laws that govern the natural machinery of physics and physical happenings as we know them just don’t work right.” Dan shrugged again. “They never did get it settled.”

“Look! Look, he her down has!”

“One, two—no, she away pulls—“

“No! He her has! He her has!”

On the trampoline the grinning mechanic staggered over his opponent. Half a dozen drinks had already been brought for him; by custom he had to finish as many as he could, and the loser drink the rest. More officials had come down to congratulate him and stake wagers on the next match.

“I wonder …” Lorq frowned.

“Captain, I know you can’t help it, but you shouldn’t look like that.”

“I wonder if the Alkane has any record of that trip, Dan.”

“I guess they do. Like I say, it was about ten years …

But Lorq was looking at the ceiling. The iris had shut under the wind that wracked Ark’s night. The clashing mandala completely covered the star.

Lorq raised his hands to his face. His lips fell back as he hunted at the roots of the idea pushing through his mind. Fissured flesh translated his expression to beatific torture.

Dan started to speak again. Then he moved away, his gristly face filled with puzzlement.

His name was Lorq Von Ray. He had to repeat it silently, secure it with repetition; because an idea had just split his being. As he sat, looking up, he felt totally shaken. Something central had been parted as violently as Prince’s hand had parted his face. He blinked to clear the stars. And his name

Draco (Roc transit), 3172

“Yes, Captain Von Ray?”

“Pull in the side vanes.”

The Mouse pulled in.

“We’re hitting the steady stream, side vanes in completely. Lynceos and Idas, stay on your vanes and take the first watch. The rest of you can break out for a while,” Lorq’s voice boomed over the sounds of space.

Turning from the vermilion rush, in which hung the charred stars, the Mouse blinked and realized the chamber once more.

Olga blinked.

The Mouse sat up on the couch to unplug.

“I’ll see you in the commons,” the captain continued. “And Mouse, bring your …”