1

It's Not a Cat, But I Guess It's Kinda Cute

"Come here, dammit," said Strider, her head stuck into one of the storage units on the command deck of the Midnight Ranger. She'd called the ship the Bredai had given them Midnight Ranger on whim, and now wished she hadn't: something like Autarch-Buster or Shaft of Vengeance might have seemed—she searched for the word—more macho. The other thing she was searching for was Loki.

The damned cat . . .

Loki—whose sex had yet to be determined, if in fact gender-identification was possible or meaningful—had been picked up during the Midnight Ranger's last planetfall. No one had been able to work out how the creature had been able to get aboard the spaceship: she, he or it had certainly not passed through the airlock. Hence the naming of the beast: it was a trickster, and had the habit of melting into or even through walls when it wanted to. It had clearly decided to stay for a while in this storage unit, whose door Nelson had inadvertently left open.

"Here, pretty one," said Strider, futilely. There was not the slightest stir inside the storage unit. This was in a way good news: there were items in there that could be severely damaged if one of Loki's scales slashed through them. Normally the little creature could be relied upon to keep its scales flat to its sides but sometimes, for no perceptible reason, it could become a ball of cutting edges, like a morningstar without the handle or the chain.

Strider's major fear was that the cat would have a crap in there, so that the command deck would be stunk out for days on end. It had happened before. Cute and affectionate Loki might be, but there was a limit to what one's nostrils could take. The first time this had happened, before Strider had to her profound irritation become fond of the little animal, she and particularly Maloron Leander had proposed to stick it out of the nearest airlock. The boy Hilary had promptly offered to take full responsibility for the pet, and some of the time he actually did so.

Loki most certainly wasn't a cat, but the crew of the Midnight Ranger couldn't think of any better term. They'd all seen ancient holos where starships had cats aboard, presumably to hunt down and exterminate all those infestations of alien mice. As starships had decontamination systems that eliminated vermin right down to the viral level, the holos always evoked chuckles.

On the other hand, Loki had somehow got aboard . . .

The real difficulty with Loki was that it was fascinated by Segrill. He was of the Trok species, and stood no higher than Strider's raised thumb. One of these days either Loki was going to remember that every time it ventured to investigate the Trok it got hit on the jaw or Segrill was going to lose patience and strike back with one of his small but lethal weapons.

"Kitty, kitty," said Strider, too aware that, as she groped here on her knees, her bottom was sticking up in the air. There was nothing wrong with the bottom per se—or so she had been told by several lovers when neurosis had struck her in the darkness—but sooner or later someone on the command deck was going to crack a joke.

To hell with the friendly approach.

Strider settled back on her haunches, drew her lazgun from its holster, and pointed the weapon in the general direction of the storage unit's interior.

"Look, kitty, I'll give you the count of ten to be out of there. Otherwise you're dead meat."

By the count of three the creature slunk out, looking guiltily with its single eye up at Strider before scuttling off to the far corner of the command deck.

Strider was astonished. The little animal must be more intelligent than she had realized. Was it telepathic?

Then she took a deep breath, and coughed.

"Hilary!" she bellowed at Lan Yi and Maria Strauss-Giolitto. "Get the goddam kid up here on the deck at once. This is his pet."

#

The Midnight Ranger was tiny by comparison with the Santa Maria, the craft which had brought Strider's mission here to The Wondervale: it was barely more than a hundred meters long and less than half that wide. The Bredai had rescued the Humans after the latter had succeeded, with the help of the Images and the Trok, in destroying the stronghold of the Autarch Nalla on Qitanefermeartha—not to mention the Autarch himself. The trouble was that Bredai and Humans were built on incompatible scales. Bredai were as big compared to Humans as Humans were to Trok, but were very much more careless. Also, they breathed a methane atmosphere, so that outside the sealed areas that had been demarcated for Humans and Trok one had to wear a spacesuit the whole time: everyone joked about the smells inside spacesuits except when they were wearing one. The Trok had learnt over generations to live with their clumsy allies—in their odd, hopping way, the Trok were nimble—but the Humans hadn't, and so, after too many fatalities, there had been a mutual agreement to part ways. The Bredai had adapted one of their ship's escape pods to create the independent craft which Strider had dubbed the Midnight Ranger.

The Santa Maria had been over three kilometers long and mightily outfitted with drive units. On Strider's original expedition from the Solar System, heading for Tau Ceti II there had been forty-six people aboard, if you counted the bot Pinocchio. Two years from home the plodding craft had fallen into one of the countless wormholes that linked distant parts of the Universe, and the dazed Humans had found themselves in The Wondervale, an elliptical galaxy in orbit about a giant spiral galaxy, Heaven's Ancestor. Almost immediately the Images had discovered them, and had taken over their lives. Strider had remained captain of her mission, but the Images had taken most of the decisions from her hands.

Just as well, because otherwise the Santa Maria would have been destroyed within hours. The Wondervale had not yet erupted into full-scale rebellion against the Autarchy, but it was about to do so. There was no way home, and circumstances had forced the Humans—aboard a Santa Maria reconfigured almost entirely by the Images, and equipped by them with the tachyon drive—to ally themselves with their new galaxy's insurgents. Even stranger circumstances had conspired to let Strider and a few of her personnel—not to mention Segrill's army of Trok—be in at the death of the Autarch himself.

The remainder of the Humans, assisted by data acquired from the Spindrifters, one of The Wondervale's ancient species, had departed in the Santa Maria, with luck to rediscover the wormhole that would take them back to the Milky Way. Since then there had been casualties.

I started off with forty-six, thought Strider glumly, and now there are only eight of us, two of whom are aliens. Let's magnify the figure flatteringly by counting in the cat: nine. And it's some mission you've been conducting when you can't even stop the cat crapping. She settled herself in her seat and looked through the view-window at the planet they were approaching. The reddish disc seemed to be expanding visibly, and it was difficult for her to relax even though she knew that the ship's two Images—Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free—would have everything under control..

A claw touched her shoulder.

"Hi, Polyaggle," she said without turning round. From a distance the Spindrifter looked beautiful, but close up Strider found Polyaggle's appearance disconcerting. At first glance the face looked as if it were a Human's, but almost immediately you saw the proboscis where there should have been a nose: it coiled and uncoiled whenever Polyaggle spoke. Her mouth was diamond-shaped, with four lips. Her face was covered in short black bristles, and a high crest of the same material—it looked like hair—ran from the top of her forehead towards the rear. None of this would have concerned Strider much—she'd encountered some fairly peculiar-looking specimens of Homo sapiens in her time—but the alien's slanting eyes were something else. They were utterly black, so that when you looked into them you had the unsettling feeling that you were staring into eternity, into a time before the Universe had formed.

There was also Polyaggle's inexplicable sexuality. It was difficult for Humans to concentrate on what they were saying when they spoke to her face-on. Probably "sexuality" was the wrong word, because the allure went far beyond sex.

"We will soon be at The Pridehouse," said the Spindrifter. "It is something I anticipate with great pleasure."

Polyaggle's chirruping made no sense to Strider, who heard it simultaneously with the translation into Argot which one or other of the Images supplied.

"Yeah," said Strider, "I can understand."

She could. Polyaggle was almost certainly the last of her species, although she was nurturing a brood somewhere inside her and, when the time was right, would give birth. Strider's mind boggled at the biological complexities that must be involved in the gestation, for Polyaggle was a colonial organism: if need be she could dissolve into myriad tiny butterfly-like creatures, and they in turn could dissolve into . . . something else entirely, things that were as elusive as quarks. Strider had seen it happen once—Polyaggle had performed the feat in order to start the regeneration of the Santa Maria's Main Computer—and, although the display had possessed a bizarre beauty, she rather hoped she would never see it again.

The Spindrifters were—had been—one of The Wondervale's ancient species. The Pridehouse were another. The ancient species were the ones who had first evolved in The Wondervale, and who had explored both this galaxy and Heaven's Ancestor. A few million years ago, when younger and more aggressive species—the Comelatelies—had emerged and the Autarchy had been bloodily installed, the various ancient species had retreated to their home planets and tried to make their cultures seem as uninteresting and unexploitable as possible, biding their time until the Autarchy dissolved. Within the past year or so, however—Strider still found herself thinking in terms of years—this had changed. Kaantalech had destroyed Spindrift and annihilated the Spindrifters; it had been by sheer chance that Polyaggle had been with the Humans when this act of barbarity was performed. What could happen to one ancient species could happen to another. The Pridehouse, the Lingk-kreatzai, the Wreeps, the Semblances of the Eternal, the Fionnoids, the Janae, the We Are and countless further cultures had quietly declared that their patience was exhausted. If the Autarchy would not of its own accord disintegrate over the aeons of history, they would encourage it to do so. They had waited long enough.

But they were not warriors. Millions of years of stubborn neutrality had deprived them of the ability to make war—although their defenses, as Strider had seen during the destruction of Spindrift, could be impressive. The Onurg of the Pridehouse had told Polyaggle—and, through her mediation, Strider—that the ancient species should be led by the commander of the extragalactic ship that had somehow fallen into The Wondervale and had already done so much damage to the Autarchy.

No wonder Polyaggle yearned to reach The Pridehouse. The people of that world might not be of her own species, but at least they were not Comelatelies. She had more in common with them than with most of the other species of The Wondervale—and certainly more than with the Human on whose shoulder her claw was resting.

In a way, Polyaggle was going home.

"We'll be there soon," said Strider, feeling that the remark was hopelessly inadequate. She found there were tears in her eyes, and wondered if there were tears in Polyaggle's. She didn't dare to turn round and look.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free spoke to her.

WE SHALL BE IN ORBIT AROUND THE PRIDEHOUSE IN JUST OVER TWO HOURS, the Image said. His voice was like a song.

"I want to communicate with them," said Strider. "Can it be arranged?"

It can.

"How soon?"

As soon as you wish.

She leaned forward and put her head into the Pocket in front of her. The Images had installed Pockets in the Santa Maria and now they had done the same for the Midnight Ranger although, the command deck being so much smaller, there was room for only three. At first all she saw was the standard projection—a depiction, in startling detail, of the exterior of the Midnight Ranger with, behind and beneath it, a graphic portrayal of their position in relation to The Pridehouse—but within a few seconds there was a flicker and she was looking directly at the face of one of the ancient species.

It could have been a wolf's face were it not for the third eye, near the tip of the snout.

"Are you the Onurg?" said Strider. It was difficult as yet for her to tell the individuals of the Pridehouse apart. But this wolf's coat seemed greyer than the Onurg's startling silver.

"I am not," said the face. "My name is Hein. Are you Umbel Nelson?" The Images translated between the species, but the effect was always that of a badly dubbed holo.

"No. I'm Leonie Strider."

"My apologies."

"And mine."

The wolf's third eye momentarily disappeared into the fur of its nose, then re-emerged blue rather than grey.

HEIN IS SMILING AT YOU, warbled Ten Per Cent Extra Free inside Strider's mind. IT WOULD BE POLITE TO SMILE BACK. I SHALL CONVEY TO HEIN THE MEANING OF THE FACIAL CONTORTION.

Strider dutifully smiled, and again the Pridehouse's third eye disappeared. When it resurfaced it was an astonishing green—the green a child uses when painting a tree—which reminded her that . . .

"Please wait a moment," she said, and withdrew her head from the Pocket."Has that damned boy cleared up the mess yet?" she yelled at no one in particular.

"I'm doing it," said Hilary sullenly. She glanced over her shoulder towards the storage unit. Seeing the expression on his face, she hastily jabbed her head back into the Pocket again.

"You have taken a long time getting here," said Hein at once.

"Less than a year. We're not equipped with the tachyon drive."

"You're not?" Ten Per Cent Extra Free made the wolfish face produce a semblance of astonishment.

"The Onurg knows."

The decision had been Strider's. The tachyon drive allowed instantaneous transport from one side of The Wondervale to the other—or to anywhere else in the Universe, for that matter, so long as you knew where you were going—but it was not unobtrusive, and if there was one thing that Strider wanted to be at the moment it was unobtrusive. After the death of the Autarch, Kaantalech had moved swiftly to take power. There were other potential claimants to the throne, and Kaantalech was dealing with them as ruthlessly as she had the Spindrifters. Kaantalech was going to win the contest for the autarchy—there could be little doubt of it—but still a few warlords held out against her, as did various rebels against the institution of the Autarchy itself. Strider knew it was only a matter of time before the tyrant's thoughts turned again to the Human intruders: the longer the moment could be put off the better. Kaantalech could find the Midnight Ranger any time she chose, because she had sensors capable of detecting the Humans' protoplasm, which was quite unakin to anything else in The Wondervale, but she must have other things on her mind as she tried to stamp out the last pockets of resistance to her usurpation—or so Strider had reasoned. A few Humans in a small craft represented no threat: they could be dealt with later, after the might of the rebel Helgiolath fleet had been countered. That said, there was no reason at all for the Humans to advertise themselves as they gathered their forces among the ancient species.

"Ask him," said Strider, feeling suddenly weary. She wasn't in the mood to explain. Back in the Solar System—so long ago—humanity had felt reasonably proud of itself that it could construct a spaceship capable of achieving a reasonable percentage of lightspeed. Now Strider was not going to apologize because the Midnight Ranger could drift along at only a few hundred times the velocity of light.

She yawned.

I DID NOT TRANSMIT THAT FACIAL EXPRESSION, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free helpfully. THE PRIDEHOUSE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT IT DISCOURTEOUS.

"Thanks," Strider subvocalized.

Hein's face had turned away. The wolf was clearly talking to someone else, but had switched off the audio channel of the Pocket. From the way that the Pridehouse nodded from time to time—again Ten Per Cent Extra Free was adjusting the body language—Strider realized that someone was explaining her reasoning. Hein must be a junior officer. Strider felt vaguely insulted.

The audio channel crackled back into existence.

"Our decontamination procedures are very simple," said Hein, "and will cause you no pain at all."

"Oh, great," said Strider without enthusiasm. The various species within The Wondervale were terrified of the microbes that could be passed on to them by other species. Only a tiny proportion of those microbes could in fact transmit from one species to another, but there was good reason for the fear: a single transmitted bug could destroy an entire culture. Strider had been through a full decontamination several times. The experience was not pleasant: you felt stripped so naked that your soul was showing. She was pretty certain the Pridehouse's system would be no better, whatever Hein said.

"How many of us will be allowed to come down?"

"Yourself," said the Pridehouse. "The Spindrifter. The Trok. None others."

Strider raised an eyebrow. She gestured behind her to Polyaggle, and a few moments later the alien's face was sharing the Pocket with her own. A rapid argument started between the members of the two ancient species. After a few moments Ten Per Cent Extra Free gave up trying to translate for her. She stood back, leaving Polyaggle sole occupancy of the Pocket.

"Glad I'm not on the receiving end of what she's giving out," said Strider to the Image. The Spindrifter's wings were moving agitatedly in and out of their pods. They were colored in rather more hues than the Human eye had been built to encompass.

SHE IS EXPLAINING TO HEIN THAT YOU HUMANS ARE SOCIAL BEINGS, AND ARE BEST NOT SEPARATED, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free in Strider's mind. SHE IS TELLING HIM THAT YOU FUNCTION AS A GROUP, NOT AS INDIVIDUALS. SHE IS MAKING THE ARGUMENT FORCEFULLY.

"I guessed that last bit," said Strider. How odd that Polyaggle, a colonial organism, should see the Humans aboard the Midnight Ranger as forming a composite creature like herself. Or perhaps it wasn't so odd. Strider hadn't been looking forward to leaving Leander, Nelson, Strauss-Giolitto, Lan Yi, Hilary—who had grumpily finished his task—and even the cat out in orbit while she was ferried down to The Pridehouse with Segrill and Polyaggle. Maybe the nine of them did indeed form some sort of Gestalt, however much they bitched at each other whenever there wasn't enough else to do.

Polyaggle reared back out of the Pocket. "It has been arranged," she said. "They are constructing a suitably sized spacestrip so that we may land the Midnight Ranger."

Strider was incredulous. "But we'll be there in a couple of hours! They're not expecting us to hang around in orbit for the next six months, are they?"

Polyaggle clacked her claws together in what Strider had learnt to recognize as the Spindrifter's equivalent of a laugh. Just to make sure she got the message, Ten Per Cent Extra Free made an appropriate noise in her mind.

"Remember," said Polyaggle, "that you are dealing with an ancient species. The spacestrip is likely finished by now."

#

They were within a couple of hours going to encounter a new species, the Pridehouse, and Maloron Leander was quietly terrified. It had taken her far longer than the others to adjust to the presence among them of the Spindrifter, and little Segrill could still startle her when he suddenly appeared on her lap as she manned the command deck. She didn't consider herself a xenophobe: she did not dislike the aliens in any way. But she felt uncomfortable among them. It was something she couldn't explain to herself, because she knew there was no rational explanation for the flutters she felt in her stomach each time that damned cat made friendly approaches. Her feelings towards Polyaggle were even more complicated because, like all the others—Hilary included, although he was at the age where he was damned if he was going to admit it—she felt a distinct sexual tension whenever she was in the presence of the Spindrifter.

Somehow this was linked to Leander's unease. She hadn't been able to work it out. Apparently men who were about to die often developed erections, the primitive organism preparing itself for one last effort to pass on its genes, however hopeless the task might seem. She was the same. As soon as it was confirmed that the Pridehouse would welcome the entire crew of the Midnight Ranger down on to their planet she virtually dragged Umbel Nelson from his cabin into her own.

Through her single secondary retinal screen she watched their coupling from various angles; through her uncovered eye she looked down along her long, over-slender body as she rode him. His penis had not fully recovered its hardness from their first lovemaking—hell, she had practically raped him—but its presence inside her comforted her. Through her secondary retinal screen she was able to watch her own buttocks rise and fall, the dark shaft of Umbel's semi-erection seemingly between them, his funny little tight-drawn testicles touching her every time she slowly descended. She reached behind her and fondled his testicles: he had told her many times that he disliked it when she did this, but at the moment she was using him as a security blanket, something the big man fully understood. Right now he wasn't complaining: her other hand, insistently rubbing her clitoris (oh, yeah, found the damned thing: funny how it could be so circumspect when it wanted to be) against his penis, felt him grow harder.

He reached up and pulled her shoulders towards him. One of her nipples was so erect that the pain was distracting her; the other was remaining obstinately flaccid, as if it wanted no part in the proceedings. Umbel Nelson licked all around it, then drew her yet further down so that their mouths joined. His hand remained eager on the uncooperative nipple, fondling it with the gentleness that was what had attracted her to him in the first place, long ago when they had still been in the Solar System.

Both of his eyes were covered by the rectangular mirrors of secondary retinal screens. He could watch the sex they were having from two different angles at once, if he wanted to. She switched her own angle, so that now she was looking at herself and Umbel from directly above. She took her mouth away from his and sat up, then leant backwards, reaching her arms towards the cabin's ceiling. Her small breasts seemed to disappear into her chest. The contrast between the paleness of her own body and the darkness of Umbel's—he was even darker than Strider—was a thing of beauty to her. She shuffled slightly backwards on his thighs so that her overhead view would reveal a centimeter or so of his penis. Neither of them moved for a moment, and then she licked an index finger and brushed it first along her lower lip, then across the blood vessel at the base of his penis and finally against herself.

Her orgasm arrived so suddenly that she almost ejected his penis. She found herself shouting words that she didn't know she knew. All of a sudden her face was against his again, her lips kissing his, her teeth nipping at his nose, her breasts rubbing themselves against his chest urgently. Her groin was moving rapidly up and down on his erection as if she were a near-virgin who had yet to discover the secret of slowness. Although Maloron enjoyed sex very much, she rarely climaxed, and almost never at all except through oral sex—even with Nelson, who was what women would have described back on Mars as a "skilled operator."

"Umbel!" she shrieked as she experienced another orgasm. Nelson thought she was talking to him, but in fact she was addressing her messiah.

Maloron worried about herself. She must be even more terrified than she'd thought if she'd come to a second orgasm so soon. There was nothing wrong with aliens. They normally smelt a bit odd, but then so did everything else in The Wondervale. They could look disturbing. They had different ways of behavior from humanity's, and very often those ways were better. But the ones she was soon going to meet were no threat: they were friends of Polyaggle.

Oh, bloody hell, she was heading towards another . . .

"Yowch!" said Umbel, shoving her half away from him.

She watched his face through her unshielded eye as it twisted in what looked like pain and probably was. He was doubtless, through both secondary retinal screens, flitting his observation point all around her cabin. She cupped her small breasts in her hands and offered them towards him. He ignored them entirely, so was probably watching the curve of her spine down towards her buttocks, the line he had often told her he loved the most.

She rode him, softly, a little longer until she was certain that he had emptied himself. Then she lay on top of him for a few minutes, listening to his heartbeat and the wheeze of his breath. Nervously, she kissed him again, and as she did so his penis fell out of her. She rolled over to one side, and he held her thin body to his muscular one, so that she suddenly felt that one or other of them was a child and the other an affectionate parent—though the hell if she could work out which was which.

He ran a finger very slowly down the buttons of her spine, then rested his hand under her buttock.

"We've got to get up to the command deck soon," he said a little later.

He looked at his watch and she hated him for it.

"In less than an hour, sweet lady of wisdom and beauty—although that second time hurt me quite a lot—we'll be in Pridehouse orbit. Strider will want us then."

She nuzzled against him.

"I'm frightened," she said.

"Do you think I don't know that?"

She had her eyes firmly closed, but very carefully, with his thumb, he pried open the lid that was not covered by her secondary retinal screen to show her that he was smiling.

"If all I was interested in doing was fucking you," he said, "do you think I'd be here?"

"Dunno."

He ran his fingers through the short, very dark hair of her head.

"Have you noticed I've never tried to get to Leonie?" he said.

"You have."

"Well, only slightly—as a matter of politeness. And I've never tried to get to Maria at all."

"That's because you discovered she was gay." Maloron felt herself slipping into sleep, even though she knew she should be awake. He had put his little finger into her navel, and now she felt him kiss it, his tongue probing into the folds. She had meant to have her navel surgically excised back on Mars, but somehow things had always seemed to get in the way: now she was glad they had. She shifted further over on to her back, holding his head. He sucked softly at her navel, producing a little phoot sound.

"No," he said from the general direction of her belly, his voice abruptly losing its customary flippancy, "it's not that at all. I'd love to have a fuck with both of them, just to see what it was like. Bloody hell, I'd like to find out what it was like fucking Polyaggle if I didn't think her coat would cut me to ribbons."

Leander knew she had to pull herself into wakefulness, but it was proving very difficult. Nelson's tongue was so soothing.

"What do you want from me?" she said drowsily.

"Friendship. The sound of your breath and the touch of your thigh when I wake up in the middle of a sleeping-time—every sleeping-time. I like to listen to the way you snore."

"I don't snore!" she said, trying to stir herself.

"You do. Not always. Usually very, very quietly. And it's a sort of graceful noise, star of the morning: it makes me think of people dancing, for some reason. But you do."

She snorted.

"Maloron?"

"Yeah, liar?"

"We've screwed around a lot. Both of us. The last few months it's been only with each other because none of the others have been interested."

"Hilary's been pretty interested."

"Hilary would be interested in a hole in the wall, right now. He's trying to work out whether or not you're his mother. At a guess, lovely lady of wherever the hell it is you come from, Leonie's won that particular battle. I've seen the little guy virtually trip over his tongue when she goes by."

"Poor Leonie."

"Yeah, well, anyway, what I was trying to say was . . ."

"No." She was suddenly awake.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not going to let you cage me." She sat up, thrusting his head away from her stomach. She still felt a sticky, comfortable glow from her groin, but somehow it seemed no longer to be at all connected with Umbel Nelson, even though he was the person of whom she was fondest. If she'd just been fucking with someone else the person she would want to kiss most—and to have kiss her—would be Umbel. She wanted to be never very far away from him, but she didn't want to become a part of him—more than that, she didn't want him to become a part of her.

"We have to dry you off," she said more kindly, taking his small penis into her hand. His fluids and hers were mixed along it, and she absentmindedly bent to give its upper surface a kiss. It twitched reflexively, as if it were vaguely hungry.

"Apologies about that, junior goddess of the skies," said Nelson. "Quick shower, huh? Any passing erections are to be ignored rather than actually hit, OK? You're loved a lot: something to remember whenever you want to remember it." As they stood, he took her into his arms. She could feel his moist penis against her pubic hair, and immediately she wanted to screw again.

But no. Not the right time. He was delicious. She loved licking his chocolate skin, especially just under his shoulder blades. He had reassured her through the sex she'd demanded. The aliens could be faced. The Onurg of the Pridehouse had been the first of the ancient species to offer alliance to the Humans. Maloron Leander had nothing to fear from such beings as these.

She hoped.

Maloron followed and then led Umbel Nelson to the shower.

"Wow," she said, looking down as the water—the precious water—pattered about them. "Um, thirds?"

#

It always surprised Strider how Maloron Leander managed constantly to look so spruce. Nelson and Leander had arrived on the command deck some considerable time after she had summoned them. Nelson looked as if he had a hangover, although that was impossible because there was neither alcohol nor ziprite aboard the Midnight Ranger. Leander had obviously taken the opportunity to get some well earned rest. Strider nodded, approving of her officer.

Later she would reprove Nelson.

But kindly and tactfully, as she always did.

#

Maria Strauss-Giolitto, standing at a Pocket, watched the depiction of the planet called by its dominant indigenous species The Pridehouse. Then she stood back and looked overhead through the view-window at the disc of the planet. The Pocket's portrayal was accurate in every respect, and yet it lacked the presence of the planet itself. She found herself shivering: she remembered Spindrift, and what had happened there—less the cold of the ice and snow, more the confidences she had shared with the bot Pinocchio. Even though the bot had now transcended The Wondervale's reality to become an Image, she still regarded him as her best friend; but the memory of those moments on Spindrift when her reserve had broken down frightened her. She should never have been on this mission in the first place: the SSIA (Solar System Interstellar Agency, to give it its full pomp) had sent a crew to Tau Ceti II who were hand-picked to be—among many other things—good breeding stock. Strauss-Giolitto's lesbianism had somehow slipped through the net. She had expected there would be at least a few bisexual females among the crew, but they had all turned out to be lusty heteros, damn them. For the first few years of the mission she had had to keep her secret a secret in case of being thrown off the Santa Maria's colonizing mission. This had been difficult because, back on Earth and Mars, it would never have crossed anyone's mind to criticize one's sexual orientation. Then, on Spindrift, she had broken down and told Pinocchio everything. She had never felt so exposed in her life: physiologically, because she had just been subjected to Spindrifter decontamination procedures, which had been so thorough that they had the effect of making one feel simultaneously stripped and emptied of every last suspicious molecule; and psychologically, because she had revealed herself not only to Pinocchio but also, somehow, to herself.

A bot!

There had been a time when she had despised bots. Now, when he came into her mind to share conversation, she wished he were a bot again, so that she could put an arm around his shoulders and watch his so-human-like eyes swivel towards her.

That old secret was no longer a secret, although Umbel Nelson nevertheless called her the light of his life and the joy of his being frequently when he talked with her. Cooped up in a small craft for nearly a year, the Humans had confessed much if not all of the things they might elsewhere have kept hidden. Things would have come out into the open anyway. And now that they were in The Wondervale, lost Jesus knew how far away from home, the fact that Strauss-Giolitto had cheated her way aboard the Santa Maria seemed terrifically unimportant.

Once, Strider had taken her to her cabin and they had made love. The sex had been great, but it had been lacking in emotion. Or, no: the worst of it was that Strider's predominant emotion, in the end not quite skillfully enough disguised, had been sympathy for the hell Maria had locked herself into. Strider had faked nothing, but she could as well have been masturbating. Midway through the sleeping-time Strauss-Giolitto had left in ill concealed tears. To be made love to through pity was worse than not being made love to at all.

Once more that funny cold feeling travelled up her spine, and she dipped her head back into the Pocket.

As with Spindrift, there was virtually no superficial sign of technology on the planet's surface. She expanded the portrayal and then thought at the Pocket that it should increase the rate of the image's spin, so that it seemed as if the planet's rotational period had become about twenty minutes. She instructed the Pocket to stop the movement any time there was something interesting to see.

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR FROM THE PRIDEHOUSE'S DECONTAMINATION SYSTEMS, said Pinocchio's voice suddenly inside her head.

"Go away," she muttered. He had just made her much more apprehensive than she had already been.

The disc stopped moving, and she expanded the depiction yet again. It was as if she were pulling the surface of the planet rapidly towards her. There was a little city in the middle of what looked like a featureless red desert. The Pridehouse seemed to have few mountain ranges or even cascades of hills, and as yet she had seen no seas or oceans. Silvery lines which she guessed were roads stretched away, cobweb-like, across the desert. No rivers, either. This must be an incredibly ancient world, to be so devoid of surface water: surely no intelligent species could have evolved on a planet without seas.

She mentally instructed the Pocket to continue its search.

Yes, the Autarchy had been here. Just as on Spindrift, there was a near-deserted spaceport, with a few rusting cruisers lying abandoned in what had obviously once been fully functional bays.

Her thought trickled on. Perhaps these weren't Autarchy relics at all. Perhaps the ancient species constructed them specially. If I were Kaantalech, she thought, I'd look out for all the planets with deserted spaceports and zap 'em. The ancient species have clearly adopted this as a way of disguise . . . The chances of some industrious book-keeper wading through the records of the hundreds of thousands of worlds that constituted the Autarchy and discovering that no, after all, this particular planet had never been visited were close to zero. Decaying spaceports were a way of advertising to anyone curious that this world had been visited long ago and had proved to possess nothing of interest: no useful slaves, no mineral resources that couldn't more easily be mined elsewhere, no handily toxic micro-organisms . . . and, in this instance, there would be the apparent lack of surface water as a further disincentive to setting down a colony.

Another little city, and another. They were regularly distributed, as if someone had neatly planted studs into a tennis ball, making sure that each was symmetrically equidistant from the other.

She told the Pocket to make the planet's image spin vertically. Yes, not even polar icecaps.

Was The Pridehouse a planet at all? Had it been built? The size of such a project made Strauss-Giolitto's mind recoil: it would take thousands or even tens of thousands of years, and the resources involved would be beyond realistic human imagination. On the other hand, the people who—after the name of their planet—called themselves the Pridehouse were one of the ancient species, and she had seen on Spindrift what the ancient species could do . . .

She wasn't enjoying this very much. She had thought that surveying the planet would help calm her anxiety, but it wasn't working. She knew that Maloron Leander was suffering even greater misgivings than she was, which made her feel a bit better. She also knew that Strider, with her usual lack of empathy, had failed to notice that either of the other two women on the Midnight Ranger was otherwise than her usual self. The Images must be perfectly aware of it, however. But the Images were obviously keeping the information to themselves. Maybe Nelson was equally worried: Strauss-Giolitto had never been able to read his body-language. Lan Yi was as tranquil as ever: he was probably playing a game of mental four-handed chess with Ten Per Cent Extra Free, or something. Blast him for his coolness!

She didn't have much time for the company of men, but she enjoyed being with Lan Yi. His Argot still occasionally lapsed into imperfection, but often he was witty. His conversation stimulated her mind. He treated her as if she were his intellectual equal, which certainly she was not: she had never even dared think about comparing their IQs. She had recognized a while ago that the emotion she felt for him was love. If only she could get over the repulsion she felt for the maleness of his body, she would be happier. Maybe not. She loved him the way a daughter can love a father. Any physical expression of the love might have felt somehow incestuous.

She moved away from the Pocket. Her mouth felt dry, and she crossed the command deck to fetch herself a drink of water. Polyaggle was watching her. Another bloody complication.

Maria Strauss-Giolitto wished she had been able to strangle at birth the person who invented hormones.

#

"Our Images tell us we are in geosynchronous orbit over your spacestrip," said Strider into her Pocket an hour or so later. "I've introduced our gravity simulators, but I'd like to come down to the surface as soon as possible: they're energy-greedy."

"That is perfectly evident to us," said Hein.

"Smartass."

Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated the wolf's expression into a grin. Hein and Strider were building up a good relationship. This was unusual between species. It was a pleasing sign. Physically and culturally different though they were, perhaps the Humans and the Pridehouse would work well together. Ten Per Cent Extra Free certainly hoped so. He and all the other Images who had ventured here from The Truthfulness were anxious that the same peace they enjoyed in their own version of reality could prevail in this Universe: anything else was unaesthetic.

"We're looking forward to meeting you in person," Hein was saying to Strider. Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated reflexively.

"I'm looking forward to punching you on the nose," said Strider, also grinning.

"Tough guy," said Hein.

"My, what big teeth you have, Grandma." Translating this into something comprehensible to the pseudo-wolf took Ten Per Cent Extra Free a fraction of a second longer than usual.

Hein's interpreted voice took on a more serious tone.

"We have locked an attractor on to you. Your Images will know how to ride it to the surface."

"I had rather hoped to be able to be in command of my own craft for this particular maneuver," said Strider, abruptly stiffening.

THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THAT THE PRIDEHOUSE WILL ALLOW NON-AUTARCHY CRAFT TO ENTER THE ATMOSPHERE OF THEIR PLANET, Ten Per Cent Extra Free informed her swiftly. SHIPS RIDING AN ATTRACTOR ARE UNDER THE PRIDEHOUSE'S COMPLETE CONTROL, SO CAN REPRESENT NO THREAT TO THEM. FREE-LANDING SHIPS MIGHT PROVE TO BE ENEMIES DISGUISED AS FRIENDS. HEIN HAS COME TO LIKE YOU, AS YOU HAVE HIM. BUT HE CANNOT COMPLETELY TRUST YOU.

"Can I trust him?" she subvocalized.

Yes. If the Pridehouse were going to harm you they would have done so half a year ago. They are one of the ancient species.

"Why don't they just zap the Autarchy?"

Hein was looking at her, watching the way her lips twitched as she spoke to the Image. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had dealt with the Pridehouse before, and knew that Hein would refrain from interrupting until this short exchange with Strider had finished. The Pridehouse were a very courteous species.

Human solutions are so . . . simplistic, Leonie. One planet against the Autarchy? Think again.

"Oh. Thanks for reminding me that Humans are thick. Once more."

Ten Per Cent Extra Free felt her fury with him. NO, IT'S JUST THAT YOU HUMANS ARE A YOUNG SPECIES. YOU FORGET THINGS.

"All right," said Strider out loud to Hein, shrugging her shoulders.

"We shall perform the decontamination during your period of transit," said the wolf. "The process is painless, as I have said."

In the Pocket Strider could see a red spark leaping from the planet's surface to the Midnight Ranger. Then everything started changing.

#

My arms! thought Strider. What the hell is happening to them? My hands!

Her clothing seemed to be melting into her skin. Her hands were shrinking until they were tiny. The flesh was somehow evaporating from her now-naked arms. Still leaning into the Pocket, unable to move, she watched as her fingers blended together into a single mass, one for each hand, then slowly redivided to form powerful talons. She felt her head stretching: there was little pain but great discomfort. From behind her she could hear her crew screaming: whatever was happening to her must be happening to them as well. Grey hairs sprang from the pores of her withered arms, so that within moments the skin was entirely covered. Her center of balance shifted backwards, so that she was clinging with difficulty to the horizontal surface of the Pocket, even though that surface was lowering slowly to compensate. There was a ripple of sensation all down her body as her breasts retracted into her torso and then reproduced themselves all down her stomach: abruptly she was the proud owner of eight paired, flat breasts, all covered in shaggy hair. Her feet were suddenly too small to take her poorly balanced weight, and she staggered backwards a moment before dropping on to all fours. Her ears pricked up as she looked towards the crew.

The eye in her snout emerged and looked sternly at the two in her forehead for a little while—she was staring into her own eyes—before turning its field of vision forwards.

There was another wrench at her sides. Hanging her head down, looking between what had become forelegs, she saw herself sprout a third set of legs. They were elegantly long and covered in the same grey fur as the rest of her. One of them, without any conscious volition on her part, raised itself and scratched under her chin.

So this was the Pridehouse's famous decontamination technique: transform the visitors into perfect replicas of yourselves, probably exact right down to the last cellular interaction, and their alien micro-organisms will certainly die. Strider hoped that the Pridehouse were able to reverse the procedure precisely, because otherwise the Humans could bear away lethal infections. Besides, she didn't want to be a six-legged, tailless wolf any longer than she had to be.

She flopped on to her stomach and, tongue lolling, looked around her at the rest of the command deck. Although the others had likewise been mutated into semblances of Pridehouse, she was still able to recognize them without difficulty—especially Hilary, who was a fluffy little cub being suckled by Leander, an experience which was probably fulfilling a deal of his adolescent fantasies.

Perhaps I ought to bark a few orders, thought Strider sarcastically.

She tried speaking, and found it easier than she'd expected. "Is anyone hurt?"

Various sets of large round eyes turned towards her. The large beast whom she knew was Umbel Nelson answered her in a voice that was half a snarl: "Flower of the ages, I feel better than I did five minutes ago."

THERE IS NO NEED FOR FEAR, said Pinocchio in all of their minds. THE PRIDEHOUSE'S IMAGES INFORMED US OF WHAT WOULD OCCUR, AND THEY ASSURED US THE PROCESS WAS PERFECTLY SAFE.

"Couldn't you have warned us?" snapped Leander.

You might have refused the treatment.

"That was our decision to take," said Lan Yi quietly. "Of any Image, Pinocchio, you should have known better."

I APOLOGIZE, half-sang Pinocchio's voice. STILL, IT'S DONE NOW.

The flippancy of his tone infuriated Strider, but she clamped down on her anger. The Images had acted wisely. It was important that the Humans made allies of the Pridehouse, and one or other of her crew might have been so horrified by the prospect of the transformation as to refuse it entirely. But still . . . "We'll discuss this later, Pinocchio," she subvocalized.

The Midnight Ranger jerked suddenly, and the crew slid hither and thither on the deck. Loki scampered anxiously among them: the cat had become a miniature six-legged wolf, but obviously hadn't noticed yet.

"That'll be the Pridehouse's attractor locking on to us," Strider guessed out loud for the sake of the others.

THAT IS CORRECT, said Pinocchio and Ten Per Cent Extra Free together. AGAIN, THERE IS NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF.

"The ship is now totally under the Pridehouse's control," she continued, ignoring the Images, "and it'll stay that way until we've left their planet again." She wondered what her voice sounded like to the others. To herself it sounded just the same as always, although perhaps slightly clumsier than usual because of the thick tongue between her unfamiliarly shaped jaws. "Don't panic. Hilary, stop whining or I'll hit you."

The cub looked appalled, and abruptly ceased making any noise except for strident breathing.

Strider twisted her head back and looked up through the view-window. There was nothing to see but red. She was reminded of home on Mars, although when approaching Mars one saw the rilles and volcanic formations, as well as the patches of green where Humans had introduced vegetation. The Pridehouse seemed almost featureless, just as it had in the Pockets.

Cautiously, she moved back to her Pocket. She found it easier than she'd expected to move on her six legs. The level of the Pocket's solid surface sank again so that she could peer into it without discomfort.

She thought of the gaseous composition of The Pridehouse's atmosphere, and at once statistics were displayed in front of her. There was oxygen in plenty, comparatively little nitrogen and carbon dioxide, a great deal of ammonia . . .

"How are we going to be able to breathe?" she subvocalized.

YOU ARE REPLICAS OF THE PRIDEHOUSE NOW, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free promptly. OF COURSE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO BREATHE THEIR NATIVE ATMOSPHERE.

"Then how can we breathe at the moment?"

The Pridehouse have altered the air in the Midnight Ranger so that it is compatible with theirs. They will alter it back again when you leave.

"Pretty impressive technology these folk have," said Strider. "How the hell did they do that?"

Some day I'll spend several years explaining it to you: their science has had several billion years' start on humanity's. Remember how old the ancient species are.

Strider did remember, and retracted her head from the Pocket, suddenly reminded of Polyaggle. Could a colonial, winged organism survive the transformation into a pseudo-mammalian one? She needn't have worried. Polyaggle was a beautiful, if rather small, silver-furred wolf: she had curled up in a corner and was sleeping peacefully, her elegant snout between the foremost pair of her legs. Her sides moved inward and outward in a soporific rhythm, and Strider found herself yawning in sympathy.

Swiftly she put her head back into the Pocket and thought of Hein. His face obediently appeared.

"That punch on the nose is definitely guaranteed," she said.

"It will be a pleasure to receive it," he replied. Now there was no need for the Images to translate his facial expression: she recognized it easily as a smile. "But remember to keep your talons sheathed: otherwise you could do me harm."

"That's what I want to do you. I like being a biped, dammit, not a hexaped. I like standing upright."

Hein shrugged: the gesture involved moving his long ears forward so that they briefly covered his upper pair of eyes. He made no further comment, and Strider realized her remark had been a lie. In her current form she much preferred being the way she was: it seemed utterly natural to her.

"How long until we land?" she asked him.

"About twenty nanreets."

Very slightly less than half an hour, Ten Per Cent Extra Free translated for her.

"Is there anything we can do until then?"

"Not much. We can talk, if you wish."

"I'd like that."

"What would you like to talk about?" said Hein. His third eye retracted briefly into his snout, and this time reappeared in a startlingly bright mauve.

"About your people," said Strider, flexing the talons of her forepaws. "Our species always assumed that we'd attained technology because we had an opposable thumb and walked upright. You clearly got there a different way. Tell me how."

"Evolution is a continuing process . . ." began Hein.

Long ago—more millions of years ago than Strider enjoyed contemplating—the Pridehouse had indeed been an upright species: they ran on four feet, but the front part of their bodies had been vertical, so that they looked something like a cross between a wolf and a centaur. In those days the foremost two limbs had been equipped with appendages which, so far as Strider could gather, had been not unlike the digits of a human hand. But then, when the Pridehouse had retreated to their Homeworld as the Comelatelies had begun to dominate the galaxy, slaughtering any species whom they perceived as a threat, it had become safer to look like animals rather than a technologically advanced people. Slowly, as time went by, the Pridehouse had physically reverted to what they assumed had been an earlier form—although, Hein assured her, it was possible that they had instead achieved a new form, one not reflected in any part of their earlier evolutionary history. On the few occasions that the Autarchy passed by, all that could be seen were, yes, dominant creatures, but creatures which could never themselves have attained any high technological status. Their cities were small and ramshackle. The Pridehouse had in effect back-evolved. Physically, anyway. What was not obvious was that their intelligence remained, and that their distant ancestors had built technological artifacts that lasted. A taloned paw could press a button or move a lever or swivel a knob just as well as a hand could, and nothing had been forgotten. With this ability, old technology could be used to create new technology, and new technology to create newer. What the Pridehouse had done, in effect, was deliberately to evolve their technology in order to compensate for their own reversed physiological evolution. Much of it responded to mental commands; much more of it had reached a level of artificial empathy or intelligence—or both—such that it had become essentially symbiotic with the Pridehouse.

The Pridehouse, despite their fearsome teeth, were not carnivores. What they ate—and here Strider found her understanding beginning to slip—was their planet. She asked Ten Per Cent Extra Free for clarification, but the Image remained silent.

The view-window above her flared. The Midnight Ranger was encountering the outer vestiges of The Pridehouse's atmosphere. The Bredai had assured her that the window was made of a material as tough as the Humans' plastite. As always, Strider neurotically half-expected the window to explode inward towards her.

She forced her attention back to the Pocket.

"We're coming in, buster," she said to Hein.

"Hope you have a bumpy ride," said the wolf. The other wolf.

"If I'm sick I'm going to save it up for you."

"'Sick'? What's that?"

"Just hope you never find out."

The craft began to jounce around as it moved down towards the region of the jetstreams. What was left in Strider of the Human felt its gorge rising, but the Pridehouse part of her was unconcerned. It felt odd to have two different sensations at once, almost as if she were two different people—which she supposed, in a way, she was.

A thought occurred to her. "Say, Hein, how far did the Pridehouse explore the Universe, back in the old days?"

Again his ears slid forwards. It was clear that the question did not interest him in the slightest. "Who knows? Who cares?"

"I care," said Strider.

"Why?"

"There were old legends on my species' home planet about people who could become wolves when they wanted to. I was wondering if maybe the Pridehouse had called by."

Hein shrugged once more. "Infinitely unlikely. How old is your oral culture?"

Now it was Strider's turn to shrug. "Maybe as much as a million years. It's hard to tell . . ."

She watched his face as the Images translated the word "years" for him. Then he started laughing at her.

"The Pridehouse have confined themselves to this planet for some five times that long," he said.

"Maybe one of your ships got lost and strayed into our galaxy," said Strider stubbornly, "the same way that us Humans found ourselves in The Wondervale? Maybe, rather than coming home, they found a world to colonize, then started looking around at the stellar systems nearby?"

Hein drew his upper eyes closer together in an expression Strider had no difficulty reading as scorn.

"Impossible," he said. "First, the Pridehouse never get lost. Second, if ever any of your people had learnt how to mutate into wolves, they'd have stayed that way. Who'd want to be a biped?"

"Two punches on the nose," said Strider. "No, make that three."

#

The Midnight Ranger did not so much land as break through the land. Strider could not watch it in reality, but she observed everything in the Pocket. Like the opening of a giant eye, a part of the planet's surface peeled apart to reveal a bright intensity within. The attractor, which glittered in the Pocket like a rod made out of mica, slowly eased the spaceship through the vent, which closed above. The craft was brought to a halt, still vertical, hovering thirty or forty centimeters above a flat shelf that seemed to hold itself in the midst of a vast volume of nothingness.

So this was what a Pridehouse spacestrip was like.

Strider, who had expected landing to be a matter of bucking and bouncing as the Midnight Ranger hit ground at a velocity close to the dangerous, carving and veering across the planet's curiously uniform surface, was impressed—and reminded herself yet again of the age of the ancient species. Maybe in a few million years humanity—assuming it hadn't destroyed itself by then through one folly or another—would be capable of similar feats.

"You can emerge now," said Hein, with a formality that had been absent from their earlier half-bantering exchanges. "You will egress singly, and you will bear no weapons."

"Not even a . . .?"

"No, Leonie, not even a lazgun." He smiled frostily. "Besides, in your current form it'd take you several nanreets to work out how to fire the thing. You have no hands any longer. No fingers."

"I'd manage," she said.

"You probably would. So—no weapons."

There wasn't any point in arguing. The eight of them were in no position to take on a planetful of technologically advanced creatures—not that she had any wish to do so. She liked Hein. The Images had told her that she could trust the Pridehouse as a species, and that was what her own instincts said to her as well. Hm. She actually rather fancied Hein. This was something that she must keep concealed. Imagine trans-species pregnancy, she thought. Better still, don't. Although I suppose the Pridehouse have some marvelous means of contraception that involves numerous glowing forcefields and something that smells of dried soya protein. Maybe . . . Get your mind back to the subject, Leonie.

"We'll send the cat out first," she said aloud.

"Cat?" said Hein.

"We call it that. It'll look like a tiny cub to you."

"Cub?"

"Child," she corrected hastily. "I'll come immediately afterwards. Then the rest of us. The last to appear will be Polyaggle."

"The Spindrifter?" Strider was annoyed that Hein looked suddenly so eager. "None of us alive have encountered a Spindrifter in the flesh before, but there are records." Oh, blast, thought Strider. The Pridehouse find the Spindrifters as pestilentially erotic as we do. So much for that jolly little fantasy I was having . . . "When they were destroyed by Kaantalech, we felt their pain as if it were our own."

"Really."

Strider insisted to the others that, as they each left the ship, they should go through a full cycling of the airlock, even though Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her the atmosphere of the ship was now identical with that of The Pridehouse: if anything went wrong she wanted at least some of the crew to be able to get away. Maybe. They'd have to try to blast their way through the planet's outer skin . . . Even so, anything to improve their chances. With much scrabbling of forepaws she managed to equip herself with a commlink, so that Pinocchio would have an artifact to cling on to; Nelson, with even greater difficulty, did the same so that he could play host to Ten Per Cent Extra Free. They tested the commlinks.

"Hi, there, love of my life."

"Sounds like there's a bit of static on the line, Nelson. Let's use these things only if we have to. Otherwise we'll end up with sore brains."

"The pain's exquisite, coming from you, Leonie."

"Shut up."

They could see Loki going berserk in the airlock.

"You're a tough bastard, Leonie," growled Nelson.

"I'm worried that she'll figure out how to get back in through the inner door," said Strider, only half-joking.

The outer door eventually opened, and at once Loki was perfectly calm. The little creature trotted to the edge of the 'lock and looked downwards. A small attractor took the beast and lowered it gently to the shelf, where it began to groom itself, doing its best to convey the impression that all along this was where it had wanted to be.

Strider, waiting for her own turn, hoped she could retain the same degree of outward dignity. They're friends, she kept telling herself. Anyway, Leonie, you've gotta look good, if only for Hilary's sake. Pretend you're just arriving at a party thrown by someone you don't know very well. Oh, shit, I never much liked parties . . .

A little later she was herself on the shelf beside the cat. She licked its spine, which she sensed was the correct way of reassuring it. It ignored her completely.

The shelf was the same hue of red as the outer plains of The Pridehouse had seemed. Curious, she sniffed at it, then focused all three of her eyes on the surface; the third eye improved the perception of depth at a distance but made it more difficult to focus on objects close up, and she found that she was arching her neck. Then she had an inspiration, and smiled. Keep that grin plastered to your muzzle, Leonie. The ancillary eye dutifully disappeared into her snout, giving her the distinctly human sensation of a lover withdrawing his tongue from her mouth.

The surface of the shelf was covered with what appeared very like centimeter-long, slightly bristly hair. She moved the talons of a paw through it, feeling it brush against the paw's surprisingly sensitive velvety underside.

Lan Yi was dropped from the airlock to join her, and likewise retracted his third eye and began to investigate the surface. Then he sat back slightly clumsily on his haunches and looked about him with interest. Strider followed suit. It was difficult to see anything in the glare of the spotlights directed on the Midnight Ranger, but she became dimly aware of vast shapes in the distance, moving ponderously, as if she were watching huge marine creatures in a dark canyon of a terrestrial ocean.

For the first time she felt truly frightened. The Images had told her that the Pridehouse would do nothing to harm the Humans, but those great, barely visible moving shapes were telling her directly of the huge gulf of years that existed between her own species and this alien one. What might seem harmless to the Pridehouse, who might have utterly different motivations to any she could hope to understand, could be lethal to herself and her small crew.

Hilary passed through the airlock, and Lan Yi licked the boy's spine, calming him. The child seemed better able to cope with things now that he was outside the confines of the spaceship, and looked around him with evident wonder. Soon Segrill, looking less like a wolf than like a six-legged mouse, appeared, followed by Leander, Strauss-Giolitto, Nelson and finally Polyaggle. There was a feeling of an era having come to an end when the airlock door hissed shut behind Polyaggle.

"Well," said Strider as loudly as she could into the dazzling brilliance, "we're here. Now what?" Her voice sounded fine to her, but she suspected it might contain nuances that would convey to the Pridehouse her fear.

"Is it possible that you have acquired the same inference as I concerning the nature of this world?" said Lan Yi quietly to her. He must be more nervous than he seemed. His Argot rarely became so stilted.

She smiled, and again there was that uncomfortable glooping sensation as her forward eye was swallowed by the surrounding flesh. "How do I know when you haven't told me what your inference is?" she said in her new body's harsh equivalent of a whisper.

"This is not a planet at all."

"Depends on your definition of the word 'planet'. It's a world that goes in orbit around a star. But I'm with you."

"It is a living organism."

"I think so, too. More than that, I think I know the reason why it has the same name as its dominant species, and what Hein meant when he said his species get nutrition by eating their planet."

"Exactly, Captain Strider," said Lan Yi in the same low tones. "Our new allies are bacteria."

#

The lights dimmed, and gradually Strider, peering through the gloom, was able to make out more of their surroundings. The huge shapes she had detected earlier now looked even more like colossal fish, floating slowly and aimlessly. She breathed deeply: the air smelled good to her. Once again, without any volition on her part, one of her central legs reached up to scratch under her chin.

"Over there," said Strauss-Giolitto, gesturing uncertainly with her nose.

Strider followed her direction and saw, far in the distance, a yellowish light approaching. No—now that she was able to bring her Pridehouse vision into full focus she saw that it was a trio of lights, close together.

"I think our friends are coming to greet us," said Strider. Again that jolt of fear went through her. It was the silence, she decided: the uncanny silence all around them; the silence of the great dark fish. Polyaggle, near her, was by contrast looking eager for the arrival of whatever it was that was coming towards them—some kind of small vessel, Strider guessed.

Her guess was correct.

Hein—yes, she was certain it was Hein—appeared as a door slid open at the front of the complexly shapen craft. He stared directly towards Strider, and his third eye vanished briefly as he made a beckoning movement with a front paw. Well, at least we share a few things in common with the Pridehouse, Strider thought, stepping ahead of the rest towards the vessel.

The powerful reek of Hein hit her as she came close to him, and for a moment her nostrils wrinkled in revulsion. But then she realized how good he smelled, how right. She remembered the moment at the Pocket when she had faced up to the fact that, in her new form, she was finding herself attracted to him; his odor was telling her that he felt the same way towards her. Damn! Was he detecting the same emanations from her? This was a complication she could do without. She felt strangely virginal, and ignorant. If she succumbed to temptation—which she determined immediately not to do—he was going to have to teach her new self everything.

"Welcome," he said, the two Images translating his word.

Strider's ears momentarily occluded her upper eyes in a shrug. "Thanks for bringing us down here," she said.

Hein laughed. "We were only just in time. An Autarchy vessel had picked up a trace of you, and was about to head in this direction. Now that you're inside The Pridehouse you've vanished from their sensors."

Strider stiffened, remembering what had happened to Spindrift. "Are you sure they can't track us down, nevertheless?"

"They can't," replied Hein, turning to lead her into the little craft. It was a partially irregular polyhedron, with more sides than she could count. She scrambled in ungainly manner up a couple of steps, obediently following him. He seemed completely assured, for which she was grateful. "We also scrambled the sensors. At this moment there's a very confused Autarchy commander in orbit around Qitanefermeartha, wondering how she got there." He laughed again.

Strider turned to look at the rest of her crew. Segrill, the one she'd been worried about because of his tininess, had locked his teeth into the shaggy hair under Nelson's throat, and was dangling precariously. Nelson leapt straight over the steps to join her, and the Trok dropped to the floor and swiftly clattered on his minute paws to shelter under what she assumed was the craft's control module. Only Strauss-Giolitto was showing reluctance to enter the craft. Strider could scent the woman's terror.

"Come on," she said. Her instinct was to reach out a hand, but of course she hadn't a hand to reach.

Reluctantly, Strauss-Giolitto slunk aboard.

The door slid shut noiselessly and Hein touched his muzzle to the console. The craft swung around, and began to move away from the landing shelf.

"I'll give you the full tour later," said Hein. "For the moment, just see what you want to see."

He touched another control and the sides of the craft became transparent. Strider immediately looked downwards, and saw beneath her splayed paws a seemingly endless vista of activity. The fish-shapes that had seemed so dark when she had been surrounded by the spotlights were in fact quite brightly illuminated. Obviously they were spacecraft, their overall design, surprisingly, only superficially different from that of the original Santa Maria: perhaps the Pridehouse had arrived early at a good design for a spaceship and decided not to make unnecessary "improvements." Each of them rested on a free-floating shelf not unlike the one that held the Midnight Ranger and was surrounded by arrays of spotlights, which also seemed to be unsupported. Like everything else on or in The Pridehouse, the craft were an ocherish red. . . . And little fleas have littler fleas, and so ad infinitum? speculated Strider. Was every part of The Pridehouse an organism of some kind?

Here and there she could see small vessels like the one they were travelling in gliding easily from site to site. Swarming around the ships, moving with startling precision and at a rate sometimes impossible to follow, were what Strider guessed must be machines of some kind—bots busily making adjustments or maybe finishing off the . . .

Name of Umbel!

"You're still building this fleet, aren't you?" she said incredulously to Hein.

"Correct. It is still in the process of being reborn."

Strider was stunned. "When did you start?"

It took Pinocchio a short while to translate the Pridehouse's reply into Human terminology. A LITTLE OVER A MONTH.

"But there must be thousands of ships down there!" she said.

"About ten thousand," said Hein promptly.

She looked up at him and saw that he was smiling at her. Then, beyond his shoulder, she saw something else.

A city.

At least, that was what she assumed it was, although it was unlike any city she had seen before, even in holos. It was hard to judge distances here inside The Pridehouse, but it seemed to her the structure was massive, stretching thousands of kilometers from one side to the other, and hanging unsupported in the gloom. The main structure was, as near as she could see, circular, with the rim higher than the center, so that it held the countless edifices, parklands, roads and all the rest as in a gently cupped hand. Over it arched what Strider recognized as the faint glow of a forcefield. There was light everywhere, running in crisscrossing necklaces all over the upper surface of the disc to create complex patterns, some of which were moving in slow undulations.

"The city's breathing," she said softly.

"Of course it's breathing," said Hein, as if there could be no question of its doing anything else. Then he laughed at her again.

"But that's not a city, Captain Strider. That's your flagship."

#

The Onurg was significantly larger than Hein and colored entirely silver, so that he looked as if he had been dipped into a bath of the molten metal and then removed, perfectly plated in every detail from the tip of his snout to the hindmost paw. Only his eyes were not silver. The two upper ones were a pale grey that somehow seemed not tranquil but full of energy: Strider sensed that, if the Pridehouse had an emotion akin to Human anger, the Onurg was a person who should not be crossed. But there was no question of his being wrathful at the moment. His muzzle-eye kept changing color as he smiled at his little collection of guests.

This ancient species certainly didn't stand on ceremony. The craft Hein had been piloting had come upward through a bafflingly complicated system of brightly illuminated tunnels to reach the surface of the city—the flagship, Strider had to keep reminding herself. The journey through the disc had taken longer than she'd expected: the structure of the flagship was so huge that what had looked from a distance to be merely eggshell thin was at least a couple of hundred kilometers thick. The network of tunnels was so complex that even Hein lost his air of confidence, moving his little craft at a cautious speed, pausing occasionally to check his position through what she reckoned must be the Pridehouse's version of a commline—or maybe he was just stopping to think about which way next to turn. Strider found the tunnel's walls threateningly organic, as if at any moment they might choose to clamp themselves tight together and start committing some obscene act of peristalsis. The sheen of liquid covering them looked disturbingly like a digestive fluid.

It had been a relief to emerge on to the upper surface of the disc.

Hein had touched a further bobble on the control module and there had been a slight grunting noise as six wheels sprouted on the underside of the craft, which landed gently on the smooth surface of what was to all intents and purposes a road which Strider might have seen on Mars. No, better than one of those, for the roads at home were often in poor repair. Even though the craft was now running on wheels—unlike a Martian cabble, which floated just above the surface—the drive was smoother than any cabble ride she'd ever experienced.

Hein was concentrating on making constant adjustments at his console. Strauss-Giolitto moved up beside her, nudging her with a shoulder.

"Why's he going on the ground?" she said. "We could be flying."

"Dunno, Maria," Strider responded. "Conserving energy?"

"I don't know that these people need to worry much about that sort of thing." Strauss-Giolitto swivelled her head from side to side; the gesture transmitted itself to Strider as the encompassing wave of an arm. "Just look at this, will you?"

Because of the slight concavity of the city—of the flagship, Leonie—there was no horizon as such, but the construction was so large that atmospheric dispersal made it seem almost as if there were. You could see a certain distance and then, beyond that, a haze that became more and more indistinct until there was nothing. Once again, as it had been from a distance, there seemed everywhere around them to be light. Strider guessed it was not unnatural that a species which dwelt inside their world—their host organism—rather than on its sunny surface would want the reassurance of light. She suddenly remembered the little, primitive-seeming surface cities they had been able to see from orbit. Perhaps they served as tourist villages, or something, while at the same time—disguise is the best defense—being camouflage against Autarchy inquisitiveness. Take a vacation on the outside, funsters, and enjoy the light of the Sun for a fortnight! You too can have all the pleasures of peeling skin and sleepless nights! And, wow, those guys and dolls won't be wearing much, and they'll be f-r-e-e and e-a-s-y! She grinned to herself, her third eye disappearing briefly with the usual ploop.

It had seemed from the distance as if the surface of the ship were crowded with buildings, but in fact mostly they were spaced several kilometers apart. Only here and there did they pass a complex, surrounded by dozens of stationary craft like the one they were travelling in. Cabble-parks, thought Strider. Some things seem to be common to all technological species. Although she thought of the various structures they passed as buildings, she realized that they were in fact growths, and they looked it: where Human edifices would have been marked by straight lines and hard edges, these were curvaceous and nodular. Tumors, she thought, then quickly rammed the notion to the back of her mind.

Aside from the occasional building, the landscape through which the road wound was monotonous and flat. There were patches of colors other than The Pridehouse's pervasive red, but they were small, few and far between, and the colors themselves were muted, as if the red had beaten them into submission and they were trying not to draw further attention to themselves. Strider assumed the areas of grey and muddy green were fields: if their crops tasted the way they looked the Pridehouse must subsist on a diet of overcooked cabbage.

But what one noticed more than the landscape was its populace. The areas to either side of the main road surface were for pedestrians. To say they were crowded would have been an overstatement, but they were in considerable use. In a way, in fact, they were crowded, because the Pridehouse did not shuffle along at a Human gait. They ran, and they ran at speed, their legs a blur of motion and their backs arching and flattening with almost the same dizzying rapidity. Sixty, eighty, a hundred kilometers per hour? Strider could only hazard a guess. Damn' fast, anyway. She wondered what happened if two of the Pridehouse ever collided, but they seemed to have perfect control of their bodies, moving around and past each other without any sign of hesitation.

A thought struck her.

She turned her head and looked at the fur of her sleek, strong flank.

Wow! Once we get off this craft I'm going to be able to . . .

It hadn't in fact worked out like that. When the vehicle finally pulled to a halt beside an undistinguished building and, at Hein's behest, they decanted, they found themselves being welcomed by the great silver wolf who introduced himself as the Onurg. Suggesting that they all go for a quick romp across the plain would have been . . . undignified. Or maybe not? Maybe it would have fitted in perfectly with Pridehouse protocol, but Strider hadn't been prepared to risk it.

The Onurg had welcomed them with the same loose informality that Hein had shown earlier, as if they were merely old friends dropping round for drinks. He had shown them the lavatories, and noisily used one of them himself—the Pridehouse clearly had no worries about privacy as they shat. Strider had followed his example, not just because she had been experiencing some discomfort but because it might have been some sort of ambassadorial ritual. Loki had disgraced itself, but the Onurg had just laughed. The Pridehouse as a species seemed eager to laugh at anything that came their way—to be frolicsome. Perhaps it was a consequence of their species being so ancient: when, as a species, you have experienced so much, there must be few reactions to the Universe left but laughter. Or Polyaggle's somberness. The ancient species appeared to lack the full range of emotions available to Humans. Appear to, Leonie, she reminded herself. You know virtually nothing of this culture.

Yet she herself had within the past few hours felt fear and nervousness and pleasure and much more. You may be mainly Pridehouse at the moment, she thought, but obviously you're still a Human at the core.

And now they were eating the planet. At least, they were eating some of the stuff that Strider had seen during their ride here. She had been right about the taste: the raw food reminded her irresistibly of overcooked vegetables, but at the same time it was delicious in a way that she could not describe to herself. They were sitting in a circle in the building's largest room, leaning forwards to snatch mouthfuls from a mound of vegetation. The circle was slowly getting smaller.

The Onurg had stopped eating some little while ago, as had Segrill and Polyaggle. The three had been talking but Strider, ravenous, had carried on eating, guiltily aware of her dereliction of duty but unable to do anything about it.

At last her hunger was satisfied, and she sat back on her haunches.

"Can you hear me, Nelson?" she said through her commlink.

"You bet, sweetest. But I'm busy right now." He was next to her, tugging a further pile of the green-grey stuff towards himself.

Reception was poor, but his thought words were perfectly intelligible.

"You're making a pig of yourself."

"You mean I'm wolfing it down." The big creature that Nelson had become briefly raised its head from the heap of food and looked at her. She had never before known that it was possible for a commlink to transmit a happy belch. Then Nelson turned his attention back to eating.

"Nelson, we have to talk."

The Onurg was looking at her, obviously expecting her to open a dialogue with him. She didn't want to speak to him, yet. Reluctantly—her belly was full—she reached forward into the vegetable mound again and started eating, trying to make it seem as if she were devouring far more than she was.

"Nelson, it's urgent."

"I know the way you feel about me, darling of the sunset, but can't you just wait until I've finished my . . .?"

"This isn't the time for farting about."

"Well, I don't want to fart about yesterday. If you gotta fart about anything, might as well fart about the present, is what I say. Except in the presence of a goddess like yourself—goes without saying."

She bit him. It was clearly a Pridehouse demonstration of minor anger, and he took it as nonchalantly as if she had sworn at him. While he carried on eating she was mortified by the way the alien instinct had taken her over.

"I can't use this thing as a flagship," she said through the commlink.

"Why not? It's big. I'll bet it's powerful. I'll bet its weaponry is better than anything else in The Wondervale. I'll bet it could take apart the average Autarchy armada and still have enough left over to be severely nasty to anyone else who displeased it."

"Nelson, do you really want to spend the rest of your life as a wolf?"

His jaws stopped working for a fraction of a second, and then he continued chewing, but more slowly now.

"The atmosphere we're breathing at the moment," she said. "If we were back in our own selves, it'd poison us immediately. I want my hands back. I want to walk upright again. I want to use my own voice. I want you and Lan Yi and Hilary and Leander and Strauss-Giolitto to look like human beings when I speak to you."

"Wouldn't be the rest of our lives," said Nelson, but she could sense his uncertainty.

"Might be. We hadn't expected the Pridehouse could produce anything like this ship. Who knows what the Autarchy is capable of producing? Something twice as big? Five times as big? Ten times? Ten times as powerful, and ten times better armed?" She paused a moment, then continued. "Besides, I'm not sure big ships are the best way of undermining the Autarchy."

"How d'you mean?"

She thought back to her first sight of the ships of the fleet the Pridehouse were building—or, rather, growing.

"Ever had a fight with a flea?" she said.

"Lady of midnight, I ain't ever seen a flea. I've always moved in better company than that."

She sensed that now, like herself, Nelson was only pretending to eat.

"You know what I mean," she thought impatiently at him. "A gadfly. Same image. Stick to fleas. They're tiny—tiny enough that it's hard even to see the little bastards: that's why they've survived everything the Human species has done to try to eliminate them. If you're bitten by one you know about it. If you're bitten by enough of them you get ill. An infestation can kill smaller animals. I think I want to be a flea—I think we could be more effective that way. Remember what we did to Qitanefermeartha."

It had been a low-technology shuttle—plus Pinocchio's quasi-suicide—that had destroyed Autarch Nalla's citadel. A hi-tech attack might well have been repelled easily.

"See what you mean, lady," said Nelson, his thoughts no longer so flippant. "So you're gonna tell the Pridehouse to stop building those big babies we saw and start building . . . well, fleas?"

"No. They know what's right for them. I think I know what's right for me—for us."

"But they've insisted you should be their commander."

"What difference does that make?"

"A commander's place is on her flagship," he said.

"Yeah? So this armada's going to have a very small flagship. Remember the damage the Trok fighters were able to do to Nalla's defensive forces? You could just about stretch your arms across one of those ships: their strength was in being too small to notice until it was too late. I'm going to get the Pridehouse to make over the Midnight Ranger—give it the tachyon drive, a fuck of a lot of shielding and enough weaponry to vaporize a small galaxy."

"You're gonna ask them to do all that," corrected Nelson. "Ask them very nicely. You're gonna say 'please'."

She thought a snort at him, then wondered how the noise had turned out at his end. "Don't you trust me?"

"No. I love you to the soles of my boots, but . . ."

She tongued off the commlink with difficulty—her tongue was overlong and overlarge—and sat up once more, looking directly at the Onurg. He must have felt her gaze, or maybe an Image prompted him, because he abruptly broke off his conversation with Segrill and Polyaggle and turned back towards her.

"What do you think of your flagship, Captain Strider? Of course, you've seen hardly anything of it, but . . ."

"I cannot accept the command."

The Pridehouse's expression of incredulity involved a crossing of the central legs and a totter on the remaining four. "But's that what you came here to do."

"Well, I cannot accept the command of this ship. It's magnificent. I admire it. I admire all of the Pridehouse." She paused. Delicacy was called for. "But it's your ship, not mine. I'm a biped with fingers and toes, and I'm accustomed to the technology that goes along with all that. If I had to be a six-legged wolf for more than a few days I'd go fucking nuts." Oops, Leonie. Remember: delicacy.

The Onurg crossed his central legs again. "This copulation with food . . .?" he began.

"My Images have translated imperfectly," she said as evenly as she could. "Being in what is, for me, the wrong body for any length of time would cause me substantial nervous strain. In many ways I prefer this body to my own, because it's stronger and it's sleeker and it's undoubtedly more graceful, but it's not mine. And I'm sure my companions feel the same as I do."

"We could reconfigure you into Human form—or Spindrifter or Trok or whatever," said the Onurg. He swivelled his head from side to side, indicating all of them. "It would be no trouble. You would still be able to breathe our air," he added before she could raise the point.

"Yeah, but even then we'd be trying to cope with technology that's alien to us. We'd fuck up the whole time." Oops again.

This time the Images coped with the translation—and presumably decorously, because the Onurg showed no trace of offense. But once more he made the odd gesture with his legs.

"Why should that be difficult for you?"

The gulf of several million years. The Pridehouse had forgotten what it was like to be a young species. Presumably they could adapt immediately to any form of gadgetry and be able to use it instinctively.

"Because our minds aren't as flexible as yours," she said. "We'd keep doing the wrong things, making the wrong decisions. To take an obvious example, to you this flagship is just big—OK, OK, it's versatile and all the other things as well. But it's still within your conception. It's way, way beyond mine. I don't know how I could handle it. First Autarchy warcruiser I came across would probably ram me right up the . . ."

"We can alter your brains so that you can deal with all of this," the Onurg interrupted. "We could make you think like we do. Surely you realize that?" Even in translation his voice displayed his perplexity, as if she were being deliberately perverse.

"But we don't want our brains altered!" She assumed that she was indeed talking for all of them. "The fact we don't want you to do that is another example of the differences between us. We might enjoy it for a bit, just the same way as I want to find out what it feels like being able to run as fast as you people, but in the end it'd drive us crazy. What we want to be is Humans, not mongrelized versions of Humans cum Pridehouse."

"Polyaggle?" said the Onurg thoughtfully, turning his head.

The Spindrifter's ears flicked forwards. "My loyalties are with the Humans, and specifically with Captain Strider. Even if they were not, I have to regain my original form soon, because I am expecting a brood. I want my offspring to be true Spindrifters, so that my species can live again."

"Then you won't lead us?" said the Onurg, turning back to Strider again. All the others—except the cat, which was still guzzling away—looked at her as well. "We need you. We've remembered the technologies of war, but we know nothing of the art of warfare." There was a sigh in the voice the Images interpreted. "I wish we didn't have to learn it again."

"If you want, I'll lead you," said Strider, "though you'd be better off finding another candidate if you can."

And then she explained to the Onurg about her Gadfly Principle.

#

Some while later, she did give in to temptation with Hein. Sex with him was quite probably the most bizarre experience she had ever had, but it was so full of genuine affection and caring that, even though its pleasures weren't human ones, it filled her with an infinite warmth and satisfaction.

Afterwards, as they romped across a tract of parkland, leaping and snarling and making little play-bites at each other, she said: "Sometime you're going to have to transform yourself into a Human."

"The Onurg has decided that I should do that anyway."

"What?" She stopped in her tracks, her talons raking great gashes in the red surface.

Hein trotted back towards her.

"He wants me to travel with you aboard the Midnight Ranger. Clearly it would be best if I did so in your bipedal form."

"He might have asked."

"But the wisdom of this course of action is obvious."

She felt her anger boil, all the sated happiness draining out of her. The presumptuous . . .

No, Leonie. Cool it. These people have forgotten that other species don't think the same way they do themselves.

And of course it was a sensible idea. She needed someone on board who could translate between her and the Pridehouse armada—not linguistically, because the Images would deal with that, but conceptually. Otherwise there might be all kinds of misunderstanding.

"Oh boy, buster," she said after a few moments. "You're in for an experience that's gonna blow your mind once I get my hands on you in Human form. It's been a long, long time."

"Why?"

She thought of explaining about the need of a Human crew to have some sort of structure of command, and the necessity for the captain to stay in general sexually aloof from the others in case of accusations of favoritism; and then she realized that there were just too many cultural differences to explain—too many bridges of reasoning, many of them hardly rational if you were from another species, looking at them from the outside—so she twitched her ears over her upper eyes and said: "I'll tell you some other day."

She laughed. "See that building over there?"

He turned. "Yes. So what?"

"I'll race you there and back. The winner gets to lay the loser. OK?"

"Seems fair enough to me."