2

I Can Remember Feeling Better

Strider sat on the command deck of the Midnight Ranger with Loki on her lap, running her fingertips through the sleek dark brown fur behind the cat's ears. The cat responded by stretching out her front legs and gently digging her claws into Strider's knee.

Ouch. Not so gently.

"Oi! Stop that!" said Strider, pulling one claw after the other out of the material of her blue jumpsuit.

The Pridehouse engineers had been baffled by her request that they experiment with turning Loki into a simulacrum of one of the many cats Strauss-Giolitto had located on one of the Midnight Ranger's holos, but had tried it anyway. The little animal had seemed completely undisconcerted by the transition, although for the first few hours she searched bemusedly for the central pair of legs to which she had grown accustomed, presumably in order to do something disgusting with them—the holos had failed to demonstrate some of the personal habits of cats. Then she had discovered the tip of her tail: this new plaything had kept her periodically amused for the succeeding weeks.

Although it hadn't been Strider's initial intention, the Onurg had accepted her Gadfly Principle to the extent that he had determined that the Pridehouse fleet—including the flagship—be returned to the body of the planet and then once more regrown. It seemed an astonishing labor until Strider reminded herself for the thousandth time that the Pridehouse was an ancient species: they regarded projects at which the collective energies of humanity would have balked as being merely something interesting to do. And there were billions of Pridehouse. Because the population of Spindrift had been no more than vestigial, she had somehow assumed that the same would be true of The Pridehouse, but the hollow, living world was aswarm with life. She shouldn't have been so surprised, she guessed: who would want to count the number of bacteria inside her own body? The bacteria analogy wasn't exactly accurate, because the symbiosis between the Pridehouse and their world was of a radically different nature from that she shared with the Escherichia coli inside her, but it was near enough.

Maloron Leander came up behind her and watched her stroking Loki for a few moments, then brushed the back of her hand gently across Strider's cheek.

"Soon be time for me to take over duty," Leander said.

"No problem. There's nothing happening. I'm enjoying it here."

"Any time you want to share out Hein, just let me know," said Leander.

"Nelson'd kill him."

"Umbel hasn't killed Lan Yi," said Leander.

Strider was surprised. "When did that happen?"

"When we were wolves. A few times since."

Leander squatted down and added her own fingers to Strider's stroking the small creature in a complicated pattern.

"The things I don't know," said Strider wryly.

"He hasn't killed Maria, either. Or Polyaggle. I haven't killed Polyaggle. I haven't killed Lan Yi."

"Look, Maloron, is Hilary safe?"

"Give him a couple of years, and no."

"I thought you and Nelson were"—Strider sought for a term that didn't have some moral connotation—"pair-bonded?"

"Both of us learnt things when we were wolves. All of us did. One of the things the rest of us learnt while you and Hein were running around fields together . . ."

"Who told you about that?"

"It was pretty bloody plain that you weren't off picking daisies. No daisies to pick, for a start. I guess you could have been picking those cabbagey sort of things, but that wouldn't have been precisely romantic." Leander looked up into Strider's face and grinned. "The first time you went off with him for a 'country ramble' all of us were pleased for you. Even Segrill joined in the cheers."

Strider felt herself blushing. Her hand had stopped tickling the cat.

"I hadn't thought it was so obvious," she said. "It's my duty not to—"

"Yeah, duty. There are nine of us and a cat on board. You're still the captain, of course, but you're also one of a very small group of people. You command because you're you, not because you're an ice queen."

"I'm not an—"

"All these years, though, you've had to pretend to be one—for the sake of duty. Oh, how we pitied you. First there was Pinocchio—"

"I did love that bloody bot," said Strider, her eyes beginning to fill with unexpected tears.

"Then Maria, because that was part of your duty as well," said Leander, an edge coming into her voice.

"How do you know all this?"

Leander pointed towards her secondary retinal screen. "We try not to snoop, but sometimes we can't help seeing things by accident."

"Not last night?" said Strider, starting forward. The cat dug its claws into her knee again, then leapt down to the floor.

"I think Maria caught a glimpse of last night, but nothing more than that. She looked away again quick."

"Oh, hell." Hein had come aboard during Strider's previous waking-time, and after she'd left the command deck they'd spent several hours trying out the potentialities of his new body. And once again before she'd come back on supervisory duty.

"Hein's nice. I like him," said Leander. "What we learnt as wolves, the rest of us, is that sex isn't the important thing: it's affection. Love's something different: hell, Nelson and I love each other like crazy. Let me say that again: Nelson and I are in love with each other. There's a difference. We're 'pair-bonded', if you want to carry on being technical about it. There are too few of us on the Midnight Ranger for any of us to feel anything but love for each other."

Strider nodded, trying to keep the tears hidden.

"You've just been making love to the cat, in a way," Leander continued. "You love the little sod. You love Hilary in a different way, even when you're bawling him out for doing some damn-fool thing. When you're playing chess with Lan Yi your fingers brush against his more often than they should—not because you're trying to seduce him, but just because the touch of your flesh against his is a way of showing affection."

Strider nodded dumbly.

"So that's what being Pridehouse for a while taught us," said Leander. "We've not only got to learn to love each other, we've got to learn to show it in every way we can. Hell, Maria can't stand the sight of the naked male body—for reasons that are a mystery between her and her psyche—and is certainly not going to let a prick inside her, but she and Lan Yi spent half a sleeping-time stroking each other the way you were just stroking Loki. Affection—that was what they were giving each other. Balling might have been a part of it, but it wasn't. So what? The affection was still there."

The cat clawed its way back up on to Strider's lap, and settled there, purring.

"You've got to discover the art of affection, Leonie. There aren't enough of us for you to do anything else."

The tears wouldn't stay back any longer. Strider found herself half-crouched over the cat, which continued purring, paying no attention to her.

"Have I ever told you how I was born?"

Leander's arm was around her shaking shoulders. Strider couldn't bear to look her in the face: she addressed her words to the steadily moving side of the cat, which seemed now to have fallen asleep in blissful contentment.

The gang-rape of her mother. Her rejection by her mother, whom she had never seen except on a viddisc, sent years later, which was filled with sanctimonious garbage and had been stuffed down the nearest disposal vent. That had been her revenge on her mother: to reject her in turn. For the sake of Strider's development as a human being, it had been the right thing to do at the time. Later . . . well, later had been too late.

All the pain came out. All the reasons why she had never let herself get too close to people: they were likely to betray her in some way or another. She had given herself up entirely to Pinocchio, and he had betrayed her by destroying himself in order to save her. Now she was close to giving herself up entirely to Hein, because she was fascinated by him and because he made her laugh in even the most intimate of moments. A bot and an alien. All her human lovers had been cheap thrills. Not the best of emotional records.

"C'mere," said Maloron Leander at last, pushing up Strider's chin. She turned Strider's face towards her and kissed her on the lips. "Was that so very bad?"

"No," said Strider, wiping the back of a hand across her eyes and then across her wet cheeks. Her throat was pulsing with a mind of its own, so that she was unable to say anything else.

"That wasn't sex. That was affection," said Maloron. "But sex is a part of affection, not the other way round. Remember that, dear captain." She threw her arms around Strider and embraced her tightly. "Don't feel so alone the whole time."

She stood up. "Do you want me to take over the watch?"

"No." Strider found herself giving a horrible, tearful giggle. "Despite what you've just said, I want to be on my own for a bit. I've got"—her voice began to break and she tried to control it, then thought: Why the fuck should I?—"I've got a lot of things to think through. Besides, I told you, there's nothing happening."

"Do you want me to stay with you?"

"I just said. No."

"It's up to you. If you want me to be with you when you knock off duty, just find me." Maloron moved towards the rear of the command deck, and turned in the door. "That's a sincere offer."

"No," said Strider. "Thanks, but . . . no. Just now the only lover I want is Hein." She looked over her shoulder, smiling through tears. "I've rediscovered sex after all these years. I think I'm beginning to discover love. Discovering things like affection may take me a while longer: in some ways, that's a more complicated emotion."

The door swished shut behind Maloron.

Strider carried on stroking the cat.

#

"Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four . . ."

"You Humans are so numerically fixated," said Hein beside her. Strider ignored him. Later she would stuff his head down a flush toilet, or something.

". . . twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one . . ."

She was watching developments in the Pocket. The Images were controlling the Midnight Ranger, as always, but she was its captain: she should supervise, just in case anything went wrong. Long ago, before the Santa Maria had left the Solar System, she had saved the ship when its Main Computer had been unable to. Ever since then she—or Nelson or Leander—had overseen every significant maneuver. The Images, not to mention the Pridehouse, were much more skilled, but the Humans had raw instinct. The confident refinement of the more advanced species led them into thought-traps.

". . . twenty, nineteen . . ."

The living world called The Pridehouse suddenly began unzipping itself. She pulled her head out of the Pocket. The whole process took only seconds. One moment Strider was looking up through the view-window at the planet's murky inner surface; the next she was gazing at starfields. Watching the depiction in the Pocket once more, she saw the world evaginate itself like a squeezed fig.

Still she kept counting.

". . . three, two, one . . . Yahey!"

The Midnight Ranger surged upwards, the gees slamming her back into her seat. "Feels good," she said hoarsely to Maria, who was sitting on her left.

"Speak for yourself," said the long woman. Out of the corner of her eye, Strider could see the way the gees were pulling down the flesh of Strauss-Giolitto's face. She probably looked even worse herself. She felt as if her lower jaw was about to jump out of its sockets. But at the same time she was filled with the same wild exhilaration she had experienced when the Santa Maria had pulled away from Jovian orbit. This was it! She was back in space again.

And behind her were over thirty-three thousand little craft like her own.

She hauled herself forwards, ignoring the ache that started somewhere behind her eyeballs and soon moved up to the bridge of her nose, and shoved her face into the Pocket.

The planet was still spewing forth little dots of red light: it was sending its seed out into The Wondervale. The graphic display behind the visual representation showed Strider that the world's orbit was already shifting slightly: it was moving a little closer to its sun. The loss of mass as the armada departed was only a tiny percentage of The Pridehouse's total, but from now until they returned—if they ever did—the planet would bask in stronger sunlight than it had since its species had reverted to it, several million years ago.

As the last of the red motes made their way clear of the planet-wide fissure, The Pridehouse began to close itself up again, healing its self-inflicted wound.

Strider called up the semblance of Hein in her Pocket. "Can you find Kaantalech?" she said. He was only a couple of meters away, but this was easier, as the gees hauled at her, than speaking to him directly.

"No. Not yet." He was concentrating. The beautiful wolf had become a beautiful—and beautifully androgynous—man. What made him so luminescently attractive to her that there was still a strong streak of Pridehouse somehow visible in him. Even Maria responded to it, sometimes allowing him to take her hand in his playful way.

Little puppy dog, thought Strider. Even with the gees dragging at his face, Hein looked all right. She bet her own face looked like the image in a carnival's distorting mirror.

"Try to find where she is," said Strider. "See if you can get the Pocket to plot as many of the Autarchy fleets as possible."

She wanted to steer clear of Autarchy forces until she'd built up the strength of her armada. It'd be a disaster if the Pridehouse fleet hit the enemy too soon, or drew attention to themselves too soon. At the same time, she wanted battle-practice. "If you can locate a single Autarchy warcruiser, or a small bunch of them, somewhere in this quadrant it'd be good," she added. "I want to test our weapons."

"An unfair competition."

"That's what I want. An unfair competition. Remember, I saw Spindrift destroyed. Most of the people who shattered that planet probably didn't want to be there." She tried to take a deep breath, but the gees wouldn't let her. She wondered how the cat was getting on. "The Images killed a lot of the Autarchy no-hopers, and the Spindrifters killed a lot more. Poor conscripts, drafted on to Autarchy ships. But think of all the innocents who'll be saved over the next million or so years if the Autarchy is destroyed. Maybe the conscripts would agree with me. Maybe not. Who cares? I worry a lot more about the Pridehouse getting wiped out because we haven't properly figured a way of annihilating Autarchy ships."

"You're ruthless," said Hein in her Pocket. His face had lost all semblance of playfulness.

"Too damn' right I am."

Hein made a clumsy shrug. He still hadn't entirely adapted himself to Human gestures. "Yes, OK, Leonie, when it comes down to it I suppose I'm as ruthless as you are. I've fixed the coordinates of a convoy of eighteen Autarchy warcruisers. Want us to get 'em?"

"We have to. Just a few of us."

"How many?"

"Fifty? Let's not make the odds too unfair. I'm a gambling woman."

"Liar."

"I want to see how we make out with them. How many of our ships would you reckon was a reasonable number?"

"Fifty."

"Then what the hell are we arguing about?"

"Odds." The Images took a fraction of a second to interpret his next word. "Humanity."

"They torture kids. They burn people alive. They torch whole species," she said.

"We should be better than they are."

"In an ideal Wondervale, I'd agree with you," she said, "but right now . . ."

"Yeah," said Hein. "You have a point. Let's zap the bastards. For safety's sake, let's make that estimate a hundred."

#

The shift into tachyon drive brought instant relief, but it was short-lived. Strider took the opportunity to straighten up, kneading the ache at the base of her back. She could see out of the corner of her eye Strauss-Giolitto doing much the same. Hein, by contrast, stepped forward to immerse his face in the Pocket in front of him.

Strider stuck a commlink into her mouth and tongued it into activation.

For a few further seconds they were in free fall, which was glorious release, and then the drive cut back in as the Pockets locked on to the positions of the Autarchy warcruisers. At least, this time, the acceleration was only a single g: anything more than that and the crew of the Midnight Ranger would have been too slowed up to operate the weaponry effectively.

"Maria, watch our tail," said Strider tersely. "Hein, you survey all round us. I'll take the front."

She called up in her Pocket the image and data of the scene in front of her. The display obligingly indicated which of the many points of light were stars and which were warcruisers. It also showed the Pridehouse's small craft—her small craft—in an appropriate red.

Since they had left The Pridehouse the Images had been running the ship: it was as if it had been under AI control, so far as Strider was concerned. She gave the occasional request, and things happened. Now it was time for her to start interacting with the Images, sharing control . . . forming a Gestalt with them and, through them, with the Midnight Ranger itself. Normally this was something she didn't enjoy, because it made her feel as if she were becoming partly a machine—hell, she didn't like even having a commlink in her mouth—but this time it was different. Something primitive was moving inside her: the thrill of the hunt. She knew that, later, she'd be sick at heart because of the killing and because of any losses she might incur, but right now she wanted to prove something, to make a mark on The Wondervale, to destroy, to dent the Autarchy and to let it know it had been dented, and then to retreat into the darkness, to hide until the next time . . .

She could feel her lips draw back from her teeth.

As the Midnight Ranger hurtled towards the nearest of the Autarchy warcruisers the Pocket modified itself, with new controls appearing on its flat lower surface. The same was presumably happening in the other two Pockets. At her command were now implosion bolts, intramolecular disruptors, maxbeams, rotary locks . . . Probably the warcruisers had the same array of weaponry—and more that she'd never heard of—but the warcruisers weren't expecting to be attacked. Probably their detectors hadn't picked up the tiny traces of the little ships yet. She hoped not. As soon as they did they'd move into tachyon drive, and it'd become ever more difficult to catch them. The Images were good at tracking targets through non-space, but the eighteen warcruisers could redistribute themselves to all corners of The Wondervale, making things difficult.

If their commanders had the imagination to think of doing that. Imagination was not one of the Autarchy's strongest suits, luckily. Imaginative officers and aides were dangerous because they might have ambitions, and so were generally eliminated before they climbed too far up the ladder of command.

As they darted towards the cluster of warcruisers, Strider saw something which hadn't been evident earlier.

"Whoopee!" she yelled. "You see what I see?"

"No," said Strauss-Giolitto. "I'm watching our tail, remember?" Her voice sounded brittle, terrified.

"Umbel or Maloron, get up here fast and take over from Maria. She's near breaking," whispered Strider through the commlink.

"I'm standing directly behind her, sweetness and light," came Nelson's voice. "You didn't think I was going to miss out on this, did you?"

Aloud she said: "They're fighting each other!"

Even as she spoke one of the warcruisers erupted in a sudden ball of angry light.

"We could just sit here and watch!"

"No," said Hein calmly. "We Pridehouse need to rediscover the art of space battle. This makes it easier for us, which is good. You said yourself that we should have practice, Leonie."

"Some of the Pridehouse are certain to die," she said.

"It's worth it. If we don't learn now we could be annihilated later."

We could all be annihilated anyway, Strider thought, but she kept it to herself. "Point taken," she said, then subvocalized: "You there, Pinocchio?"

PINOCCHIO IS LIAISING WITH THE IMAGES IN THE OTHER CRAFT, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Oh, hi, Tenper. Hein's right, isn't he?"

It is not for me to judge that.

"Well, I think he is."

Then we must assume battle formation.

"Fuck battle formation. We want to be as unpredictable as possible, remember?"

I don't like this.

"Who's in charge?"

You are.

"Right. Let's you and me between us go get us some prey—show the others how it's done."

As you wish.

#

To the already embattled aliens aboard the warcruiser, it must have seemed that the part-open doors of whatever Hell they, as a species, had invented had opened a little further and allowed a nightmare to escape.

The Midnight Ranger pounced out of emptiness and sped past the great ship's side, passing almost suicidally close, and as it did so loosing an implosion bolt.

The warcruiser's defensive shield went an ugly red as the bolt devoured its energies, but somehow the shield held. It faded slowly back to invisibility as it was recharged from the reactors of the cruiser's main drive. By the time it had done so, and by the time the Autarchy force's sensors had had a chance to register what was happening, the Midnight Ranger was just another mote in the distant cosmos.

"Showing off, huh?" said Nelson.

"Yeah," said Strider. "This is dogfighting. We won't always have pretty toys like implosion bolts to play with."

A confusing succession of g-forces pulled at them as she slammed on the retros, then used side-thrusters to pull them around. The energy-release involved would be enough for the alien sensors to lock on to them, but it couldn't be helped.

"We'd be wiser to shoot 'em where they sit, little goddess," advised Nelson.

"Not in the longer term," said Strider, clinging on to the edges of her Pocket for dear life. She was aware that, somewhere nearby, Strauss-Giolitto, still on deck, had made the mistake of looking up at the view-window to see the stars whirl vertiginously round and was as a consequence being violently sick. Her own stomach was rebelling from the maneuver the ship had just performed. Amateurs, thought Strider. We're all bloody amateurs. And we're supposed to be educating a fleet of bloody amateurs even more bloody amateurish than we are.

"Are you there, Tenper?"

As you might have expected, Strider.

"Let's make another run, then."

As you say.

"We'll try a rotary lock. We could spend the rest of our lives pouring implosion bolts into that fucker's shield."

Agreed.

The Midnight Ranger's drive howled as the little craft surged back towards the warcruiser. God knew how the people below-deck were taking all this. Polyaggle would be all right: Strider didn't think she'd ever seen the Spindrifter look even remotely discomposed. Leander would be coping as well. But Hilary was just a kid and Lan Yi was an old man. Oh, hell: the cat. Maybe the cat would be enjoying every minute of it. Maybe she wouldn't. Well, it was Hilary's job to clear up if need be.

The second pass was the one that spelled death to the occupants of the warcruiser. All space vessels possess a certain amount of angular momentum: there is some latitudinal rotation, a slight tendency to tumble longitudinally, and various other minor gyrations along haphazard axes. Most of the time it doesn't matter: the on-board puters make automatic trajectory corrections if any of these stray motions becomes greater than trivial.

The rotary lock was less a beam than a stream of information that planted in the puters false information about the diverse minor gyrations the ship was undergoing, so that they began to over-correct. Not just a little: a lot. It was one of several weapons the Pridehouse had developed with the aid of the Images while the new fleet had been being grown. It had seemed to Strider, even as she appreciated its cleverness, a tool of great cruelty; the Pridehouse's sense of play was not always without malice.

The warcruiser retaliated with a maxbeam as they approached a second time, but its sensors had picked up the Midnight Ranger too late for the aim to be effective. The deck shuddered as the beam clipped the edge of the Midnight Ranger's own defensive shield, but the Images compensated immediately and the small vessel held her course. The rotary lock had to be delivered close up: this time Strider was not risking their lives out of sheer bravado. The information stream could get scrambled by the junk in even a light-hour's worth of space, so that it had no effect whatsoever on the puters.

Deliberately Strider punched at various controls in the Pocket so that the Midnight Ranger's course shifted erratically, relying on Ten Per Cent Extra Free each time to bring it back to the correct alignment. Must be driving their sensors bananas, she thought with satisfaction. The sensors would obviously be puter-controlled. They almost certainly could cope with random variations of an attacker's trajectory if those variations were likewise puter-driven. Strider was just stabbing at the buttons as swiftly as she could, sometimes bringing her fist down on several at once and sometimes fingering the same one several times in a row, like an infant who has discovered a piano keyboard for the first time.

It made for a bumpy ride. Thank Umbel she was concentrating hard enough on what she was doing not to have sufficient mental capacity left over to respond the urgent demands of her stomach.

She was less than five thousand kilometers from the warcruiser when Ten Per Cent Extra Free coolly informed her: I HAVE FIXED THE COORDINATES OF THE ROTARY LOCK. PLEASE GIVE YOUR COMMAND.

"Now!" shouted Strider.

It seemed for a moment as if nothing had happened. She kept hammering the controls, while mentally instructing Ten Per Cent Extra Free to increase their velocity. Gees pulled at her. Big anticlimax. Had they bloody missed?

Out of range of the warcruiser's sensors once more, she brought in the retros, then called up the image of the Autarchy vessel in her Pocket.

No, the rotary lock hadn't missed its target.

The warcruiser appeared in front of her like a ballet dancer who, halfway through a pirouette, has just lost footing. It was a blur of conflicting rotational movements. The strains on its structure must already be building up to far beyond anything it had been built to withstand. Its occupants must already be pulp—unless there were a few unlucky ones. Strider tried not to think too hard about them.

Amid the blur she could see that a fissure had opened in the vessel's side. The main drive—always the most massive part of the hardware—was wrenching itself loose.

And then she was blinded as the warcruiser exploded in a fireball.

She staggered back from her Pocket and tripped over her seat, falling heavily to the deck, clutching at her eyes as if somehow that would help bring her vision back. The side of her head hit hard, and for a moment she was semi-stunned, retaining just enough consciousness to be confused by what was happening to her.

Someone scooped an arm under her shoulders, pulling her into a sitting position. Someone with vomit-smelling breath. Had to be Strauss-Giolitto.

Strider bent her legs and slumped the top half of her body forwards, putting her head between her knees, feeling their comforting hardness under her armpits: they were something nice and real that was hers.

Voices were booming at her, but she couldn't make out what they were saying.

Then some of the words began to make sense.

"Pretty impressive stunt, lady fair. Think you could do that again so we could all watch?"

"Fuck off, Nelson," she gasped. Even speaking hurt. But at least peripheral vision was beginning to creep back. She could see the rims of her boots. First time I've ever really appreciated those boots, she thought. From now on they get kissed each night when I take them off. These boots were made for . . . well, for me, actually.

Those blue things. Oh, yes. Someone's lower legs, clad in a blue jumpsuit. Hey, those are my legs!

"Can you help, Tenper?" she said, her voice thick. She'd bitten the edge of her tongue and was certain she could taste blood.

Certainly.

Within a few seconds her vision had returned. She spat between her knees on to the deck and was relieved to see no traces of red in her spittle. Her mouth still hurt like hell, but she hadn't bitten a piece of tongue right off.

She looked up. Hein was still at his Pocket, but the other three—Leander must have struggled to the deck at some point—were kneeling around her. Nelson put a hand on her head and rubbed it through her hair, then lowered it to the back of her neck.

"What are you lot just sitting about for?" she said. "The show's over. Tell Hein to tell his people that that's the way to do it. Let them polish off the rest of the warcruisers, OK?"

Then came a wave of reddish darkness that lasted no time at all until she was on her bunk wondering how she'd got there and dimly remembering that something had happened which had involved a very bright light.

#

Hilary had broken a finger and was being Terribly Brave about it. Strider wished he'd bawl his head off: it would have been easier to take than the white, solemn, virtuous face of the little martyr. Otherwise the only casualty on the Midnight Ranger was herself, and she was feeling pretty OK except for a sore mouth, an aching temple and a slight giddiness unless she remembered to take corners slowly.

Among the things the Santa Maria had borne away with her had been the Humans' entire supply of painkillers. The Pridehouse—though they themselves had no clear notion of analgesia, because they just didn't get hurt—could probably have knocked something up, given a specimen to study for a week or so while they worked out the details of human physiology. It hadn't occurred to her at the time. Now she wished it had.

"They were fighting each other," said Lan Yi as he took one of her queens. They were in his cabin playing a two-handed version of four-handed chess—a game which had been all the rage among the original personnel of the Santa Maria and was still the major recreation of Strider's remaining crew. "I wonder why that was."

By way of retribution she took a knight and put one of his kings in check. It was a petty revenge: he could easily escape the check and anyway he was going to beat her, because he always did.

"Civil war," she said.

"Meaning?"

"The succession is going even more messily than we thought it would. Some warlord or other—or maybe a whole bunch of 'em—must be putting up a better fight than she expected. Oh, you bastard!"

Her second queen vanished from the board.

Lan Yi permitted himself a smile, then murmured: "Do we in fact, then, have to fight the Autarchy? Can't we just see it tear itself to pieces?"

"No," she said. "Aw, dammit, Lan Yi, I concede the game." She moved her hand in mimicry of knocking all the remaining pieces from the board. "I spoke with the Onurg about it. Every change in rulership of the Autarchy is accompanied by a load of bloodletting. It's the way these people operate. Give them a few years, though, and there'll be somebody secure enough at the top to clamp down again on all the species in this misbegotten galaxy."

"Your money's on Kaantalech?" said Lan Yi, carefully putting the chess pieces away in their box.

"Yup." She started to help him but he waved her away: this was his set, after all, not hers. "Kaantalech's the one with the true killer instinct." Strider sat back in her chair, watching the old man as he very precisely packed away the chess set. "That's what the Onurg said. I believed him. She's single-minded in a way damn' few other people are."

"There is yourself." Lan Yi's voice was deceptively meek.

Strider laughed. "A few weeks ago I might have thought that. Now . . . now, I just don't know. A lot of me wishes I'd tried to go home with O'Sondheim. Leave that be. Kaantalech had her eye on the throne long before Nalla met his end: if Nalla had been less stupid he would have realized it and had her quietly and conveniently removed from the scene."

Lan Yi reached across the chessboard to put his hand on hers.

"Forget about Kaantalech for the moment, Leonie, my friend. I've been watching the changes in you these past few days, ever since we rejoined the Pridehouse fleet." He looked earnestly into her eyes. "You've become less sure of yourself. It's as if the blow to your head jolted a part of you away from yourself." His diction became more formal. "I would not say this were it not for the fact that I have the very greatest of respect for you."

"Thanks." She turned her hand over and wrapped her fingers around his. "I can remember feeling better, but there's nothing wrong with me."

"I'm not certain that's true."

Strider was silent for a few moments, and then said: "Well . . . I had this conversation with Maloron, and it changed the way I looked at things." She told him what Leander had said.

"Was Leander right? Have you become a better person?"

"I . . . I don't know."

He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. "Or have you become someone you were never supposed to be?"

"That's another thing I don't know. Look, let's stop this right here, shall we? It was a good game of chess—no, it wasn't, it was a rotten lousy game of chess, because I was thinking of other things and besides you're far too good for me." She stood up and walked to the door of Lan Yi's cabin. "Thanks for your kindness and hospitality," she said.

"Don't go yet." He was still seated. It was unusual for Lan Yi not to get to his feet the moment that she did.

"I need sleep," said Strider.

"You probably do." His voice took on a certainty she had rarely heard from this mild-mannered man. "But you need something more than that. Come back to the table. Please, Leonie."

Reluctantly, she did so. She yawned unexpectedly, and wondered if he would assume that she was faking weariness. She reached across and took his hand in hers, aware that she was mirroring his earlier gesture of affection. The eye of his that was not hidden by a secondary retinal screen looked concerned.

"You're our captain," he said firmly.

"Until there's an election." She tried to feel as flippant as her words. "I would boot me out if . . ."

"That's what's changed about you." The grip of his hand was becoming almost painful. "There's not going to be an election. Like it or not, Leonie, you're everybody's favorite fascist dictator. But at the moment you're not living up to your role. You're not making decisions, you're not working things out—you seem to spend most of your time screwing Hein rather than thinking."

His gaze moved away from her face towards their clasped hands.

"Be yourself, Leonie," he said. "Be yourself."

"You wanna get hit, Lan Yi?"

He looked up at her again. He was half-smiling.

"Thanks," she said. "I'm going to break your jaw unless you say that again."

"Say what?"

"That thing about being myself."

"Be yourself. Be yourself."

She bent forward and kissed him on the forehead, careful not to nick her lip on the sharp edge of his secondary retinal screen. Then she pulled her head towards him and kissed him on the earlobe.

"Go and take over from Leander," she whispered, trying to make her voice as sensual as possible. "She's been on the command deck for six hours now."

#

"Geena," Lan Yi whispered into the Pocket. The only other person on the command deck was Polyaggle, and she was paying no attention to him. The two of them were there just to pick up any urgent messages that might come through from the Onurg.

"Geena," he said again.

A combination of racial prejudice and poverty had driven his wife Geena to suicide, more decades ago than it was any longer simple to count. His body might not thereafter have been entirely faithful to her memory—she would have been furious with him had he allowed her death to castrate him—but his heart had. Sometimes, in the sleepless nights, he would discover her walking the corridors of the Santa Maria and now the Midnight Ranger: he would talk with her, baring his soul to her, but anything she said back to him was ambiguous, if she were saying anything at all beyond the echoes of what his own mind told him she might say. Or, at least, what the Images plucked from his mind about what she might have said.

For it was the Images who had given him the specter of Geena: he was certain of this. He was too much of a scientist to discount entirely the possibility of ghosts, but he was certain to many decimal places that death was death. Ten Per Cent Extra Free and the others must have discerned inside him the need—that horrible, decades-old, still-living need—for his wife, and they had done their best to restore something of her to him.

And then he had discovered that he could summon her through the Pockets. The Images were still involved, of course, but at a greater remove: they had constructed the Pockets and were responsible for keeping them operational, but there was more to the devices than that. In an earlier age, as Lan Yi knew, they would have been described as scrying devices: like a magic mirror on the wall, they enabled someone to see something far away in either space or time. Even Lan Yi had difficulty getting beyond the first base of the physics involved, but he did understand that a large part of it depended on the mind of the person using the Pocket—as if the distant vision was something already part-known, but not directly available to the conscious.

He had spent long hours speculating about the link between the mind and the Universe, but had got nowhere: he had come to the conclusion there was one, but that was as much as he could infer.

The theoretical considerations didn't matter much when he was looking into Geena's eyes.

"You're as lovely as you ever were," he said.

"You don't look any different from the way you always used to be," said her face in the Pocket.

"I wish I could kiss you, or even just reach out and touch your cheek."

He was aware that there were tears running down his face, but here inside the Pocket there was no one to see.

"What have you been doing, Yi?"

"Wanting you. Wishing you were here beside me."

She smiled. The motion of her lips, so familiar and yet so long unseen in the flesh, was heart-breaking. "What else?"

He felt like the small boy he had been over a century before, hauled up in front of his Taiwanese headmaster for some misdemeanor or other.

"Um," he said. "War. Sex. That sort of thing."

She laughed at him, and he imagined that she reached through the Pocket to take his ear in her fingers and give it a lovingly vindictive squeeze. "Hope you blasted the baddies," she said. "Hope the sex lifted the roof."

He tried to smile in response.

"The sex was an animal requirement," he said primly, "as it has usually been ever since you died."

"'Usually'?"

"You know what I mean."

"What was she like? Or was it with a man?"

Even in life Geena had been able to put him on the defensive whenever she had wanted to.

"Not this time," he said. "Does it matter? Can we change the subject?"

"Do you really want to be part of a war mission, Yi?" she said softly, her eyes seeming to become liquidly sympathetic.

He found himself beginning to weep harder. "I could walk out into space," he blurted, trying hopelessly to make it sound like a joke.

"I'm out there somewhere," the vision of Geena said. "It's cold where I am, but we could be together in the chilliness."

Her face was as he remembered it when the two of them had been young. Clinging to each other because the worlds of the Solar System had been so cruel. That had seemed like a valid way of hurling defiance at the Universe. He reached into the Pocket to fondle her, but of course there was nothing to touch.

"You tempt me," he said.

"I'm glad to know I still have the ability." She began to laugh again. "What with you and your other women."

He tossed his head. "Don't be silly."

"I seem to remember you saying that to me quite often."

"Don't speak so loudly. Someone might hear you."

"I'm not the one who's speaking." She ran a hand through her hair, scratching at her scalp. She shook her head from side to side so that her hair became suddenly a rink of ice, a shining thing on which Lan Yi found himself skating.

He almost fell.

His wife was the sky. The clouds above him were her breasts. The Sun was one of her eyes, opened lazily in the morning as he tried not to disturb her while he climbed out of bed to go for the pee that his painful erection demanded: it was full of the knowledge that, afterwards, he would probably want her. The wise eye of the Sun was noncommittal.

He was ninety-six again, and skating with the beautiful young woman whom he wanted to marry. Marriage was rare, but it was an institution that he wished to evaluate through personal experience—and he loved her very dearly. They were on a working holiday in Belarus: she was to be his secretarial assistant in his observations of the forthcoming solar eclipse because she was between jobs as an orchestral cellist. Between them they would discover much about the Sun's photosphere, interacting ground-based puters with one of the space-based puters. At the moment, however, as he swung her in his arms, all he wanted to do was to discover more about her.

He pulled away briefly from the Pocket. This was all delusion. Geena had been dead for decades. Yet the remembered image of them skating together refused to leave his mind. He was still swirling with her; her eyes were still shining as her hair rippled out. They spun, separated, rejoined. Her lips were moist, and they kissed crazily, somehow managing not to topple over in each other's arms. The hiss of skates on ice—their own included—surrounded them. That night they slept together for the first time. It was shambolic—he was like a teenage virgin all over again, and she was little better—but the following day they loved each other all the more for that. She played a short Beethoven sonata to him, straddling the cello with her naked legs, and then they made love again, this time much more successfully, before going back to the skating rink.

All day, until the evening had descended, they had skated together, flirting outrageously as they danced over the ice.

They were among the last in Belarus to hear that he had won the Nobel Prize. The following day they flew back to their home in Algeria, which was where their troubles began. The prize was worth two billion dollars, but they had no need of the money. They gave it away to various charities, an action the Algerian government resented. Lan Yi was soon afterwards ousted from his professorial post, and poverty followed swiftly. Their marriage was a short one: the pain of thwarted expectations was too great for Geena to bear. He had ritually burnt the length of washing line with which she had killed herself. By then she had hated him.

But the Geena to whom he talked now loved him: it was evident in her eyes.

He returned his head to the Pocket.

"You could, if you wanted, join me out here in the coldness," she said at once. "Then, finally, I could die. I want to die, Yi. If it weren't for you I wouldn't still be alive."

"You're not alive." He found the words very difficult to pronounce.

"I am," she said. The poignant expression on her face reminded him of her concentrating during practice sessions with her cello. She had devoted more love to that instrument than to him, and he had never resented it—because, after all, he had had his own mistress, philosophical physics. "I'm alive because you insist on keeping me that way."

He bit his lower lip. "I want to be with you for ever. But . . ."

"But what?"

"But I don't believe in it."

"In what?"

"The afterlife. I don't believe that we'll find ourselves together in some paradise. If I try to walk out through an airlock, all that will happen is that I find myself dead. There are less painful ways to kill oneself."

"You always were pusillanimous." Her tone reverted to the acerbity that had been characteristic during the final weeks before her suicide. "At least it's quick."

The conversation was getting nowhere, as so many of their conversations had in the latter months of her life, yet, as if he were worrying away at a loose tooth, Lan Yi somehow couldn't leave it be.

"Is there such a thing as an afterlife?" One thing he knew about Geena: she would never give him a direct lie. She might prevaricate, dodge the question or . . .

"If you loved me as much as you say you do, you would be prepared to find out for yourself." Again she tossed her hair, so that the artificial light of the Pocket danced across what for a few moments seemed like a solid surface.

I know she's just a mental construct, thought Lan Yi, so of course she'd give me the sort of equivocal reply I'd give to myself on the matter. Yet . . . Yet . . . Yet that's not the kind of answer I'd've given.

He suddenly began to wonder if Geena's quasi-existence were quite as simple as he thought it was. The Images were capable of so much that was incomprehensible to him, flitting into The Wondervale from their other reality—which was a further thing he found inexplicable, because it did not seem related in any way to this one, as would have been expected had it been one of the alternate universes implied by quantum mechanics. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told him something of it, but all that Lan Yi could really comprehend was that The Truthfulness was qualitatively different from the reality he knew. Was there the remotest possibility that the Images had been capable of drawing—either from his own mind or otherwise—the chimera of Geena's being back into objective existence?

He didn't think so.

But he didn't know.

#

The time for her brood to emerge was very near now. Her brood was the future of her species, the Spindrifters. The birthing would be more of a culmination than any other birthing had been. She would be the parent not just of her brood but of in effect a new species.

A host, though. She required a host for the brood, so that they could feed both on and in the security of flesh. The Human Lan Yi was the one who had shown her the greatest friendship (a concept Polyaggle was beginning to understand), and would surely be glad to act as host to her brood. Yet he was unlike Spindrifter males—unlike the way Spindrifter males had been. To a Spindrifter male becoming a host was the act of orgasm, just as birthing was for a female. It was The Death In Joy.

As she eavesdropped from the far Pocket on his conversation with his dead pair-mate, it came to her that the Humans had no concept of The Death In Joy. Most of them did everything necessary to avoid death, whatever the cause. Yet she could not birth her brood unless there were a host to birth them to, and the life of one of these aliens was surely—even they themselves would certainly agree—a small price to pay for the regeneration of the Spindrifter species. Yes, were Lan Yi aware of this he would eager to act as her surrogate mate.

She told herself this a second time, as if doing so would make it seem truer to her.

Polyaggle memorized very carefully every detail of Geena's appearance.

The Spindrifter knew she had the power to make Lan Yi see what he wanted to see. When the time for the birthing came, she would be his Geena: he would discover all the ecstasy of The Death In Joy, and she would give him his final, Human, joy.

She tapped her claws together in a smile. He would be grateful to her.