Strider's Universe

There Was This Guy I Once Met . . . Forget his Name Now

She had enemies everywhere, Kaantalech knew, and the more of them she executed the more seemed to spring up. Most of The Wondervale now accepted her as the Autarch, but there were warlords who resented her acquisition of the throne, and were prepared to launch suicidal attacks against her. Even her own military was not entirely behind her: news of battles breaking out between the members of convoys of warcruisers came in almost daily. Many of the species of The Wondervale were greedy for power. With her at its head her own species, the Alhubra, should be able to clamp down on the rest of the galaxy for at least the next few centuries, but first she had to be sure of the accession.

At the back of her mind she sometimes worried about the Humans. Their craft had been magnificently equipped for war, but suddenly it had seemed to drop out of existence. She wanted the Humans either exterminated or on her side: they might be the catalyst that brought her her final triumph. Not knowing where they were infuriated her every time she thought about them.

She had set up base on the innermost moon of a gas-giant planet called Alterifer. Rather than erect a vast deadmetal construction like the one Nalla had built as his palace on Qitanefermeartha, she had merely parked several thousand war-vessels in the huge crater that some long-ago meteoritic impact had formed in the moon's face; had the impact been much greater, the little world would have been shattered apart to form a ring around the turbulent planet. No one but herself and the several thousand aides and slaves she confined here knew where Kaantalech's base was: a few of her officers were able to holo to her, but they were aware only of the general region of The Wondervale in which she lurked. Even an out and out search operation launched by one of the warlords would be extremely unlikely to find her: the moon was an insignificant body, almost certain to be overlooked.

Her generals were winning the war. That was the positive news. Of the dozen or so warlords who had hoped to contest the throne with her, only five were now alive, the rest having died usually with all their species. If there was one thing that Kaantalech believed in, it was utter ruthlessness. A species that had produced a foe was suspect in its entirety unless it delivered up that foe to her of its own volition; then, and only possibly, she might show mercy. The destruction of a species warned all others that ambition was a lethal emotion.

The All-High of the Gorrange had died under her direct command. Before she had set up her base on this little moon, it had seemed to her most advisable to lead in person the various offensives she mounted. The nest-ship of the All-High had exploded into tiny fragments on sight of her flagship, the Blunt Instrument, and each of the fragments had ripped towards the sides of her vessel as if they were pieces of red-hot metal. The nest-ship was the All-High himself: as the flaring particles had perished over the course of some hours in the Blunt Instrument's defensive shielding Kaantalech had enjoyed a long period of happiness. General Ma-Ling, whom she had later executed on the grounds that his military success was a threat to her, had done for the Hidroni of Hidron, a species whose slowly crawling means of perambulation had belied their technological artistry, and dangerousness.

The Humans, though. Dammit, the Humans! They could be anywhere. They were the wild card in the pack with which she was trying to play. The card could fall to either side.

She had spoken with the curious little black one who seemed to be their leader, and who had conveyed nothing but enmity. Maybe all the Humans had indeed vanished to wherever it was they had claimed as their destination, or maybe they'd returned to Heaven's Ancestor—although Kaantalech was skeptical about whether or not this was where they had come from. They could have lied to her. They almost certainly had.

She must set an aide to trying to track down the Humans. But there were other things to do, first.

Kaantalech looked rather like a very broad mastodon. She was about two meters tall—little shorter than the average Human—and almost as wide: tuskless, with eyes on the shoulders rather than the head, and a mouth that glistened with teeth beneath a long and flexing proboscis, her species presented a terrifying image to most others.

She was lying in her sensory-deprivation bath, enjoying the release from responsibility. Sometimes she cheated, and washed the thick liquid across herself, so that her fur was titillated, but most of the time she remained completely still. She had no idea how long she'd been here; her aides would fetch her out once her time was up, unless she decided that she wished to stay here longer.

She stirred in the body-temperature liquid.

It had been good to see the end of the Hidroni. It had been good to see the end of Ma-Ling. It was good that she had erected a Shift field among the outer orbits of Alterifer's planetary retinue.

If she had her way, it would be good to see the end of so many people and things, so that she could watch a new beginning.

Nightmirror moves restlessly, a transition marked by the flux of several electrons and, because he is being careless, a muon. The Main Computer aboard Kaantalech's Blunt Instrument becomes almost aware of him.

He realizes this, and determines to be more careful in future.

Nightmirror wonders what is happening to Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Heartfire and Angler. He has retreated into The Truthfulness several times in search of them, but they have not been there. He considers flitting through The Wondervale to look for them, but this would cause such a severe dislocation of elementary particles that the big puter would certainly become aware of Nightmirror's presence.

He rests. Kaantalech is somewhere else, although he is aware through the puter that she is near and it will not be long before she is here aboard the Blunt Instrument.

Nightmirror wishes that he could speak with the other Images who have penetrated The Wondervale. He is becoming lonely. If he dared he would try to make friends with the nexi of the puter, but he is terrified of alerting the main brain to his existence.

He waits.

The moment will come.

They called him Orphanwifer for the very good reason that one of his wives was an orphan, something almost unheard-of among the Lingk-kreatzai. The name was part compliment, part insult; he bore the former with pride and endured the latter with dignity.

Most Lingk-kreatzai males died in infancy because of their natural aggressiveness towards other males. The few who reached breeding age were thereafter nurtured and protected by a gaggle of willing wives. By then the aggression had dimmed, but there was always the chance that a boy-child might try to slaughter his father. And it was the duty of the father to sire as many boy-children as he could on the single occasion that he impregnated each of his wives. Thereafter the wife had the status of sister to him, but was also a mother to all of his offspring, which might consist of a hundred boy-children and three girl-children. The male had to court the female into sisterhood after the birth; the marriage was a more clinical affair, arranged between the male and the female's mothers—although the arrangement was usually simple, because by now the mothers and the putative sisters were docile.

Orphans were rare, because of the plurality of mothers. Henndoz's family, however, had been wiped out en masse when a meteor had hit their stronghold in the stony Uplands. Henndoz, hardly more than a child, had been visiting the stronghold of a different family, who had for obvious reasons immediately ejected her as a pariah. Orphanwifer, tending his fields, had discovered her trying to steal a vegetable, and had taken her to himself as first a daughter (this had caused much chittering among his wives, but he had insisted) and then, when she was of age, a wife.

He could have left her to starve. It would have been the correct thing to do. It would have been morally proper. The rare orphans among the Lingk-kreatzai had been singled out by the sole god Rrhead to die, but Orphanwifer had lost his faith in Rrhead. So he had patted Henndoz's back with his hand and scooped her up into his arms. She had nuzzled up to him as if they had always known each other.

So now he was Orphanwifer and she was heavily pregnant.

The strongholds were mudpits: the Lingk-kreatzai pretended nothing else. Once they had been a galactic culture, their starships penetrating even into Heaven's Ancestor, where they had discovered raw planets where they could live. Now they were an ancient species confined to a single planet within The Wondervale.

Oh, glory days. Oh, the wrench of loss.

Mudpits. The Lingk-kreatzai of old had been able to construct cities where there was no trace of mud.

But mudpits were safe. The Autarchy rarely thought about creatures who lived in mudpits. When the Autarchy died, as inevitably it must, the Lingk-kreatzai would rise from their mudpits and rejoice with the rest of the ancient species.

Orphanwifer's family had seven spacecruisers, all carefully hidden away beneath his mudpit and all regularly overhauled by his wives. He sometimes supervised their work to make sure that it was adequate. The other families had, he knew, similar flotillas. The Lingk-kreatzai possessed at the moment over a thousand families.

Orphanwifer thought it unwise to tackle the Autarchy head-on. Nevertheless, when twenty craft from the fleet of the Pridehouse landed on Lingk his interest was stirred. Two mudpits were inadvertently destroyed in the landing. There might be other orphans to wife.

That was his duty. Not war.

But if war produced orphans who could be saved . . .

"Bloody hell," said Strider. "What a dump."

The Pridehouse had brought down the Midnight Ranger horizontally on to the surface of Lingk. Everything was at the wrong angle. The Images had swivelled the Pockets and the crew seats in order to compensate, but they still hung several meters above her. The only person aboard who could use them was Polyaggle: she had flown up to one of the Pockets and was now engaged in serious discussion with the Onurg. Strider was tangled in a corner with Hilary and rather enjoying the experience: he was so vulnerable that it felt good to be holding him in her arms.

Through the view-window she could see the surface of Lingk. In the far distance was a range of low hills, but all around the Midnight Ranger was green marsh. She wondered if the ship might sink down into the soggy soil and be trapped, but its position seemed stable.

The Pocket next to Polyaggle tumbled down towards her and Hilary, and she instinctively crouched over the child. Then, glancing upwards, she saw that the Pocket's twisting fall was under control. It came to rest neatly beside her and the boy.

"Still a dump," she muttered to him, releasing her grip around his shoulders. The 'lock that led on to the command deck was directly above their heads. On the other side of that 'lock were their spacesuits, as well as the lavatories. It was in a way pleasing to discover that the Pridehouse could foul up as comprehensively as good old humanity, but it was going to be a short-lived joy if any of the three of them on the deck required to . . . Mind you, Polyaggle would be all right, of course, because she could fly to the 'lock.

FLYING IS JUST A STATE OF MIND, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Oh, yeah?" said Strider. "Tell that to the guy falling off a cliff. He says to himself, 'Wowee, flying is just a state of—aargh!'"

It is true, nonetheless.

"Pardon me while I cough."

Let yourself fly.

She snorted, but then the knowledge of how to lift herself off the wall of the command deck filled her. It was easy: it was common sense. She could see in Hilary's eyes that the same knowledge had come into him. Yes, the three dimensions of this physical space should all be treated equally: up was the same as sideways or straight ahead. The two Humans floated, dubiously at first, above the wall, and then, gaining in confidence, swam upwards towards Polyaggle . . .

In fact, all they did was make clumsy swimming movements as they sprawled on the wall dreaming of flight.

"Um, Tenper," said Strider.

You seem to be having difficulties.

"You could put it like that, yeah."

This is most unexpected.

"Not to me it isn't. Is there any way you can raise this ship up on to its tail?"

Yes, but it seems so unnecessary. Can't you just learn to fly, Leonie Strider?

"It's more difficult than you might think." She sat up and gave the rest of the command deck the finger. It was rare that one caught the flicker of the sight of an Image, and for all she knew Ten Per Cent Extra Free was somewhere far away, but the gesture was worth it anyway.

How coarse.

"Come on, Tenper, just get this ship the right way up, can't you?"

If I'm asked nicely.

The Images were not noted for having a sense of humor—at least, they had nothing like the Human sense of humor. Maybe, back in The Truthfulness, they spent half their time making wisecracks that crumpled them up, but Strider doubted it. Now, though, she felt that Ten Per Cent Extra Free was laughing. The joke was a weak one, but perhaps the Images were becoming, as it were, slowly humanized.

"Look, I just sort of fucking said."

Requests have been made more politely.

"All right. Fucking please."

She and Hilary clung together as the Midnight Ranger slowly tipped upwards. The maneuver seemed to take forever. They had no on-board medicines, so if either of them broke a limb as they slid across the wall . . . She decided not to think too hard about this. She wasn't so worried about herself: she had enough rudimentary medical knowledge to splint up a broken leg. Strider was more concerned about Hilary. He had been so bloody brave about his broken finger: if he broke an arm or a leg he was going to be truly insufferable.

They landed on the deck with a crash, she underneath him and momentarily winded.

"Gee, Strider, that was nice of . . ."

"Stop it," she gasped. She felt as if her lungs were trying to explode out of her ribcage. Eyes closed, she tipped her head back. Kid. Cat. She could do without both of them. At the same time she was stuck with them. Maybe she couldn't do without them, because the urge to protect them was so strong. You're a natural-born mother, Leonie, she said to herself as she cradled Hilary in her arms. What a bummer.

Polyaggle floated towards them in a complicated pattern over the command deck. Strider automatically looked away from the Spindrifter's parsecs-deep eyes.

"Are you OK, Hilary?" Strider said. It was an excuse to do something other than gaze into Polyaggle's face.

"I'm fine. Are you OK?"

"Yeah. I'll feel even better once you've climbed off me."

As she groggily got to her feet, the third Pocket tumbled through the air back to its original position. Neat trick if you can do it, she thought.

WE CAN DO IT, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. WE JUST HAVE.

For once the Image's voice sounded confused. Strider was pleased. It was good to know that the gods could be puzzled by mere mortals.

She moved to the reinstated Pocket and thought of the Onurg. His face immediately appeared in front of her, his eyes laughing and his tongue drooping from his jaw. As always, she was stunned by his beauty.

"We could have spoken to the Lingk-kreatzai from orbit," she said at once.

"We need fuel," the Onurg replied.

"Yeah," said Strider, "I suppose there's that." The place to find tachyons was in deep space, but the tachyon drive was useful only for long journeys. For short excursions, like landing on a planet, what were needed were either radioactives or, preferably, a mixture of matter and antimatter. Any spacefaring species would have, at some stage, stored magnetically enclosed supplies of antimatter.

"We have already transformed you Humans into Lingk-kreatzai," said the Onurg. "We will shortly begin the process of doing likewise to ourselves."

Strider retreated and looked down at herself. She couldn't see any difference. More important, she couldn't feel any difference.

"You sure about that?" she said, returning her head to the Pocket. "I seem to be distinctly undecontaminated."

The Onurg laughed again. "The Lingk-kreatzai, of all the species in The Wondervale, has the closest resemblance to the Human. You will find you have small bodily differences, but little else. Be wary, though, Strider: just because you look like the Lingk-kreatzai doesn't mean that you think like them."

"Why not?" she said. "You'd sort of expect . . ."

"Never expect anything. We of the Pridehouse may look very different from you in our natural form, but our thinking is much like yours, as you know." The Onurg's tongue lolled again, saliva dripping from it.

"Can we breathe the air here?"

"You can at the moment. Obviously."

The first thing that Strider noticed about Lingk was that it was a cold world. She'd just eaten, but the coldness made her feel as if she were starving. Small patches of frost made the marshy surfaces around her glint eerily in the pale sunlight. Only a couple of hundred meters away she could see the figures of a Pridehouse crew, now in quasi-Human form, disembarking; it was satisfying that they, too, looked as if they were finding the freezing air a shock. Even Polyaggle, visibly uncomfortable in an SSIA jumpsuit that Strider had lent her, was shivering.

Lucky Segrill, who had chosen to remain aboard the Midnight Ranger. Assuming the cat didn't get him.

The Spindrifter made a remarkably beautiful woman, Strider recognized. Polyaggle's face was now clear of bristles and, although her eyes were still deeply glossy, their depths were of great appeal. Back on Mars she'd have been followed by a little retinue wherever she went. As it was, Maloron Leander was looking with distinct unease at Umbel Nelson, who was self-consciously looking anywhere but at Polyaggle.

Hein was less subtle.

Strider warily led her party across the treacherous ground towards the disembarked Pridehouse. In her belt there were two lazguns; in the holsters of her boots there were two more. Still she felt nervous. Falling into a swamp could kill her just as effectively as any attacker, and there was nothing the lazguns would be able to do to protect her from that.

"You there, Tenper? Pinocchio?" she subvocalized.

Of course.

"Stay close, huh?"

Of course.

The Pridehouse crew had maneuvered from their airlock a small red platform called—according to the Images' eventual translation—a hoverbug. Polyaggle and Strauss-Giolitto looked at it with what Strider realized was a sense of recognition, and then she remembered the little craft she'd seen them use on Spindrift. Other hoverbugs were approaching them from various directions across the marshes. Strider stared at her muddy boots and then at the hoverbugs. Bloody ancient species. Not only were they relatively clean, they were all—like Polyaggle and Hein—beautiful in Human form. She had searched Hein's humanoid body intimately on several occasions looking for blemishes and had never been able to find any. In a way, his immaculateness was in itself a blemish, she had come to realize: true beauty depends on slight imperfection—a mole on the cheek, or one eye slightly wider than the other. All the same, she felt her blood beginning to boil: it was so unfair that everyone in The Wondervale seemed capable of being prettier Humans than the Humans themselves. And she'd bet that the Lingk-kreatzai would be the same.

Hein, a little ahead of her, was climbing on to the hoverbug and gesturing that she and the others should follow. Strider squelched through the final few meters and scrambled up, glad of his helping arm. Lan Yi followed, then Strauss-Giolitto and Polyaggle, and finally Hilary with Leander and Nelson, each of whom held one of the boy's hands. The transformation into Lingk-kreatzai shape had made no detectable difference to any of the Humans except that Hilary's broken finger had healed instantly.

The hoverbug was overloaded. There was a groan of toiling machinery beneath them. Good, thought Strider, at the same time hoping the vehicle could take the strain. She was being jostled by unnaturally lovely creatures who to all intents and purposes were for the moment human beings. It was difficult to concentrate. The Pridehouse were playfully examining their own and each other's bodies, despite the chill. One of them wanted to examine hers, but she told him to look for someone his own age. Hell, Hein seemed young enough to be her son; this one seemed only just to have emerged from puberty, although he lacked the acne scars.

Another hoverbug came close to them, bobbing slightly.

"You want to hop over here, Strider?" said a silver-haired man whom she instantly recognized as the Onurg.

She looked around at her crew. They seemed unconcerned.

"Yeah. OK."

Hein came with her, helping her to jump the short distance. She was glad. Great for the morale of her Pridehouse troops it would have been if she'd fallen face-first into the mud.

"Where are all the Lingk-kreatzai?" she said to the Onurg.

"They won't come to us. We have to go to them."

Of course. The ancient species had survived the millions of years of the Autarchy because they maintained the pretence of primitiveness. The Lingk-kreatzai, she knew, lived in mudpits rather than the luxury which they could easily have created. To anyone from outside they looked like mere animals. Well, we are all mere animals, Strider thought.

"Crouch," said the Onurg.

"You . . .?" she said.

"Get down. We're about to start shifting." He put his arm across her shoulder blades and pressed her towards the floor of the platform. The other Pridehouse were getting to their hands and knees.

And then they were moving at speed. Never lifting more than a meter or so above the boggy surface, the hoverbug sped in a true line across the marshes. Strider looked ahead of her and felt as if she'd fallen into one of the hologames she'd played as a kid. And she felt like a kid all over again. Shucking off the Onurg's arm, she shuffled herself on her belly forward to the front of the hoverbug and watched the landscape beneath fleeing into her past.

Orphanwifer watched their approach for a short while, then tapped his farsighter so that it dissolved back into the muddy wall of his stronghold. He was uneasy about the display of technology which the hoverbugs represented. He wanted the Pridehouse's ships off Lingk as soon as possible. There were women and children here who would perish if the attention of the Autarchy was drawn to Lingk. Look at what had happened to the Hidron.

The mudpit was every bit as revolting as Umbel Nelson had been led to believe, but somehow he found himself revelling in it. He had stepped off the hoverbug into a pool of water, much of which squirted up his side, soaking instantly and coldly through his jumpsuit; there was a roar of laughter from the Pridehouse. Maloron, too, was giggling; her turn would come.

Mudpits like this one made this area of the planet look as if it were suffering from a bad attack of boils. A dome that was about sixty meters across protruded into the air some five or six meters at its highest point. There was a circular entrance directly in front of him. It showed darkness.

He rubbed his hand down the side of his jumpsuit, pressing away some of the wetness, then clapped both of his hands together. Nelson half-expected arrows of ice to dart away from his fingers, but all he felt was a welcome warmth from his palms. He clapped a few more times, then hugged himself while the others climbed out of the hoverbug just as clumsily and ignominiously as he had done.

A Human appeared at the entrance of the mudpit.

At least, it looked like a Human.

Nelson squinted at the creature. It was smaller than he was, but only just. The eyes were Human eyes. The mouth was a Human mouth.

And yet there was no doubting that the creature was not a Human. It was clearly in its element here—clearly at home with the coldness and wetness. It was smiling uncertainly at him. He reached out his right hand, and the creature took it, examined it, made a move as if to bite it, then respectfully forced his arm away.

Nelson looked at his hand, suddenly discovering how valuable it was.

A few moments later, however, he was enjoying the mudpit. As a child he'd been untidy, and had had to endure the tyranny of the fosterfather who had taken him in. Here there was mess everywhere. And children. He squelched through the mud and chuckled at the children, most of whom were naked. Some ran up to take his hand for a few meters or so as he followed Orphanwifer into the depths; then they let go to return to their games, and other children took over his hands. Orphanwifer was likewise naked, as were the several wives whom Nelson saw. They smiled at him, and he smiled back: the Lingk-kreatzai were a very beautiful species, he decided. They also came in roughly the same shades as humanity: there were blacks and browns and whites and yellows, with only the occasional blue making Nelson start. Hm, never made love to a blue woman, he thought. Wonder what it's like?

Finally Orphanwifer assembled the Humans in a place—"room" was the wrong word—that reminded Nelson of holos he'd seen diagramming the womb. Using his secondary retinal screens, he sent the vision of one eye to explore the wet walls of the chamber and the other back through the passages they'd traversed to check out Orphanwifer's various females. Soon he found that he was more interested in the romping children: some of the games they were playing he could understand and some of them he couldn't, but their enthusiasm made him grin. They reminded him of joshing around with Hilary. Nelson seemed to be the only person aboard the Midnight Rambler, apart from Strider, who was prepared to be a kid with Hilary. The boy got lonely. Thank Umbel for the cat.

Then he saw one kid beat another to death. He moved to stop the deed, but was halted by aggressive stares. Ten Per Cent Extra Free had warned him about this, but still it was difficult to take.

Nelson looked away. Cultural differences. Got to put up with them.

Orphanwifer was speaking to Strider, with the Images translating for both of them and spreading the translation to everyone else.

"You are very beautiful. I would like to welcome you as one of my wives."

"Ah, that's not why we're here."

"Bear it in mind, though."

"OK, if you insist." Strider put her hand on his shoulder, then swiftly removed it again as he flinched. Body language, she thought. I may just have insulted the guy.

Hein stepped up beside her. "What can you offer us?" he said bluntly.

"My family's cruisers. Those of the rest of the Lingk-kreatzai—well, most of the rest, at any rate. Our women and children will not fight a war, and our men are too valuable to waste: you may have our ships but you may not have our selves."

Strider was startled. She had expected to have to chat diplomatically for a few hours before reaching the nitty gritty. Clearly the Lingk-kreatzai did things differently. She decided to let Hein take over.

"That's not good enough," said the Pridehouse male. "We want more than that."

"We won't offer more," said Orphanwifer. "We will help you in any way that we can, but there are some things we cannot do."

"Your ships?" said Hein. "What are they like?"

"Good ships. They are also very much loved, so it will pain us to give them to you."

"Are they blood-kindred?" asked Hein with interest.

"No, but they have limited sentience. They recognize their names."

"Their puters?" It seemed that Hein was becoming doubtful.

"Oh, their puters are fully sentient. The ships themselves are merely aware of their surroundings and of the way they're being treated. If you're harsh to them, they will begin to refuse to function." Orphanwifer looked at Strider and smiled again. "Just like a wife."

Strider wondered about hitting him, then realized this might be taken as an invitation to lunch, or something, so controlled herself. Come to think of it, though, strangulation was less equivocal. She felt as if her lazguns were starting to itch. It was important not to react to such stuff: the Lingk-kreatzai were clearly a patriarchal culture for reasons that helped their society, and it had probably required a considerable intellectual leap for Orphanwifer to treat her as anything other than a breeding machine. Maybe that was all the Lingk-kreatzai females were. They looked very much like Human women, but it was possible that there was nothing going on inside their heads. Maybe they were like the cat: much cherished, but requiring constant attention in case they did something stupid. She remembered the vapid smiles as the Humans had come through the mudpit to get here. Nelson had liked them—the leer on his face had told her as much—but she had found them somewhat . . . creepy.

Her regard for Orphanwifer increased abruptly. He had a herd of wives, whom he had to tend and to provide for. She was in no position to judge the Lingk-kreatzai.

"And you'll allow us to take the ships?" said Hein.

"Yes."

"Won't you miss them?"

"Yes. Of course we shall. We are very fond of them. Now, will you eat with me?"

If there was something constant about alien food, Strider thought, it was the fact that it was foul. The Pridehouse ate overcooked cabbages and the Lingk-kreatzai were partial to things that looked vaguely like slugs, eaten alive. Even Hein seemed worried by the meal that was served up to them—Orphanwifer's wives did the serving—on plates that might have been made of wood. Polyaggle motioned her plate away: the Spindrifter refused animal food. Strider almost did the same, then realized how hungry she was. Polyaggle seemed to get hungry only when she wanted to. It was frustrating. The Spindrifter was pregnant and so should presumably be leaping on the most arcane foods.

The slug-things tasted fine, and their wiggling in the mouth only added to the relish with which Strider ate them. A swift crunch with the molars killed them and allowed their juices to flow on to the palate. There was the sensation that she was eating protein-rich tarragon. She devoured the contents of her own plate, then moved on to Polyaggle's.

"The Onurg is with your fleet?" said Orphanwifer.

"The Onurg is here," said Strider. She turned round, slug halfway to lips, and pointed. The silver-haired man looked up on hearing his name mentioned, and smiled. He was sitting with his back propped against one of the chamber's sweaty walls eating his slugs with interest. He put his plate down, stood up, and walked over. Strider found it odd that the Onurg—and all the rest of the Pridehouse—could walk with such ease in their strange bodies, and then remembered how little time it had taken her to adapt to being a six-legged wolf.

"In that case the Pridehouse do in truth mean business," said Orphanwifer, turning his attention away from Strider towards the Onurg. She felt as if she had been dismissed and discounted. Orphanwifer was going to be in for a nasty shock if he tried that one again; this time she maintained a look of placidity on her face.

"I never thought I would meet one of your species in the flesh," Orphanwifer said gravely, "and I certainly never believed my mudpit would be graced by the Onurg himself. This is an historic moment, the meeting of two ancient species."

The Onurg laughed, with the characteristic Pridehouse childishness. "The female sitting here"—he indicated Polyaggle, who was looking glum and now, to Strider's delight, hungry—"is the last of the Spindrifters. So that means you've had two historic moments in a row."

Orphanwifer turned to look at Polyaggle properly for the first time. "I am honored," he said. "You make a very lovely Lingk-kreatzai. It is, of course, a pity that the sole surviving Spindrifter should not be a male, but we should be glad that any of you at all . . ."

Strider hit him.

She knew it wasn't what she was supposed to do. Had she been trained as a full-fledged ambassador for the Human species she might merely have coughed gently, but as it was she was cold and getting increasingly irritated. She couldn't, at a gut level, understand Orphanwifer's attitude towards females. And then she remembered the vacuous smiles of the wives they had passed on their way here. Just because the Lingk-kreatzai look like us doesn't mean they are like us, she thought. It must be just as difficult for Orphanwifer to shift his mind-set to accept that females can be intelligent as it is for me to tolerate his attitudes. Still—she looked at her knuckles—I did enjoy that.

Orphanwifer seemed hardly to have noticed the blow, which was disappointing. He continued to speak to the Onurg. "These Humans of yours have strange ways," he said.

"This Human, Leonie Strider, is our leader. She is the captain of our fleet."

"You have said this before. Yet she is a female of adult age. Has she not mothered?"

The Onurg looked at Strider and laughed again. It must be obvious from her face how much her hand was beginning to hurt. "She is very female," said the Onurg, rolling his tongue in exaggerated fashion to annoy her, "but she is still our leader. In our species—Pridehouse, Spindrifter and Human alike—the females are as able as the males. It's something you ought to remember. Among the Alhubra the females are more powerful than the males. Kaantalech is of the Alhubra. She has almost certainly seized the Autarchy."

Strider had the feeling that things were slipping away from her.

"I'll mother when and if I want to," she said.

Polyaggle reached out a finger and touched Orphanwifer on the forehead. The effect was instant. The Lingk-kreatzai male was suddenly still, his eyes no longer on the Onurg. Strider could almost see the information coursing down Polyaggle's arm and hand. The Spindrifter was telling him everything, which was all right by Strider. Maybe this sudden dose of data was more of a punch than her own had been.

After half a minute Polyaggle removed her finger.

Orphanwifer looked slightly dazed. Say, thought Strider, I wonder if that was sex?

The Lingk-kreatzai male got to his feet and strode across the chamber, stepping on platters, slug-things, mud and extended limbs with equal equanimity and agility.

"What have you just done to that guy?" Strider hissed to Polyaggle as Orphanwifer left.

"Told him about you."

"What did you tell him?"

"That you Humans have something the ancient species don't have. Rawness. A belief that things can be changed. The Pridehouse have rediscovered this belief. We Spindrifters didn't until the very last moment, which is why we perished." Polyaggle looked down at the hand which had touched Orphanwifer; Strider was infuriated to find that she wished that finger had been touched to her own forehead rather than Orphanwifer's. Polyaggle in Human form had an androgynous quality that was hard to understand. "He has gone to make contact with the dominants of the other mudpits and to tell them that the Lingk-kreatzai will not only lend you their cruisers but also lend you themselves."

"More troopers, you mean?" said Strider dully.

"More troopers."

"But that could mean the end of the Lingk-kreatzai," said Strider. "If their males come with us and the females are basically none too bright, what future is there for the species?" Her hand was beginning to hurt really badly. She had hit Orphanwifer as hard as she could. His jaw had seemed to absorb the blow with ease. She wondered if she was beginning to like him.

"What future is there for all of us if we fail to resist Kaantalech?"

The Onurg, standing above them, grinned quizzically.

"There is no future if we don't destroy Kaantalech," he said. "Whatever Orphanwifer offers us, we have to take."

The future is a foreign country, thought Strider. They do things differently there. I wonder where I heard that before.

Some instinct within Kaantalech told her that the few remaining rebellious warlords were not really her main problem. She stood on the surface of Alterifer's innermost moon and gazed at the waterfall of stars above her. She was not a poetic being, but even she on occasion could be struck by the beauty of The Wondervale, with Heaven's Ancestor hanging mistily in the skies beyond. Those beautiful stars—some of them bore planets that harbored her enemies.

There was also a beauty in destruction. This was something she felt more keenly. On the few occasions when she herself experienced pain she found it somehow blissful at the same time as she recoiled from it. The infliction of pain gave her greater bliss, for she knew that was also administering joy.

The visor of her suit distorted the heavens, making the spiral galaxy seem larger and brighter than it would have had she been standing here in the vacuum.

She lowered her eyes towards the surface of the little moon. It was pocked with craters whose walls made Kaantalech think once again of the richness of the skies; between the craters was a sludge of ice and dust. Most of the craters were meteoritic, she knew, although the chances of a further meteor impact of any significance were minuscule. Some of them were volcanic, but these were equally ancient. Tormented by Alterifer's gravitational field, the moon had undergone an early period of intense volcanism. In a few million years' time it would suffer the same again as it slowly spiralled in towards its planet: Alterifer's atmosphere, this far out, was no more than a trace, but its friction was enough to cause the little moon gradually to move inward. At some stage the pull of Alterifer was going to be able to make the ice-volcanoes of the moon erupt again . . . and after that perhaps the little world would be split asunder to add one more ring of garbage to Alterifer's already impressive complement.

Kaantalech enjoyed the prospect of the destruction of the miniature world. And she wouldn't even have to do it herself. By then, of course, she would be long gone—perhaps even the Autarchy would be gone.

That was a thought she didn't like so much.

She ambled slowly and carefully—keeping one's balance in such a low-g environment was difficult—towards a small crater, looking around her in case one or more of her aides had a sudden aspiration towards assassination. She wouldn't put it past them. They were so stupid. If Kaantalech were to die, who would hold the Autarchy together? Almost all of the warlords were dead, along with their species. There were very few people left in The Wondervale who had sufficient power to re-establish the desirable tyranny. In fact, there might be none.

Except . . .

Kaantalech let her mind wander again as she looked at the starfield. All the different colors of those suns. Alterifer would be on the far side of the moon for quite a while longer, so there was nothing to distract her from the stars. Some were blue, some white, some yellow, some orange . . . one of the brighter orange ones seemed constantly to flicker as she watched it.

Free associate.

The stars themselves could not be plotting against her. The very thought made her angry with herself. Nalla, by the time he had died, had become convinced that the entirety of the Universe was out to get him; she would never fall into that trap of paranoia.

Keep free associating.

Some of the stars are red.

Those are very old stars.

Age.

The Autarchy is very old, too, but there were other spacefaring species in The Wondervale before the Autarchy emerged. All of them have regressed towards the primitive. Maybe one day, long after Kaantalech's death so why should she care, the Autarchy would do the same—become planet-bound and moribund.

Yet the Spindrifters . . .

She had lost a lot of ships when she destroyed Spindrift, and the planet's defenses had proved unexpectedly tough to break through.

Were the ancient species quite what they seemed?

It was a silly idea, and she knew it, yet something inside her was telling her to keep following the train of thought, even though she knew she should be thinking instead about Kortland and his Helgiolath fleet. Once she'd thought that Kortland was dead; now she was only too certain that he was alive. He must have survived, somehow, the war that had briefly surrounded Qitanefermeartha.

The Humans were another matter. She hoped they'd gone for good.

Instinct again.

She thought the Humans were still around. Still, they couldn't represent much of a threat.

Could they?

No. Think about the Helgiolath. Somewhere out there they waited. They were a direct physical threat, unlike the ancient species and the Humans, who might cause trouble in the future. It was impossible for the Helgiolath to stop her progress towards the full Autarchship, of course, but they could cause her severe damage along the way.

The Helgiolath.

But her mind kept straying back to the ancient species. Surely they could present no threat, so why was she spending so much thought on them?

The Spindrifters. That was why.

Her mind circled back to the destruction of Spindrift. The level of resistance had proved unexpectedly high. Too high. The planet had been nothing but a wasteland, largely ice with a fertile band around the equator. The population had been tiny. Her flotilla should have been able to destroy it without difficulty, but instead they had been forced to use maxbeams.

And there had been others operating within the fleet. This was the first time she had realized it. The Humans had been off to one side, but other creatures—not the Humans, not the Spindrifters—had destroyed some of her vessels. She knew it now with a blinding certainty.

There was some kind of unholy alliance building up against her.

No!

This is the way Nalla became: he couldn't look into a corner without seeing a burgeoning conspiracy there.

She must not follow that route.

Deal with the Helgiolath. They were the threat. At leisure, later, she could eliminate the ancient species, one by one. Then she could track down the Humans, if they hadn't already fled from her might.

She gave an instruction to an aide, who sped to obey her. It might be worth keeping tabs on the Humans, just in case they were still around.

Killing them would be a pleasure.

Floods of colors filling Nightmirror's eyes.

He has retracted himself briefly into The Truthfulness, where the Images were born and where they should truly dwell. The neighboring reality of which The Wondervale is only a small part is truly alien to the Images. It is hard to understand flesh. It is hard to understand stars and planets and rocks and entities who can trip up and hurt themselves, for all of these things are unknown to the Images.

Stretch out an idea to Pinocchio, who for a long time lived in such an unnatural environment.

The colors, the colors. It is very difficult to concentrate when engaged in the orgasm of being.

Pinocchio is there—or, at least, a tendril of his thought. Most of him is still in The Wondervale, but the Images can never be entirely in that manifestation of reality: it is too alien to them. They can interpenetrate with it, and they can try to rid it of its suffering, but they cannot be in it.

But Pinocchio, before Ten Per Cent Extra Free rescued him, was a part of it.

Pinocchio's thought embraces Nightmirror, caressing him as if he were a lover. Nightmirror is able to see a glimpse of Pinocchio's thought; it is a new color among the rest. This is all he will ever see of Pinocchio: that bolt of color.

Nightmirror envies, in some ways, the creatures of The Wondervale, with their knowledge of how to bump into each other's bodies and to look at each other's faces. He has never looked at another Image directly: all he has seen is a glimmer of different color. His perception of Heartfire and of Ten Per Cent Extra Free has never been more than the warmth of their voices mingling. Angler, who was with them briefly, added further warmth. There have been other Images who joined the chorus, but none have ever come as close as Angler or Pinocchio.

He basks in the cradle of Pinocchio's thought.

The thought is one that mixes apprehension and exhilaration: there is danger in store for his mortal charges, but there is still enough of the physical within Pinocchio for him—since he himself is in no danger—to find the prospect exciting.

Slight sorrow within Nightmirror. Ever since the core entity of Pinocchio was saved by Ten Per Cent Extra Free, the being has been gradually losing his identification with the Humans. The bot thought he was killing himself in order to save Strider; now he finds the idea of her being in situations where she might die at least partly exciting. His perception of things has changed. At the same time, he has yet fully to adapt to Image ways of thought; had he done so, he would be able to share with Nightmirror the aesthetic distress the Images feel over the warfare and bloodshed in The Wondervale.

Nightmirror conveys his own thought to Pinocchio. It is a complex thought, and so it takes him a little while to respond.

Nightmirror wishes that Images could speak directly to each other. Words, although they may mislead, offer such useful ways of pinning things down. He can speak in words to those who habitually use words, because then his thoughts translate into their patterns of mind, which are largely word-oriented. But he cannot communicate in this fashion with others of his own kind. To the people of The Wondervale the Images must appear almost godlike in their abilities, yet Nightmirror is envying them for something which they all take for granted: speech, whether using sound or some other means.

Pinocchio's new thought fondles Nightmirror. His love for Strider is undimmed. His excitement and apprehension are hers.

Nightmirror does not know whether or not to be pleased by this. He has great respect for Strider, but knows probably better than she does herself her capacity for bloodlust: it is a quality which makes colors brighten until they offend. Other aspects of her—so many other aspects of her—dull down colors until they bring peace and happiness to Nightmirror's mind.

Nightmirror releases Pinocchio's thought and comes back from The Truthfulness to The Wondervale. He is inside the main drive of Kaantalech's flagship, the Blunt Instrument.

He can communicate with its tachyons more easily than he can with others of his own kind.

This depresses him.

Strider was depressed.

The Midnight Ranger was far from Lingk, and she had made contact with the Helgiolath. She had just had, with Hein, one of the most imaginative bouts of sex she had ever experienced, and afterwards he had held her so tenderly in his arms that she had felt like weeping. Now he was asleep, and it was she who was fondly holding her arms around him. The regular movement of his chest against her hands was deeply reassuring.

Yet she was depressed, and she didn't know why.

Hein rolled over towards her, and she took the opportunity to remove her right arm from underneath him. She turned away from him, nestling her bottom into his groin. He groaned in his sleep and put an arm over her. She maneuvered his hand on to her breast, then stared into the darkness. Now his chest was moving regularly against her shoulder blades rather than her hands: so what?

She wondered if she needed to go to the lavatory, then decided she could hold out until the end of the sleeping-time. It was maybe not the wisest of moves, she realized, but she didn't want to leave Hein's embrace, and the comfort that it gave her.

Except that it wasn't giving her enough.

She was the leader of a fleet of nearly forty thousand warcruisers, and she found herself feeling inadequate. She should have been feeling great.

The trouble about total darkness was that there wasn't much there to see.

If she'd been fitted out with secondary retinal screens she could have had fun watching what the others on the Midnight Ranger were up to, but she resented the intrusion of technology into or on to her body.

"Pinocchio," she whispered.

I'm here, Leonie.

"What's the matter? You can see inside my mind. Tell me what's up."

Hein shifted restlessly again, and for a moment she thought he was going to wake.

Pinocchio didn't reply immediately.

THE CAUSE OF YOUR UNHAPPINESS DOESN'T LIE INSIDE YOU, LEONIE, he said at last.

She dropped her voice even lower. She loved Hein—she thought she did, at least—but this was nothing to do with him. She wanted him to stay asleep. "Well, it fucking well feels as if it does."

There's something outside you that's influencing you, but I can't make out what it is.

"I mean, I don't normally get depressed. I get pissed off quite often . . ."

I've noticed.

". . . but not actually depressed."

Yes.

"Has Tenper any idea what's going on?"

I have communicated my concern to him. Your concern.

There was a silence in her mind. Pinocchio had left her. She had the vision of the two Images running around in circles, trying to solve the problem: little glitters of light, chasing their own tails. It almost cheered her up—but at the same time she remembered the Pinocchio who had, so very often, been the comforting bulk that lay beside her on her bunk during the night, and the memory brought moistness to her eyes.

Her eyes.

Still she could see nothing in the gloom. She thought of getting one of the Images to switch on the lights, but they were busy doing a more important thing.

She closed her eyes. Somehow that made the darkness easier to bear. But she couldn't keep them closed: animal reflex made them open again—the night might shield predators. She stretched a lazy arm behind her and played with the hairs on Hein's back: it had been no surprise to discover how hairy a man he had become—her very own Esau, although she preferred to think of him as a Caliban. Now his presence was giving her no sense of security. She'd rather the cat had been there: by cocooning the animal she could have, in a strange way, cocooned herself from her own night sadness.

YOU ARE BEING SPIED ON. Pinocchio's voice in her mind came as a shock.

"What do you mean?"

It is what is causing your feelings of unhappiness.

"You mean I've suddenly become telepathic, or something? Or is there a minibot floating around my cabin, observing my more vigorous personal practices in infrared?"

No. Mentally spied on. Ten Per Cent Extra Free and I are trying to find out who or what is doing this to you. As soon as we discover, we shall inform you.

Hein began to snore. The adaptation the Pridehouse had effected on him had been perfect. Every bloody man she'd ever slept with had snored when she was trying to get to sleep. One or two of the bastards, when she'd complained, had mentioned that she snored as well.

She couldn't go on watching nothingness like this. Still careful not to wake Hein she put her feet on the floor and sat up. The floor was cold and the air was warm. The contrast made her feel better. She moved across the room and opened the door to the lavatory, then closed it quietly behind her. At last she could switch on a light. She looked at herself in the mirror and then sat on the closet. I'm contributing my little bit to the micro-ecosystem of this ship, she thought as she peed. Captain's duty.

The depression wasn't lifting. She looked at her hands in front of her, their fingers interlinking. There was nothing wrong with her fingers except that there seemed to be more wrinkles along the lines of the knuckles than there had been only a year ago. Maybe the fingers were a little fatter than they had been when she was younger, but only a little.

She turned up her palms. They were definitely paler than when she'd been a kid. Was she ageing, or was it just that the transformations the Pridehouse had carried out on her had failed to restore her precisely to her previous form?

She didn't want to think too much about that. In the old days—back on the Santa Maria—she could have called up a medibot to check her insides. Here on the Midnight Ranger things were a bit more primitive.

Strider did quite like her stomach, she decided. Her breasts weren't quite as good, although Hein obviously found them a lot of fun, even though there were only two of them. She did think her pubic hair was pretty good though, she thought as she stood and dried herself: it was a glad tuft. She peered at herself again in the mirror. Too many bags under the eyes. A face that showed her age. Was Pinocchio talking nonsense when he said that her depression was a product of something outside, rather than inside, her? She watched herself pulling her own nose, as if she could make it longer and more dignified.

To hell with it, she told herself, I've just had four orgasms, including the one that Hein didn't know about—the imagination is a wonderful thing. Maybe Pinocchio's got it wrong and this blueness is only a bad attack of the little death.

'Fraid not.

"Now I know who's spying on me."

How did you guess?

"Well, Pinocchio, it's a bit . . ."

Ah. I see what you mean. No, apart from myself—may I congratulate you, by the way, on your performance of position 7634 from the expanded ad2529 revision of the Kama Sutra?—there is another.

"Tenper?"

No, someone from outside—as I've told you. Ten Per Cent Extra Free has tracked down the source of the surveillance. It is on one of the inner moons of a planet called Alterifer.

"Never heard of the joint." Yes, her nose really was too small. Sometimes she liked its snubness, but right now . . .

The probe is from a psibot in the entourage of Kaantalech.

Now Strider straightened up and began to pay attention.

"I thought psibots didn't exist? There were experiments a couple of centuries ago and—"

You keep forgetting that the species of The Wondervale are millions of years ahead of us. It is something that I, too, keep forgetting.

"Oh. Yeah. Right."

AT THE MOMENT KAANTALECH HAS NO INTENTION OF MOVING DIRECTLY AGAINST US, ALTHOUGH SHE WILL DO SO VERY SOON. Pinocchio paused, then added: BUT TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE HAS DISCOVERED SOMETHING FURTHER. THE REASON THAT KAANTALECH IS STAYING HER HAND IS THAT SHE DOES NOT WISH ANYONE TO KNOW WHERE SHE IS UNTIL SHE HAS EXTIRPATED THE LAST OF HER RIVALS FOR THE AUTARCHSHIP.

It took a few seconds for the import of this to sink in.

"Right," Strider repeated. "You mean that no one else knows but us?"

Correct.

"Well, we can soon change that."

Is that advisable?

Strider sighed. "If we tell the Helgiolath and all the other rebels we can mass the biggest goddam fleet in the history of the Universe and beat the shit out of Kaantalech before she even knows we're on our way."

There are several reasons why this, while an attractive notion, is a very poor piece of strategic planning, Leonie.

"Name a few."

The psibot has been able to lock on to you because of your protoplasm, which is alien to that of the species of The Wondervale. As soon as you headed yourself towards Alterifer, it would convey that information to Kaantalech, who would take immediate counteraction.

"That's one. Try another."

Some of the surviving warlords doubtless have psibots with a similar capability. There are bound to be losses incurred when we "beat the shit," as you put it, out of Kaantalech. Our fleet will be weakened. A warlord may choose to attack us at that time, and thereby have nothing between him/her/it and the succession to the Autarchship. Our efforts will have been entirely in vain. Is this what you want?

Strider did her best not to be annoyed with Pinocchio for thinking things through better than she had herself. Then an idea came to her.

"You say the psibot can lock on to Human protoplasm?"

Yes.

"Only Human protoplasm?"

It is because of its strangeness.

"Seems pretty normal to me, but I know what you mean. Just . . . just switch on the lights in the bedroom and wait around a bit."

She went back through to her bunk and shook Hein's shoulder. Finally his eyes opened.

"Look, there's something I want you to do for me."

He moaned. "Not again."

"No, something quite different . . ."

The worst thing about the new status was that he was missing his musibot, which had departed with O'Sondheim and the Santa Maria. Chess was Lan Yi's devotion, science was his love, Geena was his yearning, but music was his passion. Much of the music he could conjure up in his mind: as he lay during sleeping-times in his bunk he could play through the entirety of the Goldberg Variations in any musical style he chose, or enjoy a Wagner opera sung by the Rolling Stones, but all of these things were drawn from memory of listening to his musibot. He wanted to punch up new combinations. He wanted to punch up pieces of music that he had never heard before.

When the Images spoke together in his mind, sounding almost like a group of choristers, he always asked them to keep talking so that he could listen to their new music.

There was no music like the music of Geena's voice—the seductive music that sought to draw him away from . . . from himself, he suddenly realized.

It wasn't the most pleasant of thoughts.

There's destruction and destruction. One can be shot through the chest with a lazgun and spend several minutes writhing in agony, then die, but during those final minutes one is still one's own person: the killer may have taken the life, but the identity remains secure. But there's the kind of death which one accepts willingly from somebody one foolishly trusts, where the personality is entirely subjugated to the other. This may lead to physical death—as it surely would if he walked out of the airlock—but almost worse, almost certainly worse, is if it leads instead to an existence where the body remains alive but the soul is effectively dead.

That was where he'd got to.

He was a puppet dancing on a dead woman's strings.

Strings.

In his mind's eye he saw her again, naked, playing the cello. She had loved playing the instrument and he had loved listening to her play, while loving her.

He didn't know what had been going through Geena's mind during those last few months. It had been difficult at the time to realize that she was becoming insane: each day she had seemed just a little odder, doing things slightly more wrongly. He had thought she was maybe just going through a bad patch and hoped she would get through it. Later, the few friends he still had told him that they'd recognized her insanity but hadn't, you know, liked to mention it to him, because he must have noticed it himself.

The vision of Geena that he conjured up in the Pockets was the version of her that existed in his memory. She said that she still loved him and wanted him; but that would of course be the verdict of the Geena whom he remembered rather than Geena as she had really been. It was much more likely that she had hated him, in that last time.

Music can tell one many things, not all of which are true.

Lan Yi decided that this memory of music was telling him the truth, and with a feeling of great relief said a silent goodbye to his wife.

She is lovely.

She was lovely.

She cares for me.

In the end, she cared for herself.

She is dead.

Dead.

"We've lost them," said the aide.

"Lost whom?" said Kaantalech. She was mapping out the plan of attack on the world of the Eramm. The Eramm were a powerful military force—almost as powerful as the Helgiolath—and Warlord Mgs had had his eyes on the throne of the Autarchy, so it was important that the species be eliminated. Genocide was kind of fun, but it did take a great deal of tedious concentration.

In fact, genocide was quite a lot of fun.

Still needed the concentration, though.

That was why she was concentrating.

Well, she was pretty sure she was concentrating. It was hard to be certain about things like this when aides kept interrupting.

"The Humans," said the aide. "One moment the psibot could pin them down to the nearest light-hour, and the next it had lost them altogether, as if they'd just vanished."

The aide looked at his feet. Maybe Kaantalech would start with them. He hoped not. If she bit his head off he would die instantly. If she began with the feet it would take rather a lot longer—too much longer. She didn't take kindly to bad news.

Mind you, it had been a good life, all things considered. He tried to consider a few, but couldn't find one.

"I don't care, just right now, about the Humans," said Kaantalech, not looking up.

"They are a possible threat," said the aide, having examined the depths of his soul.

"A tiny threat," said Kaantalech, still distracted. "We'll mop them up later. Oh, one thing . . ."

"Yes?"

She slashed his throat wide open with her claws and then turned back to her work.

Lan Yi knew that he was dreaming, and that what he was dreaming was a story . . . yet he was also a part of that story, as if he were seated in a theater watching a play while at the same time being one of the leading actors who moved across the stage.

Theaters. None of the species they had met so far in The Wondervale seemed to have invented the theater. Back in the Solar System humanity had invented it, lost it, and reinvented it during the century or so before the Santa Maria had set off on its abortive mission. Holos could show better close-ups—faces, phalluses, blood—but the live theater offered something brighter, even if more distant. Also, in a theater you were surrounded by others so that the experience became a shared one. Your laughter didn't echo against the walls of your solitude—Lan Yi had become a great supporter of the cult of the theater in his last years before leaving Earth, in order to get away from such merciless walls.

What he saw and what he was a part of, in this dream, was very brightly lit. There were only two characters of whom he was aware: himself and Geena.

He was a sculptor, and a fresh block of marble had just been delivered to the studio they shared. He didn't know how he knew it, but the two of them had been sharing this vast studio for several years, sleeping in the big, rather uncomfortable bed in the corner and discovering, as time passed, that they wanted to make love with each other less and less often.

Lan Yi watched the stage. Shafts of light illuminated the studio. It was the height of day. The sculptor was standing in front of the lump of stone. It was taller than he was, and wider. Crystal facets shone in its surface, dazzling him with reflected brilliance. He looked at the rock, trying to discern within it the form that it wanted to take; he ran his fingers across its coldness, and found he was experiencing the stone's femininity. Whoever—whatever—wanted to be released from the bondage of the marble was female, and the sculptor felt a pang of longing for the beautiful creature he might be able to find there inside the rock.

The Lan Yi in the audience felt tears running down his cheeks. At the same time that he was the sculptor struggling to discover what it was that the marble wanted to be he was also fully aware of the form that hid in there.

The stage seemed to be further away than it had been before, yet the image of the sculptor seemed to be brighter and more clearly defined.

Why wasn't Lan Yi the sculptor sweating? he thought as he stroked the base of his back, which ached. He seemed to be wearing nothing, which was curious because he was fully clothed, as he knew from the himself who was observing him from the auditorium. With a finger he explored the upper part of his ear, feeling its smoothness, and then he took the hand away and, crossing his arm in front of his chest, rubbed his own shoulder. It too should have been sweating under the lights, but instead it itched because it was dry.

I will reveal the form, thought the sculptor.

I will reveal myself to you, thought the form, and the sculptor heard it.

He turned towards the audience, who were invisible in the darkness. The only face that he could see was his own, way back in the huge space he knew was there. He ignored the distraction.

"Inside everything there is something else," he said, throwing his arms wide for emphasis, "and inside the something else there is something further."

Yes, thought Lan Yi. The tree bears the nut and the nut bears the kernel and the kernel bears the new tree.

The audience around him tittered, as if he had spoken his thought out loud and it had been one of those theatrical witticisms which seem neither so funny nor so perceptive afterwards.

He felt embarrassed.

On stage he found himself still wondering what was the hidden form inside the piece of marble. There was only one way to find out.

He seized, from a conveniently placed table which hadn't been there a moment before, a chisel in his left hand and a hammer in his right, and, feeling as if he were in the process of losing his virginity, made a very gentle tap against the exterior of the stone.

Lan Yi, watching himself, remembered that it hadn't been at all like that when he'd lost his virginity, all those decades ago. Sheer nerves had meant that eventually he and his first lover—dammit, he couldn't remember her name—had finally just decided to call it a night and fall asleep in each other's arms. He still recalled fondly the loving conversation they had had as they had slowly dropped off into sleep, their bodies curled around each other. In the morning, however, nerves no longer played a part.

But the actor who was also Lan Yi chose to interpret the start of his sculpture as if it were something he had never done before.

Another tap with the chisel. Another flake falls away from the surface of the rock. From a distance it looks as if the rock is somehow becoming cleaner, as if it had been dirty before.

We touch, thought Lan Yi, the hearts of ourselves only when we touch the hearts of others.

The sculptor turned towards Lan Yi—he knew those eyes were directed towards himself alone rather than into the audience at random—and held his chisel aloft. Then he threw it into the air, so that its sharp blade made glinting patterns as it flew spinning towards the spotlights before falling to land perfectly in the sculptor's hand.

There was a round of applause. The audience appreciated the trick. Lan Yi was grateful and, even though it disrupted the play, he bowed in acknowledgement of the accolade.

I hit the stone again, Lan Yi said to himself. It is as if I were knocking at a door.

Days passed, although Lan Yi knew that he was dreaming all this during only a few minutes. The play seemed very prolonged, nevertheless: the sculptor had some difficulty in releasing the form that existed within the rock.

"Can't you just leave that thing alone?" screamed Geena.

"I would if I could," said the actor. Behind him three man-sized mice had appeared as backing singers for a song that he was not going to sing.

Lan Yi looked through his spread fingers at the stage.

"It's only a hunk of rock," said Geena.

The audience erupted, as if this were witty.

"It's you," he said.

Geena stroked the insides of her thighs. She was naked. She looked out into the audience and laughed.

"Feels like I'm hotter here than that old block of stone," she said. "Bet it's pretty chilly against your fingers."

Lan Yi was the only member of the audience who did not howl with mirth. Instead, he took his naked wife in his arms and led her to the bed at the corner of the studio. For a moment she struggled against him as he laid her down and pulled covers over her, but then she seemed to realize that all he wanted to do was comfort her. There was more applause from the audience.

He sat on the side of the bed, stroking the back of her neck until she went to sleep.

The audience went wild when she began to snore.

Lan Yi, sitting in the stalls, knew what was going to happen. He looked around him, as if there might be somewhere he could flee to, but he knew there was not. All he could see were faces, in gloomy lighting, which were so convulsed by laughter that they had become lascivious gargoyles.

Now that Geena was safely out of the picture—it was as if the stage curtains had closed a trifle, so that Lan Yi could no longer see the bed in which his wife lay—the sculptor was able to re-attack the marble. This time he was less gentle, although every now and then he struck quietly for a minute or so, looking over his shoulder off-stage at his wife, clearly trying not to wake her up. He was now dressed in an SSIA jumpsuit, which seemed appropriate, although Lan Yi was uncertain why this should be so.

Chips of rock flew. Lan Yi knew that he was using the hammer and chisel without any clear purpose in mind: he was simply letting the tools carve out the form that the stone contained within it. Behind him, the audience watched in fascination, assuming that he knew what he was doing.

He turned suddenly towards them.

"This is the greatest creation of my life," he said.

There was a hush, even from himself.

"No, the greatest creation of my life is asleep now," he cried, his voice clearly audible all the way to the back of the auditorium.

One of the mice slinked back on-stage. The sculptor looked at her, seeing the way that her dark eyes were looking at him. She was slender, but all he could really see of her were those eyes.

"There is a greater creation," said the mouse.

"I must find the nature of the rock," he said, turning away from her.

When, seconds later, hammer raised, he glanced over his shoulder he saw that she was no longer there.

Touch, thought Lan Yi. All I have to do is touch the marble to make it unfold itself. There is no need to strike it hard.

The blow of his hammer against the tail of his chisel was almost a caress, but a section of marble fell away. As it dropped towards the stage it evaporated, becoming a cloud of steam that swiftly dissipated.

The same happened the next time the hammer kissed the chisel. The marble seemed to be trying to melt away to show the audience its own trueness.

There was a curve which he recognized. A complex curve. The upper left shoulder of a cello, with the sharp in-tuck underneath. Someone once lovingly saw a pregnant woman and created the cello in her likeness.

From a distance, Lan Yi knew a dreadful inevitability about what was going to be exposed. Where he was on the stage, however, it was still largely a mystery. He was a player in a game that it seemed he had created himself. He looked off towards the wings, hoping to see Geena there, but there was nothing but an overwhelming feeling of sad emptiness.

He threw the hammer towards one side of the stage and the chisel to the other, then turned to bow to the audience.

The performance was over.

The audience booed him loudly.

He was booing himself.

What should he do? Juggle with sharp knives?

No, he had simply been teasing those who had come to watch him. Assistants tossed back the hammer and the chisel from the wings, and he rapidly used the tools to reveal what the stone wanted him to reveal: the left buttock of a cello with, wrapped around it as if in a position of love, a human leg.

Lan Yi turned his face away. He remembered this. It was all too painful. Then he remembered again: there was the love which would not die.

The chisel made another polite incision. And another, and another.

Had this been a holo, no one would have lifted an eyebrow, but it was all live theater. Here, in front of the audience, Lan Yi was apparently creating life from a lump of stone. Earlier in the play Geena, most beautifully naked, had played a movement from Dorgy's Cello Sonata Number One, her body mimicking the instrument to which it seemed she was making love. Now the sculptor was making love to the chunk of marble by allowing it to emerge as itself.

At last he was finished.

There, perfect in every respect, was the naked cellist with her instrument.

Lan Yi found himself clapping his hands and standing. He was certainly not the only one.

But then the applause petered out.

The magic had not been entire.

All that the sculptor had created was a statue. The marble woman was entirely still, her bow half-drawn across the strings of her cello making a note or a chord which would never be heard. Her eyes were sightless—even the sculptor himself saw the cold stone of them. He touched her arm, as if in some way he could coax her into life by doing so, but all he felt was the chilly smoothness his chisel had discovered, not the soft hairs he had delighted in licking the wrong way until Geena had woken up, laughed in annoyance and kissed him.

Lan Yi, in the audience and waiting for his otherself to perform a new trompe l'oeil, remembered that his dream was a story. Sometimes he had licked the soft hairs of Geena's arms as she slept. He had always done so with great care after the first time he had woken her up through clumsiness.

Now the magician—who was Lan Yi and who was also someone distant, performing on a stage—was taking another bow to the audience.

The silence was profound.

The magician took a step backward.

Suddenly it was as if he were surrounded by snow. Small pieces of white marble flew up from the surface of the stage and formed a cloud around him. He moved his hands among them affectionately, his fingers stroking as if he were trying to tell each and every flake that it was individually adored. In response—and Lan Yi could feel this as if it were happening to himself, which of course it was—the flakes clustered on to the skin of the magician, who was once again naked.

The chips of rock bound together all over him. They were cold at first, but then he began to feel the warmth of their embrace. The magician had performed his ultimate magic, but could no longer bend himself towards his audience. Even when the real Geena—not the one he had released from the stone—came to the front of the stage and put a hand on the head of her motionless simulacrum, he could make no move.

He was imprisoned, yet he felt no resentment.

Geena must have felt resentment. The marble statue of her that he had created was still entirely motionless, even though various members of the audience were now beginning to throw flowers at it.

He had made her into a statue, and now he was himself becoming one. Was this her revenge on him?

No, it was his own.

Silicate crystals were forming in front of his eyes, the last part of him not to be covered. He welcomed the blindness—for he was a magician, and preferred the dark.

He tried to raise his left arm, but could not. All that he succeeded in doing was to produce a small rain of silvery dust on the stage.

Geena, her back to him as she stretched her arms to the riotous audience (and her front to him as he stood, in his otherself, applauding her), saw nothing of this.

It is the goal, thought Lan Yi, of the sculptor to become the sculpture.

This thought seemed very important to him in the first minute or so as he woke up. Then it seemed utter nonsense—as all of the most forceful messages from dreams are. A few moments later, however, he realized what he had done to Geena.

He hoped that, for the rest of eternity, she would still be accepting the applause.