4

Gadflying About is Good for the Gad

Strider thought into the Pocket that she wanted to be within striking distance of Alterifer, and there was a short pause while the Images translated this instruction. She wanted herself and her armada to be within striking distance of Alterifer. There was a subtle distinction. Pinocchio explained it to her, and she swore at him in affectionate fashion.

The tachyon drive didn't produce the usual disconcerting effect in her stomach, bowels and mind. She was a Lingk-kreatzai, as were all the other Humans on board the Midnight Ranger. She had made the request of Hein and he in turn had made it of the Onurg. If the Pridehouse and the Lingk-kreatzai could transform Humans for purposes of decontamination into simulations of their own kind, surely they could do it for other reasons, she had suggested to Hein. He had agreed, so now she was a not-quite-Human. At least she still felt like a Human.

They were in free fall, hanging relatively motionless in space. Alterifer was the nearest visible celestial body; its sun must be somewhere behind them, because it wasn't visible through the view-window. Strider thought about cutting in the gravity simulators, but decided to postpone that—at the moment she was enjoying the release from the burden of her own weight. The planet reminded her of Jupiter, but somehow it seemed even more massive. It had the same overall reddish hue and the same banding. The bands, however, were much more disrupted than those on Jupiter: their edges frayed into each other, and Strider was certain that, even as she watched them, those edges were changing their configuration. If Jupiter was a planet that fell only just short, through its mass, of becoming a star, Alterifer was a planet that could feel cheated. In a few million years' time it might collapse in on itself and blaze its glorious birth. Or it could do exactly this tomorrow.

Best for the fleet not to hang around too long. Best to go for the attack right now.

But how?

She thought again into the Pocket and expanded the image of the innermost moon. What had been a tiny mote of light became a world in its own right. It was largely a world of ice, she could see, although there were also rocky craters on its surface. Behind the visual display, graphics were rattling off a brief geological history and diagnosis of the moon, but Strider paid them no attention.

She shivered. The moon looked cold—colder by far than her own home world, which right now she regarded as Lingk.

Of course it was cold. It was as cold as the vacuum of space. She shook her head in irritation at herself, and the display in the Pocket jolted around as if, she thought, she were a veritable shaker of universes.

When things had stilled she concentrated her attention on the graphical display behind the visual one.

Kaantalech's base, if indeed this was Kaantalech's base, was lightly guarded. The putative heir to the throne of the Autarchy either thought she was secure from discovery or assumed that discretion was the best part of valor. According to the graphics display in front of Strider there were no more than half a dozen warcruisers around the moon. They were in tight orbit: there was no evidence from their trajectories that they had yet detected her own vast fleet, scant light-seconds away in the hinterlands of Alterifer's lunar system.

This worried her.

She pulled her face from the Pocket and spoke to Hein. "They should have spotted us by now."

"They haven't."

"They should have, I say. It worries me. Are they playing dumb deliberately?"

He gave her a typical Pridehouse laugh. "How should I know? We'll find out soon enough."

"Look, buster, finding out won't offer much philosophical satisfaction if we're dead by then."

The cat came up and wrapped herself around Strider's ankles, mewling to be fed. Loki had already been fed, just a few minutes ago. Strider resisted the urge to kick her away. She raised a palm to Hein, indicating that she was not speaking to him, and said: "Tenper. Pinocchio. Either of you. Get Hilary up here on deck. He's got a duty to do."

Pinocchio answered. WE SHALL DO YOUR WISHES, OH MIGHTY ONE.

"Less sarcasm from you."

She had other things to worry about than the blasted cat, and yet somehow the welfare of the animal came first. Maybe this was what distinguished her from Kaantalech—maybe it was the only thing.

Strider sat down. She could feel her brow wrinkling as she focused her eyes on something that wasn't there. She reached a hand idly to stroke the back of Loki's neck.

"I can't believe she doesn't have full defenses," Strider said.

"I can't believe it either," said Hein, "but there's only the one way to find out."

"To attack?"

"It's known technically as 'testing to destruction'."

"Yeah, but whose destruction?"

"The answer to that question solves the problem." He took a couple of paces towards her, then stopped, visibly aware that she didn't want him close to her.

"I want us out of this," said Strider.

"What do you mean?"

"I think Kaantalech has baited a trap."

"She may be concerned more about the Helgiolath, and have forgotten us. Forgotten you, rather." Hein shrugged. "She has no reason to know that we and the Lingk-kreatzai are with you."

"We're only a few light-seconds away from her. She must know we're here." She tugged at her hair as if somehow that would help her think. It was the old question: flight or fight. The Pridehouse, to judge by Hein's behavior, didn't possess this peculiarly confusing double instinct. Her mood was towards flight.

"We're leaving," she said abruptly.

"But we've only just got here."

"I know. But I have a bad feeling about Alterifer. There's something wrong."

"We may never have a better chance to strike directly at Kaantalech." The habitual smile had vanished from Hein's face and there was, unusually, a note of truculence in his voice.

"Is Tenper about?" she said, again raising her hand to Hein.

I AM HERE. Sometimes it was hard to tell the Images' voices apart, but not now. Pinocchio had once sounded unique in her mind, but he was swiftly receding into what she could only think of as Imagehood. She wondered what he thought of himself. His consciousness had been not born but created by humanity in its own image, in the first place, but then he had been re-created as something quite alien to the Human species. There was still occasionally a tinge of affection for her in his voice as he sang to her, but always she knew that the distance between them was increasing.

I WOULD ADVISE RETREAT, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. I HAVE TRIED TO PENETRATE THE PSYCHIC DEFENSES OF KAANTALECH'S SURROUNDINGS, AND HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO DO SO. I HAVE TRIED TO THINK THOUGHTS WITH NIGHTMIRROR, WHO IS LODGED AT THE HEART OF KAANTALECH'S FLEET, AND THIS TOO I HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO DO. THERE IS A PROFOUND WRONGNESS HERE.

They discovered the nature of the wrongness about one second later.

Alterifer disappeared from the view-window. The Midnight Ranger—and, Strider assumed, the rest of her fleet—was heading directly towards the photosphere of a blue giant star. All she could see through the view-window was incandescence, and she put up her hands against her eyes to blot out the sight. She staggered to the Pocket in front of her, and ordered it to give her a few moments of darkness. Then, opening her eyes reluctantly, she saw what was really happening.

#

The shock of the Shift hit different people in different ways.

Maria Strauss-Giolitto was working out. She was stretching to her tallest, straining her arms upwards until her shoulder muscles hurt, and then stretching down, her elbows brushing her thighputer, to touch her feet. She rather liked her feet. Her toes were elegant and long. Her ankles could have been better, but on the whole they weren't bad. Many years ago she had had her toenails surgically removed: it had been a cosmetic exercise which she rarely regretted. As she touched her toes now she saw them as little blind serpents, moving of their own volition. She stretched upwards again, and had the glorious feeling that she was infinitely tall. Perhaps this time, this time, she could touch the ceiling of her cabin, press her hands against it so that she was fully occupying her living space, but still a few centimeters of empty air intervened.

Maybe with her next try.

She doubled over again to grasp hold of her feet, and this time she stayed in position, enjoying the experience of her back muscles being fully extended. She raised her head, keeping her hands where they were, and looked at the edge of her bunk—when creating the Midnight Ranger the Bredai had not thought to manufacture forcefield bunks, a source of regret to Strauss-Giolitto because physical contact with her bed made it difficult for her to find sleep.

She straightened up again and reached once more towards the ceiling. Now she could see the tips of her fingers touching it, but she could feel nothing. There was an oddly milky quality to her arms and hands, and for a moment she thought they belonged to someone else.

Strauss-Giolitto, slowly lowering her arms to her sides and relaxing from tiptoes, looked down in front of her.

There was her own back, each of her vertebrae clearly visible as she posed in a position that, Strauss-Giolitto realized for the first time, was distinctly undignified. She was joined at the waist to a self that was still bent double. She put out a hand nervously, still too confused to be frightened, and touched the shoulder of this other person.

She felt the soft pressure of her own fingers on her shoulder.

But this was all wrong. She looked at her hand as if in some way this was all its fault, then stroked the shoulder of the bent-over woman—herself, because she recognized the mole which she had never had surgically removed after a lover named Iolanthe had once said that it was the thing about Strauss-Giolitto's body that most turned her on. Although she was still upright, she felt the caressing touch on her shoulder.

She was a Christian, and part of her faith was that the soul was immortal, destined for either Heaven or Hell after the death of the body. Was this what was happening to her? Had she died in that curiously embarrassing posture?

It was unlikely. She was also an Artif, and had had a fresh heart installed not long before the Santa Maria had left the Solar System. Nothing else but heart failure could have killed her with such immediacy. Anyway, she'd surely have fallen over as she died.

She took a small step backwards, and felt herself pull separate from her own hips.

Still the physical version of herself—the one that was capable of experiencing tactile sensations and transmitting them, somehow, to her mind—was utterly motionless. Strauss-Giolitto realized that her body was no longer breathing—neither of her bodies, if what she was currently inhabiting could properly be called a body. Statue, she thought, of Female Nude in Stance that Will Entice Alike Adolescents and Gentlemen of a Certain Age.

Now that she could look at it from the outside, she was rather attracted by her own body herself: she could have had a worse one.

She gave the movementless figure a push with the heel of her hand, hoping that it might fall to the side and—she knew this was silly even as she did it—somehow wake up, reabsorbing her soul. She was by now convinced that her consciousness had become a bodiless soul. There was a slight delay in summoning her to the afterlife—that was all. Probably a long queue at the Pearly Gates: so many customers, so little time.

Strauss-Giolitto felt the shove against her side, but her motionless corpse was unaffected; she had the impression that her hand had sunk a few centimeters into that dead flesh before being rebuffed by something. Not the flesh itself: there was still some essence of herself inside the carcass, she assumed, and it had politely rejected her attempted intrusion.

So perhaps I'm not dead yet?

She found herself strangely disappointed. She also found herself scared: death was less frightening than this half-existence.

Strauss-Giolitto moved out into the corridor towards the elevator that would take her to the command deck.

It was only when she was boarding the elevator that she remembered that she had not had to open her cabin door to get here.

#

"Goddammit, Hilary," Nelson was saying, "the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Can't you get that into your head?"

"If I can imagine it," the boy said, "it must be real. Everyone knows that."

They were seated at the table in Nelson's cabin eating cubes of recycled guck that had been processed to look and taste like something Nelson could never remember having eaten in the first place. The adults aboard the Midnight Ranger took turns in furthering Hilary's education, although most of what he learnt came from a thighputer which Nelson had personally detached from the dead Marcial Holmberg—"Waste not, want not" he had kept saying to himself grimly as he'd performed the task, but he'd still felt as if he were robbing the dead. Nelson wondered if the boy didn't relate better to the puter than he did to the other people around him, with the possible exception of the cat—who anyway wasn't really "people." Still, Strider had determined early on that the lad should be given the benefit of one-to-one teaching, and today Nelson was stuck with it. Actually, he kind of liked the brat, so the job wasn't an onerous one.

Except at times like this, when Hilary got it into his head to be stubborn.

"You're straying out of mathematics into higher philosophy," said Nelson. "Interesting subject, but not what we're supposed to be talking about."

"Mathematics is higher philosophy."

"That's an only partly true statement."

"Yes, Umbel, but which is the part of it that's true?"

Nelson thought briefly. "You fed the cat recently?" he said.

"I don't see what that's got to do with it."

"I do. Go feed her."

And then suddenly everything was different. Nelson was a small boy looking towards an adult whose eyes were covered by secondary retinal screens. He dropped his gaze and saw his own hands—no, they weren't his own hands, they were Hilary's. One of them was holding a lump of pinkish guck and was somewhat erratically approaching his face. The other was splayed out flat on the table, its little white fingers seeming appallingly thin. He put the piece of guck back down on the plate and flexed both his hands. He dug his fingernails into his palms and felt the pain.

He raised his eyes again.

"Is that you, Hilary?"

"Yeah. This is kind of strange, isn't it?"

Nelson looked at his own face. He'd looked at it many times before—one of the advantages of secondary retinal screens was that you could see yourself as others saw you, and make appropriate adjustments—but he had never before seen it like this. Although the face was adult, its expression was in some indefinable way childish. It was also very unhappy—almost terrified.

Holy hell, but little boy Nelson was going to have to comfort grown-up Hilary.

Nelson got to his feet and came round the table. He put his arm round himself—or, at least, as much of himself as his arm would go round—and squeezed the man-sized child.

"This won't last for long," he said. "Whatever's happened to us, it won't last for long."

"Prove it." The voice was small and dismal.

"If I believe in it, it must be true."

"Higher philosophy."

"Hilary, if you're going to be using my body for a while, could you possibly stop being such a pain in the ass? That's my ass you're being a pain in. Let's try and work out what's going on."

"The trouble is," said the boy in Nelson's body, "that I'm not hungry any more, but I still want to eat this stuff."

"Feel free. Eat as much as you want to."

"I don't know that I've got room."

Nelson tightened his grasp.

"Look, buddy, I've had a lot more experience of my body than you have, and there's always a bit of extra room. Fill it up. Make yourself—myself—kinell, who knows whose self it might be?—as sick as you want it to be."

"I don't like this. I want to be myself again."

"You are yourself, Hilary, kiddo. It's just that you're in a different body."

Nelson wasn't sure that he believed this. He himself was finding it difficult to adjust to being in a child's body—as if his smallness should make him somehow subservient to those who were bigger than him, while at the same he was having to guide Hilary through the stormy straits. Shit, but what he needed to do was to get to the command deck and find out what was going on. Yet that somehow seemed less important to him, right now, than comforting the boy.

"I am what I am," said Hilary.

"Yeah, that's a bit of higher philosophy as well," said Nelson. "And you think therefore you are. What you are is Hilary. Just remember that: the thinking is the important bit. And don't get frightened. This can't last long."

"You sure?"

"Sure I'm sure," lied Nelson. "Now I want us to get to the command deck. Want to come?"

"OK."

#

He knew it was spiteful, but the enlarged Segrill gave the cat an uppercut to the jaw before retreating towards the command deck, closing the door behind him with some difficulty.

The cat, spitting with fear, was now hiding behind his holojector.

It felt good to be this tall—forty centimeters or more—but he didn't know how long it would last. That depended on where Kaantalech's defenses had Shifted them. Loki was not too bright, and probably wouldn't remember for more than a few minutes what he had done to her, but he wanted to be out of her way for a good long while in case he reverted to his true form sooner than he expected.

He hadn't even realized the cat was there until a few moments before the transition. As soon as he had he'd taken to wing, which always infuriated Loki. She had a habit of stalking him and then just . . . watching, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Almost always he'd detected her in time, but the one time she'd caught him unawares he'd saved his life only by using a stunbeam on her. Some day soon he was going to use something more lethal and make himself very unpopular with the Humans in the crew, notably Hilary.

He'd been high up in his cabin when the Shift had come. The transition into miniature Human form had come as a shock, and it was a matter of sheer luck that he had been directly over the full-Human-size bunk the Bredai had provided for him. It had been more of a shock for the cat, though.

Segrill shook his right hand as he walked towards the elevator. There were disadvantages to giving cats uppercuts, it seemed.

A ghost appeared ahead of him and he recognized it as the Strauss-Giolitto woman. He trotted towards her, shouting her name.

She heard the sound, and turned to look at him. It was obvious from her face that she understood nothing of what he was saying.

Ah: a problem. The Images seemed to be out of commission. Segrill hoped they hadn't been Shifted to somewhere else entirely, somewhere remotely distant from the Midnight Ranger. This could be difficult. He was almost certainly the only person here who understood Shifting—he had become acquainted with its technology back on Preeae, the Autarchy's primary munitions factory-planet. His job had been security, and it had been hard—although it was strictly forbidden—not to pick up bits and pieces about the various gadgetries being developed and manufactured there. How was he going to explain to the others what was going on if he couldn't speak to them?

The ghost of Strauss-Giolitto tried to put her hand on his head, as if he were some kind of pet. No: he shouldn't think so resentfully as that, because she was trying to be affectionate, indicating friendship to him. He smiled up at her, finding it odd that a smile involved a movement of the mouth.

Her hand passed through him.

She didn't smile in return. What he could see of her face was largely the red elevator door behind her—she was almost completely transparent.

He tried to speak to her again, but all he did was make the gauzy face look puzzled. Her lips moved as she responded to him, but he could hear nothing at all.

He shrugged. That, too, was an odd sensation: for some reason his shoulders moved.

The elevator finally arrived, its inside blue and brightly gleaming. The two of them—the miniature man and the ghost—entered it. Segrill looked up at the display of buttons and, with a leap, succeeded in pressing the one that would take them to the command deck.

#

Ten Per Cent Extra Free found himself and Pinocchio wrapped around the outer skin of The Wondervale, forming a thin sheen that briefly limned the elliptical galaxy in frail colors. It was tempting to stay there—to become new and visible gods—but this was not the way of The Truthfulness.

No sooner thought than done.

The two of them retreated into The Truthfulness, where everything was more natural.

Kaantalech was the vision that both of them uncovered in their joint thought.

She.

Evil.

Done.

Something bad.

Midnight Ranger.

Where?

Locate.

Have located.

Rejoin.

Time.

Time?

Pinocchio still retained many of the traits of the culture in which he had been created. Hours, he thought to himself, but he could find no way of expressing this to Ten Per Cent Extra Free. The marker of change in the physical Universe that contains The Wondervale and Heaven's Ancestor and the Milky Way and countless others. That's what time is.

It was desperately difficult to remember all this when one was in The Truthfulness.

Remembering Strider.

Am remembering.

Allegiance. Loyalty.

Time?

The Wondervale.

Time?

The Wondervale. There is time.

Recollection.

Find Strider?

Have found.

Rejoin?

Difficult.

Rejoin!

Try.

#

Lan Yi was eighteen.

He looked in amazement at his reflection in his cabin mirror. He saw the trimness of his body and the smoothness of his skin, the brightness of both his eyes—for by that age he had not had a secondary retinal screen implanted—the swells of muscle in his arms and legs, but most noticeably the erection that refused to go away: its hardness was almost painful.

He was also amazed by the size of it. He knew as a matter of theory that the genitals slowly dwindled over the years, but it was not something he had ever much thought about because it seemed so unimportant.

By every god that humanity had ever invented, he needed sex—preferably with a woman. Failing that, a sexbot, except that there weren't any sexbots on board the Midnight Ranger. He wasn't much attracted to men, but right now he was in the mood to make do. When he found his fantasies turning to the lower mammalian orders he reined them in.

Was this a dream? No: he was certain that he was awake.

He tried to think about solving the problem of what must have happened, but it was extremely difficult to concentrate when your hormones were having the party of their lives.

Lan Yi dimly remembered a lover he had had while at university. She was a trainee nurse, because in those days medibots were still relatively primitive. She—he wished he could recall her name, because he could certainly recall what she looked and felt like—had told him that the way to get rid of an erection was to slap its base smartly with two fingers. She had demonstrated. The technique had been so spectacularly counter-effective that neither of them slept for the next seventeen hours.

He knew that he should be up on the command deck, where the Pockets would assist him in determining what was going on. It was his duty to be there.

It was difficult to think about things like duty. They were abstract in a way that his rampant lust was not. And he most certainly couldn't go to the command deck in this condition: Leonie and Maloron and Maria would be there, not to mention Polyaggle, so that his condition would only intensify.

Maria might well be offended. He loved Maria in an almost sibling fashion, and he didn't want to do anything that might cause her unhappiness. They had shared a bunk several times, stroking and chatting about inconsequentialities, but the purpose of this had been mutual comforting rather than sex: he knew that his maleness distressed her, and that any form of sexual proposal he might make would seem to her incestuous.

Lan Yi didn't know what to do.

He could masturbate, he supposed, but when you're eighteen the detumescent effects don't last very long. He could have a cold shower, but he had a sense that this wouldn't help him much either.

Or he could just tough it out. Maria would just have to look the other way.

That seemed to be the only solution.

He turned from the mirror and with some difficulty climbed into his jumpsuit. His state was going to be all too obvious to everyone, but most of them had seen him like this before, for one reason or another. Well, not quite like this, because he'd been about a hundred and twenty years old when the mission had started. There was bound to be some ribbing.

Lan Yi hoped he wouldn't meet anyone on the way to the command deck.

#

Maloron Leander awoke, but didn't believe that she had. She was the Midnight Ranger, and she was being driven through space at nearly infinite velocity towards Heaven's Ancestor by some force which she couldn't understand. She felt the fondlings of countless intergalactic particles against her skin: some were irritating, as if they were fleas crawling on her, but most were deliciously sensitizing. All of them were with her for only the most fleeting of moments. She was reminded of the time she had once been caught in a Martian dust-storm. Luckily she had been wearing a full spacesuit at the time: people caught in one of the storms—it was rare, because meteorology had been one of the first sciences instituted when humanity had begun to colonize Mars, and few were fool enough not to take precautions if there was even the slightest chance of a storm—had been known to be flayed alive by the dust-grains . . . rather slowly, because of the low gravity and thin atmosphere. The dust had scarred her visor so that she could hardly see where she was going, but the constant tugging of the wind-blown particles at her suit had made her feel as if she were being given the perfect and most detailed massage.

She had enjoyed it. Her partner on that particular enterprise—they had been sent out to make an emergency repair to a water extractor, and had had to be prepared to accept the hazard of getting caught in a storm—had found it a nightmare. The repair accomplished, she had virtually had to drag him back to the cabble, then speak sweet nothings to him all the way back to City 81. If she had been given an option, she'd have stayed out there enjoying the storm.

It was the same now. The small annoyances were more than compensated for by the tingles of pleasure.

She could see everything around her—not just the receding Wondervale and the approaching Heaven's Ancestor but also all the other galaxies scattered through this region of space. Within a galaxy one sees stars as jewels across the night sky; between galaxies, as she was now, those jewels are more distant galaxies, and their beauty is even greater.

Besides, it was good to be a spaceship.

Especially a spaceship inside which Polyaggle had become the air that people breathed.

#

Strider and Hein were the two people on the Midnight Ranger to remain physically unaffected by the Shift; instead their perceptions were altered. Strider had seen through the view-window that they were hurtling towards a blue giant star, but this hadn't been the truth. At the moment, whenever she pulled her head out of the Pocket, she saw the command deck as a field of short green grass and dandelions, with insects flitting or buzzing about. She preferred to spend most of her time with her head deep inside the Pocket.

The Midnight Ranger was moving towards Heaven's Ancestor at a rate which was not tachyonic but which approached that instantaneity. She nodded to dismiss the visuals so that she could better see the graphics. To her left was a symbol that indicated The Wondervale; to her right was another designating Heaven's Ancestor. In between the two was a scumble, rather like the distant sight of an irregular galaxy, which she interpreted as the fleet she led. The scumble was heading towards Heaven's Ancestor, and would reach it in a few minutes.

"Are you there, Pinocchio?" she subvocalized.

There was no reply.

She kept asking the question, over and over again.

Was the Midnight Ranger going to stop when it got to Heaven's Ancestor? There was no way of telling. For all she knew, whatever Kaantalech's technology had done to them—and she was by now certain that it was Kaantalech's technology that was responsible for this—could be blasting them to the furthest corner of the Universe, or back to the Big Bang.

There was a whoosh behind her as the door to the command deck opened. She came out of the Pocket and saw Maria Strauss-Giolitto and Segrill walking across the grass towards her. Off to her right, Hein—who seemed to her to have become a centaur, although she had no wish to see his face in case it was something drawn from the more dismal depths of her subconscious—was still conversing with his own Pocket. As soon as the Shift had started she had discovered that they were incapable of communicating with each other.

"Everything that's happening is illusion," she said to the new arrivals. "We're going to come through this all right—I promise."

The ghost of Strauss-Giolitto looked at her in stark disbelief. Segrill chirped something which Strider couldn't understand.

"I'm just seeing you differently. I'm seeing everything differently. I guess I must be the same to you. What do you see me as? A crocodile? The monster from outer space?"

"You look to me the way you always look," said Strauss-Giolitto, or her revenant.

"Then I must be the only goddam thing that does."

"Hein looks normal, too."

"He looks pretty unusual to me. The bit of him I can see is the rear end of a horse."

"No—he's as he always has been." The ghost of Strauss-Giolitto moved towards one of the chairs and made as if to sit down, but instead paused, her hardly visible hand resting a few centimeters above its back.

"Don't look like it to me."

Segrill chirped again and scurried across the field. Before Strider could stop him he had clambered up and into the Midnight Ranger's central Pocket.

"He's trying to tell you something," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"I'd guessed that," said Strider waspishly.

She moved to the other Pocket and leaned into it. "Can we speak?" she said.

"Yes," said Segrill. "This is the only way of doing it."

He looked like a tiny Human, but he was crouched in a way that made him seem more like an animal. She suddenly remembered. Fuseli. The Nightmare. His small face looked up at hers, and she had difficulty meeting his gaze.

"Kaantalech has Shifted us," he said.

"Sure has," Strider replied. "We're shifting at a rate of knots."

"What I mean is that she has used a Shift field on us. That's not right—probably we just ran into the Shift field she had erected around her. She probably never even knew we were there. Probably still doesn't know."

"You mean this is some kind of defense system?"

"Certainly, Leonie. I've heard you say that the best form of defense is attack, but that's not true. The best form of defense is total repulsion—so that the attackers discover themselves several hundreds of thousands of parsecs away. That's what the Shift field does—it removes threats."

"Why didn't you tell me this before?" She wanted to swipe at him, at the same time realizing that her reaction was irrational.

"I've been involved with the development of so many weapons systems that I couldn't tell you about all of them." He dropped his head, and suddenly her mood turned towards sympathy. "I knew that this was being developed, but I didn't think the Autarchy would have it up and running by now."

"How does it work? Is there any way that we can stop this happening to us?"

The door to the command deck susurrated behind her again. The others were arriving. Umbel alone knew what they would look like. She was reluctant to find out.

"I'm not a scientist," said Segrill. "My job was security, remember? Most of the things I learnt about I didn't really understand."

"Tell me what you know. I'm not a scientist either."

"One of the nuclear forces repels, even though the other attracts."

"I was told that before I was knee-high," said Strider. "Tell me something new."

"The principle of the Shift field is that it transfers this force from microcosmic to macrocosmic scale. Well, that's as much as I understand, anyway. The thing to be repelled—a ship, a fleet, whatever it might be—becomes like a subatomic particle, while the originator of the field becomes like a nucleus."

"I don't believe this," said Strider.

"It's true. What goes on is that the field reduces its environs to atomic size and then expands them again while the repulsion of the weaker force is still at work." Segrill shuffled around on all fours. "I told you, I'm not a scientist. All I know is that this is what happens. It makes the perfect defensive shield unless the attackers know what's going on and can work out a way of countering it. Those who are repelled by the Shift field are affected by various psychological and physiological alterations."

"You don't have to tell me that bit," said Strider. "Wait here."

"There's nowhere I'd rather wait." Suddenly Segrill looked cold. She put a hand into the Pocket and laid it on his back, letting him absorb her warmth. He looked up at her gratefully.

"I've got to go now," she said. "I've got to talk with Lan Yi."

"Understood," said Segrill.

She removed herself from the Pocket and looked at her crew. Much of the grass had died since she had started talking with Segrill, so that they were standing among stuff that looked fertilely brown but at the same time dead.

She recognized them all. That was the great thing. Nelson was a child and Hilary was an adult, but she could see through the disguises that had been thrust upon them to know who they were—she didn't have to try. It was the same with all the others, although presumably Leander and Polyaggle were still to arrive.

She grinned at the shade of Strauss-Giolitto. "This isn't going to last very long," she said, using her voice to convey more confidence than she felt. "I've spoken to Segrill and he's explained to me what's going on. He says that—"

"I wish to speak with Segrill," said Lan Yi formally, "and also with the Images."

"The Images aren't around at the moment."

"Then at least with the Pockets and Segrill. They could give me considerable information."

Lan Yi looked like a teenager in heat: thank goodness the walls of the Midnight Ranger's command deck didn't have knotholes. Strider didn't know whether to look at him compassionately or not: she might just make things worse for him.

"It's all yours," she said, gesturing at the Pocket Segrill was occupying.

"I thank you," Lan Yi said, stepping forward, and she realized he was thanking her for far more than access to the Pockets.

It was kind of nice, for once, to feel older than he was.

#

Lan Yi felt normality returning only a few moments after he leant into the Pocket. As he watched, Segrill shrank in front of him to become the thumb-sized, bat-winged person they had all come to know. In parallel, Lan Yi felt his adolescent erection ease away; he didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed—the flush of hormones had been exhilarating.

"It's over," said Segrill at once. "Wherever we've been Shifted to, we're there."

Lan Yi could understand what the Trok was saying, but he could hardly hear his high, shrill voice.

"Louder," he said.

The Trok iterated unnecessarily, then repeated the explanation he had given to Strider of the workings of the Shift.

"Can the process be countered?" said Lan Yi.

"With difficulty . . . but I don't know how."

"There must be a way. Can you interact with this Pocket?"

"Partially."

"Then try to get it to run graphics concerning everything you do know about the Shift. Just empty your mind into it."

Lan Yi didn't have much hope that the idea would work, but to his surprise it did. All around Segrill appeared strings of numbers and symbols; diagrams gave the symbols meanings, but it was going to take him a long time to work out what those meanings were.

Just as Strider had done, Lan Yi put his hand on Segrill.

"Sorry about this," he said, "but I am afraid I must ask you to remain here for quite a while."

Despite the species difference, he was able to recognize that Segrill was looking miserable.

"I'll be as quick as I can," said Lan Yi, and then he was lost in a maze of questioning and inference, and could no longer see the Trok. They were in the galaxy called Heaven's Ancestor: he took that as a given. He briefly flashed up the visuals to check, knowing as he did so that it was unnecessary; at the edge of the Pocket, off to the left, The Wondervale showed as a hot glow. Banishing the visuals, he concentrated once more on the equations.

Most of them were redundant—they related to other military developments that Segrill had observed on F-14, some of which interested Lan Yi considerably: at some later stage he would lure his little friend back into the Pocket so that he could examine this stuff in more detail. Now, however, with waves of thought he moved it away until all that he was left with were data concerning the Shift. He related the diagrams to the equations, annoyed with himself that he found it so very difficult to do so.

But at last things began to make sense: every time he reached a new understanding, others cascaded swiftly, as if he were touching one small rock and causing a landslide. Unfortunately everything had been worked out in hexadecimal: he had used hexadecimal a few times decades ago, as a student, just for the mental exercise; now, older, he found it difficult to force his less flexible mind into analyzing equations with the "wrong" numerical base.

The trouble was that he was accustomed to hearing numbers moving through his mind as if they were music. Working in hexadecimal was like listening to someone playing an out-of-tune pianobot: there were discords everywhere, so that the mathematics seemed to him almost like physical pain.

Music.

Now there was a thought. Start thinking of all this as if it were an experimental composition. Lan Yi preferred early music—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ochs—but he was not unreceptive to some of the more recent composers, up to and even including, albeit very rarely, the randomusic that Strauss-Giolitto had used to play him from her musibot, back in the days when they had both been in the Santa Maria.

He imagined that the equations were a piece of modern music being picked out on a harpsichord; though he had never in fact seen a harpsichord, it was one of his favorite instruments. The notes didn't sound at all right. Of course, harpsichords weren't tuned to the musical equivalent of hexadecimal. He tried to think of a few other instruments—a fretless guitar, a hyperflute, a zammarany—but had at last, ignominiously, to settle for Strauss-Giolitto's musibot. One of the few things he had been glad to see depart with the Santa Maria was Strauss-Giolitto's damned musibot.

But it was one of those few occasions when the bot served him. He could hear its tinny tinkling in his mind, and suddenly the equations became utterly clear. Sometimes he shut his eyes in between reading them, so that he could listen to them more carefully.

And music took him further.

There is no single way of observing the Universe.

Turn that round.

The entity that is the Universe has an infinity of aspects, of ways of being looked at. By technological species it is almost always observed as a chillingly beautiful construct of galaxies and energy exchanges and distance.

In the human species' own primordial past, the talking primates had been very little, if at all, less nascently intelligent than Lan Yi himself, yet they had seen the Universe as a tiny machine with the Earth at its center, the planets of the Solar System playing music as they made their approximately diurnal circles. Other thinking species must have other perceptions.

This was the sudden understanding that had come to Lan Yi.

Stop looking for explanations. Start listening for them. Start listening if you want to observe the nature of the Universe, the way it works—not the exclusive way, but an aspect that is just as true as the one that you have always observed before. Try to throw away all the cultural baggage that is forcing you to think of those bright points of light and let your mind roam across the other possible aspects of the Universe until you find the one that corresponds to a musibot playing a hexadecimal piece of randomusic that somehow makes a harmony where a harpsichord was unable to.

Lan Yi, eyes shut tight, heard the truth of the way that the Universe works. There are myriad such truths, he recognized again, and all of them are true. The truth that he listened to was the one that was being spelled out by the equations displayed in the Pocket. At first he had had to read them; now he wouldn't have been able to, even had he tried. In all the splendor of their transparent comprehensibility they were flowing into him, vibrating in his inner ears, channelled there from the tingling of his palms.

He was sailing far off the edge of the map of humanity's science. Here Be No Baryons.

What he saw—heard—was that the Universe is a single vibrating string, and that all events and energies and material objects and ideas have their place on the string. Their perfect place, as otherwise the vibration of the string—he thought of it as a cello string—would be disrupted, so that the soft, truthful note of the Universe would become fractured until eventually the vibration died and the note with it.

It wasn't anything as simple as the time-flow from the Universe's birth to its death being represented as a string, he realized.

The Universe was the string.

The string was the Universe.

All the dimensions that existed in humankind's perception of the Universe existed in this single, thrumming string. All the galaxies, all the individual consciousnesses: everything. But one couldn't run one's finger along the string and think that this happened and then that happened and then that. Causality had to be thrown out: the cause of event A could be at the far end of the string from the cause of what succeeded event A. The bit of the Universe that was Qitanefermeartha might have been entirely distant along the string from the people that came to destroy it. There was no order along the path of the Universe-string except the order of the single, long note.

An eternal note. When it stopped, as it would, there would be just nothing.

Once again.

Before the note started playing—before the bow stroked the string of the cello—there had been nothing. Yet even that was a simplification of the truth that he was hearing: there was no "before" or "after" in the Universe-string—just a condition of being.

Everything had to be in its correct place, or the beingness of the Universe would be threatened.

This could not be tolerated by the Universe which, while lacking sentience, was concerned—compelled—to protect the perfection of the note that it sounded.

And it was perfection. Lan Yi, who had so resisted earlier what he had regarded as a mindless din, was filled with the ecstasy of that perfection. The hexadecimals had converged to create the single note of truth.

What the Shift field had done was to persuade the Universe that Strider's fleet, and the Midnight Ranger, were on the wrong part of the string. The Universe had responded, as it had to if it were to preserve itself, by moving them. They had become a different part of the eternal vibration.

He opened his eyes, and with a whip of thought re-created the visual display in the Pocket.

Segrill cowered off to the side of the representation of Heaven's Ancestor. The position near its edge of the Pridehouse and Lingk-kreatzai fleet was indicated by a small and curiously irritating flicker of red light.

We could be anywhere, thought Lan Yi. We could even be anywhen.

Even though his eyes were open, he could still feel and hear the throb of the string that was the Universe. It was something that he knew he would never be able to forget. He had always known that there might be many realities, and he had experienced several since the Santa Maria had boosted out of Jovian orbit, but he'd never before appreciated that some of those realities could be profound, could be utter, could be the truth—because all truths are the truth.

He wondered if anyone among the Pridehouse had been able to interpret this aspect of the Universe. He thought it unlikely: the Pridehouse, like the Humans, were material creatures. Had it not been for the coincidence of the Pocket with his own mood—for moods, too, have locations along the Universe-string—at exactly the right time, the new perception would never have come to him.

He pulled his head from the Pocket. "We have been moved by the Universe by a single harmonic," he said to Strider.

She looked at him strangely. "Have you been staying up late at nights?" she said with all outward appearances of sympathy.

He shook his head. "It's a little hard to explain, Leonie, but I think I know how we can get us—all of us—back to The Wondervale. But it is my belief that now is not the right time to try it. I have had an insight which I think is a very valuable one, but I cannot follow it any further at the moment now." He was aware that his Argot was beginning to become stilted: he was finding it unwieldy as a means of communication, as he always did when he was exhausted or nervous or both. "Tired. I am tired. I must for a while lie down in my darkened cabin, and think of what I have done . . . have discovered, have insighted. There is nothing we can do at the moment—nothing we need to do. Better we wait until I have examined the full implications of all this."

He moved wearily towards the 'lock that led to the rear of the Midnight Ranger.

"Please tell the Onurg that we have been moved by the Universe by a single harmonic," he added, pausing there. "Some among the Pridehouse may understand what this means."

He could see her seeing the fatigue in his eyes.

"Try them," he said. "They are an ancient species, and may have encountered this before. At the moment I feel I am a very ancient member of a very youthful species. I am not looking forward to the task that awaits me—you understand?"

"I hear what you're saying," said Strider, wondering if she did.

#

Danny O'Sondheim could hardly believe his luck. The Images had told him there was a chance of finding the wormhole that had brought them into The Wondervale and getting the Santa Maria back to the Milky Way, and Strider had told him that he must make the attempt, but he'd never quite believed it would happen. He'd been going through the motions. Performing his duty as First Officer. Pretending—if he were honest with himself—to be a person he wasn't, or hadn't been until Strider had passed over the acting captaincy of the Santa Maria to him.

He tapped his thighputer to call up relevant data. It was one thing being back in the Milky Way, quite another knowing exactly where you were.

Although O'Sondheim was aware that Heartfire and Angler were still connected with the ship, he didn't want to rely on them. The Pockets were ahead of him on the command deck, but they had gained an insubstantiality that worried him. Maybe it was the case that the Images could not survive in the Milky Way. He didn't quite believe this—there seemed to be no reason why the Images couldn't manifest themselves anywhere within the material Universe—but he wasn't prepared to bet the lives of his personnel on his being right.

Strider probably would have.

Every time he thought of Strider it hurt.

Both of them had been, in separate ways, ugly ducklings, but she was the one who had turned into a swan, leaving him paddling his little feet in a river whose water ran too fast for him to have full control over where he was going. She learnt quickly how to control herself in the current; only recently had he learnt to do so.

He had lusted for her: he was honest enough with himself to admit that. But behind the lust there had been something else which, as the Santa Maria had found itself back in the Milky Way and he had started to search out with his thighputer stellar configurations that might give him guidance back home to the Sun, he had begun to think was possibly love.

The word "love" was not part of O'Sondheim's standard mental vocabulary. "Friendship" was another difficult one for him. People shared warmth and jokes and kisses and caresses and finally sex because all that was happening was that their genes wanted to replicate themselves. OK, so the people might have luck enough to have a bit of fun along the way, but the basis of it all was the perpetuation of their genes. Love was just a delusion: something the Human species had invented to make the whole reproductive process a bit more respectable.

Yet now, as his thighputer displayed further useless data, still searching for the Solar System, he wished that Strider were on the command deck nearby. That was all he wished for—that and the possibility of being able to look up and see her smile back at him.

Bright teeth. Brown eyes. Nearly black face.

A friend.

Yes, that's what she'd been: a friend, the truest of friends. Almost a sister, really. O'Sondheim had few remaining illusions about himself: he had been very unpopular among the Santa Maria's personnel from the time the ship had left the Solar System until it had re-entered the Milky Way. He had been swaggering around, an aged adolescent, the worst kind—trying to pretend to be an Alpha Male. He had thought that he'd wanted to get inside Strider's pants—because that would be a victory of sorts—when all he'd really wanted had been her arm around his shoulder and a peck of a kiss on each other's noses. Yes, having sex with her would have been good as well, but it wouldn't have been the important part. He rethought. "Having sex" with her would have been lousy; making love with her would have been fine.

He rattled his fingers on the thighputer again, trying a different combination. The thighputer would, if left to itself, work out the location of the Solar System in due course; the trouble was that it might be very unlucky in its algorithms and not hit the solution until some time after the Universe had ended.

Blind luck was not enough, which was why O'Sondheim was giving the thighputer hints.

"Forget all the blue giants," he was saying to it, a statement that came out as ! on the display.

"WHY?" said the puter's display bleakly, as if he had let it down.

O'Sondheim thought about patiently telling the thighputer that blue giants were young stars and that the Sun wasn't one of them: it was the sort of innocuous star that tended to have planets and didn't hurl so much hard radiation at them that life never got a chance of starting.

He thought about this.

He thought for perhaps a second.

What he finally tapped into the puter was: "BECAUSE I TELL YOU TO."

#

Guide me.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free's thought was a very weak disturbance in Pinocchio's consciousness, but he heard it clearly enough. How could he be a guide? Although he had accustomed himself to being an Image in many ways, this condition of existence was not instinctive to him. As a bot which had been programmed for inquisitiveness, he wanted to explore The Truthfulness; as the Real Boy he believed himself to have become, he wanted to return to Strider; as an Image, he sensed always that he was the mere apprentice who shouldn't be out of the sorcerer's sight too often in case he fouled up, and yet here was Ten Per Cent Extra Free asking him to translate them both from a condition Pinocchio didn't really understand back to the solid reality of the Universe. That Universe. The one in which Pinocchio had been manufactured.

He felt as if he had been dissolved into The Truthfulness, as if he were salt that had been stirred into warm water. It was difficult to make a string of rational logic out of his thought processes. Other times—although "time" had become an increasingly difficult concept to keep a grasp on—he saw himself as a particle in a lava flow, indistinguishable from the rest.

Try guide.

There was a rush of gratitude from Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

Strider.

Think of Strider. That was the best thing to do, Pinocchio decided, not knowing whether or not it was a daft decision. His first resort was an attempt to call up her personal details on his internal data display units, but of course that didn't work: no longer a bot, he no longer had any internal data display units.

Try thinking about her as a person, not just as a name and a picture and a collection of data. She is, instead, a concentration of mental and emotional activity that sums itself up as Strider. Forget the limbs and the organs.

Pinocchio felt as if he were struggling to understand the way that the Images moved themselves from one reality into another, yet Ten Per Cent Extra Free had indicated—in that single, pleading thought—that he was having even more difficulty rationalizing the situation into which Kaantalech's Shift had placed them. Perhaps here was a time when the apprentice, through his stark ignorance, was better able to cope than the wise old sorcerer—a time when it was the sorcerer who needed help to stop the water from cascading.

Not the easiest person to get on with, Strider. She wasn't as bad as Maria had once been, with her petty biases and outspoken ("outspoken" in the sense of "offensive") opinions. Strider did what she wanted to do, most of the time. It was one of the things that Pinocchio most liked about her. But on occasion she was vulnerable. He liked that as well. He remembered the time when the two of them had walked under the Martian moons. They had been, in ways that were so different that they could hardly be compared, equally vulnerable, equally afraid of the adventure in which they were both about to partake, yet it was then that they had discovered their liking for each other. Or was that true? Strider, he knew, had begun to feel affection for him. But in those days he had still been fighting to comprehend human emotions. He had known that he owed her loyalty, but his cold mind had not fully fathomed why. His software had told him that this was his duty.

Picture Strider.

Something of the entity he had now become was telling him that there was another of the Human-things that was doing the same.

O'Sondheim!

Yes, Pinocchio could key into O'Sondheim, and the way the man was thinking. It wasn't what he wanted to do, because he'd always held O'Sondheim in a discreet contempt, and besides the man was in the wrong part of the Universe, but at least it was a link in the chain that led back there. O'Sondheim's thoughts were so strong—too strong—that now he had locked on to them Pinocchio was finding difficulty in abandoning them.

He felt himself as a flood, a flood that was being forced to run down a particular channel that it had not chosen.

Going back there.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free's thought was rather sad. Must we?

I must.

Why?

Love Strider.

Foolish.

True.

Be a part of you?

Always. Known by you.

She legal?

On prescription.

Pinocchio reached out through the moils of consciousness and grabbed Ten Per Cent Extra Free, not letting the other Image fade away from his mental imagery, as he seemed to want to do. Pinocchio felt as if he were clutching a hand. They slipped back through the tiny film that separated The Truthfulness from the physical reality in which Strider dwelt. For a few seconds they found themselves in The Wondervale, but then they were streaking towards Heaven's Ancestor.

Pinocchio felt as if he were being painted across the sky, like a bright line slashed by an artist's brush across a black background.

WE ARE YOUR SERVANTS, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free to the Humans, the Pridehouse and the Lingk-kreatzai alike.

"About bloody time," came a response.

Strider, thought Pinocchio to Ten Per Cent Extra Free. Still alive.

The answering thought was: Mistake difficult.

#

They could if they wanted fight against the Shift field, thought the Onurg, but it would be a waste of time. Once Lan Yi had explained to him the nature of the device the Onurg recognized this. The Pridehouse had no tradition of music, so it had been difficult to understand Lan Yi's explanation, but finally the Onurg had been able to reposition, as it were, the ideas in his mind. Look at the Universe as a spectrum of colors, running all the way from inder to birep and possibly to longer and shorter wavelengths than either of those, and then one could visualize the color that had performed the Shift. That visualization completed, it was easy to understand the principles of the Shift field . . . and as easy to understand why there was no use fighting against it, at least not for an amount of time that could be calculated as a function of the one true color.

Lan Yi had told him as much, except he was talking in terms of the one true note.

It had been a very confusing conversation until it approached its end, when each of them had been able to work out what the other was talking about.

Life was everywhere, and life it was that colored the Universe—not in the way that stars did, or the clouds of gas that lay between the stars, but in a manner that the Onurg could understand when he looked slantwise at reality. As soon as he came to comprehend Lan Yi's explanation in terms of harmonics, this slantwise attitude to physics became almost second nature to him. Yes. The Universe was constructed of colors, some of which harmonized and some of which clashed. If one could only see the tapestry formed by the colors, then so very much else became plain.

The Shift field was an evil thing, the Onurg concluded. After the Autarchy had been demolished, the Shift—even its very possibility—should be removed. In the meantime, however, its consequences would have to be endured.

He trotted away from his Pocket to rub muzzles with Seragarda, his favorite current lover. She was very beautiful, her coat a mass of burnished brown. Now she wasn't in the mood for him, however: she touched tongues with him, but he could see that her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking about one of her other lovers.

His jaws dropped open in a grin.

She was happy. The reason that he loved her was that all he cared about was her happiness. He did a back-flip, landing with confidence on all six feet, to explain this to her in a way that was more profound than words. He put his right forefoot on her shoulder.

"We're in Heaven's Ancestor," he said. "Never thought our species would make it there again until long after I was dead."

The two laughed together. He removed his right forefoot, and they rubbed muzzles once more.

"How long shall we remain in Heaven's Ancestor?" she asked.

"I don't know. Possibly forever."

"I can't believe that."

"I can. Kaantalech has used a field to Shift us. I don't think we can fight against it."

Seragarda made a snorting noise, then suddenly touched her tongue to his. He was almost disappointed. She had wanted to be with a different lover, but now, out of some sort of sympathy, she wanted to be with him.

"I need to speak again with Lan Yi," he said.

He felt her sexual attractiveness like a paw on his head as he left her and returned to the Pocket: his close contact had aroused her, he knew, and he would have liked to have been the one to satisfy her arousal, for she was indeed very lovely.

The first face to appear in the Pocket was that of the Human creature called Maloron Leander. In his perception she had only one eye, the other being covered by a silver rectangle. How, how, how could the Humans communicate without a snout eye?

"Lan Yi," he said, his tongue lolling. "I wish to talk to him."

She gave him the facial grimace which he now knew to be a Human smile.

"He's here."

A moment later the Onurg was looking at Lan Yi. There was moistness in the Human's eyes.

"Do your people have such a thing as exhaustion?" said the Human. One or other of the Images translated the concept.

"Of course," said the Onurg.

"Well, that is what I am feeling at the moment."

"You have my sympathies. But I want to talk with you for a few nanreets."

Lan Yi dropped his head and then slowly raised it again. "Yes," he said.

"There is nothing we can do to counter the Shift field in the short term," said the Onurg. "As long as Kaantalech maintains it around her headquarters we cannot approach her. Trying to do so would be like"—he sought for an expression that would make sense to the Human, and then realized that the Images would interpret whatever he said—"moving oneself head-foremost against the advance of a Bredai."

"Beating one's head against a plastite wall," said Lan Yi. "The wording is different but the metaphor is the same."

"Agreed." The Onurg grinned. The enjoyment of life was the finding out of new things. At its end there would be the discovery of what the experience of death was like, and that would be interesting and enjoyable as well.

"What should we do?" asked Lan Yi.

"A final decision is up to Strider."

"She needs your advice before she can make that decision. She needs mine also."

"I believe we should resign ourselves to staying in Heaven's Ancestor for a while. I don't think we've got any option, unless we choose to head further away from The Wondervale." The Onurg touched a forepaw to his ear, then realized that the gesture would make no sense to Lan Yi and probably not even to the Images. "There are times when the only option to pick happens also to be the best one," he explained, quoting the ancient Pridehouse proverb.

"I had come to the same conclusion," said Lan Yi.

"It's a lonely place to be." The Onurg thought wistfully of the richness of The Pridehouse. He might never see it again. The loss was in itself a new experience, but he found this one strangely unenjoyable.

"The Autarchy knows virtually nothing about the existence of the ancient species," said Lan Yi.

"That's true."

"So is it not possible that there are more species within Heaven's Ancestor than even the ancient species ever discovered? Also, it has been several million years since any of you have been here." Lan Yi paused, wiping his hand across his brow, which the Onurg was intrigued to notice was oozing liquid. "There could be people who could help us."

The Onurg was dubious. "All we found were bacteria and viruses. In some places there were creatures who had developed eyes and ears, but they were rare."

"How much," said Lan Yi, "would the Autarchy be able to see if its ships were in orbit around The Pridehouse?"

The Onurg reflected. "Very little," he admitted, "except a few villages built for the purposes of sham."

"And creatures who could blunder about a few million years ago might well have developed a little. My own species did not enter its final stage of evolution until a mere five million years in the past, but now we have learnt to fly between the stars. Neither elegantly nor well, but we've done it. Mightn't it be the same in Heaven's Ancestor?"

"I can believe you," said the Onurg, although for some reason he found himself reluctant to say the words. He had a respect for the Humans, because they were new and brash and foolish but also brave and benevolent and mentally flexible; at the same time he knew of the horror his ancestors had felt when the Comelatelies had started to inherit The Wondervale. It had not been a good time: it had been hard to discover any delight in it, however much the Pridehouse and the other ancient species had tried. The idea that technological cultures might have arisen in Heaven's Ancestor was unpalatable to him. He turned the notion around in his head. The converse was that it would be exciting to meet new forms of people: perhaps they would be as peculiarly engaging as the Humans were. Maybe he was the one who was being mentally inflexible, because of the age of his species. And there would be the enjoyment—that great enjoyment—of discovering more about how the Universe worked, because the Universe was not just stars and planets and space but also the intelligence that thrived there.

"I don't know why we're arguing," said the Onurg, "because we both have the same view."

"I concur," said the Human. "I shall advise Strider of this."

"Orphanwifer may disagree."

"I doubt it. Orphanwifer will follow anywhere that Strider goes."

Lan Yi looked to one side, and the Onurg realized that Strider had locked on to an adjacent Pocket and was now listening to whatever he and Lan Yi said. He welcomed her presence. He shifted the perspective in his Pocket so that he was able to see both of them at once.

"We stay here," she said immediately. He remembered how beautiful she had been as a Pridehouse; although her face was now antipathetic to him, he could still see the beauty, somewhere.

"But how're we going to find these species Lan Yi has been talking about?" said the Onurg.

"Easy enough," said Strider. "The same way we did when the Santa Maria first fell into The Wondervale. We just wait for them to find us."

"And what if they don't?"

The Human female raised her shoulders. "They will or they won't."

#

"Are you all cozy and comfortable now, Hilary?" said Strauss-Giolitto, sitting on the end of the boy's bunk.

"Sure am, Maria."

His face had that punched-about look that indicates a child is nearly immobilized with sleepiness but is fighting hard to resist the onset of actual sleep.

She drew a deep breath. The next thing he said was inevitable, and she waited for the words.

Sure enough, here they came.

"Tell me a story?"

It was almost a relief to hear them, as if some quasi-religious ritual had been performed with a perfect devotion. She responded with the next prescribed line in the litany.

"It might be better, seeing as you're not sleepy, if we continued with your education in stellar dynamics, Hilary." She looked down her nose at him.

"Aw, shucks, Maria. 've done enough stellar d'namics already today. An' geophysics. An' dead languages. An' information"—he yawned despite himself—"retrieval. Tell me a story."

She smiled, as she always did. Strauss-Giolitto knew that Strider's methods of getting the boy to sleep, when it was the captain's turn, were more ruthless—"Shut your eyes and start snoring or you're dead meat" was the general tenor—while Lan Yi would discuss ancient philosophies, with special concentration on Plato, which normally had Hilary out like a light within thirty seconds. Strauss-Giolitto never had the heart to adopt either approach. After all, this was the only Human kid within a zillion parsecs, and it must be very lonely for him. He deserved better than to be treated as just the nuisance he was.

As if on cue, that other nuisance, Loki, snuck in through the open cabin door and, looking guiltily up at Strauss-Giolitto, jumped up to sit by Hilary's head. The cat gave his ear a tentative lick, and he yelped. Unoffended, Loki began to wash her right foreleg.

"Tell us a story."

"Oh, all right then. But only if you promise me you're going to work harder tomorrow than you did today. Your information"—she surprised herself by yawning—"retrieval was distinctly on the sloppy side today, as it is all too often. We're going to have to concentrate hard on it in future, aren't we?"

"You can concentrate hard on information"—a sudden yawn—"retrieval if you want to," came a softly rebellious voice.

"Do you want this story or not?"

"Yes."

She dredged through her memory. The stories she made up out of whole tensile-tested fabric-like material were generally not very good ones, and left the child discontented. So she tended to give him the classics she had been told herself as a child. She was running out of classics, and Hilary was distinctly unkeen on repeats.

"Have you ultrawaved your teeth?" she said, prevaricating.

"Yeah. I did 'em, just after you were teaching me more about information"—another abrupt yawn—"retrieval. 'member? You ultrawaved your teeth at the same time."

Oh, yes, now she did remember. The session on information—she was really terribly tired herself, and would climb on to her own bunk as soon as Hilary was lost in dreamland—retrieval had been a particularly arduous one today. Hilary was having serious difficulties with the subject, but she had to plough ahead with him on it because it might perhaps be the most important of all the things she taught him. Perhaps she could drop the dead—Umbel, but she was full of yawns tonight—languages in favor of extra classes on information—she worried that she might keel over sideways right away—retrieval. So after today's final lesson she had ultrawaved her teeth alongside him, hoping the act would invigorate her.

Ah! "The Princess and the Frog"! She'd never told him that one before. She'd discovered it while browsing around through the Main Computer before the Santa Maria had properly left the Solar System.

"OK, here's a story—but after it's over you've got to go to sleep, you hear?"

"Yeah. Sure will." The boy turned over on to his side, away from the cat, who looked at the back of his neck with interest, then resumed washing herself.

"Once upon a time . . ."

"I like stories that begin 'Once upon a time . . .'."

"Shut up. Once upon a time there was a princess—"

"What's a princess?"

"A very long time ago there were countries—"

"What're countries?"

"They are—were—separate bits of a world. Stop interrupting or I won't tell you the story. Some countries were ruled by kings and queens, in just the same way as Captain Strider rules the Midnight Ranger. The kings and queens made all the decisions. Their sons were called 'princes' and their daughters were called 'princesses'."

"Seems kinda queer to me."

"Nevertheless," said Strauss-Giolitto sternly, "that was the way it was. If you concentrated more on your history lessons you'd know this." But what is the use of history lessons, she thought, to a child who may never see the system that gave birth to his species? He may never even see the Milky Way. Maybe we can start phasing out history in favor of information—she caught herself yawning again—retrieval.

"Anyway," she said, "there was this princess, all right—?"

"Start with 'Once upon a time . . .'."

"Oh, very well, then. Once upon a time there was this goddam princess and she was walking through the grounds of her father's castle when—"

"What's a castle?"

"Hilary, do you know what the word 'strangulation' means?"

"Yeah, but . . . She was walking through the grounds of her father's strangulation? That don't seem to make sense."

"I'd have thought you were too sleepy to be obtuse," she said wearily. It was getting to be a question of which of the two of them would flake out first. As long as she didn't think about information—oops—retrieval she should be all right. "A castle was a very big house where a king lived."

"With all those princes and princesses?"

"You're getting the hang of history. Not very much, but a bit. Anyway, this effing princess—whom various narrators of stories, and note that I mention no names, are wishing that they hadn't remembered in the first place—was wandering through the grounds of her father's castle when, by the side of a stream—and, Hilary, you do know what a stream is—she saw a frog—"

"What's a frog?"

"It's an amphibian."

"Kinda like an armored shock assault vehicle, you mean? My puter has plenty about those. People useta use 'em a lot when they were killing other people."

Horrifyingly, Hilary was beginning to look more wakeful.

"No, it is—or was—an amphibian animal so little you could have sat it on the palm of even your own very small hand." Strauss-Giolitto sighed. She had once seen a frog in a zoo. It was unlikely that Hilary would ever see one. There almost certainly weren't any frogs any more—they'd probably gone the way of the elephants. She hadn't much admired the frog she'd seen, but still she felt a pang of grief that the genus had probably been destroyed. "Look, this princess—she's bloody beautiful, has long bloody fair bloody hair and a figure that'd make the average bloody prince claw his way with his bare hands through a bloody stone wall just to clap his bloody eyes on her—she's wandering through the grounds of her bloody father's bloody castle and she sees this bloody fr— small amphibian bloody animal. Get that into your head."

"What's a stone wall?"

Diverse courses of action suggested themselves to Strauss-Giolitto, but in the end she chose the most sensible one.

"Good night, Hilary," she said, standing up. "We'll continue the story tomorrow. Information"—despite herself she staggered, but recovered before she hit the floor—"retrieval."

The boy and the cat, both fast asleep now and curled around each other, looked very sweet. With luck the Images were recording the scene, so that she could watch it again in one of the Pockets.

Poor kid, so alone.

Maybe there was a story about warcruisers and death she could dig out of her memory. He'd understand that better.