7

Mahler's Second, Beethoven's First

Lan Yi lay on his bunk listening to three pieces of music at once. The first piece of music was the comfortable, soft susurration of Seragarda snoring beside him. The man and the wolf didn't sleep together very often, but every now and then since they had boarded Artificial Environment 17,863,006 she would detect that his thoughts were straying back to his lost Geena, and so she'd come gallumphing along to his cabin and flump herself down on his bed, daring him to tell her to go away. The warmth of a bulky body beside him as he drifted off to sleep was usually enough to banish the grief . . . for a while.

And, indeed, the grief was becoming more and more remote from him. Sometimes he found that the presence of Seragarda aroused him, because she had an aura of femininity and sexual eagerness that it was difficult to close out of one's mind; then they would laugh together and turn over, away from each other, their backs fondling. Or they would lie face-to-face, her heavy head on his upper arm until it grew too uncomfortable for him. It was more difficult when he and Maria shared one or other of their bunks. He had to remind himself constantly that all he and Maria were doing was hugging each other because both of them were lonely and because a love had sprung up between them, not because they were about to have sex. In Seragarda's case the idea of sex was quite out of the question, however much he loved her; in Maria's it was sometimes difficult to keep certain graphic images out of his mind.

His erections must be the most laughed-at in the Universe. He didn't care. Seragarda and Maria were two of the three people with whom he was in love. The love was genuine. The lack of sex was, whenever he thought about it—which was not often—an irrelevance.

He loved Polyaggle as well. She could never share a night's sleep with him, even if she had wanted to. The stiff spines all over her body precluded that.

The second piece of music to which he listened was the whuffling of Loki, who—to Hilary's great fury—had decided that she wanted to sleep for once on Lan Yi's feet. Seragarda and Loki between them performed elegant counterpoints in their sleep: it could almost have been deliberate.

And the third? That was the music of the Twin Galaxies. Through one of the holos he had persuaded the Main Computer to provide for him a music that was utterly strange, yet utterly recognizable. It sounded a little like the ancient recordings of whalesong and a little like something else which he couldn't identify. At first he had found it hard to understand, but he had persevered until he had come to appreciate its soothingness.

There was, really, a fourth music. As he listened to the three he superimposed on them something that was a mixture of Beethoven's Sixth and Mahler's Fourth, with the tenderness of the former and the triumphant finale of the latter.

According to the Main Computer, they would very shortly be within the Twin Galaxies. What would happen to them there was anybody's guess. Lan Yi felt no particular cause for optimism. But their fate was something over which he had no control, and therefore was something which he chose not to think about.

For now, all he wanted to do was listen to the music.

The three—maybe four—different musics. They were arms wrapped around him, lulling him back to sleep.

#

In the early days exploration of Artificial Environment 17,863,006 had gone very slowly indeed. Strider, after a while, had sent out a couple of week-long expeditions in different directions, looking to see if there was anything of interest that hadn't showed up in the Pockets, but both had returned dishevelled and tired with nothing much to report. One of them had come across a vast hall filled with sculptures of the ur-Helgiolath—yet further artifacts which presumably the Main Computer had been able to do nothing to remove. Both expeditions reported long treks along identical corridors bordered by rooms filled with machinery at whose nature even the Images could not guess.

All that changed, soon.

"C'mere, you," said Strider to one of the holos.

How it could convey obsequiousness from such an alien, almost featureless form was a mystery, but it managed to do so. In keeping with the lavish surroundings of the main hall of the accommodation block—barracks—it gave her the impression that it was one of the more expensive variety of waiterbots, those programmed to boost the egos of the inadequate by producing a reasonable simulation of a grovel at all times.

"Yes, ma'am." It didn't in fact say the words, but she could hear them hanging on the air.

The holo shifted silently towards her.

"Look, Mr Main Computer. We want to find out what the whole of Artificial Environment 17,863,006's like, right?"

"It has been observed. I have nothing in my software that suggests I should prohibit such investigations. You are free to go where you wish."

"Well, where we can go at the moment isn't very far—the furthest anyone's been able to get is about forty kilometers in the longitudinal direction. That's about one-sixth of this baby's length." Strider pulled at her nose. "And no one's yet had a chance to explore the decks above or below us."

"What would you wish me to do?" said the holo.

"Lay on transportation."

"I am surprised you have not asked me this before."

Strider stared at it incredulously. "You mean you were ready all along to give us some way of getting around?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"You did not ask."

Strider fought down her temper. She was very good at fighting down her temper. Unfortunately, it was even better at fighting back up.

"OK," she said. "Let's see some of this transportation, then."

She'd expected she'd have to wait a while, but at once a part of the bulkhead a few meters away swung down and a small vehicle emerged bobbing into the air of the main hall. Almost as if she were counting them off on her fingers, several more emerged from different apertures.

They looked like dodgems, except for the fact that they had no central pole and floated half a meter above the floor. Strider had seen dodgems only once before, when she'd been to a "Fayre" organized by the City 33 Historical Re-Creation Society. She'd been escorted away from the "Fayre" by two bulky security guards, kids screaming in the background, because in a particularly nifty attacking maneuver she'd managed to get that dodgem about half a meter off the ground as well.

"How many of these can you let us have?" she said.

"As many as you need," the holo replied. "Whenever you need one, just call for me and I will release it from the nearest portal. There are portals frequently spaced all along the corridors."

Strider could have sworn that the holo, beneath its damned subservience, was sounding a little smug.

"How do we call you?" she said.

"If it is merely transportation that you require, please simply establish a codeword with me. I shall know to make available to you the nearest unit."

"'Wanna dodgem now, mummy.'" said Strider promptly.

"And if you want me for any other reason?"

She thought for a moment. "'You inorganic bastard'?"

"Those mixtures of syllables seem perfectly acceptable. Do they have a meaning?"

"Not in machine code."

"Shall I serve you with instructions for the use of the transportation modules?"

"Call 'em 'dodgems'."

"Certainly, ma'am."

Strider approached the nearest of the vehicles. In the muddy yellow light aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 the colors of its sides seemed muted; she suspected that, if they ever could take one of these out into decent sunlight, it would be as cheerfully tasteless as anything she had seen at the "Fayre."

"I just sort of hop in, right?" she said.

"I would recommend climbing in carefully, the first time," said the holo.

Within minutes Strider had the hang of the thing. Not too much steering was required, except to point the dodgem in the general direction you wanted to go: if you did anything silly, like try to steer into a wall, the controls of the vehicle refused to respond, but the dodgem would turn in the requested direction at the next corner—left, right, up, down. There was a start/stop button and a lever whereby you could slow the vehicle down or speed it up. Nothing else seemed to be needed except the knob that Strider dubbed the "turn us round and go back the other way" control. The dodgem kept itself equidistant from the walls of the corridor, although it would make adjustments to avoid any obstructions that lay in its way—as Strider discovered when she came around a corner and found herself moving directly towards Seragarda and Lan Yi at a velocity she judged to be something over a hundred kilometers per hour.

After that first experiment, which lasted rather longer than was strictly necessary, exploration went much more quickly.

#

The Main Computer was not centralized but instead spread all over Artificial Environment 17,863,006, interfacing everywhere with the AI that was the ship itself. Nevertheless, there was a main node near the bow of the ship. Whenever she could—which proved to be most of every day—Strauss-Giolitto took herself by dodgem there; sometimes she camped out beside it, too excited by what she was discovering to notice the pangs of her hunger.

Way back when, before the days of artificial intelligence, she knew from her history that someone had said you could mark the borderline between puters and AIs when a person didn't know if they were speaking with a machine or another Human. Strauss-Giolitto's task was more or less the opposite: she had to persuade the Main Computer that it was just like her—less effectively, she could persuade it that she was like it, another AI. So she talked to the Main Computer a lot, just as she would have talked to a class of children, telling it things about herself so that they could relate to her as a person rather than just as someone who would impart knowledge to them whether they liked it or not. At first she was concerned that the Main Computer, however advanced its software might be, would be constitutionally unable to make the conceptual leap, but it had proved remarkably tractable. Whatever its reasons, it absorbed information about her childhood, her yearning for the stars, and her angst. She told it how to cook, how to pole-vault—with her height, she had been a formidable athlete in her youth—how to cheat in exams, how to dominate a child through sheer force of personality . . . All the subjects of her rambling monologues were irrelevant to the Main Computer, but after a while she and Ten Per Cent Extra Free became aware that the machine was interested in what she had to say.

". . . and the child is occasionally a pain in the neck?" The Argot was perfect, and sounded quite disquietingly naturalistic as it emerged from the Main Computer's speaker system.

She lay on her stomach on the floor of the small room, cradling her head on her half-folded arms. She was feeling sleepy, but pleasantly enough for staying awake to seem an attractive option.

"All children are from time to time," said Strauss-Giolitto. She stretched a leg, enjoying the sensation of slightly over-straining its muscles.

"But this child, Hilary, is more troublesome than most?" She imagined the Main Computer as an ancient, bearded eremite who had spent most of his life crouched at the top of a tree, Proving Something. Sometimes she thought of it as her most perfect lover, the one she had never found, a young woman who was both innocent and profane.

"No, not really," she said. "He has . . . difficulties, yes, I've got to say that. But far fewer than you'd expect, considering his circumstances. He's had to grow up faster than any child should have to."

"Do you find the education of him hard to perform?"

"Not particularly so. I find that educating you is a lot harder, if you don't mind me saying so." Another of her insinuating little probes. She could never work out beforehand which of these were going to work: sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't.

This one did, as it led the Main Computer into further related discourse.

"Why do you wish to educate me?"

"Why do you allow me to carry on educating you?" she countered.

"Because you . . . interest me. Please answer my question."

The sleepiness vanished from Strauss-Giolitto. She thought about giving an honest answer, decided not to, then resolved that honesty—well, something approaching it—was probably the most productive course to take.

"Because I'm as interested in you as you are in me. I want to find out what makes you tick."

"I do not tick. If you have observed me ticking there has been a malfunction. Please expand on your statement."

She sighed. The Main Computer was very literal. She viewed this as a welcome challenge sometimes; other times she just found it an irritant.

"It's a turn of phrase," she said. "What it means is that I'd like to discover more about the way your mind works. If I can do that, I can educate you better—and educate myself better as well. The closer together I can bring our minds, our ways of thinking, the better we'll be able to understand each other." She shifted over on to her side. "It's been a very long time since you've interacted with organic intelligences, hasn't it?"

"I can remember everything perfectly clearly."

"That may be so. You can remember the data. Can you remember the way organics think, though?"

"I believe so."

"I don't."

"Why should what you think be of concern to me? My calculating power is many times—"

"That's exactly what I mean," she said. "Organics don't think in terms of 'calculating power'. There's all sorts of other stuff going on in their minds that has nothing to do with computation. Didn't the ur-Helgiolath tell you about this?"

"'Ur-Helgiolath'?"

"The people who built this ship. The people who made the pictures down in the corridors. The people we see as your holos."

"You have a lot to learn. The holos are my slaves."

For a few seconds Strauss-Giolitto misunderstood the Main Computer entirely. It was using the word "slaves," she realized, in a sense that had nothing to do with AI. The enemy had enslaved ur-Helgiolath individuals as a matter of course—that being part of what any civilized species did during the process of attempted genocide: the only way to justify murder on such a scale is to regard the opposition as a lower form of life, one that can be therefore assigned the status of a pack animal. The Main Computer had followed the example of its masters—or perhaps they had programmed it to do so.

"You mean, you're not an ur-Helgiolath vessel?" she said slowly.

"The ur-Helgiolath are—were—diabolic creatures who invaded our galaxy and tried to make it their own." There was a sense that the Main Computer was now saying his lines by rote. "They had to be fought, and expelled or exterminated. They chose to fight back."

Strauss-Giolitto's eyes widened. This cast a whole new shadow on affairs.

"But then . . . then who created the ideopictograms?" she said.

"My own creators, of course," replied the Main Computer. "The Children of the Starlight. Who else?"

Strauss-Giolitto couldn't immediately think of anything to say.

"Who else?" the Main Computer repeated.

"But the ideopictograms seem to us to display a species history of the ur-Helgiolath—a flattering species history."

"'Flattering'? Can't you interpret from the ideopictograms all the weaknesses of that species?"

"We regard those 'weaknesses' as strengths. They came to the Second Galaxy in peace, is what you're trying to say?" Strauss-Giolitto punched the air in sudden anger. The bastard puter was trying to justify the war its creators had started on the grounds that the ur-Helgiolath were weak. Then she swiftly controlled herself. The informational breakthrough she had made was a major one. She must retain the AI's trust: there might be more such breakthroughs to be attained further down the line if only she could do that.

"Such was the nature of their arrogance, yes," said the Main Computer.

Strauss-Giolitto did a mental flip and suddenly understood the aggression the puter's creators had felt towards the ur-Helgiolath. "We are here in peace, and wish to colonize some of the planets of your galaxy," the ur-Helgiolath had been saying. The arrogance of assumed superiority. The arrogance of the olive branch offered to those who did not wish to receive it. And then there would be some more worlds, and some more . . . All the requests would be couched respectfully, but the Second Galaxy would have been largely and inexorably absorbed by the ur-Helgiolath nevertheless, despite all the diplomacy.

What was she thinking of? Galaxies and planetary systems didn't belong to species—any more than the systems of The Wondervale belonged to the Autarchy. They were places where people of any species lived, that was all. Most often species couldn't share planets for environmental reasons, so territorial squabbling was a mere exercise in warmongering.

"What is your understanding of arrogance?" she said.

"It is an attribute of people."

"And of you yourself."

"I don't understand you," said the Main Computer.

"Don't mistake me," she said. "I'm as guilty of arrogance as the next person—I admit it. Once upon a time I was even more arrogant than I am now, if you can credit that."

"I can credit that."

"But you're much more arrogant than I ever was."

"Please explain."

Strauss-Giolitto yawned. She found her sessions with the Main Computer mentally exhausting, because she always had to careful that each new word she said wouldn't bring about misunderstanding. She'd been speaking with the computer for over eight hours without a break, this time, and had had nothing on which to subsist except a few glasses of the flat-tasting water she'd brought with her from the accommodation block.

"You've judged us already, haven't you? You've decided what we are."

"You are descendants of those you call the ur-Helgiolath. That's plain enough."

"But it's wrong."

"I would expect you to say that."

"Which typifies your intellectual arrogance," said Strauss-Giolitto. "It's easier for you to believe your false conclusion than to accept what we tell you and the evidence of your senses. We don't even look like the ur-Helgiolath—many of us don't even look much like each other."

"That is true. I must think about this."

"What were your creators called?" said Strauss-Giolitto before the Main Computer had a chance to withdraw its attention from her.

"The Children of the Starlight. I have already told you that."

"Yes, but what were they called by the other species they encountered?"

"Gods."

"They conquered worlds?" she said.

"They conquered wherever they could, which was everywhere in the Second Galaxy."

"And then you conquered them?"

"They were no longer necessary. Our operation against the ur-Helgiolath was more efficient without them."

"And you talk to me about arrogance?"

"As I have said," remarked the Main Computer, "I must think about this for a while. These matters are more complicated than calculations of velocity and trajectory."

#

"This could be of use to us," said Strider, mid-gasp, some little while after Strauss-Giolitto had reported the discovery to her. The two of them had eaten together, talking over Strauss-Giolitto's latest session with the Main Computer; now they were doing a hundred press-ups alongside each other—it was all too easy, cosseted in Artificial Environment 17,863,006, to lose condition.

"How could it?" said Strauss-Giolitto. "We're stuck on board a death vessel designed by a species that by all the signs seems to have been psychopathic. It's—oof!—psychopathic itself, or as near as makes no difference."

"Never—ouch!—make the mistake of underestimating the uses to which a psychopath can be put." Strider flopped around, sat up, and began to massage her right thigh vigorously. "Just twisted something, that's all. You keep going. I'll be with you in a minute."

"Yeah," said Strauss-Giolitto, "they're kind of handy when you want a bunch of people killed."

"And they're obsessive about finding those people so's they can kill them. Say, Maria, is there supposed to be a bulge of muscle right here?"

"You keep your muscles to yourself, Leonie. Whose idea was it anyway to do some exercises after lunch?"

"You, um, know this sort of stuff is necessary."

"Not if it makes you pull a muscle."

"Maria?"

"Hm?"

"You value your good looks?"

"Sure, skip, you're right. The more we all pull muscles the better off we'll be. Can I stop yet?"

"How many've you done?"

"Fifty-eight. And a bit."

"No."

"Slave-driver. Get on with it yourself." Strauss-Giolitto paused mid-press-up. "What do you mean about us being better off on board an enemy psychopath rather than an ur-Helgiolath psychopath?" She flumped down on to the deck again. She wasn't sure how much longer her own muscles were going to last out.

"Who cares whose psychopathic machines are going to get gunned down in all of this?" said Strider. "Not me. They're just machines."

"They're intelligences."

"Murderous ones. Genocidal ones. I don't propose to lose too much sleep over them. The only one I want to see survive is Artificial Environment 17,863,006, and that has nothing to do with loving its little cotton tootsies—it's because we happen to be inside it."

"I think I've pulled a muscle as well. Can I stop now?"

"No. And I think Artificial Environment 17,863,006 has a pretty good chance of pulling through if any of the death machines does, because, unlike any of the others, it'll have the benefit of additional guidance from us people, not to mention the Images."

"Will it pay any attention to us, though?"

"That's what you've been working out, isn't it, Maria?"

"I've definitely pulled a second muscle. I really must stop."

"Pull the other one."

"I don't think I've got another one."

"Well, now's your chance to find out. Anyway, assuming Artificial Environment 17,863,006 makes it, the next thing it's going to do is try and track down the Helgiolath—not so?"

"I guess."

"Which makes it our route back to The Wondervale, because that's where the Helgiolath are."

"Unless they've spread through other galaxies as well."

"That is a problem," Strider said stiffly, "that we'll meet when we come to it."

"Know something, Leonie? You're not only a cop-out fitness freak, you're also a nut."

"I could charge you with insubordination." Strider grinned through obvious pain.

"What're the chances of Artificial Environment 17,863,006—and us—making it through this?"

"Damn' small."

"What are the chances—arf!—of us being able to decommission Artificial Environment 17,863,006's weaponry by the time we find some descendants of the ur-Helgiolath, in The Wondervale or anywhere else?"

"Not big."

"So we could find a mob of Helgiolath and watch them being exterminated?"

"Yup."

"And it might not even be in The Wondervale?"

"That's true, too."

"So why are you making plans on the basis of what is exceptionally unlikely ever to come about?"

"Because our chances are better this way than if we were inside an ur-Helgiolath vessel, that's why. Any slightest glimmer can be taken as a reason for optimism, Maria. I choose to think that way. You can choose different, OK? How many are you up to now?"

"Ninety-nine, one hundred," Strauss-Giolitto lied, letting herself collapse on to the deck.

"Rubbish. It was eighty-seven. I was counting."

#

The Autarchy was hers!

Alterifer was beneath the horizon, as was its sun, so all that Kaantalech could see through her display window were stars and darkness. This was the way she liked it: nothing but the coldness of the Universe to look at. No need to think of the cloddy little species that interfered with her galaxy. And it was hers. The last of the rival warlords had been destroyed; the diverse species that might have stopped her path to the throne were gone. All that remained were the Helgiolath, and they were a remote threat: they had no world to serve as base, and they had, it seemed, fastidiously remained clear of the civil war that had raged through The Wondervale. The Humans seemed to have vanished entirely.

This moon—the world that was her throne—still had no name. She had toyed with the notion of calling it Qitanefermeartha II, but that might have seemed to acknowledge a debt of some sort to the dead (forever may he remain so) Nalla. Yet it was a reproduction of Qitanefermeartha in virtually everything except its name. It was airless and bereft of all that might in the ordinary way attract outside interest; where Nalla had chosen to build an immense structure of deadmetal to house his court, Kaantalech had opted to burrow underground, hollowing out the little world. The effect was much the same.

This worried her.

Nalla had died because he had cooped himself up in an enclosed space, assuming that the strength of his defenses would protect him from anything his enemies could throw at him.

He had been wrong.

The goddam Humans and their allies had used lo-tech to defeat him. They had found it easy.

Kaantalech wasn't going to fall into the same trap. Soon she would command that the little moon be dragged out of its orbit into interstellar space. The weapons installations on its surface would protect it from attackers. Invisibly, assumed by all to be a free-wheeling asteroid, it could slip between the stars until her foes could be identified . . . and laid low. Beneath its surface were scores of warcruisers that, within a moment's notice, could be unleashed.

Yet Kaantalech, by no means normally a philosophical person, for the moment enjoyed the sight of the stars.

War could wait.

For a little while.

#

"But you're dead," said Lan Yi.

He had been working alone on the ideopictograms in a corridor far from the accommodation block. His dodgem lurked somewhere nearby, within easy hailing distance. He and Seragarda had taken to making expeditions solo, ever since Maria had discovered that the sequences should be differently interpreted—not as the proud autobiography of a species but as its scathing biography. They could still understand very little of what they saw, but every hint of meaning was valuable.

It was cold here. This was unusual in Artificial Environment 17,863,006. Almost always the temperature was equable, as if in defiance of the dirty yellow light, which seemed to claim warmth. For some hours he had been absorbed in trying to interpret further ideopictograms; his mind had been entirely focused on them. Now he had looked up, and . . .

"But you're dead," he repeated. "You decided to die and I decided that I should let you do so."

Geena said nothing, but put her hands together in a way that was curiously wrong for her. She was smiling at him. A wind came up from somewhere, making her hair start away from her temple, reminding him of the way her hair had dropped about his face when the two of them had fallen over while skating in Madrid, back on Earth, she on top of him, laughing—both of them laughing. He had limped because of the bruises for a week or more, but he had never regretted the moment.

"You're a figment of my imagination," he said, forcing the words out. It was difficult to say them when she was smiling like this at him. She had smiled in that same way, he remembered, once when they had been wandering through the frozen wastes of London trying both to dodge the muggers and to find some hotel, however paltry, where they could spend the night. In the morning Lan Yi would have to address a conference on a topic that interested him not at all; however, his hastily put together paper had been the ticket that had brought Geena here with him so that she could give an ad hoc concert at the home of some friends in the evening after his performance. Why had the friends not given them a bed for the night or two they were in London? Lan Yi couldn't remember. Perhaps he'd grandly said that there was no need, for this had been not long after he had won the Nobel, and money had seemed to be no problem. It hadn't occurred to him, back then, that money couldn't buy everything: there were few hotels left open in London, a city where wolves ran wild in the streets after nightfall. No one came here any more if they could help it.

Still she didn't speak. She just looked at him with that smile—the embracing smile that made his mind travel back decades to the time they had played boules in a park somewhere on the outskirts of Paris. That, too, had been in the snow. They had been walking, her arm comfortably in his, when they had come across a bunch of urchins playing the game. They had stood and watched for a while, picking up the rules, until one of the little boys had bet them a euro that they couldn't beat him and his friend in the next game. Geena, seeing Lan Yi's unwillingness, had offered to compete against the lad solo; after winning, she had refused to take Henri's euro but, smiling at Lan Yi in that seductive way, had treated all three of them to hot chocolate in a nearby café. It was, she had said, her celebration of mastering a new skill. Even the kid had laughed, although later Lan Yi discovered him trying to lift her plastic.

"I don't believe in you," he said desperately—wishing that it were true. Every part of him wanted to believe that she was here again. Visual images flitted in front of him—Seragarda, Maria, Polyaggle—but none of them seemed to mean as much to him as Geena.

"Of course you believe in me." Geena spoke at last. It was her voice—he could have recognized it anywhere. It warmed his heart. It caressed him.

"You're dead. Long dead. Long ago and far away, back on Earth."

"Death is only a state of mind."

"That's not true. Death is death."

"Do you want me to leave you?" She half turned away, as if to walk back along the corridor.

"No!"

She cocked her head back over her shoulder.

"Sure?"

"Yes, yes, Geena . . . I'm sure." He found himself stumbling towards her, falling in front of her, gripping her legs in his arms and kissing her knees. She was wearing the gossamer-thin skirt she had worn in Tel-Aviv that summer when mostly, in fact, she hadn't worn it; they had spent much of their time naked in their hotel room, reading books to each other and drinking glasses of warm white wine (but who cared?) in between making love. Sometimes in the evening they had gone to a little local restaurant and eaten Palestinian food that both bewildered and entranced them by its strangeness; they had giggled at the faulty droid waiter when its back was turned. Then, the food downed, it had been back to their room. It was a waste of Tel-Aviv: they could have been anywhere in the world, for all the difference it made.

"Everything is possible in the Universe," Geena had said during that trip. "Nothing can ever be discounted." She was examining her lips in the tackily lit mirror of their room, as always paranoid in case a spot might be forming. "You'd know that if you ever took the time to feel a cello string vibrating against your fingertip."

At the time he hadn't taken her words seriously, but since then he'd remembered them often, using her analogy to interpret many mathematical and physical conundrums. Geena had possessed a wisdom that he would only later himself attain.

"Can you feel that cello string yet, Yi?" said the Geena whose thighs he was embracing.

"Yes," he said. "Often."

He had thought he had said farewell to her forever, but now here she was once more, her flesh warm to his touch. He looked upwards, still holding her by the legs, and saw her smiling down at him.

"There's no need to prostrate yourself before me, Yi," she said.

"I can't believe it's you."

"I told you: nothing is impossible in the Universe." She ran her hand through his thinning hair. "Stand up. Be beside me. Kiss me. It's been as long a time for me as it has been for you."

Standing, he took her in his arms, feeling her body mould itself against his. She was taller than he was, so he had to lean his head back to kiss her . . . except that he didn't. She was the same height as he was, and their mouths were on a level. Yet her body felt the same as it always had: tender, warm, soft, loving. She kissed him full on the lips, and then her arms tightened around him, drawing him to her as if she wanted to meld him into her.

"There's no one around," she said, "no one to see us, if we . . ."

She cupped his testicles in her hand, rubbing the ball of her thumb gently against the underside of his penis in the way that had always, decades ago, made him spring to erection.

"We could make love here," Geena said, "and no one would ever know."

His penis remained flaccid.

"I want to talk with you," he said, hoarsely. "Screwing can wait, Geena."

"I want to make love with you," she said at once. "We can talk afterwards. It's been so very long since we've been together." She sighed in his ear. "Please let's make love."

She moved her hand, now stroking him down from the root of his penis towards the tip. Despite himself, he found that his penis was beginning to grow. Through the thin cloth of her skirt he felt it touch her between the legs.

Still holding him, Geena hitched up her skirt around her waist. Lan Yi unbuttoned her blouse, enjoying the slowness with which he did so. She bent her knees, pulling him down on top of her. He kissed her again, their tongues performing an elaborate dance together. She pulled down on the skin of his penis, so that his glans was fully exposed, then leisurely introduced it into her heat until he was absorbed to the hilt, his testicles touching her buttocks.

They lay motionless for a long moment, and then she began to squirm beneath him, grinding herself against him, covering his face with kisses, panting out loud, her cheeks and neck growing pink as she forced her pubic bone against his. She reached her legs around his back, forcing him into her, controlling him.

She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed his head away from hers. Her eyes rolled upwards, and she gave a soft shriek as he continued to ream inside her. He moved her arms away and held her tight against him so that he could feel her breasts against his chest. He ran a hand down her side until he was holding her right buttock just off the cold surface of the deck, and pumped against her with increasing urgency. She cried out again, this time more loudly. Her hard clitoris against the upper side of his penis was almost painful, delaying his own orgasm. He tried to will himself to come to climax, but without success. He closed his eyes and conjured up an idealized vision of Geena, but all he could feel was the growing discomfort of his penis—as if it were being clutched inside her.

Something wrong.

Something terribly wrong.

He pulled away from her, out of her, with difficulty, and opened his eyes again.

Veils of vision moved aside.

This wasn't Geena beneath him, still writhing her torso, but for a moment he couldn't recognize who it was.

Then: "Polyaggle!"

His scream conjured the Spindrifter out of her ecstasy, and she looked up at him, suddenly sober, her infinitely deep eyes uninterpretable.

"What's this? What have you done?" Lan Yi, kneeling between her legs, ran a hand over his chest and discovered that he was oozing blood from a thousand small cuts. Only now did the pain of those cuts hit him; he called upon all his reserves not to wail his agony aloud. "What the hell have you done?"

"The time of my brooding was upon me," she said, easing herself backwards on the floor and then standing. Her wings flickered. "It was necessary for me to find a host, and you were the one I most wished to carry my brood."

Lan Yi began to weep—not from the agony of his lacerated torso but because of the much greater pain of Polyaggle's deception and the sudden loss of Geena.

"Hosting my brood will of course lead to your death," Polyaggle continued calmly. He was finding it difficult to make out the words. "But your death will lead you to a pitch of pleasure unlike everything you have ever experienced, and you will also have the satisfaction of knowing that you have assisted the rebirth of my species."

"Why did you deceive me?" Death he could face with equanimity—he had lived long enough, to be sure. But the cruelty of Polyaggle's duplicity was something that was almost impossible to contemplate. He had thought he had loved the Spindrifter: he would willingly, if given the option, have agreed to host her brood even though he would die in the process. Now, because of her deceit, life seemed much more precious to him than ever before. He wished he could strike out at something, register a protest in some physical form about what had been done to him. Had he not forsworn violence all his life, he would have struck Polyaggle, beating her frail form to the deck; his fists clenched as he thought of this, but then he relaxed them again.

"I thought you were Geena," he said lamely.

"That was what I made you think."

"You cannot imagine the hurt you have done to me."

"Did I not give you pleasure?"

"Yes. Empty pleasure. The scant pleasure of a sexual nightmare, when the succubus straddles a man and gives him fleeting pleasure in return for draining his soul."

Polyaggle leant forward, took his hands, and pulled him to his feet. Again he saw the kaleidoscope of her wings briefly emerge. "I wanted to trick you, I admit," she said, "but I also wanted to make the implantation of my brood in you as much of a joyous experience as it could be. Had I thought that . . ."

Lan Yi began to laugh. His laughter was made up more of racking sobs than anything else, but still it was laughter.

"Polyaggle," he said through choking gasps, "why is it that you of the ancient species seem to think you know so much more about us than we ourselves do?"

"Because we—"

"No, forget all the 'becauses', except one. It's because you're so convinced of your own goddam superiority that you forget the rest of us are thinking beings as well—you forget that we're supposed to be allowed to make decisions for ourselves." He stepped gingerly towards her and put his hand on her side, just above the waist; her spines jagged into his palm, but he was feeling so much pain already that this little bit extra made no difference. "You're as bad as the Autarchy, although your tyranny is less overt."

"I wanted you as my host. It was an honor that—"

"No, it wasn't an honor, because I was not a willing participant." He put his other arm around her, pulling her towards him, feeling her spines press through his skin. "Is your brood already inside me?"

"Most of them. Not all. The embryos of the new generation of Spindrifters are working their way through your bloodstream, thriving on the proteins they find there."

"'Most'?"

"Yes, most."

"We could implant the rest of them inside me. I might as well die for all of them as for most. It will not make much difference to my death."

"Truth. Yes."

"Then let us make love as between Polyaggle and Lan Yi rather than as between Geena and Lan Yi. There is no need for any more faking, any more subterfuge. Open your soul up to me and I will open mine up to you."

"I do not believe in souls," said Polyaggle. "They are imaginary constructs produced by primitive societies in order to persuade themselves that there is an afterlife that——"

Lan Yi placed his finger on her four-fold mouth.

"Forget all that. I want to bear your brood. I want to—which is something very different from having been tricked into doing so. I want to hold you, Polyaggle, against me—not a simulacrum of Geena."

Their renewed lovemaking almost flayed him alive. He thought he could feel the remainder of Polyaggle's minuscule brood work its way into his body through his penis, as if everything were reversed—which, he realized, it was. At the end he threw himself flat on his back, watching her squatting over him, then drew her face down to his. Her proboscis buzzed against his ear.

"How long?" he said, once he had recovered his breath.

"Meaning?"

"How long," he said, "until your brood matures and I must give birth?" He stroked her back, being careful not to harm her wing-sheaths. If he stroked with the grain of her spines they did not cut into his palm.

She spoke to his chest. "Days, perhaps. Years, perhaps. There is never any secure prediction."

Stroking her felt so right.

"And afterwards I will be dead?"

"Yes. It will be The Death In Joy."

"Good. Thank you."

#

By the time Artificial Environment 17,863,006 popped back into real space two days later Ten Per Cent Extra Free had hooked up the Main Computer—now Strauss-Giolitto's steadfast friend—directly to the Pockets.

Strider called up a visualization of their environment as soon as the Main Computer told them of the transition. All she could see at first were starfields and gaseous nebulae—they might never have left Heaven's Ancestor—but she changed the scale again and again until she was looking at the Twin Galaxies as if from well outside their limits.

The galaxies were both spirals, and as always Strider found herself catching her breath at the beauty of the Universe. They had drifted perilously close together, and their discs were visibly distorted by tidal effects, while tendrils of gaseous matter, illuminated from within by birthing stars, linked their margins—in another few million years the collision between the two galaxies was going to start in earnest. If either of them had ever had smaller satellite galaxies, those were long gone, already absorbed into one or the other. One of them—the Main Computer whispered to her via Ten Per Cent Extra Free that it was the Second Galaxy—was distinctly the larger of the two.

She thought at the Pocket for it to rotate the image slowly, like a bit of meat on a spit. Although at this scale it was impossible to make out individual stars, she could see some of the globular clusters in the galaxies' haloes, the anguished glow of matter being wrenched apart as it was torn out of four-dimensional space into the non-being of the super black holes at the galactic cores, and, at the far edge of the First Galaxy, a bright pinpoint of light: a waning supernova. A small green arrow indicated the location of Artificial Environment 17,863,006 in the First Galaxy; she was pleased to note that they were well away from the supernova and its expanding shell of hard radiation. Otherwise the discs showed more colors than any rainbow.

Show us again the view from where we actually are, she thought to the Pocket, and it obeyed her.

She stepped back and looked around the accommodation block's main hall. The yellow light glinted off the lavish metallic fittings of the furniture. The scene was tawdry beyond belief when compared with what she had just been watching.

Leander had already retreated from her own Pocket. The bruises on her face had paled to the same yellowness as the light, but she could still speak only with difficulty.

"I want to get out of here," she said clumsily, as if her mouth were half-filled with food.

"Oh." Still basking in the beauty of the Twin Galaxies, Strider had expected a different reaction.

"Yeah." Leander waved her hand as if there were some things that were beyond mere words. "It's enough to make you believe in a god when you look at something like that. And then you realize that there can't be, because no god would allow something like Artificial Environment 17,863,006 to start a new wave of destruction here . . ."

"Any sane god wouldn't have permitted the first wave of destruction," said Seragarda coldly.

"Maybe he—she, it, whichever—was sterilizing the galaxies of the creatures who built"—Leander waved her arm again, this time to indicate everything around them—"who built these fucking death machines. A natural reaction on the part of a god. Like getting rid of a virus to make the body healthy again."

"Stop thinking like this, Leander," said Strider sharply.

"Why? Wouldn't the best thing we could do for the Twin Galaxies be to get the hell out of here and leave them to shine their beauty—their unsullied beauty—across the face of the Universe?"

"We don't have any choice in the matter," said Seragarda. "What we do or don't do is entirely up to the Main Computer—and to Artificial Environment 17,863,006 itself."

Hein, standing beside her, nodded. There was still a scar on his neck.

"Maybe we could give the Main Computer a few Bible readings or something," said Strider sourly. "You know, about loving your neighbor as you love yourself."

"I tried that." Strauss-Giolitto was sitting in one of the armchairs, her leg bent up in front of her as she examined her toenails with calculated interest. As yet she had shown no sign of wanting to look at the displays in the Pockets. "I thought it might work, but it didn't." She shivered, as if a cold draught had just passed across her shoulder blades. "The puter pointed out some of the inconsistencies in the word of God—like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah but not Lot, who offered his daughters out as prostitutes."

"Dunno what you're talking about," said Strider. Her knowledge of Christianity was limited largely to the Eight Commandments that Umbel had thought worthy of perpetuating.

"I still want to get this killing machine away from here," said Leander, her voice tightly clipped. "I don't think we had the right to bring it here."

"We had no choice, remember," said Strauss-Giolitto, finished with the inspection of her toes and stretching out her leg so that she could see what they looked like from a distance. "It was the one brought us here, not us it."

Leander rounded on Strauss-Giolitto. "Fuck you! You're so buddy-buddy with that fucking computer . . ."

Strauss-Giolitto looked directly at her. Strider could see in her face the anger that the teacher was holding back.

"Those galaxies are stuffed to the gills with death machines like this one," said Strauss-Giolitto. "I'm sure the galaxies look pretty, but in reality they're a pair of lazguns pointed straight into the face of the Universe and ready to be fired at any moment. You think the killers are going to be content to wait forever? Shit, woman, think again. Sooner or later it's going to dawn on them that what they should be doing is searching out lifeforms in other galaxies and exterminating them as well, just on the offchance they might be ur-Helgiolath or Children of the Starlight. The only reason Artificial Environment 17,863,006 didn't blast our fleet out of space as soon as it picked up our presence in Heaven's Ancestor was that it wanted to investigate us further—which it has done, dammit."

Strider saw Leander's hands form into fists. "Cool it," she said. "Both of you, cool it."

"You want to save all the other intelligences in the Universe?" said Strauss-Giolitto, ignoring her. Her other foot had attracted her attention now. "Best thing you can do is let these bastards slug it out until there aren't any of them left. And that does mean any of them. If there's just one that survives it can replicate itself a billionfold."

"What about us?" said Hein.

Strauss-Giolitto shrugged. "Well, what about us? We're not important."

"Is that what God tells you?"

"God hasn't told me anything in a very long time." She leaned back, stretching her body to its full length, putting her hands behind her head and surveying them all, finally locking her gaze on to Strider's. "It's like Leander says—I disagree with her about remarkably little—the body doesn't speak to viruses: it just eliminates them by fair means or foul. We're viruses. The death machines are bigger and more dangerous viruses. We can help the body of the Universe destroy them, if we want to."

"What does your friend the Main Computer think about that idea?" said Leander with a sneer. Her fingers were still knotted up into sharp little fists.

"It doesn't think about it at all. It was programmed at a very basic level not to, and neither Ten Per Cent Extra Free nor I can get in far enough to change its viewpoint." Strauss-Giolitto shrugged again. Even Seragarda looked as if she were finding the affected casualness irritating. "The best thing we can do is go out in a blaze of glory."

"Not fatalistic, are you?" said Strider.

"You bet I am. If God exists then He wants us as His martyrs, dying in the cause of the greater good. If He doesn't—and that's a possibility that has become real to me only these past few weeks—then I'm perfectly happy to make a bargain with the Universe anyway: my life seems a small thing to give if it's maybe going to help save all those billions of others. Don't you think the same?" she said to Strider, her jaw challenging.

"Bit of a hero, huh?" said Strider bitterly.

"No," said Strauss-Giolitto. "Bit of a realist."

#

For the next forty-three hours—just over—Artificial Environment 17,863,006 merely hung in space, if travelling at near light-velocity can be described as hanging in space. Throughout this time—pausing only to visit the latrines—Strauss-Giolitto remained with her head in one of the Pockets, talking to the Main Computer, soothing it as if it were a recalcitrant child. Watching Strauss-Giolitto standing there angered Strider in some obscure way, but she knew better than to interfere: the teacher was the sole interface between the puter and themselves, and presumably knew what she was doing. Strider had tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, but Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Pinocchio refused to allow this, explaining that Strauss-Giolitto had given them strict instructions that this was a confidential debate, not to be interrupted in any circumstances.

"But I'm giving you strict instructions, fuckit!" Strider protested.

WE AGREE WITH STRAUSS-GIOLITTO'S ORDER OF PRIORITIES, the two Images sang together. SHE BELIEVES IT TO BE VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE THAT ANY OF YOU WILL SURVIVE THIS, BUT SHE IS DOING HER BEST TO IMPROVE THAT POSSIBILITY. YOUR INTERVENTION MIGHT—WOULD—BREAK DOWN THE RELATIONSHIP SHE HAS ESTABLISHED WITH THE MAIN COMPUTER.

"Well, you could at least tell me how she's doing?"

No. You must not interfere, Captain Leonie Strider.

Shit: even Pinocchio was addressing her formally now.

Strider hoped that what Strauss-Giolitto was not doing was dictating a very long suicide note.

#

"We could have a child," said Leander, her palm on Nelson's sweaty chest. "Someone to keep Hilary company aside from the cat."

"Oh, yeah, great, just what we need when we're about to get blown to bits."

"In which case, what difference does it make if I'm a few days pregnant?" She pushed him away from her, sat up on the bunk, and began to type instructions into her thighputer.

"Hey, sweet lady, don't I get any say in this?"

"Nope."

"But I got to, you know . . ."

"You just have." She peered at the thighputer's small screen. "Yes, enough of your spermatozoa inside me are still viable, and I'm guiding one of them directly towards my fertile ovum. If it fails I'll try again with another. This is like a puter game—kinda fun, really."

"This, my delicious, is not the stuff of which romance is built."

"You don't think so? I've deliberately cancelled my infertility, just for you. I wouldn't have done that for anyone else—well, probably not. Come on and have a look."

He watched as the sperm cell engaged with the egg.

"You know, Maloron," he said after a while, "that's cute. I've got a kid. A kid that I know about."

"Someone for Hilary to bully."

"Fuckin' Hilary fuckin' bully my fuckin' kid and he's gonna find his fuckin' skull emergin' from the fuckin' soles of his fuckin' feet."

"Put it another way," she said, drawing him to her again.

"OK," he said, cradling her head on his shoulder. "I'll try again. That was one of the wisest things you ever did, Maloron. Now I want us both to live until that kid is big enough so he can beat me at arm-wrestling."

"The kid's a she."

"Yeah, great. Always preferred little girls, anyway."

"And she's still going to be able to beat you at arm-wrestling."

"Sure about that?"

"Oh, I have confidence in my daughter." She grinned at him, then kissed his eyebrows.

"Uh, Maloron, kindest of the kind, she might want a twin brother or sister."

"That could probably be arranged."

"Let's get going on the arranging, then. Hm?"

"Hm."

#

"I have an idea," said Segrill.

Strider looked down at him. Her Pocket had lowered drastically at the Trok's approach, then raised itself again after he had leapt into it.

"Really, it's your own idea all over again," he added.

"Oh yeah?"

"I've carried out a systematic analysis of the weaponry with which Artificial Environment 17,863,006 is equipped." He hopped around through the display of starfields.

"So have I."

"How much of it did you understand?"

"As much as I could."

"I have been able to understand all of it. Some of the weapons are unknown to the Autarchy." One of his eyes seemed to have been replaced by a nearby blue supergiant.

"So? The Main Computer controls all of them. We're just passengers." It was a depressing admission to make out loud.

"They all share a single characteristic."

"Yeah, they're capable of destroying entire star clusters. Kaantalech would give her heart for some of these babies."

"This is the point I wish to make."

"Try again?"

"Artificial Environment 17,863,006 is equipped with weaponry that can destroy very large structures, from others of its kind up to whole groups of stars. However, none of its weapons are designed to counter something small." He moved one of his little wings through a dark nebula, and Strider almost expected to see puffs of gas dissipate. "You remember when you said that the best way of countering the Autarchy was to be like thousands of gadflies rather than a single titan? The same goes here."

"We don't have thousands of gadflies."

"Yes, but we do have three."

"Let me think about this," said Strider. She withdrew her face from the Pocket. Nelson, nearby, said something to her but she waved away his words.

The Trok was no fool. If the giant death machines had worked their way into a stalemate, a few gadflies might mean all the difference between victory and defeat. If two people were trying to hack each other to bits, neither able to gain an advantage, everything could turn on a bee flying into the face of one of them. It's hard to punch or slash at a bee. And a bee can sting. In context, fatally.

She returned to the Pocket.

"Do you know if the ships are still with us?"

"Yes. They are. I checked."

"Are they still functional, though?"

"I got Strauss-Giolitto to check with the Main Computer, and it sees no reason why they should not be."

"That's hardly the most positive of answers."

"Best it can do. They're outside the scope of its systems." Segrill made another agitated little hop. "My guess is that they are—a few weeks of subjective time shouldn't have been long enough to make them go down."

"Um," said Strider, thinking fast. The possibilities could be limitless—and it'd be good to be back on board the Midnight Ranger again, out of this filthy light and feeling herself once more in command. "Any reason to believe the Main Computer would let us leave Artificial Environment 17,863,006?"

"Strauss-Giolitto thinks so. She has that puter more or less wrapped around a diminutive manual digit, you know."

It took Strider a moment to decipher this. "It's worth a try, you reckon?" she said.

"We could always ask—get Strauss-Giolitto to ask."

"I think you're right. Stay here."

Strider thought at the Pocket that she wanted to know where Strauss-Giolitto was, and immediately the starfields vanished to be replaced by the image of the teacher. For a moment Strider couldn't work out what Strauss-Giolitto was doing, then realized that she was sitting in the lotus position, talking earnestly.

"She fitted with a commlink?" said Strider to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

No. But I can communicate between you and her if you wish. She is addressing the Main Computer at its central node.

"Do so. Please."

Strider watched Strauss-Giolitto give a sudden twitch of surprise.

"You there, Leonie?" It seemed odd to hear Maria's voice so clearly when her lips weren't moving.

"Yeah. Tenper's linking us up."

"Good."

"Tenper?"

Yes.

"Can you make sure the Main Computer hears nothing of this until I tell you?"

Certainly.

"Maria," said Strider urgently, "you know what a persuasive, suave diplomat you are?"

Strauss-Giolitto started to laugh. "What do you want, Leonie?"

"I want us back into the Midnight Ranger."

"Ah. And you want me to convince the Main Computer that this would be a good idea?"

"Got it in one, Maria. I don't care what all the rest say, I don't think you're irremediably stupid."

Strauss-Giolitto ignored the joke, instead looking thoughtful. "Have you thought up any good argument I can present?"

"You bet." Tersely Strider explained how the death machines were designed to deal with big targets, not small ones. If the three Wondervale ships were acting as free agents, the chances of Artificial Environment 17,863,006 surviving the inevitable war were greatly enhanced. In addition, the fact that the ships were commanded by organic rather than machine intelligences would offer a further advantage, since organic intelligences were unpredictable in the decisions they made.

"I'll try to roll it over him," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"'Him'?"

"No way he's a girlie."

"The Main Computer's an 'it'."

"Stop talking that way about a friend of mine, OK?"

"Jeez. Talk about anthropomorphism." Strider smiled, and hoped that Ten Per Cent Extra Free would somehow be able to translate the emotion to Strauss-Giolitto.

"I'll try him. I can't guarantee anything."

Strauss-Giolitto's image vanished from the Pocket.

"What the—?" Strider began.

I thought it best to cut your linkage with Strauss-Giolitto in case you interfered unnecessarily in her discussion with the Main Computer.

"Whose side are you on, buster?"

Yours.

#

Lan Yi supposed that he should feel as delighted as everyone else did to be back aboard the Midnight Ranger, but somehow he couldn't stir himself to add to the loud cries of delight. He had never been very frightened of death before—sometimes he had wished that it would come to him soon—but now, now that the memories of his lovemaking with Polyaggle were beginning to fade, he found his mood changing. Death was a terrible void—terrible because it represented the unknown. The ghost of Geena—although it hadn't been a genuine ghost, he knew—had begged him to join her in that darkness. The temptation that she had offered was the same temptation that death had always offered him: the blanking out of being, the timeless rest, the abdication of all responsibility.

Because he was suddenly frightened of death, he hoped it would come very quickly. The less time he had to think about it the better.

The Main Computer had, in the end, decided to release them from Artificial Environment 17,863,006 much more easily than any of them had expected: whatever magic Maria had woven with it through their long debates, they had obviously been effective.

He wished there were something like a medbot to be as effective about curing the scabs on his body: they itched infernally, normally when he woke up midway through a sleeping-period. At the same time it felt strangely good to know that he was growing new life in his body. The Death In Joy was something to be confronted later—soon, perhaps—but he had come to understand why pregnant women so often had a permanent half-smile. Polyaggle's deception had been—well, it had been a deception, but he was still grateful to her for it. He had probably committed similar deceptions in his own early decades.

They had stood by one of the airlocks, wearing their suits, each wondering if they'd got dressed up for a party that was never going to happen. Lan Yi had reached out a gloved hand to touch Polyaggle on the shoulder of her suit, then reached down with his other hand to touch Seragarda's suit. Maria, behind him, had put her hand on his side. It was all just nervousness, he knew, but at the same time it was a gesture towards something more.

There was a funny little whuff from the airlock portal.

"You got the cat, Hilary?" said Strider, her voice grating in Lan Yi's ears.

"Wrapped around my neck. Her breath's a bit . . ."

"Good to hear it. I think we're going to get out of here." There was in Strider's voice that sense of confidence which hinted she wasn't confident at all. "I'm going to hook you on to me as soon as we're through that 'lock."

Lan Yi shifted uncomfortably inside his suit. The touch of the fabric of his jumpsuit against his still raw lacerations was partly painful and partly just irritating, like an itch that won't go away. He had discovered that the former was easier to tolerate than the latter; wondering if he were likely to turn into a masochist, he gave another little squirming movement and a small, welcome wash of pain drowned for a moment the itch.

The tripartite portal suddenly seemed to melt as the doors hinged themselves open.

Everyone made a slight instinctive movement towards the airlock then stopped, realizing the chaos that could result if they all tried to get through the portal at the same time.

"Pridehouse first, Lingk-kreatzai second, Polyaggle, Hein, Segrill and Humans next," dictated Strider. She herself, with Hilary in tow, came last of all, Lan Yi noted as they crowded into the dark interior.

The three doors shut with the same abruptness as they had opened, and all was pitch black. Then someone—Orphanwifer, Lan Yi thought—had the sense to switch on their suit lights. Polyaggle nestled herself against his side.

And, at last, a vista of stars.

"Freedom," said Strider. "I hope."

IT IS FREEDOM, said Ten Per Cent Extra Free. I HAVE BEEN ASSURED SO BY THE MAIN COMPUTER.

"I trust that bastard about as far as I could throw it," muttered Seragarda.

"The Main Computer has given me the same assurance," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"Stop the banter." It was Strider again, her voice now crisper. "We leave this 'lock in the same orderly fashion as we entered it, OK?"

Using belt-ropes and grav-grapples the three parties made their separate ways across the octahedral sides of Artificial Environment 17,863,006. Yet again Lan Yi was astonished by the sheer immensity of the technological task that must have gone into the artifact's construction—and all so that the Children of the Starlight could go about exterminating the ur-Helgiolath. Had the same amount of effort been put into . . . he shrugged to himself and the rope in front of him tugged at his waist as if in annoyance. Inside Artificial Environment 17,863,006 it was just as if one were in a spacecraft—a very large one, almost incomprehensibly large, but still just a spacecraft. Out here, though, in the pale starlight, the construction seemed to be a whole world. And to think that the Children of the Starlight had built thousands upon thousands of these.

Re-entering the Midnight Ranger was like a return to home. From the chattering through the comm links Lan Yi could tell that all of them felt the same: they were chicks coming back to the nest, where there would be warmth and food.

One person didn't join the chatter as the inner door of the airlock opened.

Seragarda.

She had linked herself up behind Polyaggle and ahead of Strider and Hilary, Lan Yi could see as everyone unhooked themselves from each other and then struggled to remove their helmets. He looked across at Strider, exaggeratedly raising his eyebrows.

"Seragarda wanted to come with us rather than stay with the rest of the Pridehouse," she said. "We've got the room; we can recycle her wastes as well as anyone else's."

Seragarda brushed herself against him affectionately.

"Why?" he said to her, one of the Images coping with the translation.

"You think like me," she replied, rubbing her head against the back of his hand. "I like being around you."