"Still there," Edward Delloso affirmed, glancing down at the hastily-rigged gravanom mapper.  Commander Anna Teague's close-cropped dark head nodded minutely, just visible over the top of the pilotbooth.  Sev Jenik felt obliged to amplify her response.

 "Expected."

 By whose game plan?  Delloso wondered.  Who was Jenik kidding?  The two agents had said little to indicate that they knew anything specific about what the Ri were up to, almost three billion kilometers below, within roasting range of Xi Tauri's vituperative stellar gales.

 Delloso sat back in his navigator's booth, which put him just out of sight of the team up front.  The searchship Strom5 was a compact longjaunt class military scout vehicle, boasting about the same living space as his old one-man startug.

 Three people crammed into this kind of intimacy put telling strains on one's tolerance, and it had been made abundantly clear from the beginning of the mission that Teague didn't give a damn how Delloso coped with the radical changes which they were imposing on the unrecovered, shattered pieces of his miserable life.  All that mattered to the two of them was the--

 "He's moving," Sev's low voice cut through the extended silence.

 Silence.  It had been a ceaseless, unforgiving enemy of Delloso's, stemming from a time he would have forgotten...had almost managed to forget...until the PanPlanet boys had tracked him down for this--
 

 "Consultant," he muttered angrily.  Spying on the unknown beings that had once saved his worthless starburned hide.  And doing it for an organization that had tossed him into the gutter only a year ago...

 His eyes dropped to the gravanom holo again, frowned.  The instrument was a prototype, invented on a distant colonial planet, possessed by only a few human ships.  It registered the rapid, elusive changes in the gravitational shift of 5-D quinton energies as hot time-slipping tachyon plasma moved through gravitational waves in fifth dimensional space.  The property mapped was the quintum radiation equivalent to a 4D doppler, but its informational relationship to 4D space-time was virtually unexplored.

 He had first seen it, used it, almost a dozen experiential years before.  And in the intervening time, the effects of its multi-colored play of pseudolight, fed direct by lec into the lateral geniculate visual processing centers of the user's brain, had changed his life forever...

 Beneath the pattern of 5D gravitational anomalies, the Ri carrier's total electro-magnetic signature had subtly changed.

 "No, not moving," he spoke absently.  "Split."  They were putting out a smaller craft.

 Sev said nothing, but swung skeptically back to his bank of sophisticated G'naian-built mek-interpreted displays, a scintillating fogbank of fields and flexures.  Delloso could see nothing sensible there at all.  He had been not accorded the dubious honor of shiplink, and without the interpretive mental overlay of the G'naian mek mind, the console remained an uninformative blur.

 Security risk, he chewed a recalcitrant hangnail.  He could imagine the stilted, distant Teague explaining such a label to him: we view your continued existence with unallayed suspicion...

 A moment later Sev nodded reluctantly to Teague.  "Yes, he may be correct.  Strom agrees that the possibility is low but measurable."

 To hell with the probabilities, Delloso grinned savagely to himself.  I'm right and you can't admit it!

 Not only did he know that the Ri had launched another ship, but he knew the size class: it was as large as a courier, although the signature was radically different.  In a way, it bore striking similarity to the Ri mothership's peculiar paradigm:  Its mass was spread out in odd, discrete bundles.

 What the hell kind of modification was that?

 He had never seen such a pattern in any G'nai starship, nor in any of the lower technologies of the G'nai's thousands of partner races.  Although who could say what passed for "normal" with the mysterious Ri?

 What more the hell was it doing out there, so close to a bizarre, hellish variable like Xi Tauri?

 And more to the point, why this particular star?

 Their attraction to Xi Tauri had to be more than mere happenstance...

 He closed his eyes down, squinting at the odd play of colors in the gravitational anomaly mapper.

 The gravanom had been one of four concessions to Delloso's several requests for nonstandard equipment during the week-long preparations at Barnard's Beacon.  Two others were the old-fashioned lidar screen and an optical telescope relay.  The fourth and last was a tiny port beside his booth.

 The port had been more a subtle revenge than a necessity.

 It cost a great deal of money to bribe the Beacon's G'nai-trained engineers to alter the hyperprotected sacredness of the G'naian cocoon-field ships.  Eyeball-to-eyeball contact between a living creature and the likes of inter-dimensional space was regarded as near blasphemy by the ancient First Race.  They exacted high tribute to breach their cocoon-field wall with something so insufferably gross as a window.

 Teague had winced.  And paid.

 A satisfying if small reprisal for the humiliating way in which they had obtained his unwilling participation.

 In truth, the damned thing remained shuttered most of the time.  Trans-c radiations of 5-space could reach through the gravnetic webs that enshrouded searchships and perform unpleasant manipulations on sensitive biological machinery.  There was nothing out there to "see," in the strict sense of the word, in any case.

 But Teague did not know this.  Delloso cultivated the mystery.

 They had their damned fogbank consoles, and he had his window.

 The little 'groper, which PanPlanet Service had ingeniously modified for their mission, was supplying all of the currently meaningful visual data, courtesy of a little piloting magic.  They were doing the theoretically improbable, Teague holding the searchship in 5-space on the lip of Xi Tauri's bloated, unstable gravity basket, invisible to any other existences.  Meanwhile the groper--which was "located," insofar as the term had any meaning, in the bowels of the searchship--was busy hopping in and out of 4-space, spending a femtosecond out of randomly generated 4-space intervals gathering information as photon flux from the dimensions humans still intractably referred to as "real," then reappearing aboard Strom5 to disgorge its accumulated impressions to the G'naian ship intelligence.

 It was a tedious business, maintaining track of their own coordinates to the required accuracy in both dimensions at once.  That Teague could do it at all, apparently without recourse to mek intervention--much less for the 52 hours during which they had been tracking the Ri--was a source of no small amazement to Delloso.

 A further mystery haunting him, in turn, was the facility with which the Ri pilots, far sunward from Strom5's cold, distant post, were riding out the 5space tsunamis that blew out of Xi's bilious gut--as if they knew the twisting, chaotic patterns in advance.

 He felt as if he ought to know how they did it.  But trying to search that particular part of his destroyed recollections triggered a nauseating physical pain in his gut and chest that persisted for hours.

 "They have efficiently and thoroughly wired you neurologically shut, Mr. Delloso," the PanPlanet psychomedician had patted him on the hand.  "And maybe that's best, after all."

 Best?  To know you once had a life, an identity, and that it had been taken forever away from you?

 He'd grabbed six hours of sleep out of the last three-day period in the tiny closet that served as his quarters.  As far as he was aware, Teague hadn't left her booth at all.  Sev seemed more human:  Delloso had caught the Eradinite dozing in his booth when he came back on shift from his last spell of welcome unconsciousness.

 For Delloso, the days had dragged by with frustrating torpidity; he felt little of the mission-oriented pressure which the two agents were clearly suffering.

 Three tedious weeks of serving as unwilling baggage had stung Delloso with one of those uncomfortable universal truths:  in the middle of a galactic war, it was just possible that one might die of acute boredom.

 Some time later, a subliminal jar jerked Delloso up in his booth.

 "We are going closer," Sev swiveled around to face back down the narrow companionway that separated the two agents from the instrument-crammed navigator's niche.  "This is where you start to earn your keep, Edward."

 Sev's inflection was studiously jovial, and bore none of the sarcastic overtones which Teague would have used with those words.  Nonetheless Delloso found it irritating.

 "I don't believe the 'keep' you're referring to much interests me, Jenik," he snapped.  "And if you intend to move down toward Xi, we've got something to set straight first."

 Teague had half-turned now, plainly surprised at this outburst after almost a month of truculent silence.  Her green eyes, large and widely spaced in a pale white but strongly-featured face, fastened on him intently.

 "What are the terms, Edward," she requested, typically direct.

 "I'm not bargaining, Commander Teague.  Your people have seen to it that I've had no choices on this little excursion-"  She started to speak, but he waved her silent.  "-No, just hold it.  I'm not going to make useless demands, or rant about Sentient's Rights or the illegal means you two used to shanghai me.  You're both pros, so you've already sold whatever once served you for a conscience-"

 "Really, Edward-"

 "-nor am I going to engage in esoteric arguments over the absurdities of interstellar wars."  All of these were jibes directed at Teague's abortive attempts to draw him into discussion on their unusually long 5-space journey from Barnard's Beacon.  He thought he caught a disconcerting twitch at the corners of her mouth, but he plowed doggedly on.

 "Up to now, I haven't counted much with the two of you.  But from this point on, Xi's whims are lord of us all.  And for whatever its worth, I know the moods of this star better than any other man alive.  From this point on, everything we do that affects the motions of this ship must be under my control directly.  Or you've wasted your effort--and likely my life--in dragging me here."

 Sev was saying soothingly, "Of course we intend to turn the prime navigation duties over to y-"

 Delloso began to angrily interrupt when he found himself deferring to Teague's quickly interposed, "Wait!"  Sev shut up and looked at her.  "Mr. Delloso is correct.  We must get everything out front, and I also expected some reshuffling of authority."

 Anna Teague smiled for the first time that Delloso could remember.  It was a tightly controlled flexing of her thin-set lips, but seemed genuine enough.  "I said 'authority,' Edward, not responsibility.  This is my ship, and my mission.  And I will never forget that."

 Delloso nodded cautiously.  "That would go without saying."

 "All this time I'd taken your silence for apathy.  Suddenly I feel much better."  She made a slight motion with her hand.  "Sev, why don't we set up a, uh, formal chow.  I believe we can afford the time.  Don't you agree, Edward."

 Delloso automatically rechecked the gravanom, letting its projections film over his visual centers.  The 'groper's last update showed the two Ri craft still in tandem, dark red sunspots against the boiling, blanched surface of Xi, in the wide stellar station-keeping orbit which the parent ship had first taken upon arrival.

 The alien engines were dead, and the antimatter-spiked fusion piles responsible for their motive power were idling.  They were maneuvering on the captured energies of Xi's exhalations alone.

 Starship engines, no matter how alien, are not machinery of a mercurial nature--they act slowly, deliberately, predictably, detectably...

 "We have time," he confirmed.  He wondered if the relief showed in his face.  At last it appeared that some sort of bridge might be forged between the three of them.  A bridge leading to some hint that might open his own blank past, and the reason for PanPlanet's undesirably persistent interest in him?

 "I'll call you when it's ready," Sev brushed by him in the narrow companionway, heading back toward the tiny galley.
 
 

 PanPlanet Service was an ill-disguised military arm of Standard Worlds, a G'nai-run partnership of races that shared one main commonality: they had been found by the G'nai, and invited to make use of the growing, galaxy-spanning web of the plexor network--a shuttle system of world-sized cocoonfield ships in constant near-lightspeed motion around their blacksling hubs--"darkstars," "blackholes," "nulldrivers"--the motors of galactic commerce.

 There had been a time, one he didn't remember clearly now, when that enterprise had kindled a youthful enthusiastic idealism in him.  That feeling had been dulled by a strange mix of catastrophe and contempt.  As one old salt of his acquaintance had put it, "Life is fifty per cent accident, and fifty per cent cussing the bastards responsible."  The result was to render him a sentient shell, emptied on the inside, only able to look outward and hunger for the meaning that escaped him.

 It was not yet clear to him what the PanPlanet agents thought the Ri carrier was doing at Xi Tauri.  Nor if they had been told anything at all by the G'nai, beyond the assignment of tracking and observing the Ri.

 But, whatever the G'nai or the agents were up to, he knew that this was not the first time the Ri had been to this most hellish of pulsating variables.

 At least once before, one of their ships had visited this unstable cosmic oddity...

 He didn't know what they had come here expecting to find, but one thing he knew they had found:  a frozen lump of protoplasm with the spark of life guttering out, part of an expanding debris cloud that had once been the brave Standard Worlds chartship Rift Edge...a dead crew of Standard Worlds' best, hand-reared personnel...and one other...

 They hadn't trusted their freelance navigator's odd hunches.  He had been, after all, a Colonial nomad, hired for the trip because of his reputation as a peculiar master of 5-space transit of variable star fields.

 It was a stunt not often attempted by sane men, except in desperation.  And Xi Tauri was one of the most dangerous types of variables, the rapid irregular.  So far, Xi Tauri-type stars appeared extremely rare in the galaxy.  But to the ancient and near-immortal First Race, nothing unique could remain so forever.

 The source of Xi-class irregular pulsations had never been satisfactorily determined.  However, one thing that had been established beyond doubt: the flux of supragravitational energies around Xi in 5space were hazardous to the near-blind plunging flight of the world-sized G'naian cocoonships along their ancient galaxy-spanning blacksling-driven plexor net.  Xi lay near a major plexor route between the central Nested Worlds and the outer Rim, and the G'nai were emphatic that its shoals be charted.

 After all, plexor cocoonships passed that way every ten thousand experiential years or so--huge ships representing huge cosmologically long-term investments on the part of both the G'nai and their participating partner races.

 Perhaps more to the point, knowledge was power, and the G'nai had wielded that power with utter, impersonal, complete control in the galaxy for many billions of years.  They knew better than to let sleeping mysteries lie, especially deadly ones.

 Of course, the risks were high for examiners of such mysteries, hence the G'nai were understandably reticent to undertake the task personally.  On the other hand, humanoid life was cheap.  And the races chock-full of risk-addicted loonies.

 And the G'nai, as usual, paid well.

 Standard always been able to find those who would fill any G'naian demand, including, in this case, one hungry, wandering Belavian Colonial with a penchant for daring the edge.  Yet, at the end, they had given his judgment about as much credence as they would have given any lunatic's...

 The impact of the Rift Edge with the 5-space component of a local Xi expansion front had been as final as that of a raindrop striking an ocean wave:  the ship had simply joined the greater sea of fluxing deBroglie energies, dumping a pitifully small amount of its shielded mass up-D and down-D as tribute to the Law of Dimensional Conservation.

 Owing his life to the unbiased expression of a law of Nature was no new thing to Delloso.  But occasionally he broke into sweats at night thinking about what had happened to those of his less fortunate shipmates who had spun, still alive, to the higher temporal extensions...

 The time from that split second of vindicating horror until his awakening in the hospital on Barnard's Beacon was a black wall as final as death.  A wall that extended in fits and starts back to his personal beginnings.

 Intellectually, he knew the synopsis that filled in the recent two-year period.  It had been furnished by the team of PanPlanet surgeons that had painstakingly resurrected him--apparently for the second time--from a state of frozen suspended animation:

 Somehow, he had been taken aboard a Ri ship.  And, somehow, they'd let him live, after a fashion.  This was an occurrence absolutely without precedent in the several thousand year history of determined avoidance by the Ri of any sort of traceable interaction with the G'nai's far-flung non-empire.

 Of course, no one had known this for quite a long while.  The Rift Edge was simply one of a few dozen unexplained disappearances of exploratory craft that epoch.  Eventually, the G'nai would have initiated a replacement mission, and likely never been the wiser.

 But then, a rare meeting had taken place at Geise 1482B.

 Geise 1482B was neutral territory in the low-key not-quite-war between the G'nai's pan-galactic network of cooperating races and the ill-understood lifeform called the Ri.  Delloso had been an unexpected part of a wordless, long-distance exchange.  A G'naian routeship had swung around a frontier plexor post and almost run into a Ri counterpart, apparently using the black hole as a plexor anchor-point just like the G'nai.

 The world-sized routeship was simply unable to stop, but it had managed to send a rather long G'naian-prepared canned message by maser.  The Ri had been distinctly better prepared for this meeting.  A single, cryptic reply had immediately fired back: a time mark and a set of coordinates on the G'naian ship's intended path.

 The routeship crew had approached the apparent rendezvous point with some trepidation, not having the slightest inkling what to expect.  And, contrary to ancient fiction, it was not possible to call home and ask for advice.  They winged it, on tattered nerves.  And there had been Delloso, in one of the Rift Edge's own coffin-like, jelly-filled exoplasm cachets, at the bottom of a well-marked crater on a small asteroid, incredibly synchronized with the routeship's near-lightspeed velocity as it exited the Giese system.

 No one could imagine spending the amount of energy it took to perform that feat for no reason other than to return a being to his people.  It went without saying that there must be more complex motives involved...

 The routeship had turned him over to Standard Worlds commercial authorities at the next plexor node they approached, which happened to be Barnard's Beacon.  He was still packed in the exoplasm cachet.  The routeship had been greatly relieved when PanPlanet lifted their brief quarantine and dispatched them on their way once more.

 A great deal of Trojan-horse suspicion was directed at Delloso initially, persisting long after confirmation of his once-valid credentials as a somewhat misfit member of the race of Homo terrestrialis ssp. transplantus sssp. polynesii.  That two-year blackout in his recent memory bothered the G'nai and their partners deeply.

 PanPlanet Service had taken him under their covert wing immediately, pumped him vainly for information on the enigmatic Ri, using every conceivable means short of torture, and finally dumped his wrung-out husk in the Barnard's Beacon Technical Labor Pool with 5000 stellars in his ill-fitting jumpsuit, and very damned little else.

 Delloso's blood tended to effervesce every time he thought about it.

 With some very large question marks still clinging to his identity and his loyalties, it had been almost impossible to fit back into his old niche as navigator.  Standard Worlds' Plexor Survey office at the Beacon had finally condescended to hire him on as a lowly startug pilot, snagging cargobots popping into safespace, destined for the Beacon.

 It was a lonely job.  Delloso both hated it for the isolation, yet was relieved because of the isolation.  The holes in his past were frightening in their completeness.  But the time on his hands had given him the chance to whittle away at the black wall over those two years.  He would sit on post, light hours from the nearest living thing, waiting for the arrival alarm, staring out an unshielded port at the dusty patchwork of unknowably distant living suns, thinking...or not thinking...waiting for the wall to fall.

 In tiny spots, the wall was weakening.  Like those grains of light, single spark-like glimpses of another side, pushing against the voracious empty darkness, struggling to get through.

 Sometimes on station, when he awoke from restless sleep, a fragment of a dream would persist.  His sense of smell seemed peculiarly heightened, making him nearly vomit at the pungency of hot electronics and ship's oil...

 Or, relaxing in an airtree park on R-and-R at a way-station, at odd times he would catch a breath of triggering scent, amplifying a whole cascade of sharp mental redolent alien echoes.  Familiar.  Tantalizing.  Painfully strange.  Then gone, utterly, beyond recall.

 "It's trying to tell you something," one forgotten companion had told him.  She had sensed, more than anyone else, the pervading empty bewilderment that ate at Delloso's soul.  "Don't tear at it so, Edward.  You only smear the meaning."

 "You know," he had told her, looking into her haunted eyes.

 "My whole life is that wall," she said simply.  "But we are different.  I want it there."  And a while later he had left her, sinking back into the anonymity of teeming station existence.

 One day, a lec disk had arrived from Standard Worlds.  It had been forwarded and sealed in his safebox at Barnard's Beacon.  By that time, Delloso had signed on a round-trip stint with the human-run G'naian commercial searchship Nightblaze.  In the strange, relativistic world of plexor travel, by the time he had returned, fully two millennia had gone by and the news was unsurprisingly a bit stale.

 He lecked the contents, relaxing in a library in the many-times-in-his-absence remodeled Beacon data resources center.  The librarian (still a living being, not one of the ever-increasing G'naian meks) showed him how to handle the new-fangled contrivance, which was little more than a flimsy hairnet, pressing just there...

 A pleasant but very no-nonsense human female clerk faced him in the now-ancient image.  He couldn't place the peculiarly smooth structure of her facial features--as if her cheek bones were molded with no sharp ridges.  Cosmetic surgery?  Genetics?  How could you guess these days.

 Or those days!  Hell this, flipping thing is 2000 years old now!

 "Mr. Edward Kalikali Delloso.  Your identity as a human nongenetic native of the planet Belavia, of Bel's Star, Hyades subcluster epsilon, has been recently (sic!) confirmed.

 "Records indicate that you were trained on this planet in Galactic Epoch 14.556876433 as a navigator, and subsequently were stationed on the Bel's Star repair station, then moved via a plexor ship to the Sagittarian arm, where you studied variable starfield 5space physics at Branyarin Complex.  After a number of private initiatives, you were contracted in Epoch 14.556876922 by us for the Rift Edge mission, which apparently aborted due to pilot error three hundred years ago, Galactic Experiential, as you know.

 (You're telling me.)

 "Standard Worlds is prepared to offer you passage to your home planet of Belavia, and the sum of $t 150,000 at successful completion, should you decide to accept our mission, in exchange for a one-time contract for your services.  We are specifically interested in hiring you for a return effort to Xi Tauri.  If at any time you decide to accept this offer, please contact any Plexor Central officer, or any PanPlanet agency..."
 

 Delloso had taken the lec net off with a slow, distracted motion.

 Belavia.  Bel's Star...

 It brought nothing but the heartache of emptiness and the rising feeling of revulsion that seemed to accompany his every effort to remember.

 "The Ri have done a very remarkable job of selective erasure, Freeman Delloso," the PanPlanet medician had confided when he had checked out of their R&R facility.  "Only olfaction, taste and kinesthetic memories seem to have survived.  Out of neurological ignorance, I'd say."  He'd stared pensively at Delloso's chart.  "I'd give anything to know how they did that."

 And Delloso would give almost anything to undo it!

 But to journey to Bel's Star?  And back to Xi Tauri on the way...?

 He then linked to his visual calculator, ran a chain of kiloflops, and laughed out loud, forgetting where he was.  The librarian and a number of patrons gave him disapproving looks.

 "Sorry."

 Epoch 14.556876433 for his training.  Close enough to his birth, probably.  Epoch 14.556876922 for the Rift Edge mission.

 511 years from his birth epoch.  And here it was, another 2,000-some galactic years later, thanks to this last job.

 He stood up, leaving the lec disk sitting in the machine.

 Take a look around me, bozos, he sent a mental message to Standard.  I can imagine what "home" looks like now.  With not even the fourth generation offspring of his own epoch still around, who the hell would care if he came back?

 And why would he want to return to a place he couldn't even remember?

 Some deal.

 As for the $t 150,000--"There aren't enough freaking stellars in the universe to get me back to Xi."

 "Please, Freeman," the librarian said sternly.  "If your business is finished..." She nodded toward the entry flexure.

 "Finished," he muttered.  "And dead.  I'm leaving.  Thank you."

 "Oh, Freeman.  Your lec."

 "Keep it.  File it in the historical comedy section."

 He levved out and up into the streaming traffic levitating along the motivways, and lost himself once more in the lonely business of living in the asynchronous galaxy.
 

 Life, as always, had its abysses as well as its valleys.

 At one point, he had found himself surrounded by an unbearably loud confluence of ill-smelling, unwashed personages, somewhere in the floating flow of traffic along a portside motivfield track.  He had blended in perfectly.

 These were the quays and warehouses and loading docks of interstellar commerce, at the interface between Barnard's Beacon's outer cocoonfield barrier and deep space.  Moon-sized transfer ships and cargobots hung close in parking orbits, exchanging the articles of trade between themselves and using the Beacon's reservoir, repair, refueling, rest and recreation facilities.

 At the moment, he was engaged in that time-honored pursuit of professional adversity...  Job-hunting.

 The incredibly energy-rich G'nai contracted with races throughout the galaxy in their peculiar way, always trading the transfer of their incomprehensibly advanced technology and "free" use of their cocoonfield ships in exchange for a continuous stream of information.  That was all.  Just data.

 Free informational access to everything.

 As to the way in which their ships and technology were used, and the data gathered, they did not seem to care.

 The First Race were the de facto preeminent intelligences of the Milky Way.  (Not the G'nai name for their galaxy.  That was humanly unpronounceable, and had probably not been vocalized even by its creators for a thousand millennia.)

 Their homes, the "Nested Worlds," were time-warped shells of matter in near lightspeed orbits around contrived black hole systems at the center of the galaxy.  The region amongst the Nested Worlds had been long since swept clean of contaminating matter, and was kept that way by their ingenious circulating hypermasses.

 The outer shells of loNest approximated galactic experiential as far as chronicity rate, but those approaching the Schwarzchild Radii of the inner worlds were progressively aposynchronous.

 In the outer shells, and living on planets of carefully shepherded stars of the Core, the G'nai still maintained their worker populations, stemming from stock now billions of years ancient, mixed and genetically manipulated to suit their eclectic interests.  Here were the counterparts of shipyards and their factories, although Delloso doubted many humans would recognize the manifestations of the G'nai technologies as such.

 But down close to cNest, the ultimate levels of G'nai life, were structures and G'nai beings that had been tailored by a bizarre science to withstand the forces of a c-contracted, time dilated existence on a gravitational precipice overlooking neverwhen.

 In cNest lived the Keepers, the philosophers, and the ultimate library of all galactic knowledge, siphoning down from the madly living universe of "normal" time, through the successive chronicity shells of the Nested Worlds, and finally entering a realm of 4th dimensional stability only dreamed of by human philosophers.  Speeding, cycling phantasms, locked away from the ephemeral pursuits of the living universe, paradoxically static, waiting...

 Waiting for an epoch the G'nai had accepted as their destiny...

 A time when secular empires grew old and suns grew cold, and the Great Atom Mother called all her myriad spinning children back to her central breast, for a kiss of actinic regenerative fire, before flinging them all outward to life anew...

 As the G'nai called it, The Epoch of Post-Imminence...distinguishing it from the current Epoch of Imminence.

 Theirs, of course.

 I should have such worries.

 Such were the destitute nomad's, Edward Kalikali Delloso's, sardonic thoughts on that particularly miserable day...

 Through the veiled cocoonfields beyond his erstwhile group of unemployed itinerants, transports and shuttle boats were hanging like corpulent nebulous clouds against an ebon sky.  Stevedore gangs swarmmed around netted cargo, doing work the G'nai meks alongside them either would not do, or found so far beneath them that they could not quite seem to fathom the reasons for anyone wanting to do it in the first place.

 Humans and other races, each cloaked in their characteristic biosuits, hauled, yelled, squealed, blasphemed, and otherwise motivated resisting ignorant matter to do their bidding, ultimately sending out an almost continuous tornado-like funneling stream of cargo across the intervening void to the fattening cloud-ships--a loading process often consuming years.

 For fifteen hours he had shoved and cursed amidst the herd of other would-be laborers, vying for the attention of an assignment mek.

 At times a faint tracery of gold would lick out from one of those G'nai intelligence's legmen, like a lightning bolt from a pale concentration of fog, and touch one of the ludicrous drops in the cloud of workers seeking employment.  The selected body would fly along the motiv field, pass through one of the dispersed entry flexures where a biosuit would be applied, and merge with the teams of players on the other side tending the loading operations.

 There was no satisfying that crowd.  They hissed any being lucky enough to be picked, and they booed when there was a break in the choosing.  Those picked generally heckled back, and were in turn vociferously ungrateful when they found themselves headed toward a task they had not volunteered for, and even if they had volunteered for it, they had changed their minds.

 That day, no lance of selection had touched him.  Toward the end, he had been so emotionally exhausted from the vigil that he was glad that he had not been picked.

 He and many hungry, weary and disgruntled others had eventually retired to the dirty chasm of a station alleyway, made all the more miserable by its 3-dimensionally-populated nature.  Filth, food, and worn personal baggage bobbed unrestrained in the close space between shop and passage walls.  Circulation was restricted and the smell was ripe.

 Here, the barriers were actual, human-contrived matter--not the almost unfelt impenetrability of G'naian force fields.  There were no meks, no intruding eyes of the aloof masters from the Nested Worlds.  Here the only things that counted were human things.  Deals.  Manipulations.  Fleeting romance.  Anger.  Frustration.  Hunger.  Thirst.  Theft.  Occasionally murder.  Sleep...

 He hadn't slept long.

 "I saw you break a stellar at the bar last night, terran.  I want the pieces."

 The knife at his back had convinced his fatigue-shrouded brain that galvanic action was necessary.

 He had spun and smashed a chunky fist into the man's throat before even considering that the would-be robber might not be alone.

 "Bastards!" he levered himself off the choking assailant's body, straight at the small group of stunned accomplices, through them as they scattered, then desperately caromed off the far alley wall and out into the motiv lanes as they regrouped and pursued.

 A chase under the observant sensors of the G'naian ward meks is a thing to behold.  The penalties for such disruptive, illogical antics are excruciating for both victim and offender.  Such considerations give rise to absurd, spontaneously choreographed pretenses to preserve anonymity on the part of both pursuer and pursued.

 But Delloso did not play fair.

 He swatted his motiv arm windings against the sensitive trailing guidewake of a passing pedestrian and sent the unfortunate creature tumbling into the lagging knot of predators.

 Cries of anguish and surprise were cut off as the motiv fields sensed motion error and clamped the nucleus of disorder into instant stasis.

 A stasis that did not include Delloso.

 As the civil meks descended like white blood cells on the clotted melee, he dodged down another side avenue, up another, and swung off the new, low-traffic motivway into an open shop flexure.

 He leaned against an entry wall, chest heaving, wiping sweat out of his eyes as his sight adapted to the dim light.

 It did not have the scent of a shop.

 Shapes drifted in the dimness.  Lighted patterns of faint coruscating mist, contained in dark lines of roughly-strung wire and rope...

 "May I help you, my brother?"

 The soft voice made him jump.  A bent shadow separated from one of the artifacts he now took to be some kind of statuary.

 "No," Delloso caught his breath, steadying himself away from the wall.  Surprisingly, he found himself drifting to a floor.  The place had a gravector installed.  "Sorry.  Just looking."

 "Oh?"  The shadow resolved itself into a small human, quite old, affecting a cloak and mantle round his skinny, wrinkled neck.  His face was burned black in the characteristic mottling of a spacer's star tan that has not undergone regenic repair.  The man was staring at Delloso's own blackened visage.  "Ah.  A fellow nomad.  Please, come into our humble temple."

 Delloso gauged the entrance flexure, still glowing open.

 "What is this place?"

 "A resting place.  A haven.  A Temple of Divided Light."

 Delloso grunted.

 "You know of us."

 "A pseudo-sect built on racial separatism."  Delloso turned toward the flexure, awkwardly disconcerted to find that his motiv windings didn't bite in.  Apparently you were expected to walk in this damned place.

 "That is the secular way of perceiving us," the little man agreed, sauntering beside Delloso's towering chunkiness.  "We also believe in separating the hunted from the hunter."

 Delloso halted at the exit, peering out into the sparsely populated motivway.  The guy had a point there.  "Tell me more."

 It was invitation enough.  "Good!  I am Brother Janus, keeper of the doors-"

 "-My thanks for keeping this one open-"

 "-and Prelate of this small Temple.  Yes...But wouldn't you prefer to sit down?  We have a lec room, quiet, contemplative.  And it is near 3meal time, if you suffer from a more temporal hunger..."

 "I prefer a doorway," he obstinately continued to scan the passersby, watching the motion pattern of the G'nai meks in their slow, drifting patrol of the way.  Nothing unusual there...  "You said, 'Keeper of Doors?'"

 The old man sighed, whisked a chair out of nowhere and sat down.  "I exaggerated.  Forgive me, there is only the one."

 Delloso shrugged.  "It'll do."

 After a few seconds:  "You are a man of much experience."

 "I'm a man, all right.  Like you.  Not a soul on this station but hasn't had plenty of experience."

 "Manifestly."  The cleric was silent for several minutes, appearing to rest his eyes on a cross-shaped artifact of hammered metal on the opposite wall.

 Delloso reached a decision, seeing no change in the sluggishly normal traffic pattern outside.  "Well, thanks for the doorway, Janus--"

 "-I wouldn't step out there just yet, if I were you," the fellow placed a surprisingly strong restraining hand on Delloso's sleeve.

 "-what?"  Delloso jerked his arm away but followed his gaze toward a shop entrance upward from their position in the tunnel-like space of the motivway.  Four shapes of mixed parentage were cycling in an eddy, seemingly window-shopping.  Apparently he was not the only one smart enough to evade the stasis check.

 "The hunters?"

 "Scum."  Delloso laughed humorlessly.  "Like me."

 "You are not one of them," the prelate disagreed decisively.  "They are foundlings.  Bred here like rats."  His distaste was evident.  "The likes of them have never trod the starways.  You should stay a short while," he urged.  "I have a few things to show you, a few demonstrations.  You are already a Separatist in lifestyle.  Would you not like to understand why that is your destiny, to be Apart--?"

 The odd little cleric met Delloso's eyes from his low position in the chair.  Each wrinkle on his countenance seemed traced in high relief, making the face a mask of imbedded knowing.

 "My destiny?"

 His words triggered an entombed resonance in Delloso's wounded psyche.  The immensely sad reverberations stung him with shocking depth.  Tears welled, his throat worked, he felt so empty--

 Delloso looked desperately back into the symbol-filled interior of the temple, specters of others' twisted fears and alien viewpoints, the contagious patterns of their lives and beliefs, always ready to explode forth and fill an inner vacuum, reaching through him for an island of being they must never, never touch...

 Just an old man...a human, like me...

 And out there, dirt and waste and trash he understood, he could count on, he could outwit, deceive, escape...

 What am I so afraid of-?

 "Goodbye, Janus."

 He bolted.
 
 

 For months he had persisted in his destructive, searching life, taking on more and more dangerous jobs, frequenting the roughest low-class labor haunts, sinking into a mix of alcophoric fogs, neuroleptic sleeps and empty unromantic interludes, interspersed with high-strung jobs from back-breaking stevedoring to startug jaunts of endless waits at the base of a pit of infinite darkness, attending the infall of a mindless writhing mass erupting through a wall from another dimension into his tug's extended, waiting flexurenets...

 Here was himself.  And there, all other things, on the other side of that black gulf.  If he just could wait long enough, it would come to him...

 "It is your destiny...to be apart--"

 The wall persisted. Until...

 After eight experiential months of startugging, Sev had shown up at the bachelor 1pad he afforded, asking him to aid PanPlanet on a mission involving "considerations of galactic peril."

 Delloso had impolitely guffawed and thrown him out.  Sev was not amused.

 A few hours later, he awakened on the Strom5, strapped in his booth and still drugged.  That had been the first time he had seen Anna Teague.

 She was standing over him as he slumped in the navbooth, woman-shaped, hair a soft net of ethereal mists, her voice droning in its higher pitched melodies amidst an irritating answering gravelly dissonance.  He shook his head, realizing the clashing tones were his own voice.

 Singing like a damned filayori--

 "Freeman Delloso?"

 Filayori...he examined the word perplexedly, baffled by its haunting familiarity.

 "Freeman Delloso?"

 Delloso had surfaced warily, finding himself straining helplessly up at her slim form.  The title 'Freeman' echoed sardonically in his spinning skull.

 "Your-" he didn't finish, stopping his hand from reaching toward the mist about her head.  It wasn't her hair, which she wore cropped short in the PanPlanet military style.  It was the aura of energy of a G'naian mek field, seeming somehow merged with her human aspect.

 It vanished as he came to full awareness, leaving him staring at her, gape-mouthed and befuddled.

 "Freeman Delloso," she continued, satisfied he was fully conscious.  She made a motion, and a G'nai valet mek he hadn't noticed before drifted away from beside his head.  It carried a tiny transjector, already absorbing back into its cloud-like body.

 "I am Commander Anna Teague, PanPlanet Service," she continued.  "You have a choice-"

 "-What did that thing stick me with?-" he demanded, levering up on one elbow.

 She waved him quiet.  "It was important that your mental state be at least marginally alert.  Now be silent and listen.  We are already in 5space.  Either you can cooperate on this mission and lend us your skills willingly, or I will keep you drugged in your quarters until you are needed.  Without your special abilities, we will probably fail in our mission, and very likely we will end up like your Rift Edge-"

 "-How do you know-?"

 "-and I doubt you would survive two such tragedies."  She stopped, staring down at him unemotionally.

 How had he ever imagined that face as being soft...?

 Delloso had shaken his head, feeling like a seed ball on the end of a long and particularly limp strand of wipi grass, trying to clear away a film that seemed to cling to his eyelids.  "In 5space?" he asked blankly.  "Why?"

 Her voice came back, "According to our records, the Rift Edge hired you to navigate her in their study of the Xi Tauri var field.  It seemed plausible to suspect Xi Tauri as the site of the Rift Edge's accident, even before we obtained your somewhat abbreviated account.  We planted a 5space monitor there only a few weeks after you were turned over to us by the Ri."  She moved away, still watching him oddly, and somehow conjured up a holovisual of the galactic disk.

 "Other information tells us that the tachyon wake of a Ri carrier has been detected in 5space in four places, on a line with the Xi Tauri system.  The G'nai requested that we attempt an intercept.  We shall arrive there only hours after the Ri do."

 Green dashed lines traced converging paths on the diadem of stars.

 Delloso massaged his aching temples.  He had to marvel at their incredibly ept piloting.  Isosynchrony of that degree of margin--a few hours--over a trip that easily encompassed several experiential millennia, moving across a significant portion of the galaxy--certainly deserved a fellow navigator's accolades.  Unfortunately, he did not feel too congratulatory just now...

 He was, in fact, damned mad. "Go to hell."

 Sev interposed, "In other words, we were in a hurry.  We couldn't afford the amenities in securing your cooperation."

 Delloso glowered at them both.  "That sounds like an apology."

 "I make no apologies for necessity, Mr. Delloso," Anna Teague corrected.  "This is merely information you may need in order to view the situation in its fullness."

 "Well, I refuse the apology you aren't offering.  And you can damn well view the situation in its fullness from as far up your ass as you care to stuff it."

 Teague had regarded him coolly.  "You prefer your quarters."

 "I prefer that you go straight to hell," he had reiterated.

 Teague had given him a peculiar look.

 "I have something I want you to view, Mr. Delloso.  Then perhaps we will discuss terms again."

 "It won't do you any good," he spat.  "Kick me out here in 5space.  I'd be better off than going to Xi.  And so would you."

 The diadem display vanished into a rippling pond-surface phantasm of a chartship's contorting innards.  Around him, familiar faces stared at him with looks of sudden and unconditional pleading understanding...

 Please show us...  We will follow...

 Delloso stared at them in uncomprehending terror.

 "What are you?  Where is this?  What-" he realized he was being beamed a dream-lec.  Did he know these twisted pitiful beings?

 A well of unfathomable darknessr opened, like a chasm between his awareness and the lec they were forcing him to experience.

 Get out! he screamed at them.  Get out of my mind!

 "Freeman Delloso.  What is this you are seeing?" the calm voice came from behind the shaking starship scene in front of him.

 It's too late, he told them miserably, trying not to read their moving lips.  There is nothing I can do!  Nothing...  Nothing to prevent the unending horror of what lay before them.

 Freeman Delloso, you must help us...

 I cannot.  I don't know the way...
 

"Yes, Edward?"

 Delloso found himself seated across from Teague at a galley table.  Sev moved in the background, an unlikely uniformed major domo, fiddling with utensils and condiments.  A mouth-watering aroma of roast baylin escaped the scrubbers in the close confines of the tiny room.

 "I- I'm sorry.  Was I saying something?"  Delloso stammered.  He covered his confusion by grabbing for a small goblet and downing its contents.  What is this?  Alcophorin flashbacks?  Where had that come from?  An instant before...weeks before...?

 "You were hazarding a guess as to what they are up to down there."

 Delloso seized the table edge in sudden vertigo.  Jeset!  This is Strom5.  I remember...

 "Edward!  Are you all right?  Sev, get the valet."

 The mek was there instantly, pressing something ephemeral and cold against Delloso's temple.

 "Get away from me, damn it!" he swatted at the inoffensive fogbank.  "What are you feeding me, you bitch?  Hypnotics?  Can't you bastards leave me alone?  I told you I would help you!"

 "Edward, we haven't-"  Teague arose in concern, reaching across the table and touching his shoulder.

 Don't!  he shouted, clumsily backing into a bulkhead, knocking preparations away.  Walls rippled around him.  He realized suddenly that the film across his eyelids was back, with a vengeance.  As if something had pulled a shade between his inner world and the rest of the universe.

 "Teague-- I don't know how--?"  He saw the two of them receding to a great distance, their forms outlined in vibrating, concentric rings of grey and rose gradations of the background flux.  Every detail of the ship came through, layer upon layer, minutely depicted, one upon the other, in crystalline crispness, without confusion, extending away in both directions--

 --what kind of direction is that?  It comes out of fragmentary existences...going through these familiar forms...diverging into apartness forever...reaching for me...engulfing...casting away...

 "Sev!  Grab him!  He's hallucinating or something."

 The other agent vaulted across the narrow room and crashed into Delloso even as the big man turned confusedly to lev up the corridor.  Their combined mass spun to an ungainly halt in the activated motiv stasis fields.

 Sev extricated himself from Delloso's unconscious form, curled in a ball against the fire-veined mist of the fieldwall.

 "Great.  About to match guns with the Ri, and now we're dependent on a bloody psycho-"

 "Quiet," Teague said brusquely.  "Mek, get him to his quarters.  Strom," she spoke directly to the G'naian shipmind.  "You will not interfere with his metabolic state."  She helped the mek levitate Delloso's lax body, watched it maneuver him toward the tiny aft quarters closets.

 She turned up the companionway, feeling Sev close behind her.  "Strom, was Freeman Delloso under the influence of any biomodulators?"

 "No, Commander," the shipmind's impersonal voice whispered from a tiny reddish plasmason emitter that floated along in the air beside her.

 "Do the G'nai still have an interest in this behavior?"

 "Yes," the plasma hissed sibilantly.

 "I thought so," she muttered grimly.  She swung into her pilot booth, felt Sev settling in his, embracing the invading network of Strom's mek mind coupling into her consciousness.

 As the visuals engaged and her autonomic centers merged with the ship's body sensors and extended senses, she saw the change immediately.

 Strom!  You sounded no alarms! she lecked accusingly.

 You left no instructions.  Your intent was to study the foundling uninterrupted.

 She could not deny the truth.

 Nor the fact that, framed against the swollen carmine corpulence of Xi Tauri, a small black speck of contrived matter hung in solitary orbit.

 At least a portion of their prey had vanished.

 And unheard in his dark, tiny quarters behind them, Delloso wept.  The nightmare had begun.

 Quite apart from its fame as the source of an incredible variety of widely-edible fruits and seafoods, Belavia was an ocean planet of magnificent volcanic islands, ringed with spectacular shallow-water reefs teeming with life.  And most propitiously of all, its biota was totally compatible with Homo terrestrialis.  It had proven especially attractive to those descendants of ancient adventurers from a certain tropical oceanic area of old Earth...

 In his long and callous youth on his adopted water world, Delloso had grown tall, bronzed and confident, moving among the biosuited tourists of a thousand worlds as they came to explore the markets, isles and oceans of his deliberately backwater, deliberately primitive planet.  On one edge of a many-times blessed open cluster of G-type stars, there was no shortage of sometimes envious company for Belavians.

 He himself was not genetically native to the world, of course;  nor were any humans.  That honor was reserved to the fast-moving, torpedo-shaped forms of the marine lythians, and their long-diverged, land-dwelling feathered brothers who populated the dense bronze forests of pipetrees, growing in thin-boled coppery profusion, cascading down precipitous granitic cliffs into azure, wind-whipped seas.

 But he had been born here, as had five hundred generations before him.

 "Watch out, Eddy!  He'll drop on ya!"

 And half a generation after him...

 His little sister, Kiki, almost fell off their pitching tri, laughing.  From fifty meters up, a fat avia hurtled off its cliffside perch and cavitated a significant hole in the water beside Delloso's cringing form, sending a cold spray over him and their group of three tourists they were shepherding on a four-day excursion.

 "You little beggar!" he shouted at her, only half mad.  A developing situation on the cliff heights above caught his attention.  "Excuse me, ma'am," he winked at the young female and her two male companions across the boat's flat deck from him.  "Family business."  He wheeled on Kiki.  "You guided us over here on purpose, you unsprouted groat!  Turn about!  Turn about!"

 She wouldn't, so he did, lunging back and yanking the skitter's control yoke to the starboard.  An entire flock of avias hit the wavetop they had just vacated, shortly bobbing up and blinking solemnly with their purple-shuttered eyes.

 One of them had hit square on a jettisoned pipetree pod with a resounding pop!, leaving red oily milk in a satin spreading stain on the waves' cut-glass surfaces.

 The armor-footed avia surfaced yards away, unscathed, a struggling ori fish in its beak.  It waddled along the water, flapping huge ungainly feathered fin-wings, until it stumbled airborne, suddenly becoming a swift, upward-spiraling sailor of the skies.

 "That mighta been your empty head, Kiki!"

 His young sister grinned a gap-toothed grin and kicked bilgewater up at him.  It was plain she loved him mightily, and Delloso heartily returned the affection.  "Shouldda been your head!" he amended.  He lowered his voice.  "Now cut out the guild-damned antics, or I cut your salary this trip."

 "Oh, Eddy.  I was just tryin' to liven things up a litt--"

 "I'm not jokin', pod-rot.  Not a tarnished stellar."

 "Oh, all right.  But--"

 "No buts.  Now, as long as we're stopped--" he throttle-braked the skitter, bringing the tri to heaving rest well out from the volcanic plug of Roost Rock and its feathered dive-bombers, above a pristine white network of shallow, sand-filled submarine canyons.  Then, grasping Kiki's lean brown leg with one hand, he levitated her straight up, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and tossed her over the side.  "--Go dredge up a few kulos for the folks!"

 "Eddy-y-y-"  She disappeared in a fair imitation of an avia's cavitating splash.

 The older of the two males--both of them human or nine points on, since they didn't require any obvious containment vestments--chuckled at their hosts' antics.  "Does the show go with the jaunt?"

 "Nope.  We charge extra," Delloso smiled back.  His gaze shot past them to a small flotilla of similar trimarans, scattered about the Roost and its environs.  His village of Hale's Bay made most of their comfortable living from such large-scale, loosely-coordinated excursions.  He joined them principally in the summer, between university stints.

 Judging from the number of tris out there, it was going to be a big beachparty tonight.  He could see his father's tall white-sailed tri, and at least two of his brothers', painted gaudy purple and sporting spinnakers.  He stood up briefly and waved at them.

 Good that they had chosen Greater Feren for the nightsite.  It would barely accommodate the crowd.

 The sparkling trills of a filayori flock sounded across the sea, on their way from the big atoll of Kaamaan to shoalfish hunting grounds on the Great Ring Reef.  The heavy male tourist threw back his head and watched the flight go by at low altitude.
 "Good lookin' birds.  Your ancestors sure picked a fine settlin' place.  Any hunting around here?"

 "For us, no.  For them, yes.  Protected species."

 The big guy shook his head.  "Ain't that always the case!  I'd sure hate to head back to Bel Port without a little real excitement.  Hard to find a place to exercise the old instincts, these days."

 Delloso nodded.  "Lots of exercise for the conscience, though."

 The fellow shot him a look, probing for sarcasm.

 Delloso relented.  "But we do have a good bit of sport about.  We'll head for the Great Ring tomorrow at dawn.  Lots of action.  We'll be in with the karaki, and the lythians won't lift a flipper to help out if you make a mistake."

 The second man rubbed his hands.  "That's for me!  Now, George, here, would rather go at it from a safe distance.  Blow feathers out of the sky with a freaking atom cannon!  But I'll take a sling-shiv in the thick of it any day."

 The big guy shrugged.  "May be, Jazerik old son.  But don't worry.  I'll sit up here with a fish line hooked in your arse and haul you out of any trouble.  Don't want to loose my best vice-prez, after all, not to any bedamnable karaki."

 Delloso watched as the one called George casually broke open a chilled nubbi gourd with one chunky hand and passed it to the girl.  That hand was tanned evenly, backside and palm.  "You from Newton?"  Delloso referred to a human-colonized system only a light year distant.

 "Me?  Do I look it?"  the fellow flexed thick, sunbronzed arms as big as ivor legs, tilting a second nubbi up and chugging its sour-sweet contents himself.  Newton II was a low-g Class L planet, its star a sometimes fitful F dwarf.  Newton II was locked in earnest combat with the onset of a likely final ice age; its surface inhabitants seldom saw unmitigated sunlight.

 Delloso laughed.  "Know what--?  Half the guys that come here from Newton look like you.  They spend fortunes on palystron workouts and hotshot juice."

 George laughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

 "Oh?  How 'bout Rini, here?" the other fellow jerked a thumb toward the girl.

 Delloso eyed their mute companion's well-developed form, shielded in a translucent biosuit that reflected back the cerulean of Belavia's gem-like skies.  The suit hid little, thickening to a murky indistinctness only in strategic areas, clearly designed for showing the girl's well-crafted lines to maximum advantage.  Yet the effect had not struck Delloso as contrived or distracting.  Skin on Belavia's open sunlit beaches went uncovered most of the time.

 It was her face, with its peculiar modification of human features and color, half hiding behind the all but invisible skin of the biosuit, eyes large and wide-set, slit-irised and definitely unsettling...

 "Foundling," he pronounced, seeing a momentary flash of bitterness cross her countenance as the judgment struck home.  "And very beautiful."  And lonely, he realized.  Desperately lonely.

 She met his gaze with a shielding, inquisitive frown.

 The big Newtonian chuckled again, nudging his somewhat skinnier companion.  "He found us out, Jaz.  That how you get your tan, boy?  Hotshot juice?"

 Delloso flexed his appreciable biceps with a teenager's pride.  "No, sir.  And I got these from you and your friends, dragging your tails out of touri bars and belabelle beds--"

 They both laughed heartily in agreement.  "An' we're mighty glad you were there!"

 Kiki surfaced then, spluttering prodigiously, but proudly holding up a brace of helmeted kulos, their metallic green tentacles all vigorously intertwining and glistening in the sun.  "Dinner!"

 Delloso reached out, took the catch and tossed it into a coldhold.  He discovered the foundling woman watching him as he hauled Kiki onto the boat, between the main hull and one of the outriggers, and suddenly was conscious of the clinging fabric of his brief surfen.

 "Did I do good, Eddy?  It was twenny meters down there!"

 "You did great, you little pipegroat.  Now, you clean the kulos, I'll put us ashore and set up the suntek.  We'll be the first ones in."

 "Aw, Eddy.  I always get the slimy jobs-"  She stopped at his warning squint.  "I do get my pay, right?"

 "Bonus, kiddo," he relented.  He glanced over at the girl, who was now examining the far coastline with subdued interest.

 Then he whirled them about and sent the tri roaring for lush Greater Feren Cay and its twin hot, flat southern lagoons.

 The late afternoon rapidly progressed to evening, with Bel's Star heading straight down into the western sea.  He and Kiki were steadily busy, using machetes to cut bronze vegetation for shelters, digging the cooking pits, hauling up other tris as their crew and passengers skittered in, laughing and chatting gaily.

 High cirrus twirled its gauze-like mesh in a pink net that shaded quickly into silver-grey, and the tradewinds picked up from the southeast.  Beyond the horizon, fragmented clots of clouds broke the sun's fading essence into streaming rays of evanescent gold, background for the wheeling, inquisitive filayori.

 The lengthening shade under the rod-thin pipetrees, with their wire-like, downy explosion of coppery leaves up above swaying in the steady trades, became populated with tanned, half-naked personages.  Green scales and golden silkiness flashed under the thin opalescence of biosuits, interspersed with the bare coppery-red of Belavian men and women in their simple brown surfens.  Cookfires in newly-dug sand pits sent clouds of pungent smoke from the forest edge back into the trees, which soon had dozens of filayori and their plumper, stay-at-home orange- and white-plumed filayaki cousins sitting in the treetops, waiting for handouts at the tops of their feathered lungs.

As the evening sea breezes picked up, the boles of the trees took up their characteristic thrumming vibration, backed up by the shriller singing of their sky-reaching crowns, sending a swelling and subsiding, deep organ-like song of life out over the waters.

 At one point, he followed the gaze of a group of touri as they pointed at the bright star of Bel Station, blazing above the western horizon, parked far sunward from Belavia.  The Station was an evening star now, but that changed from month to month.  And one day, if he passed the hurdles of the finishing exams, and if Belmauani smiled, he'd be up there, and Belavia herself would be his evening star--

 Sweating freely as he worked, jogging down to the sea for a quick splash of cold, then back to the ruddy flare of cooking fires, inhaling steam-breathed exhalations of spice bark and mellow, smoky akua leaves, washing sand grit from the kulos preparations and downing iced nubbi, Delloso felt at one with his world and all its teeming living things, knowing that the sharing of it with these visitors was just exactly right, a thing that should be done, must be done, to knit them all back into the whole pattern of the cloth---as the G'nai knitted the stars together, giving the gift of ships so that parts from every separate place could mix, melt, then spread again to their disparate origins, no longer the same, and never truly separate again.

 And then, when the feast began and he could join his family with their respective touri parties, and dancers moved in chanting, shadowed rings around the central fire, he looked across into the darkness of a suntek's sparsely thatched shelter, and found her, apart and alone, as he had never been...

 

 "-must wake up!  Edward!  Strom, give him a risinol trans."

 "You requested no biomodulators-"

 "Jeset!  Don't argue with me!  Just give him-"

 "It is already done, Commander.  I was merely reminding-"

 "Edward!"

 As consciousness leaked back, Delloso found his limbs painfully drawn up across his middle on the narrow bunk in his tiny quarters.  Anna Teague stood just inside the companionway flexure, a mek's ghostly form between them.  The film over his vision was gone, but an aching filled his chest.  He sat up abruptly, groaning as muscles spasmed.

 "I'm all right, get outta here," he batted the mek away.  "Sorry.  That happens sometimes, if I've had a little too much, or worked too hard at remembering-"

 She ignored him.  "One of the Ri has vanished.  They could not have gone to stellar velocity.  Strom's proteonic record shows a most illogical thing..."

 Delloso's eyes came up with a jerk.  "Xi Tauri!"  A flitting image burned across his vision, a flare fired over a black, forbidden wall.  "They dove in!"

 "Yes!  How did you-?"

 He was moving and past Teague, levving up the companionway to the navbooth.  "We have to move farther out now," he spoke urgently.  "Where is Sev?"

 "He's-"

 "Get him into harness, quick.  All hell will break loose in a little while!  How long was I out?"

 She was already somersaulting into the pilot booth, now above him, as he lapped down the crashwebs and fitted his arms into the booth bionics, brought the operations helmet over his head and locked it into place.

 "Fifteen minutes.  You were in some kind of trance.  I told Strom to leave you alone."

 "Thanks.  Where is Sev?"

 "Here!" the other agent sailed by, virtually diving into his position.  "Somebody had to stow the meal.  Make a helluva mess if-"

 "Give me the conn," Delloso ordered, unsurprised when he felt the shift in volition as the G'naian shipmind flowed instantly into his consciousness.

 Teague had relinquished full control.

 She watched him closely.

 Stunning, wide-spread sensations from the G'nai cocoonship's organs almost overloaded the mere human sensory channels feeding Delloso's brain.  It had been a long time since he had handled existence at this breadth and power level...

 A long, long time...

 Deep space thrummed with background microwave and infrared echoes of an ancient creation, tugging at recollections from another life.  Stars reeked with odors, fetors, stenches and fragrances, at once repulsive and inviting, a kaleidoscope of scintillating redolences, familiar, strange, unique, blended, acrid, sweet...  His legs crawled with a sensation of blistering heat and nettling insect bites, making him turn his huge, ponderous head, rolling his most sensitive eyes, shielding lids slamming down to a squint across them as a fat, blazing orb swung into view.

 Xi Tauri!

 Xi as it had never been to mere unaugmented human eyes.

 But a Xi I have seen before...

 Low moaning starwind soughed outward from the storm of searing hydrogen fire surrounding its beating heart.  Atoms in their separate existences, exchanging photon packets like messages of declared identity, meant for each other, some escaping into the great uncaring maw of the black void in a stellar attempt to declare its lonely existence to brethren it could never touch.  Behind the moaning, in the heart of the star, a greater storm was brewing...

 I know this place.  I know you.  I know...

 He had the Strom5 boosting away under conversion drive, but the flux of Xi's energies thrown out into 5space, moving far faster than the common 3space particles hurtling through time, had already reached their maximum velocities before he could be aware of them.  Quintum radiations up and down the 5space spectrum impinged on the G'nai shielding and motiv fields, saturating deflectors, loading down reservoirs with so much 5space mass/time-energy that he could not coordinate their superposition on the Strom5's lagging 4space extension...

 My God, we're going to desynchronize!  Just like the Rift Edge!

 The G'nai shipmind was not immune to the implication of what was forming in Delloso's shaking vision.  It began to wrest control away from him, realizing he was helpless, yet oddly preferring its own lesser inabilities to Delloso's certain knowledge, to his struggle with madness.

 No!

 The snap! of disconnect was like ice cold, inky water dashed in his face.  Delloso was left gasping in the sweaty confines of his booth, staring forward to where the two agents were held, equally impotent, in the dim forward cabin.  Teague half rose against the restraints, her eyes turned pleadingly back toward him--wanting to believe in him--reaching.

 No words.  There were no words.

 His hands had left a sweat-filled print on the face of the gravanom.  Its visage was dead.  Out the side port, its shielding stuttering in Strom5's now separate battle with Xi's fury, smoky red light flickered in, casting lurid shadows across the booth's controls.

The gravanom. He'd had its earlier cousin with him, when last he had been here, a lifetime ago. But I hadn't grasped what it could tell me-

A memory flickered.

 He palmed the tuchems, bringing the gravanom to life.  The airy display sprang like a colored globe into space before him.  He leaned into it, squinting against salt running into his eyes, accepting the neural beam through his visual centers.

 Patterns danced, swirled, like phantoms in firelight, a Xi whose old stable dimensional confluences were gone, replaced by an interplay of separating forces, torn against their will by subtler forces yet.  Foci of black randomness, islands of white stillness, lines of blazing green and orange and red drawn in joining bands between the polarities of calm and utter chaos...

 Strom5 chattered in overdriven conversion, struggling in 4space to outrun a danger beyond its dimensional understanding, losing the battle slowly and in agony, dying in full knowledge of death, a G'naian mek mind that knew it should never die...

 "Strom!  You must return control to me!"  Delloso fastened his eyes on the depths of the gravanom's hypnotic pulsations.  "Strom!  You must give me the conn!"

 Over the crashing, growing thunders of a howling stellar wind, the unseeable yet killing components of Xi's 5space convulsions, the G'naian mind's reply was almost unintelligible.

 "Take it.  I am lost."

 "Edward-?"

 "My God, Delloso!  Get us out of here!"

 Teague and Sev were only voices among many in another world.  They were pleading, they trusted him now, they needed to know that he knew the path.

 "Follow me," he urged the G'nai, but he was no longer seeking their acceptance.  Belief could seem to join, but volition exists forever as islands in the dark. He recoiled at his own decision, realizing how impossible the solution had to be.

 He bent their course in 5space 'round, joining every vector that would smash their dimensional unity, and found--a gift once more from a time long gone, assemblages of strange matter, somehow living, joys and faces and knowledge that would never again be, but would always have been--the one way that he had sought--

 Straight into Xi Tauri's shattered heart.
 

 "Ho!"  Delloso shouted exuberantly, feeling his muscles ripple as he heaved the javelin down the firelit beach and into the center of the leaf-stuffed target.  It hit with a satisfying thunk!

 Cheers broke out from his supporters.  Other Belavian youths--girls and boys--stood on the rough throwing line, hefting their favorite spears, including four of his older brothers.  Delloso knew he was not the best, but he had done exceptionally well tonight, as the stack of aged nubbi gourds on his blanket attested.

 "Keep them," he waived at two friends who were about to dump his current winnings onto the growing pile.  "Do you think I want to get that drunk tonight?"

 "Thank you, Kalikali!  Tiliko's group isn't going to the karaki party," one of them called over to him.  "Want to spare any of these?"

 "Sure, take them all," Delloso motioned grandly, then bit his nubbi-influenced tongue.  Damn, Edward, you overgenerous nincompoop!  There's always tomorrow night!  "Uh-- Just leave me four."

 His friend flipped an earlobe with rude impishness.  "You can have the green ones!  Or you can win more!"

 Then the two of them made off with the entire lot at high speed, laughing.

 Oh, well.  Tonight I'll have to drink my generous reputation instead.

 So, humbled, he turned back to the throwing games.

 The wind off the dark sea was a menace to straight shiv flight.  He and several others had run quick calculations, a nod to their weekday mentors' wishes that their off-time not be totally wasted.

 He had to admit, it did improve his judgment, though nothing could substitute for the simple biological gift of a good, well-exercised brain in a good, well-exercised body.

 Still, he held the visual calculator in his forethought, feeling the way its yet-alien display tingled its way into his mind.  Under the flesh of his temple was where the little mek device made its home, an implanted lec cartulary, embodied in a tiny but growing knot of engineered neurons, learning with him, as with the others, becoming a small added part of them.  An insignificant but interesting addition to his life from mother Terra's advancing bioscience, brought by Terran partners of the much-discussed but never seen G'nai of the Nested Worlds.

 Bel Station set.  Hours more went by.  Warm food sat well in his stomach.  He and the other islanders divided their time between eating, dancing, and the games.  The touri joined in wholeheartedly, forgetting their otherworldly cares, and usually overdid everything.  There would be many sour stomachs, many sore thighs, and many hangovers from the sparkling fermented nubbi beer, come morning.

 But, come morning, would also come the karakas hunt.

 And there, for the sake of the touri and himself, Delloso drew the line.  Focussing on that coming challenge, he never had trouble turning down an extra nubbi or kulo-kabob.

 Kiki came breathlessly past, throwing sand from her thrusting toes, she and several girls gleefully outrunning half a dozen village boys who were earnestly chasing them.

 "Kiki!  What are you-?"

 Without breaking stride she flashed back a piece of brown cloth and its white underlining, and sped on.

 She had stolen some kid's surfens.  Probably right off the poor fellow's scrawny beachwhite butt.  The little pod-rot!

 And there he sped by, obliviously naked and joyously mad, and just as obviously gaining.

 Delloso stuck a foot judiciously forward and sent the kid cartwheeling into a soft dune.

 "Who did that?" the boy came up, spitting grit.

 A nearby group gave a cheer.  "Great stunt, Pauli!  How 'bout a one-and-a-half?"

 "Why y' eating the beach, boy?  There's still plenty of food!"

 Pauli seemed about to launch a full-scale sand attack in their direction when he caught sight of Kiki, waiving a certain item like a banner from the forest edge.  He loped off, attention focussed on more important game.

 Delloso turned grinning toward the south beach and the suntek he had rigged for himself amongst the trees, muscles hurting just enough to make sleep a certain enjoyment.  To his left, the slapping of hand-braided hawsers and cast metal fittings against wooden masts marked the small unseen navy anchored in the lagoon.  The sounds seemed unusually insistent, increased by the swelling trades.  The slightly fishy smell of shallows air was gone, replaced by the salty freshness of open ocean.

 His path carried him between cooking pits, some yet steaming with fish and crustaceans in fragrant leaves and baking tubers still called tara, brought long ago from Earth.  In the circle of firelight under a pipetree patch, he saw the Newtonian, George, telling tall tales to a group of admiring young Belavian men and women.  And, truth be known, Newton actually was a place of certifiable, stalwart heroes--or crazies, depending on how you looked at it.  It would be a march of centuries before men could decisively reverse the cold progression of Newton's ices, if its doleful little sun would ever permit the dream to succeed.

 George's partners were nowhere to be seen.  Probably retired early to their sandy shelter in the deeper trees.

 As he left the area of beach activity, Delloso's eyes adapted to a growing gloom.  At one point, a projection of jagged stone came up from under the sands, like a petrified lythian's fins breaking the ocean's surface before a grand heaving breath and a dive to depth.

 Delloso stepped carefully up onto the rock, gazing pensively out to the vague starlit horizon.

 This was summer, if you could break Belavia's tranquil sameness into such stark seasonal divisions.  On the edge of her mother cluster, Belavia's skies at night were a study in extremes.  In winter, at midnight, her shadowed face gazed down into the heart of a gaggle of young suns.  Stars of every color were sharp, burning orbs, growing thicker and thicker into a dense glowing haze seemingly not much smaller across than his fist at arm's length.  Their combined light, as they slowly crossed the sky with the planet's rotation, carried almost tangible warmth, and permitted some Belavian plants to carry on photosynthesis even when Bel was down.

 But now, the outer edges of the galactic rim were all that graced the heavens--a few hundred suns, some near neighbors whose peoples might be represented here even tonight, but most merely the outer rogues that drifted inexorably away into the forsaken gulf of intergalactic space.

 This was a time of soft, dark nights, when the lack of starlight made the world small, when insect and animal brethren sang to each other in lonely comforting symphony with the thrumming trees, and the only imagined warmth came from distant fires burning on a beach.

 Delloso shivered, feeling the wind stir the hairs at the base of his spine.  It was an ancient empathy that stole over him, echoes of a small infinity of lives, reflected in the determined stringing of nucleotide pearls along the vertebrae of every genetic molecule of his every cell, shaped by struggling nights under far-off skies and the waves of long-dead seas.  He looked up at the stars and the faint smudges of galaxies inestimably far beyond, not yet knowing, and yet feeling that he belonged to them.

 A light clinking sound had been growing closer behind him for some time.  He registered it only when it ceased, turning to peer toward the trees.  Against a dim white band of sand, he perceived an oddly chunky shadow burdened with black slanting projections.

 "Kiki?"

 A much richer feminine voice answered back.

 "Oh, it's you, Eddy."

 The foundling touri.  Delloso jumped down onto the sward, feeling rough beach gravel roll under his callused feet.  He found himself looking only slightly downward in the night shadows, trying to make out what gear she was carrying.

 "Diving?" he concluded.  "Who is taking you?"

 "No one.  Perhaps you."

 He shook his head, only partly in disbelief.  Touri were always like that, always capable of doing something stupid, thoughtless, carelessly courageous.

 "You are not going to tell me that it is too dangerous."

 "No.  It is dangerous, but not too.  It is also beautiful.  I will go with you.  Wait while I get my gear."

 "No."  She started off toward the dim whiteness of the empty second southern beach, wrapped in a thin crescent between the dark mass of the island and the slow seething of the black lagoon.  She called back, "I have to go now.  They'll be looking for me soon."

 He caught up to her, putting a hand on her shoulder and bringing her to a spinning halt.  "I can't let you.  You do not know my planet's ways."

 "I read a lot.  See?"  She held up the dark thin stick of a sling-shiv.  She stooped to begin pulling on her fins.  "You have forgotten my name, haven't you. It doesn't matter," she interrupted his protest.  "It's Ryann.  Some people call me Rini."

 "I have to go with you, Ryann.  Someone must.  But first I'll go-"

 "I'll be gone when you get back.  But don't worry.  You can just come with me now.  Look."  She held up the second emergency regulator hooked into the thin stack of high surface area scavenger plates strapped to her back, capable of extracting dissolved oxygen directly from seawater.  "It's a high rate unit, and I really don't breathe all that much."

 She had evaded his grasp and was already moving backward through the lapping wavelets nibbling at the skirt of sand and tumbled beachrock.  Off to the south, the tangerine blossoming of lightning momentarily lit a distant thunderhead, but overhead star-spattered clarity prevailed.

 She turned and dove into the surf.

 He followed, lunging into the waves until he was deep enough to strike out into them, cursing mildly under his breath.

 The bottom dropped away rapidly to the virtually uniform ten meter depth of the shallow lagoon.  Against his face the surface water was warm, caressing, but he felt spasms of a chillier upwelling beginning to probe the lagoon from the outer sea.  Without his mask he could only make out a faint almost-blackness below, blotched here and there by the darker hulks of living things--sea cows, likely, grazing on the shallow marine pasturage.

 Where was she?  With that deep diving gear coupled with her biosuit, she could be anywhere, for as long as she liked to stay...

 A playful bump under his thighs almost turned him over.  He folded and dove downward, eyes open.  A flash of paleness identified her as her legs pumped, fins flaring.  Even with the added force of those artifices, his long years of skill and trained strength gave him the advantage.  He caught her by one calf easily, and pulled along her pleasingly squirming length until he had her shoulders in a loose embrace.  Phosphorescence swirled in a blue mist off their twisting forms as he hauled her to the surface.

 They burst into the sudden chill of the night air.

 "Now, come on, Ryann!  Are you going to play fair or not?"

 "You don't trust me."  She was laughing, one arm holding around his waist while they kicked to stay afloat.

 "No, I just don't understand what you think you're doing."  He turned her head around toward the dying glow of the fires on the beach.  "Look, there's more at stake here than spoiling your fun.  Do you know what happens when we loose someone?  It hits all of us--scares touri off, leaves people behind with broken hearts, and leaves one of us feeling dead inside, knowing we might have made it happen differently."

 "That's pretty dumb, isn't it?  We all take risks.  All the time.  I like it.  Don't you?"

 "It's not the risk, Ryann."  A wave slapped them benignly about, pointing them out to sea.  "It's what you do with the risk.  We'll all die, one day.  But we are weavers, plaiting a cloth.  Like it or not, we pull on the shape of it all--"

 "What are you talking about, Eddy?  The shape of what?"

 "The fabric of space-time..."  He stopped at her unrepressed snicker.  "Too far-fetched?  But it is what we believe.  And we, the sentient races, have the ability to see the warp and woof, to guide the pattern."

 "To guide it where?"

 It was his turn to be uncomfortable.  "I don't understand that, yet.  Away, I think."

 "Away?"

 "Away from emptiness, of any kind.  It isn't the particular pattern that matters, so much that there be a pattern.  And risk, for no reason, is not a pattern.  It's more a refusal to see, to understand what you ought to be, what you can be..."

 She was silent, head bent toward his as if still listening to an echo of his words.

 "Eddy."  Cool waters lifted them, then dropped again.  "What do you do when you're not...out here?"

 "At Hale's Bay?  I'm studying."

 "Mariculture?  Or philosophy."

 "No," he chuckled.  "I'm a preapprentice navigator.  One day I'll be a star pilot.  I'll probably fly you here for a vacation in a few years."

 "Or ride the plexors?"

 "Oh, not that, I think."

 "Why not?"

 "I love my epoch too much."

 She shook her head, bringing one hand up behind his neck and idly grabbing the short, wet curls.  "And here I pictured you all as quaint savages buried on the edge of the cluster!  You play with us, don't you."

 "Yes," he added gently, "We play with you."

"Just like the G'nai." More than a hint of bitterness there.

"No, I doubt we could claim that. We enjoy the moment, more than most, it seems." He ducked a wave as it broke across them. "And we like to share it."

 "How do these islands raise people like you?"

 Her body close to his was working an unsettling magic.

 "Ryann-"

 "Do you want me?" She kissed him, hard and quick, then broke easily free, treading water a few feet away. "They all want me."

 "Ryann, come back with me to the rocks.  We can talk."

 "About rug weaving?"

 "About life, Ryann."

 "Don't you want to play, Eddy?  We would just be two fish in a sea, all to ourselves."

 He chuckled ruefully at that image, then ducked his head below to look quickly around, saw only small life in the murk. Lots of it.

"I think you miscounted.  Besides, you did not come out here to play with me.  You came looking for an ocean all your own."

 She turned abruptly about, looking away.  "You are just a boy," she said wonderingly, not laughing.  "Eddy, you're a thousand years old.  I knew you understood, even today on the boat.  How do you know?"

 A flicker of lightning abruptly cast stark light on the scene.  For a moment Delloso's eyes held a tableau of oily black hummocks extending to distant obsidian smoothness, and Ryann's wide-eyed face gazing at him, framed about by the splayed fins of her scavving pack.  The roll of thunder, still soft and throaty with kilometers, seemed to break some spell settled on them.

 A storm was coming.  The curtain of rain traced by the flash hung beyond her on still- distant waters.

 "But what do you know about the rest of the universe, Eddy?"  Her voice had moved, yet the after-image tableau held fast, the same wherever his eyes darted, creating an eerie separation of realities.  "Only what you've been told," she answered herself. "Out there are worlds without number.  Every instant living things die.  Mate and die.  Strange things come from some of those mates.  But they die too."  She repeated softly, "They die too.  And over it all the G'nai pull our strings.  Move here, take this there.  But give us the data, they say.  Give us the answers.  Give us the sad stories of your short lives...  They watch, and collect our hardships and heartbreaks and failures like coins or string, but they never care!"

 "No, Ryann, we make our lives.  And we must care for ourselves--in every sense of the word.  They only give us ships-"

 "Of course!  How the hell else would we be able to move so damned far apart?  Did you know my mother came from Earth?  Yes!  I had a human mother.  She left Earth when it was still young, on one of the first G'naian ships.  And a spacer father.  But he went away.  And she never spoke about him.  And then she died."

 "Ryann..."  He swam gently toward her voice, a small quiet voice being blown by the wind, feeling her drifting away from him, wishing for another lightning flash to reveal her position.

 "And tonight.  When you were dancing with your family.  All together.  All that warmth."  Her breath caught.  "You were right.  I am a foundling.  But I grew up to be proud of it.  I've come a long way.  They were a good mix, and I've been tough enough."

 "Of course they were, Ryann-"

 "Don't patronize me, you overgrown child!"  She half giggled, on the verge of tears.  "Oh, Eddy.  You're no child.  I'm twice your age, and you're a big, strong, strong, old, old man, and I'm a baby.  I'm sorry.  It's just me."  There was a slight splash.  "You should have let me come alone.  I have a right to my life, too, Eddy."

 Then, nothing.  Dark wind moving over unseen tiny frothing tips of building waves.

 "Ryann?"

 The lightning flash came.  An empty frieze of ugly, blackening dunes.

 Damn!

 A bolt struck the ocean a kilometer away.  The blast of light and sound provoked him to action, diving deep, furiously seeking, surfacing, diving deep again.  And all the while the storm bore down on him.

 He searched vainly for hours, through the heaviest part of the squall, thrusting down and listening with all his worry-sharpened senses to the infinite clicking tumult of an open ocean night.  Once a staccato string of flashes seemed to reveal her moving whiteness, but his reaching dive only touched the panicky flinch of a grazing seacow.

 The lagoon's bottom surge was benignly strong, the surface heaves stinging and vicious.  He cycled between the two worlds, blindly, unthinkingly, to exhaustion, finally coming, empty, back to the shore, shivering uncontrollably in a lashing, driven rain.  He stood for a long time surveying the beach, racked with unfelt sobbing, leaning against the uncertain shelter of a pipetree bole, jerking in and out of insistent sleep.  In the Olympian flares of fire exchanged between the blowing clouds, nothing moved from water to the trees.

 I have a right to my life, too...

But it hadn't been life she was seeking.

 Toward dawn he found his suntek, streaming black rain, and crawled exhausted into the wet akua leaves, surprised but poignantly glad to find Kiki nestled there.

 "Time for the karaki hunt?" she stirred groggily.

 Thunder pealed overhead.

 "No, little pod.  No karaki today.  The storm'll chase them out to the deeps."

 "Good," she whispered happily.  "Then you lay against me and block out the rain.  It's been wet an' cold in here."

 "I won't let a drop touch you," he promised.  Her soft sighing told him she was already trustingly asleep.

 Ryann, if there was something I should have done...What could I have said...?

 He knew with finality that she had found the ocean she had sought. But her discovery had plunged him into depths he had never anticipated.

What will I tell father? How could she have done this to me? To my people?

 A black, visceral obscurity eclipsed all sight and sound.

 And yet it was alive, in some way permitting life...

 "Edward?  Where are we?"

 He answered with a question.  "Do your instruments tell you anything?"

 "No.  I think the shipmind is dead."

 "Sev?"

 "I'm...here.  But I don't believe I'm speaking.  Numb.  All over.  Where--?"

 Delloso tried to reach for something--anything.  No sense of motion of his arms or head.  Nothing.  And yet, he had guided them here, somehow.

 "We are within one of the mass concentrations at Xi Tauri's core."

 "Impossible!"

 "How, Edward?"

 "I picked a 5space vector with 4space endpoints where one might be."

 "Then we are still in 5space!"  Teague's voice teetered on disbelief.  "How can that be, if Strom5 is dead?"

 "I don't know.  Maybe it isn't.  Maybe it's just...busy."

 He listened, realizing there was no sound of breathing, no sensation of lungs expanding, exhaling...  He tried forcing his eyes open.  Panic stared back at him, a maw of utter consuming doubt.

 "What do we do?"

 "Nothing.  Wait.  Something will happen.  I've been here before."

 "But the Rift Edge was destroyed!"

 "I picked a white island last time."  He felt a tremble in the thing that was not a voice.  "I was wrong."

 Did I?  Am I remembering that, or wishing?

 Darkness quivered, like an obsidian gel.  He felt a clamping numbness gently lifting from within his gut and thighs.

No, that wasn't his own kinesthetic sensations. It was coming from Strom5 through the lec.

 "Edward-!"

 "I feel it.  We must be ready.  I don't know exactly what comes--"

 Sev's voice--his true voice, pitched almost comically high and hoarse--rang in the close confines of the ship.  "I've got 'em!  I've got all the instruments back!"

 "Do you have the conn?"

 "No!  I can't get Strom to-- Jeset!"  He screamed.  "My eyes!"

 White light crackled in an actinic shower across Delloso's vision.  In the same instant, he felt the shipmind flow fully back into his consciousness, bringing its staggering overload of sensation, its cold intelligence stinging him with urgency.

 "You must lead.  I do not understand..."

 "Keep that damned port shuttered!" he shouted at the mek.

 Through shielded eyes Delloso peered down into the heart of an inferno.  Veils of viscous fire streamed past, dangerously close, and beyond, against a wall of incredible, mottled brightness, a cluster of hundreds of crystalline droplets spun languidly, their smooth faceted surfaces alive with a perfect reflection of a raging hell.

 That is from the 'groper, Teague's thought was somehow with him.  Strom must have launched it away.

 "Yes, but into what?"

 "Sev, are you all right?"

 "I- I'm okay.  Just a little bedazzled.  What was that?"

 "We are inside one of those objects in 5space.  They are incredibly massive, almost stellar..."

 "Neutronium!"  Teague exclaimed.  "So this is how they find it."

 Starshards, Delloso's realization created a subtler reverberation.  The picture came unbidden, as if he had always known.  Broken hearts of long-dead suns, somehow seeding crippled life again.  And something else, vaster, painful to know...

 The swarm of shards hung languidly all about, their mass force and motions somehow shielding small volumes of the star.

 He wanted to interrogate Teague about the full meaning of her comment, but another and most dangerous hurdle remained.

 "Strom," he tried, but its consciousness was mute.

 "The 'groper!  It can't last long out there."

 "I know."  It's presence should have been impossible in the first place.

 A last look, a maelstrom of chaotic action so overwhelming in scope that it did not seem to change.  Then the 'groper snuffed out in a blink of fusion, taking Strom5's eyes with it.

 He shook the 'groper's last 4space image out of his mind, leaning forward and into the gravanom's presence.  In this 5space viewpoint, steady and clear, he at last found what he had wanted.

 Islands of blackness, their formation symmetric no longer.  One spun inexorably outward, like a cluster rogue drawn out by unguessable dreams into infinite night, tended by a whirling pattern of oddly distributed mass.

 The Ri!

 "I don't know how, but they are tearing one of those sunstones away.  It has disrupted the stellar pressure balance."  He raced through calculations.  "We are only hours away from stellar expansion and runaway collapse."

 "Supernova?"

 "Or something like it."

 Without 4space eyes, they would find it very difficult to make a 5space jump out of here.  He madly scanned the 5space anomalies, seeking a path through the dense radiation in any dimension.  Nothing.

 "I am going to vector us to another neutron mass," he gritted, fixing on his target.

 "Which one?"

 If he did not know the way out, he knew someone...something...that did.

 "Theirs."

 Strom5 did not accept the orders, so Delloso reached down into the autonomic regions and executed them himself.  With a wrenching snap that felt like a heavy boot in the vitals, the G'naian ship translated its 5space anchorage between dimensions.

 In that timeless instant, Delloso's vision filmed once more.  Backward, he saw Xi in infinite layered montage, shrinking to an almost normal blue sun, expanding to a disk, a loose sphere, a ragamuffin cloud of itinerant debris and ubiquitous hydrogen, trailing obliquely across the galaxy after bright bits of careening starstuff, always focussed on those dense urn-ashes of some ancient sun's demise.  And forward, that way...

 A stuttering, pulsating, erratic expansion and collapse, more rapid than any normal dying massive sun.  From the central regions, stirred incessantly by tumbling gyrations of no longer balanced swarms of mass, uncontrolled fusion followed outward.  Superheated helium ash from the core regions spun out in viscous tendrils, everywhere igniting a chaining fervor of pure light.  The wall of radiance gushed outward at near lightspeed, slowed only relatively by the densities of mantle gases.

 Transplanted to the Ri's captured shard, balanced within it in 5space, they watched the maelstrom come.

 "My God, Edward!  They can't outrun that.  What's wrong?  Surely they didn't intend-"

 With a desperate, sinking conviction, Delloso saw the source of imminent tragedy, driving a wedge down into his guarded heart.

 No!  Not because of me...

 But there was no escape.

 Strom5's 5space anchorage, insignificant in 4space, held fast to the fleeing starshard's shadowy projection--held there by Delloso's will and gifted guidance.  But the equally-willed, higher complexities of the Ri stardrive were at work, also, yanking on the captive neutronium fragment in an intricate plan of unfathomable, alien design.  The little group, tied by unguessable bonds, emerged from the fiery photosphere of Xi into the jetting plasmas of the star's corona.

 They were straining against each other, and there was no way to simply guess what the other intended...

 The two beings fought an unintentional battle for control of a broken star's heart, pegging them both to a velocity that would never permit escape.

 Strom!

 What are you doing?  Edward!  Teague's nonvoice was edged with panic, already reading something of the painful choice he faced.

 "We've got to get out!" he was screaming at it all.  Inside, they might be safe.  Out there...

 "Strom!"

 Strom5 did not respond, perhaps could not, perhaps would not.  The G'nai sometimes went to great lengths to observe the rarer facets of existence.

 Delloso closed his eyes, praying in a wash of emotion that brought back all, with stunning eternal clarity, all the forever frozen past that had been and always would be, locked within him, now set free.

 "Eddy!"

 He tore away from the uncertain death of staying toward a much greater certainty.

 I will not be responsible for the death of those beings.

 The first concussive wave boiled toward them.

 With a skill that was beyond his to give, he wheedled Strom5's prodigious mass in and out of 5space, sidestepping the majority of the shockwave's 5space component, slamming back into 4space in the wake of its real-world passing, in the barely-shielding shadow of the neutron shard.

 Yet its effects were hardly blunted.  Strom5's G'naian cocoonfield burned with coruscations.  Hot plasma streamed past at enormous velocity, shoving them outward, drenching space with gamma radiation demonically clawing at the thin nothingness wrapped so fragilely around them.

 He looked up, seeing with despair that it was a sacrifice not made soon enough.

 The Ri ships blazed awash in the unleashed stellar ocean of fire.  They either could not or would not abandon their hard-won prize.

 Let go!  Let go and run!

 Something about their hulls struck him.  Bright, incredibly reflective against all this raging hell...

 He fled into 5space, only to find another totally unexpected tsunami bearing down on him, meeting the G'naian ship in a blending of island with all-consuming sea.

 Eddy-y-y-!

He heard their accusing screams as the emergency booth cachet slammed around him and the green ichor of exoplasm rushed into his face.

 Hopeless, he knew.  The cachets were made for a much more mundane sort of cataclysm.

 I'm sorry, Anna, and his sorrow extended to all the beings his decisions had doomed.  Not this way! he denied the inevitable.

 Strom5 desynchronized, erupting just without the neutron mass's all-reflective skin in a conflagration that briefly illuminated the hungry voids in every dimension.  And in that luminous end, that was also as always a beginning, an only slightly greater entity briefly prevailed.  Up-D and down-D, a lawful tribute again was made, but not without a modicum of choice.  One only had to have the knowledge of aeons as guide...

 Yes, a chrysalis can survive.  In blasting island sun and monsoon rains, a seed can survive, because it belongs in the universe, of which it is an integral part.

Not so for the Ri.

 
"Are you certain you want this assignment, Kalikali?"

 The graduate committee chairwoman's familiarity did not bode well for the plane on which this meeting was to be conducted.

 Delloso faced his mother across a delicately woven nakkiwood desk.  A moist wind came through the open shutters of her office bay window, looking out on the peculiar mixed architecture of Hale's Bay rooftops--furred brown thatch, strident red metal and foggy G'naian forcefields, consorting randomly down University Hill to the indigo stretches of the Nether Deeps and the Great Ring Reef beyond.

 "I know what I am doing, Mother-mauani," he deftly turned the tool on her.  "I've been the best astrogation student--the best overall graduate--that Belavia's ever fielded.  I'm ready.  And Bel Station has the opening."

 "Yes, but Eddy," she sighed, shaking her head and looking at the lec recorder set up beside her nervously folded fingertips.  "I can't help but feel that it was the touri's loss that made up your mind-"

 "So what if it was?"  He regretted his harsh tone.  It spoke of the large kernel of truth in her observation.  "I might have gone for help.  A larger search, done sooner."

 "A determined woman can hide many things.  The simplest is her physical whereabouts.  She wanted to take the risk, whatever her private purposes."

 Delloso sat up straight in his chair.  He had not come here to play if-and-might-have-been.

 "Madam Chairman, this petition concerns the first step in a career.  Not unlike first steps taken by a dozen others over the years.  Two trainees last year alone.  A career that I have been aiming for all my life.  The opportunity has been presented.  I want to take it."

 "But Kali, so much can hinge on the emotions of the moment-"

 "I will go to the COGS committee myself, then."

 He rose stiffly, then relented, leaned across the desk to give her chubby shoulders, soft under her colorful bela, a fierce hug.  When he stepped back, he knew from the look in her eyes that he had won.  He left wordlessly.

 His mother watched him make his way across the outer veranda through the thin baffles of woven wipi grass screen.  Shoulders straight, steps sure and strong.

 What if that were not just a manly show, covering regret and uncertainty?  What if he were not running away?  What if this day would have come, anyway, only a little less sad?  Did it really matter that the larger world he would walk off into was not Belavia's mere planetary infinity?

 She would be wrong to put a false face on his leaving.  No matter what others might feel, she owed him that much faith.

 "Letter to Commander Aldestoni Farana, Bel's Star Station."

 Oh, but, Kali, must the stars call you so far?

 She stopped so long that the mek misinterpreted the hiatus for a concluded session.  The dump light blinked.  She was forced to begin again, continuing,

 "...On the matter of your announced opening for an Apprentice Navigator.  I would like to recommend to you most highly...my...son-"
 
 

 "Take it easy, sir," the sleek-pelted Alikanian orderly helped Delloso lev onto the bridge.  "I'll handle your starboard windings."

 The PanPlanet commander could have sent a mek.  Delloso deeply appreciated the being's living presence.  Somehow it offset some of the indignity of his infirmities.

 Across a sunken floor solidly packed with fully staffed, darkened operations booths, a raised plinth lifted the G'naian longjaunt searchship's flight officers into soft-lit prominence.  The bridge fieldwalls were a blur of racing sparks of light, subtle veins, shifting patterns--meaningful to those linked to the shipmind.  But he now found himself, once again, floating on the edge of the action, and uncertain whether he had recovered all his mental faculties.

 "Welcome, Freeman Delloso.  I am glad to finally make your personal acquaintance.  I'm Commander Ly'ktin of the Pride of the Core."  The being's vocal apparati were not immediately perceptible.  Perhaps his speech was entirely synthetic.

 "Not half as glad as I am to make yours,"  Delloso returned dryly.  "I still am not quite clear to what I owe the honor of this incredible rescue."  This second miracle, he added to himself.

 The searchship commander motioned him to a booth.  "This is my Number One officer, Lieutenant Commander Yanosef."  The cool-eyed Terran nodded from his seat, head enfolded in control bionics and clearly too busy for the amenities.

 Delloso eased himself carefully into the proffered booth.  His bare legs showed the striated scars of recent, extensive bone graft access.  He stared briefly at his arms, still gowned in a biosuit sleeve filled with mint green exoplasm.  He had lived unconscious inside a cachet full of the stuff for more than a month while Pride of the Core surgeons resurrected him from the should-be dead.

 "I'd hoped that we could have all three of you together for this moment.  Unfortunately, only Commander Teague and yourself are up and about."

 Up, and about to fall back down, Delloso amended, shifting tiredly.  He looked around the deck.  "Commander Teague is here?"

 "Not precisely.  I have had them set up a linkbooth in sickbay.  But Medician Vlayn seemed to think you might prefer a bit more action?"

 "Yes, thank you.  Very thoughtful."  He was still confused, fumbling clumsily with the booth bionics.  The orderly smoothly reached over his shoulder and pressed the nets into place.

 "We were with you all the way, of course," Commander Ly'ktin folded into his booth, lifting his legs up and out of sight as he took on a full bionics rig.  "Hiding back up in 5space.  We wanted to come in sooner, but Commander Teague's orders had been very detailed.  And rightly so."

 "You-- you came in and picked us up?"  Teague's orders?  Delloso shook his head, forgetting he was fastened into the system.  His visual centers recorded the mek shipmind's irritation at the jittering connections.  "I- I'm sorry, Commander.  I don't-"

 "We found your jettisoned main pod in 5space shortly after the Strom5 desynchronized.  Of course, we were very fortunate your pod remained fixed in the continuum-"

 "In 5space?"  Delloso was incredulous.  "That's impossible!"

 "No, quite possible, I assure you.  A trick the G'nai bought from some race or other half an epoch ago.  We don't talk about it much.  And we would appreciate your discretion."

 Delloso was slow to pick up on the expectant pause. "Oh, yes.  Of course."  The implications were even slower in coming.

 Edward, a familiar presence discreetly entered the conversation.

 Anna! he lecked back, then realized the dual level of the conversation.  How-?

 "Ah, Commander Teague," Ly'ktin recognized her consciousness patterns.  "Is that you?"

 "Yes, Commander.  Thank you for this very gracious effort."

 "Not at all.  You would have done the same for me and more, I'm sure."

 Somehow Delloso believed that.

 "Now that you have joined us--  Number One, are the probes in place?"

 "Not all of them, sir.  They'll arrive at their scanning positions in a few minutes."

 "Well, let's go visual.  No sense sitting here blind."

 A neural tuning darkness swept over his vision.  Delloso cringed, anticipating the wash of powerful inputs he'd come to expect from Strom5.  The reality was almost disappointingly insipid.  When the Commander had said 'visual,' he'd meant just that--only a single sensory channel.  It was about as exciting as a 3V broadcast.

 "Xi has jettisoned its outer shells, as you can see.  We're light hours outside the expansion front ourselves, now.  The Ri ships are dead in an orbit, coreward from the shells, that will carry them back into Xi's core in a few weeks.  Some weeks after that, the outer shells will collapse back for a final blow.  Probably not a full-scale supernova detonation.  But we need to pull those ships out of there now, or we'll lose them."

 "Have you projected the neutrones' fate?" Teague asked.

 "Yes.  The temperatures will fuse most of them into a single mass, combined with most of Xi's own degenerating core material.  It will probably be a useful new pulsar beacon for the plexor net, although a bit slow."

 "Such a waste.  We could never harvest pieces, then."  That must not happen, Anna's thoughts seemed to whisper close to him.  Delloso stared into the images, only beginning to realize that he was the ignorant one here.

 The scene flipped to a close-in view of the elusive Ri ships.  To Delloso, seeing them by normal 4space means for the first time, they looked deceptively unimposing.

 "The neutronium shard-"  Delloso noted.  It hung in a space still being criss-crossed by prodigious energies, much coming back down from incandescent shock fronts already expanded half a billion kilometers beyond.  But the Pride's observation probe was well-shielded and shuttered down, giving the scene a near black-space normalcy totally belying the reality.

 "The larger Ri ship is in orbit around the shard.  The smaller one, containing the engine they used to extract the neutrone from Xi, has become gravitationally bound to the shard.  Can you see those small humps around its middle-?"

 "What is your plan, Commander?"  Teague interrupted the travelogue.

 "Oh.  Well.  We have a beamfield for gaining entrance to either ship.  And a group of meks who will enter and examine-"

 "May I suggest that you use noninvasive techniques first,"  Teague's assumption of authority over the operation drew a puzzled frown from Delloso.  Surprisingly, the Pride's commander acceded quickly.

 "Of course!  Number One-?"

 "Tachyon and quinton scanners, standard 4D radiation scanners...  The probes carry them all.  The meks will do those first anyway, ma'am."

 "Very good.  Perhaps we can take part in the exploration directly, Commander Ly'ktin?"

 "In your condition, Commander?  Would that be wise?  I have a trained boarding crew running the meks, and the G'nai are-"

 "I appreciate your concern, Commander Ly'ktin.  But I'm sure your medician will acknowledge my fitness.  Freeman Delloso and myself will each take a mek.  That should leave still enough of your squad to accomplish their reconnaissance."

 "Mm.  Since it appears I am outgunned here, I'll go along with your request.  I'll hold my assigned experts in reserve, however, if you don't mind."

 "Not at all.  I would so insist.  Thank you."

 Ready for another look at your old friends, Edward?

 I've come this far, he lecked back, not without trepidation.  But I've got some questions to ask...

Later.

He felt the booth reclining, bringing him down into position for full mek bionics interlock.

I remember...

The memories these preparations brought back were of the exoplasm cachet, closing over him in the Strom5, just when desynch became imminent.  And another time, long before...  He fought back a rush of claustrophobia.

 "We have two meks ready to exit the equipage probe."  With the bionics fully covering his head and face, the Commander and his Number One were just disembodied voices now.  "You're free to join any time."
 
 

 There was a humming, spreading darkness of neural tuning.  The bionics threaded their signals, tied now to the artifice of a G'nai mek across a gulf of 5space in the peculiar hot vacuum between Xi's naked core and its departing outer layers, into the living pulse of his nervous system, and slowly the tingling numbness was replaced by a sense of being...elsewhere.

 Out of the darkness, a dim shape came swimming, as a mermaid out of a veil of sea haze.

 Commander Teague?  Delloso fought to see.  The image sharpened.  A human form, made seemingly entirely of mist and light, gliding up to the steely outlines of an opened port.

 "Come on out, Edward.  The ether's fine," she was laughing.  It was speech, yet nonspeech.

 "If this is science, it's way ahead of my time," he reached out with arms that looked like silver phantasms, grabbed the port rim.  Solid.  Cold.  Real.

 "Just a G'nai simulation interface--an intersim," Teague sat cross-legged in an aquamarine ocean, a slim but featureless statue.  "They pick up on what would work, as far as making you comfortable yet giving you a functional enough picture of the reality you're moving through."

 "And the reality is-?"

 "Stick your head out here and let's see."

 He did.  A white sun came streaming over the side of the probe, filtering through what appeared to be twenty meters of water.  Intervening ribbons of milky plankton cast flickering shadows, slowly wrapping in contorted, ephemeral shapes all about them.  He edged out of the port, feeling rather like an eel reluctantly leaving its protective hole in a tropical reef.

 "It- it's a strange sensation," he said shakily.  "I seem to be swimming in an ocean."

 "Is it one you know?"

 That old feeling in his gut again, threatening to double him up in pain.

 "I- I don't know."  I don't want to know!

 "Don't worry about that, Edward," Teague came up beside him.  A gentle tug on his shoulder brought him spinning slowly about, facing away from the sun and the probe, toward blue-black depths.

 "I don't see what we're looking for," he put his arms out exploritatively and found the motion propelling him effortlessly forward.

 "I'm certain they're that way," Teague spoke from below and to his left.  "Look."  Her silver-tipped fingers pointed out to the side, where a group of teardrop-shaped clouds of white mist were descending ahead of them into the glimmering blue.  "In reality, we're just lecking through the senses of one of those meks.  The rest is all you."

 "Meks?  They look like lythians."  The familiar word slipped by him unnoticed.  "You see what I see?"

 "My choice.  It's fascinating, Edward.  A beautiful water planet.  Did it really exist?"

 "I think so."

 And this, Delloso held a shining hand in front of him, turning it this way and that.  And all around us, a cauldron of Xi's cast off hide.  Metamorphosing into a stellar butterfly.

 "Interesting metaphor," Teague allowed.

 Delloso felt a strange prickling at the base of his spine.  These are my depths, he thought, looking out into the infinity of blue.  Far below, quick flashes of some abyssal mystery flickered on the edge of perception.  I once roamed an ocean like this, unafraid.  Teague was a seaborne nereid, plunging languidly and confidently beside him, aiming for the deep.  Am I now so afraid of seeing the reality?

 He brought his arms forward and straightened in a dive.  "Come on, Commander.  Let's get there first."

 They dropped like stones.

 And as he fell, the darkness was taken away and replaced with an incredible pervading radiance.  His eyes stung, as if his lashes were being driven back into them by his motion.

 Apparently his mek did not think he needed so unrealistic an interface any longer.

 To one side, the foggy clouds of G'nai meks, streaming plasma off their coruscating cocoonfields, were falling behind.  He glanced beside him and found a friendly face smiling at him, a wink.

 How-?

 "You can just make them out now," Teague chinned ahead.  "Do they look familiar?"

 Familiar? he laughed.  Was any of this incredible dream familiar?

 Then he followed her gaze, and he was suddenly chilled with recognition.

 Yes. "Oh, my God.  I know this place-"  I know...

 What do you know, Edward?  Teague hung insistently close, hand on his arm, steadying him.  What is it that they have hidden so well?

 Falling out of the radiant mists, like gigantic crystals of ices floating in some sundown sea, the Ri ship loomed up.

He put out his arms reflexively and they slowed, swinging around the glistening bulk of the ship.  Behind it, far off, was the thin shadowy mass of the starshard, like a nearby moon, and the invisible collapsed remains of the Ri capture engine.

 He glided over the gem-like ship, gazing down at a perfectly reflective surface, seamless, faceted, the change from one facet to another imperceptible...

 "What are you looking for, Edward?"

 He didn't know.  "Something."  Something I don't really want to find.

 The boundaries gave way, now and then, to areas of reflection just as distinct, yet seeming out of phase with their neighboring domains.  He knew how that would look in the gravitational anomaly mapper--black islands of hypermass interspersed with shielded hollows of near emptiness.

 "There," he knew.  "That is where we must go."  But something else was wrong.  He stared at his hands, extending in front of him.

 "What's wrong, Edward?  Is it a port?  A cocoonfield?"

 "Look at it, Anna."  Look.  Don't you feel it?

 She hovered in front of him, her form perfectly balanced, arms spread wide like wings.  And slowly she was settling, down, down, toward the mirrored fires below.

 It's incredibly massive, she felt excited.  Pulling on us, like an entire star!

 No, not that strong, he smiled without humor.  But strong enough.

 "Neutronium, Anna.  Their shields are material things, not like the G'nai fields.  Pure neutronium."

 "How could they form it, Edward?  There is no science in the galaxy-"

 He had already darted below her, almost hypnotically focussed on the dephased facet he had located.  The apparition pulled on him now with a force much stronger than gravity.

 Teague folded and dove close behind.  "This must be why the G'nai want them so badly.  If they can control such forces as to work this material...  And they knew just where to look-"

 Careful!  Delloso held up a hand, flaring out as they came up to the wall of the ship.

 There was a perceptible, insistent tugging, which he realized that they were somehow fighting against--the gravitation of the Ri ship's immense mass.  But there was a second thing, manifesting itself as a tingling along his nerves...  A souring of flavor in his mouth... A faint perfume of pungent akua leaves and burning pipetree firebrands...

 He put out his hand, not knowing what to expect, and touched the surface of the ship.

 And all the energies of Xi blazed instantly, briefly around them.

 Edward!

 Don't fight it, he held her, not knowing how the mek intersim could convey that range of tactile reality.  This is part of their capture mechanism.

 "I remember," he said aloud.

 The dephased portion of the hull collapsed inward, taking them with it, forming an invaginated bubble whose walls began rising around them.  They sank inward rapidly, the wild jetting plasma heavens of Xi's expanding stellar shell narrowing to a pool, a puddle, a tiny coin-sized disk, and then they were pinched off from everything, sealed inside a perfectly reflective bubble that now mirrored only inner darkness.
 
"Can we get out?"  Delloso asked her.

 "I don't know," Teague's voice seemed husky.  "Edward, I've lost contact with the Pride."

 How can that be?  We're back there.  These are only the projected images from a mek probe.

 "There is one possible answer," Teague sounded bitter.  "The G'nai want to know what the Ri have been hiding very badly, Edward.  You can't imagine what kind of energy they've spent, hoping for the day to get even a glimpse of such ships.  Before Sev and I found you, they had spent more than ten thousand human lifetimes getting their ducks in line, waiting for an opportunity.  This series of incidents has exceeded all their wildest expectations."

 "What do you mean, Anna?"

 "I mean, we are still on the Pride.  But we have lost the volition to quit the lec.  They want us to go on."

 Delloso grinned fiercely.  "I wouldn't leave now if they tried to tear me away," he said.

 A force shoved him to one side, flinging his body up against the curve of an invisible curved wall.

 "We're moving," Teague whispered.

 "Yes, but that's not what-" he was jerked again, tumbling head over heels across the compartment, Teague landing on top of him.  Strangely neither impact brought much pain.  There were clearly some advantages to experiencing reality secondhand.

 Sorry, Edward.

 Forget it.  I've been through this before.  But not when he had entered the Ri, long ago, after the Rift Edge died.  Then, he had been dead, or nearly so, a gelatinous icicle in the struggling pieces of a cachet.  And not when he had left again, in a functional cachet, frozen once more.  It must have been in between those times...

 A luminous darkness.  Stipplings of ink on a jet canvass.  Nonshapes in an impenetrable gloom.

 "Edward, do you see it?"

 "The walls are thinning in spots.  My God, Anna.  Pray they don't dissolve."

 Why?  Is it so horrible?

 No, not horrible, he knew somehow.  But deadly.  They had almost made the same mistake before.

 Why is it a mistake, Edward?

 Delloso whirled around furiously, feeling along the surface of the walls.  His hands came across something soft.

 "That's me," Teague laughed.  "What are you looking for?"

 "Sorry.  Something--anything we can rip off or separate from ourselves.  If it just weren't so damned dark!"

 "Easy."  Red flickering light sprang out from a plasmason.

 "Hydrogen plasma!  How are you doing that?"

 "I'm really a mek," Teague reminded him.  "They can do almost anything you ask.  But you have to ask."

 "Well, ask!  Get it to put some of that hydrogen up against the wall over there, where it seems lightest.  Quick!"

 Against the smoky glass wall across from them, a plasmason bloomed, a tiny rose of whispering flame.

 "Press it into the wall, like you're trying a flexure. But cut the flow to practically nothing. Just a thin gas."

 The wall blistered and began to evaginate, making a pocket that permitted the flame to sink outward, until the wall closed around it in a translucent bubble, a miniature of their ingress.

 "Better shutter your eyeballs, kid.  Or whatever meks do."

 "Why-?"

 Lambent flame, absolutely soundless, washed around them, pinpointed on that tiny globe.  Delloso thought he had his eyes squeezed tight, but the flash of illumination painted an alien yet hauntingly familiar tableau all around him.  In every direction, froth-tipped undulations of obsidian marched into infinity, a cavern of webbed glass and unbearable emptiness.

 In that instant, whatever glimmer of radiance had been out there, behind the barrier, extinguished absolutely.  The spherical wall around them had returned to total opacity.

 "The safeties have been alerted.  Now it knows that we can't safely mix with it.  If it works something like last time, we may never see light again--until or if we are released."

 But, Edward, this ship is dead!

 "Part of it," he said dully. "That's why it made the mistake."  Why is it that life is so adept at building artifacts that outlast it?

There were many differences this time.  The Ri had gotten much further along on their mission before they had been interrupted.  And now, their ships, their beautiful, impossible creations of reworked starshards, were floating coffins in the guts of the same star they had come to harvest.  And he... He was somehow, miraculously whole, just as before, conscious, uselessly alive.  And, however the magic was being done, he knew, I'm not really here at all.

 The after-image of the Ri ship interior brightened around him.  He mentally grabbed for support, totally surprised at the sight, once more facing whatever was to come without weapons, without knowing.

 Relax, Eddy.  I'm exercising the mek's instant replay.  Teague sat beside him, her shoulder warm against his, as if they were two kids hammocked in the boughs of an akua tree.  We've got two separate, eidetic records from the meks to work from.  Let's go exploring!

 Delloso felt her rise, then dive off into the image, like an armor-footed avia plunging seaward from its cliffside roost.  What are these things?

 "Come on!"

 He stood up shakily, on a nighttime ledge of volcanic rock high above an uncertain sea.  What is this place?

 He fell into space, brushing through the impenetrable neutronium wall as if it were nothing but a gauze of seaweed on the surface of a milky lagoon.  Then he was flying free, alternately tumbling and sailing, descending glistening canyon walls of some stop-time reef where nothing moved nor ever had moved.  Shadows were stark, unforgiving, absolute.  When he stared into them, there was nothing, no faint detail nor relief.

 "Look, Eddy," she was above him against a roof of glass like a nighttime sea from below, a dark shape with the fins of a scavenger rig on her back, her hair floating free in the unseen current, fins on her feet spreading in a slow tread.  "Mechanism of some kind.  There are patterns in the shaping of this material."

 He came up beside her, and saw what he knew he would see.  Traceries of tiny filaments, networked into a transparent matrix backed by absolute reflection.  The mek's vision zoomed in, enlarging, enlarging again, until detail was rapidly lost in the hologrammic expansion of the captured image.  At every level, complex striations interlocked with crystalline regularity, a schemata of infinitely careful design.

 Teague strayed free, turning in wonder.  Facets blazed here and there, down corridors in an eternal abyss, emerald, sapphire and tourmaline, imbedded in ebon folds.  Far below, the pinpoint source of illumination came from a pocket of starlight, frozen against the wall of an obsidian bubble.

 It's beautiful, Eddy, she sighed.  A treasure of star jewels.  And yet, it has lost...something...

 Close, he lecked back, feeling the deadness of the cavity between the walls.  At one time it had coursed with energy, streaming fires almost stellar, oceanic...  A self-contained island of meaning, searching for a significance, a way...

 Images had fluttered there, woven in a media never meant for mere human eyes to see.  If I had only had this mek to stand in for me then...

 Images of utter cold, of a collapsing, intense light shrinking back from a dying void... Of hanging somehow in a time that never was, in a dimension never known, beyond reach of what was about to become.  A burst of distant childbirth, echoing up through dark chaos, throwing outward the command to shatter, to separate, to expand forever apart, and paradoxically to gather, to form and congeal, to be, in a way achingly alien to this one left behind, but right and knowable to the tiny captive spark cowering behind a starshard wall.

 Oh, Eddy.  I hurt.  It's so cold, and it goes on forever--

 He rolled numbly toward her, the forbidden image still replaying, seeing her dark form against a futile evanescence of frozen waves, spreading satin sheens of forming matter on a newborn oceanic bubble of light.  Eyes caught up with the mystery of an unknown ocean, missing the meaning of it all, not understanding...

 Ryann...

 Her eyes were haunted, It was so anguished.  Is that what was locked in here?  Living in such sadness?

 Delloso felt tears shimmering.  So human a failing.  Yet I couldn't make her comprehend.

 Eddy, this is Anna.

 Layer upon layer, image upon image, crystalline and without confusion, forever separate, forever yearning to merge again, yet every fusion failing, breeding only new forms of isolation, whatever the time, the scale, the viewpoint or dimension...

 Lost.  Forever lost.

 "I know, Anna.  She was another, looking for another world."

 "Eddy, this is not my search alone."

 "It's mine," he said it.  And yet that wasn't enough.

 They were within the obsidian bubble.  Walls pressed against him, cold and smooth against his back.  A form hovered nearby, small and feminine, legs drawn up, head resting against her knees, hands clasped round her ankles, rocking in the darkness, crying.

 "Oh, God, Eddy.  I don't like this place.  It hurts."

 He crawled over to her, put his arm around her, wondering at the intensity of feeling.  Softness of frail flesh, brittleness of bone, farsightedness of intellect, myopia of emotion--strength in the knowing of a purpose, collapse in the knowing of none.

 Purpose, arising from apartness, dissipating in the union of parts?

 Her head came up, only centimeters away from him, somehow her eyes formed, cold, alone, subdued green emeralds in a misty grey shroud, a cloud that hung in an insistent, subliminal obscurity, like soft waves of hair framing her distant, haunted face...

 The cold of deep space flowed down Delloso's neck.

 He remembered, on Strom5, when he had first awakened.  Her inhuman energy in the pursuit.

 And something else.  In the moment before Strom desynched into oblivion.  A turning, a choosing, a way...

 Anna...  You--you're--

 There were tears in her eyes, blurred pools of ifs-and-might-have-beens, the tortuous path of knitted pieces of existence in a universe of separation.

 A mek, Eddy?  Only bits and pieces.

 She reached up and touched his temple.  He felt the lec cartulary seem to jump.  There was a thrumming sound in the background, a wild shrilling counterpoint above.  Cool wind off an unseen sea blew her hair into his face, tickling his nose, sand shifted out from beneath the curve of his haunches, settled against the bole of a tree.

 "Are we so different, Eddy?  You come as if from an early epoch.  You're almost untouched, true human stock.  Almost."

 She allowed the G'nai mek field to spread from her, touch him.  A tingling nothing.  The cartulary pulsed, and a sheen of pastel hues, beautiful and subdued, shimmered in his eyes.  "You see?  You wouldn't perceive all this, if that little knot of hybrid brainpower weren't there."  Then it was gone.

 She stood gently, moving a little away from him, a tallish woman in the severe black of a PanPlanet uniform, standing in the reflection of firelight from a distant beach.  "That's all it is.  A little extra.  They've given us a way to live our lives a little different, a little more fully.  A gift."

 "And what are we supposed to do with that gift, Anna?"

 "Just live, Eddy.  Just live."

 "Like them?" he motioned sadly at the dead, watching shadows.

 Teague turned sideways, in trim silhouette, the meticulous detail of her form shifting, wavering into a homogeneous opalescence.

 There are more of them, she lecked from the edge of transition.  We don't have to make the same mistake next time.  We know what we can do alone, Eddy.  Wouldn't it be worth it, to know what we could do together?  To learn what they might tell us?  Perhaps even to help them become... not so alone?

 Her image winked out.

 So the G'nai would let them leave now, he noted sardonically.  Had it been Anna controlling all of this, all along?  She seemed to always know so much.  To be so sure.  Invariably there, supporting, guiding...

 It's my planet, Ryann.  You don't know its ways.

 The recollection was telling.

 He sat in the darkness for a stunned, unmeasured time, tasting the layers of her meaning in a growing, bittersweet, admiring delight.

 It fits, he nodded finally.

A little while later, he followed.

 From an auxiliary booth of the rescue ship, as they pulled away, Delloso looked back upon the neutronium-hulled derelicts that would wait in their new, distant orbit above Xi, perhaps forever, to be reclaimed by their owners' replacements, should they ever come.

 "We know a lot more about them, now."

 He nodded, not looking at her.

 Sev steepled his fingers, staring up at the receding image of the ruined sun.  "I envy you your adventure.  But what was the significance of cutting off Commander Ly'ktin that way, when he wanted to beam into the hull?  Vids are fine, but hard evidence and captured instruments are something else entirely."

 "We'd all be dead," Delloso told him simply.

 "Huh?"

 "Antimatter," Teague filled in.  "More of it than you could possibly imagine.  Not just fuel, but entire constructed chunks of it, laid up against the hull.  It explains their need for neutronium...or perhaps their skill with neutronium led them to use it.  The perfect shield.  But if it had been breached, in the middle of all that hot plasma..."

 Sev nodded.  "Jeset!  Why do they use it?"

 "I don't know."  Teague smiled over at Delloso.  "Yet."

 Delloso was less jovial, preferring to let his thoughts drift forward while he sat up, stretched, and levved slowly toward the observation deck's flexure.

 "It's a good target, Anna.  I've got a few ideas.  But we'd probably all spend a turn of the galaxy looking for them.  They are afraid of us, and now you've seen why."  He shook his head in grim humor at himself.  A thousand reasons why it would be a waste of time, and yet, he knew this was what he would do with what was left of his life.  If theyll let me.  "You and Sev have a few thousand years in with the G'nai and PanPlanet.  Maybe you..." He paused, not quite certain what to ask.

 Sev made the offer.  "One word from us.   You'd have a ship--and a mission."

 "In PanPlanet?  Thanks.  I mean that."  He leaned his windings against the exit field.  "But we all know that ultimate goals have a lot of little moves in between.  I'm a crowd-lover.  I love the spaceways, but I couldn't travel so far, so...well...alone.  I've had enough of that."  He saw Teague's small nod.  "I'll find another way. But I might need a little help, here and there."

 She didn't move her gaze away from the stars until he was turning to leave.

 "It's a start, Edward.  Knowing.  Understanding.  They're not the threat we all--well, some of us, at least--supposed.  Maybe something fine.  Maybe...beautiful."  She locked eyes with him.  "It was a good mission, Edward.  I'll always remember it.  Always."

 Delloso smiled back at her.  "And that goes in your report?"

"Something like it."

"A little out of character for you, isn't it? Looking for the good points?"

She nodded, mouth twitching upward. "You think so?"

He considered. "Well. Maybe not." Her partner was staring back and forth at them both. "Sev?"

 "Don't look at me!  What do you want, a Devil's Advocate?  Let's see.  We were damn near killed.  We lost Strom5, we lost the neutronium, we lost the Ri, and Ly'ktin back there is mad enough to need gamma shielding.  And you two stand here talking 'Beautiful Mission.' Personally, I think the lady's nuts.  You're both nuts."

 "Sev!"

 "Hey, I'm just looking for the good points."

"Doctor Edward Kalikali Delloso," his name boomed out from the public plasmasons.  "Report to Blacksling Departure Bay Eighty-three.  Shuttles are ready for chartered departure."

 "That's me," he excused himself from the rest of his main blacksling planning group, whom he would never see again.  The rest of the Standard Worlds engineering group was shaking hands around as well.

 "Build it right, Kali," one of planning boys whacked him on the back.  "Don't forget, my kids'll be on the first test sling."

 "Don't we always?"  He levved away, daring to look back.  How many others had he left in the cosmic scramble of the asynchronous galaxy?  Their faces--the faces of many races--were already blurring into the crowds of the plexor shuttle terminal.  At the junction flexure he lecked to the mek switcher, "Shuttle to Searchship Nightblaze.  Delloso.  Priority two."

 "Yes, Manager Delloso.  And may I congratulate you on your company's grand mission."

 "Thank you, mek," he took its sincerity for granted now.  The G'nai's stand-ins had grown respectably in the social graces over the centuries.  Not to mention their intellects.  Or maybe it was simply in their willingness to throw a sop or two to human vanity.  Whatever it was, he liked it.  "But it's not so grand.  Just a job."

 "Of course, sir," it disagreed politely.

 To lay new highways through the stars.

 It was amazing how many ages one might pass in that enterprise.  And how many stones one might turn, surreptitiously, in the process.

Teague found him in the station's airtree park.

 He was dressed in light running attire modeled after the surfens of his long-gone Belavian youth.  The path under the floating trees, dodging their astral spray of leaf-lined boughs and curling, moth antennae-like aerial roots, was covered with a careful matrix of short yellow and green grasses.  It was spongy underfoot, pleasant to jog over.  But it wasn't sand.

 His calves and thighs were painfully slim, yet resolutely up to the task.  He felt his muscles working smoothly as he ran his daily ten kilometers, keeping his head up and catching glimpses of the station's residential sector above him, through the odd green canopy of the trees.  Networks of distant motivway chasms criss-crossed the textured patchwork of fieldwalls and balconies.  Every once in a while the shouts of children playing would drift down through the airtree boughs.

 Yes, the stations were very different now from the sometimes uncaring starports of his ancient roots.

 Perspiration streamed off his face, down his neck, down the grey hairy forest on his chest. 

They keep the air too damned humid, these days.  The G'nai trick with the hydrogen recapture must have really gone to our heads.  No one conserves water anymore.  Look over there, a lake for God's sake.  Imagine trying to make a repair station look like a damned planet!

 Imagine, indeed.

 And on the other side of that rise, a thing that had absorbed his aging creative juices for almost six years, and still left him shaking his head at his own audacity--

 He turned down another familiar path.  His skin was brown again, healthy.  It would outlast more vital parts, and still be worth handing on.  There are definitely worse things than being alive in this epoch.

 The feeling puzzled him.  Had he really resolved those ancient specters?  Or merely outlived his interest in it all?

 "Hello!  Eddy!"

 He realized the call was being repeated from behind him.

 "Hello!"  he called back, overwhelmed by surprise, and came over toward the low hillside up which she was walking, a myth out of antiquity.  "This is a miracle, Anna!  I never expected our paths would cross again."  He was panting a bit.  "Sorry about the sweat.  My God!  You look great!"

 "You apologize for a little honest sweat?  After such old times as we had?"  She grabbed his arm, half hugging him, and stumbled up the hill.  "Oh!  I see what you mean.  You're soaked!"  They topped the rise, and she was puffing a bit, too.  "Oof!  Why on earth would someone put gravectors in a station park?"  She laughed before he could reply, squeezing his arm to feel the strength there.  "You men!  Never mind.  Come on, I need you for support.  This is as close to planetside as I've been in years."

 "That long?"  He shook his head.  "I could never do that, now.  Stay away that long.  Never would have done it by choice."  He hauled up short, eyeing her with humorous surmise.  "You're not here to shanghai me again, are you?"

 "Not this time.  But you're high on my list, I promise.  No, I just was on the Beacon for refitting, called your place.  Took me about two seconds to trick your valet into telling me where you were.  You know, he's really very credulous for a mek, Edward."

 "Yeah, ol' Lightnin'.  Just my speed, these days.  They don't come much dumber," he laughed.  "But he's pleasant to be around.  Never second-guesses you.  Not rightly, anyway."  They turned down a path along a heavily shaded stream.  Leaves crunched underfoot.  "Like it?"

 "Yes.  Very much."  She looked about, soaking it in hungrily.

 "In a hurry?"

 "As a matter of fact, no."

 "Good.  There's a little beach on a sort of lagoon, just over the bridge.  If we're lucky, it mightn't be too crowded.  Care for a swim?"

 They were lucky.

 They topped the rise, and Teague sucked in her breath.

 "Oh, Edward!  So much water!"

 "Head for that big suntek down there."

 Bright sun shone down--not real sun, but it did just fine as long as he didn't squint into the radiance and see the closeness of the lev-supported fusion pod.  Wind rippled gem-like water, sending small, choppy waves up against the white sand beach.  Not real wind, but the fans were noiseless motiv fields, tuned to the wavelengths of molecular nitrogen and oxygen.  They did just fine, and squalls came only on schedule.

 The beach was peppered with sunning crew and laborers and their families, many in biosuits, some peculiar indeed.  A number of children ran barefooted on the strand.

 Delloso came out of the little beachhut changing room first.  The lagoon was an aquamarine jewel under hazy blue noon sky.  At its mouth, an indistinct sapphire line went out of sight in both directions.  It might have been the far-off division of a certain world's twin oceans, beyond the fringe of Great Ring Reef.

 He took a deep breath of the spiced air, looking up and down the clever arrangement of the scene.  It showed true artistry.

 He ought to know.  He had designed it.

 Anna came out behind him, clothed in nothing but a short brown surfen across her thighs.  He looked her up and down, tears coming to his eyes.

 "Approve?" she lowered her gaze.  "Damn, Edward, I'm blushing."

 "I'm constantly and delightedly amazed at what they've done for us," he laughed pensively.  "Good God, look at us, Anna.  Five hundred biological years hanging on these old bones, around the galaxy a handful of times, and a few good years left still.  And you look like a spring filayori!"

 "Whatever the hell that is," she grabbed him and led the way down the wooden steps.  "Now tell me, what have you been up to all the millennia I've been starjaunting?"

 "Oh, my share of that.  I got to be a fair plexor route designer after the Ri epoch.  The G'nai seemed to like my touch.  Opened up the Monoceros Arm."

 "I'd heard," she swung beside him, smiling.

 "I kept looking for 'em, you know.  Never found a thing, of course.  But I'm retired now.  I'll leave that hunt for the younger folks.  Great motivator."

 "Through designing?"

 "Oh, not exactly."  He would save that for later, wanting her to savor the place for itself.

 A thought occurred to him, and he absently ran a few megaflops through his lec array.  The answer brought him to an abrupt halt in the middle of the beach.

 "What's wrong, Edward?" she stopped just ahead of him, turning back.  Sun slanted down across her shoulders, casting soft shadows under her breasts.

 "Anna," he fixed her with a serious look.  "Do you know what the odds are that you and I would still be isosynchronous after all these epochs?"

 "By chance alone?  Astronomical, I should think."

 "Yes, that's it exactly.  Astronomical-point-ninety-nine-nines."

 "Oh, come on, Edward.  Let's do the math later," she reached for his hand again and started pulling.

 Delloso frowned, taken by a wild surmise.

 "Anna-"

 "Come on, now.  Show me this lagoon thing."

 A plexor route designer, eh?  Galactic projects paled in comparison to the schemes of an augmented designing woman!  Good God, what had the G'nai let loose in the universe?

 They came to the water's edge, where a small tri rocked in the slow surge, its three prows pointed insistently out to sea.  That could be for later, too.  Maybe a bribe for the truth.

 "Real ocean water, eight square kilometers and five meters deep, and real sand," Delloso bowed her in first.  Anna jumped directly off the dock into the hip-deep shallows and let out a whoop.

 "Hey!  And real cold, too, you might have warned me!"

 "Well, they're working on that.  Shucks, this stuff was just hauled in from interstellar space last week."

 "Last night, more like!"

 He plunged outward in a shallow dive, struck out for the middle of the lagoon and the illusion of open ocean beyond.  Wow!  She was right, it was cold.  He pressed his lips together, hard.  A few strokes out he pulled up short, "I forgot to ask," he apologized back to her.  "You can swim, can't you?"

 Anna was hugging her prickling arms across her bare upper body, standing in the shallows.  "It may be nothin' for a drowned island rat like yourself to swim amongst the ice floes, but it takes us hotblooded old ladies a little getting used to."

 Delloso came back, returning the grins of several touri playing in the waves.  "Don't mind her, folks.  She's new to the real world."  Five yards away, he pounced and lifted her, whirled around, and tossed her in a short arc toward the middle of the lagoon .

 "Eddy-y-y!"

Not as good a throw as in the old days, but it would do.

 Yes, it was a fine epoch for exploring the roads at the edge of life.  And the echoes only made it the more priceless.

 Delloso laughed and dove cleanly after her.
 
 

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