Date: 1978-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Gay
Description: A man makes the ultimate sacrifice to find the man he loves in this “magical . . . entertaining cross-genre tale” from the World Fantasy Award–winning author ( Library Journal ). In the future, cancer has been eliminated on Earth. Despite his diagnosis, celebrated artist Jimson Alleca can live peacefully for another twenty years if he stays on the planet to receive his medication. But Jimson does not want peace; he wants love. Even though it will shorten his lifespan, giving him one single year more, Jimson leaves space-normal to enter “the Hype,” a shimmering space outside of space. He goes i
Publisher: Berkley
Rights: Copyright 1978 by Elizabeth A. Lynn. All rights reserved.

A Different Light

Elizabeth A. Lynn

For RNL and WNL
with love

Chapter 1

He was standing under a white-gold sky, with brown shale under his feet.

Russell's image smiled. His red hair was a mane of curls around his white face. Emerald earrings matched the bright green of his eyes. He was holding out a hand in welcome. The illusion was perfect. Jimson's heartbeat quickened. He curled his fingers around the cold hard visicube until the edges bit into his palm. When he opened the fist, the image had not changed. It looked at him from arm's length, clear and small, as far away as the past.

He heard Raina's step outside the cubicle and shoved the cube into a pocket. She came through the sliding door, her dark hair set off by her white Senior's smock.

"Well?" he asked, impatient to be gone.

"All negative. I don't know, why you think you're sick." She always made the same joke.

"Same prescription?" he asked. Not that it mattered. He'd been on the damn drugs all his life without knowing even their names.

"Exactly the same. It's holding you well." She flipped the drug disc to him; he picked it from the air. It was round, like his old one, but red instead of sky-blue.

Shoving it in the pocket, too, he felt it click against the visicube.

"You'll be glad to get home," Raina said.

He shrugged. Clinic depressed him. No one got cancer anymore. Genetic predisposition to it could be detected in utero by the Kim test and treated at birth. There had been no false negatives on the test in twenty-five years. He hated being the freak, a body with a rare disease, to be needled and probed and lectured about to awed, gawking medical students.

"You don't have enough pictures on the walls," he said.

"There's a print of yours on the wall outside this office!" Raina pointed out indignantly.

"Is there?"

Her black eyes seemed to sharpen. "Famous artist in a slump?"

"It's lasted a little long to be a slump," he said grimly. "More like a slough."

"I saw your show four months ago. I liked it."

The praise made him angry. "There wasn't a new line in it," he said. "It was stale as old beer, and boring. My agent tells me it did very well, really well." He mimicked Samson's over-enthusiastic tones. Ah, it was no good raging at Raina. None of it was her fault. It was just—ah, stars, he was so bored!

Once Las Flores had been a place of magic, of escape. An artists' town! It had opened up the world to him at sixteen. From it he had traveled to every city on New Terrain. Now he was thirty, with nowhere to go, and the weight of time piling up behind him like the rubble of an old building made him want to gag.

He rubbed his hands together, caught himself doing it, and looked for something else to do with them. He fished the drug disc out of his pocket and snapped it into his bracelet. "You know," he said, trying to sound casual about it, "my best friend left New Terrain before I left the town I was born in."

"Your name is known all over the galaxy," she said.

"In places I've never seen. And never will see." He held up the bracelet around his wrist. It was fashioned of alternating clear and gold links. The clear links opened to hold I-discs. "See this? A friend made it for me. She's a goldsmith. She copied this from necklaces on Chabad. She spent a year there studying their work and techniques. Another place I'll never get to see." He wondered sometimes if she understood, could understand, his anger. Most of the people she saw and treated went home cured, and would live to be a hundred, and more. His cancer could be controlled—so far, Alleca, so far—but not cured. One day it would kill him.

Maybe Raina understands, he thought. She's known me a long time.

Raina said compassionately, "You must have a long list, Jim."

A long list, yes, and early begun. Always he pushed it out of his mind, and went back to his work. Plenty of people never saw a starship, never went into the Hype, their whole lives. But they had the choice, the chance. Lying alone at night, watching Epsilon Moon, the big moon, turning and turning in the sky, the notion of space gnawed at him, sharper than the ache in his bones.

"I'd like to go to Pellin," he said. "Yamaguchi is there, one hundred fifty years old, sitting with his brushes and ink as if he were two thousand years old, doing sumi-e. And Dakar. I have a friend on Dakar." He smiled with the pleasure of that memory. The sculptor Chudra, that great man, had come from Dakar to see him, Jimson Alleca, on the occasion of his second show. Jimson could still feel, round his shoulders, the hug that had swept him off his feet. "I know you do not leave New Terrain. I come to you." He'd warmed himself at that fire of praise. "You are a scribbler," Chudra had said, beaming at him. "Someday you must come and see our stone." Dakar had the finest marble quarries in the Living Worlds. Jimson had dreams about Dakar.

"Tell me about the research," he asked.

"Nothing's changed. The mutation rate of cancers sent through Hyperspace is still 96%. Jim—why can't you forget it? There's a whole world for you here."

"Because I've stopped working." He tried to be precise. "I'm a rat in a cage: an illustrious rat, and it's a plush cage, but I can still see bars." His left leg began to ache and he cursed it silently. "I think the bars would dissolve in my head if I could get off New Terrain. See something new. I'm tired of what I can see. I want to see something different. And it's been fourteen years since I've wanted anything as badly."

"You can go," Raina said evenly. "You can go off-world as soon as you get a renewable drug disc. And you can go through the Hype, and it will kill you."

Knowing the answer, he said: "Issue me the disc."

"I can't. Not without the examination. You know the law."

Yes. I know the law. He could not get an indefinitely renewable drug disc without telepathic examination. He could leave Las Flores, use up his present drug disc, walk into a clinic anywhere on New Terrain, and get another disc. But these discs would only function on New Terrain. Illegal drug traffic was still a problem as wide as the galaxy. It was curtailed, but not controlled, by the vigilance of the Hype cops and the motive-probing telepaths.

But everyone had heard, had grown up with, terrible stories about the examinations. His fear seemed as old as birth. He exhaled.

"It's not that bad," Raina said. "I've had one. Seniors must. So has every Hyper who's gone into space. They must. The Hype can drive you crazy if you don't start out very, very sane."

"I know that," Jimson said. He remembered the afternoon he had waited for Russell to come back from the examination. Not knowing if Russell would pass or fail, not knowing if he wanted Russell to pass and leave, or fail and stay.... But he had passed. Passed, and never talked about it. "No."

"Other places, other worlds—they just aren't all that different."

"Where have you been, Raina, besides New Terrain?"

"Well, I was born on Haven. I did my fieldwork on China III."

"What color is the sun on China III?"

"The sun?" She thought. "It's yellow, I suppose."

"Like New Terrain?"

"Not exactly. It's brighter, I think. Maybe a whiter yellow. I remember we wore sunshades a lot. It must have been a different light."

"I want to see a different light."

It was no good giving Raina a hard time, he thought, as he walked out of the clinic. She was just the bearer of tidings he didn't want to hear. Nothing's changed. Damn the research! He rubbed his hands together, feeling the hard thick knuckles, the calluses on his middle right finger that his pens had made; the one on his thumb from the brush. At least his hands were free. His leg ached sometimes, but he had been living with that ache most of his life. It was not true, though, what he had once read, that pain became like an old friend. Pain was never a friend.

Three years back it had struck him down; agonizing, bone-deep pain that had made him feel like raw meat, hung on a rack of jolting, diseased bones. Alone in his studio he had rolled on the floor, hands between his knees, knees to his belly, rolled without the strength to scream. They had raked him with tests, and changed the medication. That drug—a synthetic from Mira— had held him, so far. What would it be like the day that no drug, no treatment, could stop the pain? Let me get out of here before then. To see another sun, just once....

It was a short walk to his home. The walls were covered with his favorite prints; a relief to his eyes after the smooth pastels of the clinic. He threw his pack onto the bed. It held a change of clothes, his notebook, pens—he drew from it the small print of the Polish Rider that he had brought with him to the clinic and tacked to the wall. During the nights, light seeping like water through the opalescent door had illuminated it enough so that, cheek on pillow, he could see it. Young man on horseback, pausing a moment in his journey, clothed in fur, his hat and tight pants a slash of red, ruins behind him fading into a brown and formless hillside.... Jimson looked over at the larger print on his wall. The pale rider seemed to smile. Had Death come to the artist so, as a beautiful redheaded youth? It was a gentle death to contemplate.

Easier than the nightmare that woke him, of a cancerous deformed skeleton that reached out its fingerbones to him, and spoke in his own voice....

The doorchime sounded.

He went to look. It was Dina. He opened the door. She came in wearing a long cloak that looked like gold snakeskin. Bracelets jangling, she swung in a graceful circle for his admiration. "Nice, huh. I'm a goldsmith, so I wear gold!"

"I like it." She looked splendid, with her crown of ebony hair, and skin which was the color—but exactly!—of old polished bronze.

"All's well?"

"All's well."

"I'm glad. You missed a party. We gave one yesterday for Kas, to celebrate his new pots. We drank wine and got potted."

"Got what?" he asked.

"Potted. It's a word from Old Terra. It means drunk."

"You made it up."

"I didn't!"

When she had gone he went to his desk and took out a fresh sketchbook. He played around the edges of the paper. What might a potted person look like? He drew a little picture of Kas the potter in one of his own tall pots, up to his knees in earth. He made a squiggle round the outside, like lace. He drew a small umbrella over Kas's head, and rain falling from a watering can over the umbrella. He set that sheet aside and took another one. There were some faces at the clinic that he'd itched to draw on the spot. That young medic who'd taken the first set of X-rays had looked a little bit like Russ....

It was dark out when he pulled away from the desk. His bones ached; not only from weariness but because he was late for his pill. Shaking out a capsule from the bottle, he walked to the wall fountain that he had designed and Kas had made for him. Fresh water bubbled continuously from its hollows, making a soft alive sound that was background to his working hours. He tossed the pill back and bent for a mouthful of water. It splashed across his face like a cool blessing. He left his clothes on the floor and dropped to the bed, reaching up for the light. As the ache subsided, sleep came on like a sweet drenching wave.

In the morning he went first, naked, to the desk. He went through the sketchbook. He set the cartoon of Kas aside: he would redo it, and give it to the potter as a gift. The rest of the sheets—he gathered them up to stuff them in the disposal, but at the last moment changed his mind and piled them into a corner. They were not bad, just mediocre, BORING. There was not a line in them that he couldn't have drawn six months ago.

The sky through his window was a deep ultramarine. Through his windows he could see the vines with their many-hued flowers that gave Las Flores its name pouring over terraces and walls of houses. His hands twisted and rubbed together, a gesture he had carried with him from childhood when it had seemed to relieve the ache in his leg. Putting sketchbook and pens into his bag, he slung it onto his shoulder. There was nowhere in Las Flores he much wanted to go, but he could not wholly waste the brilliant light. He went out to look at it.

Chapter 2

When he walked through the clinic door three days later, the medic on morning duty pretended tactfully not to know him. "Alleca, isn't it?"

"Is Senior Ramoz here today? I need to talk to her."

The medic asked no questions. Raina's chime sounded over the call system. "Would you care to wait for her in a cubicle?"

Jimson paced impatiently in the pastel box, waiting for the door to slide back. The sharp edge of the visicube, still in his pocket, rubbed against his thigh.

Raina came in. "What is it, Jim?"

He paced, and talked. She sat at the desk, straightening the papers.

He finished, and waited for her response.

"You're sure?" she asked.

"I'm sure," Jimson said. "I'm scared shitless—but I need a drug disc to go offplanet, and if that's the only way to get one, that's how I'll have to do it."

"All right," she said. "As it happens, I think Ensel is not very busy this morning. Have you the time? If he's willing, it can all be over in a little while."

There was challenge in her voice. Put up or shut up. Fear tightened Jimson's throat. Now? So soon? But he managed a nod. Raina went out the door and came back very quickly. "Come with me."

Jimson followed her. She brought him to a door and held it for him. "Here?" At her nod, he went in. He saw a bed with high sides, almost like a crib. There was someone in it, and a chair beside it. Automatically he sat down. Supported on pillows within the crib was a spindly-limbed boy, too big to be a child, with a grotesquely big head on a skinny neck. His eyes were black and shiny and the skin around them was puffy.

Had Raina led him to the wrong room?

"I'm sorry," Jimson said gently, "I didn't mean to disturb you."

"You have not," said the boy, and he tilted his heavy head forward and up to look into Jimson's eyes.

Eyes, crib slats, walls whirled back, away. Vertigo possessed him. His senses disengaged; there was a terrifying mélange in his mind. He felt as if his arms and legs were stretching far away from his torso; he fragmented, he disconnected. There was an otherness within him, a steady, purposeful sentience not his own inside his skull, sliding through the boundaries of his mind like a drill through slippery sand. It was a violation so complete and alien that he could not even name it as pain.

When the other withdrew and he could again recognize himself, arms and legs and head, he discovered that he was slumped in the chair, unable to move. He was so nauseated that it took all his minute control to swallow and not be instantly sick. Through the slats, black eyes watched him coolly. Savagely he thought at them: "I'd love to puke in your bed!"

The telepath's lips curved in a smile.

Then there were people around him, and he felt a needle prick his arm. Nausea lessened, and then surged back as he was lifted onto a cart. Thankfully he noticed a basin beneath his chin and vomited. His insides were heaving as if they were trying to get out. "So go," he muttered. Another needle.

As if he were falling down a long dark tunnel, he collapsed.

When he woke up he wondered if his body had been eviscerated and then reconstructed. Stars! But at least he was no longer sick. He tried to sit up, but his muscles refused to respond. His arms barely moved an inch. Raina leaned over him, fingers around his wrist.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. "Not so sick, eh?"

"No," Jimson said. "Better." The words slurred.

"I thought I'd give you a chance to curse at me."

Jimson tried to shrug. "Tired."

"I know. I remember."

Jimson looked his question.

"I've been through it three times," said the Senior Medic. "Ensel and I are old friends now."

Three times! Jimson forced himself to sustain speech. "You must have wanted something very badly," he said.

"I did. So did you." The medic held a disc close to Jimson's eyes. It was clear, with imprinted black characters. Deftly she snapped it into the bracelet link, and tossed the red disc into the disposal. "You'll be fine in about six hours," she said. "Until then you might try sleeping." She turned to leave. Jimson tried to beckon her back, forgetting that his hand wasn't working. She saw the abortive attempt and came to the bedside. "Something else?"

The words came so slowly: "Are they all like that?"

"No. One of the best telepaths I know of is an exquisitely beautiful nine year old girl. Ensel is good. Very fast. They can kill you if they stay in too long at that depth. Ensel admires you, by the way. He knows who you are; he's seen prints of your work. If you ever come back to New Terrain, you might stop by here and tell him about what you did and what you saw. All telepaths are compulsive voyeurs. He can't go himself."

"Why not?"

"He has so many things wrong with his body that increased gees would kill him," said Raina. "He could take the Hype—but he can't ride a fusion-drive shuttleship up to Epsilon Moon where the starship port is. He'll never leave New Terrain."

"Then he knows," Jimson said. "He's that kind of a freak, too." It made him feel triumphant. "But I think I'd rather be me," he added.

"So would Ensel," said Raina. And she left Jimson to reflect on that until he fell asleep.

Chapter 3

He was standing in a roomful of stars.

Absurd! No, he was suspended in space, and beneath his feet and over his head drifted the dust that made universes. He searched for familiar constellations: there were none, just darkness and more stars. They shone and shone. Somewhere among them swung Old Terra, Earth, his homeworld—though he had never been there. And Nexus Compcenter, in the center of the inhabited worlds, where the starship fleets were based. He recalled the names from the wall maps, but those were flat maps, and it was hard to transfer locations from those to the totality of a matrix map. He watched the stars blazing in a black so intense it hurt his eyes. When it faded to grey, and the grey dissolved into a square room with a bored official turning knobs, he looked at his hands as if he had never seen them before, and at the room as if it were only marginally there.

"Well, that's what it looks like," said the clerk, faking interest, not very well. He lifted the helmet from Jimson's head. "Innerestin', huh?"

The spectacle of the galaxy wreathed around his head preempted Jimson's visions. "How does it do that?"

"The helmet." He tapped it with his knuckles. "It cuts out sensory feedback, otherwise you'd hear your own breathing, heartbeat, and so on. Plugs into the brain."

Now, does he know what he's talking about? wondered Jimson. Or is that all he knows, that the helmet "plugs into the brain?" Don't be critical, he admonished himself.

He thanked the man and stepped out into the hall. You're a stranger here, remember? He thought back to the talk they all had heard before boarding the shuttleship from New Terrain to Epsilon Moon. The woman giving it had barely looked at the roomful of people. "Most of you," she had said, "have already booked passage through the Hype and won't stay at Epsilon Station more than a day. The rest of you have three days to decide if you want to go on through the Hype, or go back to New Terrain. While you are there, use common sense. If you're told by Station staff to do something, do it. Ask questions later. You haven't the experience to even recognize the emergencies that might occur. Don't go where signs say you shouldn't; same reasoning applies. Custom off New Terrain differs from what you're used to. Three things you ought to remember. First: Don't go where you're not wanted. Especially, stay out of the portions of cities where Hypers live. They don't like tourists. Second: Don't ask personal questions. You can ask about the Stations, the starships, the Hype, whatever you want to know, but don't be curious about the people you talk to. It's very bad manners in the Hype. Third: Offplanet, only Hypers wear jewelry. On stations, starships, and in cities where Hypers live, you should leave bracelets, earrings, all ornaments except very plain rings, behind."

When she had turned to leave them, Jimson had noticed the blue earrings sparkling in her ears. It had given him a start; she looked, maybe, twenty. They go young, when they go, he had thought. He'd examined the faces around him. There were no young faces, and he'd realized that most of these people, whether they were going through the Hype or not, would always be strangers to it—drugged passengers on the starships, gawking tourists on other worlds. He had climbed to the shuttleship observation deck on New Terrain to look at the bright ships—and suddenly he was sixteen again. Sixteen, in the first light of summer, watching Russell ride the movalong away from him, across the open field to the Gate. He'd wanted to follow, and had known he could not. But Russell had never wanted anything more than he wanted the stars. He had not even turned to look back.

Jimson reached out to touch the corridor wall, trying to detach himself from the sudden, painful rush of memory. They'd been friends for two years. Jimson had lost all memory of Russell's voice, but he recalled without difficulty Russell's walk, and his smile. He had a sexual drive like a firestorm, and a temper to match his hair. Jimson went to Las Flores. Russell said, "I'll be in touch."

"You'll have to write to me. I won't know where you are."

"I'll write."

But he hadn't. Jimson waited till he gave up waiting. He thought he'd given up waiting.

Then the visicube had arrived.

Fourteen years ago Russell had put on a matrix map helmet, stabbed a finger into the midst of the Living Worlds, and said, There.

Jimson thought, I've followed him now. I'm on Epsilon Moon. The Hype is waiting for me. All I have to do is go.

Ahead of him a sign gleamed in the wall. "Sector One," it read, and then an arrow, and then "Port." He walked in the direction of the arrow. A ramp led into a tunnel. The tunnel sides closed around him like the gut of a giant worm. It was a short walk, but Jimson was glad when he saw the lights from Port Sector reflecting off the tunnel walls. He shifted his bag on his shoulder and lengthened his stride.

He was up and out of the tunnel. Below him lay a glittering city. Above him hung blue sky.

In blocks and towers like a child's fantasy, Port spread out below him. He stood on a balcony. Above, translucent silver-blue marked where the dome interposed between airless space and the working Station. He tipped his head back to marvel at it. Now it seemed cloudy, now clear, and it trembled and shivered with the insubstantiality of an atmosphere. How could engineers' artifices, beams and girders and rivets, do what he could almost never do with ink and paint? The illusion of depth was superb. It gave him mental shivers to think that this sky came to an end, arching down from overhead to find its anchorage in the rocky surface of an airless moon.

He looked around for the way down—and found it. It was a Gate, with a scanner, hedged by signs which read: Authorised Entrance Only. Above the Gate a cage mechanism hung, ready to drop and imprison anyone trying to go through the Gate with no I-disc, or with the wrong one. Jimson's disc, as far as he knew, would only pass him through the Gate at Sector One. He didn't want to risk the cage. Anger stirred in him. His sense of déjà vu poured through him like a wine rush. He was sixteen again, and left behind, outside.

He pulled himself out of it, firmly, and glanced around. This was not a bad spot to be. He could watch the people. A veritable parade was passing him, coming from the complex of tunnels that connected Port with the other Sectors: Garden Sector, Comp, Sector One, Research. There, for example, was a green person. Pale green skin, smooth and hairless, head hair like fine coiled gold wire, six feet tall: Jimson knew he was looking at a Verdian. She (she?) was wearing a long robe that shimmered and changed colors constantly, but appeared to be mostly green, and, on long pendant earlobes, longer ruby earrings swayed. Behind her (her?) came a woman in purple coveralls, with purple shadows drawn around her eyes like a mask. She wore a silver bracelet high on her bare right arm. He hunkered down on his heels and set his back to the railing. Bright, arrogant, the wild parade marched through the Gate. Jimson's fingers itched for paper and a pen but that, he guessed, might be rude. I wonder how long it will be before someone gets tired of this crazy stranger staring, and punches me one?

* * *

At last he got tired, not of looking but of staying still: a subtle warning ache was starting in his leg. He walked back to Sector One and went searching for the dining hall. The big room had many different kinds of food, and one thing it had was a huge pot of dark, aromatic, strong coffee. Jimson carried a cup to a table. He stretched his legs and let his bag slide to the floor. He sipped with half-closed eyes.

A rustle of cloth made him open his eyes. A woman was sitting across from him, watching him. Her eyes were outlined in purple as if she were wearing a mask, and there was a silver bracelet on her arm. "Hello," she said.

"Hello."

"I saw you at the Gate to Port today." It was not a question, but it hung in the air as a question would. Jimson found himself volunteering the information she had not asked for.

"I was looking."

"But your back was to Port."

"I'd finished looking at Port. I was looking at people." She nodded. After a moment, he explained. "I'm an artist. I like to look at faces especially."

"I'd like to see some of your work."

He reached for the bag and pulled out his sketchbook. There were sketches in it which he had made while waiting for the shuttleship on New Terrain. "They're not very good," he apologized. They weren't, but they weren't quite bad enough to throw away.

She looked through the sketchbook slowly and intently. Her hands against the creamy paper were striking: very brown, long, with crooked fingers, and the knuckles were very big and lumpy. At the picture he had done of the shuttleships she stopped, and brushed her hand across the page in sensuous response. "I like these," she said. She closed up the book and handed it back to him. "My name is Leiko Tamura," she said.

"Jimson. Jimson Alleca."

"Jimson Alleca," she repeated. "Thank you for showing me your work."

"It isn't finished stuff," he said. "Just bits and pieces—beginnings."

She was interested. "So you might end up not using any of it?"

"Right. Or only using some small part of it."

"You must use up a lot of paper that way," she said.

He had never considered it—the mountain of paper he used up. He visualized it suddenly, and it startled him. "Well, it isn't made of trees anymore," he said doggedly. And then laughed, and was pleased to find she was laughing with him. Her eyes were grey, and they laughed too.

"I wouldn't let it stop me," she said.

"No, I won't."

The shared laughter relaxed them both.

Leiko asked: "Do you like Epsilon Moon?"

"It's different," Jimson said, "I've never been here before. I keep wondering what it would be like to live here, or work here." Now there's a nice oblique way of asking a question, he thought. Alleca, you're learning.

Leiko made a face. "Kind of stuffy," she said. "It's awfully small. I think it would get boring." She grinned. "I'm sure of it. I've only been here four days, and I'm already bored. Can't wait to be gone."

"I've been here since yesterday afternoon," he said.

"You haven't had much time to look around."

"I've seen Sector One. And you saw me at the Gate."

"Have you seen the starships?"

"How could I? I thought—they're outside the dome!"

"There's a place in Port where the dome transpares, and you can see out to the Flight Field. I bet, if you asked, you could get a temporary clearance to go through the Gate."

"You think so?" He turned it over in his mind. "Do the starships look like the shuttleships?" he asked, picturing in his head those needlenosed brightnesses standing in the sun at the shuttleport on New Terrain.

"No," she answered. "Not really." She looked away from him for a moment. Then she smiled. "Would you like company? If you would, I'll go with you."

"Would you?" It delighted him. "I would love company—but you must have things to do."

"No," she said, "not a damn thing, till my ship takes off again. I'm second pilot on a passenger run. We leave for Nexus tomorrow evening; and till then, I get to racket around here." She stood up. "I'll meet you at the tunnel tomorrow morning at nine. All right?"

"I'll be there."

Chapter 4

In the morning, after breakfast, Jimson went to an Information Booth and asked, "How can I get clearance into Port?"

The clerk asked, not sounding particularly interested, "Why do you want to go there?"

Jimson had learned long ago that bureaucratic questioners can only handle the simplest answers. "I'm an artist," he said, "and I want to draw pictures of it."

"Let me have your I-disc, please."

Jimson felt for his bracelet, remembered he was no longer wearing it, and hunted the disc from his bag. They both waited while the clerk played with his keyboard. Then he handed two discs back to Jimson, the I-disc, and a black one.

"The black disc is good only at the Port Gate," the clerk said. "When you come back through the Gate it'll be no good at all, and you can destruct it. It has a limit of one day, and if you try to use it on any other Gate, you'll get caged. That's all."

He walked to the tunnel. Leiko was waiting for him, in orange coveralls so bright that they blazed. Her eyes were decorated with glitter-dust on the lids. They joined the stream of people moving towards the Port Gate. Leiko walked arrogantly through it, daring it to deny her. Jimson fumbled nervously for the black disc. She laughed at him. He slid the disc over the scanner screen. The Gate bar lifted, and let him through.

"Can you ride the movalongs?" she asked him.

He settled his bag more securely. "I could once." What happens if you do it wrong? Oh, yes, you fall down. Hell with it. Grabbing for her hand, he made a reckless leap at the moving silver surface, and balanced on it.

"Hey—good!" Her fingers were strong around his.

"Now where do we go?" The movalong was fast enough to send a breeze flickering at them. Eight kilometers an hour? Twelve? More? Already they were among the buildings.

Leiko pointed ahead. "By the Flight Tower there's a junction, and we'll step to the other band. It goes that way, all the way out to the edge of the sky."

The edge of the sky! He had played with the thought all day yesterday, and now it had been returned to him.

A graceful spire stood out amid the block-like buildings ahead of them, reminding Jimson of the shuttleships. "That's the Flight Tower," said Leiko. "They co-ordinate the jumps from there. There'll be another movalong coming up on your right. It'll run parallel to this one, and you can just step over."

At the junction she took a long graceful forward and to the side step, a dancer's glide. He copied her. Soon the two ribbons turned away from each other. They were alone. He looked back. Port glimmered behind him, the movalong seemed a stream of water running through sand. Ahead of them was nothing; just a thin covering of sand over rock, and a horizon of shimmery grey-blue. Port was the mirage of an oasis seen through spinning dust.

Leiko waved a hand at the desert-like place. "I like this," she said. "I was born on a desert world."

Then the movalong brought them to a platform, and there was a hole in the sky.

Bright light beamed across flatness. He saw shapes like huge stones: round, oval, spire-like, square, like toys made out of pipe-cleaners and clay. Not stones. Not toys. Starships.

Leiko was speaking. "The round ones are passenger ships, and the polygons are cargo ships. The ones that look like shuttleships are robot probes, unpiloted."

It was impossible to tell how big they were. The light hit them strangely, creating sharp, solid shadows that fooled the eye, and beyond the ships a curtain of stars descended, drawing his gaze. The ships seemed like artifacts made by aliens. He put a hand out and touched the cold transparent surface of the sky.

"There's a bubble out there," Leiko said.

"A what?"

"A bubble." She put her head close to his; her breath was warm on his cheek. "There." Her hand traced a line along the window.

Suddenly he saw it—or rather, saw something between the starships and his eyes. It was indistinct, but it reflected light, and he tracked it by flashes as it traveled among the ships. There was nothing moving anywhere else. Then he couldn't see it anymore. He watched. Nothing happened. He was bending to get his sketchbook from his bag when Leiko caught his arm. One of the ships was changing color, like a stone heating, from purple to blue to green to orange to yellow to scarlet to dull red. Then it was gone. Leiko made a little sound in her throat, not really a sigh.

"What was that?" Jimson asked.

"A ship jumping into the Hype. Visible light emissions are a byproduct of the Drive."

Jimson sat back on his heels and opened his sketchbook. He closed his mind to Port, to the wasteland of sand and dust ahead of him, to the silver sky, and focused it on the changing ship. Dina had named the process "doodling." It was pattern-making, like a child drawing pictures in the dirt, more internal than external. Humming, he worked pen across paper. At last he became conscious of Leiko beside him, and of his cramped legs. He looked at the pages he had filled. They were covered with sharp jagged lines, and the spaces into which those lines leaped. He stuffed the book into his pack and stretched, grunting. "How long have we been here?"

"An hour or so," Leiko said. "Are you finished?"

"I think so. Thank you for staying with me."

"I liked watching you," she said. "It was—different. Was it like you thought it would be?"

"No."

"Maybe you'll draw a picture of it," she said.

"I might."

Going back towards the miniature city in the distance, Jimson remembered Leiko's gesture and her words: I was born on a desert world. He was curious about her—where she had lived, what she had done. But custom forbade him to ask. He scowled at the movalong. She glanced at him shrewdly. "I'm hungry," she said. "Are you?"

He thought about it, and decided he was. "Yes."

"We can eat in the Flight Tower, if you'd like."

"We can?"

"Sure. There's nothing secret in the dining hall."

The inside of the Tower looked very much like Sector One; long corridors with a lot of closed doors. The dining hall was huge: four or five food counters and an acre of tables and chairs. He sniffed the strange smells. "Don't worry," Leiko said. "There'll be plenty of stuff you can eat."

She chose something that looked like bird, covered with an orange gluey sauce. "What is that?" asked Jimson.

She said something in a language he didn't know. "It's good; it tastes a little like fish."

"I'll try some," Jimson said. He liked fish. "How do I eat it?"

"With your hands," Leiko said. "Soak up the sauce with the bread." She indicated the flat pancake-looking things on the edge of the plate. Jimson picked one up. It felt like a piece of light wood, but when he dunked it in the sauce it turned orange and bulged, sopping up liquid like a sponge. He took a bite.

"S'good." Imitating Leiko, he grabbed the end of what looked to be a bone. The meat was orange-red, firm, and delicious. He watched Leiko, and, as she did, he alternated bites of meat with bread soaked in sauce. He was surprised when there was no more. "Really good."

"Now if you go to Verde, or any Verdian colony planet, you know you can eat the food."

Jimson asked, a bit diffidently, "There are a lot of Verdians here, aren't there?" It was impossible not to notice the clusters of green-skinned people in their green robes, all tall, all golden-haired.

Leiko said, "Not a lot. Most of the ones on this Station come from Dionis, I think. That's closer. But wherever you go through the Hype, you'll see Verdians working near the starships."

"Why?"

"They're terrific spatial mathematicians," Leiko said. "It has to do with the way they experience space. We sense it second-hand, with sight and hearing and balance and so on. There is a sense in us that could directly perceive it, but our other senses block it, jam it, otherwise we just go crazy. But the Verdians always experience it directly. They can handle it. And they don't need that jamming mechanism. The drawback comes when they encounter the Hype. They can't handle the dual perceptions. So they can only go into Hype under heavy sedation. But their advantage is that there's no problem in topology that they can't solve. If you need to go from here to here, through the Hype of course, there are a lot of incongruencies. Well, a navigator trying to map a course could take a month to write a program to tell the computer all the new things it needs to know. Just as if you asked me to draw your picture—I couldn't do it. I don't see that way. But you could draw mine in—what? Ten minutes? And a Verdian could write that program in two hours. Wherever they have starships, they have Verdians around to solve the problems."

"Are there any other beings out there, besides the Verdians and us?" Jimson asked.

"There are always stories," Leiko said. "I've never met them. There must be, though—there are a million systems and planets we haven't been to yet. But that's something for the X-teams to worry about, not me. That's their job." Jimson marvelled at the ease with which she dismissed his visions. A million systems and planets! And he couldn't ask her questions!

"I remember you said you're a pilot," he hinted.

"I can handle any ship in the Hype, except the colony ships that go to the Clouds, like the Sigurd, or the Cordelia. And the shuttleships, too, of course. But I prefer the smaller passenger or cargo runs."

Jimson suddenly understood an effect of the custom which prohibited personal questions. You could never demand intimacy—you could only volunteer it. To know another person you had to make yourself vulnerable to her. He wanted to give Leiko something—but she had already seen his sketches. What else did he have to offer?

He reached for his bag. "Do most Hypers know a lot of other Hypers?" he asked.

"It depends. Why?"

He felt in his pack. "I was wondering if you know this person." He handed her the visicube.

After a long look she handed it back to him, shaking her head. "No."

"My oldest friend," Jimson said. "I haven't seen him for fourteen years. This came to me about four months ago. No message. It's odd, how little he's changed. But I don't know where he is, or what he's doing. I hoped I might be able to find him."

"You meet up with people in the strangest places," Leiko commented. "He might turn up on any world, who knows? Especially if you don't look. The luck has a habit of running things that way."

"Well, I can only go to one world at a time," Jimson said. "And I don't really know where I'm going first. Any suggestions?"

"What do you like?" She was interested. "Icarus is a beautiful place. Or—do you like mountains?—there's Ley. I like Ley."

"I'm not very much on landscapes," he said. "I like to draw people."

She nodded. "People are best."

* * *

In his room, he took out a fresh sketchbook, a handful of pens which he arranged in his habitual order—broadest line to thinnest line—and a glass of cold water, set way to the left, where his right hand would not knock it over when reaching for the pens. He drew: the Flight Tower, the movalongs, the starships, Leiko's face. He stopped only for sips of water, and to stretch his cramped and ink-stained hands. This was not doodling, but careful work that might one day lead to a finished piece, or a roomful of pieces. Sternly he suppressed the excitement that was threatening to drive the pen too fast. It was like making love. Go slow, he told himself. Go slow, don't rush it.

At last he could no longer make the pen move. Stumbling to the bed, he fell across it, elated, exhausted. He was almost instantly asleep.

Just before waking, he dreamed about Russ, and woke with that face vivid in his mind, and memories he'd pushed out crowding back. He flicked the light on and went padding across the room to where the visicube stood on the desk. Just that one message, if you could even call it that, in fourteen years—just the cube, no communigram, nothing. Damn it, Russell, why can't I shake loose from you? He rubbed his eyes, feeling grimy and sticky, though not so tired. The clock face told him that he'd slept the afternoon away. It was already evening.

He looked around at the bare white walls. Already they seemed familiar. His books were in a pile on the floor. His pens were all over the desktop. The Polish Rider—he plucked the print down from the wall and laid it flat between two pages of a sketchbook. Where are we going now, you and I?

No answer.

Shall we go to Dakar? But he had the feeling that the Rider knew all about Dakar. Hell, it was just another artists' colony, he thought. After a month, it would be just like living in Las Flores. More boredom. He didn't want to die on Dakar.

Death riding slowly through His
countryside—

Noted;

Undelayed.

It came from a poem he had tried to write about the picture. He still liked that line.

The knock at the door made him start. When he opened it, he saw Leiko. She looked different. He figured out why when she came into the light. Her eyes were bare—no glitter, no color, no mask.

"Oh. Hello," he said.

"Sleeping?"

"I just woke up."

"You have that look."

He rubbed his hands through his sleep-tousled hair self-consciously, and then laughed, and she smiled. "I came to say goodbye," she said. "I'm going tonight. I wanted to see you."

"Thanks." He hunted for the right words. "You showed me things I would never have found by myself. I'm very grateful."

"It was fun. I liked being with you."

"I like being with you, too." There was a ridiculous, awkward silence.

Leiko said: "You mentioned earlier that you hadn't decided where to go."

"I haven't."

"There are a lot of worlds to see," she said, "but I thought you might like to try Nexus. Nexus Compcenter, where the starships are. I'm going there. Maybe I'll take a few months off before I look for another ship. It's an interesting place. Lots of faces." She glanced at him. "I thought you might want to look for your lover there."

"Oh."

"Sometimes it's hard to decide." She walked over to him, laid her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him. Her lips were soft and dry. "That's for goodbye." Her hair brushed his chin. It was fine, a silky brown flyaway net, framing her face. She had a small dust of freckles on either side of her nose. She stepped back. "I hope it's good for you, wherever you go," she said.

At the door she turned back. "On Nexus I spend a lot of time in the Port City, at a bar called Rin's. If you should decide to stop by, I might be there." Then she went through the doorway with one long gliding step, as if she were riding the movalongs.

Chapter 5

That summer—the summer of ivy—

We made slow love in a little room,

And watched the green stems grow up the wall

Into our window.

He was drawing Leiko again. There were other things to see in the crowded bar, but she was hunched in a new position, one hip perched on a table's edge, one shoulder up, muscles flexing under her thin shirt as she talked with her hands, her head turned away from him. He worked to catch the pose before she moved again. Her muscles moved like wire, tense and strong. Yet relaxed she was fluid as a fish, soft as a cat. She turned to smile at him. He smiled back.

Chora stopped by the table and took away his glass, replacing it with a full one. "On the house," she said. Jimson turned to catch Rin's eye and nod his thanks. The bartender nodded back, his practised hands continuing their swift, rhythmic polishing. Rows of clean glasses glinted in front of him, like burnished bones. Once, in morbid humor, Jimson had offered to paint on each glass, free, the death sign, the skull-and-crossbones. Rin, smiling appreciation, had refused politely.

"A picture, sure," he said. "But death's-heads on the glasses would be bad for business."

Jimson savored the cold sting of the drink. There were seven of his pictures on the walls now, counting the nude of Leiko that someone had bought and not yet taken away. He had almost refused to let it go. She would almost never sit for him. "I can get you ten beautiful bodies just off the street. I'm skinny, my hair's a mop, my bones stick out too much, and my face is ugly." Someone had once told her she was ugly. He hated that unknown fool with methodical hatred, every time she refused to pose. But it didn't bother her if he drew her like this, in the bar.

She was laughing now, head back, and her eyes glinted—they were grey, but not a simple grey, nor even a grey-green, but a silver grey, grey with silver highlights, like a line of silver ore on a rock face. He had been drawing her for four months now, and he still felt sometimes like a child drawing stick figures. Alleca, you're a fucking beginner.

She came to stand in front of him. "How is it?"

"Frustrating."

"That last picture you sold paid the rent."

"Fuck the rent."

She laughed at him and walked away. The rent was little enough. But he wasn't making much, and Leiko was making nothing at all. He grinned, thinking of what his friends on New Terrain would say to see him now, sitting in a bar, trying to draw. It was getting noisier, more humid, and it was packed. A fight could start soon.

There were fights in Rin's all the time. Once a week at least Chora had to dump some drunk with clenched fists out the door. Rin seemed not to mind the fights. He was strict about weapons though. People wearing knives, or carrying stun guns—pistols loaded with small light tranquilizing or sleep darts—were not welcome in the bar.

The bar was dark—because Rin kept the lights down, except in spots—and glittery. There was glitter dust in the walls and in the floor wax, glitter obscuring the windows, glitter on clothes and on flesh. Some of the jewels in rings and chains and earrings were real. There was a beat in the air, rapid savage drumming, creating a kind of heat—in the room next door, Capt had the skinheads out, the small round drums whose taut covering is illegally-taken animal hide.

Chora was bending over the tables, making rounds with her huge tray that she carried as if it weighed nothing, since for her it did weigh next to nothing. She was a Skellian, tall and big and muscular as a weightlifter, born to a gravity of two gees, and in the near Terran-standard gravity of Nexus she floated with an uncanny, incongruous grace.

Miri Ikt sat near him. Miri claimed to be an Egyptian from Old Terra, and maybe she was. She was truly a navigator on the immense colonizing ship Sigurd, which made the long jump through the Hype out to the Magellenic Clouds, one way eighty-one standard years. Miri claimed to have made it twice. She looked no more than twenty-two. The Sigurd was in Port on Nexus now. At the bar huddled Denny and Kay, loaders at Port, part-time drunkards. Languorous in his corner, Chi lolled, green-clad, gold-wire haired, stoned to his glinting eyebrows on nightshade. Across from him sat Ysao, who was truly a giant, and maybe a telepath, and kept everybody just a little afraid. It was said, here and there, that Ysao had once—in another lifetime, maybe?—worked in the almost legendary X-teams, the Exploration Teams that made the first landing on any world. It was also said—though Jimson had no way of verifying it, because no one would choose to break custom and ask him—that Ysao disappeared for part of every year and went to Psi Center, where he helped train a yearly crop (Jimson imagined them as tall, blond, and very thin, like grain) of X-team telepaths. And there was Leiko. And Jimson, in the corner that was his because he always sat in it. And fifty-odd other people.

Jimson attended to his drawing. In the back of his mind sat the words of the communigram, which had arrived in the mail a day ago.

Jimson Alleca: You could at least have told someone where you were going. It took me long enough to find you. Hope you are still there. Are you WORKING? You better be, to pay for this 'gram. Get some work together. I guarantee a show and a buyer. I scattered the news around, discreetly, that you might have some NEW things happening. Keep in touch. Samson.

"Samson?" Leiko had asked.

"Now I wonder how in hell he managed to find me?"

"Who is he?'

"My agent. He sells my pictures and sets up my shows. He is one smart man." Smart to find me, damn him, Jimson had thought.

"You've been working pretty hard," Leiko had said. She'd nodded at the sketches that lay scattered on the desk, the floor, the chairs. "Lots of portraits."

The noise of the bar skirled round him as he counted over pictures in his mind. I'll send the portraits, and the nudes. I'd like to do one more—if she'll sit for me.

She strode towards him now, glitter-dust in her hair. She set her cheek against his. "I want to go home," she whispered.

* * *

Home was a shabby, four-room house, in one of the old sections of Port City. When it had been built, it was fashionable to live in the center of a garden, and the little plot of land around the house was now a sloping, tangly jungle. The ivy crawled up the walls of the house and into the bedroom window. The summer night was sweating hot. They pushed the bed beneath the window and lay under the portal of cool air, watching the glowing light of the city hanging above them, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, as the sweat dried on their bodies. After a while Leiko sat up and pulled the sheet over them both. Then she lay down; head on his chest, one leg thrown over his hip, arm across his stomach. Their heartbeats seemed to merge, separate, merge again.

"Lady?"

"Hey?"

"Can I do one more picture of you?"

"With no clothes on, you mean?"

"Uh-huh."

"Whatever," she said. Contented. And then just had to add: "It's too bad I'm not beautiful."

"You are beautiful."

"I'm not."

He kissed her wrist. "Do you know what color your hair is?"

"Dirty brown," she offered.

"It's the color of faded copper silk floating in a pool, with sunlight shining on it."

The image so occupied her mind that she forgot to scoff. Perhaps she would indeed let him do one more nude—before she left him. Four months was a long time for a Hyper to stay planetside. She was a good pilot; she could get work anytime. When her longing for the Hype grew stronger she would leave him for it, he knew, even if she had to scrounge up the rest of a crew from the deadheads and dopers that hung around the Port at night. She'd go, and he wouldn't see her again, except, maybe, hung in frames on the walls of other people's rooms. And maybe not even there.

She sighed, and settled into his arms. "I like that," she said. "Silk on water." She stroked him with one hand. "Summer of ivy," she murmured.

He was embarrassed. "Snoop."

She was not. "I look at your papers once in a while. That one didn't say 'secret' on it. I like poetry. What comes after that verse?"

"That was all there was."

* * *

It took nearly a month before the drawings and prints were ready to send. Jimson littered the house with his mess: piles of papers, scattered pens, gouged-out shavings from wood blocks curling pathetically in corners. Leiko prowled around the house as if it had grown bars. She was irritable. "When are you going to be done with it?"

He looked up. "When I am."

She glared at him. "I'm going out." Out to Rin's, or, perhaps, out to Port. He looked at the picture on his desk. It was good—it was really good. Leiko looked out of it at him, turning back in midstride, naked against the background of a bare room. Out of the empty room her skin, her hair, her eyes all glowed. He had used colored chalks on this, and it had given him the texture he wanted. After they made love, her skin seemed to change, till it seemed almost gorged, denser, and somehow, furry. It was this feel he had worked for in the portrait, and he had achieved it. When he looked at the picture he felt as if there were firecrackers bursting inside his head.

There were two other pieces he felt that way about.

One had grown out of an incident at Rin's. It had been a soupy, foggy night, not a night for tourists to be out. Jimson was surprised when they came in: three women, two men, and behind them four more men, following at a little distance, eyes watchful, clearly in formation. He leaned to Leiko. "Who are they?"

"Roman De Vala—and friends."

"Who's he?"

"He lives here. He buys bodyguards, and brings his rich friends to Hyper bars. He's an art collector. He says he's a Terran. But a lot of people say that."

"Which is he?"

"The little one, with the black hair." Jimson observed him covertly. It was rude to stare, and fights had started for less—unless, of course, you were Ysao, or Chi, lounging with alien elegance. No one picked fights with Chi. De Vala was studying Jimson's pictures. Suddenly he turned and walked back to the table Chora had found for the group, bending to talk to one of the women. Jimson had never seen anyone wear a mask before, though he had seen a lot of Hypers use glitterstick like a mask. Hers was blue, and the face carved on it was Japanese: stylized and delicate, with feathery arching brows. The eyes were outlined with black and not painted in, and Jimson realized that there were no eyeholes. Why go out, he wondered, if you could neither see nor be seen?

The noise level went slowly up to normal, as people turned to other interests. Jimson could hear Denny muttering insults from the safe perch of his bar stool, but Chora was standing near him, ready to reach out an inexorable, restraining hand.

All would have remained fine, had Ysao not chosen that moment to shamble through the door. There was glitter in his beard, and he wore turquoise studs in his ears and a turquoise ring in his nose. He was hairy and scary and nearly two and a half meters tall. One of the tourist women went "Eep!" and pointed. One of the men laughed. The bar grew acutely, dangerously, silent. Ysao looked down his nose at the interlopers and said two sentences, both hideously contemptuous, audible throughout the front room and possibly into the back. De Vala turned pale. The other man turned red, and then started to shout. Denny edged around Chora, and glass began to fly.

The ink drawing that had come out of that fracas was jagged and jarring, like the glass mirror over the bar that Ysao had brought smashing down. Jimson was a little nervous about it, it was so unlike most of his work. But it was good, he was sure of that.

The third piece was a portrait of Ysao, a woodcut. A front face portrait: the giant was sitting on an old wooden chair that was too small, acromegalic hands in bitter prominence in his lap. His face was lumpy, distorted by its own bones. But a mind shone out through his eyes—calm, potent, and unhampered.

Sammy set up a show for him on a planet called Enchanter. Jimson packed them, and he and Leiko went to the Port together to watch the ship for Enchanter leave. Leiko danced unhesitatingly along the intricate movalong routes, and the ships' silver finish seemed dull compared to the brightness of her eyes. Desire showed plainly in her face. In the sunlight, the rainbow changing of the ship before it jumped was like watching a real rainbow. But no real rainbow left that inward shiver after, that oscillation in the nerves. She leaned over the observation railing, watching the space where the ship had been, head on one side, as if she were listening to the wind rushing in to fill the place.

Jimson knew what she was going to say before she turned to him and said it.

"I have to go soon."

"I know."

At Rin's, that night, she tried to explain it to him, her voice low to slide beneath the laughter and noise and the drum-drumming of the skins.

"The Hype—it's like the beginning of everything out there. Entropy is slower. So in the congruencies where our galaxies lie, is space, and shining dust. The dust makes patterns. They call them proto-stars. When you're there—it's all there is. Hyperspace is the universe. You come out of it, surely, to Nexus or Terra or New Terrain, and sunlight and grass. But you go back to the Hype and you're alone. On an aircruiser sometimes you can look across the plane of the sky and see another cruiser, parallel to yours, or going down into the clouds, or maybe climbing. You never see that in the Hype—I don't know why. You're alone. The silence gets so heavy outside your ship, it's like you're breathing dust, not air. The ship becomes your skin. Can you understand?" She was tense, leaning against him, trying to make him see it.

"No."

"No," she echoed sadly. "All you can do is draw."

Chapter 6

She went looking for a ship.

In the mornings she would pull on a bright pair of coveralls, and mask her eyes with glitterstick. "Where do you go?" Jimson asked her, the first night. He had stayed up, waiting for her to come home. It was very late. He was overdue for a pill. He ached.

"Crow's Place. Liathera's. The Dragon."

"Why there—why not Rin's?"

"The Starcaptains go there."

Her absence depressed him. He felt burnt out and lonely. Rin's seemed lifeless when she was not there to sit with, to look at. He got a 'gram from Sammy, two weeks after the ship left for Enchanter, burbling congratulations and a hefty credit total. It made him smile, but the pleasure was dimmed. There was no one in the house to share the news with. And soon she would be gone altogether. He would move. He could not live in the house where the ivy coming in the window made him think of her.

He went to Rin's. Ysao was there. He beckoned. Jimson went to sit beside him. During the afternoons in which Ysao sat for the portrait, they had found each other easy company.

He showed Ysao the 'gram. "Congratulations," said the giant. "I think you ought to buy me a drink."

"I think you're right," Jimson said. He went to the bar. "Whatever Ysao's drinking," he said to Rin. "Two of 'em." He brought them back to the table and tossed his down. It made him feel better.

"I don't think you should get drunk," remarked Ysao.

"Why the hell not?"

"It's still morning."

"I know. But there's nobody there." He felt desolate, lost.

"Trust the luck," said Ysao. "She always gives back what she takes away."

The luck. Once she'd been called Dame Fortune. Now she was the luck, less personal but equally powerful. All Hypers believed in the luck. The luck was misfortune, the luck was serendipitous coincidence. The luck was Goddess of the Hype.

"Come on," said Ysao. He stood up. He was very formidable, standing. "Let's go for a walk."

There were three ways to get around inside Port City. Ground level was the movalongs. Second level was the Bridge—a raised platform on which you could stroll, watching at leisure the swifter bob of heads below you. Up above the Bridge were the bubbles, strung on their cables like jewels on a chain, sliding swiftly and unceasingly around the city. They were beautiful to look at, especially at night, when they were lit from within, and their colorful neo-lucite walls glowed green, rose, red, orange, and blue, a mobile circlet of gemstones. Leiko adored them and took them every chance she got. They made Jimson nervous as they careened through the air, but he rode them once in a while just to look down and see the magical city, blue, rose, red.

Underground ran the magnetos, and overhead the aircruisers commanded the skies. Shuttleships would take you to Nexus' three moons, if you wanted to go there. To go farther—you went through the Hype.

They walked on the Bridge for a while. Despite his height and his deformities, Ysao moved like a dancer or an acrobat. It was a peculiar and improbable gait. Now, how can I ask about it? Jimson wondered. Casually he said, "It must be annoying, being too tall to reach the handrail."

Ysao shrugged. "My balance is good. I've been to a lot of other worlds, and that teaches you to stay on your feet no matter where you are. And I'm an engineer; I trained to work in freefall."

Jimson tried, and failed, to imagine himself floating, falling through space.

"Want to eat?" asked Ysao suddenly. "I'm hungry."

"Sure."

"There's a place I know—" he pointed to the Bridge ramp just ahead of them. "Let's go down and hit the movalongs for a minute." Jimson followed him. He changed bands twice, and then abruptly swung off and led the way into an alleyway. "We're being followed," he said. "We were followed all the way here."

"Followed?" Jimson said stupidly.

"I felt it when you first came into Rin's. Somebody there started paying close attention to you. It's pretty obvious—like turning on a light. I've been trying to pick out who it is, that's why I played on the movalongs, but whoever it is can shield pretty damn good. Not sure that it's deliberate, but I think it is." His heavy brows came together. "You in any kind of trouble?"

"Not that I know of," said Jimson. He was not going to insult Ysao by asking if he was sure. He looked around. The narrow alleyway seemed suddenly ominous. Ysao was leaning back against the building, humming, eyes closed. They snapped open.

"Got it," he said. "Come on."

They crossed a square. Jimson couldn't help looking behind them. No one was following them—now where the hell was Ysao? "Down here," said a deep voice. There was a narrow flight of steps. Gingerly, leaning against the wall, Jimson followed him down.

"What are we doing here?" he asked.

Here was a long room. Tables, chairs, a bar—and the familiar sound of drumming coming from somewhere. A back room, like Rin's. Jimson began to relax. Then he felt the thought floating up like dark smoke from the room. We don't like strangers, it warned. Go away. It was impossible to mistake, and there was a mind behind it.

If Ysao felt the communication, he was unaffected. "Come on," he said again. He led the way across the floor to a small triangular table. There was only one person at the table; she was looking down, nodding, and Jimson wondered if she was stoned or asleep.

Her head came up. Jimson was conscious of a pale face, and then of dark eyes. Only the eyes. He could not look away from them. The woman was speaking to Ysao. "All right," she was saying, "I'll find him for you. Go sit down."

Jimson let Ysao take him to a chair. He rubbed his face with his hands, hard, trying to shake off the feeling of having been swallowed up—devoured. He looked at Ysao. The giant was watching him apologetically. "You all right?"

"I'll manage. Where the hell are we?"

"This is Crow's," Ysao said. "That was Crow. She's going to locate our tailer. Here, drink this." He pushed a glass across the table. "You'll feel better. If I'd told you, you would have tried to block, and then it would have been worse."

Jimson tossed the drink down. "Her intentions were friendly, is that what you're trying to say?" he said. "I'll take your word for it."

He looked around. Crow's was not, at initial glance, an elaborate a place as Rin's, seeming almost shabby by comparison, until you looked and realized that everything was made of wood, real wood, in a rich dark color that eased the eyes. All along the bar was repeated the bas-relief motif of a flying bird, obviously a crow. The lights were soft, and there was no glitter anywhere.

"The back room is a bit livelier," Ysao said. "But Crow's is a good place to sit and talk. Only Hypers come here. No tourists. If you'd been alone, you'd never have made it down the steps. Crow sits at that table of hers and keeps an eye on things. And if you walk in here looking for a ship, or a job, or a person, or for nothing in particular, she can steer you towards what you want. Say, a Starcaptain, looking for a crew. She's fast and she's good. Not everybody likes her methods. Some people never come in here."

"I can see why not," Jimson said.

And Leiko was standing in front of him, resplendent in a blaze of orange.

"Hello," he said.

"What are you doing here?''

"It's complicated," said Ysao. "Crow's doing him a favor."

"I don't understand it myself," Jimson said.

"All right. Don't tell me." She sat down. "The luck's not with me today. I've been in the other room, listening to the music. I was going onto Liathera's, but since you're here, I'll stick around for a while."

Jimson said, "Got a 'gram from Sammy today."

"Good news?"

"I won't have to worry about the rent for a while."

She kissed him, and then chuckled. "Now you've got glitterstick on you." She turned to Ysao. "There's a rumor in the back room that De Vala has a job for somebody."

De Vala.... "Roman De Vala?' ventured Jimson.

"Yes. I'd love to know what it is."

"Go and ask him," suggested Ysao.

"Thanks, but no. He's rich, but—spooky. Most of his jobs, they say, are a little funny."

Jimson felt a presence at his back. Was it their quarry, their shadower? He turned in his chair. Crow stood behind him. "The person you are looking for just came down the steps. I think he will speak with you soon."

"Thanks," said Jimson. They sat waiting.

A man slid suddenly, smoothly, into the empty fourth chair. "Are you the artist who draws at Rin's?" His face was hidden by a dark hood. Jimson's hands felt cold. In the fold of the man's dark cape swung the shining weight of a Starcaptain's medallion.

Jimson said, "I am. Would you like me to draw your portrait, Starcaptain?"

The man swept back his hood. His hair under the soft light shone red-gold, a tousled froth of curls. Green eyes. Bright green gems in his ears. His voice had changed; it was deeper, older, but it rang the years back. "Crow knew me," Russell said. "So I had to come clean. Got a place to talk? A home? Can we go there?"

"Pirate," said Ysao softly, so that only they four could hear, "you've been keeping yourself hidden lately." It was not quite a question.

"I've been around," said Russell. "Think Crow would let us out the back way?"

"I'll ask her," said Ysao. He left the table. Russell reached over the table and took Jimson's hand. His own hand was warm and dry and muscular.

Leiko was studying him. "I've heard of a Starcaptain who's called Pirate," she said. "He has a ship called Morgana."

"You looking for a ship?"

"Yes. I'm a pilot."

Ysao returned. "Crow says it's all right."

The back way was a door behind a tapestry in the back room. The steps outside it were so steep, it was more like climbing a ladder then a stairway. At the top, Russell led them into the alley. "Anyone following us?" he asked Ysao. The giant shook his head.

"Where do you live?" Russell asked Jimson. Leiko told him. Jimson's mouth was dry. It was hard, suddenly, for him to talk. Russell pulled his hood over his face and led them into the sunlight. They followed him: Jimson right behind him, trying to walk smoothly; Leiko beside Jimson, her face tense with joyful excitement; Ysao last. They went up on to the Bridge and let themselves be swallowed by the restless crowd. Overhead, the bubbles swung, like bright and vigilant eyes.

* * *

They were not followed to the house. Ysao swore it. Russell relaxed. Ysao said, "Pirate, you've gotten good at shielding. I felt a shadower, but I couldn't tell it was you. Been practising?"

"Some." Russell put both hands on Jimson's shoulders. "Surprise," he said, gently. "Last person you ever thought you'd see, right?"

Jimson said, as Leiko had once said to him, "You meet up with people in the strangest places." He could not help adding, "I used to hope you'd come back to New Terrain."

Russell pulled away from him. "Sometime I'll tell you why I didn't come back to New Terrain." He prowled. "But when I saw the pictures on Enchanter, I knew you had to be on Nexus. I scorched the Hype getting here. I thought—" he paused—"there was a time when I thought you couldn't leave New Terrain. You told me that."

"It was a sudden decision," Jimson said.

"Did you ever get a visicube of me?"

"I got it."

"I didn't want you to think I'd forgotten you."

Jimson clenched his hands on the arms of his chair. You forgot me for fourteen years, he thought. Damn you, Russell. Where the hell have you been?

"How did you know that I had to be on Nexus?" he managed.

"The portrait you did of Ysao," Russell answered. He stood behind the armchair, and let his hand rest lightly on the back of Jimson's neck. "There's only two places planetside you and Ysao could have met. One of them's Rin's." He didn't say what the other one was. "You have to see Morgana," he said to the giant. "I've got some new equipment for her. An automatic scanner, and a new bank of waldoes. Do a repair job as well as you might."

Ysao snorted. "That I'd like to see."

"She's in Port, tucked in beside her big sisters like a pea in a pod."

Forgetting not to ask questions Jimson blurted, "How long can you—will you—stay?"

Russell said, "Well, that depends. The Hype cops don't want me for anything right now, that I know of. No one else is after me. If the air round me starts to heat up, or if I get bored, I'll leave. I might look for a job. 1 might look for a crew." He looked at Leiko. "I won't leave tomorrow. Day after tomorrow, maybe."

Leiko said, "Anybody besides me want some wine?"

Jimson said, "I gather your jobs aren't always legal."

"Not always," Russell agreed. He touched the back of Jimson's neck again. "In fact, not often. I was never very good at waiting for what I wanted, Jim. You remember."

Jimson shivered a little. "I remember," he said. You never waited for anything, Russell, he thought. You wanted the stars, and couldn't wait for me. He pushed the old bitterness away, not wanting it to intrude upon the present.

Leiko brought in a bottle of wine and four goblets. Ysao poured. The wine was creamy gold. Russell picked up his glass and sipped. "Thank you." He raised his goblet to Leiko. "This is fit for a feast."

Jimson leaned out of the soft cushions of the chair, and picked up a glass.

It was a time he could later recall in glimpses through a warm fog of wine. There was music—soft music, and then fast hard music. Leiko danced to it, thin and supple as a flame, in the center of the room. Ysao sat on the sofa, guarding the wine bottle in his huge hands like a benign god. He talked with Russell. Incense burned. Leiko came to sit for a while in Jimson's lap; her hair smelling of plums, her lips tasting of wine. Russell stayed on the arm of Jimson's chair. Unsteadily, and with too many words, Jimson told him about New Terrain, about the art, about the Clinic and the drug disc and Ensel and Epsilon Moon. The day turned to night, and the night went on and on and seemed never to end, until suddenly it was morning, and they went outside to watch the lights of the city blink out before the sunrise.

Jimson said, "I feel like I should have vine leaves in my hair."

Leiko laughed. "They'd overbalance you," she teased. "They'd tip you over."

But Russell took a few steps to where the ivy climbed the wall, and, ripping a length of it from its hold, he twined a wet crown on Jimson's hair. "Bacchus," he said. He brushed Jimson's cheek with his palm. Jimson smiled. It was Russell, he thought, who looked Dionysian, with his curls gilding in the sun, and his face blushed with color from the wine.

They climbed to the roof of the little house and balanced on the tiles. "I'm not drunk," Jimson said. "I'm not. What am I?"

"Bewitched," said Leiko. "Enchanted. Magicked."

Jimson teetered precariously, daringly, gloriously, on the ridgepole. "Want to watch me walk a straight line?"

Russell pulled him down. "No," he said. "Absolutely not. You are not to walk a straight line. Straight lines don't go anywhere; straight lines are imaginary, don't you know that? Everything, everyone, goes round, and round, and round...." He cut a great wheel in the air with his hands. "Look at the sun." And as they watched, the circle of the sun broke free of the city's shadow, to make its rounds across the blue arc of the sky.

Chapter 7

At noon, Jimson sat in the kitchen holding up his head. He was trying to drink some coffee. When Leiko came in he looked up at her gingerly. "Want to buy a used head?" he asked. "It just needs tender loving care for about six months to be as good as new."

"Thank you. I have one."

"Do they do head transplants?" The ache in his right eye was like a hammer, and the back of his neck hurt all the way to his eyebrows.

"I'll get you a pill," Leiko said. "In a few hours you won't even know that you had a headache."

"In a few hours you're going to be too busy to think about your head," said Russell. He came through the door, and sniffed. "Coffee! Real coffee!" He found a mug.

"I don't know how you can drink that bitter junk," said Leiko. "Miri drinks it, too."

"Then Miri is from Old Terra, New Terra, or New Terrain," said Russell. "Everyone from those worlds drinks liters of coffee. Even infants. I believe the taste comes with mother's milk."

Jimson put his hands over his ears. Russell laughed at him. "Ysao is coming by."

"Why?" demanded Jimson. "Don't think I mind."

"Because I want to talk to him and Leiko about the same thing, and it seemed easiest to do it here."

"Oh."

"We've worked together before," Russell said patiently. "I want to talk to him about a job."

"A job?" Russell, you just got here! The redhead grinned at him. Jimson felt his heart slide sideways in his chest and hang there melting, a lopsided candle trying to burn.

Russell poured him another cup of coffee. "Come on, baby, wake up and join the party."

Resignedly, Jimson took his hands from his ears.

* * *

If Ysao had a hangover, he wasn't showing it. "Good morning."

Russell said, "You ready?" He looked at Leiko.

"Go ahead and talk," she said.

"I'm looking for a crew. For a small job, a short job. I'd like an engineer—and I need a good pilot."

"What kind of job?"

"Something I'm doing for Roman De Vala."

Ysao murmured, "I recall you worked for him before."

"Once or twice."

Leiko said, "There's a house near the center of the city that they say is his."

"It is," said Russell. "It's beautiful. Marble and wood. And inside it there are jewels, paintings, statues.... There was one painting there—" he shook his head. "He said it was a thousand years old. You could see into a corner of the room—in the painting, I mean. There was an open window, and a map, and two people sitting at a cloth-covered table. The woman sat facing you. She was wearing gold, I think. She had a white headdress on, and she was smiling at the man. She was young, and happy, and the light fell on her face and on her dress. The man was sitting facing her with his back to you, and you could just see a bit of his face. He was in red, with lace, and he had a hat with a huge brim. His head was all shadowed by the hat. And the window light fell across his back. Just two people talking, that's all. I couldn't keep my eyes off it. He had it over his desk."

"Not quite a thousand years old," Jimson said. "It's by a painter from Old Terra, named Vermeer. But the original is supposed to be in the Kaolin Collection, on New Terra."

"Well, it isn't," said Russell. "De Vala has it. And it looked as if it had been there for a long time."

Ysao said, "Talk about the job."

Russell said, "I don't know the details. I know the drift. He wants me to—shall we say, obtain something for him?"

"Steal," said Ysao.

"Yes. A necklace, a rare book, once it was an old map."

"Of course," Jimson said. "Morgan the Pirate."

Russell swept a bow. "Except by tradition a ship is always she, even the Sigurd, and so my ship is Morgana."

Leiko asked: "How will you find out?"

Russell held out a small box. Leiko took it, and pulled off the top. In the cotton nestled a pair of pearl earrings. Leiko regarded them dubiously. She picked one up, turned it over. "This means something?"

Russell was pulling the green gems from his ears. "There's a signal in the earrings, and a scanner picks it up. I expect they change the scanner setting often. With these on, I walk up to De Vala's house and open the door. Without them, I can pound on the door till doomsday. The guards come out when I get inside."

"Huh." Ysao reached for the box. "I don't suppose you could arrange to walk out wearing them."

"I doubt it," Russell said. "What could I tell them? I have a friend who's an engineer. Do you mind if I borrow these for a little while? I'll bring them right back." He took the box back and put the earrings in his ears. "They're too big," he remarked. "I like small earrings. I'm going there now. If you're interested, I'll meet you at the Field Gate in an hour."

"I think they look good," said Leiko. "All right. I'm interested. An hour at the Field Gate."

"We'll go out to Morgana. Jim, you want to come see my ship?"

"I won't know what I'm seeing," Jimson said. "But if I won't be in the way...."

"You won't be in my way," said Russell. "Here." He handed Jimson a square of clear plastic. "This'll get you onto the Flight Field."

Leiko glanced at it. "It looks like a navigator's I-disc," she said.

"It is," Russell said. "It's mine. But all I need is this." He touched the Starcaptain's medallion. "An hour, then." He opened the door and was gone through it, leaving a breeze and the smell of the city streets hanging in the room.

Ysao stood up. "I think I'll see you later," he remarked. He left. Leiko looked at Jimson.

"How's your head?"

Jimson felt it carefully. "I believe I'll keep it."

* * *

When Leiko and Jimson arrived at the Field Gate, Russell and Ysao were waiting for them. The green gems were back in Russell's ears. "I've got a bubble," he told them. "Leiko, would you like to take it?"

"Would I!" Leiko was sparkling. She had put on her purple coveralls, neon-bright, and masked her eyes with gold-flecked glitter. "I haven't flown a thing in months!" The bubble looked like one of the city's swinging bubbles, but colorless: round, transparent, and alarming. Jimson used the ceiling bar to pull himself into one of the low and narrow seats. Ysao crammed in beside him. Russell took a front seat.

Leiko swung in last, and settled herself at the pilot's board with a sigh of delight. "Here goes!" Jimson clutched the seat. The little craft shivered and rose straight up in the air.

"Where to, Captain?" Russell reeled off a string of numbers, and the bubble swooped buoyantly away. Jimson clamped his teeth together to keep his insides from getting out. He had a mercifully vague memory of another such ride, on Epsilon Moon—but he'd been drugged, and the damn bubble had been opaque, not clear as a lens! He hoped that no one would suggest he look down.

The bubble dropped to earth. Leiko hopped out. Jimson came out very slowly, feeling as if everything inside had come unstuck. "You get used to it," Russell said compassionately. "This is Morgana." Jimson surveyed the round pewter-colored thing. Ysao, normally imperturbable, was impatient for once. He tapped the metal with his knuckles. Russell slapped his palm on the side of the ship, and a door opened. Reaching upwards, Ysao swung inside. Leiko went after him.

Jimson touched the metal skin. It was smooth and cool. The ship reminded him of pictures he'd seen of whales, or giant turtles. She was round. Light pulsed near them, tossing rainbows off the Morgana's side. "Go in," said Russell.

Jimson hesitated at the door. It was several feet off the ground. "How do I—"

"There's a ceiling bar," directed Russell. "Grab for it." Jimson felt for it, locked his fingers around it, and pulled himself clumsily inside. His knee scraped the opening as he went through. Russell followed him, lifting himself like an acrobat on a chinning bar. His hand slapped a plate just inside the door. It slid shut. "Ysao?" he called.

"Yo." The sound was muffled. Russell laughed.

"Trust an engineer to find the Drive Core." He touched Jimson's shoulder. "You look around," he invited. "If you want to know anything, ask me."

Jimson said, "I was wondering how long you've been a Starcaptain."

"I've been a Starcaptain for six years," Russell said. "I trained to be a navigator. That took me two years. I went to work in a nice legal job, too, navigated cargo ships for one of the combines. But you know me. I get bored fast. I got curious about the places I wasn't going to—and I got very tired of taking orders. I wanted to be my own boss. So I came back here and went through four more years of training, and came out with this." His hand brushed the medallion on his chest. "Made some good friends then, too." His eyes were looking into a private place. Jimson waited, not wanting to disturb him. The green eyes changed as if shutters had fallen over them. "I had another ship before this: a lovely old hulk named the Mariana."

"Did something happen to her?"

"I sold her. She was close to being scrap anyway. I bought this ship and renamed her Morgana two years ago—in fact, De Vala bought her for me. It was my pay for the job I did for him."

"Russ!" Ysao was calling from wherever he was.

"Coming! Feel at home," he said to Jimson.

As a home, the ship was one big round room. Leiko was standing, smiling, before a curving wall with two chairs in front of it. The wall was a collage of screens and dials and buttons. Along another curve of wall there were bunks, six of them, in two rows of three, and a food unit with a table which could be lowered out of the wall. There was a cubicle that might be a bathroom. There was no privacy. It was disturbing not to have divisions: walls, doors, rectangles and squares. Up the wall, over the ceiling, and down the other side, hung rungs. A ladder? No, they stuck out too much. Jimson scowled at them. They looked like giant towel racks.

There was a picture on the wall. He went up to it. It was one of his own: a landscape, rare for him, in colored pencil: an orchard in blossom, with petals thick as fleece. The orchard on North Island, on New Terrain, where Russell and he had walked, talked, made love in the sun.... Russell's hand fell on his shoulder. "What are you—oh."

Jimson said, "I did that five years ago."

Russell said, "I bought it five years ago. Saw it at a show on Cameo."

"Why did you buy it?" Jimson asked.

For a moment he thought Russell would refuse to answer. The green eyes shuttered. But Russell said, "I bought it because it reminded me of you." He turned then to the food unit. The table came out of the wall, and benches came out of the table. "If you'll drag Leiko from the pilot's chair, I'll get Ysao away from the Drive, and we can talk."

Leiko came to the table reluctantly. "This is a beautiful ship."

"Just tell me where we're going," Ysao said. "I'm in."

Russell looked at Leiko. "I don't know," she said. "Talk about it."

"The Crystal Masks," Russell said. He turned to Jimson. "Ever heard of them?"

"No."

"Nor I. But De Vala has, and he wants one. He described them to me. They're masks, carved out of jade, ivory, crystal. Supposed to be incredibly beautiful. They are on a planet called Demea, which circles a star called 82 Eridani. The catch is that 82 Eridani is congruent to an edge of the Maze."

"82 Eridani," murmured Ysao. "Demea. I remember something about that place...."

"What's the Maze?" Jimson asked.

Leiko answered him. "It's a place in the Hype. It's dangerous. The concentration of red dust—matter—is intense. They haven't mapped it very well. Ships jump around it. Some have been lost there."

Russell said, "A year ago, Shev Allard's ship Emeraude went into the Maze and didn't come out." Something in his tone made Jimson look at him. But his face was giving nothing away, except the equivocation of pain.

"I've never piloted near the Maze," Leiko said.

"We'll be near it. Not in it."

"Ysao engineer. You as navigator?—" Russell nodded—"Can I say yes tentatively?' Leiko asked.

"No," Russell said. "I need someone I can count on."

Leiko bristled. "Yes, then, Starcaptain! I'll try anything once, even piracy and the Maze. I'll get you past it. But I hope you struck a hard bargain with De Vala!"

"I did," Russell said. "Expenses no matter what, and ten thousand credits if we deliver a Mask."

"Done," said Leiko.

Russell slapped his right hand down on the table. Leiko covered it with both of hers. Ysao laid his huge hands on top of the pile, and Russell put his left hand on Ysao's. "Done," he repeated. The piled-up hands confirmed a contract. Jimson looked away. He was out of it. It hurt.

Leiko said joyfully, "When do we leave?"

Russell shrugged. "I'll let you know. Say—three days?"

Jimson said, jolted into speech, "Three days!"

The hands parted. Russell touched his shoulder. "It won't be a long trip," he said. "Ten days in, ten days out, and then we'll be back. Don't you think three days is long enough for us to say goodbye?"

"Sure," said Jimson shortly. What the hell, he thought, it wouldn't help if I said no. But we've fourteen years to catch up on, minus one night, and we've barely had a chance to say hello.

Chapter 8

Leiko and Jimson rode the movalongs back to the house alone. Leiko rode with her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched. Jimson felt the distance growing between them. When she happened to look his way and notice him she smiled, a pleasant gentle smile, a stranger's smile.

He followed her around the house as she packed her gear. "Lady?" he said finally, to her bent back.

She turned around. "Hey?"

"You've already left, haven't you?"

"You knew I would go back to the Hype."

"Yes." What's it like, then? Dark and dust. No stars. And people go out there and out there.

Like Russell.

"Give me something?" she asked quietly.

"What?"

"Something to hang on my wall. I never looked at pictures before I met you. Give me a print for over my bed."

Automatically Jimson reached for the print of the Polish Rider. No. That landscape was not Leiko's. He went looking for a print, a copy of an Old Terran tapestry. Mountains, a tiny temple shrine, and two sages toiling upwards to a peak hidden by a pearly cloud... "Here." It was serene and remote as starlight.

"Um. I like this."

"That's you."

"The little old woman with the bundle?"

"Yes. You'll look like that when you're eighty."

"When I'm eighty I'll be drunk in a bar somewhere, in some Port city, telling lies about my notorious past."

When I'm eighty, Jimson thought, I'll be famous. Too bad I won't be around to appreciate it.

You're famous now, Alleca. Big deal.

"What are you thinking?" She sat on the bed.

"About fame."

"You like being famous?"

"I don't care."

"When you first started to draw, did you think about it?"

"No." I first started to draw, he thought, when the doctors told me that I was sick, that I would always be sick, and never well. And I started to draw everything, anything, frantic because there was a world, a dozen worlds, a universe to see, and they had just taken away my time. Filling notebooks with mostly bad, half-done and half-baked sketches. "I just thought about all the places I wanted to see."

"Like Nexus."

"Like Nexus. And Old Terra."

"What's there?'

"Art."

"There's art on a lot of worlds. You told me about some of them. Chudra—"

"On Dakar. Yes. But even Chudra doesn't understand. They did. The old artists."

"What?"

Jimson pointed to the Polish Rider. "Tell me about that," he said.

"A man, riding. At sunset, I think."

"How does it make you feel?"

She thought about it. "Lonely. And cold."

"Yes. They could do that. That's Death. The Pale Rider. On Old Terra that road was always just ahead of you.... And everything you did, you did knowing that the next day you might not be around to see the fruit of your work. They understood. Maybe old Yamaguchi on Pellin understands. The others—" he envisioned the colors and wide white streets of Las Flores—"they play at art. They make pretty pictures. Art isn't pretty pictures. It's all you can do. It's all that lasts, when you come round the curve of the road, and see the Rider waiting. It lasts, because you painted your portraits with your own blood—" he felt the rage rising in him, "with the blood of the children you can't ever have, because famine or war or disease or their own genes will kill them.... It comes from there." He caught back his anger, wanting her to understand. "My art is my soul," he said. "It's the piece of me that won't die."

There were tears on her cheeks for him or for herself, perhaps. But he could see that she didn't understand. Couldn't understand. Would leave him, not understanding, not feeling the cold death in her own bones. They never understand, he thought. They just leave.

He wanted to hit, and then he wanted to cry.

* * *

In the morning Leiko went out early, without a word of where she was going or what she planned to do. He had not expected her to tell him. He was sitting alone, watching the light climb the ivy and the ivy climb the wall, when Russell walked in. He wore a green shirt and green earrings and gold glitterstick around his eyes.

"Hung over again?" he said lightly.

"No. Just thinking."

Russell turned lazily on his heel, gazing at the prints and sketches on the wall. When he came to the print of the Rider he nodded to it with recognition. "I remember that."

Jimson roused himself. "It's been with me a long time," he said. "You want some coffee?"

"No. You want to come on an excursion with me?"

"An excursion?"

"To visit a friend."

"A friend?"

Russell said, "Are you going to sit there and repeat everything I say, or are you coming with me?" He looked at Jimson with affection and challenge. Jimson had forgotten what it was like to be around Russell. Let's go watch the ships, Jim! The clear voice danced in memory. Let's go to North Island. He had always gone.

"Sorry," he said, "I'm not tracking. You want me to go with you to visit a friend."

"Yes. He lives a little ways from here. His name is Hari Oregon. He's—an interesting person."

Jimson stood up. "I'd like to go with you."

"Good. Is there any more of that wine we drank the other night? Hari likes wine."

Jimson went to look. There were two more bottles. "Will one be enough?"

"Hari isn't greedy."

Jimson stuck a bottle under his arm. "Ready."

Russell surveyed him. "You've filled out."

"I've grown up," Jimson said. "You've filled out too. But I think your hair's redder than it ever was."

Russell said, "And my temper's just as hot. That hasn't changed." They went into the sunlight. Bubbles slid noiselessly overhead on their cables.

"Where to?'

"Let's take a short walk on the Bridge."

Jimson followed Russell across the square. People on the ramp glanced at the medallion on Russell's chest and moved politely aside. Jimson said, "I've never walked around Port City with a Starcaptain before."

Russell rested a hand on Jimson's shoulder for a moment.

"Tell me about Hari Oregon. Why is he interesting?" asked the artist.

Russell said, "Hari works for Compcenter Records, Systems Division, where they keep all the records on known solar systems. Hari loves his work. He's crazy about it. He claims to remember everything that he's ever seen or heard or heard about or read. It's illegal, of course, to sell information out of Records, and Hari would never do that. But he just remembers everything and likes doing favors for his friends."

"He's a Hyper?"

"No. Hari was born on Nexus, and I don't think he's ever been offplanet in his life. He's obsessed."

"I see," Jimson said.

They went down the Bridge ramp into another city square. This section of Port City was newer than the section Jimson lived in. The houses looked like bright, sharp-edged boxes. But as they got close Jimson saw that the colors were scratched and dirty, and the edges worn down with time. Russell stopped in front of a white door without number or name. He drummed with his fingertips on the plastic. The door opened. A small dark man poked his head out.

"Russell O'Neill!" He opened the door. "In, in, before somebody sees you. Ah, the Pirate and a friend." He closed the door behind them and put a hand over his eyes. "Wait, don't tell me. Hari Oregon sees all, knows all. Alleca! Jimson Alleca. You draw at Rin's in the corner table and you're pretty damn good, right? Right?" He uncovered his eyes and looked expectantly at Jimson.

Russell said, "Right, as usual, Hari."

"I didn't know you knew each other." He sounded disappointed in his lapse of knowledge. He had dark skin, curly black hair streaked with grey, and very bright black eyes. "Come in, come in, and what's that under your arm?"

"It's a gift," Russell said. Jimson held out the bottle of wine. Hari took it in both hands, read the label, and nodded.

"Good stuff," he said. "Come and sit down." They followed him into a room lit by hard bright lights. It overflowed with booktapes. Hari cleared two chairs by sweeping the booktapes on them onto the floor. One unrolled. He kicked it into a corner. Jimson sat down on a chair. The room was filthy; the walls barren and white without a print or picture or scribble. The hard light made him want to squint, and the dust made him want to sneeze. Hari bustled away, kicking the booktapes aside. He returned with three glasses and a bottle of red wine, half empty.

Russell said, "Hari, you cheapskate. At least you could serve us what we bring you."

Hari grinned. "You drink this, I need to get rid of it." He leaned forward. "Want to know who brought it?"

"Now, Hari," said Russell, "you know I don't."

Hari put the bottle down jerkily. "Then what did you come here for if you don't want me to tell you things?" He looked suddenly as if he were about to throw a tantrum.

Russell said, soothingly, "I do want you to tell me things, Hari. But you have to let me ask my questions first, remember?"

"Oh." Hari licked his lips. "Yes." He picked up the bottle and filled the remaining two glasses. Jimson took a cautious sip. The wine was half-vinegar. Hari said suddenly, "Jimson Alleca! What did he tell you about me?"

Jimson said, "That you were his friend, and that you knew everything."

"Um." The man looked mollified. "That was kind of you, Pirate. But I don't know everything, not yet. I'm getting there." He was serious. "I'm getting there."

Russell said, "About the records, Hari, you know everything."

"That's true." Hari was abruptly in a very good humor. He stamped on the floor. A creaky and very dirty mushroom chair lifted from the floor. Hari sat on it. He brushed the worst of the dirt aside with one hand. "All right. Ask your questions. What do you want to know?"

Jimson decided that Hari Oregon was not sane. He'd never known anyone to jump from mood to mood so quickly. Russell said, "82 Eridani. And its system."

"82 Eridani," said Hari Oregon in a monotone. "Absolute magnitude, 5.29. Class G5 sub P sub delta. Congruent to hyperspace currents 0-36FR8,1-37DR7, 0-36H—" he stopped. "That's in the Maze."

"Not quite in the Maze," said Russell. "Tell me about its satellite Demea."

Hari sat silently, brow furrowed. Finally he said, "No."

Russell said, "No, you won't tell me?"

"No, I can't tell you. No, it isn't there. No satellites."

Russell sighed softly. "Thank you, Hari," he said gently. "You're a good friend."

Hari said, in a disappointed voice, "That's all?"

"I'm sorry, Hari," Russell said, "but that's all. We have to go now."

"But you haven't finished your wine!"

"Save it," Russell said. He stood up. Jimson stood up. They walked down the bright hall.

"Wait!" said Hari. "Wait. Let me tell you—" he followed them to the door babbling numbers, places, names. Once in the street, Russell put his hand to his head for a moment. "Hari's gotten crazier than ever," he said.

"Do you think he was wrong?' Jimson asked. "Or lying?"

"No. I think he said truthfully what the records say, that 82 Eridani has no satellites. That's interesting. That means that De Vala lied to me, and I don't think he did. Or it means Demea's a planet no X-team ever visited. But how can De Vala think the Masks he wants are there? He described to me the very building he expected them to be in. Very precise. Very odd."

Jimson said, "Does that mean you won't go?"

"Oh, no." Russell frowned. "But it means I have to try to get information from some other sources. Hari isn't the only person on Nexus who knows things."

"Russell O'Neill," said a woman's voice. Russell whirled, quick as a cat, and then relaxed. A woman stood on the street. She had broad flat features and brown hair with blond tones in it, and very large and lovely green eyes. She wore a Starcaptain's medallion on a chain round her neck.

"Tori," said Russell. "Nice to see you. How are things in Sector Garnet?'

"Things are fine."

"Jimson Alleca, this is Starcaptain Tori Lamonica. Tori, Jimson Alleca. Jim's an artist."

"How do you do," she said, polite, uninterested.

Russell said, "None of my business—but I think you're a friend of Hari Oregon's, just as I am."

"I might be," she said.

"He's not doing very well right now," Russell said. "Not very well at all."

Tori Lamonica nodded. "I see. Thank you."

"At your service, Starcaptain," Russell said.

They walked away from the bright dirty house. "Why did you do that?" Jimson asked.

Russell said, "Word will get round. If Hari's cracking up, there's no reason for anyone else to get caught in the cracks."

Jimson thought of Hari Oregon sitting amid his booktapes, waiting for his "friends*' to knock on his door. He glanced at Russell: the redhead's eyes were hard. Jimson decided to keep his thoughts to himself. "What's Sector Garnet?" he asked.

Russell grinned. "The Federation divides the Hype into territories, called sectors. Tori works Sector Garnet and Sector Sardonyx. The last time we met, in Garnet, we, um, disagreed. She snatched a cargo from under my nose. I got it back. No hard feelings."

Jimson swallowed. He tasted the dregs of vinegar in his throat. "Isn't there an easier way to get information than by asking Hari Oregon? Don't Starcaptains have access to Compcenter records?"

"Certainly," said Russell. "But if I went to Compcenter that would leave yet another datum on the records: that Russell O'Neill on such-and-such a date wanted to know all about the planet Demea, satellite of 82 Eridani. In the kind of work I do I can't afford to leave those traces."

Jimson could not get Oregon out of his mind. "What do you think will happen to him?"

"Can't you forget about Hari?" said Russell. But then he shrugged and answered. "One day he won't go to work, and they'll call him and he won't answer, and they'll come looking for him and find him staring at a wall. A telepath at some clinic will put his head together again. It's happened twice before."

Before he could stop himself, Jimson said, "Don't you care?"

Russell's face went cold. "I care where it counts," he said. "Not for Hari Oregon—what could I do for him? But I do care."

They walked silently, stiffly, side by side. Then Russell laughed. He caught Jimson's shoulder to hold him still. "I was going to suggest that we find a place to talk and tell lies about the past. But I can't now, I have to run around and try to dig out information on Demea. Will you be at Rin's tonight?"

"I usually am."

"I'll try to meet you there. I can't promise to make it, you never know what might come up. But I'll try." He brushed Jimson's cheek with his palm. "All right?"

"All right," Jimson said. It was hard to resist the familiar touch, the familiar teasing smile.

"Do you know how to get home from here, babe?"

"I'll figure it out." He stood quietly, watching Russell stroll towards a Bridge ramp. The warmth in his heart began to fade. He felt evaded, manipulated. He rubbed his hands together. He needed to talk to Russell, and not necessarily about the past. And he did not want to hear any lies.

* * *

He went home to an empty house and spent the afternoon trying to draw. By evening he was tense, and the floor of the house was littered with crumpled pieces of paper. The litter made him think of Hari Oregon. He went to Rin's. When he sat down at the bar Rin looked at him curiously. "Not in your corner?"

"No. Give me a drink, please."

Rin brought it to him and he drank it quickly. He sensed that Russell was not coming. Perhaps he had never meant to come. He stared around the bar. Chi was there. Denny and Kay were there: Miri was there, fabulous Miri, looking no more than twenty-two. Ysao was not there. He tapped on the bar for another drink. Rin brought it to him. "Word is that Leiko's found a ship," said the bartender. "That true?"

"She's leaving soon," Jimson said, and then he snarled at Rin, "Fuck off! I don't ask you questions!" He leaned his back to the bar. He had begun to think of Rin's as home. That was a mistake. No place for him was home. What the hell had he come to Nexus for? He couldn't remember. Go back to New Terrain, he told himself. Go back and hide in your cave, until one day they come and find you and haul you out and bury you.

There's nothing for you here. "Give me another drink," he said to Rin. "All I can do is draw."

Miri crossed the glittering floor and floated to the stool next to him. Rin served her. She smiled at Jimson. Blinked, like a cat. Her black eyes were outlined with dark shadow and gold glitter. He expected her to purr.

"Tell me about the Sigurd," he said.

"Tell me about New Terrain."

He wondered how she knew—but of course, he was famous. "It's a place."

"Hot? Cold? Wet or dry? Does it have stars?"

"Don't all places have stars?"

She smiled and shook her head.

"The Hype ships colonized it. From New Terra they went to New Terrain. It's earth-normal, but smaller than Terra. It has a moon. It has five moons, but four of the five are tiny, just captured rocks in orbit. The starships are on the fifth moon, Epsilon Moon. I lived in Las Flores. And before that on North Island. Russell and I met there. Your turn."

"I was born in Alexandria on Old Terra," she said, dreamily. "Before there were any Hype ships, before there were any starships at all. Just things they call spaceprobes. I was a child when the first pictures came back from Jupiter...."

"Jupiter?"

"Never mind. What do you want to know about the Sigurd? It takes four thousand people at one time to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and it looks like bubbles."

"Bubbles?"

"A long chain of bubbles."

Bubbles, like the bubbles in his glass. "Tell me about the Hype."

"The Hype. It used to drive people mad. The entropic discontinuities affected the brain. That's why we named it the Hype. Ilse Perse went to Verde to study the hyperdrive equations. Figured them out. Convinced the Terran government to build the Drive, to build the starships, to call for volunteers—some of them came back. They made the first mappings of the congruencies. I had a lover who didn't come back. No way to tell even where she went. There are places we still can't go, in the Hype."

"The Maze."

Miri raised her eyebrows. "Where did you hear about the Maze? Yes. Leiko must have told you. Most pilots won't go there."

"Does it still drive people crazy?"

"The Hype?" Miri smiled. "We're all a little crazy. It could. That's why we take the telepathic examinations. They like us to start out sane."

"How old are you really?" he asked, against all custom.

Miri smiled a cat smile, bent at the corners. "I was a student of Ilse Perse's the day the first Verdian ship landed on Terra. We went together to look at it."

"That was three hundred years ago!"

She nodded and glided away from him. Jimson thought, I think I believe her. Stars, am I drunk.

He knew that a combination of organ transplants and antiagathic drugs could bestow, upon those able to buy them, a quasi-immortality. The treatments were expensive. He had heard, too, that the treatments sometimes resulted in dangerous side effects. He grinned into his drink. You could get paranoid, living so long. Mean and paranoid. Miri wasn't mean. Miri talked to him when he was lonely; Miri was nice.

"What's the matter with you?" asked a voice at his elbow. It was Kay the loader, come from the other end of the bar to sit with him and keep him company. That was kind, too.

"Have you ever noticed—" he started to say. But the thought tangled in his sodden head. Time is a cheat. For some people it moves too slow, and for others it moves too fast to bear. Miri Akt lives three hundred years, more than her share. I get a fraction of that in which to do my work. Why is that fair?

It isn't fair, Alleca. It's just the luck. "I want another drink," he said to Rin.

Kay said, "What's eating you?"

"Everything." That was hardly explicit. He couldn't seem to talk. His tongue had gotten thick. "Leiko." That would do to start.

"She gone yet?'

"No. Two days. Day after to-tomorrow."

"I know she was looking for a ship."

"She found one. She and Ysao. S' Russell's ship." Rin put the drink in front of him. He tossed it back. By now he was too numb to taste it.

Kay grinned at him. "You're really tying one on tonight. Maybe I shouldn't talk to you."

"I don't mind."

"Where's Leiko going?"

Jimson frowned. The word—the name—sat on the tip of his numb tongue. "Dunno," he said finally.

"Who's Russell?"

"Russell O'Neill." He couldn't quite get his tongue around all the "1" sounds. Kay looked puzzled. "We were kids together."

"What's he look like?"

"Red hair," said Jimson promptly. He gazed around the room, trying to find something red as Russell's hair, so that he could show his new friend what his old friend looked like. "Like—" There was a man with red hair. Jimson pointed to him. Suddenly the redhead was standing in front of him. It was Russell. "Thisishim," Jimson said.

"Damn right this is me," said Russell. He looked at Kay. "I know you. Kay. Were you doing a little prying? If so, you'd better not have learned anything. Or I'll hang your guts from the lamps."

Kay said, "He didn't tell me anything, Starcaptain."

"Was he talking to anyone besides you?"

"I doubt it. To Rin, could be."

"That's all right. Rin knows everything." Jimson felt fingers dig into his shoulder. "Come on, Jim. You're leaving."

"Don't do that," Jimson requested. He tried to push the hand from his shoulder. It moved not an iota. He was half-pulled, half-lifted from the stool, and pushed across the room. Hands guided him through the door, and then he was slammed roughly up against the wall. It hurt, and the pain cleared his head. Russell was standing in front of him, swaying—no, it was he, Jimson, who was swaying—and there was green rage in his eyes. It was dark, and cold. Jimson shivered.

"Wait here," said Russell. "Don't move. You understand?" He disappeared, and Jimson leaned unsteadily against the wall. The rush was gone. He was cold. Russell was angry at him. What had he done?

"Jim, look at me."

With effort, Jimson focused on Russell. The redhead was holding a glass. His other hand swooped at Jimson's face and held a capsule in front of his eyes. "I want you to take this," Russell said. "Can you manage?"

"I-if you help me with the glass." Jimson shoved the pill at his mouth. Like a hard pebble it lodged at the back of his throat, and he gulped water until it went down. "What is it?"

"Neutralizer," said Russell. "It'll get you half-sober, at least. Come on, we'll get you home."

"No." Jimson stiffened his legs like a baulking animal, and stopped in the center of a city square. "Not home."

A hand like iron closed round his upper arm and jerked him off his feet. "You'll go home."

"I don't want to go home."

He felt Russell's grip relent. "All right, not home. I know a place—are you getting sober?"

Jimson squinted, trying to gather his drunken senses. They were walking a checkerboard pattern, through the city squares, which you couldn't do during the day. But the squares were less crowded at night. Most of the stores were closed, though the bars were open. Above the squares hung the bubble cables. Like falling stars, the bubbles dived by overhead, bouncing red or orange or indigo light off the pavement. It was getting easier to walk. "I'm getting sober. But I can't stop shaking."

"That's the pill," said Russell. "It's not much farther now." Jimson tried to remain steady. But on the stairs his legs collapsed with tremors, and Russell had to carry him through a doorway, into a warm room. "Here. Lie on the bed."

Once on the bed, the shaking eased off.

"I'm making us both some coffee."

"Good."

Russell sat on the edge of the bed, his face in shadow. "Do you remember talking to Kay tonight?"

"K-Kay?"

"Kay, at Rin's."

Jimson did remember. He nodded. It astounded him that he could nod. He was very tired.

"What did you say to him?"

It was hard to be precise. "Told him—told him that Leiko had found a ship. Ysao, too."

"Did you tell him the name of the ship?"

"No."

"Did you tell him where the ship was going?"

"Why don't you ask Kay?" he said, irritated. And, too late, put up a hand to stop the palm that slapped him.

The whole right side of his face hurt.

Russell caught his chin and turned his head around, positioning him for another blow. "Because I don't have time to beat the lies out of him," he said. "Did you tell him where the ship was going?"

"No."

"Did you mention the Crystal Masks?"

"No."

"Did you mention De Vala?"

"No."

"Did you tell him my name?"

"I-I told him we were old friends. He knows you're a Starcaptain."

"Did you tell him my name?"

"Yes."

"Did you tell him when the ship was leaving?"

Jimson swallowed. He kept his eyes on Russell's face and not on his hand. "I said two days. Day after tomorrow."

"Anything else? At all?"

Jimson shook his head. He could smell the coffee. "Nothing else," he said. "I was very drunk, Russ."

Russell sighed. "I know. I'll get you that coffee."

He came back with two mugs, and settled himself on the bed again. Jimson sipped the coffee. It was hot and very strong, the way he liked it. No sugar. Russell took sugar. We remembered that about each other, after all these years. He relaxed into the pillow. His shakes were almost gone. "Russell?"

"Yes."

"Will it ruin the job for you that I talked with Kay?"

Russell said, "I don't know. Kay's a snoop, but he keeps his mouth shut. I've never heard it said that he sold to the cops. But I'm in an uneasy business. I don't like people knowing where I'm going, or with whom, or when. So I think we won't wait that extra day. We'll leave tomorrow."

Jimson closed his eyes. "You're a dream," he said. "You're just a dream. You never came to Nexus. I never saw you. I'll go to sleep, and wake up, and you'll be gone." He could not keep the bitterness out of his voice. He opened his eyes. Russell was looking at him.

"No. Not a dream. I'm real." He got off the bed.

Suddenly he bent, caught Jimson's chin and kissed him, quick and hard, like a slap. "Don't drop the cup." He took it and walked out. The taste of his lips lingered on Jimson's mouth.

Jimson worked his way off the bed. He was still unsteady. He weaved out of the room. There was light. He struggled towards it. It was coming from a closetlike kitchen. Russell was putting the coffee cups away. He swung around. "What are you doing out of bed?"

"I don't want to be alone," Jimson said.

Russell produced a chair. "Sit on this," he said. Jimson sat. He studied Russell's face, trying to find in it the boy he had known. Sometimes he thought he saw him, and sometimes he was wholly absent. His heartbeat counted out a minute. Another.

"Russ, let me go with you." The words just happened. He listened with astonishment to his own voice saying them.

Russell said, "What?"

Carefully Jimson repeated it. "Let me go with you to Demea."

"I think you're still drunk."

"No," Jimson said. "I'm not drunk."

Russell leaned over him. "No."

"Why not?" Jimson leaned back so that he could see Russell's face full on.

The Starcaptain looked away from him and then back again. "Why do you think I left New Terrain, and never sent a 'gram, and never came back?"

"I don't know," Jimson said. "You tell me."

"Do you remember the night you told me you had cancer, and that it was not curable?"

"I remember," Jimson said. "You cried."

Russell said, "The thought of you dying was more than I could bear. It hasn't gotten any easier to face. I stayed away because—if I couldn't see it happening I could pretend it wasn't happening. When I realized you'd come into the Hype I thought you'd been cured. I came to find you. But now that I know you're still—" he stopped. "I'm not taking you into the Hype with me to watch you die."

"It might not happen."

"You told me the other night that it always happens."

The Polish Rider, with eyes cold as a grave, stared down at Jimson from the wall in his imagination. Death riding. Jimson said, "Russ, I want to see Demea. I want to see the Maze. I want to see the Masks. Always I've been the one to stay behind when others leave. I don't want to stay behind any more. I can't."

Russell's lips were pressed tight with denial and pain.

"Please take me with you."

Russell asked, "If I say no, what will you do?"

"I don't know," said Jimson. "Get drunk? Buy a tourist ticket to nowhere and go anyway? Don't say no, Russ, please." There were tears on his cheeks. He hadn't realized he was crying. He lifted up his hands and wiped his eyes.

Russell asked, "Do you think you can cheat the luck?"

Jimson shook his head. "I know better. I've known that all my life."

Russell said, his voice rising in the dim light, "Then I don't understand!"

Jimson thought, I'm not running away from death, Russ. I'm going to it. I must. All the roads I travel will take me there. But he did not say it. He kept his eyes fixed on Russell's face.

Russell said, "You have to promise not to die on me, Jim." His voice was somber.

Jimson's voice shook slightly. "You'll take me with you?"

Russell sighed. "How the hell can I say no? You never asked me for anything before. You wanted me to stay a little longer on New Terrain, but you never asked me to. I don't know, any more, what I would have done if you had." He leaned forward and touched his fingertips gently to the bruise on Jimson's right cheek. "And even when we were children, Jimson, you never said no to me, to anything. So I can't say it now."

Chapter 9

The second day out from Nexus, Russell started making yellow lines on the floor.

Jimson sat at the table by the food unit. In front of his nose he'd piled a small heap of objects from Ysao's workbench, chosen at random; he didn't know what they were called or what they were for. He was trying to give them the quality of a classical still life, as if they were organic. It was an interesting exercise, and the results were pretty poor, he decided.

It was nice to look at something else. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked as Russell passed him, methodically laying down tape. As far as he could tell, it made no regular patterns.

"I'm stretching my mind," Russell said. He finished, and laid the tape to one side.

"Very decorative," commented Ysao. He was sitting in his favorite place, cross-legged on top of his worktable.

Russell walked to the outer end of the tape. "I'm ready."

"Go ahead, then," said Ysao. Leiko swiveled her pilot's chair around to watch.

Russell began to walk along the path of the tape; very carefully, not trying to place his feet exactly on the yellow line, but obviously trying to stay close to it. He was having trouble. His mouth was tight with strain, and there were tension lines along his neck, where the muscles were pulled taut. Once he stopped and shook his head. Ysao's eyes bored darkly at him, like two augers. Jimson began to guess. At the inner end of the tape line, when Russell's shoulders relaxed with relief, Jimson raised an eyebrow at Ysao. "You were trying to stop him?"

Ysao nodded. "He's doing well."

"Doing what well?" demanded Leiko.

"Shielding," Ysao said. "Elementary exercise. Concentrate on walking the line while blocking interference. Pirate, you've gotten strong. That was everything I've got."

"How can Russell do that?" Leiko asked. "He isn't a telepath."

"Anyone can learn to shield," Ysao said. "It isn't psi at all, it's just a very directed mode of concentration. Most people never need to, so they never bother to learn. You could, if you wanted to."

Leiko shook her head cheerfully. "Thanks, but no thanks. Who's going to take care of the ship, while you play around? I'd rather sit and watch you." She twirled her chair lazily, like a child on a merry-go-round. "Are you going to do it again, Russ?"

"Jim, want to try?" Russell suggested.

"How do I do it?"

"With you, probably a visual block would work best," Ysao said. "Is there a picture or a piece of art you know especially well, so that you could visualize it at any time? One of your own?"

"I forget about my pictures as soon as they're done," Jimson said. "But—I can think of one...."

"Close your eyes," said Ysao. "Think of it."

Jimson closed his eyes, and hung the Polish Rider in a mental frame in his mind. He felt pressure. Steadily he looked at the picture. After a while the pressure went away. "Was that right?" he asked Ysao.

"That was exactly right. If you practice that, ultimately it'll get automatic. The minute your subconscious feels the presence of another mind, it will block for you. With enough practice you'll get so you can concentrate on something else, like walking lines, and still keep up a block."

"You know," Jimson said, "I think artists learn to do that without practicing. You almost have to, to keep from being disturbed. Unless you live on top of a mountain, like Yamaguchi."

"Could be," said Ysao thoughtfully. "Could be." He looked at Leiko. "You sure you don't want to try?"

"I'm sure." She twirled her chair back once more to face the vision screen. "I do this better. Someone want to bring me a food bar? I'm hungry."

Jimson, who was closest to the food unit, punched out a food bar. He brought it to her. She took it from him, closing her fingers round his for a moment. Now there was no anger left in the distance between them; there was only the distance itself, and it was getting smaller. They were friends, but he did not think they would be lovers again. Certainly not on the ship, where there were two other people to overhear each whisper and each word: one of them a telepath, and one of them Russell.

Leiko said, "I wish they could find a way to make these taste like something." The bars satisfied appetite and diet requirements, but esthetically they were about as satisfying as chewing up paper. She munched, frowning at the vision screen. He leaned on the back of her chair. The screen was black, the black emptiness of Hyperspace that sucked at the mind. "See the dust?" Leiko said. Jimson squinted. There was a film of red across the upper right quadrant of the screen, delicate as the tracery in a spider's web.

"We have to go through that?"

"Near it. Not through it." Leiko rubbed her eyes. "There's not very much of it. It's an easy course till we get to the Maze."

"Bored?" Russell spoke softly from behind them. "Don't worry; there'll be plenty for you to do when we hit the Maze." His hand fell idly on Jimson's neck, a light, absent-minded caress. Jimson willed himself not to feel the soft touch. He stared instead at the vision screen. The red dust was a lot more visible than before.

"Is it a proto-star?" he asked.

"It might be," Leiko said. "I don't think there's enough of it, though. It's probably just a cloud. Russ?"

Russell went over to the computer keyboard and did something that brought figures marching across the bottom edge of the vision screen. "Definitely not a star; it isn't massive enough."

"Are there stars in the Hype?"

Russell shrugged. "I don't think anyone has ever seen one. We're likely all wrong in calling them proto-stars, anyway. That was out of the older theories, which said that the Hype has less matter and a slower rate of entropy than our universe, and so the clouds we see are gas condensations that might, but probably won't, condense further. The present theory suggests that the Hype once resembled our space, and is now in that stage which our universe will come to, where all matter recedes from all other matter constantly and infinitely. The dust is debris that once was stars, and to any observer anywhere it appears red because of the Doppler effect. And there's another theory that entropy in the Hype is really faster than—"

Leiko interrupted. "Stop! Faster or slower is irrelevant. And I intend to keep on calling them proto-stars."

"Call them what you like," said Russell.

"It doesn't matter," said Ysao, not looking up. "They aren't listening."

Leiko yawned as she laughed. "I think that's the oldest joke in human space," she said. "It's too hard to stay awake; I'm going to bed. Call me in six hours, somebody." She stretched and reached for the lowest rung of the nearby arch of steel bars: the monkey bars, Russell called them. Hand over hand she went up them, across the dome of the ceiling wall, and down the other side. She slid directly from the bars into the topmost bed in the second tier. Jimson found himself yawning, too, and wondered if it was time for him to sleep. The sleep pattern on the ship was staggered so that someone was always awake, ready to wake the others if they were needed. Leiko liked to sleep six hours, work ten, sleep two more, and then work six. Russell functioned best on sixteen hours work and nine hours sleep. Jimson had no idea what Ysao's pattern was; he seemed to be always awake. And his own pattern—he hadn't found it yet. It didn't count when he slept. He was passenger, not crew. He could not be trusted to recognize a crisis if it exploded in his face.

Ysao, Leiko, and Russell never said it. But he was aware of it—as aware of it as he was of the hypnotic blackness of hyperspace, or of the pain in his leg that nudged him, like a clawed hand, when he was late to take his pill, or of Russell's eyes on him or presence near him, a physical cognizance as clear and almost as demanding as the pain. He pulled his sketchbook towards him, trying to concentrate on the ugly little things on the food table. Damn it, there was nothing organic about them, they were stiff and lifeless and he was an idiot.

Hands fell on his shoulders and he stiffened up. "You ought to go to bed, too," said Russell. "Sling that scrap away and go to sleep."

"I haven't been up very long."

"What has that got to do with going to bed?" Russell sat on the table, bending over him.

Jimson felt helpless. "Russ—" A finger touched his lips, prisoning the words.

"On the other hand, you haven't had much to eat lately, have you? That's the hassle with concentrates; they don't feel like meals, so it's easy to forget to eat them." He slapped a food bar in front of Jimson. "Eat." Grinning, he ambled back to the navigator's chair, as if he had never suggested or intended to be anywhere else.

They were ten days from Nexus when Leiko said, "There's the Maze."

Ysao was asleep. Russell woke him, and they gathered behind Leiko's chair to watch the ship move closer and closer to the red dust. Danger, danger, Jimson thought. Like monster tentacles reaching for the ship, a huge cloud of red dust was spreading spiral arms into the black of hyperspace. It sparkled and glittered, a splendid whirling storm. Jimson looked away from the vortex. He had learned, over ten days, not to stare at it too long. "It's so beautiful," Leiko said.

The patterns on the navigator's screen were flashing frantically. Russell walked to his chair and sat over the keyboard. Leiko's right hand was loosely closed over the stick. In theory, Jimson knew, there was no necessity for her ever to use it. The ship could travel under computer direction for as long as there was a navigator to direct the computer. But within the red dust, things changed. The dust distorted the normal congruencies between spacetime normal and hyperspace. The computer could correct for this. A human pilot, with the proper training, developed a special gift, a feel for the congruencies of the two spaces; it was akin to the spatial perception of the Verdians. Leiko could sense where the original mapping went wrong and correct for it directly, immediately. Her skill insured that, when they Jumped back into spacetime normal, they would be near the planet Demea, where they needed to be.

Jimson went to the food unit. It was now one of his self-appointed functions—trivial, but useful—to make sure that everybody ate, at least when he was awake. He punched for a food bar, and tossed it to Ysao. He punched out another one and brought it to Russell.

"Brought you food."

Russ reached for it, not lifting his eyes from the reeling figures on his screen. "Thanks." The lines of his face stood out, as if someone had run a grease pencil over them to highlight them.

"How long do we have to travel through this stuff, before we can Jump?"

"About four hours." Russell took a bite from the bar, and then laid it down to send his hands blurring on the keyboard, instructing the computer. "Four long hours."

But Jimson was just sitting at the table, not watching and unready, when he heard Leiko call: "Jumping now!" The red telltales spotted around the ship glowed their scarlet warning—and then the screens filled with light. Sunlight. They were out of the Hype, in spacetime normal, with the white-brown curve of a planet swelling in the screens. Leiko pounded a fist on the arm of her chair. "Done it!"

Chapter 10

There was a large brown and blue butterfly with a few orange spots spread out in the vision screen.

"We're looking at the whole planet," said Russell. "The light brown is desert. The dark brown is mountain. There are small poles, largely icecap. There are two small continents in the northern hemisphere, and three large ones in the southern hemisphere. We're going to this one. The one with the lake." He put his finger on a blue spot.

"Salt water lake," said Ysao.

"What are the orange spots?" Jimson asked.

"Heat emissions," said Russell.

Jimson had to think a moment. "Cities?"

Russell shook his head. "De Vala said there are no cities here. They could be volcanoes, or hot springs, or some other form of natural heat. De Vala was adamant: there are no civilized beings on this planet at all."

"What did the records at Compcenter say?" asked Ysao. "Of course you checked them."

"Of course I checked them." Russell made the map disappear. "According to Hari Oregon, they said nothing. There was plenty of information about 82 Eridani: stellar class, Hype coordinates, all the information that's easy to find, but nothing about Demea. I checked around town after I spoke to Hari. Everybody drew a blank. Roman de Vala appears to be alone in knowing that 82 Eridani has a system."

Ysao said, very thoughtfully, "But that's impossible. Or ridiculous."

Leiko said, "How could De Vala know about the planet if the X-teams don't?"

Sharply, Ysao said, "Russell, could there be people on this planet? Primitives?"

Russell said, "I hope not." But he avoided the telepath's eyes.

"There were once," said Ysao. "Someone had to make those Masks, and preserve them, and tell Roman De Vala about them. You thought of that."

"I thought of it," said Russell. "Get mad if you like. I went back to De Vala after I talked with Hari and insisted he furnish me with proxies. But if I'd told you there was a chance that the planet is inhabited, you would have refused to come. I know your scruples. I even have some of my own. That's why I got the proxies. And why we've been sitting on our asses here for two days, letting them gather data."

Jimson asked, "What if the air hadn't been breathable?"

"We wouldn't be here," Russell said flatly. "I'm not an X-team. De Vala knows that. I don't go to places where I can't move around."

Ysao was scrutinizing the blank vision screen as if he thought it might start talking to him. "If there are any non-primitives down there," he said, "they must be going flippy trying to figure out what we are."

Leiko laughed. "We're a UFO."

"What's that?" Jimson asked.

"An unidentified flying object," Russell said. Once more, Jimson felt left out.

"Can they see us?' he asked.

"Above the cloud level? Not with their eyes."

Jimson flushed. It's not my fault that I don't know the language, he thought. Hell, I'm not even supposed to be here!

"De Vala was very precise," Russell said. He played with the keyboard, and another map lit the screen. "We are going to the smallest southern continent, to a desert, to a black building in the middle of that desert."

Leiko said, "We're almost exactly above it, Captain. If we take the bubble straight down and eastward, we'll land on the roof. If it has a roof."

"Are there any artificial satellites junking up the space around here?" asked Ysao.

"No," said Leiko. "Not even dead ones."

Ysao frowned—a remarkably frightening sight. "I don't like it."

"I depend on your experience to haul us out of any problems," said Russell. "Get your gear. You, too," he said to Jimson. "Leiko, give him a thermal suit."

"Me?"

"You're coming down with us."

"But—I don't know—"

"Your ass from a hole in the ground," finished Russell. "So what are you planning to do up here? Fight with Leiko, or sleep, or draw bad pictures of tools you can't even name, let alone use. Get your pack out and put this into it." This was a small can of quick drying foam. What the hell is that for, Jimson wondered. "And this." A communicator. "And this." A water bottle. "You asked to come, remember?"

Leiko said, "Tell me what you want me to do."

"Sit for six hours, local time. I'll call you every hour. After six hours, unless I tell you different, come down. If you can't find us, use the proxies to make a grid pattern search. If we stop calling in, come down early. If someone else contacts you, don't answer. Get up. If we yell for help—"

"I'll be there."

"Do you know what the penalty for cultural interference is?" demanded Ysao.

"I've been trying not to think about that—did you have to remind me?" said Russell. "Let's hope De Vala is right, and there are only primitives here, and that we meet no one, not a chicken, not a goat, no one at all."

Jimson went to find his pack.

It was in a small compartment under his bunk. He put into it the communicator, the can of foam, and the water bottle. Leiko came to stand beside him. "Food bars," she suggested gently. "Your pills." He put his pill bottle in the pack, and, walking to the food unit, he punched out four food bars. He put a small sketchbook on top of it all, and threw in a handful of pens.

"I don't know what the fuck I'm doing," he said to her. He wiggled into the thermal suit.

"Don't worry," she said. "You'll do fine."

The bubble sat inside a section of the hull. Ysao jammed into the back. Russell took the pilot's seat, and Jimson sat next to Russell. The door slid down with a hiss of sound. Leiko closed the inner hull door, sealing them off from the rest of the ship. For half a second they sat motionless. Jimson had just enough time to feel the beginnings of fear. Then the outer hatch opened, and they were kicked out into the sky.

* * *

Blue above, white below, and shards of sunbeam stabbing at their eyes...

Russell swore and touched a button. The skin of the bubble polarized, dimming the glare, but it was still very bright. They angled swiftly down. Through fluffy cloud layers, so solid-looking, so deceptive, Jimson caught a glimpse of land beneath white. Grey mist wreathed them, and then they were through it, falling very fast.

"You don't have to hold on quite that tight," said Russell. Jimson uncurled his fingers from the bar in front of his seat.

"I hate these damn things," he said.

"So do I," said Ysao. "They're too small."

"We'll be down soon," said Russell. "The proxies took; some pictures of this area. They showed little mounds. Probably building clusters. If you look down you might see them."

Jimson declined to look down. Ysao, however, stared between his own feet. "I see something. They could be buildings, Russell. Let's hope they're empty."

"De Vala swore they were."

"I would love to know how he knows."

They were traveling eastward, into the sun. "A big, black building," Russell said, "should show up easily against this countryside."

Because he could not bring himself to look down, Jimson looked up. Even through the polarized surface of the bubble, the sun stabbed at eyes; a small white point, very small in the untrammeled sky, Jimson chanced a look below. Their shadow, a black shapeless beast, ran hunting beneath them. Under the fierce and different light, the shadows of the shifting sand dunes were sharp as blades. The tiniest weed would have cast a cutting edge across the sand. But there were no weeds.

They saw the building soon enough; against the dull brown of the earth it looked like a black stone. Russell plunged the bubble towards it, and it acquired edges, depth, and height. But there were no other buildings near it. "No people," Russell said. "If there were people here, we would see other buildings, or at least tents, animals." He looked to Ysao for confirmation.

"Not necessarily," said the giant.

Russell let the bubble drift to the sand near the black structure. Dunes pushed up against its stone sides. Dust devils whirled frantically on the wind. As far as Jimson could see, there was nothing living; not a bird, not a lizard, not a trace of green. The building was a dark and mournful monument to nothing.

"The Masks are supposed to be inside," Russell said. "Shall we go?"

They climbed from the bubble. The first thing they felt was the wind. It tore at their clothes, howling, and nearly lifted the pack from Jimson's shoulders. He tightened the straps hastily, bracing himself. They slid around to the lee side of the bubble. The wind roared as it searched for them. Russell shouted: "Did either of you notice a door?"

Ysao yelled, "Try the side that's away from the wind!"

They dashed from their shelter. As Ysao had guessed, there was a door, and a path leading up to it. The wind dropped perceptibly as they approached the door. Close to it, a line of grey pavement showed through the sand. Ysao knelt to look at it. "It's made of cut blocks of stone," he said. He stood up and ran his hand along the wall. "Without mortar. They knew what they were doing when they built this."

Jimson felt the pressure of the wind, hunting them. It held menace. He understood why there was no green on this desert; the wind would blow away anything that bloomed. "Where the hell did they go?" he asked.

Russell said, "Ysao, come look at this door."

The door was huge; ten feet wide, twice as high. Yet when Russell pushed on it, it swung inward, easily and noiselessly. Ysao touched it. "High-grade steel," he said. "I don't like to even guess what it weighs. These people could do more than just build with stone."

He pushed the door open the rest of the way. Jimson felt Russell's hand on his shoulder. He was glad of it. He had come expecting the unknown, but not the uncanny, and there was something about the door

And the hall.

It was lit by sun falling through skylights in the roof, and it was huge! Pillars marched through breathtaking emptiness. It took Jimson a little while to realize that it was the pillars that gave the room its tremendous illusion of depth. It was not all that big. It was really an anteroom, leading them forward to another room, glimpsed beyond the columns. Jimson said, "They knew something about perspective, too."

Russell said, "I don't see any Masks." But he spoke very softly, as if they might hear him and hide.

Only Ysao looked right in the oversize hallway. He went striding on ahead of them. Halfway down the hall he waited for Jimson and Russell to catch up with him. They reached the archway into the second room together.

They stood together there, stunned and silenced. This room was truly huge. It was round, with a round skylight through which light poured and reflected off the veins in the dark walls. Lit by glancing beams, the Crystal Masks sparkled and glowed, like faces peering through holes in solid black. Jimson felt Russell take a long slow breath. He counted. There were eleven Masks fastened, somehow, to the stone wall.

And Jimson felt the hairs rise and prickle on the back of his neck. A voice was speaking.

Thin and clear, it filled the room, speaking a language he didn't know.

They were not alone. There was a dais along the curve of the room. Diminished by it, facing it, and wholly intent upon it, were people. Faces pressed into their hands, they knelt. On the dais stood another figure, and from this person the voice came. A human figure, a human voice—but the face of the figure was the face of a Mask.

If we can see them, Jimson thought, then we're not too far away to be seen.

"Don't move." Russell's words were a breath in his ear. Ysao was standing like a statue. Russell glided to him. Jimson saw his lips move; saw Ysao nod. Russell straightened up very, very slowly. Oblivious to them, the voice was going on and on.

It stopped. Jimson pressed into the wall. The silence was deafening. His heartbeat sounded like thunder in double-time. The people who had been kneeling were standing now, turning towards the archway. The ritual was over. Only the Masked figure stood still. It can't see, Jimson realized. The Mask has no eyeholes. Behind the Mask it's blind. He felt a frisson of remembrance. Who—where—

"Come."

Imitating Russell, Jimson sank slowly to a crouch. Now they were below eye level. A living frieze on the temple wall, they moved around the room, away from the people who walked towards them in stately procession. If only the luck stayed with them; if only the people did not see them—

But someone did. There was a shout of outrage, warning, and surprise. Immediately Russell was up. "Go!" He slammed Jimson's shoulder. Ysao was already running, zig-zagging in monster strides towards the other side of the room. On the dais the Masked figure stood, blind. Jimson followed him. He heard an odd buzzing sound and turned to look. The people had bows and arrows. They were shooting. An arrow went clattering at Jimson's feet. And another.

Ysao gave a cry, and fell.

Jimson ran to him. He was lifting himself with his hands. There was an arrow shaft in his left thigh, and blood was seeping through the material around it. He was cursing. "Let me lean on you." He pushed himself up, one great heavy hand on Jimson's shoulder. He balanced on one leg. "That way. There's a door ajar. I'll hop."

He hopped. Jimson looked back at their pursuers.

Russell was holding a stun pistol that Jimson had not known he had. He lifted his hand, leveled it, and a man went down. He pointed it again, and another man went down. "Go on!" he said. "I'm right behind you. Move!"

Ysao hopped. Jimson could see the door now; it was like the front door, but much smaller. He hoped its hinges were as good. He glanced back again; Russell was walking backwards, his weapon holding back the line of men. Ysao overbalanced and grunted with pain as his leg hit the floor. Suddenly Russell turned and raced, not for the door, but for the dais. He leaped onto it, and with a scythe-like sweep of his arm, he grabbed the Masked one around the neck. Yelling with fury, the people came running at him. He whirled and faced them, arm locked around the Masked one's throat. He tightened the choke until it stopped struggling and its arms went limp. Eyes on the people in front of him, he put the end of the stun pistol to its head.

The runners froze in place.. "Get out!" They understood the tone if not the words. They began to back away. Jimson helped Ysao lean against the wall. He pushed the door all the way open. The room behind it was small and square, and also lit through skylights. Ysao hopped inside and lowered himself down. Russell brought his burden inside. "Does that door have a bolt?" Jimson slid it home. Russell knelt next to Ysao. "Thank the luck that I threw a medikit into my pack."

He sprayed his hands with antiseptic, and pulled a long-handled knife from the kit. Slitting the fabric carefully, he turned the pieces of suit back from the leg.

"I might as well be on an X-team," Ysao grumbled. He scowled at the leg. A wooden shaft was firmly stuck through it. Blood had started to crust around the wound. "It looks worse than it is. Spray it, Russell. The immunomines should hold off any infection." Russell took up the spray again and aimed it at the wound. "As long as it isn't poisoned. What did you use on those people?"

"Two hour stunner."

"Good. Gives us time to think."

"But—" Jimson was startled. "You've got to get that out!"

"Why?" asked Ysao. "The arrowhead's somewhere in the muscle. It's a little large to just yank out. It'll keep till we get back to the ship." He touched the wood about ten centimeters above the entrance wound. "Cut it shorter, Russ."

"All right." Russell took out the knife again. "This is going to ruin this blade. You braced?" Ysao put both hands flat on the floor and pushed himself against the wall. "Jim, c'mere. Hold onto this here." Jimson put his hands on the shaft. "One hand above, the other below. Right." Russell sawed at the wood till he'd made a groove all the way around. He caught it with both hands. "Let go." Snapped it off.

Ysao gasped.

"Sorry." Russell said. He threw the piece into a corner.

"I'm all right." Ysao lowered his shoulders. "What did you bring with you?"

They looked at the body lying limp on the ground. "A Mask," Russell answered. "And we'll see what else." He knelt beside the figure, feeling around the head, and lifted off the Mask. Jimson took it from him. It was rose pink, smooth as glass; a thin shell, with two flexible metal bands fastening to the sides and curving round the back. The Mask was serene, sexless, ageless. The face on the floor glared angrily at them. Dark eyes looked first at Jimson, and then at Russell. Black hair. Small, high-cheekboned face. Breasts heaving beneath a thin white tunic. Russell grinned at the spate of words. "I don't think that needs a translation," he said. "She doesn't like us."

"She really doesn't," agreed Ysao. Then he barked, "Pirate, look out!"

Russell whirled. A weapon? Jimson thought. Then agony drilled into his head. He couldn't breathe. He fell. Then, suddenly as it had come, the mental invasion was gone, leaving him retching and trying to grip the stones of the floor.

Chapter 11

With effort, he brought his stomach under control. An arm round his shoulders helped; he let Russell prop him against the wall. "Feel all right?"

"I've felt better—and worse." His side hurt from the fall. "What the hell was that?"

"Can't you guess?" said Ysao. "She's a telepath." Jimson looked at the girl, lying limp again on the floor.

"Ysao felt it coming—when he yelled, I did, too. Got my shield up, but I had to knock her unconscious to stop her." Russell rubbed his head as if it ached. "She's strong."

"But untrained," said Ysao. "Watch it, Pirate, she's coming to."

"I'm not taking any chances," Russell said. He reached her in two long strides, wrapped one hand around a slight wrist, and levered up between the girl's shoulder blades. Her body bent like a drawn bow, back arching against Russell's knee. "She can't do much if she's in pain."

"Let up a bit, Pirate," Ysao said. His face was twisting; with his own hurt or with the girl's? Jimson wondered. "If you hurt her too much, you block me from her too."

"Can you get through to her?"

"I think so."

Russell eased the arm. "Ask her what her name is."

Ysao relayed: "She won't tell you. She's afraid that you'll use it against her in some fashion."

"Does she believe in magic?"

"Something like that. I think she thinks we are magicians."

"That should help. I don't care if she tells me her real name or not. I just want something to call her."

Ysao looked at the girl. "Ast will do," he said.

"Ask her where she lives."

Jimson could see the girl's face; it was tight-lipped and defiant.

"She doesn't understand the question. She doesn't like this kind of communication at all. Telepathy is a sacred thing to her, not to be used casually. I think she feels that she's committing an offense."

Russell scowled down at her. "Can you suggest anything else? Sign language? Pictures? Jimson brought a sketchbook." He was clearly not serious. "Damn De Vala for getting us into this."

"De Vala?" Despite the armlock, Ast was trying to twist around in Russell's grasp to look at him. She spoke—a long string of intent words, clearly a question. The name De Vala came into it often, with an odd inflection and without the break, so that it became one word: Devala. Devala.

"What the hell—how does she know that name?" Russell squinted. "Come to think of it, she looks like him. Same build, same color skin, same eyes...."

Ysao growled. Ast jumped. "82 Eridani— something there! Why can't I remember?"

"She knows the name," Russell said. "There must be a connection somewhere." He looked around. "I don't like it in here. I wonder where the hell her people are, and what they're doing."

"Waiting just outside the door?" suggested Jimson.

"Ysao, are they?"

"No," said Ysao. "They've withdrawn outside the building."

"Maybe they've found the bubble. I wish them joy trying to get into it, that'll keep them busy for quite a while."

"There might be a back way in," Jimson said. There was clearly no other door, but there might be a secret passage, a trapdoor, a roof entrance.... "They could break in through the skylights."

"They have to get up there first," Russell said. But he was evidently thinking along the same lines. "Shit." He stood up, leaving the girl free, and paced. "Well, we can call the ship, take the Mask we have, and run." Ast went scrambling away from him, rolling upright. Jimson quickly pushed himself up and stood between her and the bolted door. She glared at him.

"We could do that," said Ysao.

"But—"

"But?"

"But I want to know how she knows the name De Vala," said Russell.

Ysao nodded. "I have an idea. There's a skill we teach at Psi Center. Call it language-patterning. A trained telepath can pick up languages from other minds the way you'd pick up a rock. If she's willing, Ast should have no trouble learning our language straight from my mind."

"You're willing to let her do that? Can't she just take you over—control you?"

"No. I can block her out the minute she tries anything unpleasant."

Russell said, "If she does that, I will get very unpleasant. Make that clear. But try it, if you must."

Ysao looked at Ast, where she stood poised and braced against the wall. It was clear she didn't like the telepathic touch. Her face twisted in distress, and she shook her head. But she walked to Ysao and sat down beside him, cross-legged, facing him, taking care not to joggle the wounded leg. A thick dusty sunbeam fell across her head, lighting black curls, white cloth, and fine-grained tan skin. What a model she'd make! Jimson thought.

She and Ysao were both so intent that they might have been transported to another world. Jimson wondered what telepathic touch was like for another telepath. He knew that it could not be the same for Ast as it was for him, where all but the gentlest contact irritated the nervous system beyond bearing. Ysao knew how to do it. Ast's face was remarkably calm. But Ysao was breathing harshly. Suddenly his eyes closed; his head lolled to one side. Russell sprang to him. Ysao's eyes opened. "I'm all right," he said.

"Water?" Russell reached into his pack for a water bottle. Ast's small hand came up to guide it to Ysao's lips. "Thanks," the giant said. He took the pack from Russell and hunted in it for a food bar. "I'm all right," he said again. "Ast, I am Ysao. That man by the door is Jimson. This is Russell, our chief."

Ast looked at Russell. Puzzling out the sounds of the unfamiliar language, she said, "Why have you come to steal our Masks?"

* * *

She had no trouble comprehending Russell's explanation. "I have never heard of thieves working for any but themselves," she said, "but I suppose that this might be so. But you must come from a far country indeed, not to know. Our Masks are not things to be stolen and sold at a thieves' market like beads. They are the voices of the Gods to our people. You must know that. You spoke the name of Devala."

"We do not know," said Ysao. "Tell us."

"It was Devala who made the Masks, before he went to live among the stars." Her voice took on priestly authority. "He was our ruler, our king. That is why we have no kings, now. He was very great. When he grew weary of ruling over such children as we seemed to him to be, he left us, with wives and children and all his kin, to live among the stars. They flew away on roaring dragons, our history tells us. But before Devala left, he gave us Law, so that we might remain human, and not become as beasts, and he made for us the Masks, so that the Gods might speak to us through them. Devala, they say, spoke face to face with the Gods. But we cannot. The Speaker must wear a Mask and speak through it to the tribes when there is dispute. Without the Masks there can be no Judgment. If you take the Masks, then our Gods will no longer speak to us!"

Ysao asked, "Is there dispute now in the tribes?"

"Yes. There is dispute between Athou and Rahid. Rahid is chief. Athou disputes with him—but it is sham. He wishes Rahid's power, that is all. The Gods know his mind."

"Tell us about the ritual," Ysao said.

"They must walk across the desert to the temple— that is the first test. Then they fast for a day, and do not sleep for a night. The voice of the God then speaks to them through the mouth of the Speaker."

"That is you," Ysao said.

"I have been Speaker for three years. It is a hard thing to do, and I think this will be my last year; I have grown too old. Already there are children in the tribe who can hear minds more strongly than I can. I will choose one of them to succeed me, as I was chosen, and I will be a teacher, and live with the old women, and learn the healing arts from them. So our Law requires. You—you will go now, won't you? And say to your Masters that you could not find the Masks? Or that a greater magic than theirs kept you from stealing?"

"Who do you think our masters are?" Russell asked.

"I do not know. But they say that in the north live magicians, who can make rain at will, and imprison the winds in great caves, letting them out only when they choose. I think they must have sent you. Else how could you have come across the desert?"

"How do you know that we ourselves are not magicians?"

"Magicians would not be hurt by our arrows," said the girl. "And—" she looked at Russell—"magicians would not need to twist my arm."

Russell said: "You are right. We are not magicians. We are only thieves, who will be well paid for stealing from you your Masks." He laid a hand on the beautiful carven face glowing against the dusty floor.

"But you can't!"

Russell reached for his pack and found the communicator. "Jim, use the foam on that Mask." Jimson, reluctantly, rummaged in his pack till he found the can of foam.

"What are you doing?" Ast asked.

"Leaving," said Russell. He was holding the stun pistol in one hand and the communicator in the other. "Leiko, this is Russell."

"Coming in clear, Captain," her voice said. Ast gazed with wonder at the little machine.

"We've encountered some opposition and we need a little muscle," Russell said. "Bring the ship down."

Ast was looking at the Mask. "Let me hold it," she whispered to Jimson, piteously. She picked it from his hands gently and with great care, and held it in front of her eyes.

Ysao shouted. Too late. Jimson felt the splitting pain of telepathic assault—many times stronger than it had been before. He remembered the brief lesson on board the ship, and tried to block, but the pain was paralyzing. Deep in memory, he heard Raina Ramoz: They can kill you if they stay in too long at that depth.

All coherence fled.

Chapter 12

Jimson woke to a grinding headache, the taste of dust on his lips, and in his ears a whisper of sound that went on and on, with steady ferocity. He tried to move. It hurt. His wrists and arms were tied together behind him; his ankles too. And it was dark, darker than simple night, darker than the Hype. Where was he? He was lying face down on cold stone. His ribs and jaw hurt. He twisted his torso to turn over on his back, painfully. If something was going to happen to him, he wanted at least to see it coming.

The whisper ceased. "Jim?"

"Russell?"

"Yeah. Are you tied?"

"I can move my head."

"So can I. It might as well fall off for all the good it's done me." Russell sounded savage. "At least Leiko's on the way."

"Where are we?"

"I'm not sure, but I think we're under the Hall. I remember some stairs."

"Ysao?"

"He's not with us," Russell said.

"Ast did it," Jimson said.

"Yes," agreed Russell. Jimson heard his boots scraping against the stone. "I'm working my way over to you, babe. Back to back we should be able to untie each other."

Jimson tried to move his fingers. He could barely feel them through the numbing cords. "I don't think I can—" He stopped. Light shone down at them, dazzling through the darkness. Steps came down at them. Jimson's eyes adjusted slowly to the light. Russell lay a few feet from him. Ast, and a man, were standing over them. The light flared from a torch stuck in a wall sconce.

"This is Rahid," said Ast. "Our chief."

He gazed down at Russell with a measuring and speculative look. He spoke, and Ast translated. "I am chief of the tribe. You with the fire in your hair—you are the chief of thieves, are you not?"

"My name is Russell." Silence, broken by the scrape of boot heels. Russell was pushing himself towards the wall. He worked himself to a sitting position against it.

"That is not a name of our folk, and you do not look like us, or smell like us. Where are you from?"

"North," said Russell.

"Ast told us that you called upon something for assistance, before the Gods delivered you into her hands. Ysao will not say what this thing is, and we cannot make him speak. He is protected against us. Since he names you as his leader, I will ask you. Did you indeed call upon a thing for aid?"

"I did," said Russell, "I am no magician." Ast's eyes widened and she spoke very fast.

"So your Masters are indeed the northern magicians! What thing did you call?"

"I don't think I need to tell you," Russell said, marvelously tranquil. "The thing has been called. It will come."

"An air demon? A fire-breather?"

Russell shook his head.

"Red one, you have no such protection as Ysao."

Russell made a face like a shrug. "I am in your hands. But the thing comes, and only my voice can call it off." He looked up, as if measuring the thickness of the ceiling stone. "You will not have to wait long to know."

It's like watching a play, Jimson thought.

"You can call it off," said Ast for Rahid. "Do you care so little about your own life?" Rahid bent close. There was suddenly a knife in his hand.

Russell remained calm. "My life will mean very little to me," he said, "if I return north without that for which I was sent."

"We will not let you steal our Masks."

"Then you will not have them long. The thing that comes is mindless and does not care what it burns. In the hottest fire, crystal and stone alike will melt."

Ast spoke to Rahid. He snapped a question at her. "How long before it comes?" she asked.

"The longer we talk, the nearer." Russell looked at Rahid. "The Masks."

Rahid shook his head before Ast could translate.

"One Mask—or the lives of all the people in this Hall, and beyond."

"There is no way—" Ast said.

"A way can always be contrived," Russell said mercilessly.

Rahid listened as Ast translated. His face was taut with worry and indecision. He spoke to Ast. Jimson heard the name Athou repeated several times.

Russell had heard it, too. "Is not Rahid chief of the tribe?" he said to Ast. "Surely, when the chief talks, no one will dispute him."

Ast translated this to Rahid. He frowned, and spoke to her at length. At last she turned to Russell and said, "Rahid will speak with the tribe. But this may take some time. Is there time to talk before the dragon comes?"

Russell said, "Did you destroy our packs?"

"No."

"Bring me one. I will speak to the beast."

Ast translated for Rahid. He shouted something up the stairs. There was a thump of feet, more shouts, more thumps, and then a panoply of shadow on the walls. Rahid disappeared and came back with the pack. He laid it at Russell's side, and then drew his knife again and cut the cords on Russell's hands and feet. "There are two of us," Russell said to Ast. She spoke. Rahid leaned over Jimson. The bonds around his ankles fell away. Then his arms were free. He tried to lift himself, failed, clenched his teeth, and pushed hard. His shoulders burned where they had been forced back. A line on his wrist was painfully raw.

Russell pulled the communicator out of the pack. "Leiko, this is Russell."

"Homing in, Pirate!"

"No!" Russell said sharply. "Hold off. I'll call you again. If I don't check back with you in one hour, come on down. Can you make a noise like a dragon over us, now?"

"Noise like a dragon? Are you having fun? Sure I can. Roaring off." Russell grinned and laid the communicator down.

"It will not come now," he said to Ast. "But if I do not speak to it again within a certain time, it will."

"I understand," said Ast. She spoke with Rahid. He nodded grimly, still holding the knife, blade upwards. "We will go upstairs now," she said. "You will walk behind us, and the guards will follow. Make no sudden moves." Now that the immediate crisis was over, Rahid looked more sure of his ground. He pointed the knife at Russell.

There were two guards at the doorway, each carrying long, metal-tipped spears. They moved aside at Rahid's command. The chief took the torch from the wall and started up ahead of them. Russell and Jimson fell in behind him. Jimson glanced at Russell. He was grinning, happy, gliding up the stone steps in easy strides. He caught Jimson's eyes on him, and chuckled.

The small sound unnerved the spearmen. One of them, the nearest, lifted his spear and laid the point of it in the small of Russell's back.

The redhead turned, smooth as a dancer, and caught the spear from underneath, just below the point. Still stepping backwards and up, he jerked it forward. The man flung forward, unbalanced. Russell's boot caught him crisply in the stomach. He gyrated backwards, yelped, tumbled against the other guard, and almost knocked him down. Russell held up the spear, then broke it over his knee, and tossed the pieces down the stairs.

As they climbed up into the temple, the roar began.

It started like the sound of a rushing wind, and filled the building, growing and growing, an enraged growling bestial scream. The men in their long dun-colored robes were falling down, covering their ears with their hands, wailing in fear. Boom it went, and the stones of the temple seemed to vibrate. Boom! BOOM. As it died leaving a wake of silence like doom, Russell walked across the hall to where Ysao lay, propped against the dais. Jimson followed him. He was slightly shaken, partly by the noise, mostly by its spectacular effect.

Ysao was looking not too uncomfortable. He was holding a food bar. "Interesting," he said to Russell.

"You've heard a dragon roar before," Russell said.

"A dragon—of course. Nice, very nice. I told Rahid that he would have to talk to you. Thank the luck these people are untrained, Russell, and that Rahid has scruples about questioning an injured man. What arrangement have you made?"

"Talking time," Russell said. "I told them I have a dragon on tap. If they give us any trouble, it will come and burn this hall."

"Talking time," repeated Ysao. "Yes. We need some talking time. I want a Mask to look at, Pirate. Can you get me one?"

"I think so," said Russell.

Jimson's ears were still ringing with the ship's sound. Around the hall the men of the tribe still lay prostrate and trembling. The Masks in their niches watched the scene as if it were a comedy played out for their amusement in the hall. We are old, they seemed to say. Show us something new, strangers. Jimson felt pity for the tribespeople. They've never heard anything louder than the desert winds—or, maybe, thunder in a storm.

I wonder what the Masks are thinking.

He could not help but think of them as living.

Like a person who has the upper hand, and knows it, Russell walked over the bodies to the nearest Mask, and took it down from the wall.

It was the representation of a woman's face, carved out of some cold stone—streaked milky-grey. Alabaster? wondered Jimson. Her hair was long, and it twined about her face, obscuring the whole left side of it below the eye. Ysao turned and turned it in his lap. At last he picked it up and placed it on his head. It looked monstrous there. He laid it back on his lap, looking pleased and also amazed. He smoothed the lovely stone with one hand.

Rahid came pleading to them, hands palm to palm in supplication, forgetting that they couldn't understand him. Russell took the Mask from Ysao and gave it to him.

"I suppose they're all like that," murmured Ysao.

"Like what?" said Russell.

"No wonder Ast was so strong, holding it."

They waited for him to explain at his own pace.

"The Masks are psychic resonators."

Around them now, the men were rousing. But no one moved in their direction. Most were backing away, back into the pillared hallway. Only Rahid remained, cradling the Mask, listening to the strange sounds. Ast stayed, crouching at Ysao's feet.

"You know about resonating crystal, Pirate?" Russell shook his head. "It wasn't discovered till after we got out into the Hype. It's rare. We don't know how to synthesize it. It's got a lot of uses, and a lot of forms. You can pattern it, and it will grow in that pattern. You can pattern it to diamond, if you have a diamond, and the proper form of the stuff. This form—well, I've seen two pieces of it. One is at Psi Center. One belongs to the Director of the Ships, on Nexus. With a piece of this stuff, you can increase the intensity and distance of telepathic communication. When psi talents were first being seriously investigated, it was theorized that we could extend telepathy from planet to planet, from system to system, even, so that telepaths light years apart might be able to send to each other. But they soon discovered that no telepath alive can focus more than a few kilometers. Except with resonating crystal. With this, I can send halfway around this planet. Maybe farther. And I can go as deep and as precisely into another mind as I need to. On Psi Center, they use it for surgery. And Psi Center would give damn near anything to have another piece. This is a treasure, Russell."

Russell asked, "How much would Psi Center pay for it, Ysao?"

"I think you could name your own price."

Russell blinked. "I'm not greedy," he said. "But I'd be a fool to pass that up. We can take one Mask to Psi Center, Ysao. And take a second to Roman De Vala."

Ysao said, "No. Nothing to Roman De Vala."

Russell said, "He hired me, Ysao. I don't break contracts."

"De Vala." Ysao's voice was tired and contemptuous. "Once this was his world. Let me tell you the story, Russell. Took me some time to remember it. The old star charts—we don't use them any more. Don't need to. You chart courses with the Hype mappings. But you remember what happened on Old Terra, when it got desperate there, not enough to eat, before the Verdians landed—before hyperdrive? They fought a war. Then they saw it wouldn't help to kill each other off, and they built a huge fusion starship fleet, and pointed it through spacetime normal to the stars. Some of those ships landed on New Terra." Jimson nodded. From New Terra colonists had come through the Hype to New Terrain. "Check the old star maps and you'll see it, Pirate—82 Eridani is close to Sol. One ship, or two, or half a dozen, I don't know, landed on Demea. The trip must have taken them a hundred years."

"Not that much," objected Russell.

"Fifty? That's a long time to be cooped up in a moving metal box with no sunlight, no fresh air, and the same damn faces every day, every night. Under those conditions culture rigidifies and stratifies. The biggest problem new colonists in the Clouds have is breaking out of the traditions they've set up for themselves on shipboard."

Russell said, "That trip is eighty years."

Ysao said, "But people live longer now, so it evens out. Imagine shutting yourself into that box with no knowledge of where you're going, or belief that you'll even get off ship alive! Remember, they had no telepathic screening then. When the people from Terra arrived on 82 Eridani, they'd turned very strange. The technology they'd brought with them wasn't up to the world they'd found—or else they weren't. Demea killed a lot of them and brutalized the rest. It took another hundred years before an X-team arrived. The X-team was pretty shaken at what it found. The culture had developed along classic lines: an exploited and degraded majority, and a privileged, corrupt, despotic minority. The minority knew who they were, and why, and even where. But the majority had lost all but the most mythic bits of history. I suppose that out of those myths they made this building and the Masks."

Russell said, clearly shaken despite himself, "It sounds ugly."

Jimson said, "Was De Vala one of the despots?" Ast stirred at the name. He wondered how this version of her history sounded to her, if she could even hear it. He thought it sounded to her the way hyperdrive physics sounded to him.

"Could be," said Ysao. "Who knows how old he is? Russell, do you?"

"No," said Russell. "But what happened after the X-team landed?"

"They decided that meddling in the situation would probably make it worse. They took Demea off the records. That's why the Gompcenter records were bare. They left the place alone. But something had to be done with the worst of the despots. They couldn't be left alone."

Russell said, "They could have killed them."

"X-teams don't make that decision," said Ysao. "They took the worst ones with them, and resettled them."

"They flew away on roaring dragons," quoted Russell. "That's why De Vala claims to be Terran."

"If he's as old as—as he could be—he probably still thinks of Terra as his home. He probably thinks of Demea as his property. The Masks, too."

"And he wants them because they're beautiful," Jimson said.

"You don't understand him," said Ysao. "He wants them because they're his. And maybe because he knows what they are. Psychic resonators. He's a broody little man. He has money, and he likes power. You know him, Pirate, you've talked to him. You even work for him, for a good stiff price. Would you give him power over you?"

Russell said uneasily, "Are you suggesting he's a telepath?"

"Again, why not?"

Jimson said, "I thought all telepaths had to go to Psi Center for training."

Ysao chuckled. It was a tired sound. "They don't have to, and some of them can't." Jimson thought of Ensel. "It's hard to make a telepath do something. Anything."

Russell said, as if in argument, "De Vala's just a little man, Ysao. A weird little man with a lot of money."

"Perhaps it was his mother and father who played god on Demea," said Ysao. "Maybe it was his grandfather, his grandmother, or farther back. But he must have grown up hearing stories of a planet where he could be a king. You think he's just obsessed with beauty, an art collector, a little man with money. Maybe that's what he wants you to think. Never mind what he says he wants. He could be lying. And if he's a telepath, how the hell could you tell?"

"Speculation," said Russell. He sounded angry.

Ysao leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "Yes. But you'll grant me that nine years working for Psi Center, on and off the X-teams, Russell, gives me some experience in making cultural speculations."

Russell said, "How do you know all this?"

Ysao said, eyes still closed, "The X-team telepath told me the story, once, many years ago. A woman named Goryn."

Jimson tried to remember De Vala. The little one, with the black hair. But the man's face would just not come to him.

"I grant you that," Russell answered. "But I contracted to bring De Vala a Crystal Mask. I don't break contracts."

Jimson felt it then—a hum of ancient laughter in the Hall. Why, this dispute is better than the other, it said. Listen, brothers and sisters.

The Masks.

He walked to one of them. It jutted out from the wall: a silver head, slightly more than lifesize. Lifelike was too poor a word to describe it. It gleamed with cold beauty and arrogance. Jimson could not help the sudden thought: This is the face of a god.

It seemed to smile at him. His hands itched. I don't want to steal you, he said to it. Even I can see that you belong here. But I could draw you.

The next Mask was a dragon's head, carved out of purplish-red stone. The long snout, flaring nostrils, scales, and fangs were vividly graven—they seemed to move on the wall. The darkness soaked up light as sponge soaks up water, but the red dragon glowed with its own light. Iridescent eyes regarded Jimson with inhuman curiosity. He shivered. I could draw you, too. I could.

"Jim?" said Russell. Jimson had not heard him. "What is it?"

"A night." Jimson reached out to stroke the cool stone. "Give me a night, Russell."

There was a shout from the archway. Rahid shouted back. A wrangling and raucous voice responded. Russell turned to Ast. "What is it?" he asked.

"They wish to go," she said. "They fear you, and do not want to stay. They wish Rahid to leave you to the Gods. Night comes."

"Give me a night, Russell."

"Why?"

"Give me a night, and you won't need to take De Vala a Mask. I can bring them back for you. Last time I looked, my name was good for something. I'll draw them. The Crystal Masks, by Jimson Alleca. De Vala's a collector. He'll know what they're worth. It's a better bargain for him, more things to hang on his walls. If he isn't a telepath, he won't mind the substitution. He'll pay you for them. And if he is a telepath—well, maybe he shouldn't have a Mask."

The Red Dragon grinned.

The shouting started up again. Ast called back something sharp. "What's going on?" demanded Russell.

"Athou tells me I am a fool, or else, he says, I have gone mad, because I will not leave." She regarded Russell with steady eyes. "I am the Speaker of the Gods. It is right that I stay."

Russell glared at Rahid, who was standing by Ysao. "Why does he stay?"

"He has sworn to stay and protect the Masks."

Ysao said, not looking at them, "He might let you walk away with one Mask, Pirate. If you try to take two, he'll try to stop you. You'll have to kill him. If you take two Masks and don't kill him, you leave him for his people to kill."

Russell said, "You like Jim's idea?"

Ysao said, "It's up to you. You're giving the orders."

Russell stared at Rahid. "I don't want to kill him."

Ysao said, "He isn't going to give you much choice."

Russell said, with real anger in his voice, "I hate not having a choice." He stood fuming. Finally he took out his communicator. "Leiko, this is Russell."

"You want a ride, Captain?"

"Not just yet. We are going to stay here—" Russell paused, looking at Jimson—"overnight. I'll call you every hour. If I miss a call, you land. Otherwise, we'll see you at dawn."

"I feel left out," Leiko complained. "Will do. Keep in touch."

"Every hour." Russell turned to Ast. "Tell Rahid," he said, "that I will make a bargain with him. A compact, an oath—no harm will come to this temple, or to your tribe, in exchange for a Mask. One Mask."

"Then why must you wait here till dawn?"

Jimson answered. "Do your people make images, Ast?" He knelt, and pretended to draw a face in the dust.

"The women decorate the tents with chalk." She understood, then. "You will make images of the other Masks, and take these back to your masters! But there is no chalk here, and surely this will take a long time."

"No." Jimson pulled out his sketchbook. "Look." Praise to the luck, it was a nearly unused book; he could waste paper. He sketched a face, gave it curly dark hair, high cheekbones, thick and flaring brows— Rahid came to look as the portrait flowed from the pen.

"That is me," said Ast.

Rahid touched the paper with a cautious finger. Ast translated his question. "What is this stuff? It is not hide. I have never seen anything like it."

Jimson closed the sketchbook. "Something we make, in our country," he said.

Rahid was gazing at his thermal suit. He commented in a soft voice to Ast. She translated it. "A country where even thieves are rich." Jimson nodded. Ast spoke with the chief for a long time. Finally she turned back to Russell. "Rahid says that he will agree to this. For the good of the tribe." And Rahid, after a few words to her, turned his back on them all and walked with dignity out of the great round room.

"And you?" Russell said to Ast.

"I told you. I will stay."

Russell shrugged. Jimson could barely see his face. It was getting dark. It was almost dark enough to be night. "Jim, how many Masks are there?"

"Twelve."

"That means you have to draw eleven. Can you do eleven portraits in a short night? It sounds like a lot of work."

"They don't have to be finished portraits," Jimson explained. "I can do those on the ship, on the way back to Nexus."

"Yes," said Russell, "of course. On the ship there'll be plenty of time." He turned away.

Jimson felt dismissed. "Russell!" he called. His voice echoed in the darkness. Russell turned back.

"Yes?" he said.

Lamely, Jimson said, "Where are you going?"

Russell said, "To make sure we're really alone, and that all Rahid's people have gone." Jimson recognized the hard edge to his tone.

"Wait," he said. He took a step towards Russell. "Russell, something's wrong. Tell me what's wrong."

Russell said, "I feel used. I feel that the luck sent me to Enchanter just in time to see your show, and then to Nexus to find you, just so that you could get out here on the forgotten edge of nowhere and draw!"

"That's hardly fair," Jimson said. "I couldn't know this would happen."

"Then why did you ask me to let you come here?" asked Russell. "You could have taken ship with anyone, Jim. Why ship with me?"

"We—we're friends."

"We were friends."

"No!" Jimson said. "We are friends. I thought we were."

"I thought we were, too," said Russell. "I thought we were more than friends. Once we were. I haven't forgotten it. But we were cooped up in Morgana for ten days together, and you had me walking around you with my hands in my pockets. If that's what you want, I'll keep them there, and the hell with the past, or the present. I know there isn't a future." He paused. "I suppose you're punishing me," he said at last, "for having left you. For not coming back. I told you why that happened, and it wasn't because I didn't care about you. It was because I did. I do. I would—if you gave me the chance."

He wheeled. Jimson reached a hand to him, but it was too late, Russell was already walking fast, walking away. Jimson almost shouted at him. Damn it, Russ, he thought. It's been fourteen years since we met, and you want to wipe those years away, and go back to being lovers? I can't relax with a telepath breathing down the back of my neck! And there's Leiko, too. I need some time alone with you, and some space, and some privacy.

Ast was watching him, sympathy plain on her face. 1 wonder how much of that she understood?

Probably all of it, he decided. She's a telepath.

He listened to Russell's returning steps in the darkness. Alleca, he thought, you don't have any time. Not any time at all.

Chapter 13

Jimson rubbed his eyes.

The Mask of the Red Dragon watched his exhaustion, patient and interested. In the glow from the lamps—resourceful Leiko had tucked two inside Ysao's pack—Ysao's face seemed whiter under his beard, his energy drained, spent. His eyes were closed. Ast sat beside him, slumped against the cold stone. She had tried to stay awake, but sleep had won out against awe. Jimson stretched his fingers, his neck, and rubbed his eyes again. "I need another Mask," he said.

Russell took the Red Dragon in his arms and disappeared. They had moved back into the small square room behind the dais. "Easier to defend," the redhead had pointed out. He returned after a long time with the Silver God in his arms. He propped it on a pack. "I went to take a piss. I pity anyone moving across the desert tonight. The wind's bad."

Jimson labored over the stern, bright face. The room seemed to be growing darker. Could the lamp be failing? No, that's impossible. It's your imagination. He ached from sitting still, from tension, from the cold that crept in through his thermal suit, crept into his bones.... He could hear the wind. It moaned outside the skylights, sweeping sand across glass with a noise like claws. Wasting time—why the hell was he wasting time? Fantasizing isn't working. He took a drink from his water bottle, wishing he had all his pens, a desk, a decent light, and no night noises to disturb his thoughts.

And that Russell had not said what he had said.

He forced himself to work. An hour passed. Russell whispered in the darkness, reporting to Leiko. "I need another Mask." Russell brought it to him: a Silver Goddess, majestic and lovely. Ysao's head was a grotesque bobbling shadow. Alleca, you selfish bastard. He's hurt. He should be on the ship.

He rubbed his hands together, caught himself doing it, and picked up the pen again. The creeping darkness and the wind reminded him of his own death, his devourer, the doppelganger in his bones. Fury fueled him. I'll beat you, he told it. I'll take what I need from anyone, from everyone, to beat you.

Sometime in the passage of the night, Ysao began to mumble in his dreams: softly, first, whispers without words, and then unintelligible sentences, like pebbles tossed at imprisoning walls. Jimson barely heard him. He was working on a Mask whose features were blue ice, translucent as the swinging bubbles of Nexus. The planes of the face looked smooth, but when he ran his fingers over them, they were sharp, as if they had been freshly chiseled. "Chudra," he muttered, "I wish you could see this stone."

"Jim."

Russell was bending over Ysao. He was pulling back the slit clothing. Jimson stood up and staggered. His legs were numb. Under the dried blood covering Ysao's wound, red streaks were inching upwards towards the groin, and down to the knee. Ysao stared blindly at them, gasping, talking nonsense. Jimson touched his forehead. It was hot. "Fever."

"Shit." Russell was digging the medikit from his pack. He selected four gel ampules from it, and laid them on the skin near the wound. They shrank and melted in. "We should have; done this right away, without trusting to the immunomine shots. The luck alone knows when he last had them. There's a capsule for fever in here—where's the water?" Quietly, Ast handed him a water bottle. "Now, how the fuck are we going to open his mouth?"

"I can do that," Ast said.

"Can you? All right. Here." Russell handed the pill and water bottle to Jimson. "When she gets his mouth open, dump in the pill and some water. Go on!" Ast was feeling through the brush of Ysao's beard for the contours of his jaw. She pulled down gently on his lower jaw. Thrashing, he fought them. Russell held his head between both knees, and leaned his weight on those massive shoulders. Jimson tried to pin one of Ysao's arms. Ast had the mouth open. Jimson let go the arm and pushed the pill down Ysao's throat, poured water in—"Close his mouth!"

Ast held it closed. Ysao choked, tried to sit up, and swallowed. Jimson tried to pin his arms and got hit on the side of the head. He hung on. Ysao bucked, tried to roll, bucked again. Russell's left hand was being banged into the floor. At last the convulsive movements ceased. Russell looked at his hands. One of the knuckles on his left hand was scraped and bleeding, and they were all puffy. "Pass me the kit." He sprayed his hands with the antiseptic spray.

"Now what?" Jimson asked.

"Now we wait. I don't want to have to carry him out in the cold wind. The fever should subside. If it doesn't, if he gets worse—then we carry him."

Ast asked, timidly, "Is that magic?"

"No," said Russell, "it's medicine." He sat down beside the twitching giant. "Jim, why don't you call Leiko? It's time."

"Shall I tell her about Ysao?"

"Yes, you can tell her."

Jimson thumbed the communicator uncertainly. "Hey, lady."

"Hello, lover," said Leiko cheerfully. "You having a good time?"

"Not exactly."

"Fill me in."

He said, "Well, Ysao's not doing too well. I guess he's going to be all right. And I'm just sitting on my ass, drawing pictures."

Her laughter sounded very close. "I can't say I'm surprised. But what's wrong with Ysao?"

He gave her details.

"Russell wouldn't wait if he were seriously worried," she said. "But I'll be standing by if you need me in a hurry. I'll see you soon anyway. It's less than two hours till dawn."

"Bye." Jimson remembered that other dawn they had shared from the roof of the cottage on Nexus. Everyone, everything, goes round and round and round....

He touched the communicator stud, and Leiko went away.

"Tired?" said Russell from behind him. "Hold still." He put both hands on Jimson's shoulders.

"Since when do Starcaptains learn shiatsu?" Jimson asked, gasping as Russell's powerful thumbs loosened the knots. "Sssss..."

"I was always good with my hands," Russell answered. His fingers probed expertly, half-pleasure, half-pain. Jimson recalled the orchard on North Island, the afternoons—So the circle comes round again, he thought. With no one watching, Leiko in the ship, Ysao asleep—he turned around. I'll have to tell Leiko, he thought absently. I wonder what she'll say?

She would only laugh at him, for waiting so long.

"Don't put your hands in your pockets, Russ."

Ysao began to talk again. Russell sighed, his mouth against Jimson's hair. He got up and knelt beside the engineer. Ysao thrashed weakly, eyes rolling and unfocused. "Ysao," Russell said. "Ysao!" He caught Ysao's head between his palms to steady it. The telepath focused.

"Russell?" he said.

"That's right," said Russell. "You're tired, Ysao, you need to sleep. Go to sleep."

Ysao seemed not to understand him. "Russell? Where—" he tried to lift himself off the floor. "This isn't—where is this? It's cold here. I want to go to bed."

Russell touched his face with astonishing tenderness. "This is the only bed around," he said.

"I'm cold," said Ysao peevishly.

"All right. Be still." Russell eased down beside the restless telepath and put his arms around him. There was no awkwardness in the motion. It looked as if it had been done many times before. In the familiar embrace Ysao rested, and seemed to be asleep. Russell stayed beside him, holding him.

Jimson left the room to let them be together.

He was sitting on the edge of the dais when Russell came to find him. "Ast woke up again and said she'd watch him. She promised to call me if he starts to yell again."

Jimson nodded. Russell sat on the edge of the dais and put an arm around him. "You're stiff again," he said. "I thought I'd taken care of that. Something's on your mind, Jim."

"You were lovers—you and Ysao."

"Yes," Russell said, "for a little while. Does it bother you? Are you jealous?"

Jimson tried to laugh. "Of your other lovers? I'm not an idiot. It's been fourteen years, and you always did love to bed-hop. You must have a hundred lovers scattered here and there across the Hype."

"At least," said Russell. "What is it, then?"

Jimson scrubbed his face with his hands. He was very tired. "A friend once told me—a friend who would know—All telepaths are voyeurs."

Russell said, "You'd have to ask Ysao. As far as I know, it's true."

"It's awfully hard for me to know that there's someone watching me in bed with you."

"I understand," Russell said. "Is that why you kept pulling out of my reach, aboard ship?"

'That's a lot of it."

"Ah. Well, Ysao's asleep now."

The wind wailed through the sand, like a voice. Jimson pulled away from Russell's arms. He had to push himself off the dais to stand. "No," he said. "The Masks, Russell. I'm not finished drawing them yet."

* * *

There was light in the room. Sunlight made a great grey patch on the dusty floor. The Blue Mask lay in the center of the patch. It sparkled. Jimson stretched. It was time for a pill. He had lost all sense of time over the night, but his bones kept their own time, and they ached now. He had to step over Russell to get to his pack. The Starcaptain was stretched out full length on the filthy floor. Ast too was asleep, snoring softly; so was Ysao, curled like a baby in a nest of packs. His breathing was easy. Jimson laid a palm on his forehead; it was cool.

Russell came awake. "He's better."

"Leiko will be here soon."

Russell drew back the cloth over Ysao's leg. The area around the wound was still reddened, but the streaking had vanished. Ysao murmured, shifted, and woke. "Huh."

"You had a bad night," Russell said. "How do you feel?"

"Feel all right."

"Think you can walk?"

"If I have to."

"Good," said Russell, "because I don't want to have to carry you."

Then the sound of the ship landing shook the world.

It was anticlimactic when Leiko came walking in through the door. She was carrying her stun pistol. Her thermal suit was a non-standard, ornate silver; it matched her eyes, and it gleamed in the sunlight. "Hello," she said.

Russell sprayed Ysao's leg with topical anaesthetic. Jimson gathered their scattered belongings. Lamps, the water bottles, the can of foam.... He reached for the Blue Mask. The light touched it and changed it. He could see now that the lips were faintly curved. The God was smiling. Stars, if only I had another hour! Jimson thought.

"Are we taking that one with us?" asked Leiko.

"I thought we'd take the dragon," Russell said. Then he grinned at Jimson. "No, we'll take that one. I know how frustrating it can be, to have to leave something half done."

Then the glass shattered, and the men came in.

The air filled with them. They came leaping, suicidally, it seemed, from the roof. They wore sand-colored robes. Jimson wondered in the midst of the chaos if they had been all night in the dunes. Four of them fell on Russell, fighting him for the stun pistol. Someone was shouting orders. Leiko, backed against a wall, calmly aimed and fired, aimed and fired, dropping them. One man had been cut coming through the glass. He lay writhing on the floor, mouth working, bloody hands holding in his belly. Why aren't they attacking me? Jimson wondered, and remembered that he was holding the Mask. As he thought it someone grabbed his elbows from behind and jerked backwards. His fingers opened convulsively. The Mask dropped.

Ast, lizard-quick, darted through the press of desperate struggling men to receive the Mask as it fell from his arms.

Suddenly there was an arm around his neck, choking him viciously. He tore at it—and felt a bright pain cut through his clothes on his left side. He stopped fighting. The room was quiet, except for the harsh breathing in his ear, and the whimpering of the badly wounded man on the floor. He smelled sweat.

The man holding him spoke. Ast translated: "Rahid says he makes no agreement with thieves. He says he will kill your companion if you do not surrender to him."

There was a beat of silence. Held as he was, Jimson could not see Russell's face. But he heard in his voice a deep, killing rage. "Tell Rahid if he uses that knife he will die—and that I will still take one of the Masks."

The silence seemed infinite. Jimson felt the sweat roll from his hairline to his eyes. It tickled. Be still, he told his body, be still. You're not going to die now. He felt Rahid's heartbeat through the shudder of his own. The knifepoint of pain joined them close as lovers. He did not hear Russell's next sentence, nor Rahid's response, but suddenly he was free.

He stumbled forward. Leiko's long fingers closed round his wrist and pulled him out of the way. Ast was holding both stun guns, and the Mask. Rahid's men were dragging their stunned fellows to one side. The man with the stomach wound screamed as they moved him. "What's going on?"

"Sh!" Leiko said fiercely.

Rahid said something. One of his men bent and skittered a bright shining object across to Russell. The redhead scooped it up. A knife. Rahid was moving in, moving his knife, waving it back and forth in his hand. Russell crouched slightly and circled away, his own knife steady. Rahid struck out, and Russell parried the blow, catching it with the blade of his knife. Steel sheared on steel—shreek. Ast was leaning forward, her hand on the wrong end of one of the stun pistols, her other hand on the Mask. Rahid lunged, and ripped through Russell's thermal suit. Russell whirled like a dancer and spun behind him, but Rahid was fast as he, facing him, knife alert to parry. He snarled at Russell. Russell smiled at him. There was blood across his ribs. "Don't bitch at me, sweetheart," he said. Rahid lunged at him once more. He blocked it—and stumbled, arms flailing, off balance. Rahid stood waiting for him to go down.

Russell fell, throwing himself forward—and rolled, his body a circle in the air, twisting, coming up on one knee, in graceful ukemi, a warrior gymnast—and then he threw the knife. It turned in the air, catching the sunlight as it passed, and went point first into Rahid's throat. The chieftain went down, blood spraying like water from the wound. Leiko went unobtrusively down on one knee, and picked both stun pistols from Ast's loose grasp. She pointed the stunners at Rahid's men.

Russell was breathing hard, and there was blood on his face and in his hair. He rose to his feet. He looked at Jimson. "I learned that trick twelve years ago," he said. "Put some foam around that Mask. We've paid the toll; we can leave."

Chapter 14

Jimson looked once, quickly, at the red glitter crawling out of the vision screen, and just as quickly, looked away. Through the stunning scarlet vortex the darkness drew at his mind. Quietly he turned away from the screen, not speaking to Leiko, not touching her. In the pilot's chair she was totally intent, her hand imperceptively moving the stick, weaving the ship like a shuttle through the strands and currents of the Maze. Her face was drawn. Three days.

They had Jumped into it. Russell's face had tightened grimly when he saw the red dust closing around them. He said to Leiko, "You'll get us out of it." She had nodded, and not slept since. Russell forced her out of the chair to exercise on the monkey bars and eat. She refused to leave until he swore not to touch the stick. He slept lightly as a hunted beast, waking to pace, and check the computer, and pace again. Three days. What if we never get out?

Forget it—work. But he couldn't work. His notebooks lay piled on his bunk, but he hadn't opened them. His leg, his head, even his hands ached from the tension. He rubbed his hands together.

Russell came out of his bunk, hand over hand down the monkey bars. "What's the matter with you?" he said.

Jimson could not say: I'm afraid. "I ache."

"We're all tense," Russell said. "Except the girl."

Ysao said, from his place on his work table, "She's tense, too. She's started picking it up from us."

"Poor baby," said Russell. He looked towards where Ast lay, curled up, not sleeping, eyes open and staring at nothing.

They had let Rahid's men carry his body from the temple. Ast had confronted Russell at the great entrance door. "Take me with you."

"We can't."

"If you do not, Athou will kill me. He is chief now. As Speaker, I spoke against him in his dispute with Rahid. But Rahid is dead, and one of the Masks has been lost to us. He will say I am to blame. He is thinking it now. I know his mind."

Leiko said: "We can't leave her to die."

"Where do we take her?" asked Russell. "Nexus?'

"I guess—she could go to my homeworld, Anzen. It has deserts      "

"She can go to Psi Center with me," said Ysao. "She's a telepath, remember. They'll know what to do with her there."

"If the Hype cops ever hear about it—you know it's kidnapping."

"Stealing, kidnapping, what's the difference?' Leiko had said. "We can't leave her."

The inside of the Morgana had intrigued but not frightened her. The take-off had not frightened her. But the Jump had, and the Hype terrified her. She ate and drank with Ysao standing over her, coaxing her. She would not use the bathroom at all. Ysao cleaned up after her, lifting her easily to another bunk, scolding her gently, as you would scold an infant, without heat.

"Is she going to be all right?" Jimson asked Ysao.

"If we all are," Ysao said. "She's still sane. She just doesn't like it here, and why should she? Even though she asked to come with us, she's terrified. Nothing here works the way it should. It's like nothing she knows. She's retreated into semi-dreams, waking daydreams, of Demea, of her tribe, her family.... But she knows where she is. She'll eat, if I suggest it. She's very gutsy."

"We'll be all right," Russell said. He crossed to stand behind Leiko.

"Want some distraction?" Ysao said to Jimson. "I found those schematics."

"Sure." Jimson sat on the workbench, careful to avoid Ysao's leg. Russell had done makeshift surgery on it, to dig out the arrowhead, and it was bandaged tight. "What am I looking at?"

"The Drive Core." Ysao laid the diagram between them. "Think about the Core." Jimson visualized the cramped bright space in the ceiling of the ship to which he and Ysao had climbed, the day before. "The control panel—you'll remember it, on the left-hand side of the access door as you come off the monkey bars—has one row of buttons and three dials." He laid a fat finger on the diagram. "Here, and here."

"Right."

"The buttons are color- and also heat-coded. The big red one which is quite warm, but not hot, to touch is the OFF button. Punch it, and the pilot's controls go off. The ship can't Jump until you punch the blue, cool one to the right of the red one. If you punch the buttons in hyperspace, they won't work."

"What if they did?"

"The ship would blow up."

"Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire."

Jimson stopped. "I can't remember the rest. Except he said that ice would work too."

"I expect it would," Ysao said dryly. "Are you interested in this at all?"

"Not much." It was hard to be interested in the Drive, when they might never get out of the Hype. The day before Russell had shown him the controls to direct the proxies, focus the vision screen, and fire the ship's weapons. "Sorry." He had liked playing with the proxies. And it gave them all something to do.

His leg was aching badly now. He went to the lowest rung of the monkey bars and started to climb it. When his body began to curve backwards he swung away from the wall, holding on only with his hands. Slowly he pulled himself hand over hand to his bunk, got his pills, stuck them in his pocket, took a few deep breaths, and started down again. Someday, he thought, I'll ask Russell to put us into free-fall. He imagined himself swinging weightless on the bars. That was, after all, what they had been designed for.

Alleca, face it. You don't have a someday. Pretty soon he was not going to be able to hang from the bars. It made his hands ache too much. He was taking the pills now every six hours, instead of every twelve. He thought they did some good. He hoped they did. But even if they got out of the damned Maze—we'll get out. He grinned at the ceiling, glad that no one could see his face, for the grin felt more like a grimace. He would not believe that the luck would choose to kill him this way. The irony would be insupportable. He said it aloud. "We'll be all right."

"Russell." It was Leiko. Jimson dropped from the bars, a meter and a half of drop. One ankle twisted under him and he fell. He made himself stand. He rubbed the bruised knee and limped to the vision screen.

"What is it?" Russell said.

"I just saw something solid. What could be solid in the Hype?'

"Let's send proxies out. Jim, you do it." Jimson tapped out the code on the control keyboard. The proxies swarmed out of the Morgana, a cluster of mobile eyes. The picture on the vision screen jerked and changed.

"There!" Russell leaned over to cue the proxies. A shape filled the vision screen, drifting across it, outlined in red dust: a dark polygon. Ysao came up to stand behind them. Russell's face had suddenly gotten grim and tight. "It looks like a ship," he said. "A cargo ship."

Leiko said: "It can't be."

Ysao said, "I think it is."

"I'll try to reach her." Russell played with the keyboard. "Calling Cargo. Calling Cargo. Cargo, answer. This is the Morgana, out of Nexus Port. Calling Cargo. Cargo, answer." They watched the screen as Ship's Code signals went into the Hype. It remained bare. "Nothing," Russell said. His fingers hovered doubtfully over the keyboard.

"Try audio," said Ysao.

Russell spoke the message. "Calling Cargo. Calling Cargo. Cargo, answer...."

Laughter.

It came shrieking across the void and welled up inside the ship, insane, crowing and gleeful, whipping the nerves, till Jimson shivered under the lash. Leiko's knuckles were white on the stick. Suddenly it changed. "Russell? Russell O'Neill? Russell, are you here, too?" The voice was shrill and fierce.

Russell answered. "Yes, Shev. I'm here."

The laughter began again. Ysao said softly, "He's mad."

Russell shook his head. "Shev!" he called. "How many alive in your ship?"

"Just me, lover. The others tried to walk to find the stars. Ah—ha ha ha!"

Ysao said: "Hype madness, Pirate. The effect of entropic discontinuity on the brain cells—it's physiological. The early Hype explorers, remember? The pilot must have succumbed first. Without a pilot, they couldn't get out."

"Shev, follow us," Russell said urgently. "Hook your computer to ours. We're going to Nexus."

"No. Oh, no, no, no. I'm so tired. I'm so tired, Russell. The Hype—it pulls, you know. It pulls at the mind. It broke me months ago, when Barbara died. I can't follow you. I can't get out. I Jump, and I don't know where I am, and I Jump again and I'm here. My proxies burned out long ago; I can't even see you. How can I follow you?"

"Your computer...."

"They're all dead, Russell. Barbara and Dash and Pesha, all dead. Geryon's dead. 1 fed their bodies out into the Hype, it wanted them, you see. It wants me. It wants us dead. Make it happy, Russell, or you'll never get out, it'll never let go of you. Kill me. Blow up the Emeraude. Don't leave me here like this. Please kill me." Russell's hand on the switch cut off the terrible words. He turned his chair to stare at them. He looked more shaken then Jimson had ever seen him.

"I can't do it!"

Leiko said fiercely, "Russell, you'd better! Would you leave a friend like that?"

Russell's hands were shaking. He stilled them by clenching them. "A friend—we trained together! We were lovers. I can't."

Leiko glared at him. "If you can't, I can."

Russell stood up so fast the chair rocked. He caught Leiko by the upper arms. "Not if I don't order it," he whispered. His face was like death.

"Easy, Pirate," breathed Ysao.

Leiko nodded. "All right."

Russell let her go. "I'll talk to him." He turned the audio on again. "Shev! Let your computer be your pilot. Hook up to us—"

"I have no pilot. Barbara was my pilot, but Barbara's dead. Ah—haa!"

Leiko said quietly. "Russell, if I have to hear much of that, I'll go mad."

"I'll talk to him," Russell said again. He talked, whispering, arguing, yelling across the Hype, as the red dust made ouroubouroi around the two ships.

"Kill me. Kill me." There was no place in the Morgana to escape the plea. Even Ast heard it, and moaned in her shattered daydreams.

Jimson brought Russell water and a food bar. "Thanks." He reached a hand for the food without looking at it, put it to one side, and forgot it. He sipped the water. His voice was hoarse. "How long have I been—?"

Jimson said, "Six hours."

"Shev's been in the Maze over a year," Russell said. "He's lost all sense of time. I can't find out exactly when the others died but it was soon after they made the Jump. Barbara killed herself. Dash just curled up on his bunk and stopped eating. Shev thinks the computer is dead, too, because it won't talk to him when he turns it on. He's told it, he says, to destroy the ship, and it won't. And he laughs when I talk, laughs and laughs and says Kill me. Why in all hells did the luck bring us together, if it were not for him to stay alive?" His voice was tight with horror. Jimson touched his hair. It was wet with sweat.

"We were lovers," Russell said. "We met on Nexus. Shev is—not very tall. He's dark, too. He reminded me of you a little. When we stopped being lovers we stayed friends. When he contracted for that last run, I begged him not to go. I did." Jimson tried to imagine Russell begging for anything. "He teased me out of my fear, he swore nothing would go wrong. But I was right." He looked up at Jimson. There were tears in his eyes. "I sent you the visicube when he was lost. Like throwing out a lifeline—"

"I came," Jimson said.

Russell caught his breath. "Yes. You came. But what do I do now?" It was a boy's plea.

Jimson asked, "Can you do what he asks you to do?"

"No," said Russell. "No."

Jimson touched his hair again. Russell, he thought, you never could deal with death. Russell had left New Terrain for the Hype so that he would not have to watch a lover die. One day, soon, that may be me, begging for death. I wonder if you will be there. He rubbed his hands together, feeling the pain building in his bones.

I make a bargain with you, Russell O'Neill, he thought to himself. A compact—an oath. If you will stay with me to the end, I will do this for you now.

He worked out the codes in his mind. The fourth button from the end unlocks the weapons panel, and the laser controls are on the far right. He would only get one chance. Russell was speaking again: "Shev, we're going to get out of here. So can you. Your computer's still functional. You can follow us."

"Kill me," said Shev Allard.

Jimson let his fingers rest casually on the computer keyboard. Ysao was standing to his left. Jimson saw the telepath nod. Staring at the starship which drifted, like an abandoned soul, in the frame of the vision screen, Russell seemed tranced. He didn't notice the computer's automatic signal of acknowledgement. He didn't feel the minute discontinuity in the noise pattern of the ship, as the guns came out. A protective shield went up, jamming the link between the vision screen and the proxies. The screen blanked suddenly. The ship pointed itself at the Emeraude.

Shev's voice cut off in midsentence. Russell stiffened. He sprang, sprawling across the console, for the manual override. Too late. Damn, Jimson thought, trivially, idiotically, the proxies will go, too. We can do without them now. They were for Demea.

Forgive me, he thought across the Hype to Shev Allard. Forgive me for not being Russell.

In the tranquil and deadly crimson of the Maze, a fireball flamed, flamed and was gone to dust. Russell cried out with grief and anger. Jimson had just enough time to get his chin down and wrap an arm around his eyes.

Chapter 15

"Relax."

Jimson forced the breath out of his lungs, and tried to keep his facial muscles still. Russ teased up a corner of the bandage and then ripped: the line of tape pulled off. It felt as if a hot brand had been trailed across his cheek. He bucked. Russell, straddling him, tightened the grip of his knees. "Now the other one."

"Be quick," Jimson said.

"All right." Russell caught hold of his chin with one hand, and with the other, tore the second bandage off. Leaning down, he set his lips on the scratches, and ran his tongue down the line of the wound. It was warm.

"Let me up."

Russell got off him. Jimson slid out of the bunk and padded naked to the mirror. His left cheek had two furrows in it, his right, one, where he had been struck by the hard edge of Russell's ring. His ribs were mottled with purple. It seemed a lot of damage for the few seconds it had taken the redhead's fury to spend itself. Then he had allowed Leiko and Ysao to wrestle him away.

Russell came up behind him, brushing his fingers over the bruises. Jimson shivered.

Sometime in his sleep period, after he had blown Shev Allard's life away, he had heard, drawing him out of sleep, Leiko's cry of triumph: "Done it!"

The bed had dipped, under Russell's weight. "We're out of the Maze, Jim. Nine days from home." Under the exhaustion in his voice, Jimson had heard appeal. He moved over. It had not taken long to overcome the hesitancies legacied by their separation. Russell had become an experienced and elegant partner.

Ysao remarked, watching them now from his workbench, "You ought to put something on those bruises."

"Like padding," said Leiko. Turning from her contemplation of the vision screen, she grinned at his nakedness. He was not shy of her. It was too late to be shy of Ysao. During the lovemaking, held a breath from orgasm by Russell's hands, he'd felt the presence of another mind and known that Ysao was watching them. Then he had something else to think about—but now he was certain that all through the loving, Ysao had been there.

Russell saw him grimace. "You want some anaesthetic on them?" he asked.

"No, no." Jimson turned away from the mirror. "Leave them be. They don't hurt." What hurt was his ankle, where he had twisted it falling from the monkey bars. He went to his bunk for clothing. He pulled his clothes on slowly, hoping that the others were not looking. His joints ached when he bent them. When he finished pulling on his coveralls he had to stop to catch his breath. Doggedly he checked the time and took a pill. He wondered if they were doing him any good at all. He picked his notebooks up and carried them to the food unit table.

Eight days from home; light years across the universe. Jimson set himself to ignore the pain, to banish it. Eight days was no time. He would last. On Nexus he would get the tools he needed to make the finished drawings. He would do pen-and-ink on most of the Masks, he decided, but dry point for the Dragon and the Alabaster Lady, and scratchboard for the Blue Mask. All he needed was a week to work in, and then De Vala could have them. A week? Alleca, can you do nine pen-and-inks, two etchings, and a scratchboard in one week? He rubbed his hands together. Damn right I can.

Then the pain shot through his left leg, making him cry out against his will, and he was no longer sure.

"Jim." Russell bent over him. "Jim, are you all right?"

Jimson resisted the urge to say, No, damn it, Tm not all right, and I'll never be all right! Instead, he waited till the pain subsided, and then said, "Yes. It's just a cramp."

"I'll get you something for pain." Russell went to the ship's medikit, and came back with a pill and water. He stood and watched as Jimson took it.

"Don't stand over me," Jimson said. "I said I'm all right."

"Russell!" called Leiko from her chair, "I need a course to Psi Center."

"Right." Russell went to his chair. After a while he swung around. "This course gets us home a bit faster then our present one. Five days to Psi Center, one day in spacetime normal, and half a day through the Hype to Nexus."

"I like that," Leiko said. "Does Psi Center have a port?"

The pill was taking affect. Jimson listened, detached and curious. "There's a moon but we don't land there," Russell said. "There's a spaceport planetside."

Leiko made a face. "I hate bouncing around in the atmosphere. What do we do after we land? Is there a mail-slot? One ancient artifact, one approximately fifteen-year-old girl for delivery. Receipt please." Jimson chuckled at the image of stuffing Ast through a mail-slot. The pain needled through his left leg again, but this time it was easier to ignore. He had gotten much farther away.

"Ysao," said Russell. The telepath looked up. "What do we do when we get to Psi Center? Is there a door?'

"You'll find out," Ysao promised.

* * *

In-ter-est-ing.

Yes.

Stirred in the middle of a drug-fed sleep, Jimson heard the two voices—one male, one female—talking within his dream. The woman's voice made him think of the Silver Goddess. That, he thought, was the way she talked: powerful and amused. She had a trick of breaking her syllables up. He wondered what she was doing on the Morgana.

And then he woke up.

Even in sleep he had been aware of the moment of the Jump into spacetime normal around Psi Center. We must have landed, he thought, and tried to sit up.

He couldn't move.

The voices continued their conversation.

It was the right solution, to blow up the ship.

Per-fect. O'Neill could not have done it.

The pilot would have.

Yes, she would. But this was per-fect. I ap-plaud it. The voices faded out and then returned. One rarely sees such artistry in our un-ti-dy world. Such ro-mance is the stuff true tragedy is made of.

The second voice agreed. Jimson wondered if he was hearing things. He could not imagine human beings talking like this. A third voice entered the conversation. You waste time.

The Silver Goddess laughed. But no, Mahil. You have no ap-pre-ci-a-tion.

Wake the girl.

The voices faded out completely. Jimson tried again to move. He was not in pain. His body was simply not responding to his head. It seemed to take hours as, centimeters at a time, he propped himself against the bulkhead until he could see the whole of the ship. Leiko was in her chair, immobile. Russell was in his. The cords in the Starcaptain's neck stood out as he fought to turn his head.

Ysao, said the Silver Goddess, don't you agree with me? Did you help it happen that way?

Jimson wondered how the Goddess knew Ysao's name.

"No," said Ysao aloud. "Absolve me, Goryn. I do not play with my friend's lives."

Dull, said Goryn, for you. I do.

"That is why you have no friends," said Ysao.

Goryn said, I think you are very rude. The voices faded out and came back again. Mahil and Nior and I have conferred. We think you ought to stay. Since you are here. It will save you the trouble of making a second trip.

Ysao said, "You are planning something. I know you."

Certain-ly, said Goryn. If you want to affect it you must stay to find it out.

The third voice said again, Wake the girl.

Ast came rolling out of her bunk. She stretched. She walked to Jimson's bunk and pulled out, smiling at him, his pair of expandable boots. She put them on. She walked to the Blue Mask, swathed as it was in protective wrapping, and put it under her arm.

"I must go," she said, speaking to Jimson. "They tell me I am like them, I am one of them. I think they must be gods. I will go and learn to be a god." She turned to Ysao where he sat on his workbench. "You must come. They want you."

The woman's voice said, coaxingly, If you do not come now you will have nothing to say about it later, Ysao.

Ysao shook his head. "Goryn, you are incorrigible," he said.

Jimson felt a shiver, a shift, inside his mind. Jim-son Al-lec-a. It was the woman's voice. I like your mind. You have vi-sion. When you are finished with your life, come to me here. I will find you something to do, an in- ter-est-ing thing.

"Goryn!" said Ysao sharply, from the open door.

Come when you are ready, not before!

Goryn, you waste time! said Mahil.

Goryn laughed. Oh, no.

Ysao and Ast swung out into the sunlight. Farewell, said a blending trinity of voices.

Fusion drive yelling, the Morgana went racing away from Psi Center.

* * *

Leiko was indignant. "I have a crick in my neck," she said. "Ysao might have warned us that that was going to happen."

Russell said, "I don't think he knew it. I think he was surprised."

"What do we do if we have an emergency and no engineer?"

"I can handle it."

Jimson climbed stiffly down from his bunk. He hurt. He went to the medikit and got himself a pain pill. Then he punched buttons at the food unit for three food bars. He brought one to Leiko, and one to Russell. "Thank you," Leiko said.

Russell looked sharply at him. "Are you all right?"

Jimson nodded. "I'm all right."

"What do you think that woman meant when she spoke to you?"

Jimson shrugged. "I don't know." He stood for a moment, unseeing, remembering. When you are finished with your life....

The food bar snapped between his fingers and fell to the floor. He looked at the pieces, surprised at the sudden spurt of anger; equally surprised that he had that much strength left. He could be gentle with Russell but it was pointless for him to lie to himself. The woman with the voice like the Silver Goddess had been talking about his death.

He walked slowly—he could no longer walk fast—to the table by the food unit. He turned the pages of his notebook. The drawings seemed good to him. He savored them. And as his hand and arm moved to turn the pages, he could feel the brittle tension in each motion.

If there could only be someone else there, someone to hold on to—but the essence of dying was that there could not be. You can't cheat the luck. He clenched his fingers till his knuckles trembled, till the nails left crescent shaped cuts in his palms. He straightened out his hands, feeling the tendons move under the skin. The pill was starting to work. He touched his eyelids with his fingertips. Your eyes and your hands, Alleca, that's all you have. That's all you ever had. And your mind.

He walked to his bunk, feeling himself float away on the drug. After the first effects wore off he would work, but not now. He couldn't now.

No time. No time at all.

Chapter 16

From Psi Center it took the Morgana a day and a half to get to Nexus.

During that time Jimson's appetite diminished: he ate half a food bar. The pain came and went at its own pacing, independent of the drugs. He sat at the table with his notebook open, his pens laid out, looking at the drawings, his hands too weak to work. He snarled at Leiko and Russell until they left him alone. Leiko sat in her chair, working out an approach to Port. Going in to Nexus was a much more complicated procedure than Jumping from it: they would have to Jump from the Hype to spacetime normal somewhere past the orbit of Nexus' moon, and then jet in. Leiko played with the computer and sang tunelessly to it, or to herself. Russell paced. Jimson could feel the redhead's eyes boring into his back. When Jimson could no longer sit on the bench, he asked Russell to help him to the bunk.

"Just an arm," he said. "My left leg doesn't seem to want to function."

"Put your arm round my neck," Russell said. Jimson did, and Russell caught him round the ribs and lifted him, taking almost all of his weight. Russell lowered him into a bunk and then stayed with him, steadying him as he fought to catch his breath.

"All right," Jimson said. "I'm all right."

"Do you want a pill?"

"The pills stopped working days ago. I'm all right, damn it! Leave me alone." Noiselessly Russell turned away from him.

After a while Jimson said, "Russ, I didn't mean to yell at you."

Russell said, "That's all right." He came to stand over the bed. His eyes were like green glass, giving nothing away. "When we get to Nexus, I'll take you to a clinic."

"Sure," Jimson said.

But he doubted that any clinic had medication to help him now.

The pain ebbed. He slept a little. When he woke he felt refreshed. He moved. The ache in his joints had lessened. He moved slowly and carefully out of bed. He felt the stirrings of hunger and walked to the food unit to get a food bar.

Leiko said from her chair, "Hey, should you be up?"

"I feel better." He ate. "How close are we to Nexus?"

"Very close," said Leiko, and she made a rude noise.

When they landed on Nexus, Jimson felt almost normal. He avoided looking at himself in a mirror. He gathered his things together, his notebooks, his pens. Russell tried to take the pack from him. Jimson held to it. "I'll carry it," he said. Leiko palmed the door-plate. Sunlight, many times brighter than the ship's artificial light, splashed across the floor. The air rushed in. It smelled of hot metal. Russell's medallion caught the light and glittered.

Leiko said, "Where shall we go first?"

Russell said, "The clinic."

Jimson pictured the pastel walls and bright machines and sympathetic faces. "No," he said.

"What do you mean, no?" said Russell.

"You heard me! I feel all right. I don't want to go to any clinic until I have to. I feel just fine." He stood very straight, ignoring the ache curled in his bones. "I want to go to Rin's."

Leiko said, "I think that's a good idea. Come on, Starcaptain. Let's go to Rin's."

* * *

The noise in the bar was like a slap across the ears. Stars, Jimson wondered, was it always this loud? Rin, dark and ageless, was tucked behind the bar as if he had grown there like a mushroom crop. He was still polishing his endless pile of glasses. Three of Jimson's pictures still hung on the walls. They pushed through the crush to the bar, and Rin nodded at them. "Welcome back. First drink is on the house. What'll it be?"

"Wine," said Leiko.

"Beer," said Russell.

"I'll pass," Jimson said. He felt Russell looking at him.

They sat at a table. Jimson looked for Miri, but she was gone, and he guessed the Sigurd had already left. He wondered if she was really four hundred years old. He would never have the chance to challenge her.

"It is," said a voice at Jimson's back.

"It isn't. He's much too thin."

"It is," said the first voice. "I think it looks like him and I'm going to ask. Sir?"

It was an unusual syllable to hear in Rin's. Jimson turned around. Two youngsters stood back of his chair, one fair-skinned, blond, tall, the other short and darker. They were both looking at him. The blond one said, "Are you Jimson Alleca, the artist?"

Jimson said, "I think so."

"We've been coming in here every day," said the blond. "It's hard to talk to people, you know, when you can't ask questions. But we knew what you looked like. I have a picture of you on a booktape. I'm Sarah. This is Achiko. This was my idea and that's why I'm doing all the talking. We wanted portraits. One of me for her, and one of her for me. She's leaving in seven days. I'm staying here on Nexus: I have two more years to train."

Jimson said, "You're—eighteen?"

"Nineteen. Achiko's twenty-one."

Russell's face, across the table, had whitened as if someone had hit him in the heart.

Achiko said, "I brought a credit disc. We can pay for it."

Jimson studied the two faces. "I can draw you," he said. He reached for his notebook and pens. "There'll be no charge. You first," he said to Achiko. Sarah pushed her forward under the swinging table light. She had wide features, her bones were strong and prominent beneath the skin. A pad of fat across the nose. Curly hair. Dark brown watchful eyes. He crosshatched the shadows along the nose, widened the eyes, and tore the page off. "You next." Sarah stepped under the pool of light. She had a long head, long jaw, high cheekbones. Her hair was long and fine and straight like water falling down from a precipice. Her eyebrows were like feathers. Blue eyes. She was nervous, conscious of the ring of faces grinning around her, and her eyes kept shifting, moving from one face to another, returning each time to Achiko. They wore matching looks of love.

They walked out clutching the sketches, arms around each other. As the door shut behind them, the entire bar appeared to sigh.

Jimson looked at Russell. The Starcaptain's face was granite. Russell, Jimson thought, can you see in my eyes the country I must travel through? The horse and its Rider wait just over the curve of the hill.

"Starcaptain," said a light whisper. A woman plucked at Russell's sleeve. He listened to her for a moment, and then got up and moved from the table, face intent. Jimson turned to Leiko. She was watching him with unusual concentration.

"Lady, I want to go home," he said.

She held out her hand to him.

The door to the house opened to Jimson's palm against the lock. Summer of ivy. Leiko said, "I'm glad we paid a holding rent." The place was musty. On Jimson's desk, books, sketchbooks and pens lay as he had left them, in elegiac order. They had an air of disuse about them, as if they really belonged to somebody else, somebody who'd forgotten them and never really used them, just left them to gather dust....

We made slow love in a little room. Jimson sat on the bed. Leiko came to sit beside him. After a while she pulled off her jumpsuit.

Sunlight stippled her back, and then his.

* * *

Water running. Footsteps in the other room. Russell walked in, carrying a half-full bottle of wine, three glasses, and a small white box. He sat on the end of the bed. They drew their legs up to give him room. "You forgot to finish your wine," he said to Leiko. "So I bought the bottle from Rin. I'll drink two glasses of it, one for me, and one for Ysao who ought to be with us and isn't." He poured it out. "Jim, do you want to make a toast?"

Jimson hesitated, and then lifted the glass. "To the end of all good things."

Leiko made a face at him. Solemnly, they drank. Russell held out the white box. Leiko plucked off the top. "Appropriate," she said. She lifted out a pair of silver earrings, patterned after the classical masks of Comedy and Tragedy: one face laughing, one face mourning.

Russell said, "De Vala's messenger slipped me these at Rin's. He's heard we're back, and he's very impatient. The woman was explicit: he won't wait. He wants his Masks."

Jimson said, "But I've nothing to give him! I thought you said I'd have another week to finish in."

"Give him your sketches," said Leiko.

Russell said, "He won't wait a week. And I can't keep him waiting; we have a contract."

"Give him your sketches," urged Leiko. She touched his arm. "He'll take them."

"They're just roughs."

Russell stood up. "But they're all we have, so that's what we'll bring him. He'll take them, Leiko's right. Remember, he is a collector, whatever else he is, and that means he's a little crazy. If they're something that no one else has, or could have, or will have, he'll love them. Clean up, and put your coveralls back on."

"Why?'

Russell smiled. "Don't you want to come with me? Don't you want to see that house?" He laid his palm for a moment against Jimson's cheek.

Jimson got out of bed.

Leiko said, "You just leave me the rest of that wine."

"Don't you want to—"

"Come with you? No." She tipped her head back to gaze at Russell. "Pirate, would you go away?"

"I'll wait for you in the square," Russell said to Jimson.

Leiko waited until she heard the sound of the door closing. Then she pulled Jimson down onto the bed and hugged him fiercely. "I wanted to say goodbye to you," she said.

Jimson put his cheek against the dry soft net of her hair.

"Don't come back here," she whispered into his ear. "There's nothing in this house for either of us but the past, and that won't sustain us."

"You're here."

"I won't be. If you come back looking for me, I won't be here. I'm going back to the Hype."

"Are you really?"

"No. But pretend I am. Just as now you're pretending to be strong, well, without pain."

"You know that?"

Her breath was warm on his ear. "Of course I know it. I'm not Russell O'Neill. That's why you mustn't come back here. It isn't me you need now. It's Russell." She kissed his left eyelid closed. "He wants you, too." Then his right eyelid. She moved out of his arms. He felt her leave the bed. He thought she was dressing. "There's something you have to do for each other. And I'd only be in the way. Count to twenty before you open your eyes. Goodbye, lover. I'm gone."

He counted to twenty. The room was empty. Her last kiss had left the taste of wine on his tongue. He said into the silent room, "Lady—goodbye."

* * *

Russell waited outside the house. Jimson almost asked him what direction Leiko had gone.... He said, forcing cheerfulness, "Where do we go now?"

"Let's take the movalongs." Russell took the pack out of Jimson's hands; this time Jimson didn't resist him. He recalled that Russell—or Leiko—someone had said that De Vala lived in the center of the city. He settled himself for a long ride. He started when Russell grabbed his wrist.

"What are we—?"

"Getting off. We've an errand to do." They were still in the Hyper section of the city. Russell led the way through a maze of alleys. He halted in front of a shop. The brightly painted sign swinging in the wind held a name, Tyan, and the picture of a long silver needle. Jimson had no time to look in the window. Russell's hand on his shoulder hurried him into the shop.

"Ty!" Russell called. The owner of the name came from the rear of the place. He had long black hair which hung to his waist, and a curly black beard.

"Hey, Pirate."

Russell put an indicative hand on Jimson's shoulder. "Friend of mine," he said. "Needs his ears done."

Tyan pointed to a gilt chair. "Be so kind as to sit." Jimson sat rather gingerly on the cushion of the chair, which was embroidered as if the seat had been a throne. "Relax, now." He pulled up a small stool and peered at Jimson's face. "Hmm, yes, you have nice earlobes, I must say. Very erotic." He glanced over Jimson's head at Russell. He had four holes in his own ears, two on each side. His earrings were delicate plain gold rings.

"You keep your fantasies to yourself," said Russell.

Tyan grinned. "Well, pick out the earrings you want. 1 always think it's so romantic, buying the first pair of earrings for a friend. Turn your head slightly. Yes, that's right." His tone reminded Jimson of the tone of medics at a clinic; he almost laughed aloud. Something very, very cold touched his left earlobe. He felt a sting. "Don't twitch," murmured Tyan. "Turn your head the other way. Good." Cold. Sting.

"These," said Russell.

"Lovely," said Tyan. "Opals. I love opals." He moved his hands outside of Jimson's line of sight. "Lots of superstitions about opals, you know. Blue ones were supposed to impart wisdom, but it was very bad luck to give them as gifts, especially black opals, they were considered symbols of impending death—"

Russell said, "Tyan, shut up."

Tyan fell suddenly silent. He produced a marvelously ornate hand mirror and held it up for Jimson.

Framed in the gilt oval, his face became a stranger's looking out at him, surprised... who's he? What's HE doing here? Light brown skin, dark knotty hair, slim build, but with chunky square shoulders that made him look top-heavy and ungraceful when he was tired. There was a grey streak in his hair. His pale blue eyes were a migrant's mutation, passed on to him from his mother's family which had come across spacetime normal from Old Terra to New Terra on the fusion starships. Erotic earlobes? Really? Pale blue fire-opals—gleamed in his newly-pierced ears. He reached to touch them.

"Let them alone." Tyan slapped his hands away. "Don't play with them. Give the skin time to heal. Don't change the earrings for a month, and don't take them out, even when you sleep, or whatever you do in bed. Wipe them with alcohol—the holes, not the opals—twice a day. Russell can show you how to take care of them. In a month you can come back here and I'll sell you another pair."

Outside the window of the shop, Russell said, "Hold still." He took out the white box. "Tyan would not approve of this. But Tyan is goddamn lucky he's still got a head."

"He's watching us from the window."

"I don't give a damn." Gently, Russell drew out one of the opal stud-backed earrings, and put one of the masks in its place. "The matched pair looks a lot better." He put the Comedy mask in his own earlobe. "But this will get us both into the house."

* * *

The house sat in its own grassy plot in a square. Something in Jimson's mind woke when he saw it. The square stone building teased his memory. He had seen it, or pictures of it. It was a copy of some famous museum or other. He thought it had been built on Terra by some wealthy art collector. The man had lived in it, too, and it bore his name, the something—the Fruck, the Fluke, House.

He stopped short on the walkway as he remembered I what painting had been on a wall of that house.

The door was open. Russell said, "Jim? Come on. We're here."

They stepped into a wood panelled foyer. Two guards with stun pistols waited for them. "There's only supposed to be one," said the nearer guard. "Who're you?" She pointed her gun at Jimson.

"My name is Jimson Alleca."

A voice spoke from the wall. "Let them come in." Russell took a step forward. The guards got out of their way. Jimson heard the sound of water running. He thought of his fountain, the fountain he had left for his friends to enjoy in the house on New Terrain. In harmony with the fountain sounds came music unlike any he'd ever heard before, complex and beautiful and, he guessed, old. Old as the house, or maybe older. He gazed down the short wood-panelled hall

The room in front of him held a pool with fountains and flowers. There was sun on the water. There was statuary in the pool. The music and the water fell together on the stone. Russell sat casually down on the marble edge of the pool. After a moment, Jimson forgot him.

He was recalled by a cough. A man was standing beside him. Black hair, black eyes, high cheekbones. Yes, Jimson thought, he looks like Ast, a little. Same bones. "This house," he said.

"Yes," Roman De Vala said. "You recognize it?"

"I've read about it."

"Only parts of it are the original, of course. Pieces of it were saved by collectors when the city of New York was destroyed. I bought what I could. The music is my own choice. It's Bach. Another period altogether, but I like to think it goes with the intention of the house."

"I like it."

"You are Jimson Alleca, the artist?"

"Yes."

"Well." De Vala smiled shyly. "I'm honored to have you here, really. Would you like to see the rest of the house? Much of the art is original, too. As much as I could find."

"Yes."

"I have no way of knowing how close the architecture and the arrangement of paintings is to the original museum, but I flatter myself that it is fairly close. I use the library as my office, and I rotate my favorite paintings into it. The Holbein portraits are there now. And I do have one room filled with moderns, yourself among them. You recall the pen-and-ink titled Bar Brawl? It has sentimental value for me."

"You were there that night."

"I am pleased that you remember. Now, I have business to discuss with the Starcaptain, so you will forgive me if I leave you?" Jimson would. "Enjoy yourself." He spoke softly to the discreetly watchful guard, and left the gallery.

Jimson paced. He felt obliged to hurry but he could not hurry. He kept retracing his steps, from the two small Vermeer paintings at one end of the long gallery to the four monumental Goyas in the side gallery, to the library, and then to the long gallery again. Each time he passed the Rider he went more slowly. Finally he stopped.

He hadn't known it was so big.

It was very big. The light that only Rembrandt captured in paint shimmered across it and through it. The horse's flowing mane, the smooth fur of the rider's coat gleamed. The metal bit, the stirrups, the sword hilt and the axe-head shimmered with a different light. Death, riding. The Rider looked past him, but knowingly. I am not come for you now, Death said. Not yet. But soon.

De Vala, beside him, said, "It's strange to think that Rembrandt painted on a planet and under light that neither one of us has ever seen."

Jarred from contemplation, Jimson turned to look at the little man. "That's true," he said, trying to be polite.

De Vala was holding Jimson's notebook in his hands. "Starcaptain O'Neill gave me these. He says you drew them on Demea."

"That's right."

"Why couldn't you bring me back a Mask? One Mask."

Jimson wondered what Russell had said. He hoped it was the truth. "There were people on Demea. We had to bargain with them. They let me draw the Masks, but to take one we would have had to kill them." Jimson thought of Rahid. "We did have to kill one man, before they let us go."

"That's what the Starcaptain said too," De Vala murmured. "I wouldn't have wanted that, no, no. These sketches are the originals, right, not the copies? No, of course, they couldn't be copies. I really don't know what to offer you for them."

"Roman!"

De Vala jumped at the imperious call. "Excuse me," he said. He trotted down the long gallery clutching the sketchbook.

"Roman!" A woman swept into the long gallery. She stood just inside the entranceway, staring down the wide windowless hall. No. She was not staring. She was pointing her face in their direction. She wore a long white robe. Her hair, like De Vala's, was black. Her eyes were milky white across the pupil. Jimson knew her. She was the woman who had come into Rin's wearing a blue Japanese mask without eyeholes. He knew now why the mask had needed no eyeholes.

De Vala hurried to her side. She topped him by half a head. "Roman, is it he? The Starcaptain?"

"Raob, you must not get excited. Go back to your own rooms now." De Vala's attempt to be soothing put even Jimson's teeth on edge. She pushed him aside with one irritated thrust, walking down the gallery as if she could see, with lovely long free strides.

"Did you bring them? Did you bring my Masks? One Mask?" She was focusing on Jimson, ruthless and direct as laser light. "Answer!"

De Vala pattered around her like a worried puppy, trying to intervene. "Raob, that is not—"

Jimson reached for a title in a dead language. "Senhora, I am sorry. No." At the end of the hall Russell was coming through a door, a chagrined guard following him. Russell was holding a stun pistol. The guard was holding his right wrist in his left palm.

Her fingers curled to talons. "A bad thief," she said, with venom. "Why not?"

"We would have had to kill too many people," Jimson said. Russell leaned against the wall.

She shrugged. "Little savages. All they ever had came from us. What do you imagine their lives are worth, next to power?" Her blind glare was stunningly malefic. He retreated, and still it came on, a wave of pressure beating on his tired mind

He looked at the painting, at the serene, watching Rider. Did I not say, not yet? Almost Jimson heard the voice issue from the silence of the canvas and pigment. Armored, he waited out Raob's rancor.

Blocked from his mind, she turned again to words. "I wish you ill luck, poor thief, failed thief. I wish you loss and pain and—"

"Raob!"

She turned on De Vala. "Roman, you will send someone else."

"Raob, please let us discuss this in private—"

"You will send someone else."

"I will. Go back to your rooms, now."

She smiled sweetly, having won, and said, "Send someone with me, then, so that I do not lose my way." De Vala sighed, and motioned to the guard, who looked nervous. Politely, Russell passed back the captured stun gun. Raob laid her hand on the guard's arm. The portraits of the dead duchesses seemed to smile approval as she passed them by.

"I apologize for my sister." De Vala made no effort to hide his relief. "She is difficult. The Masks are an obsession with her, as you saw. She insists that they have some special power, totally apart from their artistic and historical merit, which she desires. I think she thinks they will let her see again. I—I would just like to own one. To be able to look at it."

"Will you send someone else?" Jimson asked. The direct question was rude, but De Vala was no Hyper. He wouldn't know.

"I expect I will. Raob is not easy to withstand. And I would like to own a Mask. They are mine. I have a right to them. I saw them being made, you know. It's pointless to leave them there, on a dim world where they cannot possibly be appreciated." He stopped. "Well. Excuse me. As I was saying, I will be glad to buy these sketches from you."

Pain like a serpent uncoiled up the great bone in Jimson's left thigh.

He fought it, waiting for it to stop. When it subsided he said, "You can buy them. Pay whatever you think they're worth to Starcaptain O'Neill. I don't care what you do with them. Hide them, show them, whatever you like." He took one more look over De Vala's shoulder at the Polish Rider. "Thank you for letting me see your house."

"This way," said the guard. He gestured for them to walk ahead of him to the front door. "The earrings, please."

Russell knocked Jimson's hands away as he fumbled for the earring. "I'll do it."

"I can do it." But he put his hands down.

"Who the hell wants your money?" said Russell into his ear.

"I owe it to you," Jimson said. "Call it passenger fee." Pointedly the guard was holding open the door. They stepped outside. It closed behind them.

"I don't want a passenger fee from you! I took you to Demea because you asked me to. That's all the fee I need."

Jimson was finding it difficult to talk. "Not the fee for—for Demea," he said. "Fee for the next trip."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Going back to Psi Center." Pain twisted in his bones, shooting up his left thigh, stopping speech, stopping the breath in his throat. His leg buckled; he started to fall. Russell caught him.

"I'm taking you to a clinic."

"No!" Jimson fought him. "Oh, no. You're not taking me to some clinic so that you can leave me there. We made a bargain that—that you don't even know about."

Russell said, with rage in his voice, "I was not going to take you to a clinic and leave you there."

"I want to go to Psi Center."

"You need medics. Medicine."

"There's a clinic on Psi Center."

"It's five days to Psi Center, Jimson!"

Jimson gasped, and waited for the pain to stop. It stopped. "I'm not going to die on you, Russell," he said. "You think I can't do it? You watch. You just get me there."

Chapter 17

Russell got him there.

He had not wanted to take medication for the pain, hating the way the stuff fogged his mind. The last few days he had had to. He floated. He thought it was hysterical that the Morgana should land but that he remained high. They landed and waited for something to happen. The air was warm and scented; it reminded Jimson of Las Flores. Everything goes round and round and round. The field was edged with grass and tall trees. It took some time for them to see the woman standing alone, waiting for them.

"Goryn?"

The mental voice was unmistakable. What did you expect? A dra-gon? An an-gel with a flaming sword?

"At least a Sphinx," Jimson said.

You are a romantic, she said. But you came.

Psi Center was an image seen through a teleidoscope: complex, symmetrical, and disguised. "You understand," Goryn said, walking beside them, "that this is only a piece of Psi Center. This is the X-team training school." The planet, she explained, was small, its gravity comfortable, a little less than Terran standard. The sun was red, a K-type star. There were some squat utilitarian laboratories, and a domed observatory. There were dormitories. Jimson wondered if the labs would be like the clinic labs on New Terrain: pastel walls with not enough pictures on them.

"Do you wish to go to the clinic first?" she asked.

"Yes," said Russell.

"No," said Jimson. "Not yet. I want to see more of the school."

"Certainly," said Goryn. She took them inside it. They passed one room with tumbling mats in it; with rings, ropes, beams, and parallel bars. Three people were exercising there, bending and stretching. At Goryn's approach they all looked up. "Tom." A boy with long straight black hair and olive skin nodded shyly. "Felicia." Felicia was a pale girl with hair cropped to her skull, and muscles like wire moving under her thin shirt. "Theo." Theo was a fair-skinned boy under a great blond head of hair like a dandelion. He looked down at them from his perch on the vault, and grinned. "Students here."

"Telepaths?"

Of course.

"Is everyone here a telepath?" asked Russell.

"Nearly so."

"How do you keep from overhearing one another's thoughts?"

"We don't," said Goryn. "Why bother? Though you needn't worry, no one will listen to your thought. Except me. You are guests. When we wish to have a closed conversation, we hold up a very large bright mental sign which says on it: PRIVATE. Then all the other people go away."

"What if they don't?"

"They do."

Jimson asked, "Is Ast still here?'

"No," said Goryn. "We did not keep her here. She is at another training center not too far away."

"What's happening to her?'

"She is learning control and understanding of her power. When she is finished, we will find her something to do which will adequately use her talents."

"You don't waste talent," Jimson said.

"No. Haven't you noticed how little of it there is in the universe?"

"What kind of work do you have which would adequately use her gifts?"

Goryn pursed her lips. "I think we will send her home, to Demea. That was an ugly situation. Ysao told you that I was there. I think we have been laissez-faire about it long enough. Ast will know best how to reach her people and let them know they are not, and never have been alone. Something must be done. We cannot let Raob De Vala get her hands on one of those Masks."

"What a tidy world you live in!" Jimson said.

That is be-cause we work to make it so.

Russell asked, "Is Ysao here?"

"Certainly. He is an instructor here, you must know that. Oh, I forget. Hypers do not ask each other such personal questions. Did you wish to see him?"

Russell said, "Not especially."

On the horizon Jimson saw towers, spires, cutting into the lavender-blue sky. They sparkled remotely. "What does the rest of the planet do?" he asked.

Goryn shrugged. "They live."

Goryn was unexpected: small and intense, brown all over except for her hair and her eyes, which were grey. Her speaking voice, disconcertingly unlike her mental voice, was harsh and tense. "Now," she said, "we will take you to our clinic." She herded them both through swinging doors. "Starcaptain, you will wait downstairs." Russell stiffened. "Oh, I know. You do not like anyone telling you what to do. If you are planning to stay here, you had better get used to it. Otherwise, you can leave."

Russell faced the wall and would not look at her.

Jimson saw his big hands knot together. Then he turned around. His face was quiet. "I'm not leaving." He watched them put Jimson on a table. He laid his palm against Jimson's cheek. "See you later."

"X-ray first," chirped Goryn.

In the X-ray chambers Jimson made the technician promise not to take off his earrings. "The pain's in my leg," he said, "not in my head." He had started to come down from his narcotic high. Seeing himself in a full length mirror was a shock. He had eaten almost nothing during the trip. Lack of exercise and weight loss had stringed out the muscles in his arms and legs like used-up rubber bands.

He met Mahil and Nior. Nior was a short fat man with incredibly careful and gentle hands. He took the first set of blood samples. Jimson eyed the array of syringes with weary trepidation; Nior noticed. "Don't worry," he said as he patted Jimson's arm. "I always hit the vein on the first try." Mahil did the scans. In the middle of the second scan, while Jimson was lying naked and a little cold on a table, Ysao walked in.

"They treating you right?"

"You haven't exactly caught me at my best," Jimson said. "I hate all this. And I want to piss."

Ysao fetched him a urinal. Mahil came back. "Ysao, you're in my way." Ysao sat on the desk. Jimson allowed himself to be pulled and pushed and positioned on the table. "Tell me how you train a telepath," he said to Ysao as Mahil loped off again. "Explain this place. Talk to me."

"It's something like the way you teach art," Ysao said, obligingly.

"I know even less about teaching art than you do," Jimson said. "I make art."

"How one teaches art. It has to do with learning to identify mental patterns. Human beings have about twenty-seven basic mental patterns. The pattern gets masked by emotional and personality accretions, by the accumulation of experience, by the process of aging. The easiest person to touch telepathically is a baby. But what can you do with a baby?" Jimson nodded; he was interested in spite of himself. "Telepaths learn to key into the pattern of a mind. X-team telepaths learn human patterns, Verdian patterns, aberrants—because they have to be prepared to contact minds that they have no pattern for. It's hard to prepare for. The first telepath to meet a Verdian went into bad shock."

"Ouch!" Jimson said to Mahil. "How many mental patterns do Verdians come in?"

"About twelve."

"Verdians and us. Have we met up with any other alien races?"

"One," said Ysao. "The Verdians found them first. Only one so far. All the other worlds we've made contact with have been human colony, Verdian colony, or human non-colony primitive. But that's why there have to be telepaths on X-teams. Just because we haven't met them—"

"Doesn't mean they aren't there," said Mahil. "You know, Ysao, I would rather not have to work around you. You're too big. I'd like to get out of here before dinnertime, and I'm not sure I will be if I have to keep walking around you."

"All right," Ysao said. "See you later, Jim."

"Bye." Jimson shifted his shoulders and stared at the ceiling. There was nothing to look at on it, not even interesting cracks. It was white and as unpromising as a blank canvas.

His poem formed in his mind.

Death riding slowly through a countryside,

Unheralded, unstayed.

Suspended inbetween a sunset sky

And the darkened pitted earth below—

His scythe in one indifferent hand.

Young man passing on a short day's journey...

Death riding slowly through His countryside—

Noted;

Undelayed.

It seemed appropriate that the lines he had first thought of turned out to belong on the end of the poem.

* * *

Mahil was barely finished when the pain returned. Jimson clenched his fists and teeth and mind against it. Mahil muttered something and stuck him with a needle. It knocked him out. When he woke from the sleep he was in a bed. It was night. Russell was sitting in an armchair, watching him. He looked tired. He said, "They said they'd have the test results for you when you wake up. And a proposition. And food, if you want it."

"I'm not hungry."

In a little while Ysao walked in. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Morose," Jimson said.

Ysao grinned at him. "One morose artist, at loose ends, age thirty, size small. Receipt please."

Jimson said, "I'm not so damn small. You're oversize."

"One argumentative artist, age thirty—"

"And I'll be thirty-one in a month."

"Size medium," amended Ysao. "What am I bid, folks?"

Jimson said, "I'd be a bad bargain."

Goryn walked in. "I'll take him. You don't even have to wrap him up," she said. "It won't be for very long."

Ysao grabbed Russell and held him still as he came out of his chair. "Russell, don't be a fool. You can't attack a telepath. Goryn, you still have no use for tact?"

The brown woman perched on the end of Jimson's bed. "Tact is for cowards," she replied. "I am certainly not telling Jimson Alleca something he doesn't know. You know, don't you, my friend, that you are a dead man. That's why you came to me." She shifted to look speculatively at Russell. "Russell O'Neill, you've been running from this death for more than fourteen years. Will you run again? The door is open. Your ship is waiting for you. Or will you stay and face it now? Let him go, Ysao."

Ysao lifted his great hands from Russell's shoulders. Russell leaned back against the wall. His face was white.

Jimson said, "There are places I think I'd prefer dying in, now that you mention it."

Goryn said, "Then you should go to them. Better hurry. You think we invite just anybody here to leave a corpse on our pretty lawn?"

"The test results—"

"Show that you have two new tumors. As was only to be expected, your cancer mutated and then metastasized. You have two new tumors in the left femur and tibia for which there is no controlling medication." Her harsh voice softened. "There are, of course, always narcotics to blanket the pain."

"Yes," said Jimson. His mouth had gone numb. He wondered if that meant he was in shock. His mind felt remarkably clear. "How much longer?"

For some reason, Ysao chose to answer. "A month," he said. "Maybe two." Goryn nodded. Jimson understood: it was a death sentence. This small brown woman was his executioner.

"Thank you," he said.

Russell pushed away from Ysao and went to stand apart from them all, looking out the room's one narrow window.

"While I die on your lawn," Jimson said, "what is it that you have for me to do?"

"We want your mind."

"I didn't think you'd have any use for my body."

Goryn took him seriously. "No. Not at all. The body dies. The personality dies. But the talent—the vision— that we will take. It will be incarnate. Immortal."

Jimson said, "You are going to make me a god?"

"Of a sort. Shall I go on, or are you leaving?"

"Go ahead," Jimson said.

"You have a gift," said Goryn. "You have the artist's vision, the ability to see in patterns. You have expressed it all your life in your art. But all expression of a vision is imperfect. For me to understand it totally, as you do, I must become you. Teaching artistic techniques cannot teach it. And there is no way for me to suppress my personality enough to become you, and still function. We have experimented with impress upon the brain-damaged. We know how to do it. But the transfer cannot be made successfully or completely when the personality of the impressor is strong." She paused.

"I follow you," said Jimson.

"You know about telepaths, what they do, what they can do. You know that one member of an Exploration Team is always a telepath. It is tedious, tiring work, running from planet to planet, and there is little reward, unless you are lucky enough to like the work. It is dangerous, too. There is danger to the telepath, and danger to us all if one telepath should make a mistake. You studied history. Remember the history of the Earth wars? All through early history there are stories of wars because cultures meeting cultures could not understand each other, could not find the things they shared amid the differences. The Verdians, too, had wars. But even on individual planets within the Living Worlds, there are still sometimes violences which could be called wars. Our horizons enlarge. Can you imagine a war between worlds?"

Jimson tried. "I don't see what people could find to fight about," he said.

"People fight from fear, fear of domination, fear of difference. Let me tell you a story as an example of difference. Once an X-team telepath met a mind that she could not understand. It was a mind for which she had no prior pattern. When the rest of her team found her, she was catatonic. She remained so until she died, some fifty years later."

Russell said, "Is this a true story?"

"Certainly."

"Where are they—these aliens?" Russell laid his hand on the glass of the window. "Still out there?"

"They are. But they are not a threat. They do not seek out contact with human or Verdian worlds: They live alone, separate even from others of their own kind. So far, we have found only four of them. Consider my story only as an example. That telepath who first encountered them might have been spared her sanity, if, like an artist, or a musician, or a mathematician, she had had the ability to see patterns, to find them in chaos. That gift which you possess could have surmounted the gap which all her training could not fill."

"Might have surmounted it," said Ysao.

"Might have surmounted it," agreed Goryn. "We think it is worth an experiment to find out."

Russell asked, "Why don't you go out and find a dying mathematician to play your games with? There must be at least one in the Living Worlds."

Goryn said, "Because we have an artist. I thought Hypers believed in the luck."

"Was it the luck that arranged this?" Russell said. "Or was it you, and Ysao, and the others here?"

Ysao said, "Tell them what must happen, Goryn."

"We will take your mind," Goryn said, "and break it into pieces until the personality is gone. We have drugs to do that with. It is not painful." How the hell would you know? Jimson thought. "Then we will impress your mental pattern, the pattern of the artist, with that gift to see in patterns, to vision, upon the minds of our X-team telepaths. It will be like playing a tape over and over again until it cracks and melts; like shaving a hologram thinner and thinner, until the image blurs and can no longer be distinguished. You will be gone, Jimson Alleca, played like a tape into other minds. But your vision, your gift, frozen like ice, shorn of body and soul, will be immortal."

"And the body dies," said Russell.

"Oh, we can keep it alive," Goryn said. "We can stuff it. What does that matter?"

Russell said evenly, "It makes a difference." He walked to Jimson, and touched his face with trembling fingers. "I love your personality," he said. "I love your body. I don't want to lose you to this—vampire."

Ysao said, "Tell them how it is done, Goryn."

Russell whirled on him. "You tell it!"

"To maintain the depth and the precision necessary for these techniques," Ysao said, "some machinery must be used. Drugs to suppress the personality and lessen emotional interference. The intensity of communication is maintained by using resonating crystal."

Goryn said helpfully, "We took a piece off the Mask you brought us."

Russell's laugh was almost a sob. "Such efficient vampires!"

"Not a god," Jimson said. "A pattern."

"The Mask that should have gone to Roman De Vala—" Russell turned on Ysao. "This was your idea?"

Ysao said, "Not exactly. But—" he faced Jimson. "You remember, on the way to Demea, when you suggested that artists learn to block without practice? It made me think about what other abilities artists have, or might have. When we landed on Psi Center, the first time, before Ast and I left the ship, I—mentioned it to Goryn."

"Be fair to yourself," said Goryn, unexpectedly. "You did not mention it to me. I am a telepath. I took it from your mind."

"I could have kept you from doing that."

"How could you know what I would do with it? Ysao, you see, has scruples. He could not ask you back. So I did it." In that magnificent, mellifluous mental voice, Goryn added, That would have been against his prin-ci-ples. Ysao does not make use of his friends.

Russell was trembling where he stood. He stared at Jimson's face. "You're going to do it," he said.

Jimson nodded. He was thinking of a poem. He had written it the day after he saw a collection of paintings by a Terran artist named Vincent Van Gogh.

True, he was mad when he died.

No one sane can see in a cloudy sky

That pulsating glare, that beaten copper sun.

No one, surely, can see in trees

The great green and gold shaking giants he saw.

The earth humped like sea under his feet.

Look, it is peaceful here.

Farms seem the same as in the next county.

No wind demons the cornstalks.

Yet we see, walking through his town of Aries,

How heat bums the brown earth red.

The green trees blue,

And how the sun shudders.

Our eyes are not our own.

Surely it has changed, since then.

Jimson thought, that was what I wanted all my life. I wanted my art to survive. No one can draw my pictures for me. But if I do this thing, a generation of telepaths will see light through my eyes.

Goryn was delighted. Ysao, he understands. Perfect!

"When do you want to start?" Jimson asked.

"Tomorrow," she said.

Tears were running down Russell's face, in the furrows that anguish was scoring there. He sat down on the edge of the bed and bowed his head into his hands, crying silently, body shaking.

"How long will it take?" Jimson asked.

"Till there is nothing left," Goryn said quietly.

I will do it, Jimson thought. He was almost content. He stroked Russell's hair.

Ysao spoke for him. "Goryn, he is ready for you now."

Chapter 18

"Hi. My name is Daffyd."

"Hi. My name is Tom."

"Hi. My name is Leonice."

"Hi. My name is Theo."

Behind his head Jimson heard a rustling noise. Mahil was playing with the I.V. tubing. Lately it had become easier to listen than to look. But this was a new person. Alleca, be polite. Jimson dragged his eyelids across his eyes. It hurt. The drugs they were giving him dried him out. He was a stick-figure man, a child's drawing, two dimensional on the sheet. He moved his fingers in welcome and said what he always said. "Hi. I'm better on faces than on names."

His voice was a croak. This face—he'd seen this face before. Thin face, lumpy muscular body, red-gold hair standing out from his head like a burning bush.... Bright orange shirt. "Theo," he repeated. A chain of names bound him to his death. He tried to remember them—Daffyd, Tom, Leonice, others before them he couldn't recall. It was hard to remember when they kept taking away pieces of his brain.

Momentarily he wished for Russell's hand to be there, holding his, holding him into the world. But Goryn had forbidden Russell the room after the first few days.

"You make it harder for him," she said. "You hurt him by calling him back."

Russell had turned to Jimson with a flame of desperation in his eyes. "Jim?"

Jimson had had to say, "She is right."

Russell's face hardened. Jimson had been frightened for him, feeling how close he was to collapse. But Russell didn't break. He touched his fingers to Jimson's chapped dry lips and then turned away. "You will call me when it happens," he said to Goryn.

Mahil was giving his customary lecture. "The drugs are personality-suppressants. Disregard the tendrils of thought and emotion concealing the pattern you wish to take. It's normal for them to be there, but they are not the pattern. Focus on the vision, on the imagination-structure. Take it from the mind as you have learned to take the language-structure from someone's brain."

The young telepath's face was intent above his own. It starts now, Jimson thought, and it started. The drugs poured into him. Despite himself, knowing it did no good, he braced, his fingers closing on the sheet.

Theo, with unusual gentleness, reached out and held his hand.

Thank you, Jimson thought. He felt his muscles relax as the drug took him, forcing him into lethargy. He felt his frame take on the lineaments of dissolution. His eyelids slacked and closed. It seemed to him, then, as it always did, that he was outside himself, bending over the bed, over this sick stranger with grey skin and eyes that sank back like stones into the face. Going into the mind, pushing memory aside, pushing hope and regret and love aside, going for the pattern, going for the heart.... He felt the electrodes on his temples and felt the shock at the sudden invasion: again, he thought, oh no, it happens again. Again.

Please don't fight me, said the young clear voice in his mind.

DON'T. GO AWAY.

Please.

The interface between them was very thin.

Suddenly it hurt. It had never hurt before, and he cried a protest: DON'T. GO AWAY. IT HURTS.

Somewhere else Mahil was calling "Theo! Theo!"

It was too late, and he knew it was too late. He opened his eyes in the inward darkness. The shadow of the Rider, huge and inescapable, lay across his road. The dark eyes gleamed. TOO LATE. Jimson's heart pounded, writhed, broke and fibrillated, trembling without surcease, without cease, it hurt, and he fought it. In his pain he heard the Rider call him. Time. It's time.

He stopped fighting then. He looked for the road, forgetting the young life still linked to his.

He could not see the road. His vision narrowed, and he saw what looked like a lawn; cool, green, soft, a space to breathe. He had never seen it in the painting before. His body, lying on the bed, would not obey him, and so he left it behind, and went.

It was not a place he had ever been before, but it received him.

"Theo!" Mahil roused the young telepath with difficulty. "Are you all right?" Theo opened his eyes. Mahil glared at his machinery with ludicrous disfavor. "Theo," he said, "I'm sorry. I had no warning. If I had, I would have told you to pull out. I hope it wasn't too bad for you. He's gone now. Theo?"

Theo whispered, "Russell."

"Oh, damn. Of course. You stay put. You don't look like you can move, anyway. I'll get him."

Russell came. He stood beside a body still warm, and still palisaded with bottles and tubes. Mahil had not had the thought, and Theo had not had the strength, to pull the electrodes away.

Russell said nothing. He didn't cry, not even later, alone in the room they had given him to live in. But every telepath in the X-team center, with the exception of Theo Moukis, had a deviling, tormenting, furious headache.

* * *

Theo Moukis stood in front of the mirror, talking to himself. Look in the mirror. See? There is no dark ghost looking out at you. There's only you.

Fair skin, blond thick hair, a scar on one shoulder from a childhood fall.... VERY DISTINGUISHED, THEO, said the voice. It was cool and calm, pleasant, and not at all like his own. WHAT IS IT LIKE FOR YOU?

Automatically Theo answered. Like having a second set of memories inside my head. Like sharing the space of my mind with another mind.

IT'S THE LUCK. Rubbing his temples, Theo turned from the mirror. THINK OF YOURSELF AS A HAUNTED HOUSE.

"That's easy for you to say!" Theo exclaimed aloud. But of course, no one answered him. There was no one else in the room. He ran his fingers through his hair. Damn, he thought, what do I do now?

THE LIBRARY...?

He went to the library. The whole complex was subdued; there was almost no one in the hall. The other students were out gathering wood for the pyre. Theo had been excused from that.

"Newer students or inexperienced examiners occasionally encounter minor cases of personality impress," the computer told him.

He watched the words pile up on the screen.

"Such effects, while frightening, are invariably temporary, with the original personality characteristics of the student ultimately, usually within two weeks, subordinating and eliminating the impressed template."

Theo checked the bibliography and reference selections at the end of the chapter.

"See Smyth, Smith, and McGonegal—"for more of the same.

Obviously, before now nobody had ever experienced the impression of one personality upon another at the moment of the impress-personality's death.

YOU COULD BE A CASE STUDY.

Thank you, but I don't want to be a case study!

It was disconcerting to Theo to find himself responding to the Jimson Alleca-template as if it were really another person sharing the space in his skull. The effects are temporary, he told himself. You have been momentarily impressed with someone else's emotion, experience, and memory. But it isn't a consciousness. It only needs time to be integrated, subsumed, and subordinated. Watch it disappear!

YOUR CERTAINTY, said the Jimson-piece, IS APPALLING.

For a moment, Theo considered telling Goryn what had happened. But he hesitated. She would insist that he be examined. She would fuck around with his head. I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THAT. A vision of a silvery, celestial face with Goryn's features floated into Theo's imagination. Hard not to agree with that. Definitely, Goryn delighted in behaving like a minor divinity.

I AM GLAD YOU AGREE, said the Jimson-piece. ARE WE FINISHED HERE? I WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND MY FUNERAL.

* * *

It was cold. They stood in a circle around the pyre, twelve students, four teachers, and Russell. A strong cedar-like scent concealed that other smell of a body burning. Sparks whipped up from drying bones. The wood shuddered and fell inward, thrust at by the gusting wind. The pyre guttered sparks. Flickered. Went out. Russell knelt, and laid his palm down on the edge of the dark circle, where the ash had cooled. Then he pushed himself up and turned away from them.

RUSS—

Theo took a step forward but checked himself. He did not want to call attention to himself. PRIVATE, he said to the rest of the world. And turned inward. Are you all right? he asked. He tried to reach inward, but came up against a wall. Part of his mind was literally closed to him. But the closure was not complete; he could sense, in the same way that he could sometimes sense his dreams as he was dreaming them, a deep and lonely mourning. He tried to reach in again—

DON'T. GO. AWAY.

Theo could appreciate the surrealism of being present at one's own funeral. It would be comic, he thought, if it weren't for this—this pain. He felt it. He could not help feeling it. He felt as if he was a stone whirling at the end of a string; whirling and whirling in helplessness, till the person holding the string chose to let go.... He staggered a little.

"Theo, are you all right?" He had not been aware of Mahil watching him. "I told you to rest. You shouldn't be here."

"I felt I had to come." He searched for the right words. He thought of asking Mahil's help—but no, he'd been over that. He would be able to handle the whole thing if his teachers would leave him alone. "I just can't get my balance."

Mahil said, "It could be the drugs."

"I'll be all right."

"You're sure?'

"I'm sure."

THANK YOU. The words emerged, without his conscious control.

Listen, he said, listen, you can't just live in my head.

He waited for an answer. If there was an entity in his head, it had withdrawn into a space he didn't know. He couldn't get at it. On the other hand, it could get at him. The thought disturbed him.

THEO. LET ME STAY HERE. I WON'T HURT YOU.

Do I have a choice?

DID I HAVE A CHOICE?

But it's my head! Theo said.

He—it—Jimson—did not answer him.

* * *

Two weeks passed. Theo relaxed. In his head, the entity, if it was there, if it was an entity, rested quiescent. Theo got drunk. He went to two parties, and allowed himself to be happily seduced into three beds. In training they were learning about starships: hyperspace mechanics, computer training and terminology, navigation codes. They learned to fly a bubble. This section of Psi Center owned and maintained a grounded starship. It was called the Missing Link, and all that it was missing—a pretty big all—was the drives. They slept in it, ate in it, and exercised on the monkey bars, simulating Jumps. "You aren't crew," they were told, "but you need to know enough to be useful and not to make nuisances of yourselves." It was a different kind of training than what, as telepaths, they were used to, and it made a nice change before the mounting pressure of the final exam. And Theo was aware that Goryn, Mahil, Nior and Ysao had started to watch the twelve pattern-impressees with anxiety. They referred to the whole event as The Experiment.

Three weeks. He began to believe that the event that had happened to him—and, he was sure, to nobody else—had devolved. Occasionally he felt hedged by memories not his own, coming, seemingly, from a space he could not get to in his mind—but that was a minor effect. He thought.

Until the night when, bored with studying a navigator's text for work he would never do, he headed for the gym. You need exercise, Theodore. He needed a workout; a climb on the ropes to clear out the kinks.

But in the doorway he had to stop. Russell was there, alone, throwing himself forward and back, forward and back, rolling on the mats. The redhead looked up—and Theo felt a low moan from deep in his mind. Everything reeled. DAMN IT, THEO, WHY DID YOU DO THAT? He hung on to the wall outside the gym and waited for his heart to stop hitting him.

He ought to be gone. YOU ought to be gone.

I TRIED.

Theo said, slowly, You're real, aren't you? You aren't going to be gone. You're not a fantasy and not a fabric—you're a person. Jimson.

YES.

Would you leave me alone? he asked. At least till I pass my test?

TELL ME ABOUT THIS TEST.

You lie down on a couch, and they give you a dose of suppressants. Then the examiner tries to take over your mind. If it happens, you fail. If you resist the takeover, you pass.

DO PEOPLE FAIL?

Theo was indignant. "All the time!"

I WAS ONLY ASK-ING, Jimson said, producing a very credible imitation of Goryn. I WILL TRY TO LEAVE YOU ALONE, THEO, he said. BUT YOU ARE THE ONLY LINK WITH REALITY THAT I HAVE.

Jimson kept his word, as best he could. But Theo began to dream odd dreams.

Intersecting, moving light, a giant net of colored bubbles in which a city seemed to hang like something captured in flight... a dark and glittery room permeated with the sound of drums... a woman with silver eyes...

He slept badly. His lover moved out on him after two nights of it, and he slept, rather insulted, alone. He inquired casually of the others who had participated in The Experiment. They all said yes, their dreams had changed. Goryn said it was an effect of The Experiment and a possible proof of its working, that the twelve pattern-impressees dreamed in colors now, all the time. They all agreed it was exciting. Something had changed the way the impressees looked at things. But no one had Theo's dreams.

Four weeks after the death and burning of the body of Jimson Alleca, the instructors announced the final examination.

The night before the exam, Theo dreamed that he was slumped before a crib in a clinic on New Terrain. Ensel the telepath was drilling a hole through his mind.

He woke from the dream to find Ysao sitting on his bed. The hairs on Theo's neck stood on end. They did when he got angry. "I'm asleep," he said.

"I know you're asleep," said Ysao. "You're dreaming."

PRIVATE!! The flags went up and the portcullis went down in Theo's head with an almost audible thud. Ysao was sitting practically in his lap. He concentrated on physical reality: the shadows thrown by the heavy starlight against the wall, the taste of sleep in his mouth, the chill of the room. He hunched his knees to his chest and pulled the blanket higher.

He temporized, not knowing how much Ysao knew or how much he had guessed. "All the impressees have been dreaming," he said.

Ysao nodded. "Your dreams are different. I think it's very likely nobody noticed but me. But I was linked with Jimson Alleca for a little while. Your dreams have the feel of him. Knowing he's dead, and then touching your dreams is like salting a wound. Something happened to you that happened to none of the other impressees. Do you know what it is?"

Theo closed his mind shield as tight as he could make it, and decided to lie. "I think," he said carefully, "that it's a simple personality impress. I was linked with Jimson at the moment of his death. I got some of his memories. The booktapes I checked said that when personality-impress occurs, it takes about two weeks for the effect to wear off. But those were based on impresses from damaged brains. Nobody ever tried to impress a mind like Jimson's before. It's taking longer for the effects to fade. For a while the effects were hitting me all the time, waking and sleeping. But the strength of them appears to have faded. All I get is dreams now."

He wondered if he had been too glib. He waited.

Ysao said, "You didn't think it was worth mentioning to one of us?"

Theo said, "I can handle it."

"Are you taking the exam tomorrow?"

"Yes, of course."

"Had you considered that it might interfere with the exam?"

"I can handle it," said Theo stubbornly. "It's just some stray memories, Ysao."

"All right," Ysao said. "You know yourself best."

A whisper drifted through Theo's brain. AH, YOU ARE A GOOD LIAR.

"Are you planning to mention it to the others?" Theo asked.

"Shouldn't I?" said Ysao.

"Well, I wish you wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Because if you tell Goryn, she won't want me to take the exam. She's like that."

Even in the dark Theo could see Ysao raise a massive eyebrow. "I've never found Goryn to be solicitous," said the giant.

"Hell, no," said Theo. "But she wouldn't permit me to take the exam if she thought I would damage myself. I might ruin the results of The Experiment. And it would be a waste of good material—me—and such a waste of her time!"

Ysao laughed. "I won't tell her." The giant stood up. The bed lifted level again. Theo spared himself a brief grin of pride at the success of his deception.

At the door Ysao turned. "Have you talked, at all, to Russell O'Neill?"

"To Russell?" said Theo. "Why should I talk to Russell?"

"I thought, with the effect of the personality-impress in your mind, you might have found yourself wanting to."

Theo said quietly, though his heart was beating very fast, "I did start to, once. But I couldn't."

"Just as well." Ysao sighed. "When Jimson was alive Russell could not deal with his death, and now that Jim is dead his guilt is coming close to killing him. I don't know why he stays here. He hasn't—" Ysao paused. "He won't talk to me. He won't talk to anyone, and not even Goryn has the strength to ask him to go. He reminds me of a bolt of lightning, looking for something to strike."

Chapter 19

Theo walked into the examining room hungry.

He had been without food or drink for twelve hours. His stomach would not stop rumbling. His throat tasted like a fistful of sand. The optimists among the students claimed that the fasting decreased the possibility of side effects from the drugs; pessimists said that the lack of nourishment made it easier for the suppressants to take hold. Theo was too hungry to have an opinion. But at the sight of the couch with its attached restraining webs, he bristled like a cat.

RELAX.

Mahil looked apologetic. "Sometimes people thrash," he explained. "Mostly we don't have to use them."

Theo lay down without comment. He felt the light cold of a gel ampule press against his bare arm. It spread out on the skin and dissolved, like an amoeba turning itself inside out.... He blanked, and came back to consciousness with Goryn like a bright red blaze in his head and with webbing tightly crisscrossing him everywhere. He was sopping wet, sweating wet. There was I.V. tubing running into the big vein in his strapped-down right arm.

"What happened?"

You threw a fit, Goryn said. Very en-ter-tain-ing.

He lay still. His body and his mind felt sore. "Get this stuff off me," he requested. Mahil unsnapped the webbing and pulled the I.V. needle from his arm. Goryn came walking into the room. There was a bruise under her left eye, darkening.

Theo said, "Did I do that?"

Far inside the recesses of his skull, someone was having a fit of malicious and appreciative laughter.

"You think I did it myself? Yes, you did."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"How are you feeling?"

"All right. I think." He swallowed. "Did I pass?"

"Certainly you passed! I feel pity for the unwary idiot who might try to control you. You don't like it at all. Anybody else would have gone to pieces, trying to juggle two sets of memories as if they were oranges. Not you; you're tough as a little bull."

Defensively he said, "I figured I could handle it. It's just a personality-impress. It'll go away."

Goryn snorted. "Do I care? Juggle what you like."

"What do I do now?"

"You get off this couch and get out of here."

In the hall Theo had to lean against the wall. Goddamn it, he said to his assistant, stop laughing!

WAS SHE MAD AT YOU!

It wasn't my idea to hit her in the eye!

I COULD HARDLY HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOUR FIST.

Theo went to his room. Elation stormed through him; he sang in the shower, and picked out clean clothes, the bright clothes that he loved to wear, flame- colored satin shirt, tight white pants. He preened a little in the mirror. How do I look?

QUITE THE DANDY, THEODORE. WHO ARE YOU CHASING TONIGHT?

You have a suggestion?

HOW ABOUT A STARCAPTAIN? The voice was teasing, but Theo sensed the intense core of desire underneath it.

Would you want that? he asked, incredulous.

DO WHAT YOU WANT.

You DO want it. All right. I will. He strode down the hall towards Russell's room. But by the time he got there he had to lean against the wall to quiet his shaking legs. It was embarrassing. His nerves were learning to respond to someone else's feeling.

I'M SORRY.

Would you kindly calm down and let me handle it? He knocked on the door.

"Who is it?"

He pushed the door open and sauntered in.

Russell was sitting at the desk. He turned around. "I didn't say Come in. Who the hell are you?"

THEO—

Stay away! Theo warned. And trust me. You know him—but I'm the telepath. He felt Jimson's watchful and unconvinced retreat. "My name's Theo," said Theo, "and I'm the telepath who was linked to Jimson Alleca's mind when he died."

A pen snapped in Russell's hands. It was a violent sound. A skein of memory unravelled in Theo's head. He remembered a fireball blazing into darkness, burning a derelict starship to ash. He heard Shev Allard's voice cut off in mid-cry, and Russell's cry of fury.... Memory overruled his telepathic sense. A reflex not of his own making made him step back, and raise his hands to protect his eyes.

"What's the matter?' said Russell.

Theo dropped his hands. The Starcaptain had not moved.

I told you, Theo said. Back off!

TELL HIM THE TRUTH.

Oh, all right! I can't deal with the both of you! Theo said to Russell, "I thought you were going to hit me."

"Why?" Russell laid the pieces of the pen aside. "I wasn't. Why should you think that if you're a telepath?"

Theo started to ready the story of the personality-impress. NO! The voice exploded in his mind. DON'T LIE TO HIM. TELL HIM!

Theo could not refuse that plea.

Russell heard him out in profound and painful silence. The half light of the evening transposed to night. Russell lit a candle and it threw a circle of wavering light across his hands. His hands opened and closed, and opened and closed.

"You have Jimson's memories?" he asked when Theo fell silent.

He hasn't understood. "Some of them."

"And his feelings?"

"Not exactly." Theo tapped his forehead. "There are two of us in here."

There was a darkness about Russell's hunching shoulders that had nothing to do with the night. "Are you talking about the patterning?" He said the word with loathing.

"No," said Theo. "The patterning probably worked on the others. This is something different." He hesitated. He could not quite say, Don't you understand? In a sense, Jimson Alleca is still alive.

Russell said, "I don't understand. But it wouldn't be the first time I didn't understand." He bowed his head as if over a secret. "I think you'd better go."

In the place in Theo's mind that was Jimson Alleca, there was a sob. Now, said Theo, coldly imperative, now will you get the hell out of my cortex and let me do this my way? He felt Jimson withdraw to that far off space in his mind. He was just aware of him. "Think of it," he said to Russell, stepping forward to the desk, "as something that Jimson left to both of us."

"He left me nothing," said Russell. A terrible bitterness welled up in him. Theo felt the pain like the scent of burning paper. Smoke curled at the limits of Russell's mind. It rose like an incense, till Theo felt that his lungs were filling with the bitter smoke. "Some pictures." His blocks were all down. Every avenue to his mind was open.

Theo went in with all his considerable mental energy and talent, through the bitter smoke, into the place of pain. He brought in what it felt like to have your mind chipped to bits like plaster. What it meant to be dying at thirty-one while the children around you could expect to live to be a hundred. He brought in Jimson's anger: Where were you for fourteen years! And he brought in the loss: We didn't get to say goodbye. I love you. I will miss you. He whipped it through and through Russell's mind, and fueled the lash with all the frustrated, knotted down, held back, self-controlled sexual energy he had ever seen or felt.

He took one step closer to Russell.

And waited for the explosion, as a lightning rod waits for the lightning.

* * *

THEO.

Morning. Sunlight striped the floor, the pillows on the floor, the bed, and Theo's chest. He stretched into the warmth. Um. He was not quite awake.

Jimson's voice reached to him again out of its recess in his mind. THANK YOU.

Theo grinned reminiscently. Thank you! There was a note for him on the desk, but he knew what it said; he had been linked, very gently, with Russell as he wrote it. Theo—Thanks. And goodbye. Please give my love to Ysao. He rolled out of bed, yawning, and went to look at it. There was no signature, just a whorled scribble at the bottom of the page, which could have been the letter "R" and could have been someone checking out a pen, to see if it would write. The handwriting was tiny and meticulous as print. I'd never have guessed him to write so neatly.

RUSSELL CAN BE VERY PRECISE ABOUT SOME COMMUNICATION.

My god, yes, Theo said. He went looking for his clothing. His pants had ended up in a corner. He put them on. His shirt had been carefully hung on the back of the desk chair, turned inside out. Well, that happens in the dark. He combed out his hair with his hands till it stood on end.

AND NOW?

Now I get a vacation. For two months he could travel around the Living Worlds, drawing on his salary. Then he had to return to Psi Center to earn the money he'd spent.

WHERE CAN THEY SEND YOU?

Anywhere, said Theo. Whichever sector they are exploring now.

DON'T YOU CARE? AREN'T YOU CURIOUS?

I never was before.

BROTHER, YOU WILL BE NOW!

Theo grinned. He was more concerned with his vacation. He had never been in the Hype except as a tourist. But telepaths were accepted everywhere.

LIKE CROW.

In the Hype he could wear the bright colors he loved, and no one would laugh at him. Red and orange and sunburn brown.

AND YOU SHOULD TRY SOME GOLD GLITTER IN YOUR HAIR.

I might even meet up again with Russell.

YOU MIGHT.

Damn it, what'd I do with the letter? It had slipped out of his hands somehow.... He pummeled the pillows and waved the sheets like valedictory flags. It fluttered to the floor, and he picked it up and took it to the desk and smoothed it out against the desktop. I must remember to show it to Ysao.

DO YOU THINK YSAO KNOWS THE TRUTH?

About you? No. What I told him was very close to the truth—could easily have been the truth.

SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE TRUTH?

No, Theo said. He was surprised at the firmness of his own response. Really. I'm getting used to you. I don't mind.

I AM GLAD.

Theo mused to himself. I wonder if the pattern-impress worked for the others. They're dreaming differently. Maybe they're seeing differently too. It may take years before we know for sure.

MEAN-WHILE, Jimson said, being Goryn again, THE EX-PER-I-MENT FAILED.

No, protested Theo. It just had an unexpected result. Us.

There were four pens lying on the desk, and the pieces of the one that had snapped in Russell's hands. The ink had soaked in, making a tentacled blot on the wood. Theo picked up a pen and tried to inscribe a T in the wood. The point promptly broke off the pen.

CLOD, Jimson said wrathfully. THOSE ARE MINE, AND THEY'RE DELICATE!

Sorry. Theo gathered them up and stuck them in his pocket, first checking the points to make sure the caps were on tightly. He said aloud, "No sense in getting ink all over my sexiest shirt!"

I WANT TO DRAW A PICTURE.

"What?" Theo's chest tightened. I thought we had an agreement, he said. You were going to stay back there where you are, and leave the work of the body to me. It's my body. I don't plan to share it. I'm not willing to. And I can't draw. But YOU can.

Jimson withdrew, back into the corner of Theo's mind that the telepath could not quite get to. But then Theo felt him again. YOU DON'T REALLY UNDERSTAND, he said. YOU'RE A TELEPATH. YOU'RE THINKING IN TERMS OF CONTROL, OF ME TAKING OVER YOUR MIND. I CAN'T DO THAT. I DON'T KNOW HOW. YOU'RE THE TELEPATH, THEO. I'M JUST RIDING HERE, I'M A GHOST. YOU HAVE ACCESS TO ME. I'M NOT JIMSON ALLECA. I'M A PART OF YOUR BRAIN. THINK OF ME LIKE THAT. USE ME.

Theo considered. All right, he said. I'll try it. How do I reach to you? You're pretty far back there.

HERE, said Jimson. I'M HERE!

Theo felt the barriers drop away. This is how it should have been the first time, he thought. Without suppressants, without fear, without the treacherous and broken body fighting him off, the union was easy. Yes, he thought triumphantly, there. There.

He looked for paper. He took out Russell's letter and turned it backside up. He had a pen. There were four of them in his pocket. He felt for the one he wanted, the fine-nibbed one, the OOO. He visualized a subject. Jimson Alleca had never drawn this portrait, because it hurt too much. But now, Theo thought, he can. We can.

He set the pen to the paper. The portrait grew slowly. Hair like a mane framed aquiline features. The mouth curved in a familiar grin. One hand reached out in welcome.... Theo put the pen down and scratched his jaw. He didn't know what to think. The sketch did not resemble Jimson Alleca's style in the least. It was flamboyant, almost brutal. A thought wandered into Theo's consciousness: IT NEEDS ROUGH EDGES. NEXT TIME WE'LL GET SOME CHARCOAL.

Is it any good? Theo stared uneasily down at the portrait of Russell.

Jimson searched for the word. Found it—flung it at Theo like a shooting star.

PER-FECT!

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1978 by Elizabeth A. Lynn

Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

ISBN 978-1-4976-0618-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com

Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19