“Why did you steal this card?”
The Mouse shrugged. “It was just there. It fell out on the rug near me.”
“’But if it had been some other card, the Two of Cups, the Nine of Wands—would you have picked it up?”
“I guess so.”
“Are you sure there isn’t something in this card that’s special? If any other had been there, you would have let it lie or handed it back …?”
Where it came from the Mouse didn’t know. But it was fear again. To battle it, he whirled and caught Lorq’s knee. “Look, Captain! Don’t mind what the cards say, I’m going to help you get to that star, see? I’m going right with you, and you’ll win your race. Don’t let some crazy-woman tell you different!”
In their conversation, Lorq had been self-absorbed. Now he looked seriously at the dark frown. “You just remember to give the crazy-woman her card back when you leave here. We’ll be at Vorpis soon.”
The intensity could maintain itself no longer. Rough laughter broke the dark lips. “I still think they’re playing, Captain.” The Mouse turned back in front of the couch. Planting his bare foot on top of Lorq’s sandaled one, for all the world like a puppy by its master, he struck.
The lights flickered over the machines, copper and ruby, to arpeggios recalling harpsichords; Lorq looked at the boy by his knee. Something happened to him. He did not know the cause. But for the first time in a long time, he was watching someone else for reasons having nothing to do with his star. He did not know what he saw. Still, he sat back and looked at what the Mouse made:
Nearly filling the cabin, the gypsy moved a myriad of flame-colored lights about a great sphere, in time to the crumbling figures of a grave and dissonant fugue.
Chapter Five
Draco, Vorpis, Phoenix, 3172
The world?
Vorpis.
A world has so much in it, on it—
“Welcome, travelers …”
– while a moon, Katin thought as they left the spacefield by dawn-blazed gates, a moon holds its gray glories miniatured in rock and dust.
“ … Vorpis has a day of thirty-three hours, a gravity just high enough to increase the pulse rate by point three of Earth normal over an acclimating period of six hours …”
They passed the hundred-meter column. Scales, burnished under the dawn, bled the mists scarfing the plateau: the Serpent, animated and mechanical, symbol of this whole sequined sector of night, writhed on his post. As the crew stepped onto the moving roadway, an oblate sun rouged away night’s bruises.
“ …with four cities of over five million inhabitants. Vorpis produces fifteen per cent of all the dynaplasts for Draco. In the equatorial lavid zones, more than three dozen minerals are quarried from the liquid rock. Here, in the tropic polar regions, both the arolat and the aqualat are hunted by net-riders along the inter-plateau canons. Vorpis is famous throughout the galaxy for the Alkane Institute which is located in the capital city of its Northern Hemisphere, Phoenix …”
They passed the limit of the info-service voice, into silence. As the road buoyed them from the steps, Lorq, among the crew, gazed-on the plaza.
“Captain, where we now go?” Sebastian had brought only one of his pets from the ship. It swayed and stepped on his ridged shoulder.
“We take a fog crawler into the city and then go to the Alkane. Anyone can come with me who wants, wander around the museum, or take a few hours leave in the city. If anybody wants to stay back on the ship—“
“—and miss a chance to see the Alkane? – “
“—doesn’t it cost a lot to get in? – “
“—but the captain’s got an aunt working there—“
“—so we can get in free then,” Idas finished.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lorq said as they jogged down the ramp to the slips where the fog crawlers moored.
Polar Vorpis was set with rocky mesas, many of them several square miles in area. Between, heavy fogs riled and slopped, immiscible with the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere above. Powdered aluminum oxide, and arsenic sulfate in vaporized hydrocarbons expelled from the violent floor, filled the space between mesas. Just beyond the table that held the spacefield was another with cultivated plants, indigenous to a more southern latitude of Vorpis but kept here as a natural park (maroon, rust, scarlet); on the largest mesa was Phoenix.
The fog crawlers, inertial-drive planes powered by the static charges built up between the positively ionized atmosphere and the negatively ionized oxide, plowed the surface of the mist like boats.
On the concourse, the departure times drifted beneath the transparent bricks, followed by arrows directing the crowds to the loading slip:
ANDROMEDA PARK—PHOENIX—MONTCLAIR
and a great bird dripping fire followed through the multi-chrome beneath boots, bare feet, and sandals.
On the crawler deck Katin leaned on the rail, looking through the plastic wall as white waves crackled and uncoiled over the sun to shatter by the hull.
“Have you ever thought,” Katin said as the Mouse came up to him sucking on a piece of rock candy, “what a difficult time a man from the past would have understanding the present. Suppose someone who died in, let’s say, the twenty-sixth century woke up here, Do you realize how totally horrified and confused he’d be just walking around this crawler?”
“Yeah?” The Mouse took the candy out of his mouth: “Want to finish this? I’m through with it.”
“Thanks. Just take the matter of”—Katin’s jaw staggered as his teeth crushed crystalline sugar from the linen thread.—“cleanliness. There was a thousand-year period from about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, when people spent an incredible amount of time and energy keeping things clean. It ended when the last communicable disease finally became not only curable, but impossible. There used to be an incredibility called ‘the common cold’ that even in the twenty-fifth century you could be fairly sure of having at least once a year. I suppose back then there was some excuse for the fetish: there seemed to have been some correlation between dirt and disease. But after contagion became an obsolescent concern, sanitation became equally obsolescent. If our man from five hundred years ago, however, saw you walking around this deck with one shoe off and one shoe on, then saw you sit down to eat with that same foot, without bothering to wash it—do you have any idea how upset he’d be?”
“No kidding?” Katin nodded.
Fog broke at a shaft of rock, sparking.
“The idea of paying a visit to the Alkane has inspired me, Mouse. I’m developing an entire theory of history. It’s in conjunction with my novel. You don’t mind indulging me with a few moments? I’ll explain. It has occurred to me that if one considers—“ He stopped.
Enough time passed for a handful of expressions to subsume the Mouse’s face. “What is it?” he asked when he decided nothing in the moiling gray had Katin’s attention. “What about your theory?”
“Cyana Von Ray Morgan!”
“What?”
“Who, Mouse. Cyana Von Ray Morgan. I’ve had a perfectly oblique thought: It just came to me who the captain’s aunt is, the curator at the Alkane. When Tyy gave her Tarot reading, the captain mentioned an uncle who was killed when he was a child.”
The Mouse frowned. “Yeah …”
Katin shook his head, mocking disbelief.
“Who what?” the Mouse asked.
“Morgan and Underwood?”
The Mouse looked down, sideways, and in the other directions people search for mislaid associations.