But the Mouse was fiddling with his strap.
At Phoenix Katin asked, “You really don’t want to go?”
The Mouse was fiddling with his strap again. “Naw.”
Katin shrugged. “I think you’d enjoy it.”
“I’ve seen museums before. I just want to walk around some.”
“Well,” Katin said. “Okay. We’ll see you when we get back to the port.” He turned and ran up the stone steps behind the captain and the rest of the crew. They reached the auto-ramp that carried them up through the crags toward gleaming Phoenix.
The Mouse looked down at the fog slopping along the slate. The larger crawlers-they had just disembarked from one – –were anchored down the docks to the left; the little ones bobbed to the right. Bridges arched from the rocks, crossing the crevices that cut here and there into the mesa.
The Mouse dug carefully in his ear with his little fingernail, and went left.
The young gypsy had tried to live most of his life only with eyes, ears, nose, toes, and fingers. Most of his life he had succeeded. But occasionally, as on the Roc during Tyy’s Tarot reading, or during the interviews with Katin and the captain afterwards, he was forced to accept that what had happened in his past affected present action. Then a time of introspection followed. Introspecting, he found the old fear. By now, he knew it had two irritant surfaces. One he could soothe by stroking the responsive plates of his syrynx. To ease the other required long, private sessions of self-definition. He defined:
Eighteen, nineteen?
Maybe. Anyway, a good four years past the age of reason, they call it. And I can vote in Draco. Never did, though. Again picking my way down the rocks and docks of another port. Where you going, Mouse? Where you been, and what you going to do when you get there? Sit down and play awhile. Only it’s got to mean more than that. Yeah. It means something for Captain. Wish I could get that riled up over a light in the sky. Almost can when I hear him talk about it. Who else could fire my harp to ape the sun? A pretty big light it’d be, too. Blind Dan … and I wonder what it looked like. Don’t you want to make the next five fifths of your life with hands and eyes intact? Bind myself to a rock, get girls and make babies? Naw. Wonder if Katin’s happy with his theories and notes and notes and theories? What would happen if I tried to play my syrynx the same way he’s trying on this book, thinking, measuring? One thing, I wouldn’t have time to ask myself these bad questions. Like: what does the captain think of me? He trips over me, laughs, and picks the Mouse up and puts him in his pocket. But it does mean more than that! Captain’s got his crazy star. Katin makes his word-webs that no one listens to. Me, Mouse? A gypsy with a syrynx instead of a larynx. But for me, it isn’t enough. Captain, where are you taking me? Come on. Sure I’ll go.
There’s no place else I’m supposed to be. Think I’ll find out who I am when I get there? Or does a dying star really give that much light so as I can see?
The Mouse walked off the next bridge, thumbs in his pants, eyes down.
The sound of chains.
He looked up.
Chains crawled over a ten-foot drum, hauling a shape from the mists. On the rock before a warehouse, men and women lounged at giant machinery. In his cabin, the winch operator was still in his mask. Covered in nets, the beast rose from the fog, wing-fin whipping. Nets rattled.
The arolat (or it might have been an aqualat) was twenty meters long. Smaller winches lowered hooks. The net-riders holding to the flank of the beast caught at them.
As the Mouse walked down among the men to watch at the precipice, someone called: “Alex’s hurt!”
Lowered on a pulley, a scaffold took down a crew of five.
The beast had stilled. Crawling the nets as though they were an easy ladder, they loosed one section of links. The rider hung centered and limp.
One nearly dropped his section; the injured rider swung against the blue flank.
“Hold it there, Bo!”
“That all right is! I it have!”
“Bring him up slow.”
The Mouse gazed down into the fog. The first rider gained the rock, links clattering on the stone ten feet away. He came up dragging his net. He released the straps from his wrist, unplugged the connections from his arms, kneeled, and unplugged the lower sockets from his wet ankles. Now he dragged the net over his shoulder across the wide dock. The fog-floats at the net’s edge still took the major weight of the web, buoying it through the air. Without them, the Mouse judged, not taking into account the slightly heavier gravity, the sprawling entrapment mechanism would probably weigh several hundred pounds.
Three more riders came up over the edge, their damp hair lank along their masks—standing out curly and red on one man’s head—dragging their nets. Alex limped between two companions.
Four more riders followed. A blond, chunky man had just unplugged his net from his left wrist, when he looked up at the Mouse. Red eye-plates flittered in the black mask as he cocked his head. “Hey”—it was a guttural grunt—“that on your hip. What is?” His free hand pushed back his thick hair.
The Mouse looked down and up. “Huh?”
The man kicked the net loose from his left boot. His right foot was bare. “A sensory-syrynx is, hey?”
The Mouse grinned. “Yeah.
The man nodded. “A kid once who really the devil could play I knew—“ He stopped, the head uncocked. He pried his thumb beneath the jaw of his mask. Mouth-guard and eye-plates came away.
When it hit him, the Mouse felt the tickly thing happen in his throat which was another aspect of his speech defect. He clamped his jaws and opened his lips; then he closed his lips and opened his teeth. You can’t speak that way either. So he tried to let it out with a tentative question mark; it rasped in uncontrolled exclamation: “Leo!”
The squinting features broke. “You, Mouse, it is!”
“Leo, what are you …? But …!” Leo dropped the net from his other wrist, kicked the plug loose from his other ankle, then scooped up a handful of links. “You with me to the net-house come! Five years, a dozen … but more …”
The Mouse still grinned because that was all that was left to do. He scooped up links himself, and they dragged the net—with the help of the fog-floats—across the rock. “Hey, Caro, Bolsum, this the Mouse is!”
Two of the men turned around.
“You a kid I talked about remember? This him is. Hey, Mouse, you a half a foot taller even aren’t! How many years, seven, eight, it is? And you, still the syrynx have?” Leo looked around at the sack. “You good are, I bet. But you good were.”
“Did you ever get hold of a syrynx for yourself, Leo? We could play together
Leo shook his head with an embarrassed grin. “Istanbul the last time a syrynx I held, Not since. By now I it all have forgotten.”
“Oh,” the Mouse said and sensed loss.
“Hey, that the sensory-syrynx you in Istanbul stole is?”
“I’ve had it with me ever since.
Leo broke out laughing and dropped his arm around the Mouse’s sharp shoulders. The laughter (did the Mouse sense Leo’s gain?) rolled through the fisherman’s words. “And you the syrynx all that time have been playing? You for me now play. Sure! You for me the smells and sounds and colors will strike.” Big fingers bruised the dark scapula beneath the Mouse’s work vest. “Hey, Bo, Caro, you a real syrynx player now will see.”
The two riders hung back:
“You really play that thing?”
“There was a guy through here about six months ago who could tinkle out some pretty …” He made two curves in the air with his scarred hands, then elbowed the Mouse. “You know what I mean?”
“The Mouse better than that plays!” Leo insisted,