“Fair, Captain,” the man said. The slanted eyes in his ruddy face crinkled with a smile. With his free hand now he grasped his opposite biceps and slid his fingers down the blond hair that matted each forearm, the back of each knuckle, till he held the woman’s hand in both of his. They were the couple who had played cards in the bar, the Mouse realized. “When you us aboard want?”
“An hour before dawn. My ship goes up to meet the sun. It’s the Roc on Stage Seventeen. How do your friends call you?”
“Sebastian.” The beast beat on his golden shoulder.
“Tyy.” Its shadow crossed her face.
Captain Von Ray bent his head and stared from beneath his rusty brows with tiger’s eyes. “And your enemies?”
The man laughed. “Damned Sebastian and his flapping black gillies.”
Von Ray looked at the woman. And you?”
“Tyy.” That, softly. “Still.”
“You two” Von Ray turned to the twins. “Your names?”
“He’s Idas—“ the albino said, and once more put his hand on his brother’s arm.
“—and he’s Lynceos.”
“And what would your enemies say if I asked them who you were?”
The dark twin shrugged. “Only Lynceos—“
“—and Idas.”
“You?” Von Ray nodded toward the Mouse.
“You can call me the Mouse if you’re my friend. You my enemy, and you never know my name.”
Von Ray’s lids fell halfway down the yellow balls as he looked at the tall one.
“Katin Crawford.” Katin surprised himself by volunteering. “When my enemies tell me what they call me, I’ll tell you, Captain Von Ray.”
“We’re on a long trip,” Von Ray said. “And you’ll face enemies you didn’t know you had. We’re running against Prince and Ruby Red. We fly a cargo ship out empty and come back—if the wheels of the machine run right—with a full hold. I want you to know this trip has been made twice before. Once it hardly got started. Once I got within sight of the goal. But the sight was too much for some of my crew. This time I intend to go out, fill my cargo hold, and come back.”
“Where we for running are?” Sebastian asked. The creature on his shoulders stepped from one foot to the other, flapping to balance. Its wingspan was nearly seven feet. “What out there, Captain, is?”
Von Ray threw up his head as though he could see his destination. Then he looked down slowly. “Out there …”
The Mouse felt the skin on the back of his neck go funny, as though it were cloth and someone had just snagged a loose end and raveled the fabric.
“Somewhere out there,” Von Ray said, “is a nova.”
Fear?
The Mouse for one moment searched for stars and found Dan’s ruined eye.
And Katin spun backward across the pits of many moons, his eyes bulged beneath the faceplate while somewhere, wombward, a sun collapsed.
“We’re hunting a nova.”
So that’s real fear, the Mouse thought. More than just the beast flapping in the chest, lurching into the ribs.
It’s the start of a million journeys, Katin reflected, with your feet stuck in the same place.
“We have to go to the flaming edge of that imploding sun. The whole continuum in the area of a nova is space that has been twisted away. We have to go to the rim of chaos and bring back a handful of fire, with as few stops as possible on the way. Where we’re going all law has broken down.”
“Which law do you mean?” Katin asked. “Man’s, or the natural laws of physics, psychics, and chemistry?”
Von Ray paused. “All of them.”
The Mouse pulled the leather strap across his shoulder and lowered the syrynx into its sack.
“This is a race,” Von Ray said. “I tell you again. Prince and Ruby Red are our opponents. There is no human law I could hold them to. And as we near the nova, the rest break down.”
The Mouse shook massed hair off his forehead. “It’s going to be a changey trip, eh, Captain?” The muscles in his brown face jumped, quivered, fixed finally on a grin to hold his trembling. His hand, inside the sack, stroked the inlay on the syrynx. “A real changey trip.” His woolly voice licked at the danger. “Sounds like a trip I’ll be able to sing about.” And licked again.
“About this … handful of fire we’re bringing back,” Lynceos began.
“A cargo hold full.” Von Ray corrected. “That’s seven tons. Seven slugs of a ton each.”
Idas said: “You can’t bring home seven tons of fire—“
“—so what are we hauling, Captain?” Lynceos finished.
The crew waited. Those standing near the crew waited.
Von Ray reached up and kneaded his right shoulder.
“Illyrion,” he said. “And we’re getting it from the source.” His hand fell. “Give me your classification numbers. After that, the next time I want to see you is on the Roc an hour before dawn.”
“Take a drink—“
The Mouse pushed the hand away and kept dancing. Music smashed over the metal chimes while red lights fled one another around the bar.
“Take a—“
The Mouse’s hips jerked against the music, Tyy jerked against him, swinging dark hair back from a glistening shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her lips shook.
Someone was saying to someone else: “Here, I can’t drink this. Finish it for me.”
She flapped her hands, coming toward him. Then the Mouse blinked.
Tyy was beginning to flicker.
He blinked again.
Then his saw Lynceos holding the syrynx in his white hands. His brother stood behind him; they were laughing. Real Tyy sat at a corner table shuffling her cards.
“Hey,” the Mouse said, and went over fast. “Look, don’t fool with my ax, please. If you can play it, fine. But ask me first.”
“Yeah,” Lynceos said. “You were the only one who could see it—“ “—it was on a directional beam,” said Idas. “We’re sorry.”
“That’s okay,” the Mouse said, taking his syrynx back. He was drunk and tired. He walked out of the bar, meandered along the glowing lip of Hell3, finally to cross the bridge that led toward Stage Seventeen. The sky was black. As he ran his hand along the rail, his fingers and forearm were lit orange from beneath.
Someone was leaning on the rail ahead of him.
He slowed.
Katin looked dreamily across the abyss, face devil-masked by underlight.
At first the Mouse thought Katin was talking to himself. Then he saw the jeweled contrivance in his hand.
“Cut into the human brain,” Katin told his recorder. “Centered between cerebrum and medulla you will find a nerve cluster that resembles a human figure only centimeters high. It connects the sensory impressions originating outside the brain with the cerebral abstractions forming within. It balances the perception of the world outside with the knowledge of the world within.
“Cut through the loose tangle of intrigues that net world to world—“
“Hey, Katin.”
Katin glanced at him as the hot air shook up from the lava.
“—ties star system to star system, that keeps the Sol-centered Draco sector, the Pleiades Federation, and the Outer Colonies each a single entity: you will find a whirl of diplomats, elected or self-appointed officials, honest or corrupt as their situations call for—in short, the governmental matrix that takes its shape from the worlds it represents. Its function is to respond to and balance the social, economic, and cultural pressures that shift and run through empire.
“And if one could cut directly through a star, centered in the flaming gas would be a bole of pure nuclear matter, condensed and volatile, crushed to this state by the weight of the matter around it, spherical or oblate as the shape of the sun itself. During a solar disturbance, this center carries vibrations from that disturbance directly through the mass of the star to cancel those vibrations racing the tidal shift on the sun’s surface.