He followed her voice into the night, where flickering tracery seined motes of interstellar gas, and impossible nothingness burned with infinite energy, potential transformed and transforming. With the wisdom of a thousand years a ship of the League fell through limitless seas, navigating the shifting currents of the void, beating into the sterile winds of space. Stars glittered like snow on the curving hull, spitting icy daggers of light that moved imperceptibly into spectral blues before him, reddened as he looked behind: imperceptibly time expanded, velocity increased and with it power. He saw the haze of silver on his right rise into their path, a wall of liquid shadow… the Pleiades, an endless bank of burning fog, kindled from within by shrouded islands of fire. Tendrils of shimmering mists curved outward across hundreds of billions of kilometers, the nets found bountiful harvest, drew close, hurled the ship into the edge of cloud.
Nebulosity wrapped him in clinging haloes of colored light, ringed him in brilliance, as the nets fell inward toward the ship, burgeoning with energy, shielding its fragile nucleus from the soundless fury of its passage. Acceleration increased by hundredfolds, around him the Doppler shifts deepened toward cerulean and crimson; slowly the clinging brightness wove into parabolas of shining smoke, whipping past until the entire flaming mass of cloud and stars seemed to sweep ahead, shriveling toward blue-whiteness, trailing embers.
And suddenly the ship burst once more into a void, a universe warped into a rubber bowl of brilliance stretching past him, drawing away and away before him toward a gleaming point in darkness. The shrunken nets seined near-vacuum and were filled; their speed approached 0.999c… held constant, as the conversion of matter to energy ceased within the ship… and in time, with a flicker of silver force, began once more to fall away. Slowly time unbowed, the universe cast off its alienness. One star grew steadily before them: the sun of Patris.
A sun rose in ruddy splendor above the City in the Clouds on Patris, nine months and seven light-years from Oro… And again, Patris fell away; and the brash gleaming Freeport of Sanalareta; they crept toward Treone through gasless waste, groping for current and mote across the barren ship-wakes of half a millennium… And again—
Maris found himself among fire-gnat stars, on a ship in the bay of New Piraeus. And realized she had stopped speaking. His hand rubbed the copper snarl of his hair, his eyes bright as a child’s. “You didn’t tell me you were a witch in your spare time.”
He heard her smile, “Thank you. Mactav makes the real magic, though; her special effects are fantastic. She can show you the whole inhabited section of the galaxy, with all the trade polyhedra, like a dew-flecked cobweb hanging in the air.” Daylight returned to the panel. “Mactav—that’s her bank, there—handles most of the navigation, life support, all that, too. Sometimes it seems like we’re almost along for the ride! But of course we’re along for Mactav.”
“Who or what is Mactav?” Maris peered into a darkened screen, saw something amber glimmer in its depths, drew back.
“You’ve never met her, neither have we—but you were staring her right in the eye.” Brandy stood beside him. “She must be listening to Giri down below… Okay, okay!—a Mactavia unit is the brain, the nervous system of a ship, she monitors its vital signs, calculates, adjusts. We only have to ask—sometimes we don’t even have to do that. The memory is a real spacer woman’s, fed into the circuits… someone who died irrevocably, or had reached retirement, but wanted to stay on. A human system is wiser, more versatile—and lots cheaper— than anything all-machine that’s ever been done.”
“Then your Mactav is a kind of cyborg.”
She smiled. “Well, I guess so; in a way—”
“But the Spacing League’s regulations still won’t allow cyborgs in crews.” She looked annoyed. He shrugged. “Sorry. Dumb thing to say… What’s that red down there?”
“Oh, that’s our ‘stomach’: the AAFAL unit, where”—she grinned—“we digest Stardust into energy. It’s the only thing that’s never transparent; the red is the shield.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t really know. I can make it go, but I don’t understand why—I’m only a five-and-a-half technician now. If I was a six I could tell you.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Aha! I finally impressed you!”
He laughed. “Not so dumb as you look.” He had qualified as a six half a century before, out of boredom.
“You’d better be kidding!”
“I am.” He followed her back across the palely opalescing floor, looking down, and down. “Like walking on water… why transparent?”
She smiled through him at the sky. “Because it’s so beautiful outside.”
They dropped down through floors, to come out in a new hall. Music came faintly to him.
“This is where my cabin—”
Abruptly the music became an impossible agony of sound torn with screaming.
“God!” And Brandy was gone from beside him, down the hallway and through a flickering wall.
He found her inside the door, rigid with awe. Across the room the wall vomited blinding waves of color, above a screeching growth of crystal organ pipes. Nilgiri crouched on the floor, hands pressed against her stomach, shrieking hysterically. “Stop it, Mactav! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
He touched Brandy’s shoulder; she looked up and caught his arm; together they pulled Nilgiri, wailing, back from bedlam to the door.
“Nilgiri! Nilgiri, what happened!” Brandy screamed against her ear.
“Mactav, Mactav!”
“Why?”
“She put a… charge through it, she’s crazy-mad… sh-she thinks… Oh, stop it, Mactav!” Nilgiri clung, sobbing.
Maris started into the room, hands over his ears. “How do you turn it off?”
“Maris, wait!”
“How, Brandy?”
“It’s electrified, don’t touch it!”
“How?”
“On the left, on the left, three switches—Maris, don’t— Stop it, Mactav, stop—”
He heard her screaming as he lowered his left hand, hesitated, battered with glaring sound; sparks crackled as he flicked switches on the organ panel, once, twice, again.
“—it-it-it-it!” Her voice echoed through silent halls. Nilgiri slid down the doorjamb and sat sobbing on the floor.
“Maris, are you all right?”
He heard her dimly through cotton. Dazed with relief, he backed away from the gleaming console, nodding, and started across the room.
“Man,” the soft hollow voice echoed echoed echoed. “What are you doing in here?”
“Mactav?” Brandy was gazing uneasily to his left. He turned; across the room was another artificial eye, burning amber.
“Branduin, you brought him onto the ship; how could you do this thing? It is forbidden!”
“Oh, God.” Nilgiri began to wail again in horror. Brandy knelt and caught Nilgiri’s blistered hands; he saw anger hardened over her face. “Mactav, how could you!”
“Brandy.” He shook his head; took a breath, frightened. “Mactav—I’m not a man. You’re mistaken.”
“Maris, no…”
He frowned. “I’m one hundred and forty-one years old… half my body is synthetic. I’m hardly human, any more than you are. Scan and see.” He held up his hands.
“The part of you that matters is still a man.”
A smile caught at his mouth. “Thanks.”