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“What savages,” I murmured.

“Perhaps; but do they have anything we’d like to buy?” asked Commander Galamea, with creditable hard-headedness.

“Bombs?” I hazarded.

“According to our intercepted transmissions,” Morval continued, “this war has lasted a thousand years. One group of sentients live in the inner solar system, the other group live in the outer solar system. They are fighting for dominance and the right to own the sun.”

“What do they look like?” asked Galamea, and Albinia conveyed an image from Explorer’s space-cameras and projected it in the air.

I studied the image with curiosity. These were diamond-headed creatures with no visible eyes or ears or limbs, whose squat bodies were supported on three powerful legs.

“How do they play piano?” asked Phylas, mockingly.

Albinia animated the image; tendrils emerged from the diamond torso and sweet music was heard.

“They have no musical instruments,” explained Phylas, “but they sing their own internal organs.”

“Could we trade with them?” Galamea persisted.

Another missile struck the alien battleship and it split apart. And then, as sentients slowly spiralled out of the ship, the fighter craft dived in and obliterated the stranded sentients one by one.

“I doubt it,” said Commander Galamea regretfully. “Seal off the system.”

“When I was a boy,” said Morval, “the Olarans only had five planets. Olara, New Olara, Olara the Third, We Miss Olara, and Far From Olara.”

“In those days,” observed Phylas, “the Olarans were a sad bunch.”

“My father was on one of the first rift ships. He was a pioneer, one of the greatest of all explorers,” Morval bragged.

“I’ve read about him,” I said.

“Back then,” said Morval, “no one knew if the rifts were stable. Your ship rifted and it might, for all you knew, end up as random matter, or materialise in some other universe. So the courage of those early explorers was extraordinary.”

“I’ve heard it said,” said Phylas, thoughtfully, “that most of them were volunteers. They went into space exploration for love, not as a result of, um, a court order.” He blushed, filled with shame at his own criminal past.

“That’s true,” Morval acknowledged. “My father was an idealist. He believed the exploration of space was one of the greatest adventures of all time.”

“As do I!” I said defensively.

“You’re just here,” said Morval scornfully, “because some female broke your heart.”

“Who told you that?” I said angrily.

“It’s written,” said Morval, “all over your soul.”

I seethed; but could not deny the truth of his words.

“My father eventually settled,” Morval reminisced, “in a Trading Post in some far-flung galaxy, and never returned to his family. My mother didn’t care; she had married again of course, long before that. And she never spoke of him; all that I know about my father was gleaned from research.”

“My father,” said Phylas, “was-” Then he ran out of words; clearly there was very little to say about his father.

I sipped my rich-juice; thinking about my own father.

I had not really known him all that well, in all honesty. My mother had been the main presence in our family, as was so often the case with Olarans. He had been an artifice monger; but I could recollect no tales he had ever told about his work. I decided I had nothing much to add to this particular conversation.

“Have I ever told you,” I said, “about the time I tried to sell carpets to the Vengans and-”

I drank too much that night and went to the Command Hub to look at the stars. On a Vassal Ship I could have used the Observation Deck and looked into space with my own eyes, but here I had to make do with camera images.

Albinia was still wired to Explorer; eyes closed and effectively unconscious. I wondered when she slept, or if this for her was sleep.

I conjured up the phantom control display and flicked through different star charts until I found the night sky of my own home world, Shangaria. It brought back fond memories; when I was ten years old I’d wanted to be an astronomer and spent every night looking at the stars. My mother used to name them for me; for she knew each star by heart.

I wondered if my mother had ever loved my father. There was however no evidence for it. She was a wonderfully self-contained female, and intensely serious; my father had been a funny delightful man, but she’d never once laughed at his jokes. Perhaps that was because they were stupid jokes. I had found them incredibly funny; but then, I’d been just a child.

After the divorce my father had visited us every weekend and he always had a smile for me. He told me that no Olaran marriage ever lasts more than twenty years; because females always grow impatient at the intellectual gap between them and their males. “Savour it while you can,” he’d told me, still with a smile.

“You’ve been drinking,” said Albinia. Her voice startled me out of my reverie. I turned to her. Her eyes were open; she’d emerged from trance.

“I am smashed,” I said, extravagantly, “sozzled, delirious, and delighted!”

It was a stupid thing to say; and I said it in an extremely stupid fashion. And after I’d said it, Albinia stared at me for a long while, clearly baffled at my idiocy.

Then she giggled.

I offered to leave of course, after the giggle-moment, but Albinia insisted that I stay.

And so I stayed, and we talked, surrounded by stars, as she plucked absent-mindedly at the cable that led out of her skull.

We talked about aliens we’d encountered, and about missions, successful and unsuccessful, and about other members of the crew. Albinia knew the biographies of every crew member. I knew most of them by their first names from card games and drinking bouts, but she knew their full names including the matronymic and their professional and personal histories and she told me it all. I listened, an expression of rapt interest pinned to my face.

“Are you bored?” she asked abruptly.

“Not in the least,” I protested. “You say something.”

“I would be delighted so to do.”

“Go on then.”

“Shall I tell you,” I said, expansively, “of the time when I was trapped in a cloud on the planet of-”

“Unplug me,” she whispered, urgently, cutting off my words.

“I’m sorry?”

“Please. I’d like to get up and stretch my legs.”

I was startled at her request; but I reached over and gently eased the plug out of her skull; a curiously intimate act.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“You can’t bear to do it yourself, can you?” I said, with dawning comprehension. “Disconnect yourself?”

Albinia blinked, clearly disorientated at being fully in a human body. “I do find it-an effort of will,” she admitted. “Galamea makes me spend an hour in the gym, twice a day. But there are brain-plugs there too. It’s only at meal times that I am-naked.” She touched her skull holes self consciously.

“Here, take a walk with me,” I said.

I changed the settings on the panoramic wall screen; we were in a park now, the sun was shining, and there was a lake.

Albinia got up from her chair, carefully stretching her limbs. Her bald head gleamed in the muted evening lighting.

We promenaded around the Control Hub for several minutes; I held her arm in mine. She was, I noted, a little wobbly on her feet.

“Look,” she whispered, confidingly.

She showed me what was in her hand; it was her skull plate, that she used to cover the holes in her head on social occasions. “It holds a wirefree,” she admitted.

“You wear this when you’re not connected to Explorer?”

“When I wear this, I am connected to Explorer.”

She smiled, like a child confessing a wicked secret; and she slipped the skull plate back into place, covering the holes. It was a silver oval, almost the same shape in miniature as her shapely head.

Her eyes sparkled as the contact was made; Explorer was back in her brain.