Katin frowned. “Then what are we doing here? What happened then?”
“We stayed out by the manned stations and watched the fireworks from a safe distance. It took a little over three hours to reach peak intensity. We were talking with the Alkane’s crew when we got the captain’s signal from The Black Cockatoo. So we scooted on around, picked him up, and let all the Cockatoo’s cyborg studs loose.”
“Picked him up! You mean he did get out?”
“Yeah. He’s in another room. He wants to talk to you.”
“He wasn’t fooling us about ships going into a nova and coming out the other side?” They started toward the door.
Outside they passed down a corridor with a glass wall that looked across broken moon. Katin had lost himself in marvelous contemplation of the rubble when the Mouse said, “Here.”
They opened the door,
A crack of light struck in across Lorq’s face. “Who’s there?”
Katin asked, “Captain?”
“What?”
“Captain Von Ray?”
… Katin?” His fingers clawed the chair arms. Yellow eyes stared, jumped; jumped, stared.
“Captain, what …?” Katin’s face furrowed. He fought down panic, forced his face to relax.
“I told Mouse to bring you to see me when you were up and around. You’re … you’re all right. Good.” Agony spread the ruptured flesh, then faltered. And for a moment there was agony.
Katin stopped breathing.
“You tried to look too. I’m glad. I always thought you would be the one to understand.”
“You … fell into the sun, Captain?”
Lorq nodded.
“But how did you get out?”
Lorq pressed his head against the back of the chair. Dark skin, red hair shot with yellow, his unfocused eyes, were the only colors in the room. “What? Got out, you say?” He barked a laugh. “It’s an open secret now. How did I get out?” A muscle quivered on the wrack of his jaw. “A sun—“ Lorq held up one hand, the fingers curved to support an imaginary sphere “—it rotates, like a world, like some moons. With something the mass of a star, rotation means incredible centripetal force pushing out at the equator. At the end of the build-up of heavy materials at the surface, when the star actually novas, it all falls inward toward the center.” His fingers began to quiver. “Because of the rotation, the material at the poles falls faster than the material at the equator.” He clutched the arm of the chair again. “Within seconds after the nova begins you don’t have a sphere any more, but a …
“A torus!”
Lines scored Lorq’s face. And his head jerked to the side, as if trying to avoid a great light. Then the scarred lineaments came back to face them. “Did you say torus? A torus? Yes. That sun became a doughnut with a hole big enough for two Jupiters to fit through, side by side.”
“But the Alcane’s been studying novas up close for nearly a century! Why didn’t they know?”
“The matter displacement is all toward the center of the sun. The energy displacement is all outwards. The gravity shift will funnel everything toward the hole; the energy displacement keeps the temperature as cool inside the hole as the surface of some red giant star—well under five hundred degrees.”
Though the room was cool, Katin saw sweat starting in the ridges of Lorq’s forehead.
“The topological extension of a torus of that dimension—the corona which is all the Alkane’s stations can see—is almost identical to a sphere. Large as the hole is, compared to the size of the energy-ball, that hole would be pretty hard to find unless you knew where it was—or fell into it by accident.” On the chair arm the fingers suddenly stretched, quivered. “The Illyrion—“
“You … you got your Illyrion, Captain?”
Again Lorq raised his hand before his face, this time in a fist. He tried to focus on it. With his other hand he grabbed for it, half missed, grabbed again, missed completely, then again; opened fingers grappled the closed ones. The doubled fist shook as with palsy.
“Seven tons! The only materials dense enough to center in the hole are the trans-three-hundred elements. Illyrion! It floats free there, for whoever wants to go in and sweep it up. Fly your ship in, then look around to see where it is, and sweep it up with your projector vanes. It collects on the nodes of your projectors. Illyrion—nearly free of impurities.” His hands came apart. “Just … go on sensory input, and look around to see where it is.” He lowered his face. “She lay there, her face—her face an amazing ruin in the center of hell. And I swept my seven arms across the blinding day to catch the bits of hell that floated by—“He raised his head again. “There’s an Illyrion mine down on New Brazillia.
Outside the window a mottled planet hung huge in the sky. “They have equipment here for handling Illyrion shipments. But you should have seen their faces when we brought in our seven tons, hey, Mouse?” He laughed loudly again. “That’s right, Mouse? You told me what they looked like, yes?
Mouse?”
“That’s right, Captain.”
Lorq nodded, breathed deep. “Katin, Mouse, your job is over. You’ve got your walking papers. Ships leave here regularly. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting on another one.”
“Captain,” Katin ventured, “what are you going to do?”
“On New Brazillia, there’s a home where I spent much pleasant time when I was a boy. I’m going back there … to wait”
“Isn’t there something you could do, Captain? I looked and—“
“What? Speak louder.”
“I said, I’m all and I looked!” Katin’s voice broke.
“You looked going away. I looked searching the center, The neural distortion is all the way up into the brain. Neurocongruency.” He shook his head. “Mouse, Katin, Ashton Clark to you.”
“But Captain—“
“Ashton Clark.”
Katin looked at the Mouse, then back at the captain. The Mouse fiddled with the strap of his sack. Then he looked up. After a moment they turned and left the lightless room.
Outside they once more gazed across the moonscape.
“So,” Katin mused. “Von Ray has it and Prince and Ruby don’t.”
“They’re dead,” the Mouse told him. “Captain said he killed them.”
“Oh.” Katin looked out on the moonscape. After a while he said: “Seven tons of Illyrion, and the balance begins to shift. Draco is setting as the Pleiades rises. The Outer Colonies are going to go through some changes. Bless Ashton Clark that labor relocation isn’t too difficult today. Still, there are going to be problems. Where’re Lynceos and Idas?”
“They’ve already gone. They got a stellar-gram from their brother and they’ve gone to see him, since they were here in the Outer Colonies.”
“Tobias?”
“That’s right.”
“Poor twins. Poor triplets. When this Illyrion gets out and the change begins …” Katin snapped his fingers. “No more bliss.” He looked up at the sky, nearly bare of stars. “We’re at a moment of history, Mouse.”
The Mouse scraped wax from his ear with his little fingernail. His earring glittered. “Yeah. I was thinking that myself.”
“What are you going to do now?”
The Mouse shrugged. “I really don’t know. So I asked Tyy to give me a Tarot reading.”
Katin raised his eyebrows.
“She and Sebastian are downstairs now. Their pets got loose around the bar. Scared everybody half to death and almost broke up the place.” He laughed harshly. “You should have seen it. Soon as they get finished calming down the owner, they’re coming up to read my cards. I’ll probably get another job studding. There’s not much reason to think about the mines now.” His fingers closed on the leather sack under his arm. “There’s still a lot to see, a lot I have to play. Maybe you and me can stick together a while, get on the same ship. You’re funny as hell sometimes. But I don’t dislike you half as much as I dislike a lot of other people. What are your plans?”