– a year on Argos is three months longer than a year on Earth, with six seasons instead of four—“
“—and at the beginning of our second, algae-tinted autumn, we made ready to leave. But Tobias would not go. His hands had taken up the rhythms of the tides, the weight of ore became a comfort on his palms—“
“—so we left our brother in the Illyrion mines, and came up among the stars, afraid—“
“—you see, we are afraid that as our brother, Tobias, found something that pulled him from us, so one of us may find something that will divide the remaining two—“
“—as we thought the three of us could never be divided.”
Idas looked at the Mouse. “And we are out of bliss.”
Lynceos blinked. “That is what Illyrion means to us.”
“Paraphrase,” Katin said from the other side of the walk. “In the Outer Colonies, comprising to date forty-two worlds and circa seven billion people, practically the entire population at one time or another has something to do with the direct acquisition of Illyrion. And I believe approximately one out of three works in some facet of its development or production his entire life.”
“Those are the statistics,” Idas said, “for the Far Outer Colonies.”
Black wings rose as Sebastian stood and took Tyy’s hand.
The Mouse scratched his head. “Well. Let’s spit in this river and get on to the ship.”
The twins climbed down from the rail. The Mouse leaned out over the hot ravine and puckered.
“What are you doing?”
“Spitting into Hell3. A gypsy’s got to spit three times in any river he crosses,” the Mouse explained to Katin. “Otherwise, bad things.”
“This is the thirty-first century we’re living in. What bad things?”
The Mouse shrugged.
“I never spit in any river.”
“Maybe it’s just for gypsies.
“I it kind of a cute idea is think,” Tyy said, and leaned across the railing beside Mouse. Sebastian loomed at her shoulder. Above them one of the beasts was caught in a hot updraft and flung into the dark.
“What that is?” Tyy frowned suddenly, pointing.
“Where?” The Mouse squinted.
She pointed past him to the canon wall.
“Hey!” Katin said. “That’s the blind man!”
“The one who busted up your playing!”
Lynceos pushed between them. “He’s sick.” He narrowed his blood-colored eyes. “That man there is sick.”
Demoned by the flickering, Dan reeled down the ledges toward the lava.
“He’ll burn up!” Katin joined them.
“But he can’t feel the heat!” the Mouse exclaimed. “He can’t see—he probably doesn’t even know!”
Idas, then Lynceos, pushed away from the rail and ran up the bridge.
“Come on!” the Mouse cried, following.
Sebastian and Tyy came after, with Katin at the rear.
Ten meters below the rim, Dan paused on a rock, arms before him, preparing an infernal dive.
As they reached the head of the bridge—the twins were already climbing the rail—a figure appeared at the canon’s lips above the old man.
“Dan!” Von Ray’s face flamed as the light fanned him. He vaulted. Shale struck from under his sandals and shattered before him as he crabbed down the slope. “Dan, don’t—“
Dan did.
His body caught on an outcropping sixty feet below, then spun on, out, and down.
The Mouse clutched the rail, bruising his stomach on the bar as he leaned.
Katin was beside him a moment afterward, leaning even further.
“Ahhh!” the Mouse whispered and pulled back to avert his face.
Captain Von Ray reached the rock from which Dan had leaped. He dropped to one knee, both fists on the stone, staring over. Shapes fell at him (Sebastian’s pets), rose again, casting no shadow. The twins had stopped, ledges above him.
Captain Von Ray stood. He looked up at his crew. He was breathing hard. He turned and made his way back up the slope.
“What happened?” Katin asked when they were all on the bridge again. “Why did he …?”
“I was talking with him just a few minutes before,” Von Ray explained. “He’s crewed with me for years. But on the last trip, he was … was blinded.”
The big captain; the scarred captain. And how old would he be, the Mouse wondered. Before, the Mouse had put him at forty-five, fifty. But this confusion lopped ten or fifteen years. The captain was aged, not old.
“I had just told him that I had made arrangements for him to return to his home in Australia. He’d turned around to go back across the bridge to the dormitory where I’d taken him a room. I glanced back … he wasn’t on the bridge.” The captain looked around at the rest of them. “Come on to the Roc.”
“I guess you’ll have to report this to the Patrol,” Katin said. Von Ray led them toward the gate to the take-off field, where Draco writhed up and down his hundred-meter column, in the darkness.
“There’s a phone right here at the head of the bridge—“
Von Ray’s look cut Katin off. “I want to leave this rock. If we call from here, they’ll have everybody wait around to tell his version in triplicate.”
“I guess you can call from the ship,” Katin suggested, “as we leave.”
For a moment the Mouse doubted all over again his judgment of the captain’s age.
“There’s nothing we can do for the sad fool.”
The Mouse cast an uncomfortable glance down the chasm, then followed along with Katin.
Beyond the hot drafts, night was chill, and fog hung coronas on the induced-fluorescent lamps that patterned the field.
Katin and the Mouse were at the group’s tail.
“I wonder just what Illyrion means to handsome there,” the Mouse commented softly.
Katin grunted and put his hands under his belt. After a moment he asked, “Say, Mouse what did you mean about that old man and all his senses having been killed?”
“When they tried to reach the nova the last time,” the Mouse said, “he looked at the star too long through sensory input and all his nerve endings were seared. They weren’t killed. They were jammed into constant stimulation.” He shrugged. “Same difference. Almost.”
“Oh,” Katin said, and looked at the pavement.
Around them stood star-freighters. Between them, the much smaller, hundred-meter shuttles.
After he’d thought awhile, Katin said: “Mouse, has it occurred to you how much you have to lose on this trip?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re not scared?”
The Mouse grasped Katin’s forearm with his thin fingers. “I’m scared as hell,” he rasped. He shook his hair back to look up at his tall shipmate. “You know that? I don’t like things like Dan. I’m scared.”
Chapter Three
Draco, Triton, Hell3, 3172
Some stud had taken a black crayon and scrawled “Olga” across the vane-projector face.
“Okay,” the Mouse said to the machine. “You’re Olga.”
Purr and blink, three green lights, four red ones. The Mouse began the tedious check of pressure distribution and phase readings.
To move a ship faster than light from star to star, you take advantage of the very twists in space, the actual distortions that matter creates in the continuum itself. To talk about the speed of light as the limiting velocity of an object is to talk about twelve or thirteen miles an hour as the limiting velocity of a swimmer in the sea. But as soon as one starts to employ the currents of the water itself, as well as the wind above, as with a sailboat, the limit vanishes. The starship had seven vanes of energy acting somewhat like sails. Six projectors controlled by computers sweep the vanes across the night. And each cyborg stud controls a computer. The captain controls the seventh. The vanes of energy had to be tuned to the shifting frequencies of the stasis pressures; and the ship itself was quietly hurled from this plane of space by the energy of the Illyrion in its core. That was what Olga and her cousins did. But the control of the shape and the angling of the vane was best left to a human brain. That was the Mouse’s job—under the captain’s orders. The captain also had blanket control of many of the sub-vane properties.