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  ‘I like it,’ she said, and took the player from him.

  ‘Johnson recorded that song just before he died. Poisoned by a woman. He died on his knees, barking like a dog. So much for art.’

  ‘Some people say he was poisoned because of a woman. Given a bottle of poison whiskey at a party because he was coming on to the host’s wife. Though maybe you wouldn’t appreciate the difference.’

  ‘So much of the music you listen to is about death, Suzy. It is worrying.’

  ‘I suppose that you’re going to tell me that people talk about my…my musical preferences. Let ’em gossip, I don’t care.’ But she knew very well what the other combat fliers said: that she was flirting with the idea of death, had been ever since the end of the Alea Campaigns. For why else would she still be flying at age twenty-nine? Truth was, she didn’t fly to court a flier’s death (the sudden rippling collapse of Shelley’s wing, his deathwail all the way down to the unforgiving ground). No, not at all. It was simply that there was nothing else left to her.

  She said, ‘Just quit playing at being a person and tell me the message you’re here to give. Okay? Cause I don’t much feel like company right now.’

  ‘Duke Bonadventure sends his condolences, Suzy.’

  She knew what was coming. She felt like she was free-falling right there on the dirty concrete floor.

  ‘Of course, the accident means that your team will withdraw from competition.’

  Like your insides have been cleanly haled away, and air is rushing through the hollow space.

  Suzy got to her feet, fists clenched. She said, ‘There must be a hundred solos looking for team action. Jesus Christ, I know most of them, I know two or three who can fit right in. I can audition tomorrow, have them run through our moves—they’ll have watched us, they’ll know what’s on. I can do it in a week, and we’ve two…’

  ‘And exhaust yourself and the rest of the team. No.’

  ‘That’s your fucking cool computer speaking, right? It don’t know about it. All it knows is how to play safe.’

  ‘You are tired. You are upset.’

  Suzy was so mad she could have torn those metal plates right out of his head. Instead, she jumped to her feet and shoved a hand into one of the control mitts of the practice rig, balled her fist and brought the wing that arched above Adam X’s head swooping down. She felt the impact in the tips of her fingers as primaries rattled against concrete.

  But Adam X didn’t even blink. ‘Please,’ he said, calmly looking up at her as if nothing had happened. ‘I know of the bond between the four of you. I know you will want to honour Shelley’s memory by still trying to compete. But I know too that it is not possible to integrate a new member into your team in such a short time.’

  ‘I’ll see Bonadventure. I’ll make him understand.’

  ‘That is good. Because he would very much like to see you, Suzy. He has a proposition for you. He needs a pilot.’

  ‘Go ask a freespacer. I retired from that a long while ago.’

  Adam X said, ‘He needs someone with combat experience.’ He said, ‘He wants someone who can fly against the Enemy.’

  3

  * * *

  Dorthy Yoshida woke with a parched mouth and a headache. She was dressed in white linen trousers and a white linen tunic belted with a wide black sash, and lying on a bed, as big and soft as a cloud, that seemed to stand in the middle of a rocky clearing in a sunlit pine forest. A huge red silk banner, painted with yellow Han ideograms, slanted a dozen metres above, glowing with the late morning light of Earth’s sun.

  A spring bubbled up from beneath a tilted slab of granite. Dorthy drank with cupped hands, splashed cold water on her face.

  The water, the rocks, the soft turf: those were real, at any rate. It was difficult to tell where the room ended and the hologram of the pine forest began, and it took her a while to find the way out: which was to follow the little gravel-bedded stream fed by the spring. It ran between two towering pines which faded away as Dorthy passed beneath them into a still bigger space roofed with the interlocking triangular panes of a geodesic dome. The panes were tinted bright blue. Across a hectare of emerald green turf, half-hidden by a stand of (real) pine trees, a waterfall cascaded down a high rock face into a huge circular pool. Dorthy crossed the red-painted wooden bridge that arched over the water, pausing to look at the big koi carp which sculled above clean white pebbles. The planks of the bridge vibrated gently beneath her bare feet. She nodded to herself and went on.

  A dank, mossy tunnel pierced the rock face behind the pool, opening onto a conservatory. Raked gravel paths looped around stands of fruit trees under more blue-tinted glass. Munching sweet peach flesh, Dorthy pushed through the curtain of ivy that shrouded the only other doorway, and found herself waist deep in drifts of stars.

  Talbeck Barlstilkin turned towards her across a hundred thousand simulated light years, his mutilated face grotesquely underlit by the bright, close-packed stars of the galactic core. ‘Come and see, Dr Yoshida,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain everything!’

  He must have been waiting for her, Dorthy thought, but how had he known she would find her way here? Posthypnotic suggestion? With a moment of vertiginous panic she wondered just how deeply she was trapped, just what was wanted of her. Perhaps none of this was real. She could be asleep: she had spent so much of the time after P’thrsn asleep, dreaming under compulsion. Perhaps that was why she had accepted what had happened to her so easily. After so many years of dreaming, nothing seemed quite real any more.

  Still, the orrery compelled attention. Hung right in front of her was the Galaxy’s familiar triple spiral, stars like packed diamond dust winding into the lanes of dark gases which shrouded the glowing nucleus where Barlstilkin stood. The thing that lived inside Dorthy’s head stirred. She could feel it, nothing more. Without counter-agent to the secretions of her implant, her Talent was little more than an unspecific low-grade empathy, and the Navy had never allowed her access to counteragent, not since P’thrsn. But that didn’t stop her trying to probe her guest, as her tongue might return again and again to an aching tooth.

  ‘Known space,’ Barlstilkin said, and the glittering tinsel of four hundred billion stars vanished in an eyeblink. A few hundred points of light filled the orrery now, most of them dim red dwarfs. Barlstilkin was a shadowy sketch, black on black. He said, ‘Altair. 1745. BD plus twenty degrees 2465. Procyon. Sol.’ And each star brightened in turn: a brilliant blood-red ruby; two dull spots of cornelian, close together; a sapphire; a diamond. Sol was in the centre.

  ‘Very pretty. Really, I am impressed. But why are you showing me this?’

  ‘Two more steps,’ Barlstilkin said, ‘then we’ll be there. First of all, I’m widening the frame.’

  All around, other stars seemed to drift into the oval room; and the bubble of known space shrank until it was lost in an ocean of stars.

  ‘Now we run proper motions backwards from the present, about a thousand years per second in real time.’ Barlstilkin’s voice was cool and controlled, with the faintest upwards lilt at the end of each sentence. Dorthy couldn’t see his face, and with her deadened Talent could do no more than sense his presence.

  Stars began to drift like motes of dust in a sunbeam, some moving faster than others, some swirling counter to the general motion, but most slanting from left to right, sinking towards the floor.

  ‘That’s the proper motion in this part of the galactic arm,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said, ‘but of course there are rogues. Here’s Barnard’s Star, for instance…’ And a faint red point moving three or four times more quickly than most of the motes flared so brightly that it illuminated Barlstilkin’s forefinger.

  Dorthy said, ‘Proper motion of about ten arc seconds. All this is well known.’ Yet the display was compelling. It aroused an atavistic oceanic feeling, of self dissolving out into the boundless Universe. But she couldn’t tell if that was her true self, or what she had come to call, privately, her guest.

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nbsp; ‘To be sure. I know of course that you were studying to be an astronomer, before the Alea Campaigns. But please now watch this point—’ and another star flared, dirty green-white. It was moving counter to the general motion, like a streak now it had been brightened; in a few moments it had flown out of the frame.

  ‘That’s real?’ Dorthy felt a kind of sick eagerness that was not excitement, that was more than yearning. The closest she could come to defining it was the dependency burnt into every cell of a drug addict, so strong she’d felt a ghost of it days after the few times she’d skimmed the minds of such people in her salad days at the Kamali-Silver Institute. A desperate need to know everything about this, without knowing why she needed to know.

  ‘It’s about seventy light years away right now,’ Barlstilkin said. Dorthy’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the velvety star-spattered dark. She could make out his bulk, looming against drifting stars like a vast dust-cloud, like one of the gods with which humans had once populated the heavens. He said, ‘When the first comprehensive catalogues were being made, seven hundred years ago, it was about one hundred and ten light years away, coming towards us out of Sagittarius. By us, I mean the solar system. Extrapolation shows that it will pass close to Sol in twelve hundred years, perhaps so close that the orbits of the planets will be perturbed. The difficulties of measuring the proper motion of something that’s heading right down our throats leave a wide margin of error, as you may imagine. In fact, the star is listed in a couple of the old catalogues, but no one noticed how unusual it was.’

  ‘Hardly the word for a star moving at what, about six per cent the speed of light?’

  ‘Indeed. With a relative proper motion of close to seventeen thousand kilometres per second it is the fastest star in the Galaxy. It is a very strange star, too. All sorts of odd metal lines in it, and it seems to be rotating very quickly, enough to distort it into an oblate spheroid. Almost enough to tear it apart. If it was on the main sequence it would have been torn apart long ago, in fact, but of course white dwarfs have a nicely dense uniform structure.’

  Dorthy had been working something out in her head, a conclusion so fantastic that she had to run through the figures again. She said slowly and reluctantly, ‘It came from the galactic core, then, about half a million years ago.’

  ‘Oh yes. I know something of that story already, Dr Yoshida, from the same source that told me about the fastest star. Half a million years ago, the Alea who planoformed the world we call P’thrsn, refugees from a civil war in the galactic core, discovered that there was an interstellar civilization emerging on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani. The Alea were worried that this civilization would attract the attention of those from whom they had fled, and so they fired off a small moon at close to the speed of light. It more or less disintegrated when it crossed the dusty gravity well of Epsilon Eridani, but enough fragments hit the second planet to ruin its biosphere for ever. Well, I need not tell you any more about Novaya Rosya, I think. You have been there, after all.’

  ‘But the family which destroyed the civilization of Novaya Rosya never had the kind of technology that could accelerate a star And there was no kind of civilization at all on Earth then, nothing to destroy!’

  ‘Of course not. But who did the Alea family flee from, Dr Yoshida? Who was the enemy of the Enemy?’

  ‘The marauders,’ Dorthy said. ‘You think they did this? That they could see into the future?’

  ‘I don’t know. But there is something you should know, Dorthy. There is at least one planet orbiting the hypervelocity star. Who would put a world around a weapon?’

  Later, they sat on a terrace that seemed to overlook crags and terraced bamboo forest tumbling down into an ocean of mist. The impassive bonded servant set down a lacquer tray bearing a teapot and porcelain bowls so thin that they were translucent, stepped backwards to wait silently by the rough rock wall.

  ‘Jasmine tea is a weakness of mine,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said, as he poured.

  Dorthy, looking out across simulated kilometres of mist towards rounded mountain tops, took her bowl of tea distractedly. There was even a bird circling in the middle air, sunlight flashing on its wings as it widened its gyre. She watched the illusionary bird circle higher and higher, and sipped scented tea, and thought about all she’d been shown.

  There had been a projected simulation of how the runaway star had been accelerated. A pair of white dwarf stars swinging in close to the black hole at the centre of the Galaxy, one star captured, spilling its guts across the sky in a nova flare, the other gaining its partner’s momentum and flying away at a tangent: gone in the blink of an eye. Impossibly, it had taken a gas giant with it, something Barlstilkin’s simulation couldn’t explain. The orbits of the binary’s component stars had been so close-coupled that neither partner could have had a planet—and besides, any planet would have been lost in the Newtonian encounter with the black hole.

  And there had been a simulation of what would happen if the hypervelocity star passed close to Sol. Cataclysms as tides pulled apart the outer planets and stripped away their moons; the orbits of the myriad asteroids in the Belt collapsing sunwards; the orbits of Mars and Earth widening eccentrically.

  Measurements of the hypervelocity star’s relative motion were still unrefined; it was likely to miss Sol by a light year. But close encounter was a possibility. It could happen, and it would be a thousand times worse than the ruin of Novaya Rosya. And if the knowledge became public, no one would stop to think about probabilities, or even that the disaster wouldn’t happen for twelve hundred years…Dorthy felt as if she had been manoeuvred into a corner. Trapped. The way the Navy had trapped her, used her for her Talent and then imprisoned her because of what had happened on P’thrsn, because of what was inside her head. She’d been freed for the same reason, but she didn’t know why.

  Barlstilkin had been watching the view quietly, sipping tea. Waiting for her to speak, Dorthy realized. She asked him, ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Look at my face, Dr Yoshida. Go ahead. I’m not embarrassed by it.’

  ‘I was wondering why you haven’t had it fixed—’

  Her bowl shattered against the stone flags of the terrace. Barlstilkin had reached across the little table and grabbed her under the chin with a square, strong hand, pulled her head around until she was looking right into his face.

  ‘Look at it!’ His fingertips were bruising her gums through her cheeks.

  She looked.

  Shiny scar tissue sheeted the left side, pulled down the corner of his mouth. The eye was half hidden, a lashless glittering crescent. Under the cap of his straight black hair, his left ear was a knob of tissue twisted around its hole. Dorthy held his gaze with her own (it hurt her more than his grip), feeling the swirling storm of his emotions. A castle on fire high above a raging sea, flames flapping up hundreds of metres, flung away by wind into the night…

  ‘You see…’ His voice was softer; his grip relaxed.

  Dorthy pulled back. She couldn’t tell if it was his anger that she was feeling, or her own.

  Barlstilkin said, ‘It happened before the Federation of Co-Prosperity. Not long after the phase graffle was invented, and the ReUnited Nations sent expeditions to find out what had happened to the old American and Russian colonies. They set up a puppet government on Elysium, decided to take control of agatherin production. When they began to force all the growers to join the Fountain of Youth Combine, my father decided to resist. He hired fifty or so mercenaries from Earth, but the RUN had a bottomless purse: they hired a fucking army. Their troops sacked the castle, killed my father. I escaped them, but only because I was so badly hurt they didn’t recognize me. Afterwards the RUN pretended to be kind, to placate the other growers. They did not steal my inheritance, and they allowed me to sit on the Combine’s Council. Their mistake. It gave me money enough to do what I want. To pursue this. The ReUnited Nations has kept what happened to you on P’thrsn secret, even from the other governments
of the ten worlds. But I found out. And they’ve kept the hypervelocity star secret, too, even though they’ve already sent an expedition out to it. I’m going there too, and I want you to come with me, Dr Yoshida. You wanted to tell all the peoples of the Federation the truth about the Alea. I want to find out the whole truth.’

  ‘So do I,’ Dorthy said, and was pleased to see his surprise. It gave her, for a moment, the feeling of being in control, ahead of the game. Trying to keep him off balance, she asked, ‘But aren’t we already on our way?’

  Talbeck Barlstilkin smiled and waved a hand. Mountains and misty sky blew away like rags. There were only the myriad pinpoint lights of the stars, hard and bright against interplanetary night, sweeping very slowly and imperceptibly up from the balustrade.

  ‘I should have known I couldn’t fool a Talent forever,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been on a ship like this once before, when I was a working girl. Really, an airplant would be simpler than your greenhouse and waterfall and pine trees.’

  ‘Simpler, but not as elegant. I have…appearances to keep up. This ship is a lot bigger than you think it is. A relic, rather like me.’ He was only a bulky shadow against the stars, but Dorthy knew that he was smiling.

  ‘And where are you taking me?’

  ‘Why, to the hypervelocity star, of course. But first, to Titan.’

  ‘Titan? But intersystem ships are only allowed to depart from Luna orbit.’

  ‘Exactly. It will take us two more days to get there. We have to pick up our pilot. Some old friends of mine are arranging that. I am no solitary schemer, Dr Yoshida. There are almost a dozen of us engaged in this. The others look for profits to be made from exotic technologies. Ostensibly, so do I. Meanwhile, I suggest you enjoy the rest of the trip.’

  Dorthy knew, because she had made the journey from Earth to Titan once before, that it took a lot longer than two days. ‘You put me to sleep again,’ she said.