"Don't tell me you're vacuum-capable," she protested.

"Except for a few peripherals," he answered, removing elements of the jewelry around his loins, a UHF emitter from his forehead.

"Old-fashioned, aren't you?" she asked.

"Merely two centuries."

She whistled, the sound blurring oddly with the hissing seal of her suit. He knew what she was thinking: Bootstrapped. He had achieved his personhood before real artificial rights, before developmental minders and childhood protection protocols and SPCAI proctors with their monthly Turing tests.

But his annoyance quickly evaporated. Her naked breasts were still visible beneath the translucent material of the vac suit, a few years shaped away by its semi-rigidity. He allowed himself to make comparisons between Mira and a lover from long ago.

"That explains a couple of things," she said. Her voice came now in direct interface, matching the movements of her condensation-misted lips, but oddly without direction. He heard a sub-vocalized command, as intimate in DI as if she'd whispered it in his ear.

The lock cycled, and the sudden pressure drop triggered a few of Darling's internal alarms. The great portal across from them opened…

… onto madness.

A maelstrom aurora bombarded the full range of his senses in a great informationless howl, a raging hurricane as tall and wide as his sensory parameters extended. A terrific white noise (if noise can encompass gamma, X-ray, visible, radar, microwave, and on down: an uninterrupted gamut of sheer presence) blared from a quintillion suns trapped inside the infinite and expanding non-place of the ship's engine core. Here was a pocket universe in all its glorious obscenity: an artificial cosmos surging against the metaspace bonds that held it to this reality, trying to escape into the utter disappearance of its own realm, the ship bleeding the vast energies of its endeavors like some omnipotent god-leech.

Mira, visible only as the faintest of shadows in the torrent of radiation, had opened herself to the cry of this fearsome engine: arms and legs spread wide, mouth agape, fingers grasping as if the storm of energy were palpable. Darling unfurled his sensory strands to drink in the constant howl, extending his filaments until they reached the airlock's floor, ceiling, walls. With the array fully deployed, he was a glowing statue caught in some monster-ous spider's web.

There was a long time like that, sovereign and changeless, marked only by gradual cycles in which his comprehension of what was happening stabilized, only to be overturned by a fresh wave of disbelief. This drive was not unlike Darling's own AI core: an artifical cosmos, a collapsing singularity held forever in the Common Universe. It was this technology that underlay faster-than-light travel, unlimited power production, and the personhood of AIs, and which had made the Expansion possible. But he had never seen one before—not in the flesh.

It was very big.

And then the portal closed, and the world cascaded into a sudden and awesome silence. Only the measured hiss of returning air registered the continued existence of the universe.

Mira moved first, settling down onto her heels again. She peeled back the head of her suit and gasped a breath of air. She sat heavily upon the changing bench: an exhausted athlete, a firefighter grasping a few moments' rest.

She watched Darling with heavy eyes as his filaments furled, suddenly shy snakes disappearing into the voluminous robe.

"Touche," he said.

"Stars," she said. "God's fires."

Later, in his cabin, he patiently explained the possible complications of his sexual apparati. They had been accumulated across two centuries of travel, among branches of the human family that had been weathered and roughened by alien environments, xenophobia, xenophilia, rates of mortality that the Home Cluster hadn't seen since the Expansion began. Practices that had originated when the original human equipment had failed through some trick of radiation or diet, or from temptations borrowed from species intelligent, adaptable, and likeable, but spawned in utterly different seas.

Mira waved these warnings aside, as casually as signing a release before taking a ride on a grav-sled or a leap down a fric-tionless slide. She even invoked the ship's avatar to witness a blanket statement of consent—far more than he'd asked for; he'd only meant to create a measure of anticipation. But when she was done waving off his cautions, he realized he could have legally killed her then, that first time they had sex.

Never a temptation; it was simply an unfamiliar token of trust extended from her in an evening of extraordinary gifts.

Later, he wished he'd taken her there in the airlock. He would ask himself why the blaze of an imprisoned universe hadn't been enough to level any reticence. Why they'd talked instead.

"What do you do?" she asked. "What brings you so far Out?"

"I'm an originals dealer."

She shook her head. The term clearly meant nothing to her. A filmy layer of trapped sweat blurred the transparency of her vacuum suit. He longed to taste it, the bodily expression of her ecstasy a few moments before. He would have traded another look at the maelstrom for a drop of it.

"I deal in artwork: paint, sculpture, representations and installations. But I only buy and sell prototypes. Not the fabricated copies, virtuals, or sensory recordings. Just the one-and-only."

She nodded, pealing the vacuum suit down to her waist, the trapped moisture beading exquisitely in the cool air of the lock. "Of course. You get a lot more, don't you, if you've got the first one?"

"More than any fee for a reproduction license, yes. Sometimes by a factor of billions."

She paused at this, thumbs wedged into the suit's tight seal around her hips, eyes in the middle distance as if to confirm the orders of magnitude there. Her lips parted to make a noncommittal sound.

"So you buy and sell 'originals. " She said the word like so many did in the age of synthplants: a novel concept. Or possibly, a quaintly ancient one.

"I don't buy, actually. I don't like hanging onto things," he answered. She ran all ten fingers through her hair, which had been compressed by the suit. Her raised arms lofted her breasts a little in their wake. "I'm more of an agent," he continued. "I assess the authenticity of beautiful objects. I assess their value."

He could have used filaments so thin that they wouldn't have triggered a gag reflex, but he wanted her to feel it. The finger-thick cord of strands pushed her lips apart, registered the complex motions of her tongue, let her offer the sweet pressure of suction for a few moments. But the strands moved greedily inward.

There were already slender filaments touching the surface of her belly, soft and attentive. When the muscles there began to clench, the cord in her throat reacted. A miniscule gland at its tip sprayed a reflex-suppressant, a substance he had customized for her body chemistry from evidence supplied in saliva, sweat, even the flickers of her eyes. The substance—half topical, half invasive—caused a host of reactions. The sense data coming from Mira's inner ear was neatly severed from her kinesthetic awareness, causing not the nausea of dizziness, but the unsure orientation of zero-g. Her anus dialated slightly, with the cool sensation of relief, as if a dangerous accident had been narrowly averted. Her eyes closed in grim concentration as the cord pushed further.

Deep in her throat, the cord parted into separate strands, some no wider than nerves. Two bloodlessly penetrated her lungs, opening a channel of pure oxygen that Darling could control in nanoliter increments. Another filament took up residence in her stomach, where it brandished the sensations of nervousness, of panic, of awe. The remaining dozen strands snaked cautiously to various stations of Mira's heart, where, with the most minute of electrical shocks, they could seize control of its beating.