“Spinner, the disc is a hundred thousand light-years across. It will take us just fifty minutes to traverse its width…”

Spinner heard Louise turn away and mumble something.

“What was that?”

“Your kid sister. Painter-of-Faces. She asked why we aren’t seeing relativistic distortion.”

Spinner grinned. “Tell her not to bother us with such stupid questions.”

“We aren’t all hardened space pilots like you, Spinner-of Rope…”

There was no relativistic distortion — no starbow, no red or blue shift because the nightfighter wasn’t moving through the Universe. The ’fighter was hopping from point to point like a tree frog, Spinner thought, leaping between bromeliads. And at the end-point of each jump, the ship was stationary — just for a second — relative to the Galaxy.

So, no blue shift.

But the nightfighter was falling out of the Galaxy at an effective velocity of millions of times lightspeed. It was the frequency of the jumps which gave Spinner this illusion of constant, steady motion.

It was working out, just as planned.

“We’re making it, Louise,” Spinner said. “We’re making this happen.”

“Yes… But — ”

Spinner let out a mock groan. “But now you’re going to tell me how things just ain’t what they used to be, again, aren’t you?”

“Well, it’s true, Spinner,” Louise said angrily. “Look at it… Even from this distance, outside the Galaxy, you can see the handiwork of those damn photino birds.”

The Galaxy contained two main classes of stars, Louise told Spinner. Population I stars, like the Sun, had evolved in the hydrogen-rich spiral arms, away from the center. Some of these — like the blue supergiants — had been hundreds of times larger than the Sun, blazing out their energy in a short, insanely profligate youth. Population I stars tended to explode, enriching the interstellar medium — and later generations of stars — with the complex products of their nucleosynthesis.

By contrast, Population II stars had formed in regions where hydrogen fuel was in scarce supply: in the old regions close to the core, or in the clusters outside the main disc. The II stars were more uniform in size, and — by the era of the earliest human astronomy — had already been old, characterized by jostling herds of red giants.

“Look at that disc,” Louise snapped. “I don’t suppose the damn birds had to do much to the dull, stable Population IIs; those things were half-dead already. But look — oh, look at the spiral arms…”

Spinner saw how ragged the spirals were, disrupted by the blisters of yellow-red light which swelled across the lanes of dust.

“Those blisters are supernova remnants,” Louise said bitterly. “Spinner, not every star would respond as peacefully to the photino birds’ engineering as did our poor old Sun. A lot of the more spectacular, and beautiful. Population I stars would simply explode, tearing themselves apart… Probably the birds set off chain reactions of supernovae, with the wreckage of one star destabilizing another.”

Spinner stared up at the wreckage of the disc, the muddled spiral arms.

…We’re already forty thousand light-years below the disc, Spinner, her companion said. The light you’re seeing now left the stars forty millennia ago… Think of that. Forty thousand years before my birth, humans were still shivering on the edges of glaciers, making knives out of bits of stone. And the further we travel, with every second, the light is getting older: Spinner-of Rope, you’re taking us through a hail of ancient light…

Spinner laughed. “You should have been a poet.”

“What?”

“…Tell me what’s coming next, Louise.”

“All right. Spinner, do you know what a globular cluster is?”

Spinner frowned. “I think so.” She closed her eyes. “A stable ball of stars perhaps a hundred thousand of them orbiting around the main disc, in the Galactic halo.”

“Right,” Louise said. “They are Population II stars. And one particular cluster, called Omega Centauri, was one of the brightest clusters visible from old Earth.”

Spinner thought that over. “Omega Centauri. That name means it was in the line-of-sight of the Centaurus constellation.”

“Right.”

“You mean — ”

“We’re heading right for it. Keep your eyes tight shut, Spinner-of-Rope.”

Spinner turned, and looked ahead.

Beyond the fragile cage, giant stars ballooned at her, dazzling her with their billowing silence.

Upright on their zero-gee scooters, Lieserl and Milpitas descended into the deep loading bay at the base of the Northern’s lifedome. Above Lieserl the maintenance bulkhead at the base of Deck Fifteen spread out, an improbable tangle of ducts, cables and tree roots.

From the corner of her eye, Lieserl watched Milpitas curiously. He looked down at the drop beneath his feet with undisguised dread. Milpitas had been a starship traveler for a thousand years, but he was so obviously a gravity-well dweller. He visibly suffered in this zero-gee environment, his instincts quite unadapted to the fact that even if his scooter failed completely he’d simply drift through the air, perfectly safely.

Beneath the thick layer of dank, empty air into which she was descending, the base of the Northern’s lifedome had been turned transparent. The base appeared to Lieserl as a pool of cool darkness — and there, pinned against the underside of the lifedome base, like some immense insect immersed in a pond, was the slender form of the Xeelee nightfighter which bore them through space. Its sycamore-seed wings looked somehow darker even than the emptiness between stars.

The Planner turned to her stiffly and smiled. “You look uncomfortable — on that scooter.”

She suppressed a grin. Me? “Uncomfortable? Not really.” She clicked her fingers and her scooter disappeared. She smiled at Milpitas, feeling mischievous. She did a back flip in the air, rolling twice; the clear floor beneath her wheeled across her vision.

She finished up falling alongside Milpitas once more. “I don’t feel uncomfortable,” she said. “Just — well, a little foolish. Sometimes I feel these Virtual masks Mark sets up for me are a little forced.”

Milpitas had turned away from her antics, his face pale; he gripped the handles of his scooter so hard his knuckles were white.

Hastily she called subvocally for the return of her Virtual scooter. “I’m sorry,” she said, sincerely. “I guess I shouldn’t have done that.”

She saw how the sweat glistened on the patchwork scars of his brow, but he determinedly held himself erect on his scooter. “Don’t apologize,” he said primly. “We’re here on an inspection tour… to consider the disposition of the ship, not my well-being.”

So, after that brief moment of human frailty, Milpitas was back in his shell. She turned away, vaguely disappointed.

They were approaching the base of the loading bay, now. Lieserl could see the twin small jets of her scooter reflected in the clear floor; like attracting stars, she converged with her own image — in fact it was an image of an image, she thought wryly; the processors which sustained her were doing a good job with their Virtual reality creation today.

Milpitas, with a tense flick of his bony, scarred wrist, levelled off and began to sail parallel to the surface. Lieserl followed, a few feet behind.

Beneath the dome base, the Xeelee nightfighter spread its construction-material wings, huge, dormant.

“Good morning, Spinner-of-Rope,” Louise said.

Spinner stretched. Allowing herself to wake up slowly, she sucked fortified fruit juice from her helmet nipples and let the environment suit clean her skin with blasts of ultrasonics; she felt a warm trickle of urine enter her catheter.