Michael knew he could return to Kimpurusha. He didn't want to find out what had happened there since he left.

The only thing that swayed him one way or the other, was the memory of that young woman in the garden tonight. She was of the halos, hence exotic and wild. No inscape indicators hovered over her. Yet she seemed well grounded. He had liked the sound of her voice.

Most of all, he remembered what she had said. "Sometimes, you just have to jump right back…"

In his imagination, the alien cycler was an awesome place, full of mystery and unguessable age. Dis had been like that. Michael sometimes wondered if things had been different, if he had been more prepared at Dis, more wary.

He couldn't go back to Dis; couldn't recover a moment that was lost. But just maybe, at Jentry's Envy, he could still try to capture and accept the infinite one more time.

"THIS WHOLE COMPLEX is amazing," said a habitat designer walking with Dr. Herat. "It looks like it was built by hand."

Herat nodded, looking around at the vast corridor they were in. "The detailing was done by monks of the Cycler Compact."

The designer ran a hand appreciatively over a wall carving. "It's beautiful. Intimidating. But almost… obsessive. Inward-turning, you know?"

"Alien to us, yes. It challenges our notions of time. Maybe that was the idea."

"Why do they call it the halo, anyway?" somebody else said. "That implies light. Those worlds are all dark."

Herat laughed. "There's a story about that. They originally called them orphan worlds, but try to imagine encouraging people to emigrate to the orphan worlds! So they renamed them the halo worlds. Just so people would find them attractive to visit." There was a general chuckle at this.

Admiral Crisler awaited them at the doors to what looked like a ballroom. Just inside was a short line of people: the halo-worlders.

Dr. Herat was the first in line to greet them. He shook hands down the line, followed by the man he'd been talking to— a Dr. Katz, it seemed. Then it was Michael's turn.

"Michael Bequith."

"Blair Genereaux." He was surprisingly young, sharply dressed in the latest Chandaka fashion. Michael wondered if he was one of the halo-worlders or a liaison.

"Michael Bequith."

"Dr. Bequith, nice to meet you. I'm Corinna Chandra." She was tall, of indeterminate age, with dark, shadowed eyes and dusky skin. Her iron-gray hair was tied back and cascaded in a fan down her back. She wore a simple red jumpsuit, and the only adornment she wore was a stud in her left nostril. Her gaze was direct and businesslike.

"Max Cassels. How ya doing?" Someone had made an attempt to dress Max well, but he wasn't having any of it. His shirt was untucked and his hair uncombed. He looked distracted.

Was this the famous «Bud» Cassels?

"Rebecca France, M.D." Tall and slender, with gray eyes and broad cheekbones. She seemed secretly amused by something.

"Evan Laurel." This was the man from the garden last night; Michael recognized his voice. He was tall and blond, with lines of care around his eyes, about forty-five years old. He had the sigil of the Cycler Order on his jacket. And standing next to him…

"Ah, yes, the man from the garden last night," she said before Michael had a chance to introduce himself. He felt his face grow hot.

"I'm Rue," she said. Her eyes were hidden behind black pince-nez sunglasses today. "And you are…?"

"Bequith," he stammered. "Michael Bequith."

"Pleased to meet you, Mike." She smiled distantly.

That was the end of the line. He stalked into the hall, still smarting.

They'd set up a long table at one end of the hall. This place was sumptuous beyond belief— the scenes painted on the walls were neither inscape illusions nor copies done by mesobots. The ceiling showed scenes of planetfall and the conquest of nature here on Chandaka, with fabulous beasts and vines carved into the native stone that formed the arches. There was even design in the parquet flooring. Hot coffee and a good Martian breakfast was waiting for Michael as he sat himself.

Once all the members of the expedition were seated, Crisler walked to the end of the table. Where he stood, his head was framed by the baroque jaws of a dragon on the far wall. He said, "Welcome everyone. This is the first assembly of our full scientific crew. There will be seventeen of us, plus the halo worlders and a support staff of forty-five on the Banshee. Today I'd like to go over the mission profile we've developed.

"We're going to rendezvous with Jentry's Envy one point-seven light-years out from Chandaka. That's farther from an inhabited star than most of you have ever been." He smiled woodenly at the halo-worlders. "Since the Envy is receding at eight-five percent c, we can't use a conventional starship to catch up to her. If you'll check your inscape, you'll see the ship we'll be using."

A public inscape window opened over Crisler. It showed the golden limb of some gas giant planet. Clouds swirled below.

"Where's the ship?" asked Cassels.

"Patience," said Crisler. "Here it comes."

As they watched, a dark rectangle, translucent like a fine gauze, moved across the face of the planet. It resolved into a black cylinder of indeterminate size. There were some mirrored spheres at one end and a set of black rings of consecutively larger sizes appeared to be drifting behind it.

"You can't see a lot of the Banshee," said Crisler, "because it's mostly thin spars and cable. There's sixty kilometers of line played out behind the engine you see here. It ends," the image changed, "here." This was a more familiar sight: two standard balloon habitats, joined by a V-shaped elbow at their tops. It seemed to be floating alone in space.

"Banshee's state of the art: a fullerene-wrapped superconducting magnet with a field radius of eight thousand kilometers, a pion drive, and a courier class fast hyperdrive. The drive unit normally tows the habitats, so don't worry about radiation, we'll never get near the thing."

"It's a ramjet?" asked Cassels.

"Hybridized to use antimatter from an onboard supply instead of doing straight fusion. Banshee is very, very fast. We'll approach the Envy's velocity in a little under two months. We'll use the hyperdrive first to get near the Envy, so we can accelerate in empty space. We'll come out of jump three light-months behind her and accelerate up from there. We'll have a six-week window to bail out once we get there. Then we'll have reached a point where it'll be just as worth our while to stay with the Envy until its next stop. So the mission is a five-week exploratory phase, followed by a possibly extended mission of a year and a half. Luckily the Envy is on a course that will take it near the K-class star Maenad in two years. Maenad has no planets or colonies, but it's a massive enough star to start our FTL drive. We can jump back to Chandaka from there."

Dr. Herat was shifting impatiently in his seat. "That's fine. What about the cycler? All we've seen of it so far has been a set of photos. What are we going to find when we get there?"

The admiral smiled. "Well, to answer that, I think we should defer to the owner of the cycler, Mr. Cassels. Max?" He turned to the rumpled halo-worlder, who glanced around and stood up.

"Actually…" said Max. "I'm Max Cassels, all right, but I'm not Bud Cassels and I'm not the real owner of the Jentry's Envy."

He was met with a puzzled silence.

Just as Admiral Crisler opened his mouth to speak, Max said, "We decided that while we were here, the real owner would let me play the part because I've got a bit more experience dealing with… people in powerful situations. She's confident she can take over now and frankly I think the deception really annoys her." He smirked at the other halo-worlders. "So, then, let me introduce the real owner of Jentry's Envy, Rue Cassels."