Unfortunately there were two of the cyborg legionnaires. The second had wrenched Starshine’s leg off at the hip.

He died. Up above the world so high, where night always was. Where the stars never shut their eyes.

Mark had survived, somehow, and the magic of Takisian technology had made him whole again. His body anyway. The mentatic magic of Tachyon’s sister Roxalana had given him back the power of speech. She’d used a different kind of magic, to give him back something he hadn’t been able to identify yet. He was grateful anyway.

But he had not been able to face the stars. The stars that killed him.

He held up a vial. The powder within was black and silver, swirled together.

There was no hiding from the stars now. But night was Moonchild’s element. He didn’t have enough of the black-and-silver vials to take him all the way through to dawn, even if he wanted to burn them all up. But if he had to face the night, he could at least ease into it.

Besides, Moonchild had the power of self-regeneration, and now that he was over his hunger attack, he was becoming acutely aware of the pain that stabbed him in the side with every breath. It was time to heal the damage Mistral had laid on J. J. Flash in the Parthenon.

If they gave out black belts in rationalization, you’d have a third dan. It was J. J.’s voice, way back in his head.

He smiled.

So fucking what, J. J.? He uncorked the vial and tossed its contents back.

On the foreshore the woman dances through the stations of her art. She is small and finely formed. Her black hair falls unbound to her shoulders. She wears a formfitting garment of black and silver; a black half mask is yang to the yin of her face.

She dances the first Ki-Cho, simplest and most bluntly physical of the Poom-Se forms. She is stretching her muscles after long disuse, blowing the dust from her neuromuscular pathways. She slides her right foot forward and fires her right fist in a middle punch as a kiai explodes from the center of her, then cocks her left foot and snaps ninety degrees into a low block. Then step forward, punch, reverse, block, step forward, punch, the ancient dance, and activity and long familiarity begins to soothe the fear that yammers in her hindbrain and makes even her warrior’s heart flutter.

She consummates the first Ki-Cho, segues smoothly into the next, and next, and then on to the Tae-Kook forms, the shadowboxing, in which combat is more realistically acted out. Then, when she is warmed and energized and her body is well oxygenated, she moves on to Pal-Gwe, the forms of Law and harmony, the active meditation that reconciles the three Do: Heaven, Man, and Earth.

Rest easy, Mark, my older brothers, she thinks, controlling her breath so that active calm suffuses her selves. Now we have nothing to fear from Death. We have transcended, passed through the Flame, stepped through the Gateless Gate.

Don’t fear the stars. What can they do to us, who have died and risen again?

The moon comes up, laying a silver path upon the water. Where its rays touch her, her skin tingles and grows warm. The pain in her ribs fades, is gone. All that remains is serene exaltation, and motion, and the wind on her cheek, and the smells of sea and cooling soil and grass and trees, and the moon’s mother love.

Mark took a deep, shuddering breath as he came back to himself. Moonchild sure gets herself a heck of a workout, he thought. He lifted his head from between his bony knees.

The stars stared him in the face, unwinking.

He looked at the sky for a long time. I wonder if those three stars in a row down by the horizon are Orion’s Belt, he thought after a while. He had owned a telescope as a kid, a simple little Tasco three-inch refractor, and had been an avid amateur astronomer. But it had been a long time, and anyway he’d never quite been able to get the hang of the constellations.

He wished Sprout were here to see it with him. When I get somewhere the DEA can’t trace me, 171 have to send her a postcard, let her know that I still love her and that I miss her If there was any such place on Earth.

He stood up, batted the loose earth off the seat of his pants, and trudged up to the top of the promontory that dominated the tiny island. He needed some heavy-duty sleep, and he didn’t want to be soaked in case a tide came in.

What a long, strange trip it’s been… Mark had always thought of that old Dead tune as the soundtrack to his life. Even before the last few years, when things really had started getting strange. Now here he was, literally Truckin’, on a trip in its way almost as strange as the one to Takis in a Network starship: in the dimly red-lit cab of a giant gleaming white Mercedes tractor trailer highballing through the flat Iranian plains on the midnight run from Tabriz to Tehran. And on the Blaupunkt CD player was, not Jerry Garcia and company, but Hank Williams, Jr., singing about just who was coming over tonight.

He caught himself on the edge of dozing, glanced over at Otto, his co-driver, who currently had the wheel. Otto beamed and bobbed his head. He was a stocky man in probably his early forties, with a ruddy complexion and thinning blond hair. He was shy a front incisor, apparently because of a dispute with an earlier employer. Or maybe even the one he and Mark were temporarily sharing; Mark could just barely make sense out of his Bavarian accent, with its Austrian lilt and sprinkling of Italian vocabulary. The Yugos on the Montenegro had been easier to understand. They’d learned the same academic Hochdeutsch in school that Mark had.

“Nice rig you got here, man,” Mark said. Otto had had English classes in school and seemed to understand it pretty well, but he spoke the language even worse than Mark understood his southern German.

Otto beamed and nodded. “Ja, ja. Ganz modern.”

Which Mark actually understood. It was nifty. Even Mark, no connoisseur of the big rigs, could tell that. It was all ergonomic and streamlined inside, no sharp corners, and it had one of those neat little sci-fi phones that bounced signals off the ion trails left by meteorites, of all things, so you could talk to just about anywhere in the world. Then above and behind the cab you had an entire apartment, complete with a bed with burgundy silk sheets and a miniature refrigerator and a TV and VCR and a selection of really startling pornographic videos.

As a matter of fact, since he was off-shift, Mark was fully entitled to be up in the apartment, putting the bed and other modern conveniences of his choice to use. Somehow he preferred being awake and alert and down here, so that he could pop an appropriate powder in his mouth when Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard crazies came screaming out of the night with their AK-47s blazing.

There were risks involved, though hundreds of trucks a day made the run from Turkey. The situation in Iran was fraying like a cable under tension, giving way one strand at a time without the Ayatollah Khomeini’s charismatic presence to hold it intact. The ethnic, political, and religious factions that had been kept down by force of Khomeini’s personality – and brute repression – were crawling out into the air again, and most of them had guns. That was why the German trucking company had signed Mark on with few questions asked in Istanbul. Trade went on – Mark was getting the impression that was pretty much true no matter where you were or what else went down.

As a matter of fact Mark had no idea what they were actually hauling in the trailer. Whatever it was, the Islamic Iranian government was eager enough to get its hands on it. They’d been waved across the Turkish frontier with barely a glance. That may also have had something to do with the fact that trucks were lined up for a good eight klicks waiting to cross – and that no matter how hot your zeal once burned for preserving the purity of the revolution, after a dozen years at a border checkpoint your interest in what was in the nine hundred and eighty-seventh truck of the shift was bound to be guttering low.