"No," he said. "Pella. Tell me the truth. I swear—it doesn't go past me."

Long silence. Then: "Worth your life. Mine. Yours. The ship. Yeah, I know we've got Hawkins troubles. But screw 'em. Blow 'em. Ships have got lost before now in the deep dark. But we can't goout with this guy on our tail, and he will be, he can feelus in the dark."

"We can't not!"

"If Patrick's in port, this isn't the time I'd have sent shock-waves through the informational ambient here, you know what I mean? You seriously understand?"

"Patrick-who?"

"Patrick's enough. Used to be Europe. "

"Mazian himself?"

"Yeah."

"He's alive."

"Oh, yeah. Stuff I can't say, Christian-person."

" Christian, dammit. I have a name."

"Yeah. So did I. But names are little things. Winner. Loser. Right. Wrong. This side, that side. All that shit. On old Earth—they used to be superstitious about names. Like if you could call somebody the right one, you could catch their soul. And you don't wantto engage on that level, you truly don't, Chrissy-love. You don't want that karma with me."

"Don't play me for a fool, dammit, I don't know your words."

"I like you. Like you too much."

"Is that why you're sleeping with my brother?"

"Chrissy… Christian. Is that a matter? Is that sincerely a matter? We are talking about survival. We are talking about something…"

Capella didn't finish.

"Yeah?" he said, notdismissing the matter of older-brother and Capella and what he thought had been going on.

"Christian. Not all of us trade with you. Some have their own notions. I need to talk with the captain."

"Yeah," he said.

It was all heknew to do.

—iv—

SABY WAS RIGHT. THE RESTAURANT view was spectacular, a real viewport (fortified, the sign at the door assured the patrons: even the Battle of Pell hadn't compromised it) that reached from polished black floor to mirror-finish ceiling, a revolving view of the stars and the planet that spacers themselves rarely saw so directly. To either side, making silhouettes of the tables, dwarfing human dancers, the walls were high-rez screens, with magnified, filtered views, that spun and whirled in a camera-construct, a montage of images that a spacer's body reacted to in expectation of accel and vector shifts that didn't, of course, happen.

Meaning a spacer could get motion-sickness walking across the floor, if he was a cabin-dwelling merchanter whose well-loaded ship didn't regularly do the maneuvers those shots described, but whose stomach knew when a g-shift ought to happen. Tom kept his eyes on the level surface where the floor was real as the waiter captain led them to their table. A stationers' revenge on spacers, that tape was, that produced those images… or the stationers that produced it had no remotest idea they'd made an amusement ride for a spacer's force-trained body.

Dance, did the woman want? Damned show-off spacer-femme. He was going to fall on his ass before he reached the table. Tripped over his own feet, but the chair saved him.

Grace under pressure.

They sat. They had cocktails. The food was good, if scant by his reckoning, small vegetable things he hadn't seen on the tour, and a good sauteed fish with, they advertised, genuine herbs (not difficult) and genuine citrus sauce, an expensive and tongue-puzzling treat. But not an extravagance at Pell. He'd seenoranges growing. He'd got himself a leaf—well, Saby had it, but he'd caught it in mid-flight. He'd seen fish swimming in a man-made brook, almost enough to put him off eating this one. But not quite. It was good. The lights came and went and whirled about the polished floor.

And against the light, shadows came, once, that he took for children, until a handful of spacer-diners near them stopped, and stared.

He looked, too, and saw the glint of breathing-masks with a little increase of heart rate. Downers, a handful of them, and the sight richocheted off the study he'd done as a boy—off all the sense of the strange and unfathomable that a boy could romanticize. Alien intelligence, if eccentric and even childlike to human estimation.

"Look," he whispered to Saby, not to be rude, because they were quite near.

"Local sun's sacred to them," Saby said. "They can come here. It's the law."

"Law, hell. They're people. It's their world. " He'd thought he almost liked Saby tonight. Not with that attitude.

"Yeah," Saby said. "But good there's a law. Damned shame we have to make a law. What I hear… we had to explain crime to them."

"They have deviants."

"Not criminals."

He was discussing criminality with a Corinthiancrewwoman. "No kidnappers?"

"No reason, I guess. " Saby refused the bait. "But I wouldn't be a Downer. I'd rather have our faults… since we can't figure theirs. Seems safer."

The waiter came. Saby ordered a drink. He did. The band had started. He saw the Downer-shadows bobbing to the music, knees bending ever so slightly, to tunes light, classic, rather than current. Couples were walking onto the floor.

Going to fall on my ass, he thought.

They had the cocktails. His was lime and vodka, hers was import Scotch. The music was slow and soft, and the Downers had filed away to the edges of the dark. They lived in the arteries and veins of Pell Station, where their oxy-ratio was law. They maintained, they worked, they asked no pay but the sight of the Sun of Downbelow, Pell's Star. They worked a season or two and then went down again to the world, in the springtime of their main continents, when, the brochures said, Pell had to take to human resources, and make do without its small and industrious helpers. No Downer would work in springtime. Mating consumed them. Females left their burrows and took to walking, simply walking, wherever their fancy took them; and males followed them, far, as far as their resolve and their interest could drive them, until the last gave up, lost interest, resigned the Downer lass to his last rival, who had still to find a place, and dig a nest, and satisfy the far-walking adventuress of his craft and his passion and his worth. What need of nations or boundaries, or such territorial notions? The object of their desires went where she pleased.

Not likely they'd form a government. Not likely they'd fight a war.

Not likely they'd have achieved their dearest dream, to see their Sun, except as human guests.

But they traded their agriculture for human goods, they maintained complex machinery they had no innate impulse to invent themselves. Ask what they might become, or understand, or do, in centuries to come.

"Penny for your thoughts."

"Huh?"

"They say that, this side of the Line. Penny for your thoughts. What are you thinking?"

"About the Downers. About getting into things you don't understand. About fools that go wandering in warehouses. Why haven't they hauled me back to the ship?"

Saby lifted a bare and shapely shoulder. Pretty. A distraction to clear thinking. You could get to looking in her eyes and missing the thoughts entirely.

Saby didn't answer his question. Never had. They'd sat in the room for most of three days, shopped via the vid system, used the Aldebaran'srestaurant, the Aldebaran'sgym, the Aldebaran'shair salon, swum in the pool, baked in the sauna… had no personal conversation, just a Race you to the other side, and a, What's your favorite color? kind of dealing with each other, shallow, safe. Saby liked green, loved to dance, preferred coffee to tea, liked the skintight craze and bought him some for evening as well as day. Saby could take an hour in the bath and run a chain of figures in her head instantly. Those things he'd learned about Saby. But talk about the ship, Christian, the captain, even Tink,—no. Dead cutoff.