Later, she’d cornered the captain. “Where does it go?”

He’d been a short, slightly overweight man. Not particularly good-looking. Not at all the romantic type she’d visualized piloting a starship. She’d seen enough sims to know what they were supposed to look like. Hell, she’d made one, several years earlier, in which Carmichael Conn had played the captain. Well, Conn hadn’t been much of a romantic, either, now that she thought about it. But he looked the part. This one—his name was Captain Crook, so even that didn’t work—struck her as having all the drive of an insurance statistician.

“It goes out to Pinnacle, mostly,” Captain Crook had explained. “And to the stations. And sometimes to Quraqua and Beta Pac.”

“Does it ever go anywhere nobody’s been before?” She’d felt like a child, especially when he smiled paternally at her.

“No,” he said. “The Callista has a routine schedule, Ms. Ballinger. It doesn’t go anywhere that doesn’t already have a hotel and restaurant on hand.”

He’d thought that was just impossibly funny, and his face broke up into a grin that made her think of a bulldog with a feather up its rear.

SHE’D GONE DOWN in the shuttle with a horde of other people, but there was no help for it because the damned thing only ran once an hour or something like that. But it had a bar and the studio people had managed to clear an area for her and Sandy.

Sandy gabbled all the way to the bottom. If she’d ever retained any of what he’d said, it was long gone. She knew only that she wanted to go back up and get on board the Callisto and ride it out to the stars. But not to Harvey’s Steak house and the Lynn-Wyatt. No, ma’am. Give me the wide open, get me out of the trolley lanes, and let’s go where it’s dark and strange and anything can happen.

She mentioned it to Sandy, with whom she seldom talked about anything that was important. He’d patted her on the head in that infuriating you’re-my-little-puppy way of his and told her sure, we can do that, we’ll get to it as soon as our schedule permits. Which meant, of course, that they would never do it.

But it didn’t matter because Sandy came up for renewal less than a year later, and she jettisoned him.

NEVERTHELESS, SHE DIDN’T go. Life has a way of getting busy and keeping people on the run. Her career branched out. She starting directing, and when that went well she formed a production company. The production company made some highly successful musical sims. She negotiated an invitation to take a unit on tour for live shows. They’d gone to London and New York, Berlin and Toronto. And in a sense they never went home.

But Alyx never quite got the Callisto out of her head. Sometimes it showed up at night as her last conscious thought, and sometimes it arrived with the morning alarm, when she began to reassemble what needed to be done that day. It became a kind of lost lover.

But there was a problem with the Callisto. It was chained, locked into a schedule much like the airbus that flew between Churchill and the London theater district. Back and forth. When she conjured up the great ship she understood that it wasn’t intended to run back and forth between familiar places. It was designed to go out into the night. To see what was there. And to bring stuff back.

What kind of stuff?

Something.

News of cloud cities. Of electrical intelligences. Of incorporeal beings.

Some of these ideas even found their way into her shows. She did two interstellar fantasies, Here for the Weekend and Starstruck, and both had been successful. She’d even done a cameo in the latter, as a ship’s doctor trying to deal with a plague that kills inhibitions.

She met George during the cast party to celebrate the opening of Here for the Weekend. They were in New York, and her lighting director, Freddy Chubb, knew George, had been aware he’d be in the audience, and had invited him up to the bash. The party was being held in a suite rented for the purpose in the Solomon Loft, just a couple of blocks from the Empress, where the show was running.

George was a bit rough around the edges, but she’d liked him, and it didn’t take much time for them to uncover mutual interests. Starships. Mysterious places beyond the circle of exploration. Voices that called from the vast dark wilderness. The trouble with Callisto.

“What they need,” Alyx told him, “is a playwright or a choreographer, or somebody like her, to go out with the survey teams. Somebody who’d take time, when the ships drifted through the ring systems of worlds never seen before, to consider what was being accomplished. To measure the significance of it all. And to find a way to get it onstage.”

George had nodded knowingly, in complete agreement. “Something else we need,” he said, “is to build a fleet of Callistos. Did you know we’re doing very little survey work?” George was big, in the sense that he had presence. He simply walked into a room, and people came to attention. He was already drawing interested glances. “The Academy’s resources,” he said, “are concentrated now on terraforming, and on examining the ruins at a handful of worlds. And on doing some astrophysical research. But the survey vessels are down to fewer than a dozen.”

They were standing near a window, looking out at an overcast sky. Alyx was, of course, aware of the effect she had on men, of the effect she had on everybody. Since reaching adulthood, she could not recall ever failing to get her way. She knew that, and she liked to believe it hadn’t spoiled her. That under the glamour and the power she was just the girl next door. Except maybe a bit prettier and a lot smarter. “I wish there were something I could do,” she said.

It was how Alyx became the public face of the Contact Society. And why, five years later, George invited her along on the Memphis mission.

HERMAN CULP, WHO had defended the young George Hockelmann at the Richard Dover Elementary School and later at Southwest High, graduated into a decent government job, not much challenge, and not much money, but the pay came regularly, and it was enough to afford a comfortable existence. He had a problem picking wives though, and went through three of them by the time he reached thirty. Each filed for divorce within a year of the wedding.

Emma was different. She loved him, and she didn’t expect him to be anything other than what he was. And Herman knew he wasn’t the quickest horse in the barn. But she worked hard and added her income to his, so they got by. She tolerated his Saturdays with his old gang, even when he limped home after a day of tag football. She didn’t even mind his heading off with George on their annual hunting trips to Canada. “Have a good time,” she’d tell them as they pulled away in the hauler. “Don’t shoot one another.”

He knew that she genuinely worried about the guns, that she didn’t entirely trust them, and he wished there were a way to reassure her, to convince her that they knew what they were doing, that they were safer in the woods in each other’s company than she was at home.

When George founded the Contact Society, it was more or less natural that Herman would become a charter member. Actually, Herman lacked the imagination, or the naiveté, to take aliens seriously, and he would never have gotten involved on his own. He saw it, in fact, as not much different from one of those ghost-hunter groups that ran around using sensors in haunted houses. But they needed someone to do the administrative work, and George depended on him.

When the invitation had come to go out to 1107, Herman had thought of it as a kind of extended hunting trip. “Sure,” he said, confident that Emma wouldn’t object.

And she didn’t. But after he began to understand where they were going, and what they were looking for, he almost wished she had.