The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.

"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of shit. You haven't been talking to my mother again, have you?"

It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he says slowly.

"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree —

"To summarize: Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly.

"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks.

Sadeq breathes deeply again: "Yes, I think so."

Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks.

He raises a dark eyebrow: "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation."

Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations."

"What! From the alien?"

The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. "Where else?" she asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We've known for years there's a whole alien packet-switching network out there, and we're just getting spillover from some of their routers. It turns out there's a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io – there is a purpose to all this activity."

Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?"

"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to real-time. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise."

The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god," it says. "And she needs to convince the peanut gallery back home that she's got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, you're it, monkey boy. There's a slot open for the post of ship's theologian on the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don't suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?"

Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that doesn't exist.

The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud – it's a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion – or a hard link to the ship's control module – it's the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast the Field Circus is moving. Some time ago, the ship's momentum exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb.

A ginger-and-brown cat – who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male – sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer, the other a half-empty cocktail glass.

"It wouldn't be so bad if she is giving me some sign," says one of them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. "No; that not right. It's the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with her."

The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the ceiling. "Take it from one who knows," he says: "If you knew, you'd have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the same thing."

The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. "Pierre, if talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping Amber —"

Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can muster. "Be glad she has no ears in here," he hisses. His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it. "You've had too fucking much to drink, Boris."

A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. "Shut up, you," says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back, lets the dregs trickle down his throat. "Maybe you're right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude about the queen." He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. "Am just getting depressed."

"You're good at that," Pierre observes.

Boris sighs again. "Evidently. If our positions are reversed —"

"I know, I know, you'd be telling me the fun is in the chase and it's not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn't believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that." Pierre snorts. "Life isn't fair, Boris – live with it."

"I'd better go – " Boris stands.

"Stay away from Ang," says Pierre, still annoyed with him. "At least until you're sober."

"Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread." Boris blinks irritably. "Enforcing social behavior. It doesn't normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public."

He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat.

"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship.

The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds," she says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds."

"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please."

"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. "If you'd been following the news from back home, you'd have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. They're having another networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in the ground."

"Switched … entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?"

The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I might tell you," she suggests.

"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go – freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!"

"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. "You apes – if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks faintly confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?"