Rockvecs, Orphu said softly. He was obviously looking at the same video source. There are a few million scattered around the Belt.

Are they as hostile as everyone says? As soon as he sent his question, Mahnmut was afraid it would type him as anxious.

I don’t know. My guess is that they are—they chose to evolve in a much more competitive culture than we created. Word is that they fear and loathe post-humans and flatly hate us outlying moravecs. Koros III might know if the legends of their ferocity are true.

Koros? Why would he know?

Not many moravecs know it, but he led an expedition to the rocks about sixty e-years ago for Asteague/Che and the Five Moons Consortium. Nine moravecs went with him. Only three others returned.

Mahnmut pondered this for a minute. He wished he knew more about weapons; if the rockvecs wanted to kill them now, did they possess an energy weapon or hyperkinetic missile that could catch this ship? It seemed unlikely—not at their current velocity of more than 0.193 light speed. Mahnmut said to Orphu, What are the three ways Proust’s characters tried to solve the puzzle of life—and failed?

The big deep-space moravec cleared his virtual throat. First, they followed their noses down the scent-trail to nobility, title, birthright, and the landed gentry, said Orphu. Marcel, the narrator, tries this route for two thousand pages or so. At least he believes that in the more important aristocracy lies nobility of character. But it all comes up empty.

Just snobbery, says Mahnmut.

Never just snobbery, my friend, sends Orphu, his booming voice growing more animated over their private line. Proust saw snobbery as the glue that holds society—any society, in any age—together. He studies it on all levels throughout the book. He never tires of its manifestations.

I did, Mahnmut said quietly, hoping that his honesty wouldn’t offend his friend.

Orphu’s rumble, vibrating in the subsonic even on the line, assured Mahnmut that he hadn’t.

What was the second path he tried to follow to the answer of the puzzle of life? asked Mahnmut.

Love, said Orphu.

Love? repeated Mahnmut. There had been plenty of it in the more than 3,000 pages of In Search of Lost Time, but it had all seemed so—hopeless.

Love, boomed Orphu. Sentimental love and physical lust.

You mean the sentimental love that Marcel—and Swann, I guess—felt for their family, Marcel’s grandmother?

No, Mahnmut—the sentimental attraction to familiar things, to memory itself, and to the people who fall into the realm of familiar things.

Mahnmut glanced at the tumbling asteroid called Gaspra. According to Ri Po’s databar, it took Gaspra about seven standard hours to revolve completely around his axis. Mahnmut wondered if such a place could ever be a source of familiarity, of sentimental attraction, to him, to any sentient being. Well, the dark seas of Europa are.

Pardon?

Mahnmut felt his organic layers prickle when he realized he had spoken aloud on the private line. Nothing. Why didn’t love lead to the answer to the puzzle of life?

Because Proust knew—and his characters discover—that neither love nor its more noble cousin, friendship, ever survive the entropy blades of jealousy, boredom, familiarity, and egotism, said Orphu, and for the first time in their direct communication, Mahnmut fancied that he heard a tone of sadness in the big moravec’s voice.

Never?

Never, said Orphu and rumbled a deep sigh. Remember the last lines of “Swann in Love”?—“To think that I wasted years of my life, that I hoped to die, that I had my greatest love affair with a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”

I noted that, said Mahnmut, but I didn’t know at the time if it was supposed to be terribly funny or horribly bitter or unspeakably sad. Which was it?

All three, my friend, sent Orphu of Io. All three.

What was Proust’s characters’ third path to the puzzle of life? asked Mahnmut. He increased the O2 input to his chamber to clear away the cobweb-tendrils of sadness that were threatening to gather in his heart.

Let’s save that for another time, said Orphu, perhaps sensing his interlocutor’s mood. Koros III is going to increase the scoop radius and it might be fun to watch the fireworks on the X-ray spectra.

They passed Mars’s orbit and there was nothing to see; Mars, of course, was on the opposite side of the sun. They passed Earth’s orbit a day later and there was nothing to see; Earth was far around the curve of its orbit on the plane of the ecliptic far below. Mercury was the only planet clearly visible on the monitors as they flashed above it, but by then the roar and blaze of the sun itself filled all their viewing screens.

As they passed over the sun at a perihelion of only 97,000,000 kilometers—radiator filaments trailing heat—the boron sail was collapsed, reeled in, and folded into its aft dome. Orphu helped the remote handlers with the job and Mahnmut watched on the ship’s screens as his friend shuttled to and fro, his surface scars and pitting quite visible in the blazing sunlight.

Two hours before they were scheduled to fire the fusion engines, Koros III surprised Mahnmut by inviting everyone to gather at the control-room module near the magnetic scoop horns.

There were no internal corridors in the ship. The plan had been for Koros to transfer to The Dark Lady via cables and grabholds once the ship was finished decelerating and in Martian orbit. Mahnmut was dubious about making the trip across the hull now to the control room.

Why should we physically gather to talk? he asked Orphu on their private line. And you can’t fit in the control-room module anyway.

I can hover outside, view all of you through the port, connect hardlines to the control module for a secure communication.

Why is that better than conferencing on the allcall?

I don’t know, said Orphu, but we fire the engines in one hundred fourteen minutes, so why don’t I shuttle around to the ship’s hold and pick you up?

That’s what they did. Mahnmut had no problem with vacuum and hard radiation, of course, but the thought of disconnecting from the ship and somehow being left behind had rattled him. Orphu met him at the cargo bay and Mahnmut had an unforgettable glimpse of The Dark Lady, starkly illuminated by the sun’s blinding rays, tucked in the spacecraft’s hold like a salt shark in a kraken’s belly.

Orphu used his manipulators to place Mahnmut in a sheltered niche in the Ionian’s carapace and clipped onto guidelines for the reaction-jet trip around the dark belly of the ship, up its girdered and torused ribs, and forward along the upper hull. Mahnmut glanced at the spherical fusion engines, clipped onto the prow like design afterthoughts, and checked the time—one hour and four minutes until ignition.

Mahnmut studied the ultrastealth material enclosing the ship proper—dead-black and porous baffle-wrap that made the ship, minus its fusion engines, boron sail, and other expendables, theoretically invisible to sight, radar, deep radar, gravitonic reflection, infrared, UV and neutrino probes. But what difference does that make if we go in on four pillars of fusion flame for two days?

The control room had an airlock. Mahnmut helped Orphu connect his shielded hardline, and then he cycled through the lock and resumed breathing air the old-fashioned way.

“This ship is carrying weapons,” said Koros III without preamble; he spoke the words through the air. His multifaceted eyes and black humanoid shell reflected the red halogen lights.