The Rum Runner's viewscreens were filled to the edges with flaming green; the physical windows had all turned opaque. "Take us in once around the star's equator," said Jag, "then do a polar loop. It's possible that the star's structure isn't uniform. Before I get too worked up over these absorption lines, I want to be sure the spectra are the same all over."

It took almost five hours at one one-thousandth of lightspeed to complete the five-million-kilometer sweep around the equator, and another five to do the loop from pole to pole. Longbottle kept the Rum Runner corkscrewing all the while. Jag's eyes were glued to his scanning equipment, watching the dark vertical absorption lines. He kept muttering to himself, "Silt in the water, silt in the water" — the truth remained hidden.

Jag had no trouble measuring the star's mass from its footprint in hyperspace; it was somewhat heavier than he'd expected. Except for the color, the star's surface was fairly typical, consisting of tightly packed beads of light and dark caused by convection cells in the photosphere. It even had sunspots, but unlike those of other stars, these were'all connected in dumbbell shapes. It was, without doubt, a star — but it was also unlike any star Jag had ever seen before.

Finally, the flybys were complete. "Ready home to go?" asked Longbottle.

Jag lifted all four arms in a gesture of resignation. "Yes."

"Mystery solved?"

"No. A star like this should simply not exist."

The Rum Runner swept back toward Starplex, Jag muttering over his data for the entire journey.

Keith lay in bed next to his wife, unable to sleep. He looked over at Rissa's form in the darkness, watched the thin sheet covering her rise and fall in time with her breathing.

She deserved better, he thought. He exhaled, trying to force the worries out of himself with the escaping breath, and conjured up images of happier times.

Rissa had dark eyes that turned into upward-arching crescents when she smiled. Her mouth was small, but her lips were full — half as tall as they were wide. Her mother had been Italian; her father, Spanish. She had inherited her lustrous dark hair and his fiery eyes. In his forty-six years of life, Keith Lansing had never met anyone who looked more appealing by candlelight than Rissa.

When they'd first met, in 2070, he'd been twenty-two and she'd been twenty, with a wonderfully curvy figure. Of course, her body shape was changing in natural ways as she aged; she was still in fine condition, but the proportions had shifted. Back then, Keith couldn't have imagined finding a woman of forty-four attractive, but to his infinite surprise, his tastes had altered as the years passed, and although two decades of marriage had doubtless dulled his immediate reaction to her, when he saw Rissa in an unusual way — in a new suit, or stretching to reach something on a top shelf, or with her hair swept in a different manner — she could still take his breath away.

And yet…

And yet, Keith was aware that time was taking its toll on him. His hair was departing. Oh, there were "cures" for that — imagine suggesting that something as natural as male-pattern baldness required a cure! — but to employ them seemed vain and foolish. Besides, middle-aged scientists were supposed to be bald. It was in the rule book somewhere.

Keith's father had had a full head of dark hair up until he'd been killed at age fifty-five; Keith wondered now whether he'd used a hair restorer. But for Keith to do something like that would be silly.

He remembered Mandy Lee, a holovid star he'd been infatuated with as a twelve-year-old boy. Back then, nothing had been more exciting to him than large breasts on a woman, probably because none of the girls in his class yet had them; they were a symbol of the forbidden, alien world of adult sexuality. Well, Mandy — dubbed "the binary star system" by some wag at HV Guide — was famous for her physique. But Keith had lost all interest in her when he'd found out that her breasts were fake; he couldn't look at her without imagining the implants beneath the swelling alabaster skin and the surgical scars (even though he knew, of course, the anabolizing laser scalpels would have left no marks at all). Well, he'd be damned if he'd turn his head into a fake; he'd be damned if he'd let people looking at him think, hey, the guy's really bald, you know…

And so there they were, Rissa Cervantes and Keith

Lansing: still in love, if not in the passionate way of their youth, in what was ultimately a more satisfying, more relaxing fashion.

And yet — And yet, dammit, he'd just turned forty-six. He was aging, balding, graying, and hadn't been with another woman since his three — such a small number! — awkward encounters in high school and at university. Three, plus Rissa — a total of four. An average of less than one a decade.

Christ, he thought, even a Waldahud could count my partners on the fingers of one hand.

Keith knew he shouldn't think about such things, knew that what he and Clarissa had was something most people never really achieved: a love affair that grew and evolved as they aged, a relationship that was solid and secure and warIll.

And yet — And yet there was Lianne Karendaughter. Like Mandy Lee, the very symbol of beauty in his youth, Lianne had exquisite Asian features; something about Asian women had always appealed to Keith. He didn't know how old Lianne was, but there was no doubt that she was younger than Rissa. Of course, as ship's director, Keith could easily access Lianne's personnel records, but he was afraid to do so. For God's sake, she might be as young as thirty. Lianne had come aboard the last time Starplex had passed by Tau Ceti, and now, as Internal Operations manager, she and Keith often spent hours together on the bridge. And yet, to his surprise, no matter how much time he spent with her, he always wished it were more.

He hadn't done anything foolish yet. Indeed, he thought he had everything under control. Still, he'd always been an introspective sort; he wasn't blind to what was going on.

Midlife crisis, the fear that he was no longer virile. And what better way to dispel that notion than by bedding a beautiful, young woman?

Idle fantasies. Of course, of course.

He rolled onto his side, facing away from Rissa, tucking himself into a semifetal position. He didn't want to do anything that would hurt Rissa. But if she never learned about it — Christ, man, get a grip.

She'd find out for sure. How would he face her after that? And their son Saul? How would he face him? He'd seen his son beam at him with pride, yell at him in fury, but he'd never seen him look at him with disgust.

If only he could get some sleep. If only he could stop tormenting himself.

He stared into the darkness, eyes wide open.

Once the Rum Runner had docked, Longbottle went off to eat, and Jag returned to the bridge. The Waldahud was now keeping erect by use of an intricately carved cane — still better than reverting to four legs.

Keith, Rissa, Thor, and Lianne had all had a night's sleep, and Rhombus — well, Ibs didn't sleep, a fact that made their long lifespans seem doubly unfair. Jag usually stood in front of the six workstations to give reports, but this time he walked back to the seating gallery and collapsed into the center chair, letting the others rotate their stations to face him.

Keith looked at the Waldahud expectantly. "Well?"

Jag marshaled his thoughts a moment, then began to bark.

"As some of you know, stars are divided into three broad age categories.

First-generation stars are the oldest in the universe, and consist almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the two original elements.

Less than 0.02 percent of their composition is heavier atoms, and those, of course, were produced internally through the stars' own fusion processes. When first-gens go nova or supernova, the interstellar dust clouds are enriched with these heavier elements.