The author gratefully acknowledges the invaluable aid of Helen Adam and Russell FitzGerald with problems of Grail and Tarot lore. Without their help NOVA would cast much dimmer light.

“Hey, Mouse! Play us something,” one of the mechanics called from the bar.

“Didn’t get signed on no ship yet?” chided the other. “Your spinal socket’ll rust up. Come on, give us a number.”

The Mouse stopped running his finger around the rim of his glass. Wanting to say “no” he began a “yes.” Then he frowned.

The mechanics frowned too:

He was an old man.

He was a strong man.

As the Mouse pulled his hand to the edge of the table, the derelict lurched forward. Hip banged the counter. Long toes struck a chair leg: the chair danced on the flags.

Old. Strong. The third thing the Mouse saw: blind.

He swayed before the Mouse’s table. His hand swung up; yellow nails hit the Mouse’s cheek. (Spider’s feet?) “You, boy…”

The Mouse stared at the pearls behind rough, blinking lids.

“You, boy. Do you know what it was like?”

Must be blind, the Mouse thought. Moves like blind. Head sits forward so on his neck. And his eyes—

The codger flapped out his hand, caught a chair, and yanked it to him. It rasped as he fell on the seat. “Do you know what it looked like, felt like, smelt like—do you?”

The Mouse shook his head; the fingers tapped his cheek.

“We were moving out, boy, with the three hundred suns of the Pleiades glittering like a puddle of jeweled milk on our left, and all blackness wrapped around our right. The ship was me; I was the ship. With these sockets—” he tapped the insets in his wrists against the table: click “—I was plugged into my vane-projector. Then—” the stubble on his jaw rose and fell with the words “—centered on the dark, a light! It reached out, grabbed our eyes as we lay in the projection chambers and wouldn’t let them go. It was like the universe was torn and all day raging through. I wouldn’t go off sensory input. I wouldn’t look away. All the colors you could think of were there, blotting the night. And finally the shock waves: the walls sang! Magnetic inductance oscillated over our ship, nearly rattled us apart. But then it was too late. I was blind.” He sat back in his chair. “I’m blind, boy. But with a funny kind of blindness; I can see you. I’m deaf; but if you talked to me, I could understand most of what you said. Olfactory endings all dead, and the taste buds over my tongue.” His hand went flat on the Mouse’s cheek. “I can’t feel the texture of your face. Most of the tactile nerve endings were killed too. Are you smooth, or are you bristly and gristly as I am?’ He laughed on yellow teeth in red, red gums. “Dan is blind in a funny way.” His band slipped down the Mouse’s vest, catching the laces. “A funny way, yes. Most people go blind in blackness. I have a fire in my eyes. I have that whole collapsing sun in my head. The light lashed the rods and cones of my retina to constant stimulation, balled up a rainbow and stuffed each socket full. That’s what I’m seeing now. Then you, outlined here, highlighted there, a solarized ghost across hell from me. Who are you?”

“Pontichos,” the Mouse offered. His voice sounded like wool with sand, grinding. “Pontichos Provechi.”

Dan’s face twisted. “Your name is… What did you say? It’s shaking my head apart. There’s a choir crouched in my ears, shouting down into my skull twenty-six hours a day. The nerve ends, they’re sending out static, the death rattle that sun’s been dying ever since. Over that, I can just hear your voice, like an echo of something shouted a hundred yards off.” Dan coughed and sat back, hard. “Where are you from?” He wiped his mouth.

“Here in Draco,” the Mouse said. “Earth.”

“Earth? Where? America? You come from a little white house on a tree-lined street, with a bicycle in the garage?”

Oh yes, the Mouse thought. Blind, and deaf too. The Mouse’s speech was good, but he’d never even tried to correct his accent.

“Me. I’m from Australia. From a white house. I lived just outside Melbourne. Trees. I had a bicycle. But that was a long time ago. A long time, wasn’t it, boy? You know Australia, on Earth?”

“Been through.” The Mouse squirmed in his chair and wondered how to get away.

“Yes. That’s how it was. But you don’t know, boy! You can’t know what it’s like to stagger through the rest of your life with a nova dug into your brain, remembering Melbourne, remembering the bicycle. What did you say your name was?”

The Mouse looked left at the window, right at the door.

“I can’t remember it. The sound of that sun blots out everything.”

The mechanics, who had been listening till now, turned to the bar.

“Can’t remember a thing any more!”

At another table a black-haired woman fell back to her card game with her blond companion.

“Oh, I’ve been sent to doctors! They say if they cut out the nerves, optic and aural, slice them off at the brain, the roaring, the light—it might stop! Might?” He raised his hands to his face. “And the shadows of the world that come in, they’d stop too. Your name? What’s your name?”

The Mouse got the words ready in his mouth, along with, excuse me, huh? I gotta go.

But Dan coughed, clutched at his ears.

“Ahhh! That was a pig trip, a dog trip, a trip for flies! The ship was the Roc and I was a cyborg stud for Captain Lorq Von Ray. He took us”— Dan leaned across the table—”this close”—his thumb brushed his forefinger—”this close to hell. And brought us back. You can damn him, and damn Illyrion for that, boy, whoever you are. Wherever you’re from!” Dan barked, flung back his head; his hands jumped on the table.

The bartender glanced over. Somebody signaled for a drink. The bartender’s lips tightened, but he turned off, shaking his head.

“Pain,” Dan’s chin came down, “after you’ve lived with it long enough, isn’t pain any more. It’s something else. Lorq Von Ray is mad! He took us as near the edge of dying as he could. Now he’s abandoned me, nine-tenths a corpse, here at the rim of the Solar System. And where’s he gone—” Dan breathed hard. Something flapped in his lungs. “Where’s blind Dan going to go now?”

Suddenly he grabbed the sides of the table.

“Where is Dan going to go!”

The Mouse’s glass tumbled, smashed on the stone.

“You tell me!”

He shook the table again.

The bartender was coming over.

Dan stood, overturning his chair, and rubbed his knuckles on his eyes. He took two staggering steps through the sunburst that rayed the floor. Two more. The last left long maroon prints.

The black-haired woman caught her breath. The blond man closed the cards.