“All secure?” Von Ray’s voice rang through the ship. “Open the fore vanes.”

The Mouse’s eyes began to flicker with new sight—

—the space port: lights over the field, the lavid fissures of the crust fell to dim, violet quiverings at the spectrum’s tip. But above the horizon, the ‘winds’ were brilliant.

“Pull open the side vane seven degrees.”

The Mouse flexed what would have been his left arm. And the side vane lowered like a wing of mica. “Hey, Katin,” the Mouse whispered. “Ain’t that something! Look at it--”

The Mouse shivered, crouched in a shield of light. Olga had taken over his breathing and heartbeat while the synapses of the medulla were directed to the workings of the ship.

“For Illyrion, and Prince and Ruby Red!” from one of the twins.

“Hold your vane!” the captain ordered.

“Katin look—”

“Lie back and relax, Mouse,” Katin whispered. “I shall do just that and think about my past life.”

The void roared.

“You really feel like that, Katin?”

“You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”

“You two, look up,” from Von Ray. They looked.

“Cut in stasis shifters.”

A moment Olga’s lights pricked his vision. And were gone; winds swept against him. And they were cartwheeling from the sun.

“Good-bye, moon,” Katin whispered.

And the moon fell into Neptune; Neptune fell into the sun. And the sun began to fall.

Night exploded before them.

What were the first things?

His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in the big house up the hill: New Ark (NW. 73), Ark. That was what you told somebody on the street if you should get lost, and that person would help you find home. The streets of Ark were set with transparent wind shields, and the evenings from the months of April to Iumbra were blasted with colored fumes that snagged, ripped free, and writhed above the city on the crags of Tong. His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived… Those were the childish things, the things that persisted, the first learned. Ark was the greatest city in the Pleiades Federation. Mother and Father were important people and were often away. When they were home they talked of Draco, its capital world Earth; they talked of the realignment, the prospect of sovereignty for the Outer Colonies. They had guests who were senator this, and representative that. After Secretary Morgan married Aunt Cyana, they came to dinner and Secretary Morgan gave him a hologram map of the Pleiades Federation that was just like a regular piece of paper, but when you looked at it under the tensor beam, it was like looking through a night window with dots of light flickering at different distances, and nebulous gases winding. “You live on Ark, the second planet of that sun there,” his father said, pointing down where Lorq had spread the map over the rock table beside the glass wall. Outside, spidery tilda trees writhed in the evening gale.

“Where’s Earth?”

His father laughed, loud and alone, in the dining room. “You can’t see it on that map. It’s just the Pleiades Federation.”

Morgan put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I you a map of Draco next time bring.” The secretary, whose eyes were almond-shaped, smiled.

Lorq turned to his father. “I want to go to Draco!” And then back to Secretary Morgan: “I some day to Draco want to go!” Secretary Morgan spoke like many of the people in his school at Causby; like the people on the street who had helped him find his way home when he had gotten lost when he was four (but not like his father or Aunt Cyana) and Mommy and Daddy had been so terribly upset (“We were so worried! We thought you’d been kidnapped. But you mustn’t go to those cardplayers on the street, even if they did bring you home!”). His parents smiled when he spoke like that to them, but they wouldn’t smile now, because Secretary Morgan was a guest.

His father humphed. “A map of Draco! That’s all he needs. Oh yes, Draco!”

Aunt Cyana laughed; then Mother and Secretary Morgan laughed too.

They lived on Ark but often they went on big ships to other worlds. You had a cabin where you could pass your hand in front of colored panels and have anything to eat you wanted any time, or you could go down to the observation deck and watch the winds of the void translated to visible patterns of light over the bubble ceiling, flailing colors among stars that drifted by—and you knew you were going faster and faster than anything.

Sometimes his parents went to Draco, to Earth, to cities called New York and Peking. He wondered when they would take him.

But every year, the last week in Saluary, they would go on one of the great ships to another world that was also not on the map. It was called New Brazillia and was in the Outer Colonies. He lived in New Brazillia too, on the island of Sao Orini, because his parents had a house there near the mine.

The first time he heard the names Prince and Ruby Red it was at the Sao Orini house. He was lying in the dark, screaming for light.

His mother came at last, pushed away the insect netting (it wasn’t needed because the house had sonics to keep away the tiny red bugs that occasionally bit you outside and made you feel funny for a few hours, but Mother liked to be safe). She lifted him. “Shhh! Shhh! It’s all right. Don’t you want to go to sleep? Tomorrow is the party. Prince and Ruby will be here. Don’t you want to play with Prince and Ruby at the party?” She carried him around the nursery, stopping to push the wall switch by the door. The ceiling began to rotate till the polarized pane was transparent. Through the palm fronds lapping the roof, twin moons splattered orange light. She laid him back in the bed, caressed his rough, red hair. After a while she started to leave.

“Don’t turn it off, Mommy!”

Her hand fell from the switch. She smiled at him. He felt warm, and rolled over to stare through the meshed fronds at the moons,

Prince and Ruby Red were coming from Earth. He knew that his mother’s parents were on Earth, in a country called Senegal. His father’s great-grandparents were also from Earth, from Norway. Von Rays, blond and blustering, had been speculating in the Pleiades now for generations. He wasn’t sure what they speculated, but it must have been successful. His family owned the Illyrion mine that operated just beyond the northern tip of Sao Orini. His father occasionally joked with him about making him the little foreman of the mines. That’s what “speculation” probably was. And the moons were drifting away; he was sleepy.

He did not remember being introduced to the blue-eyed, black-haired boy with the prosthetic right arm, nor his spindly sister. But he recalled the three of them—himself, Prince, and Ruby—playing together the next afternoon in the garden.

He showed them the place behind the bamboo where you could climb up into the carved stone mouths.

“What are those?” Prince asked.

“Those are the dragons,” Lorq explained.

“There aren’t any dragons,” Ruby said.

“Those are dragons. That’s what Father says.”

“Oh.” Prince caught his false hand over the lower lip and hoisted himself up. “What are they for?”

“You climb up in them. Then you can climb down again. Father says the people who lived here before us carved them.”

“Who lived here before?” Ruby asked. “And what did they want with dragons? Help me up, Prince.”

“I think they’re silly.” Prince and Ruby were now both standing between the stone fangs above him. (Later he would learn that “the people who had lived here before” were a race extinct in the Outer Colonies for twenty thousand years; their carvings had survived, and on these ruined foundations, Von Ray had erected this mansion.)