Lorq always associated Prince Red with the coming and going of light.

He was sitting naked by the swimming pool on the roof, reading for his petrology exam, when the purple leaves at the rock entrance shook. The skylight hummed with the gale outside; the towers of Ark, vaned to glide in the wind, were distorted behind the glittering frost.

“Dad!” Lorq snapped off the reader and stood up. “Hey, I came in third in senior mathematics. Third!”

Von Ray, in fur-rimmed parka stepped through the leaves. “And I suppose you call yourself studying now. Wouldn’t it be easier in the library? How can you concentrate up here with all this distraction?”

“Petrology,” Lorq said, holding up his note-recorder. “I don’t really have to study for that. I’ve got honors already.”

Only in the last few years had Lorq learned to relax under his parents’ demand for perfection. Having learned, he had discovered that the demands were now ritual and phatic, and gave way to communication if they were allowed to ride out.

“Oh,” his father said. “You did.” Then he smiled. The frost on his hair turned to water as he unlaced his parka. “At least you’ve been studying instead of crawling through the bowels of Caliban.”

“Which reminds me, Dad. I’ve registered her in the New Ark Regatta. Will you and Mother go up to see the finish?”

“If we can. You know Mother hasn’t been feeling too well recently. This past trip was a little rough. And you worry her with your racing.”

“Why? I haven’t let it interfere with my schoolwork.”

Von Ray shrugged. “She thinks it’s dangerous.” He laid the parka over the rock. “We read about your prize at Trantor last month. Congratulations. She may worry about you, but she was as proud as a partridge when she could tell all those stuffy club women you were her son.”

“I wish you’d been there.”

“We wanted to be. But there was no way to cut a month off the tour. Come, I’ve got something to show you.”

Lorq followed his father along the stream that curled from the pool. Von Ray put his arm around his son’s shoulder as they started the steps that dropped beside the waterfall into the house. At their weight, the steps began to escalate.

“We stopped on Earth, this trip. Spent a day with Aaron Red. I believe you met him a long time ago. Red-shift Limited?”

“Out on New Brazillia,” Lorq said. “At the mine.”

“Do you remember that far back?” The stairs flattened and carried them across the conservatory. Cockatoos sprung from the brush, beat against the transparent wall where snow lay outside the bottom panes, then settled in the bloodflowers, knocking petals to the sand. “Prince was with him. A boy your age, perhaps a little older.” Lorq had been vaguely aware of Prince’s doings over the years as a child is aware of the activity of the children of parents’ friends. Some time back, Prince had changed schools four times very rapidly, and the rumor that had filtered to the Pleiades was that only the fortunes of Red-shift, Ltd., kept the transfers from being openly labeled expulsion.

“I remember him,” Lorq said. “He only had one arm.”

“He wears a black glove to the shoulder with a jeweled armband at the top, now. He’s a very impressive young man. He said he remembered you. You two got into some mischief or other back then. He, at least, seems to have quieted down some.”

Lorq shrugged from under his father’s arm and stepped onto the white rugs that scattered the winter garden. “What do you want to show me?”

Father went to one of the viewing columns. It was a transparent column four feet thick supporting the clear roofing with a capital of floral glass. “Dana, do you want to show Lorq what you brought for him?”

“Just a moment.” His mother’s figure formed in the column. She was sitting in the swan chair. She took a green cloth from the table beside her and opened it on the quilted brocade of her lap.

“They’re beautiful!” Lorq claimed. “Where did you find heptodyne quartz?”

The stones, basically silicon, had been formed at geological pressures so that in each crystal, about the size of a child’s fist, light flowed along the shattered blue lines within the jagged forms.

“I picked them up when we stopped at Cygnus. We were staying near the Exploding Desert of Krall. We could see it flashing from our hotel window beyond the walls of the city. It was quite as spectacular as it’s always described. One afternoon when your father was off in conference, I took the tour. When I saw them, I thought of your collection and bought these for you.”

“Thanks.” He smiled at the figure in the column.

Neither he nor his father had seen his mother in person for four years. Victim of a degenerative mental and physical disease that often left her totally incommunicative, she had retired to her suite in the house with her medicines, her diagnostic computers, her cosmetics, her gravothermy and reading machines. She—or more often one of her androids programmed to her general response pattern—would appear in the viewing columns and present a semblance of her normal appearance and personality. In the same way, through android and telerama report, she “accompanied” Von Ray on his business travels, while her physical presence was confined in the masked, isolate chambers that no one was allowed to enter except the psychotechnician who came quietly once a month.

“They’re beautiful,” he repeated, stepping closer.

“I’ll leave them in your room this evening.” She picked one up with dark fingers and turned it over. “I find them fascinating myself. Almost hypnotic.”

“Here.” Von Ray turned to one of the other columns. “I have something else to show you. Aaron had apparently heard of your interest in racing, and knew how well you were doing.” Something was forming in the second column. “Two of his engineers had just developed a new ion-coupler. They told us it was too sensitive for commercial use and wouldn’t be profitable for them to manufacture on any large scale. But Aaron said the response level would be excellent for small-scale racing craft. I offered to buy it for you. He wouldn’t hear of it; he’s sent it to you as a gift.”

“He did?” Lorq felt excitement lap above surprise. “Where is it?”

In the column a crate stood on the corner of a loading platform. The fence of Nea Limani Yacht Basin diminished in the distance between the guide towers. “Over at the field?” Lorq sat down in the green hammock hanging from the ceiling. “Good! I’ll look at it when I go down this evening. I still have to get a crew for the race.”

“You just pick your crew from people hanging around the spacefield?” Mother shook her head. “That always worries me.”

“Mom, people who like racing, kids who are interested in racing ships, people who know how to sail, they hang around the shipyards. I know half the people at Nea Limani anyway.”

“I still wish you’d get your crew from among your school friends, or people like that.”

“What wrong is with people who like this talk?” He smiled slightly.

“I didn’t say anything of that nature at all. I just meant you should use people you know.”

“After the race,” his father cut in, “what do you intend to do with the rest of your vacation?”

Lorq shrugged. “Do you want me to foreman out at the Sao Orini mine like last year?”

His father’s eyebrows separated then snarled over the vertical crevices above his nose. “After what happened with that miner’s daughter…?” The brows unsnarled again. “Do you want to go out there again?”

Lorq shrugged once more.

“Have you thought of anything that you’d like to do?” This from his mother.

“Ashton Clark will send me something. Right now I’ve got to go pick up my crew.” He stood up from the hammock. “Mom, thanks for the stones. We’ll talk about vacation when school is really over.”