They turned up Rue de Les Astronauts past the restaurants and hotel marquees. Dan dug under the rope around his middle to scratch his stomach, then pushed his long hair from his forehead. “Where do you get drunk around here if you’re a working cyborg stud?” Suddenly he pointed down a smaller street. “There!”

At the bend of the L-shaped street was a small cafe-bar with a crack across the window, Le Sideral. The door was closing behind two women.

“Fine,” Dan drawled, and loped ahead of Lorq and Brian. “I envy someone like that, sometimes,” Brian said to Lorq, softly.

Lorq looked surprised.

“You really don’t care,” Brian went on, “I mean if he brings a woman on the ship?”

Lorq shrugged. “I’d bring one on.”

“Oh. You must have it pretty easy with girls, especially with a racing ship.”

“I guess it helps.”

Brian bit at his thumbnail and nodded. “That would be nice. Sometimes I think girls have forgotten I’m alive. Probably be the same, yacht or no.” He laughed. “You ever brought a girl onto your ship?”

Lorq was silent a moment. Then he said, “I have three children.”

Now Brian looked surprised.

“A boy and two girls. Their mothers are miners on a little Outer Colony world, New Brazillia.”

“Oh, you mean you…”

Lorq cupped his left hand on his right shoulder, right hand on his left.

“We lead very different sorts of lives, I think,” Brian said slowly, “you and I.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” Then Lorq grinned. Brian’s smile returned uneasily.

“Hold on, you there!” from behind them. “Wait!” They turned.

“Lorq? Lorq Von Ray?”

The black glove Lorq’s father had described was now a silver one. The armband, high on his biceps, was set with diamonds.

“Prince?”

Vest, pants, boots were silver. “I almost missed you!” The bony face beneath black hair animated. “I had the field call me as soon as you got clearance at Neptune. Racing yacht, huh? Sure took your time. Oh, before I forget; Aaron told me if you did come, I should ask you to give his regards to your Aunt Cyana. She stayed with us for a weekend at the beach on Chobe’s World last month.”

“Thanks. I will if I see her,” Lorq said. “If she was with you last month, you’ve seen her more recently than I have. She doesn’t spend much time on Ark any more.”

“Cyana…” Brian began. “…Morgan?” he finished in astonishment. But Prince was already going on: “Look.” He dropped his hands on the shoulders of Lorq’s leather vest (Lorq tried to detect a difference in pressure between gloved and ungloved fingers), “I’ve got to get to Mt. Kenyuna and back before the party. I have every available bit of transportation bringing people down from all over everywhere. Aaron’s not co-operating. He’s refused to have anything more to do with the party; he thinks it’s gotten out of hand. I’m afraid I’ve been throwing his name around to get things I needed in a few places he didn’t approve. But he’s somewhere off on Vega. Do you want to run me over to the Himalayas?”

“All right.” Lorq started’ to suggest that Prince stud with Brian. But perhaps with his arm Prince might not be able to plug in properly. “Hey, Dan!” he shouted down the street. “You’re still working.”

The, Australian had just opened the door. Now he turned around, shook his head, and started back.

“What are we going for?” Lorq asked as they started back toward the field.

“Tell you on the way.”

As they passed the gate (and the Draco column ringed with the Serpent gleaming in the sunset), Brian hazarded conversation. “That’s quite an outfit,” he said to Prince.

“There’ll be a lot of people on the Ile. I want everybody to be able to see where I am.”

“Is that glove something new they’re wearing here on Earth?”

Lorq’s stomach caught itself. He glanced quickly between the two boys.

“Things like that,” Brian went on, “they never get out to Centauri till a month after everybody’s stopped wearing them on Earth. And I haven’t even been in Draco for ten months anyway.”

Prince looked at his arm, turned his hand over.

Twilight washed the sky.

Then lights along the top of the fence flicked on: light lined the folds on Prince’s glove.

“My personal style.” He looked up at Brian. “I have no right arm. This”—he made a fist of silver fingers—”is all metal and plastic and whirring doohickeys.” He laughed sharply. “But it serves me… about as well as a real one.”

“Oh.” Embarrassment wavered through Brian’s voice. “I didn’t know.”

Prince laughed. “Sometimes I almost forget too. Sometimes. Which way is your ship?”

“There.” As Lorq pointed, he was acutely aware of the dozen years between his and Prince’s first and present meetings.

“All plugged?”

“You’re paying me, Captain,” Dan’s voice grated through. “Strung up and out.”

“Ready, Captain,” from Brian.

“Open your low vanes—”

Prince sat behind Lorq, one hand on Lorq’s shoulder (his real hand). “Everybody and his brother is coming to this thing. You just got here tonight, but people have been arriving all week. I invited a hundred people. There’re at least three hundred coming. It grows, it grows!” As the inertia field caught them up, De Blau dropped, and the sun, which had set, rose in the west and crescented the world with fire. The blue rim burned. “Anyway, Che-ong brought a perfectly wild bunch with her from somewhere on the edge of Draco—”

Brian’s voice came over the speaker. “Che-ong, you mean the psychorama star?”

“The studio gave her a week’s vacation, so she decided to come to my party. Day before yesterday, she took it into her head to go mountain climbing, and flew off to Nepal.”

The sun passed overhead. To travel between two points on one planet, you just had to go up and come down in the right place. In a vane-projector craft, you had to ascend, circle the Earth three or four times, and glide in. It took the same seven/eight minutes to get from one side of the city to the other as it did to get to the other side of the world.

“Che radioed me this afternoon they were stuck three-quarters of the way up Mt. Kenyuna. There’s a storm below them, so they can’t get through to the rescue station in Katmandu for a helicopter to come and pick them up. Of course, the storm doesn’t stop her from getting a third of the way around the world to tell me her troubles. Anyway, I promised her I’d think of something.”

“How the hell are we supposed to get them off the mountain?”

“You fly within twenty feet of the rock face and hover. Then I’ll climb down and bring them up.”

“Twenty feet!” The blurred world slowed beneath them. “You want to get to your party alive?”

“Did you get that ion-coupler Aaron sent?”

“I’m using it now.”

“It’s supposed to be sensitive enough for that sort of maneuvering. And you’re a crack racing captain. Yes or no?”

“I’ll try it,” Lorq said warily. “I’m a bigger fool than you are.” Then he laughed. “We’ll try it, Prince!”

Reticulations of snow and rock glided under them. Lorq set the loran co-ordinates of the mountain as Prince bad given them. Prince reached over Lorq’s arm and tuned the radio…

A girl’s voice tumbled into the cabin:

“… Oh, there! Look, do you think that’s them? Prince! Prince, darling, have you come to rescue us? We’re hanging here by our little frozen nubs and just miserable. Prince…?” There was music behind her voice; there was a babble of other voices.

“Hold on, Che,” Prince said into the mike. “Told you we’d do something.” He turned to Lorq. “There! They should be right down there.”

Lorq cut the frequency filter till Caliban was sliding down the gravitational distortion of the mountain itself. The peaks rose, chiseled and flashing.

“Oh, look, everybody! Didn’t I tell you Prince wouldn’t let us languish away up here and miss the party?”