“And this is why Prince Red can call us pirates?”

“A couple of times Aaron Red the first—Prince’s father is the third—sent one of his more uppity nephews to head his expeditions into the Pleiades. Three of them, I believe. They never got back. Even in my father’s time the feud was pretty much a personal matter. There’d been retaliation, and it had gone on well beyond the declaration of sovereignty that the Pleiades Federation made in ‘twenty-six. One of my personal projects as a young man your age was to end it. My father gave a lot of money to Harvard on Earth, built them a laboratory, and then sent me to the school. I married your mother, from Earth, and I spent a lot of time talking with Aaron—Prince’s father. It wasn’t too difficult to effect, since the sovereignty of the Pleiades had been an accepted fact for a generation, and Red-shift had long since stopped teetering under any direct threat from us. My father purchased the Illyrion mine out at New Brazillia—this was back when the mining operations were just beginning in the Outer Colonies—mainly as an excuse to have some reason to deal formally with Red-shift. I never mentioned the feud to you, because I thought there was no need to.”

“Prince is just crazy then, breaking out an old grudge that you and Aaron settled before we were born.”

“I can’t comment on Prince’s sanity. But you have to bear in mind: what’s the biggest factor affecting the cost of transportation today?”

“The Illyrion mines in the Outer Colonies.”

“There’s a hand around Red-shift’s throat again,” his father said. “Can you see it?”

“Mining Illyrion naturally is much cheaper than manufacturing it.”

“Even if it takes plugging in a population of millions upon millions. Even if three dozen competing companies from both Draco and the Pleiades have opened mines all over the Outer Colonies and subsidized vast migrations of labor from all over the galaxy. What strikes you as different about the set-up of the Outer Colonies as opposed to Draco and the Pleiades?”

“It has, comparatively, all the Illyrion it wants right there.”

“Yes. But also this: Draco was extended by the vastly monied classes of Earth. The Pleiades was populated by a comparatively middle-class movement. Though the Outer Colonies have been prompted by those with money both in the Pleiades and Draco, the population of the colonies comes from the lowest economic strata of the galaxy. The combination of cultural difference—and I don’t care what your social studies teachers at Causby say—and the difference in the cost of transportation is what assures the eventual sovereignty of the Outer Colonies. And suddenly Red-shift is striking out at anyone who has their hands on Illyrion again.” He gestured toward his son. “You’ve been hit.”

“But we’ve only got one Illyrion mine. Our money comes from the control of how many dozen different types of businesses all over the Pleiades, a few of them in Draco now—the mine on Sao Orini is a trifle—”

“True. But have you ever noticed the businesses we don’t handle?”

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“We have very little money in shelter or food production. We are in computers, small technical components; we make the housing for Illyrion batteries; we make plugs and sockets; we mine heavily in other areas. The last time I saw Aaron, on this past trip, I said to him, jokingly of course: ‘You know, if the price of Illyrion were only at half the price it is now, in a year I could be making spaceships at less than half the price you manufacture them.’ And do you know what he said to me, jokingly?”

Lorq shook his head.

“‘I’ve known that for ten years.’”

His mother’s image put her cup down. “I think he must have his face fixed. You’re such a fine-looking boy, Lorq, it’s been three days since that Australian brought you back home. That scar is just going to—”

“Dana,” his father said. “Lorq, can you think of any way to lower the price of Illyrion by half?”

Lorq frowned. “Why?”

“I’ve figured that at the present rate of expansion, in fifteen years the Outer Colonies will be able to lower the cost of Illyrion by almost a quarter. During that time, Red-shift is going to try to kill us.” He paused. “Knock everything out from under the Von Rays, and ultimately, the whole Pleiades Federation. We have a long way to fall. The only way we can survive is to kill them first; and the only way we can do that is to figure out a way to get Illyrion down to half price before it goes down to three quarters, and make those ships.” His father folded his arms. “I didn’t want to get you involved in this, Lorq. I saw the termination of the whole affair coming in my lifetime. But Prince has taken it on himself to strike the first blow at you. It’s only fair you be told what’s happening.”

Lorq was looking down at his hands. After a while he said, “I’ll strike a blow back.”

“No,” his mother said. “That’s not the way to handle this, Lorq. You can’t get back at Prince; you can’t think of getting back at—”

“I’m not.” He stood up and walked to the curtains. “Mom, Dad, I’m going out.”

“Lorq,” his father said, unfolding his arms, “I didn’t mean to upset you. But I just wanted you to know… “

Lorq pushed back the brocade curtains. “I’m going down to the Caliban. Good-bye.” The drape swung.

“Lorq—”

His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in Ark, the capital city of the Pleiades Federation. He walked beside the moving road. Through the wind shields, the winter gardens of the city bloomed. People looked at him. That was because of the scar, He was thinking about Illyrion. People looked, then looked away when they saw him look back. Here, in the center of the Pleiades, he himself was a center, a focus. He had once tried to calculate the amount of money that devolved from his immediate family. He was the focus of billions, walking along by the clear walls of the covered streets of Ark, listening to the glistening lichens ululate in the winter gardens. One out of five people on the street—so one of his father’s accountants had informed them—was being paid a salary either directly or indirectly by Von Ray. And Red-shift was making ready to declare war on the whole structure that was Von Ray, that focused on himself as the Von Ray heir. At Sao Orini, a lizard-like animal with a mane of white feathers roamed and hissed in the jungles. The miners caught them, starved them, then turned them on one another in the pit to wager on the outcome. How many millions of years back, those three-foot lizards’ ancestors had been huge, hundred-meter beasts, and, the intelligent race which had inhabited New Brazillia had worshiped them, carving life-sized stone heads about the foundations of their temples. But the race—that race was gone. And the offspring of that race’s gods, dwarfed by evolution, were mocked in the pits by drunken miners as they clawed and screeched and bit. And he was Lorq Von Ray. And somehow Illyrion had to have its price lowered by half. You could flood the market with the stuff. But where could you go to get what was probably the rarest substance in the universe? You couldn’t fly into the center of a sun and scoop it out of the furnace where all the substances of the galaxy were smelted from raw nuclear matter by units of four. He caught his reflection in one of the mirrored columns, and he stopped just before the turnoff to Nea Limani. The fissure dislocated his features, full-lipped, yellow-eyed. But where the scar entered the kinky red, he noticed something. The new hair growing was the same color and texture as his father’s, soft and yellow as flame,

Where do you get that much Illyrion (he turned from the mirrored column)? Where?

“You’re asking me, Captain?” From the revolving stage in the floor Dan lifted his mug to his knee. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be bumming around this field now.” He reached down, took the handle of the mug from his toes, and drank half. “Thanks for the drink.” With his wrist he scrubbed his mouth, ringed with stubble and mustached with foam. “When are you going to get your face put back together…”