Rusty brows twisted in shadow.

Yellow eyes dropped their lights at the Mouse.

“I, eh, borrowed it from Tyy. I’ll give it back—”

“Come up here, Mouse.”

“Yes, sir.” He started up the coiled steps. Ripples lapped the pool edge. His image, rising, glittered behind the philodendrons on the wall. Bare sole and boot heel gave his gait syncopation.

Lorq opened the door. They stepped into the captain’s chamber.

The Mouse’s first thought: His room isn’t any bigger than mine.

His second: There’s a lot more in it.

Besides the computers, there were projection screens on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Among the mechanical clutter, nothing personalized the cabin—not even graffiti.

“Let’s see the card.” Lorq sat on the cables coiled over the couch and examined the diorama.

Not having been invited to sit on the couch, the Mouse pushed aside a tool box and dropped cross-legged to the floor.

Suddenly Lorq’s knees fell wide; he stretched his fists; his shoulders shook; the muscles of his face creased. The spasm passed, and he sat up again. He drew a breath that pulled the laces tight on his stomach. “Come sit here.” He patted the edge of the couch. But the Mouse just swung around on the floor so that he sat by Lorq’s knee.

Lorq leaned forward and placed the card on the floor.

“This is the card you stole?” The expression that was his frown wrinkled down his face. (But the Mouse was looking at the card.) “If this were the first expedition I pulled together to plumb this star…” He laughed. “Six trained and crackling men, who had studied the operation hypnotically, knew the timing of the whole business like they knew the beating of their own hearts, functioned closely as the layers in a bimetal strip. Stealing among the crew…?”He laughed again, shaking his head slowly. “I was so sure of them. And the one I was surest of was Dan.” He caught the Mouse’s hair, gently shook the boy’s head. “I like this crew better.” He pointed to the card. “What do you see there, Mouse?”

“Well, I guess… two boys playing under a—”

“Playing?” Lorq asked. “They look as if they’re playing?”

The Mouse sat back and hugged his sack. “What do you see, Captain?”

“Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under… the sun. I see Prince and myself.”

“Which is which?”

“I don’t know, Mouse.”

“What sort of person is Prince Red, Captain?”

Lorq’s left fist flopped in the hammock of his right palm. “You saw him on the viewing screen in color and tri-D. You have to ask? Rich as Croesus, a spoiled psychopath; he has one arm and a sister so beautiful I…” Weight and hammock came apart. “You’re from Earth, Mouse. The same world Prince comes from. I’ve visited it many times, but I’ve never lived there. Perhaps you know. Why should someone from Earth who’s had every advantage that could be distilled from the wealth of Draco, boy, youth, and man be…” The voice caught. Weight and hammock again. “Never mind. Take out your hell-harp and play me something. Go on. I want to see and hear.”

The Mouse scrabbled in his sack. One hand on the wooden neck, one sliding beneath curve and polish; he closed his fingers and his mouth and his eyes. Concentration became a frown; then a release. “You say he’s one-armed?”

“Underneath that black glove he so dramatically smashed up the viewer with, there’s nothing but clock-works.”

“That means he’s missing a socket,” the Mouse went on in his rough whisper. “I don’t know how it is where you come from; on Earth that’s about the worst thing that can happen to you. Captain, my people didn’t have any, and Katin back there just got finished explaining how that made me so mean.” The syrynx came out of the sack. “What do you want me to play?” He hazarded a few notes, a few lights.

But—Lorq was staring at the card again. “Just play. We’ll have to plug up soon to come in to the Alkane. Go on. Quick now. Play, I told you.”

The Mouse’s hand fell toward the—

“Mouse?”

—and moved away without striking.

“Why did you steal this card?”

The Mouse shrugged. “It was just there. It fell out on the rug near me.”

“‘But if it had been some other card, the Two of Cups, the Nine of Wands—would you have picked it up?”

“I guess so.”

“Are you sure there isn’t something in this card that’s special? If any other had been there, you would have let it lie or handed it back…?”

Where it came from the Mouse didn’t know. But it was fear again. To battle it, he whirled and caught Lorq’s knee. “Look, Captain! Don’t mind what the cards say, I’m going to help you get to that star, see? I’m going right with you, and you’ll win your race. Don’t let some crazy-woman tell you different!”

In their conversation, Lorq had been self-absorbed. Now he looked seriously at the dark frown. “You just remember to give the crazy-woman her card back when you leave here. We’ll be at Vorpis soon.”

The intensity could maintain itself no longer. Rough laughter broke the dark lips. “I still think they’re playing, Captain.” The Mouse turned back in front of the couch. Planting his bare foot on top of Lorq’s sandaled one, for all the world like a puppy by its master, he struck.

The lights flickered over the machines, copper and ruby, to arpeggios recalling harpsichords; Lorq looked at the boy by his knee. Something happened to him. He did not know the cause. But for the first time in a long time, he was watching someone else for reasons having nothing to do with his star. He did not know what he saw. Still, he sat back and looked at what the Mouse made:

Nearly filling the cabin, the gypsy moved a myriad of flame-colored lights about a great sphere, in time to the crumbling figures of a grave and dissonant fugue.

The world?

Vorpis.

A world has so much in it, on it—

“Welcome, travelers…”

—while a moon, Katin thought as they left the spacefield by dawn-blazed gates, a moon holds its gray glories miniatured in rock and dust.

“… Vorpis has a day of thirty-three hours, a gravity just high enough to increase the pulse rate by point three of Earth normal over an acclimating period of six hours…”

They passed the hundred-meter column. Scales, burnished under the dawn, bled the mists scarfing the plateau: the Serpent, animated and mechanical, symbol of this whole sequined sector of night, writhed on his post. As the crew stepped onto the moving roadway, an oblate sun rouged away night’s bruises.

“…with four cities of over five million inhabitants. Vorpis produces fifteen per cent of all the dynaplasts for Draco. In the equatorial lavid zones, more than three dozen minerals are quarried from the liquid rock. Here, in the tropic polar regions, both the arolat and the aqualat are hunted by net-riders along the inter-plateau canons. Vorpis is famous throughout the galaxy for the Alkane Institute which is located in the capital city of its Northern Hemisphere, Phoenix…”

They passed the limit of the info-service voice, into silence. As the road buoyed them from the steps, Lorq, among the crew, gazed-on the plaza.

“Captain, where we now go?” Sebastian had brought only one of his pets from the ship. It swayed and stepped on his ridged shoulder.

“We take a fog crawler into the city and then go to the Alkane. Anyone can come with me who wants, wander around the museum, or take a few hours leave in the city. If anybody wants to stay back on the ship—”

“—and miss a chance to see the Alkane?—”

“—doesn’t it cost a lot to get in?—”

“—but the captain’s got an aunt working there—”