“—so we can get in free then,” Idas finished.

“Don’t worry about it,” Lorq said as they jogged down the ramp to the slips where the fog crawlers moored.

Polar Vorpis was set with rocky mesas, many of them several square miles in area. Between, heavy fogs riled and slopped, immiscible with the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere above. Powdered aluminum oxide, and arsenic sulfate in vaporized hydrocarbons expelled from the violent floor, filled the space between mesas. Just beyond the table that held the spacefield was another with cultivated plants, indigenous to a more southern latitude of Vorpis but kept here as a natural park (maroon, rust, scarlet); on the largest mesa was Phoenix.

The fog crawlers, inertial-drive planes powered by the static charges built up between the positively ionized atmosphere and the negatively ionized oxide, plowed the surface of the mist like boats.

On the concourse, the departure times drifted beneath the transparent bricks, followed by arrows directing the crowds to the loading slip:

and a great bird dripping fire followed through the multi-chrome beneath boots, bare feet, and sandals.

On the crawler deck Katin leaned on the rail, looking through the plastic wall as white waves crackled and uncoiled over the sun to shatter by the hull.

“Have you ever thought,” Katin said as the Mouse came up to him sucking on a piece of rock candy, “what a difficult time a man from the past would have understanding the present. Suppose someone who died in, let’s say, the twenty-sixth century woke up here, Do you realize how totally horrified and confused he’d be just walking around this crawler?”

“Yeah?” The Mouse took the candy out of his mouth: “Want to finish this? I’m through with it.”

“Thanks. Just take the matter of”—Katin’s jaw staggered as his teeth crushed crystalline sugar from the linen thread.—”cleanliness. There was a thousand-year period from about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, when people spent an incredible amount of time and energy keeping things clean. It ended when the last communicable disease finally became not only curable, but impossible. There used to be an incredibility called ‘the common cold’ that even in the twenty-fifth century you could be fairly sure of having at least once a year. I suppose back then there was some excuse for the fetish: there seemed to have been some correlation between dirt and disease. But after contagion became an obsolescent concern, sanitation became equally obsolescent. If our man from five hundred years ago, however, saw you walking around this deck with one shoe off and one shoe on, then saw you sit down to eat with that same foot, without bothering to wash it—do you have any idea how upset he’d be?”

“No kidding?” Katin nodded.

Fog broke at a shaft of rock, sparking.

“The idea of paying a visit to the Alkane has inspired me, Mouse. I’m developing an entire theory of history. It’s in conjunction with my novel. You don’t mind indulging me with a few moments? I’ll explain. It has occurred to me that if one considers—” He stopped.

Enough time passed for a handful of expressions to subsume the Mouse’s face. “What is it?” he asked when he decided nothing in the moiling gray had Katin’s attention. “What about your theory?”

“Cyana Von Ray Morgan!”

“What?”

“Who, Mouse. Cyana Von Ray Morgan. I’ve had a perfectly oblique thought: It just came to me who the captain’s aunt is, the curator at the Alkane. When Tyy gave her Tarot reading, the captain mentioned an uncle who was killed when he was a child.”

The Mouse frowned. “Yeah…”

Katin shook his head, mocking disbelief.

“Who what?” the Mouse asked.

“Morgan and Underwood?”

The Mouse looked down, sideways, and in the other directions people search for mislaid associations.

“I guess it happened before you were born,” Katin said at last. “But you must have heard about it, seen it someplace. The whole business was being sent out across the galaxy on psychoramics while it happened. I was only three, but—”

“Morgan assassinated Underwood!” the Mouse exclaimed.

“Underwood,” Katin said, “assassinated Morgan. But that’s the idea.”

“In Ark,” the Mouse said. “In the Pleiades.”

“With billions of people experiencing the whole business throughout the galaxy on psychoramics. I couldn’t have been more than three at the time. I was at home on Luna watching the inauguration with my parents when that incredible character in the blue vest broke out of the crowd and sprinted across Chronaiki Plaza with that wire in his hand.”

“He was strangled!” the Mouse exclaimed. “Morgan was strangled! I did see a psychorama of that! One time in Mars City, last year when I was doing the triangle run, I experienced it as a short subject. It was part of a documentary about something else, though.”

“Underwood nearly severed Morgan’s head,” Katin elucidated. “Whenever I’ve experienced a re-run, they’ve cut out the actual death. But five billion-odd were subjected to all the emotions of a man, about to be sworn in for his second term as Secretary of the Pleiades, suddenly attacked by a madman and killed. All of us, we felt Underwood land on our backs; we heard Cyana Morgan scream and felt her try to pull him off; we heard Representative Kol-syn yell out about the third bodyguard—that’s the part that caused all the confusion in the subsequent investigation—and we felt Underwood lock that wire around our necks, felt it cut into us; we struck out with our right hands, and our left hands were grabbed by Mrs. Tai; and we died.” Katin shook his head. “Then the stupid projector operator—his name was Naibn’n and thanks to his idiocy he nearly had his brain burned out by a bunch of lunatics who thought he was involved in the plot—swung his psychomat on Cyana—instead of the assassin so we could have learned who he was and where he was going—and for the next thirty seconds we were all a hysterical woman crouching on the plaza, clutching our husband’s streaming corpse amid a confusion of equally hysterical diplomats, representatives, and patrolmen, watching Underwood dodge and twist through the crowd and finally disappear.”

“They didn’t show that part in Mars City. But I remember Morgan’s wife. That’s the captain’s aunt?”

“She must be his father’s sister.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, first of all, the name, Von Ray Morgan. I remember reading once, about seven or eight years back, that she had something to do with the Alkane. She was supposed to be quite a brilliant and sensitive woman. For the first dozen years or so after the assassination, she was the focus for that terribly sophisticated part of society always back and forth between Draco and the Pleiades; being seen at the Flame Beach on Chobe’s World, or putting in an appearance with her two little daughters at some space regatta. She spent a lot of time with her cousin, Laile Selvin, who was Secretary of the Pleiades Federation herself for a term. The news-tapes were always torn between the desire to keep her at the edge of scandal and their respect for that whole horror with Morgan. Today if she appears at an art opening or a social event, it’s still covered, though the last few years they’ve let go of her a little. If she is a curator of the Alkane, perhaps she’s gotten too involved in it to bother with publicity.”

“I’ve heard of her.” The Mouse nodded, looking up at last. “There was a period when she was probably the best known woman in the galaxy.”

“Do you think we’ll get to meet her?”

“Hey,” Katin said, holding the rail and leaning back, “that would be something! Maybe I could do my novel on the Morgan assassination, a sort of modern historical.”

“Oh yeah,” the Mouse said. “Your book.”