“The thing that’s been holding me up is that I can’t find a subject. I wonder what Mrs. Morgan’s reaction would be to the idea. Oh, I wouldn’t do anything like those sensational reports that kept coming out in the psychoramas right afterwards. I want to attempt a measured, studied work of art, treating the subject as one that traumatized an entire generation’s faith in the ordered and rational world of man’s—”

“Who killed who again?”

“Underwood—you know, it just occurred to me, he was my age now when he did it—strangled Secretary Morgan.”

“Because I wouldn’t want to make a mistake if I met her. They caught him, didn’t they?”

“He stayed free for two days, gave himself up twice and was turned away twice with the other twelve hundred-odd people who confessed in the first forty-eight hours; he got as far as the spacefield where he had planned to join his two wives on one of the mining stations in the Outer Colonies, when he was apprehended at the emigrations office. There’s enough material there for a dozen novels! I wanted a subject that was historically significant. If nothing else, it will be a chance to air my theory. Which, as I was about to say—”

“Katin?”

“Eh… yes?” His eyes, before on copper clouds, came back to the Mouse.

“What is that?”

“Huh?”

“There.”

In broken hills of fog, metal flashed. Then a black net rose rippling from the waves. Some thirty feet across, the net flung from the mist. Clinging to the center by hands and feet, vest flying, dark hair whipping from his masked face, a man rode the web into the trough; fog covered him.

“I believe,” Katin said, “that is a net-rider hunting the inter-plateau canons for the indigenous arolat—or possibly the aqualat.”

“Yeah? You’ve been here before…

“No. At the university I experienced dozens of the Alkane’s exhibits. Just about every big school is iso-sensory with them. But I’ve never been here in person; I was just listening to the info-voice back at the field.”

“Oh.”

Two more riders surfaced in their nets. Fog sparkled. As they descended, a fourth and fifth emerged, a sixth.

“Looks like a whole herd.”

The riders swept the mists, doffing, electric, disappearing to emerge further on.

“Nets,” Katin mused. He leaned forward on the rail. “A great net, spreading among the stars, through time—” He spoke slowly, softly. The riders disappeared. “My theory: if you conceive of society as a…” Then he glanced down at a sound beside him like wind:

The Mouse had taken out his syrynx. From beneath dark, and shaking fingers gray lights swiveled and wove.

Through the imitations of mist, gold webs glittered and doffed to a hexatonic melody. The air was tang and cool; there was the smell of wind; but no pressure of wind.

Three, five, a dozen passengers gathered to watch. Beyond the rail, the net-riders appeared once more, and someone, realizing the boy’s inspiration, went, “Ohhhh, I see what he’s…” and stopped because so did everyone else. It ended.

“That lovely was!”

The Mouse looked up. Tyy stood half behind Sebastian.

“Thanks.” He grinned and started to put the instrument back into the bag. “Oh.” He saw something and looked up again. “I have something for you.” He reached into the sack. “I found this on the floor back in the Roc. I guess you dropped it?”

He glanced at Katin and caught the frown vanishing. Then he looked at Tyy and felt his smile open in the light of hers.

“I you thank.” She put the card in the pouch pocket of her jacket. “You the card did enjoy?”

“Huh?”

“You on each card to gain must meditate.”

“You did meditate?” Sebastian asked.

“Oh, yeah. I looked at it a whole lot. Me and the captain.”

“That good is.” She smiled.

But the Mouse was fiddling with his strap.

At Phoenix Katin asked, “You really don’t want to go?”

The Mouse was fiddling with his strap again. “Naw.”

Katin shrugged. “I think you’d enjoy it.”

“I’ve seen museums before. I just want to walk around some.”

“Well,” Katin said. “Okay. We’ll see you when we get back to the port.” He turned and ran up the stone steps behind the captain and the rest of the crew. They reached the auto-ramp that carried them up through the crags toward gleaming Phoenix.

The Mouse looked down at the fog slopping along the slate. The larger crawlers-they had just disembarked from one— -were anchored down the docks to the left; the little ones bobbed to the right. Bridges arched from the rocks, crossing the crevices that cut here and there into the mesa.

The Mouse dug carefully in his ear with his little fingernail, and went left.

The young gypsy had tried to live most of his life only with eyes, ears, nose, toes, and fingers. Most of his life he had succeeded. But occasionally, as on the Roc during Tyy’s Tarot reading, or during the interviews with Katin and the captain afterwards, he was forced to accept that what had happened in his past affected present action. Then a time of introspection followed. Introspecting, he found the old fear. By now, he knew it had two irritant surfaces. One he could soothe by stroking the responsive plates of his syrynx. To ease the other required long, private sessions of self-definition. He defined:

Eighteen, nineteen?

Maybe. Anyway, a good four years past the age of reason, they call it. And I can vote in Draco. Never did, though. Again picking my way down the rocks and docks of another port. Where you going, Mouse? Where you been, and what you going to do when you get there? Sit down and play awhile. Only it’s got to mean more than that. Yeah. It means something for Captain. Wish I could get that riled up over a light in the sky. Almost can when I hear him talk about it. Who else could fire my harp to ape the sun? A pretty big light it’d be, too. Blind Dan… and I wonder what it looked like. Don’t you want to make the next five fifths of your life with hands and eyes intact? Bind myself to a rock, get girls and make babies? Naw. Wonder if Katin’s happy with his theories and notes and notes and theories? What would happen if I tried to play my syrynx the same way he’s trying on this book, thinking, measuring? One thing, I wouldn’t have time to ask myself these bad questions. Like: what does the captain think of me? He trips over me, laughs, and picks the Mouse up and puts him in his pocket. But it does mean more than that! Captain’s got his crazy star. Katin makes his word-webs that no one listens to. Me, Mouse? A gypsy with a syrynx instead of a larynx. But for me, it isn’t enough. Captain, where are you taking me? Come on. Sure I’ll go.

There’s no place else I’m supposed to be. Think I’ll find out who I am when I get there? Or does a dying star really give that much light so as I can see?

The Mouse walked off the next bridge, thumbs in his pants, eyes down.

The sound of chains.

He looked up.

Chains crawled over a ten-foot drum, hauling a shape from the mists. On the rock before a warehouse, men and women lounged at giant machinery. In his cabin, the winch operator was still in his mask. Covered in nets, the beast rose from the fog, wing-fin whipping. Nets rattled.

The arolat (or it might have been an aqualat) was twenty meters long. Smaller winches lowered hooks. The net-riders holding to the flank of the beast caught at them.

As the Mouse walked down among the men to watch at the precipice, someone called: “Alex’s hurt!”

Lowered on a pulley, a scaffold took down a crew of five.

The beast had stilled. Crawling the nets as though they were an easy ladder, they loosed one section of links. The rider hung centered and limp.

One nearly dropped his section; the injured rider swung against the blue flank.

“Hold it there, Bo!”

“That all right is! I it have!”