“I hope they get here soon,” Alex grunted. “I know I’ve got at least a broken arm. I can’t feel anything in the leg, and something’s bleeding inside—” He spat red again. “I’ve got to go out on a run again in two hours. He better get me patched up quick. If I can’t make that run this afternoon, I’ll sue ‘im. I paid my damned health insurance.”

“He’ll get you back together,” one of the riders assured. “They ain’t let a policy lapse yet. Shut up and let the kid play…”

He stopped because the Mouse had already started.

Light struck glass and turned it copper. Thousands on thousands of round panes formed the concaved facade of the Alkane.

Katin strolled the path by the river that wound the museum garden. The river—the same heavy mists that oceaned polar Vorpis—steamed at the bank. Ahead, it flowed beneath the arched and blazing wall.

The captain was just far enough in front of Katin so that their shadows were the same length over the polished stones. Among the fountains, the elevated stage was continually bringing up another platform full of visitors, a few hundred at a time. But within seconds they dispersed on the variegated paths that wound down rocks licked through with quartz. On a bronze drum, at the focus of the reflecting panes, some hundred yards before the museum, her marble, armless grace vivid in the ruddy morning, was the Venus de Milo.

Lynceos squinted his pink eyes and averted his face from the glare. Idas, beside him, looked back and forth and up and down.

Tyy, her hand in Sebastian’s, hung behind him, her hair lifting with the beating of the beast on his gleaming shoulder.

Now the light, thought Katin, as they passed beneath the arch into the lens-shaped lobby, goes blue. True, no moon has natural atmosphere enough to cause such dramatic diffraction. Still, I miss a lunar solitude. This cool structure of plastics, metal, and stone was once the largest building made by man. How far we’ve come since the twenty-seventh century. Are there a dozen buildings larger than this today through the galaxy? Two dozen? Odd position for an academic rebel here: conflict between the tradition thus embodied and the absurdity of its dated architecture. Cyana Morgan nests in this tomb of man’s history. Fitting: the white hawk broods on bones.

From the ceiling hung an octagonal screen where public announcements were broadcast. A serial light-fantasia played now.

“Would you get me extension 739-E-6,” Captain Von Ray asked a girl at the information desk.

She turned her hand up and punched the buttons on the little com-kit plugged on her wrist. “Certainly.”

“Hello, Bunny?” Lorq said.

“Lorq Von Ray!” the girl at the desk exclaimed in a voice not hers. “You’ve come to see Cyana?”

“That’s right, Bunny. If she isn’t busy, I’d like to come up and talk to her.”

“Just a moment and I’ll see.”

Bunny, wherever Bunny was in the hive around them released control of the girl long enough for her to raise her eyebrows in surprise. “You’re here to see Cyana Morgan?” she said in her own voice.

“That’s right.” Lorq smiled.

At which point Bunny came back, “Fine, Lorq. She’ll meet you in South West 12. It’s less crowded there.”

Lorq turned to the crew. “Why don’t you wander around the museum a while? I’ll have what I want in an hour.”

“Should he carry that”—The girl frowned at Sebastian—”thing around with him in the museum. We don’t have facilities for pets.” To which Bunny answered, “The man’s in your crew, Lorq, isn’t he? It looks housebroken.” She turned to Sebastian. “Will it behave itself?”

“Certainly it itself will behave.” He petted the claw flexing on his shoulder.

“You can take it around,” Bunny said through the girl. “Cyana is already on her way to meet you,”

Lorq turned to Katin. “Why don’t you come with me?”

Katin tried to keep surprise off his face. “All right, Captain.”

“South West 12,” the girl said. “You just take that lift up one level. Will that be all?”

“That’s it.” Lorq turned to the crew. “We’ll see you later.”

Katin followed him.

Mounted on marble blocks beside the spiral lift was a ten-foot dragon’s head. Katin gazed up at the ridges on the roof of the stone mouth.

“My father donated that to the museum,” Lorq said as they stepped on the lift.

“Oh?”

“It comes from New Brazillia.” As they rose about’ the central pole, the jaw fell. “When I was a kid I used to play inside one of its first cousins.” Diminishing tourists swarmed the floor.

The gold roof received them.

Then they stepped from the lift.

Pictures were set at various distances from the gallery’s central light source. The multilensed lamp projected on each suspended frame the closest approximation (as agreed on by the Alkane’s several scholars) to the light under which each picture had originally been painted: artificial or natural, red sun, white sun, yellow or blue.

Katin looked at the dozen or so people wandering the exhibit.

“She won’t be here for another minute or so,” the captain said. “She’s quite a ways away.”

“Oh.” Katin read the exhibit title.

Overhead was an announcement screen, smaller than the one in the lobby.

Right now it was stating that the paintings and photographs were all by artists of the last three hundred years and showed men and women at work or play on their various worlds. Glancing down the list of artists, Katin was chagrined to discover he recognized only two names.

“I wanted you with me because I needed to talk to somebody who can understand what’s involved.”

Katin, surprised, looked up.

“My sun—my nova. In my mind I’ve almost accustomed myself to its glare. Yet I’m still a man under all that light. All my life people around me have usually done what I wanted them to do. When they didn’t—”

“You made them?”

Lorq narrowed yellow eyes. “When they didn’t, I figured out what they could do and used them for that instead. Someone else always comes along to fill the other jobs. I want to talk to someone who will understand. But talking won’t convey it. I wish I could do something to show you what this all means.”

“I… I don’t think I understand.”

“You will.”

Portrait of a Woman (Bellatrix IV): her clothing was twenty years dated. She sat by a window, smiling in the gold light of a sun not painted.

Go With Ashton Clark (no location): he was an old man, His work coveralls were two hundred years out of style. He was about to unplug himself from some great machine. But it was so big you couldn’t see what it was.

“It’s makes me wonder, Katin. My family—at least my father’s part—is from the Pleiades. Still, I grew up speaking like a Draconian in my own home. My father belonged to that encrusted nucleus of old-guard Pleiades citizens who still held over so many ideas from their Earth and Draconian ancestors; only it was an Earth that had been dead for fifty years by the time the earliest of these painters lifted a brush. When I settle on a permanent family, my children will probably speak the same way. Does it seem strange to you that you and I are probably closer than I and, say, Tyy and Sebastian?”

“I’m from Luna,” Katin reminded him. “I only know Earth through extended visit. It’s not my world.”

Lorq ignored that. “There are ways Tyy, Sebastian, and myself are much alike. In those basic defining sensibilities we are closer than you and I.”

Again it took Katin an uncomfortable second to interpret the wrecked face’s agony.

“Some of our reactions to given situations will be more predictable to each other than to you; yes, I know it goes no further.” He paused. “You’re not from Earth, Katin. But the Mouse is. So is Prince. One’s a guttersnipe; the other is… Prince Red. Does the same relation exist between them as between Sebastian and me? The gypsy fascinates me. I do not understand him. Not in the way I think I understand you. I don’t understand Prince either.”