The dancers’ faces fell.

Lorq turned a dial on the stage. “I’ve had the sensory recorder running.” The music began again. And the ghostly visions of the Mouse’s syrynx cavorted once more, along with images of Tyy, Sebastian, and the twins dancing, the sound of their laughter—

“Where are we going, Captain?” the Mouse asked. He put his syrynx down on the case.

“I’ve been thinking. We need something here. I’m going to get some bliss.”

“You mean you know—”

“—where to get hold of some?”

“The Pleiades is my home,” the Captain said. “We’ll be gone maybe an hour. Come on, Mouse.”

“Hey, Mouse, will you leave your—”

“—syrynx here with us—”

“—now? It’ll be okay. We won’t—”

“—won’t let anything happen to it.”

With lips pulled thin, the Mouse looked from the twins to his instrument. “All right. You can play it. But watch out, huh?”

He walked over to where Lorq stood at the door.

Leo joined them. “Now it too time for me to go is.”

Inside the Mouse, surprise opened like a wound over the inevitable. He blinked.

“For the lift, Captain, I you thank.”

They walked down the hall and through Taafite’s garden. Outside the gate, they stopped by the smoking grate. “For the ice docks down there you go.” Lorq pointed down the hill. “You the mono to the end of the line take.”

Leo nodded. His blue eyes caught the Mouse’s dark ones, and puzzlement passed on his face. “Well, Mouse. Maybe some day again we’ll see, huh?”

“Yeah,” the Mouse said. “Maybe.”

Leo turned and walked down the fuming street, boot heel clicking.

“Hey,” the Mouse called after a moment.

Leo looked back.

“Ashton Clark.”

Leo grinned, then started again.

“You know,” the Mouse said to Lorq, “I’ll probably never see him again in my life. Come on, Captain.”

“Are we anywhere near the spacefield?” the Mouse asked. They came down the crowded steps of the monorail station.

“Within walking distance. We’re about five miles down Gold from Taafite.”

The spray trucks had recently been by. The wandering people were reflected on the wet pavement. A group of youngsters—two of the boys with bells around their necks—ran by an old man, laughing. He turned, followed them a few steps, hand out. Now he turned back and came toward the Mouse and Lorq.

“An old guy with something, you help? Tomorrow, tomorrow into a job I plug. But tonight…”

The Mouse looked back after the panhandler, but Lorq kept on.

“What’s in there?” The Mouse pointed to a high arcade of lights. People clustered before the door on the shining street.

“No bliss there.”

They turned the corner.

On the far side of the street, couples had stopped by a fence. Lorq crossed the street. “That’s the other end of Gold down there.”

Below the ragged slope, bright rock wound into the night. One couple turned away hand in hand, with burnished faces.

Flashing from his hair, hands, and shoulders, a man came up the walkway in a lame vest. A tray of jewels hung around his neck. The couple stopped him. She bought a jewel from the vendor and, laughing, placed it on her boyfriend’s forehead. The sequined streamers from the central cluster of stones ran back and wound themselves in his long hair. They laughed up the wet street.

Lorq and the Mouse reached the end of the fence. A crowd of uniformed Pleiades patrolmen came up the stone steps; three girls ran up behind them, screaming. Five boys overtook them, and the screams turned to laughter. The Mouse looked back to see them cluster about the jewelry man.

Lorq started down the steps.

“What’s down there?” The Mouse hurried on behind.

On the side of the broad steps, people drank at tables set beside the cafes cut into the rock wall.

“You look like you know where you’re going, Captain.” The Mouse caught up with Lorq’s elbow. “Who is that?” He gazed after one stroller. Among the lightly clad people, she wore a heavy parka rimmed with fur.

“She’s one of your ice-fishermen,” the captain told him. “Leo will he wearing one of them soon. They spend most of their time away from the heated part of the City.”

“Where are we going?”

“I think it was down this way.” They turned along a dim ledge; there were a few windows in the rock. Blue light leaked from the shades. “These places change owners every couple of months, and I haven’t been in the City for five years. If we don’t find the place I’m looking for, we’ll find one that’ll do.”

“What sort of place is it?”

A woman shrieked. A door swung open; she staggered out. Another suddenly reached from the darkness, caught her by the arm, slapped her twice, and yanked her back. The door slammed on a second shriek. An old man—probably another ice-fisherman—supported a younger man on his shoulder, “We you back to the room you take. Your head up hold. All right it will be. To the room we you take.”

The Mouse watched them stagger by. A couple had stopped back near the stone stairway. She was shaking her head. Finally he nodded, and they turned back.

“The place I was thinking of, among other things, used to have a thriving business conning people to work in the mines in the Outer Colonies, then collecting a commission on each recruit. It was perfectly legal; there’re a lot of stupid people in the universe. I’ve been a foreman in one of those mines and seen it from the other end. It’s not very pretty.” Lorq looked over a doorway. “Different name. Same place.”

He started down the steps. The Mouse looked quickly behind him, then followed: They entered a long room with a plank bar by one wall. A few panels of multichrome gave out feeble color. “Same people too.”

A man older than the Mouse, younger than Lorq, with stringy hair and dirty nails came up. “What can I do for you boys?”

“What have you got to make us feel good?”

He closed an eye. “Have a seat.”

Dim figures passed and paused before the bar.

Lorq and the Mouse slipped into a booth. The man pulled up a chair, reversed it, straddled it, and sat at the table’s head. “How good do you want to feel?”

Lorq turned his hands palms up on the table.

“Downstairs we have a…” The man glanced toward a doorway in the back where people moved in and out. “…pathobath?”

“What’s that?” the Mouse asked.

“A place with crystal walls that reflect the color of your thoughts,” Lorq told him. “You leave your clothes at the door and float among columns of light on currents of glycerin.

They heat it to body temperature, mask out all your senses. After a little while, deprived of contact with sensory reality, you go insane. Your own psychotic fantasies provide the floor show.” He looked back at the man. “I want something we can take with us.”

Behind thin lips the man’s teeth came together sharply.

On the stage at the end of the bar a naked girl stepped into the coral spotlight and began to chant a poem. Those sitting at the bar clapped in time.

The man looked quickly back and forth between the captain and the Mouse.

Lorq folded his hands. “Bliss.”

The man’s eyebrows raised under the matted hair that fell down his forehead. “That’s what I thought.” His own hands came together. “Bliss.”

The Mouse looked at the girl. Her skin was unnaturally shiny. Glycerin, the Mouse thought. Yeah, glycerin. He leaned against the stone wall, then quickly pulled away. Drops of water ran the cold rock. The Mouse rubbed his shoulder and looked back at the captain.

“We’ll wait for it.”

The man nodded. After a moment he said to the Mouse, “What do you and pretty-man do for a living?”

“Crew on a… freighter.” The captain nodded just enough to communicate approval.

“You know, there’s good work in the Outer Colonies. You ever thought about doing a hitch in the mines?”

“I worked the mines for three years,” Lorq said.