“Will you shut up! I swear, Katin, if I did all the brain-hacking you did, I’d go nuts!”

Katin sighed, and flipped off his recorder. “Ah, Mouse, I’d go nuts if I did as little as you.”

The Mouse put the instrument back in his sack, crossed his arms on the top, and leaned his chin on the back of his hands.

“Oh, come on, Mouse. See, I’ve stopped babbling. Don’t be glum. What are you so down about?”

“My syrynx…”

“So you got a scratch on it. But you’ve been over it a dozen times and you said it won’t hurt the way it plays.”

“Not the instrument.” The Mouse’s forehead wrinkled. “What the captain did with…” He shook his head at the memory.

“Oh.”

“And not even that.” The Mouse sat up.

“What then?”

Again the Mouse shook his head. “When I ran out through the cracked glass to get it…”

Katin nodded.

“The heat was incredible out there. Three steps and I didn’t think I was going to make it. Then I saw where Captain had dropped it, halfway down the slope. So I squinched my eyes and kept going. I thought my foot would burn off, and I must have got halfway there hopping. Anyway, when I got it, I picked it up, and… I saw them.”

“Prince and Ruby?”

“She was trying to drag him back up the rocks. She stopped when she saw me. And I was scared.” He looked up from his hands. His fingers were clenched; nails cut the dark palms. “I turned the syrynx on her, light, sound, and smell all at once, hard. Captain doesn’t know how to make a syrynx do what he wants. I do. She was blind, Katin. And I probably busted both her eardrums. The laser was on such a tight beam her hair caught fire, then her dress—”

“Oh, Mouse…”

“I was scared, Katin! After all that with Captain and them. But, Katin … “ The whisper snagged on all sorts of junk in the Mouse’s throat. “It’s no good to be that scared…”

“Queen of Swords.”

“King of Swords.”

“The Lovers. My trick is. Ace of Swords—”

“Tyy, come in and relieve Idas for a while,” Von Ray’s voice came through the loud speaker.

“Yes, sir. Three of Swords from the dummy comes. The Empress from me. My trick is.” She closed the cards and left the table for her projection chamber.

Sebastian stretched. “Hey, Mouse?”

“What?”

Sebastian walked across the blue rug, kneading his forearm. The ship’s medico-unit had fixed his broken elbow in forty-five seconds, having taken somewhat less time over the smaller, brighter wounds. (It had blinked a few odd-colored lights when the dark thing with a collapsed lung and three torn rib cartilages was presented to it. But Tyy had fiddled with the programming till the unit hummed efficiently over the beast.) The creature waddled now behind its master, ominous and happy, “Mouse, why you not the ship’s med your throat let fix?” He swung his arm. “It a good job would do,”

“Can’t. Couple of times they tried when I was a kid. Back when I got my plugs they gave it a go.” The Mouse shrugged.

Sebastian frowned. “Not very serious now it sounds.”

“It isn’t,” the Mouse said. “It doesn’t bother me. They just can’t fix it. Something about neurological con-something-or-other.”

“What that is?”

The Mouse turned up his palms and looked blank.

“Neurological congruency,” Katin said. “Your unattached vocal cords must be a neurologically congruent birth defect.”

“Yeah, that’s what they said.”

“Two types of birth defects,” Katin explained. “In both, some part of the body, internal or external, is deformed, atrophied, or just put together wrong.”

“My vocal cords are all there.”

“But at the base of the brain there’s a small nerve cluster which, if you see it in cross section, looks more or less like a template of a human being. If this template is complete, then the brain has the nervous equipment to handle a complete body. Very rarely the template contains the same deformity as the body, as in the Mouse’s case. Even if the physical difficulty is corrected, there are no nerve connections within the brain to manipulate the physically corrected part.”

“That must be what’s wrong with Prince’s arm,” the Mouse said. “If it had been torn off in an accident or something, they could graft a new one on, connect up the veins and nerves and everything and have it just like new.”

“Oh,” Sebastian said.

Lynceos came down the ramp. White fingers massaged the ivory clubs of his wrists. “Captain’s really doing some fancy flying—”

Idas came to the rim of the pool. “This star he’s going to, where is—?”

“—its co-ordinates put it at the tip of the inner arm—”

“—in the Outer Colonies then—”

“—beyond even the Far Out Colonies.”

“That a lot of flying is,” Sebastian said. “And Captain all the way himself will fly.”

“The captain has a lot of things to think about,” Katin suggested.

The Mouse slipped his strap over his shoulder. “A lot of things he doesn’t want to think about too. Hey, Katin, how about that game of chess?”

“Spot you a rook,” Katin said. “Let’s keep it fair.”

They settled to the gaming board.

Three games later Von Ray’s voice came through the commons. “Everyone report to his projection chamber. There’s some tricky crosscurrents coming up.”

The Mouse and Katin pushed up from their bubble chairs. Katin loped toward the little door behind the serpentine staircase. The Mouse hurried across the rug, up the three steps. The mirrored panel slid into the wall. He stepped over a tool box, a coil of cable, three discarded frozen-coil memory bars—melting, they had stained the plates with salt where the puddle had dried—and sat on the couch. He shook out the cables and plugged them in.

Olga winked solicitously above, around, beneath him.

Crosscurrents: red and silver sequins flung in handfuls. The captain wielded them against the stream.

“You must have been quite a racer, Captain,” commented Katin. “What kind of yacht did you fly? We had a racing club at school that leased three yachts. I thought of going out for it one term.”

“Shut up and hold your vane steady.”

Here, down the galaxy’s spiral, there were fewer stars. Gravimetric shifts gentled here. Flight at galactic center, with its more condensed flux, yielded a dozen conflicting frequencies to work with. Here, a captain had to pick at the trail wisps of ionic inflections.

“Where are we going, anyway?” the Mouse asked.

Lorq pointed co-ordinates on the static matrix and the Mouse read them against matrix moveable.

Where was the star?

Take concepts like “distant,” “isolate,” “faint,” and give them precise mathematical expression. They’ll vanish under such articulation.

But just before they do, that’s where it lay.

“My star.” Lorq swept vanes aside so they could see. “That’s my sun. That’s my nova, with eight-hundred-year-old light. Look sharp, Mouse, and swing her down hard. If your slapdash vaning keeps me a second from this sun—”

“Come on, Captain!”

“—I’ll ram Tyy’s deck down your gullet, sideways. Swing her back.”

And the Mouse swung as all night rushed about his head.

“Captains from out here,” Lorq mused when the currents cleared, “when they come into the inflected confusion of the central hub, they can’t ride the flux in a complicated cluster like the Pleiades to save themselves. They go off beams, take spins, and go headlong into all kinds of mess. Half the accidents you’ve heard about were with eccentric captains. I talked to some of them once. They told me that here on the rim, it was us who were always piling up ships in gravity spin. ‘You always fall asleep on your strings,’ they told me.” He laughed.

“You know you’ve been flying a long time, Captain,” Katin said. “It looks pretty clear. Why don’t you turn off for a while?”