Darkness.

Silence.

Nothing.

Then thought shivers:

I think … therefore I … I am Katin Crawford? He fought away from that. But the thought was him; he was the thought. There was no place in here to anchor.

A flicker.

A tinkle.

The scent of caraway.

It was beginning.

No! He clawed back down into darkness. The mind’s ear recalled someone shrieking, “Remember Dan…” and the mind’s eye pictured the staggering derelict.

Another sound, smell, flicker beyond his lids.

He fought for unconsciousness in terror of the torrent. But terror quickened his heart, and the increased pulse drove him upward, upward, where the magnificence of the dying star lay in wait for him.

Sleep was killed in him.

He held his breath and opened his eyes—Pastels pearled before him. High chords rang softly on one another. Then caraway, mint, sesame, anise—And behind the colors, a figure.

“Mouse?” Katin whispered, and was surprised how clearly he heard himself.

The Mouse took his hands from the syrynx…

Color, smell, and music ceased.

“You awake?” The Mouse sat on the window sill, shoulders and the left side of his face lit with copper. The sky behind him was purple.

Katin closed his eyes, pushed his bead’ back into the pillow, and smiled. The smile got broader, and broader, split over his teeth, and suddenly verged against tears. “Yes.” He relaxed, and opened his eyes again. “Yes. I’m awake.” He pushed himself up. “Where are we? Is this the Alkane’s manned station?” But there was landscape through the window.

The Mouse shoved down from the sill. “Moon of a planet called New Brazillia.”

Katin got up from the hammock and went to the window. Beyond the atmosphere-trap, over the few low buildings, a black and gray rock-scape carpeted toward a lunar-close horizon. He pulled in a cool, ozone-tainted breath, then looked back at the Mouse. “What happened, Mouse? Oh, Mouse, I thought I was going to wake up like..

“Dan caught his on the way into the sun. You caught yours while we were pulling out. All the frequencies were dopplering down the red shift. It’s the ultraviolets that detach retinas and do things like happened to Dan. Tyy finally got a moment to shut your sensory input off from the master controls. You really were blind for a while, you know. We got you into the medico as soon as we were safe.”

Katin frowned. “Then what are we doing here? What happened then?”

“We stayed out by the manned stations and watched the fireworks from a safe distance. It took a little over three hours to reach peak intensity. We were talking with the Alkane’s crew when we got the captain’s signal from The Black Cockatoo. So we scooted on around, picked him up, and let all the Cockatoo’s cyborg studs loose.”

“Picked him up! You mean he did get out?”

“Yeah. He’s in another room. He wants to talk to you.”

“He wasn’t fooling us about ships going into a nova and coming out the other side?” They started toward the door.

Outside they passed down a corridor with a glass wall that looked across broken moon. Katin had lost himself in marvelous contemplation of the rubble when the Mouse said, “Here.”

They opened the door,

A crack of light struck in across Lorq’s face. “Who’s there?”

Katin asked, “Captain?”

“What?”

“Captain Von Ray?”

“… Katin?” His fingers clawed the chair arms. Yellow eyes stared, jumped; jumped, stared.

“Captain, what…?” Katin’s face furrowed. He fought down panic, forced his face to relax.

“I told Mouse to bring you to see me when you were up and around. You’re… you’re all right. Good.” Agony spread the ruptured flesh, then faltered. And for a moment there was agony.

Katin stopped breathing.

“You tried to look too. I’m glad. I always thought you would be the one to understand.”

“You… fell into the sun, Captain?”

Lorq nodded.

“But how did you get out?”

Lorq pressed his head against the back of the chair. Dark skin, red hair shot with yellow, his unfocused eyes, were the only colors in the room. “What? Got out, you say?” He barked a laugh. “It’s an open secret now. How did I get out?” A muscle quivered on the wrack of his jaw. “A sun—” Lorq held up one hand, the fingers curved to support an imaginary sphere “—it rotates, like a world, like some moons. With something the mass of a star, rotation means incredible centripetal force pushing out at the equator. At the end of the build-up of heavy materials at the surface, when the star actually novas, it all falls inward toward the center.” His fingers began to quiver. “Because of the rotation, the material at the poles falls faster than the material at the equator.” He clutched the arm of the chair again. “Within seconds after the nova begins you don’t have a sphere any more, but a…

“A torus!”

Lines scored Lorq’s face. And his head jerked to the side, as if trying to avoid a great light. Then the scarred lineaments came back to face them. “Did you say torus? A torus? Yes. That sun became a doughnut with a hole big enough for two Jupiters to fit through, side by side.”

“But the Alcane’s been studying novas up close for nearly a century! Why didn’t they know?”

“The matter displacement is all toward the center of the sun. The energy displacement is all outwards. The gravity shift will funnel everything toward the hole; the energy displacement keeps the temperature as cool inside the hole as the surface of some red giant star—well under five hundred degrees.”

Though the room was cool, Katin saw sweat starting in the ridges of Lorq’s forehead.

“The topological extension of a torus of that dimension—the corona which is all the Alkane’s stations can see—is almost identical to a sphere. Large as the hole is, compared to the size of the energy-ball, that hole would be pretty hard to find unless you knew where it was—or fell into it by accident.” On the chair arm the fingers suddenly stretched, quivered. “The Illyrion—”

“You… you got your Illyrion, Captain?”

Again Lorq raised his hand before his face, this time in a fist. He tried to focus on it. With his other hand he grabbed for it, half missed, grabbed again, missed completely, then again; opened fingers grappled the closed ones. The doubled fist shook as with palsy.

“Seven tons! The only materials dense enough to center in the hole are the trans-three-hundred elements. Illyrion! It floats free there, for whoever wants to go in and sweep it up. Fly your ship in, then look around to see where it is, and sweep it up with your projector vanes. It collects on the nodes of your projectors. Illyrion—nearly free of impurities.” His hands came apart. “Just… go on sensory input, and look around to see where it is.” He lowered his face. “She lay there, her face—her face an amazing ruin in the center of hell. And I swept my seven arms across the blinding day to catch the bits of hell that floated by—”He raised his head again. “There’s an Illyrion mine down on New Brazillia.

Outside the window a mottled planet hung huge in the sky. “They have equipment here for handling Illyrion shipments. But you should have seen their faces when we brought in our seven tons, hey, Mouse?” He laughed loudly again. “That’s right, Mouse? You told me what they looked like, yes?

Mouse?”

“That’s right, Captain.”

Lorq nodded, breathed deep. “Katin, Mouse, your job is over. You’ve got your walking papers. Ships leave here regularly. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting on another one.”

“Captain,” Katin ventured, “what are you going to do?”

“On New Brazillia, there’s a home where I spent much pleasant time when I was a boy. I’m going back there… to wait”

“Isn’t there something you could do, Captain? I looked and—”

“What? Speak louder.”