SEND THEM FLOWERS
                        WALTER JON WILLIAMS


W
alter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as
well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global
Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the
collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels
include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels,
Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi,
Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel,
Destiny’s Way. His most recent books are the first two novels in his acclaimed
Modern Space Opera epic, “Dread Empire’s Fall,” Dread Empire’s Fall: The
Praxis and Dread Empire’s Fall: The Sundering. Coming up are two new novels,
Orthodox War and Conventions of War. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in
2001 for his story “Daddy’s World,” and took another Nebula in 2005 with his story
“The Green Leop-ard Plague.”

       Williams has made his name in New Space Opera circles with novels such as
Aristoi and the “Dread Empire’s Fall” books, but those are not the only strings he
has to his bow. In the droll and exciting adventure that follows, he demonstrates that
even if you have multiple universes to flee through, the past has an uncomfortable
way of catching up with you...

                                       ****

We skipped through the borderlands of Probability, edging farther and farther away
from the safe universes that had become so much less safe for us, and into the fringe
areas where stars were cloudy smears of phosphores-cent gas and the Periodic
Table wasn’t a guide, but a series of ever-more-hopeful suggestions.

       Our ship was fueled for another seven years, but our flight ended at Socorro
for the most prosaic reason possible: we had run out of food. Exchange rates and
docking fees ate most of what little money we had, and that left us on Socorro with
enough cash for two weeks’ food or one good party.

      Guess which we chose?

      For five months, we’d been running from Shawn, or at any rate the cloaked,
dagger-bearing assassins we imagined him sending after us. I’d had nothing but
Tonio’s company and freeze-dried food to eat, and the only wine we’d drunk had
been stuff that Tonio brewed in plastic bags out of kitchen waste. We hadn’t
realized how foul the air on the Olympe had grown until we stepped out of the
docking tube and smelled the pure recycled air of Socorro Topside, the station
floating in geosynchronous orbit at the end of its tether.

       The delights of Topside glittered ahead of us, all lights and music, the sizzle of
grilled meats and the clink of glasses. How could we resist?

       Besides, freaky Probability was fizzing in our veins. Our metabolisms were
pumped by a shift in the electromagnetic fine structure constant. Oxygen was
captured and transported and burned and united with carbon and exhaled with
greater efficiency. We didn’t have to breathe as often as in our home Probability,
and still our bodies ran a continuous fever from the boost in our metabolic rate.

       Another few more steps into Probability and the multiverse would start
fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces, causing our bodies to fly apart or
the calcium in our bones to turn radioactive. But here, we remained more or less
ourselves even as certain chemical reactions became much easier.

       Which was why Socorro and its Topside had been built on this strange
outpost of the multiverse, to create alloys that weren’t possible in our home
probabilities, and to refine pure chemicals in industrial-sized quantities at a fraction
of the energy it would have taken elsewhere.

       Probability specialists in the employ of the Pryor corporate gene line had
labored hard to locate this particular Probability, with its unique physical
properties—some theorists would argue, in fact, that they’d created it, like
magicians bringing an entire universe into being with their spell. Once the Pryors had
found the place, they’d explored it for years while putting together the right industrial
base to properly exploit it. When they finally came, they came in strength, a whole
industrial colony jigsawing itself into the Socorro system practically overnight.

       Once they started shipping product out, they had to declare to the au-thorities
where it came from, and this particular Probability was no longer secret. Others
could come and exploit it, but the Pryors already had their facilities in place, and the
profits pouring out.

      Nobody lived in Socorro permanently. There was something about this reality
that was conducive to forming tumors. You came in on a three-year contract and
then shipped out, with cancer-preventing chemicals saturating your tissues.

      “Oh yisss,” Tonio said as we walked down Topside’s main avenue.
“Scru-tinize the fine ladies yonder, my compeer. I desire nothing so much as to
bond with them chemically, oh yisss.”

      The local fashion for women was weirdly modest and demure, cover-ing the
whole body and with a hood for the head, and the outfit looked inflated—as if they
were wearing full-body life preservers, designed to keep them floating even if
Topside fell out of orbit and dropped into the ocean.

      But even these outfits couldn’t entirely disguise the female form, or the female
walk. My blood seemed to fizz at the sight, and perhaps, in this quirky Probability, it
did.

      Music floated out of a place called the Flesh Pit, all suggestive dark win-dows
and colorful electric ads for cheap drinks. “Let us sample the pleasures of this
charming bistro,” Tonio suggested.

      “How about some food first?” I said, but Tonio was already halfway through
the door.

       The Flesh Pit had alcohol and other conventional stimulants, and also others
that were designed for our current reality, taking advantage of the local biochemistry
to deliver a packaged high aimed at our pumped me-tabolisms. The charge was
delivered from a pressure cylinder into a cheap plastic face mask. The masks
weren’t hygienic, but after a few huffs, we didn’t much care.

      While getting refills at the bar we met a short, brown-skinned man named
Frank. He was drinking alcohol, and joined us at our table. After two drinks, he was
groping my thigh, but he didn’t take it amiss when I moved his hand away.

      The Flesh Pit was a disappointment. The music was bottom-grade puti-puti
and the women weren’t very attractive even after they took off their balloon-suits.
After we bought Frank another drink, he agreed to be our guide to Topside’s
delights, such as they were.

      He took us up a flight of stairs to a place that didn’t seem to actually have a
name. The very second I stepped into the front room, a woman attached herself to
me, spreading herself across my front like a cephalopod embracing its prey. My
eyes were still adjusting to the dim light and I hadn’t seen her until she’d engulfed
me.

      My eyes adapted and I looked around. We were in what appeared to be a
small dance hall: there was a bar at one end and a live band at the other, and benches
along the sides where women smoked and waited for partners. There were a few
couples shuffling around on the dance floor, each man in the octopus clutch of his
consort.

      “Buy me a drink, space man?” my partner said. Her name was Étoile and she
wore a gardenia above one ear. I looked longingly at the prettier girls sitting on the
benches and then sighed and headed for the bar. On my way, I noticed that Tonio
had snagged the most beautiful woman in the place, a tall, tawny-haired lioness with
a wicked smile.

       I bought Étoile an overpriced cocktail and myself a whiff of some exotic gas.
We took a turn on the dance floor, then went to the bedroom. Then back to the bar,
then to the bedroom. Frank was sent out for food and came back with items on
skewers. Then the bar, then the bedroom. I had to pay for clean sheets each time.
Étoile was very efficient about collecting. Oc-casionally I would run into Tonio and
his girl in the corridor.

      By morning the bar was closed and locked, the dance floor was empty, I was
hungry and broke and melancholy, and Tonio’s girl had gone insane. She was crying
and clutching Tonio’s leg and begging him to stay.

      “If you leave I’ll never see you again!” she said. “If you leave I’ll kill myself!”
Then she took a bottle from the bar and smashed it on a table and tried to cut her
wrist with a piece of glass.

      I grabbed her and knocked the broken glass out of her hand, and then I
pinned her against the wall while she screamed and sobbed, with tears run-ning down
her beautiful face, and Étoile tried to find the management or the bartender or
someone to get Tonio’s girl a dose of something to calm her down.

      I gave Tonio an annoyed look.

      He had driven his woman crazy in only one night.

      “That’s a new record,” I told him.

                                         ****

Étoile returned with an irritated and sleepy-eyed manager, who unlocked the bar and
got an inhaler. He plastered the mask over the weeping woman’s face and cracked
the valve and held the mask over her mouth and nose till she relaxed and drifted off
to sleep. Then Tonio and I carried her to her room and draped her on the bed.

      “She ever done this before?” I asked the manager.

       He slapped at the wisp of hair atop his bald head as if it had bitten him. “No,”
he said.

      “You’ll have to watch her,” I said.

      He shrugged his little mustache. “I’m going back to bed,” he said.

      I looked at Étoile. “Not me,” she said. “Unless you pay.”
       “It is necessary at this juncture,” said Tonio, “for me to confess the
infortunate condition of our finances.”

      Infortunate. Tonio was always making up words that he thought were real.

      “Then get your asses out of here,” said the manager. Étoile glared at me as if it
weren’t her fault I had no money left.

       We dragged ourselves back to the Olympe. The ship smelled a lot better with
air being cycled in from the station. I wondered if I’d ever be able to pay for the air I
was breathing.

      “I hope Fanny will recover, yiss,” Tonio said as he headed for his rack.

      “What did you do to her?” I said.

      “We did things, yiss. It was Fanny did all the talking.”

      I looked again at Tonio and tried to figure out yet again why so many women
loved him. He wasn’t any better-looking than I was, and he was too skinny and he
had dirt under his nails. His hands were too big for the rest of him. He had blue eyes,
which probably didn’t hurt.

       Maybe the attraction was the broken nose, the big knot in the center of his
face that made it all a little off-center. Maybe that’s all it took.

      “Listen, Gaucho,” he said. He had his sincere face on. “I am aware that this
contingency is entirely my fault.”

      “It’s too late to worry about that,” I said.

       “Yiss, well.” He reached down and took the ring off his finger, the one with
the big emerald that Adora had given him, and he held it out to me. “This is the only
valuable thing I own,” he said. “I desire that you take it.”

      “I don’t want your ring,” I said.

        He took my hand and pressed the ring into it. “If necessity bides, you can sell
it,” he said. “I don’t cognizate how much it’s worth, but it’s a lot, yiss. It will pay
for docking fees and enough food to peregrinate to some other Probability where
you might be able to make a success.”

      I looked at him. “Are you saying goodbye, Tonio?”

      He shrugged. “Compeer, I have no plans. But who knows what the future may
necessitate?”
        He ambled away to his rack. I looked at the ring on my palm—all the intricate
little designs on it, the dolphins of the Feeneys and the storks of the Storch line all
woven together in little knots.

      I went into my stateroom, where I closed the door. I put the ring on my desk
and looked at it for a while, and then I went to bed.

       When I woke in the morning, the ring was still there, shining like all the unpaid
debts in all the multiverse.

                                        ****

I met Tonio when I was working with my wife Karen on a mining conces-sion
owned by her family, an asteroid known only by an identification num-ber. We were
supervising the robots that did the actual mining, following the vein of gold and
sending it streaming out into the void to be caught by the processor that hovered
overhead. Gold was a common metal and prices were low. The robots were old and
kept breaking down.

       Tonio turned up in a draft of new workers, and we became friends. He had his
charm, and his strange Andevin accent, and the vocabulary he’d got in prison, where
he had nothing to read for months but a dictionary. He said the prison term was the
result of a misunderstanding about whether or not he could borrow someone else’s
blazemobile.

      Tonio and I became friends. After Karen and Tonio became friends, I
equipped myself with a heavy pry bar and went looking for him. When he opened
the door to his little room and saw me standing there, he just looked at me and then
shrugged.

       “Do whatsoever thou must, compeer,” he said, backing away from the door.
“For I deserve it in all truth.”

       I stepped in and hefted the pry bar and realized that I couldn’t hit him. I
lowered the bar and then Tonio and I talked for about six hours, after which I
realized that my marriage hadn’t been working in a long time, and that I wanted out
and that Tonio could have Karen for all I cared.

       After the divorce, when everything had played itself out and there was no
point in staying on the claim of a family to which I was no longer tied, I left the scene
along with Tonio.

      Of the various options, it was the course that promised the most fun.

                                        ****
The Olympe isn’t a freighter, it’s a small private vessel—a yacht in fact, though I’m
far from any kind of yachtsman. The boat can carry cargo, but only a modest
amount. In practice, if I wanted to carry cargo, there were three alternatives.
Passengers. Compact but valuable cargo, which often means contraband. And
information, dispatches so private that the sender doesn’t want to broadcast them
even in cipher. Usually the dispatches are carried by a courier.

       Once we docked on Socorro, I advertised Olympe—I even offered
refer-ences—but didn’t get any takers, not right away. Fortunately, docking on
Socorro was cheap—this wasn’t a tourist spot, but an industrial colony with too
much docking capacity—and the air was nearly free. So Tonio got a job Upside,
selling roasted chestnuts from a little wheeled grill—and with his blue eyes and
broken nose working for him, he soon sold more chestnuts than anyone in the
history of the whole pushcart business.

       I took my aurora onto the station and went looking for work as a musi-cian. I
did some busking till I got a job with a band whose aurorista was on vacation in
another Probability, and my little salary and Tonio’s got us through the first month
even though the puti-puti music bored me stiff. Then I auditioned for a band that had
a series of regular gigs in upscale bars, and they took me on. I got a full split and a
share of tips instead of a tiny salary, and things eased a bit. Even the music was
better. We played popu-lar songs while the tables were full of the dinner crowd, but
afterward we played what we liked, and when I got a good grind going, I could make
the room sizzle the way my blood sizzled in this little corner of the multiverse.

       During our flight, I’d had nothing to do but practice, and I’d got pretty good.

      A couple of months went by. I didn’t see Tonio much—he’d got a girl-friend
named Mackey and was spending his free time with her. But he sent a piece of his
pay into my account every month, to help pay for Olympe.

       I didn’t have to sell the ring. I put it in the captain’s safe and tried not to think
about it.

       The docking fees got paid, and our air and water bill. I had Olympe cleaned
and the crudded-up old air filters replaced. I polished the wood and the ornate
metalwork in my stateroom till it glistened, and put up some of Aram’s old things, in
case I wanted to impress a potential passenger with the luxury we could offer. I
started stocking the larder against the day it was time to leave.

      I began to relax. Perhaps Shawn’s vengeance was not quite so hot on our tail.
I even spent some dinars on my own pleasures.

      Not knowing whether or not it was a good idea, I went back to the place
where Frank had taken us that first night. I wanted to find out if Tonio’s
tawny-haired woman was all right. But I didn’t see her, and I had barely started
chatting with a couple of the employees when the manager recog-nized me and threw
me out.

      Which was an answer, I guess.

     There were other places to have fun, though, that didn’t come with bad
memories. My band played in a lot of them. I met any number of women in them,
and we had a good time with the sizzling in the blood and nobody went crazy.

      So it went until a friend of Frank’s made an offer to hire Olympe. Eldridge
was a short man with fast, darting hands and genes left over from some long-ago
fashion for albinism. His pale hair was shaggy, and his eyes looked at you with irises
the color of blood.

       Eldridge offered a very generous sum to ship a small cargo out to one of the
system’s outer moons, a place called Vantage, where a lot of mining and processing
habitats were perched on vast seams of ore. The trip would take five days out and
five back, and I was free to take any other cargo on the return trip. Half our fee
would be paid in advance, half on delivery. The one condition Eldridge made was
that the seals on the packages should not be broken.

       I’d been scraping a living aboard Olympe long enough to know what that
stipulation meant, and I knew what I meant to do about it too.

       The band hired a temporary aurora player, and Tonio quit his chestnut-selling
job even though his boss offered him a bonus. We had no sooner cleared Upside
than the two of us went into the cargo space and broke every seal on every
container, digging like maniacs through cushions of spray foam to find exactly what
was supposed to be there, bottles of rare brandy or expensive lubricating oil for
robots or canister filters for miners’ vac suits. We searched until the air was filled
with a blizzard of foam and I began to wonder if we’d misjudged Eldridge entirely.

       But in what was literally the final container, we found what we were looking
for, about forty kilos of blue salt, exactly the stimulant to keep miners working those
extra hours to earn that end-of-the-year bonus, to keep them all awake and alert and
safe until the salt turned them into sweating, shivering skeletons, every synapse
turned to pork cracklings while heavy metals collected in their livers and their zombie
bodies ran on chemi-cal fumes.

      Well, well, I thought. I looked at Tonio. He looked at me.

        Vantage would have been a couple months away except that Olympe could
shift to a Probability where we could make better time, a place where the stars hung
in the sky like hard little pearls on a background of green baize. We made a couple
course changes outside our regular flight plan, then docked at Vantage and waited
for the police to come and tear our ship apart.

       Which they did. It was all part of Eldridge’s plan. The griffs would find the
blue salt in our cargo hold, and we’d be arrested. The salt would find its way from
police lockers to Eldridge’s dealers on Vantage, who would sell it and give the griffs
a piece. In the meantime, the griffs would collect our fee from Eldridge in fines, and
the money would be returned to Eldridge. I’d be coerced into signing over Olympe
in exchange for a reduced sentence, and Olympe would be sold, with the profits split
between Eldridge and the griffs.

      It’s the sort of trap that tourists in the Probabilities walk into all the time. But
Tonio and I aren’t tourists.

       The griffs came in with chemical sniffers and found nothing, which meant they
had to break into the cargo containers, and of course found that they’d been broken
into already. “A freelance captain’s got to protect him-self,” I told the griff
lieutenant. “If I find contraband, it gets spaced.”

      I wouldn’t admit to actually having found the salt. I didn’t know the local laws
well enough to know whether that admission would implicate me or not, so I refused
to admit anything.

       The lieutenant in charge of the search just kept getting more and more angry. I
was worried that she or one of her cronies would plant some con-traband on the
ship, so I made a point of telling her that I’d turned on all the ship’s cameras, one in
every room and cargo space, and was livecasting the whole search back to a
lawyer’s office on Upside. If she tried to plant anything, it would be caught on
camera.

      That sent her into a towering rage, and she tossed all the staterooms for spite,
ripping the mattresses and blankets off the beds and emptying the closets onto the
deck, before she stomped off.

       I planned to unload the cargo and leave the second we could get clear-ance,
but thanks to the griff lieutenant’s temper tantrum, we had to do some cleanup first.
That’s why we had time for a passenger to find us. That’s how we met Katarina.

      Katarina was one of the Pryors, the incorporated gene line that pretty much
owned the system, all of Upside and most of Downside, as well as every facility on
Vantage. She’d been on some kind of inspection tour of the Pryor facilities on the
various moons, but she’d been unexpectedly called back to Socorro and needed a
ride.

       When the message first came that someone wanted passage to Socorro, I’d
been worried that Katarina was a plant from the police or from Eldridge, but as soon
as I looked at her I knew that she was going to be a lot more trouble than that.
       I don’t understand the way the gene lines operate internally, with all the
cloning and use of cartridge memories and marriages by cousins to keep all the
money and power in the same pedigree, but it was clear from the second she came
aboard Olympe that she ranked high in the structure. She had that eerie perfection
that came with her status. Geneticists had sweated over her body years before she’d
ever been born. Flawless complexion, perfect black hair, perfect white teeth, full
expressive lips, black eyes that looked at me for a full half-second before they had
added up my entire life and riches, found them unworthy of further consideration,
and looked away. She wore an outfit that was the opposite of the balloon-suits
women wore in Socorro, a dark fabric that outlined perfectly every curve of that
genetically ideal body. I got dizzy just looking at her.

       She looked at my stateroom—I’d moved my stuff out of it—and spared an
extra glance for the painting I’d put over the cabinet door that had been ripped off
its hinges by the griffs. The painting was of a nude woman on a sofa, with a black
ribbon around her neck and a bangle on her wrist. She has a cat, and a servant
bringing her flowers from the admirer that’s obviously just walked into the room.
She’s looking out of the painting at her visitor with eyes hard and objective and
cutting as obsidian.

       Aram had that painting in the stateroom when he’d died. I’d kept it for a
while, but put it away later. It is true that travelers, stuck in their ships for months at a
time, like to look at pictures of naked ladies, but not the same lady all the time, and
not one who looks back at you the way this one does.

        I looked for a startled moment at Katarina and the woman in the paint-ing, and
I realized that they had the same look in their eyes, that same hard, indifferent
calculation. She turned those eyes to me.

        “I’ll take it,” she said. “There’s a room for my secretary?”

        “Of course.” With a torn mattress and a smashed chair, but I didn’t men-tion
that.

      She left the stateroom to call for her secretary and her baggage. In the
corridor, she encountered Tonio.

      He grinned at her, blue eyes set on either side of that broken nose. Those hard
black eyes gazed back, then softened.

        “Who is this?” she asked.

        Trouble, I thought.

        “I’m the cook,” Tonio said.
      Of course, she was married. They almost always are.

                                        ****

Tonio and I had first come aboard Olympe as crew. Aram was the owner and
captain—he was a Maheu and had inherited money and power and responsibility,
but after eight hundred years he’d given up everything but the money, and traveled
aimlessly in Olympe, looking for something that he hadn’t seen somewhere before.

       He also used massive amounts of drugs, which were sent to him by Maheu’s
special courier service. To show that the drugs were legitimate he had doctor’s
prescriptions for everything—he collected them the way he had once collected art.

       Physically, he had the perfection of the high-bred gene lines, with broad
shoulders, mahogany skin, and an arched nose. It was only if you looked closely
that you saw that the eyes were pouchy and vague, that his muscles were wasting
away, and that his skin was as slack as his first-rate genetics would permit. He was
giving away his body the same way he’d given away his collection.

       He was lonely too, because he would talk to Tonio and me, about history, and
art, and poetry. He could recite whole volumes of poetry from memory, and it was
beautiful even though most of it was in old languages, like Per-sian, that I’d never
heard before and didn’t understand.

       I asked him about his gene line, his connections, what he did before he’d
started his wandering.

      “It was prostitution,” he said, with a look at the painting on his stateroom wall.
“I don’t want to talk about it, now I’m trying to regain my virtue.”

       These conversations took place in the morning, after breakfast. Then he’d put
the first patch of the day on his arm and nod off, his head in Maud’s lap.

      Maud Rain was his girlfriend. She looked about seventeen, and maybe she
was. She appeared as if her genetics had been intending to create a lily, or
cornflower, or some other fragile blossom, and then been surprised to discover
they’d produced a human being. She was blond and green-eyed and blushed easily,
and she loved Aram completely. I was a little in love with her, myself.

       Life aboard the Olympe was pleasant, if somewhat pointless. We wandered
around the multiverse without a schedule. We’d stop for a while, and Aram would
leave the ship to visit old friends or see something new that he thought might interest
him, and we wouldn’t hear from him for anywhere between three days and three
months, then abruptly we’d be on our way again. Aram paid us well and gave us a
good deal of time off, and once he bailed Tonio out of a scrape involving the wife of
a Creel station superin-tendent.

      I don’t pretend to understand the chemistry between users and their
con-sorts, and I don’t know whether Aram talked Maud into using, or whether it was
her own idea. I do know that, like all users, Aram wanted to make everyone around
him use too. He offered the stuff often enough to me and Tonio, though I never
heard him make the same offer to Maud.

       Whoever made up Maud’s mind for her, she then went on to make a stupid,
elementary mistake. She gave herself the same dose that Aram took, without his
magic genes and all the immunity he’d built up over the de-cades, and she screamed
and thrashed and went into convulsions. Tonio got his fingers savagely bitten trying
to keep the vomit clear of her mouth while I madly shifted the ship through about
eight Probabilities to get her to a hospital. By the time we got her there, she didn’t
have much of a brain left. She still blushed easily, and looked at you with dreamy
green eyes. She had the sweet-natured smile, but there was nothing behind it but a
void.

       We left her in a place where they’d look after her, a stately white building on a
pleasant green lawn, and Olympe resumed its wanderings. Aram dete-riorated
quickly. He no longer talked in the mornings. We’d find him alone and crying, the
tears pouring down his face in silence, and then he’d put a new patch on his arm and
drift away. One afternoon, we found him dead, with six patches on his arm.

      In his will, he left all his money to a trust for Maud, and he left Olympe and its
contents to me. He left Tonio some money. I gave Tonio everything in the
pharmacy, and he sold it to someone on Burnes Upside and we gave Aram a long,
crazy wake with the profits. The rest of Tonio’s money went to lawyers to fix a
misunderstanding that occurred during the course of the wake.

      When we sobered up, I realized that I had a yacht, but no money to sup-port
it.

       Tonio was the only crew I ever had, because he didn’t expect to be paid. He
did the job of a crew, and when he had money, he paid me, as if he were a
passenger. When I had money, I shared it with him.

      We kept moving, the same kind of random shifts we’d made with Aram.

      It was almost enough to keep us out of trouble.

                                        ****

Tonio spent that first night in the stateroom with Katarina Pryor. I tried to console
myself with the fact that this was all happening in a whole other Probability from the
one Katarina normally lived in. I also tried to concen-trate on how I was going to
handle Eldridge when I saw him again.

       I checked some data sources and inquired about Katarina Pryor. She was
about fifty years old, though she looked half that and would for the next millennium,
if she so desired. She was one of the Council of Seven that ran Socorro on behalf of
the Pryor gene line.

      Her husband, Denys, was another one of the Seven.

        I let that settle in my brain for a while. Then I sent a message to Eldridge,
telling him that I wanted to meet him as soon as Olympe docked Topside. He replied
that it would be his pleasure to do so.

      We’d see how much fun he’d have.

       I told Tonio of this development as we were walking to the lounge. As he
stepped into the room, he gave me the news. “Katarina has invited me to accompany
her to Downside on completion of our returnment. I have accepted, yiss, pending of
course my captain’s sanction.”

       Katarina’s secretary, a young Pryor named Andrew, happened to be sitting in
the lounge as we entered, and he looked as if someone had hit him in the head with a
brick.

      “It’s not as if people are going out of their way to hire us,” I said, “so the ship
can spare you. But...” I hesitated, aware of the presence of Andrew. “Doesn’t this
remind you of anything, Tonio?”

      He gave me a look of offended dignity. “The situation of which you speak
was on an entirely different plane,” he said. “This, on the contrary, is real.”

      The conversation was taking place in a Probability where stars looked like
spinning billiard balls on a felt-green sky, and he and Katarina were traveling to
another place where oxygen burned in their blood like naphtha. Who knew how real
anything could be under such circumstances?

      I asked Tonio if he could delay his departure with Katarina until Eldridge came
aboard.

      “Oh yiss. Most assuredly.”

      He seemed perfectly confident.

      I wish I could have echoed his assurance.

                                        ****
Eldridge was present when Olympe arrived at Upside, and he had brought a couple
of thick-necked thugs with him. They were hanging back from the personnel lock
because there were plainclothes Pryor security present, wait-ing to escort Katarina
and her new beau on the first stage of their planetary honeymoon.

       I called Eldridge from the control room. “Come on in,” I said. “Leave your
friends behind.”

      When he came on board, he looked as if he were fully capable of
dis-membering me all by himself, his small size notwithstanding. I escorted him
through the lounge, where Katarina and Andrew waited for Tonio to finish his
packing job, a job that would not be completed until I gave him the high sign.

       Eldridge’s eyes went wide as he saw Katarina. She wore a compromise
between the local balloon-suits and the form-fitting outfit she’d worn when she came
aboard, which amounted to a slinky suit with a puffy jacket on top. But I don’t think
it was her looks that riveted his attention.

      He recognized her.

     “This is Miss Katarina Pryor,” I told him, redundantly I hoped, “and Mr.
Andrew Pryor.”

      “Pryor,” Eldridge repeated, as if he wanted to confirm this striking fact for
himself.

        Andrew gave him a barely civil nod. Katarina just gave him her stone-eyed
stare, let him know he had been measured and found wanting.

      I went to the bar and poured myself a cup of coffee. You had to drink coffee
quickly here, because in this Probability it cools very fast.

      “Eldridge,” I remarked. “I haven’t received my on-delivery fee.”

       He gave me a scarlet stare out of his white face. “The cargo did not arrive
intact.”

       “One crate went missing,” I said. “It was probably the fault of the load-ers,
but since I signed for it, you should feel free to deduct its value from the delivery
fee.” I made a show of looking at the manifest on my pocket adjutant. “What was in
that crate—? Ah, jugs of spray foam mix. Value three hundred—would you say
that’s a correct value, Miss Pryor?”

      Katarina drummed her fingers on the arm of the sofa. “Sounds about right,
Captain Crossbie,” she said, in a voice that said Don’t bother me with this crap.
         I called up my bank account. “Might as well do the transfer now,” I said.

         Eldridge’s eyes cut to Katarina, then cut back. His lips went even whiter than
usual.

      If the Pryors decided to step on him, he wouldn’t leave so much as a grease
spot on their shoes. He knew that, as did I.

      He got out his own adjutant and tapped in codes with his one long thumbnail.
I saw my bank account jump by the anticipated amount, and I put away my adjutant
and sipped my coffee. It was already lukewarm.

         “Want some coffee, by the way?” I asked.

         Eldridge gazed at me out of those flaming eyes. “No,” he said.

       “We have some other business, but there’s no reason to bother Miss Pryor
with it,” I said.

      He followed me into the control room, where I closed the door and gestured
him toward a chair.

         “Consider that a penalty,” I said, “for thinking I was new to the multiverse.”

         “The Pryors aren’t really protecting you,” he said. “They can’t be.”

       “They’re old family friends,” I said. I sat in the padded captain’s chair—
genuine Tibetan goat hide, Aram had told me—and swiveled it toward him. He just
stared at me, his busy fingers plucking at his knees.

         “I’m willing to sell you coordinates,” I said.

         He licked his lips, pink tongue on paper-white. “Coordinates to what?” he
asked.

         “What do you think?”

         He didn’t answer.

      We had put the blue salt in orbit around an ice moon, one that circled the
same gas giant as Vantage.

      “The coordinates go for the same price as the cargo.” I smiled. “Plus three
hundred.”
       He just kept staring. Probably that agate gaze had frightened a lot of people,
but I wasn’t scared at all.

          Five days around Katarina Pryor had given me immunity to lesser terrors.

          “If you don’t want the coordinates,” I said, “your competition will.”

          He sneered. “There is no competition.”

          “There will be if Katarina takes you and your tame police out of the equation,”
I said.

       So, in the end, he paid. Once the money was in the account, I gave Eldridge
the seven orbital elements that described the salt’s amble about its moon. Someone
from Vantage could easily hop over and pick up the salt for him, and the strung-out
miners would go on getting their daily nerve-searing dose of fate.

      I showed Eldridge out, and as he bustled away, he cast a look over his
shoulder that promised payback.

       I sent a message to Tonio, telling him to solve his packing crisis, and as I
returned to the lounge, he came loping out of his quarters, his belongings carried in a
rucksack on one shoulder. Andrew raised an eyebrow at the tiny amount of baggage
that had taken so long to pack.

          Katarina rose to embrace Tonio. I watched as she molded her body to his.

          “I am primed, lover mine,” Tonio said.

          “So am I.”

      I showed them to the door. “Thank you, Captain,” Andrew said, and with an
expression like someone passing gas at a funeral, handed me a tip in an envelope.

          I looked at the envelope. This had never happened before.

          “See you later, compeer.” Tonio grinned.

          “You bet.”

      I watched them walk toward their waiting transport, arms around each other’s
waists. People stared. Wary guards circled them. Eldridge and his people were long
gone.

          I decided it was time to buy and stow a lot of rations. A year’s worth, at least.
      For two fools, running.

                                        ****

But first I wanted to celebrate the fact that I now possessed more money than I’d
ever had in my life, even if you didn’t count my tip—which was two thousand, by
the way, an inept attempt to buy my silence. I couldn’t make up my mind whether
Eldridge was going to be a problem or not—if I were him, Katarina would have
scared the spleen right out of me, but I didn’t know Eldridge well enough to know
how stubborn or stupid he was.

      While I considered this, it occurred to me to wonder how many years it had
been since I’d had a planet under my feet.

      Too many, I thought.

       I opened my safe and put Tonio’s emerald ring in my pocket—no sense in
leaving it behind for people like Eldridge to find—and then I followed in the
footsteps of Tonio and Katarina and took the next ride down the grapevine to
Downside. I looked for tourist resorts and exotic sights, and though I discovered
there were none of the former, there were plenty of the latter. There were mountains,
gorges, and colossal wildlife—the chemi-cal bonding of the local Probability led to
plants, even those with Earth genetics, running amok. I saw rose blossoms bigger
than my head, and with a smell like vinegar—chemistry not quite right, you see. Little
pine trees grew to the size of Douglas firs. Socorro’s internal workings had thrust
huge reefs of nearly pure minerals right out of the ground, many of which the miners
had not yet begun to disassemble and carry away. For a brief time, wearing a
protective raincoat, breathing apparatus, and crinkly plastic overshoes, I walked on
the Whitewashed Desert that surrounded Mount Cyanide. I bathed in the Red Sea.
Then the Green Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the Winedark Sea. The Yellow Sea stained
my skin for days. It looked as if I were dying of cirrhosis.

      I kept the ring in a special trouser pocket that would open only to a code from
my personal adjutant. After a while, I got used to the feel of it, and days went by
before I remembered it was there.

      I’d brought my aurora. Along the way there was music, bars, and happy
moments. I met women named Meimei, Sally June, and Soda. We had good times
together. None of them died, went crazy, or slit their wrists.

       Carried away by the sheer carefree joy of it all, I began to think of going back
to the Olympe and sailing away on the sea of Probability. Tonio was probably still
happy with Katarina, and I could leave with his blessing.

     I would be safe. Shawn wasn’t after me. And Tonio, provided he stayed put,
would be as safe as he ever was, probably safer.
      I contemplated this possibility for a few too many days, because one morning
I woke from a dense, velvety dream to the birdlike tones of my adjutant. I told it to
answer.

      “Compeer,” said Tonio. “Wherewhich art thou?”

      “Shadows and fog,” I said, because the voice seemed to be coming from my
dream.

       “There’s a party on the morrow. Come and share it with me. Katarina would
be delighted to see you.”

      I’ll bet, I thought.

                                        ****

The hotel looked like a hovership that had stranded itself on land, a series of swoops
and terraces, surrounded by cypress trees the size of skyscrapers, with gardenias as
long as my leg tumbling brightly down from the balco-nies. Katarina had installed
Tonio and his rucksack in a five-room suite and given him an expense account that,
so far, he’d been unable to dent.

      Tonio greeted me as I stepped into the suite. His blue eyes sparkled with joy.
He looked well scrubbed and well tended, and his hair was sleek.

       “Did you bring your aurora, Gaucho?” he said. “Let us repair to a suitable
location, with drinks and the like, and partake of heavenly music.”

      “I thought we were going to a party.”

      “That is later. Right now we’ve got to have you measured for clothes.”

       A tailor with a double chin and a ponytail stepped out of a side room, had me
take off my jacket, and got my measurements with a laser scriber. He vanished.
Tonio led me out of the apartment and down a confusing series of stairs and lifts to
a subbasement garage. Empty space echoed around us, supported by fluted pillars
with lotus-leaf capitals. Tonio whispered a code into his adjutant and turbines began
their soft whine somewhere in the darkness. Spotlights flared. A blazemobile came
whispering toward us on its cushion of air. I felt its breath on my face and hands.
The colors were gray and silver, blending into each other as if they were somehow
forged together. The lines were clean and sharp. It looked purposeful as a sword.

      “Nice,” I said. “Is this Katarina’s?” I had a hard time not calling her “Miss
Pryor.”
        “It’s mine,” Tonio said. “Katarina purchased it for me after, ah, the inci-dent.”

        I looked at him.

       “There was a misunderstanding about another vehicle,” Tonio said. “I thought
I had the owner’s permission to take it.”

        Ah, I thought. One of those misunderstandings.

        “Are you driving?” I asked.

        “Why don’t you drive? You’re better than I am.”

       I settled into the machine gingerly. It folded around me like a piece of origami.
Tonio settled into the passenger seat. I drove the car with care till I got out of town,
then let the turbines off their leash, and we were soon zooming down a highway
under the system’s fluorescing, shivering smear of a sun, huge jungle growth on
either side of the road turning the highway into a tunnel beneath vines and wild,
drooping blossoms.

       “There’s another car behind us,” I said, looking at the displays. I was
sur-prised it could keep up.

      “That would be Katarina’s security,” Tonio said. “It is a mark of her love.
They follow me everywhere, to render me safe.”

        And to prevent, I thought, any of those misunderstandings about who owns
what.

       A blissful smile crossed Tonio’s face. “Katarina and I are so in love,” he said.
“I sing her to sleep every night.”

        The thought of Tonio crooning made me smile. “That sounds great,” I said.

        “We wish to have many babies, but there are complicatories.”

        “Like her husband?”

        “He is obstacular, yiss, but the principal problem is legal.”

       It turned out that Katarina did not legally own her own womb, as well as other
parts, which belonged to the Pryor family trust. She could not become pregnant
without the permission of certain high-ranking members of her line, who alone knew
the codes that would unlock her fertility.

        “That’s... not the usual problem,” I said, stunned. I don’t know much about
how the big corporate gene lines work, but this seemed extreme even for them.

      “Can you hire a surrogate?” I asked. “Use an artificial womb?”

      “It’s not the same.” He cast a glance over his shoulder. “Those individuals
behind us—mayhap you can outspeed them?”

      “I’ll try.”

      I set the jets alight. My vision narrowed with acceleration, but oxygen still
blazed in my blood. Alarms began to chirp. The vehicle trailing us fell back, but
before long we came to a town and had to slow.

       It was a sad little mining town, covered with the dust of the huge magnesite
reef that loomed over the town. Vast movers were in the process of disassembling
the entire formation, while being careful not to ignite it and incinerate the entire
county.

     Tonio pointed to a bar called the Reefside. “Pull in here, compeer. Mayhap
we may discover refreshment.”

       The bar sat on its tracks, ready to move to another location when the last
chunk of magnesite was finally carried away. I put the blazemobile in a side street so
as not to attract attention to ourselves. We climbed up into the bar and blinked in its
dark, musty-scented interior. We had arrived during an off-peak period and only a
few faces stared back at us.

       We huffed some gas and shared a bag of crisps. After ten minutes, the
security detail barged in, two broad-shouldered, clean-cut, thick-necked young men
in city suits. After they saw us, one went back outside, and the other ordered fruit
juice.

      The regulars stared at him.

      I asked the bartender if it was all right to play my aurora.

      “You can if you want,” he said, “but if the music’s shit, I’ll tell you to stop.”

       “That’s fair,” I said. I opened the case and adjusted the sonics for the room
and put the aurora against my shoulder and touched the strings. A chord hung in the
air, with just a touch of sourness. The bartender frowned. I tuned and began to play.

       The bartender turned away with a grudging smile. I made the aurora sound like
chimes, like drums, like brass. Our fellow drinkers began to bob their heads and call
for the bartender to refill their glasses. One gent bought us rounds of beer.
       The shifts changed at the diggings and miners spilled in, their clothes dusty,
their respirators hanging loose around their necks. Some were highly specialized
gene types, with sleek skin and implants for remote control of heavy equipment.
Others were generalized humans, like us. One woman had lost an arm in an accident,
and they were growing it back—it was a formless pink bud on the end of her
shoulder.

       I played my aurora. I played fierce, then slow. The miners nodded and
grinned and tapped their booted feet on the grainy plastic floor. The security man
clung unhappily to his glass of fruit juice. I played angry, I played tender, I played
the sound of birds in the air and bees in their hive. Tonio borrowed a cap from one
of the diggers and passed it around. It came back full of money, which he stuffed in
my pockets.

      My fingers and mind were numb, and I paused for a moment. There was a
round of applause, and the diggers called for more refreshment. A few others asked
who we were, and I told them we were off a ship and just traveling around the
country.

        Tonio had a blazing white grin on his face. “It is spectacular!” he said. “This
is the true joy!”

      “More than with Katarina?”

       He shrugged. “With Katarina it is sensational, but she is terribly occu-pied,
and I don’t know anyone else in this coincidence of spacetime. People fear to be in
my vicinity, and when I corner one, they only speak to me because they are afraid of
Katarina. I have nothing in my day but to wait for Katarina to come home.”

      “Can’t she give you a job? Make you her secretary, maybe?”

      “She has Andrew.”

      “Her social secretary, then.” I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea.

       He gave a big grin. “She knows the social rules, yiss. I am signally lacking in
that area of expertise.”

      “You could be a prospector. Travel around looking for minerals or
what-ever.”

      “For this task they have satellites and artificial intelligences.” He gazed for a
long moment off into nowhere. “I am filled with gladness that you came to see me,
Gaucho.”

      “I’m glad I came.” Though I’m not certain I was telling the truth.
      Tonio was getting bored with his life with Katarina. A bored Tonio was a
dangerous Tonio.

      We talked and drank with the miners till Tonio said it was time to leave. Our
guard was relieved to follow us out of the bar. His partner had been guarding our
blazemobile all this time.

       We were both too drunk to drive, so we got in the car and told the auto-pilot
to take us home. Once we arrived, I had a fitting with the tailor, who had run up my
suit while we were off enjoying ourselves. I had this deep blue outfit, all spider silk,
with lots of gold braid on my cuffs.

      “What’s this?” I asked Tonio.

      “You are my captain,” he said, “and now you are dressed like one.”

      “I feel ridiculous,” I said.

      “Wait till you see what I am compelled to wear.”

       The tailor adjusted the suit, then gave me the codes so that I could alter the
suit’s fit if I wanted to, or add a pocket here or there. In the meantime, Tonio
changed. His suit was the latest mode, with ruffles and fringes that seemed to triple
the volume of his thin body. He looked unusual, but he carried himself with his usual
jaunty style, as if he wanted it made clear to everyone that he was only pretending to
be the person in the suit.

       Katarina arrived and wrapped herself around Tonio without caring if I was
there or not. I was reminded of my little limpet-girl, Étoile.

       Katarina began tearing at Tonio’s ruffles and fringes. They went off to the
bedroom for a lust break. I went out onto the balcony and watched the sun set over
the jade forest. The sweet smell of flowers rose on the twilight air.

       Tonio and Katarina returned. She wore a dark lacy sheath that was as simple
as Tonio’s suit was elaborate. Gemstones glittered sunset-red about her neck, and a
languid postcoital glow seemed to float around her like a halo. I could feel sweat
prickling my forehead at her very presence.

      “You’re looking very well, Captain Crossbie,” she said.

      “You’re looking well yourself,” I said. There was a bit more regard in her
glance than I usually got. I wondered if Tonio had been telling her stories that made
me seem, well, interesting.
       We went to the party, which was in the same building. It celebrated the fact
that some production quota or other had been exceeded, and the room was full of
Pryors and their minions. Katarina took Tonio’s arm and pressed herself to him all
night, making it clear that they were a couple.

      The place was filled with people who were perfectly perfect, perfect
ev-erywhere from their dress to their genetics. All the talk I heard was of busi-ness,
and complex business at that. If I’d been a spy sent by the competition, I would
have heard a lot, but it would have been opaque to me.

       Don’t let anyone tell you that people like the Pryors don’t work for their
riches and power. They do nothing else.

      I was introduced as Captain Crossbie, and people took me for a yachts-man,
which technically I suppose I was. People asked me about regattas and famous
captains, and I admitted that I only used my yacht for travel. I was then asked where
I’d been, and I managed to tell a few stories.

       I was talking about yachts to an engineer named Bond—his dream was to buy
a ship when he retired, and travel—when a blond man came up to talk to him. I
thought the newcomer looked familiar, but didn’t place him right away.

       He talked to Bond about some kind of bottleneck on the Downside grapevine
station that was threatening to interfere with shipments to Upside, and Bond assured
him that the problem would be engineered out of existence in a couple weeks. He
asked after Bond’s family. Bond told him that his son had won some kind of prize
from the Pryor School of Economics. It was then that the blond man turned to me.

       He had the chiseled perfection that came with his flawless genes, and violet
eyes, and around his mouth was a tight-lipped tension that nature— or his
designers—had not quite intended for him.

      “This is Mister Denys Pryor,” Bond said. “Denys, this is Captain Crossbie.”

      He realized who I was about the same instant that I finally recognized him as
Katarina’s husband. The violet eyes narrowed.

      “Ah,” he said. “The accomplice.”

      “I don’t have any response to that,” I said, “that I’d expect you to be-lieve.”

       He gave me a contemptuous look and stalked away. Bond looked after him in
surprise, then looked at me. Then the light dawned. Panic flashed across his face.

      “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, and was gone before I could even reply.
       That was the last conversation I had at the party. Word about my con-nection
to Tonio flashed through the room faster than lightning, and soon I was alone. I got
tired of standing around by myself, so I went out onto the terrace, where a group of
women in immaculate white balloon-suits were grilling meats. I was considering
chatting up one of them when Tonio came up, carrying a pair of drinks. He handed
me one.

      “My apologies, compeer,” he said. “They are stuck-up here, yiss.”

      “I’ve been treated worse.”

     He looked up at the strangely infirm stars. “I have Katarina by way of
compensation,” he said. “You have nothing.”

      “I have Olympe,” I said. “I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time she and I flew
away to the next Probability.”

      He looked at me somberly. “I will miss your companionhood,” he said.

       “You’ll have Katarina.” I looked at the sky, where Upside glittered on its
invisible tether. “I hope Eldridge isn’t still looking for me,” I said.

      “You don’t have to worry about Eldridge,” Tonio said. “I told Katarina all
about him.”

      Hot terror flashed through my nerves.

      “What did you tell her?” I asked.

       “I told her that Eldridge tried to use us to smuggle his salt, and that we found
the stuff and spaced it.”

      I relaxed a little. The scene that Eldridge and I had played in front of Ka-tarina
might not seem that suspicious, if, of course, she believed her lover.

      “You didn’t hear the news?” Tonio said. “About that police officer that was
found in the vacuum, over on Vantage.”

      My mouth was dry. “That griff lieutenant?” I asked.

      “Her captain. The lieutenant is learning a new job, floating in zero gravity and
sucking up industrial wastes with a big vacuum cleaner.” He rubbed his chin. “The
Pryors don’t like people fucking up their workers with drugs.”

       “They don’t seem to mind all those enhanced production quotas, though,” I
said. “Do you think those come from workers who aren’t spiked up?” There was a
moment of silence. The scent of sizzling meat gusted past. “What happened to
Eldridge?” I asked.

      “Don’t know. Didn’t bother to ask.”

       If anything was going to harden my determination to leave Socorro as quickly
as I could, it was this.

      I turned to Tonio. “I’ll miss you,” I said. I raised a glass. “To happy
endings.”

       Before Tonio could respond, there was a sudden brilliant radiance in the sky,
and we looked up. An enormous structure had appeared in the sky above Socorro, a
vast black octahedron covered with thousands of brilliant lights, windows enabling
the 1.4 million people aboard to gaze out at the passing Probabilities. To gaze down
at us.

      “It’s the Chrysalis,” I said aloud.

      Surrounding the structure were half a dozen birds, each larger than the habitat,
long necks outstretched. The storks that were the emblem of the Storch gene line,
each with ghostly white wings flapping in utter silence, holograms projected into
space by enormous lasers.

      Suddenly, I remembered Tonio’s emerald ring, in its special pocket on the old
trousers I’d left back at Tonio’s flat.

      Too late, I thought. Shawn had come for us.

                                        ****

“We can’t keep them out,” Katarina said. “This Probability isn’t a secret any longer,
and anyone can exploit it now that it’s registered.”

        I doubted the Pryors could keep the Chrysalis out even if they wanted to. The
Pryors maintained a police force here, not an army, and I knew that the Chrysalis
had weapons for self-defense. They had those huge lasers they’d used to project
their flying stork blazons, for one thing, and those could be turned to military use at
any time.

      We sat on Tonio’s terrace the morning following the Storches’ arrival,
soaking in the scent of blossoms. The Chrysalis was still visible in daylight, its edges
rimmed with silver.

      Breakfast was curdling on our plates. Nobody was very hungry.
      “The Chrysalis is a state-of-the-art industrial colony,” I said. “They can park it
here and start exporting materials in just weeks.”

      Katarina gave me a tell-me-something-I-don’t-know look.

      “They have also made an official request,” she said. “They want the two of
you arrested on charges of theft and turned over to them.”

     I felt myself turn pale, a chill touching my lips and cheeks. “What are we
supposed to have stolen?” I asked.

       Katarina permitted herself a thin smile. “They haven’t said. We have
re-quested clarification.” She turned her black eyes to me. “They have also asked
that your ship be impounded, until it can be determined whether you obtained it by
forging Aram Maheu’s will.”

      “That was all settled in the chancery court on Burnes Upside,” I said.
“Besides, if I was going to forge a will to give myself a yacht, I’d give myself the
money to keep it going.”

      “The request is a delaying tactic,” Katarina said. “It’s to tie up your vessel for
an indeterminate period and prevent you from escaping.”

      “Is it going to work?” I asked. Katarina didn’t bother to answer.

       The previous night’s party had ended with the appearance of the Chrysa-lis,
as the Council of Seven went into executive session and their employees scattered to
duty stations to do research on the Chrysalis and the implica-tion of its arrival.

       Apparently at some point in the night, Tonio had told Katarina about Adora
and Shawn, and Katarina must have believed him, because neither of us was being
tied to a chair and tortured by Pryor security armed with shock wands.

      Katarina rose and gave Tonio a kiss. “I’ve got a lot of meetings,” she said.

      “See you tonight, lover mine,” Tonio said.

      We sat in silence for a while as Socorro’s strange sun climbed above the
horizon. I turned to Tonio.

      “Are you certain,” I asked, “that Adora gave you that ring?”

     He gave me a wounded look. “Surely I am not hearing what I am hear-ing, my
compeer.”

      “It wasn’t one of those misunderstandings?” I pressed. “Where you’re certain
she gave it to you, but she doesn’t remember doing it?”

       “I am certain she told Shawn it was stolen,” Tonio said with dignity, “but this
is what happened in sooth. He presented her with the ring at their wed-ding, a
sentimental token, I imagine. But later she was angry at Shawn for a scene he’d
made, where he was complaining about how she had behaved with me at a certain
social function, and out of anger she bestowed the ring upon me.”

        “And when you left and she went back to Shawn,” I said, “she couldn’t admit
it, so she told him it was stolen.”

      “That is my postulation.”

      Or that was the postulation that Tonio wanted me to believe.

        Tonio had been to prison, and in prison you learn to manipulate people. You
learn to tell them what they want to hear. Is it lying if there is no harm intended? If
it’s just saying the thing that’s most convenient for everyone?

      I didn’t steal anything. How often in prison do you hear that?

       I think Tonio was sincere in everything he said and did. But what he was
sincere about could change from one minute to the next.

      In any case, this had to be about more than just the ring. The ring was
valuable, but it didn’t justify moving over a million Storch employees to this
Probability and opening mining operations.

      “Why did Shawn and Adora marry in the first place?” I asked.

     “Their families told them to. They hadn’t met until a few days before the
ceremony.”

       “But why? Usually line members marry each other, like Katarina and Denys. It
keeps the money in the family. When they merge or take another outfit over, they do
it by adoption. But Shawn and Adora were different— each was ordered to marry
out. The Storches do heavy industry. The Feeneys specialize in biotech and
research. What did they have in common?”

       Tonio waved a hand in dismissal. “There was a special project. I did not ask
for details, no. Why would I? It was connected to Shawn, and when I was with
Adora, I had no wish to talk about Shawn. Why spoil a bliss that was so perfect
with such a subject?”

      “If it was so perfect, why did you leave Adora?” I asked. “When I last saw
you together, you seemed so... connected.”
      “She grew too onerous,” Tonio said. “Once we began to live together, she
began giving orders. Go here. Do this. Put on these clothes. What do you want to
name the children? Under the oppression my spirit began to chafe, yiss. She loved
me, but only as a pet.”

      “Still,” I said, “you had good times.”

       “Oh yiss.” There was a soft light in his eyes. “They were magical, so many of
our times. When we were sneaking away together, to make love in an isolated corner
of the Chrysalis... that was bliss, my compeer.”

      I looked up at the Chrysalis, hovering over our heads like the Big Heavy Shiny
Object of Damocles.

       “Do you think she’s up there?” I asked. “It was Adora who was the member
of the Storch line. Shawn was the Feeney half of the alliance. He could only
command the Chrysalis with the permission of his in-laws.”

      Tonio looked at the sky in wonder. His face screwed up as he tried to think.

      I rose and left him to his thoughts. I needed to do a lot of thinking myself.

                                          ****

For the next several days we bounced around the apartment with increasing energy
and frustration. The news was grim. Shuttles from the Chrysalis were exploring
uninhabited parts of Socorro. There had been one near-miss between a Storch
shuttle and a Pryor transport. Fail-safes normally kept ships from getting remotely
close to one another, so the miss had been a deliberate provocation.

      Guards stood at our door and even on the next terrace, sensors deployed,
looking for any assassins lurking on the horizon. Tonio’s blazemobile privi-leges had
been revoked, and he wasn’t allowed out of the building.

      “I love my little Katarina, yiss,” he said one day as he stalked about the main
room. “But this is growing onerous.”

      A bored Tonio was a dangerous Tonio. If he walked out on Katarina, we were
both just so much dog food.

       “She’s just trying to protect you,” I said. “It’ll only last until the business with
the Storches is resolved.”

      He flung out his arms. “But how long will that be?”
      I looked at him. “What if Adora’s up there, Tonio?”

      He gave me an exasperated look. “What if she is?”

      “Do you think you can talk to her? Find out what she wants?”

      Tonio stopped his pacing. His startled face began to look thoughtful.

      “Do you think I can?” he asked.

      “If you try it from here, Katarina will be listening in before you can spit.”

      “But she won’t let me leave here!”

      “Let me work on that.”

       His adjutant bleeped, and he answered. His face broke into a look of pure joy
as he said, “Hello, lover.”

      Go on pleasing them, Tonio, I thought.

      I went to one of the security guards at our door and told him that I needed to
speak to Denys Pryor.

                                         ****

“I don’t know why I’m even talking to you,” said Denys. I had been called into his
office, the design of which told me that he liked clean sight lines, no clutter, curved
geometries, and a terrace with a water view. He remained at his desk as I entered,
and was turned slightly away, so that I saw his perfect chiseled features in
three-quarter profile. He wore fewer ruffles in his office than at the party.

       There was no chair for me to sit in. Not anywhere in the room. I had a choice
of responses—Denys would probably have preferred an awkward shuffle—so
instead I leaned on his immaculate white wall.

      “I’m here to solve your problems,” I said.

      He raised an eyebrow.

     No wonder Katarina was dissatisfied with him, I thought. She could have
conveyed the same suspicion and contempt without twitching a single hair.

      “Your Chrysalis problem,” I clarified, “and your Tonio problem.”

      “Tonio Hope,” he said, “is welcome to my wife. They deserve each other,
and I hope you’ll tell them that. But the problem represented by the Chrys-alis is
rather more urgent.” He turned in his chair to face me. “Tell me your scheme, please.
Then I can have a good hearty laugh and have you thrown out of here.”

      Cuckolded husbands, I have observed, are rarely models of courtesy.

      “Tell me one thing first,” I said. “Is Adora Storch on the Chrysalis?”

     “Your friend’s former lover? Yes.” His tone was bored. “Apparently, he stole
something from her, but she’s too embarrassed to admit what it was.”

      “Her heart,” I said. He looked away suddenly, toward the distant lake.

      “What I would like,” I said, “is a secure means of communication be-tween
Tonio and Adora.” And then, at the sudden, sharp violet-eyed look, I added,
“Secure, I mean, from Katarina.”

                                        ****

“Start with flowers,” I suggested. Tonio contacted a florist on the Chrysalis and sent
an extravagant bouquet, with a humble little message. There was no reply. “Just call
her,” I said finally.

       Her secretary kept him waiting for half an hour, while he paced about gripping
the adjutant I’d got from Denys. I played quiet, tinkly music on the aurora to keep
him calmed down, while I watched the muscles leaping on his face. Finally, I heard
Adora’s voice.

      “Tonio! You have the nerve to call me after the way you walked out on me?”

       Adora had taken half an hour to work up sufficient anger to decide to
confront Tonio instead of just leaving him hanging. Things had worked out more or
less as I’d hoped.

       Tonio looked at the adjutant’s screen. Over his shoulder I saw Adora’s
brilliant red hair, her flashing green eyes, her pale rose complexion. He didn’t reply.

       “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “Have the lies stuck in your
throat for the first time in your life?”

      “I—I am but stunned, seeing you again,” Tonio said. “I know you’re angry
and suchlike, but—at least the anger shows you still care.”

       Adora began screaming at that point, and I left the room. Just do what you do
best, I told Tonio silently.
      I heard Tonio murmur, and more fury from Adora, and then a lot of si-lence,
which meant Adora was doing the talking and Tonio was listening. It went on for
nearly two hours.

       While it went on, I strummed the aurora, volume at a low setting. I really
didn’t want to know how Tonio did these things: I didn’t think I could be trusted
with the knowledge.

       After the murmuring stopped, I walked back out into the main room. Tonio
sat on the sofa, his hands dangling over his knees. He shook his head.

      “I’d forgotten what Adora was like,” he said. “How beautiful she is. How
passionate.”

      “You’ve got to tell Katarina,” I said. He looked up in shock.

      “Tell her that I—”

      “Tell her that you’re in touch with Adora. Tell her it was my idea, and I made
you do it.”

      “Why?”

      “Because if you don’t, Denys will. He’ll use it to turn Katarina against you.”

      He rubbed his face with one of his big hands. “This is complicated.”

      “Tell Katarina the next time you see her,” I said.

      Which he did, that night. By morning, he had Katarina thinking this was a
good idea, and the three of us plotted strategy over breakfast.

      When, later that day, Denys told her of Tonio’s supposed treachery, she
laughed in his face.

                                        ****

While Denys was fuming, and Tonio and Adora were cooing at each other with
Katarina’s approval, I decided that it was time to find out as much as I could about
the ring. I got free of security by telling them I was going to report to Denys, and
took the ring to a jeweler. If I got no answer there, I’d take it to a laboratory.

     I could feel my blood sizzle as I walked into the shop. There was a little extra
oxygen in the air here, I thought, to make the customers happy and more willing to
buy.
       The jeweler was a dark-haired woman with a low, scratchy voice and long,
elegant hands. She stood amid cases of brilliant splendor, but refused to be
distracted by them. Her attention was devoted entirely to the customer.

        “Splendid work,” she said, gazing at a hologram of the ring as big as her head.
“The emerald is a natural emerald, which makes it slightly more valu-able than an
artificial one.”

      “How do you know?” I asked. She’d made the judgment a split second after
she’d put the ring into the laser scanner.

      “Natural gems have flaws,” the jeweler said. “Artificial gems are perfect.”

      Imperfection is worth more. Perhaps that says something about our world.
Perhaps that says something about how women relate to Tonio.

        “The setting is common gold and platinum,” the jeweler continued, “but it’s
more valuable than the gem, because it’s clearly handmade, and by a master. Let me
see if it’s signed anywhere.”

        She called up a program that would scan the ring thoroughly for num-bers or
letters. “No,” she said, and then cocked her head. She rotated the image, then
magnified it.

      “This is curious. There are letters laser-inscribed in the gem, and that’s not
unusual—most gems are coded that way. But this is a type of code I’ve never seen.”
She frowned, and her long fingers reached for her keyboard. “Let me check—”

      “No,” I said quickly. “That’s not necessary.”

      I only recognized the number sequence because I was a pilot. The num-bers
had nothing to do with the gem. They weren’t a code, they were a set of
coordinates.

       For a Probability. And given how badly Shawn wanted it back, it was almost
certainly a brand-new Probability.

       Feeney researchers must have developed it, very possibly a Probability with
one of the Holy Grails of Probability research, like a Probability where
electromagnetism never broke into a separate force from gravity, or where atoms
heavier than uranium have a greater stability than in the Home Uni-verse, thus
allowing atomic power with reduced radioactivity. The Feeneys had discovered this
new universe, but they needed an industrial combine with the power of the Storches
to exploit it properly. Hence a marriage to seal the bargain. Hence a gem given by
one line to the other with the co-ordinates secretly graven onto it.
      I wasn’t foolish enough to think the ring held the only copy of the
coordinates—the Feeneys wouldn’t have been that stupid. But it was the only copy
outside the gene lines’ control. If we gave the coordinates to the Pryors, the
Storches would have competition in their new realm before they ever made their
investment back.

       No wonder something as huge and powerful as the Chrysalis had been sent
after us.

      I asked the jeweler for an estimate of the ring’s worth—“so I know how much
insurance to buy”—and then I took the ring and walked out of the shop with billions
on my finger. The store’s oxygenated atmosphere boiled in my blood.

       The ring was the best insurance in the world, I thought. Shawn didn’t dare kill
us until he got his wedding present back.

      That night, Tonio and Katarina had their first fight. She complained about the
time he was spending talking to Adora. He pointed out that he was stuck here in the
apartment and had nothing else to do. It degenerated from there.

        I went to my room and played the aurora, loudly this time, and tried to decide
what needed to happen next. It might be a good idea to get Tonio closer to Adora,
just in case he needed a fast transfer from one girlfriend to another.

      I went to Denys and suggested that we all go up the grapevine to Upside, in
case any face-to-face meetings became necessary. He understood my point at once.

      And so we all moved off the planet, spending a day and a half in the first-class
compartment of a car roaring up the grapevine. Katarina spent the time adhered to
Tonio, who looked uncomfortable. Denys kept to a cubicle where he worked,
except for his occasional parades through the lounge, where he was all ostentatious
about paying no attention to his wife.

       The atmosphere on the car was sullen and ominous and filled with elec-tricity,
like the air before a thunderstorm. Even the other passengers felt it.

       To dispel the lowering atmosphere, I played my aurora, until some pomp-ous
rich bastard told me to stop that damned noise or he’d call an attendant. “I’m with
Miss Katarina Pryor,” I told him. “Take it up with her.”

      He turned pale. I played on for a while, but the mood, such as it was, had
been completely spoiled. I went to my cabin and lay on my bed and tried to sleep.

      I needed to get away from Tonio and Katarina and Denys. I needed to get
away from this freakish Probability where my blood sizzled all the time and my skin
burned with fever. I needed to get away.
      “I’d like to move onto Olympe,” I told Katarina. She was curled around the
spot on a lounge sofa where Tonio had just been sitting. He had gone to the bar for
a cup of coffee, but you could still see his impression on the cushions.

      Her cold eyes drifted over me. “Why?”

      “I’ll be out of your way. And it’s where I live.” When she didn’t answer, I
added, “Look, I can’t leave the dock without your permission. I’m not going
anywhere.”

      She turned away, dismissing me. “I’ll tell the guards to let you pass,” she said.

      “There are guards?”

      The only answer was an exasperated set to her lips, as if she didn’t con-sider
the question worthy of answer.

       So it was that I showed the guards my ID and moved back onto Olympe. The
air was stale, the corridors silent. I stepped into the stateroom and told the lights to
go on and the first thing I saw was the painting of the naked woman, staring at me.
She reminded me too much of some people I’d grown to know, so I put the painting
in storage.

       I went to the pilot’s station, where I’d talked to Eldridge, and checked the
ship’s systems, which were normal. I wondered what would happen if I powered up
the engines, and decided not to find out.

        For a few days, I indulged myself in the fantasy that I was going to escape. I
filled the larder with food and drink, enough for eight months of flight to whatever
Probability struck my fancy. I tuned every system on the ship except the drive. I
made plans about where I’d like to travel next.

       I thought about putting the ring back in the safe, but 1 figured that the safe
was no real obstacle to people like Denys or Shawn, so I kept the ring in the special
pocket in my trousers. Maybe Denys or Shawn was less likely to rip off my pants
than rip off the door to the safe.

       I went to some of the places I’d enjoyed when I was living Topside the first
time. All the bars and restaurants that had seemed so bright and inviting when I was
just off a five-month voyage now seemed garish and third-rate. Guards followed me
and tried to be inconspicuous. Without a friend, I didn’t seem to be having any fun.

      It really was time to leave.

      I brought a bottle home to the Olympe and drank while I worked out a plan.
I’d sell the ring’s coordinates to Denys in exchange for our safety and a lot of
money. Then I’d sell the ring itself back to Shawn for the same thing. I’d split the
money with Tonio, and then I’d run for it while the running was good.

      I looked at the plan again the next morning, when I was sober, and it still
seemed good. I was trying to work out my best approach to Denys when Tonio
came aboard. He was a reminder of everything I was trying to escape and his
presence annoyed me, but he was exasperated and didn’t notice.

        “Katarina is more onerous than ever before,” he said. He flapped his big
hands. “I am watched every moment, yiss. She says she is protecting me but I know
it’s all because she doesn’t want me to speak to Adora. Yet out of every port I see
the Chrysalis floating in the sky, with Adora so near.”

         “You’ve got to keep Katarina’s trust,” I said.

      “Olympe is the only place where I’m free,” Tonio said. “Katarina doesn’t
mind if I come here. And that’s why you’ve got to help me get Adora on board.”

         “Adora?” I said. “Here?”

         “There’s no place else.”

       “But the ship’s being watched. So is the Chrysalis. If Adora comes here,
they’ll see her.”

       Tonio smiled. “The Pryors and the Storches do not confront each other all
the time. Even if they’re playing chicken with each other’s cargo ships, both the
Chrysalis and Socorro possess resources the other finds useful. There are ships
coming from the Chrysalis, to purchase certain commodi-ties and sell others and
perform transactions of that nature. Adora will come in one of these ships, and when
the business is being transacted by her min-ions she will fly here to me in a vacuum
suit, and enter through our very airlock, bypassing those inconvenient guards upon
the door.”

         I was appalled. Tonio smiled. “Adora assures me that it will be perfectly
safe.”

         For whom? I wondered.

         “I don’t want to be on board when this happens,” I said.

                                          ****

When Tonio entertained Adora on my ship, I spent the time shopping for stuff I
never bought, and when I got bored with that, I found a bar and huffed some gas. I
didn’t return to Olympe until Tonio sent me a prearranged little beep on my adjutant.

      Olympe’s lounge still smelled faintly of Adora’s flowery perfume. Tonio was
splayed on the couch. Energy filled his skinny body. His blue eyes were aglow.

      “Such a passion it was!” he said. “Such zealocity! Such a twining of bodies
and souls!”

      “Glad to know she doesn’t want to kill you anymore,” I said.

      He waved a hand. “All in the past.” He heaved a sigh, and looked around the
lounge, the old furniture, Aram’s brass-and-mahogany trim. “I am glad to bring
happiness here,” he said, “to counter those memories of sorrow and tragedy.”

      I looked at him. “What memories are those?”

      “The afternoon I spent here with beautiful little Maud. The day before she
gave herself that overdose.”

      I stared at Tonio. Drugs whirled in my head as insects crawled along my
nerves.

      “You’re telling me that—”

      He looked away and brushed a cushion with the back of his knuckles. “She
was so sweet, yiss. So giving.”

      I had been off the ship that day, I remembered, making final preparations for
departure. Aram was saying goodbye to some of his friends and picking up a new
shipment of drugs from the Maheu office. That must have been the time when Maud
Rain had finally succumbed to the magic that was Tonio.

        And then, in remorse, she’d decided to grow closer to Aram. By becom-ing a
user, like him.

      And now she lived in a little white room in the country, her mind as white and
blank as the walls that surrounded her.

      I stood over Tonio. I felt sick. “Remember you’re spending tonight with
Katarina,” I said.

       The glow in his eyes faded. “I know,” he said. “It is not that I am not fond of
her, but the circumstances—”

      “I don’t want to hear about the circumstances,” I said. “Right now I need to
be alone so I can think.”
       Tonio was on his feet at once. “I know I have made an imposition upon you,”
he said. “I hope you understand my gratitude.”

      “I understand,” I said. “But I need to be by myself.”

      “Whatsoever thou desirest, my captain.” Tonio rose and loped away.

      I went to the captain’s station and sat on the goatskin chair and decided that I
had better get my escape plan under way. I called Denys’s office and asked for an
appointment. His secretary told me to come early the next day.

      Tonio had been in prison, I thought. In prison, you learn how to handle
people. You learn how to tell them what they want and how to please them.

      I wondered if Tonio had been playing me all along. Telling me what I wanted
in exchange for a place to stay and a tour of the multiverse and its attractions.

      I had many hours before my appointment, but alcohol helped.

                                        ****

This reality’s blazing oxygen had burned the hangover out of my blood by the time I
stepped into Denys’s office. The geometries of the room were even more curved
than his place Downside, and there were even more windows. Outside the office, the
structures of Upside glittered, and beyond them was the ominous octahedron of the
Chrysalis, glowing on the horizon of Socorro.

      There were two chairs in the room this time, but neither of them were for me.
Both were on the far side of Denys’s desk. One held Denys, and the other the
black-skinned, broad-shouldered form of Shawn Feeney.

      Denys raised his brows. “Surprised, Captain Crossbie? Surely you don’t
imagine that you and Tonio are the only people who employ back-channel
communications?”

       He was enjoying himself far too much. Cuckolds, as I’ve stated elsewhere, are
rarely models of deportment.

      “I’d asked for a private meeting,” I said, without hope.

       “Shawn and I have decided,” Denys said, “that it’s time for you and your
friend to leave this reality. We know that your ship is provisioned for a long journey,
and we intend that you take it.”

      “How do I know,” I said, “that there isn’t a bomb hidden somewhere in my
ship’s pantry?”

        The two looked at each other and smirked. Denys answered.

       “Because if you and Tonio disappear, or die mysteriously, that makes us the
villains,” he said. “Whereas if you simply abandon this Probability, leav-ing the two
ladies behind...” He couldn’t resist a grin.

        “Then you are the bad guys,” Shawn finished in his deep voice.

        I considered this. “I suppose that makes sense,” I said.

        “And in exchange for the free passage,” Denys said, “I’ll take the ring.”

        “You?” I said, and then looked at Shawn.

        “Oh, I’ll get it back eventually,” Shawn said. “And I’ll get the credit for it,
too.”

      “The Storch line,” Denys said, “will have at least a couple years to exploit the
new Probability before we Pryors arrive in force. But even so, we’ll get there years
ahead of the rest of the competition. .. and I’ll get the credit for that.”

        Shawn smiled at me. “And you’ll get the blame for selling our secret to our
rivals. But by then I’m sure you’ll have lots of practice at running.”

        “I could tell the truth,” I said.

       “I’m sure you can,” Shawn said. He leaned closer to me. “And the very best
of luck with that plan, by the way.”

        “The ring?” Denys reminded.

        I thought about it for a moment, and could see no alternative.

        “To get the ring,” I said, “I have to take my pants off.”

     Shawn’s smile broadened. “We’ll watch,” he said, “and enjoy your
embar-rassment.”

        Tonio was in Olympe by the time I returned. Delight danced in his blue eyes.

        “I have received a missive from Adora!” he said. “We are to flee together, she
and I—and you, of course, my compeer. She has bribed someone in Socorro
Traffic Control, yiss, to let us leave the station without alerting the Pryors. We then
fly to the coordinates she has provided, where she will join us. From this point on
we exist in our own Probability of bliss and complete happiness!”

      I let Tonio dance around the ship while I went to the captain’s station and
began the start-up sequence. Socorro Traffic Control let us go without a murmur. I
maneuvered clear of the station and engaged the drive.

      As we raced to the coordinates the message had provided, there was no
pursuit. No ships came out of some alternate Probability to collide with us. No lasers
lanced out of the Chrysalis to incinerate the ship. No bomb blew us to fragments.

      As we neared the rendezvous point, Tonio grew anxious. “Where is my
darling?” he demanded. “Where is Adora?” His hands turned to fists. “I hope that
something has not gone amiss with the plan.”

      “The plan is working fine,” I said, “and Adora isn’t coming.”

       I told him about my meeting with Denys and Shawn, and what I had been
ordered to do. Tonio raged and shouted. He demanded I turn Olympe around and
take him back to his beloved Adora at once.

       I refused. I fed coordinates into the Probability drive, and, an instant later, the
stars turned to hard little pebbles and we were racing away from Socorro, leaving its
quirky electromagnetic structure in our wake.

     Tonio and I were on the run. Again. Trapped with one another in Reality,
whether we liked it or not.

       I had let Tonio play me, just as he had played Adora and Katarina and Maud
and the others. Now we were in a place where we had no choice but to play each
other.

       Tonio was in despair. “Adora and Katarina will think I deserted them!” he
said. “Their rage will know no bounds! They may send assassins—fleets— armies!
What can I do?”

      “Start,” I said, “by sending them flowers.”

                                         ****