Listen. That golden silence.

Sometimes, drifting alone in the void between the suns, I open my channels and listen for the datawarren’s roar. There’s seldom anything there. An occasional chirp from far, far away. The brief, pro forma drone of a half-dead astrogation prism, calling out its vector sum. Every now and again, the faint, crying whisper of some terrified ghost.

All of them lost and alone in the dark.

Sometimes, when I feel like that, I go walking on the starship’s hull, like a man on a beach at night, static hissing all around me, soft and remote, like distant surf. Overhead, the stars are a dead white sprawl nailed across the black backdrop like so many cheap chrome pinheads, and so I stroll among the antennae and cargo arms, dodging through the blue shadows of the field modulus exhaust, missing the ship’s imago like hell.

We used to talk, Tammuz and I, down all the centuries that we’d flown together. All the centuries since the Company recruited me, since it put me on the ship and sent us out to haul cargo, this way and that, one star to another, war in and war out.

We talked the whole time, arguing and hating one another, until he came to seem like another me. I always hoped he felt that way, too, immaterial or not.

Times I’d walk out here back then, man walking on a midnight beach, he’d walk with me, invisible, close, warm, and we’d talk, about the process of the suns, or maybe just about who we’d been, once upon a long time ago.

Peacetime, wartime. The places we’d been, the things we’d seen. Great stuff. Small stuff. Until orders came down the warren from the Company Mind, of one last Starfish blockade we’d have to run. Even then, I don’t think we knew how bad things were, hearing tales of Spinfellow triumph, and Starfish desperation.

Oh, maybe Tammuz knew. But I’m just human. Sort of. You know how it is.

Our strategy seemed like a good idea at the time, but the Starfish caught us, and when I awoke he was gone, blown away into the datawarren like the fading memory of a dream.

Company Mind’s gone too, which, I guess, is justice of a sort.

The starship works well enough without him, though it relies on me for most of its decisions now. And I wonder if he’s a ghost lost in the great empty spaces of the datawarren, afraid, all alone, with no way home anymore.

They say that’s what happened to Meyer Sonn-Atem’s wife in the last days of the old Centauri Jet conflict, that she was killed in battle while abroad on the warren, that she emerged from chaos, a Power in her own right, when he needed her most. They say that’s why the wars began again, not from Spinfellow greed or Starfish hatred.

So maybe there’s hope.

Or maybe they’re all gone now.

Gone for good.

The localnode scrolled gray numbers through my head, telling me where we were, what was up, whispering to me in a cold gray voice, asking for a decision.

Tammuz would have called to me, cheerful and warm, "Crystal, we’ve arrived! It’s the Cloud Belt, segment thirty-fifty-seven. . . ." Except if he were alive, we might not be here now. Things would be different.

I told it to give me a nav display, stood looking at shadow images in my head, mountainous scraps of aerogel stretching in a long arc across almost a quarter parsec, hanging together by its own force of will, here between spiral arms, where the stars tend to be just a little farther apart.

"Go sublight and drop us into the segment just off Bluebell." Evidence of technogenic debris there, just what we’re looking for.

Us. No us here. Just me.

But the localnode understood anyway, and the field modulus device flared violet, washing away the sky, hullside skinfield sparkling around me, pinpricks of hard radiation deflected.

I drifted soulless Tammuz up against one of the larger pieces of cloudscape, watching the light from my exhaust reflect and flicker in its depths, secured the tagalong, and got out.

There was a cool breeze here, soft wind ruffling through my hair as I walked among drifting curls of insubstantial white ground, Bluebell hanging low in the sky like a vast water droplet. It was slightly oblate, revealing a fair amount of angular momentum, but there were no features to show it going round and round, just that deep, even, pale silver-blue light, coming from somewhere inside.

Overhead, other clouds drifted, soft and white against the stars, following a long arc around Bluebell, and there were other things drifting between them. Little broken things that sparkled and tumbled, catching the wan light just so.

We came to the right place, didn’t we?

Yes.

Beyond the next white hill, I found a dead balloonsailer lying in the trough of a wave, stiff wings bent, crumpled, torn, toothy red mouth hanging open, eyes squeezed tight shut, face reflecting some final anguish. Not so much the pain of death, as the pain of failure, its last thought I let my comrades down.

Maybe it bled out here, dying slowly while the guns flared all around it and tore apart the sky, but any evidence was long absorbed. The tissues of its mouth seemed a little pale, that’s all.

I walked on, headed for a familiar wreck crushed into the side of a long white hill, remembering datatracks I’d seen of balloonsailers facing our men in battle. Brave beings, they told us. Heroes in their own right. That was in the days when the big lie was in vogue again, and they needed us to believe we were heroes fighting for a just cause, rather than Spinfellow stooges, only there to die.

What good’s a hero if he’s only got cowards to fight? So the balloonsailers had to be brave, and who knows what big lies they told themselves.

The ship, which had been a class-eight light destroyer, one of those things you see swarming round the hulls of squadron carriers in a big battle, must have smacked into the hillside at quite a clip. Hard enough, at any rate, to collapse the hullfield and break the stringers on the molecular beams, allowing everything to crumple forward, whatever was loose flying free when the power cut.

I don’t imagine the organic crew felt a thing.

Maybe the software entities had time to copy themselves out to fleet storage, though that’s cold comfort, if you ask me.

Everything on the forward end was gone, crushed to dust or worse, ship’s waist a tangle of crystalline scraps and snarly loops of monofilament. I could cut it up and get at stuff, I suppose, but maybe that’s too much trouble. Aft was still more or less intact, hull torn open and hanging loose like so much silver cloth, shadowy objects visible inside the engine room, promising things might be whole and in place.

Always good when the fittings are still there.

There was a white skull embedded in the aerogel near the rip, almost invisible white on white, a few shattered long bones, looking like some carnivore had broken them open for marrow, sticking up to mark the place. I kneeled down and pulled it free. Below it, buried a bit deeper, you could see the jawbone, with all its neat white teeth.

Human. Like me. Sort of.

I sat down, putting my back to the torn hull, holding it for a minute, looking into empty eye sockets, alaspooryorick running inanely through my head. Was it glorious, the day you died? They say it’s glorious, but I wouldn’t know.

I put the skull down, carefully putting it back in the hole, face down, maxilla approximating mandible, wrapped my arms around my knees and drew them close to my chest, staring out toward the horizon, white cloudscape under starry black sky.

Probably, when the ship crashed and the hull tore open, he just flew right out the hole. Not so glorious then.

I remembered a fine spring day on an artificial world called Telemachus Major, off one end of the Centauri Jet, oh, I don’t know, maybe five, six hundred years ago. Lovely blue sky. Tall buildings. Distant, snow-capped mountains. Fine white beach. Deep blue ocean.

There were people on the beach that day. Real human people. My enjoyment was spoiled, wondering if they could tell. But they couldn’t. Hadn’t. And that made everything okay.

I got to my feet, carefully stepping over the skull, and climbed up into the wrecked engine room, where I knew there’d be things I could use.

One of the good things about the localnode is it’s always paying attention, never anything else on its mind. It let me whistle up the tagalong’s extension service, and pretty soon the stuff I cut loose from the wrecked engine room was streaming across the cloudscape, sorting itself out in Tammuz’s aft cargo pod, stowing itself away.

Incredibly, though broken into its major components, the entire field modulus device had survived. I didn’t need a spare, the damned things can’t wear out, but I was sure I’d find someplace to sell it, down in some peripheral survivor culture or another.

That last place I stopped was crazy. Things like big red bloodworms hardly aware of the Spinfellow empire all around them; so poorly instrumented they wouldn’t’ve known about the war at all if that old battleship hadn’t exploded off one of their gas giants a few decades back. And all the crazy bastards wanted was atom bombs to use on each other.

I started walking away from the wreck, heading over the horizon, Bluebell rising as I went round the curve, remembering those red bloodworms I used to dig up as a boy. I remember thinking, One day I’ll bring my son here, and we’ll dig these bloodworms, and go fishing together.

Fishing. Like a dad and a boy in some wistful story I must once have read. I’m sure the place is a cinder now, bloodworms and all. No, not my memory at all, damn it. Some old drama I’d made my own.

"Sir! Oh, please sir!"

I thought I imagined it for a moment, that high, pleasant, cartoon-timbre voice calling out to me.

It said, "Could you help me, sir? I seem to be stuck."

I looked around, searching the cloudscape for . . .

"Over here, sir!"

My heart was pounding.

But the voice was coming from a dark lump in the gel, a half-buried assemblage of cylinders and beams, dark metal of some kind, with little armature stumps sticking out here and there. On one end, the unburied end fortunately, there was a thing like a little black parabolic dish antenna, turning to follow me as I walked toward it. Inside the antenna was a little cartoon face, bright blue eyes, sketchy snub nose, little pink bow of a mouth.

It smiled up at me as I stood over it, looking down.

"Who are you?"

"I’m a welding machine, sir! Mr. Pommesfrites, if I may make so bold!"

"Welding machine."

"Oh, yes sir! And a fine one I was before . . ." One of the broken armatures, what was left of a manipulator, whined and twisted pitifully.

"Quite a fix you’re in, Mr. Pommesfrites."

It smiled again, eyes brightening. "Oh, I’m so glad to see you, sir. It’s been just awful!"

"How long you been here?"

The smile faltered a bit. "A long time, sir. I was on the hull of one of the carriers, sir, when a Starfish weapons system got her. Blown clear, I was. And it was a long time before I impacted here. A long time."

Guess so. I said, "What became of your arms?"

"Torn off in the explosion, sir."

I took tools from my belt and started jacking it loose from the cloudscape, whistling up the localnode so it could send a tagalong tendril my way. "I think we can fix you up, Mr. Pommesfrites."

"Oh, thank you, sir!"

"No trouble at all."

It said, "Are you part of a salvage team, sir?"

I shook my head.

"Scavenger?"

A nod.

It sighed, closing its eyes for a second. "Well, sir, I’m sure you’ll get a good price for me. In my day, I was top, of the line."

I patted it on the dish, imagining a human head, and said, "You’ll do just fine."

"Yes, sir. And thank you, sir."

"Is there . . . anyone else?" I made a weak gesture around, more or less skyward.

It said, "I don’t think so, sir. I had my beacon on for a long time, you know. Until my batteries started getting low."

"Did the Spinfellows . . ."

"No, sir. No rescue team."

So much for that.

"Oh, sir!" cried Mr. Pommesfrites, as the blue-green-white sky and landscape swung around, far below, wind singing in the lines of our tandem parawing, clouds rolling this way and that. "I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun!"

I’d really gotten my hopes up, when I heard creaky bits of datawarren traffic emerging from a burst of technogenic fuzz, hesitant beacon identifying itself as Corporate Habitat TenHalleq. Even more hopeful when it responded to my ping. Then, when I saw it hanging against the void with all its running lights aglow, vast cylinder slowly spinning, docking portals open, viewports lit up like sunrise. . . .

With his arms and legs back on, Mr. Pommesfrites could walk like a champ, and he had a hand to lay softly on my shoulder as we stood in the habitat’s axial dome, looking out over jungly ruin, everything overgrown green, half lit by patches of still-living stemshine, half in shadow, forest withered, in places where it’d gone out.

"Oh, sir . . ." he’d said.

Maybe that was when he stopped being it. Or maybe it was when he started following me around, chattering merrily away. I got used to him soon enough.

I leveled us off, dropping lower and lower through TenHalleq’s thickening air, bumping over turbulence. Even in the lit-up areas, the forest was a funny color, bits of turquoise here and there, as if non-terragenic in origin, maybe just programming gone awry now that there was no one to look after it anymore.

You see lots of these things scattered around this part of the galaxy, stuck out here in the flush of first contact, when we got to buy overdrive technology from the Spinfellows’ Firefox client civilization, before we found out who their masters were, or that there was a war on. From the look of things, this one was abandoned early on, probably not long after some military planner figured out just how many of us there were, lurking in our dense little corner of interstellar space.

Mr. Pommesfrites called out, "Oh, look, sir! Look over there!" He was pointing downward and off to our left with one of his shiny new manipulator arms.

There was a flock of airspyders sailing toward us, hanging by long threads from their own silken wings, maybe a dozen or so, each spyder like a big black dog on the end of its thread. When they got close enough, you could see their turrets rotating our way, stemlight reflecting off crystalline lenses.

How long’s it been since you’ve seen a human man, old boy? A half-millennium or more?

"Are they dangerous, sir?"

"No. Just put in here for decoration." I let go the shrouds with one hand and waved to them. After a second, the squadron leader lifted a thin, hairy black arm and waved back, almost a salute.

"If I remember right," I said, "someone found them on a old wreck of a planet circling Aldebaran. Something of a surprise in the early days, before we figured out what was what."

I remember being there, working with much older optimod teams, men and women covered with hair, hands and feet adapted for life in free fall, who had a lot of trouble walking upright, though they did just fine in Aldebaran IV’s tangled yellow forest.

The spyders hauled on their control lines and started sheering away, back the way they’d come, going higher, whatever curiosity they’d had about me satisfied perhaps. In the shocky daylight of Aldebaran, those silken parawings had glittered like spun crystal, pale pink, almost invisible against the pastel sky, with its great, glary, starspotted sun.

I remember we were working in mountains of gold, gold glowing as if molten under that sun, when we came upon a team of human supervisors, one of them, a bearded man, looking at me, frowning, muttering to his companion, a slim brown woman, Bad idea. Very bad idea.

I remembered the old-style optimods, all wolfy faces, foxtails and chimp feet, wondering if any of them had survived. Not the wars, of course. Just wondered if they’d survived the years of their own obsolescence.

We circled low, Mr. Pommesfrites and I, sliding along barely above the trees, following rivers, cruising round sandbars and jungle-choked islands, then there was a clearing on a hillside that I circled, going around and down.

My little welding machine stared, silent, at the litter on the hillside. Finally, he whispered, "Do you think we could land, sir?"

We’d get aloft again just fine, if the wing’s equilibrimotor kept on working. I said, "Sure." Turned us into the wind, stalled, dropped down on soft, dead brown grass.

Mr. Pommesfrites got out of his harness and walked across the sloping ground to the first piece of junk, a thing like a white refrigerator lying on its side in the dirt. It had four legs and a pair of arms. No head. And the refrigerator door was hanging open, lying in the dirt, exposing a dark interior with a tangle of wires and some organic-looking black stuff, mold maybe.

He stood staring down at it for a long time, dish antenna craning over, shadows obscuring his little cartoon face, then he reached out with a manipulator and lifted the door, pushing it shut until I heard a latch click. The refrigerator door had an exaggerated doll’s face imprinted on it, blue eyes half open, Cupid’s bow mouth relaxed, as in sleep. Below that were a couple of things like spigots.

"What is it?"

Mr. Pommesfrites looked at me, face uncharacteristically expressionless. "It’s an incubator," he said.

"What does it incubate?"

"Baby machines." He was looking down at it again, one hand resting gently on the gasket where the door met the body.

"What kind of machines?"

Another look. "Any kind. If she mated with me, baby welders."

I wanted to reach out and put my hand on some part of him that I could imagine was a shoulder, but . . . just too machinelike, maybe.

He said, "My wife would have been one of these."

I decided the regulator system behind his facial dish was in the right spot to serve as a shoulder, and put my hand there.

In time, Mr. Pommesfrites learned when to walk with me, out on the hull, and when to leave me alone.

The top of the forward docking adaptor is a bit like a mountain peak, surrounding me with a flower of dark metal. Tammuz’s hull hides the modulus exhaust here, blue corona streaming above its horizon, like sunrise on some world with hardly air enough to scatter light red.

What the hell was her name?

Danaaë, and I remember how proud she was of the double-A, of that neat little diaeresis. Dahnah-ay, dot-dot. I remember that her golden eyes sparkled with little flecks of silver, and that she had sealpoint fur like a Siamese cat.

I remember she never tried to use me for a human man, like so many desperate others. No fault of yours or mine, she’d said, if time and styles have changed.

I remember I took her up on a mountain just like this one, on a world with thin, dark skies, where the suns were small red sparks and the stars would shine on us day and night. It was a star without a name, only a number, and I remember she liked it there with me.

Gone so long ago that I can’t remember when.

I opened my channels to the datawarren then, wondering if I’d hear her ghost. What there was was a soft whisper of static, signs of traffic beyond my range, embedded in it the low, broken whisper of a closer world, bearing, no doubt, a cargo of survivors.

Not human, I decided. Not even the Spinfellows that I knew must be around somewhere. But people of a sort who might buy my wares, top off my energy pods and let me be on my way.

Mr. Pommesfrites came crawling slowly over Tammuz’s horizon, knowing I’d awakened from my little dream. "It seems to be an imperial world, sir, fairly deep in the Spinfellows’ claim. Just a client, I’m afraid. The localnode . . ."

Too far away to tell, just now.

He said, "Shall we go directly there, or do you still want to cut through Thîxen space? It’s close enough, we ought to have heard something by now."

"Afraid there might still be a Starfish or two out there waiting?"

"One never knows, sir."

I’d been to Thôxdark once before, in the long lull between the wars. I’d come here with Tammuz, bearing a Company cargo, and stayed for a little while on the pretext of an engine overhaul, charmed by what I saw.

The Thîxen were part of an expanding-shell civilization, one much older and more established than the one making up human space, enough older that their core worlds had died, starved out by the pipeline effect, their population in decline. That’s what happens to interstellar civilizations that fail to discover faster than light travel. It’s what would have happened to humanity, if the Firefoxes hadn’t found us.

Fair to say, we’d’ve been better off if they hadn’t.

Or maybe not.

During the first war, the Thîxen had been clients of the Starfish, serving them much as the balloonsailers, much as humanity served the Spinfellow empire. And in the few decades of peace after the armistice, they held a civilization-wide conclave, trying to map out a plausible future for themselves in the peaceful galactic community to come. It hadn’t been hard for them to switch sides, even before the wars began again.

So. Wan Axe the Traitor, Meyer Sonn-Atem. Finn mac Eye. Lydia’s Ghost. The glorious revolution. History had them entrained. And in due course, when hostilities resumed, it turned out the Starfish remembered who’d turned their backs when the chips were down.

I stood on yet another long, low hillside, snapper cradled in my arms, gray-green grass up to my knees, wind blowing, not quite hard, stirring the grass like waves in a sea, stirring my hair, white clouds like little puffballs scudding across pale blue heaven, sun an empty yellow orb at our backs halfway down the western sky, our shadows growing longer as the afternoon progressed.

Mr. Pommesfrites stood motionless and silent by my side, holding the game bag, three dead tilties collapsed together inside, watching. It was hot out, but the wind was cooling, so it seemed just about right. There was motion in the grass down below, but I waited for it to come a little closer.

Across the valley, on a crag just this side of the white mountain foothills, was the crushed castle of some local lord. Maybe not the one I’d visited before. But just the same. I remembered how once Thôxdark had been a jewel from space, blue-gray-green. Tried not to remember the burnt-off patches I’d seen yesterday.

Or the black, blistered hole where the commercial cosmodrome had been, last time I was here.

Down below, the tiltie stotted, wobbling for just a second above the grass. As it disappeared, I lifted the snapper, easing off on the safety.

Maybe I’d hunted these same hills with General Bûnzolo, the two of us relishing our evening feasts of tiltie and rhôg, drinking brandy, chattering away, the general with his cigars of terragenic tobacco, all of it the gift of a matching biochemistry and Spinfellow adaptive medicine.

I thought the general looked like a miniaturized, water buffalo-based centaur, he thought I looked like a gigantic version of some little forest creature he’d promised me he’d show me in the zoo when we got back to the city by the spaceport. We both agreed the Firefoxes were assholes, and that the galaxy would have been better off if the Spinfellows and Starfish had killed each other off a long time ago.

If they had, humans and Thîxen, crawling sublight, would eventually have met, would have liked each other well enough, just like the general and I.

The grass rustled, forming a moving vee that pointed uphill, in my direction. I lifted the snapper.

Suddenly, Mr. Pommesfrites whispered, "How many of them can you eat, sir?"

The tiltie stotted again, spinning like a saucer above the grass, obviously seeing us. When it dropped, the vee formed again, heading downhill. I sighted in on the apex, knowing it would stott one more time and I would get it then.

God damn it. I liked these people. What’s left of them now? A few hundred thousand, maybe a few million, out of all their billions, on scattered worlds, blasted and burned, not in war, but for punishment.

The tiltie did just as I expected, looking at me right through the gunsight, fell into the grass and took off. When I looked at Mr. Pommesfrites, he was looking at me. "None," I said.

He looked down at the game bag. "I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to spoil your fun."

I returned the safety and slung the snapper. "We’ll give ’em to those people we found near where we landed the ship." A dozen starving refugees, living in crude tents made from blankets, in the shadow of a ruined castle. There’d been a village down by the river, maybe theirs, but it was burned away to nothing.

Hell, they’re better off than humans were after the first war. Just a few years before the armistice, a Starfish fleet, frantic to cut off the flow of cannon fodder swamping them in battle, had found its way into human space and tried to clean the place out. Burnt whatever they could to a bloody crisp. Maybe one tenth of one percent of the civilian population survived, maybe less.

Which, during the lull, left a human civilization composed mainly of soldiers, maybe accounting for some of the things we did when the war resumed.

Still and all, I really liked them, these people.

Maybe one day the general would find his way home.

***

From the bridge, with its isolated pools of instruments hanging against the dark, the star and its family of worlds were just like all the others I’d seen across so many years, planets like so many colored dots, all but indistinguishable from the fixed stars beyond, central sun a brilliant pip centered against the backdrop.

F10, the localnode said, when called upon. Slightly younger, slightly hotter, slightly smaller than humankind’s home star had been. Slightly higher metallicity, born a bit later among the generations of the suns.

Five rocky worlds, spaced about as you’d expect. Six gas giants, none so large as Jupiter had been, two with gorgeous great ring systems, fresh and bright. A sparse population of relict planetesimals in-system, a few dozen large ice bodies circling in tilted, elliptical orbits beyond the outermost gas giant, scraping the inner boundary of the comet cloud beyond.

I bloated them one by one, remembering Tammuz’s interest in the varied ways a gas giant could present itself, so much more interesting than rocky terrestrial worlds, however laden with life.

Cheap stuff, he said. Mere chemicals.

Long a joke between us.

One of the gas giants, banded with pale yellow and soft gold, had a perfect, brilliant orange spot in its northern hemisphere, going round and round, sweeping up white eddies, spinning them about, spitting them out behind, reminding me of Jupiter, which I’d seen once in the days before the first armistice, Tammuz telling me how, once upon a time, the Great Red Spot had been really red, not the shrunken, washed out pink of modern times.

And I’d seen a datatrack of Jupiter being hit by a Starfish weapons system whose name nobody knew, blown away in a glorious bright steam of color and light, like pastel chalk dust caught in the wind, filmed by some pilot who’d gotten his ship safely out of the solar system that day, one of the very few.

They say the same weapons system, in the same moment, exploded the Sun, but no one made a record of that, or saw what became of Earth. No one who lived to tell, anyway.

Out in the datawarren, you could hear the Gozahghn Traffic Controller calling, asking my ID, wanting to know what business I had here. Even the machine minds seemed jittery and nervous now, however emotionless they were supposed to be. Primitive stuff, bought from the Spinfellows at a steep discount, thousand-year-old military surplus, or maybe cheap commercial junk the Firefoxes peddled, because the Spinfellows let them.

Two separate data streams suddenly spooled, one each in Spinfellow and Starfish diplomatic code. The war’s over. Nobody won. Please don’t hurt us.

Standing in space beside me, lit up like the consoles because the local-node considered him hardware, Mr. Pommesfrites whispered, "Really, sir, don’t you think you ought to . . ."

I smiled. "They’re unarmed. Not even home-grown domestics."

But that’s not what you meant, is it? I told the localnode to answer them, which seemed to make him happy, Gozahghn itself swelling like a mottled ball in front of us, blue ocean, small green and brown continents, stripes of cloud showing where the weather fronts were, one tropical storm spinning near the limb. No ice caps. A few little moons, each no more than half the size of the one Earth had had, the last time I was there, most a lot smaller than that.

No sign of damage, the lucky bastards.

***

I got Tammuz settled on the white concrete of the planet’s only cosmodrome, cargo pods arraying themselves in a horseshoe around the control room, field modulus device breaking the links, lowering itself last in a gaudy splash of almost invisible blue ghost fire. Outside, the sky was pale and cloudless, arching not quite green overhead, sun a little silvery disk hanging above distant cityscape.

Morning, I remembered, Boroghwen Cosmodrome rolling up from the terminator.

Mainly, the place smelled of primitive technologies, other ships scattered widely around the many square kilometers of the landing yard, reeking of hydrocarbon fuels, the chemical tang of fresh polybutadiene rubber and ammonium perchlorate.

Mr. Pommesfrites said, "Oh, look, sir!" Pointing at one of the nearer spacecraft. It was a fat, truncated cone a couple of hundred meters high, and they had a big old steam crane set up next to it, busily lifting solid rocket motors from a flatbed truck, boosters like so many stacked logs, lifting them up to stand beside the cone, where antlike technicians clung, ready to bolt them on. "Can they really be so backward?"

I shrugged. "There probably wasn’t any space industry here. I never visited Gozahghn before . . ." before all that, yes. "Probably just served by Firefox commercial interests, licensed from the Spinfellows, as usual."

Almost wistful: "I never really got around much, sir. We were kept in navy yards, when the fleet was in port."

And kept between the stars when it wasn’t. I said, "You should’ve worked for the Company, Mr. Pommesfrites. I went all over the galaxy between the wars."

"Even the Starfish worlds?"

"Once. What was left of them."

"I wish I’d had the chance. But they only sell the old machines as surplus, you know."

A ground effect car stinking of methyl alcohol slid up, fans whining, bearings squeaking faintly as if to show their age, and settled, two tall, slim, scaly brown Gozahghnhen getting out, walking over with a delicate, high-stepping gait. They looked, I thought, like those old, old pictures of pleiosauri you sometimes see, the ones from that little time when sauropod structural dynamics weren’t quite understood, standing a little taller than me, but not much, little heads craning down at the end of long swan necks.

You could hear them chirping a little bit behind the translators, making me wonder just where they’d bought the damned things. Datawarren reaches right into your head, but then things are falling apart. What little is left, anyway.

The one on the left gestured to the one on the right, and said, "This is the customs inspector, and I am the portmaster. Welcome to Gozahghn, honored human."

No way for them to tell of course. Even real humans had trouble. I held out my hand, relying on the machinery to let them know what it meant, even if they’d forgotten. "Crystal."

"Welcome to Gozahghn, Captain Crystal."

"Just Crystal, I’m afraid. I’m only a Company pilot."

That made their heads curl back, tiny eyes glinting in the sun. The localnode fished for information in the regional warren-fragment and found tracks that told me they knew the Company was no more, which I’d guessed but hadn’t known for sure.

I said, "I need a translight packet insert and a life support system recharge. Can you manage that?"

The portmaster said, "Well, sir." He looked over at my habitation modules. "I think your system will take our LSS fittings. But, sir . . . our overdrive maintenance supplies are extremely limited."

"I can pay."

"Sir . . ." the two of them looked at each other, snaky necks bending close, so that their heads twisted around. "The Spinfellow credit exchange is down. There’s no telling when it’ll ever come back up."

"I’ve got trade goods."

"Well . . ." more twisting necks. "There’s not much of a market for luxury items here anymore. I’m sure you understand. With the collapse of the galactic economy . . ."

I told the localnode to open one of the cargo pods and led them over to where I had my scavenged military-grade field modulus device stowed. Obviously broken in pieces, of course, but also obviously all there, ready to be put back together and flown between the stars.

The one looked at the other, movements very stiff, then the customs inspector said, "Oh, sir! I’m not sure we can afford this!"

Don’t do me a damn bit of good to know what it’s worth somewhere else, if I can’t get there from here. I said, "You fit me out for a long voyage, as far as you can manage with what you’ve got, and it’s yours. That and enough local credit to see to my needs while I’m here."

The customs inspector said, "Where were you planning to . . ."

"Doesn’t matter."

"Well. . . ." You could see him sorting through a list of his stores, somewhere back in his head, where it connected to whatever piece of the warren they’d managed to hang onto hereabouts. "Okay. I think. . . ."

"How much interstellar traffic have you been getting here?"

After a long silence, the portmaster said, "There are a half-dozen small freighters working locally, sir. The planets around here were very lucky. We’ve found three other surviving star systems within a few hundred parsecs."

Three. Out of how many? "Just those ships?"

"Well, no, sir. There was a Spinfellow high-liner through here a while back. A big one. They picked up a few strandees, only their own kind, of course, and moved on."

"Moved on where?"

"Far On High."

If the Spinfellow empire had a capital, that was it. I’d been there once, not long after the resumption of hostilities, picking up a hull full of frozen soldiers the Company’d contracted to carry into the battle zone. I almost got killed on that one, right off the bat.

I’d been amazed by Far On High, a spinning cylinder bigger than your average terrestrial world, following its own galactic orbit. A lot of humans had gone there after the armistice, not wanting to hang around on what was left of our own worlds. It’s where all the trouble started, too, but I wasn’t there then.

"So they think Far On High is still there?"

"We assume so. They didn’t say."

If it is, then there’s still an empire.

Then the portmaster said, "Once upon a time, many humans came here. Humans and Spinfellows. Firefoxes. Even Starfish." There was a sort of wistful trailing away.

"Once," the customs inspector said, voice rather crisp and bright, "there was a whole quarter devoted to their . . . common interests."

Starfish and humans. The time between the wars. How could anyone forget?

By the time they left, happy with the bargain they’d made, carting away the stuff of their own starship, the sun had passed overhead and was falling down the afternoon sky.

It was a nice day for a long walk, Mr. Pommesfrites and I strolling through the old city of Boroghwen as Gozahghn’s sun sank slowly toward the horizon, sky staining deeper and deeper green as it went. Apple green, I think. The color of some hard candies I remember a nice man gave me once, when I was fresh from the vat, aoi ringo. That’s the one. Funny thing. Because in that language aoi also meant blue, the color of a certain kind of sky.

It was an old city, older than the spaceport I’m sure, though the Spinfellows could have come here a very long time ago, full of worn stone buildings, cobblestone streets with dusty ruts that must have been cut by the rims of iron-shod cartwheels, though the streets were full of boxy gas-turbine automobiles now.

There was a nice breeze, a sweet breeze sweeping in off the plains, maybe down from distant mountains, carrying away the dust, helping keep the streets clean. All the buildings were the same tan color as the cobblestones, not sandstone, though. Something else. It seemed brassy when you looked up, juxtaposing it against the darkening green sky, and the only discordant colors were on posters pasted here and there.

Funny pictures, not human-style, more like exploded diagrams, images of Gozahghnhen pressed flat, so you could see all sides of them at once, arms and legs and necks and tails outstretched, belly hide spread, as though skinned and nailed to a board.

Mr. Pommesfrites said, "Can you read them, sir? The localnode doesn’t think I need to know."

Something between them I can’t know. Something machine-to-machine. Gozahghnhen was vaguely Chinese-like, splatters of random marks the localnode said were core ideas, with lines of curlicues sticking out to right and left that had something to do with the twitters and cheeps of the local language, a kind of commentary about the idea in spoken words.

I said, "Most of them seem to be about something called the Flower Blood Festival. The subwarren has a lot of stuff about it that doesn’t make much sense. Religious, I think."

Mr. Pommesfrites said, "It really is a beautiful day, sir. Don’t you think? A fine, soft breeze. And I really can’t remember when I’ve seen such a lovely green sky!"

What the hell does a welding machine know about lovely green skies? It was starting to get dark out now, sky turning more or less black above the buildings to our east, sun gone away, stars pricking bright white through the heavens, and the localnode let us know we were walking by hotels.

I was starting to get used to the subtleties of the architecture now, kind of a cross between Shinto temples, Hellenistic fantasies, odd patterns of stone like nothing ever seen on Earth. I picked one that looked, I don’t know, just right.

Maybe some little subliminal urging from the localnode. It’s hard to say how much it thinks, or even if.

There was a front desk inside, just like a human hotel, though maybe I never stayed in one of those, knowing them only from old layered-image counterfactuals, things on which I’d wasted my time during long rides between the stars. The little Gozahghnhen behind the counter didn’t react for a moment, just staring through us. Invisible maybe? Things you don’t expect often are.

Then he jumped, coming around the counter, eyes glittering, holding out both hands. "Honored human! Why, it’s been so long since we’ve had one of your kind! Welcome to my hotel. I am the maitre d’."

The maitre d’ took my hand in both of its own, shaking it just like a character in one of those old movies I used to dote on. "Welcome, sir, to the Historic Hotel Glory!"

"We’d like a room."

"Why, of course, sir! Did you choose the Glory because of it’s glorious history?" It was fooling around with piles of paper on the desk now.

"History?"

The maitre d’ spun to face me again, tail thumping on the side of the desk, and the localnode let me know the posture of its neck indicated incredulity. "Why, sir! This is the very hotel where Meyer and Sparrow vacationed for the last time before the revolution began!"

I saw Sparrow perform just once, that time I visited Far On High. Not something you’d want to see twice.

The maitre d’ waved toward an empty expanse of parquet-like floor. "Why, this is the very ballroom where Wan Axe and the beautiful Hetaerrhÿë danced, the night before he decided humans were the key to the future of the Spinfellow empire."

"Some future."

The maitre d’ froze. "Ah. Yes, sir. It’s . . . easy to forget what’s happened, isn’t it, sir?"

"What about that room?"

He looked at Mr. Pommesfrites, neck forming into something like a question mark. Very hesitant then: "Is this one a being?"

"What difference does it make?"

"If a being, then it must pay."

"Merely a machine."

"Certainly, sir."

When I looked at Mr. Pommesfrites, his dish antenna was turned my way, blue eyes on my face, unblinking. Merely a machine? What does that make me, eh, my friend?

At night, there are more Gozahghnhen abroad in Boroghwen than during the day. I guess during the day they’re all hard at work, maintaining a planetary infrastructure that’d been dependent on interstellar trade ever since the Spinfellows and their friends came here, however long ago. I’d’ve liked this place, I think, had I known it between the wars. Gozahghn has that same primitive feel I used to get on visits to human space, or among the Thîxen. Homey. That’s the word.

Nighttime, the sky was spangled with familiar stars, the sky of a planet deep in a spiral arm, but not too deep, Milky Way arching up to quarter the heavens, thinnish and silvery gold, clotted just a little thicker in the direction of the galactic core. Mostly, the stars were etched in random patterns, though I could see one bright triplet, two white diamonds bracketing a vague sort of green that reminded me a bit of Orion’s belt.

Childhood stars, for all the myriad worlds of human space were compacted into a region so small the constellations were all more or less the same. Sublight empires are like that, economical, without the superluminals’ luxury of taking only the very best worlds.

After supper, the maitre d’ so very proud he’d been able to scrape together the ingredients for a real human meal, even after all this time, Mr. Pommesfrites slightly indignant when one of the courses turned out to share his name, we stepped out into a cooling night.

No destination, I think, just . . . out and about.

Like old times.

Boroghwen had a different smell at night, cooler, damper, crowds of natives stirring the night air, alien animal tang competing for my attention with the methanol miasma of the cars.

Mr. Pommesfrites said, "Is it like a real human city, sir?"

"Real? I don’t know. Humans had been living on ice-moons and inside deep space habitats for thousands of years by the time the Spinfellows found us."

"But not all of them, sir."

"No. I didn’t get much downtime on real human worlds, however."

"I suppose not, sir." Diplomatic of him.

Up ahead, I could see a little gaggle of Gozahghnhen gathered on a street corner, gathered round a little display of some sort, some kind of vendor, picking over his wares, which seemed to be strings of bright glitter.

"Oh, sir! Is that a Firefox?"

I looked. Small, dark, furry, not quite quadrupedal. "No. Similar, though. Firefoxes have a pair of limbs attached to the sides of their heads that they use for arms." I checked with the localnode but it didn’t know what this one was called either. "One more strandee, I guess. A Firefoxoid."

"Is that a joke, sir?"

"Yes." I guess they don’t get many Firefoxes in the Spinfellow navy, especially not in the human squadrons.

The sky lit up behind me, off to the west, and when I turned to look, something was lifting off from the cosmodrome, climbing atop a column of firelit smoke. The gaggle of Gozahghnhen stopped playing with the foxy being’s gewgaws and made little skirling and tootling sounds the localnode said it thought were the equivalent of oohs and ahs.

It took a few minutes for the thunder to reach us.

Imagine what it must have been like, living in the days when rocketships were the only way off a planet, when no one knew that on the other side of the nighttime sky some nasty things called Spinfellows and Starfish were at each others’ throats, dragging down everyone else who’d come to play.

Beyond the vendor, we got into an area that wasn’t so well lit, once the rocket’s fire faded from the sky. Older buildings, with a kind of crumbly look, tattered posters hanging from their dusty stone walls. Something about this place.

Something familiar.

I put out a hand and smoothed one of the posters, lifting it upright again, turning up my night vision as far as it’d go. Not enough. "Mr. Pommesfrites?"

"Certainly, sir!" He hit the wall with a workspot, picking out the poster bright as day.

Most of it was Starfish barcode, zig-zag bands of color, dominated by broad, dark yellow stripes. Above that was a little strip of human-style picture, something shaped more or less like a human woman, though one obviously executed by an unfamiliar nonhuman hand. A naked woman, frozen in the attitudes of a dance.

"Can you read it, sir?"

"No." And I shoved away the localnode before it could offer me a translation.

If you’ve got any sense, you’ll run away.

Instead, I leaned close to the poster, and took a deep breath. Nothing. Whatever organic chemicals had graced this thing were long since leached away. Which is just as well.

I walked down a dark alleyway, one filled with scraps of rubbish where the wind couldn’t reach to sweep them away, Mr. Pommesfrites casting a soft golden radiance just bright enough to light our way, bright enough to cast eerie moving shadows.

That’s the ticket, Mr. Pommesfrites. Like ambient light from a scary old story.

Though the windows were boarded up, the entrance was broken open, making me invent tales about what life was like on Gozahghn in the post-war world. With the economy blown flat as can be, there’d be homeless Gozahghnhen sleeping in doorways. Beggars and whores, assuming they had the biology to support such a thing. Footpads, I think. An interesting word.

It was dark inside, Mr. Pommesfrites’ radiance casting shadows far up into exposed rafters. Up there, you could see hanging bits of hardware, things with glassy lenses that had to be spotlights.

There was a stage on one end of the room, a pit before it with row on row of Starfish buckets for the audience. And, in the wings, smaller sections of seating meant for the sort of human who might enjoy this kind of thing.

What a place Gozahghn must have been, way back when.

I sat in the front row of left wing human seating, staring at the empty stage, looking round a room full of deep shadows. In back was the curve of a juice bar, lined with tubular Starfish buckets for the serum addicts.

I could almost see them now, as they had been, groaning softly as they took their injections.

As I recall, sometimes late-stage addicts would scream.

Creepy thing, a Starfish’s scream.

Up front, on the stage, maybe a very rich Starfish, some holdfast lord who’d prospered despite their losing the first war, now a helpless addict squandering his starline’s fortune, would pay to join the dancer on the stage.

And I remembered what it’d been like that day in Far On High, when I’d seen Sparrow dance with Starfish. I remember how I ran from the dancehall, stunned that the humans I’d once worshipped had fallen so low.

They say the dancers were born on the battlefields of the first war, when humans appeared in combat for the first time and Starfish soldiers went wild, throwing aside their weapons so they could get at them. A pretty day it must have been, human soldiers devoured alive by Starfish, while the Spinfellows killed and killed.

It’s how they lost the war. By the time the Starfish found human space and tried to wipe us out, it was just too late. Maybe if they could’ve stuck to fleet actions, safe in the antiseptic sky . . . but wars aren’t won by starships. They’re won by soldiers. Not Nelson on the high seas, but Wellington in the peninsula.

Mr. Pommesfrites whispered, "Perhaps we should go now, sir?"

Remembering Sparrow dancing her dance, I felt a useless little spasm of desire.

And back outside, walking up the dark and dirty alleyway, I remembered another such alley, on another primitive world, back in the time between the wars. I remember I was all alone that night, walking half-drunk, when a Starfish derelict sprang from the shadows, engulfing me, slobbering, soft and sticky, grunting its Starfish words.

I remember how it backed away; I remember how the datawarren told me of its disappointment. I remember how it slunk off, deeper into shadow, and of how glad I was, just that once, for my accursed nonhuman genome.

Not human, the Starfish whimpered, oh, damn.

Over to the west, the sky lit up again, as the Gozahghnhen, busy as little Firefoxes, lobbed another payload aloft.

Nothing for it then but to walk back through the dark, home to Hotel Glory and sleep. Boroghwen was full of Gozahghnhen now, things that could call themselves people dancing in the streets. Maybe just cutting loose after a long, hard day’s work, Gozahghnhen building their way free of the war’s ruin, maybe even aware the war had set them free.

Then again, there was that Flower Blood Festival, and maybe that had something to do with a party of snaky-necks I saw, marching down the street, blowing things like lurhorns, though the horns made a squeaky chirp as if in imitation of Gozahghnhen speech. No sign of anything like flowers around here, nor yet any blood, but translators have their own secrets to keep.

Hotel Glory seemed a well-lit place when I got there, clean like the streets of the windy city, scaly brown people lining something like a bar, a real bar, I suppose, since it had once been meant for real humans almost like me, Gozahghnhen dipping their muzzles into low, flat glass dishes full of what looked like fat brown seeds, lifting their heads high, looking to the ceiling as they jiggled and swallowed.

There was a placard over the bar, words on it printed in an old human tongue, the one most widely used when I was new: "No Lizzies." Maybe the Gozahghnhen can’t read it. Or if they can, maybe it’s just local color now, and doesn’t matter anymore.

Lizzies. Humans were like that, weren’t they?

I headed for the stairs, wanting my room and bed, but the maitre d’ caught me, placing a gentle, hesitant claw on my arm. "Honored sir?" Nervous about something, if the localnode got its neck language right. "There is a . . . machine to see you, sir. Something left behind at the cosmodrome, apparently." He gestured at Mr. Pommesfrites. "Perhaps your servant . . ."

My little welding machine swung his face to look at me, but I couldn’t tell if he was amused by the job description.

"What kind of a machine?"

"I . . . don’t know, sir. I never saw one like it before. Humanoid?" The localnode hesitated so long before supplying that last I clearly heard the Gozahghnhen chirp-tootle, warrentracks letting me know the long, low toot was what they called humans, the embedded warble encoding uncertainty, the chirp a modifier implying similar but not the same.

He gestured away then, and led us beside the bar and through an archway into the old dining room, lighting subdued and full of shadows. "Sir, this is . . ."

She stepped from deeper shadow, casting off splinters of reflected light, creating bright scintillae on the walls and ceiling, a vague, glossy, female human-shaped mannequin, the shape of a slim young woman cast as a bright chrome balloon. Slim silver hips and small silver breasts, a still, expressionless silver face with empty silver eyes, the shape of a woman, without all the salient details.

Mr. Pommesfrites said, "Why, sir! It’s a silvergirl!"

The silvergirl stood mute, empty eyes on mine. I murmured, "So it is."

The maitre d’ said, "I’ll send it away, sir, if . . ."

I waved him away, and gestured for the silvergirl to sit down at one of the tables. I can remember seeing them, though I never knew one personally. Mostly, in the old, old days, you saw them walking a few paces behind human women, in whose households they served, seldom with men, who apparently had no use for them.

"So. Who are you?"

She looked at me for a long moment, learning who knows what from my face. "I belong to the port authority maintenance depot. We heard there was a human ship here."

Some faint emphasis on the human. Well. From what I remembered of real human women, a silvergirl would be politic indeed. I said, "The ship is called Tammuz. I’m Crystal. Mr. Pommesfrites," I indicated the welder. "What’s your name?"

She looked at the welder, and her silver lips made something like a smile. A little girl’s shy smile maybe. "Pleased to make your acquaintance." Then back at me, "No silvergirl ever had a name of her own, just whatever milady chose to call her."

"So what do they call you here?"

She said, "I don’t mean to be difficult . . . sir." That hesitation, if you don’t rate it, I don’t mean it. But when you want something, you have to be careful. "Gozahghnhen don’t have names they tell each other, much less . . . and I’m the only silvergirl on the planet."

Mr. Pommesfrites said, "In the first war, we had some silvergirls in the fleet. Waiting table I think. We seldom saw them down in the tool shed."

She smiled at him again. "We were supposedly set free after the Centauri Jet business, but things didn’t work out the way anybody expected."

No. I suppose not. I said, "What did you want with me, Miss Silvergirl?"

I could swear she dimpled at that, but with eyes as empty as two little pools of mercury, I couldn’t tell much of anything. She said, "I was on a human world that made it through both the Jet conflict and the first war. My owners took me along when they were escaping during the big push, if you know about that?"

I nodded. Hard for me to miss, flying cargo after cargo of munitions from forward depots out to the firebases.

She said, "Our ship got caught in a fleet action crossfire. Everyone killed, I guess. Things that needed to breathe, anyway. I managed to hang on, powered down in a locker full of cleaning supplies, until we were picked up by a Firefox salvage team. I was sold here on Gozahghn, just before things went really bad."

I wonder if they saw anything, here on Gozahghn? It’s been long enough, lightspeed images of some of the larger, closer explosions should’ve gotten here by now.

She said, "I got the night off so I could . . . try to see you, sir."

"What for?"

"Take me with you when you go."

For some reason, it took my breath away, reminding me of the little pang I felt, sitting in the old Starfish juice bar, remembering Sparrow’s dance.

I said, "Can you pay?"

Mr. Pommesfrites whispered, "Sir. She’s property."

"Cargo rate, then. Deck cargo, if you want."

Those empty liquid eyes stared into mine for a long time, but there was nothing in them I could relate to. I’m sure humans did that on purpose. Human women knew what was what.

She said, "The only way I can go with you is if you buy me from the port authority. I’m not worth much to them, unlike Mr. Pommesfrites here. I’m sure they’d let me go cheap."

Something about this thing was as appealing as a child, most likely deliberately so, but . . . "I don’t think . . ." I stood up suddenly, looking down at her, and said, "I’m sorry."

I walked away, not looking back, went up to my room and undressed for bed in the dark, finally going out on the balcony, standing there naked in the soft, warm night breeze, looking out over the lit-up city, westward to where the spaceport lay, picked out in the floodlights’ glare. If I waited a while, I knew, I’d see one of those archaic rocketships lift off.

Damned silvergirl. I’ve got enough to deal with.

Mr. Pommesfrites didn’t come up for more than an hour, and didn’t say anything when he did. I’m not sure why I was still awake.