All this was on Valseir’s advice. Fassin couldn’t find any mention of anywhere called Aopoleyin in his databases either. He was starting to wonder if the memory-scanning process he’d had to undergo before being allowed to leave the Isaut had scrambled some of the gascraft’s information storage systems.

· Ah, Zosso sent. — Aopoleyin. That I have heard of. Hmm. Well, in that case, if I were you, I’d talk to Quercer Janath. Yes, you’ll need them. I should think. Tell them I sent you. Oh. And ask for my mantle scarf back. Might do the trick. No guarantees, though. Mind.

· Quercer and Janath. Your mantle scarf back.

The old Dweller rolled a fraction, jerkily, and looked down at Fassin. — I’ll have you know it was a very good mantle scarf.

He rolled back, facing again into the never-ending rush of cloud and stars and day and night. — I could do with it up here. It’s windy.

FIVE:

CONDITIONS OF PASSAGE

Where?

“You want to go where?”

“Hoestruem, near Aopoleyin,” Fassin said. “We know where Hoestruem is.”

“We’re not stupid.”

“Well, I’m not. Janath might be.”

“I entirely fulfilled my Creat Minimum Stupidity Allocation by associating with you.”

“Forgive my partner. We were asking for confirmation more out of shock at your unspeakable alienness than anything else. So. You want to go to Hoestruem.”

“Yes,” Fassin said.

“And Zosso sent you.”

“Still banging on about that damn scarf.”

“Useful code, though.”

“Hoestruem.”

“Hoestruem.”

“Doable.”

“Yes, but it’s more the why of it, not the how.”

“The how is easy.”

“The how is easy. Problem is definitely why.”

“As in bother.”

“As in should we.”

“Well, should we?”

“More rhetorical.”

“Has to be a joint decision.”

“Absolutely.”

“Zosso asks.”

“Zosso does.”

“Do we accommodate?”

“We could just give him back his mantle scarf.”

“Was there ever a scarf?”

“A real scarf?”

“Yes.”

“Now you mention it.”

“Anyway.”

“Beside the point.”

“Always a dangerous place to tarry”

“Zosso. A travel request. This human gentleman in his gascraft esuit.”

“Ahem,” said Y’sul. “And his friend.”

“Not forgetting his friend.”

“And mentor,” Y’sul pointed out.

“Yes, that too.”

“Do we do or do we don’t?”

“Is the question.”

“Does we does or don’t we not?”

“Yes. No. Select one of the aforementioned.”

“Quite.”

“Precisely.”

“In your own time,” Y’sul muttered.

They were in a spinbar in Eponia, a globular stickycity in the cold chaotic wastes of the North Polar Region. The borrowed jetclipper had done its best impression of a suborb, skipping nearly into space in a series of bounced trajectories, finally slowing, sinking and coming to rest by the tenuous cloudlike structure of the great city, occupying hundreds of cubic kilometres of cold, stale gas just fifteen thousand klicks from the giant planet’s North Pole. They’d tracked Quercer Janath down to a spinbar called The Liquid Yawn. Valseir had demurred but Y’sul and Fassin had crammed into a crushpod, been accelerated up to speed and then — dizzily — joined the two travelcaptains in their booth.

Fassin had never encountered a travelcaptain before. He’d heard of them, and knew that they were almost always found in the equatorial band, but they were elusive, even shy. He’d tried to meet with one many times in the past but there had always been some sort of problem, often at the last moment.

The spinbar whirled madly, twisting and looping and rolling at extreme high speed, making the city outside its bubble-diamond walls seem to gyrate as though with the express intention of disorientating the outward-looking bar-going public. The effect was intense and intentional. Dwellers had a superb sense of balance and it took a lot to make them dizzy. Being spun like a maniac was one Dweller idea of fun just because it led to a profound, giddy dislocation with one’s surroundings. Taking drugs at the same time just added to the hilarity. Y’sul, however, it had seemed to Fassin, looked a little grey around the gills as they’d woven their way through the mostly empty spinbar to the travelcaptains’ booth.

“You all right?”

“Perfectly”

“Bringing back memories of heading through the storm wall in the Poaflias?”

“Not at… Well, just a little. Ulp. Perhaps.”

Quercer Janath, travelcaptains, were one. They looked like one big Dweller, of about Adult age, but there were two individuals in there, one in each discus. Fassin had heard of truetwin Dwellers before, but never met a set. Usually a Dweller’s brain was housed just off the central spine in the thickest, central part of one discus; generally the left one. Right-brain Dwellers were about fifteen per cent of the total population, though this varied from planet to planet. Very, very occasionally, two brains developed in the one creature, and something like Quercer Janath tended to be the result. The double-Dweller wore a shiny set of all-overs with transparent and mesh patches over the hub sense organs, and a shaded transparent section over the outer frill of sensory fringe.

“You’ll not be able to see much.”

“That’s if we take you at all.”

“Yes, that’s if we do take you in the first.”

“Place. Which is by no means guaranteed.”

“Indeed not. Decision not yet made.”

“Still pending.”

“Absolutely. But.”

“In any event.”

“You’ll not be able to see much of anything.”

“Not exactly a sightseeing trip.”

“Or a cruise.”

“Either.”

“And you’ll have to switch everything off.”

“All non-bio systems.”

“At least.”

“If, that is.”

“Big if.”

“We do take you.”

“I think we get the idea,” Fassin said. “Good.”

“Brilliant.”

“When can we expect a decision?” Y’sul asked. He’d turned his right sense-fringe inward so that he was seeing with only one. This was the Dweller equivalent of a drunk human closing one eye.

“Made it. I’ve made it. You made it?”

“Yep, I’ve made it.”

“It’s a Yes?”

“It’s a Yes.”

“You’ll take us?” Fassin asked. “Are you deaf? Yes.”

“Definitely.”

“Thank you,” Fassin said. “So where are we going?” Y’sul asked tetchily. “Ah.”

“Ha!”

“Wait.”

“And see.”

The ship was no joke. Three hundred metres long, it was a polished ebony spike necklaced with drive pods like fat seeds. It lay in a public hangar deep under the stickycity, a semi-spherical space a kilometre across bounded by the hexagonal planes of adjacent smaller bubble volumes.

Valseir was bidding them farewell here. The trip would begin with what the two travelcaptains described as an intense, fractally spiralled, high-acceleration, torque-intense manoeuvre complex, and was not for the faint-willed. The old Dweller had invoked his seniority to excuse himself the ordeal.

“More spinning around,” Y’sul sighed, on hearing what awaited them.

“My regards to Leisicrofe,” Valseir told Fassin. “You still have the leaf image, I hope.”

Fassin took the image-leaf with its depiction of sky and clouds out of its storage locker in the little gascraft and showed it to the old Dweller. “I’ll say hello.”

“Please do. Best of luck.”

“You too. How do I find you when I get back?”

“Leave that to me. If I’m not readily available, try where we found Zosso. Or, perhaps at a StormSail regatta.”

“Yes,” Y’sul said. “But next time just don’t bring any friends.”

The black spike-ship was called the Velpin. It burst from the vast cloud of the city like a needle shot from a frozen waterfall of foam, disappeared into the gelid rush of gases forever swirling around the planet’s distant pole and started its bizarre flight, spiralling, rolling, looping, rising and falling and rising again.