“I was. Though you would never have known it.” Bony knew the image that was in Liddy’s mind. The Miraculous Mirambelles, poised and confident, aerialist builders with a grace and sense of balance that would shame a cat or a squirrel, directing the robot spinners in their monofilament spans three thousand meters above the ground. In seven generations, no Mirambelle had ever suffered a fall.

Bony felt that he could not breathe, his lungs were as starved as if the air of Limbo had suddenly lost all oxygen. He went on, “Naturally, my parents didn’t want me anywhere near ultrahigh construction. Not on the ground, either. Too hard on me, they said. Also, of course, I would ruin the Mirambelle legend. Better to have me deep down below the surface, where no one would expect to find a Mirambelle. Better to have me hidden in the Gallimaufries.”

“But you didn’t stay there. You got out.”

“I did. No thanks to the Mirambelle clan, though.” This was the place to stop. This was where he ought to say no more. Bony went on. “I got out because of something else. When I was thirteen years old I became interested in remote viewing, and I heard about something that the Duke of Bosny had been doing. I wanted to take a look.”

“What was it?”

“I’d rather not say.” There was a long silence, then Bony continued, “He was, well, you know, fooling around in unusual ways. Doing things I wasn’t sure were even physically possible. So I figured out how to make the equipment, and I built it, and I did the remote viewing. I wanted to see. I mean, I was only thirteen.”

Now she was staring at him in a peculiar way. His instinct had been right, he should have stopped with the Mirambelles.

Liddy said, “Bony, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. And you probably don’t need to. Anything you’ve seen or heard about, I probably did . Oh dear. Now I’ve shocked you.”

“No, no. I’ve — been around.”

“I was at the Leah Rainbow Academy, you know.”

“Yes. Yes. The Leah Rainbow Academy. The Academy.”

“Bony, stop gibbering. Forget the Academy. I lived through it, so can you. You did the remote viewing. Tell me what happened next.”

“I got caught. I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, and I had no idea how many levels of security there were around the Duke of Bosny. A man called Chan Dalton came to see me.”

“Chan Dalton! He’s a big wheel. He’s the Duke’s chief enforcer.”

“He is now. But this was twenty years ago. He had some connection with the Duke that he didn’t specify, and he had all kinds of weapons in his belt. I felt sure he’d come to kill me. He told me he wanted to know how I’d broken in, because the Duke’s experts told him that remote viewing access to the inner court was impossible. He made me do it again, with him actually present, to prove that I could.”

“And then he killed you.”

“No. Then he recruited me. Not to the Duke of Bosny’s service, but for a project of his own. He told me he was putting a specialized team together to go to the stars. He believed that the other freelance expeditions were doing everything wrong, and he knew better. His team was almost assembled, and an inventor and tinkerer like me was the final component. If I could learn what was needed, I was in. Otherwise, it would be back to Earth and the Gallimaufries. He sent me away to a little planetoid called Horus, and tried to give me a proper education. It didn’t work out too well. Turned out I had to learn things my own way, or not at all.”

“But you must have learned. You didn’t go back to Earth.”

“There were other reasons for that. Just before I finished on Horus and found out whether I was in or out, news came back from Mercantor about the Guljee Expedition, with all the killings. The other Stellar Group members decided it was the final proof that humans were too bloody-minded to wander free around the stars. Right after that they put the quarantine in place. Chan Dalton had to disband the team. We all went our separate ways. He gave me my freedom, and enough money to start another life. I kept in touch with the other team members for a long time, but when the quarantine went on and on we drifted apart and lost contact. With the road to the stars closed, there was no point in thinking of ourselves as a team. It was a depressing period for everybody. But you’re too young to remember it.”

“No I’m not. One of my first memories was the big news that none of the Link access points were working.”

“Not quite that. We could go anywhere within the extended solar system. But nothing beyond a lightyear.”

“Surely the Geyser Swirl is more than that. We’re a lot more than a lightyear from the Sun.”

“More than a hundred lightyears. That’s one of the mysteries we came here to solve: Why is there a Link access point open to humans? Well, we’re here, and no closer to finding out.” Bony waved his arm around at their barren surroundings. They had been walking steadily as they talked, and had reached the top of a sharp-edged ridge. The black rock showed signs of weathering by wind and rain, but nowhere in all the expanse of hills and valleys ahead could the eye find any sign of a living thing. The sun was lower in the sky, and soon it would be time to turn back.

“In fact,” Bony went on, “we have other mysteries. How could we come through a Link and arrive in the middle of the sea? Our mass detector is supposed to inhibit a Link transit when there’s matter at the other end.”

He was talking too much, and more to himself than to Liddy. He was surprised to hear her say, “And now there’s one more mystery to explain.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you said there was no life on land, and I assume that included birds.” Liddy was pointing off to the left. “But isn’t that a bird?”

Bony followed her arm and at first could see nothing. Then he caught the dark moving point in the sky. A bird.

So there were birds, or at least some kind of flying animal. He had been wrong about that, and he must be just as wrong about life on land. Surely a flying form couldn’t evolve directly from a sea-creature without a land form in between.

The moving dot was larger, drifting across the sky on a slanting course that would cross their own path far ahead of them. Bony stared hard, trying to make out details of the flying shape.

“I see a tail behind the main lobes,” Liddy said. Her eyes must be sharper than his. “And a line of little dots on the side of the body. I think — yes, it’s turning. There are wings. But—”

Bony could see them, too. The moving shape was banking. As it did so, the profile as seen from below was revealed. It was the same triple-lobe winged form that had cast its shadow on Bony when he was on the seabed. And something else. The sun was at their back, and the sunlight catching the underside of the object turned it to a silvery gleam.

“That’s reflection from metal,” Liddy said excitedly. “It’s a ship!”

“It is. And it’s big . Those `little dots’ you see on the side are ports. But how can it fly, with a shape like that? It seems to just hang in the air.” Bony grabbed Liddy’s arm. “Come on. It will be getting dark in another hour or two and we don’t want to find ourselves wandering around the sea at night. We have to get back to the Mood Indigo and tell Friday what we’ve learned.”

Liddy gave him a questioning look, but she turned at once and allowed him to lead her back the way that they had come. She didn’t say anything, but Bony suspected that she knew the real reason he wanted to return to their ship. It had nothing to do with their responsibility to report everything they found to the official leader of the expedition, Friday Indigo. It was the fact that the outline of the ship they had just seen did not resemble any design in use by humans or other species of the Stellar Group. It was not the product of Tinkers, Pipe-Rillas, or Angels. The ship they had seen wasn’t just alien, it was alien alien.