"What happens if I won't swear? You kill me now, and tell Tweed I was escaping?"

Vaffa looked surprised, and slightly offended. "No. I won't harm you further, no matter what happens, unless you try to escape. I'm not threatening you to make you swear. A promise made under duress is not binding." She stated it like a natural law of the universe.

"All right. I swear I won't try to escape on Pluto."

They sealed the oath in blood, of all things. Making the cut in her own palm without deadening her nerves was one of the most courageous things Lilo had ever done.

It wasn't until later that Lilo realized how childlike the whole thing had been. Was a solemn oath enough to bind her to Vaffa when the stakes were her life and freedom? She didn't see how it could be, but the question troubled her more than she was willing to admit.

Later, Vaffa turned to Lilo in the dim light of the sleeping room. Iphis was snoring.

"We've got to talk." Lilo had been afraid Vaffa wanted to cop again. While Lilo got along well sexually with Iphis, Vaffa frightened her. They moved out into the tiny freefall gym.

"You should read this first." Vaffa handed her a sheet of faxpaper. It was covered with code groups, and under them was a messy translation in Vaffa's seismographic writing. Lilo noted the StarLine name, and the Topsecret, AAA rating.

"I don't know where the Boss got it," Vaffa volunteered. "He has his sources."

Lilo read it through, then again, carefully. She was familiar with the weighting system used in decoding Hotline transmissions. Often the Hotline signal, after traveling seventeen light-years, was considerably garbled. But that couldn't be the case here, not with thirty repeats. So the uncertainty attached to key words was the result of the computer's lack of context for a good translation.

It did not surprise Lilo. She knew most people thought of Hotline transmissions as a sort of substitution code; when cracked, the result would be in good, grammatical System Speech.

But the data received over the Hotline was the result of alien thinking. As long as it stuck to data of a scientific nature, couched in mathematical terms, reasonable translations could be made. Even so, there were huge "gray areas" which were thought to be data but could not be interpreted by any computer programs yet devised. Lilo had her own opinions about the gray areas. Her research into them had put her in jail.

The few times messages had come through which the computers tagged as being something like language, the translations were hedged with uncertainties. The linguists were not surprised at this. Languages embody cultural assumptions, inconsistencies; even contradictions. Given a large body of transmissions, the computers could get closer and closer to the meanings of words. But the Ophiuchites had not shown much interest in talking about themselves, or in doing anything but sending oceans of engineering data. The few verbal messages could have been anything from commercials to religious evangelism, or something that had no human analogue at all.

Lilo read it a third time.

"What's this blowout about accounts, and termination of service? and payment? What could they possibly want? What could we give them?"

"Maybe what they're giving us. Information." Vaffa shrugged.

"But we... what does it mean?"

"I'm assuming it means just what it says. This is a phone bill for four hundred years of service."

"But... that's crazy."

"Is it? Why did we think the Hotline should just go on forever, without us giving anything in return? Why should we expect them to be any less mercenary than we are?"

Lilo calmed down and thought about it before she replied.

"Okay. I can see that. But what would we give them? And how? I guess we could build a big laser like they have—I'm not saying it's within our power for sure, but we might—but what do we transmit? Everything we've gotten from the Hotline has been two or three thousand years beyond where our science was at the time. It's like... like asking an Earth primitive for advice on how to fix your fusion motor. What could we have that they want to learn?"

Vaffa grimaced, and took the message back. "I was hoping you'd have some ideas about that. I can't think of anything, and it's got me worried. I guess what I'm really wondering is, what are the 'severe penalties'?"

"I don't see what it could be except a disconnection. I mean, they're seventeen light-years away. What could they do?"

"I don't know." Vaffa brooded for a while as Lilo tried to figure it out. Then she looked up. "Everybody says star travel is impossible, or at least it would take so long it wouldn't be worthwhile. One of the big reasons they give is the Ophiuchites. If they had star travel, they'd be here, right? They wouldn't be sitting home beaming messages." She shook her head. "Now I wonder. Maybe we've got them all wrong. Maybe they had another reason for staying away. But I don't think they'd send this unless they meant business."

Lilo wanted to talk about it some more, but Vaffa had withdrawn into a private world. The woman was scared. Lilo wasn't, yet, but she would be.

13

Starline, by the Public Relations Master Program, Main Business Computer, StarLine, Ltd. Read-rating II.

Who'd a thought they'd miss? Nobody figured on it. People were looking for junk from the stars for God knows how long. Way back in old-style time, Project Ozma took a listen. No good. Later on, we turned the big ears on 'em. Centauri, Wolf, Lalande, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Quiet, real quiet. What gives? We listened to 'em all, and no buzz.

Then we started to get way far out. Beyond Pluto, twice that fuggin' far away, and what do you think? Voices!

Well, not voices, exactly, you readout? Computer bippety-bips and offedy-ons. Nobody could read 'em for a long time. (I mean, you should take a look at 'em! Press the printout and a zillion acres of flyspecks.) Even the computers didn't know what the message was. But a couple things were sure. Somebody was sittin' on 70 Ophiuchi with one fuggin' big laser, they wanted to talk, and they couldn't shoot piss into a pot!

Hold on! Maybe they weren't shootin' at us. So they looked around behind us, you know, but there's nothing but a couple of stars in Orion's armpit. They were yakkin' at us, all right. But how come they missed? You think they'd build a laser like that if they can't aim it?

No way. Somebody said, "Hey! Maybe they don't want to talk till we're ready! Like, we gotta be smart enough to get out there, or something." Sounds okay, huh? Sure enough. They've been talking for four hundred years now. They lead us by fifteen billion klicks, like a skeet shooter. You wanna listen, you gotta go out there.

Somebody else said, "How come we don't build us a big laser and talk back?" You kiddin'? Who's gonna pay for it?

Even at the best of economic times, there was little a traveler would choose to bring to Pluto. The import duties were the highest in the system, and the weight penalties charged by the shipping lines made it more sensible to leave all luggage at home and buy a new wardrobe on arrival. Normally, the only thing worth bringing to Pluto was information, and even that was carried as compactly as possible.

But Pluto was in a depression. The government had been on the losing end of an economic war with Mercury for two years, and the effects were drastic. Vaffa had used her Intersystem Credit Card on Mars to get a small amount of cash. Even so, the weight penalty was steep.

Lilo and Vaffa stepped out of the five-gee express at Florida Port, groggy and miserable from eight days spent floating in an acceleration tank. Lilo kept coughing up unpleasant substances, and there was a steady drip of fluid from her nose. She had licked it once, which proved to be a mistake.