The question took him by surprise, but he was in good form. "Paul Kraus in atmosphere systems. He could tell you whatever you want to know."

Mouse chuckled.

A muscle in Amy's cheek started twitching. "You know what I mean. Answer me."

"Take it easy, Amy," Mouse said. "Your badge is showing."

‘What?"

"A little professional advice, that's all. Don't press. It puts people off. They clam up. Or play games with you, leading you around with lies. A good agent never pushes unless he has to. You don't have to. Nobody's going anywhere for a year. So why not just lie back and let the pieces fall, then put them together." He had selected the tone of an old pro advising a novice. "Take our situation. Give me a twenty-centimeter copper nipple, Moyshe. You know we're Navy men. We know you work for Kindervoort. Okay... "

"I what?"

"Don't be coy. Torch, Moyshe. And find the solder. You give yourself away a dozen times a day, Amy. The greenest apprentice wouldn't have fallen for that left-handed wrench thing."

BenRabi chuckled. Amy had torn through all three tool kits trying to find the mythical wrench. Then she had gone down to Damage Control and tried to requisition one. Somebody down there had gone along with the gag. They had passed her on to Tooling...

Amy had been given a crash course in plumbing, but she had not learned enough to fool the initiate.

Fury reddened her face. It faded into a soft smile. "I told him I couldn't pull it off."

"He probably didn't expect you to. He knows we're the best. Doesn't matter anyway. We're out of it now. Just a couple spikes here working. Okay, we know where we stand. Where's the flux, Moyshe? So why don't you do like we do? Don't push. Pay attention. Wait. It'll come in bits and pieces. No hard feelings that way. And that closes Old Doc Igarashi's Spy School and Lonely Hearts Club for today. Be ready for a surprise quiz tomorrow. Ow! That's hot."

"Watch the torch, dummy," Moyshe said. "This T pipe is an odd size. We'll have to choke it down to two centimeters somehow."

"Here," Amy said. She made a checkmark on one of the sheets on her clipboard, handed Moyshe a reduction joint with a number tag attached. "Special made. See. I'm learning." She laughed. "No more questions. Mouse. Moyshe. I feel better now. Not so sneaky."

"Good for you," Mouse said.

Danion suddenly groaned and shivered. BenRabi whirled, looking for a spacesuit locker. Mouse crouched defensively, making a sound suspiciously like a whimper. "What the hell?" he demanded. "We breaking up?"

Amy laughed. "It's nothing. They're shifting mindsails and catchnets."

"Mindsails?" BenRabi asked. "What's that?"

Her smile vanished. She had, evidently, said too much. "I can't explain. You'd have to ask somebody from Operations Sector."

"And that's off limits."

"Yes."

"Got you."

The shuddering continued for a half hour. They lunched while waiting for the Damage Control people. Amy began to lose her reserve toward benRabi. Soon they were chattering like teenagers who had just made up.

Mouse did a little poking and prodding from the sidelines, as skillfully as any psychologist, maneuvering Amy into inviting Moyshe out next recreation day.

BenRabi went to Mouse's cabin after supper. They played chess and, lip reading, discussed what Moyshe was putting down, using the venerable invisible ink trick, between the lines of his drafts of Jerusalem. They also attacked the problem of the Sangaree woman, and found it as stubborn as ever.

Recreation day came, with all its mad morning chess tournaments and its afternoon sports furor, its Archaicist exhibitionism, and its collectors' excitement. BenRabi concluded some business with Grumpy George, got deadlocked over some stamps, and managed a handsome cash settlement on some New Earth mutant butterflies he had brought along for trading.

That evening he and Amy attended another ball. This one was Louis XIV. He went in his everyday clothing. Amy, though, scrounged a costume and was striking. From the ball they went to her cabin so she could change. They had been invited to another party, by the same cousin.

"How did you people get involved in the Archaicist thing?" Moyshe asked while she was changing.

"We're the originals," she replied from her bathroom, her voice light with near-laughter. She had been mirthfully happy all day. Moyshe, too, had been feeling intensely alive and aware. "It starts in creche. In school. When we act out history. We haven't really been around long enough to have any past of our own, so we borrow yours."

"That's not true. We all have the same history."

"I guess you're right. Old Earth is everybody's history if you get right down to it. Anyway, it's a creche game. A teaching method. And it carries over for some people. It's fun to dress up and pretend. But we don't live it. Not the way some people do. Know what I mean?"

"You remember Chouteau? That Ship's Commander who brought us here? He had as bad a case as I've ever seen."

"An exception. Look at it this way. How many people go to these things? Not very many. And they're most of the Archaicists aboard. See? It's a game. But your people are so serious about it. It's spooky."

"I'll buy that." Curious, he thought. In these two weeks he had seen nothing culturally unique to the Seiners. They lived borrowed lives in a hash that did not add to a whole. His expectations, based on landside legends, rumors, and his Luna Command studies, had been severely disappointed.

But Amy had a point. He had encountered only a narrow selection of her people. An unusual minority. The majority, remaining aloof, might represent something different.

She came from the bathroom. "Zip me up, okay?" Then, responding to a question, "We're not complete borrowers. It's partly because you're just seeing a few people, like you say. And partly because this is the fleet. You wouldn't judge Confederation by what you saw on one of your Navy ships, would you? The Yards and creches are different. Except when we're working, we try to make life a game. To beat the boredom and fear. Can't be that much different for Navy men. Anyway, you're not seeing the real us, ever. You're just seeing us reacting to you."

What were these Yards? They kept slipping into Seiner conversation. Did the Starfishers have a world of their own, hidden somewhere out of the way? It was not impossible. The records revealing the whereabouts of scores of early settlements had been destroyed in the Lunar Wars... He was about to ask when he recalled Mouse's advice about pressing.

There was much, much more to the Seiner civilization than anyone in Confederation suspected. The bits he and Mouse had collected already would be worth fortunes to the right people. If he kept learning at this rate...

They were going to give him another medal when he got back. He could see it coming. He would rather have that damned year off.

The party was a carbon of the previous one. Same people. Same music. Same conversation and arguments. Only he and Amy were different. They watched their drinking and tried to understand what was happening to them.

The partiers were younger than he or Amy, and uncomfortable with the gap, though Amy's cousin did her best to make them part of things. Moyshe never felt unwelcome, only out of place. He supposed he had been as much an anomaly before, but had been too preoccupied to notice.

Had Amy manipulated the invitation? If so, why? Another Kindervoort ploy? Both Jarl and Mouse seemed eager to push them together.

Why did he question everything? Even the questioning? Why did he feel that he was losing his grasp on his place in the universe?

They cuddled. They drank. The shadows closed in. They probed one another's pasts. He learned that she had once had an abortion after having been tricked into pregnancy by a man who had wanted to marry her, but whom she had loathed. He resisted the temptation to ask why she had been in bed with him in the first place.