«What are you thinking? Close to a sun?»

«Outsiders and starseeds. We only guess at the relationship, but the best guess is they'll try to rescue the starseeds. Stet?»

«Stet. Maybe they'll make for the Clouds of Magellan.»

«The shock wave will drive the starseeds ahead of it, wherever they're going. There won't be Outsiders near the Core. Ander, there won't be anybody near the Core.»

I was trying to picture it. Worlds in flight — «Drive up along the galactic pole, then turn toward the hub. In ten thousand years they'd meet the shock wave from the Core explosion. I saw it, Ander. A shell of exploding suns, fairly tight, fairly narrow. They'd be through it in another five thousand years. The Outsiders are gone. All the sapient species are gone, too, dead or fled or hopelessly mutated and still mutating. Thousands of worlds would have been sterilized — maybe millions — but they'd still be covered with free oxygen and organic sludge and maybe even deep-sea life. All ready for easy terraforming. That's it. They're headed for the Core.»

He said, «Well.» And thought again and said, «At least it's different.»

«Is this what you came for?»

«Beowulf, I believe I can tell Sigmund it was worth the trip. Now, will you tell me what happened to Feather Filip and Carlos Wu?»

«Yeah. And Carlos Wu's autodoc?»

He shrugged it off. «Feather Filip vanished from the same time and locale as you and Carlos Wu and Sharrol Janss. I'm supposed to find out who's dead.»

It wasn't a slip of the tongue. He put the question that brutally quite deliberately. Maybe it got him what he wanted; because the blood was draining out of my face again. I found my hand at my throat, massaging.

I said, «Nobody should have to eat with you, Ander.»

He looked at the monster on my plate and again wouldn't give me the satisfaction. «Who's dead?»

Me! I said, «At least Carlos. You want it from the beginning?»

«Why not?»

PROCRUSTES

Asleep, my mind plays it all back in fragments and dreams. From time to time a block of nerves wakes:

That's some kind of ARM weapon! Move it move it too late blam. My head rolls loose on black sand. Bones shattered, ribs and spine. Fear worse than the agony. Agony fading and I'm gone.

Legs try to kick. Nothing moves. Again, harder, move! No go. The 'doc floats nicely on the lift plate, but its mass is resisting me. Push! Voice behind me, I turn, she's holding some kind of tube. Blam. My head bounces on sand. Agony flaring, sensation fading. Try to hang on, stay lucid … but everything turns mellow.

My balance swings wildly around my inner ear. Where's the planet's axis? Fafnir doesn't have polar caps. The ancient lander is flying itself. Carlos looks worried, but Feather's having the time of her life.

Sprawled across the planet's face, a hurricane flattened along one edge. Under the vast cloud fingerprint, a ruddy snake divides the blue of a world-girdling ocean. A long, narrow continent runs almost pole to pole.

The lander reenters over featureless ocean. Nothing down there seems to be looking at us. I'm taking us down fast. Larger islands have low, flat buildings on them. Pick a little one. Hover while flame digs the lamplighter pit wider and deeper, until the lander sinks into the hole with inches to spare. Plan A is right on track.

I remember how Plan A ended. The Surgery program senses my distress and turns me off.

I'm in Carlos Wu's 'doc, in the intensive care cavity. The Surgery program prods my brain, running me through my memories, maintaining the patterns lest they fuzz out to nothing while my brain and body heal.

I must be terribly damaged.

Waking was sudden. My eyes popped open, and I was on my back, my nose two inches from glass. Sunlight glared through scattered clouds. Display lights glowed above my eyebrows. I felt fine, charged with energy.

Ye gods, how long had I slept? All those dreams … dream memories.

I tried to move. I was shrink-wrapped in elastic. I wiggled my arm up across my chest, with considerable effort, and up to the displays. It took me a few seconds to figure them out.

Biomass tank: nearly empty. Treatment: pages of data, horrifying … terminated, successful. Date: Ohmygod. Four months! I was out for four months and eleven days!

I typed, Open:

The dark glass lid retracted, sunlight flared, and I shut my eyes tight. After a while I pulled myself over the rim of the intensive care cavity and rolled out.

My balance was all wrong. I landed like a lumpy sack, on sand, and managed not to yell or swear. Who might hear? Sat up, squinting painfully, and looked around.

I was still on the island.

It was weathered coral, nearly symmetrical, with a central peak. The air was sparkling clear, and the ocean went on forever, with another pair of tiny islands just touching the horizon.

I was stark naked and white as a bone, in the glare of a yellow-white dwarf sun. The air was salty and thick with organic life, sea life.

Where was everybody?

I tried to stand, wobbled, gave it up, and crawled around into the shadow of the 'doc. I still felt an amazing sense of well-being, as if I could solve anything the universe could throw at me.

During moments of half wakefulness I'd somehow worked out where I must be. Here it stood, half coffin and half chemical lab, massive and abandoned on the narrow black sand beach. A vulnerable place to leave such a valuable thing, but this was where I'd last seen it, ready to be loaded into the boat.

Sunlight could damage me in minutes, kill me in hours, but Carlos Wu's wonderful 'doc was no ordinary mall autodoctor. It was state of the art, smarter than me in some respects. It would cure anything the sun could do to me.

I pulled myself to my feet and took a few steps. Ouch! The coral cut my feet. The 'doc could cure that, too, but it hurt.

Standing, I could see most of the island. The center bulged up like a volcano. Fafnir coral builds a flat island with a shallow cone rising at the center, a housing for a symbiote, the lamplighter. I'd hovered the lander above the cone while belly jets scorched out the lamplighter nest until it was big enough to hold the lander.

Just me and the 'doc and a dead island. I'd have to live in the 'doc. Come out at night, like a vampire. My chance of being found must be poor if no passing boat had found me in these past four-plus months.

I climbed. The coral cut my hands and feet and knees. From the cone I'd be able to see the whole island.

The pit was two hundred feet across. The bottom was black and smooth and seven or eight feet below me. Feather had set the lander to melt itself down slowly, radiating not much heat over many hours. Several inches of rainwater now covered the slag, and something sprawled in the muck.

It might be a man … a tall man, possibly raised in low gravity. Too tall to be Carlos. Or Sharrol, or Feather, and who was left?

I jumped down. Landed clumsily on the smooth slag and splashed full length in the water. Picked myself up, unhurt.

My toes could feel an oblong texture, lines and ridges, the shapes within the lander that wouldn't melt. Police could determine what this thing had been if they ever looked; but why would they look?

The water felt good on my burned feet. And on my skin. I was already burned. Albinos can't take yellow dwarf sunlight.

A corpse was no surprise, given what I remembered. I looked it over. It had been wearing local clothing for a man: boots, loose pants with a rope tie, a jacket encrusted with pockets. The jacket was pierced with a great ragged hole front and back. That could only have been made by Feather's horrible ARM weapon. This close, the head … I'd thought it must be under the water, but there was no head at all. There were clean white bones, and a neck vertebra cut smoothly in half.