“So you don’t get sick from the effects of Coriolis,” he said. “But, in case you do—” And he handed me a bag. “Come to think of it, take two—the way you were eating.”

I took a last look up before putting on the blindfold. We were getting ready to ascend a dauntingly tall ladder. But I knew that “gravity” would get weaker the higher we went, so it wouldn’t be that arduous. We would, however, be experiencing powerful, disorienting inertial effects as we moved closer to the axis. Hence the concern about motion sickness.

I groped for the lowest rung. “Slow,” Jules said, “settle on each step and wait for it to feel correct before moving to the next.”

Since the whole ladder was enclosed in a tubular cage, there was scant danger of falling. I took the rungs slowly as recommended, listening for movement from Lio, who was above me, before going to the next. But above a certain point the rungs became mostly symbolic. A flick of the wrist or finger floated us to the next one up. Still the Troan soldier at the top maintained the same steady pace—he’d learned the hard way that those who climbed too fast would soon be reaching for their bags.

I was thinking about that keypad. What if Fraa Jad had punched in one of the 9,999 wrong numbers? What if he had attempted it several times? Eventually a red light would have gone on in some security bunker. They’d have turned on a speelycaptor and seen a live feed of two firefighters screwing around with the keypad. They’d have sent someone to shoo them off. That person probably would not have been issued a shotgun—just the nonlethal weapons that our escorts were toting.

Jesry’s words came back to me: A threat. He was right. Opening that ball valve had been a way of putting a gun to the head of the whole Orb. No wonder those soldiers had simply rushed up and blown us away! In a cosmos where Fraa Jad knew—or guessed—the number on the keypad, we were sure to get killed. Freeing me, apparently, to end up somewhere else.

But what would have happened in all of the vastly more numerous cosmi where he’d punched in the wrong random number? We would have been taken alive.

What would have happened next in those cosmi?

We’d have been detained for a while—then taken to parley with Gan Odru.

My ears told me I had emerged from the top of the shaft, my hand pawed in the air but didn’t find a next rung. Instead the Troan intercepted it, hauled me out, hauled back the other way to kill the momentum he’d conferred on me, and guided me to something I could grab. I peeled up my blindfold and saw that I had emerged into the Core. The ball valve leading to the aft bearing chamber was just a stone’s throw behind us. Its length in the other direction was inestimable, but I knew it to be two and a quarter miles. It was as I “remembered” it: glowing tubes strung down its inner surface emitted filtered sunlight, and the conveyor belt ran endlessly with well-lubed clicking and humming noises.

Three other well-shafts were plumbed into the Core at this nexus. The one directly “above” or opposite us led into Orb Four; it looked like a direct, straight-line continuation of the shaft we had just finished climbing. A ring-ladder ran around the Core wall, providing access to all of them. Those who were practiced at this kind of thing could simply jump across.

There was a wait. To begin with, those below me on the ladder had to catch up. Moreover, a traffic jam had already developed in the shaft to Orb Four. There were safety rules governing how many were allowed to use the ladder at once, being enforced by a soldier stationed at the top rung. Some other delegation was going down ahead of us—though from our point of view they appeared to be ascending the ladder feet-first—and we would have to wait until they had reached the bottom.

So, Lio and I began screwing around. We decided to see if we could make ourselves motionless in the center of the Core. The goal was to place oneself near the middle of the big tunnel while killing one’s spin so that the whole ship would rotate around one’s body. This had to be done through some combination of jumping off from the wall just so, and then swimming in the air to make adjustments. Desperately clumsy would be a fair description of our first five minutes’ efforts. From there we moved on to dangerously incompetent, as, while flailing around, I kicked Lio in the face and gave him a bloody nose. The Troan soldiers watched with mounting amusement. They couldn’t understand a word we were saying, but they knew exactly what we were trying to do. After I kicked Lio, they took pity on us—or perhaps they were just scared that we’d get seriously hurt and they’d be blamed. One of them beckoned me over. He grabbed my chord in one hand and my bolt, at the scruff of my neck, at the other, and gave me a gentle push combined with a little torque. When I swam to a halt in the middle of the tunnel, I saw I was closer than I had ever been to achieving the goal.

Hearing voices in Fluccish, I looked up the Core to see a contingent of perhaps two dozen coming to join us. Most were floating down the middle of the Core instead of using the conveyors, so even if they hadn’t been speaking Fluccish I’d have known them for tourists. One of these suddenly bounded ahead of the group, drawing a rebuke from a soldier.

Cord hand-over-handed her way along the tunnel wall and launched herself at me from a hundred feet away. I feared the impending collision, but fortunately air resistance slowed her flight, so that when we banged bodies it was no more violent than walking into someone. We had a long zero-gravity hug. Another Arbran was not far behind her: a young Sæcular man. I didn’t recognize him, but I had the oddest feeling that I was expected to. He was slowly tumbling on all three axes as he drifted toward me and my sib, flailing his arms and legs as if that would help. For that, he was very impressively dressed and coiffed. One of our soldier escorts reached out and gave him a push on the knee that stopped his tumbling and slowed his trajectory to something not quite so meteoric. He came to a near-stop with respect to me and Cord. Gazing at him past Cord’s right ear, which was pressed so hard against my cheek that I was pretty sure her earrings were drawing blood, I saw him raise a speelycaptor and draw a bead on us. “In the chilly heart of the alien starship,” he intoned, in a beautifully modulated baritone, “a heartwarming reunion between brother and sister. Cord, the Sæcular half of the heroic pair, shows profound relief as she—”

I was just beginning to have some profound—but not quite so heartwarming—emotions of my own when the man with the speelycaptor was somehow, almost magically, replaced by Yulassetar Crade. Associated with the miracle were a few sound effects: a meaty thwomp, and a sharp exhalation—a sort of bark—from the man with the speelycaptor. Yul had simply launched himself at the guy from some distance away, and body-checked him at full speed, stopping on a dime in midair as he transferred all of his energy into the target.

“Conservation of momentum,” he announced, “it’s not just a good idea—it’s the law!” Far away, I heard a thud and a squawk as the man with the hairdo impacted on the end-cap. This was almost drowned out, though, by chuckling and what I took to be appreciative commentary from our soldier-escorts. If I’d been startled, at first, to learn that Yulassetar Crade had been made part of—of all things—a diplomatic legation, I saw the genius of it now.

Once Cord had settled down enough to release me, I drifted over and bumped bodies (more gently) and shared a hug with Yul too. Sammann had emerged from the Orb Twelve shaft by now, and greeted them both in high spirits. Of course, there was much more that I wanted to say to Cord and Yul, but the man with the speelycaptor had crawled back close enough to get us in his sights—though from a more respectful distance—and this made me clam up. “We’ll talk,” I said, and Yul nodded. Cord, for now, seemed content merely to look at me, her face a maze of questions. I couldn’t help wondering what she saw. I was probably drawn and pasty. She, by contrast, had gone to some effort to dress up for the occasion: all the milled titanium jewelry was on display, she had gotten a new haircut and raided a women’s clothing store. But she’d had the good sense not to get too girly, and she still seemed like Cord: barefoot, with a pair of fancy shoes buckled together in the belt of her frock.