There were two circuses in town shortly after I arrived on Cytheria. Well, only one of them called itself a circus.

The fact they were in town was a bonus. I hadn’t been on a tourist-visa waitlist for a month to come to Cytheria for a circus. I was there just to rock back on my heels somewhere where drinks were cheap and the ocean breeze had soaked itself into the curtains over your hotel room window, and you didn’t have to worry about what was coming through (or going out of) your cortical link.

It’s a fairly hardline Old Way world, Cytheria, so I’d been politely asked to deactivate most everything I was wearing or harboring when I touched down. I suspect a good half of the tourists who come through bitch endlessly about locking their clothes into a single pattern or—horrors—turning off their CL. It wasn’t like I would use the latter a whole lot down there, on a world where the only people sporting CLs in the first place were the tourists who came here mostly to turn theirs off in the first place. And it wasn’t like I couldn’t stand to wear some clothes that might actually need to be changed for real once in a while. I’d been born on an Old Way world relaxed enough to allow things like CLs and protomic clothing, albeit little beyond that.

That was the whole point of being Old Way: you still had dirt between your toes, so to speak. Not only that, but you knew the value of getting that dirt in there to begin with.

The customs inspector who debriefed me started his whole patter about disabling CLs right as I was stepping out of the lock for my ship—he was running a scan on me, and halfway through his speech he stopped and said, “Oh, good, you’ve already turned off your CL. And I see your clothes have also been locked down . . . good, good.”

I gave him a shrug and a smile. “Friends of mine gave me the drill before I came planetside.”

“Well, I see that the hull of your ship is also a protomic construct. We’ll need to—”

“Absolutely. Take your time,” I said, with as much cheer as I could simulate, and sat down in the little vestibule opposite his desk. He needed to make sure I wasn’t smuggling anything in a suspension lattice, or that the hull was capable of being transmuted into weaponry, or any of the dozen-hundred other paranoias that come courtesy of protomics. Not that he was really capable of preventing any of that from happening; he just wanted to say he’d done his job, and I just wanted to pass his inspection without having to grease his hands. Cytheria was like most Old Way worlds: if you did shady business, the only thing stopping you from coming planetside was a slightly stiffer bribe and maybe some friendly favors on the way back out. I’d known this going in, but I’d decided to just be a tourist this time.

He paused before entering the ship, and I wanted to believe that was so he could admire what I’d made: two closely-fused spheres which revolved together to provide 1G emulation, surrounded by a ring that was actually a pair of crescents fused at the horns. The skin of the ship was gold and red patterns over lacquer black. Vajra, I called her. It had taken me years to come up with a design where I couldn’t think of anything else to take away.

I counted floor panels and got up to thirty-eight before he, too, came back smiling and approved my visa.

“Welcome to Cytheria. Enjoy your stay!”

“Already am.”

I almost felt bad for the guy. If he really had been able to tell what the hull and my clothes and a few other things were made of, he would have had one amazing story to tell his grandkids. There’s protomics, and then there’s . . . protomics. Such as Cavafy’s gift, from which my ship had been spawned, and which most definitely fit into the second category.

But by that point I’d gotten good at hiding things from most everyone. To this man I was just plain old Henré Sim, former protomics-systems engineer and ship designer. Alleged reason for travel: pleasure. Real reason for travel: not telling.

Septimus’s Great Sky Theater: A Panopoly of Aerodromic Gyrotoma read the posters. Just under that wooly title, a spiky tangle of what looked like drastically-modified low-altitude craft (possibly even unmanned drones) swirled like a fresh summer cloud of butterflies. At the bottom, a slender, moon-faced girl in a single-piece leotard—white chased here and there with red, like strategically-applied body paint—stood with toes wrapped across a high wire. Her hair, and she had a lot of it to show off, was also white, with its own share of red at the roots and tips. The show was tomorrow evening at the docks. Free admission. Evidently they made their keep either by being paid by the town government to draw business, or by selling souvenirs, or both.

I’d come planetside only a couple of days before said Great Sky Theater of Whatever was supposed to do its thing, and the posters had already mottled most every wall throughout the crumbling maze of streets near the wharf. Sometimes they popped up underfoot on the sidewalks, five abreast all the way to the curb. They’d been spot-sprayed using the same protomic pigment used for any number of other ads. Each ink droplet was its own little machine for soaking up light and re-radiating it back out in pre-programmed patterns. In a few days, the weathering of feet and wheels and, well, weather itself would dull all those spirited colors and turn those swirling letters into broken hieroglyphs. A day after that, what was left would quietly melt away of its own accord—silicon, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all mixing effortlessly with the rain like sugar melting in your tea. By that time, Septimus and Cie. would have long since packed up and poofed offworld.

The engineer part of me, which was buried deep inside but still came out from time to time, emerged and had its bitter laugh for the day. The same protomics, the same microscopic-machine protean-matter technology used to create everything from self-reconfiguring starship hulls to replacement body parts to the very suit I wore, was also used to plaster advertising across any available flat surface.

At least the rain’ll wash it off, I thought. But only because it was designed to let that happen.

I stood at the corner of the cobblestoned, sharply-rising street where I’d rented a room for the week. On a relatively staid little Old Way world like this, they made most of their money by spinning all kinds of house variations on the game of Skinflint the Tourist. The fee for getting on the planet’s waitlist was bad enough; the fee for actually visiting Port Cytheria itself was pure extortion. If you wanted to get in and out of your own ship while it was parked in their docks, you had to pay an “access fee” that was only slightly less than what it cost to rent a damn room in the first place. That was on top of the “docking fee” and the “orbital approach fee”. They had no orbital dock here (few did), and no orbital elevator, either—in fact, they prided themselves on not having those things, proving once again people were willing to pay for extra hassle that sported the pretense of being classy. Even only a few of the highest of Highend worlds had no elevator, either; most still kept just one as a token gesture to the rest of the lowly universe.

So I’d stuck the Vajra in one of the seaside niches, a few kilometers south of this place by rail, and decided to take the week off. Not that I wasn’t already “off”; for the last five years I’d listed myself as having no income apart from various interest and capital-gains earnings on my savings and investments.

But it wasn’t like I was doing nothing. I had a mission of my own; I just knew better than to talk about it.

Port Cytheria is all sloping roofs and twisting stony streets leading up and down a hillside towards the water. The sun sets right over it and those two little moons that kick up such interesting cross-tides transit the sky at least twice during the day. Awnings flap and flash in gold and brown; pennants and streamers hang down from third-story windows and advertise the cafés and restaurants in red and green. You stand in doorways and you smell tracked-in street dust, locally-hybridized peppers drying on a string just over your head, fresh-cut flowers wet and cold. People smile at you with their head down a little bit, as if they’re inviting you to be in on a secret. You could almost believe it wasn’t all by design.

Those who come here from lives on more upscale worlds always have trouble discovering how efficiently the liquor gets you good and drunk (and gives you honest-to-god hangovers) or how everything from the meat on their grill to the tomato in their salad sports flavors so fierce they can barely chew any of it. Many of them beat a safe retreat back to whatever soggy, limp excuses for a meal can be found back at home, and only venture out to Cytheria or the like as a way to jolt themselves. They don’t live like this—and they don’t want to—so they only come here for the thrill of being able to get away from it after a few days. They would rather leave the experience of living here to those unlucky enough (in their mind) to be born here in a place that chose to live as little as possible with CLs and most kinds of protomics and with population controls (a planet of barely two hundred fifty million? Are you kidding?) that are best described as . . . well, religiously strict. No prizes for guessing which religion.

Because despite all that, up and down all those streets in Port Cytheria are more kids than you’ve ever seen in your life, especially if you’re from a higher-end world. Look at ‘em—running barefoot or thin-sandaled, punting balls or waving homemade eight-bladed windbreakers. It didn’t matter that a good chunk of them would emigrate offworld by the time they were eighteen, most of them to worlds where the Old Way was less devoutly observed—or not observed at all—where they could get a CL and wrap themselves in protomics and forget that much more about being Old Way human. But plenty still stay behind, because it’s all they know, and they find something here in the Old Way that they can’t find anywhere else. Some leave, find that out after breaking their knuckles for a few years working for people who barely even see them as sentient, and they come on back wondering what they ever saw in leaving behind home cooking. And many more crowd in here on the sly, paying off the locals to look the other way and not report them on the planet’s census. Those two hundred fifty million are only the official numbers, and the time was fast approaching when the official numbers wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone.

All the same, Old Way worlds are crowded with the young; they’re the only place left in the whole galaxy to find the young ones anymore.

I should know; I’d had a kid myself, once. But I’d grown skilled at thinking less about it.

The harbor was only four blocks away, already soaked in sunset. Part of me wished it had been further off—I wanted to stretch my legs a little more—so I cheated and picked as circuitous a route as I could find from the map that had been left in my hotel room. No CL headmaps here; you used your eyes and your whole brain. For some people this was as nasty as camping out without nothing to wipe down with.

I was still in my favorite outfit—white suit, snappy Panama hat, mutable wraparound shades (because sometimes you just wanted to hide your eyes)—and I’d gotten into the habit of letting my hair get long after my retirement. I could tame it any number of ways, or even get rid of it entirely and get protomic implants, but in the end I’d just put it in dreads and kept it oiled. By itself it wouldn’t make people think me that much more a dropout, but it was one of the many small ways I served notice I wasn’t the Henré Sim of before. My two-meter frame and broad shoulders were a bit stooped over and hollowed out now. But all the things Biann had liked in me—the big brow, the big jaw (and the big smile to go with it), and the maybe-too-big nose—all those hadn’t gone anywhere.

No sense denying it: there was some part of me that was still a little vain, still a little bit thirsty for some spotlight time, wherever I could find it. Maybe that was why I wandered over to see the Sky Theater Etcetera—to see someone else in the spotlight, and imagine how they dealt with it.

Behind the breakwater wall at the beach were bleachers eight and ten steps high. Any seat in the house was a good one; the sun and the sea filled your vision. Right overhead, a single vertical smear of cloud was shot through with sunset. The hills behind me were too steep to see the first stars coming out, but both moons were wandering around overhead, pale and tiny. And crowds of people were sitting or standing all around me—men in coveralls, women in flimsy summer dresses, boys and girls riding on shoulders. Two men at my feet, similar enough to each other to be brothers, with their curly black hair and protruding ears, undid the seal on a bottle of beer nearly as tall as my forearm was long, and filled a pair of knobby green glasses. They offered me the rest of the bottle, about a third left. I took it with thanks and soon its heavy, nutty flavor was swirling around in both my stomach and my head. Not too fast, now, I warned myself, and sat down with the bottle clasped between my knees.

Applause and whooping burst out around me. I looked up from fumbling with the bottle cap.

There she was.

The way she had been depicted on the poster wasn’t too far from the truth. She had the same waterfall of white hair, the same bodysuit—but I saw now that her suit was in fact tricked out with a sensor array, with the red chasings not just for decoration. Whatever it is she was going to do, they wanted to show she could use only her body to do it, that no CL trickery was needed. Not that she would have been able to use a CL here in the first place, but . . .

To my eye she couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, but as she stood with her feet wrapped around the wire that rose from the water (it supported on either side by pyramidal drones), she straightened her back and shot herself through with the kind of poise you would normally only believe possible from an adult. That’s what you get for living so long on worlds where barely anyone is under the biological age of twenty-five in the first place, I told myself: you forget what’s possible in people.

She arched herself back and raised her arms, and I saw now that behind her, hovering just over the water, were two more drones shaped like piles of pyramids joined together at their vertices. They flexed and twisted like proteins folding, and as I peered closer (Customs hadn’t forced me to disable the protomics in my sunglasses, so I could zoom in without trouble) I saw their churnings were guided by the ways her wrists bent and her fingers flexed.

From somewhere at the edge of the water, almost out of sight behind the wall, musicians were playing a reedy, sinuous tune that rose and fell as it wished. They weren’t making it so much for us to listen to as they were to make her turn and bend, to make her arch her back and do a cartwheel so slow there seemed no way for her to not slip off the wire. But she didn’t slip, not even when she shot herself straight up and landed back on the wire hard enough to make the drones at either end jitter in place.

The other drones, the ones that had started off hovering behind her, followed her moves. When she swayed, they swayed; when she lunged, they lunged, and in lunging they skated across the surface of the water hard enough to hit the lowest seats with glittering evening mist. The crowd showered her right back with applause, me included.

I know there was more. The jugglers with their protomic props that split and rejoined, sprouting razor edges and spewing plasma. Or the other dancers who turned somersaults across the water, landing right on wires that were submerged just below the waves. I know there was more, but the only part I trust in my memory was the sight of that girl: Enid.

I slept in late the next morning, and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the bottle of beer I’d lugged back home with me. It was in a near corner, lying on its side as if it were imitating me. I had plenty of experience dealing with real alcohol, real drinking and real hangovers, so my mild headache and leaden steps were all familiar territory. The tap water had a strange greenish tinge to it (“It’s the local minerals,” I was told), but I immersed myself in a tubful of it anyway.

While watching the sun coming in through the window slit and make a slow transit across the floor, I mumbled to myself some things that passed for plans. They mostly involved being seen in public living up to my current reputation as a failure.

From all I’ve seen, people speak more freely in front of someone they think of as being a little bit pitiable. They share more with someone they can safely condescend to as a hard-luck case. A harmless man’s a captive audience for bragging.

That’s why I didn’t change names when I changed careers. I wanted the universe to know Henré Sim the starship architect, Henré Sim the genius of his kind, Henré Sim the bereaved and broken, was now Henré Sim the aimless, wandering playboy. The way I figured it, after enough wandering I might find myself in the company of the sort of folks willing to engineer the deaths of a few thousand people by splitting the hull of a starship like a stomped grape.

I didn’t care about the odds of ever finding such people to be orders of magnitude out of my league. I had any number of decades of life still left in me and absolutely nothing else to do with them but look and listen and learn. And, maybe one fine day, take action.

That was the level I’d sunk to—and would soon rise from again.

The rooftop of the hotel was decorated with lawn chairs and strings of fluttering pennants overhead—a place to lie back, soak up some sun, and let something alcoholic stay cold in the bucket next to you. I dressed and went up there for the view. The hotel wasn’t the tallest building in town, but it was tall enough to show me the whole sloppy sprawl of everything rolling right up to the edge of the water. Being on a hillside also helped. It was another beautiful day, and Cytheria’s smaller moon was directly overhead. The available worlds out there that were this livable, without centuries of tinkering, were fewer than ever.

After all of that ruminating in the tub, I was finally saying to myself what I’d been trying to clam up inside for too long: Maybe slumming it like this isn’t the best way to an answer. Well, it wasn’t like I’d tried other things first, but I’d never been able to shake the feeling the only way to find out what had really happened was to go down into the same gutters where people who could do such a vile thing lived and splashed around. I’d thus far avoided admitting to myself the reason I’d gone down there was only to wallow in that same gutter.

I stepped to the edge of the roof and peered over the wrought-iron fence—it came only up to my waist—down into the street below. Someone with a printer, a big square metal frame, was stopping every so often to press the device against a wall or sidewalk. After a brief spitting sound from the printer, he’d step away and there on the concrete or tarmac was a newly-printed poster. Not for the circus; those posters were already dissolving faster than I’d anticipated. This was for the other circus.

By the time I was downstairs and out in the street, a couple of other folks—one of them a fellow with the too-classy, too-clean look of a tourist, rather like me—had also emerged from the hotel lounge to see what was worth billeting the neighborhood about. I think I was the one that felt the most astonishment, even if I didn’t show it.

Her Grace, The 16th Supreme Kathaya of the Old Way, Angharad il-Jakaya, in an open town hall meeting on Day 251 (sol. 6/2) at the Public Pavilion in Port Cytheria. All are welcome but seating will be by random lottery at the discretion of the hosts.

Below that headline, Angharad herself—sitting on a cushion, wrapped in midnight blue robes, a wimple half-concealing her face. With eyes as large and deep as hers (and a mouth as sweetly happy to boot), it’s no wonder there were a couple trillion people across the galaxy who put a picture of her somewhere conspicuous and gave it honor every day.

I had been one of those people. Once.

Under the portrait were three frames in which a number of slightly blurry 3D image loops played themselves out. Those little ink droplets could be programmed to do a whole slew of things, after all. There was more stuff in smaller print, and some coded data for those who could interpret it, but after the name and the picture below it you didn’t need anything else.

“Oh good grief,” the tourist next to me said out loud.

“I’ll go with just ‘good’, personally.” I smiled when I said it, trying to make it all the more clear that it was a joke. His CL was off as well, which meant he had to depend on such tiresome crutches as tones of voice and facial expressions to tell such things. Small wonder I didn’t miss having that thing turned off.

“I came here to get away from crap like this. If I’d known she was coming here I would’ve left for Lythander by now.” He slapped the flat of his hand against the closest instance of the poster, right on Angharad’s face, and when he lifted it away the face had become a runny watercolor. He probably had a protomic glove on—for all I knew, the whole hand could have been protomic—with an extension that could, among other things, disable those kinds of ink particles. He wasn’t supposed to be walking around down here with something like that, but a) I didn’t think he would be given too much grief for something that minor and b) I was packing a lot more than he was, and a whole lot more clandestinely, so who was I to be critical?

Just for fun, he smeared the face of three more wall-etched posters on his way up the street to my left, then stepped away from the wall and doubled his pace. Probably on the way to find out what other few kicks Cytheria had to offer the likes of him. He’d been tall, with the chiseled good looks, and the lousy taste in everything from cosmetics to haberdashery, of someone from a pretty high-end world. I turned away from him and looked back at one of the unspoiled pictures of Angharad. I had lapsed from the Old Way—and that was entirely by choice—but no, I couldn’t deny how even a picture of her still made me feel that much more comfortable in my own skin.

She’s here tomorrow afternoon, I thought. This planet is going to be mobbed. But I doubted they would raise the inbound planetary traffic quotas for anyone, even Angharad. Whoever got to see her would most likely be whoever was already planetside and in the vicinity or lucky enough to know she’d been coming and had reserved a visa accordingly. There were pilgrims who puppy-dogged her from planet to planet whenever they could, but even she had come out and told them they needed to put their time to better use. Not that they listened, mind you.

“Watch it, you tadpoles!” shouted a voice from up the street. The tourist, again. I turned and saw he’d been aiming his voice at a whole gaggle of kids barreling through a cross street right in front of him. What really caught my eye was the kid at the head of the pack: round face, big eyes, white hair, bodysuit ... The girl from the circus; no mistaking that even at this distance, with or without magnifying vision. What looked like a bunch of little flags seemed to be following her at about head-and-a-half height, but she and the others vanished around the corner before I could properly size it all up. With my CL turned off that meant things like optical replay were also out of the question, but that in turn gave me an excuse to go take a closer look.

I jogged up the street, about halfway to the intersection where all the commotion had played out, and then noticed there was a small alley to my right that I hadn’t seen from further back. Echoing out from the mouth of that alley were high and shrill sounds that could only be kids at play.

The alley was not quite narrow enough that I had to turn sideways to walk through it, but it was close. A pool of something stagnant, with oily soap-bubble colors on its surface, had formed from whatever was dripping from a few stories up. Just as I was stepping over it, the kids came around a corner from where the alley split off further down. She was still in the lead, and I could see now that she had five or six little triangular flags of different colors—they looked like the same kind fluttering on the roof of the hotel—mounted on long wands protruding from the back of her belt. The kids chasing her had been making grabs for them, but with one good leap she shot straight up into the air, out of reach.

At the apex of her jump she stuck her legs out in both directions and lodged herself there between the alley walls. There was nothing for the other kids to climb onto; they threw themselves at her and couldn’t even so much as get their fingers to scrape along the undersides of her legs. She grinned. No, she hadn’t gone up that far originally, but had eased her way up that much more, using one foot at a time, after wedging herself in that position. With my two meters of height and my big frame, I could have reached up and spoiled the whole game, but I hung back instead.

“Oh, come on,” I chided her. “They followed you this far. Throw them a bone.”

“If you insist.” She pulled her feet back in and landed on her toes, ankles together. The kids ran up, each one snatching away a flag before winding around the two of us to disappear up the street.

“You were really something yesterday,” I said, and meant it. “How long have you been doing this with that circus crew?”

“Two years. But this is the end of it.” She put her back to the wall and raised herself up on her toes, as if she were about to leap up again. “Bumming around from one planet to another sure seems like fun until you actually do it for long enough.”

Good thing you’ve learned that this early in life, I thought. Out loud: “You have any plans?”

She squinted at a spot just over my left shoulder. “I thought . . . I’d just see what this place has to offer me first and go from there.”

“From what I can see, Cytheria mostly offers tourists. And not much to offer someone from off-world who’s used to the creature comforts of cortical links and protomic clothing.”

She stuck her jaw out and frowned. “I’m not spoiled, you know.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Fifteen solar.”

“You’re fifteen solar and you’re leaving behind what I presume are your current legal guardians? How’d they take to you breaking that news to them?”

“They don’t have to like it, and they’re not my guardians. I joined them ‘cos I wanted to; I can leave any time. I joined up with them right after I passed my emancipation interview.” She eased down off her toes. “And that’s legal on pretty much every world where there’s human beings.”

“Yeah, but why walk away from something that looks like a pretty good deal? You get to travel, you do the thing you love . . . ”

“I’m bored and I wanted a change. Is that enough for you?”

The kids ran past the mouth of the alley once more. One of them dropped his flag and almost tumbled butt over skullcap cutting a U-turn to go back for it. I had a feeling the girl in front of me was enjoying throwing answers back at me as much as I was enjoying fishing for them, so I went on.

“Not a lot of other kids traveling with you, I guess?” I realized my mistake the instant I’d said it: she wasn’t a “kid”, and she was going to make damn sure I knew it.

But all she did was look out the mouth of the alley, arms folded across her chest. “It’s been a long time since I just did my own thing, that’s all.” Those words came out a lot quieter than I thought they would.

“I’m Henré, by the way.” Even if our CLs had been on, I suspected I would have still done the introduction the old-fashioned way.

“I’m Enid.” She shifted her gaze back to me. “And you’re one of those candy-snatchers who comes to planets like this to look for girls who don’t put up too much a fight, is that it?”

There’s a lot of external dangers my outfit could protect me against, but they couldn’t protect me from laughing my own ass off. I sagged against the wall behind me and did everything I could to smother my hilarity short of biting my fingers. Finally I gave up, stuffed the heel of my hand into my mouth and just snorted around it.

“What’s so funny!” She wrinkled her nose at me as she shouted that.

The fact that you haven’t stormed off yet, I thought. You’re testing me, so I’m going to test you right back.

“Okay,” I managed to say, getting my giggling under control and sticking my hand back in my pocket. “Would it help if I came out and said, no, I’m not that kind of tourist? Besides—after seeing what you can do, I’m pretty sure any struggle between us would be You 1, Me Zero. I haven’t met an acrobat yet that didn’t have some martial training. Especially when they’re spacebrats.”

“How many spacebrat acrobats have you met?”

“Two, including you.”

“That’s not a whole lot, is it?”

“You tell me if I’m wrong. Hey, I’m trying to praise you here. Will you let it sink in? Or are you that touchy about taking props from someone who’s at least three times your age?”

I still had a joshing tone to my voice, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about kids—teenagers especially—they always think you’re mocking them when you’re actually trying to get them in on the joke. That might explain why in the next second after speaking those words, I suddenly couldn’t see anything but her foot in front of my face.

She didn’t actually kick me, mind you. She just reared back on one leg and put her other heel a centimeter from my nose. I didn’t move; she didn’t move. Then she broke the stalemate by tapping my forehead lightly with her toes and standing down.

“Brown belt,” she said. “Last time I checked, anyway.” And then she put on one of those crooked, sidelong smiles that told me yes, she felt she was quite capable of knocking me onto my ass. “Live training, too, with a real teacher. None of that neuro-kinesthesia crap. I mean, yeah, I use that to brush up or to pull off some of the fancier tricks, but all the core training was live and direct.”

What she thinks she’s capable of, I thought, and what she can actually do, is not something I want to put to the test just yet. “You want some lunch?” I said. “On me. And out in public.”

“Sure.”

I let Enid pump me for information after we took seats in the hotel restaurant. I’ve always believed I’m a bad liar—that the vaguer the story I tell, the less embellishment I throw in, the easier it is for someone to believe me. They can fill in the gaps themselves, and with most of the people I tell those open-ended sob stories to, they’re just waiting for me to stop talking so they can start anyway. And since most of the time I never see them again, there’s little harm done.

But Enid didn’t let me off easy. Again, not that I minded: there was scarcely a thing she could ask me that I hadn’t already told someone else or which wasn’t public record somewhere. She was just trying to prove to herself how smart she was, that she couldn’t be fooled by the likes of me.

“So how many ships have you designed?” She said that right after her mango lemonade arrived, in a tone of voice that sounded like the word allegedly was going to be shoved in at the end there.

“I’ve lost count,” I said. I imagined to her ears that sounded like I was just as full of shit as she hoped.

“Five? Ten? Dozens? Come on, your memory can’t be that bad.”

I raised fingers. “The Nimbus-class personal cruiser. The Halo; the Corona. The Coriolis-class luxury liner.” Saved the worst for last, did you? I told myself. “There’s more than that, but those are probably the four everyone remembers.”

There was always the chance she was too young (or too incurious, or both) to associate the word Coriolis with Kyritan and therefore with disaster. If we were on a world where CLs weren’t almost completely banned, she would have looked it all up by now—heck, she could have simply run my CL tag and learned everything she needed that way. But she wasn’t uncomfortable asking me these things; she wasn’t wholly uncomfortable living without a CL. Old Way, I thought; she’s from a world or at least an environment where those things weren’t taken for granted, and so she doesn’t itch for them. Just for that alone I felt all the more comfortable around her.

“The Coriolis class was really something,” I heard myself saying. “It was amphibious, and then some. Protomic hull, so it could be reconfigured—you could start off planetside, sail around on the oceans. Then shove everything around, break it into lots of little compartmentalized pieces that you could wagon-train up a planet’s orbital elevator, provided it had one. Put the pieces back together at the other end: starship. Off to the next destination. And it worked, too; it went through five flawless shakedown missions. Spotless ten-year operational record. I won the Proteus Society medal for that thing. Morphic Journal did this whole piece on both it and me.—Oh, thanks.”

My beer had arrived; I looked at Enid over the top of the bottle. She was still sizing me up, hanging back, waiting for me to say something else she could pin me down with.

“I guess all this is before your time,” I said lamely, before shutting myself up by putting the mouth of the bottle to my own lips.

“What happened?” she said, quieter than I expected. Yeah, I thought, you can tell from the way it was all coming out that something happened, can’t you?

“I got out of the business.”

“Why did you get out of the business?”

Tenacious, she was. Not like I hadn’t been fishing for a little tenacity to shake me up.

“There was an accident with the Kyritan, a late-iteration Coriolis ship. Something went wrong with . . . a whole bunch of things at once. One thousand one hundred forty-six people died. There was a long and very exhaustive investigation after which the board concluded that there had been no design flaw in the ship, but that was the end of my design career any way you cut it. I received a severance settlement. And now I look around for nice places where I can soak up the sun and talk to teenaged acrobats.”

I’d left out a lot, of course. If she was as good as I was at sniffing out lies by omission, she’d know by now.

“They thought you were at fault for something?” she said.

I took another drink and used the wetness in my throat to help mimic the nasal voice of the chief investigator. “ ‘It is the finding of this board that while there is no direct evidence of sabotage, the possibility of same cannot be completely ruled out.’ Not sabotage by me, but all the same, I didn’t feel like I had much of a career after that.”

The waiter came back with Enid’s tartare salad and yam fritters. After seeing her rip open the paper around her fries and pick up her fork, I decided man cannot live by liquid bread alone, flagged the waiter right before he disappeared around the near end of the bar, and asked for one of what she was having. The waiter was a kid probably only a few years older than Enid—skinny wrists, Adam’s apple sticking out like a wart on a witch’s cheek. Unreconstructed genetics. Old Way in the blood, I thought, like everyone else down here; for all I know he might have started working here when he was younger than she was now.

“So now nobody wants to work with you? They can’t . . . not know it wasn’t . . . your fault.” Even the way she stumbled over her own syntax was adorable, I had to admit. You only word a sentence like that when you’re trying hard to make someone else look like the bad guy.

I shook my head. “It was the other way around.”

“How so?”

I stopped, realizing I’d never before put this into words for someone else’s sake. It was tougher to do that than I thought.

“I started getting job offers again after the noise died down,” I said, “and for one of them, I remember—I was having dinner with the CEO of the outfit, on a rooftop a little like the one in this hotel. It was a pretty up-level planet, too, with this little touristy oasis of no CL and all those other Old Way things, to make it look ‘quaint’. Anyway, we’re up there, and he’s got his drinks and I’ve got mine, and he makes the mistake of getting a little more legitimately drunk than he should have. I got the impression he did this sort of thing a lot, but had always done it around people who weren’t Old Way, people who wouldn’t think too much about what he said when he was sloshed because, hey. But anyway, I’ve got most of a bottle of wine in me and I’m still good, and he’s got about that much put away—and he says, right between one thing and another, ‘Nobody’s going to be looking over your shoulder here, not even me. Don’t worry about it.’ And I wanted to say something like, well, if I’m not supposed to worry about it, why in the cosm did you bring it up? But I knew better than to say anything, and for me right there the whole thing was out in the open. I wasn’t going to be able to do those things anymore, not without someone wanting to look over my shoulder. I didn’t live in that kind of universe anymore, just because. And call it what you want, call it stubborn or stupid, but I just couldn’t work like that anymore, knowing I was going to be surrounded by people who had to force themselves, however much or however little, to trust me. Or, worse, that I had to hide behind someone else to get the kind of trust other people could get naturally.”

I looked at the bottle and decided I didn’t want to see it quite that full anymore. I drained most of it in one long pull. From somewhere behind me I heard the boomp-bump of a ball bounding against the pavement, and when I turned my head I saw a gaggle of kids scuttling around it at play. I was fairly sure the short one with the curly yellow hair had been among the gang playing Snag-the-Flag with Enid.

“Well—to me, it sounds stubborn and stupid,” Enid said after she finally finished chewing her current mouthful. Go ahead, I thought, feel free to believe that. “So you decided it was better to just quit?” she went on.

I did my best to not make myself sound bitter. “Why did you decide to leave the Sky Theater?”

She was suddenly all wound up. “What’s that got to do with anyth—”

“I’m making a point. Why did you decide to leave?” I stayed as calm as she wasn’t.

“I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Because—” Good, I thought; she’s exasperated. Best way to get the truth out of someone is to exasperate them. “Because it stopped being fun, okay? I hate running from planet to planet. I hate the schedules. I hate the fact that I have to do the same ten or twelve dumb tricks over and over each time.”

“Do you hate the people you work with?”

“No. They’re . . . all right. I mean, I’m gonna miss them, honestly. It’s not them that’s the problem.”

“It’s just that it’s not fun doing it like this with them. Right?” She nodded. Good; I had her. “Now you know how I felt.”

I killed the rest of my bottle and swapped it for a fresh one right as my own meal arrived. I was proud of myself: even with most of a beer in me and all the temptation in the world to scold her, I’d said those last six words with nearly as much sympathy as the last time I’d said I’m sorry.

“I guess I’ll understand when I’m older.”

Her words sounded way too close to an apology for my ears, so I deflected them with a smile. “Well, I am older. And I still don’t understand anything.”

I made us both laugh with that. I think I needed it more than she did.

She kept on needling me through the whole meal, though. Little things, and sometimes not so little: “So you’re really never gonna build another ship?” (I shook my head.)

Somehow, she knew that someone like me wouldn’t just give up on creating. And she was right: I hadn’t given up. I had just—how would my wife have put it?—“shifted venues”.

That’s when it hit me why I’d sought out her company. Not just to look for a captive audience, but to have that captive audience understand me from the inside out—and maybe even give me the very forgiveness I’d trained myself not to accept.

Because someday, someone was finally going to give me that forgiveness in a way I couldn’t say no to.

The patio out in back of the hotel was walled in on three sides: the hotel itself on one, and walls covered with climbing vines on the other two. The fourth side was a strip of sky between the other buildings on the hillside, in which every now and then we could see the glittering ribbon of the planet’s elevator, thin as an eyelash, running up as far back as you could tilt your head.

I stood at the far end of the patio, a wrought-iron fence blocking my way, and a dish of raspberry-flavored shaved ice on the table next to me. End’s ice was passion-lemon; she leaned back against the fence and eyed the larger of the two moons as it edged into view.

I’ve learned to depend on my real senses, not the web of synthetic ones that we’ve created for ourselves on more upscale worlds. Your native senses don’t always give you more precise information, or give it to you faster, but they’re a lot more interesting. That was why I perked up when I saw a man and a woman enter the patio area and walk straight for us—no, not us, exactly, but Enid. She almost dropped her spoon.

“Enid?” The woman said that one word like she was trying not to break a spell. She was tall, all knees and elbows, frizzy brown hair pointing all ways like a compass rose. I remembered her: she had been one of the two fencers who had dueled on the high wire after Enid had left it behind. The equally tall, equally limber, hollow-faced man next to her had been her partner, and he held up a flat sheet of MemoCel that had a translucent still image of Enid’s face on it.

“We’ve been tearing this whole city apart,” the man continued. “What in cosm’s name have you been doing? We’re leaving in two hours. You know how hard it is to find someone on a planet where CLs aren’t allowed? And was this supposed to be a joke?” He tugged the sheet at either end and Enid’s image began speaking: I don’t know any other way to say this, so I’ll just say goodbye. It’s been fun being with you—

“It’s not a joke.” End put her ice down and stood away from the fence. “I’m staying right here.”

—and the last two years, I wouldn’t trade them for anything else. But I can’t keep running around like this anymore. Please don’t look for me.

“I guess you guys ignored that part,” the real Enid said, twisting up one side of her mouth. “Sev sent the two of you out to look for me, didn’t he?”

“Sev’s busy enough without having to look for you.” The man wadded up the MemoCel in one fist. “Who is this man? —Are you responsible for this, sir?”

“I couldn’t tell you if I was or not,” I said. I looked at Enid; she seemed calm enough, but it was the clamped-down kind of calm that seemed ready to fly apart at any second. “I only just bumped into her. —Look, Enid, they’re obviously worried about you. If you’re not gonna go back with them, at least say a proper goodbye? It seems like you owe them at least that much.”

One of the few people seated out in the patio area, a woman in a close-fitting blue robe, had turned her dismayed attention our way. I blinked back at her and managed a weak smile: I just got here myself, okay?

Enid looked at her feet, then back at the woman. One step, two, and then Enid’s wrists were draped atop the other woman’s shoulders. She bowed her head.

“I can’t stay with you,” Enid said, and while her voice was tiny enough by then it was made even tinier with her head down. “Every time we stop somewhere I keep asking myself the same thing: What if I just stayed here for a while? What kind of road would I be on if I did that? But I’m never on any of those roads; I’m only on your road.”

The woman reached down and put her hand to the back of Enid’s neck, stroking slowly. “Agoro, you knew she was going to say something like this.”

The man (Agoro, I presumed) pinched his eyes closed, then opened them again. “Would you at least come back with us and tell Sev to his face that you’re leaving?”

“You were with them for what, two years?” I said, prompting Enid to raise her head and look back at me. “What’s another few minutes to say goodbye?”

Pause. I made a go on, humor them gesture.

“You think I’m stupid, don’t you.” Enid let her hands fall from the woman’s shoulders. She was looking at me, but it wasn’t hard to believe she was speaking to all of us just then.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, no.” I used the most factual voice I could find just then, which turned out to be pretty factual-sounding. “I just think that . . . ”

She was listening, I thought. I went on.

“I just think maybe you’ve never done this before. Saying goodbye on your own, that is. The first time you’re the one turning and walking away, instead of someone else . . . ”

Yeah, that’s always tough, I thought. No wonder you had no idea how to go about doing it. Maybe you’re like me: you’re worried that if you try and do it properly, you’ll change your mind.

“Go say goodbye the right way,” I said, and gave her head a pat of my own. “Even if it hurts.”

Enid blotted furiously at her fresh tears, and her face turned red enough to look like I’d smeared it with my dessert. But she let each of them take one of her hands and walk with her back out through the hotel lobby.

Some part of me was sure that was the last time I would ever see her. She’d go back to the bay where the Sky Theater’s ship was parked, and then there would be more tears and regret and soon she’d be shaking her head at ever having wanted to leave behind so many good people. That seemed about right.

I finished my dessert, then admired the moon as the line of the elevator bisected it vertically for a moment. A winking silver dot on that line, an inbound ship, also traversed the moon’s face top to bottom. Hope you know what you’re getting yourself into down here, I thought.

Upstairs in my room, the message slot over the desk was showing I had mail. Physical mail. That was either very good news or very, very bad.

I let the desk read all the biometrics it needed from me, then tore open the little envelope that protruded from the slot, ignoring the codings and stamps on the outside. The note inside was hand-printed on paper that felt finer than the sheets in most luxury hotels. Someone had gone through a lot of deeply impractical trouble to get my attention.

Mr. Henré Sim:

Please do me the honor of allowing me to receive you for a private audience from 1400 to 1500 hours local time tomorrow at the Leonelia Room in the Cytherian Summit Lodge.

Her Grace, The 16th Supreme Kathaya of the Old Way, Angharad il-Jakaya.

RSVP

I called the front desk and told them I wanted to report a tasteless prank. They told me, in the solemn tones reserved for telling children two and two do not in fact make three, that the note had been verified as genuine by Cytherian Summit Authorities. All the junk on the envelope, the stuff I’d torn in half without looking at it, that was their certification, which they would be happy to reconfirm for me in my presence . . .

I RSVPed and said yes, I’d be there at the appointed time. I had no reason to be insulting, even if I wasn’t one of the Old Way myself anymore. Curiosity hadn’t killed me yet.

I set the Do Not Disturb lock for the room, moved the furniture, did my exercises, then opened the tallest bottle in the in-room bar and made myself snug with it.

Next Chapter: Chapter Two