Source: Cocteau

"No! No! What are you doing?" Clu Sherril yells from the hangar balcony. The workers on the factory floor below look up. One rolls his eyes. "Great, " he mutters. "What'd we do now?"

The huge metal paned framework of the space vehicle looms above Clu as she hurries down the steps onto the brightly lit floor. There are pipes, fittings, and containers everywhere, but she moves past them nimbly, eyes on the huge plate being raised to a location near the top rear of the hull. She wears a white lab coat over a dark dress that matches the thick hood of her hair. Her eyebrows are too thick, and her face is a bit too angular and angry to be beautiful, but her eyes are crisp with the vitality of intellect.

She strides up to the lifter boss and gestures with a slashing motion of her narrow hand. The plate hangs in the air beyond, swaying slightly on the cables. "Who said you were supposed to do this?" she demands icily, eyes flicking across each of the workers in turn.

"Britton was down earlier," the lifter boss replies.

"San, you listened to Britton? I thought you knew better."

"Clu, he's the Directorate rep."

"He's a political idiot. That plate failed N ray testing last week, and the vacuum weld group doesn't have it scheduled for another two days. Bring it down."

The lifter boss sighs, and presses against the side of his headset. "Put the E39 Baker back into the pending bay, Sten."

She hears the mutter of voices and the sound of the lift slowly starting to shift the plate back across the floor. The workers disperse, except for the lifter boss, who hesitates, halfway between one step and the next. "Clu, uh... you'll deal with Britton on this?"

Her narrow face seems to sharpen with faint bitterness. "Yeah, I'll take care of it.

The twilit roadways of Goslin are choked with snow. Clu stares, unseeing, shifting on the narrow plastic bench as the bus lurches along the street. Litanies against incompetence rattle like tired chains through her mind. She rubs her thin fingers together on her lap, thinking of the spacecraft motors they have drawn, of how light the stylus has been in her hands - not like a tool, but like a cable connecting her mind to the thing to be done. She presses her temple wearily and turns back to the window. Well, she thinks, one more day. At least it's over. For now.

She pushes at the boarded front door, but the frame has been bent even more by the continued attacks of unknown hoodlums, and entry is denied. She steps back, staring impassively at the denial light, turning her collar up behind her neck against the cold flakes of snow as she steps away.

Street lights help her find her way through the uneven snow into the alley. The side door yields to her touch, but fails to open fully, so she squeezes past into the hallway beyond.

Ten familiar flights of stairs lead to her floor, and she takes them slowly but evenly. At her landing, the door is dented and covered with slashes of paint that seem almost to form words. But it accepts her handprint and she is in the battered corridor, passing unkempt doors, some of them replaced with wood and hinges.

Then she stops. Her door is ajar.

Her mouth tightens. She crouches forward and pushes the door aside. It slips into the wall with the well-lubricated whisper that her extra access to chemistry has provided.

From a squat, she steps forward and up in defensive posture. A shard of ceramic crackles under her feet - Lan's only precious possession, a vase smuggled in from Sionon Pergola by one of her test pilots. Book sheets have been ripped carelessly from their cases and strewn across the floor, damage colors wrinkling across some of them. The contents of desks and cabinets have been strewn across the carpet. The standalone systems are gone.

Lan is not there. Anywhere.

She had warned him. And here are the consequences. The Securitar.

She straightens, slowly, as if recovering from a sharp blow. Her hands release her bag to the floor. She turns slowly, first this way, then that, as if some motion might show her that she is wrong, and as if trapped in the motion to deny the events unseen.

By slow degrees, her shoulders loosen. She looks down at the sleeves of her coat in a slight confusion. Snowflakes are slowly melting at the cuffs, and she plucks at them, then pulls on the fabric, finally getting the coat off her shoulders and letting it slide to the floor.

She wanders into the kitchen. From the shatter on the counter, she salvages a mostly intact cup. But there is nothing left to put in it.

She looks up at her reflection in the window. Snowflakes flash past, whirled in violent eddies, then as suddenly, swept away. Her hand reaches out for the windowframe; it is cold, and there is frost in the corners of the glass, and bitter water on the metal of the frame. She traces a finger along the edge of the crystals, her face creased with the line of a frown, her eyes half closed with the familiar pain.

How much longer? she asks herself. No, you've made it through this before. You will this time.

A bitter chuckle curls her lips. As if there's a choice.

It is a warm day in early Torid as Clu Sherril rides in the open back of the power wagon on a pile of dried fronds. The veined balloons of the hydrogen trees sway gently overhead, their mottled globes jostling and resonating with the breeze. And, as the power wagon whines and ticks, riding softly on its vast tires, she dangles her feet over the tailgate and thinks about their new home.

Once they had lived in the city. She remembers its hugeness, dimly; the towers like crystals that seemed to be majestically rising from the flattened jumble of older buildings. There were no hydrogen trees in the city, instead there were oaks, damdals, and pines, some reputed to be from Earth itself. She remembers more, she reminds herself proudly: they had once lived in a tower. She remembers standing on the broad terrace, nose pressed to the hard glass, seeing the buildings and the tiny vehicles so far below. Her father, a huge man with a beard that prickled against her face, would stand there with her, pointing out different things: there an orange car, out on the horizon a gleaming dirigible, and there - a huge truck carrying hydrogen from the farms to the fusion plants.

In the city there were many sounds, some alarming. There was a time when it seemed as if there were suddenly more of them. They would wake her at night, like the cries of a child afraid, but then she would remember it was normal, and she would return to sleep.

Her parents changed. They became angry more easily, and sometimes Clu would cry with the frustration of trying to please them. Their conversations in the evenings were strained, and Clu, who used to listen to the sound of their voices for reassurance in the night, began to try not to hear.

Then came the day when they had to leave. The door rang demandingly, but she ran to it, happy because her father would be home, and wanting to say hello to him. Her mother swept past.

"Who is it?"

"Me," her father answered.

And there he was, disheveled, bleeding from a cut on the forehead. Clu watched, stunned, while her mother pulled him inside and slammed the door. "What happened to you?" she demanded.

"It's the partisans," he replied. "They're rioting in the streets. The fighting's started. I think it's time to get out."

"All right," her mother sighed. "I'll get the packing started. Get cleaned up and help Clu."

They had fled through busy violent streets, past the flashing of energy guns and the dull reports of explosions. The last thing she had seen in the city was one of the huge towers crumbling, its glass fragmented and flung through the air as it toppled...

She didn't like to remember that, but she did - she knew it was somehow important.

After a while, she had grown used to the domed house and outbuildings, the whispering hydrogen trees, and the strange sounds of night creatures which replaced the anxious noises of the city.

There were fields where they grew Terran vegetables alongside native jhinla, karabat and bluish-leaved woosby. The fields weren't large; they were scattered across the slopes below the house. But they were pretty, especially on humid days, when the colors were muted and the forest stood like a wall across the valley. And then there were the animals - she had cared for them with special delight. Keshy, with so many eyes and oddly shaped legs, always looking querulous and oddly intelligent in six directions at once.

The wagon toils slowly up the hill and then bursts into sunlight. The hydrogen trees receed, a shattered wall, slowly reforming with distance. She scrambles up, clinging to the back of the cab. Ahead, the house, flanked with decrepit machines, its dome patterned with the light that slips past the foliage. There is a strange car in the driveway - black and low.

As the power wagon stops in the yard, Clu can see two men in coarse dark jumpsuits waiting by the door. Sunlight trembles on the metal of the cab, and Clu is suddenly afraid.

Clu's father steps from the wagon. He seems stiff, somehow. His arms are straight at his sides, as if they merely hang from his shoulders. Clu waits, silent.

"What do you want?" he father asks, voice loud.

One of the men steps forward. He is corpulent, a scar slanting across his forehead, thick lips, and a deceptively gentle voice.

"Your name, brother."

"Marik Sherril."

The fat one shoots a triumphant look at his partner.

"He's the one," he calls. "You're to come with us to Ranvelek, brother. You're under arrest for unlawful sequestration of property and for witholding skills needed by the government."

Her father raises an eyebrow, but under his beard, the corners of his mouth are turned down."Since when has the government of Ranvelek had authority over the citizens of Kzakan?"

The thin one in the doorway seems mobilized by this resistance, and he produces a small energy weapon. "None of your business, I think, zek. Time's long past we had to put up with your exploitation." The two walk forward. "Hands behind your back."

But when they are close enough, Sherril lashes out with his fists. Clu screams. The men struggle, shuffling in the dirt, falling, rolling all together, then falling again on Sherril. The gun spins across the pavement and skids into the dust. Clu jumps out of the wagon and snatches it up, running desperately for the house.

Her mother appears in the doorway, staring at the fighting men. Then she glances down and sees Clu, whose eyes are wide, gun dangling from her hand. Her face smooths, but she still seems desperately pale. "Good girl, " she whispers. "You stay right behind me, understand?" Then she steps out into the driveway, clenching the gun in her fist. "You!" she shouts, "Hey, you! Cut that out! Let my husband up."

The fat one peers up, face blanched, contorted with rage. "Fool!" he whispers tensely, "She's got your gun!"

They disentangle and slowly stand into the dusty light. Marik's mouth is smeared with blood, and his arm hangs oddly.

The thin one snarls: "You'd better tell her to give me that gun, Sherril."

An insect flicks through the sunbeams.

Marik's eyes are drawn, lids heavy. He wipes the blood from his lip, and flinches.

"They'll be dead, Sherril, and so will you."

Her mother's mouth is grim, and she calls, "Marik, come away from that scum. We're not playing any of their game anymore, are we?"

Clu wants him to hit back, to knock them down. To hurt them. The sight of her father's blood is like a horrible shock of vulnerability, and though she is too young to know consciously, what she wants is revenge.

"Sherril," the fat one warns, "we've no orders on them. If you want them to go free, you'll come with us now. Otherwise, the next to come will have orders, and you know what they'll be."

Marik Sherril looks at his wife and daughter in the way a man looks at a fond memory. When he finally, speaks, his voice is free of strain. "Lana, just stay where you are. I have go with them, you know that. You and Clu, you have to do what's right for you, just like I have to do this." He steps toward them and pitches his voice carefully so only they can hear. "As soon as we're gone, you must go to the city. Not Ranvalik, Goslin. Get yourselves lost." He glances over his shoulder at his captors. "They may not hurt me. Maybe they'll put me at a labor collective, maybe they'll just question me and release me. When I get out, I'll find you. They're not going to kill me. They need me. I'll find you. But get away from here." He grasps her by the shoulders and kisses her deeply. "You know why I have to do this. I have to make sure you two have a chance." She says nothing, but the weapon in her hand sags as she lays her head on his shoulder.

Clu lies restlessly without him, but somehow in the middle of an aching evening, her consciousness drops away, and she sleeps until the cold light of dawn spreads rectangles across her face.

She wakens with the brightness and reaches for him but her hand closes on empty blankets, and she remembers. Her hand stays clenched as if paralysed. Slowly, she rolls onto her elbows, consults her watch. Nothing to do but shower until the bureaucracies open.

Stepping into the living room, she hopes that it will be normal, the signs of violation a mere nightmare - but everything is the way it was left when she fell asleep - only now brightly-lit with winter sunlight. She kicks angrily at a pile of datasheets which flap like wounded birds. The sound brings her instant remorse, as if she had kicked Lan, instead.

She searches through the mess for the commport, but when she finds it, she sees that it has been ripped irreparably from its connection. She lays it carefully on the floor, and her hand lingers on it for a moment. Finally, she stands to dress for her work day.

Clu Sherril strides angrily through the wide halls between the labs, coat and hair like the wings of a dove and a crow blown together on the wind. Phil Kent leans out his lab door and calls after her. "Hey, Clu!" She stops and whirls toward him. "What do you want, Phil?"

"Hey, hey don't chew me up!" he protests, holding his flat hands in front of his face.

She stalks over. "Well?"

"What's going on?" he asks, innocently.

"I need to get out of here to spend the day down at MOJ and I can't find that cretin Britton."

"He's over at the liason office running the forms, I think. But you'd better not call him a cretin when you're trying to get a day off. And why are you going to the Ministry, anyway?"

She frowns. "You don't want to know."

"If you say so," he replies. "Listen, you want me to cover for you? You don't have to ask him if its just for a few hours."

Finally she smiles and grips his shoulder. "You're a good kid, Phil. Thanks, anyway." She steps briskly away toward the liason office.

Britton hadn't turned out to be a problem. But the Ministry of Justice offices were. She finally found them in new quarters - an archaic building that had been damaged long ago, halfway across the city. The wind stirred wisps of snow into low swirls as she mounted the stairs under the morning clouds.

Then she was shunted from office to office for hours. It seemed impossible to find who was responsible for anything.

"No, no," the fat woman mutters, finally. "I don't see him in here. He's not one of ours."

"I see." Clu stands, dazed.

The woman peers at her through heavy eyelashes, not unkindly. "Look, they all run off sometimes. I'm sure he'll be back."

"Thanks," Clu replies, numb.

Outside, she is glad of the cold. It stings her cheeks and helps her ignore the tears. She never sees the disklike watcher that wheels like a shard of paper in the air above.

She steps from the bus into the driving sleet, eyes narrow against the stinging ice. And perhaps that is why she slams into another pedestrian. But the tall man doesn't simply mutter and walk on, like so many inhabitants of Goslin. He stops and grasps her arm by the bicep as if to steady her.

"I'm sorry, miss," he rumbles in a gravelly voice. She suddenly feels his hand grasp hers and a folded paper thrust within - then he is gone. Bewildered, she still knows enough to thrust her hands in her pockets, and finally to walk, head down to the atrium door.

The elevator is out again, so she climbs the stairs slowly, as usual, enjoying the play of muscles in her legs, and wondering what she should do. At the final landing, by the irregular flicker of the remaining lamp, she brings out the paper and peers at it.

"1011 x Laskin, Breakfast 9, 10, Sonday" Then something odd happens. The writing fades slowly, and the paper seems to soften to a dust and then evaporate.

"What the hell?" she mutters. Then she starts the internal chant to commit the place and the appointment to memory.

Daylight blazes on the slowly melting piles of the last snowfall. She squints against the light, looking through the window out from Breakfast 9, sipping hot brew in a cup from the cafeteria line, enjoying the bitter sweetness, and, even while her hand shakes slightly, wondering what will happen. It is nearly ten.

"Clu Sherril!" she hears, "It is you!" a deep masculine voice brings her head up. A huge man towers over her, his long dour face lit with a strange smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. He is wrapped in a dark coat.

She manages her own smile. "Yes, how are you?"

"Fine, just fine. It's been quite a while. Years I think. May I join you?"

"Of course." She is proud that her voice hardly shakes.

They watch each other over the table as he settles into place. The man is secretly strong under his bulky coat, she thinks, and his eyes have a commendable quality of directness. But the smile looks odd, not fully connected to the rest of his face.

A cup and saucer are before her. He places his on the table. And then he picks up the cup and sips.

He looks over the edge at her. "You don't know me, but I know you. I know you're worried about Lan, and you should be. Put down your drink, please."

She is surprised. "What?"

"Put your brew down, try not to react."

Carefully, she sets the cup in the saucer.

"All right."

"Lan will be committed to Rendor by next week. Right now, he's being questioned at Ecliptic Station. You have been under occasional and indirect surveillance, but - right now - they are not watching."

Her hand twitches and nearly knocks against the cup. She spends a moment regaining control. "How do you know that?" She is stunned by the implications.

He leans back. "Because I've been watching them watching you."

"But if you're right..."

"I am right. It's tough, I know. but the faster you take it in, the better. He's not coming back. And you won't be too long following him if you keep making the kind of noise you were making yesterday at MOJ. Lay low for a while. I'll be in touch, and we'll make some plans."

"What kind of plans?"

"Plans to get you to safety. It's what Lan would have wanted."

"You can't know that."

"Oh, but I do. He was my friend." The anonymous man drains his cup, stands. "I'll be in touch."

She watches him go, staring in disbelief, wanting to scream, or sob, or run after him, but instead she does none of these - she simply watches the door split and slip closed behind him.

In the night, she shifts restlessly, sheets tangled across her body as she mourns the questions unasked. What are they doing to him? How can I help him escape?

And she thinks of the relief and the fear. The relief that there is someone who can share her secret, someone who wants to help...

She forces her mind away from the uncontrollable. She tries to march her thoughts along the path of her work, but she only hears the silence in the room.

And as she finally drifts away, heart pounding, she remembers how Lan had helped her once, and guilt follows her into sleep...

"Miss Sherril, have you finished?" the teacher inquires irritably.

She looks up at him, stylus poised over the exam sheet. "Almost," she replies. She is seventeen, a youthful and still innocent version of her future self.

He snatches the sheet from under her hand. "It will have to do." He speaks severely, and the light winks from round lenses suspended by wire in front of his eyes. He peers at what she has scribed, running his long fingers through the brush cut hair above his ears. Suddenly his eyes glare over the lenses. "Show me your worksheet," he demands, extending a thin, veined hand. She feels her throat close.

"I haven't done anything on it, " she protests feebly, her hand moving restlessly on the plastic. Her classmates murmur at her impertinence. "Sir," she adds.

"Do you want to suffer discipline, Sherril?"

"No, Mir Taskov, sir." She would not look at him when all she could see was the edge of the worksheet under her hand.

"Then give it to me."

She looks up at last. His thin bloodless mouth is pursed with disapproval. His hand is extended.

She has a choice - she can give in, and suffer the inevitable ridicule of things she loves, or she can fight, destroy what she has made -- it would be so easy to avoid the real conflict, to perform the contraction of the muscles that would irretrievably erase the content of the sheet, to take discipline for the sake of that. But it would not be right.

She hands him the sheet.

He glances down and scans it. Then his head comes up and there is a mocking smile on his thin lips. "Well, well, you weren't kidding me, Sherril. You haven't done anything on here. Nothing having to do with your test, that is. Look at this," he states loudly, holding it up to the class. "Sherril's been drawing spaceships instead of working out her mathematics." The class erupts with forced laughter. "Maybe," he sneers, swinging back to her, "you think you're some kind of designer? Maybe you think you're supposed to choose what you get to do with your life, regardless of what society needs? What are you doing, drawing junk like this, when you're supposed to be doing your work? What makes you think you get to decide what you do in this class? Answer me!"

She glares back, face hot. But her voice stays calm. "I did my work, Mir Taskov. Look at my exam sheet. I've finished everything but the last problem - and they're all right."

"Right!" he exclaims. "Well, that can't be, unless you were cheating, since you have obviously not done your work. Look around you. Do you see one worksheet unused? Has anyone else been drawing spaceships?" And, as the rustle of laughter subsides, a gangling boy with tousled brown hair stands, smooth face and cool eyes calm.

"I have, sir."

Taskov's head snaps around toward the boy. "What do you mean, Masson?"

The boy lifts his head slightly, and, in the silence, his voice is unnaturally clear. "I did drawings on my worksheet, too, sir. Not spaceships, but what difference does it make? I didn't use it to do my problems." He turns to Clu, his face mocking but stern under her grateful gaze. "I did ALL of my problems, and all of my answers are right, too."

Taskov's bloodless lips move, as if forming silent words. The rest of his face seems paralysed while his mouth moves. Then, suddenly, he slaps his hand down on the desk nearest him, startling its occupant, and screams - "All right, Masson, we'll see how you like a disciplinary assembly." He swivels toward Clu, features contorted and flushed. "We'll see how you both like it. Get out of here. The headmaster's office - now."

The headmaster's office is dark, paneled with wood that had once been light, but whose varnish had aged and darkened to a dim sienna.

They wait on the unconfortable bench outside the headmaster's glass-enclosed cubicle, Clu desperately wishing to speak, but afraid of the baleful gaze of the headmaster's secretary.

A buzzer sounds on the secretary's desk. With a scornful glance for the two youths, she stands and enters the headmaster's office. The boy turns to Clu and whispers. "My name's Lan. Lan Masson. You ever do this before?"

"Clu Sherril," she whispers back. "No... I've just heard..."

"Well, listen, it's not so hard. Just don't say anything, no matter what they do, and don't give in."

"I... I won't."

The headmaster pulls open his door and bellows: "Masson, cut that talking. You're first. Get to the auditorium, now." Lan grins at her as he walks away.

The dream twitches to remind her of her own price paid.

"Miz Clu Sherril," the boy shouts into the microphone in unconscious hyperbole, " - look at her! A Disgrace To The School, A Disgrace To The Memory Of Bukarin; her behaviour a Model Of That Which We So Narrowly Escaped..."

She tries not to smile at the sound of the capitalized phrases.

These are the professional denunciators - the young leaders of the Osol. Taught by the Leadership Council who to denounce, well-schooled in the Things To Be Said, and the Way To Say Them.

"Her fantasies she holds above the common good; her duties to society, her duty to learn and place her knowledge at the service of the people, all this she scorns with her thoughtless actions. Does she join in the youth collectives? No! Does she devote her free time to the mandatory volunteer projects that benefit us all? Only to the least she can..."

He is reading from a paper with blanks inked in. Primitive tools for a primitive act.

The ranks of seats stretch into the dimness. First one then another student is called to denounce according to the script.

"It's true," one said. "I heard her say she thought the collectives were driving the farmers into poverty." Faint laughter shudders the bowl - they all knew it was the truth. The boy looks indignant. "Well, it's true!" he shouts. The laughter bursts out again. He sits down in a huff.

"Stop that!" shouts the Osol leader at the microphone. Silence drops like a sheet of glass, backed by the shifting of the students in their seats. "Is there anyone here who considers the collectives a laughing matter?" There is only silence, thickened by a susurrus of breathing. The boy looks disgusted. "Comrade Sonia, will you speak?"

The girl shakes her head. A murmur rises from the crowd.

"Sonia, you are an acquaintance of this one, are you not?"

"Yes..." her voice is very small.

"Then speak up. Stand. Say what you must. Speak of your moral indignation, speak your condemnation, tempered with hope for her recantation... Stand up!" he threatens. The girl comes to her feet reluctantly.

The Osol youths know things are going badly - to continue might be worse than to stop. But they had wanted to get Clu, ever since she refused to join their cadre (something she had long ago forgotten), and now, with the administration on their side, they thought to intimidate not only Clu, but any supporters and sympathizers she might have attracted.

"Well? Speak up, Comrade!"

"I..."

"Yes, you were about to tell us of your feelings about your friend now that her anti-social tendencies stand revealed?"

"I... I've known Clu for a long time, we're in classes together." The girl shifts her feet uncertainly, head lowered.

"And?"

"And I always liked her..."

"But surely you feel upset at her individualistic tendencies, Comrade Sonia?"

"Why..." her voice falters, " ... Yes, yes, I... Uh... I have to admit I was very surprised that... " She would not meet Clu's eyes. "That she did not do what was right."

"Did you encourage her to attend collective meetings and lectures, as do all good citizens?"

"I... I talked to her about it. She... Uh, she said they were boring." She looks up at the Osol youth's face. "That's the only thing she ever said.. I mean that you might say was... anti-social. I... I hope she'll decide to renounce the... worship of the individual, and return to... the collective we all love." Her voice breaks on the last word, and she slumps down into her seat. Clu watches with pity.

Another youth, fat, with pale hair and droplets of sweat gleaming on his forehead under the lights, steps to the microphone.

"Comrade Sherril, your fellow students are eager to go back to their studies," he wheezes. "Perhaps you too would like to leave."

She says nothing, her throat locked with so rigid a control that she cannot permit herself to speak. Her stomach churns with revulsion and anger.

The boy stares at her, then glances uncertainly at his comrades across the stage. His eyes return to Clu, and he grimaces.

"Comrade Sherril, you are making your life difficult. You know the penalties for insubordination which brought you here..."

She knew. Isolation, forced labor, reduction in food allotment. Loss of free study privileges, compulsory attendance at corrective meetings and lectures... yes, she knew.

"You know what you've done wrong, you've heard it here today. You know the sins of pride, of selfishness, and elitism were what brought down the old society in favor of the new order. Will you let these same sins bring you down? Or will you admit to your brothers and sisters that you've done wrong, and let the penalties against you be waived in the hope of your return to our noble collective?"

Everyone waits. She knows the cost of what she is about to say. It would be so easy to lie, to pretend to give in to be left alone. But then the next lie would be easier. And though she was too young to know how to express it, she knew that reality was an absolute. That to renounce one's own vision for another's is to make that other the master.

She raises her head. She remembers Lan speaking up for her, when he didn't have to, undergoing this trial for the sake of his belief in himself. She remembered him saying "Don't give in."

"No," she says. I won't, she thinks.

On the dawn of day three without him, she awakens to the cold light of snow. It hardly stirs her. She curls into the blankets and sees the images running through her mind. Images she can't and won't stop. Not a plan, but a desire. Not a way, but a hope. There's too much waiting, she realizes. And no one she can depend on.

She feels a little feverish as she pushes the blankets off and swings her feet to the floor, sitting with her head in her hands. I can't do this, she thinks. It's the end of my career.

That thought brings her head up. My career?

So is that what I'm going to think of?

She looks around at the room, at the shabby walls, the few precious pictures. And she remembers her sight long ago of Lan looking out from the rail at the Pavilion. For a moment she feels the tears wanting to well up in her eyes, but she looks at them and rejects them. The tears are weakness. They are not knowing what to do. They are helplessness. She is not going to be helpless.

She is rebuilding the wall that follows the path down the hillside from the school to the city, when she sees him again. Her hands are raw from the stone and the mortar, but she doesn't care.

"Hi, Clu," he calls.

She is lifting a stone, and she does not look at him, but she replies: "Hi." She puts the flat rock into place and shifts it until it joins the mortar. She knows that she wants to turn and look at him, so she takes pride in waiting.

He sits on the wall, his eyes assessing the length and labor.

Finally, he says: "Hey, I'm sorry."

She looks up at him with a radiant smile. "What for? I like it. It's real." He laughs with the sound of someone unexpectedly pleased.

"I'm glad. They've got me tearing one down on the other side of the school. It's not as much fun. You know, they really were disappointed. They thought they'd have two recantations to take home and hug to their chests. I heard what you did."

"Yeah."

"I like you. You didn't betray that."

"For you to like me, I don't think I could."

He nods, smiling introspectively. He produces a battered pack of cigarettes from his sock... then, after consideration, offers it to her. She takes one, and he lights both.

He leans back, balancing himself on both arms against the sun, sighing smoke into the air above. "You know, we did pass. Taskov didn't fail us. In fact, I hear we're both recommended for the Lyceum. He may be a bastard, but at least he doesn't lie about what's on paper... You know, I heard he was in business, or maybe his family."

"That's not an excuse," she reacts, startled.

"No, just an explanation. Coming from there... to here. Well, he's probably got a lot to atone for."

"Sounds like you've forgotten how things got this way," she snaps.

Lan grinned. "No, I just like to know why people do things."

"Really?" She had never thought of such a thing before.

"Sure. There were people who changed things. They made everything come out this way. Why? We remember, don't we - it wasn't that long ago. They know even better. Why would they give it up? Why do they let things go on like this?"

"You know," she says, leaning back against the wall, voice tinged with wonder, "I always wondered... my father - " She returns her focus to him, facing him uncompromisingly. "Well, I guess I've thought about it too, a little."

They smoke in silence for a while. Finally he interrupts. "I'd better get back, my commissioner is probably looking for me already. Can you get out tonight?"

She smiles. "Sure."

"I'll meet you by the pond, after Sakmar sets."

"Okay."

He grinds out the cigarette and stands on the top of the wall. "See you, then." He leaps from the wall to the ground and runs swiftly over the hill. She watches him go, filled with a sense of boundless anticipation.

"Phil?" she asks, leaning through the door into his computer lab. "I need some help. No, not here. Let's go have some lunch. Come on..."

"Why here?" Phil asks, craning his neck around Breakfast 9.

"Let's just say that, besides being safe, I met a friend here once, and it fits what I've got in mind." She smiles coldly.

"Clu..." he warns.

"I know, you hate this kind of thing. Sure you do. It's your hobby for crying out loud, Phil."

He rolls his eyes comically. "You know I never do it for money."

"And I'm not paying you."

"Seriously."

"I need a prisoner transfer roster for transfers from Ecliptic Station to Rendor over the next week." She says quietly.

He stares over the coffee cup at her blankly for a moment, then brays with laughter. "You want... you must be kidding."

"You can do it, and I have a place where you can get away with it."

"Well, at least you don't expect me to try this at work."

"No."

"What's this about then?"

"Lan," she replies.

"OK."

"What, no second thoughts?"

"No."

She watches him, carefully. "Why not?"

"Well, you know. I mean, it's a challenge. And Lan's OK. But I do not want to know what you want this for, you get me?"

She smiles, thinking of her own fears, and her future.

"Yeah."

Stars shatter the sky as she runs down the hill, her feet hissing in the grass. Behind, her dormitory room window gapes open and black, a blind eye staring into the darkness.

The pond is a hole, a void in the dewy grass, with only an occasional wrinkle of light showing that the stillness contains something solid and gleaming.

She pauses on the shore, not knowing which way to go, when she hears his voice from the dimness. "I'm here." He emerges from the shadowed bulk of a tree.

His skin seems pale and strange in the faint light of millions of distant suns. His eyes are dark wells, like the pond, unrevealing of their depth, buts showing by their size an intense perceptiveness. She smiles at the sight, thinking of the children's story of the wide-eyed beings who supposedly lived in the ponds and lakes of South Cocteau, and how they had been astonished by their first sight of a man.

He leads her down the trail between the trees. There were whispers from the hydrogen trees as they rubbed softly against the earthly pines. The forest floor is choked with foliage lit like coins at the bottom of stream. The two weave their way through the aisles of the trees, until they burst into a clearing roofed with pines.

The ground is soft, and a barely seen light shifts with the quiet sound of clashing living pine needles meeting in the breeze. Lan settles to the ground and lights a cigarette, his match a soft burst of fire. "Want one?" he asks.

She shakes her head. "What is this place?" she whispers, sitting down in front of him, feeling a cool breeze across her forehead.

"It's a place I've found - they don't know about it, even with their glorious collectivist bulldozers less than a mile away, razing the forest for another of their glorious collectivist concrete and cardboard apartment complexes. But, you know, from here, you can see the stars better - even with the trees. Look..." he points upward to where the trees open on the sky.

"They are beautiful," she acknowledges."But why do you say 'better'?"

He sighs smoke and rolls over onto his side. "Well, in the direction you're looking, they say a hundred light years or so, Prometheus hangs in the space between stars."

"What's that?" she asks.

"You've never heard of it?"

"No."

"There's a lot of stories. Who knows which is true? But the one I like is where a thousand years ago, a hundred men of Earth took the best of their machines and hollowed out planets into shells. They linked them together into a chain of rock and metal, and then sent themselves and their new home into space."

"Are they really free?" she asks, hugging her knees and staring upward.

He shrugs. "The people I ask, they say no. But they're all ones who've given up, anyway. Or teachers."

"I hope they're free."

"Why?"

"Somebody has to be, Lan. Somebody. How are we going to go on, if there's nowhere better? Do you remember? The towers, the dirigibles, the cars? Whoever made that, they're gone now. Maybe out there, somewhere. Then, even when all the lights go out here, and we're all freezing in the dark, scared, there will be someone still alive, really living, anyway."

He grinds out his cigarette into the pine needles, and digs it into the soil. His face has turned too suddenly for the motion to be voluntary, and she wonders what she has said to upset him.

"Come on," he says, brusquely, standing. "I'll take you back."

They emerge by the side of the pond. "Hey," she says, softly, "What's the matter? Did I say something wrong?"

He whirls, and his face is taut, eyes sharp, his hand leaping to her arm. She sees the meaning of his face, in a glance assessing his single purpose, and desiring to be the embodiment of that value. She reaches up and pulls his lips down to hers, and they fall to the grass, the sound of their laughter carrying on the breeze over the starlit hillside.

She sits quietly on her couch with a morning cup of coffee steaming in a sunbeam. She thinks of how much she enjoys these quiet moments - until she thinks of Lan, and the torture he might be under. Her heart races again with the giddiness of her plan and its pain. Suddenly, she frowns. There is an odd sound - from the couch. A soft, insistent beeping. She plunges her hands into the cushions, searching, and quickly she retrieves a small box that is the source of the sound. She recognizes it as the property of her anonymous benefactor. So he left it, after all, she thinks, cupping it to hide in her hand.

What does it mean? Is she being spied on?

She tries not to look around, and she folds her hand, palming it down into the edge of the couch. She sips her coffee as if nothing has happened.

But the cup clatters a little too loudly on the saucer.

It is midway through her work morning when Clu checks her watch. "Oh, no," she mutters, and hurries out to the hallway. Then, composing herself, she walks slowly down to the simulator bays. She waves at the technician on her way through. "Hey, Michela, I want to run some sequences with the weapons interfaces to make sure they're running right, OK?"

The woman looks up with a sullen expression, says nothing, but turns to address the keyboards.

"OK, let's start with approach to a stationary target," Clu adjusts the headset as she settles further into the seat.

"Like what?"

"Let's try an orbital station, say L-1013 or something, all right?"

The image of a station appears outside the ports, and the systems are reporting the vehicle in flight. She notes the clarity of the displays with approval, and calls up the battle systems. "Now where is that targeting array..."

She makes notes as the engagement progresses, carefully recording her successes and failures.

"Well, that trajectory stank. So much for good advice," she mutters for the benefit of her listener. "OK, let's try it again. Give me a couple of minutes to make some changes here..."

"I want the test flight on schedule for two days from now, understand? No excuses, no reasons why not - nothing you've failed to do. This project has been delayed enough already."

"But what about Britton?"

"I'll take care of Britton," she promises. "Two days. I know you can do it."

Kania, regarding herself in the mirror, tugs at a fold of her skirt, her full lips pouting mockingly as she turns this way and that.

"I don't think I'll ever get this to fit properly," she complains. Clu, sitting cross-legged on the bed, brushes her long, thick black hair with abstract strokes. She glances up briefly from the book before her, shrugs, and resumes scanning the page. She is twenty-one.

"What are you reading, anyway?" Kania asks, dropping onto the bed beside her.

"Structural integrity theory, Kartz and Reimer," Clu replies, not looking up. She sets the brush down, pauses, and keys to the next page, her face intent.

"What a thing to be reading before the only party of the year..."

"What difference does it make?" Clu asks sharply, her eyes glittering under deep brows. "Should I turn my brain off to practice for it?"

She had changed in the last four years. While she would never be tall, her presence had become such that no one ever remembered having looked down at her. While the girls thought she was cold, the men were torn between being afraid of her and finding her distance alluring as a promise of the reward awaiting the one who broke through her sardonic barriers. She was equally indifferent to the opinions of each.

Especially since, in the four years just past, she had lost Lan.

Despite his troubles with the political authorities, he had graduated from the Lyceum with honors. His smile had been mocking as he stood in the cold wind on the platform, listening to the headmaster acclaim his academic excellence, and how that excellence was a reflection of the high standards of the state. But Clu could see the brief burst of bitterness as the medal was lowered to his shoulders.

That winter they had met on the railway platform, the snow streaming across the gleaming tiles of the landing, the lights harsh and blue against the night. She knew he was being transferred to a school in Westal, a special school for physicists; they both knew the authorities had denied their requests for regional passports.

So they sat on a bench, watching the snow slide across the tiles on the impulse of the thin, icy wind. They didn't speak, but their hands clasped in the pockets of his coat.

Then, when they stood by the doors of the monorail, with the wind a hollow resonance in their ears, she said, "I put something in your bag. For you to remember."

His head had been lowered, as if he were gathering strength to move, when the harsh light cut across his face as it rose to meet her eyes. She saw what she had never seen before - an anguish that tightened the angles of his face and pulled down the corners of his mouth in a ruthless effort to suppress its display.

"I'll be back," he says, finally. "Soon. Somehow."

She smiles to restrain the terror. "You've never lied before. Don't start now."

He nods, eyes bright. His hand reaches out, caressing her face with a touch. Briefly. Then he lifts his suitcase and steps into the monorail. She could swear to a tear at the corner of his eye.

She returned to school, but people were as they had always been. She did not write to him, nor he to her. They had agreed not to submit their private thoughts and emotions to the scrutiny of the censors. Her only letter - ever - was to inform him that she would be transferred to the Southern Pavilion of Engineering and Space Dynamics in the spring.

Clu found herself driven to her work as her substitute for him. It was the only kind of excellence she was allowed, and, for a while, she forgot the world as it was. She channeled all of her resentment, all of the emotion of loss, into working harder. If someone she knew asked about Lan, she just shrugged and changed the subject.

"Hey, why don't you take a bus with me into the city, this afternoon?" Kania asks, breaking her reverie. "I could go look for a dress, and you could go to the book emporium."

"I'm studying, " Clu replies again, her attention on the book.

"Well, I hope at least you're going tonight," Kania exclaims. She jumps off the bed and stalks out of the room. Clu barely notices her leaving.

An hour or two passes. Finally, she snaps the book shut, thinking - Now that's done. She holds the book carefully and sighs at its crudeness. But students no longer have access to datasheets. She looks around and realizes for the first time that the air is stale and that her legs are cramped. The sun, which had laid a blazing track across the windowsill had, by now, disappeared to the other side of the building. She decides to take a walk.

The plaza, a vast expanse of smooth tan stone, is broken into two levels.A few decorative hydrogen trees grow from openings, their flexible trunks swaying gently in the breeze. She walks past them, heading for the stairs that lead to the upper level.

But just before she reaches the stairs, she happens to glance up. At the railing leans a young man staring out over the Pavilion. His head seems to be held at a sharp, proud angle, and his lips are curved in a slight smile. She wonders who he is, but it is only a dim, distant thought, almost as if it belongs to someone whispering in her ear, because she is too occupied with perceiving him. She cannot tell how long she remains captured by the incident - but when she is released, she realizes that she wants to meet him. No, don't do that, she thinks. Let it stay in your mind the way it is now. Don't destroy it. She climbs the stairs, but her eyes keep returning to him. She forces herself not to look, guiding her feet in the appropriate steps to the massive glass doors.

She drops, exhausted, into a chair in the lobby, staring unseeingly at the racks of books and the windows beyond. She had always known that her omnipresent companion was lonliness, even in every human relationship which engaged her. Not because of insecurity or shyness, but lonliness for a real human contact, something beyond the superficial unthinking encounters which seem to be all everyone she had ever met was capable of. She wants a chance to deal with, or to fight, someone thinking, percieving, and careing about both - not the endless grey softness that seems to be everyone she meets.

Except for Lan, of course.

She thinks of the young man outside. There were some ways in which he resembled Lan... just once, she thinks, if just once I could meet someone I like.

She lights a hand-rolled cigarette and stares out the window. But there is no one to see.

In the late evening of a cold night, Clu Sherril works over her design board in her private office. The lights are low and the offices are silent when she finally pushes back, staring at the images on the board. She glances around, and then reaches into her coat pocket. The box is quiescent. Only the test light shows. She lays the box on the design board and brings up a set of special diagrams. She accesses the requisition system and alters the sequence numbers on some pending items. Then she replaces everything and the board is black.

She glances around, involuntarily. The box is still green. She slips it back into her breast pocket, where she can see the light. Then she stands, shrugs into her lab coat, and heads out onto the fabrication floor.

The third shift is off tonight and the floor is darkened with nothing more than pools of light amidst the enormous objects and equipment. She smiles tenderly up at the almost completed hull of the 369.

She walks amidst the huge formed crates at the edges of the room. She pauses at the security gate and looks around. Her heart thuds endlessly in her chest, the sound distracting her. She knows she can still turn back, save her life, but she knows there will never be another chance. Her hand reaches to the combination.

The gate seems to scream as she pulls it open. She pauses. There is no good explanation for what will come next, but she knows that the guards are kept outside, for security reasons. She steps inside and picks up an inventory pad from the controller's desk. It takes a few moments to master the unusual interface, but in a moment, the requisitions she had altered are up on the surface. She drops them into retrieval, and, in a moment, a crane rumbles to life in the distance. It moves across its rails in the near darkness, grinding as it closes toward its goal. Arms drape down in the half light and slowly raise two massive formed crates above the security gate. She commits the transaction and leaves the pad on the desk, dark, then follows the crane out onto the floor. Carefully, she closes the gate behind.

She stands at the edge of the 369 work area as the crane automatically unloads the crates into the clear. From the lift boss desk, she grabs a pad of stickers and fills them out in a terse, unrecognizable hand. She slaps them on the boxes and then takes up the lift boss' schedule pad. A few moments, and she has the installation scheduled for first thing next shift.

She walks away into the darkness, weapons scheduled for installation. No mockups for this woman, she thinks, legs shaking as she walks slowly back to her office.

In her mind, she runs over the gradually forming plan. There are still so many things that could go wrong. But it has to work. Has to... She remembers helplessness, too well...

"You know why I have to do this. I have to make sure you two have a chance." She says nothing, but the weapon in her hand sags as she lays her head on his shoulder.

Never again.

The back room of the Nexus is walled with machines in various states of repair. Clu leans over Phil's shoulder, until he finally snaps "You're making me nervous."

"Sorry," she replies, straightening. "Where'd you find these router codes?"

"You don't want to know."

She sighs.

"Look, Clu, this is stuff that people tell me in confidence. I can't trespass without it. But you don't give keys to people who won't or can't handle the sensitivity, right?"

"I suppose that's supposed to make me feel better."

"OK, then, sit back, and let me do this. Things are about to get really sensitive, now."

Clu slumps in a chair in the corner, watching Phil's fingers shift in the shadows. She tries to read her sheet, triggering the next page before she finishes the current one, her eyes sliding over words she isn't reading, images she isn't seeing. Modra sticks his head through the door. "Coffee, Clu?" She smiles at him. "Thanks." She takes the cup and sips gratefully. Modra nods and slips out.

"OK Clu, get over here, now," Phil calls. "We don't have much time."

She pushes quickly to her feet and stands beside him. "Here it is," he says. "See?"

"Where's Lan?" she pleads. "I don't see any names."

"No, I'm joining off the roster now, so look. We have to be out in a minute or so, because we're simulating an automated transfer."

"I see him!" she cries, watching the glowing script.

"I've got it captured. OK, we're out." He whistles a low breath. "Damn, I'm good."

"You are, Phil. Absolutely." She squeezes his shoulders. "Can we get a print of that?"

The party is being given by the Physicist's Commune, in a large room of the Underdome. There are broad windows, through which the flow of the river Troiga can be seen. But the windows cannot be opened, since the river is filled with pollutants and emits a noticeable stink.

There are colored lights, people in clothes of a cut and color seldom seen on campus, and, of course, food. Kania talked about it all the way from the dormitory, across the plaza, and down the long paneled hallway.

"Just think," she revels, "Meat. Real meat, not that stupid genvoya, but actual beef. With krolain sauce and cheese, and..." Clu finds it amusing to see so slight a woman so consumed by a passion for eating. The amusement lifts a corner of the sadness that had begun with her trip to the library. She welcomes it, as she welcomes the idea of the party, feeling a not quite extinct hope that this time will be different.

Clu's gown is like a soft metal tinted the ink-green of twilight - it sweeps from her shoulders to the floor like a shield of light revealing form while concealing substance. Her black hair is lustrous beneath the lights, the color lines shifting as she walks through the eddies of the gathering crowd, exchanging greetings with the few she knows and likes. But many more eyes are following her. She never notices.

She spends some time with a couple of her acquaintances, nucleonics students from Goslin, whose parents had known her mother long before. But suddenly, over a shoulder, she sees him, face gaunt and contemptuous as he bends his head to converse with a functionary from the capitol. She wrenches her eyes back to her companions, trying to hear what they are saying.

And later, as she stands against a pillar with a drink, listening to the inane conversations of passersby, she begins to feel her old distaste...

"Oh, but it puts her right in her place. Can you imagine? She'll never be published again by anyone I know..."

Clu shakes her head in disgust. This is why people come to parties, she thinks, so they can say things like that, and think that makes them gay and bright. Never again, she thinks. She pushes away, losing the voices in the crowd.

And somehow, she finds herself looking out the window, beside the man she feels she has been watching all evening.

Through young, he is tall and straight, his formal suit tight across his wide shoulders. His eyes, which swung toward her as she appeared from the crowd, are grey, sharp like a fine measuring instrument.

"You're not having a good time," she says. There is an openness to his eyes, like a sadness not quite manifest.

"So?" he replies, voice low, controlled.

"Why not?" she asked.

His eyes focus more closely on her, and his lips pull back against his teeth in what might be almost about to become a smile. Or a snarl.

"Who are you?" he wonders. "You look..."

"Like a friend? I might be, if you'll give me a direct answer."

He laughs, the sudden smile revealing his teeth. She feels like a puzzle which has been solved. "Why, it's a simple reason," he continues. "Everything I like to talk about is forbidden here."

"Such as?" She leans back against the window in what she imagines is a seductive languor.

"Oh, carbon-iron sequences, multiple pion interactions, evenings by a pond in a pine grove..."

In the silence that follows, all she can manage is to say weakly, "I thought... I'd never see you again.All those years. But I knew what we had decided."

"But you are," he continues eagerly. "And how I've wanted to see you. I never expected you to be here. I thought I'd drown in all the meaningless flesh they've packed into this room. Can we get out of here, go outside and talk... really talk?"

They sit on a bench under the hydrogen trees for hours, while the stars wheel across the warm sky, till long after the partygoers have streamed over the plaza and across the campus to the dormitories and the waiting buses beyond. It is late as she walks back to her room, heels clicking on the flagstones. Alone.

So their love had lasted. And Lan was more than she remembered. Abd even better, when he left, he touched her cheek. It was the only contact between them all evening., and it reminded her of how his hand had felt, cold against her cheek, the night they had separated. "I'll call you tomorrow," he had said, and she knew it was true. She smiles, thinking of how he had looked, striding across the plaza under the stars. She decides she will never let him go again, regardless of the cost.

She manages to stay away from the floor for most of the day. But around the schedule time, she finds a way to get in a fight on the floor with the inventory manager, protesting the installation of live weapons for the test flight. As the systems jocks are plugging the pulse cannons into the main waveguides, he proves to her with requisitions over various bureaucratic codes that the authorization is fully correct. It's a risk, but she hopes it is worth it. She arranges for a deluge of inventory changes for two other products to hit his board five minutes later to take his mind off of it.

It is raining when she comes home from work. She slides the door behind her and hangs the soaked coat on the hook beside it. The clatter of Lan's typewriter masks the sound of rain on the window.

She leans over the desk and kisses him on the temple. "Hi! What are you doing?"

"Typing," he replies, intent.

"Typing what?" she asks, leaning across the table to turn on the hot plate.

"Stellar Interiors," he replies, stopping. He looks up from the page and she can see his eyes are faintly swollen. She had started to open a can of clathry, now she stares at him, perplexed. "But what happened about - "

"They rejected it," he replies.

It is now a year since their marriage and their graduation. She had begun work at the Dejunier Engine Facility as a design team leader; Lan is a teacher and researcher at the Technical Pavilion.

Stellar Interiors is his first book.

She pulls back a chair, straddles it. "What happened?" she asks again.

"Levedin doesn't like it, I think. They won't say."

"You mean he doesn't like your attitude," she snaps.

"Nobody'll touch it, if he's down on it."

She sighs. "So why are you typing it again?"

"Some friends wanted to see it, and you know I don't have copy privileges. So I figured I'd type it over again. At least somebody gets to see it."

"The government likes samizdat as much as they like copiers," she reminds him. He shrugs. "It's nothing political."

She waits a moment, until the typing starts again. She empties the can into a pan and sets it on the hot plate. "Hey," she says. He stops again. "I'll take it with me to work. I can probably get it all done in a week if I work late and slip it into my normal copier allowance." His eyes seem to grow a little larger. But he smiles.

Clu walks slowly past the shop windows that evening, looking at the few displays, saddened by the shabbiness. She remembers the stores of her childhood, crowded with bright and colorful items. She knows it isn't just a glamour of childhood, but a truth, once present, now lost, as if everyone had agreed to forget.

Suddenly, there are footsteps beside her, and she doesn't look up as she hears a voice.

"Doctora Sherril, you really must stop mucking around in the files. Believe me, we were lucky to be able to cover for you."

She pushes her hands down in her pockets, shoulders hunched, trying not to react. "Is that so?" she asks, finally. "And why would you do that?"

"Because I don't want you in trouble."

"Then help me," she asks, stopping, turning, locking with his blue eyes.

"How?"

"Help me get him out."

"I can't do that."

"Then I will, and you're no help at all. All your talk was nothing. Why did you waste my time?"

His face is strangely twisted. "I didn't say I wouldn't help you. I said I can't help you. I thought I could. But I can't help Lan the way you want without ruining everything."

"Everything for who? How can you call yourself a friend of his? He would do anything to help his friends. Listen, if you're going to be useless to me, why don't you just take off?"

He is silent for a moment. Finally he says, "I know. But there is one thing I can help you with that won't ruin everything."

"Oh?"

"Yes. I can tell you where to go."

"What do you mean, it's going to take another day to irradiate the coupling?" Clu demands. "C'mon Thio. Get it done today. No, I don't want to hear about the schedule. You know as well as I do that six-eighty-six doesn't have to go today, and if that's what's getting in the way, then I want you to put it aside... Of course, I'll take responsibility. Get that thing on the line as soon as you can."

She pushes away from her console, sweating. This morning, she had wakened six times, every five minutes, heart pounding.

Her movements, everywhere, feel too fast, like she is jerking back and forth. She is terrified that someone will notice. But, so far...

She waits for the bus, and never notices the figure in the shadows who watches the coordinates change hands between Clu Sherril and an anonymous passerby.

Claro Britton, a heavyset man in his forties, upper lip graced with a thin mustache, stands in the gondola watching the activity below. He sighs. "It's a sad thing, Commisioner. The schedule has been going so well. We even have a test flight scheduled for the day after tomorrow. But I understand. So, she is involved in something indiscreet?"

The Commissioner eyes the factory floor. "That is nothing you need to know. Just take it as understood that we need to be able to keep an eye on her for a few days."

"Yes, well, it's no surprise to me," Britton replies. "I always knew she was a problem."

Today is the day, she thinks, stirring from bed the next dawn, feet cold on the floor.

The space field is an endlessly scarred concrete plain. At the margins are the carcasses of the old outsystem shuttles and cargo fleets, long since nationalized, now slowly rotting as "outsystem" retreats to near orbit.

She drives past them in the field car, the dawn hazy and bright across the windscreen, and strangely, as she looks at them, she feels the same old feeling - excitement, as if she could see their potential, and what it would take to bring that potential back to life. They aren't just wrecks. But she is instantly sad at the thought. Because after this, she will never have that chance again.

Everything feels strange and new. The chain of events that she had started is about to become irreversible.

The shadow of the 369 falls across the car, and she admires its clean shape, glistening with backlight as she pulls to a stop beside it. She twists around to lift the carryall from the back of the car, and then climbs out into the sun. Her breath smokes in the cold.

There is no one here yet - it is too early. But she hurries, with a speed borne of anxiety, and anticipation. The timing must be exact.

Her deft gloved hands press the loading catches and fill couplings are revealed on the side of the 369. She pauses, and then pats them gently. "Okay, Zadar" she says. She reaches down and drags the hose up from its recess to attach it to the fuel fill with a strenuous twist of the heavy collar. Then the water and air double hose and the same motion. Inside the recess, she double-hands the heavy brass handles and she can feel the throb of materials pouring into the hoses. Carefully, she hunches over the feeds monitoring the gauges on the hoses, looking for backpressure, patting her hands together with impatience, glancing around in fear of pursuit.

"I wish I knew what you were talking about," Phil replies for the fifth time in an hour, shivering in the cold metal chair.

The room is harshly lit and walled with frighteningly hard tile that echoes his voice. The interrogators are anonymous in the unlit spaces behind the sourceless brightness.

"Phil, Phil, we've already found out most of what we need to know. You're just filling in the details for us." The interrogator's voice takes on a sibilant whisper, seductive, promising... "We can help you. Give us good information, and we can make sure you get a lab of your own. Why work for Mikoyan, when you could have a high directorate position? The fact that you could get into the prison systems shows you have talents we need. All you have to do is tell us the details."

He looks up with a faint hope. "Oh, sure," he replies, skeptically. But his resistance is low. He had never expected to be caught. And he is terrified of the promise of pain.

Clu checks her watch. The frost is slowly receeding, following the inperceptible motion of the shadows. Finally she decides it has to be time, full or not. She yanks the pipes and climbs up into her sleek vehicle.

On the frozen stone, the superfluid slips toward the car. She once would have cared. The car had been so important to her.

Inside, suited, as she flips switches and takes in the cool smells of plastics, she realizes this will be her first flight in a real ship of her own design. For a moment she is bitter at what she is about to lose. But then she tosses her head and forces herself to smile. She brings out a coveted cigar from her spacesuit breast pocket. "Ok, so what. Let's do the job." She lights it, and the burst of smoke clouds the flight deck. At least the simulator time will pay off in something more than ergonomics, this time.

She pulls the sheet from her other pocket and looks over the coordinates. Again. Yes, she had remembered them right.

She flicks on the injectors and listens to the whine of the pumps with a fiendish smile.

In the watchtower, the controllers are just taking their first shift seats. "Detar, I've got an APU power up and disconnect on the 369!"

"What? That test isn't until four, right?"

"There's no clearance request."

"Contact them. Maybe it's just the prep team. Who's running that show? Sherril?"

"No, Britton."

"He's just a figurehead. Try to reach Sherril. And get me whoever's on that vehicle."

She starts sweating as the com rings. Should she answer? She elects to bluff. "369," she responds, terse.

"369 this is watchtower, please confirm authorization."

"Right, this is Sherril, 287492, just running the warm-ups for the test flight."

"Right, Sherril, you're cleared, just wondering what's up. Clearance is for four, repeat four."

"No problem. Four confirmed. Traffic to be cleared starting ten minutes, right?"

"That's a little early, 369."

"Just want to be safe, watchtower."

"Right, 369, ten it is."

The door to the watchtower slams open and dark blue Securitar uniforms push through. The troop leader shoves his visor back. "Who's in that vehicle?" he demands in a thick, graveled voice.

The controller is in shock. "Shh... Sherril. Clu Sherril, she's the project designer on pre-check."

The troop leader glances at the other uniforms. "Get out there." He turns back to the controller as the others race down the stairs. "That vehicle is not leaving the ground. Got me? No clearance. No fuel. Nothing."

"I... I'm sorry, but the 369 was fueled and aired for the test. There's nothing we can do about that."

The Securitar leader makes a sharp cutting motion. "You do not let that vehicle lift, understand? Or you'll be off in Cocteau wilderness making trees into twigs for the rest of your life."

She braces her hand against the controller and flips the ignitor switch.

An enormous pillar of flame blooms up from the field, enveloping the vehicle in blinding fire and smoke.

The acceleration feels as if it might flatten her, pressing hard against her shoulders, hips, and dragging down her guts into her bones. But somehow she holds onto the controller as the sky rushes down past the windows, forcing the program to shift the nose up. She transitions to the rear engines, so that the pitch throws gravity to her back, and makes her feel as if she were falling out of a building. She applies full military thrust, and blacks out for a moment.

The radar systems haven't been rebuilt enough since the war to follow me. They won't see me. They'll think the vehicle was destroyed on the field. Even when they figure out I'm alive, they'll never know where I'm going. Until it's too late. For them.

She awakens and the stars are outside in the midnight blue that quickly thins to black.

I'm not ready! I'm not ready! she screams to herself. But somehow the rituals she had practiced over and over in her mind as she fell asleep come to her rescue. She checks the accelerometer and sees she is over the orbital trajectory. She retards the throttle, and watches the prediction rejoin the desired. The heading fights with her, and she tries to deal with the skittish response. The vehicle is not a simulator, and she belatedly realizes how different all of this could be from what she imagined.

There's no time to worry. You have to be ready. It's time to start.

She lifts the helmet and considers it for a moment. Then she pulls it over her head and twists it home.

It takes a few moments to bypass the safety constraints, but finally one airlock vents a shuddering cloud of volatiles into space. The impetus from the venting slews the 369 wildly, and she fights with it. But some part of her mind is pleased, because she knows it will add realism to what is starting to feel like an all too sketchy plan.

"M'aidez, m'aidez," she calls, weakly, feeling foolish for even attempting to act. "369, 369 Mikoyan test vehicle, I have an accident on board, venting atmosphere from a damaged airlock, require emergency clearance. I say again, m'aidez, m'aidez..."

"Negative, 369, you are not cleared, this is a restricted zone, do not continue closure."

She still cannot see it in the distance, though it is now above the dayside horizon.

"I'm sorry, but I really have no choice. Look, all I need is a dock for some repairs or a drop downside."

"Negative, 369, this is Ecliptic Prison Station, you may not dock."

She gets angry now, at one more obstacle to what was already a hopeless plan. "Ecliptic, I don't give a damn about your restrictions, I'm coming in, and I'm docking. If you plan on shooting me down, you'd better be prepared to explain it to the Mikoyan Directorate."

There is a long silence, during which she sees a sudden glint ahead.

The voice returns, resigned. "All right, 369, attach to the outward port if you can."

"Thanks, Ecliptic," she replies, suddenly exhilarated. "Thanks a lot." Then she remembers the plan. "Uh... what's the collar type on your outward port?"

"That's a P-34, 369."

"Thanks. I've got you in sight. A P-34 is fine." She smiles in the instrument-lit darkness for the first time in days.

Phil shakes off the slap, and the blood trickles from his split lip, salty in his swollen mouth.

"Why are you doing this," he whispers. "I've told you..."

"Oh, we know," the Securitar officer hisses, leaning close. "We know what you told us. Too bad Lan isn't at Ecliptic, and isn't going there. But we'll be there. We just want you to remember. You see, Lan's out in the farback. Out where you're going. Where you'll have plenty of time to tell him how you betrayed his wife."

"But, but you said..."

"Did I? Well, we'll see. It depends on how useful you've been - and remain."

The docking is scary and shaky. The 369 does not handle as it had in the simulator, and she is not experienced enough to keep it in rein. But as much as it bucks against her inputs, she somehow keeps in on vector, and only needs two passes before she is slow enough to couple.

She feels the latches slam home and the 369 shudders with pent up energy spent into the docking collar. Her heart is racing and she has to lean back against the seat, feeling the sweat trickle between her breasts. "Going to make it," she mutters. "It's going to happen."

The weapon, supplied by her anonymous benefactor, is cradled in a thigh pocket under her suit. It looks like a checkpad, to the eye and to the scans. She presses it with a hand, and then heads to the midships lock.

There is a sound of hammering from the inner door.

They drag her from the airlock, down a short hall, and push her through the door into a narrow room. "Hey!" she cries, "Listen, I just need to call my base." But before she can react, the door slams shut. She tugs at the handle, but it refuses to open.

She looks down at her checkpad/weapon, knowing her thoughts are futile.

The door opens on a tall bulky figure in a Securitat uniform. It takes a moment before she connects the face with her memory. "You!" she cries.

He looks at her sternly, and then glances back at the door. "That's right, Sherril, and you're coming back with me." He steps close. "You've been fooled. Lan isn't here. Now listen, play along." He steps back and grabs her arm roughly.

"Hey!" she yells.

"Let's go."

A guard captain is standing down the hall. "Well, what about her?" he asks.

"She's the one. I'm taking her down with me. We'll send someone up for her vehicle."

"OK."

She wriggles and glares at him. "Damn you," she snaps.

"Feisty," the captain remarks.

"Yeah, for now. Come on, help me get back to my vehicle. Too easy to get lost here. Don't know how you guys deal with this warren."

"Don't you want to lock her up? I have some wristies here."

"No, what for? She's not going anywhere I don't let her."

She kicks him in the shin and whips out her weapon as she runs. The guard captain reaches for a pistol at his hip, but she pulls off a shot that releases a surprising bong from its blinding energy release. The captain falls. She runs toward the 369's dock. Her captor smiles as he chases her, feet pounding heavily on the deck as his shadow sweeps before him.

Just at the airlock, she waits for the cycle, and the horns whine into silence as the door slips aside. But he is right behind her. "Wait!" he hisses, holding the door. "Go to the coordinates. Emit the signal. I'll chase, but you'll escape. Get going. You can't help Lan."

She grabs him by the shirt front. "What are you talking about!"

"I'm telling you, Lan isn't here. The Securitat forged the transfer to throw you off the trail. He's down planet in South Cocteau. A labor camp. I'll do what I can. Go now, quick."

She is shocked, but acts quickly, stepping through the door, and watching him turn and run. "Damn." She pulls the hatch and the locks slam home.

The 369 slips from the docking collar and accelerates outsystem at a frantic rate. Behind her, the pursuit has begun.

She programs quickly, calling up and linking preset evasion courses into what she hopes is an unpredictable sequence. Beyond the flight deck, the stars are faintly bluer as she pushes the acceleration to full military and tries not to black out.

The chase systems detect a vehicle trailing her course and she smiles coldly. So this is her benefactor, playing at the chase. For now, she is content with the slow pace at which he is closing the gap. On purpose, she supposes.

She leans back in the control chair, enveloped in its new scent, and suddenly the truth of what is occurring comes back to her.

She is running away. Now, she has a moment during which her choices are restored. She sits up straight, holding her hands firmly away from the controls, watching the computer adjust her course, feeling a sensation of cold and distance.

She thinks again of Lan in prison, even though her thoughts flinch from the images.

And she turns the vehicle, heading back toward her homeworld.

At the console of his military vehicle, Haris Rannart squints at the sensor display. What is she doing?, he wonders, realizing suddenly that she is on an approach course.

He grimaces and flips through his sheets on the 369. He dials through the comm frequencies to the private channel of the 369, and directs the maser at her oncoming vehicle. "Sherril," he calls. "What are you doing?"

There is no answer.

He wonders if she knows about the comm system.

She stares at the trajectory plot and compares it with a chart of the world. The 369 is not going to be much help on reentry. Navigation beacons on the surface are only sufficient for basic air travel and military overflights, but the systems on the 369 are not fully integrated with the NAVAIR beacons on the ground. Many of the tactical systems which would synchronize the plot with the current planetary position and rotation have not been completed.

And she has very little practice with even simulated landings. It hadn't been in her mission profile.

She looks up at a blinking region of the console display. What is that? she wonders, racking her brain for the pages of the manual. Communications, she remembers suddenly. The frequency displays on the block.

She touches the block, only to hear silence. Then "Sherril, come on, I can't keep this up."

Her hand comes to her mouth as she recognizes the voice.

"What do you want?" she whispers.

"What are you doing? You're going the wrong way. Are you out of control?"

She watches a tear detach and float into the sub-G environment. "I'm going back to get Lan."

"Are you out of your mind? I've got pursuit vehicles less that ten minutes behind me. They'll blow you out of space without a thought."

"I have a few surprises of my own. Maybe you're more worried about your precious status than about Lan, but I can't go without him."

"You'll never find him. For crying out loud, let me do my job. I can get in touch with you - I can maybe get him out eventually. Please."

Alarms bray with a startling sound that causes her to jerk in her seat. "Incoming attack - Incoming attack."

She punches up the tactical analysis. It takes precious minutes for her to recall and integrate the complex symbology. She rubs at her eyes. There are missiles heading for her, ten of them. And, she realizes... she has no way to fight them. No practice in the simulator, a bare understanding of the details of the tactical displays.

Suddenly, she realizes how hopeless her plan had always been. She had depended on a complete lack of resistance, on a level of stupidity and foolishness among her opponents that was... childlike. Childlike and impossible. And now... she would die and Lan would die, never knowing.

The numbers on the tactical display count down the distance between the 369 and the projectiles. She is enraged at their quiet acceptance. With a swift motion, she sweeps the 369 around on an angled escape course and throws full military throttle in again. Now what? she wonders. She stares at the panel, willing the information up from the depth of her memory. Countermeasures... where? There! She strikes the combination of keys, and the alarms go off. The sequence was wrong. She bites the corner of her lip. "This... this.. no, this one. OK."

She hears the sound of her benefactor talking like a distant surf, but she has nothing with which to pay attention, as she tries to find and implement an evasive strategy, working fiercely, fighting for her life, in a tiny room walled with stars.

He watches her vehicle boring erratically at an angle to the pursuit - himself and the others, spread out behind.

It is an enormous string of beads, anchored by a fragile world and a space station in synchronous orbit. The line of pursuit vehicles is spread throughout the intervening hundred thousand miles. A tight pattern of missiles has left the lead vehicle, and is now slightly astern of him, kept off by his transponder, continuing to accelerate with probably another ten minutes before engine burn-out. His projections show her unable to escape.

He watches silently as her face is racked against his memory. His first sight of her fierce sadness as he appeared on a mission of protection rejected, half asleep after a frantic call from his operative. Her velvet eyes, her thick hair in disarray, her lips cold even while her eyes sang tears. Their meetings as he watched her struggle against just leaving well enough alone, despite his best, most well-meaning advice across a table of uneaten food. Her strength as she forced him to help her.

He draws on that same force as he pushes his hands into action.

He thinks about his apartment and its carefully concealed books. His walks in the summer under the hydrogen trees. The secret meetings and tensions of a double life... well, maybe it isn't so hard to decide after all. It is harder to avoid the thought of someone waiting at home. But he made his choice years ago, and this was always implied.

She watches the displays in shock as a phalanx of anti-missiles and energy weapons strikes against the pursuing threat. The void is lit suddenly and briefly with annihilation that echoes like a lightning flash against the controls. But there are a few which slip past the countermeasures.

She blinks, and turns to the plot.

She tries to lean forward in the chair against the pounding acceleration of the engines. It must be that resonance which shakes her hands against the plastic. Her eyes rove the controls, the most advanced interfaces ever designed. Designed by her. Helping her flee into nothing, for all she knows.

His fingers fly across the interfaces, even as his practiced knowledge tells him that there is no further use. The pursuit has split, and some of them are now coming for him.

She stares at the displays, unable to believe what they are telling her. She has programmed the most evasive course in the system, but it has accomplished nothing. The missiles veer sharply with her every turn.

Clu picks up her helmet from the floor, but her hands feel like lead.

She locks the seal, and reaches for her gloves.

It happens in utter silence.

The edge of her ship is enveloped in a blinding flash that quickly dies away into a vague fog of parts and gas as the vehicle tumbles away, shattered.

Air roars out of the hull, tearing at her suit. The force of the blast spins the ship, and she faints with G-shock as the blaze of the explosion envelops her. The energy vaporizes parts of the seat and the control panel. It washes across her back as she is thrown forward against the restraints.

In the distance, Haris Rennart is destroyed in the now indiscriminate missile barrage.

She is sweating, and her mouth is wet with salty blood. The temperature inside her suit feels hot enough to sear her skin, and her breath is a desert rasp. Panel lights and displays are fuzzy luminosities that are only barely visible. She feels gravity again, but it is a strangely surging and inconstant gravity.Over and again, she blinks, trying to clear her eyes; there is some improvement, but then she realizes that the visor has been shaded with volatiles from the blast.

She looks down at the restraints, and tests her resolve - can she handle being free of their support?

She tries to move an arm, and it works, so she moves the other - and screams. But she quickly chokes it off with a grunt. So that's what a broken arm feels like, she thinks.

Her eyes rove the panel. Some of it is gone, much of it is black. The stars past the ports are rotating sickeningly, and her gorge rises in response. Quickly, she looks away.

She tries to focus on the comm display, and has to blink again to clear her eyes of tears from pain. Instinctively, she reaches out her right arm, and winces with the onset of the break. Slowly she lowers it back into place, and moves her left instead. She keys in the code and frequency for the transmission that was part of the aborted rendezvous.

Nothing to lose, she thinks.

A flake of metal arcing into the gravity field of a barren world, the 369 winks into darkness as it passes into shadow.

The surface below is disturbed, and something - something huge, massive, and extremely speedy - races upward toward her.

Then her vehicle is snatched within the maw of the vast object, and she is gone.