She was not presently conscious of that. At first she had reveled in adventure. Everything was an excitement; every day offered a million discoveries to be made. She didn’t mind being the sole human aboard besides her grandfather. He was fun in his bearish fashion: had been as far back as she could remember, when he would roll roaring into her parents’ home, toss her to the ceiling, half-bury her under presents from a score of planets, tell her extravagant stories and take her out on a sailboat or to a live performance or, later on, around most of the Solar System…Anyhow, to make Ythrian friends, to discover a little of how their psyches worked and how one differed from another, to trade music, memories, and myths, watch their aerial dances and show them some ballet, that was an exploration in itself.

  Today, however—They were apparently nearing the goal for which they had been running in a search helix, whatever it was. Van Rijn remained boisterous; but he would tell her nothing. Nor did the Ythrians know what was sought, except for Hirharouk, and he had passed on no other information than that all were to hold themselves prepared for emergencies cosmic or warlike. A species whose ancestors had lived like eagles could take this more easily than men. Even so, tension had mounted till she could smell it.

  Her gaze sought outward. As an astrophysicist and a fairly frequent tourist, she had spent a total of years in space during the twenty-five she had been in the universe. She could identify the brightest individual stars amidst that radiant swarm, lacy and lethal loveliness of shining nebulae, argent torrent of Milky Way, remote glimmer of sister galaxies. And still size and silence, unknownness and unknowability, struck against her as much as when she first fared forth.

  Secrets eternal…why, of course. They had run at a good pseudovelocity for close to a month, starting at Ythri’s sun (which lies 278 light-years from Sol in the direction of Lupus) and aiming at the Deneb sector. That put them, oh, say a hundred parsecs from Earth. Glib calculation. Yet they had reached parts which no record said anyone had ever done more than pass through, in all the centuries since men got a hyperdrive. The planetary systems here had not been catalogued, let alone visited, let alone understood. Space is that big, that full of worlds.

  Coya shivered, though the air was warm enough. You’re yonder somewhere, David, she thought, if you haven’t met the inevitable final surprise. Have you gotten my message? Did it have any meaning to you?

  She could do nothing except give her letter to another trade pioneer whom she trusted. He was bound for the same general region as Falkayn had said Muddlin’ Through would next go questing in. The crews maintained rendezvous stations. In one such turbulent place he might get news of Falkayn’s team. Or he could deposit the letter there to be called for.

  Guilt nagged her, as it had throughout this journey. A betrayal of her grandfather—No! Fresh anger flared. If he’s not brewing something bad, what possible harm can it do him that David knows what little I knew before we left—which is scarcely more than the old devil has let me know to this hour?

  And he did speak of hazards. I did have to force him into taking me along (because the matter seemed to concern you, David, oh, David). If we meet trouble, and suddenly you arrive—

  Stop romancing, Coya told herself. You’re a grown girl now. She found she could control her thoughts, somewhat, but not the tingle through her blood.

  She stood tall, slender almost to boyishness, clad in plain black tunic, slacks, and sandals. Straight dark hair, shoulder-length, framed an oval face with a snub nose, mouth a trifle too wide but eyes remarkably big and gold-flecked green. Her skin was very white. It was rather freakish how genes had recombined to forget nearly every trace of her ancestry—van Rijn’s Dutch and Malay; the Mexican and Chinese of a woman who bore him a girlchild and with whom he had remained on the same amicable terms afterward as, somehow, he did with most former loves; the Scots (from Hermes, David’s home planet) plus a dash of African (via a planet called Nyanza) in that Malcolm Conyon who settled down on Earth and married Beatriz Yeo.

  Restless, Coya’s mind skimmed over the fact. Her lips could not help quirking. In short, I’m a typical modern human. The amusement died. Yes, also in my life. My grandfather’s generation seldom bothered to get married. My father’s did. And mine, why, we’re reviving patrilineal surnames.

  A whistle snapped off her thinking. Her heart lurched until she identified the signal. “All hands alert.”

  That meant something had been detected. Maybe not the goal; maybe just a potential hazard, like a meteoroid swarm. In uncharted space, you traveled warily, and van Rijn kept a candle lit before his little Martian sandroot statuette of St. Dismas.

  A moment longer, Coya confronted the death and glory beyond the ship. Then, fists knotted, she strode aft. She was her grandfather’s granddaughter.

  “Lucifer and leprosy!” bellowed Nicholas van Rijn. “You have maybe spotted what we maybe are after, at extreme range of your instruments tuned sensitive like an artist what specializes in painting pansies, a thing we cannot reach in enough hours to eat three good rijstaffels, and you have the bladder to tell me I got to armor me and stand around crisp saying, ‘Aye-yi-yi, sir’?” Sprawled in a lounger, he waved a two-liter tankard of beer he clutched in his hairy left paw. The right held a churchwarden pipe, which had filled his stateroom with blue reek.

  Hirharouk of the Wryfields Choth, captain of the chartered ranger Gaiian (=Dewfall), gave him look for look. The Ythrian’s eyes were large and golden, the man’s small and black and crowding his great hook nose; neither pair gave way, and Hirharouk’s answer held an iron quietness: “No. I propose that you stop guzzling alcohol. You do have drugs to induce sobriety, but they may show side effects when quick decision is needed.”

  While his Anglic was fluent, he used a vocalizer to convert the sounds he could make into clearly human tones. The Ythrian voice is beautifully ringing but less flexible than man’s. Was it to gibe or be friendly that van Rijn responded in pretty fair Planha? “Be not perturbed. I am hardened, which is why my vices cost me a fortune. Moreover, a body my size has corresponding capacity.” He slapped the paunch beneath his snuff-stained blouse and gaudy sarong. The rest of him was huge in proportion. “This is my way of resting in advance of trouble, even as you would soar aloft and contemplate.”

  Hirharouk eased and fluted his equivalent of a laugh. “As you wish. I daresay you would not have survived to this date, all the sworn foes you must have, did you not know what you do.”

  Van Rijn tossed back his sloping brow. Long swarthy ringlets in the style of his youth, except for their greasiness, swirled around the jewels in his earlobes; his chins quivered beneath waxed mustaches and goatee; a bare splay foot smote the densely carpeted deck. “You mistake me,” he boomed, reverting to his private version of Anglic. “You cut me to the quiche. Do you suppose I, poor old lonely sinner, ja, but still a Christian man with a soul full of hope, do you suppose I ever went after anything but peace—as many peaces as I could get? No, no, what I did, I was pushed into, self-defense against sons of mothers, greedy rascals who I may forgive though God cannot, who begrudge me what tiny profit I need so I not become a charge on a state that is only good for grinding up taxpayers anyway. Me, I am like gentle St. Francis, I go around ripping off olive branches and covering stormy seas with oil slicks and watering troubled fish.”

  He stuck his tankard under a spout at his elbow for a refill. Hirharouk observed him. And Coya, entering the disordered luxury of the stateroom, paused to regard them both.

  She was fond of van Rijn. Her doubts about this expedition, the message she had felt she must try to send to David Falkayn, had been a sharp blade in her. Nonetheless she admitted the Ythrian was infinitely more sightly. Handsomer than her too, she felt, or David himself. That was especially true in flight; yet, slow and awkward though they were aground, the Ythrians remained magnificent to see, and not only because of the born hunter’s inborn pride.

  Hirharouk stood some 150 centimeters tall. What he stood on was his wings, which spanned five and a half meters when unfolded. Turned downward, they spread claws at the angle which made a kind of foot; the backward-sweeping alatan surface could be used for extra support. What had been legs and talons, geological epochs ago, were arms and three-fingered two-thumbed hands. The skin on those was amber-colored. The rest of him wore shimmering bronze feathers, save where these became black-edged white on crest and on fan-shared tail. His body looked avian, stiff behind its jutting keelbone. But he was no bird. He had not been hatched. His head, raised on a powerful neck, had no beak: rather, a streamlined muzzle, nostrils at the tip, below them a mouth whose lips seemed oddly delicate against the keen fangs.

  And the splendor of these people goes beyond the sunlight on them when they ride the wind, Coya thought. David frets about the races that aren’t getting a chance. Well, Ythri was primitive when the Grand Survey found it. The Ythrians studied Technic civilization, and neither licked its boots nor let it overwhelm them, but took what they wanted from it and made themselves a power in our corner of the galaxy. True, this was before that civilization was itself overwhelmed by laissez-faire capitalism—

  She blinked. Unlike her, the merchant kept his quarters at Earth-standard illumination; and Quetlan is yellower than Sol. He was used to abrupt transitions. She coughed in the tobacco haze. The two males grew aware of her.

  “Ah, my sweet bellybird,” van Rijn greeted, a habit he had not shaken from the days of her babyhood. “Come in. Flop yourself.” A gesture of his pipe gave a choice of an extra lounger, a desk chair, an emperor-size bed, a sofa between the liquor cabinet and the bookshelf, or the deck. “What you want? Beer, gin, whisky, cognac, vodka, arrack, akvavit, half-dozen kinds wine and liqueur, ansa, totipot, slumthunder, maryjane, ops, galt, Xanadu radium, or maybe—” he winced “—a soft drink? A soft, flabby drink?”

  “Coffee will do, thanks.” Coya drew breath and courage. “Gunung Tuan, I’ve got to talk with you.”

  “Ja, I outspected you would. Why I not told you more before is because—oh, I wanted you should enjoy your trip, not brood like a hummingbird on ostrich eggs.”

  Coya was unsure whether Hirharouk spoke in tact or truth: “Freeman van Rijn, I came to discuss our situation. Now I return to the bridge. For honor and life…khr-r-r, I mean please…hold ready for planlaying as information lengthens.” He lifted an arm. “Free lady Conyon, hail and fare you well.”

  He walked from them. When he entered the bare corridor, his claws clicked. He stopped and did a handstand. His wings spread as wide as possible in that space, preventing the door from closing till he was gone, exposing and opening the gill-like slits below them. He worked the wings, forcing those antlibranchs to operate like bellows. They were part of the “supercharger” system which enabled a creature his size to fly under basically terrestroid conditions. Coya did not know whether he was oxygenating his bloodstream to energize himself for command, or was flushing out human stench.

  He departed. She stood alone before her grandfather.

  “Do sit, sprawl, hunker, or how you can best relax,” the man urged. “I would soon have asked you should come. Time is to make a clean breast, except mine is too shaggy and you do not take off your tunic.” His sigh turned into a belch. “A shame. Customs has changed. Not that I would lech in your case, no, I got incest repellent. But the sight is nice.”

  She reddened and signaled the coffeemaker. Van Rijn clicked his tongue. “And you don’t smoke neither,” he said. “Ah, they don’t put the kind of stuff in youngsters like when I was your age.”

  “A few of us try to exercise some forethought as well as our consciences,” Coya snapped. After a pause: “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to sound self-righteous.”

  “But you did. I wonder, has David Falkayn influenced you that way, or you him?—Ho-ho, a spectroscope would think your face was receding at speed of light!” Van Rijn wagged his pipestem. “Be careful. He’s a good boy, him, except he’s not a boy no more. Could well be, without knowing it, he got somewhere a daughter old as you.”

  “We’re friends,” Coya said half-furiously. She sat down on the edge of the spare lounger, ignored its attempts to match her contours, twined fingers between knees, and glared into his twinkle. “What the chaos do you expect my state of mind to be, when you wouldn’t tell me what we’re heading for?”

  “You did not have to come along. You shoved in on me, armored in black mail.”

  Coya did not deny the amiably made statement. She had threatened to reveal the knowledge she had gained at his request, and thereby give his rivals the same clues. He hadn’t been too hard to persuade; after warning her of possible danger, he growled that he would be needing an astrophysicist and might as well keep things in the family.

  I hope, God, how I hope he believes my motive was a hankering for adventure as I told him! He ought to believe it, and flatter himself I’ve inherited a lot of his instincts…No, he can’t have guessed my real reason was the fear that David is involved in a wrong way. If he knew that, he need only have told me, “Blab and be damned,” and I’d have had to stay home, silent. As is…David, in me you have here an advocate, whatever you may have done.

  “I could understand your keeping me ignorant while we were on the yacht,” she counterattacked. “No matter how carefully picked the crew, one of them might have been a commercial or government spy and might have managed to eavesdrop, But when, when in the Quetlan System we transferred to this vessel, and the yacht proceeded as if we were still aboard, and won’t make any port for weeks—why didn’t you speak?”

  “Maybe I wanted you should for punishment be like a Yiddish brothel.”

  “What?”

  “Jews in your own stew. Haw, haw, haw!” She didn’t smile. Van Rijn continued: “Mainly, here again I could not be full-up sure of the crew. Ythrians is fearless and I suppose more honest by nature than men. But that is saying microbial little, nie? Here too we might have been overheard and—Well, Hirharouk agreed, he could not either absolute predict how certain of them would react. He tried but was not able to recruit everybody from his own choth.” The Planha word designated a basic social unit, more than a tribe, less than a nation, with cultural and religious dimensions corresponding to nothing human. “Some, even, is from different societies and belong to no choths at allses. Ythrians got as much variation as the Commonwealth—no, more, because they not had time yet for technology to make them into homogeneouses.”

  The coffeemaker chimed. Coya, rose, tapped a cup, sat back down, and sipped. The warmth and fragrance were a point of comfort in an infinite space.

  “We had a long trek ahead of us,” the merchant proceeded, “and a lot of casting about, before we found what it might be we are looking for. Meanwhiles Hirharouk, and me as best I was able, sounded out those crewbeings not from Wryfields, got to understand them a weenie bit and—Hokay, he thinks we can trust them regardless how the truth shapes up or ships out. And now, like you know, we have detected an object which would well be the simple, easy, small dissolution to the riddle.”

  “What’s small about a supernova’!” Coya challenged. “Even an extinct one?”

  “When people ask me how I like being old as I am,” van Rijn said circuitously, “I tell them, ‘Not bad when I consider the alternative.’ Bellybird, the alternative here would make the Shenn affair look like a game of peggletymum.”

  Coya came near spilling her coffee. She had been adolescent when the sensation exploded: that the Polesotechnic League had been infiltrated by agents of a nonhuman species, dwelling beyond the regions which Technic civilization dominated and bitterly hostile to it; that war had barely been averted; that the principal rescuers were her grandfather and the crew of a ship named Muddlin’ Through. On that day David Falkayn was unknowingly promoted to god (j.g.). She wondered if he knew it yet, or knew that their occasional outings together after she matured had added humanness without reducing that earlier rank.

  Van Rijn squinted at her. “You guessed we was hunting for a supernova remnant?” he probed.

  She achieved a dry tone: “Since you had me investigate the problem, and soon thereafter announced your plans for a ‘vacation trip,’ the inference was fairly obvious.”

  “Any notion why I should want a white dwarf or a black hole instead of a nice glass red wine?”

  Her pulse knocked. “Yes, I think I’ve reasoned it out.”

  And I think David may have done so before either of us, almost ten years ago. When you, Grandfather, asked me to use in secret—

  —the data banks and computers at Luna Astrocenter, where she worked, he had given a typically cryptic reason. “Could be this leads to a nice gob of profit nobody else’s nose should root around in because mine is plenty big enough.” She didn’t blame him for being close-mouthed, then. The League’s self-regulation was breaking down, competition grew ever more literally cutthroat, and governments snarled not only at the capitalists but at each other. The Pax Mercatoria was drawing to an end and, while she had never wholly approved of it, she sometimes dreaded the future.

  The task he set her was sufficiently interesting to blot out her fears. However unimaginably violent, the suicides of giant suns by supernova bursts, which may outshine a hundred billion living stars, are not rare cosmic events. The remains, in varying stages of decay—white dwarfs, neutron stars, in certain cases those eldritch not-quite-things known as black holes—are estimated to number fifty million in our galaxy alone. But its arms spiral across a hundred thousand light-years. In this raw immensity, the prospects of finding by chance a body the size of a smallish planet or less, radiating corpse-feebly if at all, are negligible.

  (The analogy with biological death and decomposition is not morbid. Those lay the foundation for new life and further evolution. Supernovae, hurling atoms together in fusing fury, casting them forth into space as their own final gasps, have given us all the heavier elements, some of them vital, in our worlds and our bodies.)