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actually for anything. It wasn't a fight about anything. The part I had been
cut out to play was so monumentally trivial as to be quite absurd. A joke of
truly minuscule proportions.
My mind had to go back through Soulier to Nick delArco before I discovered
anything worth thinking about. Captain delArco. I couldn't quite work out how
long it had been since I pulled him out of that storm on Mormyr. And what for?
So he could commit suicide in a dark nebula. The score might be level between
me and fate, because Johnny was still alive. One apiece. But even so it was
annoying to think that so little had been gained by saving Nick's worthless
hide. Poor Nick. A sucker all along the line. A prince of suckers. His mother
had no right to turn him out of his playpen with so little preparation for the
wicked wide world and its evil ways. A good guy, Nick. A nice guy.
I knew I could forget Nick, but I knew I wouldn't. Somehow, he had contrived
to leave an impression. Eve was different. Eve I couldn't forget even if I
wanted to. She'd echoed in my mind just a little too loud. She'd echoed
Lapthorn, and I could no longer think Lapthorn without knowing that there were
two of them. Brother and sister. Man and ghost. I couldn't count the number of
times my reaction-pattern to Lapthorn had taken hold of my behaviour toward
Eve. She might have interpreted that as an endless series of small cruelties.
She could hardly understand. I'd never tried to explain. She could have died
hating me. And all for nothing. All for a fake relationship. I hadn't loved
Eve. Not ever. But I just might have, perhaps, if it hadn't been for the
Lapthorn reactions that had got into me.
You did all this to me, I accused the wind. You've turned my head around. If
it wasn't for you... why the hell should I feel guilty? Was it me who killed
them?
-No, he said.
We made level time to Darlow. There was plenty of time for things to happen,
but nothing did. The Swan was in perfect shape. All the pounding she'd taken
in the Leucifer system had left not a mark on her. They'd done a good job back
on New Alexandria. She was her old self, in every detail. If it were
mechanically and humanly possible to make the flight that Charlot had planned,
then the Swan and I were fit for it. The only question mark was Johnny.
Darlow was a desolate ball of impure iron whose only conceivably useful
feature was its closeness to the Nightingale Nebula. It was a small planet of
a tired rose-colored sun. Its air wasn't poisonous but it contained very
little oxygen and life of our kind could only be supported courtesy of
abundant artificial aid. The planet wasn't inhabited, in the normal sense of
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the word, but New Alexandria had maintained a dome there for a long time,
partly as an element in the vast web of New Alexandria interests which
threaded the known galaxy, and partly for the specific purpose of observing
the enigmatic Nightingale. The base never supported anything resembling a
thriving community, but its population tended to be fairly stable; there were
men and women who spent all their working lives there, and a handful of
children had been born there. Technically, therefore, it counted as one of the
vast number of "human" worlds, and like Earth or Penaflor it added no less and
no more than one to the numerical total. On statistics like that the success
of the human race is measured. People will claim we are the galaxy's primary
inhabitants because we "possess" more worlds than the Khor-monsa, the
Gallacellans, and all the rest put together. People do say it. All the time.
The people who lived their lives here spent the time in between ships digging
holes in the ground looking for whatever they might find or writing the great
Darlovian novel. Many of them had a fierce patriotism. It had to be fierce,
because there was no other way to answer the questions put to it. The
transients-mostly peripatetic technical staff theoretically based on New
Alexandria (though they might never see "home" in their entire lives) were
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