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observed the taciturn brother, glancing back at Bach, whose lights had all gone off during the turmoil. A single orange light winked on. Lily agreed mildly.
    “‘So appear the blessed children, prisoners, and guardians of the Void,’” said the voluble brother. The screens that covered the shuttle’s windshield rolled back.
    Lily gasped.
    Stars. A million. A myriad. Astonishing. The sky, which was never anything but clouds on Unruli, was black, strewn with an infinity of brilliant points of light.
    “This must be your first time up,” said the voluble one.
    “Ten years ago I came up to Station,” said Lily softly, still transfixed. “I was fifteen. I ran away from home.”
    “Didn’t get far,” remarked the taciturn one.
    “I got as far as Remote,” she said. “But I never forgot this.”
    Bach began to sing, softly,
Wie wunderbarlich ist doch diese Strafe!—
    “How miraculous indeed is this punishment!”
    Static on the radio, and a disembodied voice cut in with numbers.
    “Ah, there’s Station on,” said the voluble brother. “We’ll be there faster’n you can say your periodic table.”
    “Hoy,” Lily said in a breath, staring at the stars.

4 Station
    T HE RADIO TRAFFIC, LILY soon discovered, had nothing to do with them, except as a guide to avoid Security as they approached Station.
    Of the three small moons that orbited Unruli, one had been found to be large enough and stable enough to house the interlacing spread of Station. Here cargoes came up from Unruli or, routed through Tagalong, from the asteroid belt on in-system ships and were transferred to the highroad merchanters or the unmanned lowroad freighters for the haul between systems. Here news and information, personal communications, and government edicts were, for Security reasons or for astonishingly high prices, loaded into the occasional military cruiser and sent through windows at vectors only highly trained personnel on the best ships could risk, so the news could arrive at the next systems before the fastest merchanter would dare to. Here lived folk who by biology or prejudice could not exist on the world below. Here, on the fringes, the old areas long since left to decay, the poor and the unemployed and the desperate eked out a life separated from vacuum by the thinnest of patched walls. Here, beyond the reach of Security mostly because Security could not be bothered by an organism that would, if driven to ground, only spring up somewhere else, the booters landed, using their wits rather than the Portmaster’s controllers.
    The elderly brothers landed swiftly and, despite the pronounced jar at impact, efficiently. Lily offered to help offload their cargo; they refused. They did, however, request Bach’s assistance in clearing up a small matter—not illegal, they assured her—on Station’s mainline computer, and in return detailed for her a variety of shortcuts that would make her trip through Station quicker and more unobtrusive. She left alone to find the Portmaster’s office.
    As she waited in the port lock, it occurred to her that if the Sar hadn’t sent her to Heredes’s Academy after that attempt at running away, she might have been back here long ago. She smiled ruefully. The lock coughed and jerked open onto a scene quite unlike that brief glimpse of Station she remembered from ten years ago. But, of course, she had come nowhere near this area then.
    Each elongated finger of Station consisted of a public corridor allowing access to shops, offices, housing, docking facilities, and warehouses. Lily remembered the constant hum of machines and a quiet background of humans and pygmies and the occasional sta moving with purpose and order from dock to shop to office.
    Now, stepping over the bulkhead into the corridor, Lily smelled first: the odor of rotting food kept for too long in a closed area. Heard the pandemonium of life occasionally broken by the shrilling of a machine or the hiccuping jolts of an ill-repaired