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reprogrammed to handle a Citizen. “And a good thing, too. You are taller than Carlos.”
    Louis twitched. “When I was young, my . . . stepfather was
much
taller than Carlos. Somehow they became the same height. Did that have something to do with this autodoc?”
    “Carlos and Beowulf have complicated stories. Beowulf, of course, was a—”
    “The history lesson can wait.” Louis pushed away his tray. “I’m still waiting to hear what you expect me to do.”
    A padded Y-shaped bench was the main piece of furniture in the relax room. Suddenly too tired to stand, Nessus half collapsed onto it. Merely to describe this mission would take all his strength.
    A trill to the ship’s computer authorized its Voice to respond to Louis—with limited access to data. Man and machine could continue to talk when, very soon now,
he
must hide in his cabin. A second trill evoked a hologram. From the corner of an eye Nessus saw Louis blink.
    Five globes now hung over the relax-room table, each sphere marking a corner of an equilateral pentagon. Four of the worlds showed large blue oceans and skies flecked with cloud, their continents lush with farm and forest. Earth-like, Nessus knew—even though Louis would no longer fully appreciate that—except for their necklaces of artificial suns. These planets flew free of any star.
    The fifth world was of similar size, but there any similarity ended. No artificial suns orbited this world; it blazed with its own light. Only scattered small parks interrupted continent-spanning cities. Beholding Hearth, his hearts skipped beats.
    “The Fleet of Worlds,” Nessus said.
    “The glowing world, that’s Hearth. That’s your home.”
    “Yes.” The home of all Nessus held dear. “The Concordance holds sway on Hearth and its Nature Preserve worlds.”
    “Hearth is different,” Louis muttered to himself. He stared at the image, considering. “No sun. So the Puppet . . . Citizens are taking their
worlds
away from the core explosion?”
    “Our worlds are safe and familiar.” Nessus moved a neck in sinuous waves, the gesture encompassing the ship. “Sane beings do not fly
this
way.”
    “So, they travel in normal space.” Louis pondered some more. “No matter how safe the worlds are, what dangers loom in their path?”
    A minute, no more, and Louis had focused on the essential problem. He was his fathers’ son—in quickness of mind, at the least. Nessus permitted himself a moment of hope. “That is the question, of course.”
    “What am I to be, then,” Louis asked. “An advance scout? Expendable?”
    “More than a scout, certainly. A problem solver. I like to think not expendable, because I will accompany you.”
    “You went to a great deal of trouble to find my fathers. I don’t believe you would do that for some theoretical danger. What has you scared more than usual?”
    Nessus replaced the Fleet with another image: of a five-limbed creaturescuttling about an ocean floor. In human terms, the being somewhat resembled a starfish crossed with an octopus, or perhaps five tube worms fused together at their tails. One “worm” directly faced the camera, revealing the limb to be a hollow tube, its aperture slowly pulsating. From deep inside the hollow, past rings of sharp, closely packed teeth, eyes and less obvious sensors peeked.
    He said, “It’s a Gw’o, no bigger from tip to tip than the length of your arm.”
    “It doesn’t look scar . . .”
    Louis trailed off as Nessus, with another tone burst, replaced the holo again. Now an industrial complex sprawled across a plain of ice. An upwardly curved track, an electromagnetic launcher, hurled a ship into the sky. The vessel lit its fusion drive and raced away. Except for running faster than real time, the video was untouched.
    Nessus said, “The Gw’oth broke through the ice of their ancestral ocean less than two Earth centuries ago. Before that, their technology was stone tools. Now they have fusion and