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dung house to sleep when Bolen sought to impress upon her dull wit this lesson or that. She forgot, in a fashion, that she spoke to a disembodiment, a magic, or—how to conceive it?—to the mind of the great metal hull. She remembered, instead, a mellifluous voice from a gently blurred face hovering over a comforting form robed like the old goddess’s statue hidden between the rocks a half-day’s walk from Bolen’s inn. She would lie on that bed softer than the down of fifty geese with her arm crooked over her eyes, and speak endless questions. And Hassid would answer untiringly, with never a hint of impatience. When Marada would call Shebat out to dinner, his voice flying to her ear instead of Hassid’s murmur, or her own—then she was always surprised that the room was empty, but for herself and the decorative tastes of the dead enchantress—and irritable, like one rousted out of bed before the sun to serve a horde of hard-trekking nomads—and blinking, like a cat caught in sudden torchlight.
    But on the morning of the tenth day of their journey, all her contentment was washed away. Marada sluiced it from her with a quiet reminder that this was the day of debarking, that she should pack her things. Even his offer to let her sit again in the couch to his right while he brought the Hassid into her cradle did not ease the shock rolling over Shebat like frigid water.
    She got wordlessly up and went into the pearly cabin and gathered her things, blinking often and fiercely. But the water flooding her eyes would not be banished so easily. Should she speak tender farewells to her invisible tutor? Could she, without dissolving her courage under a cascade of salty tears? She muttered hallowed formulae in her own tongue, her diction rough and uneasy after so long speaking Consulese. When she was ready all but for her heart, she went to the door, whose obverse gave back a reflection of who stood there, examining herself as she had not since she had spent so long there the day she had discovered it, trying to catch some hint of the mil-hood’s presence between skin and air.
    But like the voice of Hassid , the mil-hood’s comfort was as invisible as a summer breeze. Shebat ran fingers through jet, wavy hair that suffered no tangle or speck of dust to mar its sheen. This, at least, was an improvement that promised not to be temporary. Once around Shebat pirouetted slowly. The stranger in sable flight satins wore them familiarly, open at the throat, tucked into gleaming boots. Shebat shivered at the girl whose gaze met hers. Then, with a lilting song she had sung from babyhood to summon up courage and dam back the tide of fear, she took wordless leave of the opalescent cabin whose student she had most willingly become, pausing only once in her song’s rhythm: to kiss softly the door jamb before she crossed its portal.
    “Goodbye, Hassid , I will not forget what you have taught me.”
    But the room was silent. Marada had called its attention elsewhere.
     
    Crystalline Lorelie lay bedizened in the brilliant heavens of Centralia, a testimony to Kerrion wealth, Kerrion style and Kerrion largess. Taste, had said grizzled Selim Labaya sourly as he traversed this same route thirty-six hours before Marada, had been no part of Kerrion concern when the platform had been conceived.
    And the leather-jowled Labaya had not been wrong: Lorelie sat like the central jewel in a monarch’s fillet, the ringed giant about which she spun regardless of the difficulties in such a placement only pointing up the excellence of Kerrion skill. The choice of such a turgid planet (made more extravagant by the wealth of frozen oxygen, ammonia, and hydrogen that ringed her, unplundered, a mere decoration for the Lorelien sky) whispered of pride beyond conscionable limits and discernment refined so as to approach amorality. With the ability to stabilize a geosynchronous orbit around such a world should have come not one monumental temple of a platform, but a