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man-made ring of mining docks, shipping platforms; the busy glint of cargo ships like happy workers around a sweet hive.
    And a specially sweet hive was the anchor of Lorelie’s midsummer dream vista, Alexandria.
    Selim Labaya had shaken his head, pursed his mouth in which the spittle had suddenly turned chalybeate, and called his shipboard bondmates to his side to sketch them the outline of their consul general’s plan to turn tragedy into comedy, loss to gain, mortification to satisfaction.
    Those who knew the countenance of Selim Labaya of old were drawn like swords to ready by the welcoming smile that slithered across the old patriarch’s visage like a hungry python toward a burrow of mice. Some who knew him better saw the Labayan device of undulant dragons rampant replacing the airborne eagle above a circle of seven stars which was etched into the rings of Lorelie’s anchor-planet, Alexandria. One, who could not set foot on Lorelie, whose face would have begun a war had Parma Kerrion beheld it, whose gerontic back was bent, whose inveterate mind was the more deadly from all the years poison had been baking into its blade, laughed a laugh which sounded throught the Labayan ship like rending metal squealing in complaint.
    But when the delegation had made dock, departing with those sent to meet them, there was no sign of the bare-pated man, who was holed up content with a dream dancer secreted in the ship’s bowels for just that purpose. Old Jebediah giggled over the proximity of himself and his pleasure to Parma and his displeasure, when he remembered it, which was not too often, for the dream dancer was most talented, and kept him ecstatically engaged.
     
    To Marada, surveying Lorelie, no hint of Labayan presence showed. But he needed no doubt of their attendance nor insight into Labayan intentions to make him wary. He was twelve hours late to the audience his father had demanded, a function of the deep sleep come upon him so disadvantageously in the Orrefors’ guest suite. He bore with him mute testimony to the folly of his willfulness. The effect of his transgressions on his father’s temper could be no less far-reaching than the results he carried so cold in Hassid’s hold.
    The beauteous Lorelie did not beguile him: he was immune to her outward glory, knowing full well the passions swirling within like rot eating away fruit beneath a perfect rind.
    Shebat’s awe at the sight—soft oohs and aahs cooed from wonder’s own throat—temporarily lightened his load, then brought it back redoubled when he added her again to the sum of his difficulties and found the number a heretofore undreamed of prime too great to be contained within the universe he had known. All would change; how, he had no idea.
    At best, he would sit in his older brother’s chair, a fate beside which death would seem the kinder to one who shunned the machinations of commerce. At worst, he would resign his citizenship quietly, if it were demanded of him, accepting the attendant sterilization without complaint. This, too, was an alternative beside which death’s dirge was a celebratory hymn. But death, the eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth death of primitive times, was no part of Consortium justice. Its gentler sister, suicide, had been exposed upon a winter hillock: the shame of suicide upon the entire bond group would lead to a rash of the same; no man committed suicide without committing murder. Hence, no Kerrion had ever stooped so low, since the Jesters’ first smirk.
    Marada, in his rat’s maze, turned back from the blind alley of what might occur in the unknowable hours stretching out before him, matched velocities with the man-made moon Lorelie, and docked his ship. It was not so difficult as it would have been even a hundred years previously, before the Kerrion codicils of supergravity had obviated the necessity of dizzying spin and Kerrion crystalline chemistries had freed habitational designers from restricting considerations of size