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if you need—”
    A yawn smothered the rest of the sentence. He blinked vaguely at the dancing light. “God,” he said with gratitude. “I might actually sleep.”
    “You want another beer?”
    Aaron shook his head. “I’ve got to go.” Still he lingered, listening, he realized finally, to the overtones of music constantly trembling beyond the silence within the Flying Wail. He turned to make a request, and found the Magician already in motion.
    He had swiveled his chair; his fingers played a pattern on the rows of lights beside the control panel. The panel opened to reveal an old-fashioned black-and-white keyboard. The Magician touched a few keys gently. A reflector over the main porthole turned slowly to intercept light.
    Aaron smiled, both at the lovely synchronicity between mechanics and music, and the Magician’s unabashed satisfaction in his handiwork. The Magician disengaged the keyboard from the ship’s power and glanced at Aaron, acknowledging his thoughts. Then all his attention drained out of the world around him. His face grew detached, gently contemplative.
    His hands strayed randomly over the keys, slowly fashioned the sounds into something complex, elegant and, Aaron guessed, a few centuries older than the FWG. For a moment the numb weariness in his brain eased, and even the squat, battered patrol-cruiser took on dignity under the Magician’s vision.
    He was still playing when Aaron left.

    When Aaron woke in the late afternoon, the sky was roiling white with summer fog.
    He watched it as he dressed. He lived high above the city, in one of the huge FWG ghettos.
    They marched among smaller constructs like alien spiders; their intersecting arches buttressed one another against earthquake, and their free form took up space instead of land. Aaron had a small room close to the top of an arch. It contained nothing much besides a bed and an FWG-issue computer. It faced west; on hot evenings he could watch the horizon blaze with odd colors as the sun sank behind the haze the sea-factories expelled. Suncoast Sector was three hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long. The north section Aaron lived in was haunted by a stubborn ghost of pre-FWG history. In a hundred years it had grown extremely elusive.
    But even Aaron, whose imagination was negligible, could sense it now and then in the sigh of the tide, the silent fog drifting through old streets running always to the sea.
    The fog was feathering now through the immense arches of the ghettos. He watched it mindlessly, his eyes reflecting its paleness. He turned abruptly, a brisk, finely tuned movement away from the fog, negating with his body the subtle, chilly silence drifting into his head.
    He had three hours before his night shift started. He took an elevator to the street and got into an empty magne-car that carried him to the parking dock where he kept his sol-car. He eased himself up into the milky sky. He liked flying fast; he had raced felons and drunk drivers to turnaround and brought them down under luminous moons, skies giddy with stars. But the fog’s blank face looming out from the sea turned the long summer evening into an amorphous blur of white and shadow. Air traffic moved cautiously around him, slow blobs of indistinct light. He rose high above them and the world he inhabited vanished.
    A single foghorn bellowed like a dinosaur in the mists. It was obsolete; an endless argument between Sector bureaucracy and FWG bureaucracy kept it sounding. It was said to forecast ghost ships, lives rising out of the brine of earlier times. It cried warnings at Aaron that grew fainter and fainter, though no less imperative, as he flew west. He landed finally on a promontory and got out. The breakwaters in front of the sea-factories and purifying-plants had calmed the tides, but the ocean could still braid a bitter whip of wind and spume. Aaron stood a moment in the cold, steeled against it and enjoying it. He strained his eyes for rotting sails, rusty