Read Into the Slave Nebula for Free Online

occupants, and a hint of fragrance clung even in the open cockpit. Horn put his feet up on the forward rim of the vehicle and leaned back to stare at the stars.
    One learns to recognize the ones which have inhabited planets
. …
    Only later one also forgets, he qualified. He couldn’t for the life of him have identified two of those stars and their inhabited worlds. He could have listed most of the names, given a few minutes to think about them; what he could never have hoped to do was attach them all to the proper dots of brillance above.
    Annoyed, he switched his attention to the lights underneath him instead. There was the fairground, over on his left; there was the arc of the beach, fringed with the luminous organisms sown at sundown, some of which had been carried out to sea in the wake of paddleboats or by chance changes in the current. His vehicle was bearing him in a wide curving swoop all over the city, controlled as much by the breeze as by its automatics. Now the air bore to him the distant fairground blare, now a freak snatch of song from a boat lazing on the ripples a mile from shore. Carnival!
    The sound montage should have been evocative, since it was part of the heritage of every living adult. It should at once, even without the euphorics he had gulped down, have snatched his imagination away from all such nastiness as androids beaten to death. Who cared about androids,anyhow—except other androids? And the man who had been killed was a total stranger, probably with delusions of grandeur to judge by the boastful certificate he had carried.
    Yet, by the time his bubbletaxi had deposited him at the far edge of the fairground, in the thick of the merrymaking, he was growing terrified at the prospect of being haunted for the whole of carnival week by visions of brutal murder. To distract himself he jumped out before the vehicle had properly come to rest and ran whooping down the grassy bank it had settled on to dive headlong between two gaudy concession-booths.
    Two girls—alike, perhaps sisters—coming the other way arm-in-arm tried to leap apart in order to let him charge between them. They didn’t quite separate fast enough, or he had to put his arms around them to save himself from falling, or something. However it might have been, a moment later they were all three sprawled on the ground in a tangle of limbs, kissing and laughing with the ring of hysteria that always pervaded the racket of carnival week.
    “Get off me, idiot!” giggled one of the girls, seizing a discarded burr of glittering plastic from near at hand and tangling it among Horn’s dark hair.
    “Correct!” Horn declared. “I am an idiot! Carnival started hours ago, and I’ve only just turned up to join in! Want to help me make up for lost time?” He plucked at the hem of her skimpy dress while leering across her at her companion.
    It took little persuasion. They linked arms again, this time with Horn in the middle, and went strutting through the fairground to a nonsense song picked up from one of the organs, to which each of them contributed a verse in turn. The girls seemed to laugh much louder at Horn’s verses than at their own. Delighted, he laughed louder than both of them.
    There were same performing shoemice from Vernier; they hooted with amusement over the antics of those. There was a not-quite-face on a purple animal from Lygos, which retained a perfectly solemn expression while its trainer drilled it through the most absurd contortions; that struck them as fantastically funny and left them barely able to stagger towards the next concession, where a lightning caricaturist turned each of them in turn into sarcastic parodies: the two girls into a kind of playing-card, heads and arms waving either side of a union at waist-height, and Horn into a hooded skeletal figure with a scythe. That was too appropriate to be amusing. He ripped the drawing of himself into shreds and chased the girls away, masking his annoyance with