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had ever seen her cry.
       "It's a beautiful ring," my Aunt Justine said as she came up to me and bowed her head. She held up her own pilot's ring for me to look at. "And well deserved, no matter what Soli says." Like my mother, Justine was tall with slightly grayed black hair pulled back in a chignon; like my mother she loved chocolates. But where my mother most often spent her days thinking and exploring the possibilities of her too-ambitious daydreams, Justine liked to socialize and skate figures and perform difficult jumps at the Ring of Fire, or the North Ring, or one of the city's other crowded ice rings. Thus she had retained the streamlined suppleness of her first youth at the expense, I thought, of her naturally quick mind. I often wondered why she had wanted Soli for a husband, and more, why the Timekeeper had allowed these two famous pilots a special dispensation to marry.
       Burgos Harsha, with his bushy eyebrows, jowls and long black hairs pushing out of his piglike nostrils, approached us and said, "Congratulations, Mallory. I always expected you to do something extraordinary - we all did, you know - but I never dreamed you'd break our Lord Pilot's nose the first time you met him and swear to kill yourself in that nebula known colloquially - and, I might add, quite vulgarly - as the Solid State Entity." The master historian rubbed his hands together vigorously and turned to my mother. "Now, Moira, I've examined the canons and the oral history of the Tycho as well as the customaries, and it's clear - I may be wrong, of course, but when have you known me to be wrong? - it's clear that Mallory's oath was a simple troth to the Lord Pilot, not a promissory oath to the Order. And certainly not a solemn oath. At the time he swore to kill himself - and this is a subtle point, but it's clear - he hadn't taken his vows, so he wasn't
legally
a pilot, so he was not
permitted
to swear a promissory oath."
       "I don't understand," I said. From behind me came singing, the swish of silk against silk, and the chaotic hum of a thousand voices. "I swore what I swore. What difference does it make who I swore it to?"
       "The
difference
, Mallory, is that Soli can release you from your oath, if he wants to."
       I felt a squirt of adrenalin in my throat, and my heart fluttered in my chest like a nervous bird. I thought of all the ways pilots died: They died fenestering, their brains ruined by too-constant symbiosis with their ship, and they died of old age lost in decision trees; supernovae reduced their flesh to plasma, and dreamtime, too much dreamtime, left them forever staring vacantly at the burning stars; they were killed by aliens, and murdered by human beings, and minced by meteor swarms, and charred by the penumbras of blue giant stars, and frozen by the nothingness of deep space. I knew then that despite my foolish words about death among the stars being glorious, I did not want glory, and I desperately did not want to die.
       Burgos left us, and my mother said to Justine, "You'll talk to Soli, won't you? I know he hates me. But why should he hate Mallory?"
       I kicked the heel of my boot against the floor. Justine traced her index finger along her eyebrow and said, "Soli's so difficult now. This last journey nearly killed him, inside, as well as out. Oh, I'll talk to him, of course, I'll talk on until my lips fall off as, I always do, but I'm afraid he'll just stare at me with his broody eyes and say things like, "If life has meaning, how can we know if we're meant to find it?' or, 'A pilot dies best who dies young, before crueltime kills what he loves.' I can't
really
talk to him when he's like that, of course, and I think it's possible that he thinks he's being noble, letting Mallory swear to die heroically, or perhaps he really believes Mallory will succeed and just wants to be proud of him - I can't tell
what
he thinks when he's all full of himself but I'll talk to him, Moira, of course I