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idea,” I said, taking the reader from her. “What’s your last name, by the way?”
    “I don’t have one,” she said, adjusting herself in her seat. “We’ll be rejoining the train in about an hour. If you have any questions, please wake me.”
    She closed her eyes, and for a moment I studied that nondescript face of hers. She’d be watching every move I made from now on, I knew, ready to whistle up the nearest Spider at the first wrong step.
    I turned back around to face forward. I still didn’t know if the Spiders were on to me or not. But if they were, they were certainly giving me plenty of rope with which to hang myself. It would be a shame to let that much good rope go to waste.
    Settling back into my seat, I got to work.
    Chapter Four
    Exactly one hour and nine minutes later I felt a slight jolt run through the car. Two minutes after that, the connecting door at the front of the car irised open and a conductor appeared from the vestibule, its slender legs picking their way carefully down the narrow aisle toward us. I watched it come, listening to Bayta’s slow breathing behind me; and as the Spider came within five meters of us I heard a sudden catch in the rhythm as she came awake. “Yes?” she called.
    “I think we’re here,” I said, half turning to look at her.
    “Yes, we are,” she said, her fingertips rubbing the skin on either side of her eyes. “He’s come to show us to our new compartment.”
    “Do you know which one is ours?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Then tell it thanks, but we’ll get there on our own,” I said. “An escort will just draw unnecessary attention.”
    She hesitated, then nodded. “All right,” she said, locking her eyes onto the conductor. Its globe dipped slightly in response, and it reversed direction and left the car. “So?” she prompted. “Are we going?”
    “Patience,” I said, studying my watch. So apparently all she had to do was to look at a Spider to communicate with it. Interesting. “In another twenty minutes we’ll reach New Tigris. There won’t be a lot of traffic coming and going, but at least we won’t be the only ones on the move.”
    We sat in silence until, twenty minutes later, we decelerated to a stop. Then, as the expected trickle of passengers began, we headed forward.
    The walk proved more interesting than I’d expected. On the Quadrail trips I’d taken while working for Westali I’d normally traveled third class, making it up to second only on the rare occasion when some nervous medium-level bureaucrat insisted on having an escort assigned to him. In each of those latter instances I’d ended up in cars dominated by other humans, either business or government types or minor celebrities who couldn’t swing the price of a first-class seat.
    Now, as we passed through the last of the second-class cars into the first-class section, I got to see how the galaxy’s elite and powerful traveled.
    The seats themselves were, not surprisingly, larger and better furnished than those in second and third class. They were also far more mobile. Third-class seats were fixed in place, with only limited adjustability. Second-class seats were a step up from that, attached to small floor circles that permitted them to both rotate and also move laterally to a limited extent, allowing passengers to create little conversation circles for themselves. The first-class cars had gone this one better, with seats that could be moved anywhere in the car, allowing a lounge atmosphere in which neat rows and aisles were pretty much nonexistent.
    What was surprising to me was how the occupants had used this flexibility to sort themselves out. Unlike the lower classes, where travelers tended to congregate with their own species, the first-class cars were much more heterogeneous. Shorshians and Bellidos sat together, engaged in serious discussions, while here and there humans conversed as equals with Halkas or Juriani, despite the fact that both those races had been