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pull off some other stunt.”
    “Maybe related to all that coral he was moving?” Bayta suggested.
    “Could be,” I said. “Of course, that would require Lorelei to also have been a walker who went to my apartment to snag one of my guns. Scenario three is that the whole thing was a setup to get me to flush McMicking out into the open for him.”
    Bayta took a thoughtful sip of her lemonade. “You did say the walkers following you seemed more interested in him than in you.”
    “True,” I agreed. “On the other hand, we could still be on scenarios one or two, and deciding to follow us was just something the Modhri decided on the fly after seeing McMicking bail me out.”
    “I don’t know,” Bayta said thoughtfully. “Something about the last two scenarios bothers me.”
    “Me, too,” I said. “Starting with the fact that if Lorelei was a walker there was no reason for her to keep hanging around my apartment after she’d stolen my gun. There was certainly no reason for her to spin me that story about a kid sister in trouble.”
    “So what you’re saying is that, for good or evil, someone wants you to go looking for her,” she concluded slowly.
    I cocked an eyebrow. “‘For good or evil’?”
    She colored slightly. “I’ve been reading Earth literature lately,” she admitted. “I thought it would help me to understand… all of us… a little better.”
    I suppressed a grimace. Bayta was in effect a hybrid, a Human who’d grown up with a full-blown alien Chahwyn similarly growing up inside her. They shared much the same sort of dual mind as a walker and his Modhran colony, except that in Bayta’s case it was a true symbiosis and not simply a parasitical relationship. The Chahwyn part gave her a stamina beyond normal Human capacity, and let her communicate telepathically with the Chahwyn and the Spiders, an ability that came in handy on a regular basis.
    If I thought about it too hard, it could become a little unsettling. But for her, obviously, it worked.
    But partly because of that, and partly because Bayta had been raised by the Chahwyn, there were certain gaps in her Human cultural understanding. I’d been doing my best to help fill those gaps over the past few months by showing her some of the classic dit rec dramas by Hitchcock and Kurosawa and Reed. Now, it seemed she’d decided to branch out into literature, as well.
    Still, there was something vaguely embarrassing about her admission, composed as it was of equal parts childlikeness and the painful awareness that for all her Human appearance she still wasn’t fully Human. I turned my eyes away from her, pretending I was just checking out the area around us.
    My eyes halted their sweep, Bayta’s discomfiture abruptly forgotten. Sitting on a bench fifty meters away, his left profile turned to me, was a Pirk.
    There was nothing unusual about that per se. Pirks loved to travel, and were reputed to spend more of their income on that than anything else except housing. This particular Pirk was typical of his people: wiry, covered with goose-like feathers, wearing the simple headdress that denoted modest means and social standing. He was gazing across the platforms that straddled the various four-railed Quadrail tracks running along the inside of the Tube.
    But there was something else about him, something that was decidedly atypical of the species. The bubble of empty space that typically surrounded every Pirk wasn’t there. Other travelers, Humans as well as non-Pirk aliens, were passing by his bench without veering away, some of them getting as close as a meter before they even seemed to notice he was there.
    Either Terra Station was witnessing a mass paralysis of the olfactory organs, or else we’d stumbled across the galaxy’s first non-aromatic Pirk.
    “Frank?” Bayta asked.
    “Take a look,” I said, nodding fractionally toward the bench. “The Pirk over there with the yellow-and-pale-blue headdress.”
    Lifting her lemonade, she