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to just outside the windows, for the gripliner airlocks were positioned in an octagon around the lobby. As Jak watched, a gripliner was just arriving, a silver cylinder the size of three gymnasiums sliding down the bright line of the linducer cable like a drop of mercury on a wire, as it lost the very last of its speed before slipping into the airlock to dock.
    Jak wandered aimlessly around the central shopping area, shuttered now because it was still some hours until First Shift would be getting up and going to work. As he made one trip or another around the cluster of cafes, newsstands, and office supply stores, Dujuv would turn up.
    Glancing at his reflection in the shop windows as he passed, Jak thought he was doing a superior job of being conspicuous in a good way—his clothes for the evening were the very model of clash-splash-andsmash; he looked right from head to foot. He had chosen to wear his new singlet with spirals of nonfunctional buttons, over his zebra print coverall, with lace-up red gripslip-pers with grown-lizard soles. Over the singlet, he wore his lavender cutaway with big, droopy, double-rolled sleeves, popular that year at the Academy and just starting to spread down into gen school; he’d have to take that off, of course, for the dancing, but right now it definitely added. The unattached collar and bowler hat completed the look; he stood out in a way that said he had taste and style, not quite perhaps at the heliopause of fashion, but toktru his orbit was close to tangential to it.
    The crowd now coming in for the next gripliner seemed to be mostly families with young children. Jak remembered vaguely that there was a big public play area near Centrifuge, so quite possibly it was just all the Third Shifters who had the day off. The station echoed with screams and shouts; very low gravity is a hard place in which to cope with very small children—when they can leap five meters into the air, and they take ten full seconds to descend from that height, more if they airswim, little kids rapidly begin exploring whole new dimensions of misbehavior. Jak quickly lost count of the number of times he heard a parent hissing or growling to a child, “Do that one more time and I’ll leash you like a two-year-old.”
    Not that leashes on two-year-olds were doing much good; the common slang for a two-year-old on a leash was “yoyo,” and not merely for the resemblance to the toy. As Jak watched, two leashes, then two tantrums, then two mothers all became hopelessly entangled.
     
    His view through the big viewports in the central dome far over his head was disturbed only by the occasional high-jumping older child. The stars seemed motionless overhead, although the ferry station crawled along the big track that circled the Hive. The Hive itself didn’t rotate at all; there was no reason for it to do so, since it got its gravity from the black hole of the power plant at its center, and kept its sunside cool and its dark-side warm with an active circulatory system. But gravity was a drawback for many industrial processes and recreation in zero-g was one of the great pleasures to which humanity had become addicted in a millennium and a half of spaceflight. Hence the Ring orbited the Hive at a distance of about 3500 kilometers above its surface decks, a tubular industrial park, playground, port, sports arena, farm, and whatever else it needed to be, less than half a kilometer across but more than 28,000 km long. It was connected by a few hundred ribbons of linducer track running between regularly-spaced gripliner stations on the underside of the Ring and moving stations on the great track that belted the Hive, so that the Hive-side stations followed along, like a toy dog on wheels, under the Ring. Thus the gripliner stations were the only places on the Hive that had regular, predictable days and nights and rising and setting stars.
    Just at the moment, the station was rolling around the dark side of the Hive, and the