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trying to grasp in some way the secrets that must lie within that sleeping mind. At least, I thought it was sleeping. Some of the learned warlocks at Gonlanburg contended that a long coma, no matter how induced or supported, would inevitably destroy brain tissue. That would leave my beautiful alien some sort of preserved vegetable, her secrets locked up forever. I couldn’t believe that.
    In Rhada we tend to be a bit more religious than in the nations of the galactic center, probably because we are a Rim planet. When one can see the shapes of the galactic lens so clearly in the darkness of the night, one tends to glorify the unknown powers of God and the holy Star spirit. So it was inevitable that the clergy, the Order of Navigators, should be consulted on the theological aspects of the alien in the laboratories in Gonlanburg. Priest-Navs of all the medical disciplines gathered at the university to study and to give tongue to their opinions. I learned of all this second hand, through friends at the university, for after the court adjourned, I was put on leave from the Survey Wing (this was the brass’s way of preserving me while they decided what to do with a reprimanded Fleet officer who was also hereditary warleader and Starkahn of Rhada).
    Ariane was refitted at New Kynan and given leave, too. She chose to spend her rest period playing manta in the Gonlan Sea. I think she did it for me, knowing I’d want someone on Gonlan while I paid my respectful duty to Lady Nora on the home estates in Rhada. Ariane called me by hyperphone every three days to keep me informed about what was happening to the silver-eyed girl in the capsule. “After all,” Ariane explained, “she is as much my responsibility as she is yours , Starkahn.” I didn’t know what to make of such remarks, but I was glad she took the trouble to report to me.
    On the twelfth day of Iceblue, our coldest month on Rhada, Ariane called me to say that the weather was warm and balmy on the Gonlanburg coast, that the sea was clear and the diving good, and that, incidentally, a commission of warlocks and Navigators had recommended that the university medical staff attempt to revive the alien girl within a month or less, since the power sources available did not match exactly the systems of the life-support capsule and they feared a malfunction might produce irreversible damage. “They say they have to take a chance on revival,” Ariane reported, “because the starship is gone and, well, you know the rest of it--”
    I did, indeed, know the rest of it. If they tried and failed to revive the alien girl, I would be forever damned as the idiot who had killed mankind’s only contact with whatever mysterious branch of the race had created the vast technology that had produced the greatest starship ever heard of in the main galaxy.
    “Reserve accommodations for me at Zodiac Bay,” I told Ariane. “I have to be there when the magicians try to wake her.”
    “Not a sensible decision, Starkahn,” Ariane said. “But more like you than skulking about at home nursing your wounds. I will expect you in thirty hours.”
    As I rang off, I became conscious of the Lady Nora watching me. She stood in the doorway of my suite, looking statuesque and quite properly framed by the ancient stones of the archway.
    “That was Ariane, I suppose,” she said.
    “Yes, Lady Mother,” I replied formally and politely, like a well-brought-up child. The truth was that I always felt a bit like a child in Lady Nora’s presence. She was certainly one of the most beautiful women of the Empire, even though she was close to seventy years old. She had never undergone geri-genesis, and consequently she hadn’t that parchment-skin quality that old reborns get. In an earlier age, Lady Nora would have passed easily for a woman in her early thirties--perhaps even younger than that. One must remember that she is a noblewoman of the Empire: a personage who has never known a day’s want or an