The red stars were the biggest and brightest. I could actually pick some of them out as individuals. The rest was a finger painting in fluorescent green and blue. But those red stars … they would have sent Aldebaran back to kindergarten.

It was all so bright. I needed the telescope to see black between the stars.

I'll show you how bright it was.

Is it night where you are? Step outside and look at the stars. What color are they? Antares may show red if you're near enough; in the system, so will Mars. Sirius may show bluish. But all the rest are white pinpoints. Why? Because it's dark. Your day vision is in color, but at night you see black and white, like a dog.

The Core suns were bright enough for color vision.

I'd pick a planet here! Not in the Core itself but right out here, with the Core on one side and on the other the dimly starred dust clouds forming their strange convoluted curtain.

Man, what a view! Imagine that flaming jeweled sphere rising in the east, hundreds of times as big as Binary shows on Jinx, but without the constant feeling Binary gives you, the fear that the orange world will fall on you, for the vast, twinkling Core is only starlight, lovely and harmless. I'd pick my world now and stake a claim. When the puppeteers got their drive fixed up, I'd have the finest piece of real estate in the known universe! If I could only find a habitable planet.

If only I could find it twice.

Hell, I'd be lucky to find my way home from here. I shifted into hyperspace and went back to work.

V.

An hour and fifty minutes, one lunch break and two rest breaks, and fifty light-years later, I noticed something peculiar in the Core.

It was even clearer then, if not much bigger; I'd passed through the almost transparent wisps of the last dust cloud. Not too near the center of the sphere was a patch of white, bright enough to make the green and blue and red look dull around it. I looked for it again at the next break, and it was a little brighter. It was brighter again at the next break …