«School and the holo cube. We watched a lot of travelogues when we were kids. And we hung around the spaceport, so I knew they make the General Products ships.»

«And your first contact?»

«We wrote that up together. Oh, tanj, Ander! You're recording, aren't you?»

He said, «Yes,» giving me an instant to object, daring me. Who was he recording for? Who was involved in hunting Beowulf Shaeffer? If it was Sigmund Ausfaller … I'd never outguessed Sigmund yet.

Ander said, «We'll pay you a consultant's fee. Ten per hour, Beowulf. Will you accept?»

«How many hours do you need?» It was generous, but my yes would be a verbal contract. I'd be his prisoner.

He waved it off. «Until midnight. Then we can renegotiate. I need the recording for Sigmund.»

Ouch. «Until midnight,» I said, «present time being ten to noon local.»

«Your first contact with Pierson's puppeteers?»

Fifteen years flying passengers between the worlds. Then Nakamura Lines collapsed, and I was on the street … on We Made It, because the bankruptcy courts allowed us transport home. Two years later I was ready to accept an offer from anyone. Anyone …

NEUTRON STAR

The Skydiver dropped out of hyperspace an even million miles above the neutron star. I needed a minute to place myself against the stellar background and another to find the distortion Sonya Laskin had mentioned before she died. It was to my left, an area the apparent size of the Earth's moon. I swung the ship around to face it.

Curdled stars, muddled stars, stars that had been stirred with a spoon.

The neutron star was in the center, of course, though I couldn't see it and hadn't expected to. It was only eleven miles across, and cool. A billion years had passed since BVS-1 had burned by fusion fire. Millions of years, at least, since the cataclysmic two weeks during which BVS-1 was an X-ray star, burning at a temperature of five billion degrees Kelvin. Now it showed only by its mass.