He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out on a view that was less than exciting.

Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in his wake. When he cleared the forward view, they would shine a hellish blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly flattened. But now there were only stars, white points sparsely scattered across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid the blazing glory of home.

The light in the center of the view was not a star. It was big as a sun, dark at the center, and bright enough to have burned holes in a man’s retinae. It was the light of a Bussard ramjet, burning a bare eight miles away. Every few years Phssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow, periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship from becoming a tiny nova. But the blue-white light had not changed at all in the weeks he’d been watching it.

For most of a long, slow lifetime the heavens had been crawling past Phssthpok’s porthole. Yet he remembered little of that voyage. The time of waiting had been too devoid of events to interest his memory. It is the way with the protector stage of the Pak species, that his leisure memories are of the past, when he was a child and, later, a breeder, when the world was new and bright and free of responsibilities. Only danger to himself or his children can rouse a protector from his normal dreamy lassitude to a fighting fury unsurpassed among sentient beings.