The Marty Lingham discovered a bleak

orbit; hooked by a fuchsia dwarf,

perihelion at the customary handful

of millions: cometary, cemetery.

He showed his nasty old teeth to Captain Truck, recognizing another loser, however well disguised. He screwed up his dreadful face, winked.

'An intellectual, am I right, bos'n -?' he began his spiel, stepping craftily into Truck's bee-line.

'If it hadn't been for that,' Truck swore later, 'I might have given him something.'

Inside the Rave, it was a different matter: inside, Tiny Skeffern, the Galaxy's last great musician, was blowing his brains out through his instrument like the contents of a rare egg.

John Truck knew him of old. He stood five foot three and slightly built in the Rave's confusion of spots and strobes and kaleidomats, tapping his right foot. His hair was sparse, curly, and blond — at twenty-two years, he already had a bald patch. When he wasn't playing, he was spring-heeled, he was a leaper; when he was, he stayed in one place for minutes on end, giving the ladies a reserved but cheeky smile. He was an enthusiastic loser from way back, and he nodded when Truck came in.

He played a four-hundred-year-old Fender Stratocaster with all the switchgear jammed full on, through a stack of Luthos amps — each one with a guaranteed output of half a kilowatt — and a battery of Hydrogen Line thirty-inch speakers. He had a loose-limbed Denebian queen, all pink flares and slashed sleeves, on bass; his drummer was a local man, looking seedy and aggressive by turns like all good drummers. His sound:

His sound was long-line and hairy, slow and grinding, full of inexplicable little runs and complications. He stalked the Denebian bass through the harmonies; he made sounds like breaking glass and exploding quasars, like dead ships and orbital confrontations and eras of geological upheaval; he made sounds like God.