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my ship was still on Glister, along with all our major credit. It took our last sou to get us to Miranda. And here we are."

    "May I speak?" But this time Tally did not wait for permission. "You are here. I see that. But why are you here? I mean, why did you come to Miranda, where neither you nor Atvar H'sial are at home? Why did you not go to some other and more familiar region of the spiral arm?"

    Careful! Councilor Graves, whether he be Julius, Steven, or Julian, can read more truth than you think. Atvar H'sial's comment to Louis Nenda was more a command than a warning.

    Relax, At! This is the time to tell the truth. "Because until we can return to the planetoid Glister and to my ship, the Have-It-All , Atvar H'sial and I are flat broke. The only valuable things that either of us own"—Nenda reached into his pants pocket, pulled out two little squares of recorder plastic, and squeezed them—"are these."

    Under the pressure of his fingers, the squares began to intone simultaneously: "This is the ownership certificate of the Lo'tfian, J'merlia, ID 1013653, with all rights assigned to the Cecropian dominatrix, Atvar H'sial." "This is the ownership certificate of the Hymenopt, Kallik WSG, ID 265358979, with all rights assigned to the Karelian human, Louis Nenda." And to repeat: "This is the ownership certificate of the Lo'tfian, J'merlia, ID—"

    "That'll do." Nenda pressed the edge of the plastic wafers, and they fell silent. "The slaves J'merlia and Kallik are the only assets we got left, but we own 'em free and clear, as you know and as these documents prove."

    Nenda paused for breath. The hard bit was coming right now.

    "So we've come here to claim 'em and take 'em back to Miranda Port, and rent 'em out so we'll have enough credit to travel back to Glister and get the Have-It-All ." He glared at Graves. "And it's no good you gettin' mad and tellin' us that J'merlia and Kallik are free agents because we let 'em go free back on Serenity, because none of that's documented, and these"—he waved the squares—"prove otherwise. So don't give me any of that. Just tell me, where are they?"

    Graves was going to give him a big argument, Nenda just knew it. He faced the councilor, waiting for the outburst.

    It never came. Multiple expressions were running across Graves's face, but not one of them looked like anger. There was satisfaction and irony, and even what might be a certain amount of sympathy in those mad and misty gray eyes.

    "I cannot deliver J'merlia and Kallik to you, Louis Nenda," he said. "Even if I would. For one very good reason. They are not here. Both of them left Delbruck just two hours ago—on a high-speed transit to Miranda Port."

     

    MIRANDA PORT

     
"If you wait long enough in the Miranda Spaceport, you'll run into everyone worth meeting in the whole spiral arm."

There's a typical bit of Fourth Alliance thinking for you. Pure flummery. The humans of the Alliance are a cocky lot—no surprise in that, all the senior clade species think they're God's gift to the universe, with an inflated view of the importance of their own headquarters world and its spaceport.

But I'm telling you, the first time you visit Miranda Port, you think for a while that the Alliance puffery might be right.

     
I've seen a thousand ports in my time, from the miniship jet points of the Berceuse Chute to the free-space Ark Launch Complex. I've been as close as any human dare go to the Builder Synapse, where the test ships shimmer and sparkle and disappear, and no one has ever figured out where those poor bugger "volunteers" inside them go, or why the lucky ones come back.

And Miranda Port? Right up there with the best of them, when it comes to pure boggle-factor.

Visualize a circular plain on a planetary surface, two hundred miles across—and I mean a plain, absolutely level, not part of the surface of the globe. The whole downside of Miranda Port is flat to the millimeter, so the center of the circle is a mile and a