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half closer to the middle of the planet than the level of the outer edge.

Now imagine that you start driving in from that outer edge toward the middle, across a uniform flat blackness like polished glass. It's hot, and the atmosphere of Miranda is muggy and a bit hazy. At ten miles in you pass the first ring of buildings—warehouses and storage areas, thousand after thousand of them, thirty stories high and extending that far and more under the surface. You keep going, past the second and third and fourth storage areas, and into the first and second passenger arrival zones. You see humans in all shapes and sizes, plus Cecropians and Varnians and Lo'tfians and Hymenopts and giggling empty-headed Ditrons, and you wonder if it's all going on forever. But as you clear the second passenger ring, you notice two things. First, there's a thin vertical line dead ahead, just becoming visible on the horizon. And second, it's midday but it's getting darker.

     
You stare at that vertical line for maybe a couple of seconds. You know it must be the bottom of the stalk, running from the center of Miranda Port right up to stationary orbit, and it's no big deal—nothing compared to the forty-eight Basal Stalks that connect Cocoon to the planetary surface of Savalle.

But it's still getting darker, so you look up. And then you catch your first sight of the Shroud, the edge of it starting to intersect the sun's disk. There's the Upside of Miranda Port, the mushroom cap of the Stalk. The Shroud is nine thousand miles across. That's where the real business is done—the only place in the spiral arm where a Bose access node lies so close to a planet.

You stop the car, and your mind starts running. There's a million starships warehoused and netted up there on the edge of the Shroud, some of 'em going for a song. You know that in half an hour you could be ascending the Stalk; in less than a day you'd be up there on the Shroud, picking out some neat little vessel. And a few hours after that you could be whomping through a Transition on the Bose Network, off to another access node a dozen or a hundred or even a thousand light-years away . . .

And if you're an old traveler like me, there's the real magic of Miranda Port; the way you can sit flat on the surface of a planet, like any dead-dog stay-at-home Downsider, and know that you're only a day away from the whole spiral arm. Before you know it you're itching for another look at the million-mile lightning bolts playing among the friction rings of Culmain, or wondering what worlds the Tristan free-space Manticore is dreaming these days, or what new lies and boasts old Dulcimer, the Chism Polypheme, is telling in the spaceport bar on Bridle Gap. And suddenly you want to watch the universe turn into a kaleidoscope again, out on the edge of the Torvil Anfract in far Communion territory, where space-time knots and snarls and turns around itself like an old man's memories . . .

     
And then you know that the space-tides are running strong in your blood, and it's time to raise anchor, and kiss the lady good-bye, and hit the space-lanes again for one last trip around the Arm.

    —from Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:
Jetting Alone Around the Galaxy ; being the
personal and unadorned reminiscences of
Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloan (Retired)
(Published by Wideawake Press, March E.4125;
remaindered, May E.4125; available only in
the Rare Publications Department of the
Cam H'ptiar/Emserin Library.)

     

Chapter Four

    Money and credit meant little to an interspecies Council member. To serve the prestigious needs of a Council project, any planet in the spiral arm would readily turn over the best of its resources; and should there ever be any hesitation, a councilor had final authority to commandeer exactly who and what was needed.

    But for an ex -councilor, one who had resigned in protest. . . .

    After a lifetime in which costs were irrelevant, Julian Graves was suddenly exposed to the real world.