Daylight would have fried me before I reached my target. But the night was a gorgeous display of stars, and the waves crashed down in spectral blue and yellow flashes of luminous algae. In this light an albino would look no weirder than anyone else.

If I had a trick worth trying, it was unpredictability. Ander might trace me as far as the singles node. What he would learn there might set him to searching hospitals for a battered P. J. Hebert. He couldn’t follow coins, I thought, but if somehow he did, he’d find I had reached the Flying Island dirigible terminal, then—

Then? Somewhere else, with the same haste I’d shown up to now. Possibly I’d boarded a dirigible; more likely I was on Shasht via instantaneous booth.

But for most of an hour I rode slidebridges toward Beast Island.

On Aladdin Island I found a tourist section and a hairstyler with a wide range of settings. Nobody but a flatlander would want his hair colored. I turned it sandy and curly and short. I stopped again to buy fresh clothing and a bigger backpurse, again for a steam bath and massage and to ditch my old clothing. Ander could have left any number of cameras on my person. Well before dawn I walked into the Grail Hunt terminal, where I bought my dirigible ticket as Martin Wallace Graynor.

If Ander knew that name, he’d have Milcenta Graynor, too: Sharrol. But he didn’t have Feather, and Feather was Adelaide Graynor. We weren’t caught yet.

I boarded the Wyvern. I settled into a hammock chair and fell fast asleep.

✴
GHOST: EIGHT

The Core. Ashes of supernovas: plasma thick and glowing among millions of neutron stars. Lighter stars still glowed, still retained their retinue of planets.

Automated spacecraft streamed out from a pentagon of blue and white worlds. Terraforming began on a vast scale. Would they all be farming worlds to feed one homeworld with a population approaching quintillions? The surface would be lost. A hollow world would form and swell to Jovian size.

Tens of thousands of years away. Would anyone remember the Pierson’s puppeteers?

They would, yes. Information is too easy to record, too difficult to destroy. When the Core explosion glared in the night sky, anyone who cared would find the Fleet of Worlds in ancient United Nations records, and the record of their departure, and even Beowulf Shaeffer’s opinion, as recorded by Ander Smittarasheed, as to where they’d gone. If our civilization survived, there would be records showing whether I was right.

The easy sway of Wyvern had awakened me. I knew before I opened my eyes: we were airborne.

I studied my watch. Four hours I’d slept. Not enough. Dawn must be a long way away, but I ought to do something about it.

The floor jittered under my feet as I made my groggy way to the dispenser wall.