As his eyes dark-adapted, more stars came out, peering around Charon’s limb, and he made out more detail on the moon’s mottled surface. He leaned close to Mara’s shoulder to see, and his cheek brushed the coarse cloth of her robe. There was a mustiness about her, but he was not repelled, as he had been by Draq; she was strange, he thought, even eccentric, but oddly likeable. He wondered what her story was, how she had come to be assigned to a covert establishment on this remote world.

She pointed again. “There—can you see? Look along my arm.”

Suddenly he saw it, stretching between Pluto and its moon. Only dimly visible in Sol’s reduced light, a glimmer here, a stretch of arc there, it was nothing like the Bridge that had been erected between Earth and its Moon—this was finer, more elegant, more organic than that. But it was a line that spanned worlds nevertheless.

Pirius had heard of this. “It’s natural, isn’t it?”

“It’s spiderweb,” she breathed. “Pluto-Charon is swathed in spiderweb.”

Nilis came bustling up. “One of Sol system’s more memorable spectacles,” he said. “And it is only possible here, where both worlds are locked face to face.” He slapped Pirius on the back. “But we aren’t here to sightsee, Ensign! We have work to do.”

Reluctantly they rejoined the rest of the group, who were crowding into a flitter.

The journey was going to be long, Pirius was told; they would be taken right around the curve of the world. He was dismayed that the little craft was already full of these exiled scientists’ peculiar odors.

As they took their places, Mara sat beside Pirius. She said, “You must come back in the spring, when the spiders of Pluto come out to sail between the worlds and build their webbing all over again.”

“Spring? When’s that?”

“Oh, about another seventy years . . .”

The flitter lifted smoothly.

They flew silently through the geometry of the double worlds.

Pirius, retreating from the chattering group, spent the journey preparing a long Virtual message to Torec, who was stuck at Saturn, still working on the development of the CTC processor. He fixed a cloak of antisound around himself so the Plutinos would not be offended by what he had to say about them.

When the cramped little craft began at last to descend, Charon was long lost beneath the horizon. There was nothing to be seen here, nothing but the fractured, ancient ground. But before the flitter, the ground rose to a ridge. Beyond this, evidently, was what they had come to see.

Draq said, “We’ll walk from here, rather than fly. It’s best if you come to the facility yourself. There’s nothing quite so striking as a purely human experience—don’t you think, Commissary?”

Pirius was glad to seal up his skinsuit, which smelled of nothing but him. But the Commissary, as usual, demurred, and insisted that a Virtual projection would do just as well for him.