She said, “I know it’s chance that I’m here at all. It could have been anybody.” She shifted again. “Look, Pirius, I might have been brought here for you. But now I’ve found my own place. That’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t come swanning back and expect things to be as they were before.”

“I don’t think I ever did expect that,” he said.

“Then what?”

He shrugged. “I need you.”

She snorted. “Yeah. For sex.”

“Not just that.” He hesitated to say the word, knowing it sounded soft. “Company.”

She laughed. “What are you, a Coalescent drone? Life isn’t about company, Pirius. It’s about doing your job.”

Defensively he said, “Yes. But maybe we can help each other to be more effective. Have you thought of that?”

“What help do you need? It wasn’t even you who was sent into that weird other-place on Callisto.”

“It was a copy of me who went off and died, to spare me having to do it. Just as Pirius Blue is a copy of me, who saw friends die in action, who went back into the Core again—and because he lived through that, I won’t have to. All these copies of me, taken away to die. And I’m left standing here.”

“This talk is stupid.”

He whispered, “Or perhaps I’m not real. Pirius Blue could have died out there, at the magnetar. What if he did die? What if I’m just his ghost? Or perhaps I’m existing in somebody else’s memories, or dreams. Perhaps Pirius Blue dreamed of Earth before he died, and everything I think is happening to me is happening inside his mind, in the last fraction of a second before the starbreaker hits—”

“And maybe you’ve got your pointy head so far up your own ass it’s coming out the other end.” She pinched his kidney, hard enough to make him yelp. “Is that real enough for you?”

Before she could do it again he rolled over and grabbed her. Laughing, they wrestled. He finished up above her, with his hands locking her arms above her head. Her face was a pool of soft shadows beneath him; she looked very young.

He said, “You’re tougher than me. You always were. But don’t you feel . . . dislocated?”

“Well, a little. But you tell anybody back on Arches I said so, I’ll kick your butt.”

Hesitantly, he bent down, and kissed her, very softly, just brushing her lips. At first she was cold, unresponsive. Then she opened her mouth, and he felt the tip of her tongue on his teeth.

Once again the test rig was readied for a fresh shot at the patient Xeelee nightfighter.

It had been decided to try hooking up the CTC processor to the control systems of the test rig’s GUTdrive engines. It was possible that the CTC’s greater processing speed would permit the refinement of the control of the spacetime wave fronts sufficiently to get the result the designers wanted. Commander Darc railed at the foolishness of hooking up one experimental technology to another, but the CTC had already proven itself, in control of the grav shield. And as Nilis said, “Compared to the rest of this lash-up, CTC is a mature technology.”