“It will maintain any shape you want,” Dr. Haends promised. “You can be this, or you can be something else. You can be a white cat again, and pounce among the stars. Or why not try something new? I’m quite pleased with it now,” he said. “Yes! Look! You see? That’s it!”

She rose up and circled about awkwardly above his head. “I don’t know how to do this!” she called down to him.

“Some turns! Do some more turns! You see?”

She did some more turns. “I’m quite good at it,” she said. “I think I could be quite good at it.” The shadow operators flew up to her. They flocked to her whispering delightedly and clasping their bony work-worn hands. “You took care of me so well,” she congratulated them. Then she made herself look down at the White Cat.

“All those years!” she marvelled. “Was I that?”

She shed something that might have been tears, if an organism so bizarre—so huge and yet so frail, so perpetually emergent from its own desires—could be said to weep. “Oh dear,” she said. “I don’t know how I feel.” Suddenly she laughed. Her laughter filled the vacuum. It was the laughter of particles. She was laughing in every regime. She tried out the different things she could be: there were always more; there were always more after that. “Do you like this?” she called down. “I think I preferred the last one.” Her wings lost their look of feathers, and the Kefahuchi-light ran along them from tip to tip like wild fire. Seria Mau Genlicher laughed and laughed and laughed.

“Goodbye,” she called down.

She rose suddenly, faster than even Dr. Haends’s eyes could follow. Her shadow passed over him briefly and vanished.

After she had gone, he stood there for a time, between the empty K-ship and the remains of the physicist Michael Kearney. He was exhausted, but he couldn’t seem to settle. He bent down and picked up the dice Michael Kearney had brought to that place. He turned them over thoughtfully; put them down again. “That was tiring,” he said to himself. “They can be more tiring than you think.” After a while, he allowed himself to slip back into a shape he was more comfortable with, and stood there for a long time looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract, a small pudgy thing with a huge curved bone beak and a maroon wool coat with food stains down the front, which shrugged and said to itself:

“Well, the rest is yet to do.”

33
Ed Chianese’s Last Throw

The Perfect Low emerged from her journey down the wormhole. Her engine wound itself down then broke up into its component parts. She seemed to consider her options for a minute or two, then made off busily through local space, to arrive a little later above an asteroid in full view of the Kefahuchi Tract.