“What would you understand,” Seria Mau asked it, “by the idea ‘ Evidence of myself?’ ”

“Not much,” the fetch said. “Is that why you did this? To leave evidence of yourself? Over here, we wonder why you kill your own kind so ruthlessly.” Seria Mau had been asked this before.

“They’re not my kind,” she said.

“They are human.”

She greeted this argument with the silence it deserved, then after a moment said:

“Where’s the money?”

“Ah, the money. Where it always is.”

“I don’t want local currency.”

“We almost never use local currencies,” the fetch said, “although we sometimes deal in them.” Its larger joints appeared to vent some kind of gas. “Are you ready to fight again? We have several missions available forty lights down the Beach. You would be up against military vessels. It’s a real part of the war, not ambushing civilians like this.”

“Oh, your war,” she said dismissively. Fifty wars, big and small, were going on out here in plain sight of the Kefahuchi Tract; but there was only one fight, and it was the fight over the spoils. She had never even asked them who their enemy was. She didn’t want to know. The Nastic were strange enough. Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens. “Motives,” she thought, staring at the collection of legs and eyes in front of her, “are a sensorium thing. They are an Umwelt thing. The cat has a hard job to imagine the motives of the housefly in its mouth.” She thought about this. “The housefly has a harder job,” she decided.

“I have what I want now,” she told the fetch. “I won’t be fighting for you again.”

“We could offer more.”

“It wouldn’t help.”

“We could make you do what we want.”

Seria Mau laughed.

“I’ll be gone from here faster than your vessel can think. How will you find me then? This is a K-ship.”

The fetch left a calculated silence.

“We know where you are going,” it said.

This gave Seria Mau a cold feeling, but only for a fraction of a second. She had what she wanted from the Nastic. Let them try. She broke contact and opened the ship’s mathematical space.

“Look at that!” the mathematics greeted her. “We could go there. Or there. Or look, there. We could go anywhere. Let’s go somewhere!”