She looks particularly beautiful tonight, he thought, with the simple yellow stripes in her forehead and the three pink dots topping each. She wore matching neck and body attire of violet iridescent material. Violet and silver thread had been applied with temporary glue around her b-thorax and spicules. Silver wires formed double helixes around both arching ovipositors, an agonizingly long task at which her brother and friends had helped.

For a moment Ryo thought to boldly announce their intention to mate, but of course he could not do that without consulting her first, though he knew she would agree instantly. It was just as well, he thought. Lovely as she was, he still wasn’t certain he was ready for that.

So he stood, accepting the accolades of his clan, the four-pointed crimson star shining on his shoulder. As he thought of the lady who loved him and the certain promotion to the Inmot local council, he was quiet, contemplative.

No one in the assembled crowd of friends and relatives could have guessed that the thought uppermost in Ryozenzuzex’s mind was this: he did not hate but, instead, greatly envied the AAnn of the shuttles …

III

The ship was nearly as young as her captain. Six great oval projection fans formed a circle in front of it, attached to the octahedral bulk of the craft proper by long metal corridors and a webwork of struts and braces.

Each fan generated a portion of the posigravity field, a crude precursor of the KK drive that was to come following the Amalgamation. This field pulled the ship through Space Plus, for all that it was ungainly, unstreamlined, and resembled an angular metallic squid. Generation of the posigrav field used a great deal of energy and Space Plus was no place for timid physics. It was a region inhabited by ghost stars, where visible light turned diffuse and X-ray stars became visible. Other peculiarities were normal to Space Plus, the region of theory wherein the ships of Deep Space uncertainly made their way. A captain had to be ready to deal with all sorts of manipulative physical phenomena, some that were not matter, others that were not energy.

Below Space Plus lay normal space (“below” here signifying a place more colloquial than relativistic), where could be found predictable stars and habitable planets. Below that were the unnatural atomic and subatomic vagaries of Space Minus, or Nullspace, a region of eternity best not touched, where tachyons and other nonexistent particles became real and where ships and messages sometimes vanished more utterly than if they’d dropped into a collapsar. Nullspace was, according to a most respected Thranx theosophical physicist, “the inside-out of real.”

Captain Brohwelporvot strolled the control room of the Zinramm. Though he was on his third expedition for Deep Space Research he was still nervous about his first command. Relaxed in their saddles, his crew formed a circle around him.

Through the forward observation port the distant purple glow of the posigravity drive field marked the burrow the Zinramm was tunneling through Space Plus. They were a quarter of a season out from Hivehom system. In addition to verifying and extending the charts for this considerable section of space, they’d entered and studied two new planetary systems, one holding a world that was marginally inhabitable—a discovery by itself sufficient to make this the most productive of the three expeditions Broh had so far directed.