She was nineteen years old, and she had already met Black Orpheus four times. He even began joking that he’d wander into the least likely bar on the least likely planet he could think of, and there would be Moonripple, scrubbing floors, cleaning tables, or washing dishes. The highlight of her brief life was the single verse he created about her one evening on Voorhite XIV, when he was playing his lute and singing his ballad to keep his mind off the storm that was raging through the chlorine atmosphere just beyond the human colony’s domed enclosure.

She fascinated him, this waif with a future that seemed no more promising than her past. Where did she come from? How many worlds had she been to? What was she searching for? Had she no higher aspiration than to be a barmaid to the galaxy? She tried to help him, but she truly didn’t know any of the answers.

The last time he saw her was on Trefoil III. She was waiting on some twenty-five tables by herself and falling increasingly behind. When her employer began yelling at her and threatening to beat her if her performance didn’t improve, Orpheus stepped forward and stated that since she couldn’t remember when she had been born, he was officially declaring this to be her seventeenth birthday and was taking her out to dinner. The crowd was thirsty and ill tempered, and probably not even Sebastian Cain or Peacemaker MacDougal could have taken the tavern’s only barmaid away and emerged unscathed, but because he was Black Orpheus they let him lead her out of the bar without a word of protest.

He fed her, and bought her new clothes, and even offered to take her with him until he could find her a permanent job on some other world. She replied with disarming sincerity that she bore her employer no ill will and had no desire for any other type of work. Orpheus got the feeling that she was afraid to form any bond, either emotional or financial, that might tie her down to a particular world until she finally found the as-yet-undefined thing she was searching for. They talked far into the morning, the Bard who took such pleasure in the endless variety of Men and worlds he visited, completely unable to understand the wanderlust of one who seemed to take no pleasure in anything.

Finally, when it was time for him to leave, he offered her a few hundred credits, enough to book passage to another planet with another tavern, but she refused, explaining that it rarely took her more than a month or two to save enough money to move on to the next world, and that she would feel guilty about taking money from a man who had already done so much for her.