"You'll have to tell me about it sometime." She tapped what she was carrying. "What are these?"

"Cassettes and a reader. Records."

She thought it over, longer than seemed necessary. Then she reached to plug one of the Grad's cassettes into a slot in front of the pilot. The pilot said, "Hey-"

"Science. My preogative," she said. She tapped two buttons. (Buttons, permanent fixtures in a row of five: yellow, blue, green, white, red.

The panel was otherwise blank, save for the transitory glowing lights within. A tap of the yellow button made all the yellow lights disappear; the white button raised new symbols in white.) "Prikazyvat Menu."

The familiar table of contents appeared within the glass: white print flowing upward. She'd chosen the cassette for cosmology. The Grad felt his hands curling to strangle her. Classifie4 classtfled! Mine!

"Prikazyvat Gold." The print shifted. The pilot was gripped by ternfled fascination, unable to look away. The Scientist's Apprentice asked the Grad, "Can you read?"

"Certainly."

"Goldblatt's World probably originated as a Neptune-like body, a gas giant world in the cometary halo that circles Levoy's Star and TeeThree, hundreds of billions of kilometers. . . klomters out. A supernova can spew its outer envelope asymmetrically due to its trapped magnetic field, leaving the remaining neutron star with an altered velocity. The planetary orbits go all to hell. In Levoy's s-scenario Goldblatt's World would have dropped very close to Levoy's Star, with its per

perihelion actually inside the neutron star's Roche Limit. Strong Roche tides would quickly warp the orbit into a circle. The planet would have continued to leak atmosphere to the present day, replacing gasses lost from the Smoke Ring and the gas torus to interstellar space.

"Goldblatt estimates that Levoy's Star went supernova a billion years ago. The planet must have been losing atmosphere for all of that time. In its present state Goldblatt's World defies description: a worldsized core of rock and metals-"

"Enough. Very good, you can read. Can you understand what you read?"

"Not that. I can guess that Levoy's Star is Voy and Goldblatt's World is Gold. The rest of it-" The Grad shrugged. His eye caught the pilot's, and the pilot flinched. He seemed shrunken into hirnself~

Dominance games. The Scientist's Apprentice had assaulted the pilot's mind with the wonders and the cryptic language of science. Now she was saying, "We have that data on our own cassettes, word for word, as far as I can remember. I hope you brought us something new."

A shadow was congealing in the silver fog around them. They were drifting back toward London Tree.

The carm's free-falling path had curved back toward the tree's midpoint. East takes you ouL Out takes you west-He had a great deal to learn about flying the carm. Because he must learn. He would learn to fly this thing, or end his days as a copsik.

There were structures here. Huge wooden beams formed a square.