A Xeelee nightfighter is a hundred-yard sycamore seed wrought in black. The wings sweep back from the central pilot's pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they are so fine you can see the stars through them.

Lipsey caught me gawping. "Save it. You've seen nothing yet..."

The pilot's pod was an open framework about my height. A human crash couch had been cemented inside it. I clambered through the skeletal hull and into the couch. The hull became a mesh of blackness around me that barely excluded the stars. "Kind of open," I said.

Lipsey, watching from outside, laughed a bit unsympathetically. "Evidently the Xeelee don't suffer from vertigo. Do you?"

I clamped the translator box to a strut above my head. Now the Qax spoke. "Study your controls, Bolder."

"Right." Set ahead of me and to my sides were three control panels, each briefcase-sized. Magnifying monitors showed me sequinlike control studs. Waldoes would let me work the panels by my sides, but there was no waldo for the third.

"The panels to your sides are for in-system flight," said the Qax. "The third, before you, is for the hyperspace drive. The three panels were the only equipment found in this ship -- apart from the synchrotron handgun."

"I'm not getting that back?"

"The Qax think you're dangerous enough as it is," Lipsey said quietly.

The Qax continued: "We've worked out a setting to take you out to the Great Attractor. Just hit the red button, on the left of the third panel. Hit it again to come home."

I ran a gloved finger over the surface of the third panel. Apart from the red button the panel was half-melted... unusable. I asked why.

"Of course," the Qax explained acidly, "you'd never be tempted to steal a treasure like this, but..."

I slipped my hands into the waldo manipulators. The ship woke up. "So tell me how I fly this thing."

The wings of the sycamore seed billowed out, a shaken blanket a hundred miles wide.

"The motive force comes from the structure of space itself," the Qax explained. "The wings are sheets of discontinuity in space. The -- healing up -- of space drives the ship forward."

I squeezed minutely. The wings trembled and the pod jerked. Lipsey and his flitter disappeared. "Try to restrain your monkey impulse to meddle," said the Qax. "You've just traveled half a light second."

I let go, fast.

"Now," said the Qax. "A controlled pressure with your right index finger..."

All I've ever wanted to do is fly. I've given up everything else in life for it, I suppose... and now my wings pulsed like sheets of shadow as I flew around the Qax star at half the speed of light. I stared into the eye of a vacuole and, whooping, whizzed under the blue-shifted arch of a stellar flare.