“Putcha, putcha, putcha,” the Taprisiot said. “This is a remark which I will now translate in the only way that may make sense to ones like yourselves of Sol/Earth ancestry. What I said was, ‘I question your sincerity.’ ”

“You gotta justify your sincerity to a damn Taprisiot?” one of the enforcers asked. “Seems to me . . .”

“Nobody asked you!” Furuneo cut him off. Any probing attack by a Taprisiot was likely a greeting. Didn’t the fool know this?

Furuneo separated himself from the enforcers, crossed to a position below the bench. “I wish to make a call to Saboteur Extraordinary Jorj X. McKie,” he said. “Your robogreeter recognized and identified me and took my creditchit. Are you the transmitter?”

“Where is this Jorj X. McKie?” the Taprisiot asked.

“If I knew, I’d be off to him in person through a jumpdoor,” Furuneo said. “This is an important call. Are you the transmitter?”

“Date, time, and place,” the Taprisiot said.

Furuneo sighed and relaxed. He glanced back at the enforcers, motioned them to take up stations at the room’s two doors, waited while they obeyed. Wouldn’t do to have this call overheard. He turned then, gave the required local coordinates.

“You will sit on floor,” the Taprisiot said.

“Thank the immortals for that,” Furuneo muttered. He’d once made a call where the transmitter had led him to a mountainside in wind and driving rain and made him stretch out, head lower than feet, before opening the over-space contact. It had had something to do with “refining the embedment,” whatever that meant. He’d reported the incident to the Bureau’s data center, where they hoped one day to solve the Taprisiot secret, but the call had cost him several weeks with an upper respiratory infection.

Furuneo sat.

Damn! The floor was cold!

Furuneo was a tall man, two meters in bare feet, eighty-four standard kilos. His hair was black with a dusting of grey at the ears. He had a thick nose and wide mouth with an oddly straight lower lip. He favored his left hip as he sat. A disgruntled citizen had broken it during one of his early tours with the Bureau. The injury defied all the medics who had told him, “It won’t bother you a bit after it’s healed.”

“Close eyes,” the Taprisiot squeaked.

Furuneo obeyed, tried to squirm into a more comfortable position on the cold, hard floor, gave it up.

“Think of contact,” the Taprisiot ordered.

Furuneo thought of Jorj X. McKie, building the image in his mind—squat little man, angry red hair, face like a disgruntled frog.

Contact began with tendrils of cloying awareness. Furuneo became in his own mind a red flow sung to the tune of a silver lyre. His body went remote. Awareness rotated above a strange landscape. The sky was an infinite circle with its horizon slowly turning. He sensed the stars engulfed in loneliness.

“What the ten million devils!”