Two small figures moved silently amid the handlike vanes of the desktop holotor frame, stretching and warming up prior to the competition.

"Cancel it," said Neil B. He turned his back on the vista stretching into the distance and faced the small cabin's port. Cloudlight from Kendrick's World washed his dark face, throwing his cheekbones into relief.

The athletes faded from view. The holotor folded its vanes prayerfully and sank part way into the top of the oblique irruption of floorstuff that currently served Neil as a desk.

Blasted ball of rock and gas, Neil thought while staring at the blue and white arc of the planet.

"The game begins in thirty minutes," said Haltija. The voice seemingly emanated from the air in front of Neil and not from the com-link patch interfaced with his brain. Like most of the other crew Neil preferred not to share his thought-space with another being. TJ's inner "voice" was so placed in Neil's sonic spectrum so that it seemed located a meter in front of him at eye level.

Over his shoulder Neil cast a baleful look at his desk. The holotor put forth a pseudopod, apparently uncertain whether or not to unfold again.

Neil sighed. The holotor stayed shut. "Compared to football," he said, "envies are glorified hide-and-seek."

"Most of your crew-family would not agree."

"Most of them never played football."

"Were anyone to ask me," the saber went on, "I would speculate that your upcoming meeting with Usona Vabbidge is causing you some apprehension."

"Fortunately, no one is likely to ask you," said Neil, smiling in spite of his dark mood. "But you're right. I'm not looking forward to it."

Neil had heard people who weren't spacers say that sapio-cybernisms--sabers, in the common parlance--were no more capable of interpersonal communication than autistic humans. Even some non-spacer sabertechs, reactionaries, said so; but Neil felt that Haltija had more insight than half the crew, not to mention a better sense of humor.

Haltija said, "The choice of landing site is yours alone. Representative Vabbidge must accept your decision as final."

The saber's inference was startlingly human; Neil entertained a fleeting thought about the DIS. The Design Intelligence System had quit Earth for the stars centuries before, leaving behind dozens of early generation "dysfunctional" systems: sabers such as TJ.

But the DIS was history, while Usona Vabbidge was very much of the here-and-now. "In theory, you're correct," Neil said with irony. "In practice, I might have to obey a direct order from her, if she doesn't like what I have to say."

"She is in charge of this expedition only nominally until its coordinating personnel actually set foot on Kendrick's World. After that she may issue direct orders; not before."

Neil leaned back in his contoured chair and stretched hugely. His knuckles almost touched the walls of his cabin. Rank accorded him no privileges in terms of personal space. The cabin's smartwalls were currently set to Hoagland, a 3D representation of the space colony that had been his home as a youth. Neil enjoyed staring down the cylindrical vista, across concave lakes and a colorful patchwork of fields and cantons. While it gave the illusion of volume, the holo also left him feeling enclosed. Like most spacers, he found this comforting.

The sharp, icy light from Kendrick's World, however, overloaded the walls in places, allowing ghostly glimpses of shiny organo-colloids beneath: the reality of the walls.

"Again, true enough...in theory," he said, reaching under his tunic to scratch his ribs. "But I'll tell you this, TJ: I may not know much about politics--much to my mother's dismay--but I do know it doesn't pay to argue with Vabbidge."

"You have never before shown such reluctance to question the authority of any government official," said Haltija.

"I never had one like Usona Vabbidge aboard my ship."

"She must rely on your experience as captain-father," Haltija said. "She has no de facto authority over the crew family."

"No, but any trouble with her could have me up in front of an Implementation review board on Earth. This expedition isn't some everyday name-it-and-claim-it. Officially, Kendrick's World is a former colony. Our conduct--my conduct--is going to be scrutinized by more committees than I could name in an hour."

"Political interactions defy logic even more than most other forms of human activity," said Haltija.

"You'll get no argument from me." Neil stood. With hands clasped behind his back, he leaned toward the port, squinting out at the brilliance of Kendrick's World. A sensuous arc of blue and white bulged toward him, cradled in thin encircling arms of cream, deep blue and off black. Clouds obscured much of the dark yellow landmasses.

Despite his very real feeling of friendship toward Haltija, Neil knew he could never admit to the saber that neither the complicated politics of the situation nor the more immediate task of having to deal with a temperamental Implementation representative really bothered him. Rather, he could not rid himself of a disquieting premonition of disaster.

Neil's foreboding had begun almost from the day Haltija slid out of cellspace a light year and a half out from Kendrick's World's primary. No matter how often he admonished himself for falling prey to his mother's habit of expecting the worst, he couldn't banish his unease. As captain-father he felt obliged not to discuss his feelings with any of his human crew-family, even the psis. And Haltija, being a saber, would lend no credence to such nonlogical thoughts as premonitions.

The planet pressed on him like a mounting debt. Just the thought of it out there--he scowled and shook his head.

"TJ," he said, dropping into his chair, "I'm going out for a while."

"Very well."

The processors in the chair accessed the holotor network. Around him Hoagland vanished, replaced by an external view. He might have been sitting precariously balanced on the outer curve of Haltija's sculpted midsection, the stars lost in the glory of light reflected from Kendrick's World.

From here the view toward the bow was interrupted by the main mass of the communications assembly, an irregularly-shaped structure bearing masts and dishes, pointed Solward--not that Sol, 10 light years distant, was visible among the dust of stars. To port, an immense vane bearing solar collectors was spread to catch available energy. Its mate, to starboard, was as large but made complex at its root by a maze of catwalks, modules and hemispheres. These housed a diverse hydroponics system. Astern were the main engines and the shuttle bay, hidden by the curve of the hull.

"Ahead at half a meter per second," said Neil. The chair seemingly began sliding along the hull. His palms grew damp.

"Aida, I think," he said. The opera's familiar strains opened in his mind. Music came over the saber's systems as well as its voice, and this Neil did have positioned within his head.

It relaxed him, made him reflective even in this time of increased pre-landing stress.

He had had plenty of dirtside training, including backpacking trips into the Shenandoahs, nights spent sleeping under the stars in the Gobi, treks across Antarctic icefields and hasty scrambles to melt permafrost for drinking water within the ringwall of Korolev crater on Mars. Though he had become intellectually acclimated to a convex horizon, the sight would never be second nature. He didn't delude himself that he would ever be able to fully appreciate what it must be like to live one's life under an open sky, watching ships sink below the horizon rather than rising above, shrinking in pellucid distance.

Neil had grown up among the landed gentry of Earth's oldest continuously inhabited orbital community. It had never occurred to him to question his privileged status. He played freeball in the outer hull courts every day after school, then often took a coriolid tram ninety degrees around the hullcurve to a lake to watersky with friends. High above the slope of the lake, hanging from a line tethered to a speeding pleasure boat, he could see sunlight glinting off the polished carapaces of robot threshers, kilometers away across the sky on the opposite inner surface.

Not that he hadn't had plenty of occasion to see Earth and Luna, but viewing a planet from space wasn't the same as being on one, with nowhere to go.

And this envie simulation of a tour along Haltija's hull wasn't the same as being back in Hoagland--not that he wanted to be there, or anywhere near where his mother could evidence her disinterest in him.

As though becoming a spacer were a crime, he thought.

Among Hoagland's aristocrats, grudges could be held for generations. The colony's inhabitants hadn't forgotten the civil strife that had split their troubled society, sending many expatriates to the Belt kingdom, whose denizens were still derogatorily called Roiders by the Hoaglanders.

But it wasn't simply a matter of his having opted to become a spacer. He knew he probably wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for Evan, his younger brother.

Even as children it was easy to see that Neil was the gifted athlete, the superior student. Success came easy to him. To Evan, three years younger, nothing came easy. Sickly from birth and hobbled by a learning disability that resisted all therapy, Evan had nevertheless refused to be overshadowed by his younger brother. Evan drove himself to do better in school, to excel on the playing field.

Neil had felt protective of his brother. It hadn't mattered to him that Evan attracted more attention--at first for his problems, later for his achievements. Somehow that seemed perfectly natural, and Neil actually took pride in having been able to help Evan.

Then, when he was 17 and Evan 14, the brothers had been returning in an old shuttlecraft from a soccer competition in another colony when an accident caused a sudden decompression of the vehicle's passenger compartment. Neil had made it into his suit, but Evan, marginally slower, had not.

Neil's parents never really recovered from the blow. His father began drinking more. His mother became increasingly distant. It seemed that nothing Neil could do after that was ever good enough for her.

He became attracted to the space service arm of the Implementation. Half as a lark he took the entrance exam for the Academy, though he had previously been on track to become a lawyer. Rather to his surprise, he passed the exam. Even more to his surprise, he decided to enter the Academy.

"That's enough for now," he said. His cabin dissolved back into his field of vision.

Neil stood. "Closet," he said. A panel slid aside, revealing a row of clothing. He selected a fresh uniform: dark gray tunic set off by lighter gray breast pockets and metallic gold piping at wrists and shoulders. The loose knee-length breeches were the same gray as the pockets. Neil didn't enforce a dress code aboard the sabership, but liked to wear a uniform of his own design for social occasions. Those among his crew-family who wore clothing had similar ones.

He secured his stockings with standard-issue garters, and slid soft-soled sandals onto his feet. As always he found the choice of cosmetics difficult. At last he selected a tastefully unobtrusive deep maroon eye shadow that alluded to the formality of the occasion without over-emphasizing it.

Misgivings could be, had to be, ignored. The mission charter mandated Kendrick's World's initiation into Implementation society. Failure, his superiors on Earth had made clear, was unacceptable.

A C major 7 chord sounded. Neil recognized it as Fir-Bolg Domnan's query signal.

"Go ahead, Fir," Neil said.

Domnan, the chief engineer, was at 85 the oldest man aboard. "I know you're busy," he said quickly, "but there's something you need to see. Can I have a few moments of your time in Engineering?"

"I've got a meeting with Vabbidge scheduled right after the game, Fir," said Neil as he applied the last strokes of makeup. "And the corridors are supposed to be kept clear to test the envie field."

"I know. This is important."

Neil pursed his lips. Domnan wasn't given to hyperbole.

"It's about Haltija," the engineer added. There was an odd note in his voice, a note Neil had never before heard.

"Very well."

The ship's halls were indeed empty. Whoever had last passed through them had his or her personal field set to North American Southwest: cactus and chapparal indicated intersections, and marvelous rock formations marched off into the illusory distance. At one point he came across a bubble of Barrier Reef, floating mirage-like amid the desert sand. Someone with a different head had looked out into the corridor for a moment.

With competition scheduled to begin within the quarter hour, everyone not on duty was sitting near a holotor nexus, making last-minute wagers and arguing over the players' skills. A mood of excitement vibrated throughout the sabership, almost as tangible as the subsonic throb of the gravity-wave amplifiers.

The thrum grew as Neil approached Engineering through a short connecting corridor leading from the crew's living quarters.

Here, no holofield masked the circulatory maze of pipes and conduits forming Haltija's various systems. On his infrequent inspection trips to this part of the ship, Neil could never repress the faint feeling that he was walking inside a living being.

He came to a stop in front of Domnan's door. Like most on the ship it was envie-generated to save mass. Privacy was maintained by a collision field that registered any attempted entry not authorized by the room's occupant. "B," Neil said. The door sounded his personal B-major chord. He stepped in at Domnan's bidding.

The room was currently devoid of personality. Just as well, Neil thought. Domnan's choice of smartwall decor ran to the pornographic.

Domnan stood waiting for him, holding a memex pad.

"Well, Fir," said Neil. "What's so important?"

"Number six," said Domnan to his pad. An image formed in the air between the two men, like a 3D representation of a cell. "I've been running pre-diagnostics on some of TJ's lower level functions," he said. "Nothing special, just trying to get an idea how much recalibration we need to do. I discovered this." He pointed.

A small nodule in the maze of circuit schematics began blinking. Neil sighed. "I don't know what that is, Fir," he said. "Other than a readout of a cabin's, what, com-web."

"Uh, correct," said Domnan. He had the grace to redden slightly. "It's Dunbahr's quarters. And this thing--well, what it seems to be is a semi-organic molecular recording and transmission complex."

"And? It's in the com-web--isn't it supposed to do that?"

Domnan puffed out his breath. "Well, yes it is, but....well, I can't be sure, because I haven't seen it operating, but I think--it's some sort of clandestine listening device."

"Listening--are you saying that someone's bugged her cabin?"

Domnan nodded unhappily. "I was tracing some minor fluxing in our internal communications network," he said, speaking very fast. "The sort of thing we get all the time when we're in cellspace, you know...and minor piezoelectric effects in this-space from collisions with micrometeoroids and cosmic ray impact...but it's rare in parking orbit. Normally I'd never have noticed it, but the envie's putting a lot of stress on insystems, so when I saw the flux I--"

Neil made a chopping gesture with his left hand. "Just tell me how long the damn thing's been there."

"I checked the maintenance records back to when we left Earth," Domnan said, sweating visibly. "No sign of it then. I'll have to examine the physical assembly to be sure, but I'd stake a month's pay that it wasn't there when we dropped out of cellspace."

"Nearly two years ago."

"I'm sorry, yes, Neil. I--"

Neil held up a hand and Domnan paused.

"Haltija!" Neil said.

"Yes?" There was the slight echo on the voice that denoted a general broadcast--Domnan was on the channel, too.

"Access override code phi omega theta. How long has that thing been in place?"

"I cannot say," said the saber.

"Excuse me?"

"I do not remember."

"You--what?" Neil said. He stared at Fir-Bolg. Perspiration stood out on the engineer's brow.

"I'm sorry," said Haltija, "I can access no data pertaining to the placement of the object."

"The only way he wouldn't remember anything," Domnan said after a long moment, "is if there was a defect in his sapio-cybernetic systems." He bent over his memex, speaking quietly to it.

A cold knot formed in Neil's stomach. He felt the vastness of space outside the sabership's hull. Unspoken between him and Domnan was the realization that to a small group of people dependent on Haltija for survival and eventual return home, this was very bad news.