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to the saur. "How about you?"
    The slow-swinging electric light's reflection made tiny arcs in Salasso's black eyes as the saur waited patiently in the converted hold's low narrow doorway. His clothing needed no cleaning or adjustment. Nor, Gregor suddenly realized with a blush of his own, would it need any possibly expensive alternative for social occasions.
    He ducked to lace up his shoes as Salasso said he would certainly come along.
    "Don't worry about, uh, dressing up," he called after Elizabeth as she stepped up to the deck. "You know what the merchants are like, they wouldn't know what the fashion is here anyway."
    "I'll think about it," she told him, not looking back.
    Up on deck the three students thanked Renwick, the skipper, who was making the last check of the boat before leaving it for the night. The specimens, safe in their various containers, would keep until the morning, when they'd be hauled off to the Marine Biology Station.
    "Pint at the Bailie's?" Elizabeth asked Renwick.
    The skipper shook his head. "Nah, I'll have a short with the crew. Last seen heading for the Shipwright, I think. See you tomorrow, folks."
    The harbor was so old it might have been natural, but it was merely pre-human. The quarter-mile-long mole was built of the same hard metamorphic rock as the castle's exterior walls, and was reckoned to have been blasted and lifted from the harbor basin in ancient times, either by the brute force and primitive ingenuity of multitudes, or by the laser lances and gravity sleds of visitors from outer space. It formed one curved arm of the harbor's embrace, the other being provided by the headland's cliffs. Beyond it, the rocky outcrops gave way to a long, white sandy beach, which broke up in the distance to tussocked dunes.
    Gregor scrambled up the rusty rungs of the ladder and out onto the mole. A few hundred meters across the water, on the harbor's central docks, a small knot of humans and saurs had gathered around the landed skiffs. Gregor glanced at them incuriously and turned to gazing again at the sky as he waited for the others to join him.
    The rainbow clouds had dispersed. Gabriel, the evening and morning star, burned like a lamp low in the west, its light outshone by the god standing higher in the sky, and by the auroral flicker of the starship floating on the sea beneath it. High above them all hung the icy gleam of Raphael and the tiny spark of Ariel, its moon; and -- following the ecliptic around to the east -- the bright sickle of the new moon, beyond which Gog and Magog, the ringed gas giants of the outer system, glowered like a monster's eyes.
    Crossing the sky from north to south, alone in its polar orbit, deserted for two hundred years, went the old ship from home. To Gregor, tracking it with a rapidly blinking eye, the Bright Star seemed a stranger and more evocative sight than all the familiar constellations -- the Musketeer, the Squid, the Angel's Wing, and the rest -- that straddled the sky on either side of the Foamy Wake.
    And, ironically, more difficult for humans to reach.
    The two humans and the saur walked briskly along the mole and into the waterfront streets of Kyohvic, turning right along a brightlit, cobbled esplanade to the Bailie's Bar, its sign a jolly, pint-quaffing grandee in plumed hat and lace cravat. Inside, it was long, low-ceilinged, its plastered walls decorated with naive murals and shelves and brackets supporting harpoons and stuffed ichthyosaurs; its tables and bar counters half filled with men just off the boats and ships. It was that kind of place, at this time of the evening; later, the sawdust would be swept up, the tables wiped, and a cleaner crowd would pour in from the shows or the eating-houses; but for now it reeked of sweat and fish, yeast and baccy and hemp, its dim light glinting with the glitter of glasses and pots and the glazed, lidded gaze of men relaxing thoughtfully over their long pipes. The regulars recognized the students with a nod and a