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daughter. Jumping from the forty-second story balcony, Mama had shattered herself on the terraces of the Regis Galactic Hotel in the middle of Faul del Parma's annual company extravaganza, the oneatt the gossipbyters attended. And the news and gossip and rumor and innuendo that surrounded the suicide of del Parma's wife had been splashed all over the newsbeams for weeks thereafter. Why should she kill herself? Faul del Parma could give a woman every--thing. There was no history of mental instability. And everyone knew Faul del Parma never so much as looked at another woman, he only cared for his wife—

well, one didn't hear so much about the wife, did one?

A homebody type. But he went everywhere with that lovely little daughter at his side, only thirteen but a heartbreaker in the making....

It occurred to a dozen gossipbyters at once that the daughter should be interviewed. And that had stopped it. Faul del Parma had whisked his daughter into a very exclusive, very private boarding school where no gossipbyters could find her and ask inconvenient questions.

Fassa twisted the minihedron on its clasp. Tkankyou, Mama. Even now, six years later, the story of the del Parma wife's suicide still made an occasional gossipbyte. Even now, Faul del Parma didn't want to risk having Fassa anywhere near him. So now that she was graduated from the expensive, exclusive school, he'd found a position for her with the least of his companies, Polo Construction, based on a planet in Vega subspace. And Fassa had practiced her bargaining skills for the first time.

"I'll take it. But not as your subordinate. Make over Polo Construction to me, and I'll go out to Bahati and manage the company and never trouble you again.

Call it a graduation present."

Call it a bribe for going into exile, Fassa thought, twist-66

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ing the minihedron back and forth until the sharp angles of the facets bit into her thumb and forefinger. Because when Paul had balked at giving her complete ownership of the company, Fassa had leaned elegantly on his desk and speculated aloud about her chances of getting a position with one of the major newsbeamers. '"They're aU very interested in me," she teased her father.

"Interested in picking up sleazy gossip about our family," Faul snapped. "They've no interest in you for your own abilities."

Fassa smoothed her gleaming black hair back from her face. "Some of my abilities are very interesting," she told him. She let her voice drop down into the husky lower register that seemed to produce such an effect on her male teachers. "And the del Parma y Polo family is always news. I bet some of the major newsbeam companies would just love to serialize a book by me. I could tell them all the secrets I learned from my father...."

"All right. It's yours!" Faul del Parma y Polo slapped his hand on the palmscanner beside his deskcomp, jabbed the hardcopy pad with his free thumb and ejected the finished minihedron with a glare for his daughter.

"You won't object if I scan it first?"

"Use a public scanner. You can't be sure of mine," Faul pointed out "I might have programmed it to give a false readout You'd better start thinking smarter if you want to make a success of this business, Fassa. But don't worry

—it's all there. Ownership transfer and my palmprint to back it up. I wouldn't cheat you. I don't want you coming back to this office."

"Don't you, Daddy dear?" Fassa twisted forward over the desk, sinuous and flowing in her formfitting sheath of Rigellian spiderspin. She leaned dose enough to let Faul breathe in the warmth and subde perfume of her skin... and was rewarded by a flash of pain and desire in his eyes.

"Ta-ta, Daddy dearest." She slid from the desk and PARTNERSHIP 67

clasped the minihedron inside a coryciurn heart that dangled from her charm bracelet "See you around...

Idon't think."

"I wonder," Faul said hoarsely, "how many of those Htde charms contain men's hearts and souls."

"Not many — yet." Fassa paused at the door and gave him a sparkling smile. "I'm starting the collection with you."

Now, three days out from Central, she had already added a second hedron to the collection. Fassa jingled the charm bracelet reflectively. Each of the sparkling bits of jewelry was a clasp or a cage or an empty locket, waiting to receive some trinket. She'd collected the charms over those lonely years at boarding school, spending the lavish birthday and Christmas checks from Faul on expensive custom-made baubles. One for each time that Faul had come to her room at night Only twenty-three hi all; strange, she thought, that less than two dozen carefully chosen nights over a period of four or five years could make you rot away from the inside. Twenty-three shining jewels, each as perfect and beautiful in its own way as Fassa was in hers; each as empty inside as she was.

No, not any more. Two of them are filled. Fassa pushed off from the wall with the tips of her fingers and floated gently through the main cabin, twirling the charms around her wrist Before she was done, she'd fill every charm with something... appropriate.

Andthenwhat?

No answers to that, no conceivable end to the future she'd mapped out for herself.

Blaize

The central cabin was empty; Polyon's buddies had all slunk off to their cabins to think over their wager and its probable consequences. Good. Blaize knew he could perfecdy well have talked to Nancia from the 68

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privacy ofhis own cabin, but somehow it seemed more real to come here and speak directly to the titanium column that contained her shell.

Besides, she wasn't answering him from the cabin.

He thought maybe she'd turned off the cabin sensors to give her passengers privacy.

He cleared his throat tentatively. Now that he was here, and not so confident of his welcome, it seemed rather strange to be talking to the walls. Sort of thing that got you shipped off for a nice rest in a place like Summerlands Care, Inc. Blaize shivered. Not for him, thank you. If he ever did need medical treatment, he'd make sure to go to a clinic where that snake Alpha bint Hezra-Fong vtasnot operating.

"Nancia? Can you hear me?"

The silence was as absolute as that of the empty, black space outside the brainship's thin skin.

"I know you're listening," Blaize said desperately.

"Watching, too. You have to be. / wouldn't close my eyes or turn my back on somebody like Cousin Polyon, and I don't believe you'd risk letting him sneak into your control cabin unobserved."

His wild gestures as he made the last statement almost overbalanced him in the ship's light grav field.

He grabbed at a handrail and made a dancer's turn into the center of the cabin, recovering from the near-stumble as gracefully as a cat correcting a mis-timed jump. Nancia's titanium column coruscated in rainbow reflections of the cabin lights, sparkling and dancing around him. And she did not reply.

"Look, I know what you're thinking, but it's not like that. Really." Blaize grasped a chair back to steady himself "I mean, what could I do? Did you expect me to call them all criminals and wrap myself in my own integrity? They could've spaced me before we got to Angalia, and called it an unfortunate accident"

Silence.

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"All right," Blaize conceded. "They probably wouldn't have spaced me. Especially if I told them you were a brainship and could bear witness against them."

Silence.

This was worse than the time he'd been locked in his room for a month.

"But that would have meant telling on you," Blaize pointed out, "and you didn't really want them to know you've been listening, did you?"

Silence.

"Well, what did you expect me to do, anyway?

They'd all have hated me." Blaize's voice cracked.

"Isn't it bad enough I have to go out to Angalia and spend the next five years handing out PTA boxes to some walking veggies? Do I have to start by losing my only friends in the whole star system?"

Nancia answered at last. "They are not your friends, and you know it."

Blaize shrugged. "Best imitations I've got. Look, I've spent my whole life being the family black sheep, the one nobody bothers with, the one nobody likes much, nobody respects. Can you blame me for wanting to change that? Just once in my life I want to belong"

"You do," Nancia told him. "As far as I'm concerned, you do indeed belong with the rest of this amoral brat-pack. And as for respect,.. you can add me to the list of people who don't respect you. I don't believe you ran away from home three times, either. You haven't got the gumption to cross the street without somebody holding your hand."

"I did so!"

Silence.

"Once, anyway. And if I had run away again, it would've been just like I said. They'd have been waiting for me at the Academy. So what was the point? And 70

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what difference does it make? Worked out the same as if I'd actually done it, didn't it?"

Silence.

filaize decided to go back to his cabin before somebody drifted in here and caught him talking to the walls.

"One more thing," he called as he pushed off for the return. "I did win that scholarship. Under the name of Blaize Docem. You can check Academy records on that!"

Nancia maintained her silence. All the way to Angalia.

The neighborhood of the brainship collapsed inward on itself, spiraling down tornado-like to the Singularity point where Central Worlds subspace could momentarily be defined as intersecting Vega subspace. The ship's metachip-augmented parallel processors solved and optimized the set of equations represented in a thousand-square matrix of subspace points, dropped out of that subspace into Decomposition, rode the collapsing funnel of spaces with a new optimization problem to choose and resolve every tenth of a second.

To Nancia, Singularity was how she envisioned the ancient Earth sport called "surfing"; balanced at the non-degrading point where decomposing subspaces met, she recognized and evaluated local paths so quickly that the massive optimization problems blurred together into a sense of skimming over a wave that was alwaysjust about to crash beneath her.

The Singularity field test she'd taken at the Academy had been simpler than this. There, she'd had to deal with only one set of parallel equations; here, the sequence of equations and diminishing subspaces streamed past her in an incessant flow. It was challenge, danger, joy: it was what she had been trained for. She swept over matrices of data and guided them to the ship's processors, choosing and resolving the ever-changing paths to Singularity with an athlete's single-minded concentration.

The same newsbeam that showed Nancia the sport of "surfing" had also had a section on a diving com-72

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petition. The dean lines of the divers' movements, the seconds during which they hurtled through the air as though they could give their bodies the lift and freedom of brainships, fascinated Nancia; she'd viewed the beam over a dozen times, marveling at what softpersons would go through for a few seconds of physical freedom. "Didja see how he ripped that dive!" the newsbyter had jabbered after one athlete's performance, then explaining that the term referred to the clean way the diver had entered the water without a single splash.

Nancia ripped a perfect dive through Singularity and came out into Vega subspace.

For her passengers, with nothing to do during Singularity and no way to filter the barrage of sensory data, the transition was markedly less pleasant. The few seconds of decomposition and reformation seemed like hours of wading through air gone viscous, picking their way among shapes distorted out of all recognition, in a place where colors hummed on the air and light bent around corners.

They gasped with relief when the ship broke through into normal space again.

Nancia watched them staggering and rubbing their eyes and ears. She was rather surprised by the intensity of their reactions; the trainer who'd accompanied her through her Singularity test had not seemed to be bothered by the few seconds of sensory distortion. Perhaps practice made a difference to how softpersons took Decomposition. Polyon's first words after the return to normal space suggested this might be the case.

"Well, mes enfants" said Polyon, "how did you like your first Decomposition? It's been so long since my first training flights that I've forgotten how it affects newcomers."

"Once is enough," said Darnell with feeling. "If I ever go home again, I'll take the six months of travel by FTL. Or better yet, I'll walk."

Fassa nodded vigorous agreement, then winced as if she wished she hadn't moved her head so soon.

"Have a Blissto," Alpha offered. "Works on hangovers — ought to help with Singularity headaches too."

Darnell snatched the small blue pills out of her hand and downed six of them in a single desperate gulp.

Fassa started to shake her head and then obviously thought better of it. She waved Alpha's hand away with a languid gesture. "Never touch drugs."

"More fool you," said Alpha. "I know more about side effects than any of you, and I promise you a few blues won't do any harm. Just wish I'd thought of it before we entered Singularity. Blaize?"

"Excellent idea," Blaize said hollowly, accepting the offered pills. Unlike Darnell, he made his way to the far side of the cabin and found a half-empty bottle of Stemerald to help him choke down the pills. "Almost as good an idea as walking. Don't think I ever really appreciated Earth before." His skin was pale green under the spattering of freckles.

Polyon chuckled. "May have been a blessing in disguise that you weren't allowed to go in for brawn training, little one. Apparently you haven't die stomach for it. Now when you imagine combining frequent Decom hops with Mil Spec meals of boiled synthoprot and anonymous vitacaps that all smell like cabbage—"

Fassa clapped a hand over her mouth and ran for the door. Darnell swallowed convulsively two or three times. "Would you mind very much not mentioning food just now?" His last words were slurred and relaxed; the Blissto was already taking effect.