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Ahead they could see their canyon of clear space narrowing until it was pinched to nothingness. Beyond that swirled a hurricane so big it could have floated the Earth on it like St. Brendan’s coracle. “We have to go over that,” their captain said, and with a sweet curve their craft ascended until the flat dome of the hurricane lay spinning below them. Overhead, the steady stars stood in their customary places.

“Are there fliers?” Swan asked. “Does anybody fly these cloud canyons in birdsuits?”

Wahram said, “Yes, a few. Usually they’re scientists doing their work. Until recently it has been considered too dangerous to visit. So this space has not yet been cultured to the extent you are used to elsewhere.”

Swan shook her head. “You probably just don’t know about them.”

“Perhaps. But I think I would.”

“You don’t come down here often yourself?”

“No.”

“Will you go flying down here with me?”

“I don’t know how to fly.”

“You could let the birdsuit’s AI do it, and merely be a passenger making requests.”

“Is it ever more than that?”

“Of course it is.” She gave him a disgusted look. “People fly any space in the solar system that can be flown. Our bird brains demand it.”

“I’m sure they do.”

“So you’ll go with me.” She nodded as if she had won an argument and gotten a promise from him.

Wahram tucked his chin into his neck. “So you are a flier, then?”

“Whenever I can.”

He didn’t know what to say. If he was going to be badgered by this kind of peremptory bullying and yet still be expected to love her, then he refused! But it might be that it was already too late for that. The hooks were already in him pretty deep; he could feel them tugging in his chest; he was in fact hooked; he was very, very interested in whatever she might say or do. He was even willing to consider stupidities like birdflight in the clouds of Saturn. How could it be? To a woman not even his type—ah, Marcel, if only you knew—this Swan was worse even than Odette.

“Maybe someday,” he said, trying to sound agreeable. “But right now we are looking for this ship of yours.”

“Indeed,” Inspector Genette interjected. “And we appear to be nearing it.”

They kept descending, dove into another cloud. The ship vibrated tremulously, constantly. Below them lay another thirty thousand kilometers of ever-thickening gas before one would hit the black layer of frozen goo, difficult to characterize, which was the planet’s real “surface.” It was said ships were hidden down there in the deeper depths, and Wahram had been worried that the one they sought would be down there too. But now there loomed out of a cloud to the south a spaceship, pewter against the blue, hanging under an enormous teardrop balloon. Then, like an apparition, it slipped back into the cloud from which it had emerged.

T
he abandoned ship drifted, swinging this way and that under its balloon. It was quite a bit darker in the cloud, a matter of chocolates briefly turning tangerine or bronze and then darkening again. To express the scene musically Wahram thought one might
play Satie and Wagner together, a pin of sadness pricking the magniloquent thunderheads: this little lost ship.

They strapped into the cloud diver’s hopper and it emerged from the dock, shuddering as the little craft fought the turbulence. Out of the mist loomed the dark mass of the silent ship. Wahram could not help thinking of the
Marie Celeste
, or Pap’s houseboat on the river. He had to cast aside these old tales to focus on the thing at hand, a typical asteroid trawler by the look of it, with an old-fashioned deuterium-tritium fusion engine bulbing at its stern.

“Is this the one you want?” Wahram asked.

“I think so,” Inspector Genette said. “Your system hit it with a taggart as it went in, and we’re getting a ping from that taggart. Let’s go have a look.”

They docked with it, their pilot nicely finessing the delicate problem of contact in the fluctuating wind. When they were magnetically moored to it, the three of them and two more of Genette’s colleagues suited up and went out, all of them on Ariadne lines.

Swan jetted over the ship ahead of the others and touched down next to a lock door just ahead of the rocket bulb. When she hit the door pad, its red light went green, and the door opened. Then there was a flash of light, gone as soon as it flashed; Swan cried out.

Genette jetted to her side and floated over her shoulder like her good angel, pulling her back. “Wait a minute. I don’t like that. And Passepartout tells me that a powerful radio signal has just been sent by the ship.”

The little inspector jetted into the lock ahead of them, pulling a tool like a pair of bolt cutters from a thigh pocket. “Maybe it came from this.” There was a box attached to the lock’s inside door. “This is a tack-on of some sort. Some kind of little sentinel. May have taken your picture and transmitted it. Let’s take it with us.”

Swan pounded the lock wall next to the device. “Here we are! Fuck you!”

“They already know,” Genette said, working at the little box as
if it were an abalone. “But maybe we can turn the tables here. This ship will have a provenance, elements we can trace. We’ll take its AI with us.” The other Interplan investigators opened the inner lock door; the interior appeared to be as much a vacuum as space outside. Wahram followed the others inside. The interior lights were on, the bridge looked functional, and yet no air, no people.

“Everyone knows a ship has an ID,” Wahram said. “Why would they hang the ship here? Why wouldn’t they just dispose of it?”

“I don’t know. Possibly they intended to use it again and didn’t know about the Saturnian tracking system.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Maybe this ship is from the unaffiliateds,” Swan said. “Off record from the start.”

“Are there ships entirely off the grid?” Wahram asked.

“Yes,” Genette said briefly, plugging cords from Passepartout into ports on one of the consoles.

“I have its data,” Passepartout said.

“Let’s get out of here,” Genette said. “Passepartout says the balloons holding this thing up have been punctured. They’re big, but we need to get out of this thing before it starts falling fast.”

They rushed through the short halls back to the lock. Their cloud diver’s pilot was urgently requesting them to get back inside so it could delink; they were dropping into Saturn at an accelerating rate as the giant balloon over them emptied. Quickly they all five jammed into the lock, the inspector and his two assistants taking up only small spaces in the upper corners, looking like spandrels. When the outer door opened, they jetted out into space. The balloon above the abandoned ship was already visibly deflated, thinner and creased and flapping. Nevertheless the Interplan smalls jetted around the hull, inspecting and photographing it by quadrants. “See there,” Genette said to one of them. “Bolt holes. Get samples from the threading.”

Then they returned to their cloud diver, reeling in on their
Ariadne threads. When they were in the lock of the diver, they felt it come away from the abandoned ship and start to rise. They made their way to the bridge, where the pilot was too busy or too polite to comment on the situation. They rose, cutting through clouds overhead, shuddering hard.

“We’re free of it,” Genette said irritably to the pilot. “Slow down.”

Wahram for one was happy to be rising at speed. In his youth people had not dived into the planet; it still struck him as an impudent thing, dangerous in the extreme.

When they were free of the clouds and back in a clear channel between masses, he relaxed a little. For a time, when they got high enough, they could see north and south to the bands in which the wind coursed in the opposite direction; these both had cloud levels slightly higher than theirs, so for a time it appeared they floated easily down a very broad canal, the banks of which were rushing madly upstream.

When they were a bit higher, Inspector Genette showed Swan the screen of his wristqube. “We’ve got it confirmed. The ship is owned by a transport firm based on Earth. They never reported it missing. Last registered port of call was that asteroid we saw it on.”

Swan nodded and looked at Wahram. “I’m going to Earth next,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

Wahram said cautiously, “I have to go downsystem anyway. So I think I can meet you somewhere down there.”

“That’s good,” she said. “We can work together there.”

She seemed not to suspect him of any possibility of harm. Which was nice—even encouraging—but, unfortunately, incorrect.

He swallowed heavily. “Before you go—can I perhaps show you a bit of Saturn? There is a different kind of flying you might enjoy, in the rings. And I could introduce you to my crèche. To my family.”

She was surprised by this, he could see. He swallowed again, tried to look bland under her sharp gaze.

“All right,” she said.

I
nspector Genette and his team had business to conduct in the Saturn system and would not be returning downsystem for a while, so Swan was free to join Wahram as he had requested. His manner had been very odd, his gaze fixed on her, x-raying right through her—toad vision, yes. It reminded her of the look he had given her when she told him she had eaten the Enceladan alien suite; out of the fog of that whole incident, the look on his face was what she recalled—his surprise that anyone could be such a fool. Well, he had better get used to it. She was not normal; not even human, but some kind of symbiote. Ever since eating the aliens she had never felt the same—assuming there had ever been any same to begin with. Maybe it had always been true that colors burst in her head, that her sense of spaciousness was sharp to the point of pain or joy, her sense of significance likewise. Possibly the Enceladan bugs made no more difference than any of the other bugs in her gut. She was not sure what she was.

The look on Wahram’s face seemed to suggest he felt much the same.

T
he visit with Wahram’s crèche on Iapetus was just a matter of dropping in on one of the ordinary meals in their communal kitchen. “These are some of my friends and family,” Wahram said when introducing Swan to the small group at a long table. Swan nodded as they chorused hello, and then Wahram walked her
around the room and introduced her to people. “This is my wife Joyce; this is Robin. This is my husband Dana.”

Dana nodded once, in a way that reminded Swan of Wahram, and said, “Wahram is funny. I seem to recall that I was the wife when it came to us.”

“Oh no,” Wahram said. “I was the wife, I assure you.”

Dana smiled with a little squint of suppressed disagreement. “Maybe we both were. It was a long time ago. In any case, Miss Swan, welcome to Iapetus. We’re happy to be hosting such a famous designer. I hope you’ve enjoyed Saturn so far?”

“Yes, it’s been interesting,” Swan said. “And now Wahram is going to take me down into the rings.”

She followed them to the central dining table, and Wahram introduced her to some more people, whose names she forgot, and they waved or nodded without attempting to say more. After a while they chatted with her a bit, then went back to their conversations and left Wahram and his guest alone. Wahram’s cheeks sported little spots of red, but he seemed pleased too and was easy with his crèchemates as they drifted by on their way out. Maybe on Saturn, Swan thought, this was a rousing party.

S
oon after that they took a shuttle to Prometheus, the inner shepherd moon of the F ring. The gravitational sweeps of Prometheus and Pandora, F’s outer shepherd moon, changed in relation to each other in ways that ended up braiding the F ring’s billions of ice chunks into complex streamers, very unlike the smooth sheets of the bigger rings. In effect the F ring was being swirled in the tides created by its two shepherd moons, making for some waves. And where there were waves, there were surfers.

Prometheus proved to be a potato moon, 120 kilometers long. Its biggest crater dimpled the end closest to the F ring and had been domed, and a station set just inside the rim.

Inside the dome a group of ring surfers greeted them and
described the local wave, of which they were very proud. Prometheus reached its apoapse, meaning its farthest point away from Saturn, every 14.7 hours; each time it did so, it almost brushed the slowly tumbling wall of ice chunks that composed the inner border of the F ring. Prometheus was moving faster in its orbit than the ice chunks were in theirs, so it tugged a streamer of chunks out behind it as it passed, in a gravitational effect called Keplerian shear. The curving strand of tugged ice always appeared at a regular distance behind Prometheus, as predictable as the wake behind a boat. The wave at each apoapse appeared 3.2 degrees farther along than the previous one, so it was possible to calculate both when and where to drop in and catch it.

“One wave every fifteen hours?” Swan asked.

That was enough, the locals assured her, grinning crazily. She wouldn’t need more. The rides went on for hours.

“
Hours?
” Swan said.

More crazy grins. Swan turned to Wahram, and as usual could not read his stone face.

“You’re going out too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you done it before?”

“No.”

She laughed. “Good. Let’s do it.”

T
he rings could be modeled mathematically as a fluid, and from any distance they looked like a fluid, grooved by tight concentric waves. Up close one could see that the F ring, like the others, was made of ice chunks and ice dust, layered in ribbons that thickened and thinned in masses of individual bodies, all flying at almost the same speed. Gravity: here one saw its effects in a pure state, unobstructed by wind or solar radiation or anything else—just the sling of spinning Saturn and a few small competing tugs, all creating this particular pattern.

Prometheus was a perfect put-in spot for the surfers, and the ones going out with Swan and Wahram informed them they were both going to be launched into the wave with experienced veterans going before and after, to keep tabs and give help if needed. They offered tips for how to catch the wave, but Swan nodded agreeably and forgot their advice: surfing was surfing. You needed to catch the break at its own particular speed, and off you went.