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Cargo amassed in the holds of the Swiftwing, from worlds beyond all dreams of strangeness. Bart grew, not bored, but hardened to the incredible. For days at a time, no word of human speech crossed his mind. The blackout at peak of each warp-shift persisted. Vorongil had given him permission to report off duty, but since the blackouts did not impair his efficiency, Bart had refused.
Bart glanced at his human hands. Vorongil shrugged. "We've carried Mentorians as full-ranking Astrogators. There don't happen to be any on the Swiftwing. But there's no law about it." Bart looked the old Lhari in the eye. "I won't accept Mentorian terms, Vorongil." "I wouldn't ask it.
"Come, Bartol," he said gently, "I'm taking you back to the Swiftwing. I don't have to treat you like a prisoner, do I?" As they left the council hall, Bart, in a gesture of despair, covered his face with his hands. As he brought them down, he found himself staring at them, transfixed. The fingers looked longer and thinner than he remembered them, but they were his own hands again.
Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the Swiftwing far, far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal of Antares burned in their viewports. Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which far away now, at the furthest point in its orbit from the point of the Swiftwing's entry into the system was a small captive sun.
The Swiftwing ships out tonight, Bartol for Antares and beyond. It will be a couple of years before your Eight Colors can be made over into an Interstellar line and as Raynor One has said to me several times, he'll have to handle all those details, for you're not of age yet. "I've been thinking. Now that we Lhari must share space with your people, you'll need experienced men for your ships.
And after a little while he went out on the balcony and stood looking down at the spaceport, where the Swiftwing lay in shadow, huge, beloved renounced. "What now, Bartol?" Vorongil's quiet voice asked from his elbow. "You're famous notorious. You're going to be rich, and a celebrity." "I was wishing I could get away until the excitement dies down." "Well," said Vorongil, "why don't you?
He had thought that only a short time an hour or so had elapsed between the time he was drugged and the time they took him before the Council. Later, from what he learned about the dispatch schedules of the Swiftwing, he realized that he had been kept under sedation for nearly three weeks, while his face and hands healed. As Raynor Three had warned, the change was not altogether reversible.
He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he was safely back in the human worlds again. He stood long, looking at the unfamiliar galaxy of the Lhari stars; the unknown, forever unknowable constellations with their strange shapes.
There's a ship, due to come in here in about ten days, called the Swiftwing, which is just about due to make the Antares run. Captain Steele had managed to arrange I don't know how, and I don't want to know how for a vacancy on that ship, and somehow he got credentials.
You can't go by the Swiftwing it doesn't carry passengers but there's another route you can take." Bart sprang up. "No," he said, "I know a better way. Let me go on the Swiftwing in Dad's place as a Lhari!" "Bart, no," Raynor Three said. "You'd never get away with it. It's too dangerous." But his gold eyes glinted. "Why not? I speak Lhari better than Dad ever did.
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