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“Stand by for translation.”

“Ready for translation,” answered Alora.

I twisted the energies pouring into the translator. The entire universe shimmered, then turned black, and the Yeats and I fused into one entity, no longer pilot and ship, but a single black swan flying through deeper darkness.

A deep chime rolled from below, and crystalline notes vibrated from above, shattered, and fell like ice flakes across my wings, each flake sounding a different note as it struck my wings, and as each note added to the melody of the flight, it left a pinprick of hot agony behind.

I continued to fly, angling for the distant droning beacon that was Alustre, with the sure knowledge that there would be at least one timeless interlude. One was standard, two difficult.With three interludes began high stress on both the ship and the pilot, and a loss level approaching 50 percent. Only one trans-ship had been known to survive four interludes; the pilot had not.

Unseen cymbals crashed, and the grav waves of a singularity shook me. Black pinnae shivered from my wings, wrenched out by the buffeting of a black hole somewhere in the solid underspace I flew above/between.

Brilliant blue, blinding blue, enfolded me—and passed—and I stood on the edge of a rock, wingless, now just a man in a mackintosh, looking at the gray waves sullenly pounding on the stone-shingled beach less than two yards below. A rhyme came to mind, and I spoke it to the waves on that empty beach.

“Captain Sean went to the window

and looked at the waves below

not a mermaid nor a merrow

nor fish nor ship would he know . . .”

“So you’d not know a merrow? Is that what you’re saying, captain of a ship that is not a ship?”

I turned. To my right, where there had been no one, was a man sitting on a spur of rock. Although he wore brown trousers, and a tan Aran sweater, his webbed feet were bare, and he was not exactly a man, not with a scaly green skin, green hair, and deep-set red eyes that looked more like those of a pig than a man. He had a cocked red hat tucked under his arm.

“It’d seem to me that I know you, by your skin and hair, but mostly by the hat.”

“For a drowning sailor, you’re a most bright fellow.”

“Bright enough to ask your name,” I answered, not terribly worried about drowning. Overspace captains drown all the way through every voyage. We drown in sensation, and in the unseen tyranny of underspace that presses in on the overspace where we translate from system to system, world to world.

“ ’Tis Coomra, or close enough.” He smiled, and his teeth were green as well. Beside his feet was a contraption of wood and mesh. The mesh was not metal, but glimmered as if it were silver coated in light. It probably was. “And your name is . . . ?”

“Sean.”

“A fine Irish name that is.” He laughed.

“A fine lobster pot that is,” I replied, although I knew it was no such thing. I’d prepared for this moment as well as for many others, for to fly/sail overspace, a pilot must know all the stories and all his or her personal archetypes. That is, if he or she doesn’t want to drown out there. Or here. I had to remember that interludes were real, as real as life underspace, and just as able to kill me, and all the passengers who rode on my wings.

“A lobster pot? That’s what others have called it, but you, Sean Shannon Henry, would you not know better?” The green eyes glittered.

I stepped closer to him, but on the side away from the soul cage. “How old are you? As old as my great-grandfather Patrick?”

“I’m older than any dead man, and any that swim in the sea.”

“He’s not dead. In fact,” I said as I stepped closer, “he’s in his second century now, and feeling like he still has years ahead of him.”

“You’d not be thinking I was that young, now, would you?”

“He’s older than fine brandy,” I pointed out, concentrating hard, before producing an earthen jug. That was a trick it had taken years to master, making objects seem real in overspace, because interludes are short, long as they