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Lando nodded solemnly. “That’s true. On the other hand, everybody has to start again, fresh every day, from wherever they are.”

“Well, Mas—I mean, Lando, we have your winnings from the Oseon. Wouldn’t the Renatasians recover a good deal more quickly if they had some help? After all, we’re gamblers and adventurers. Being rich would only get in our way. I think we ought to give Klyn Shanga the twenty million.”

Lando looked at Vuffi Raa, lit his cigarette, and leaned back in his acceleration couch. It was a long time before he spoke.

“Vuffi Raa, you’re a decent, humane droid at heart. And, when you get right down to it, I’m not too bad a sort myself. Compared to the rest of the universe, we’re the good guys.

“But as far as the twenty million is concerned, my little mechanical friend, forget it.

“I’m going to enjoy being rich.”

LANDO CALRISSIAN

• AND THE STARCAVE OF THONBOKA •

This one’s for

F. Paul Wilson, Healer and friend,

and

for James P. Hogan,

who makes seven.

• I •

LEHESU SWAM THE endless Open Sea.

He was large for a young adult, although there were Elders of his species twice his size and mass. An alien observer in a different place and time would have pointed out his resemblance to an enormous manta ray—broad and streamlined, powerfully winged, and somehow pleasingly sinister. His sleek dorsal surface was domed high with muscle.

Others would have been reminded of the Portugese man-o’-war, seeing the tentacular ribbons hanging from his ventral side, marveling at the perfect glassy transparency of his body with its hints and flashes of inner color.

Yet, naturally enough, such comparisons would have been misleading. Lehesu had been born among the people who call themselves the Oswaft. He was, unlike ray or jellyfish, penetratingly intelligent. Unlike most others of his kind, he was also aggressively curious.

He dwelt in a place the Oswaft called the ThonBoka, which, in Lehesu’s language, brought to mind visions of a cozy harbor on the margins of a stormy ocean. It was a haven of peace and plenty, a refuge.

There were those among the Oswaft, principally family and friends, who had warned him smugly that he would regret adventuring beyond the safe retreat of the ThonBoka into the dark perils of the Open Sea. Few of them actually dared speculate precisely what those perils might consist of, what he might find, what might find him—except a quick, unpleasant death. For all their intelligence, the Oswaft were not remarkably imaginative, particularly when it came to the topic of death. They were a long-lived people and patiently, even fatally, conservative in their outlook.

Others hadn’t even cared enough to scold him. Lehesu, himself, was a nuisance and a danger, whose very presence was somehow inappropriate to the warm sanctum of the ThonBoka, a hint of the darker ugliness that lurked beyond its confines. To their credit, it would have been completely uncharacteristic of them to expel him, just as it would never have occurred to any one of them, regardless of personal opinion, to attempt to stop Lehesu from sacrificing himself to his incomprehensible exploratory itch.

At that moment, he was beginning to wish he had listened to someone. The Open Sea was slowly starving him to death.

He flapped his great manta wings reflexively to achieve calm. It was an awe-inspiring, majestic gesture—had there been anyone to see it—among his kind, the equivalent of breathing slowly and deliberately. And for Lehesu, it was every bit as effective: it didn’t help in the slightest. If anything, it only reminded him that he had a plight to worry about.

He was not really frightened. For all their conservatism, fear came slowly to the Oswaft, panic not at all. It was just that curiosity was not a common characteristic among them, either. They had their ancient, venerable, time-tested, firmly established, customary, and honored traditions. Such redundancy was necessary, Lehesu thought, to convey the suffocating stuffiness of it all. Yes, there