[...disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Okay?]

[OH: by the way, thanks to Roger Zelazny, too.]

Primus blazed momentarily through the nav port as the ship hove around for its decel burn. Tak squinted reflexively even as the port's polarizer blacked out the direct glare. Ariel loomed and swung past his view, the thin magenta line of atmosphere showing no arc, at this distance, through the tiny circle of fused quartz that served as Tak's only view out. He lolled in his straps, weightless, staring, as he had every waking moment of his sixty-five day solitary journey. --This is what a drowning man would see,-- he thought, --having slipped below the surface. Horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle.

Tak. His name would be Tak. He took the name from ancient lore of Earth-That-Was, because it suited him in so many ways. He had not used his own name in so long it truly was lost even to him.

He had lost so much. Remembering, now, those everyday things he lacked was becoming a tediously redundant surprise.

The burn began and the jerryrigged sling rose up to cradle his body. He switched the cabin lights on and scanned the display on the terminal plugged into the ship's system. UexAV cargo ships had no life-support pod. Tak had had to improvise. It suited him: a line of glowing plasma creeping across Ariel's night sky would herald his coming, but monitors would not look for a human cargo.

------------

Landfall and debarkation were absurdly easy. The ship was docked and shunted into a que with dozens of identical units by unseeing machinery, and Tak rappelled down to the deck and simply walked off. He realized it would sometimes have been useful to have travelled this way as an operative; and, he knew now, it would never have occurred to him then. Add Arrogance to his list of sins.

The sky brightened as he rode the levitrack across the depot complex toward the Admin massif. The air was fresh and cool. Always, on Ariel, fresh and cool. What might they have put in the air, he