Ibrahim Smith fell asleep that afternoon, heavy with lunch, physically and emotionally drained from waiting on a knife's edge all morning for a decision on next steps from Misr Hub. The Mouse awoke a little more than hour later, sweat-soaked and panting.

That dream again. Six years, and it put him right back in Paris, right back under the Jacobin's thumb.

Jefferson laying in that bed with his hand - his healthy, sound right hand - laying across the coverlet. That damned hand. And Ibrahim standing over the bed, surgical vise in own his hands, trying to muster the courage to do what he'd come there to do.

In the dream white light swells up under the Sprite's eyelids, flares out when those lids draw back, searing light, beneath it darkness….

Ibrahim jerked himself up and out of his bunk, automatically ducking his head to avoid the ship's bulkhead. Of course, he wasn't on a ship anymore, and his quarters, while hardly spacious, gave him plenty of room to stand up.

"Only a dream." He crossed the meter of floor between his bunk and the ablution cubicle and splashed his face with cold water. "Only a dream, Smith. Not the Mouse. You're not the Mouse."

The face looking out at him from the mirror was the Mouse's face. Eyes wide, the lower lid of the right one twitching with his heartbeat. Red beard tangled, red hair sticking out in all directions. Red splotches, purple lumps like bruises, under his eyes.

"Not the Mouse, not the Mouse." He fumbled at the controls along the edge of the sink. Cold water cascaded over his hands. "Not the Mouse." He gasped at the first splash of water on his face. The sleep-fuzz in his head rolled back a bit. The second splash drove it back further. He leaned forward to let the water run down over his hair, into his beard.

The water cut off. It would be five minutes before the conservation circuits would let him coax any more out of the tap, but the water had done its work. When he lifted his head and regarded himself in the mirror again, it was himself that he saw. A soaking, drowned-rat version of himself, but Ibrahim Wilson Smith nonetheless.

"You are not the Mouse," he told his reflection. He wasn't, not anymore, and he never had been before the Jacobin's Rebellion. Not to say he'd been a particularly brave man, nor an especially strong one. Bullied by bigger kids in primary school, picked last for football in secondary. The usual thing. But he'd made it through his mandatory two years' service in the Ghazi Corps, survived and even performed well, if without distinction. He'd operated a Swarmer panel in action against the Alliance of Aryan Worlds, and even boarded an Alliance cruiser. Granted, he'd been more or less in the rear of the charge, and the only shot he'd fired had careened off a shielded bulkhead and nearly sheared the scalp off a Sîni exchange officer. But he had fired, and kept to his position throughout the action. He might not have cloaked himself in glory, but he'd managed well enough.

He'd even spent three months patrolling the Ghul Frontier. Though his cruiser never so much as pinged on an alien vessel, he'd fulfilled his duties satisfactorily and gotten through every day without collapsing into a quivering mess.

Fear had unmanned him utterly only on the Glory of the Ottoman's Park World. Only when the Sprite of Thomas Jefferson opened his eyes when he should have been deeply sedated. Only when he'd addressed him in that voice so full of certainty, so full of belief. Who the hell had programmed that Sprite? What the hell had they been thinking?

Half-formed hiccups clutched at his chest. Ibrahim drove the image of the auburn-haired Sprite from his mind, replaced it with the clutch of palms outside the villa on Al-Bustan where he'd roomed during Warden training. Cool, green, alive in the middle of all that desert.

In the mirror, he saw some color creeping back into his face. The spray of freckles across his nose no longer stood out quite as starkly as they had.

"Not the Mouse," he muttered as he collapsed back onto his bunk. He could still see the top of his head in the mirror, a strand of red rising up stubbornly as his hair began to dry. His quarters weren't as stifling as the cell he'd occupied on the Investigation Platform the Caliphate had towed to Misr Hub after the Rebellion. The mirror hung a good meter-and-a-half away from him, and the wall with the access hatch was almost the same distance from the foot of his bed. Scarcely palatial, but roomy enough by the standards of a long-time spacer.

Right then it felt like a coffin.

He had to get out for a bit. A glance at the time display on his berth's dataport told him the athan for Salat-al-Asr would be going in less than an hour. He could get up to the observatory lounge on the mosque level and wait there for prayer to begin. With the entire universe on display around him he might not feel so walled-in.

He'd gone to sleep in his baggy shelwar, so he only needed to scrounge up a clean khamees from his closet and pull it on. The loose, knee-length tunic couldn't quite hide the bulge of his belly, but Ibrahim had pretty much given up worrying about that. He scrounged in the drawer under his bunk for his comm unit, which he hauled out and slapped on his wrist. He glanced at it as he passed through the hatch. The stand-by display was empty: no new messages. No word yet from Misr Hub. He knew better than to see this as a good sign – to hope that it meant, for example, that Misr was busy figuring everything out, and that the call, when it came, would offer up the solution to the crisis.

No, knowing Setna Amjed, the delay meant only that he was working up a good steam. Planning dire consequences. Determining the exact, best way to make Ibrahim’s life utterly, completely miserable.

He could only pray that didn’t involve sending him down to Murkworld.

The lift to the mosque level was blessedly empty at that hour - most people would be on duty or drowsing in their berths waiting for the afternoon shift to kick in after Asr. The lift's hatch irised open on a narrow access way. He passed the gravways up to the mosque on his left as he followed the corridor up toward the observation lounge. A last hatchway, this one vacuum-proofed, irised open, and then Ibrahim stood at the edge of the gulf.

Everywhere, stars. The lounge’s holo generator was always set to surround-view. As Ibrahim stepped into the observatory he not only saw the real stars shining down through the glasteel dome overhead, but also the stars which lay beyond the asteroid beneath his feet, their projected images just as vivid as the starscape above. When he stepped into the lounge he felt as if he were stepping out into the void. Not for the first time, he thought he should probably have been terrified by the sensation. He wasn't.

Murkworld bulged out of the joining of dome and holo-floor at the far side of the lounge, the uppermost curve of blue and white real, the rest illusion. A spark of reflected light just above the planet's rim marked the location of the Lahab-u-Din, parked above the planet's pole, just out of sight of Murkworld's continent. Who could guess what the Sprite astrologers would make of the appearance of a new star in their skies?

"That you, Smith?"

The spectacle of a universe spread out before his feet might not have been enough to frighten Ibrahim. Raver calling to him with his usual exuberance - and volume - was another matter altogether. Ibrahim jumped at the unexpected burst of sound and the knot in his chest clenched tight around his esophagus, trying its best to squeeze a hiccup out of him.

The programmer's bulk loomed up to his left, blotting out a wide swath of stars. Ibrahim knew he shouldn't have been so startled - the tricks of light and shadow with which the lounge's holo projectors simulated the void often made it difficult for lounge patrons to see each other. But did Raver always have to be so, so energetic?

Raver's massive paw swept across the starfield and clapped Ibrahim on the back. "Did I scare you? Sorry about that, Smith. Thought you saw me."

"No." Ibrahim took a deep, calming breath. "No, I didn't see you."

"Sorry about that." Raver shuffled around so he stood beside Ibrahim, staring out at the same patch of night. "So why are you wound so tight anyhow, Smith?"

"I wonder why," Ibrahim said. He sent Raver a withering look then realized it was probably invisible in the darkness. "I mean, everything's going so peachy, I can't imagine what I've got to be tense about."

Raver whistled softly. "You really are uptight. You getting enough sleep?"

Ibrahim bit back a sharp none-of-your-business sort of reply, and stood silent instead. Anyone with even the most rudimentary social skills should have been able to read that as a change-of-subject cue.

"Really uptight," Raver said.

"I'm fine."

"I mean, really, really -- "

"I'm fine!"

Raver nodded, almost as if he were going to let it go. "Suppose you're worried what might happen now."

“I'm not worried about anything."

"Afraid they won't be able to sort things out from up here."

"Listen, Raver, I've got to get ready for prayer -- "

"Afraid they're going to have to send -- "

"Raver!" Ibrahim bellowed. He gasped, surprised himself at the volume of his own voice. The darkness rustled with the awkward coughs and low whispers which marked the positions of the other lounge patrons.

"Sorry!" Raver said. Ibrahim thought he could make out the programmer's hands moving in the universal motion used to shush animals, children and lunatics.

Ibrahim breathed deeply again, only to find that the breath failed as miserably to calm him as the first had. "It's O.K. I shouldn't have shouted like that."

"No problem." One heartbeat, two. And then: "So, you're afraid they'll send you down there. Like they did on Glory of the Ottomans."

Ibrahim gulped down yet another lungful of air, and waited for the hiccups to seize him. To his amazement, they didn't. Not even the urge. In fact, the knot that had been sitting in his chest ever since the lights had gone out on Murkworld loosened a bit, like a fist unclenching.

"Damn you, Raver," he mumbled. There was no anger in his voice - he spoke in the tones of a man who has just grasped the meaning of a particularly obscure poem, or just realized he hadn't in fact lost his car keys at all - because he'd sold his car the day before.

Raver was right. On some level Ibrahim had known all along that the thought of mops and brooms (or the outside of an airlock) hadn't been making him feel like a convict waiting for the headsman’s sword to fall. He was afraid they'd send him to fix things on Murkworld like they'd sent him down to sort things out on Glory of the Ottomans.

Bureaucracy or no, Misr wouldn't make that mistake twice. When it came right down to it, he had nothing to worry about.

"Was it really that bad, Smith?" Raver's voice was quiet, at least for him, scarcely boisterous at all.

Though the same question hung in the air between Ibrahim and pretty much everyone else ever since the Inquiry, no one had actually asked it before. That social cues thing, Ibrahim supposed. That thing Raver wasn't quite up on.

A part of Ibrahim wanted Raver to leave him alone, another part wanted to spill it all out. Like the Ancient Mariner in that old Coleridge poem. Doomed to tell the story of the worst thing he'd ever done, as if nothing in his life before or after really mattered, was really real at all.