The lights flew off to the van to snuggle into their little cubbyhole along with Sundi's soundgear, where fresnels and ellipsoidals would mate with cardioid mikes and tiny speakers, just as Sundi and I would be doing before too long.

Meanwhile the hands swirled around us, loading flats and pieces into the van manually. A lot of this stuff is too flimsy and/or cumbersome for mechs, most of which Sweet Apocalypse can't afford anyway. I'm glad I'm a tech. Maggie was busy with a fat suit who was probably the local box, arguing about our take, so Sundi and I headed off to the dressing room, where the troupe was busy packing away wigs and makeup and scripts while Annie Bee was ordering the costumes around.

As usual, all we could do here was get in the way so we headed out to the front of the van, where Ford was lying on its nose in front of the cockpit staring at the alien sky.

"How long?" he asked.

"An hour," Sundi replied.

Ford went back to his stargazing. "See that rift up there?"

I looked up. About a third of the sky was covered by a thin veil of light, its edges ragged but motionless. "Yeah?"

"That's gas."

"So?"

"You know what would happen if we went into it at super-c?"

"Is this a quiz?" I'm Ford's first backup.

"Like a brick wall."

"Are we going into it?" Sundi asked.

"I dunno. Ask Maggie."

"Not yet," Maggie said a little over a standard hour later as Ford prepared to head out.

"Tell them jokers back there to tie down if they don't want to be jelly," Ford said. Maggie ordered the troupe and hands to get into their pods. They would spend the trip inside them, fed intravenously and massaged, plugged into each other for virtual rehearsals and other recreations, while Ford, myself, Sundi (2nd backup), and Maggie (3rd backup) stayed in realtime.

"What do you mean, not yet?" I asked.

"We got two more stops then...who knows?"

"Tie down, children." We all got into our own pods. I studied the telltales. All green. Not a red or an amber in the lot. Hooked into the main comp, I felt the van like it was my own body— a break in the fuel lines would feel like a cut in a major artery. Only I had no control over this body; it was Ford's right now.

Ford cut in the engines and we were off, struggling against gravity, not feeling it in our capsules but recognizing it as something our common metal-and-plastic-and-whatnot body strained against.

It was about five rocks later that Maggie laid it down. That rift, as Ford had called it, was now a solid curtain across the sky, taking up well over three-quarters, hanging over us like Damocles' sword, the tiny ragged edges now serrated in a Mandelbrot that defied replication. You could swear those wisps of gas were moving but they were immobile.

"A thousand meters a sec," Ford said. Hyperbole, of course. We were too close for anything going that fast not to show motion. 

Inside the rift were clots and clouds of condensation, a mottle of motley white and gray, dirty snow drifts on the face of the universe, graffiti against the normal black of space or the blue of rocksky.

We were loading out again. That's the life of a trouper: load in, set up, perform, knock down, and load out. It's a lifetime of building something up just so you can tear it down tomorrow night or, if you're lucky, next week. It's the set-up that's the killer. Every stage is different and what worked in Hoboken may be useless in Passaic, as the old saying goes. So it's cut-and-try and cut-and-try again and again and again.

Maggie walked up to us. "Let's fly, children."

"Where to, captain?" Ford asked.

"Here's the coordinates." Maggie handed him a chip and he slipped it into the console. Numbers started spewing out on the screen.

"I knew it!"

"Knew what?" Our Maggie was all innocence, our brash and brassy Maggie, who blew down tough boxes like they were made of straw. Our satin-and-iron Maggie.

"We're going into the rift."

"The rift?"

"You know. That cloud of gasses we've been getting closer and closer to, the one that hangs over our heads now like...like a..."

"Sword of Damocles?" I asked helpfully.

"Like a goddamned fire curtain!"

"It's just gas, Ford.” Maggie was unruffled. “A very attenuated gas, at that. Only a couple of molecules in every cee-cee."

"It's a bloody brick wall! We have to go in at way under sub-c or we'll all de-attenuate that gas a little bit more."

"I know that. Look at the numbers, Ford. It's all there."

She was right, of course. We all knew that. Ford knew it even before he started screaming at Maggie. I think he just likes the sound of his own voice, like so many in the troupe.

The figures sent us out at super-c to a dead stop at the very edge of the cloud, so close we could touch it, then crept in at about a dee-c until we would reach a rock just barely inside.

"They came out of the heart of the cloud a couple of years ago," Maggie told us. "They've just started commerce with the neighbor rocks. We'll be the first troupe to visit them."

Did I say anything about canny, clever, conniving Maggie? Go find your own adjectives.

So we podded ourselves and headed for the cloud, the rift, the nebula, the veil, the attenuated gasses, where we stopped on a poor defenseless hydrogen molecule, just a half a meter from where the cloud stopped. 

And it did. I had figured it would just gradually fade away over a distance but indeed it was like a wall, a definite jump from one quantum level of molecules to another. Ford put the van into second and we inched forward into that tenuous gas, feeling it with the sensors on the surface of the van, a breeze blowing in our faces. I smelled applesauce.

"Stinks," Sundi sent to us. To each his/her own.

We settled down into shifts. Me and Maggie, Ford and Sundi. At this rate, it would take us about two weeks to get to the rock. In a universe where nowhere is more than three standard days from anywhere, that is creeping, and we were grinding teeth and other body parts by the time we finally reached the rock.

"They expecting us?" I said.

"Of course. You don't think I'd let us go in uninvited, do you?" Smart Maggie. Money-smart Maggie. If you're so smart, Maggie, what are you doing with Sweet Apocalypse?

We parked in a field that was in the process of becoming a parking lot, a legacy, I guess, of their new neighbors, who were beaming in to take advantage of a new set of yokels. No theatre, no auditorium, just a bunch of concrete shacks scattered in bunches around the rock. Some of the bunches barely talked with the others.

But that didn't bother Sweet Apocalypse, much less Maggie. We'd been everywhere, from the rock-wide, rock-deep streets of N'lonyo to the muddy expanses of Old Aphneo. Give me an auditorium and I'll find places to put lights where you'd never expect lights to go but you'll never notice them when they're on, and the same for Sundi and her sounds. As for our hands, well....

So a tent went up on the rock, which was called Barter by the neighbors who had come to visit it like a bunch of friendly vultures. But what a tent! Pillars a foot thick holding up a canvas of a thousand colors, twisting and turning and changing in the breeze, a red that shifted before your eyes into purple then blue to green to yellow to orange and back to red, or maybe blacking or whiting out or changing back to red or any other color whenever it felt like it. In between the pillars another shimmering fabric was as solid as steel while appearing to be as evanescent as steam— steam with wide ornate doors, embroidered with the history and wonders of Sweet Apocalypse.

And the local yokels came to gape and watch at the construction of this edifice, a show in itself, for which Maggie did not charge. That, of course, would come later. The troupe trooped out of the van and put on mini-shows of their own, singing, playing instruments, rehearsing.

Inside the tent, Maggie decided where to place the stages, craftily using the local version of trees as part of the set, transplanting others so that we could restore everything when we left. Sundi and I huddled over our plots, trying to keep our instruments from interfering with each other.

Big Jan, foreman of the hands, came over when they were done. "How does it look?" he asked.

Where there had just been a field of local flora, now there was a little corner of old Earth, but no such corner had ever existed--pieces of Elizabethan England, Old New York, Tokyo, Rio, and a dozen others, times and places overlapping in a way that made no sense to anyone who hadn't already seen it a hundred times before in a hundred different configurations.

Now it was time for Sundi and I to do our stuff. We flew around the stage and the auditorium, planting lights and speakers and mikes in trees, stanchions, the very roof of the tent itself, and programming others to fly to where they would be needed when we needed them.

Then Sundi flew around the stage while I tested the lights, making personal notes for needed changes. For a first cut, it wasn't bad. But then, I had lots and lots of experience by now.

So what if Jonaplin gets peeved, if Booth throws a fit? In a few days, they'll be podded and maybe next rock they'll get their chance to shine.

"Tek, we need more light on five-b." One of the hoovers is having a problem so I fly in two fresnels for general lighting and an ellipsoidal for focus as soon as Maggie can give me a location.

"More gain in five-b." Sundi turns up the volume and I eavesdrop, curious.

Oh, there's a battle royal. Caught redhanded, the rube is arguing with our hoover, who wants only to get him out of the tent. But the rube who had been offended wants more than that and has slugged the first rube while the hoover was grappling with him. Neighbors have joined in, some on one side, some on another, making more opportunity for the local rube grifters, bringing our hoovers in from other areas, opening those areas up for more local foul play, and...well, you get the picture.

In less than thirty minutes, a couple of dozen rubes are crying foul and the local gendarmes are trying to sort things out with Maggie and the hoovers, while the hands and hoovers are hustling the rest of the complaining locals out of the tent, Sundi is monitoring like crazy and telling me when and where to shut down, since Maggie's too busy to help, and I can help herd the rubes out with my lights but...when the lights go out somewhere, there's always a local grifter eager to take advantage of the situation, so the hoovers have to keep their eyes open but five of them are busy with Maggie, trying to sort things out, so pretty soon there's another ruckus going down where Jonaplin had been performing. Jonaplin's ticked off because he got cut off in the middle of his favorite number, so he decides to join in on the fun and gets clocked right in the throat and is lying there gurgling for breath and I have to bring up the lights so Doc can help him, dragging him off to a dark corner where I set up a spy light for Doc alone but now people are lying all over the ground, bloody and battered, being stepped on, fallen over, and the local gendarmes call for backup.

Finally Ford hits the freeze button, which Maggie or me or Sundi should have thought of long ago, and everybody but Ford, who's out of the field, goes into stasis. Now stasis ain't no fun, friend, with your muscles all tight and taut. The freeze only affects the major muscles, so you can blink and move your eyes around slowly and, for that matter, you can even move a little but not enough to keep from crashing to the ground if you're in a position where gravity wants you to do that. And of course a lot of the rubes were in that position.

Ford moves fast, I'll give him that. He moved in, slapped all our cancellation generators on Maggie and the gendarmes. They left the field and Ford went in to get our hoovers and the original combatants. Then he and Maggie came in and got me, Sundi, and the rest of the hoovers. While we stayed on the outside, the hoovers went in and brought out the rubes one by one.

Meanwhile reinforcements arrived and, as soon as everyone was out of the tent, it was sealed off and Maggie, Ford, Sundi, and I were bustled on down to the local hoosegow for some serious palaver. Then Sundi left with a couple of the gendarmes to pick up her cameras so the locals could review the recordings and verify the story our hoovers told. Nobody likes to be told that it's their people who are the troublemakers. We're the outsiders; we're the ones who caused everything. Just by being there. Forget the fact that just a couple of hours ago they were welcoming us with open arms, parades, and brass bands.

The rubes who weren't in any of the fights and got frozen aren't happy about that either and they want their money back, not to mention those who got hurt in the freeze or in a fight. Of course, the troupe didn't get out unscathed either. Most of the hoovers got clobbered one way or another, as well as Jonaplin and a few of performers, and a half dozen of the hands who didn't double as hoovers but who had also joined in on the fun.

Now this isn't the first time something like this has happened to us, of course, not by a long shot. But those other times were outside, out of the cloud, on rocks that had seen troupes before and who had connections. But the rubes on Barter were newcomers to the scene and we had no serious recourse to the outside, since it was a two-week trip in.

We did have EM to the outside, of course, and, I'll give the local politicos credit, they got in touch with outside toot sweet. I think they wanted to hear that we were trouble makers so they could plant the whole thing on us but we've got a Grade A rep out there even if our cred rate isn't Number One.

So we opened up again, taking torn chits as credit, and each of our hoovers was accompanied by a local gendarme. The sight of all that purple must have spooked the local grifters because we had very little trouble. Not none. Just very little.

Our biggest problem was Jonaplin. He was still ticked off and he wanted to get out there again while Doc wanted him to take a couple of days off. Ford suggested we freeze his throat but Maggie vetoed that, of course. I suggested we freeze his brain but Sundi said we wouldn't be able to find it. From there on in, the suggestions went downhill.

As usual, Maggie solved that particular problem by convincing Jonaplin that if we didn't let him perform till the very end, it would make him look like a star. He peacocked out of there with a strut that would have put our Booth to shame.

So all our problems were solved. Sure. If you believe that, I've got a matter transmitter you might be interested in. We still had a bunch of court suits to settle, a couple from locals involved in some of the fracases and a dozen or so from people injured in the freeze.

And the Barter courts were in no hurry to deal with them either. Ford suggested we just take off and forget the whole thing. They had no way of stopping us. 

But Maggie was worried about our rep, of course. If word got out that we'd run out on an entire rock's worth of rubes, we would have ourselves trouble finding tent space much less a nice warm auditorium somewhere. Sure, the circumstances were unusual, to say the least, but try telling that to the rubes.

So we stayed, putting on more shows, which put us in more danger of more lawsuits, not to mention that we had to pay for the gendarmes to keep the grifters low. And we weren't being paid in credit or gilt but in produce and products that we could trade outside but for which we had only limited space.

Every possible place we could store produce and products in the van was filled and still it piled up. We didn't dare stop performances or we'd have trouble with the locals. They liked our shows and wanted us to stay longer; that softened some of our problems but at the same time gave the courts a reason to string things out a little longer.

To put it bluntly, we were losing money while the Barter courts dealt with the cases. A bunch were quickly dismissed. The grifters who'd been caught were summarily dealt with as well as the griftees. What was holding us up were the suits from those who'd been injured by the freeze. They claimed it was our fault, that we'd overreacted and that, even if we hadn't, we were still responsible.