As Ida wandered on randomly through the hot white mists of the intercosmic wastelands of the moid, U-scampi flew around her in lazy figure eights.
        "Do you have to fly around like that?" said Ida, crossly. "Couldn't you just settle in one place and stay there?"
        "I need the photo angles," said U-scampi.
        "You have plenty enough to generate any photo angles you want," said Ida.
        "By computer gimmickry?" said U-scampi, sounding shocked. "Oh no! That would be unethical! The audience is paying for verisimilitude! Girl dying for real in wilderness."
        "Young woman, thank you very much," said Ida. "I'm nineteen years of age. That's a woman, not a girl."
        "Not in my dictionary," said U-scampi doubtfully. "Say, could I ask you a favor?"
        "What?"
        "Could you cry a little? The audience doesn't really go for this stoic stuff. They'd like to see you emote a bit. The stubborn bloody-minded thing won't help your ratings, you know."
        "What do I care about my ratings?" said Ida.
        "Well," said U-scampi, "if we could do an exclusive interview — and, under the circumstances, you're not likely to do any other kind — I can offer you a top-money contract. You'd die rich. Your parents — I'm assuming you have parents, right? — could use the money, couldn't they?"
        "What kind of interview?" said Ida.
        "An emotive one," said U-scampi. "As a lead-in, I'd like you to cry a little."
        "But that would be faking!" said Ida.
        "No, not at all," said U-scampi. "I'd merely present the images to the public. If they assumed that you were really sobbing your little heart out, that would be their error of interpretation. I wouldn't be mistruthing, would I now? Besides, if you let yourself fake it, I'm sure you'd soon be crying for real."
        This was uncomfortably close to what Ida was thinking herself. As she crunched over the whitish dunes of the moid, tired and thirsty, her emotional resources were getting more and more depleted.
        "Well," said U-scampi. "Is it a deal?"
        "I don't have time for deals now," said Ida, spotting a blur of orange amidst the white mists of the moid. "I see a tarj!"
        And so she did. She could see an orange tarj — one of those pillars of revolving color which served as portals to the moid — barely a hundred paces distant. She started toward it.
        "Ta da da da da DAH, ta da da da da DAH," said U-scampi, striking up triumphalistic background music. "And, as we watch, we see Ida Brahma — and what a plucky girl she is, isn't she? — heads toward the beckoning doorway which may offer her salvation or doom."
        The word "doom" was followed by a thunderous roll of suitably doomish drums.
        Ida stopped and sat down. "What exactly do you think you're doing?" said U-scampi, switching off the background music.
        He circled her, waiting.
        "Well? You can't just sit here, you know."
        "Yes I can," said Ida. "I'm on strike."
        "On strike?" said U-scampi incredulously. "But you can't go on strike! This is real life, not a theatrical performance. You're a real person, not an actor. Real people don't have the option of going on strike."
        "I think they do, you know," said Ida. "I can, and I have, and I'm on strike until further notice."
        And, whistling a little to herself — her throat was so dry that humming would have been uncomfortable — she started to pick her fingernails. U-scampi circled a little, waiting.
        "Oh, all right," he said, finally. "What do you want?"
        "No more background music," said Ida. "And no voice-overs."
        "But the public likes them," said U-scampi.
        "Then add them in afterwards!" said Ida.
        "But I work for an organic news service," said U-scampi. "Free-range news. News with no additives. We add nothing — absolutely nothing — to the authentic record of the real world."
        "But you're manipulating the real world just by being here," said Ida. "After all, if you weren't here, I wouldn't be on strike. And, anyway — what gives you the right to do this snooping thing at all? I'm a private person, aren't I? Yes, I am. I'm sure of it."
        "You're out of your depth," said U-scampi.
        "No," said Ida. "Listen to me, Mister Photoface — "
        "U-scampi, please."
        "Listen to me, Spy Guy. I, Ida Brahma, hereby invoke my legal rights not to be snooped on by the media. I refuse you the right to record me. I refuse you the right to play, broadcast, and, uh, document — no, that's not it — disseminate, that's the word — you may not sperm out any of this pornography of death stuff to the waiting world. Is that clear?"
        "It's clear that you don't understand the law," said U-scampi.
        "Oh yes I do," said Ida. "I am a private person, and the media needs my permission to report on my life."
        "Not if you're a current event," said U-scampi.
        "A what?" said Ida.
        "A current event," said U-scampi. "A hurricane, a meteorite strike, a space wreck — the media doesn't need signed permissions. We just go in and report."
        "I'm lost," said Ida. "That doesn't make me a current event."
        "People in danger of dying because of their involuntary presence in an inimical environment are current events," said U-scampi, unshakably. "Trust me — it's been tested in law. If you fell off a ferry and started drowning in the harbor, you'd be a current event. By exactly the same token, now that you're lost in the moid, you're equally a current event. Look — there's a tarj just over there. Why don't you go through it?"
        "Go away," said Ida. "I want to pick my nose."
        "Do you really want to die alone?" said U-scampi. "Alone, and unobserved? A death of hideous loneliness, with no witnesses?"
        "Yes," said Ida. "If possible. It sounds much better than the alternative, which I suspect to be death with background music."
        "Very tasteful background music," said U-scampi. "Sobbing strings. Low. Unobtrusive."
        "I'd rather be eaten by crabs," said Ida.
        "Well, maybe I can find you some," said U-scampi.
        And he flew off by himself, and vanished into the orange mists of the tarj. Perversely, as soon as he was gone Ida started to feel lonely. She noticed, as she had not done for some time, the hissing white noise which was the constant sonic background in the moid.
        Five minutes later, U-scampi returned.
        "Good news," he said. "I've checked it out, and it's safe. There's water. Well — what are you waiting for?"
        "A deal," said Ida.
        "What kind of deal?" said U-scampi.
        "No background music," said Ida, "and no voice-overs."
        "That's impossible."
        "Well, how about this. How about you play the background music so softly that I can't hear it. And you do the voice-overs likewise. Then, later, you could amplify them. For the audience, I mean."
        "I'm not sure," said U-scampi, doubtfully. "It wouldn't be strictly authentic."
        "Then, how about this," said Ida. "For any really important event, we can have background music, but no more than ten minutes in the hour. Deal?"
        "Deal," said U-scampi.
        And, with that, Ida got moving, in the direction of the orange tarj.
        
         * * *
        
        Ida pushed her way through the orange mists of the tarj, the portal from the moid, and emerged onto the surface of a planet somewhere in the transcosmic vastness of Known Reality. (At least, she hoped she was still somewhere in Known Reality, though, the moid being what it was, it was theoretically possible that she might have come further.)
        U-scampi circled, recording diligently, as Ida surveyed the landscape.
        Desert. Ruinously hot. Landscape of red rocks. Jumble-smash chaos. Red rock, red sands. And cactus plants. And ants the size of her thumb, so remorselessly busy — they were deconstructing what looked to be the last remains of a dead camel — that just looking at them made her feel exhausted. And dry watercourse gulches. Just looking at that landscape made her feel more thirsty than ever.
        The worst thing was that she had no recollection of ever encountering this desert landscape in any of her researches; and, though she had never methodically researched the moid, books and films and comic strips about it had been a routine constituent of her data inputs since earliest childhood. Growing up near the green tarj, one of the interfaces of the morphologically variable transcosmic topological integration known as the moid, she had always been interested in alien environments. Yet this planet was totally unfamiliar.
        "But just how many planets have you visited, Ida-zan?"
        A count revealed just the two: the planet of the gray tarj and the planet of the pink tarj. Gonamek Daramantra and the beachcomber's beach. Counting this new, desert planet: three. So why did she feel as if she had been wandering in the wilderness for something like half a lifetime?
        "We are discoverers," said Ida. "And it's more hard work than you'd imagine from just watching it on TV. Okay, U-scampi, where's this water you were talking about?"   
        "By the red rock — "
        " — great help!"
        " — with the yellow streak."
        And there it was. Water. A clear bright upwelling from the innermost recesses of the planet, from which Ida drank. And drank. And drank.
        Thirst quenched, she cast around for signs of civilization. And found at least one — an empty Suki-Suki can. This was infinitely familiar, since Suki-Suki, the pink candyfloss softdrink of the Zafari Jahar, was advertised everywhere. Ida looked in the can. It was totally empty. There was absolutely no Suki-Suki in it. Good. Ida hated Suki-Suki.
        "Come here," said Ida, washing the can in the water.
        U-scampi obeyed.
        "Now," said Ida, "record this."
        And she put the wet and dripping can to her lips, tilted back her head, then made gulping drinking movements with her throat. Then emoted.
        "Oh, Suki-Suki! A dream come true! I just love that liquid candyfloss!"
        "Exactly what do you think you're doing?" said U-scampi.
        "Shut up and record," said Ida.
        "No," said U-scampi. "It seems to me that you're trying to fake an incident that never happened. What's more, I suspect that you're doing so for your own commercial advantage."
        "What if I am?" said Ida. "I've told you," said U-scampi. "I'm in the verisimilitude business."
        "Oh, really?" said Ida. "But you're the one who wanted me to cry!"
        "Yes," said U-scampi. "But, if you were to cry, or to seem to be crying, you really would be holding your face in your hands and sobbing, or seeming to drink."
        "Right!" said Ida. "So right now I really am holding a can in my hands. Okay? A Suki-Suki can!"
        "Yes, but there's no Suki-Suki in the can," said U-scampi. "The can is empty."
        "I'm not saying it isn't," said Ida. "All I'm saying is that I love Suki-Suki."
        "But you're pretending to drink something," said U-scampi.
        In response, Ida wordlessly filled the empty can with water.
        "Now I'm not pretending," she said. "The can is full. I'm going to drink from it."
        "I refuse to have any part in this," said U-scampi. "I'm not going to record this."
        "What?"
        "You heard me. I'm going on strike."
        "Okay," said Ida, thinking it through. "How about this? You record my Suki-Suki incidents — and there are going to be quite a few of them before I'm done — and I'll cry for you. Once."
        "One of my colleagues got caught doing something like this," said U-scampi. "He lost his job. He's now running an obedience school for dogs."
        "I won't tell if you don't," said Ida.
        "Okay," said U-scampi. "Deal."
        So they recorded various improvised Suki-Suki product placements. What Ida had in mind was the famous "thirsts of real people" ad sequence, detailing how real people resorted to Suki-Suki in the face of death. Drinking it in burning buildings, on board sinking ships, on transcosmic space liners facing alien invasion and (in the most famous ad of all) just before facing a firing squad (the execution, fortunately, was canceled at the last moment).
        Ida was sure that the Suki-Suki people would pay real big money for her true-life experiences. All she had to do was get out of this alive, and she would be rich for life.
        Ida, a little daringly, had just tucked the Suki-Suki can inside her T-shirt — some of the Suki-Suki ads were downright dirty — when a strange man wandered into view, emerging from behind one of the huger desert rocks, a skyscraper's worth of splintered red. (What did you call those things? Stalagrams? Chonagoils? Buttes?)
        "Hi!" said Ida, spontaneously, waving.
        Then wished she had not. For she distinctly remembered the warning given in "A Student's Guide to Chastity": "For an unchaperoned woman to seek to attract the attention of a strange man lacks something of prudence." Back in Lon Tray Pay, Ida had laughed without resistance when Pollen had made fun of the manual, but out here, in what one might call the real world — it certainly felt a whole heap more real than sitting at a classroom desk — the manual was starting to make more and more sense.
        Still, it was too late. She had called out to the strange male, and, obedient to her invitation, he was approaching, leading his donkey. (Or was it a donkey? Maybe it was a, what did you call it. Burro? Or mule? Whatever.)
        U-scampi had vanished — a glimpse of his flickering shadow showed Ida that he had taken to the sky. She remembered, again, the photojournalist who had chosen not to intervene when the crocodile had started chasing the child in the wheelchair.
        But maybe the stranger was a good guy.
        Maybe.
        To judge by the gear carried by his donkey — which included, amongst other things, a gold-washing pan and a theodolite — Ida's strange man was a prospector. He was bearded, mustachioed, dusty, his knees rendered khaki with dirt, the rest of his clothing faded greenish leather studded with brass-yellow metal rivets. He wore a big leather belt, brown and cracked, from which there hung a sizeable hunting knife and a machete. A small black plastic cannister hung from a loop stitched into the leather of his left shoulder. What was in that cannister? Earplugs?
        "Hi," said Ida. "Peace, and, uh, all. All that. I'm Ida, Ida Brahma."
        In response, the prospector — very close by now — unslung his rifle and pointed it at her.
        "En-hen," he said, curtly.
        "Now, uh, let's not make any mistakes," said Ida, starting to back away, imagination livid with visions of the downside possbilities of this situation.
        "En-hen!" said the prospector, with more emphasis.
        Ida turned and fled into the tarj, sprinting as fast as she could. Orange mist enveloped her, then she was through to the whiteness of the moid beyond. There was a gunshot blast from behind. She stumbled, fell, and threw out a hand to stop herself from crushing the Suki-Suki can underneath her T-shirt. The impact of her landing almost broke her wrist.
        "Uh," said Ida, gathering herself to her feet.
        Shot?
        Wounded?
        Dead?
        No — everything was apparently in working order. She had not been punctured. She was not gushing blood. As she turned to face her enemy, the moid tugged at her faintly; yielding to its promptings, she began walking sideways, going where the moid's currents wanted to take her. The prospector followed, gun in hand. And, as she watched, he brought the weapon up to his shoulder.
        "Don't shoot!" yelled Ida.
        But the prospector, dimly visible through the mist, aimed his rifle with full deliberation.
        Intent on murdering Ida Brahma, he pulled the trigger.
        Immediately, an aura glowed to life amidst the white mists of the moid, an orange aura slowly turning to red. Ida knew it was the aura of something trying to force its way through the moid in defiance of the moid's internal currents.
        Slowly, slowly, slowly, the aura strained toward her, pure red by now. It drew nearer and nearer, so close she could have almost reached out to touch it. Then she saw the actual bullet in the middle of the aura. In a manner not to be accounted for by the mechanics of normative reality — several physicists had gone mad trying to understand the mechanics of the moid — the bullet was straining to get at her, heading insolently along its chosen vector in defiance of the forces being exerted upon it. The persuasions of the moid and the thrust of the bullet momentarily canceled each other out, and the bullet hung utterly frozen in the air.
        To move efficiently through the morphologically variable transcosmic topological integration, it was necessary to be sensitive to its persuasions, and to yield to them. The bullet which had been fired into the moid was incapable of taking a hint, and so the moid was steadily amplifying the force it was exerting to persuade the bullet in the desired direction.
        For one poised instant, the bullet hung in the air. Then there was a buzz of angry green light and the bullet was gone, snatched away, vanished. And then the currents of the moid lightly scooped Ida off her feet and started wafting her away.
        Dimly, through the mists, she saw the prospector draw his machete and come charging toward her. His mouth was open, suggesting that he was shouting something, but no sound was reaching her. Then an eddy of the moid currents caught him and tossed him abruptly head over heels. His machete flew off at a tangent as he tumbled and spun. He was turning into a human windmill. Ida caught one last glimpse of his horrified face, and then he was swept away into the contorted darkness.
        Sensibly submitting to the moid currents, Ida drifted, floating along in the invisible current. After a while, she realized that U-scampi was drifting near her. Like the good photojournalist he was, he had stayed remote from the action, contenting himself with the job of recording it.
        "Could you cry for me now?" said U-scampi.
        "Not yet," said Ida.
        She was still far too incredibly angry to even think about crying. The prospector guy had tried to shoot her! If she had had a gun then she would have shot him right back.
        Ida drifted, floating, until the moid at last lost interest in her, and dumped her down between two blurs of color, one khaki, one gold. A gold tarj and a khaki tarj. Perhaps they existed in a stable binary relationship, like the green tarj of Velis Tantris and the Tangerine tarj of Una Matoa.
        Any sign of the prospector? No. Good. U-scampi was still with her, of course. And Giggles? Still no sign of Giggles, that weird crinkling three-dimensional rainbow which she had met earlier, and had taken to be an alien. No sign of Giggles at all. Gone for good? Maybe. Anyway —
        "Which one do you think I should try first?" said Ida.
        "Don't ask me," said U-scampi. "I'm just a camera."
        "Sounds like you're suffering from low self-esteem," said Ida.  
        "I prefer to think of it as professionalism," said U-scampi.
        "Well," said Ida, heading for the nearer of the two planetary interfaces, "gold first."
        But the gold tarj brought her to a planet of ice, total ice, upon which she did not dare step out in her bare feet. The sunlit ice was even brighter than the glaring interior of the moid: the glare hurt her eyes, even through her sunglasses. No birds, no penguins, no sign of a walrus.
        "No, no thank you, not ice," said Ida.
        She did a couple of Suki-Suki product placements as best she could — tricky when she could not step on the ice on account of having no shoes — then retreated to the interior of the moid and tried the khaki tarj.
        Khaki mist yielded to a sharpness of sun. A valley of some kind, between high mountains. Venturing beyond the khaki mists, Ida took a few experimental paces, careful in the placement of her feet, then realized she felt strangely tired. There was something wrong with her breathing: it was starting to labor. Furthermore, she had no strength at all: she felt drained. Worse, her ears were hurting, as they had during one of her airplane rides. Remembering airplane experiences, she held her nostrils and blew until her ears popped. She felt better.
        "Altitude change," she said.
        Within the moid, gravitation and air pressure were maintained — by mechanisms as yet unexplained by the science of the Zafari Jahar — at something approximating sea level planetary norms. But, when you stepped out through one of the interfaces, there was no guarantee that you would even have air, let alone breathable air, or air at a healthy atmospheric pressure.
        "But this is tolerable," said Ida, assessing.        
        Still carefully treasuring her bare feet, the most precious of all her possessions, she climbed to the top of a small mound to survey the landscape. The first thing revealed to her was the ruptured carcass of a man — she presumed it was a man — who was lying not far away. He was missing both legs. He was dead and decomposing. She swayed, steadied herself.
        "You are a scientist."
        Scientific scrutiny revealed, not far from the dead man, a boot with an ankle sticking out of it. Which meant that the deceased had probably stepped on a landmine. Which meant that this was probably a battlefield, or had been in the past: some landmines were designed to survive for centuries. If a battlefield, it might well be radioactive. Or contaminated with anthrax spores, or worse.
        A dangerous place, then.
        Still —
        She could hear, somewhere, a trickle of running water.
        Where?
        And was it worth risking getting both legs blown off in order to find something to drink? She had drunk a lot on the prospector's desert planet, but she was already starting to feel dry again. Probably, it was best to drink whenever you got the chance. Drink first, and worry about dysentery later.
        "I hear water," said Ida, taking out her Suki-Suki can. "It makes me remember the best thing to drink."
        "Which is?" said U-scampi, hovering near her.
        "Shut up," said Ida. "We don't need an interactive dialog. We want something open-ended, suggestive. Okay?"
        "The great advertising executive," said U-scampi sardonically.
        "Suki-Suki, take two," said Ida. "I hear water. Water makes me think of good things to drink. Good things — and great things."
        And where exactly was the water? Scanning the landscape, Ida saw a flashing light in the middle distance, and she looked right at it before she realized what she was doing.
        Realizing —
        Realizing the magnitude of her error, Ida threw herself flat, her Suki-Suki can going flying as she went straight down on her belly on the loose stones of the small mound, clenching her eyes tightly. She opened those eyes cautiously. Could she still see? Yes.
        "Well, don't do it again," said Ida.
        Meaning: don't look at flashing lights on battlefields.
        Easily said, more difficult to do, for the eye was naturally attracted to flashing lights. That was why battlefield lasers were often associated with just such lights: as soon as you looked at the light, the laser would blind you. You could be instantaneously and irretrievably blinded: and, little as Ida cared for military history, she was nevertheless aware of the hideous fate of the blundering armies of the blinded which had resulted from some of the more dire conflicts of history. Thousands and thousands of people, staggering across minefield battlegrounds, entirely blinded but lacking the skills of the blind, stumbling eyeless —
        As Ida was thinking about it, there was an explosion, very near at hand. A mine must have been triggered by mere proximity to her bioactivity. The explosion showered her with dirt. For a moment, Ida lay there, like an electrocuted rag doll. Then, recovering the use of her limbs, she bolted back into the moid.
        Once she was safe in the misty wilderness of the moid, the shock hit her for real, and soon she was shuddering, red-eyed, weeping. So very close to death!
        After a while, she became aware of U-scampi circling, recording.
        "That is very satisfactory," said U-scampi. "Very, very satisfactory indeed. Authentic to the bone."
        "I'm glad you think so," said Ida shakily, and starting back to the khaki tarj.
        "Where do you think you're going?" said U-scampi in alarm.
        "I dropped my Suki-Suki can."
        "You can't go back for an empty can!" said U-scampi.
        "Yes I can," said Ida.
        "But you're the star of my news show!"
        "Then you should take better care of me, shouldn't you?" said Ida. "I'll be no good for your ratings if I'm dead. Will I now? Now, come on. I need you!"
        Back in the high altitude environment, Ida found her precious Suki-Suki can. It was scratched on one side. She positioned the can so the scratch was hidden by her hand.
        "Wow," said Ida, as U-scampi circled, recording. "That landmine almost killed me! But I'm alive! When I'm alive, I appreciate the good things in life."
        Did that make sense? Well, worry about sense later.
        Ida faked drinking from the Suki-Suki can.
        "Wow, that was good," said Ida, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, forcing a big toothy smile. "That was the best!"
        Done. They had captured the best product placement of all. Near death by landmine would certainly qualify Ida for a "thirsts of real people" spot. It was much better than being threatened by a stinking rapist. Landmines didn't have dirty minds. Death, pure and simple, makes for the best product placements — that's the kind of culture we live in.
        "All right," said Ida. "Let's get out of here."
        Ida risked a last one-eyed glance at the landscape of the planet of the khaki tarj, then turned, rose, trotted down the mound and headed back into the moid.
        "Onwards," she said.
        Easy to say, harder to do. She became more and more despondent as she trudged thirstily through the eternal white mists. Increasingly, she worried about her physical condition. Her feet were holding up all right — walking over crunchy force fields was no worse than working on sand, and she was accustomed to taking long barefoot walks on the beach — but she was conscious of having over-exerted herself. Her legs were aching, gravely fatigued. How much further could she walk?
        Then, finally, she saw, looming through the whiteness, a smudge of black.
        "A black tarj?" said Ida to herself. "There's no such thing as a black tarj."
        "Yes, there is," said U-scampi, who had not spoken for some time. "I entered the moid through just such a tarj."
        "Oh?" said Ida.
        "I was on a starship," said U-scampi. "It's a long story, but, basically, I was the sole survivor."
        "When was this?" said Ida.
        "Seven years ago," said U-scampi.
        "You mean you've been wandering around in the moid for seven years?" said Ida.
        "It's a big place," said U-scampi.
        Seven years! That was the most discouraging thing Ida had heard all day.
        As Ida homed in on the smudge of darkness, it grew and expanded, swelling to definite tarjness. She hesitated. Blackness she associated with blindness, with the unknown. She was convinced that something truly horrific might lie through those black mists.
        However —
        Since it was a choice of daring the black tarj or dying of thirst, she pushed on through the black mists, and after only a few steps emerged onto a ridgeline overlooking a vast expanse of rolling hills thickly forested with pine trees. The trees were a dark luxuriant green: the hills were almost black with their massed weight of subdued color.
        "Is this the planet where your starship crashed?" said Ida.
        "No, not at all," said U-scampi. "It crashed in a kind of — well, scrap metal yard, you could call it. Rubbish all around. Nanotechnological phages. They were programmed to dismantle any kind of machine they could find. I was lucky not to get infected."
        "A kind of war zone, then," said Ida.
        "I guess," said U-scampi. "A pity you don't drink Suki-Suki," said Ida. "You could have done some great product placements."
        Then, cautiously, inspecting the ground for landmines — though she knew very well that she had precious little hope of spotting a mine before stepping on it — Ida scouted round the black tarj, which was a small one, barely as tall as a house. It sat amidst pine trees on a narrow steep-sided ridge, along which ran a path.
        Okay. The sky. The sun of this new planet was a quarter of a way through its arc, either rising or setting, one or the other. The time, then, was roughly mid-morning or mid-afternoon. It was cool, a lot of gray rainclouds in the sky. Listen. No sound of water. No sound of anything, much.
        "Looks good," said U-scampi.
        "Quiet," said Ida.
        "Is that a command or a comment?" said U-scampi.
        Ida did not reply. Her mouth was hangover-dry. She did not want to speak more than she had to. The slopes of the ridge were too steeply dangerous for her to chance a descent, so she started along the narrow path. Cautiously, for paths people. And people are dangerous. But people imply water. And, also, restaurants, double beds, bottles of wine, spaceports, telephones, television and shoe shops.
        Spiderweb upon spiderweb — nobody had been here recently — the trail gave way before her. If there were any shoe shops hereabouts, then, it was reasonable to suppose that they were doing precious little business. Slowly, the ridge broadened. And, at last, widened into a clearing, where there stood a log cabin.
        As soon as Ida saw the clearing, she stopped, and hunkered down behind a tree, observing clearing and cabin carefully just as she had seen heroes of the moid doing TV. On TV shows, isolated buildings in the wilderness tended to be associated with (a) serial killers, (b) transcosmic terrorists, (c) drug smugglers, (d) mad scientists, (e) werewolves or (f) blonde women with big bazoomas who have been cruelly hurt by men, and have vowed to have no more to do with them, but who have come to such decision without ever meeting any man as handsome, tender and sensitive as the hero who stars in the current episode.
        "What are we waiting for?" said U-scampi.
        "There might be an ambush," said Ida.
        "So there might," said U-scampi.
        "Well?"
        "Well what? I've told you. I'm just a camera."
        "I could go on strike again."
        "I don't think you will, you know. Come on. Be a devil. Check it out. Someone might shoot you in the face. It would make a great finish."
        And, with that, Ida realized that U-scampi had enough safely recorded. Whether she lived or died, she was going to be a news event in her own right. And, dying at this stage, after so many adventures, she might make a better news event than she would if alive.
        At last, Ida got to her feet and headed toward the cabin. The roof looked to be made of corrugated iron, and had a gutter. This suggested to her that there might just possibly perhaps —
        "God, I hope so — "
        — be a water tank round the side.
        And so there was.
        A gray galvanized tank stood at the side of the cabin. It came equipped with a tap which opened in the conventional direction, releasing water which looked to be clear. Ida investigated no further, but drank with gulping greed, slaking her thirst with the violence of overpowering physical need.
        "Ah," she said, lifting her head, water dripping from her chin. "Ah ...!"
        She felt positively animalistic.
        "Don't over-dramatize," she said crossly, lecturing that small but dangerous histrionic element which lurked within her personality. "You just drank some water, that's all. Come on, let's get on with it."
        Thus lectured, Ida pulled herself together, and entered the cabin. Inside, a rough wooden floor, a couple of wooden tables flanked by wooden benches, some bunks with mattresses covered with striped plastic covers of a faded gray, green and blue. The lowest bunks built high off the ground, leaving plenty of room for backpacks. Some spiders, some spiderwebs. A bent nail lying on the floor. A warped metal button. Glass windows, one cracked. An iron stove of the kind used for heating rather than cooking. Ashes in the stove, cold beneath her fingers. No toilet.
        "No toilet?" said Ida.
        Scouting around outside, she found the charred ashes of an ancient outhouse. And that was that.
        "No food, no toilet, no blankets," said Ida, assessing her equipment.
        Well, at least she had a notebook, so she could make scientific observations. But, despite all her journeyings in the heat of the moid, the notebook remained damp: by immersion in the seas of the beachcomber's planet it had been reduced to squidgy mass of damp paper. And, in any case, she had no pen. Okay, then, she would just have to remember her research data. Her head was spinning with it: planets, aliens, gunshots, auras, minefields, spiderwebs.
        "Wow," said Ida.
        She laid herself down on one of the bunks and closed her eyes. After a while, a faint crinkling grinkling sound like the folding up of sandpaper made her open them again. Giggles, the Zelma Kan alien she had first met in the moid, had returned, and now hung over her, mathematically deconstructing and reconstructing himself, his three-dimensional bars of color grid-graphing the gloom of the cabin.
        "What's your problem?" said Ida. "You want a hand job or something?"
        She snorted with laughter, irrepressibly amused by her own outrageous vulgarity, then closed her eyes again. With her eyes closed, she had the impression that she was falling down through darkness in a dense dark snow of drugged petals. She was being pressed down into sleep, thrust down into oblivion, crushed by the weight of fatigue and experience.
        "But where's my climax?" said Ida.
        She was a hero of the moid, was she not? And a hero of the moid was entitled to a climax in which he shot it out with the Evil Aliens and claimed the love of the Big Blonde Woman With The Big Bazoomas.
        "But maybe that's the difference between life and art," said Ida. "No climax. No closure."
        Then sleep insisted again. And, this time, Ida did not resist.

         * * *

        Asleep, she had the oddest dream. She was going to university. But not to study xenology, no. She was training to be a dentist. For some reason, it only took two years. In her dream, she was enormously happy to be in the process of evolving into a dentist.
        "The world is full of teeth," said Ida, rubbing her purple buttes together.
        Using her theodolite, she opened the mouth of a practice patient.
        "Don't hurt me," said the patient.
        "Don't do that AI thing on me," said Ida, crossly. "You're just a Suki-Suki sump, I know that."
        She started to drill, using a piece of sharpened icecream for the purpose. The patient was promptly sick, splattering Ida's face with a shower of red ants. The red ants bit. The bites were painful, and made Ida giddy.
        The pain was so bad that Ida woke up, and found her head spinning. Worse, she felt sick. She promptly threw up all over the floor. But that did nothing to solve the mounting pain. She was hot, and sweating. Her body felt like one big rash.
        "What's happening?" wailed Ida.
        No answer came. But, through a window, she saw a fractional moon, speaking in silence of cool nights and empty eternities. A disordered thought came to her: the coolness of the moon might save her. She staggered outside, and collapsed just outside the hut, and lost consciousness.
        
         * * *
        
        The next morning, come sunup, Ida wakened, groggy but still alive. She felt a bit shaky, but was able to walk. And, half an hour down the trail, she found a sign which seemed to explain the events of the night. A sign set up for the benefit of people going in the direction she was coming from.
        "Uptrail cabins closed — termite countermeasures. Toxic danger — do not enter."
        Which led Ida to formulate two observations. Observation the first: Reality (even Known Reality) is not only more dangerous than you imagine, it is more dangerous than you can imagine. Observation the second: The doorstep is more dangerous than the journey.
        "Still," said Ida, "I'm sure it all ups my value to the Suki-Suki people. I mean, it'd have been a bit anti-climactic otherwise, wouldn't it?"
        
         * * *
        
        That day, U-scampi did a long interview with Ida, and extracted from her the story of her original encounter with the alien Giggles, which apparently was planning on keeping her company for some time. The interview was barely finished when a couple of hunters happened along, and informed Ida that civilization was barely a day's walk distant.
        While walking out to civilization, Ida entertained wild dreams of fame and glory. She was a survivor of the moid, a discoverer of a new kind of alien, a true "thirsts of real people" survivor. She was going to be rich, and famous, and the toast of the entire Suki-Suki organization.
        A week later, however, shortly after her first TV appearances, Ida found herself face to face with a battery of very angry lawyers from the Suki-Suki Bottling Corporation.
        "You, Ida Brahma, have appeared on TV throughout the Zafari Jahar in the possession of what is, patently, a succession of cans of bootleg Suki-Suki."
        "Bootleg?" said Ida.
        "No doubt about it. The cans you drank from — and you appear to have drunk a couple of dozen, at least — bear none of the twelve authenticating marks of a true Suki-Suki can. You are a consumer of pirated products. And the law is clear. A consumer of pirated products is a pirate in her own right."
        And Ida realized, with the despair of the truly doomed, that her destiny was the law courts. If she was lucky — if she was very, very lucky — she might just possibly survive to run an obedience school for dogs.