Farthest Star

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The place was called Sun One. It had begun as an asteroid, circling a young blue-white giant in the great dense cloud called the Orion Nebula. Over centuries it had been built upon, sheathed and tunnelled; and what it had become was the closest thing there was to a central headquarters of the loose association of intelligent races in the Galaxy that had made contact with one another.

 In one of the inner shells two members of a very junior race were meeting. They came from Earth. They loved each other. They were young. They planned to marry. All these things made them curiosities to the races which possessed personal curiosity, and they were widely watched, heard or sensed as they came towards each other. They didn't mind. Ben Charles Pertin saw the girl and launched himself in a shallow three-percent gravity dive over the heads of a thing like a dragon, a creature composed mostly of a single great blue eye and a couple of scurrying collective creatures from one of the core stars. 'Sorry,' he cried down at them, caught the laughing girl's hand and stopped hard beside her.

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