Star quest

the body had perished. For what reason? So that he could, periodically, see how his child was growing. Twenty-odd years Triggy Gop had been floating through space looking for readers, people hungry for information, and found mostly warriors. He tried to remember what the librarian had said about seeing him again, a poem…
Perhaps some
… He tried to remember. Yes. Four lines the man had composed himself. He repeated the lines to the twinkling dragon eyes.
    "Perhaps in some lonely cabaret,
    some black night, some bright day
    with snow upon the ground or grass
    turned yellow with days gone past."
    "Very poetic," a voice said almost directly in front of him.
    He started, jumped up, stumbled over his chair.
    "For goodness sake," Mayna said, looking through the bars. "Be quiet! You want to have every cop in the world up here?"
    "You again."
    "Shh!"
    "But how-?"
    "Cats can go anywhere, Hero Tohm. Even up the sides of sheer buildings, accomplishing the impossible. If there's a convenient rainspout, that is."
    "You'll get caught," he said, looking over his shoulder to the cell door.
    "We will if you insist upon being so damnably loud." she hissed, hooking a metal prong onto each bar where it met the sill at the bottom, covering each hook with thick, green putty.
    "What are you doing?"
    "Getting you out. Lay down on the floor. This isn't noisy, but there's one helluva lot of heat."
    He got down on his stomach next to the door and did not argue. Mayna backed away from the window, clinging to the wall by whatever impossible manner she had scaled it. There was a sudden
pfft
, then no noise at all. He could feel the heat on his back through the thin material of his shirt. Once he glanced up to see exactly what was happening. There didn't seem to be any light, unless… He looked closer. Yes, the flame was very dark blue, almost black. The room was stifling by then.
    "Okay," she whispered.
    He stood up, reached out.
    "No! Don't touch. It's hot yet."
    She took a small can of white crystals from the rucksack on her back, sprinkled them over the sill. There was steam, a
crackle-snap
noise, and ice began forming across the bars and on the cement.
    "Okay," she said again, putting the can away. "Now. Grasp the bars and bend them back, away from the sill. Only the bottoms are burned through."
    "Uh," he grunted, straining at them.
    "You can do it, Hero Tohm, if anyone can."
    He never knew, later, whether he could have done it without that goad. At the time, it smacked him in the pit of the stomach, churned up adrenalin. He twisted the bars back and up until he could squeeze through unto the wide sill. He sat on the window ledge, clinging desperately to the bars. A small ledge, only an inch wide, a decorative trim actually, broke the smooth facade of the building. It was that that Mayna perched upon, standing lightly on her toes, perfectly balanced. "Do you have a flybelt?" he asked. "They aren't as easy to come by for everyone as they are for you."
    "But I can't walk on that goddamn ledge!"
    "Shh! We made allowances for that. We knew you were a poor, incompetent normal." He didn't say anything.
    She took a strong nylon cord-rope from her rucksack, tied one end through the bars, almost knocking him from his perilous perch. "Use your feet against the wall to keep from sliding down and burning your hands. And please do be quiet—if that isn't beyond your meager talents."
    He grabbed the rope, swung away from the building, wriggling around to face it on the first outward arc, planting his feet against the wall when he swung back. As easily as possible, he moved down. Swinging… Jumping…
    Swinging, jumping, swinging… A human spider… Mayna waited, watching him go. Her eyes glinted green in the starlight-… "Very good," a voice said below.
    For a moment, he froze, imaging gestapos below. But then his mind cleared itself and he recognized the voice as Babe's. He dropped the last few feet, letting the rope slap against the wall. He looked up. Mayna still waited on the ledge, looking somewhat like a great vampire woman nestled there in the shadows. But now she was turning very adeptly and moving along the narrow ledge toward the rainspout.
    "Here," Babe said, tugging urgently at his shirt. "The shrubs."
    They ran, Tohm crouching to match Babe's height, and made the shelter of the bushes without incident. They turned and watched Mayna creep easily down the building, using the rainspout very little. She swung gracefully, down, down,