The Colors of Space, page 80 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
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pain when he tried to pick up anything heavy, had healed. Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the Swiftwing far, far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal of Antares burned in their viewports.
Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which--far away now, at the furthest point in its orbit from the point of the Swiftwing's entry into the system--was a small captive sun. No larger than the planet Earth, it revolved every ninety years around its huge primary.
Small as it was, it was blazingly blue-white brilliant, and had a tiny planet of its own. After their stop on Antares Seven--the largest of the inhabited planets in this system, where the Lhari spaceport was located--they would make a careful orbit around the great red primary, and land on the tiny worldlet of the blue-white secondary before leaving the Antares system.
As Bart watched Antares growing in the viewports, he felt a variety of emotions. On the one hand, he was relieved that as his voyage in secrecy neared its official destination, he had as yet not incurred unmasking.
But he felt uncertain about his father's co-conspirators. Would they return him to human form and send him back to Vega, his part ended? Or would they, unthinkably, demand that he go on into the Lhari Galaxy? What would he do, if they did?
At one moment he entertained fantasies of going on into the Lhari worlds, returning victorious with the secret of their fueling location, or of the star-drive itself. At another, he could not wait to be free of it all. He longed for the society of his own people, yet ached to think that this voyage between the stars must end so soon.
They made planetfall at the largest Lhari spaceport Bart had seen; as always, the Second Officer was the first to go through Decontam and ashore, returning with exchanged mail and messages for the Swiftwing's crew. He laughed when he gave Bartol a sealed packet. "So you're not quite the orphan we've always