"Casseiopea? A lot to tell about that one. Anything you want to know in particular?" The old man, wrapped in a generous sweater, was rocking in a handcarved rocking chair that served his writing table, and cahair and table both seemed older even than he was. He drew on a faded, yellowed meerschaum whose bowl was the form of a leapinng catfish, intricatly carved.

"I'm not sure, sir." said his visitor. "Perhaps if you began with the general view..."

The old professor rocked forward and back.

"Well," he started, "The story is along this wise. Long ago, in Ethiopia, Cassiopeia had been the wife of Cepheus and the mother of Andromeda. Because she thought herself more beautiful than the daughters of Nereus, a god of the sea, she challanged the anger of the god Poseidon. To punish her, her daughter was chained to a rock of the coast as a sacrifice for a sea monster. Andromeda was saved from death by Perseus. (Publius Ovidius Naso: Metamophoses, IV, should you want to look it up.)"

"To learn humility, Cassiopeia was banned to the sky. A contrite Poseidon put both father and mother in the heavens. But because of Cassiopeia's vanity, he placed her in a chair which revolves around the Pole Star, so half the time she's obliged to sit upside down.."

"Her leading star is s an iirregular variable star called Alpha Cas; but it is also called Shedir a word which in old Arabic translates as The Breast.   Her second, Gamma Cas, is called, in ancient Chinese, Tsi , which means the Whip. Highly variable brightness, attributed to throwing off giant shells of burning gas at irregular intervals."

Eta Cas is a double, while Iota Cas is a triple, but hard to detect.

Their region of the sky contains a lot of diffuse nebulae, too, such as the diffuse nebula NGC 281, and the planetary nebula NGC 7635 all of which are quite mysterious to us down here."

The professor paused, and squinted over his pipe.

"One other thing. Omicron Cas has a faint companion although some deny its existence because it is hard to see; but the word among those who have the equipment and the patience is that the faint companion has been behaving most irregularly of late, putting out streaks of thin blue light at odd intervals unlike anything we have ever observed -- they look coherent, almost artificial, ridiculous as that may seem."

Charles Delacroix thanked his informant profusely, and strode into the summery night, following the long trail along the shore from the Portsworth University campus, along the curving shores of Point Sharp, and back to the bay-side festival grounds and the relative comfort of the Albert Hansell. He knocked on Robert E. Leej's door, and rapidly relayed what he had learned. The two of them went forward to open well-deck and stared with intense curiousity at the remote "W" form of Cassiooea. high above the dwindling moon.