The Green Man looked a little pale, which was hardly a surprise, as he had been locked up and encircled with a voice and motion paralyser for hours. He had been lured, like Mandy, by the false voiced Songstealers, and they had whined around him as he turned the corridor into 8 Aft. Their voices, like the Mandragorian snake singers, caught him with his defences down. They weren't very bright, Songstealers (not like Songdealers), but they moved fast and viciously, like the trained hounds they were. Boukey had just enough time to protect his memories of Sharazade before darkness engulfed him.

When he woke, with the voices whispering about him, he could feel the shift in the ship's trajectory. For a moment he began to think an important thought, and then balked, remembering how they operated. He backed off, thought of something else, emptied his mind. He turned his attention to obvious thoughts: THEY WERE HOLDING HIM BECAUSE HE KNOW HOW TO GET THROUGH THE ASTEROID BELT. BUT DO YOU WANT ME TO HELP GET THE SHIP THROUGH OR DON'T YOU? I THOUGHT YOU DID? I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO SUCK THE LIFE OUT OF TERN? The voices whispered, began whining, then broke into multiple low howls. Then he could feel their mind vacuities letting go. They were slipping away -- where? To find the Songdealer, perhaps?

His bonds were as tight as ever. He suddenly remembered Mandy. Had they got to her also? Silence.

He could not reach down to check on his fieldbook, but he was sure it was still there in the body pouch.

He decided it was safe to check and see what was missing in his mind. Within seconds, he realized that all his own Earthsong repertoire had been lost, including the Pleiades fragments, the Cygnus ballads, and virtually all the holy songs. There were sickening signs of replacements: he now knew the entire back catalogue of 135,000 Disney videos, including The Little Mermaid's Granddaughter Meets Aladdin's 2nd Cousin (with its excruciating theme music by Elton John and Xeebleblort XI). His only hope was that most of them were still retrievable because of the time spent with Sharazade singing and comparing in the interlude after Polgar and during the tribal uprising. But he dared not go there for those memories -- yet, anyway -- as long as the Songstealers had a trace on his mind. He would have to improvise. If he had the constellation chart....and then he remembered that he had left it in his room. And then he remembered what the Terran had told him about the Asteroid Belt!!!!!!!!