Brightness Reef

Asx

Who would have imagined that a robot might display surprise? Yet did we not discern an unmistakable yank, a twitch, in response to Vubben’s manifest lie? An impromptu falsehood, contrived out of sudden necessity by Ur-Jah and Lester, whose quick wits do their hot-blooded tribes proud?

The first scrolls — a mere ten kilowords, engraved on polymer bars by the original g’Kek pioneers — warned of several ways that doom might fall from heaven. New scrolls were added by glaver, hoon, and qheuen settlers, first jealously hoarded, then shared as the Commons slowly formed. Finally came human-sept and its flooding gift of paper books. But even the Great Printing could not cover all potentialities.

Among likely prospects, it was thought the Galactic Institutes charged with enforcing quarantine might someday find us. Or titanic cruisers of the great patron clans would descry our violation, if/when the glaring eye, Izmunuti, ceased spewing its wind of masking needles.

Among other possibilities, we pondered what to do if a great globe-ship of the hydrogen-breathing Zang came to one of our towns, dripping freezing vapors in wrath over our trespass. These and many other contingencies we discussed, did we not, my rings?

But seldom this thing which had come to pass — the arrival of desperados.

If malefactors ever did come to Jijo, we reasoned, why should they make themselves known to us? With a world to sieve for riches, would they even deign to notice the hovels of a few coarse savages, far devolved from ancient glory, clumped in one small corner of Jijo’s expanse?

Yet here they have come into our midst with a boldness that terrifies.

The robot emissary contemplated Vubben’s proclamation for ten duras, then responded with a single terse interrogation.

“Your presence on this world, it is a (query) accident?”

Do you recall, my rings, the brief thrill that coursed our linking membranes? The robot’s masters were set aback! Against all reason or proportionality of force, the initiative was ours, for a moment.

Vubben crossed two eyestalks in a gesture of polite aloofness.

“Your question, it insinuates doubt.

“More than doubt, it suggests grave assumptions about our nature.

“Those assumptions-might they lay upon our ancestors’ necks a shackling suspicion?

“(Query) suspicion of heinous crimes?”

How resilient was Vubben’s misdirection. How like the web of a mulc-spider. He denies nothing, tells no explicit lie. Yet how he implies!

“Forgiveness for (unintended) insults, we implore,” the machine ratcheted hastily. “Descendants of castaways, we take you for. An ill-fated vessel, your ancestors’ combined ship must have been. Lost on some noble errand, this we scarcely doubt.”

Now they were the liars, of that we had no doubt at all.

Dwer

Leaving the craggy Rimmer range, Dwer led Rety and the others into that region of undulating hills, gently slanting toward the sea, that was called the Slope. The domain of the Six.

Dwer tried getting his mysterious young prisoner to talk about herself. But his first efforts were answered in morose monosyllables. Clearly, Rety resented the fact that he could tell so much from her appearance, her animal-skin clothes, her speech and manner.

Well, what did you expect? To sneak over the mountains and walk into one of our villages, no questions asked?

Her burn scar alone would mark her for attention. Not that disfigurement was rare on the Slope. Accidents were common, and even the latest traeki unguents were crude medicine by Galactic standards. Still, people would notice Rety anywhere she went.

At meals, she gaped covetously at the goods he drew from his backpack. His cup and plate, the hammered aluminum skillet, his bedroll of fleecy hurchin down — things to make life a bit easier for those whose ancestors long ago forsook the life of star-gods. To Dwer there was a simple beauty in the woven cloth he wore, in boots with shape-treated tree sap soles, even the elegant three-piece urrish fire-starter — all examples of primitive cunning, the sort his wolfling ancestors relied on through their lonely isolation on old Earth. Most people took such things for granted on the Slope.

But to a clan of sooners — illegal squatters living jealous and filthy beyond the pale — they might seem marvels, worth any risk to steal.

Dwer wondered, was this the only time? Perhaps Rety was just the first to get caught. Some thefts blamed on noors might be the fault of other robbers, sneaking over the mountains from a far-off hermit tribe.

Was that your idea? To swipe the first worthwhile thing you came across and scoot home to your tribe, a hero?

Somehow, he figured more than that must be involved. She kept peering around, as if looking for something in particular. Something that mattered to her.

Dwer watched Rety lead the captive glaver by a rope tied to her waist. The girl’s saucy gait seemed meant to defy him, or anyone else who might judge her. Between clumps of grimy hair, he was nauseated to see puckered tracks made by borer bees, a parasite easily warded off with traeki salve. But no traekis lived where she came from.

It forced uncomfortable thoughts. What if his own grandparents had made the same choice as Rety’s? To flee the Commons for whatever reason, seeking far reaches to hide in? Nowadays, with war-and war’s refugees — a thing of the past, sooners were rather rare. Old Fallon had found only one squatter band in many years roaming across half a continent, and this was Dwer’s first encounter.

What would you do if you were raised that way, scraping for a living like animals, knowing a land of wealth and power lay beyond those mountains to the west?

Dwer had never thought of the Slope that way before. Most scrolls and legends emphasized how far the six exile races had already fallen, not how much farther there was yet to go.

That night, Dwer used tobar seeds to call another clock teet, not because he wanted an early wakeup, but to have the steady, tapping rhythm in the background while he slept. When Mudfoot yowled at the burst of aroma, covering his snout, Rety let out a soft giggle and her first smile.

He insisted on examining her feet before bed, and she quietly let him treat two blisters showing early signs of infection. “We’ll have healers look you over when we reach Gathering,” he told her. Neither of them commented when he kept her moccasins, tucking them under his sleeping roll for the night.

As they lay under a starry canopy, separated by the dim campfire coals, he urged Rety to name a few constellations, and her curt answers helped Dwer eliminate one momentous possibility — that some new group of human exiles had landed, destroying their ship and settling to brute existence far from the Slope. Rety couldn’t realize the importance of naming a few patterns in the sky, but Dwer erased one more pinprick of worry. The legends were the same.

At dawn Dwer awoke sniffing something in the air — a familiar odor, almost pleasant, but also nervous — a sensation Lark once explained mysteriously as “negative ions and water vapor.” Dwer shook Rety awake and hurriedly led the glaver under a rocky overhang. Mudfoot followed, moving like an arthritic g’Kek, grumbling hatred of mornings with every step. They all made it to shelter just as a sheet-storm hit-an undulating curtain of continuous rain that crept along the mountainside from left to right, pouring water like a translucent drapery that pummeled everything beneath, soaking the forest, one wavy ribbon at a time. Rety stared wide-eyed as the rainbow-colored tapestry swept by, drenching their campsite and ripping half the leaves off trees. Obviously she had never witnessed one before.

The trek resumed. Perhaps it was a night’s restful sleep, or the eye-opening start to the day. But Rety now seemed less sullen, more willing to enjoy sights like a meadow full of bumble flowers — yellow tubes, fringed with black fuzz, which rode the steady west wind, swooping and buzzing at the end of tether-stems. Rety’s eyes darted, enthralled by the antic dance of deception and pollination. The species did not exist in the stagnant weather shadow beyond the Rimmers, where a vast plain of poison grass stretched most of the way to the Gray Hills.

Just getting here across all that was an accomplishment, Dwer noted, wondering how she had managed it.

As alpine sheerness gave way to gentler foothills, Rety gave up hiding her fierce curiosity. She began by pointing and asking — “Are those wooden poles holding up your backpack? Don’t they make it heavy? I’ll bet they’re hollow.”

Then — “If you’re a hunter, where’s the rest of your stalking gang? Or do you always hunt alone?”

In rapid succession more questions followed. “Who made your bow? How far can you hit somethin’ the size of my hand?

“Did you live in one place the whole time you were little? In a… house? Did you get to hold on to stuff you wanted to keep, ’stead of leavin’ it behind when you moved?

“If you grew up by a river, did you ever see any hoon? What’re they like? I hear they’re tall as a tree, with noses long as your arm.

“Are the trikki really tricky? Are they made of tree sap? Do they eat garbage?

“Do noors ever slow down? I wonder why Buyur made ’em that way.”

Other than her habit of turning Buyur into a singular proper name, Dwer couldn’t have phrased the last question any better himself. Mudfoot was a perpetual nuisance, getting underfoot, chasing shrub critters, then lying in ambush somewhere along the path, squeaking in delight when Dwer failed to pick him out of the overhanging foliage.

I could shake you easily, if I didn’t have a glaver and a kid in tow, Dwer thought at the grinning noor. Yet he was starting to feel pretty good. They would make quite an entrance at Gathering, sure to be the talk of the festival.

Over lunch, Rety used his cooking knife to prepare a scrub hen he had shot. Dwer could barely follow her whirling hands as the good parts landed in the skillet with a crackling sizzle, while the poison glands flew to the waste pit. She finished, wiping the knife with a flourish, and offered it back to him.

“Keep it,” Dwer said, and she responded with a hesitant smile.

With that he ceased being her jailor and became her guide, escorting a prodigal daughter back to the embrace of clan and Commons. Or so he thought, until some time later, during the meal, when she said — “I really ha’ seen some of those before.”

“Seen some of what?”

Rety pointed at the glaver, placidly chewing under the shade of a stand of swaying lesser-boo.

“You thought I never saw any, ’cause I feared she’d bite. But I seen ’em, from afar. A whole herd. Sneaky devils, hard to catch. Took the guys all day to spear ’un. They taste awful gamey, but the boys liked it fine.”

Dwer swallowed hard. “Are you saying your tribe hunts and eats glavers?”

Rety looked back with brown eyes full of innocent curiosity. “You don’t on this side? I’m not surprised. There’s easier prey, an’ better eatin’.”

He shook his head, nauseated by the news.

Part of him chided — You were willing to shoot this particular glaver down, stone dead, if it crossed over the pass.

Yes, but only as a last resort. And I wouldn’t eat her!

Dwer knew what people called him — the Wild Man of the Forest, living beyond the law. He even helped nurse the mystique, since it meant his awkward speech was taken for something more manly than shyness. In truth, killing was the part of any hunt he did as capably and swiftly as possible, never with enjoyment. Now, to learn people beyond the mountains were devouring glavers! The sages would be appalled!

Ever since surmising that Rety came from a sooner band, Dwer had known his duty would be to guide a militia expedition to round up the errant clan. Ideally, it would be a simple matter of firm but gentle ingathering, resettling lost cousins back into the fold of the Commons. But now, Rety had unknowingly indicted her tribe with another crime. The Scrolls were clear. That which is rare, you shall not eat. That which is precious, you must protect. But, above all — You may not devour what once flew between the stars.

Irony was ashen in Dwer’s mouth. For after the sooners were brought back for trial, his job then would be to collect every glaver living east of the Rimmers — and slaughter those he could not catch.

Ah, but that won’t make me a bad person… because I won’t eat them.

Rety must have sensed his reaction. She turned to stare at the nearby stand of great-boo, its young shoots barely as thick as her waist. The tubelike green shafts swayed in rippling waves, like fur on the belly of the lazy noor, dozing by her foot.

“Are they gonna hang me?” the girl asked quietly. The scar on her face, which was muted when she smiled, now seemed stretched and livid. “Old Clin says you slopies hang sooners when you catch “em.”

“Nonsense. Actually, each race handles its own—”

“The old folks say it’s slopie law. Kill anyone who tries to make a free life east o’ the Rimmers.”

Dwer stammered, suddenly awash in irritation, “If— if you think that, why’d you come all this way? To— to stick your head in a noose?”

Rety’s lips pressed. She looked away and murmured low. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

Dwer repented his own flash of temper. In a gentler tone, he asked… “Why don’t you try me? Maybe… I might understand better than you think.”

But she withdrew once more into a cocoon of brooding silence, unresponsive as a stone.

While Dwer hastily rinsed the cooking gear, Rety tied herself in place ahead of the glaver, even though he had said she could walk free. He found his cooking knife by the smothered coals, where she must have laid it after those sharp words.

The gesture of rejection irked him, and he muttered gruffly, “Let’s get out of here.”

Asx

We had chosen to feign a small distinction between two crimes. At best a slightly lesser felony — that of accidental rather than planned colonization.

No one could deny the obvious — that our ancestors had loosed unsanctioned offspring on a fallow world. But Vubben’s artful evasion implied an act of culpable carelessness, rather than villainy by design.

The lie would not hold for long. When archaeological traces were sifted, forensic detectives from the Institutes would swiftly perceive our descent from many separate landings, not one mixed crew stranded by mishap on this remote shore. Moreover, there was the presence of our juniormost sept — the human clan. By their own bizarre tale, they are a wolfling race, unknown to Galactic culture until just three hundred Jijoan years ago.

Then why even try such a bluff?

Desperation. Plus a frail hope that our “guests” have not the skill or tools for archaeology. Their goal must be to swoop in for a quick sampling of hidden treasures. Then, covering their tracks, they would wish a swift, stealthy departure with a ship’s hold full of contraband. To this mercenary quest, our strange, forlorn colony of miscreants offers both opportunity and a threat.

They must know we possess firsthand knowledge of Jijo, valuable to their needs.

Alas, my rings. Are we not also potential witnesses to their villainy?

Sara

Nobody expected an ambush. It was the perfect place for one. Still, no one aboard the Haupb-woa had any idea of danger until it actually happened.

A century of peace had blurred the once-jealously guarded domains of old. Urrish and g’Kek settlers were few, since the former could not raise young near water, and the latter preferred smooth terrain. Still, all types were seen crowding tiny docks when the Hauph-woa glided by, eager to share scant news.

Alas, there had been none from downstream since that terrible spectacle crossed the sky.

Mostly, the river folk were reacting constructively, rushing to reinforce their facade screens, cleaning the baffles of their smokestacks, or hauling boats under cover-but one forlorn tribe of traeki marsh-dwellers had gone much further, burning their entire stilt village in a spasm of fear and fealty to the Scrolls. Pzora’s topknot shivered at the aroma of woebegone ring-stacks, floundering in the ashes. The Hauph-woa’s captain promised to spread word of their plight. Perhaps other traeki would send new basal segments for the locals to wear, making them better suited for evacuation inland. At worst, the swamp traeki could gather rotting matter, settle on top, and shut down higher functions till the world became a less scary place.

The same could not be said for an urrish trade caravan they passed later, stranded with their pack beasts on the desolate west bank, when the panicky citizens of Bing Village blew up their beloved bridge.

The hoonish boat crew back-pedaled with frantic haste, rowing against the current to avoid getting caught in a tangle of broken timbers and mule-fiber cables, shattered remnants of a beautiful span that had been the chief traverse for an entire region. A marvel of clever camouflage, the bridge used to resemble a jagged snag of jumbled logs. But even that apparently wasn’t enough for local orthodox scroll thumpers. Maybe they were burning it while I had my nightmare last night, Sara thought, observing charred timbers and recalling images of flame that had torn her sleep.

A crowd,of villagers stood on the east bank, beckoning the Hauph-woa to draw near.

Blade spoke up. “I would not approach,” the blue qheuen hissed from several leg-vents. He wore a rewq over his vision-ring while peering at the folk on shore.

“And why not?” Jop demanded. “See? They’re pointing to a way past the debris. Perhaps they have news, as well.”

Sure enough, there did appear to be a channel, near the shore, unobstructed by remnants of the broken bridge.

“I don’t know,” Blade went on. “I sense that… something is wrong.”

“You’re right avout that,” Ulgor added. “I’d like to know why they have done nothing for the stranded caravan. The villagers have voats. The urs could have veen ferried across vy now.”

Sara wondered. It certainly would not be fun for any of Ulgor’s race to ride a little coracle, with icy water lapping just an arm’s breadth away. “The urs may have refused,” she suggested. “Perhaps they’re not that desperate yet.”

The captain made his decision, and the Hauph-woa turned toward the village. As they drew near, Sara saw that the only construct still intact was the hamlet’s camouflage lattice. Everything else lay in ruins. They’ve probably sent their families into the forest, she thought. There were plenty of garu trees for humans to live in, and qheuenish citizens could join cousins upstream. Still, the toppled village was a depressing sight.

Sara pondered how much worse things might be if Jop ever got his wish. If Dolo Dam blew up, every dock, weir, and cabin they had seen below the flood line would be swept away. Native creatures would also suffer, though perhaps no more than in a natural flood. Lark says it is species that matter, not individuals. No eco-niches would be threatened by demolishing our small wooden structures. Jijo won’t be harmed.

Still, it seems dubious, all of this burning and wrecking just to persuade some Galactic big shots we’re farther along the Path of Redemption than we really are.

Blade sidled alongside, his blue carapace steaming as dew evaporated from the seams of his shell-a sure sign of anxiety. He rocked a complex rhythm among his five chitinous legs.

“Sara, do you have a rewq? Can you put it on and see if I’m mistaken?”

“Sorry. I gave mine up. All those colors and raw emotions get in the way of paying close attention to language.” She did not add that it had grown painful to wear the things, ever since she made the mistake of using one at Joshu’s funeral. “Why?” she asked. “What’s got you worried?”

Blade’s cupola trembled, and the rewq that was wrapped around it quivered. “The people onshore- they seem… strange somehow.”

Sara peered through the morning haze. The Bing Villagers were mostly human, but there were also hoon, traeki, and qheuens in the mix. Likes attract, she thought. Orthodox fanaticism crossed racial lines.

As does heresy, Sara noted, recalling that her own brother was part of a movement no less radical than the folk who had brought down this bridge.

Several coracles set forth from tree-shrouded shelters, aiming to intercept the riverboat. “Are they coming to pilot us through?” young Jomah asked.

He got his answer when the first grappling hook whistled, then fell to the deck of the Hauph-woa.

Others swiftly followed.

“We mean you no harm!” shouted a thick-armed man in the nearest skiff. “Come ashore, and we’ll take care of you. All we want is your boat.”

That was the wrong thing to say to the proud crew of a river-runner. Every hoon but the helmsman ran to seize and toss overboard the offending hooks. But more grapplers sailed aboard for every one they removed.

Then Jomah pointed downstream. “Look!”

If anyone still wondered what the Bing-ites planned for the Hauph-woa, all doubts vanished at the sight of a charred ruin, blackened ribs spearing upward like a huge, halfVburned skeleton. It triggered an umble of dismay from the crew, resonating down Sara’s spine and sending the noor beasts into frenzied fits of barking.

The hoon redoubled their efforts, tearing frantically at the hooks.

Sara’s first instinct was to shield the Stranger. But the wounded man seemed safe, still unconscious under Pzora’s protecting bulk.

“Come on,” she told Blade. “We better help.”

Pirates often used to attack ships this way until the Great Peace. Perhaps the attackers’ own ancestors used the technique in deadly earnest, during the bad old days. The grapples, made of pointy Buyur metal, dug deep when the cables tautened. Sara realized in dismay that the cords were mule fiber, treated by a traeki process that made them damnably hard to cut. Worse, the lines stretched not just to the coracles but all the way to shore, where locals hauled them taut with blocks and tackle. Hoon strength, helped by Blade’s great claws, barely sufficed to wrestle the hooks free. Still, Sara tried to help, and even the g’Kek passenger kept lookout with four keen eyes, shouting to warn when another boat drew near. Only Jop leaned against the mast, watching with clear amusement. Sara had no doubt who the orthodox tree farmer was rooting for.

The beach loomed ever closer. If the Hauph-woa made it past midpoint, she’d have the river’s pull on her side. But even that force might be too little to break the strong cords. When the keel scraped sand, it would spell the end.

In desperation, the crew hit on a new tactic. Taking up axes, they chopped away at planks and rails, wherever a grapple had dug in, tearing out whole wooden chunks to throw overboard, attacking their own vessel with a fury that was dazzling to behold, given normal hoon placidity.

Then, all at once, the deck jerked under Sara’s feet as the whole boat suddenly shuddered, slewing, as if the center mast were a pivot.

“They’ve hooked the rudder!” someone cried.

Sara looked over the stern and saw a massive metal barb speared through the great hinged paddle the helmsman used to steer the ship. The rudder could not be pulled aboard or chopped loose without crippling the Hauph-woa, leaving it adrift and helpless.

Prity bared her teeth and screamed. Though shivering •with fear, the little ape started climbing over the rail, till Sara stopped her with a firm hand.

“It’s my job,” she said tersely, and without pause shrugged out of her tunic and kilt. A sailor handed her a hatchet with a strap-thong through the haft.

Don’t everybody speak up all at once to argue me out of doing this, she thought sardonically, knowing no one would.

Some things were simply obvious.

The hatchet hung over one shoulder. It wasn’t comforting to feel its metal coolness stroke her left breast as she climbed, even though the cutting edge still bore a leather cover.

Clothes would have been an impediment. Sara needed her toes, especially, to seek footholds on the Hauph-woa’s stern. The clinker construction style left overlaps in the boards that helped a bit. Still, she could not prevent shivering, half from the morning chill and partly from stark terror. Sweaty palms made it doubly hard, even though her mouth felt dry as urrish breath.

I haven’t done any climbing in years!

To nonhumans, this must look like another day’s work for a tree-hugging Earthling. Kind of like expecting every urs to be a courier runner, or all traekis to make a good martini. In fact, Jop was the logical one for this task, but the captain didn’t trust the man, with good reason.

The crew shouted tense encouragement as she clambered down the stern, holding the rudder with one arm. Meanwhile, derisive scorn came from the coracles and those ashore. Great. More attention than I ever had in my life, and I’m stark naked at the time.

The mule-cable groaned with tension as villagers strained on pulleys to haul Hauph-woa toward the beach, where several gray qheuens gathered, holding torches that loomed so frighteningly close that Sara imagined she could hear the flames. At last, she reached a place where she could plant her feet and hands- bracing her legs in a way that forever surrendered all illusions of personal modesty. She had to tear the leather cover off the ax with her teeth and got a bitter electrical taste from the reddish metal. It made her shudder-then tense up as she almost lost her grip. The boat’s churning wake looked oily and bitter cold.

Jeers swelled as she hacked at the rudder blade, sending chips flying, trying to cut a crescent around the embedded hook. She soon finished gouging away above the grapple and was starting on the tougher part below, when something smacked the back of her left hand, sending waves of pain throbbing up her arm. She saw blood ooze around a wooden sliver, protruding near the wrist.

A slingshot pellet lay buried halfway in the plank nearby.

Another glanced off the rudder, ricocheting from the boat’s stern, then skipping across the water.

Someone was shooting at her!

Why you jeekee, slucking, devoluted…

Sara found an unknown aptitude for cursing, as she went through a wide vocabulary of oaths from five different languages, hacking away with the hatchet more vehemently than ever. A steady drumbeat of pebbles now clattered against the hull, but she ignored them in a blur of heat and fury.

“Otszharsiya, perkiye! Syookai dreesoona!”

She ran out of obscenities in Rossic and was starting to plumb urrish GalTwo when the plank abruptly let out a loud crack!. The attached cable moaned, yanking hard at the grappling hook—

—and the tortured wood gave way.

The hook snatched the ax out of her hand as it tore free, glittering in the sunlight. Thrown off balance, Sara struggled to hold on, though her hands were slippery from sweat and blood. With a gasp she felt her grip fail and she dropped, sucking in deeply, but the Roney slammed her like an icy hammer, driving air from her startled lungs.

Sara floundered, battling first to reach the surface, then to tread water and sputter a few deep breaths, and finally to keep from getting tangled in all the ropes that lay strewn across the water. A shiny hook passed a frightening hand’s width from her face. Moments later, she had to dive down to avoid a snarl of cords that might have trapped her.

The boat’s turbulent wake added to her troubles, as the Hauph-woa took advantage of its chance to flee.

Her chest ached by the time she hit surface again-to come face-to-face with a lanky young man, leaning on the rim of a coracle, clutching a slingshot in one hand. Surprise rocked him back when their eyes met. Then his gaze dropped to notice her bareness.

He blushed. Hurriedly, the young man put aside his weapon and started shrugging out of his jacket. To give to her, no doubt.

“Thanks …” Sara gasped. “But I gotta … go now.”

Her last glimpse of the young villager, as she swam away, showed a crestfallen look of disappointment. It’s too soon yet for him to be a hardened pirate, Sara thought. This new, hard world hasn’t yet rubbed away the last traces of gallantry.

But give it time.

Now she had the river’s current behind her as she swam, and soon Sara glimpsed the Hauph-woa downstream. The crew had the boat turned and were stroking to stay in place, now that they had reached a safe distance from Bing Village. Still, it was a hard pull to reach the hull at last and start up the rope ladder. She only made it halfway before her muscles started to cramp, and the helpful sailors had to haul it in the rest of the way by hand.

I’ve got to get stronger, if I’m going to make a habit of having adventures, she thought as someone wrapped a blanket around her.

Yet, Sara felt strangely fine while Pzora tended her wound and the cook made her some of his special tea. Sara’s hand ached, and her body throbbed, yet she felt also something akin to a glow.

I made decisions, and they were right ones. A year ago, it seemed every choice I made was wrong. Now, maybe things have changed.

Clutching her blanket, Sara watched as the Hauph-woa labored back upstream along the west bank, to a point where they could take aboard the stranded caravan, ferrying the urs and their beasts far enough to have no worries about local fanatics. The calm teamwork of passengers and crew was such an encouraging sight, it boosted her morale about “big” issues, almost as much as the brief fight had lifted something else inside her.

My faith in my own self, she thought. I didn’t think I was up to any of this. But maybe Father’s right, after all.

I stayed in that damn treehouse long enough.

Asx

Shortly after Vubben spoke, the portal reopened and there emerged from the ship several more floating machines, growling disconcertingly. Each hesitated on reaching the onlookers lining the valley rim. For several duras, the folk of the Commons held their ground, though trembling in foot, wheel, and ring. Then the robots turned and swept away, toward every point of the compass, leaving cyclones of broken grass in their wake.

“Survey probes — these shall commence their duties,” the first messenger explained, buzzing and clicking primly in a formal version of Galactic Two.

“(Preliminary) analyses — these surrogates shall provide.

“Meanwhile, toward a goal of both profit and rescue — let us, face-to-face discussions, commence.”

This caused a stir. Did we understand correctly? Our dialects have drifted since our devolution. Did the phrase “face-to-face” mean what it seemed?

Below, the ship’s doorway began reopening once more.

“Bad news,” Lester Cambel commented gruffly. “If they’re willing to let us see them in person, it means—”

“—that they are not worried anyone will be left after they depart, to tell whose face was seen,” finished Knife-Bright Insight.

Our hoon brother, Phwhoon-dau, shared the gloomy diagnosis. His aged throat sac darkened from somber thought. “Their confidence is blatant, unnerving. Hrrrhrm. As is their haste.”

Vubben turned an eyestalk toward my/our sensor ring and winked the lid-an efficient, human-derived gesture conveying irony. Among the Six, we traeki and g’Keks hobble like cripples on this heavy world, while hoon stride with graceful power. Yet those dour, pale giants claim to find the rest of us equally frantic and wild.

Something, or rather two somethings, stirred within the shadowy airlock. A pair of bipedal forms stepped forward — walkers — slim, stick-jointed, and somewhat tall. Clothed in loosely draped garments that concealed all but their bare hands and heads, they emerged into the afternoon light to peer upward at us.

From the Commons there erupted a low collective sigh of shock and recognition.

Was this a hopeful sign? Out of all the myriad spacefaring races in the Civilization of the Five Galaxies, what impossibly remote chance decreed that our discoverers might turn out to be cousins? That the crew of this ship should ,be cogenetic with one of our Six? Was this the work of our capricious goddess, whose luck favors the anomalous and strange?

“Hyoo-mans-s-s…” Ur-Jah, our eldest sage, aspirated in Anglic, the native tongue of our youngest sept.

From Lester Cambel, there escaped a sound i had never heard before, which these rings could not decipher at the time. Only later did we comprehend, and learn its name.

It was despair.

Dwer

Rety led single file along a track that now ran atop a broad shelf of bedrock, too hard for great-boo to take root. The slanting, upthrust granite ledge separated two broad fingers of cane forest, which Dwer knew stretched for hundreds of arrowflights in all directions. Although the rocky trail followed a ridgetop, the boo on either side grew so tall that only the highest peaks could be seen above the swaying ocean of giant stems.

The girl kept peering, left and right, as if in search of something. As if she wanted something, rather urgently, and did not want to walk past it by mistake. But when Dwer tried to inquire, all she gave back was silence.

You’ll have to watch it with this one, he thought. She’s been bun all her life, till she’s prickly as a dartback bare.

People weren’t his specialty, but a forester uses empathy to grasp the simple needs and savage thoughts of wild things.

Wild things can know pain.

Well, in another day or so she won’t be my problem. The sages have experts, healers. If I meddle, I may just make things worse.

The stone shelf gradually narrowed until the footpath traced a slender aisle between crowded ranks of towering adult boo, each stem now over twenty meters tall i and as thick as several men. The giant green stalks grew so close that even Mudfoot would have trouble getting far into the thicket without squeezing between mighty boles. The strip of sky above pinched gradually tighter becoming a mere ribbon of blue as the trail constricted. At some points, Dwer could spread his arms and touch mighty cylinders on both sides at the same time.

The compressed site played tricks with perspective as he pictured two vast walls, primed to press together at any instant, grinding their tiny group like scraps of cloth under Nelo’s pulping hammer.

Funny thing. This stretch of trail hadn’t felt nearly so spooky on his way uphill, two days ago. Then, the slender avenue had felt like a funnel, channeling him briskly toward his quarry. Now it was a cramped furrow, a pit. Dwer felt a growing tightness in his chest. What if something’s happened up ahead. A landslide blocking the way. Or afire? What a trap this could be!

He sniffed suspiciously, picking up only a gummy reek of greenness given off by the boo. Of course, anything at all could be going on downwind, and he wouldn’t know of it until—

Stop this! Snap out of it. What’s gotten into you?

It’s her, he realized. You’re feeling bad because she thinks you’re a bastard.

Dwer shook his head.

Well, ain’t it so? You let Rety go on thinking she might be hanged, when it would have been easy enough to say—

To say what? A lie? I can’t promise it won’t happen. The law is fierce because it has to be. The sages can show mercy. It’s allowed. But who am I to promise in their name?

He recalled his former master describing the last time a large band of sooners was discovered, back when old Fallen had been an apprentice. The transgressors were found living on a distant archipelago, far to the north. One of the hoon boat-wanderers — whose job it was to patrol at sea the same way human hunters roamed the forests and urrish plainsmen ranged the steppes — came upon a thronging cluster of her kind, dwelling amid ice floes, surviving by seeking the caves of hibernating rouol shamblers and spearing the rotund beasts as they slept. Each summer, the renegade tribe would come ashore and set fires across the tundra plains, panicking herds of shaggy, long-toed gallaiters, sending the frightened ungulates tumbling over cliffs by the hundreds, so that a few might be butchered.

Ghahen, the boat-wanderer, had been drawn by the smoke of one mass killing and soon began dealing with the crime in the manner of her folk. Patient beyond human fathoming, gentle in a way that gave Dwer nightmares to hear of it, she had taken an entire year to winnow the band, one by one, painlessly confiscating from each member its precious life bone, until all that remained was a solitary male elder, whom she seized and brought home to testify, ferrying the dejected captive in a boat piled high with the fifth vertebra of all his kin. After reciting his tale — a crooning lament lasting fourteen days — that final seagoing sooner was executed by the hoon themselves, expiating their shame. All the impounded vertebrae were ground to dust and scattered in a desert, far from any standing water.

The forbidding memory of that story filled Dwer’s heart with leaden worry.

Spare me, please, from being asked to do as Ghahen did. I couldn’t. Not if all the sages ordered it. Not if Lark said the fate of all Jijo hung in the balance. There’s got to be a better way.

Just where the rocky shelf seemed about to narrow down to nothing, letting the divided tracts of boo converge and obliterate the trail, a clearing abruptly opened ahead. A bowl-shaped depression, nearly a thousand meters across, with an algae-crusted lake in its center and a narrow outlet at the far end. A fringe of great-boo lined the crater’s outer rim, and spindly tufts of the tenacious plant sprouted from crevices between jagged boulders that lay tumbled across the silent mountain vale. The lake’s watery shore was outlined by a dense hedge, appearing at a distance like rank moss, from which radiated countless twisted tendrils, many of them broken stumps. Even where Dwer stood, ropy fibers could be seen half-buried in the dust, some as thick as his leg.

The peaceful quiet was belied by an eerie sense of lifelessness. The dust lay undisturbed by footprints, only the scrape of wind and rain. From prior visits, Dwer knew why prudent creatures avoided this place. Still, after the strangling confinement of that tunnel-trail, it felt good to see sky again. Dwer had never much shared the prevailing dread of crossing open ground, even if it meant walking for a short time under the glaring sun.

As they picked their way past the first boulders, the glaver began to mew nervously, creeping alongside Rety to keep in her shadow. The girl’s eyes roved avidly. She seemed not to notice drifting off the trail, at an angle that would skirt the fringe of the lake.

Dwer took several long strides to catch up. “Not that way,” he said, shaking his head.

“Why not? We’re headin’ over there, right?” She pointed to the only other gap in the outer wall of boo, where a narrow, scummy stream leaked through the valley’s outlet. “Quickest way is past the lake. Looks easier, too, except right by the shore.”

Dwer gestured toward a relic webbery of dun strands, draping the nearby jagged boulders. “Those are-” he began.

“I know what they are.” She made a face. “Buyur didn’t only live on the Slope, y’know, even if you wes-ties do think it’s simply the best place to be. We got mulc-spiders over the hill, too, eatin’ up old Buyur ruins.

“Anyway, what’re you so scared of? You don’t think this one’s still alive, do you?” She kicked one of the desiccated vines, which crumbled to dust.

Dwer controlled himself. It’s that chip on her shoulder talking. Her people must have been awful to her. Taking a breath, he replied evenly.

“I don’t think it’s alive. I know it is. What’s more — this spider’s crazy.”

Rety’s first reaction was to raise both eyebrows in surprised fascination. She leaned toward him and asked in a hushed voice — “Really?”

Then she tittered, and Dwer saw she was being sarcastic. “What’s it do? Put out sticky lures full o’ berry-sugar an’ sweet gar, to snatch little girls who’re bad?”

Taken aback, Dwer finally grunted. “I guess you could say something like that.”

Now Rety’s eyes widened for real, brimming with curiosity. “Now this I gotta see!”

She gave the rope at her waist a sudden yank. The formidable-looking knot fell apart, and she took off, dashing past several craggy stones. The gaily squeaking noor pursued with excited bounds.

“Wait!” Dwer yelled futilely, knowing it useless to chase her through the boulder maze. Scrambling up a nearby talus slope of rocky debris, he managed to glimpse her ragged ponytail, bobbing as she ran toward where the rocky slabs converged in a tumbled labyrinth rimming the lake shore.

“Rety!” he screamed into the wind. “Don’t touch the—”

He stopped wasting breath. The same breeze that pushed the lake’s musty pungency against his face stole his words before they could reach her ears. Dwer slid back down to the trail, only to realize — damn! Even the glaver was gone!

He finally found it half an arrowflight uphill, shambling back the way they had come, following whatever instinct sometimes drove its kind to wander doggedly east, away from comfort and protection and toward near-certain death. Growling under his breath, Dwer seized the mare’s tether and sought something, anything, to tie her to, but the nearest stand of gangly boo lay too far away. Dropping his pack, he whipped out a length of cord. “Sorry about this,” he apologized, using his hip to lever the glaver over. Ignoring her rumbling complaint, he proceeded to hobble her rear legs, where he hoped she couldn’t reach the rope with her teeth.

“Pain, frustration — both quite tedious are.”

“Sorry. I’ll be back soon,” he answered optimistically, and took off after the sooner child.

Stay uphill and downwind, Dwer thought, angling to the right of her last heading. This might just be a trick to let her circle around and head for home.

A little later, he noticed he had reflexively unlimbered his bow, cranking the string tension for short range, and had loosed the clamp securing the stubby arrows in his thigh quiver.

What good will arrows do, if she makes the spider angry?

Or worse, if she catches its interest?

Toward the valley’s rim, many stones retained a semblance to their ancient role, segments of whatever Buyur structure once stood proudly on this site, but as Dwer hurried inward, all likeness to masonry vanished. Ropy strands festooned the boulders. Most appeared quite dead — gray, desiccated, and flaking. However, soon his eye caught a greenish streak here… and over there a tendril oozing slime across a stony surface, helping nature slowly erase all vestiges of former scalpel-straight smoothness.

Finally, raising a creepy feeling down his back, Dwer glimpsed tremors of movement. A wakening of curling strands, roused from sleep by some recent disturbance.

Rety.

He dodged through the increasingly dense maze, leaping over some ropy barriers, sliding under others, and twice doubling back with an oath when he reached impassable dead ends. This Buyur site was nowhere near as vast as the one north and east of Dolo Village, where each local citizen dutifully took part in crews gleaning for items missed by the deconstructor spider. Dwer used to go there often, .along with Lark or Sara. That spider was more vigorous and alive than this crotchety old thing — yet far less dangerous.

The thicket of pale cables soon grew too crowded for an adult to pass, though the girl and noor might have gone on. In frustration, Dwer whirled and slapped a rounded knob of rock.

“Ifni sluck!” He waved his stinging hand. “Of ail the bloody damn jeekee…”

He slung the bow over one shoulder, freeing both hands, and started scrambling up the jagged face of a boulder three times his height. It was no climb he would have chosen, given time to work out a better route, but Dwer’s racing heart urged him to hurry.

Mini-avalanches of eroded rock spilled over his hair and down his collar, stinging with a dusty redolence of decayed time. Flaky vines and dried tendrils offered tempting handholds, which he strove to ignore. Rock was stronger, though not always as reliable as it looked.

While his fingers traced one fine crack, he felt the outcrop under his left foot start to crumble and was forced to trust his weight to one of the nearby crisscrossing mule-cables.

With a crackling ratchet, the vine gave but a moment’s warning before slipping. He gasped, suspending his entire weight with just his fingertips. Dwer’s torso struck the stone wall, slamming air out of his lungs.

His flailing legs met another strand, thinner than the first, just seconds before his grip would have failed. With no other choice, Dwer used it as a springboard to pivot and launch himself leftward, landing on a slim ledge with his right foot. His hands swarmed along the almost sheer face — and at last found solid holds. Blinking away dust, he inhaled deeply till it felt safe to resume.

The last few meters were less steep but worn slick by countless storms since the boulder had been dragged here, then left in place by the weakening vines. Finally, he was able to get up on his knees and peer ahead, toward the nearby shore.

What had seemed a uniform hedge, lining the lake’s perimeter, was now a thick snarl of vines, varying from man-height to several times as tall. This near the water, the cables’ gray pallor gave way to streaks of green, yellow, even bloodred. Within the tangle he glimpsed specks of yet other colors, sparkling in shafts of sunlight.

Beyond the thorny barrier, the scummy pond seemed to possess a geometric essence, both liquid and uncannily corrugated. Some areas seemed to pulse, as if to a cryptic rhythm — or enduring anger.

One-of-a-Kind, he thought, not really wanting to evoke the name but unable to resist. He pulled his gaze away, scanning for Rety. Don’t hurt her, One-of-a-Kind. She’s only a child.

He didn’t want to converse with the mulc-spider. He hoped it might be dormant, as when the lake was a harmless cranny in the winter snowscape. Or perhaps it was dead, at last. The spider was surely long past due to die. A grisly hobby seemed to be all that kept this one alive.

He shivered as a creeping sensation climbed the nape of his neck.

{Hunter. Fellow-seeker. Lonely one. How good of you to greet me. I sensed you pass nearby some days ago, hurrying in chase. Why did you not pause to say hello?

{Have you found what you sought?

{Is it this “child” you speak of?

{Is she different from other humans?

{Is she special in some way?}

Scanning for traces of Rety, Dwer tried to ignore the voice. He had no idea why he sometimes held conversations with a particular corrosive alpine puddle. Though psi talent wasn’t unknown among the Six, the Scrolls warned darkly against it. Anyway, most psi involved links among close kin — one reason he never told anyone about this fey channel. Imagine the nicknames, if people learned of it!

I probably imagine it all, anyway. Must be some weird symptom of my solitary life.

The tickling presence returned.

{Is that still your chief image of me? As a figment of your mind? If so, why not test it? Come to me, my unowned treasure. My unique wonder! Come to the one place in the cosmos where you will always be prized!}

Dwer grimaced, resisting the hypnotic draw of the algae patterns, still scanning amid the rocks and tangles for Rety. At least the spider hadn’t taken her yet. Or was it cruel enough to lie?

There! .Was that a flicker to the left? Dwer peered westward, shading his eyes against the late afternoon sun. Something rustled near the coiled vines, just a dozen or so meters closer to the lake, hidden by the bulk of several stone slabs, but causing a section of hedge to quiver. Squinting, Dwer wished he hadn’t been so hasty in dropping his pack, which contained his priceless handmade ocular.

It might be a trap, he thought.

{Who would trap you, Special One? You suspect me? Say you don’t mean it!}

The wind had died down a bit. Dwer cupped his hands and called, “Rety!”

Queer echoes scattered among the rocks, to be sucked dry by pervasive moss and dust. Dwer looked around for alternatives. He could slip down to ground level and hack his way inward, using the machete sheathed at his back. But that would take forever, and how would One-of-a-Kind react to having its fingers sliced off?

His only real option was to go over.

Dwer backed up till his heels hung over empty space, then took a deep breath and sprang forward… one, two, three paces, and leaped — sailing over a jungle of interlacing tendrils — to land with a jarring thud atop the next slab. This one slanted steeply, so there was no time to recover. He had to scramble fast to reach a long knife-edged ridge. Standing up, he spread his arms and gingerly walked heel-and-toe, teetering for ten paces before reaching a boulder with a flatter top.

Dwer’s nostrils filled with sour, caustic odors from the lake. More nearby tendrils throbbed with veins now, flowing acrid tinctures. He skirted puddles of bitter fluid, collecting in cavities of etched stone. When his boot scraped one pool, it left fine trails of ash and a scent of burning leather.

The next time he took a running leap, he landed hard on hands and knees.

“Rety?” he called, crawling to the forward edge.

The shoreline barrier was a dense-woven knot of green, red, and yellow strands, twisted in roiling confusion. Within this contorted mass, Dwer spied objects — each nestled in its own cavity. Each sealed, embedded, within a separate crystal cocoon.

Golden things, silvery things. Things gleaming like burnished copper or steel. Tubes, spheroids, and complex blocky forms. Things shining unnatural hues of pigment or nanodye. Some resembled items Dwer had seen dragged from Buyur sites by reclaimer teams; only those had been decomposed, worn by passing centuries. These samples of past glory looked almost new. Like bugs trapped in amber, their cocoons preserved them against the elements, against time. And each item, Dwer knew, was one of a kind.

Not every sample was a Buyur relic. Some had once been alive. Small animals. Insectoids. Anything that strayed too close and caught the mad spider’s collecting fancy. It seemed a wonder that a being devoted to destruction — one designed to emit razing fluids — could also secrete a substance that conserved. All the more astonishing that it would want to.

The rustling resumed, coming from his left. Dwer slithered that way, dreading to find the girl trapped and suffering. Or else some small creature he would have to put out of misery with his bow.

He edged forward… and gasped.

What he saw netted in the profuse tangle, just a few meters ahead, came as a complete surprise.

At first sight it resembled a bird — a Jijoan avian — with the typical clawed stilt for a landing leg, four broad-feathered wings, and a tentacle-tail. But Dwer swiftly saw that it was no species he knew — or any genus listed on his brother’s charts. Its wings, flapping desperately against a surrounding net of sticky threads, articulated in ways Dwer thought unnatural. And they beat with a power he found suspicious in any living thing that size.

Feathers had been ripped or burned away in several places. Within those gaps, Dwer glimpsed flashes of glistening metal.

A machine!

Shock made him release the screen on his thoughts, allowing the tickling voice to return.

{Indeed, a machine. Of a type I never before owned. And see, it still operates. It lives!}

“I see that, all right,” Dwer muttered.

{And you don’t yet know the half of it. Is this my day, or what?}

Dwer hated the way the mulc-spider not only slipped into his mind but somehow used what it found there to produce perfect Anglic sentences, better than Dwer could manage, since the spider never stammered or seemed at a loss for words. He found that obnoxious, coming from a being lacking a face to talk back to.

The false bird thrashed in its snare. Along its feathered back gleamed clear, golden droplets that it fought to shake off, flicking most aside before they could harden into a shell of adamant, preserving crystal.

What on Jijo could it be? Dwer wondered.

{(I was hoping, now that I have you, to learn the answer.}

Dwer wasn’t sure he liked the way One-of-a-Kind put that. Anyway, there wasn’t time to bandy words. Dwer pushed aside pity for the trapped creature. Right now he must keep Rety from becoming yet another unique specimen in the mulc-spider’s collection.

{So, as I suspected. The small human is special!}

Dwer quashed the voice with the best weapon he had — anger.

Get out of my mind!

It worked. The presence vanished, for now. Once more, Dwer lifted his head and shouted. “Rety! Where are you!”

An answer came at once, from surprisingly close by.

“I’m here, fool. Now be quiet, or you’ll scare it!”

He swiveled, trying to stare in all directions at once. “Where? I don’t see—”

“Right below you, so shut up! I’ve been followin’ this thing for weeks! Now I gotta figure how to get it outta there.”

Dwer slid further left to peer into the crisscrossing network just below — and found himself staring straight into the beady black eyes of a grinning noor! Stretched out across a dormant vine as if it were a comfy roost, Mudfoot tilted his head slightly, squinting back at Dwer. Then, without warning, the noor let loose a sudden sneeze.

Dwer rocked back, cursing and wiping his face, while Mudfoot grinned innocently, happily.

“Quiet, you two! I think I see how to get a little closer—”

“No, Rety. You mustn’t!” Ignoring the noor, Dwer crept back to the edge and found her at last, close to the ground, perched with a leg on either side of a giant vine, squinting through the gloomy tangle at the mysterious avian.

“Took you long enough to catch up,” Rety commented.

“I … had some distractions,” he replied. “Now just wait a second, will you? There’s — some things you ought to know about this — about this here mulc-spider.” He motioned at the snarled mesh surrounding them. “It’s more, well, dangerous than you realize.”

“Hey, I been exploring webs since I was little,” she replied. “Most are dead, but we got a few big ones in the Hills, still full o’ sap and nasty stuff. I know my way around.” She swung her leg over the branch and slipped forward.

In a panic, Dwer blurted out — “Did any of those spiders try to catch you?”

She stopped, turned to face him again, and smirked.

“Is that what you meant by crazy?Oh, hunter. You got some imagination.”

Maybe you’re right, he pondered. That could be why he never heard of anyone else holding conversations with shrubs and lakes.

{What, again? How many times must we speak before you are convinced—}

Shut up and let me think!

The spider’s presence backed off again. Dwer bit his lip, trying to come up with something, anything, to keep the girl from venturing deeper into the thicket.

“Look, you’ve been following that bird-machine for some time, right? Is that what led you west in the first place?”

She nodded. “One day some o’ the boys saw a critter swoop out of a marsh, down by the Rift. Mean ol’ Jass winged it, but it got away, leaving a feather behind.”

She plucked something out of her leather blouse. Dwer glimpsed a brief metal sparkle before she put it away.

“I swiped it from Jass before I snuck out to go after the bird. Poor thing must’ve been hurt, ’cause by the time I picked up the trail, it wasn’t flyin’ so good. Kind of gliding for a stretch, then hoppin’ along. I only got one good look. Upslope to the Rimmers it started pullin’ ahead. Then I reached the Slope, and it came to me that I risked getting hanged every dura that I stayed.”

She shivered, a memory of fear.

“I was about to give up and head back home for a beatin’, when I heard a tapping sound in the night. I followed it, and for a minute I thought the clock teet was my bird!” She sighed. “That’s when I saw you, snorin’ away, with that fancy bow of yours lyin’ nearby. Figured it’d make Jass an’ Bom happy enough to forget knockin’ my teeth out for runnin’ off.”

Dwer had never heard their names before but decided a rope was too good for some sooners.

“That’s why you came all this way? To follow that bird-thing?”

Rety answered with a shrug. “I don’t spect you’d understand.”

On the contrary, he thought. It was what he himself would have done, if something so strange ever crossed his path.

{As would I, were I not rooted to this spot, ensnared by my own limitations. Are we not alike?}

Dwer chased the spider out — and the next instant an idea glimmered, offering a possible way out of this mess, as Rety slid off the branch and began to sidle forward, holding a slim blade that Dwer had never found when he searched her, the day before. It gleamed with razor sharpness.

“Wait. I— think about it, Rety. Shouldn’t we work together? Wouldn’t we do a better job getting it out?”

She stopped and seemed to consider the idea, looking up through the branches. “I’m listenin’.”

Dwer frowned, concentrating on getting the words right. “Look… nobody on the Slope has seen an active Buyur machine since — well, long before humans came to Jijo. This is important. I want to get that thing out of there as much as you do.”

All of which was true, or would have been if his first concern weren’t saving the girl’s life and his own. Stall for time, Dwer thought. There’s only a midura of daylight left. Get her to retreat till tomorrow. Then you can drag her away by force if you have to.

“Go on,” Rety said. “You want to come down an’ chop with your big knife? I bet you’d splatter, hacking at live vines. Lotta pain that way, if the sap goes spraying around.” Still, she seemed interested.

“Actually, I know a way that won’t bruise a single branch but might spread a hole big enough to get your bird-thing out. We’d use some of the — um, natural resources handy hereabouts.”

“Yeah?” She frowned. “The only stuff around here is rock, and dirt, and—”

Her eyes lit. “Boo!”

He nodded. “We’ll cut some young shoots, trim them tonight, and return in the morning with bridges and ladders to cross on top of the boulders — and enough pry bars to spread a path through all this” — he waved at the surrounding thicket — “without spilling any acid or gunk on ourselves. We’ll get your birdie-thing out long before it’s sealed in a crystal egg, and march right up to the sages with a surprise that’ll make a hoon’s spine pop. How does that sound?”

Dwer saw distrust in her eyes. She was naturally suspicious, and he had never been a very good liar. When she glanced back at the trapped mystery machine, he knew she must be gauging whether it could hold out overnight. “It still looks strong,” he told her. “If it lasted in there several days, one more night shouldn’t make that much difference.”

Rety lowered her head, pondering. “Might even be good if its wings got stickier. Won’t be able to fly off when we free it.” She nodded. “All right. Let’s go cut us some boo.”

With one hesitant, longing scan behind her, Rety swung her legs over the thick branch and reached up to begin climbing. She carefully examined each hand or foothold before committing herself, eyeing it for caustic leaks, then testing whether the next vine would bear her weight. Clearly, she was an experienced explorer.

But Rety had never ventured through a spider like this one. When she was about a third of the way through the twisty tangle, she suddenly winced, withdrawing her hand and staring at a single pale-golden droplet, glistening on the back of her wrist. It did not burn, or she would have screamed. For a moment, she seemed more entranced by the color than afraid.

“Quick, shake it off!” Dwer cried.

She complied. The glob flew into the foliage. But instantly there followed two more soft splatting sounds. A drop appeared on her shoulder, and one in her hair. Rety looked up to see where they came from — and took one more in the middle of her forehead. Cursing, she tried wiping it off — but managed only to smear it down her cheek. Rety backed away rapidly.

“Not that way!” Dwer urged. He saw some active vines snake toward her, golden dew oozing .from crevices. Rety hissed in dismay, taking more drops in her hair as she scrambled in a new direction.

{Tell her not to fight. There need be no pain.}

Dwer’s angry snarl was voiceless, inarticulate, hurling the spider’s mind-touch away. He shrugged the bow off of his shoulder, leaving it atop the boulder, and began clambering down to the girl. Vaguely, he was aware that the noor had departed, sensibly fleeing danger. Unlike some fools I know, Dwer thought, slipping the machete out of its sheath.

“I’m coming, Rety,” he said, testing his weight on a branch. Dwer saw Rety try to ascend by another route, easily evading the sluggishly pursuing vines.

“Don’t bother!” she called. “I’m all right. I don’t need your hel— ack!”

The branch she was holding, which had seemed inert moments before, suddenly beaded a line of golden moisture. Rety recoiled, cursing. Several drops adhered to her hand. “Don’t rub them!” Dwer urged.

“I’m not an idiot!” she retorted, backing away. Unfortunately, that took her deeper into the morass.

Dwer’s machete, an artfully reshaped length of Buyur metal, gleamed as he took a swipe at one of the vines between them. It looked lifeless, but he was ready to leap back in case—

It severed neatly, a crumbling, decaying tube, spilling nothing but cloying dust. A good thing he had decided against using it as a foothold, then. This place wasn’t forgiving of mistakes.

He let the machete hang by the pommel loop while he lowered himself one level, to what seemed a stable vine, setting his weight down gingerly; then he sidled along the horizontal span seeking a way downward. The next foothold seemed thinner, less anchored, but he didn’t have much choice. At least it didn’t gush acid or try to wrap his ankle like a snake. How did she get this far in the first place? He wondered, glad that most of the tendrils were dead. The hedge would have been impassable when the mulc-spider was in its prime.

“Dwer!”

He swiveled, wobbling as the ropy strand rocked to and fro. Peering past shadows, he watched Rety climb a chimneylike funnel, offering what seemed a way out. Only now, halfway up the slim gap, she saw something begin twisting into place above. Another clump of living vines… moving in to block the promise of escape. Meanwhile, the chimney’s base was closing the same way. Her face betrayed rising panic. Flushed, she held out her slim blade, eyes darting for some vital spot to stab her foe. But all she could do was saw at some nearby strand, hoping it would not gush vitriol or golden death.

A short way beyond, Dwer saw the bird-thing, still struggling within its own trap.

Let her go, One-of-a-Kind, Dwer thought as he crouched, then leaped with both hands outstretched for another cable-which fortunately held as he swung across a dark opening to land straddling another almost horizontal branch, as thick as a sapling’s trunk. Let her go, or I’ll—

His mind seemed to strangle on the .demand, not knowing how one intimidated a mulc-spider. Could he do more than irritate it with a machete? He might threaten to depart and return with tools to destroy the ancient thing, with flame and explosives, but somehow Dwer knew that would seem too abstract. The spider appeared to have little sense of perspective or cause and effect, only immediacy and avarice, combined with enough patience to make a hoon seem like a cranky noor.

Anyway, by the time Dwer could carry out his retribution, Rety would be sealed in a golden cocoon, preserved for all time… and dead as a stone.

Let’s talk a trade, One-of-a-Kind, he projected as he took up the machete once more. What will you take in exchange for her?

There was no answer. Either One-of-a-Kind was too busy pushing vines and fluids around, acting with unaccustomed haste, or else—

The spider’s silence felt eerie, predatory. Smug. As if it felt no need for conversation when it had two treasures and seemed about to get a third. Grimacing, Dwer sidled deeper into the quagmire. What else could he do?

He hacked at three more vines. The last sent streams of caustic sap arcing between crisscrossing branches. Smoke curled up from the rubbish-strewn floor below, adding to the acrid stench.

“Dwer, help me!”

Rety was fully hemmed in now, and touchy pride no longer suppressed the normal panic of a frightened child. Seen through a matrix of ensnaring mule-twine, her hair glistened like an urrish tinker’s mane on a dewy morning, coated with a fine dusting of golden droplets. A vine parted under her sawing knife — and two more slithered in to take its place.

“I’m coming!” he promised, splitting two more cables, then dropping to the next stable-looking branch. It sagged, then Dwer’s footing went slippery as it seeped a clearish, greasy liquor. He shouted, and his feet slid out from under him.

The same dense tangle he’d been cursing saved him from a broken neck. His windmilling arms caught a vine, wrapping round it desperately as his legs swung in midair. But his sigh of relief turned into a gagging gasp. Under his chin, livid veins pulsed with some vile, crimson solution. Blisters formed as corrosive liquid welled beneath the thinnest of membranes. Dwer’s eyes stung from escaping vapor.

{No, no. Don’t think I would ever harm you so! You are much too precious for that.}

Before Dwer’s tear-blurred gaze, the blisters stopped rising — then reddish fluid seemed to drain out of the throbbing arteries.

{That nectar is for plain stone. For you, my unique one, only the gold.}

Dwer grimaced. Thanks a lot!

Peering to one side, he found another tangle within reach of his feet. Risking that perch, he pushed away from the loathsome branch that had broken his fall.

{Think nothing of it.}

Dwer was almost at Rety’s level now, close enough to see grim determination replace panic in her eyes as she sawed another vine in half. A fine spray rewarded her, gilding the forearm she raised to protect her face. All of a sudden, Dwer realized — She’s cutting in the wrong direction!

Instead of taking the most direct route toward daylight, she was heading deeper into the morass — toward the mechanical bird-thing!

Of all the times to chase an Ifni-slucking obsession!

Sudden liquid coolness brushed Dwer’s wrist. A shimmering meniscus bead lay amid the dark hairs. He moved aside quickly, before another drop could fall from the seep-pore overhead. Dwer shook the droplet off, but even after it was gone, the spot still felt chilled, touched with a not-unpleasant numbness, like when the village dentist spread powdered Nural leaves along a patient’s gums, before spinning his hand-cranked drill.

The machete now wore its own streaked coating, already starting to crystallize in places. Certainly it was an artifact worth collecting, a slab of star-god stuff, adapted by a tribe of primitives to new use in a twilight place, between the gritty earth and urbane sky. Grimly, he raised his weapon and set to with a will.

Concentration was vital, so he ignored the stench and grinding dust with a hunter’s narrow-minded focus. Sweat beaded his brow, face, and neck, but he dared not wipe. No doubt he already looked like Rety, who now glittered like some fairy confection, dusted with beads of honey. Dwer did not bother shouting for her to turn and head toward him. Given her obstinacy, he might as well save his breath.

Glancing back, he saw his escape route still looked clear — a tunnel lined by chopped branches and dangling severed vines. One-of-a-Kind could marshal more, but the mulc-spider was old, slow. As Dwer neared Rety’s cage, he felt sure he could thwart the spider’s move, when it came.

Now he called, hoarsely.

“Okay, Rety. No foolin’. Let’s get outta here.”

The girl was over at the far end of her funnel opening, staring at the bird-thing past the branches that blocked her way. “Hey, it noticed me! It’s turning around!”

Dwer wouldn’t care if it stood on its head and gave Drake’s Farewell Address in Buyur-accented Galactic Three. He sliced another cable and coughed as fumes flowed from both writhing ends. “Rety, we haven’t got time!”

When the smoke cleared, he sidled closer and saw that the bird-thing had risen up within its cell, peering skyward and ignoring droplets that settled, mistlike, on its feathered back. Rety, too, seemed to notice its attention shift. She turned to look upward, as Dwer heard a shrill, chittering sound from the same general direction.

It’s just the bloody noor.

Beyond the diffracting crisscross of vines, he saw Mudfoot, returned from wherever it had fled. Only now the creature stood on its hind legs, sinuous body upraised, whiskered snout pulled back, snarling at something out of sight, to the south.

Another flicker caught Dwer’s eye. Like an epileptic snake, a kinked vine twisted into view, crossing part of the opening Dwer had cut through the hedge. Its jerky fits and starts seemed pathetic, all alone — but that tendril was followed by another, and another still.

“Rety!” He shouted, preparing to slash at the remaining barrier between them. “The trap’s closing. It’s now or never!”

On her face lay the frustration of coming within arm’s reach of her grail, only to have it snatched away by cruel fate. Not waiting for her answer, he lifted the heavy machete with both weary arms and cried out, splitting with three hard strokes the heavy cable blocking his way forward. Don’t throw it away, Rety, he pleaded inside, knowing it would do no good to say anything more aloud.

With a cry of frustration, Rety whirled around, forsaking her treasure, hurling herself at smaller vines with her tiny blade, then squeezing between others with lithe, squirmy agility. The tight passage smeared gold drops until she resembled a streaked pastry of swirled nut cream. Dwer sliced relentlessly and at last was close enough to stretch one arm into the morass.

Rety’s hand clasped his wrist.

Dwer planted his feet and hauled backward, drawing her through a dark, fetid funnel. A low moan accompanied the passage. He could not tell if it came from her, or himself, or both of them at once.

She slid free at last and clung to him with sudden fury, wrapping his torso in quivering arms and legs. Underneath all her macho bravado, Dwer knew she must have been terrified in there.

“We’ve got to hurry,” he said, tugging at one arm.

Rety resisted but a moment, then slithered off. She inhaled. “Okay, let’s go.”

He gave her a boost with his hands, sending her clambering into the tunnel-chimney he had carved through the hedge.

{Oh, going so soon? Have I been so poor a host?}

“Dry up and burn, One-of-a-Kind,” Dwer muttered under ragged breaths as he climbed after Rety, trusting her strong instincts to lead the way.

{Someday I surely will. But by then I’ll have preserved a legacy.

{Think on it! When Jijo’s fallow age ends, and new tenants possess this world for an aeon of shining glory, they will gaze in wonder at this collection I’ve gathered. Amid their glittering city towers, they’ll cherish my samplings of the interregnum, setting my prize pieces on pedestals for all to see. And paramount among those specimens will he you, my trophy, my treasure. Perhaps the best-conserved exemplar of your by then long-extinct wolfling race.}

Dwer puzzled — how did the spider sink hooks into his brain to draw forth words he didn’t recall ever learning, like exemplar and interregnum. Lark might have used them in his presence sometime, when perhaps they lodged somewhere deep in memory.

You’re the one who’s going to be extinct, spider! You and your whole damn race.

This time his blistering reply did not shove away the entity’s mind-touch.

{By then, certainly. But our type-design is always to be found in the Great Galactic Library, and we are far too useful ever to be forgotten. Whenever a world must be evacuated, tidied up, and allowed to lay fallow once more-whenever the mighty works of some former tenant race must be rubbed down to recycled dust-then we shall always rise again.

{Can your tribe of ignorant monkeys claim such usefulness, my precious? Can you claim any “purpose” at all? Save a tenacious will to keep on existing?}

This time Dwer did not answer. He needed to conserve his strength. If the earlier descent had been awful, ascending became pure hell. It was twice as hard craning backward to hack away at vines overhead as it had been striking down. In addition to danger from whipping cables and spurting acid, he and Rety had to climb through a mist of shimmering drops. It was no longer a matter of shaking them off one by one, but of dodging the thicker drifts and somehow preventing them from adhering to their eyes, noses, and ears. Through that luminous miasma, Dwer saw more creepers twist and flop into a gathering mesh above, more quickly than he would have believed possible. Clearly, One-of-a-Kind had been holding back till now.

{What did you expect? That I would show you all the things that I am capable o—

{…that I would show you all the…

{…that I would show . . .}

When the voice in Dwer’s head trailed off, his first reaction was relief. He had other worries, like an agonizing crick in his neck and a right arm that looked as if it had been dipped in a jeweler’s vat, and that seemed about to cramp from the repetitive hacking, hacking, hacking. Now if only the chattering noor would shut up too, with its shrill keening. Mudfoot’s piercing chitters crescendoed, rising in pitch beyond the limit of Dwer’s direct hearing but not past ability to scrape a vexing runnel under his skull.

Through it all, a nagging worry bothered Dwer.

I left the glaver all tied up. Will she die of thirst if I never make it back?

“Left!” Rety shouted. He quickly obeyed, swinging as far as possible, trusting her swift reflexes to warn of jets of yellow sap.

“Okay, clear!” she called.

The machete slipped. Dwer fumbled at the wrist strap three times before getting a grip to resume chopping the slender vines filling the chimney overhead, cutting off the swiftly failing twilight. If they didn’t make it out by full nightfall, every advantage would belong to the crazy mulc-spider.

Now a sound he had dismissed as background noise grew too loud to ignore. A low rumbling counterbass overrode the noor’s yapping. All around Rety and Dwer, the hedge began vibrating. A number of brittle vines shuddered to dust while others sprouted cracks and dripped fluids — red, orange, and milky — noxious additions to a fog that already stung human eyes. Through that blur, Dwer blinked upward to see Mudfoot, perched nimbly atop the hedge of vines, withdrawing in snarling defiance as something new entered view from the south — something that hovered in the air, without any visible means of support!

A machine! A symmetrical, slab-sided form with gleaming flanks that reflected the sunset, drifting to a point just above the shuddering hedge.

Suddenly, its belly blazed forth a bitter light that diffracted past the vines. The slender beam lanced right past Rety and Dwer, as if probing for something deeper…

“It’s hunting the bird!” Rety crouched beside Dwer, seizing his arm and pointing.

“Never mind the damn bird!” he cursed. The hedge was shaking worse than ever. Dwer dragged her behind him just as a sundered tube whipped past, spurting caustic fluid, splattering a trail of fizzing agony along his back as he shielded the girl. Purple spots swarmed across his field of vision, and the machete slipped its thong to fall, clattering off branches on its way down.

Now it seemed as if the hedge were alive with stark, fleeing shadows, as the floating machine’s searchlight narrowed to a searing needle that scorched anything it touched.

By the same light Dwer glimpsed the bird-thing, trapped inside its cage of ropy mesh and coated with a golden patina, erupting now in a dance of evasion, leaping back and forth as it tried to dodge the burning ray of light, its feathers already smoldering in spots. Rety let out a throaty cry of anger, but it was all the two humans could do simply to hold on.

Finally, the bird-thing seemed to give up. It stopped ducking and instead spread its four wings in a pitiful effort to create a shielding canopy, which began to smoke as the blazing shaft struck home and stayed. Only the little bird-machine’s head poked out, snaking upward to gape toward the aggressor with one open, staring eye.

Dwer was watching in horrified amazement, mixed with stunned pity, when that dark, jadelike eye abruptly exploded.

The blinding flash was the last thing he clearly remembered for a long time to come.