Infinity's Shore

PART SIX

FROM THE NOTES OF GILLIAN BASKIN

MY DECISION may not be wholly rational.

For all I know, Alvin may be bluffing in order to avoid exile. He may have no idea who we are.

Or perhaps he really has surmised the truth. After all, dolphins are mentioned in many of the Earth books he’s read. Even wearing a fully armored, six-legged walker unit, a fin’s outline can he recognized if you look in the right way. Once the idea occurred to him, Alvin’s fertile imagination would cover the rest.

As a precaution, we could intern the kids much farther south, or in a subsea habitat. That might keep them safe and silent. Tsh’t suggested as much, before I ordered the Hikahi to turn around and bring them back.

I admit I’m biased. I miss Alvin and his pals. If only the fractious races of the Five Galaxies could have a camaraderie like theirs.

Anyway, they are grown-up enough to choose their own fate.

WE’VE had a report from Makanee’s nurse. On her way by sled to check on a sick member of Kaa’s team, peepoe spotted two more piles of junked spacecraft, smaller than this one, but suitable should we have to move Streaker soon. Hannes dispatched crews to start preparatory work.

Again, we must rely on the same core group of about fifty skilled crewfen. The reliable ones, whose concentration remains unflagged after three stressful years. Those who aren’t frightened by superstitious rumors of sea monsters lurking amid the dead Buyur machines.

AS for our pursuers — we ve seen no more gravitic signatures of flying craft, east of the mountains. That may be good news, but the respite makes me nervous. Two small spacecraft can’t be the whole story. Sensors detect some great brute of a ship, about five hundred klicks northwest. Is this vast cruiser related to the two vessels that fell near here?

They must surely realize that this region is of interest.

It seems creepy they haven’t followed up.

As if they are confident they have all the time in the world.

THE Niss Machine managed to exchange just a few more words with that so-called noor beast that our little drone encountered ashore. But the creature keeps us on tenterhooks, treating the little scout robot like its private toy, or a prey animal to be teased with bites and scratches. Yet it also carries it about in its mouth, careful not to get tangled in the fiber cable, letting us have brief, tantalizing views of the crashed sky boats.

We had assumed that “noor” were simply devolved versions of tytlal … of little interest except as curiosities. But if some retain the power of speech, what else might they be capable of?

At first I thought the Niss Machine would be the one best qualified to handle this confusing encounter. After all, the noor is its “cousin,” in a manner of speaking.

But family connections can involve sibling rivalry, even contempt. Maybe the Tymbrimi machine is simply the wrong spokesman.

One more reason I’m eager to bring Alvin back.

AMID all this, I had time to do a bit more research on Herbie. I wish there were some way to guess the isotopic input profiles, before he died, but chemical racemization analyses of samples taken from the ancient mummy appear to show considerably less temporal span than was indicated by cosmic-ray track histories of the hull Tom boarded, in the Shallow Cluster.

In other words, Herbie seems younger than the vessel Tom found him on.

That could mean a number of things.

Might Herb simply be the corpse of some previous grave robber, who slinked aboard just a few million years ago, instead of one to two billion?

Or could the discrepancy be an effect of those strange fields we found in the Shallow Cluster, surrounding that fleet of ghostly starcraft, rendering them nearly invisible? Perhaps the outer hulls of those huge, silent ships experienced time differently than their contents.

It makes me wonder about poor Lieutenant Yachapa-jean, who was killed by those same fields, and whose body had to be left behind. Might some future expedition someday recover the well-preserved corpse of a dolphin and go rushing around the universe thinking they have the recovered relic of a progenitor?

Mistaking the youngest sapient race for the oldest. What a joke that would be.

A joke on them, and a joke on us.

Herbie never changes. Yet I swear I sometimes catch him grinning.

OUR stolen Galactic Library unit gets queer and opaque at times. If I werent in disguise, the big cube probably wouldn’t tell me anything at all. Even decked out as a Thennanin admiral, I find the Library evasive when shown those symbols that Tom copied aboard the derelict ship.

One glyph looks like the emblem worn by every Library unit in known space — a great spiral wheel. Only, instead of five swirling arms rotating around a common center, this one has nine! And eight concentric ovals overlie the stylized galactic helix, making it resemble a bull’s-eye target.

I never saw anything like it before.

When I press for answers, our purloined archive says the symbol “… is very old …” and that its use is “… memetically discouraged.”

Whatever that means.

At risk of humanizing a machine, the unit seems to get grumpy, as if it dislikes being confused. I’ve seen this before.

Terragens researchers find that certain subject areas make Libraries touchy, as if they hate having to work hard by digging in older files.… Or maybe that’s an excuse to avoid admitting there are things they don’t know.

It reminds me of discussions Tom and I used to have with Jake Demwa, when we’d all sit up late trying to make sense of the universe.

Jake had a theory — that Galactic history, which purports to go back more than a billion years, is actually only accurate to about one hundred and fifty million.

“With each eon you go further back than that,” he said, “what we’re told has an ever-increasing flavor of a carefully concocted fable.”

Oh, there’s evidence that oxygen-breathing starfarers have been around ten times as long. Surely some of the ancient events recorded in official annals must be authentic. But much has also been painted over.

It’s a chilling notion. The great Institutes are supposed to he dedicated to truth and continuity. How, then, can valid information be memetically discouraged?

Yes, this seems a rather abstract obsession, at a time when Streaker—and now Jijo — faces dire and immediate threats. Yet I can’t help thinking it all comes together here at the bottom of a planetary graveyard, where tectonic plates melt history into ore.

We are caught in the slowly grinding gears of a machine more vast than we imagined.

Hannes

AT TIMES HANNES SUESSI ACUTELY MISSED HIS young friend Emerson, whose uncanny skills helped make Streaker purr like a compact leopard, prowling the trails of space.

Of course Hannes admired the able fins of his engineroom gang — amiable, hardworking crew mates without a hint of regression in the bunch. But dolphins tend to visualize objects as sonic shapes, and often set their calibrations intuitively, based on the way motor vibrations sounded. A helpful technique, but not always reliable.

Emerson D’Anite, on the other hand—

Hannes never knew anyone with a better gut understanding of quantum probability shunts. Not the arcane hyperdimensional theory, but the practical nuts and bolts of wresting movement from contortions of wrinkled spacetime. Emerson was also fluent in Tursiops Trinary … better than Hannes at conveying complex ideas in neodolphins’ own hybrid language. A useful knack on this tub.

Alas, just one human now remained belowdecks, to help tend abused motors long past due for overhaul.

That is — if one could even call Hannes Suessi human anymore.

Am I more than I was? Or less?

He now had “eyes” all over the engine room — remote pickups linked directly to his ceramic-encased brain. Using portable drones, Hannes could supervise Karkaett and Chuchki far across the wide chamber … or even small crews working on alien vessels elsewhere in the great underwater scrap yard. In this way he could offer advice and comfort when they grew nervous, or when their bodies screamed with cetacean claustrophobia.

Unfortunately, cyborg abilities did nothing to prevent loneliness.

You should never have left me here alone, Hannes chided Emerson’s absent spirit. You were an engineer, not a secret agent or star pilot! You had no business traipsing off, doing heroic deeds.

There were specialists for such tasks. Streaker had been assigned several “heroes” when she first set out — individuals with the right training and personalities, equipping them to face dangerous challenges and improvise their way through any situation.

Unfortunately, those qualified ones were gone — Captain Creideiki, Tom Orley, Lieutenant Hikahi, and even the young midshipman Toshio — all used up in that costly escape from Kithrup.

I guess someone had to fill in after that, Hannes conceded.

In fact, Emerson pulled off one daring coup on Oakka, the green world, when the Obeyer Alliance sprang a trap while Gillian tried to negotiate a peaceful surrender to officials of the Navigation Institute.

Not even the suspicious Niss Machine reckoned that neutral Galactic bureaucrats might betray their oaths and violate Streaker’s truce pennant. It wasn’t supposed to be possible. If not for Emerson’s daring trek across Oakka’s jungle, taking out a Jophur field-emitter station, Streaker would have fallen into the clutches of a single fanatic clan — the one thing the Terragens Council said must not occur, at any cost.

But you let one success go to your head, eh? What were you thinking? That you were another Tom Orley?

A few months later you pulled that crazy stunt, veering a jury-rigged Thennanin fighter through the Fractal System, firing recklessly to “cover” our escape. What did that accomplish, except getting yourself killed?

He recalled the view from Streaker’s bridge, looking across the inner cavity of a vast, frosty structure the size of a solar system, built of condensed primal matter. A jagged, frothy structure with a pale star in its heart. Emerson’s fighter swerved amid the spiky reaches of that enormous artifact, spraying bright but useless rays while claws of hydrogen ice converged around it.

Foolish heroism. The Old Ones could have stopped Streaker just as easily as they stopped you, if they really wanted to.

They meant to let us get away.

He winced, recalling how Emerson’s brave, futile “diversion” ended in a burst of painful light, a flicker against the immense, luminous fractal dome. Then Streaker fled down a tunnel between dimensions, thread-gliding all the way to forbidden Galaxy Four. Once there, her twisty path skirted the trade winds of a hydrogen-breathing civilization, then plunged past a sooty supergiant whose eruption might at last cover the Earthship’s trail.

Others came to Jijo in secret before us, letting Izmunuti erase their tracks.

It should have worked for us, too.

But Hannes knew what was different, this time.

Those others didn’t already have a huge price on their heads. You could buy half a spiral arm with the bounty that’s been offered for Streaker, by several rich, terrified patron lines.

Hannes sighed. The recent depth-charge attack had been imprecise, so the hunters only suspected a general area of sea bottom. But the chase was on again. And Hannes had work to do.

At least I have an excuse to avoid another damned meeting of the ship’s council. It’s a farce, anyway, since we always wind up doing whatever Gillian decides. We’d be crazy not to.

Karkaett signaled that the motivator array was aligned. Hannes used a cyborg arm to adjust calibration dials on the master control, trying to imitate Emerson’s deft touch. The biomechanical extensions that replaced his hands were marvelous gifts, extending both ability and life span — though he still missed the tactile pleasure of fingertips.

The Old Ones were generous … then they robbed us and drove us out. They gave life and took it. They might have betrayed us for the reward … or else sheltered us in their measureless world. Yet they did neither.

Their agenda ran deeper than mere humans could fathom. Perhaps everything that happened afterward was part of some enigmatic plan.

Sometimes I think humanity would’ve been better off just staying in bed.

Tsh’t

SHE TOLD GILLIAN BASKIN WHAT SHE THOUGHT OF the decision.

“I still do not agree with bringing those young sooners back here.”

The blond woman looked back at Tsh’t with tired eyes. Soft lines at the corners had not been there when Streaker started this voyage. It was easy to age during a mission like this.

“Exile did seem best, for their own good. But they may be more useful here.”

“Yesss … assuming they’re telling the truth about hoons and Jophur sitting around with humans and urs, reading paper books and quoting Mark Twain!”

Gillian nodded. “Farfetched, I know. But—”

“Think of the coincidence! No sooner does our scout sub find an old urrish cache than these so-called kids and their toy bathysphere drop in.”

“They would have died, if the Hikahi didn’t snatch them up,” pointed out the ship’s physician, Makanee.

“Perhaps. But consider, not long after they arrived here, we sensed gravitic motors headed straight for this rift canyon. Then someone started bombing the abyssss! Was that a fluke? Or did spies lead them here?”

“Calling bombs down on their own heads?” The dolphin surgeon blew a raspberry. “A simpler explanation is that one of our explorer robots got caught, and was traced to this general area.”

In fact, Tsh’t knew the four sooner children hadn’t brought Galactics to the Rift. They had nothing to do with it. She was herself responsible.

Back when Streaker was preparing to flee the Fractal System, heading off on another of Gillian’s brilliant, desperate ploys, Tsh’t had impulsively sent a secret message. A plea for help from the one source she felt sure of, revealing the ship’s destination and arranging a rendezvous at Jijo.

Gillian will thank me later, she had thought at the time. When our Rothen lords come to take care of us.

Only now, images from shore made clear how badly things went wrong.

Two small sky ships, crashed in a swamp … the larger revealing fierce, implacable Jophur.

Tsh’t wondered how her well-meant plan could go so badly. Did the Rothen allow themselves to be followed? Or was my message intercepted?

Worry and guilt gnawed her gut.

Another voice entered the discussion. Mellifluous. Emanating from a spiral of rotating lines that glowed at one end of the conference table.

“So Alvin’s bluff played no role in your decision, Dr. Baskin?”

“Is he bluffing? These kids grew up reading Melville and Bickerton. Maybe he recognized dolphin shapes under those bulky exo-suits. Or we may have let hints slip, during conversation.”

“Only the Niss spoke to them directly,” Tsh’t pointed out, thrusting her jaw toward the whirling hologram.

It replied with unusual contrition.

“Going over recordings, I concede having used terms such as kilometer and hour… out of shipboard habit. Alvin and his friends might have correlated this with their extensive knowledge of Anglic, since Galactics would not use wolfling measurements.”

“You mean a Tymbrimi computer ccan make mistakesss?” Tsh’t asked, tauntingly.

The spinning motif emitted a low humm they all now recognized as the philosophical umbling sound of a reflective hoon.

“Flexible beings exhibit an ability to learn new ways,” the Niss explained. “My creators donated me to serve aboard this ship for that reason. It is why the Tymbrimi befriended you Earthling rapscallions, in the first place.”

The remark was relatively gentle teasing, compared with the machine’s normal, biting wit.

“Anyway,” Gillian continued, “it wasn’t Alvin’s bluff that swayed me.”

“Then what-t?” Makanee asked.

The Niss hologram whirled with flashing speckles, and answered for Gillian.

“It is the small matter of the tytlal … the noor beast who speaks. It has proved uncooperative and uninformative, despite our urgent need to understand its presence here.

“Dr. Baskin and I now agree.

“We need the children for that reason. Alvin, above all.

“To help persuade it to talk to us.”

Emerson

HE BLAMES HIMSELF. HIS MIND HAD BEEN ON FARAWAY places and times. Distracted, he was slow reacting when Sara fell.

Till that moment, Emerson was making progress in the struggle to put his past in order, one piece at a time. No easy task with part of his brain missing — the part that once offered words to lubricate any thought or need.

Hard-planted inhibitions fight his effort to remember, punishing every attempt with savagery that makes him grunt and sweat. But the peculiar panoramas help for a while. Ricocheting colors and half-liquid landscapes jar some of the niches where chained memories lie.

One recollection erupts whole. An old one, from childhood. Some neighbors had a big German shepherd who loved to hunt bees.

The dog used to stalk his quarry in a very uncanine manner, crouching and twitching like some ridiculous ungainly cat, pursuing the unsuspecting insect through flower beds and tall grass. Then he pounced, snapping powerful jaws around the outmatched prey.

As a boy, Emerson would stare in amazed delight while outraged buzzing echoed behind the shepherd’s bared teeth, followed by a vivid instant when the bee gave up protesting and lashed with its stinger. The dog would snort, grimace, and sneeze. Yet, brief pain came mixed with evident triumph. Bee hunting gave meaning to his gelded suburban life.

Emerson wonders, why does this metaphor resonate so strongly? Is he the dog, overriding agony to snatch one defiant memory after another?

Or is he the bee?

Emerson recalls just fragments about the haughty entities who reamed his mind, then sent his body plummeting to Jijo in fiery ruin. But he knows how they regarded his kind — like insects.

He pictures himself with a sharp stinger, wishing for a chance to make the Old Ones sneeze. He dreams of teaching them to hate the taste of bees.

Emerson lays hard-won memories in a chain. A necklace with far more gaps than pearls. Easiest come events from childhood, adolescence, and years of training for the Terragens Survey Service.…

Even when the horse caravan departs the land of stabbing colors to climb a steep mountain trail, he has other tools to work with — music, math, and hand signs that he trades with Prity, sharing jokes of ultimate crudity. During rest breaks, his sketchpad helps tap the subconscious, using impatient slashes and curves to draw free-form images from the dark time.

Streaker…

The ship takes form, almost drawing itself — a lovingly rendered cylinder with hornlike flanges arrayed in circuits along its length. He draws her underwater—surrounded by drifting seaweed — abnormal for a vessel of deep space, but it makes sense as other memories fill in.

Kithrup…

That awful world where the Streaker came seeking shelter after barely escaping a surprise ambush, learning that a hundred fleets were at war over the right to capture her.

Kithrup. A planet whose oceans were poison … but a useful place to make repairs, since just half a dozen crew members had legs to stand on. The rest — bright, temperamental dolphins — needed a watery realm to work in. Besides, it seemed a good place to hide after the disaster at …

Morgran …

A transfer point. Safest of the fifteen ways to travel from star to star. Simply dive toward one at the right slope and distance, and you’d exit at some other point, far across the stellar wheel. Even the Earthling slowboat Vesarius had managed it, though quite by accident, before humanity acquired the techniques of Galactic science.

Thinking of Morgran brings Keepiru to mind, the finest pilot Emerson ever knew — the show-off! — steering Streaker out of danger with flamboyance that shocked the ambushers, plunging her back into the maelstrom, away from the brewing space battle…

… like the other battle that developed weeks later, over Kithrup. Fine, glistening fleets, the wealth of noble clans, tearing at each other, destroying in moments the pride of many worlds. Emerson’s hand flies as he draws exploding arcs across a sheet of native paper, ripping it as he jabs, frustrated by inability to render the gorgeous savagery he once witnessed with his own eyes.…

Emerson folds the drawings away when the party remounts, glad that his flowing tears are concealed by the rewq.

Later, when they face a steaming volcano caldera, he abruptly recalls another basin, this one made of folded space … the Shallow Cluster … Streaker’s last survey site before heading for Morgran — a place empty of anything worth noting, said the Galactic Library.

Then what intelligence or premonition provoked Captain Creideiki to head for such an unpromising site?

Surely, in all the eons, someone else must have stumbled on the armada of derelict ships Streaker discovered there — cause of all her troubles. He can envision those silent arks now, vast as moons but almost transparent, as if they could not quite decide to be.

This memory hurts in a different way. Claw marks lie across it, as if some outside force once pored over it in detail — perhaps seeking to read patterns in the background stars. Retracing Streaker’s path to a single point in space.

Emerson figures they probably failed. Constellations were never his specialty.

“Emerson, you don’t have to go.”

His head jerks as those words peel from a memory more recent than Morgran or Kithrup, by many months.

Emerson pans the land of fevered colors, now seen from high above. At last he finds her face in rippling glimmers. A worried face, burdened with a hundred lives and vital secrets to preserve. Again she speaks, and the words come whole, because he never stored them in parts of the brain meant for mundane conversation.

Because everything she said to him had always seemed like music.

“We need you here. Let’s find another way.”

But there was no other way. Not even Gillian’s sarcastic Tymbrimi computer could suggest one before Emerson climbed aboard a salvaged Thennanin fighter, embarking on a desperate gamble.

Looking back in time, he hopes to see in Gillian’s eyes the same expression she used to have when bidding Tom farewell on some perilous venture.

He sees worried concern, even affection. But it’s not the same.

Emerson frees his gaze from the torment-colored desert, turning east toward less disturbing vistas. Far-off mountains offer respite with natural undulating shapes, softened by verdant green forests.

Then, from one tall peak, there comes a glittering flash! Several more gleam in series. A rhythm that seems to speak.…

His intrigued detachment is cut short by a frightened yell. Yet, for an instant Emerson remains too distant, too slow to turn. He does not see Sara tumble off the path. But Prity’s scream tears through him like a torch thrust into cobwebs.

Sara’s name pours from his throat with involuntary clarity. His body finally acts, leaping in pursuit.

Hurtling down the jagged talus slope, he flings eloquent curses at the universe, defying it—daring it—to take another friend.

Lark

THE SERGEANT’S FACE WAS STREAKED WITH CAMOUFLAGE. Her black hair still bore flecks of loam and grass from worming through crevices and peering between brambles. Yet Lark had never seen Jeni Shen look better.

People thrive doing the thing they were bom for. In Jeni’s case, that’s being a warrior. She’d rather have lived when the elder and younger Drakes were fashioning the Great Peace out of blood and fire than during the peace itself.

“So far, so good,” the young militia scout reported. Blur-cloth overalls made it hard to trace her outline amid stark lantern shadows.

“I got close enough to watch the emissaries reenter the valley, bringing the sages’ reply to the Jophur. A couple of guard robots swooped in to look them over, especially poor Vubben, sniffing him from wheel rims to eyestalks. Then all six ambassadors headed down to the Glade, with the bots in escort.” Jeni made slanting downward motions with her hands. “That leaves just one or two drones patrolling this section of perimeter! Seems we couldn’t ask for a better chance to make our move.”

“Can there be any question?” added Rann. The tall starfarer leaned against a limestone wall with arms folded. The Danik was unarmed, but otherwise Rann acted as if this were his expedition. “Of course we shall proceed. There is no other option.”

Despite Rann’s poised assurance, the plan was actually Lark’s. So was the decision whether to continue. His would be the responsibility, if three-score brave lives were lost in the endeavor … or if their act provoked the Jophur into spasms of vengeful destruction.

We might undermine the High Sages at the very moment when they have the Galactic untraekis calmed down.

On the other hand, how could the Six Races possibly pay the price the Jophur were demanding? While the sages tried to negotiate a lower cost, someone had to see if there was a better way. A way not to pay at all.

Anxious eyes regarded him from all corners of the grotto — one of countless steamy warrens that laced these hills. Ling’s gaze was among the most relentless, standing far apart from Rann. The two star lords had been at odds since they worked to decode those cryptic data slabs — that awful afternoon when Rann cried “treason!” then a dread gold mist fell on Dooden Mesa. Each sky human had a different reason to help this desperate mission.

Lark found little cheer in Jeni’s report. Only one or two drones left. According to Lester Cambel’s aides, the remaining robots could still probe some distance underground, on guard against approaching threats. On the plus side, this terrain was a muddle of steam vents and juttering quakes. Then there were the subtle patterning songs put out by the Holy Egg — emanations that set Lark’s stone amulet trembling against his chest.

They all watched, awaiting his decision — human, urs, and hoon volunteers, plus some qheuens who weren’t yet sick.

“All right.” Lark nodded. “Let’s do it.”

A terse, decisive command. Grinning, Jeni spun about to forge deeper into the cavern, followed by lantern bearers.

What Lark had meant to say was, Hell no! Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy a round of drinks so everyone can raise a glass for poor Uthen.

But if he mentioned his friend’s name, he might sob the wrenching grief inside. So Lark took his place along the twisty column of figures stooping and shuffling through the dim passage, lit by glow patches stuck to the walls.

His thoughts caromed as he walked. For instance, he found himself wondering where on the Slope all six races could drink the same toast at the same time? Not many inns served both alcohol and fresh simla blood, since humans and urs disdained each other’s feeding habits. And most traeki politely refrained from eating in front of other races.

I do know one bar in Tarek Town … that is, if Tarek hasn’t already been smothered by a downpour of golden rain. After Dooden, the Jophur may go for the bigger towns, where so many g’Kek live.

It makes you wonder why the g’Kek came to Jijo in the first place. They can only travel the Path of Redemption if it is paved.

Lark shook his head.

Trivia. Minutiae. Brain synapses keep firing, even when your sole concern is following the man in front of you … and not slamming your skull on a stalactite.

When they glanced at him, his followers saw a calm, assertive pose. But within, Lark endured a run-on babble of words, forever filling his unquiet mind.

I should be mourning my friend, right now.

I should be hiring a traeki undertaker, arranging a lavish mulching ceremony, so Uthen’s polished carapace can go in style to join the bones and spindles of his foremothers, lying under the Great Midden.

It’s my duty to pay a formal visit to the Gray Queens, in that dusty hall where they once dominated most of the Slope. The Chamber of Ninety Tooth-Carved Pillars, where they still make pretenses at regal glory. But how could I explain to those qheuen matrons how two of their brightest sons died — Harullen, sliced apart by alien lasers, and Uthen, slain by pestilence?

Can I tell those ashen empresses their other children may be next?

Uthen had been his greatest friend, the colleague who shared his fascination with the ebb and flow of Jijo’s fragile ecosystem. Though never joining Lark in heresy, Uthen was the one other person who understood why sooner races should never have come to this world. The one to comprehend why some Galactic laws were good.

I let you down, old pal. But if I can’t perform all those other duties, maybe I can arrange something to compensate.

Justice.

Debris littered the floor of the last large cavern, strewn there during the Zealots’ Plot, when a cabal of young rebels used these same corridors to sneak explosives under the Danik research station, incinerating Ling’s friend Besh and one of the Rothen star lords. Repercussions still spread from that event, like ripples after a large stone strikes a pond.

The Jophur battleship now lay atop the station wreckage, yet no one suggested using the same method of attack a second time. Assuming a mighty starcraft could be blown up, it would take such massive amounts of exploser paste that Lark’s team would still be hauling barrels by next Founders’ Day. Anyway, there were no volunteers to approach the deadly space behemoth. Lark’s plan meant coming no closer than several arrowflights. Even so, the going would be hard and fraught with peril.

“From here on, the way’s too close for grays,” Jeni said.

Urrish partisans peered down a passage that narrowed considerably, coiling their long necks in unison, sniffing an aroma their kind disliked.

The gray qheuens squatted while others unstrapped supplies from their chitin backs. Given enough time, the big fellows might widen the corridor with their digging claws and diamond-like teeth, but Lark felt better sending them back. Who knew how much time they had, with plague spreading on Jijo’s winds? Was it a genocide bug? Ling had found supporting evidence on decoded data wafers, though Rann still denied it could be of Rothen origin.

The glowering starman was obsessed with a different wafer-gleaned fact.

There had been a spy among the station’s staff of outlaw gene raiders. Someone who kept a careful diary, recording every misdemeanor performed by the Rothen and their human servants.

An agent of the Terragens Council!

Apparently, Earth’s ruling body had an informant among the clan of human fanatics who worshiped Rothen lords.

He wanted badly to quiz Ling, but there was no time for their old question game. Not since they fled the Dooden disaster along with Lester Cambel’s panicky aides, plunging through a maze of towering boo. New trails and fresh-cut trunks had flustered the breathless fugitives until they spilled into an uncharted clearing, surprising a phalanx of traeki who stood in a long row, venting noxious vapors like hissing kettles.

Galloping squads of urrish militia then swarmed in to protect the busy traeki, nipping at ankles, as if the humans were stampeding simlas, driving Cambel’s team away from the clearing, diverting them toward havens to the west and south.

Even after finally reaching a campsite refuge, there had been no respite to discuss far-off Galactic affairs. Ling spent her time with the medics, relating what little she had learned from the spy’s notes about the qheuen plague.

Meanwhile, Lark found himself surrounded by furious activity, commanding an ever-growing entourage of followers.

It goes to show, desperate people will follow anyone with a plan.

Even one as loony as mine.

Hoonish bearers took up the grays’ burdens, and the caravan was off again. Half a dozen blue qheuens took up the rear, so young their shells were still moist from larval fledging. Though small for their kind, they still needed help from men with hammers and crowbars, chiseling away limestone obstructions. Lark’s scheme counted on these adolescent volunteers.

He hoped his farfetched plan wasn’t the only one at work.

There is always prayer.

Lark fondled his amulet. It felt cool. For now the Egg was quiescent.

At a junction the earlier zealot cabal had veered left, carrying barrels of exploser paste to a cave beneath the Rothen station. But Lark’s group turned right. They had less distance to cover, but their way was more hazardous.

Jimi the Blessed was among the burly men helping widen the path, attacking an obstruction with such fury Lark had to intervene.

“Easy, Jimi! You’ll wake the recycled dead!”

That brought laughter from the sweaty laborers, and booming umbles from several hoonish porters. Brave hoons. Lark recalled how their kind disliked closed places. The urs, normally comfortable underground, grew more nervous with each sign of approaching water.

None of them were happy to be approaching the giant star cruiser.

The Six Races had spent centuries cowering against The Day when ships of the Institutes would come judge their crimes. Yet, when great vessels came, they did not bear high-minded magistrates, but thieves, and then brutal killers. Where the Rothen and their human stooges seemed crafty and manipulative, the Jophur were chilling.

They demand what we cannot give.

We don’t know anything about the “dolphin ship” they seek. And we’d rather be damned than hand over our g’Kek brothers.

So Lark, who had spent his life hoping Galactics would come end the illegal colony on Jijo, now led a desperate bid to battle star gods.

Human literature has been so influential since the Great Printing. It’s full of forlorn causes. Endeavors that no rational person would entertain.

He and Ling were helping each other descend a limestone chute, glistening with seepage and slippery lichen, when word arrived from the forward scouts.

“Water just ahead.”

That was the message, sent back by Jeni Shen.

So, Lark thought. I was right.

Then he added—

So far.

The liquid was oily and cold. It gave off a musty aroma.

None of which stopped two eager young blues from creeping straight into the black pool, trailing mulc-fiber line from a spool. Hoons with hand pumps kept busy inflating air bladders while Lark steeled himself to enter that dark, wet place.

Having second thoughts?

Jeni checked his protective suit of skink membranes. It might ward off the chill, but that was the least of Lark’s worries.

I can take cold. But there had better be enough air.

The bladders were an untested innovation. Each was a traeki ring, thick-ribbed to hold gas under pressure. Jeni affixed one to his back, and showed him how to breathe through its fleshy protrusion — a rubbery tentacle that would provide fresh air and scrub the old.

You grow up depending on traeki-secreted chemicals to make native foods edible, and traeki-distilled alcohol to liven celebrations. A traeki pharmacist makes your medicine in a chem-synth ring. Yet you’re revolted by the thought of putting one of these things in your mouth.

It tasted like a slimy tallow candle.

Across the narrow chamber, Ling and Rann adjusted quickly to this Jijoan novelty. Of course they had no history to overcome, associating traekis with mulch and rotting garbage.

“Come on,” Jeni chided in a low voice that burned his ears. “Don’t gag on me, man. You’re a sage now. Others are watchin’!”

He nodded — two quick head jerks — and tried again. Fitting his teeth around the tube, Lark bit down as she had taught. The burst of air did not stink as bad as expected. Perhaps it contained a mild relaxant. The pharmacist designers were clever about such things.

Let’s hope their star-god cousins don’t think of this, as well.

That assumption underlay Lark’s plan. Jophur commanders might be wary against direct subterranean assault. But where the buried route combined with water, the invaders might not expect trouble.

The Rothen underestimated us. By Ifni and the Egg, the Jophur may do the same.

Each diver also wore a rewq symbiont to protect the eyes and help them see by the dim light of hand-carried phosphors. Webbed gloves and booties completed the ensemble.

Ling’s tripping laughter made him turn around, and Lark saw she was pointing at him as she guffawed.

“You should talk,” he retorted at the ungainly creature she had become, more monstrous than an unmasked Rothen. Hoons paused from laying down cargo by the waterline, and joined in the mirth, umbling good-naturedly while their pet noors grinned with needlelike teeth.

Lark pictured the scene up above, past overlying layers of rock, in the world of light. The Jophur dreadnought squatted astride the mountain glen, thwarting the glade stream in its normal seaward rush. The resulting lake now stretched more than a league uphill.

Water seeks its own level. We must now be several arrowflights from shore. That’s a long way to swim before we get to the lake itself.

It couldn’t be helped. Their goal was hard to reach, in more ways than one.

Bubbles in the pool. One qheuen cupola broached the surface, followed by another. The young blues crawled ashore, breathing heavily through multiple leg vents, reporting in excited GalSix.

“The way to open water — it is clear. Good time — this we made. To the target — we shall now escort you.”

Cheers lifted from the hoons and urs, but Lark felt no stirring.

They weren’t the ones who would have to go the rest of the way.

Water transformed the cavities and grottoes. Flippers kicked up clouds of silt, filling the phosphor beams with a myriad of distracting speckles. Lark’s trusty rewq pulled tricks with polarization, transforming the haze to partial clarity. Still, it took concentration to avoid colliding with jagged limestone outcrops. The guide rope saved him from getting lost.

Cave diving felt a lot like being a junior sage of the Commons — an experience he never sought or foresaw in his former life as a scientist heretic.

How ungainly swimming humans appeared next to the graceful young qheuens, who seized the rugged walls with flashing claws, propelling themselves with uncanny agility, nearly as at-home in freshwater as on solid ground.

His skin grew numb where the skink coverings pulled loose. Other parts grew hot from exertion. More upsetting was the squirmy traeki tentacle in his mouth, anticipating his needs in unnerving ways. It would not let him hold his breath, as a man might do while concentrating on some near-term problem, but tickled his throat to provoke an exhalation. The first time it happened, he nearly retched. (What if he chucked up breakfast? Would he and the ring both asphyxiate? Or would it take his gift as a tasty, predigested bonus?)

Lark was so focused on the guide rope that he missed the transition from stony catacombs to a murky plain of sodden meadows, drowned trees, and drifting debris. But soon the silty margins fell behind as daylight transformed the Glade of Gathering — now the bottom of an upland lake — giving commonplace shapes macabre unfamiliarity.

The guide rope passed near a stand of lesser boo whose surviving stems were tall enough to reach the surface, far overhead. Qheuens gathered around one tube, sucking down drafts of air. When sated, they spiraled around Lark and the humans, nudging them toward the next stretch of guide rope.

Long before details loomed through the silty haze, he made out their target by its glow. Rann and Ling thrashed flippers, passing Jeni in their haste. By the time Lark caught up, they were pressing hands against a giant slick sarcophagus, the hue of yellow moonrise. Within lay a cigar-shaped vessel, the Rothen ship, their home away from home, now sealed in a deadly trap.

The two starfarers split up, he swimming right and she left. By silent agreement, Jeni accompanied the big man — despite their size difference, she was the one more qualified to keep an eye on Rann. Lark kept near Ling, watching as she moved along the golden wall.

Though he had more experience than other Sixers with Galactic god machines, it was his first time near this interloper whose dramatic coming so rudely shattered Gathering Festival, many weeks ago. So magnificent and terrible it had seemed! Daunting and invincible. Yet now it was helpless. Dead or implacably imprisoned.

Tentatively, Lark identified some features, like the jutting anchors that held a ship against quantum probability fluctuations … whatever that meant. The self-styled techies who worked for Lester Cambel were hesitant about even the basics of starcraft design. As for the High Sage himself, Lester had taken no part in Lark’s briefing, choosing instead to brood in his tent, guilt-ridden over the doom he helped bring on Dooden Mesa.

Despite the crowding sense of danger, Lark discovered a kind of spooky beauty, swimming in this realm where sunlight slanted in long rippling shafts, filled with sparkling motes — a silent, strangely contemplative world.

Besides, even wrapped in skink membranes, Ling’s athletic body was a sight to behold.

They rounded the star cruiser’s rim, where a sharp shadow abruptly cut off the sun. It might be a cloud, or the edge of a mountain. Then he realized—

It’s the Jophur ship.

Though blurred by murky water, the domelike outline sent shivers down his back. Towering mightily at the lake’s edge, it could have swallowed the Rothen vessel whole.

A strange thought struck him.

First the Rothen awed us. Then we saw their “majesty” cut down by real power. What if it happens again? What kind of newcomer might overwhelm the Jophur? A hovering mountain range? One that throws the whole Slope into night?

He pictured successive waves of “ships,” each vaster than before, matching first the moons, then all Jijo, and — why not? — the sun or even mighty Izmunuti!

Imagination is the most amazing thing. It lets a ground-hugging savage fill his mind with fantastic unlikelihoods.

Churning bubbles nearly tore the rewq off his face as Ling sped up, kicking urgently. Lark hurried after … only to arrest himself moments later, staring.

Just ahead, Ling traced the golden barrier with one hand, just meters from a gaping opening. A hatchway, backlit by a radiant interior. Several figures stood in the portal — three humans and a Rothen lord, wearing his appealing symbiotic mask. The quartet surveyed their all-enclosing golden prison with instruments, wearing expressions of concern.

Yet, all four bipeds seemed frozen, embedded in crystal time.

Up close, the yellow cocoon resembled the preservation beads left by that alpine mulc spider, the one whose mad collecting fetish nearly cost Dwer and Rety their lives, months back. But this trap was no well-shaped ovoid. It resembled a partly melted candle, with overlapping golden puddles slumped around its base. The Jophur had been generous in their gift of frozen temporality, pouring enough to coat the ship thoroughly.

Like at Dooden Mesa, Lark thought.

It seemed an ideal way to slay one’s enemies without using destructive fire. Maybe the Jophur can’t risk damaging Jijo’s ecosphere. That would be a major crime before the great Institutes, like gene raiding and illegal settlement.

On the other hand, the untraeki invaders hadn’t been so scrupulous in scything the forest around their ship. So perhaps the golden trap had another purpose. To capture, rather than kill? Perhaps the g’Kek denizens of Dooden Mesa might yet be rescued from their shimmering tomb.

That had been Lark’s initial thought, three days ago. In hurried experiments, more mulc-spider relics were thawed out, using the new traeki solvents. Some of the preserved items had once been alive, birds and bush creepers that long ago fell into the spider’s snare.

All emerged from their cocoons quite dead.

Perhaps the Jophur have better revival methods, Lark thought at the time. Or else they don’t mean to restore their victims, only to preserve them as timeless trophies.

Then, night before last, an idea came to Lark in the form of a dream.

The hivvern lays its eggs beneath deep snow, which melts in the spring, letting each egg sink in slushy mud, which then hardens all around. Yet the ground softens again, when rainy season comes. Then the hivvern larva emerges, swimming free.

When he wakened, the idea was there, entire.

A spaceship has a sealed metal shell, like the hivvern egg. The Rothen ship may be trapped, but its crew were never touched.

Those within may yet live.

And now proof stood before him. The four in the hatchway were clearly aware of the golden barrier surrounding their ship, examining it with tools at hand.

Just one problem — they did not move. Nor was there any sign they knew they were being observed from just a hoon’s length away.

Treading water, Ling scrawled on her wax-covered note board and raised it for Lark to see.

TIME DIFFERENT INSIDE.

He fumbled with his own board, tethered to his waist.

TIME SLOWER?

Her answer was confusing.

PERHAPS.

OR ELSE QUANTIZED.

FRAME-SHIFTED.

His perplexed look conveyed more than written words. Ling wiped the board and scratched again.

DO EXACTLY AS I DO.

He nodded, watching her carefully. Ling swished her arms and legs to turn away from the ship. Imitating her, Lark found himself looking across the poor wounded Glade. All the trees had been shattered by ravening beams, left to submerge under the rising lake. Turbid water made everything hazy, but Lark thought he saw bones mixed among the splinters. Urrish ribs and hoonish spines, jumbled with grinning human skulls. Not the way bodies ought to be drossed. Not respectful of the dead, or Jijo.

Perhaps the Jophur will let us seed a mulc spider in this new lake, he mused. Something ought to be done to clean up the mess.

He was jarred by Ling’s nudge. TURN BACK NOW, her wax board said. Lark copied her maneuver again … and stared in surprise for a second time.

They had moved!

As before, statues stood in the hatchway. Only now their poses were all changed! One human pointed outward wearing an amazed look. Another seemed to peer straight at Lark, as if frozen in midrealization.

They did all this while we were turned away?

Time’s flow within the golden shell was stranger than he could begin to comprehend.

THIS MAY TAKE SOME DOING, Ling Wrote.

Lark met her eyes, noting they held tense, hopeful irony.

He nodded.

You could say that again.

Alvin

I SPENT MOST OF THE RETURN TRIP WITH MY NOSE buried in my journal, reviewing all the things that I’ve seen and heard since Wuphon’s Dream plunged below Terminus Rock. Pincer kindly chewed my pencil to a point for me. Then I lay down and wrote down the section before this one.

What began as a guess grew into reinforced conviction.

Concentration also diverted attention from nervous anticipation and the pain in my slowly healing spine. My friends tried wheedling me, but I lapsed into hoonish stubbornness, refusing to confide in them. After all, the phuvnthus had gone to great lengths to hide their identity.

The spinning voice said it was to protect us. Maybe that was just patronizing glaver dreck. Typical from grown-ups. But what if he told the truth? How can I risk my friends?

When the time comes, I’ll confront the voice alone.

Sara

SHE DRIFTED IN A CLOUD OF MATHEMATICS.

All around her floated arcs and conic sections, glowing, as though made of enduring fire. Meteors streaked past, coruscating along paths smoothly ordained by gravity.

Then more stately shapes joined the frolicking figures and she guessed they might be planets whose routes were elliptical, not parabolic. Each had its own reference frame, around which all other masses seemed to move.

Rising, falling…

Rising, falling…

The dance spoke of a lost science she had studied once, in an obscure text from the Biblos Archive. Its name floated through her delirium—orbital mechanics—as if managing the ponderous gyres of suns and moons were no more complex than maintaining a windmill or waterwheel.

Dimly, Sara knew physical pain. But it came to her as if through a swaddling of musty clothes, like something unpleasant tucked in a bottom pantry drawer. The strong scent of traeki unguents filled her nostrils, dulling every agony except one … the uneasy knowledge—I’ve been harmed.

Sometimes she roused enough to hear speech … several lisping urrish voices … the gruff terseness of Kurt the Exploser … and one whose stiff, pedantic brilliance she knew from happier days.

Purofsky. Sage of mysteries…

But what is he doing here?

… and where is here?

At one point she managed to crack her eyelids in hopes of solving the riddle. But Sara quickly decided she must still be dreaming. For no place could exist like the one she witnessed through a blurry haze — a world of spinning glass. A universe of translucent saucers, disks and wheels, tilting and rolling against each other at odd angles, reflecting shafts of light in rhythmic bursts.

It was all too dizzying. She closed her eyes against the maelstrom, yet it continued in her mind, persisting in the form of abstractions.

A sinusoidal wave filled her mental-foreground, but no longer the static shape she knew from inked figures in books. Instead, this one undulated like ripples on a pond, with time the apparent free variable.

Soon the first wave was joined by a second, with twice the frequency, then a third with the peaks and troughs compressed yet again. New cycles merged, one after another, combining in an endless series—a transform—whose sum built toward a new complex figure, an entity with jagged peaks and valleys, like a mountain range.

Out of order … chaos …

Mountains brought to mind the last thing Sara had seen, before spilling off the volcano’s narrow path, tumbling over sharp stones toward a river of fire.

Flashes from a distant peak … long-short, short-long, medium-short-short…

Coded speech, conveyed by a language of light, not unlike GalTwo…

Words of urgency, of stealth and battle…

Her mind’s fevered random walk was broken now and then by soft contact on her brow — a warm cloth, or else a gentle touch. She recognized the long, slender shape of Prity’s fingers, but there was another texture as well, a man’s contact on her arm, her cheek, or just holding her hand.

When he sang to her, she knew it was the Stranger … Emerson … by his odd accent and the way the lyrics flowed, smoothly from memory, as a liquid stream, without thought to any particular word or phrase. Yet the song was no oddly syncopated Earthling ballad, but a Jijoan folk ballad, familiar as a lullaby. Sara’s mother sang it to her, whenever she was ill — as Sara used to murmur it to the man from space, soon after he crashed on Jijo, barely clinging to life.

“One comes from an umbling sac, a

song for you to keep,

Two is for a pair of hands, to spin you

happy sleep,

Three fat rings will huff and puff out

clouds of happy steam,

Four eyes wave and dance about, to

watch over your dream,

“Five claws will carve your new hope

box, all without a seam,

Six will bring you flashing hooves to

cross the prairie plain,

Seven is for hidden thoughts, waiting

in the deep,

But eight comes from a giant stone,

whose patterns gently creep.”

Even half-conscious, she knew something important. He could not sing unless the words were stored deep within, beyond the scarred part of his brain. It meant she must have touched him, when their roles were reversed.

Not all the unguents in the world — nor the cool beauty of mathematics — could do as much for Sara. What finally called her back was knowing someone missed her, when she was gone.

Ewasx

THERE WAS AN ENJOYABLE SENSE OF IMPORTANCE TO our task, was there not, My rings? There we stood, this stack of shabby-looking, retread toruses, deputized with a noble job — explaining to envoys of six races the new order of life on this world.

FIRST — they should not hope for great judges to come from those Institutes who mediate among ten thousand starfaring races. Passions run too high, throughout the Five Galaxies. Institute forces have withdrawn, along with timid, so-called moderate clans, a dithering, ineffectual majority. Only great religious alliances show nerve nowadays, battling over which way the Galactic wheels shall turn during a time of changes.

WE ARE YOUR JUDGES, I told the ambassadors. Out of kindness, we the Polkjhy crew have volunteered to serve as both posse and jury, chastening the seven races who invaded this world’s fallow peace.

To demonstrate this benevolence, we have delayed by many days the important work that originally brought us here, even though it means leaving our comrades to make their own repairs in that eastern swamp, while our remaining corvette tours the Slope, photographing and recording evidence. It also gives us an opportunity to demonstrate the irresistible majesty of our power. We did this by destroying egregious structures that sooners should not use, if their goal truly is racial redemption.

IT IS NOTED THAT YOU WERE NOT MUCH HELP IN THIS WORK, MY RINGS. (Accept these reproaching jolts, as tokens of loving guidance.) Asx melted many memories, before capture and conversion, yet we/I did recall certain abominations. We gained credit, for instance, by helping target the Bibur River steamboats, and a refinery tower in Tarek Town, an edifice called the Palace of Stinks.

DON’T WORRY. In time, we of the Polkjhy will find all pathetic objects-of-sin prized by headstrong sooners. We shall help erase the flagrant hypocrisy of tool use among those who chose the Downward Path!

SECOND comes our unstoppable demand for justice. The High Sages showed surprising good sense by swiftly emitting a call, soon after our last meeting. A flicker of computer cognizance, leading our corvette to Dooden Mesa. But this token gesture will not suffice for long. We want every living member of the g’Kek race accounted for. That should not be too hard. Stranded on a roadless planet, they are singularly immobile beings.

“Please do not destroy our wheeled brethren,” the envoys entreat. “Let the g’Kek seek holy shelter down Redemption’s Path. For is it not said that all debts and vendettas stop, once innocence is resumed?”

At first we see this as yet more lawyerly blather. But then, surprisingly, our senior Priest-Stack agrees! Moreover, that august pile makes an unusual, innovative suggestion—

HERE IS THE QUESTION posed by the Priest-Stack: What kind of revenge on the g’Kek would transcend even extinction?

ANSWER: to see the g’Kek race become once again eligible for adoption, and for their new patrons to be Jophur! In their second sequence of uplift, we might transform them as we see fit — into creatures their former selves would have disdained!

Vengeance is best when executed with imagination. This justifies bringing a priest along. Indeed, that stack variety has uses.

Of course this daring plan carries complications. It means refraining from informing the Five Galaxies about this sooner infestation. Instead, our Jophur clan must keep it secret, tending Jijo like our own private garden.

SO WE BECOME CRIMINALS, under Galactic law. But that hardly matters. For those laws will change, once our alliance assumes leadership during the next phase of history.

Especially if the Progenitors have indeed returned.

THIRD comes opportunity for profit. Perhaps the Rothen gene raiders were onto something. Jijo seems exceptionally rich for a fallow world. (The Buyur were good caretakers who left the planet filled with biopossibilities.) Might the Rothen have discovered a likely presentient race already? One ripe for uplift? Should we have bought off the gene raiders so we might have access to their data, instead of sealing them away in time?

REJECT THE NOTION. They are known blackmailers and double-crossers. We will bring in our own biologists to survey Jijo.

AND WHO KNOWS? Perhaps we might accelerate the sooner races along the path they seek! Glavers are already far progressed toward innocence. Hoons, urs, and qheuens have living star cousins who might object if we adopt too soon. But that may change as battle fires burn across the galaxies. As for human wolflings, at last word their homeworld was under siege, in desperate straits.

Perhaps those on Jijo are already the sole remnant of their kind.

THAT LEAVES OUR TRAEKI RELATIVES TO CONSIDER. The rebel stacks who came here sought to reject the gift of the Oailie — the specialized rings that give us purpose and destiny. It is wrenching to see traeki stumbling about like our pathetic ancestors. Such ungainly beings, so placid and unambitious! We should at once commence a program to create master rings in large quantities. Once converted, our cousins will be ideal instruments of dominance and control, able to knowledgeably run this planet for us without further cost to the clan.

ALL THESE CONCERNS SEEMED PARAMOUNT. Yet from the start, some members of the crew chafed at talk of vengeance, or profit, or redemption. Even the fate of local traeki seemed unimportant, compared with the matter that brought the Polkjhy here in the first place.

Hints by the Rothen that they knew the whereabouts of the missing prey ship.

The prey ship carrying news of the Progenitors’ return.

DROP ALL OTHER CONCERNS AT ONCE! these stacks insisted. Send the remaining corvette east! Do not wait for the first boat’s crew to make repairs on their own. Fetch and interrogate the human-slaves-of-Rothen. Search deep-water places where the prey ship might be hiding. Delay no longer!

But our Captain-Leader and Priest-Stack agreed that a few more days would not matter. Our hold on this world is total. The prey cannot escape.

Lark

PALE DAYLIGHT PENETRATED THE LAKE TO WHERE A few drowned trees wafted their branches, as if to a gusting breeze. The rewq over his eyes helped him see, amplifying the dim glow, but Lark found the resulting shadows creepy, adding to a feeling that none of this could possibly be real.

Working underwater alongside Rann and Ling, he took part in an odd ritual, communicating with the trapped inhabitants of the preservation bubble. Since the process began, the hatchway of the imprisoned ship had filled with humans and Rothen, pressing eagerly against the gold barrier. Yet, from the outside no motion was seen. Those within were as still as statues, like wax effigies, depicting people with worried expressions.

Only when Lark and the other swimmers turned away, averting their gaze, did the “statues” change, shifting positions at incredible speed.

According to Ling’s terse explanation, scribbled on her wax board, the captives lived in a QUANTUM SEPARATED WORLD. She added something about COGNIZANCE INTERFERENCE BY ORGANIC OBSERVERS and seemed to think that explained it. But Lark failed to see why not-looking should make any difference. No doubt Sara would understand better than her brother, the backwoods biologist. I used to tease her that the books she loved best were filled with useless abstractions. Concepts no Jijoan would need again. Guess it just shows how little I knew.

To Lark the whole thing smacked of a particularly inconvenient kind of magic, as if the capricious goddess, Ifni, had invented the gold barrier to test the patience of mortals.

Fortunately, their micro — traeki rings provided the human swimmers with all the air they needed. When pressurized supplies ran out, the little toruses unfolded great feathery fans that waved through the lake water like lazy wings, sieving fresh oxygen for Lark and the others to breathe. Another impressive feature of the ever-adaptable ringed ones. Combined with the skink-skin wet suits and rewqs, it made the swimmers look like bizarre sea monsters to those inside the bubble. Finally, though, the prisoners set up an electronic message plaque that flashed words through the translucent barrier in shining Anglic letters.

WE MUST MAKE COMMON CAUSE, they sent.

So far, Lark’s idea had been fruitful. Unlike at tragic Dooden Mesa, these prisoners had been sealed within an airtight hull that kept the golden liquor from swamping their bodies and life-support machinery. Moreover, the chill lake carried away enough heat so their idle engines did not broil them. They were surrounded, enmeshed in strange time. But they were alive.

When Lark stared at one of the Rothen masters, he easily made out the creature’s facade. Rewq-generated colors divided its charismatic features, so noble in human terms, into two parts, each with its own aura. Across the upper half lay a fleshy symbiont beast, shaped to provide the regal brow, high cheeks and trademark stately nose. A gray deadness told that some kind of synthetic lens insert lay over the Rothen’s eyeballs, and the fine white teeth were artificially capped.

It’s an impressive disguise, he thought. Yet even without masks the Rothen were remarkably humanoid, a resemblance that no doubt originally spurred their cunning plan to win over some impressionable Earthlings back in the frantic, naive days soon after contact, turning those converts into a select tribe of loyal aides — the Daniks. If handled right, it would let the Rothen pull quite a few capers using human intermediaries to do the dirty work. And if Daniks were caught in the act, Earth would get the blame.

All told, those inside the trapped ship had a destiny they deserved. Lark might have voted to leave them till Jijo reclaimed their dross. Only now an even greater danger loomed, and there was no other place to turn for allies against the Jophur.

The captives inside the shell seemed eager enough. The last line of their message expressed this.

GET US OUT OF HERE!

Floating in the gentle current, Lark saw Rann, the tall Danik leader, write on his wax board.

WE MAY HAVE A WAY.

YOU MUST PREPARE A FORMULA.

IT IS

Lark grabbed for the board, but Ling got there first, snatching the stylus right out of Rann’s meaty hand. Surprise, then anger, flared across the part of his face visible between the rewq and breathing ring. But the big man was outnumbered, and knew that Jeni Shen had lethal darts in her underwater crossbow. The militia sergeant watched from a vantage point where her vigilance would not interfere with the time-jerked conversation.

Ling replaced Rann’s message with another.

HOW DO YOU SUGGEST WE DO THAT?

She slung the sign’s strap over her neck so the board rested against her back, message outward. At her nodded signal, Rann and Lark joined her turning around. A spooky feeling swarmed Lark’s spine as he imagined a flurry of activity taking place behind them. Without observers peering at them, the Rothen-Danik crew were liberated from frozen time, free to read Ling’s message, deliberate, and shape a reply.

I never read much physics, Lark thought. But something feels awful screwy about how this works.

The swimmers let momentum carry them around. Only a few duras passed before they faced the hatch once more, but most of the Rothen and human figures had moved in that narrow moment. The electric placard now glimmered with new writing.

PREFERRED METHOD: DESTROY THE JOPHUR.

Bubbles burst past Lark’s breathing tube as he choked back a guffaw. Ling glanced his way, conveying agreement with a shake of her head. The second half of the message was more serious.

OTHER POSSIBILITY: OFFER JOPHUR WHAT THEY WANT.

BUY OUR FREEDOM!

Lark scanned the crowded statues, where many human faces wore expressions of desperation. He could not help feeling moved as they pleaded for their lives. In a way it’s not their fault. Their ancestors made a stupid deal on their behalf just as mine did. People must have been both crazed and gullible in those days, right after Earthlings first met Galactic culture.

It took effort to harden his heart, but Lark knew he must.

Again, Rann tried for the big writing tablet, but Ling wrote fiercely.

WHAT CAN YOU OFFER US, IN RETURN?

On seeing her message, Lark and Rann both stared at her. But Ling seemed unaware that her words carried a personal as well as general meaning. They turned again, giving the prisoners a chance to read and react to Ling’s demand. While sweeping the slow circle, Lark glanced toward her, but living goggles made direct eye contact impossible. Her rewq-mediated aura conveyed grim resolve.

Lark expected to find the captives in turmoil, upset by Ling’s implied secession. Then he realized. They only see us when our backs are turned. They may not even know it’s Rann and Ling out here, after all!

WHATEVER WE HAVE.

That was the frank answer, arrayed in shining letters.

Ling’s next message was as straight to the point.

RO-KENN RELEASED QHEUEN AND HOON PLAGUES.

MAYBE OTHERS.

CURE THEM, OR ROT.

At this resumed accusation, Rann nearly exploded. Strangled anger echoed in his pharynx, escaping as bubbles that Lark feared might carry his curses all the way to the far surface of the lake. The starman tried to grab the message board, briefly struggling with Ling. But when Lark made slashing motions across his throat, Rann glanced back as Jeni approached from the ship’s curved flank, brandishing her deadly bow, accompanied by two strong young qheuens.

Rann’s shoulders slumped. He went through the next turning time sweep mechanically. Lark heard a low, grating sound, and knew the big Danik was grinding his teeth.

Lark expected protestations of innocence from the imprisoned starfarers, and sure enough, when they next looked, the signboard proclaimed—

PLAGUES? WE KNOW NOTHING OF SUCH.

But Ling was adamant to a degree that clearly surprised Rann. Using forceful language, she told the captives — her former friends and comrades — to answer truthfully next time, or be abandoned to their fate.

That brought grudging admission, at last.

RO-KENN HAD OPTIONS,

HIS CHOICE TO USE SUCH MEANS.

GET US OUT.

WE CAN PROVIDE CURES.

Lark stared at the woman next to him, awed by the blazing intensity of her rewq aura. Till that moment, she must have held a slim hope that it was all a mistake … that Lark’s indictment of her Rothen gods had a flaw in it somewhere. That there was some alternative explanation.

Now every complicating what-if vanished. The flame of her anger made Rann’s seem like a pale thing.

While both Daniks fumed, each for different reasons, Lark took the wax board, wiped it, and wrote a reply.

PREPARE CURES AT ONCE.

BUT THERE IS MORE.

WE MUST HAVE ONE MORE THING.

It made sense that the Jophur used this weird weapon — pouring chemically synthesized time-stuff over their enemies. It suited their racial genius for manipulating organic materials. But in their contempt, the master rings had forgotten something.

They have cousins on Jijo, who are loyal to the Six.

True, local traekis lacked ambitious natures, and were unschooled in advanced Galactic science. Regardless, a team of talented local pharmacists had analyzed the substance — a viscous, quasi-living tissue — by taste alone. Without understanding its arcane temporal effects, they managed to secrete a counteragent from their gifted glands.

Unfortunately, it was no simple matter of applying the formula, then rubbing away the golden cocoon surrounding the Rothen ship. For one thing, the antidote was miscible with water. Applying it under a lake presented problems.

But there was a possible way. At Dooden Mesa, they found that the old mulc spider’s preservation beads could be pushed against the golden wall and made to merge with it, flowing into the barrier like stones sinking in soft clay.

Lark had more beads brought from the ancient treasure hoard of the being Dwer called One-of-a-Kind. Agile, five-clawed blues pushed several egg-shaped objects against the section of wall he indicated, opposite the hatch. These beads had been hollowed out and turned into bottles, stoppered at one end with plugs of traeki wax. Within each could be seen machines and other relics of the Buyur era, gleaming like insects caught in amber. Only now those relics seemed to float inside, sloshing in a frothy foam.

At first there were few visible results to the qheuens’ effort. The water resonated with bumps and clanks, but no merging occurred. Lark scribbled a command.

EVERYBODY DON’T LOOK!

Ling nodded vigorously. When earlier experiments were performed at the devastated g’Kek settlement, there had not been observers on the inside. No living ones, that is. Here, the scene was being watched, in a weird alternating manner, by people on both sides of the enclosure. Perhaps the unsymmetrical quantum effects meant that nothing would happen while people observed.

It took a while to make those within the ship understand that they should turn around, as well. But soon all the Rothen and humans on both sides swiveled away. Young qheuens pushed blindly, with vision cupolas drawn inside their horny shells. This has got to be the strangest way to get anything done, Lark thought, staring across a suffocated landscape, once the Festival Glade of the Commons of Six Races. All his life, teachers and leaders said if you want a job to go well, pay attention to what you are doing. But this reversed way of acting — where inattention was a virtue — reminded him how some Nihanese mystics in the Vale practiced “Zen arts” such as archery while blindfolded, cultivating detachment and readiness for the Path of Redemption.

Again he glanced at Ling, the star-voyaging biologist. Her aura still seethed, though now in cooler shades. She’s declared an end to her old allegiance. Does she have a new one yet? Other than revenge, that is? He wished they could go somewhere private — and dry — to talk, without the guarded gamesmanship of their earlier conversations. But Lark wasn’t sure she’d want the same thing. Just because his allegations had proved right, that did not mean she should bless him for smashing her childhood idols.

After counting a long interval, Ling nodded and they turned around again.

Rann grunted satisfaction, and Lark felt his heart race.

The beads had penetrated most of the way into the glowing cage! Hardworking blues bubbled satisfaction, then hurried toward the boo grove, fetching air from their makeshift snorkel.

Lark wrote a message to those inside the Rothen airlock.

EVERYBODY CLEAR OUT

BUT 2 SMALL HUMANS.

WEAR AIR SUPPLY.

BRING CURES!

When next he and his companions turned back toward the lock, it was nearly empty. Two women stood on the other side. Petite, though even through their swim-coverings he saw well-developed figures — buxom and wasp-waisted. Clearly, they must have taken advantage of the same cosmetic biosculpting that had made Ling, and the late Besh, so striking. It’s a different universe out there, where you can design yourself like a god.

Lark swam to where the tip of a mulc capsule protruded from the Jophur barrier. Most of the bead lay deep inside. At its far end the makeshift bottle’s hole was plugged by a thick wax seal.

From his thigh pouch Lark drew a tool provided by one of Lester Cambel’s techie assistants. A can opener the fellow called it.

“Our problem is to deliver dissolving fluid into contact with the barrier, but not lake water,” the tech had explained. “Our answer is to use the new traeki fluid to hollow out some mulc beads. Then we coat these cavities with neutral wax, and refill them with more of the antidote fluid. The hole is plugged, so we have a sealed vessel—”

“I see you left an old Buyur machine inside,” Lark had observed.

“The fluid won’t affect it, and we need the machine inside. It doesn’t matter what it did in Buyur days, so long as we can signal-activate it to move again, pulling a string attached to the plug. When the plug goes pop! — the contents pour into contact with the Jophur wall! It’s foolproof.”

Lark wasn’t so sure. There was no telling if clever, homemade electrical devices would work underwater, surrounded by time-warped fields. Here goes everything, he thought, squeezing the activator.

To his relief, the Buyur device began moving right away … unfolding an appendage, all coiled and springy like a shambler’s tail.

I wonder what you used to do, he pondered, watching the machine writhe and gyre. Are you aware enough to puzzle over where you are? Where your masters have gone? Do you have an internal clock, to know half a million years have passed? Or did time stop for you inside the bead?

The coiled arm flailed as the machine sought to right itself, yanking a cord attached to the stopper at the far end. The plug slipped, caught, then slipped some more.

It was hard to follow events in the region of “quantum separated time.” Things seemed to happen in fits and starts. Sometimes effect seemed to precede cause, or he saw the far side of a rotating object while closer parts remained somehow obscured. It was a strange, sideways manner of seeing that reminded Lark of “Cubist” artworks, depicted in an ancient book his mother loved borrowing from the Biblos Archive.

Finally, the stopper slid free. At once reddish foam spread from the nozzle of the makeshift bottle, where its contents met the golden wall. Lark’s heart pounded, and he felt his amulet, the fragment of the Holy Egg, react with growing heat. His left hand clawed at the skink-skin wrappers, but could not gain entry to grab the vibrating stone. So, like an itch that could not be scratched, he endured the palpitation as his breastbone was rubbed from both sides.

Grunts of satisfaction escaped Rann as the foamy stain spread, eroding the Jophur barrier from within. The widening hole soon met a neighboring “bottle,” embedded in the wall near the first. In moments, fresh supplies of dissolving fluid gushed. The material of the barrier seemed to shiver, as if it were alive. As though in pain. Waves of color rippled around the growing cavity, as his rewq tried reading strange emotions.

So fixed was everyone on the process, for long intervals no one looked beyond, to the airlock and its two inhabitants, until a stray current tugged Lark aside. Lacking outside observers, the Danik women must have experienced time’s passage in a somewhat linear fashion. They looked tense, hunching away from the red foam, crouching near the airlock’s sealed inner door as the bubble slowly approached. Fear showed through their transparent face masks. No one knew what would happen when the hissing effervescence broke through.

It was also getting closer to Lark’s side of the wall. He backpedaled toward the others … only to find they had retreated farther still. Ling grabbed his arm.

Apparently, if they succeeded in making a tunnel, it would be wide in the middle but awfully narrow at both ends. Also, the wall material wasn’t solid, but a very viscous liquid. Fresh toporgic could already be seen slumping toward the wound. Any passage was bound to be temporary.

If we didn’t estimate right … if the two ends open in the wrong order … we might have to start all over again. There are more bottles of fluid, back at the cave. But how many times can we try?

Yet he could not talk himself out of feeling pride.

We’re not helpless. Faced with overwhelming power, we innovate. We persevere.

The realization was ironic confirmation of the heresy he had maintained all his adult life.

We aren’t meant for the Path of Redemption. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never tread its road to innocence.

That is why our kind should never have come to Jijo.

We’re meant for the stars. We simply don’t belong here.

Nelo

THE OLD MAN DID NOT KNOW WHICH WAS THE SADDEST sight.

At times he wished the boat had capsized during that wretched, pell-mell running of the rapids so he would not have lived to see such things.

It took half a day of hard labor at the oars to climb back upstream to Dolo Village. By the time they reached the timber pile that had been the town dock, all the young rowers were exhausted. Villagers rushed down a muddy bank to help them drag the boat ashore, and carried Ariana Foo to dry ground. A stout hoon ignored Nelo’s protests, picking him up like a baby, until he stood safely by the roots of a mighty garu tree.

Many survivors milled listlessly, though others had formed work gangs whose first task was collecting dross. Especially bodies. Those must be gathered quickly and mulched, as required by sacred law.

Nelo saw corpses gathered in a long row — mostly human, of course. Numbly he noted the master carpenter and Jobee the Plumber. Quite a few craft workers lay muddy and broken along a sodden patch of loam, and many more were missing, carried downstream when the lake came crashing through the millrace and workshops. Tree farmers, in contrast, had suffered hardly a loss. Their life on the branch tops did not expose them when the dam gave way.

No one spoke, though stares followed the papermaker as Nelo moved down the line, allowing a wince or a grunt when he recognized the face of an employee, an apprentice, or a lifelong friend. When he reached the end, he did not turn but kept walking in the same direction, toward what had been the center of his life.

The lake was low. Maybe the flood didn’t destroy everything.

Disorientation greeted Nelo, for it seemed at first he was transported far from the village of his birth. Where placid water once glistened, mudflats now stretched for most of a league. A river poured through the near side of his beloved dam.

To local qheuens, dam and home were one and the same. Now the hive lay sliced open, in cross section. The collapse had sheared the larva room in half. Teams of stunned blue adults struggled to move their surviving grubs to safety, out of the harsh sunlight.

With reluctant dread, Nelo dropped his gaze to where the famed paper mill had been, next to a graceful power wheel.

Of his house, his workshops, and pulp vats, nothing more remained than foundation stumps.

The sight tore his heart, but averting his gaze did not help. Just a short distance downstream Nelo saw more blue qheuens working listlessly by the shore, trying to extricate one of their own from a net of some kind. By their lack of haste, one knew the victim must be dead, perhaps trapped in the shallows and drowned.

Unhappily, he recognized the corpse, an older female — Log Biter herself — by markings on her shell. Another lost friend, and a blow to everyone along the upper Roney who valued her good wisdom.

Then he recognized the trap that had pinned her down long enough to smother even a blue qheuen. It was a tangle of wood and metal wires. Something from Nelo’s own home.

Melina’s precious piano, that I ordered built at great cost.

A moan escaped his throat, at last. In all the world, he had but one thing left to live for — the hope, frail as it was, that his children were safe somewhere, and would not have to see such things.

But where was somewhere? What place could possibly be safe, when starships could plunge from the sky, blasting five generations’ work in a single instant?

Words jarred him from dour thoughts of suicide.

“I didn’t do this, Nelo.”

He turned to see another human standing nearby. A fellow craftsman, almost his own age. Henrik the Exploser, whose young son had accompanied Sara and the Stranger on their journey to far lands. At first, Henrik’s words confused Nelo. He had to swallow before finding the strength to reply.

“Of course you didn’t do it. They say a skyship came—”

The exploser shook his head. “Fools or liars. Either they have no sense of timing, or else they were in on it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, a ship passed overhead all right, and gave us a look-over. Then it went on its way. ’Twas most of a midura later that a gang of ’em came down, farmers mostly. They knocked the seals off some of my charges, under one of the piers of the dam, and laid a torch against it.”

Nelo blinked. “What did you say?” He stared, then blinked again. “But who …?”

Henrik had a one-word answer.

“Jop.”

Lark

THE EXPLORERS EMERGED TRIUMPHANT, RESURFACING from the chill lake into the cave, having brought back almost everything they sought. But bad news awaited them.

Fatigue lay heavily on Lark, while helpers stripped the diving gear and toweled him off.

Tense sadness filled the voice of the human corporal, reporting what had happened in Lark’s absence.

“It hit our grays all at once — wheezing up lots of bubbly phlegm. Then a couple of young blues got it, too. We sent ’em to a pharmacist topside, but word says the plague is getting worse up there. There may not be much time.”

Attention turned to the Danik women who had just barely escaped from the trapped ship. They still looked woozy from their experience — starting with a blast of highpressure water that had burst into the airlock when the fissure broke through at last. After that came a hurried, nightmarish squeeze through the briefly dilated opening, squirming desperately before the tunnel could close and immure their bodies in liquid time like the poor g’Keks of Dooden Mesa.

Watching quantum-shifted images of that tight passage nearly unnerved Lark. Instead of two human figures, they looked like jumbled body parts, writhing through a tube that kept shifting around them. One woman he briefly saw with her insides on the outside, offering unwanted knowledge about her latest meal.

Yet here they were, alive in front of him. Overcoming residual nausea, the two escapees kept their side of the bargain, setting to work right away on a small machine they had brought along. In exchange for a cure, Jijoans would help more of their crew mates break out of the trapped ship, then coordinate joint action against the Jophur — no doubt something quite desperate, calling for a pooling of both groups’ slim knowledge and resources, plus a generous dollop of Ifni’s luck.

This whole enterprise had been Lark’s idea … and he gave it the same odds as a ribbit walking unscathed through a ligger’s den.

“Symptoms?” asked the first woman, with hair a shade of red Lark had never seen on any Jijoan.

“Don’t you know already what bug it is?” Jeni Shen demanded.

“A variety of pathogens were kept in stock aboard the research station,” answered the other one, a stately brunette who seemed older than any other Danik Lark had seen. She looked a statuesque forty, and might be two centuries old.

“If Ro-kenn did release an organism from that supply,” she continued, “we must pin down which one.”

Even having stripped off his rewq, he had no trouble reading fatalistic reluctance in her voice. By helping solve the plague, she was in effect confessing that Ro-kenn had attempted genocide … and that their ship routinely carried the means for such a crime. Perhaps, like Ling, she had been in the dark about all that till now. Only utter helplessness would have forced the Rothen to reveal so much to their human servants, as well as to the sooners of Jijo.

From the look on Rann’s face, the tall star warrior disagreed with the decision, and Lark knew why.

It goes beyond mere morality and crimes against Galactic law. Our local qheuens and hoons have relatives out there, among the stars. If word of this gets out, those home populations might declare vendettas against the Rothen. Or else, with this evidence, Earth might file suit to reclaim the Danik population group that the Rothen have kept secreted away for two centuries.

Of course that assumes Earth still lives. And there’s still law in the Five Galaxies.

Rann clearly felt the risk too great. Ship and crew should have been sacrificed to keep the secret.

Tough luck, Rann, Lark thought. Apparently your fellow spacers would rather live.

While Ling described the disease that ravaged Uthen before her eyes, Lark overheard Rann whisper impatiently to Jeni Shen.

“If we are to get the others out, it must be a complete job! There are weapons to transfer, and supplies. The traeki formula must be duplicated aboard ship, in order to make a durable passageway—”

Jeni interrupted sharply.

“After we verify a cure, starman. Or else your compadres and their master race can sit in their own dung till Jijo grows cold, for all we care.”

Colorful, Lark thought, smiling grimly.

Soon the machine was programmed with all the relevant facts.

“Many hoons are showing signs of a new sickness, too,” Ling reminded.

“We’ll get to that,” said the redhead. “This will take a min or two.”

Lark watched symbols flash across the tiny screen. More computers, he mulled unhappily. Of course it was a much smaller unit than the big processor they used near Dooden Mesa. This “digital cognizance” might be shielded by geologic activity in the area, plus fifty meters of solid rock.

But can we be sure?

The device issued a high-pitched chime.

“Synthesis complete,” said the older Danik, taking a small, clear vial from its side, containing a greenish fluid. “This is just two or three doses, but that should suffice to test it. We can mass-produce more aboard the ship. Which means we’ll need a permanent channel through the barrier, of course.”

Clearly, she felt her side now had a major bargaining chip. Holding up the tube with three fingers, she went on. “Now might be a good time to discuss how each group will help the other, your side with manpower and sheer numbers, and our side providing—”

Her voice cut off when Ling snatched the capsule from her grasp, swiveling to put it in Jeni Shen’s hand.

“Run,” was all Ling said.

Jeni took off with a pair of excited noor beasts yapping at her heels.

• • •

Any return to the imprisoned ship would have to wait for dawn. Even a well-tuned rewq could not amplify light that was not there.

Ling wanted to keep the two rescued Daniks busy producing antidotes against every pathogen listed in the little Library, in case other plagues were loose that no one knew about, but Lark vetoed the idea. Since the Dooden disaster, all computers made him nervous. He wanted this one turned on as little as possible. Let the Rothen produce extra vaccines inside their vessel and bring them out along with other supplies, he said, if and when a new tunnel was made. Ling seemed about to argue the point, but then her lips pressed hard and she shrugged. Taking one of the lanterns, she retreated to a corner of the cave, far from Rann and her former comrades.

Lark spent some time composing a report to the High Sages, requesting more bottles of the traeki dissolving fluid and describing the preliminary outlines of an alliance between the Six Races and their former enemies. Not that he had much confidence in such a coalition.

They promise weapons and other help, he wrote. But I urge caution. Given Phwhoon-dau’s description of the Rothen as Galactic “petty criminals,” and the relative ease with which they were overwhelmed, we should prefer almost any advantageous deal that can be worked out with the Jophur, short of letting them commit mass murder.

Insurrection ought to be considered a last resort.

The sages might find his recommendation odd, since his own plan made the Rothen alliance possible in the first place. But Lark saw no contradiction. Unlocking a door did not mean you had to walk through it. He just believed in exploring alternatives.

There was little to do then but wait, hoping news from the medics would be happy and. swift. The party could not even light a fire in the dank cavern.

“It’s cold,” Ling commented when Lark passed near her niche. He had been looking for a place to unroll his sleeping bag … not so close he’d seem intrusive, yet nearby in case she called. Now he paused, wondering what she meant.

Was that an invitation? Or an accusation?

The latter seemed more likely. Ling might have been much better off remaining forever in the warmth of hightech habitats, basking in the glow of a messianic faith.

“It is that,” he murmured. “Cold.”

It was hard to move closer. Hard to expect anything but rejection. For months, their relationship had been based on a consensual game, a tense battle of wits that was part inquisition and part one-upmanship … with moments of intense, semierotic flirting stirred in. Eventually he won that game, but not through any credit of his own. The sins of her Rothen gods gave him a weapon out of proportion to personal traits either of them possessed, leaving him just one option — to lay waste to all her beliefs. Ever since, they had labored together toward shared goals without once trading a private word.

In effect, he had conquered her to become Jijo’s ally, only to lose what they had before.

Lark did not feel like a conqueror.

“I can see why they call you a heretic,” Ling said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

Either out of shyness or diffidence, Lark had not looked at her directly. Now he saw she had a book open on her lap, with one page illuminated by the faint beam of her glow lamp. It was the Jijoan biology text he had written with Uthen. His life’s work.

“I … tried not to let it interfere with the research,” he answered.

“How could it not interfere? Your use of cladistic taxonomy clashes with the way Galactic science has defined and organized species for a billion years.”

Lark saw what she was doing, and felt gladdened by it. Their shared love of biology was neutral ground where issues of guilt or shame needn’t interfere. He moved closer to sit on a stony outcrop.

“I thought you were talking about my Jijoan heresy. I used to be part of a movement”—he winced, remembering his friend Harullen—“whose goal was to persuade the Six Races to end our illegal colony … by voluntary means.”

She nodded. “A virtuous stance, by Galactic standards. Though not easy for organic beings, who are programmed for sex and propagation.”

Lark felt his face flush, and was grateful for the dim light.

“Well, the question is out of our hands now,” he said. “Even if Ro-kenn’s plagues are cured, the Jophur can wipe us out if they like. Or else they’ll hand us over to the Institutes, and we’ll have the Judgment Day described in the Sacred Scrolls. That might come as a relief, after the last few months. At least it’s how we always imagined things would end.”

“Though your people hoped it wouldn’t happen till you’d been redeemed. Yes, I know that’s your Jijoan orthodoxy. But I was talking about a heresy of science—the way you and Uthen organized animal types in your work — by species, genus, phylum, and so on. You use the old cladistic system of pre-contact Earthling taxonomy.”

He nodded. “We do have a few texts explaining Galactic nomenclature. But most of our books came from Earth archives. Few human biologists had changed over to Galactic systematics by the time the Tabernacle took off.”

“I never saw cladistics used in a real ecosystem,” Ling commented. “You present a strong argument for it.”

“Well, in our case it’s making a virtue out of necessity.

We’re trying to understand Jijo’s past and present by studying a single slice of time — the one we’re living in. For evidence, all we have to go on are the common traits of living animals … and the fossils we dig up. That’s comparable to mapping the history of a continent by studying layers of rocks. Earthlings did a lot of that kind of science before contact, like piecing together evidence of a crime, long after the body has grown cold. Galactics never needed those interpolative techniques. Over the course of eons they simply watch and record the rise and fall of mountains, and the divergence of species. Or else they make new species through gene-splicing and uplift.”

Ling nodded, considering this. “We’re taught contempt for wolfling science. I suppose it affected the way I treated you, back when … well, you know.”

If that was an apology, Lark accepted it gladly.

“I wasn’t exactly honest with you either, as I recall.”

She laughed dryly. “No, you weren’t.”

Another silence stretched. Lark was about to talk some more about biology, when he realized that was exactly the wrong thing to do. What had earlier served to bridge an uncomfortable silence would now only maintain a reserve, a neutrality he did not want anymore. Awkwardly, he moved to change the subject.

“What kind of …” He swallowed and tried again. “I have a brother, and a sister. I may have mentioned them before. Do you have family … back at …”

He let the question hang, and for a moment Lark worried he had dredged a subject too painful and personal. But her relieved look showed Ling, too, wanted to move on.

“I had a baby brother,” she said. “And a share daughter, whose up-parents were very nice. I miss them all very much.”

For the next midura, Lark listened in confusion to the complex Danik way of life on far-off Poria Outpost. Mostly, he let Ling pour out her sadness, now that even her liberated crew mates were like aliens to her, and nothing would ever be the same.

Later, it seemed wholly natural to stretch his sleeping bag next to hers. Divided by layers of cloth and fluffy torg, their bodies shared warmth without touching. Yet, in his heart, Lark felt a comfort he had lacked till now.

She doesn’t hate me.

It was a good place to start.

The second dive seemed to go quicker, at first. They had a better knack for underwater travel now, though several human volunteers had to fill in for blue qheuens who were sick.

About the illness, recent word from topside was encouraging. The vaccine samples seemed to help the first few victims. Better yet, the molecules could be traeki-synthe-sized. Still, it was too soon for cheers. Even in the event of a complete cure, there were problems of distribution. Could cures reach all the far-flung communities before whole populations of qheuens and hoons were devastated?

Back at the Rothen ship, they found the airlock already occupied by crew members wearing diving gear — three humans and a Rothen — along with slim crates of supplies. Like wax figures, they stood immobile while Lark and Ling trained new assistants in the strange art they had learned the day before. Then it was time to begin making another tunnel through the golden time-stuff.

Again, they went through turnaround sweeps, letting those inside the hatch prepare. Again, volunteers swam close with mulc preservation beads that had been hollowed and turned into bottles for the special dissolving fluid. Once more, the actual act of embedding had to take place in a shroud of nescience, without anyone watching directly. Nothing happened the first few tries … until Jeni caught one of the new helpers peeking, out of curiosity. Despite watery resistance, she smacked him so hard the sound traveled as a sharp crack.

Finally, they got the hang of it. Six beads lay in place, at varying distances inside the barrier. As yesterday, Lark applied the “can opener,” turning on an ancient Buyur machine, which in turn pulled a wax plug, setting in motion a chain reaction to eat a gap through the viscous material. He backed up, fascinated again by creepy visions as the red foam spread and a cavity began to form.

Someone abruptly tapped his shoulder.

It was Jeni, the young militia sergeant, urgently holding a wax board.

WHERE IS RANN?

He blinked, then joined Ling in a shrug. The tall Danik leader had been nearby till a moment ago. Jeni’s expression was anguished. Lark wrote on his own board.

WE’RE NOT NEEDED NOW.

LING AND I WILL LOOK NORTH.

SEND OTHERS SOUTH, EAST.

YOU STAY.

Grudgingly, Jeni accepted the logic. Lark’s job was largely done. If the tunnel opened as planned, another batch of escapees would wriggle through and Jeni must coordinate moving them and their baggage back to the caves.

With a nod, Ling assented. They headed off together, kicking hard. United, they should be a match for Rann if he put up a fight. Anyway, where would the big man go? It wasn’t as if he had much choice, these days.

Still, Lark worried. With a head start, Rann might reach the lakeshore and make good an escape. He could cause mischief, or worse, be caught and questioned by the Jophur. Rann was tough, but how long could he hold out against Galactic interrogation techniques?

Ling caught his arm. Lark turned to follow her jabbing motion up toward the surface of the lake. There he saw a pair of flippers, waving slowly at the end of two strong legs.

What’s he doing up there? Lark wondered as they propelled after the absconded Danik. Getting close, they saw Rann had actually broached the surface! His head and shoulders were out of the water. Is he taking a look at the Jophur ship? We all want to, but no one dared.

Lark felt acutely the shadow of the giant vessel as they kicked upward. For the first time, he got a sense of its roughly globular shape and mammoth dimensions, completely blocking the narrow Festival Glade, creating this lake with its bulk. Having grown up next to a dam, Lark had a sense of the pressure all this water exerted. There would be an awful flood when the ship took off, returning to its home among the stars.

The tube in his mouth squirmed disconcertingly. The traeki air ring struggled as they rose upward, hissing and throbbing to adapt to changing pressure. But Lark was more worried about Rann being spotted by the Jophur.

With luck, the skink skins will make him look like a piece of flotsam … which is what he’ll feel like once I’m through with him! Lark felt a powerful wrath build as he reached to seize the big man’s ankle.

The leg gave a startled twitch … then kicked savagely, knocking his hand away.

Ling tugged Lark’s other arm, pointing a second time.

Rann had an object in front of him—the Rothen minicomputer! He was tapping away at the controls, even as he tread water.

Bastard! Lark thrust toward the surface, grabbing for the device, no longer caring if his mere body happened to be visible from afar. Rann might as well have been waving a searchlight while beating a drum!

As soon as Lark broke through, the starman aimed a punch at him — no doubt a well-trained, expert blow, if delivered on dry land. Here, watery reaction threw Rann off balance and the clout glanced stingingly off Lark’s ear.

Amid a shock of pain, he sensed Ling erupt behind her former colleague, throwing her arms around his neck. Lark took advantage of the distraction, planting his feet against Rann’s chest and hauling back until the computer popped free of the big man’s grasp.

Alas, that wasn’t enough to end the danger. The screen was still lit. He cried to Ling: “I don’t know how to turn the damned thing off!”

She had troubles of her own, with Rann’s powerful arms reaching around to pummel and yank at her. Lark realized the Danik must be put out of commission, and quickly. So with both hands he raised the computer as high as he could — and brought it down hard on Rann’s crew cut.

Without leverage, it struck less forcefully than he hoped, but the blow pulled Rann’s attention away from Ling.

The second impact was better, giving a resounding smack. Rann groaned, slumping in the water.

Unfortunately, the jolt did not break the durable computer, which kept shining, even after Lark landed a final blow.

Rann floated, arms spread wide, breathing shallowly but noisily from his traeki ring. Ling thrashed toward Lark, gasping as she threw an arm over his shoulder for support. Finally, she reached out to stroke a precise spot on the computer’s case, turning it off.

That’s better … though it’s said Galactics can trace digital cognizance, even when a machine is unpowered.

Lark closed the cover, letting the machine drop from his grasp. He needed both hands to hold Ling.

Especially when a new, umbral shadow fell across them, causing her body to stiffen in his arms.

Suddenly, things felt very cold.

Tremulously, they turned together, looking up to see what had come for them.

Dwer

THAT NIGHT WAS AMONG THE STRANGEST OF Dwer’s life, though it started in the most natural way — bickering with Rety.

“I ain’t goin’ there!” She swore.

“No one asked you to. When I start downhill, you’ll take off the other way. Go half a league west, to that forested rise we passed on the way here. I saw good game signs. You can set snares, or look for clamette bubbles on the beach. They’re best roasted, but you oughtn’t trust a fire—”

“I’m supposed to wait for you, I s’pose? Have a nice meal ready for the great hunter, after he finishes takin’ on the whole dam’ universe, single-handed?”

Her biting sarcasm failed to mask tremors of real fear. Dwer didn’t flatter himself that Rety worried about him. No doubt she hated to face being alone.

Dusk fell on the dunes and mudflats, and mountains so distant they were but a jagged horizon cutting the bloated sun. Failing light gave the two of them a chance at last to worm out from the sand, then slither beyond sight of the crashed ships. Once safely over the verge, they brushed grit out of clothes and body crevices while arguing in heated whispers.

“I’m telling you, we don’t haveta do anything! I’m sure Kunn had time to holler for help before he went down. The Rothen ship was due back soon, and musta heard him. Any dura now it’s gonna swoop down, rescue Kunn, and pick up its prize. All we gotta do then is stand and shout.”

Rety had been thinking during the long, uncomfortable wait. She held that the fighter craft full of untraeki rings was the very target Kunn had been looking for, dropping depth bombs to flush his prey out of hiding. By that logic, the brief sky battle was a desperate lashing out by a cornered foe. But Kunn got his own licks in, and now the quarry lay helpless in the swamp, where frantic efforts at repair had so far failed to dislodge it.

Soon, by Rety’s reasoning, the Rothen lords would come to complete the job, taking the untraeki into custody. The Rothen would surely be pleased at this success. Enough to overlook Dwer’s earlier mistakes. And hers.

It was a neat theory. But then, why did the untraeki ship attack from the west, instead of rising out of the water where Kunn dropped his bombs? Dwer was no expert on the way star gods brawled among themselves, but instinct said Kunn had been caught with his pants down.

“In that case, what I’m about to try should put me in good with your friends,” he told Rety.

“If you survive till they come, which I doubt! Those varmints down there will spot you, soon as you go back over the dune.”

“Maybe. But I’ve been watching. Remember when a herd of bog stompers sloshed by, munching tubers torn up by the crash? Large critters passed both hulls and were ignored. I’m guessing the guard robots will take me for a crude native beast—”

“You got that right,” Rety muttered.

“—and leave me alone, at least till I’m real close.”

“And then what? You gonna attack a starship with your bow and arrows?”

Dwer held back from reminding Rety that his bow once seemed a treasure to her — a prize worth risking her life to steal.

“I’m leaving the arrows with you,” he said. “They have steel tips. If I take ’em, they’ll know I’m not an animal.”

“They should ask me. I’d tell ’em real fast that you’re—”

“wife, enough!”

The reedy voice came from Rety’s tiny urrish “husband,” who had been grooming her, flicking sand grains with his agile tongue.

“have sense, wife! brave boy make ship eyes look at him so you and me can get away! all his other talk-talk is fake stuff nice-lies to make us go be safe. be good to brave boy-man! least you can do!”

While Rety blinked at yee’s rebuke, Dwer marveled. Did all urrish males treat their wives this way, chiding them from within the heavy folds of their brood pouches? Or was yee special? Did some prior mate eject him for scolding?

“Iz’ at true, Dwer?” Rety asked. “You’d sacr’fice yourself for me?”

He tried reading her eyes, to judge which answer would make her do as she was told. Fading light forced him to guess.

“No, it’s not true. I do have a plan. It’s risky, but I want to give it a try.”

Rety watched him as carefully as he had scanned her. Finally, she gave a curt laugh.

“What a liar. yee’s right about you. Too dam’ decent to survive without someone to watch over you.”

Huh? Dwer thought. He had tried telling the truth, hoping it would convince her to go. Only Rety reacted in a way he did not expect.

“It’s decided then,” she affirmed with a look of resolve he knew too well. “I’m coming along, Dwer, whichever way you head. So if you want to save me, we better both get on west.”

“This ain’t west!” she whispered sharply, half a midura later.

Dwer ignored Rety as he peered ahead through the swampy gloom with water sloshing past his navel. Too bad we had to leave yee behind with our gear, he thought. The little urrish male provided his “wife” with a healthy dose of prudence and good judgment. But he could not stand getting wet.

Soon, Dwer hoped Rety’s survival instincts would kick in and she’d shut up on her own.

They were nearly naked, wading through the reedy marsh toward a pair of rounded silhouettes, one larger — its smooth flanks glistening except where a sooty stain marred one side. The other lay beyond, crumpled and half-sunk amidships. Both victor and vanquished were silent under the pale yellow glow of Passen, Jijo’s smallest moon.

Colonies of long-necked wallow swans nested in the thickets, dozing after a hard day spent hunting through the shallows and tending their broods. The nearest raised spear-shaped heads to blink at the two humans, then lowered their snouts as Dwer and Rety waded on by.

Mud covered Dwer and the sooner girl from head to toe, concealing some of their heat sign with steady evaporation. According to ancient lore, that should make the patrolling guard machine see them as smaller than they really were. Dwer also took a slow, meandering route, to foster the impression of foraging beasts.

Slender shapes with luminous scales darted below the water’s surface, brushing Dwer’s thighs with their flicking tails. A distant burst of splashing told of some nocturnal hunter at work among the clumps of sword-edged grass. Hungry things moved about in this wet jungle. Rety seemed to grasp this, and did not speak again for some time.

If only she knew how vague Dwer’s plan was, Rety might howl loud enough to send all the sleeping waterfowl flapping for the sky. In fact, he was working from a hunch. He wanted to have a closer look at the untraeki ship … and to check out his impression of this swamp. In order to test his idea, he needed to attain a particular frame of mind.

What was I thinking about, that day when I first contacted — or hallucinated — the voice of One-of-a-Kind?

It happened some years ago. He had been on his first solo trek over the Rimmers, excited to be promoted from apprentice to master hunter, filled with a spirit of freedom and adventure, for now he was one of the few Sixers licensed to roam wherever he wished, even far beyond the settled Slope. The world had seemed boundless.

And yet…

And yet, he still vividly recalled the moment, emerging from a narrow trail through the boo forest — a cathedral aisle as narrow as a man and seemingly high as a moon. Suddenly, the boo just stopped, spilling him onto a bowl-shaped rocky expanse, under a vast blue sky. Before Dwer lay a mulc lake, nestled in the mountain’s flank, surrounded by fields of broken stone.

What he felt during that moment of disorienting transition was much more than welcome release from a closed space. A sense of opening up seemed to fill his mind, briefly expanding his ability to see — especially the tumulus of Buyur ruins. Abruptly, he beheld the ancient towers as they must have stood long ago, shimmering and proud. And for an instant, Dwer had felt strangely at home.

That was when he first heard the spider’s voice, whispering, cajoling, urging him to accept a deal. A fair trade. With its help, Dwer might cease living, but he would never die. He could become one with the glorious past, and join the spider on a voyage into time.

Now, while sloshing under starlight through a murky bog, Dwer tried again for that feeling, that opening sensation. He could tell from the texture of this place — from its smell and feel — that mighty spires had also pierced the sky, only here they were much grander than at any mountain site. The job of demolition was far advanced — little remained to tear down or erase. Yet somehow he knew what stood where, and when.

Here a row of pure-white obelisks once greeted the sun, both mystical and pragmatic in their mathematically precise alignment.

Over there, Buyur legs once ponderously strode down a shopping arcade, filled with exotic goods.

Near that translucent fountain, contemplative Buyur minds occupied themselves with a multitude of tasks beyond his reckoning. And through the sky passed commerce from ten thousand worlds.

Down the avenues were heard voices … not just of Buyur, but a myriad of other types of thinking beings.

Surely it was a glorious time, though also fatiguing for any planet whose flesh must feed such an eager, busy civilization. After a million years of heavy use, Jijo badly needed rest. And the forces of wisdom granted it. All the busy voices moved on. The towers tumbled and a different kind of life took over here, one dedicated to erasing scars — a more patient, less frenzied type of being.…

…?

Yes?

Who … goes …?

Words slithered through Dwer’s mind, hesitantly at first.

Who calls … rousing me from … drowsy musing?

Dwer’s first urge was to dismiss it as merely his imagination. Had not his nervous system been palped and bruised from carrying the robot across icy streams? Delusions would be normal after that battering, followed by days of near starvation. Anyway, his habitual defense against One-of-a-Kind had been to dismiss the mulc spider’s voice as a phantasm.

Who is a phantasm?

I a being who serenely outlasts empires?

Or you, a mayfly, living and dying in the time it

takes for me to dream a dream?

Dwer held off acknowledging the voice, even casually. First he wanted to be sure. Wading cautiously, he sought some of the vines he had glimpsed earlier, from the dune heights. A nearby hummock seemed likely. Despite covering vegetation, it had the orderly outlines of some ruined structure. Sure enough, Dwer soon found his way blocked by cables, some as thick as his wrist, all converging on the ancient building site. His nose twitched at the scent of dilute corrosive fluids, carried by the twisted vines.

“Hey, this is a mulc swamp! We’re walkin’ right into a spider!”

Dwer nodded, acknowledging Rety’s comment without words. If she wanted to leave, she knew the way back.

Spiders were common enough on the Slope. Youngsters went exploring through mulc dens, though you risked getting acid burns if you weren’t careful. Now and then, some village child died of a foolish mistake while venturing too deep, yet the attraction held. High-quality Buyur relics were often found where vine beasts slowly etched the remains of bygone days.

Folk legends flourished about the creatures, whose bodies were made up by the vines themselves. Some described them talking to rare members of the Six, though Dwer had never met anyone else who admitted that it happened to them. He especially never heard of another mulc spider like One-of-a-Kind, who actively lured living prey into its web, sealing “unique” treasures away in coffins of hardening jell.

You met that one? The mad spider of the heights?

You actually shared thoughts with it? And escaped?

How exceptionally interesting.

Your mind patterns are very clear for an ephemeral

That is rare, as mayflies go.…

How singular you are.

Yes, that was the way One-of-a-Kind used to speak to him. This creature was consistent. Or else Dwer’s imagination was.

The words returned, carrying a note of pique.

You flatter yourself to think you could imagine an entity as sublime as myself! Though I admit, you are intriguing, for a transitory being.

So you need verification of my objective reality? How might I prove myself?

Rather than answer directly, Dwer kept his thoughts reserved. Languidly, he contemplated that it would be interesting to see the vines in front of him move.

As if at your command? An amusing concept.

But why not?

Come back in just five days. In that brief time, you will find all of them shifted to new locales!

Dwer chuckled contemptuously, under his breath.

Not quickly enough, my wanton friend? You have seen a mulc being move faster?

Ah, but that one was crazed, driven mad by isolation, high altitude, and a diet of psidrenched stone. It grew unwholesomely obsessed with mortality and the nature of time. Surely you do not expect such undignified haste from me?

Like One-of-a-Kind, this spider could somehow tap Dwer’s human memory, using it to make better sentences — more articulate speech — than he ever managed on his own. But Dwer knew better than to bandy words. Instead, he willed himself to turn around.

Wait! You intrigue me. The conversations our kind share among ourselves are so languid. Torpid, you might say, featuring endless comparisons of the varied dross we eat. The slow-talk grows ever more tedious as we age…

Tell me, are you from one of the frantic races who have lately settled down to a skittering life beyond the mountains? The ones who talk and talk, but almost never build?

Behind Dwer, Rety murmured, “What’s goin’ on!” But he only motioned for her to follow him away from the mulc cords.

All right! On a whim, I’ll do it. I shall move for you!

I’ll move as I have not done in ages.

Watch me, small flickering life-form. Watch this!

Dwer glanced back, and saw several vines tremble. The tremors strengthened, dura after dura, tightening and releasing till several of the largest bunched in a knotty tangle. More duras passed … then one loop popped up out of the water, rising high, dripping like some amphibious being, emerging from its watery home.

It was confirmation, not only of the spider’s mental reality, but of Dwer’s own sane perception. Yet he quashed all sense of acknowledgment or relief. Rather, Dwer let a feeling of disappointment flow across his surface thoughts.

A fresh shoot of lesser boo moves that much, in the course of a day’s growth, he pondered, without bothering to project the thought at the spider.

You compare me to boo?

Boo?

Insolent bug! It is you who are a figment of my imagination! You may be nothing but an undigested bit of concrete, or a piece of bad steel, perturbing my dreams.…

No, wait! Don’t leave yet. I sense there is something that would convince you.

Tell me what it is. Tell me what would make you acknowledge me, and talk awhile.

Dwer felt an impulse to speak directly. To make his wishes known in the form of a request. But no. His experience with One-of-a-Kind had taught him. That mulc beast might have been mad, but it clearly shared some properties of personality with its kind.

Dwer knew the game to play was “hard to get.” So he let his idea leak out in the form of a fantasy … a daydream. When Rety tried to interrupt again, he made a slashing motion for quiet while he went on picturing what a spider might do to convince him it was real. The sort of thing Dwer would find impressive.

The mulc being’s next message seemed intrigued.

Truly?

And why not?

The new dross to which you refer already had me concerned. Those great heaps of refined metal and volatile organic poisons — I have not dealt with such purified essences in a very long time.

Now you worry that the dross might fly away again, to pollute some part of Jijo beyond reach of any mulc being? You fear it may never be properly disposed of?

Then worry no more, my responsible little ephemeral! It will be taken care of.

Just leave it to me.

Alvin

I WAS RIGHT! THE PHUVNTHUS ARE EARTHLINGS! I haven’t figured out the little amphibians yet, but the big six-legged creatures? They are dolphins. Just like the ones in King of the Sea or The Shining Shore … only these talk and drive spaceships! How uttergloss.

And there are humans.

Sky humans!

Well, a couple of them, anyway.

I met the woman in charge — Gillian is her name. Among other things, she said some nice words about my journal. In fact, if they ever succeed in getting away from here, and returning to Earth, she promises to find an agent for me and get it published.

Imagine that. I can’t wait to tell Huck.

There’s just one favor Gillian wants in return.

Ewasx

OH, HOW THEY PREVARICATE!

Is this what it means to take the Downward Path?

Sometimes a citizen race decides to change course, rejecting the destiny mapped out for it by patron and clan. The Civilization of the Five Galaxies allows several traditional avenues of appeal, but if all other measures fail, one shelter remains available to all — the road that leads back, from starfaring sapience to animal nature. The route to a second chance. To start over again with a new patron guiding your way.

This much I/we can understand. But must that path have an intermediate phase, between citizen and dumb beast? A phase in which the half-devolved species becomes lawyers?

Their envoys stand before us now, citing points of Galactic law that were handed down in sacred lore. Especially verbose is the g’Kek emissary. Yes, My rings, you identify this g’Kek as Vubben — a “friend and colleague” from your days as Asx the traeki. Oh, how that sage-among-sooners nimbly contorts logic, contending that his folk are not responsible for the debt his kind owes our clan, by rule of vendetta. A debt of extinction.

The senior Priest-Stack aboard our ship insists we must listen to this nonsense, for form’s sake, before continuing our righteous vengeance. But most of the Polkjhy crew stacks side with our Captain-Leader, whose impatience-with-drivel steams with each throbbing pulse of an angry mulching core. Finally, the Captain-Leader transmits a termination signal to Me/us. To faithful Ewasx.

“ENOUGH!” I interrupt Vubben in loud tones of Oailie decisiveness. All four of his eyestalks quail in surprise at my harsh resonance.

“YOUR CONTENTIOUS REASONINGS ARE BASED ON INVALID ASSUMPTIONS.”

They stand before us/Me, frozen silent by our rebuke. A silence more appropriate to half animals than all that useless jabber. Finally, the qheuen sage, Knife-Bright Insight, bows her blue-green carapace and inquires:

“Might we ask what assumptions you refer to?”

Our second cognition ring performs a writhing twitch that I must overcome with savage pain jolts, preventing the rebellious ring’s color ceils from flashing visibly. Be thou restrained, I command, enforcing authority over our component selves. Do not try to signal your erstwhile comrades. The effort will accomplish nothing.

The minirebellion robs Me of resources to maintain a pontifical voice. So when I next speak aloud, it is in more normal tones. Yet the message is no less severe.

“Your faulty assumptions are threefold,” I answer the thoughtful blue qheuen.

“You assume that law still reigns in the Five Galaxies.

“You assume that we should feel restrained by procedures and precedents from the last ten million years.

“But above all, your most defective assumption is that we should care.”

Dwer

IT WAS NOT ENOUGH SIMPLY TO COAX THE MULC beast. Dwer had to creep close and supervise, for the spider had no clear concept of haste.

Dwer could sense its concentration, shifting fluids and gathering forces from a periphery that stretched league after league, along the Rift coast. The sheer size of the thing was mind-boggling, far greater than the mad little alpine spider that nearly consumed Dwer and Rety. This titan was in the final stages of demolishing a vast city, the culmination of its purpose, and therefore its life. Millennia ago, it might have ignored Dwer, as a busy workman disregards the corner scratchings of a mouse. Now boredom made it responsive to any new voice, offering relief from monumental ennui.

Still, Dwer wondered.

Why was I able to communicate with One-of-a-Kind? And now this spider, as well? We are so different — creatures meant for opposite sides of a planet’s cycle.

His sensitivity, if anything, had increased … perhaps from letting the Danik robot conduct force fields down his spine. But the original knack must be related to what made him an exceptional hunter.

Empathy. An intuitive sense for the needs and desires of living things.

The Sacred Scrolls spoke darkly of such powers. Psitalents. They were not recommended for the likes of the Six, who must cringe away from the great theater of space. So Dwer never mentioned it, not to Sara and Lark, or even Fallon, though he figured the old chief scout must have suspected.

Have I done this before? He mused on how he coaxed the spider into action. I always thought my empathy was passive. That I listened to animals, and hunted accordingly.

But have I been subtly influencing them, all along? When I shoot an arrow, is it my legendary aim that makes it always strike home? Or do I also nudge the flight of the bush quail so it dodges into the way of the shaft? Do I make the taniger swerve left, just as my stone is about to strike?

It made him feel guilty. Unsporting.

Well? What about right now? You ’re famished. Why not put out a call for nearby fish and fowl to gather round your knees for plucking?

Somehow, Dwer knew it did not work that way.

He shook his head, clearing it for matters close at hand. Just ahead, rounded silhouettes took uneven bites out of the arching star field. Two sky boats, unmoving, yet mysterious and deadly as he drew near. He swished a finger through the water and tasted, wincing at some nasty stuff leaking into the fen from one or both fallen cruisers.

Now Dwer’s sensitive ears picked up noise coming from the larger vessel. Clankings and hammerings. No doubt the crew was working around the clock to make repairs. Despite Rety’s assurances, he had no faith that the new day would see a Rothen starship looming overhead to claim both its lost comrades and long-sought prey. The opposite seemed rather more likely.

Either way, he had a job to do.

Till I hear otherwise from the sages, I’ve got to keep acting on Danel Ozawa’s orders.

He said we must defend Jijo.

Star gods don’t belong here, any more than sooners do. Less, in fact.

The cry of a mud wren made Dwer slide his torso lower in the water.

Rety’s mimicked call came from a lookout point on a Buyur ruin near the dunes. He scanned above the reeds, and caught sight of a glimmering shape — a patrol robot sent out by the stranded untraekis, returning from its latest search spiral.

The mulc spider read his concern and expressed curiosity.

More dross?

Maintaining aloof reserve, Dwer suggested the creature concentrate on its present task, while he worried about flying things.

Your memories assert one of these hovering mechanisms slew my brother of the highlands. Mad he may have been, but his job was left undone by that untimely end. Now who will finish it?

A fair enough question. This time, Dwer formed words.

If we survive this time of crisis, the sages will have a mulc bud planted in the old one’s lake. It’s our way. By helping get rid of Buyur remains, each generation of the Six leaves Jijo a little cleaner, making up for the small harm we do. The scrolls say it may ease our penance, when judges finally come.

But don’t worry about this robot now. You have a goal to focus on. Over there, in that hull of the larger ship, there is a rip, an opening…

Dwer felt hairs on his neck prickle. He crouched low while the unmistakable tingle of gravitic fields swept close. Clearly this was a more powerful robot than the unit he nearly defeated back at the sooner village. That one still cowered in a hole under the sand, while he and Rety took on its enemies.

He hunched like an animal and even tried thinking like one as the humming commotion passed, setting the tense surface of the water trembling like a qheuen drum. Dwer closed his eyes, but an onslaught of images assailed him. Sparks flew from an urrish forge. Stinging spray jetted over a drowned village. Starlight glinted off a strange fish whose noorlike mouth opened in a wry grin.…

The creepy force receded. He cracked his eyelids to watch the slab-sided drone move east down a line of phosphorescent surf, then vanish among the dunes.

More vines now clustered and writhed around the base of the larger sky boat, bunching to send shoots snaking higher. This whole crazy idea counted on one assumption — that the ship’s defenses, already badly damaged, would be on guard against “unnatural” things, like metals or energy sources. Under normal conditions, mere plants or beasts would pose no threat to a thick-hulled vessel.

In here?

The spider’s query accompanied mental images of a jagged recess, slashed in the side of the untraeki vessel … the result of Kunn’s riposte, even as his air boat plunged in flames. The visual impression reaching Dwer was tenuous as a daydream, lacking all but the most vague visual details. Instead, he felt a powerful scent of substance. The spider would not know or care how Galactic machines worked, only what they were made of — and which concocted juices would most swiftly delete this insult to Jijo’s fallow peace.

Yes, in there, Dwer projected. And all over the outside, as well

Except the transparent mewing port, he added. No sense warning the creatures by covering their windows with slithering vines. Let them find out in the morning. By then, with Ifni’s luck, it would be too late.

Remember—he began. But the spider interrupted.

I know. I shall use my strongest cords.

Mulc monofiber was the toughest substance known to the Six. With his own eyes, Dwer had seen one rare loop of reclaimed filament pull gondolas all the way to the heights of Mount Guenn. Still, a crew of star gods would have tools to cut even that staunch material. Unless they were distracted.

Time passed. By moonlight the marsh seemed alive with movement — ripples and jerky slitherings — as more vines converged on a growing mass surrounding the ship. Snakelike cables squirmed by Dwer, yet he felt none of the heartsick dread that used to come from contact with One-of-a-Kind. Intent is everything. Somehow, he knew this huge entity meant him no harm.

At uneven intervals, Rety used clever calls to warn him of the guard robot’s return. Dwer worried that it might find the cowardly Danik machine, hiding under the sand. If so, the alerted Jophur might emerge, filling the bog with blazing artificial light.

Dwer moved slowly around the vessel; taking its measure. But as he counted footsteps, his thoughts drifted to the Gray Hills, where Lena Strong and Jenin Worley must be busy right now, uniting Rety’s old band with surviving urrish sooners, forging a united tribe.

Not an easy task, but those two can do it, if anyone can.

Still, he felt sad for them. They must be lonely, with Danel Ozawa gone. And me, carried off in the claws of a Rothen machine. They must think I’m dead, too.

Jenin and Lena still had Ozawa’s “legacy” of books and tools, and an urrish sage to help them. They might make it, if they were left alone. That was Dwer’s job — to make sure no one came across the sky to bother them.

He knew this scheme of his was farfetched. Lark would surely have thought of something better, if he were here.

But I’m all there is. Dwer the Wild Boy. Tough luck for Jijo.

The spider’s voice caught him as he was checking the other side of the grounded cruiser, where a long ramp led to a closed hatch.

In here, as well?

His mind filled with another image of the vessel’s damaged recess. Moonlight shone through a jagged rent in the hull. The clutter of sooty machinery seemed even more crowded as vine after vine crammed through, already dripping caustic nectars. But Dwer felt his attention drawn deeper, to the opposite wall.

Dim light shone through a crack on that side. Not pale illumination, but sharp, blue, and synthetic, coming from some room beyond.

The ship probably isn’t even airtight anymore.

Too bad this didn’t happen high in the mountains. Traeki hated cold-weather. A glacier wind would be just the thing to send whistling through here!

No, he answered the spider. Don’t go into the lighted space. Not yet.

The voice returned, pensively serious.

This light … it could interfere with my work?

Dwer assented. Yeah. The light would interfere, all right.

Then he thought no more of it, for at that moment a trace of movement caught his eye, to the southeast. A dark figure waded stealthily, skirting around the teeming mound of mulc vines.

Rety! But she’s supposed to be on lookout duty.

This was no time for her impulsiveness. With a larger moon due to rise in less than a midura, the two of them had to start making their getaway before the untraeki woke to what was happening.

With uncanny courtesy, mulc cables slithered out of his path as he hurried after the girl, trying not to splash too noisily. Her apparent objective was the other crashed ship, the once-mighty sky steed Kunn had used to drop bombs into the Rift, chasing mysterious prey. From the dunes, Dwer and Rety had seen the sleek dart overwhelmed and sent plunging to the swamp, its two human passengers taken captive.

That could happen to us, too. More than ever, Dwer regretted leaving behind Rety’s urrish “husband,” her conscience and voice of good sense.

About the interfering light.

I thought you would like to know.

It is being taken care of.

Dwer shrugged aside the spider’s mind touch as he crossed an open area, feeling exposed. Things improved slightly when he detoured to take advantage of two reed-covered hummocks, cutting off direct sight of the untraeki ship. But the robot guardian still patrolled somewhere out there. Lacking a lookout, Dwer had just his own wary senses to warn him if it neared.

While wading though a deeper patch, floundering in water up to his armpits, he felt a warning shiver.

I’m being watched.

Dwer slowly turned, expecting to see the glassy weapons of a faceless killer. But no smooth-sided machine hovered above the reedy mound. Instead, he found eyes regarding him, perched at the knoll’s highest point, a ledge that might have been the wall of a Buyur home. Sharp teeth grinned at Dwer.

Mudfoot.

The noor had done it again.

Someday, I’ll get even for the times you’ve scared me half to death.

Mudfoot had a companion this time, a smaller creature, held between his paws. Some recent prey? It did not struggle, but tiny greenish eyes seemed to glow with cool interest. Mudfoot’s grin invited Dwer to guess what this new friend might be.

Dwer had no time for games. “Enjoy yourselves,” he muttered, and moved on, floundering up a muddy bank. He was just rounding the far corner, seeking Rety in the shadows of the Rothen wreck, when a clamor erupted from behind. Loud bangs and thumps reverberated as Dwer crouched, peering back at the large vessel.

This side appeared undamaged — a glossy chariot of semidivine star gods, ready at an instant to leap into the sky.

But then a rectangular crack seamed its flank above the ramp, releasing clots of smoke, like foul ghosts charging into the night.

The interference is taken care of.

The spider’s mind touch seemed satisfied, even proud.

Dark figures spilled through the roiling soot, then down the ramp, wheezing in agony. Dwer counted three untraeki … then two shambling biped forms, leaning on each other as they fled the noxious billows.

What followed nauseated Dwer — solitary doughnut shapes, slithering traeki rings shorn from the waxy moorings that once united them as sapient beings. One large torus burst from the murk, galloping on pulsating legs without guidance or direction, trailing mucus and silvery fibers as it plunged off the ramp into deep water. Another hapless circle bumped along unevenly, staring in all directions with panicky eye patches until surging black vapors overtook it.

I have not acted thus — with such vigor and decisiveness — since the early days, when still-animate Buyur servant machines sometimes tried to hide and reproduce amid the ruins, after their masters departed. Back then, we were fierce, we mulc agents of deconstruction, before the long centuries of patient erosion set in.

Now do you see how efficient my kind can be, when we feel a need? And when we have a worthy audience? Now will you acknowledge me, O unique young ephemeral?

Dwer turned and fled, kicking spray as he ran.

The Rothen scout boat was a wreck, split in the middle, its wings crumpled. He found an open hatch and clambered inside. The metal deck felt chill and alien beneath his bare feet.

The interior lacked even pale moonlight, so it took time to find Rety in a far corner, taking treasures from a cabinet and stuffing them in a bag. What’s she looking for? Food? After all the star-god poisons that’ve spilled here since the crash?

“There’s no time for that,” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

“Gimme a dura,” the girl replied. “I know it’s here. Kunn kept it on one o’ these shelfs.”

Dwer craned his head back through the hatch to look outside. The robot guardian had reappeared, hovering over the stricken untraeki vessel, shining stark light on the survivors mired below. As the thick smoke spread out, Dwer whiffed something that felt sweet in the front of his mouth, yet made the back part gag.

Abruptly, a new thing impacted the senses — sound. A series of twanging notes shook the air. Lines stretched across the water as hundreds of cables tautened, surrounding the skycraft like the tent lines of a festival pavilion. Some vines snapped under the strain, whipping across the landscape. One whirling cord sliced through a surviving stack-of-rings, flinging upper toruses into the swamp while the lower half lurched blindly. Other survivors beat a hasty retreat, deeper into the bog.

The robot descended, its spotlight narrowing to a slender, cutting beam. One by one, straining mulc cables parted under the slashing attack. But it was too little, too late. Something or somebody must already have undermined the muck beneath the ship, for it began sliding into a slimy crypt, gurgling as a muddy slurry poured in through the hatch.

“Found it!” Rety cried, rare happiness invading her voice. She joined Dwer at the door, cradling her reclaimed prize. Her metal bird. Since the first time he laid eyes on it, the thing had gone through a lot of poking and prodding, till it could hardly be mistaken for a real creature anymore, even in dim light. Another damned robot, he thought. The Ifni-cursed thing had caused Dwer more trouble than he could count. Yet to the sooner girl it was an emblem of hope. The first harbinger of freedom in her life.

“Come on,” he muttered. “This wreck is the only shelter hereabouts. The survivors’ll be coming this way. We’ve got to go.”

Rety had only agreeable smiles descending back into the swamp. She followed his every move with the happy compliance of one who had no further need to rebel.

Dwer knew he ought to be pleased, as well. His plan had worked beyond all expectation. Yet his sole emotion was emptiness.

Maybe it’s on account of I’ve been wounded, beat up, exhausted, and starved till I’m too numb to care.

Or else, it’s that I never really enjoyed one part of hunting.

The killing part.

They retreated from both ruined sky boats to the nearest concealing thicket. Dwer was trying to select a good route back to the dunes, when a voice spoke up.

“Hello. I think we ought to talk.”

Dwer was grateful to the mulc spider. He owed it the conversation it desired, and acknowledgment of its might. But, he felt too drained for the mental effort. Not now, he projected. Later, I promise, if I survive the night.

But the voice was persistent. And Dwer soon realized — the words weren’t echoing inside his head, but in the air, with a low, familiar quality and tone. They came from just overhead.

“Hello? Humans in the swamp? Can you hear me?”

Then the voice went muffled, as if the speaker turned aside to address someone else.

“Are you sure this thing is working?” it asked.

Bewildered, and against his better judgment, Dwer found himself answering.

“How the hell should I know what’s working, an’ what ain’t? Who on Jijo are you?”

The words returned more clearly, with evident eagerness.

“Ah! Good. We’re in contact, then. That’s great.”

Dwer finally saw where the words were coming from. Mudfoot squatted just above, having followed to pester him from this new perch. And the noor had his new companion — the one with green eyes.

Rety gasped, and Dwer abruptly realized — the second creature bore a family resemblance to Rety’s bird!

“All right,” Dwer growled, his patience wearing thin with Mudfoot’s endless games. “We’re footprints, unless you tell me what’s goin’ on.”

The creature with green eyes emitted a low, rumbling sound, surprising for one so small. Dwer blinked, startled by the commonplace resonance of a hoonish umble.

“Hr-r-rm … Well, for starters, let me introduce myself.

“The formal name my folks gave me is Hph-wayuo—

“But you can call me Alvin.”