The Singers of Time

3

Four thousand kilometers from the Turtle compound at Kansas City, Captain Francis Krake looked around him and felt almost at peace.

That was a blessing he had longed for, for a long time. Just being on an air field revived some wonderful, aching old memories—the memories of that almost forgotten Second Lieutenant Francis Krake of World War II. Nineteen years old. The world before him then. There was the memory of basic training in Miami Beach, flight cadet school in Mississippi, two-engine transitional training in Oklahoma—and, in all of those places everywhere, the dayrooms with their jukeboxes blaring That Old Black Magic and My Reverie and all those other soppy, sentimental, wonderful songs of parted lovers and joyous reunions. There had been real reunions in Krake's memories, too; the precious forty-eight hour passes with a friendly pilot to take you home for a day; that last overseas leave when Madeleine had promised to wait for her airman to come safely back home from the war. . . .

It did not do to think about Madeleine. Krake knew that, at last, the wait would have turned out to be too long.

It didn't do to think of the end of it, either, when Krake had known for certain that he was going to die . . . until that incredible stub-winged Turtle scout ship had appeared miraculously to pull him from the waters of the Coral Sea. They had certainly saved his life. . . .

Or they had stolen it from him, one or the other.

Now here he was, at an air field again. It was his kind of field. It certainly was not an "airport," like that crowded, crazy place at Kansas City where he'd boarded the commercial flight to take him here to New Mexico. This place was relaxed, slow-moving—no giant liners inching toward a takeoff strip, just a few dozen parked light planes and a sign that said "rentals." And when he had phoned that pretty doctor at the Turtle compound to make sure nothing new had come from the orbiter, he entered the rental office. Inside, a shapely young woman looked him over appreciatively and said, "An aircraft? Certainly, sir. You'll want a low-speed, hover-capable two-seater, I suppose? Any particular model?"

Krake shrugged. "Whatever you think best," he said, and glanced away as she gave him a warm smile before leading the way out of the rental shack. He felt embarrassed. It wasn't that he didn't recognize the interest in her eyes. It wasn't that he was no longer sexually functional, either. At least, he didn't think he was—though with all those long space voyages since the Turtles had picked him up, and no human companionship except for Marco and Daisy Fay—and Daisy Fay, though certainly female, being what Daisy Fay was these days—he was no longer entirely sure.

Anyway, there was one thing decisively wrong with this pretty woman. She did not look in the least like Madeleine.

But he followed her with a spring in his step—caused, maybe, by the idea of flying a real airplane again after all the subjective years in Turtle spacecraft. He was prepared to find that these new planes would be a little tricky to fly. You had to expect that, after all these years. Krake thought he might have to taxi around the field for a while, until he got used to the new controls. But it couldn't be too hard. The planes were sure to have wings, flaps, an engine and landing gear; and if you could fly a P-38 in aerial combat in the Pacific you could fly anything. . . .

He was wrong about that. It turned out that you couldn't.

When the woman opened the cockpit hatch for him, Krake pulled back in sudden wrath. The controls! There wasn't any joystick, no rudder pedals, no throttles. All there was was a keyboard, like an adding machine. That was it.

"Of course," said the woman from just behind him, her voice as warm as her gaze had been, "you'll need the piloting memo disk. We'll be happy to supply it at no extra charge, so if you'll just—oh," said her voice, its tone now completely different. Krake turned to stare at her. She was looking wide-eyed at the back of his head. "But you aren't a memmie, are you?"

"No," he said tightly.

"Oh," she said, trying to adjust to the surprising new information. "Well, I'm afraid that all our planes are adapted for memo disk operation only, sir—"

"Then what do you have that isn't?" he snapped. "A jeep? A bicycle? A pogo stick?"

"What's a 'pogo stick'?" she asked curiously. "But we don't have one, anyway. We do, however, have some surface cars— though not very fast or large ones, of course. But these do have pure manual controls. ..."

So a few hours later, Krake was driving his rented car along the narrow New Mexican road. It wasn't a plane. But it was taking him where he wanted to go, and Francis Krake began to feel at peace again.

He marveled at the things he saw out of the car window. Could this really be the land he was born in? He had been prepared for changes, because they said the climate was all different these days. They said that every year the monsoon rains spiraling up from Baja grew heavier now, transforming the arid plains he had known—but he was not prepared for this. It was just as hot as he remembered, but everything else was different. Alders and willows instead of a few isolated cot-tonwoods, groves of redfruit and fields of corn and soybeans instead of the dry, flat, empty lands of his boyhood, with nothing but sagebrush and mesquite as far as the eye could see.

Francis Krake was not a man given to self-doubt. All the same, he wondered if he should have come on this trip. It could be a complete waste of time—almost certaindy would be. Things changed in a few hundred years. There wouldn't be anything left of his childhood home. Certainly there would be no one he knew still alive. There wouldn't even be anything he could recognize.

Still, until his crew members were out of the Turtle hospital, Francis Krake had nothing but time to waste.

He still wished he had an airplane instead of this strange, hot, flimsy three-wheeler. Any kind of airplane—well, no, he thought. Not any kind of airplane. He didn't want anything as fast and tricky as the crippled P-38 he'd been flying when the engine died and he ditched over the Coral Sea long ago. Say, one of those slow, easy UC-78s he had flown at the transition school, or even a Piper Cub. Any kind of plane at all would do-

Except the only kind that had been available at the airport at Clovis, New Mexico. The kind that you needed a memo disk to operate.

Francis Krake had no intention of, ever, becoming a memmie.

It was a good thing, he thought, that when the Turtle scout ship fished him out of the drink in 1945, they hadn't developed memo disks for humans yet. They couldn't have, of course, since Francis Krake himself had been their first human —captive? Might as well use that word, he reflected, because it was the only one that fit. They had saved his life and, as far as they could, treated him very well. But they hadn't let him go home.

The woods began to open up as he drove. Now and then he passed cornfields, and one or two plots of what he recognized as sugar beets. That was all new since his time. It wasn't catde country any more. Krake supposed that there probably wasn't any such thing as cattle country any more, anywhere in the world, not since the Turtles had brought the first herds of that new and better kind of livestock, the Taurs, to Earth. He did see an occasional cluster of Taurs, placidly munching away at their graze in the late evening sun, but none of the four-legged, forty-acre cattle he remembered from his youth. Curiously, there weren't even any human beings in sight. He had driven for most of an hour without passing a soul on the road, and hardly a building.

New Mexico had always been thinly populated—but this was something else entirely.

In all the subjective years of Francis Krake's star traveling in the service of the Turtles he had thought about Earth often. Nevertheless, he had not, he realized, really understood what it had become with the benevolent partnership of the Turdes. He certainly had not expected to find the human race so sparse on the ground. Had humanity just frozen in its development, like aborigines when Europeans arrived, overwhelmed by Turtle technological superiority?

He knew, of course, that all military activities had been terminated. The Turtles did not believe in war, or armed conquest, or violence of any kind. But what else had happened on Earth? He knew there were still big cities—even old Kansas City had been largely rebuilt, outside the Turtle compound. But how many people, actually, were still left?

On impulse, Krake slowed down. More or less at random he stopped the car by a field planted with soybeans, not because he was particularly interested in them but because he was tired of driving. A small herd of Taurs was methodically cropping the weeds between the rows of beans, careful not to harm the crop.

The great heads were turning placidly toward him. "Hello, babe," he said, reaching out to stroke the head of the nearest. It did not respond, merely gazed at him as it placidly munched away at its fistfuls of growing things.

They were ranch stock—each one had a brand on its broad, hairy face, just under the massive cheekbone. He saw with regret that they were all females. If only there had been a nearly mature male with them! The males, up until the point where they were turned into steers at least, were much more alert and intelligent. Some of them made good house servants, or manual workers, before they were sent off for slaughter. But the females had only the most limited intelligence.

Yet they faced the same fate. They were so gentle, he thought. Did they know they were about to be slaughtered?

Surely they did, if what was said about the Taurs was true. Krake had not spent much time with Taurs; there hadn't been any on the scout ship that rescued him from the Coral Sea, and he'd only seen a handful of them in his contacts with the Turtles since then. He wasn't sure what to make of Taurs. Turtles said they were more or less intelligent. (But then why did the Turtles treat them like beef catde or slaves?) Turtles also didn't like to talk about some things connected with the

Taurs, and so Krake hadn't pushed his questioning too far. Something about adult male Taurs being—what? Dangerous? Crazy? Or merely just, for some Turtle reason that only Tur-des could understand, offensive to them?

That wasn't the biggest puzzle. The great wonder was why, if the Taurs were as intelligent as people said, they so meekly allowed themselves to be enslaved, herded, castrated and finally butchered for food.

Krake retreated to the shade of a redfruit grove across the road to think about what to do next. In the shelter of the broad, leathery crimson leaves he pulled out the map the young woman had given him in Clovis and frowned over it. "Of course," she had apologized, "this doesn't show every little place in New Mexico. But I think the one you're looking for was about—here." And she'd penciled a cross along a road.

The trouble was, he didn't know exactly where he was. This New Mexico simply did not look like anything he remembered. He folded the map. Then, realizing that he was hungry, he plucked some of the fruit. The big, heavy globes were still yellowish, not quite the ruby red of ripeness, and they were more tart than he liked. He tossed most of the fruit across the fence for the Taurs in the soyfield: They probably liked that stuff better than he.

And then the first car appeared on the road.

It was really a light, four-wheeled truck. In the back, gripping the roof of the cab, stood a tall young male Taur, still bearing its horns, and the driver was a young woman in overalls and a visored cap.

She pulled up behind Krake's three-wheeler, peering into the grove. "Hello there," she called. "Having trouble?"

He shook his head as he approached, but he was hardly looking at the girl. His eyes were on the Taur. The huge, strange creature was bobbing its head, too. Krake decided it was nearly mature, its horns already sharp-pointed and, even in the sunlight, with a hint of the adult glow that would soon suffuse them. Its purple-blue eyes were fixed on Krake. The space captain jumped back as the Taur vaulted lightly over the side of the truck, sniffing at the strange human.

"Easy there, Thrayl," the young woman commanded. The Taur obediently backed away, and she said, "He won't hurt you, you know."

Krake kept his eyes fastened on the animal. Curiously, he wasn't afraid. There was something about the way the Taur held himself, the way he gazed at Krake out of those immense purply eyes, that was reassuring—almost as though the thing liked him.

He turned to the young woman. "I don't know much about Taurs," he began—and then, as he got his first good look at her face: "My God!"

The Taur made a worried noise, and the young woman drew back. "Is something wrong?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

"All right?" he repeated. Then he shook his head. "I—I was just surprised, that's all. You, uh, you look a lot like somebody I used to know, and it was kind of a shock there for a minute." He collected himself and went on to finish the sentence, still staring at her. "I started to say that I don't know much about Taurs," he apologized. "I've seen them, of course, but we didn't have much contact with them on my ship." She looked even more surprised at that, as though he had said he were unfamiliar with sunrises, or with rain. Then, belatedly answering her question, "I'm fine, I just took a break from driving. My name's Francis Krake. I used to live around here."

"Moon Bunderan," she responded, offering her hand out of the window. She looked at him curiously. "You used to live around here, and you don't know much about Taurs?"

"It was a long time ago."

"It must've been," she agreed skeptically, but she opened the door and climbed down. She was very young, he saw, not much older than the Taur bull who was dancing nimbly around on his four-toed feet, keeping his great eyes fixed on Krake. And she was not, he realized, really very much like the woman he had taken her for at first. On the other hand, she was definitely rather pretty—a fact which was getting more and more important to Francis Krake, in the unaccustomed company of all these humans on Earth—though there was a look of worry in her face that he didn't understand. As she turned to close the door he saw that her hair was brushed smoothly into a pony tail. There was no implant scar on the back of her head.

"You're not a memmie," he said, a little bit startled, a lot pleased.

"No, of course I'm not," she said, surprised in her turn. "Why would I be? We don't have memmies here, except a few in the cities. And," peering up at him, making the same discovery, "you're not either."

He grinned. "Sorry. I said I've been away for a long time, and at the airport almost everybody I talked to wore a memo disk. I didn't mean anything by it."

She nodded to show she accepted his explanation, and then said suddenly, "I could have been, though. I thought of it once."

He looked at her doubtfully. She said, "It was because I wanted to be a doctor. We used to have one—he delivered me, and he was our doctor for years."

"And he was a memmie?"

"No! That was the point," she explained. "I loved Dr. Tetford more than any other man but my father, and I wanted to be like him. But when he died there wasn't anybody. One of the ranch hands volunteered to take his place. I hated that idea—but he did it; he went to the city, and got a slot cut in his head, and when he came back he had the disks to stick in his skull. Oh," she said, in justice, "he was all right as a doctor, I guess. But he was still the same ignorant herder! And—I just couldn't be like him."

"No, of course not," Krake said, looking at her with either curiosity or sympathy, he wasn't sure which. He changed the subject. "Maybe you can help me. I'm looking for a place called Portales."

She blinked at him. "Portales? But you're on the Portales ranch now."

He blinked back at her. "I'm not talking about a ranch. I mean the town."

She shook her head. "There isn't any town called Portales anymore," she said positively.

"But I used to live there."

"Mister," she said, "nobody's lived there for a long time. It isn't even a town anymore. My dad's grandfather said the floods got it a hundred years ago—"

"Floods! In Portales?"

She nodded. "After the Turtles built that undersea baffle in the North Pacific. It was because of the Dry Time," she explained. "My dad's grandfather used to tell us about it. There was irrigation farming here once. Then the aquifers were just pumped dry—no water left at all. The desert came back. There wasn't any way to liye here then, so people just moved away—"

"You were talking about floods, not drought!"

She nodded earnestly. "That was why the Turtles did all that macroengineering. They wanted to make it possible to farm here again—to do us good, you see. So they built the undersea baffle that diverted a warm tropical current past the Aleutians and through the Bering Strait, and—"

"Miss Bunderan," Krake said sharply, "why are you telling me all this?"

She was frowning at him, obviously wondering. "I'm explaining why the town's gone. When the weather really began to change, there were some really bad floods. The whole town just got wiped out. I don't think there's much left."

"I still want to find it," he said stubbornly. "Meanwhile, I need a place to camp for the night."

She studied him appraisingly. "All you want is a campsite?"

"That's right. I've got all the gear in the car. I just want a place to set up my tent." He hesitated, then offered an explanation. "I guess you could say I'm on a kind of a vacation here."

She nodded, then reachcd a quick decision. "You could probably just camp anywhere you liked around here. Nobody's likely to chase you, as long as you don't start a brush fire or leave too much junk around. If you want permission, you're welcome to camp anywhere on our land."

He looked at her curiously. Flushing, she said, "Well, it's not our land, exactly. A Turtle company bought up all the old deeds after they changed the climate—seemed fair enough, people say, because it sure wasn't worth anything before that."

"So they helped you by changing the climate. And now they own the land," Krake said, his tone non-judgmental.

"My dad says it's fair," she said firmly, and that closed the question. "Anyway, he's foreman on the ranch, but right now he's off at the far end with my brothers. I know they'd be glad enough to have you. Our headquarters is just about ten kilometers down the road, at the fork. If you take the left-hand road it'll take you to where the town used to be. At least, I think it will. There's a stream there for water. Tell me, what are you on vacation from?"

Krake turned and looked at her. She was in the shadow of the redfruit grove now, and her face was shaded by the tall rows of trees, the big leaves dark maroon and thick as leather. The air was sweet with the scent of the yellow, bell-shaped blooms, edged with the odd, sharp odor that drifted from the Taurs across the road.

She said apologetically, "Excuse me for being so nosy, but you look kind of lost. Is there something I could help you with, besides finding that old town?"

He shook his head, forcing his eyes to focus on her face again, to make sure that it was not the face he had dreamed of finding again. It wasn't. This young woman was the present, alive and vital in this strange new now.

"That's all right," he said. Then he took the plunge: "I'm on vacation from space, Miss Bunderan. I'm a waveship captain."

She stared at him. "You're what? I didn't know that was possible! I thought only Turtles could fly the interstellar ships."

"Almost always," he agreed, "but I'm a special case. This particular ship is chartered to me, for my own use. I earned it, too. The Turtles leased it to me to operate on their behalf, so I could do the things they don't like to do themselves. They don't like actually going down to the surface of planets much, you know, unless the planets are a lot colder and drier than Earth. I suppose that's because of what their home planet is like, but as to that I don't have a clue. I've seen the place from space, but that's all."

"But you've seen a lot of other planets?"

He grinned at her. "Eleven," he admitted. "At least, altogether there were eleven that I actually landed on. If you count the planets I've seen in the ship's screens, from orbit, probably a couple of hundred. They're not all worth landing on, you know."

"Eleven!" she breathed.

He said, "Well, that was over a lot of years. Not that many subjective years; most of my travel was at pretty nearly light speed, so time dilation made it go fast. You understand about time dilation—?"

He looked at her inquiringly. She nodded to show that she knew what time dilation meant. "You look young to have done all that," she observed.

Krake managed another grin. "I was born in 1923."

She blinked at him. "I beg your pardon?"

"1923. That's a date," he explained. "It's the year I was born, the way human beings used to count the years before the Turtles came. 1923 was what we called a vintage year for boy babies; I was born just in time for the war."

"War," the girl repeated flatly. It was a word out of the dim past.

"Oh, yes, we had wars then. This was a big one—we called it World War Two—and I was right in the middle of it. The Turdes must have been cruising around the area, checking us out from a distance. Then, when everybody's attention was on the war, they came in for some sampling missions. That was when they picked me up. 1945. I was twenty-two years old. I'd been flying combat for nearly a year, and the war was almost over. I was a fighter pilot, you see. I got shot down in the Coral Sea, strafing a surfaced Japanese submarine."

He paused, remembering that time. "It didn't scare me much right at first," he said. "I thought there was a good chance that somebody from a carrier might pick me up—"

He shrugged. "They didn't, though. Nobody came near me. I drifted a week in a rubber boat before I saw anything but clouds and waves, and then the thing I saw didn't belong to human beings. It was a Turtle scout craft exploring the planet. I don't think saving me was exactly intended as an act of mercy. Turdes don't really operate that way. What they wanted was to collect a specimen of the human race without attracting attention. But they did save my life while they were doing it."

He stared into space. "That was centuries ago by Earth time—not quite fifteen years by my watch and my diary. I guess you know what happens to time when you're traveling near the speed of light—oh, sorry. I asked you that already, didn't I?"

Moon looked at him sympathetically. The man was troubled, she could see. She wanted to touch him reassuringly, but, after all, he was almost a complete stranger.

He thought for a moment, brooding. Then he shrugged. "I tried to learn their language, but that took a long time. They had to develop the transposer first, you see. You know how it is with Turtles and Taurs. Nobody can make the sounds of their languages."

"I can, a little. Taur, I mean, not Turtle," she offered. "Thrayl's a Taur, and he understands me, and I understand him."

He looked at her blankly. "That's nice. Anyway, the Turtles are smart. I finally worked out enough language so I could understand most of what they said in their language, and they could figure out my English. They interrogated me. They— put me to work." He grimaced. "That was the first work I did for them. Helping them understand the human race. I told them all I could about the Earth, because I figured they couldn't make things worse than the war already had." He paused for a somber moment before going on. "And I worked on their ship, and after they saw I could run it well enough they made me a deal. The Turtles are honest traders. They do pay for services. So when they had tested me out and they were quite sure I could handle it they leased me a starship of my own. I've still got it. I've been running it on charters for them ever since, me and my crew."

His voice trailed off. To break the silence, Moon offered, "I never met anybody who'd been in a 'war' before. I think in some ways that's the best part of the Turtles coming—at least we don't have those terrible wars any more. The Turtles don't approve of them."

Krake laughed sharply. "And do you know why? Have you ever heard of the Sh'shrane?"

Moon Bunderan thought for a moment. "N—no, I don't think so—"

"Well, they're why the Turtles don't believe in war," he declared harshly. "Don't think it's some kind of moral superiority for the Turtles. They fought the Sh'shrane when they had to, all right. They just don't need to go to war when they're dealing with people like us."

Under the curly beard, Moon Bunderan could see that his jaw was pulsing. "Haven't you noticed?" he cried. "You don't have your freedom any more, either. That's a little detail they didn't bother to tell me when they picked me up—that they were going to take over the planet—and the whole human race along with it!"

Behind them there was a worried, warning rumble from the Taur, and Francis Krake realized he was frightening the young woman. "Oh, hell, Maddy," he mumbled, "I'm sorry. I just got a little over-excited. Tell your Taur I didn't mean any harm."

"Thrayl knows that," she declared. "It's all right." And then, after a moment, "Who's Maddy?"

He blinked at her. "What?"

"You called me Maddy. Is that someone you know?"

He looked away unhappily. "Not anymore," he said. "Not for a very long time now . . . and not ever again."

What Moon Bunderan wished was that she could spend the whole day with this exciting stranger. But it was impossible; she and Thrayl were supposed to be going into town for supplies for her mother, and finally, reluctantly, she let the man from space go about his search for the old town of Portales.

Then he was gone.

Moon didn't want that to happen. On her way to town, she made a conscious effort to keep her mind on him. That wasn't hard, at least at first, for Captain Francis Krake was certainly the most interesting thing that had happened to her in a long time. But that didn't last, and then the nagging worries at the back of her mind, that she had managed to suppress for a brief time, began insistently to come back.

Worriedly, she glanced into the rear-view mirror. She saw Thrayl's purple-blue eyes gazing soberly and insistently into her own. And, sickly, she knew that there couldn't be any doubt about it.

She wouldn't have to tell Thrayl what was going to happen to him. He already knew.

It wasn't fair! But what could she do about it?

Moon Bunderan wished sadly that Thrayl could be sitting next to her in the cab, as he had done when he was smaller. That was another of those things that wasn't possible any more. Thrayl was too big to fit there comfortably any more, but that wasn't the real reason. More important was that it would cause talk if anyone saw. Making a pet of a calf was one thing—silly, of course, but not wrong. But it was not all right at all when the calf had become a grown Taur bull, with horns that had already begun to glow with the adult light that soon would be darkened forever. . . .

Moon Bunderan shivered, because she knew exactly what was in store for her pet Taur. She had learned the basics from her childhood at the ranch, and filled in the rest at the university, when she majored in Taur husbandry. Like everyone in her class she had had to take her turn at branding the Taurs and giving them their routine shots. It wasn't at all difficult. What made it easy was the nature of the Taurs themselves. The great creatures came in willingly and lay there, unresisting and passive, while Moon did her work. Sometimes they even patted her affectionately with their hard, three-fingered hands before they left. The young males brought in to be castrated and dehorned were just as unquestioningly cooperative. She had done it herself at college, the huge, powerful Taurs submitting themselves to being manacled on the work table. The manacles were necessary not because any one of them would ever resist, but because the agony of the operation might cause some involuntary shudder or muscle twitch and thus disturb the concentration of the surgeon.

Then, when it was over, the Taurs would get up carefully, made cautious by the pain of their wounds, and leave without complaint.

Just as Thrayl would ... if she didn't prevent it.

In the town Thrayl trotted obediently behind his mistress as she ran her errands. He easily shouldered the great sacks of concentrated feed supplement for the Taur calves, loaded them into the back of the truck, squatted outside the drugstore and the hardware store and the clothing shop as she picked up her list of needed items.

When she came out of the hardware store Thrayl was sitting at the curb with his great legs folded, eyes blank. "Listening to the songs" was how he described it to her, in his own impossibly unpronounceable language, but to Moon's eye it closely resembled what she had heard called "meditation." When she touched his warm, hard shoulder the great purple-blue eyes focused on her at once. He rose quickly to take the sack from her hands.

The shopkeeper had followed her outside. He looked at Thrayl, then glanced at Moon Bunderan, wiping his hands on his apron. "Getting a little too old to keep, isn't he?" he said neutrally.

Moon didn't answer the storekeeper. To Thrayl she said, "Up you go," and as the great Taur lifted himself easily into the back of the truck she nodded good-bye to the man. But the owner of the hardware store was not put off so easily. He had known Moon Bunderan since she was in diapers and was fond of her. He came up to her and put his hand parentally on her arm. "Honey," he said, his voice sorrowful and sympathetic, "I know how you feel. But it's a mistake to make a pet of them. There always comes a time when they have to go. Don't make it worse by putting it off."

Moon gave him a brisk nod. "Good-bye," she said, as politely as she could, getting into the truck and starting the engine. But as she pulled out she caught a glimpse of the storekeeper's eyes, following her wisely, sympathetically.

As Moon drove out of town she was going fast—too fast, she knew, but there was something on her mind.

She had to talk to Thrayl about the thing that was planned for him. She had to do it now, she told herself. She had put it off as long as she possibly could, and there wasn't any more time.

But she didn't know what to say to the Taur. She was sobbing softly as she drove along, still speeding, though she knew that speed was no answer to the problem—

Suddenly there was a roaring drumbeat of thunder from over her head.

The truck swerved wildly as, startled, Moon almost lost control. Could so violent an electrical storm have sprung up so quickly? But the sky ahead was almost cloudless above the redfruit groves along the road.

She pulled over to the side of the road as the sound repeated itself—a violent drumming on the roof. It wasn't thunder.

It was Thrayl.

She got out, startled, almost frantic, and gazed up at the Taur. His usually placid demeanor was shattered as he drummed despairingly on the roof of the cab, moaning to himself. "Thrayl! Stop that! What in the world is the matter?" she gasped.

Then he quieted, as suddenly as the tempest had begun.

"A bad thing," he rumbled. "It is a very bad thing that has happened."

Moon's hand flew to her throat. "My—my mother?"

But the great head shook somberly. "No. Not a person. Not here. But very bad."

Half reassured, still frightened, she asked, "Then what is it, Thrayl?"

The great head rolled back, the horns thrusting toward the sky, the purple-blue eyes half closed. But the Taur could not find an answer for her. "The smallsongs sing of a bad thing that has happened to the Turtles," he rumbled unhappily. "There is great fear. Great pain. Great—mourning, Moon."

"But it's just the Turtles?" she insisted. He didn't answer that, just shook the immense head. The girl fidgeted for a moment, then forced herself to the thing she didn't want to do.

"Thrayl," she said, "I thought it was something else. About you." She gazed up into the affectionate eyes of the young bull Taur. "Thrayl," she said, speaking slowly and clearly, "do you know what is going to happen to you?"

The Taur stood silent for a moment. Then the great head nodded. He spoke in the Taur tongue, so hopelessly unpronounceable for humans, so hard to comprehend even when the words were known: "It is sung. It is true. It is right." And he gestured sweepingly at his horns, the little apron over his sexual organs—finally at his throat.

Moon shuddered involuntarily. He did know, yet he seemed so calm about it! "But there's more, Thrayl. After they slaughter you, they will—"

She couldn't say the rest of it. Thrayl waited a moment, then pantomimed eating. "So it is sung," he rumbled. "Have heard this song always."

She said fiercely, "But I don't want that to happen! Thrayl, you could hide out in the western plantations! There's plenty of redfruit there, and no one comes there except my own people—I'd always know where they were going, I could warn you. Then, after a while, I could get an aircar and take you somewhere else. Maybe up north! Into the mountains!" He didn't respond, merely looked at her fondly, almost seeming to smile. "But it could happen, Thrayl! It wouldn't be easy, I know. When it gets to be winter again you'll be cold. And there won't be any redfruit plantations there—but you'll be alive\ I can save you, Thrayl!"

He gazed down at her benignly, with a ghost of a smile in the immense eyes. She waited for a response—waited a long time, until she almost wondered whether he would answer at all.

Then he reached down and touched her brown hair kindly. "Your wish, Moon," he rumbled, and turned away.

They were preparing dinner, Moon Bunderan and her mother, but the young woman was not in her customary cheerful mood. Molly Bunderan's eyes turned often to her daughter. The older woman sighed, her heart heavy for the girl. "You're making yourself sick about Thrayl, aren't you?" she observed.

"It isn't fair" said Moon.

Her mother thought for a moment, setting the timer for the grill. "Well, honey," she offered reluctantly, "let's see if we can figure something out. Maybe Thrayl doesn't really have to go to the slaughterhouse. Not right away, anyway. I suppose if you wanted your father wouldn't mind if we just dehorned him and sold him to a breeding farm. We wouldn't want to keep him ourselves, of course, but they could put him to stud—"

"No!"

Moon's shout caused her mother to peer at her over her glasses. "I mean," the girl added swiftly, "you know what happens to the studs. They go wild!"

Her mother nodded, acquiescing to the fact of life. Dehorned Taur males who had not been castrated were valuable to ranchers, because they were how the ranchers kept their female Taurs in calf. But an uncastrated, dehorned male quickly lost that placid good temper that marked the Taur race, along with those vestiges of intelligence that made them good slaves. A breeding male had to be kept caged. The females he mounted were always at risk. Often they came out of the breeding pen wounded and bleeding—sometimes even killed, for the fury of the studs was legendary. And no human could ever go near one again, until the physical decline that began with the dehorning reduced the Taur to a raving, raging wreck that it was a kindness to put away.

"I know," her mother sighed. "And it wouldn't keep him alive very long anyway—you're lucky if you get two seasons out of a Taur stud before you have to put him down, and then you can't even sell the meat."

"I don't want that to happen to him either!"

Molly Bunderan said soothingly, "I know you don't, dear, but some things can't be changed. When the males mature they have to be castrated and dehorned; that's the rule."

"Thrayl wouldn't be any trouble!"

Her mother shook her head. "You hear stories," she said darkly. "Adult male Taurs and human girls—"

"That's ridiculous!" Moon flared. "How could such stories be true? Nobody's ever kept an adult unaltered male Taur!"

"Where there's smoke there's fire," her mother said wisely. "Why, just a couple of years ago, over toward Amarillo, there was that young bull Taur they burned alive—"

Moon shuddered. "I know the story," she said grimly. "I don't believe he did anything. And Thrayl would never hurt me, you know that!"

Her mother turned from the steaming pots to gaze at her tenderly. "I know it's hard for you, Moon dear. I blame myself. I should never have let you make a pet of him."

"But he's gentle," Moon begged. "He loves me—not in any ugly way."

"We'll talk about it later," Mrs. Bunderan promised. She patted her daughter's shoulder in awkward sympathy . . . but in her heart Mrs. Bunderan was sure Moon's reasons for objecting to the idea would never matter to her father. What those reasons might really be Molly Bunderan did not even want to think.

She turned back to the practical job of running her part of the ranch. "Vegetables," she said. "What would you like tonight, Moon? Peas and carrots, and a salad? Go find Leesa and tell her to bring in whatever you like."

But she knew that whatever the girl had for dinner that night, the taste would be ashes in her mouth.

Half an hour later the men came back from their work at the ends of the ranch. Their hover dropped into the courtyard with a flurry of dust and squawking chickens. The first thing on the agenda was baths for all of them, then they had dinner.

They all ate at once—that was one of the great advantages of having Taur females, like their house Taur, Leesa, to wait on table. The meal was Taur steaks, with vegetables from the little garden the Taur females tended for them. Leesa served them silently, then curled up at the foot of the table to wait for orders, like any good dog.

Moon avoided the female Taur's eyes. It had always been hard for Moon, as a child, to eat the meat of the Taurs they raised, but her father had laughed at her and her mother had insisted, and gradually Moon Bunderan had learned to turn off that part of her mind. Tonight was harder. When the meal was over Moon quickly put the dishes in the washer and slipped out of the house. Her brothers went off in the aircar for an evening in the town.

Then Molly Bunderan sat down with her husband to talk over cups of coffee. He looked tired, she thought. With the boys he had been out in the aircar, inspecting the herds at the far reaches of their land. "Too much rain," he told her. "The streams are up, and we're going to have flooding if we get another big storm. And—" he shook his head—"this afternoon the whole herd was spooked by something. Even the cows took an hour or so to quiet down—God knows what it was."

"We had a little flurry here, too," Molly Bunderan told her husband.

He nodded, considering that, then shrugged. "Well, that's Taurs for you," he said. "They were all all right when we left, anyway. Even the young bulls."

His wife took a deep breath. "That—that brings up something I want to talk to you about," she told him.

Then, when she had her husband's full attention, she told him her worries about Moon and her pet, Thrayl. "We never should have kept the Taur so long," she said, blaming herself. "It was all right when he was little. She played with him like a doll, remember? Bathing him. Dressing him up. It just seemed like a sweet, little-girl kind of thing. But now—"

He nodded. "Where is she now?"

"Where else? Out talking to him in his pen."

Mr. Bunderan took a long, slow sip of his coffee. Then he said: "It's too bad, Molly, but we don't have any choice in the matter, do we?"

"It's just that she's so attached to the animal," his wife said.

"And there's no better time than now to end it. No, Thrayl's getting too mature. He's got to go off to be fattened.

Next time we have a shipment for the feedlots." He glanced up at the date clock on the wall to see when that might be, then nodded. "There's a shipment tomorrow," he said heavily, "and that's as good a time as any."

The human poet sang on, while the aiodoi listened kindly through the more perfect music of their own everlasting singing:

"Let's talk about whether the universe is symmetrical.

"We all hope it will turn out that way, but if we want to find the truth about that, first we have to establish some universal frame of reference. That's where those people we were talking about at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow—Heller, Klimek, Rudnicki—come in. They discovered that this universal frame—or rigging vector field, as it is sometimes called—sounds so much like the old idea of an 'ether,' you remember, that they refer to it as a neoether. But, whatever you call it, you have to have some frame from which to measure whatever symmetries may be.

"It turns out that the larger the frame, the better the case looks for symmetry.

"In fact, although velocities of individual stars within galaxies, and of individual galaxies within clusters, vary very widely, the velocities of massive galaxies at the center of clusters vary quite linearly with their red-shift distances, at least within the error bars for measurement. This (say Heller, Kli-mek and Rudnicki) means that there is indeed some indication of an overall law that describes both nuclear particles and the largest bodies in the universe, for the correspondence is to the velocities of fundamental particles—and that, they say, is 'one more proof of Nature's kindness toward Earthly cosmolo-gists.'

"We'll talk about some of those other proofs before long because, trust me on this, class, before you get through you're likely to think that we human beings have indeed had some special gifts from—Nature. Or God. Or Whoever it is you want to credit with doing the things that make it possible, or even maybe inevitable, that people like you and me could sit in this room discussing them now."

To the aiodoi that was a pleasing song, but not a new one, for they had heard that song forever, and would go on hearing it forever, for that was known to be the nature of great songs always.