Brightness Reef

Dwer

It did no good to shout or throw stones at the glavers. The pair just retreated to watch from a distance with blank, globelike eyes, then resumed following when the human party moved on. Dwer soon realized there would be no getting rid of them. He’d have to shoot the beasts or ignore them.

“You have other things to keep you busy, son,” Danel Ozawa ruled.

It was an understatement.

The clearing near the waterfall still reeked of urs, donkey, and simla when Dwer warily guided Danel’s group across the shallow ford. From then on, he borrowed a tactic from the old wars, reconnoitering each day’s march the night before, counting on urrish diurnal habits to keep him safe from ambush — though urs were adaptable beings. They could be deadly even at night, as human fighters used to find out the hard way.

Dwer hoped this group had lazy habits, after generations of peace.

Rising at midnight, he would scout by the light of two smaller moons, sniffing warily each time the trail of hoofprints neared some plausible ambuscade. Then, at dawn, he would hurry back to help Danel’s donkey train plod ahead by day.

Ozawa thought it urgent to catch up with the urrish band and negotiate an arrangement. But Dwer worried. How does he expect they’ll react? Embracing us like brothers? These are criminals. Like Rety’s band. Like us.

The spoor grew fresher. Now the urs were just a week ahead of them, maybe just a few days.

He began noting other traces. Soft outlines in the sand. Broken stone flakes. Fragments of a moccasin lace. Smudged campfires more than a month old.

Rety’s band. The urs are heading straight for the heart of their territory.

Danel took the news calmly. “They must figure as we did. The human sooners know a lot about life in these hills. That’s valuable experience, whether it can be bought, borrowed—”

“Or tortured out of ’em,” Lena Strong finished, whetting one of her knives by the evening’s low red coals. “Some urrish clans used to keep human prisoners as drudges, before we broke ’em of the habit.”

“A habit they learned from the queens. There’s no call to assume slavery is a natural urs behavior. For that matter, back on Old Earth humans used to—”

“Yeah, well, we still have a problem,” Dwer interrupted. “What to do when we catch up.”

“Right!” Lena inspected the knife-edge. “Do we pounce fast, taking the urs all bunched together? Or do it hoon-style — picking them off one at a time.”

Jenin sighed unhappily. “Oh, Lena. Please stop.” She had been cheerful throughout the journey, until hearing all this talk of fighting. Jenin had joined this trek in order to be a founding mother of a new race, not to hunt down beings who had once been her neighbors.

Dwer’s heart felt the same pain as Jenin, though his pragmatic side agreed with Lena.

“If we have to, I’d rather do it fast,” he muttered, glancing at the donkey carrying their most secret, unspeakable “tools.”

“It shouldn’t come to that,” Danel insisted. “First let’s ascertain who they are and what they want. Perhaps we can make common cause.”

Lena snorted. “Send an emissary? Give away our presence? You heard Dwer. There’s over a dozen of ’em!”

“Don’t you think we should wait for the second group, then?” Jenin asked. “They were supposed to be right behind us.”

Lena shrugged. “Who knows how long they’ll take? Or if they got lost? The urs could find us first. And there’s the human tribe to consider.”

“Rety’s old band.”

“Right. Want to let them get killed or enslaved? Just on account of we’re too scared to—”

“Lena!” Danel cut her off. “That will do for now. We’ll see what’s to be done when the time comes. Meanwhile, poor Dwer should get some sleep. We owe him whatever rest he can get.”

“That ain’t half what he’s owed.” Lena muttered, causing Dwer to glance her way, but in the pre-moonrise dimness, he could make out only shadows.

“G’night all,” he said, and slipped away to seek his bedroll.

Mudfoot looked up from the blanket, chuttering testily over having to move. The creature did help warm things up at night, which partly made up for its vexing way of licking Dwer’s face while he slept, harvesting perspiration from his forehead and lip.

Dwer lay down, turned over — and blinked in surprise at two pairs of giant round eyes, staring back at him from just three meters away.

Jeekee glavers.

Normally, one simply ignored the placid creatures. But he still couldn’t shake the memory of that pack of them, clustered greedily around a dead gallaiter.

He tossed a dirt clod vaguely their way. “Go on! Get!”

Just as vaguely, the pair turned and sauntered off. Dwer glanced at Mudfoot.

“Why not make yourself a bit useful and keep those pests away?”

The noor just grinned back at him.

Dwer pulled the blanket over his chin, trying to settle down. He was tired and ached from sore muscles and bruises. But slumber came slowly, freighted with troubling dreams.

He woke to a soft touch, stroking his face. Irritably, he tried to push the noor away.

“Quit it, furball! Lick a donkey turd, if you want salt so bad.”

After a surprised pause, a hushed voice answered.

“Reckon I never been welcomed to a man’s bed half so sweetly.”

Dwer rolled onto an elbow, rubbing one eye to make out a blurred silhouette. A woman.

“Jenin?”

“Would you prefer her? I won the toss, but I’ll fetch her if you like.”

“Lena! What — can I do for you?”

Dwer made out a white glint — her rare smile.

“Well, you could invite me in from the cold.” Her voice sounded soft, almost shy.

Lena was buxom and sanguinely female, yet soft and shy were two words Dwer had never linked with her before. “Uh — sure…” Am I still dreaming? he wondered as she slid alongside, strong hands working to loosen his clothes. Her smooth skin seemed to blaze with ardent heat.

I must be. The Lena I know never smelled this good.

“You’re all knotted up,” she commented, kneading his neck and back with uncanny, forceful accuracy. At first, Dwer’s gasps came from released muscle strain. But Lena somehow also made each jab or digging twist of her calloused fingers seem feminine, erotic.

She got halfway through the massage before Dwer passed his limit of self-control and turned over to gently but resolutely reverse their positions, taking her beneath him, repaying her vitality with a vigor that welled from weeks of pent-up” tension. Hoarded worry and fatigue seemed to explode into the air, into the forest, into her as she clutched and sighed, pulling him closer.

After .she slipped away, he pondered muzzily — Lena thinks I may die, since my job is to be up front in any fight. This might be the last… the only chance…

Dwer drifted into a tranquil, dreamless repose — a slumber so blank and relaxing that he actually felt rested by the time another warm body slid into the bedroll next to him. By then, his unconscious had worked it out, crediting the women with ultimate pragmatism.

Danel will probably be around later, so it makes sense to use whatever I have to give, before it’s gone.

It wasn’t his place to judge the women. Theirs was the harder job, here in the wilderness. His tasks were simple — to hunt, fight, and if need be, to die. Theirs was to go on, whatever it took.

Dwer did not even have to rouse all the way. Nor did Jenin seem offended that his body performed but half awake. There were all sorts of duties to fulfill these days. If he was going to keep up, he would simply have to catch what rest he could.

Dwer woke to find it already a midura past midnight. Though he felt much better now, he had to fight a languid lethargy to get dressed and check his gear — the bow and quiver, a compass, sketch pad, and hip canteen — then stop by the dim coals to pluck the leaf-wrapped package Jenin left for him each night, the one decent meal he would eat while away.

For most of his adult life he had traveled alone, relishing peace and solitude. Yet, he had to admit the attractions of being part of a team, a community. Perhaps, under Ozawa’s guidance, they might come to feel like family.

Would that take some of the bitter sting out of recalling the life and loved ones they had left behind, in the graceful forests of the Slope?

Dwer was about to head off, following the urrish track farther in the direction of the rising moons, when a soft sound made him pause. Someone was awake and talking. Yet he had passed both women, snoring quietly and (he liked to imagine) happily. Dwer slipped the bow off his shoulder, moving toward the low speech sounds, more curious .than edgy. Soon he recognized the murmured whisper.

Of course it was Danel. But who was the sage talking to?

Beyond the bole of a large tree, Dwer peered into a small clearing where satiny moonlight spilled over an unlikely pair. Danel was kneeling low to face the little black creature called Mudfoot. Dwer couldn’t make out words, but judging from tone and inflection, Ozawa was trying to ask it questions, in one language after another.

The noor responded by licking itself, then glancing briefly toward Dwer,’ standing in the shadows. When Ozawa switched to GalTwo, Mudfoot grinned — then twisted to bite an itch on one shoulder. When the beast turned back, it was to answer the sage with a gaping yawn.

Danel let out a soft sigh, as if he had expected to fail but felt it worth an effort.

What effort? Dwer wondered. Was the sage seeking magical aid, as ignorant lowlanders sometimes tried to do, treating noor like sprites in some fairy tale? Did Ozawa hope to tame Mudfoot, the way hoon sailors did, as agile helpers on the river? Few nonhoon had ever managed that feat. But even if it worked, what use was one noor assistant? Or would Dwer’s next assignment — after dealing with urrish sooners and then Rety’s band — be to run back and collect more of Mudfoot’s kind?

That made no sense. If by some miracle the Commons survived, word would be sent calling them all home. If the worst happened, they were to stay as far from the Slope as possible.

Well, Danel will tell me what he wants me to know. I just hope this doesn’t mean he’s gone crazy.

Dwer crept away and found the urrish trail. He set off at a lope that soon strained forward, pulling him with unwilled, eagerness to see what lay beyond the next shadowy rise. For the first time in days, Dwer felt whole and strong. It wasn’t that all worries had vanished. Existence was still a frail, perilous thing, all too easily lost. Still, for this narrow stretch of time he pounded onward, feeling vibrantly alive.

Rety

The dream always ended the same way, just before she woke shivering, clutching a soft blanket to her breast.

She dreamed about the bird.

Not as it appeared the last time she had seen it — headless, spread across Rann’s laboratory bench in the buried station — but as she recalled first glimpsing the strange thing. Vivid in motion, with plumage like glossy forest leaves, alert and lustrous in a way that seemed to stroke her soul.

As a child she had loved to watch native birds, staring for hours at their swooping dives, envying their freedom of the air, their liberty to take wing, leaving their troubles far behind. Then one day Jass returned from a long journey to the south, bragging about all the beasts he had shot. One had been a fantastic flying thing that they took by surprise as it emerged from a tidal marsh. It barely got away after an arrow tore one wing, flapping off toward the northwest, leaving behind a feather harder than stone.

That very night, risking awful punishment, she stole the stiff metal fragment from the tent where the hunters snored, and with a pack of stolen food she ran off, seeking this fabled wonder for herself. As luck had it, she guessed right and crossed its path, spotting the fluttering creature as it labored onward with short, gliding bounds. In a throat-catching instant of recognition, Rety knew the bird was like her — wounded by the same man’s taste for senseless violence.

Watching it hop-glide ever westward, never resting, she knew they shared one more trait. Persistence.

She wanted to catch up with it, to heal it, talk to it. To learn its source of power. To help it reach its goal. To help find its home. But even disabled, the bird soon outdistanced her. For a heart-aching time, she thought she had lost it forever…

At that point of harsh emotion, without transition, the dream shifted to another scene. Suddenly, the bird was right in front of her, closer than ever, fluttering inside a jeweled cage, dodging a mist of golden, cloying drops… then cowering away from searing knives of flame!

Frustration choked Rety, unable to give aid. Unable to save it.

Finally, when all seemed lost, the bird did as Rety herself would have done. It lashed out with desperate strength, dying to bring down its oppressor, the agent of its torment.

For several nights in a row the dream ended the same way, with someone’s insistent arms holding her back in shameful safety while the bird fired its own head upward toward a hovering, shadowy form. A dark rival with dangling, lethal limbs.

It seemed revenge was going to be another of those things that didn’t turn out quite the same in real life as she’d imagined.

For one thing, in her heart, Rety never reckoned on Jass taking pain so well.

The hunter lay strapped to a couch inside the scout aircraft, his ruggedly handsome features twisting as Kunn kept the promise he had made. A promise Rety regretted a bit more each time Jass clamped back another moan, choking it behind gritted teeth.

Who would’ve thought he’d turn out to be brave, she pondered, recalling all the times Jass used to brag, bluster, and harass other members of the tribe. Bullies were supposed to be cowards, or so one of the tribe’s aged grandfathers used to mutter when he was sure the young hunters wouldn’t hear. Too bad the old geep would never know how wrong he’d been. That battered patriarch had died during the months since Rety left these hills.

She tried steeling her heart during the contest of wills between Kunn and Jass, one Jass was bound to lose. You want to find out where the bird came from, don’t you? she asked herself. Anyway, don’t Jass deserve everything he’s getting? Ain’t his own stubborn-headedness bringing this on himself?

Well, in truth, Rety had played a role in stiffening the hunter’s resistance, thus extending his torment. Kunn’s patient, insistent questions alternated with grunts of pure glaverlike obstinacy from Jass, sweating and contorting under jolts applied by Kunn’s robot partner.

When she could take no more without getting sick, Rety silently slipped out the hatch. If anything changed, the pilot could call her on the tiny comm button the sky-humans had installed under.the skin near her right ear.

She set off toward the campsite, trying to appear casual in case any sooners watched from the shrubby undergrowth.

That was how she thought of them. Sooners. Savages. No different in kind from those puffed-up barbarians on the Slope, who thought themselves so civilized with their fancy books but who were still little more than half-animals, trapped on a dirty world they could never leave. To a sky-being like herself, they were all the same, whichever side of the Rimmers they led their dirt-scratching lives.

She smelled the camp before reaching it. A familiar musty blend of wood smoke, excrement, and poorly tanned hides, all mixed with a sulfury pungence rising from the steam pools that always drew the tribe here this time of year — a fact that had made it easy to guide Kunn to this pocket canyon, high in the Gray Hills. Rety paused halfway to the campsite, smoothing down the sleek jumpsuit Ling had given her, soon after she became the first Jijoan to enter the underground station, that wonderland of luxuries and bright marvels. Ling had also bathed Rety, treated her scalp, and applied potions and rays to leave her feeling cleaner, stronger, even taller than before. Only the livid scar on one side of her face still marred the mirror’s transformed image, and that would be tended, she was assured, when they all went “home.”

My home too, Rety mused, resuming a brisk pace until all moaning traces of the hunter’s torment faded behind her. She drove out memory of Jass’s squirming agony by calling to mind those images the sky-foursome had shown her — of a splendid, jewellike city, tucked inside a steep-walled valley. A city of fairy towers and floating castles, where one lucky branch of humanity lived with their beloved patrons, the wise, benevolent Rothen.

That part didn’t quite appeal to her — this business of having masters who told you what to do. Nor did the Rothen themselves, when she met the two living aboard the station, who seemed too pretty and prim, too smugly happy, by far. But then, if Ling and Besh loved them, she supposed she could get used to that idea too. Anyway, Rety was willing to do or put up with anything to reach that city of lights.

I always knew I belonged someplace else, she thought, rounding a bend in the forest. Not here. Not in a place like this.

Before her stretched a debris-strewn clearing dotted by half a dozen ragged shelters — animal hides thrown over rows of bent saplings — all clustered round a cook fire where soot-smudged figures hunched over a carcass. Tonight’s meal. A donkey with a neat hole burned through its heart. A gift, courtesy of Kunn’s handy hunter-killer robot.

People dressed in poorly tanned skins moved about at chores or simply slouched through the middle of the day. Their complexions were filthy. Most had matted hair, and they stank. After meeting the Slopies-and then Ling and Besh — it was hard to picture these savages as the same race as herself, let alone her own tribe.

Several male figures loafed near a makeshift pen where the new prisoners huddled, having barely moved since they were herded into camp a couple of nights back. Some of the men chopped at tree stumps with machetes swiped from the newcomers’ supplies, marveling at the keen blades of Buyur metal. But the men kept well away from the pile of crates Kunn had forbidden them to touch, awaiting his decision which to destroy.

A handful of boys straddled a new fence of laser-split logs, passing the time by spitting, then laughing as angry complaints rose from the captives.

Shouldn’t let ’em do that, Rety thought. Even if the outlanders are nosy fools who oughtn’t have come.

Kunn had assigned her the task of finding out what brought the prisoners to these parts, violating their own sacred law. But Rety felt reluctant, even disgusted.

Dawdling, she turned to survey a way of life she once thought she’d never escape.

Despite the tumult of the last few days, tribal life went on. Kallish, the old clubfoot, still labored by the stream bed, hammering stone cores into flake arrowheads and other tools, convinced the recent influx of iron implements would be a passing fad. He was probably right.

Upstream, women waded through shallows, seeking the trishelled juice oysters that ripened in volcanic heat this time of year, while farther upslope, beyond the steamy pools, a cluster of girls used poles to beat Illoes trees, gathering the tart fallen berries in woven baskets. As usual, females were doing most of the hard work. Nowhere was this more evident than near the cook fire, where grouchy old Binni, her arms bloody past the elbows, took charge of preparing the donkey for roasting. The headwoman’s hair was even grayer than before. Her latest baby had died, leaving Binni irritable with swollen, tender breasts, hissing at her two young helpers through wide gaps between yellow-brown teeth.

Despite such signs of normality, most tribe-folk moved in a state of sluggish distraction. Whenever anyone glanced Rety’s way, they flinched, as if she were the last thing on Jijo they ever expected to see. More shocking than a glaver standing upright.

Rety, the god.

She held her head high. Tell your stinky brats about it by the campfire, till the end of time. Tell ’em about the girl who talked back to big mean hunters, no matter what they did to her. A girl who wouldn’t take it anymore. Who dared to do what you never imagined. Who found a way to leave this stinking hell and go live on a star.

Rety felt a thrill each time someone briefly met her gaze and quickly looked away.

I’m not one of you. Never was. And now you know it too.

Only Binni showed no trace of being overwhelmed by the deity Rety had become. The same old disdain and disappointment lay in those metal-gray eyes. At age twenty-eight, Binni was younger than any of the foray-ers, even Ling. Still, it seemed nothing on Jijo, or in heaven, would ever surprise her.

It had been years since Rety last called the old woman “Mama.” She wasn’t tempted to resume now.

With her back straight, she walked past the chefs and their grisly work. Inside, though, she wavered.

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come back here. Why mix with these ghosts when she could be in the aircraft, relishing victory over her lifelong enemy? The punishment being executed on Jass seemed rightful and good, now that she didn’t have to face his agony up close. That contradiction made Rety nervous, as if something were missing. Like trying to use moccasins without laces.

“wife! there you are, wife! bad wife, to leave yee alone so long!”

Several clansmen scurried out of the way, making room for a four-legged creature, galloping past their ankles like some untouchable, all-powerful being. Which the little urrish male was, in a sense, since Rety had loudly promised horrors to anyone laying a hand on her “husband.”

yee leaped into her arms, squirming with pleasure even as he scolded.

“wife leave yee alone too long with female foes! they offer yee soft, warm pouch, temptresses!”

Rety flared jealousy. “Who offered you a pouch! If any of those hussies—”

Then she saw he was teasing. Some of the tension in her shoulders let go as she laughed. The little critter was definitely good for her.

“relax, wife,” he assured her. “just one pouch for yee. go in now?”

“In now,” she replied, unzipping the plush hip bag Ling had provided, yee dove inside, wriggled around, then stuck out his head and long neck to peer at her.

“come now, wife, visit Ul-Tahni. that sage ready talk now.”

“Ah, is she? Well now, isn’t that awfully nice of her.”

Rety didn’t relish going to see the leader of the out-landers. But Kunn had given her a job, and now was as good a time as any.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s hear what the hinney has to say.”

Dwer

The urs, it appeared, had done the small human expedition a favor. In receiving death and devastation, they had left a warning.

A tale of callous murder was clear to read through the dawn light — in seared and shattered trees, blackened craters, and scattered debris, pushed by a gusty, dry wind. The violence that took place here — just a few days ago by Dwer’s estimate — must have been brief but horrible.

The plateau’s terraced outlines were still visible after ages of softening by erosion and vegetation. It was a former Buyur site, going back to the last race licensed to use this world — legal residents dwelling in heavenlike towers, who went through their daily lives unafraid of the open sky.

Dwer traced the terror that recently fell upon this place. All too vividly he pictured the panicked urrish settlers, rearing and coughing with dread, coiling their long necks, with slim arms crossed to shield their precious pouches as the ground around them exploded. He could almost hear their screams as they fled the burning encampment, down a steep trail leading into a narrow defile — where human footprints swarmed in abruptly from both sides, tracked by crude moccasins, mingling with urrish hooves chaotically.

He picked up shreds of home-twisted twine and leather cord. From countless signs, Dwer pictured ropes and nets falling to trap the urs, taking them prisoner.

Couldn’t they tell they were being herded? The aircraft aimed off to the sides and all around, to drive them. So why didn’t the urs scatter instead of clumping in a mass to he caught?

Several patches of sticky sand gave him an answer. The overall intent might have been capture, but the flying gunner had few qualms about enforcing the round-up with a corpse or two.

Don’t judge the urs too harshly. Do you know how you’ll react when lightning bolts start falling all around? War is messy, and we’re all out of practice. Even Drake never had to cope with anything like this.

“So, we’re facing an alliance between the human sooners and the aliens,” Lena concluded. “Kind of changes things, don’t it?”

Danel Ozawa wore a bleak expression. “This entire region is compromised. Whatever fate befalls the Slope will now surely happen here, as well. Whether by plague, or by fire, or hunting their victims one at a time with machines — they’ll scourge the area as thoroughly as back home.”

Danel’s task had been to carry a legacy into the wilderness — both knowledge and fresh genes to invigorate the human tribe already living here — to preserve something of Earthling life in case the worst came to pass. It was never a joyous enterprise, more like the mission of a lifeboat captain in some ancient tale about a shipwreck. But at least that endeavor had been based on a slim hope. Now his eyes lacked all trace of that emotion.

Jenin protested, “Well, didn’t you just say the sooners and aliens were allies against the urs? The star-gods wouldn’t turn on the tribe now, would they?”

She stopped as the others looked at her, their expressions answering better than words.

Jenin paled. “Oh.”

Moments later, she lifted her chin once more.

“Well, they still don’t know we exist, right? So why don’t we just leave, right now? The four of us. What about north, Dwer? You’ve been up that way before. Let’s go!”

Danel kicked some debris left by the urs’ riotous flight and the looting that followed. He pointed to a narrow cleft in the rocks. “We can build a pyre over there.”

“What are you doing?” Jenin asked, as Dwer led the donkeys where the sage indicated and began unloading their packs.

“I’ll set the grenades,” Lena said, prying open a container. “We’d best add some wood. I’ll gather these broken crates.”

“Hey! I asked you guys — what’s going on?”

Danel took Jenin’s arm while Dwer hauled a portion of their supplies to one side — food and clothing plus a few basic implements, none containing any metal. Left behind in a stack were all the books and sophisticated tools they had taken from the Slope.

The sage explained.

“We brought this legacy in order to maintain some minimal semblance of human culture in exile. But four people can’t establish a civilization, no matter how many books they have. We must prepare for the likelihood that all of this must be destroyed.”

Clearly the prospect gnawed at Ozawa. His face, already haggard, now seemed sliced by pain. Dwer averted his gaze, concentrating on the work at hand, separating only supplies helpful to a small party of fugitives on the run.

Jenin chewed on the news and nodded. “Well, if we must live and raise families without books, I guess that just puts us ahead of schedule, no? A bit farther along the Path of—”

She stopped. Danel was shaking his head.

“No, Jenin. That is not the way things will be.

“Oh, we four might as well try to survive. But even if we did make it to some far-off valley, beyond reach of whatever demise the aliens have planned, it’s unlikely we’d adapt to a strange ecosystem in time. Rety told us that her band lost half its first generation to accidents and allergic reactions. That’s typical for sooner groups, till they learn what’s safe to eat or touch. It’s a deadly, trial-and-error process. Four just isn’t enough.”

“I thought—”

“And that leaves out the problem of inbreeding—”

“You can’t mean—”

“But even if we could solve all of those dilemmas, it still wouldn’t work, because we aren’t going to start a band of fallen savages, spiraling into ignorance, even if the scrolls give that fate all sorts of fancy names. Human beings never came to Jijo for the Path of Redemption.”

Dwer looked up from his work. Lena halted as well, holding a thick tube with a clockwork fuse at one end. Up to that point, Ozawa had been explaining what Dwer already knew. But now silence reigned. No one was going to move or speak until the sage explained.

For a second time, Danel Ozawa sighed deeply.

“The secret is passed on to a few, each generation. But I see no point in concealing it from you three, whom I now think of as kin, as family.

“Some of the other five races were appalled when we built Biblos. The Great Printing seemed to imply we had no intention of ever forgetting. Our founders did some smooth talking to explain the flood of books. A temporary measure, they called it. A way to help all races live in enough comfort to concentrate on developing their souls, till we’re spiritually ready to move on down the Path.

“Officially, it’s the long-term goal of each of the Six. But the Tabernacle founders never meant their descendants to devolve down to speechless proto-humans, ready for some race of star-gods to adopt and uplift.”

The sage paused until Dwer finally broke in. “Then why are we here?”

Danel shrugged. “Everyone knows that each race had ulterior motives. Those forbidden to breed at home sought a place where they can have offspring as they please. Or take the g’Keks, who tell of persecutors, hounding them throughout the star lanes.”

“So humans came to Jijo because folks on Earth weren’t sure they’d survive?”

Ozawa nodded. “Oh, we’d made a few friends, who helped Earth get a Library branch. And having uplifted two client races, we won low-level patron status. Still, Galactic history doesn’t offer much hope for a wolfling race like ours. We already had enemies. The Terragens Council knew Earth would be vulnerable for a long time to come.”

“So the Tabernacle crew weren’t outcasts?”

Danel ticked a thin smile. “A cover story, in case the colonists were caught, so the Council could disavow them as renegades. In fact, our ancestors were sent to find a hidden refuge for humankind.” The sage raised his hands. “But where? Despite rumors, no route is known beyond the Five Galaxies. Within them, every star is catalogued, many with lease-holders to watch over ’em. So the Terragens searched the Great Library to see what other races did in our position.

“Despite flaws, the ‘sooner’ phenomenon showed promise.”

Lena shook her head. “There’s a lot you’re leavin’ out. Like what we’re supposed to be doing here, while hiding, if our mission isn’t to go down the Path.”

“If Lester or the others know, they haven’t told me,” Danel answered. “Maybe we’re to sit tight and wait for the universe to change. Anyway, that hardly matters now. If our culture’s finished, I won’t have any part in going on as wretched fragments, whelping kids who will be no more than savage brutes.”

Jenin started to speak, but then pressed her lips.

“At least we know Earth has survived a few hundred years,” Dwer said.

“Though the forayers say there’s a crisis,” Lena noted. “With Earth in the middle of it.”

Danel looked away, his jaw set.

“Hey,” Dwer said, “aren’t the sky-humans exactly what that Terra Council wanted? To have a branch of humans off somewhere safe from whatever happens to Earth? Those guys you met back at the Glade have these Rothen characters to protect them.”

Danel exhaled. “Perhaps, though who knows if they’ll remain human under that influence? The irony of being murdered by cousins seems too much to bear.”

The sage shook himself, as if shedding cobwebs.

“Let’s prepare that pyre. If these items cannot serve a civilized tribe of exiled Earthlings, then we can at least do our duty by this world and leave no dross. Lena, set the timer to go off one day from now, if we don’t return.”

“Return?” Lena looked up from her preparations. “I thought we were giving up—”

She rocked back as the sage whirled, with some of the old fire in his eyes.

“Who said anything about giving up! What’s the matter with you three? Look at your faces. Are you going to let one little setback get you down?”

A little setback? Dwer wondered, glancing at the blast scars and shattered trees surrounding the urrish encampment. “I don’t get it. You said we can’t finish our mission.”

“So?” Danel Ozawa demanded. “We’re adaptable. We’ll switch missions! We’re not colonists anymore — so what?

“We can still be warriors.”

Rety

The prisoners lay dejected. In muddy wallows, necks drooping, already stinking after two days’ confinement in the dank pen. Thirteen urs who would have preferred the arid plateau where they had settled, till a warcraft screeched over their camp without warning, casting lightning, driving the survivors toward Jass and the other hunters^ waiting with rough ropes.

Thus Kunn had fulfilled his side of a bargain, ridding the hills of a recent, hated urrish infestation. In return, Jass was to guide Kunn to the site where he and Bom first saw the flying bird-thing. No one knew why the deal later broke down — why Jass abruptly changed his mind, preferring the robot’s caresses over giving the pilot what he wanted.

No one except Rety.

Binni used to say — why defy men, who can beat you if you make them mad? Use words to nudge and guide the brutes. Make ’em think it was their idea all along.

But I kept talking back, didn’t I?

Well, I finally tried it your way, Binni, and know what? You were right. Nothing I could do to Jass could ever hurt him like he’s hurting himself, right now.

Bom was guarding the gate to the prisoners’ pen. The burly hunter hurriedly obeyed her command to open up, not once meeting Rety’s eyes. He knew where his pal was now. Just two things kept Bom from sharing the same fate. First was his notoriously poor sense of direction. Alone, he could never find the place where he and Jass had spotted the metal bird.

The other thing was Rety’s whim. Bom’s abject cringing pleased her more than screams. This bully was scared half out of his breech-clout.

When she glared at the boys spitting at the prisoners, they jumped off the wall and ran. She cast curt laughter after them. The tribe-kids never used to speak to her in the old days, either.

She entered the pen.

Ul-Tahni, leader of the unlucky urs, greeted Rety with a fluid bow of her long neck. From a gray-fringed snout, she launched into a series of whistles and clicks, till Rety broke in.

“None o’ that now!” she admonished. “I don’t follow that jabber.”

Wincing, Ul-Tahni switched to Anglic.

“I afologize. Your attire deceives the eye into seeing a Galactic-level entity.”

Rety lifted her head. “You weren’t dee-seeved. That’s exactly what I am.”

I hope, she added inside. Rann and the others could change their minds before the ship returned, especially once she gave them all she had in trade. Even if the forayers kept their word, she would, in time, have to learn all those crazy languages they used among the stars.

“Again, regret for having offended. Is it true, then? You have veen adofted off Jijo’s forlorn desert into the running-clan of star creatures? What a fortunate youngling you are.”

“Yeah,” Rety agreed, wondering if the urs was being sarcastic. “So, yee says you’re ready to tell us what your bunch was doing out here, beyond the Rimmers.”

A long sigh blew the gray fringe.

“We arrived, disgracefully, to set uf a colony, freserving our kind in a secret sanctuary.”

Rety grunted. “That much is obvious. But why here? Why now?”

“It is a site already ascertained to ve ha vita vie… suitavle for sustaining Earthlings, and therefore the donkeys we rely on. You yourself testified to that fact.”

“Ah.” Ul-Tahni must have been one of the junior sages in the pavilion when Rety told her story to the High Council. “Go on.”

“As to our haste — we sought to elude the fate soon to fall on the Slofe, annihilation at the hands of star-felons.”

Rety reacted angrily. “I’ve heard that damned lie before. They’d never do a thing like that!”

Ul-Tahni rocked her head. “I stand corrected. Clearly such fine entities would not slay folk who had done them no hurt, nor cast death without warning from a cloudy sky.”

This time the sarcasm was thick. Rety glanced at a young middling urs with a nasty burn along one flank, from the flying robot’s heat beam.

“Well, I guess it’s just your tough luck we had reason to come visit, asking directions, and found you already at war with my old family.”

“Not war. A transient discord. One we did not initiate. Naturally, your cousins were shocked to see us. Our idea was to vanquish their reflex hostility with resolute friendliness. To induce cordiality with gifts and offers of assistance.”

“Yeah, right.” Rety knew how early human settlers had been treated by urrish clans of yore. “I bet you also counted on having better weapons than any they had here.”

Again, a snorted sigh. “As your associates crushed us, using fower far greater than our own? It kindles wonder — could this chain of uneven strength ve extrafolated?”

Rety didn’t like the bemused look in those beady urrish eyes. “What do you mean?”

“A conjecture. Could there exist forces as far suferior to your new lords as they are over us? In all the wide galaxies, can one ever be sure one has chosen the right side?”

The words sent twinges up Rety’s spine, reminding her of recent disturbing dreams.

“You don’t know nothin’ about galaxies an’ such, so don’t you pretend—”

At that moment a sudden yelp cut her short, as yee popped his head out of the pouch, mewling with unease. A ripple of reaction spread among the prisoners’ husbands, who emerged howling, swinging their heads to face south. Soon the larger females followed suit, clambering to their feet.

Rety worried — was it a revolt? But no, clearly something was unnerving them.

“What d’you hear?” she demanded of yee.

“engine!” the little urs answered, corkscrewing his agile neck.

A moment later Rety sensed it too. A distant whine. She brought a hand to the bump near her ear and pressed.

“Hey, Kunn! What’s going on?”

There followed a long pause, during which the open line relayed cabin sounds — switches being thrown, motors revving. Finally, the pilot’s voice buzzed near her skull.

“Jass chose to cooperate, so we’re off now in search of the source of your metal bird.”

“But I want to go too!”

Kunn’s reply was cool.

“Jass told me everything, including the reason he resisted so hard. It seems you convinced him I’d finish him off the moment he told what he knew. That he would live only until then. Now why did you tell the poor bastard such a thing, Rety? It caused inconvenience and unnecessary pain.”

Rety thought — Unnecessary for you, but darn important to me! Revenge was only half of her rationale for manipulating Jass. But it would have been enough all by itself.

“Kunn, don’t leave me. I’m one of you now. Rann an’ Besh, an’ even Ro-pol said so!”

Suddenly she felt small and very vulnerable, with urs in front of her and Bom behind at the gate, surrounded by others who would surely love to bring her down. She covered her mouth and lowered her voice, whispering urgently for the little transmitter, “The sooners’ll turn on me, Kunn. I know it!”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before.” Another long pause followed. Then — “If Rann hadn’t insisted on long-range radio silence, I could talk it over with the others before deciding.”

“Deciding what?”

“Whether to bring you back, or to leave you where you began.”

Rety fought down a trembling that coursed her body, in response to Kunn’s harsh words. Her hopes were a bright tower that seemed about to crash.

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll leave the robot to protect you, Rety. It will do what you say till I get back. Do not abuse the privilege.”

Her heart leaped at the phrase — till I get back.

“I promise!” she whispered urgently.

“Treat this as a second chance. Question the urs. Destroy their weapons. Don’t let anyone leave the valley. Do a good job and we may wipe the slate clean when I return — providing my hunt flushes out the prey at last.

“Kunn out.”

The line clicked, cutting off the cabin sounds. Rety quelled an urge to press the button and choke out another plea to be taken along. Instead she set her teeth grimly and climbed the fence rails to stare as a silvery dart lifted out of the narrow canyon, turned in the morning light, then streaked southward, leaving her with a heart as cold and barren as a glacier.

Dwer

The sooner village was a simmering place that squatted at the base of a canyon filled with dense, sulfurous, listless air.

A hellish place, from an urrish point of view. Dwer’s high vantage point looked down at the captives, in their cramped pen. Long necks drooped, and they lay like the atmosphere, barely moving.

“I count about a dozen, not including dead ones, just as you said,” Lena noted, peering through her compact telescope. “I guess you’ll do as a tracker, fella-me-boy.”

“Thanks, Oh Mistress of Forbidden Devices,” Dwer answered. He was getting used to Lena’s ways. She always had to get a little bite in, even when making a compliment. It was like a noor, purring on your lap, who repays your petting by dipping its claws briefly into your thigh. The funny thing was — he’d actually been getting used to the idea of making a life with this woman, along with Jenin, Danel, and the lost tribe of human exiles. Even discovering the urrish invasion hadn’t made the notion absurd. Danel had been right. There might have been room for common cause.

But now all such ideas were obsolete. Over to the left lay the reason why — a silver-gray machine, shaped like a hoonish cigar with stubby wings. It was the first alien thing Dwer had seen, since almost being killed with Rety by a floating robot that evening in a mulc-spider’s lair.

The sky-car should not be here in the badlands.

It meant the demolishment of all their plans.

It also had no business being so beautiful.

Dwer was proud of this overlook, high on the canyon wall, which surveyed from the village, past the steam pools, all the way to the flying machine, sitting in a nest of crushed vegetation.

“I wish the yokels would stop movin’ around. It’s hard gettin’ a good count,” Lena complained. “At least the kid said the local bully-boys won’t let women use weapons, so they aren’t combatants to worry about.”

She sniffed disdain over such a stupid waste of resources.

Dwer would prefer not to fight Jijoan humans, as well as the alien kind. Anyway, their only real chance lay in achieving complete surprise.

Sharing the cramped ledge, Dwer felt Lena’s breast pressing against his arm, yet it provoked no arousal. Their bodies seemed to grasp that a change had occurred. There would be no more passionate episodes. No life-affirming gestures. Sex and gender were important to colonists planning to raise families, not to a raiding party bent on destruction. All that mattered now were skills. And an ability to count on one another.

“It looks like a standard atmospheric scout,” Danel Ozawa said. “Definitely a fighter. I wish we brought along just one text on Galactic technology. Give me the glass, will you?”

Like Dwer’s and Lena’s, Danel’s face now bore jagged, charcoal slashes that were supposed to muddle the pattern-recognizing optics of alien killer machines. Dwer preferred thinking of it as war paint.

“Well, I’ll be—” Danel muttered. “Here, take a look. I guess now we know how the star-gods found this place.”

When Dwer got the telescope, the first thing he noticed was that the flyer’s hatch now lay ajar, revealing part of the interior, including banks of control panels. If only we were close right now, he thought. With the door open and no guard robot in sight…

“Look to the right, up the. trail a ways,” Danel urged.

Dwer shifted the spyglass, sweeping till he glimpsed a small figure dressed in one of the aliens’ one-piece garments, moving toward the sooner encampment.

“Great Ifni’s Egg!” he yelped.

“What is it?” Lena demanded, grabbing the scope as Dwer rolled on his back, staring past tangled branches at a murky sky.

“Well, well,” Lena muttered. “Looks like she caught up with us, after all.”

“I should’ve strangled her when she stole my bow. I should’ve left her to the damn spider.”

“You don’t mean that, son,” Danel chided.

Dwer knew the sage was right. Still, he grumbled. “Oh, don’t I? She was a pain from the start. Now she’s ruined everything.”

“Perhaps Rety was coerced.” But the sage sounded unconvinced as they took turns with the telescope. Each of them had seen the girl’s clothes, her freshly coifed hair, and her confident stride, swaggering into camp like she owned the place.

“She’s gone to see the prisoners,” Lena reported, a little later. “Talking to one of ’em now… Those urs sure look ragged, poor things.” Lena tsked, and her sympathy was clearly more than sarcastic. “I wish I could make out—”

She stopped as Dwer suddenly gripped her arm, reacting to a faint, high keening that seemed to scrape the inside of his skull. The noor beast chuttered irritably, shaking its head and sneezing. Soon the noise deepened and grew loud enough for the rest of them to hear. Even Jenin, who was on lookout duty upslope, hissed a worried query.

The clamor came from the aircraft. It made Dwer’s teeth feel as if they were loosening in their moorings.

“Something’s coming out!” Lena exclaimed, turning the telescope. “It’s the robot!”

Dwer saw a hovering black dot with dangling tendrils separate from the ship, whose hatch then closed. The air shimmered from expelled dust as humming motors lifted the scout off the ground. The gray arrowhead was larger than the house Dwer grew up in, yet it wafted upward and turned lightly, stopping when its nose pointed almost due south. Then the heavens echoed its fierce growl as it plunged away, receding faster than anything he had ever seen.

“Damn,” Danel cursed. “We missed our best opportunity.”

Lena wasn’t watching the departing scout. Instead, her eyes followed the black robot, now cruising toward the tribal village.

“Don’t worry,” she assured. “I expect we’ll get another chance.”

The glavers were back. Of all irksome times for the stupid things to tag along!

They must have followed, at their own lazy pace, all the way from last night’s campsite. Now they mewled unhappily at the sights and smells of the fetid ravine, but that did not keep them from following Dwer as he left the shelter of the forest, heading toward the cluster of rude huts.

Dwer glanced back at Lena Strong, crouched at the edge of the last line of trees. With raised eyebrows, she asked if he wanted her to shoot the idiotic beasts. He said no with a terse headshake. They were dangerous only to a man who was trying to hide. And he did not mind being conspicuous at this point. In fact, that was the general idea.

Still, when he passed a rotting log, he gave it several swift kicks, exposing a rich trove of grubs swarming the interior. The distracted glavers crooned delight and dove in for the kill.

Which left just one irritation, the scampering noor beast, who darted through the meadow grass and between his legs.

Trying to ignore Mudfoot and carrying his bow slung over one shoulder, Dwer walked with feigned nonchalance past a devastation of jagged tree stumps toward the bustling sooner tribe. The. prisoners’ pen lay a quarter of an arrowflight to the left, the huts to the right. Straight ahead, a cook fire fumed smoke that hovered lazily, as if reluctant to depart.

Come on, people, Dwer mused when he was over halfway across the pocket meadow and still unnoticed. Don’t you have any son of sentry system?

He pursed his lips and whistled a tune — “Yankee Doodle,” the first thing to come to mind.

Finally, one of the kids peering at the urrish captives glanced his way, did a gaping double take, and began screaming, pointing at Dwer.

Well, whatever works.

Their reaction might have been different as recently as a week ago. For generations these people had seen no outsiders at all. Now, after making contact with an urrish band, then flying aliens and a lost cousin transformed into a goddess; they took his arrival pretty well. Only three out of four ran away, howling in terror. Hesitantly, with goggle-eyes that showed white around the rims, the remainder gathered to stare at him, edging forward in a clump when he showed no sign of aggression.

Dwer motioned for one boy to come forward.

“Yeah, that’s right, you! Don’t worry, I won’t bite.”

He squatted down in order to seem less imposing. The boy, a filthy urchin, looked like one for whom bravado was as important as life. Dwer knew the type. With others watching, the lad would rather die than let himself show fear. Puffing his chest out, the kid took several steps toward Dwer, glancing back to make sure his courage was being noted.

“What a fine young man,” Dwer commented. “And what would your name be?”

The boy looked nonplussed, as if no one had ever asked him that before. Didn’t everybody in the world grow up knowing each other’s names?

“Well, never mind,” Dwer said, aware the throng was growing larger as curiosity overcame dread. “I want you to run an errand for me. If you do, I’ll give you something special, understand? Good. Please go to Rety. Tell her someone she knows is waiting for her—” Dwer turned and pointed the way he came. “—over there. By the trees. Can you remember that?”

The boy nodded. Already, calculating avarice had replaced fear. “Whatll I get?”

Dwer pulled a single arrow from his quiver. It was made by the best fletchers of Ovoom Town, perfectly straight, with a tip of razor-sharp Buyur metal that gleamed in the sunshine. The boy reached out, but Dwer snatched it back.

“After you bring Rety.”

Their eyes met in brief understanding. With a blase shrug, the boy swiveled and was gone, squeezing past the crowd, shouting for all he was worth. Dwer stood up, winked at the staring tribesmen, and began sauntering back toward the forest, whistling casually. Glancing back, he saw a good part of the clan following at a distance. So far, so good.

Oh, hell, he cursed when he saw the glavers. Get out of the way, will you?

They had finished browsing at the rotten log and now sauntered toward him. Dwer worried — when they saw the villagers, might they panic and bolt toward the prisoners’ pen? The female glaver turned one globelike eye toward the approaching crowd. The other eye then followed, a sure sign of concern. She snorted, and her mate reared backward in surprised dismay. They whirled — and fled in exactly the direction Dwer feared!

With a tracker’s sense of light and shadow, he noted Jenin Worley crouching by a tree, where the forest came nearest the prison-corral. One of Dwer’s objectives had been to attract notice away from there.

He had the bow off his shoulder and an arrow drawn when Mudfoot suddenly reared out of the tall grass, waving its forepaws in front of the glavers, hissing. The glavers skidded to a halt and reversed course with astonishing spryness, cantering away with the noor yipping close behind.

For some reason the locals found all of this terrifically funny. It didn’t seem to matter that they had never seen a noor before. They guffawed, pointing and laughing uproariously at the glavers’ distress, clapping as if Dwer had put on a show for their benefit. He turned around, grinning as he reslung the bow. Anything to keep their regard riveted this way.

Abruptly, the crowd fell silent as a shadow fell across Dwer. A low, eerily familiar whine raised shivers up his spine. Shading his eyes against the sun, he looked up toward a hovering black shape, all jutting angles and hanging tendrils, like a certain demon that still haunted his dreams — the fire-spitting monster that had finished off the old mulc-spider of the mountains. Despite a pen-umbral glare surrounding it like a fierce halo, he made out the same octagonal symmetry. Only this one wore a rounded silhouette, perched on one jutting shoulder.

“So. You made it all the way here, after all,” the silhouette commented. “Not bad for a Slopie. You’re no fluff-baby, I guess — though the trip seems to’ve wore you down to a rag man. I seen you look better, Dwer.”

“Thanks, Rety,” he said, edging aside so the sun would not blind him. He also wanted to get closer to the forest. “You, on the other hand, never looked so good. Been taking it easy?”

She answered with a curt chuckle that sounded husky, as if she hadn’t laughed a lot lately. “I turned down the offer your sages made — to have me hike all the way back here afoot, guiding a bunch o’ geeps. Why walk, I figured, when I can ride?”

Now he could make her out clearly. Except for the old scar, she seemed quite made over, as they said in certain parts of Tarek Town. Yet the same sullen wariness lay in her eyes.

It was also his first chance to have a good look at an alien machine. Eight even rectangles made up its sides, black without highlights, as if sunshine had trouble glancing off it. Below, a pair of tendril-arms dangled menacingly on either side of a globe that was studded with glass facets and metal tubes. Danel had warned him to watch out for that globe. On top, where Rety sat in a lashed-on saddle, the robot’s surface looked flat, except for a spire rising from the center. An “antenna,” Danel had identified it.

Dwer nodded toward the hovering machine.

“Seems you’ve been making new friends, Rety.”

The girl laughed again — a sharp bark. “Friends who’ll take me places you never saw.”

He shrugged. “I’m not talking about star-gods, Rety. I mean the friend giving you a ride, right now. Last time I saw one of these things, it was trying to kill us both—”

She cut in. “A lot’s changed since, Dwer.”

“—and oh, yeah, it was burning the hell out of that bird thing you cared so much about. Ah, well. I guess sometimes it just pays better to join those who—”

“Shut up!”

The robot reacted to its rider’s anger by bobbing toward him. Retreating, he noted movement by the spherical cluster of lenses and tubes under the machine’s blocky torso, turning fluidly to track him. On a hunch, Ozawa had called it a weapons pod, and Dwer’s every clawing instinct confirmed the guess.

A crowd gathered beyond Rety, most of the human tribe, watching this confrontation between a ragged stranger and one of their own who had harnessed a flying devil. It must seem a pretty uneven matchup.

Some things are exactly as they seem.

Dwer caught a flash of movement toward the prison-pen. Jenin, making her move.

“Well?” Rety demanded, glaring down at him.

“Well what?”

“You sent for me, idiot! Did you hike halfway round the world just to try and make me feel guilty? Why didn’t you stay away, once you saw what’s going on here?”

“I could ask you the same question, Rety. What are you doing? Showing off for the folks? Getting some payback? Did the star-gods have some special reason to need a guide to this armpit of Jijo?”

Complex emotions crossed her face. What finally won was curt laughter.

“—armpit? Heh. That just about tells it all.” She chuckled again, then leaned closer. “As for what Kunn is lookin’ for, I can’t tell ya. It’s a secret.”

Rety was a lousy bluffer. You don’t have the slightest idea, Dwer pondered, and it galls you.

“So, where’s that pack of Slopies you were gonna lead out here?” she demanded.

“In hiding. I came ahead to make sure it’s safe.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? Nothin’ dangerous here, except maybe my nasty ol’ cousins… an’ a bunch of smelly hinneys—”

When she said that, a piping whistle, like faint, piccolo laughter, vented from a padded pouch at her waist.

“And killers from outer space?” Dwer added. “Planning to wipe out every thinking being on the planet?”

Rety frowned. “That’s a damn lie! They ain’t gonna do it. They promised.”

“And what if I showed you proof?”

Her eyes darted nervously. “More lies. They just wouldn’t do nothing like that!”

“Like they wouldn’t shoot a poor, unsuspecting bird-thing, I suppose. Or attack those urs without warning.”

Rety turned red as Dwer hurried on.

“Come along. I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

Before she could refuse, he turned to walk back toward the forest. “I left it over there, behind that stump.”

The girl grumbled but followed on her robot steed. Dwer worried that the machine might be more sophisticated than Ozawa guessed. The reference works the sage had studied were three hundred years out of date and sparse on details. What if the robot both understood speech and could tell he was lying? What if it could read his thoughts!

The tree stump was thicker than most. The sooners must have worked hard with their primitive tools to hack it down, when they made this clearing. Dwer bent to pick up two things he had stashed on the far side. One, a slender tube, he slid up his tunic sleeve. The other was a leather-bound book.

“What is it?” Rety demanded, nudging the robot to drop closer. Atop the machine’s flat upper surface there protruded short tentacle-things with glossy ends. Three swiveled toward Dwer, while the fourth watched for danger from the rear. So far, Danel Ozawa had been right about the robot’s mechanical organs. If these were “eyes,” then that narrow spindle jutting up from the robot’s center—

“Show me!” Rety demanded, dropping closer still, peering at the small volume, containing about a hundred paper pages, a treasure from Danel’s Legacy.

“Oh, it’s a book,” she muttered with contempt. “You think you can prove anything with this? The Rothen-kin have pictures that move, an’ talk, an’ tell you anythin’ you want to know!”

Exactly, Dwer thought. They can create images to show exactly what you want to see.

But he answered with a friendly nod. “Oh, sorry, Rety. I forgot, you can’t read. Well, open it up, and you’ll find this book has pictures, too. I’ll explain them, if you like.”

This part had been Danel’s idea. Back at Gathering, the lesser sage had seen Rety flip through dozens of picture books in apparent fascination — when she felt no one was watching. Dwer was trying to mix insult with encouragement, shame with curiosity, so the girl would have no choice but to look at this one.

Wearing an unhappy grimace, Rety reached down further and accepted the book. She sat up and riffled the paper leaves, clearly puzzled. “I don’t get it. What page should I look at?”

The robot’s hover-fields brushed Dwer’s leg, making all the hairs stand on end. His mouth felt dry, and his heart pounded. He fought a wave of anticipation-weakness by pure force of will.

“Oh, didn’t I open it to the right picture? Here, let me show it to you.”

As Rety turned toward him, the robot dropped lower. Dwer raised his arms, reaching toward the book, but staggered when he bumped the robot’s side.

It was fiery death if the thing thought it was being attacked. Would the machine recognize normal human clumsiness and make allowances?

Nothing happened. The robot didn’t fear his touch.

“Hey, watch it,” he complained. “Tell your pal here to take it easy, will you?”

“What? It’s not any o’ my doin’.” She kicked the machine. “Leave him be, you stupid thing!”

Dwer nodded. “All right, let’s try again.”

Both hands went up. His legs were like coiled springs — and Dwer’s life seemed to float above him like a sound, ready to flee on the wind.

He leaped.

The robot’s brief hesitation ended in a sudden yowl, joined instantly by a series of sharp detonations, coming from the nearby forest. Heat flared between Dwer’s legs as he yanked two of the sensor-heads, using them as hand-holds to swarm desperately up the machine’s flank, away from the deadly ball. Pain erupted along one thigh the split instant before he hauled his torso atop the gyrating machine. He clutched the bucking thing with his left hand while his right brought forth the slender tube.

The world was a blur of trees and clouds and whirling sky. More explosions pealed, accompanied by horrible sizzling sounds. Desperately, Dwer shoved the tube at the robot’s central spindle and squeezed.

Traeki enzymes combined and emerged in an acrid, fizzing stream, vanishing down openings at the spindle’s base. Dwer kept squirting despite the robot’s wild pirouettes, until his aim was spoiled by Rety, shoving his arm away. Only then did Dwer note her screams amid the general tumult. When her teeth clamped on his wrist, Dwer’s own howl joined in. The half-empty tube escaped his convulsing hand, tumbling away.

Purple steam rose from the robot’s center. The spindle began to slump. Dwer shook Rety off and with a reckless cry threw himself on the drooping antenna, taking it in both hands, heaving with all his might. He shouted an ululation of triumph when the whole thing tore free at the base, though it left him rolling across the flat surface, clutching futilely for a hold.

Flailing, he tumbled off the edge, falling toward the meadow floor.

Dwer never worried, during that brief interval, about striking some rock or jagged tree stump. The machine would likely dice him to bits before he ever hit the ground.

But he was not sliced. Nor did he strike the rough meadow. Blinking in surprise, he found that a pair of arms had caught him!

Relief was tempered when he saw the arms belonged to the robot.

Oh, great. Out of the frying pan and into the—

There came another series of detonations, and the hovering machine rocked as if slammed along one side. Hanging below the octagonal body, Dwer saw part of the globe underneath explode in a spray of steel and glass. The weapons-ball was already a smoking ruin. Not a single lens or tube appeared intact.

Great work, Lena, Dwer thought, proud of how well she used the terrible devices that only she and a few others on the Slope were trained to use. Firearms that did not use a bit of metal. He turned his head in time to see more brief flares as Lena or Danel fired again from the forest edge. The machine rocked as another exploding shell impacted. This time one of the dangling tentacles holding Dwer shuddered and went limp.

That was definitely Lena’s work. What a clever girl, he thought, half-dazed from pain. The sages chose well. I would’ve been a lucky boy, if things had gone according to—

He got no chance to finish the thought, as the robot whirled around to flee, zigzagging across the meadow, using his body as a shield between it and danger. Dwer saw Lena rise and take aim with her launcher, then lower it, shaking her head.

“No! Shoot, dammit!” he screamed. “Don’t worry about me!”

But the rushing wind of flight carried off his words. Lena dropped her weapon and hurried to a figure lying on the ground nearby, slumped beside a second missile tube. She turned Danel Ozawa over, revealing a red river pouring from his chest.

The robot’s next zigging turn spun that poignant scene away. Now Dwer spied terrified villagers cowering beyond a low hill of garbage near the prisoners’ pen. So dismayed were they by the battle that they seemed unaware of the group now circling around behind them — Jenin Worley and a dozen newly released urs. The former captives held ropes and arbalests. Dwer prayed this part of Danel’s plan would turn out all right.

“All or nothing,” Ozawa had said. “Either we live together as civilized beings, or let’s end it. End it now — bringing as much harm to our enemy as we can.”

Dwer had time for one benedictory thought, as Rety’s cousins grew aware of the reversal taking place behind their backs.

Learn to be wise…

Then the village vanished as the fleeing machine streaked around a bend, whipped through a forest aisle, and plunged almost straight downhill, accelerating.

Rety was still shrieking from her perch, wailing for it to stop. From Dwer’s point of view, dangling underneath, the ground seemed to sweep by in a blur. Fighting the buffeting wind, he brought up both arms to grab the base of the tendril wrapped around his torso, holding him horizontal to the rushing terrain. If he tore it loose, the fall might kill him, but anything would be better than this torment.

He tugged with all his might, but the tentacle would not budge. It flexed occasionally, yanking him up in time to miss being smashed against some boulder or shrub. Soon they were swooping beside the canyon’s central stream, an obstacle course of sudden turns and bitter, stinging spray. Disorientation forced Dwer to close his eyes, moaning.

Faintness took hold, threatening to haul him the rest of the way to unconsciousness.

Come on, he chided. Now’s not the time to give up. If you can’t escape, at least check and see if you’re bleeding to death!

Pain helped him concentrate, ignoring the looming vertigo. It came in a nagging medley, from a searing ache in his left thigh, to Rety’s teeth-marks that still oozed blood from his right hand, to the chafing rub of the robot’s arm, all the way to a series of awful, biting scratches that clawed into his hip, then his abdomen, and finally his chest — as if someone were stabbing him with clusters of sharp needles, working their way up along his battered body.

He opened his eyes — and shrieked at the sight of a gaping mouth, filled with horrible, glistening fangs!

“Oh, Ifni…” he moaned. “Oh, God oh God oh God…”

Even when he knew the truth about the specter that loomed inches from his face, it didn’t help much. At this point, and for a while longer, all Dwer could manage was a frail, thready whimper.

Mudfoot, the noor, yawned a second time, then settled into the narrow space between Dwer’s chest and the robot’s hard shell. The beast watched the boy — jibbering from one shock over his limit. With a sigh of affectionate scorn, it started chuttering, less to comfort Dwer than for its own simple pleasure, making a sound somewhat like that of a hoon sailor, umbling a song about the joys of travel.

Asx

If the Commons survives — if we six endure into times to come — no doubt it will be called the Battle of the Glade.

It was brief, bloody, and tactically decisive, was it not, my rings?

And strategically futile. An interval of flame and terror that made my/our manicolored bands so very glad/sorrowful that we are traeki.

Sorrowful because these stacks of rings seemed so useless, so helpless to match the frantic pace of other beings whose antic warlike fury drives them so quickly in a crisis. With such speed that waxy imprints cannot form within our core, except duras behind actual events.

Sorrowful that we could not help, except to serve as chroniclers-after-the-fact, bearing testimony to what already took place.

And yet we are also glad, are we not, my rings? Glad because the full impact of violence never quite fills our central cavity with a searing steam of dread. Not until the action is already over, leaving the dead like smoky embers, scattered on the ground. That is a blessing, is it not, my rings? To us, horror is seldom an “experience,” only a memory.

It was not always so. Not for the beings we once were, when our kind roamed the stars and were a terror on the Five Galaxies. In those days, creatures like us wore bright shining rings. Not only the ones given to us by our patrons, the Poa, but special collars, donated by the meddlesome Oailie.

Rings of power. Rings of rapid decisiveness and monumental ego. Had we possessed such rings but moments ago, they might have spurred us to move swiftly, in time to help our friends during the struggle.

But then, if the old tales are true, those same rings might have kept us from having friends in the first place.

Stroke the wax. Trace the images, frozen in fatty drippings.

Images of atrocity and dread.

There lies Bloor, the portraitist, a smoldering ruin, draped over his precious camera.

Nearby, can we trace the slithering path of a dying creature? A symbiont crawling off the face and brow of the dead Rothen named Ro-pol? Revealing in its wake a sharp, angular visage, humanoid, but much less so than we had thought. Less charismatic. Less winsomely womanlike than we were led to believe.

If Bloor died for seeing this, are all eyes now accursed?

There, screams Ro-kenn, ordering Rann, the star-human servant, to call back the fierce sky-car from its distant errand, even if it means “breaking” something called “radio silence.”

There, screams Ro-kenn once more, ordering his slave-demons, his robots, aloft to — “clear all of these away.”

Meaning us. All witnesses to this abrupt revelation. All who know the secret of Bloor’s Bane.

Up, up rise the awful instrumentalities, meting out slashing doom. From their bellies lash spears of cold flame, slicing through the stunned host, turning it into a roiling, screaming mob. Four-legged urs bound high into the air, screeching panic. Qheuens cower low, trying to burrow away from rays that carve chitin as easily as flesh. Humans and hoon throw themselves flat on the ground, while poor g’Keks spin their wheels, trying to back away.

We traeki — those left at Gathering after weeks of silent departures — mostly stand where we were, venting multi-fragranced fumes of woe, erupting wet fear-stench as cutting beams slice through popping toruses, spilling rich liquor, setting our stacks afire.

But look! Stroke the image layers one more time, my rings. See the darkly clad ones? Those who rush forward tvoward the terror, not away? Our vision spots scry little, even by daylight, for their clothing blurs them in uncanny ways. Nonetheless, we/i trace squat qheuen shapes, running with humans crouched on their backs, and urrish troops sweeping alongside. There comes, as well, a booming noise, a rarely heard sound, that of lethal hoonish ire. From their midst, these dim shapes raise strange tubes, even as the soaring demons turn their killing rage upon the newcomers, slashing at them mercilessly.

There is a place…

It is here, in our core, where the wax depicts only a roar — a flash — an overload of searing afterimages — and then…

What followed now lies before us.

Cinders — where the robots fell to sully Jijo’s holy soil, shattered and reduced to dross.

Three sky-lords — stunned to find themselves held captive, taken prisoner, stripped of their godlike tools.

A poignant field — strewn with lamented dead. So many dead.

A makeshift infirmary — where even more wounded writhe and grimace, crying diverse plaints of pain.

Here, at last, is something we can do in real time. Perhaps they can use the assistance of an old retired pharmacist.

Is it agreed, my rings?

Wonderful unanimity. It makes easier the unaccustomed haste as i hurry forth to help.

Sara

The hard march had taken nothing from the tension between the two rebel groups. UrKachu’s painted warriors and Dedinger’s dun-clothed hunters eyed each other warily while eating separate meals under an aged canopy of patched and weathered blur-cloth, never wandering far from their weapons. Members of each group took turns sleeping after supper, no more than six at a time, while the rest kept watch. Sara found it hard to imagine this alliance lasting a dura longer than it was in both sides’ perceived self-interest.

What if fighting broke out? In these close quarters it would be no artful exercise in maneuver and strategy but a roiling tumble of slashing, grappling forms.

She recalled the frontispiece illustration in volume one of The Urrish-Earthling Wars, by Hauph-hutau, one of the most popular titles published since the Great Printing. In small type, the great historian acknowledged copying the scene from a Tabernacle-era, art book, showing the sculpture frieze that once surrounded the Parthenon, in ancient Greece. That famous relief depicted a long row of mighty figures, clenched in mortal combat — naked men brawling with furious monsters, half human and half horse, who reared, kicked, and slashed at their foes in a bitter fight to the death. According to myth, the feud broke’ out during a festival of peace and concluded with extinction for the centaur race.

Of course, an urs had almost nothing in common with a centaur, beyond having four legs and two arms. Yet the symbolism of the frieze was so eerie, so unnerving, that it became notorious during the age of struggle, helping steel the resolve of both sides. Sara had no wish to see such a bloody scene enacted in front of her.

Of the others taken captive at Uryutta’s Oasis, young Jomah was already out like a snuffed candle, curled in his bedroll, fast asleep. The Stranger picked away at his meal of corn mush, frequently putting down his spoon to pluck a series of soft notes from his dulcimer, or else performing the ritual of counting its strings. Numbers, it seemed, were like music to him — a window to what he once had been, more faithful than the knack at sentences, that he had lost.

Kurt, the exploser, doodled on his notepad, occasionally picking up one of the little books he kept so secretively, either in his valise or the inner pocket of his gown. He covered his work whenever any human or urs passed close but seemed not to mind that Prity lingered nearby, after bringing his meal. Putting on her best I’m-just-a-dumb-critter act, Prity spent some time pretending to inspect her leg for lice. But soon the little chimp was peering over the exploser’s shoulder, rubbing her chin, drawing her lips past her gums, exposing a grin of silent, delighted interest.

Sara had to squelch an urge to laugh out loud. At the same time, she worried.

The Urunthai and desert-men are politely leaving Kurt alone, for now. The habit of deference to explosers runs deep and is hard to break. But they also promised “persuasion” when we reach our destination. Does Kurt really imagine he can keep his work secret then?

He’d be better off throwing his notebooks into the fire.

Sara restrained her own curiosity. Explosers were a mysterious, formidable sect. Frankly, she doubted the wisdom of the Urunthai in messing with them.

“We won’t wait till nightfall, vefore setting forth,” Ulgor told Sara, passing near her bedroll. “I’d catch uf on sleef, if I were you.”

The urrish tinker’s unpainted pelt, well-kept mane, and piercing black true-eyes set her apart from her wild cousins. There was no air of antagonism, no anti-human hostility. After all, Ulgor had visited Dolo Village dozens of times, always on friendly terms.

Sara shook her head. “I can see what drives the others. Religion can be a strong motive when you think your descendants’ salvation is at stake. But what do you get out of all this, Ulgor? I know it can’t be profit.”

The narrow, conical head split in a triangular grin.

Sara did not need a rewq to know the expression was sardonic.

“Why exclude the overt reason? Earnings. Personal gain.”

Sara quoted scripture: “ ‘What use will be all your wealth and goods, two leagues down Redemption’s Road?’ ”

Ulgor breathed a soft whistle of laughter. “Little good at all. On the other hoof, hero status can ve useful in a clan of savages. Ferhafs I will ve one of the great chiefs of the plains, higher in renown than Ur-Chown!”

Ulgor’s self-mocking tone dismissed that idea, while encouraging Sara to keep guessing.

Sara suddenly felt tired. “You’re right, Ulgor.”

“You think so?”

“Indeed I do. It would be a good idea to catch up on sleep, while I can.”

The tinker stared, twisting her neck a half spiral. “I thought you wanted to know—”

Sara covered a yawn. “Please be assured, Ulgor, that I am very sorry I asked.”

With that she turned away to lie down on her bedroll. Prity hurried over to tuck the blanket around Sara, then chuffed at Ulgor, shooing her away. Sara listened to the urbane traitor’s hooves pound a nervous retreat, as if burdened by Sara’s contempt.

She really was exhausted. Her muscles throbbed from several days’ unaccustomed exertion, and her tailbone from jarring contact with the hard leather saddle. And there was an emotional element.

I was given a job to do. Several of them. Now it looks like I won’t complete even one.

A low, repetitive thrum pervaded the pavilion, like the synchronous, pulselike snoring of the urs. It was the Stranger, plucking his dulcimer’s lowest string, so softly and regularly that no one, not even UrKachu, might find any cause for complaint, creating a lulling rhythm, resembling less a heartbeat than the rise-and-fall cadence of ribcages — both urrish and human — as members of both parties slept.

Ariana figured he’d develop new skills, to compensate for those he lost, she thought. I guess this musical sensitivity is pan of that.

Just after dawn, while the two radical groups worked to set up camp, the spaceman had played for the urrish males, briefly released from the close confines of their wives’ pouches, taking advantage of the break to stretch their legs in the fresh air. A few males kept close watch on maturing larvae, with six short legs and no arms, almost ready to be spilled onto the plains and fend for themselves.

Using two curved mallets to strike the dulcimer strings, the Stranger had accompanied himself as he sang a chain of children’s melodies, familiar enough to flow smoothly from undamaged memory. Sara even recognized a few. Among the rest, one seemed especially apropos.

He repeated the verse several times, and soon, under his encouragement, the males were beating time to the song, crooning along. Sara recalled thinking, if he wound up stranded on Jijo and had no future in any other profession, the fellow could certainly find employment in one of those modern Tarek Town day-care centers.

If we still have such luxuries when all this is done.

Prity plopped herself in front of Sara. Sniggering softly, the little chimp flattened a patch of sand and began drawing figures with a stick — mostly convex, parabolalike shapes that climbed, turned over, and fell once more to zero. Prity chuffed and pointed, as if eager to share a joke. But Sara could not concentrate. Fatigue overcame the throbbing of her abused body, drawing her down to helpless slumber.

She dreamed of Urchachka — world of grass — its plains whipped endlessly by hot winds, seared by frequent fires, or else swept by scorching rains of glittering volcanic dust. After each scalding episode, the plains seemed strewn with ashy death — yet bright stems always burst forth in prolific flashes, pushing skyward fast enough to be tracked by a patient eye.

On busy Urchachka, water seldom stayed long on the ground. Life sucked it up, caching it in buried tuber reservoirs that meshed across whole continents, or else in bulbous, multihued spore-pods, or in the lush grass stems themselves. These, in turn, were browsed by herds of grazing beasts — nervous brutes whose three-pronged horns used to wave threateningly toward danger, till they found themselves tended in great herds, protected by creatures more formidable than any past predator.

In the manner of dreams, Sara dwelled concurrently both within and outside the images. At one level, her mind’s eye peered through a forest of waving fronds, feeling wary and fearful, alert to dodge being trampled by the great beasts, or worse, being gobbled by accident in their ever-crunching maws.

Holes in the fecund loam led down to underground warrens — a lightless, crowded realm of sweet roots and frequent violent encounters — a domain that had lately begun to seem all too cramped, confining. The world of light above now appeared paradise by comparison — for those large enough to snake their necks above the tips of wafting grass.

With a slim, detached portion of her mind — the fragment that knew she was dreaming — Sara marveled at the power of imagination. A gift allowing her to inflate what little anyone on Jijo knew about Urchachka — from terse entries in a prelanding encyclopedia, plus a few fables passed by urrish storytellers. Tales about days before their fallow breed was discovered on its torrid home world, by a patron race who dropped from the sky to claim that strain of clever herders, guiding them upon the Rising Path. The road of uplift, toward the stars.

The detached part could observe but had no other power over a fantasy like this one. A color dream, potent, forceful, and emotional. A fey fantasm, with momentum all its own. A vision of clouded, insentient paranoia.

Darting between bulbous stems, evading the big dumb herbivores, she followed a smell of drifting smoke and came upon the trampled circle surrounding a smoldering pit of ashes, with a crowd of lanky four-legged figures lounging around its rim. She peered cautiously at the Big Ones. Only lately had she recognized them as larger versions of herself, older cousins and aunts, instead of dangerous horrors with flashing hooves and alarming tempers. Now she spied on them, creeping closer, fighting an ever-growing temptation.

An urge to step forward, out of the grass, and announce herself.

She had seen others do so, from time to time. Other small ones like herself, shaking off the dust of their burrows and stretching out their necks. Boldly moving to assert their claim, their birthright to a place by the fire. About a third of those who did so were ignored, then tolerated, accepted, and finally welcomed into the tight web of intermeshing loyalties. The rest did not meet happy ends. There seemed to be a trick of timing involved. A ritual of twisting necks and groveling abasement that varied from group to group.

Then there was smell. It was best to approach a band that had a good aroma. One like your own.

Stealing closer, she watched the party of adults, some with pouches that squirmed with lucky males who had found safe refuge from the dangerous world. Dimly, she recalled having once lived in such a place. But now she was much too big.

The adults lay sheltered by tall stems from the beating sun, resting with their long necks curled round upon their backs. Now and then, one of them snorted when her breathing fell briefly out of phase with the others. The third eye — the simple one without lids — kept watch.

Overhead, a swarm of tiny flying things hovered in parasitic avarice, wary for any chance to dive and briefly suck at an exposed lip, or pouch flap, or even a blood-rich eyelid, and get away again before quick hands or jaws snapped. Sara watched as one unlucky bug was snatched before landing. In a fluid motion, the adult popped the buzzing bloodsucker into her mouth, crunching away without bothering to rouse from her slumber.

I don’t recall diving insects when I read about the urs homeworld, pondered the detached part of Sara’s drowsy mind, or in any tale of Urchachka.

Gradually, it dawned on her that she wasn’t making it all up. Rather, her unconscious was borrowing from events in the real world. Her eyes were open just a crack, and through the dreamlike diffraction of her interlaced lashes, she was watching actual urs do what she had thought she imagined.

As before, half of the Urunthai lay curled on sandy wallows, breathing with uncanny unison under the blur-cloth canopy. Nothing seemed much changed from when she had last gazed at her captors. But then something happened that correlated eerily with her dream — a low, buzzing sound, accompanied by whizzing motion through the air. A small, insectlike object darted from left to right, toward one of the dozing urs. In a flash, the sleeper snatched the hurtling speck out of the air with her gaping, three-jawed mouth, chewing contentedly with both main eyes still closed. The central one, unlidded and faceted, retained the glassy dullness of full sleep as the warrior settled back down, snoring heavily.

I’ve never seen that happen before, Sara pondered. Are there bugs here in the foothills that attack urs like those on their homeworld?

Taut, bowstring tension ran up Prity’s spine as the little chimp edged backward, pressing against Sara with an elbow. Sara slowly lifted her head to scan the Urunthaj. Those awake fondled their arbalests and switched their tails nervously, as if beginning to suspect that something was wrong. Their long necks stretched,

waving left all at the same time, then at Dedinger’s desert men, and onward to the right. When they turned away again, there came another low twanging buzz, so familiar it almost seemed unnoticeable. Once more, a small shape sped toward a dozing urs. Again, it was snatched from the air and consumed without rousing the sleeper.

Sara followed the arc of that brief flight, backward across the tent to where the Stranger sat at his dulcimer, still plucking at the lowest note, creating a steady hypnotic rhythm. The rewq draped over his eyes only partly masked an enigmatic smile.

Sara realized two others were watching the star-man — Dedinger and Kurt the Exploser.

Sniffing at the humid air, UrKachu motioned for Ulgor to join her outside. The four painted warriors on duty went back to tending their weapons.

The Stranger bided his time, softly plucking the string. He kept up a slow, soothing cadence until the wary Urunthai guards settled back down. Then, with his left hand, the Stranger touched the side of his head and slipped two fingers under the filmy covering provided by the rewq — reaching into the hole in his head, Sara realized, with a touch of nausea. When the fingers emerged, they held a tiny object, a pellet, about the size of one of the message balls used in the Biblos Library. While his right hand plucked the string another time, his left brought the pellet forth, poising it for the next stroke.

He’s using the dulcimer as a launcher! Sara realized, watching in fascination.

She noted a slight difference in the sound, a buzzing dissonance as the tiny pill spun through the air toward another sleeping urrish rebel. It missed this time, dropping half a body length short of the target.

Dedinger was in motion, surreptitiously nudging his comrades, using furtive hand signs, telling them quietly to prepare. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he wants to be ready when the pulp hits the screen.

The tent flap opened, and UrKachu reentered, without Ulgor. The chieftain sauntered over to one of the sleeping Urunthai and prodded her-an action that normally would have a wiry urs on her feet in an instant. But there was no response. The raider kept on snoring.

Alarmed, UrKachu began jabbing, then kicking the sleeping warrior. Others hurried over to help. In moments it grew clear — of eight who had gone down to sleep, all but two were lost in a soporific stupor.

The dulcimer twanged again, and several things happened at once.

UrKachu swiveled angrily and shouted in Anglic — “Stof that infernal racket, now!”

Meanwhile, a tiny object sailed over the dying coals, toward the confused warriors. One of them snapped reflexively, taking it with her jaws. Almost instantly, her nostril flared and her neck stretched to full extension, trembling along its length. The urs began to wobble at the knees.

Sara would not have thought she could react so fast, scrambling backward with Prity, gathering up the blanket-swathed Jomah, hauling the sleeping boy to the rear of the tent. Swift as ghosts, Dedinger’s men were already deploying in a crescent, surrounding the Urunthai, with arrows nocked and drawn.

“What’s going on?” Jomah asked, rubbing his eyes.

The wobbly urs drifted to one side, fell against another, and collapsed, ribcage heaving slowly, heavily.

“Remain calm,” Dedinger announced. “I urge you to lay down your weapons. You are in no condition to fight.”

UrKachu stared blankly, dismayed by the sudden reversal of power. Her group had outnumbered the humans. But now her remaining followers stood in a cluster, unready, at the Earthlings’ mercy. The Urunthai leader growled.

“So, in this (perfidious) treason, the nature of human (so-called)friendship is revealed.”

“Yeah.” Dedinger laughed, a little smugly. “As if you planned things any different, when the chance came. Anyway, there is no cause for panic over this. We’ll still keep our side of the bargain, only as senior partners, with a few slight changes, such as the destination for tonight’s march. Once there, we’ll let you send a message—”

He might have meant to sound soothing, but the words only infuriated UrKachu, who cut in with a shrill battle cry, hurling herself toward Dedinger, unsheathed knives flashing.

“No!” screamed the Stranger in an outburst of reflex horror as feathered shafts sprouted from the thorax of the Urunthai leader. “No dammit! dammit! dammit!”

UrKachu’s remaining followers followed her example, charging into a hail of arrows. Half were riddled during the first half dura. The survivors leaped among their bipedal foes, slashing and drawing some blood before being dragged down by weight of human numbers.

Finally, with no living Urunthai left on their feet, the panting, wild-eyed desert men began turning their knives on the unconscious ones, those whose drugged stupor never let them take part or defend themselves.

To the Stranger, this was the final straw. Screaming curses, he threw himself on the nearest human, throttling his neck ganglia. The hunter struggled briefly, then sagged with a moan. The star-man leaped at another, hurling streams of epithets.

Sara pushed Jomah toward the tent flap and cried — “Prity, take him to the rocks!”

In the blurry muddle of split instants, she saw three of Dedinger’s hunters turn and assail the Stranger. One tumbled away, tossed by some tricky twist of the alien’s body, while another found himself suddenly burdened with a new problem — Sara — hammering at his ribcage from behind.

If only I listened, when Dwer tried to teach me how to fight.

For a moment things went well. Sara’s short-but-burly adversary groaned and turned around, only to catch her knee in the gut. That didn’t stop the hard-muscled hunter, but it slowed him, letting Sara get in two more blows. Meanwhile, the Stranger threw his remaining foe aside in a dazed heap and started to turn, coming to her aid—

The avalanche hit then. A tide of male-human wrath that dragged both of them down. Sara struck ground with enough force to knock the breath from her lungs. Someone yanked her arms back and sharp agony made her gasp, wondering if the limbs were about to tear off.

“Don’t harm them, boys,” Dedinger commanded. “I said ease off!”

Distantly, through a muzzy fog of pain, she heard blows landing as the former sage slapped and hauled his men back from the brink of murderous revenge. Desperately, Sara managed to swing her head around to see the Stranger, pinned down, red-faced, and bleeding from the nose, but well enough to keep up a faint, hoarse stream of inventive profanity. The outpouring was as eloquently expressive, though not quite as fluent as song. Sara worried that shouting and straining so hard might reopen his injuries.

The leader of the human rebels knelt by the Stranger, taking his face in both hands.

“It’s too bad you can’t understand me, fella. I don’t know what you did to the urs, but I truly am grateful. Made a complicated situation simple, is what it did. For that reason, and because your living carcass is still valuable to us, I’ll hold back my guys. But if you don’t settle down, I may be forced to get unpleasant with your friend here.”

With that he nodded pointedly at Sara.

The Stranger glanced at her, too, and somehow seemed to grasp the threat. His stream of scatological curses tapered, and he ceased heaving against the men holding him down. Sara felt relieved that he stopped straining so hard — and strangely moved to be the reason.

“That’s better,” Dedinger said in the same smooth, reasonable voice he had used before UrKachu’s fatal charge. “Now, let’s take a look at what you’ve got hidden in that handy little hole in your head.”

The ex-sage began to peel back the Stranger’s rewq, revealing the wound from which he had taken the mysterious pellets.

“No!” Sara shouted, despite sharp pain when two men yanked her arms. “You’ll give him an infection!”

“Which his star-friends will cure, if they so choose, once we make our exchange,” Dedinger answered. “Meanwhile, this stuff he was feeding the urs seems worth looking into. It could prove powerfully handy during the years ahead.”

Dedinger had finished pulling back the rewq and was about to insert his hand, when a new voice broke in, whistling a trill-stream of rapid Galactic Two.

“Sara, I (earnestly) urge you to (swiftly) close your eyes!”

She turned her head and glimpsed Kurt, the Tarek Town exploser, holding a small brown tube. A burning string dangled from one end, giving off sparks at a furious pace. The exploser cranked his arm back and threw the tube in a high arc, at which point Kurt dove for cover.

Sara squeezed her eyes shut tight as Dedinger began to shout a warning to his men—

A flash like a thousand lightning bolts filled all reality, stabbing through her eyelids. At the same instant, roaring noise shook her like a bird in a ligger’s jaws, rolling the mass of sweaty men off, releasing her twisted arms, so that waves of relief clashed with agonizing sensory overload.

It was over almost the moment that it happened — except for howling reverberations, rebounding off the stony pillars that now could be seen towering over the shredded tent … or perhaps they were shock waves hammering inside her own head. Hurriedly she fled the tangle of screaming men, who clutched their useless eyes. Blinking past purple spots, she made out one other human who could stand and see: Dedinger, who would also have understood Kurt’s brief warning. The desert prophet peered ahead while holding forth a gleaming blade of Buyur metal.

He yelled past the bedlam in her ears and charged at Kurt, knocking the old man down before the exploser could bring a new weapon to bear. Sara recognized a pistol from pictures in ancient texts.

“So much for exploser neutrality!” Dedinger shouted, twisting Kurt’s arm until the old man groaned and the weapon fell. “We should have searched you, and tradition be damned.”

Overriding pain, Sara tried to spring at the ex-sage, but he lashed out with savage backhand, knocking her down amid a swirl of spinning stars. Consciousness wavered. Only gritty resolution let her rise again, turning on her knees to try one more time.

There came another flash-and-roar, as Dedinger fired the pistol just past her and then tried awkwardly to cock for a second shot — before being bowled over by two hairy forms, hitting him from both sides. Sara somehow managed to fling herself into the fray, joining Ulgor and Prity in subduing the former scholar, whose wiry strength was astonishing for his age.

Fanaticism has rewards, she thought, as they finally managed to tie Dedinger’s hands and feet.

Recovering his weapon, Kurt backed away, taking a rocky perch where he could watch the moaning remnants of the desert gang, as well as the surviving urs. Especially Ulgor. The tinker’s sudden return might have been fortuitous, but that would not make him trust her.

A sticky sensation made Sara stare at her hands, trying to separate red stains from vision-blotches left by Kurt’s stun bomb. The stains had the color and scent of blood.

It isn’t me — and Ulgor wouldn’t bleed this shade of—

It was Prity stanching a crimson flow from a deep gash in her side. Sara took the trembling little chimp into her arms and fought a sudden fit of weary sobs.

The wrecked tent was a horror scene of dead or delirious Urunthai and flash-blinded men. The Stranger seemed in better shape than most, when he finally staggered to his feet. At least he could see well enough to help Ulgor bind the arms of Dedinger’s. crew, while young Jomah returned to hobble the legs of sedated urs. Still, it soon grew clear that the battered man from the stars could not hear a blessed sound.

Against every instinct that urged her to be thorough, Sara forced herself to make do with a pressure compress over Prity’s wound. It did not seem immediately life-threatening, and someone else might yet be saved by quick action. So with the chimp’s grunt of approval, she hurried over to one wheezing quadruped, a young urs thrashing feebly with an arrow through her neck, whose labored breathing made noisy, purple bubbles—

—and who died with a shuddering gasp of despair, before Sara could do a thing to help her.

Asx

Battle-echoes gouged the land, only a few short duras ago. Firebolts lashed from heaven, scourging the Six, laying open flesh, chitin, and bone.

Traekis gushed molten wax across the tortured valley, or else burst aflame, ignited by searing beams.

Oh my rings, what images lay seared throughout our trembling core!

The dead.

The dying.

The prudent ones, who fled.

The rash heroes, who came.

Their blur-cloth tunics are now grimy with mud and grue, no longer quite as slippery to the eye. Young tree farmers and donkey-drivers. Simple keepers of lobster pens. Junior hands on the humblest fishing coracles. Volunteers who never imagined their weekend training might come to this.

Our brave militia, who charged into that maelstrom, that cauldron of slicing rays. Amateurs, soft and unready after generations of peace, who now wince silently, clenching their limbs while horrid wounds are dressed or while life slips away. Bearing agony with the gritty resolve of veterans, their suffering eased by the only balm that soothes.

Victory.

Was it only yesterday, my rings, that we feared for the Commons? Feared that it might fly apart in jealous hatreds fostered by crafty star-devils?

That dread fate may yet come to pass, along with a thousand other terrors. But not today. Right now the arrogant aliens stand captive, staring about in surprise, stripped of their godlike tools, their hellish robots destroyed by the crude fire-tubes of our brave militia.

A day of reckoning may not be far off. It could swoop at any moment from an unforgiving sky.

Yet there is exhilaration. A sense of relief. The time of ambiguity is over. No more subtle games of misdirection and innuendo. No more pretense or intrigue. Ifni’s dice have been shaken and cast. Even now they tumble across Jijo’s holy ground. When they stop rolling, we will know.

Yes, my second ring. You are right to point this out. Not everyone shares a sense of grim elation. Some see in recent events cause for nihilism. A chance to settle old grudges, or to spread lawlessness across the land.

One vocal minority — “Friends of the Rothen” — demands the release of Ro-kenn. They advise throwing ourselves prostrate before his godlike mercy.

Others call for the hostages to be done away with at once.

“The starship may have means to track its lost members,” they claim, “perhaps by brain emanations, or body implants. The sole way to be sure is to grind their bones and sift the dust into a lava pool!”

These and other testy groups might think differently, if the full truth were told. If only we sages could divulge the plans already set in motion. But secrets are innately unfair. So we hold our peace.

To the folk of the Six, we say only this—

“Go to your homes. See to your lattice screens and blur-webs. Prepare to fight if you can. To hide if you must.

“Be ready to die.

“Above all, keep faith with your neighbors — with the Scrolls — with Jijo.

“And wait.”

Now our survivors hurry to pull down pavilions, to pack up valuables, to bear the wounded off on litters. Children of all races spend one sacred midura scouring the Glade for every scrap of dross they can find. Alas, that midura is all we can spare for tradition. There will be no festive mulching ceremony. No gaudy caravan, bearing ribboned crates down to the sea and ships — the most joyous part of any Gathering.

Such a pity.

Anyway, the aliens’ ruined station will take generations to haul away, one donkey-back at a time. That task must wait for after the crisis. If any of us remain alive.

The hostages are spirited off. Caravans depart toward plains, forest and sea, like streams of sentient wax, creeping in liquid haste to flee a fire.

The sun retreats, as well. Bitter-bright stars now span that vast domain called The Universe. A realm denied the Six, but where our foes roam at will.

A few of us remain, rooted to this sacred vale, awaiting the starship.

Are we/i in agreement, my rings? To linger near the Holy Egg, resting our base on hard stone, sensing complex patterns vibrate up our fatty core?

Yes, it is far better to rest here than to go twisting up some steep, rocky trail, hauling this old stack toward an illusion of safety.

We shall stay and speak for the Commons, when the great ship lands.

It comes now, roaring out of the west, where the sun lately fled.

A fitting replacement, the ship hovers angrily, erupting a brilliance that puts daylight to shame, scanning the valley floor with rays that sear and scrutinize. Scanning first the ruined station, then the surrounding countryside.

Searching for those it left behind.