Final Review

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

It was all Monitor Commander Drinnil’ib could do to keep his only slightly overweight mass of Do’utian muscle and blubber calm on his reserved pad in the cozy, by Do’utian standards, Trimus University auditorium. Everyone said that his “Memoirs of a Planet Monitor” was a solid, if unexciting, favorite for the non-fiction award, but his tail would grow no longer with a display of eagerness.

The Human master of ceremonies, Richard Moon, was a bright new humorist with a bushy blond mane around his head who’d won the nonfiction award last year. He, Drin remembered, won it for “The Flying Whale,” an account of balloon-borne anthropologist Doglosha’idn’s gargantuan adventures above the Kleth-set-tled outer pole of Trimus. Richard Moon was saying something intended to be funny, but Drin’s attention was elsewhere.

His friend and frequent partner, Monitor Lieutenant Mary Pearce, sat on the edge of his pad, and playfully nudged his head back and forth to distract him. Was his agitation that obvious?

He nudged her back, gently. It would take six of the tiny humans, laid from foot to head, to equal his length. But in crowded places, she was much more mobile and, for her size, surprisingly strong—she moved his massive beak with relative ease. This was the genetic heritage of a high-gravity planet reinforced by the rigorous Monitor training regimen, Drin reflected, glad for something to distract his thoughts. The waiting was torture.

Mary’s touch comforted him and, in an exotic way, excited him. In the privacy of his mind, he let himself savor that. They both had open, curious minds and a deep affection for each other having saved each other’s lives more than once. In the course of these years together, had touched in ways that more conservative Do’utians would find difficult to accept. His worries about this were getting increasingly easier to handle—but he was careful, very careful, about what he let beyond the beak.

Drinnil’ib had no wives, no beachhold, and played the rogue in Do’utian society—but his people could easily smell the difference between his contentment and the need of an unbeached bull looking for a challenge. Someone, or something, was filling that role in his life—and the scent of that made the Do’utian men he dealt with a little less defensive, especially those who fancied themselves minor beachmasters. His problem was with uncowed Do’utian women who hinted from time to time that they wished to join his nonexistent harem. Drin avoided mating, however, having had nothing but bad experiences in that part of life. If his feelings for Mary helped him avoid that, so be it. It was a private matter.

At last the crowd hushed and the award presenter, noted critic and personality Zo Kim, glided in over them and settled on stage with what passed for dignity in a Kleth—a couple of precise beats with his jet black wings and a firm two point landing with barely a hop. He was alone—a Kleth that liked to live on the edge. By reports, his mate, Bi Tan, was still on the outer pole, working on her next romance. She was well known for not carrying a comset, for reasons both Kleth and writers might understand.

Highly agitated, Zo Kim approached the master of ceremonies.

Moon wasn’t laughing now, though. In fact, as far as Drin could tell, the human looked honestly horrified. Was he refusing to give the presenter the envelope? Drin stifled himself—that might be his award. Zo Kim’s review of Drin’s book had been scathing, as had been his review of Moon’s. The stylistic pollution of this posturing pundit had been tolerated by the community because he could read so much and at least distill the current of content with some accuracy between ill chosen adjectives. After two centuries, toleration had become a kind of grudging, institutional respect. Perhaps Moon, despite his demeanor, was simply tweaking the tail of the too-pompous critic.

“You know, and I will know now!” Zo Kim shouted at Moon, lifting himself off the stage with a flap of anger to be head high with the human.

Cut the comedy, Drin thought, I want to know too!

“Very well,” Moon answered, barely audible, his posture one of defeat, not challenge. What, Drin wondered, was wrong? “It is your right to know. I was told of Bi Tan’s end by . . . someone I trust, I did not see it myself, but... I have no reason, myself, to doubt the report. But that, of course, does not mean the report is true. There may be a mistake, Zo Kim. I suggest you don’t be convinced without seeing the body.”

“You try to hide this from me just so that I can live long enough to present an award? For some mediocre Monitor’s stinking salacious pandering sadography?”

Sadography? OK, Drin thought, so he hadn’t pulled any punches about the time a primitivist harpoon had gone through Mary’s leg into his back. Occasional violence was a fact of monitor life, but something totally outside the experience of most citizens of Trimus, and he had not quite been prepared for the reaction, either in interest and in vituperation. But, wait a minute—had Zo Kim just said that he’d won? The tip of Drin’s tail lifted off his mat in anticipation.

Zo Kim snatched the envelope from poor Moon’s hand, tore it three times with the incredible quickness of the Kleth, and threw the pieces like so much confetti out from the stage. Now Drin was on his feet, both hearts pounding. Pollution! Why this? The hall resounded with rumbles, whistles, and gasps.

Then, in one horrible second, Zo Kim’s behavior made sense to Drin, like the sonic image of an iceberg resolving itself right in front of him where he’d been expecting a school of fish. Bi Tan’s end? Someone had just told Zo Kim that his mate had died. In the Kleth and their close relatives, the death of a mate triggered an involuntary, emotional loss-driven process whereby the remaining mate could both defend and feed its young, for a day or two. It happened whether they had young or not—Kleth were mated for life from hatching and could not mate again. It was as if the two were one organism, but in Zo Kim’s case...

“Drop dead!” a human voice yelled. Someone else probably hadn’t figured it out yet. Drin located the voice—a black-bearded man, short even by human standards, but stocky and strong looking. Gorman Stendt—Drin knew him by reputation—an author of heroic human space adventures who illustrated them with intricately detailed working models of imagined alien technology, working aircraft, war machines, cities and space stations, all rendered at micro scale. They floated or crawled around you as you listened to the narrative. He had an unlinked cybernetic system at his farm, eight-squared macrounits out of Trimus City, so each new work was a genuine surprise. His manners, Drin surmised, must have suffered from his isolation.

Zo Kim had recently excoriated Stendt’s historical novel concerning the first Kleth-Human contact as chauvinist, overdetailed, and boring. Its length was over four dimacrobytes and Drin had not had time to experience it yet—so Zo Kim may have been right—not that that mattered anymore.

Drin touched his beak to his mat. This was tragic. And suppose that Zo Kim’s information was wrong? Or worse—false? Drin’s professional interest was triggered by the thought, and he fixed an eye on Richard Moon. Pretending to be reluctant? He discreetly slid his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, slipped a branch into his ventral pouch, and triggered the alert on his comset. Mary, Do Tor and Go Ton, and any other monitors present would feel the low frequency signal and start paying attention, if they weren’t already.

“You and your spies and your claque can drop dead!” Stendt yelled at Zo Kim, still apparently ignorant of what was happening to the Kleth.

“Right on!” a Do’utian woman added.

“Shut your beak!” another human added—Drin couldn’t tell if at Zo Kim or his detractors.

This shouldn’t happen here, in public, Drin thought—a spectacle utterly at odds with the Compact’s goal of interspecies amity. Perhaps he could delay Zo Kim’s demise—move it out of view.

“Silence!” Drin finally roared. “Zo Kim, things may not be what you think! Hold onto that thought. You are not complete, you and Bi Tan have things to do. At least let the monitors investigate this rumor—you have enemies. It may be a lie, and if you let yourself believe it, you’ll kill her, too!”

The whispers hushed, as from perches, chairs, and pads, the audience realized what was about to occur. Stendt and the others, Drin thought, would wish to call their words back the rest of their lives—for drop dead was what just what Zo Kim was about to do.

The Kleth leapt to the podium in a single bound, already visibly trembling. The need for a Kleth to die when his or her mate died, and whatever assistance he or she is given, was normally a very private matter, not a public spectacle. But there had never, ever, been anything normal about Zo Kim.

“No, you phony. I know, now, that Bi Tan is really dead,” Zo Kim declared, shaking with an almost manic intensity. “Richard Moon is incapable of credible fantasy.”

Despite everything, a scattering of dry spouts, laughs, and chatters filled the hall. Zo Kim would go out like Don Giovanni, Drin decided. Unrepentant.

But Zo Kim had a surprise even there. “I suspected for days, but hung on in the balance as my body prepared itself—it will end quickly now. Well, everyone, whatever little merit she had as a mate or an author matters not now. Bi Tan was mine and, observe everyone, my destiny is to go with her.” Zo Kim’s wings raised in an unbalanced, almost involuntary spasm. He would not fly again. “I note that while there are two-eights and one of Bi Tan novels, there are none of Zo Kim. So she will fly higher in history despite my superior wit and literary sense. What irony!”

Zo Kim’s head jerked from side to side. The Kleth’s wings went out and in, restlessly. “What irony! My body has begun to prepare itself to feed the nestlings we never had because of Bi Tan’s career. It is now far too late for me to join the debate about engineering this out of our species, so please watch the effects for a while with whatever curiosity you may possess.” Zo Kim gave a horrid little cackle, both high and low pitched. “Become edified as I become putrefied! Consider it as performance art! I will have my fame, too!”

Did self-digestion trigger self-loath-ing? It might make some evolutionary sense, Drin thought, as an abandonment of all urge to self-preservation. With such analytical thoughts, he tried to put some emotional distance between himself and the awful thing happening in front of him.

“Yes, friends, it looks painful and it is,” Zo Kim continued, his dry intellect seemingly unaffected by what was happening to his body, “but the pain is curiously comforting. Drinnil’ib, you sterile, clinical, mannered murder detective: look, learn, and put a little sense of the horror of this in your next one. Eh?”

Drin rocked forward, his four powerful webbed claws digging into his pad, speechless now.

Zo Kim’s wings snapped in and out, and his head back and forth. “What a show, everyone! But I am getting bored now. Will someone help me end this? Someone with a little style? Do Tor and Go Ton, your execrable contributions to Drinnil’ib’s mindless horror at least had the minor virtue of being interesting. Would you? Please?” This was followed by some almost intelligible Kleth dialect.

Drin rolled an eye toward Kleth Monitors Do Tor and Go Ton, frequent collaborators in real life as well as popular history. In fiction, Go Ton swam in the currents of classic Kleth air-battle, sounded in multilevel free-verse, and had achieved some minor success, at least in terms of the number of downloads from the Trimus net. Enough success, it seemed, to attract Zo Kim’s withering attention.

Go Ton, characteristically ignoring her own treatment at Zo Kim’s beak, had earlier fumed to Drin about the extremity of personality defect required for a Kleth to be rejected by even its own mate. Even being apart for a few hours was risky for Kleth; living apart was a fatalistic, almost nihilistic act—and Drin was seeing the results of it now.

Do Tor, seated with his bright yellow mate, had been silent about Zo Kim’s insults, but now he flew up and lit about half a charter unit from the dying critic and came no closer.

“Calm down, Zo Kim. Shouting and fighting makes it faster and worse. You need to clean your nest one last time. Could you say something good about The Last of the Air first?”

“No!” shouted Zo Kim, his crest snapping erect.

Do Tor simply stood there. Kleth had different feelings about suffering. And death.

By the compact, Drin thought, Do Tor had reason to let Zo Kim suffer, but this was unseemly—the Kleth monitor was cutting his tail for a transitory revenge. How long was this going to go on? There were tales in legend of Kleth who had, by force of will, lasted as long as a Trimus week. Drin slipped his tongue out the corner of his beak and down into his ventral pouch. The hand on the left branch of his tongue found his gun and changed the load by feel—self-guiding darts, short ones for Kleth. He could double-check the gun’s audio display in a second when he had it out.

No, it wouldn’t do. Zo Kim was alone on the stage, and while he could probably lock on from here and deliver the euthanasia, probably wasn’t good enough in a crowded room.

“Mary,” Drin said softly. “Get your piece. It wouldn’t look right—if I did it.”

Mary nodded and raised her many-curved body with ever-fascinating, seemingly boneless fluidity. She drew her gun from her belly kit, loaded the nerve poison clip, and sprinted toward the stage. She seemed to almost fly, though her feet had to strike the aisle every half charter unit or so.

But Zo Kim himself broke the impasse. “I can’t say anything good about it, Do Tor, because I haven’t read it! Have mercy—I cannot fly. Look, the stage below me is stained! Isn’t that interesting, everyone? I am leaking! I am becoming very digestible, right before your eyes!”

Someone actually laughed—indigestible was a word Zo Kim often used to great effect in his critiques. He was clearly in agony with his morbid not-pain, but his brain would be the last thing affected, and he would probably be able to critique the process almost to the last, cutting and ironic as if by some unconscious mental reflex. Drin shuddered.

A putrid smell reached Drin. How long, he thought, could we, the arguable intellectual elite of three species who together have traveled the stars long enough to reach halfway to the core of the Galaxy, sit here and watch this?

Finally, Do Tor acted—apparently, the lack of a negative review was enough. With breathtaking quickness, his mouth was at Zo Kim’s offered throat. The latter shuddered, made one last reflexive flap of his mottled brown wings, and was still.

Mary reached the stage as someone belatedly told the curtains to close, and over her Monitor’s comset Drin heard Do Tor say, softly, “Tastes very sweet.”

“Richard Moon,” Mary called. Yes, of course, Drin thought as the fog of horror lifted from his brain, standard procedure called for an interview with whoever told a Kleth that their mate was dead, though obviously it had been the last thing Moon had seemed to want to do.

The shocked audience started, on its own, to leave its seats, pads and perches for the clean air outside, as silent as the dead themselves. Death was rare on Trimus, and when it happened it was almost always a fatal accident in some remote area, or the very private suicide of someone who had come to feel their time in the Universe was complete. This was unprecedented—the most private moment one could imagine of a sentient being turned into an awful public spectacle. An accident? Zo Kim was unloved, but this? Who would wish this on anyone?

“Richard Moon?” Mary repeated, somewhat louder.

Now Drin was fully alert and looking around the room. Their erstwhile master of ceremonies was nowhere to be seen. Drin’s award, if indeed he had won, was so many scraps of paper polluting the stage in front of the curtain and the first row of empty seats. Why? In the name of the Compact, why?

Drinnil’ib’s Trimus City office smelled of the sea, as well it should—a deep pool took up the western third of the hexagonal room and connected to the main canal. That, in turn, looped through the city from the North Sea from Miller’s Beach to Dori Bay, carefully arranged to let the Zom current, which impinged on the bay, flow through and keep it clean. Clean, neat, ordered.

Not ordered enough, Drin thought. He grabbed a crate of pollution effects samples from the misnamed protected regions of the south and moved it from under the main wall screen to the storage shelves and made a note to turn it over to Do Tor and Go Ton—he would have to delegate more, and the Kleth monitors were more naturally suited to monitor the pollution of these ad hoc human settlements in the protected region. He grunted. Some protection! The protected regions were crawling now with human primitivists and Do’utians playing old-time beachmaster.

Drin noted the mother of pearl century plaque with its silver 144 on the wall—a human decimal word for a Do’utian’s milestone rendered in Kleth base eight. It was, in itself, a symbol of the principles of Trimus he held sacred.

The office had been his for over a century, since he’d risen from Monitor to Monitor Lieutenant. He’d stayed there as he was promoted to Monitor Captain, and finally elected to the Trimusian Council and given the Monitor portfolio with the title of Monitor Commander. A human might have requested a larger office, or a Kleth a higher one. But for him, his length of tenancy on this artificial beach was a psychological reward. It would take a bomb to move him.

Unfinished business was stuck in the corners, some of which was probably as old as his occupation of the office. It would have to remain unfinished for a few more weeks, he realized. Pollution! That mess on the awards stage was contaminating everything in his life.

The ceilings were as high as he was long—almost a charter unit, and the arched windows in the southern three walls let in plenty of light during the day. But the surpassingly clever aspect of the office was that the southeast windows faced Ember directly, and its infrared glow fell on photovoltaic panels on the northwest wall, powering the office and the human offices above him. Those were much smaller, though still big enough to allow two Do’utians to visit in reasonable comfort.

Luxuriously spongy soft living carpet covered the entire room—no need for pads here—and it even ramped down into the sea door. Maybe he should go for a swim. Get some exercise. Write his reports with the currents cooling his brain, and download them later. He looked longingly at the sea water.

Someone was coming—he wasn’t sure how he knew. Perhaps his subconscious recognized a change in the pattern of ripples in the sea door. But such a small disturbance ... a child? No, a human woman broached the surface, and gracefully pushed herself up with her forelegs to the normal, for tailless humans, upright sitting posture. She opened her sea mask.

“Mary!” Of course. Doing things the Do’utian way as much as she could, to surprise and please him. Humans typically used the corridors, not the sea doors. But Mary loved being atypical. They’d been acquaintances for almost two centuries and partners for the last two-eights.

“Surprise! I just finished checking out a sub,” Mary said as she pulled off her flippers. “Mom says Gori’allolub is concerned about Zo Kim’s death.”

Drin dipped his beak in respect to the Council President. The fact that the case had the Long One’s attention made it all the more urgent. That Mary’s mother, Councilor Karen Olsen, was playing an active role in affairs again was also good news—she shared her daughter’s inclination toward his species, and, over decades, became too attached to one whose honor had come second to other loyalties. She had been devastated for years by the former long one’s belatedly honorable death. Did Mary, at her core, understand the difference between a useful partnership, and human mating, or the Do’utian beach, for that matter?

“Does that make sense?” Mary continued, “Surveillance will turn him up sooner or later.”

“A murder,” Drin rumbled, anguished, “may have been committed in plain view of eight cubed people, including you and the Councilman Commander of Monitors, and we just lay there like beached gluttons! Yes, the President’s interest makes sense! Besides,” he waved his tongue at the evidence boxes, “I don’t seem to be able to get anything else accomplished with this cow unbirthed!”

Mary giggled. One of the things that made her an easy partner was that she didn’t mind Do’utian beach language—there were a few human female monitors, that, once they understood it, felt offended. And the few Do’utian women in the monitor force... Drin shuddered and lowered his beak. Many of those already felt he was getting too familiar with Mary—to the point of compromising his position. So he kept quiet around them. And as long as he and Mary were discrete, most people didn’t object.

“So I’ve got the sub ready,” she said, back to business. “The connection with Richard Moon seems to be with the Do’utian writer, Gonikli’ibida. Which suggests we head north.”

Drin’s head came up at the name. She was a relative, and not all that distant.

“She’s a mutual friend of both Bi Tan and Richard Moon—to judge by the number of collaborations in the data base, and she was working on a second volume of a collaboration with Bi Tan on the weapons industry of primitivists.”

Drin nodded. A significant number of bored humans had fled the north to live “primitive” lives in natural reserve lands and waters in the south. One group had fallen into a dictatorship under a “Lord Thet” who seemed to have empire in mind and was busily trashing all the environmental restrictions and reinventing the wheel of human history. It didn’t surprise him that a conservative Do’utian like Gonikli’ibida and a radical Kleth like Bi Tan might find common cause in documenting “Lord Thet’s” efforts and their dangers.

An effort to exile Thet and his followers to a freshly bioformed world in the Aurum system had run afoul of outraged biologists and conservatives who had deliberately sabotaged the ecosystem of the new world to make it dangerous for settlement by primitivists. Drin had played a leading and ultimately tragic role in overcoming the conspiracy, but the ecological damage had been done, and any resettlement program was octades in the future. Human Monitor agents were trying, with mixed success, to attrit the colony voluntarily. Meanwhile, Thet was out of control, restrained only by threats of violence that, occasionally, had to be validated.

“Yes,” Drin added, “I know they were having a hard time with getting editorial support because of how Zo Kim panned the first volume for being too wishy-washy and boring.” With some justification, Drin thought— he’d read the first volume. But the word had to get out somehow.

Mary shook her head. “I have a hard time with Kleth publicly deriding his mate’s work.”

Drin nodded. A “Kleth Divorce” was common vernacular for any mutually destructive parting of the ways. “Zo Kim found pollution in everyone’s work. So if it’s murder, and Zo Kim’s reviews are the motive, we’ll have literally a million suspects, given how long Zo Kim has been cutting away at people’s artistic efforts.”

“Yeah. Well, anyway, I’d rather pursue that lead than try to locate Bi Tan.”

Drin nodded slowly; the body of Zo Kim’s mate had not been recovered—indeed, she might be still alive, working away in isolation, unaware that her mate was dead. If so, the approach to her would have to be sophisticated—and delayed as long as honorably possible.

One didn’t run up to a solitary Kleth and spout, “We’ve been looking all over for you! Uh...” Drin had no desire to view a repeat performance of Zo Kim’s death. If Bi Tan were still alive, the Kleth would handle it, in privacy, with dignity.

Drin had remembered the death of a fellow monitor whose mate had been killed in the line of duty with Do Tor and Go Ton. They silently offered him a drug to lessen the initial shakes, and left him alone in his office to close the couple’s affairs. A few minutes later, he’d invited the group back to say his farewells, and nodded to Do Tor. The Kleth were so intelligent that one sometimes let float loose the fact that they lived twice as close to death as a human or Do’utian, and had attitudes toward sacrifice, pain, and the eating of flesh that were so different, that the other two species’ instincts sometimes seemed mere variations on the same theme.

Handled properly, Bi Tan, if still alive, could make whatever statements she needed to make painlessly, finish her business, and depart with her dignity intact.

But Gonikli’ibida came first. The outward subservience of an intelligent Do’utian female was a fragile behavioral artifact, founded as much on fear as biology. Given a cause, a Do’utian woman could do anything to achieve her ends; however horrible, anything. It was their saying that the cow defends her children not to her death, but to yours. Gonikli had no children—but she was an author.

“It’s an old Do’utian family,” Drin said. “Relatives of mine. Their place is on the south coast of Droni Island, near the Innil Glacier. Actually, it’s not far from my birthplace. My sister lived with them as part of the Doglaska’ib harem.” By a face-saving formal arrangement only, Drin added to himself. Memories. His sister Bodil’ib had died in a fall on the glacier, almost eight-squared years ago, of a broken back and internal injuries before adequate help could reach her. He’d learned about it while in Monitor training. Officially, her life had been incomplete and she had struggled, courageously, against the end.

Her life was less incomplete than most knew. He hadn’t been there for her. He’d mated, imprinted, then denied it and left as if he were a human. It had seemed so reasonable, so Trimusian, at the time.

“Are you feeling OK, Drin?” Mary asked.

The Polar Sea was Drin’s element. As the temperature dropped his metabolism increased and he brought his sustained speed up to half a charter unit per beat. Northward, northward. Mary’s submarine kept pace beside him. Now and then he would sound deep, turn and fling his tail at the water five or ten times until he had to shut his eyes against the slipstream. Then with one mighty, convulsive twist, he’d broach like a rocket, shooting almost two charter units above the wavetops. From there, he’d scan the horizon for signs of food or distant land. Then he could either knife into the water to pursue a fish normally too fast for him to catch, or slam flat on the surface, scouring the parasites from his hide.

His monitor comset, of course, could tell him exactly where he was—but using that didn’t feel like seeing for himself. His was a spacefaring race and hungered for the wide view as well as the deep.

Once, just to show that her submarine could do it too, Mary followed him into the air, using its buoyancy tank exhausts like jets to nose it over smoothly into the water.

On one of these leaps he saw the wind ship; a cloud of sails scudding north.

Once they were under water, he let loose several blasts of sound and watched the sonic image of the water-air interface shimmer as the parts of his brain that actually “saw” interpreted the sonic information gathered by his ears. There was an oval bump about eight cubed charter units east of them. A check with the locator aerostat showed no electronics at that position. A primitivist whaler? This far north?

“Mary, look out for a primitive ship almost due east of us, possible poacher, about point four. No comset, or any electronics.”

“Roger, I have it at point-three-seven pi radians from north. Small single hull, just under two charter units. Wide beam. I don’t think it’s a whaler, Drin.”

“Let’s hope not.” He and Mary both still bore scars from an unlucky harpoon shot from an earlier encounter with a ship from Thet’s polar sea colony. Ignored by Trimus’s mainly complacent civilization of philosophers, recreationalists, and artists, it had recruited disaffected, hostile, or bored humans until it had become a behavioral problem. Drin and Mary had been given the job of cleaning up one of its nastier messes—humans hunting Do’utians with harpoons. “But we’d better check it out.”

“Let me lead, guy. Stay out of range, OK?”

As their relationship had progressed, Drin found Mary, more and more frequently, talking cow-to-calf. It was something they would have to discuss—sometime later. Despite the minor humiliation, her suggestion made sense, particularly since some of these primitivist humans would resist non-human monitors. But he had a suggestion of his own.

Pollution! Make that an order—he was senior.

“Mary, out of range shall be about a charter unit under the ship for me—and relay your voice through your sonar—I can handle the frequency shift. And you stay in the sub! They can see you easily enough through your canopy, and it’s solid diamond, which you are not. Also, let’s get Do Tor and Go Ton involved now.”

A macrobeat later, as Drin and Mary paced the ship below its horizon, the Kleth’s contrails traced a white vector toward their destination.

“Weapons not visible,” Do Tor sent, with an “oh, yes,” echo from his mate. “But two decks likely below what we see.”

“You stay in the aircraft, too.” Drin sent back. “No heroics.”

“Roger, stay in aircraft. Heroics depend on situation.”

Any other monitors would be treating him with beak-dragging deference—a danger in this situation. But Mary, Do Tor and Go Ton had been through too much to be awed by his new status; they’d spout before he wandered onto the wrong beach, thank providence!

Two turns of Trimus ago, Drin thought, I was waiting to receive a literary reward. Chaos and pollution!

“Ready when you are,” Mary sent.

“Let’s go in,” Drin ordered, vacated his lungs in a big steamy cloud, then sounded deep and headed toward the ship at an energy spendthrift charter unit a second, his undulating tail and body shoving water efficiently and purposefully behind him. He closed his eyes to protect them from the pressure and relied on the deeper but fuzzier audio image, illuminated as much by the noise of Mary’s submarine as by chirps of his own voice far above the range that she could hear. They were below the small ship in minutes. Drin stuck a hand out of his beak and gave her an OK sign, and watched her sub shoot toward the surface.

Mary hit them with her loudspeakers. “Sailing vessel, this is Monitor Lieutenant Mary Pearce. You are unregistered and in an ecologically sensitive area. Be advised that hunting large life forms is prohibited in these waters, and that I have back-up immediately available. Please state your business.”

Mary’s use of rank surprised Drin. Was this the same woman who, three years ago, had undertaken an interrogation in the tropics by walking up to another human completely naked and saying, essentially, “Hi, I’m Mary?” Well, she swam in colder waters now. As they all would until the council decided what to do with the primitiv-ists—and, somehow, did it.

“Mary Pearce?” the response came. “Should have known that by the way you ran that ship of yours up to me, lee side, smart and pretty. Yohin Bretz a Landend. Harbor pilot, ’till Lord Thet decided his mistress’ brother should have the job. Got this as a consolation prize.”

Drin released a bubble with his tension. This rustic human sailor had guided them through the harbor on their first eventful visit to Thet’s city state, and lived there all his adult life. In spite of his wildly different values concerning technology and sentient relations, Yohin had been a competent professional with a sense of his duty. Drin wondered how many of these wooden ships might get stuck in the polluted mud flats of Thet’s choked river delta, now that Yohin was no longer on the job. Thet used his harbor as a sewer.

“Yohin!” Mary cried out with relief. “Tell me you’re not poaching, please.”

“Not poaching a thing, don’t think so anyway. We take enough fish to eat. Small ones—nothin’ the size o’ your fish-man friend. Say, he your backup today?”

Rustic, but no idiot at all, Drin thought, laughing to himself. Still, he stayed under the boat, hiding his chirps in the random ocean noise while slowly building up a sonar image of the lower decks. Cabins, it seemed. No metal in contact with the hull.

“Now there, Yohin!” Mary laughed. “I’m supposed to ask the questions. No guns on board?”

“Got a rifle. Another consolation prize from Lord Thet—after what you folks did to his guard, he decided to get a little more advanced. Shoots good, too. Don’t think it would bother the fish-man though, and I’ve got other ways of catching fish. Hell, the way Lord Thet’s going he’ll just be another Trimus City in less than a century.”

Drin had heard and seen enough below; it was clearly a passenger vessel. He flicked his tail and rounded the hull, then slammed the ocean aside twice and shot two charter units out of the water. The decks were clear of anything suspicious as well. He dove in and surfaced beside Mary, taking care to minimize the splash.

The humans seemed to appreciate his athletic show—they were pointing and some of them clapping. At the rail of the ship was the lanky, thatchhaired human male he remembered; the man made a motion with his head that might have been surprise, or a greeting.

He pitched his voice low to carry clearly through the sea noise and the walls of the vessel. “Mr. Bretz a Land-end, Councilor Drinnil’ib, Commander of Monitors.”

“Well met, Commander. Impressive jump there. Getting used to you folks now.”

“How so?”

“Running tourists out of Trimus City since I left Thet. And, Lieutenant Pearce, I am registered—but I left the gadget on the dock. This is wood, wind, and sail here, no compromises.”

Mary laughed. “Drin, I don’t think they’re any threat to us. Yohin, do you still have slaves?”

“Yeah, but they can’t be slaves up here, so they’re crew. Recruited some more. Look up in the riggin—”

Drin looked, too. A human, heavily clothed, waved down at them. Did he remember the face from their adventure at Thet? Do’utian’s didn’t forget, he told himself, that was what all the extra brain mass was for. But connecting memories in real time was something else—and he’d gotten a lot of patterns stored in his two gross of Trimus years.

He looked at the side of the ship. It had two eights of ports all along the deck below the top deck, and there was a human face in every port but two—and those were Kleth! The ship was loaded with tourists! He even recognized some of the people from the awards event—Gorman Stendt’s black beard and the wild red hair of Nelle Yvle, the humorist. How embarrassing!

“Mr. Bretz a Landend,” Drin rumbled, “Next time, take that one polluting gadget with you. Then we can get to you if you need us, and we won’t bother you when you don’t.”

“Look, fish-man — Commander. That’s like being half pregnant. When I say I’m wood, wind and sail only I mean—hey, Mary Pearce what are you doing?”

Mary had emerged from the hatch behind her canopy and was pointing a marker gun at the wooden vessel. Drin barely heard the snap above the sea noise, but he saw the dart planted just above the waterline.

“You’re marked now, Yohin,” Mary shouted. “I’ve tagged you with a transponder. and your customers can’t arbitrate because it’s not your fault.”

Yohin scowled and shrugged.

“By the way, where are you headed?” Mary added.

“Hot Springs Island. Landfall tonight, if we don’t have any other delays.” Yohin replied, ignoring the dart. The volcanic island was about midway from Trimus City to their destination.

Drin’s ear coinset tone sounded. The Kleth wanted to speak to him.

“Hot Springs Island was last place Bi Tan seen,” Do Tor told him. “Writer’s colony there.”

Interesting. Bi Tan was connected with Richard Moon, Gonikli, Gorman Stendt, Yohin and his primitivist crew. But knowing where a Kleth had been seen two eights of days ago was about as helpful as knowing where a cloud had been. Kleth were naturally prone to flit wherever they pleased, and eight to the eighth years ago they had developed aircraft to do it farther and faster. Bi Tan—or her body—could be anywhere on the planet or in nearby space. Gonikli would be much easier to find.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Bretz a Landend,” Drin said. “We’ll be on our way now.” Drin sounded without further ceremony and resumed his course northward.

He was soon joined by Mary’s submarine. “What’s bothering you?” she asked.

“Memories,” Drin answered. “Of several kinds. From recently, and ... from my youth. I’d rather put you in their wake until I understand them better myself.”

Mary looked at him and put her hand on the inside of her canopy. Drin slowed and sent his tongue to her, grasping a cleat with the hand on the right branch while pressing the hand on the left against the canopy opposite her. He felt her warmth through that. Sometimes, words were not needed.

“Drin, it’s—it’s awesome.”

The Ib family complex was built on a great beach of black gravel now well above the tide line. They were approaching from the north, and the banded half-disk of Ember, lit gold by distant Aurum, rose huge over the snow-capped volcanic cones behind the great Do’utian domes—as if it was just another, greater dome. Mary rode on Drin’s neck, holding on to the thin, but virtually indestructible decorative sash that Drin wore to show his office. On this beach, for politeness’ sake, everyone’s status should be clear.

Drin nodded. By ancient Do’utian standards, the Ib family estate buildings were respectable, though hardly awe inspiring. But, excepting some of the government buildings at Trimus City, they were among the largest structures on the planet. Drin blew a little steam in an involuntary spasm of humor—he remembered that there was a tacit agreement among the Do’utians that no measurements be taken, lest it lead to beach-status arguments. “Their branch of the Ib have lived here since the founding. The small white stone dome in the center is older than anything still standing in Trimus city.”

“Small? It has to be twenty charter units across! Drin, the Ib in your name—is it?”

“My great-grandfather was a second son. If he had been first, and my father had been first in the subsequent line, I would be master of that. But,” Drin paused for a short laugh, not entirely free of wistfulness, “there are at least a hundred Do’utians on this planet with a closer claim. The flaking domes are fairly recent; they replaced older domes that fell in a quake eight-cubed, three eight-squared, seven-eights and two years ago. The more modem hexagonal structures house employees and a small replicator factory.”

“How many live here?”

Drin had to think. “Doglaska’ib is the long one, and has been for nearly seven centuries. He has a harem of five including Gonikli’ibida, though this is attended more by his son and heir, the master Borragil’ib. Two bachelor brothers maintained offices there, but they live in Trimus City for the most part. There is a child in residence and Borragil’ib’s widowed sister. Uh—” it was uncomfortable for Drin to admit the next—“a cousin, a returned primitivist, and two of his beach harem are staying there too, temporarily. So there may be a dozen in residence, but our ways are such that two or three are all we’re likely to find here. This complex will house three-eights comfortably, and there have been larger gatherings. Their cybernetic system maintains the place between visits.”

“They have an artificial intelligence in this place?” Mary sounded horrified, Drin thought, at what she clearly thought was a violation of values and possibly the Compact.

“We aren’t in Trimus City anymore, Mary. The domination of one mind by another is not abhorrent in Do’utian culture, and this is perhaps the most Do’utian place of Trimus. The computer is a tool, technically subsentient.”

“First Yohin, then this. I’m getting a lesson in the gray areas of slavery law today,” Mary remarked. “An uncomfortable lesson.”

“A stool without legs,” Drin remarked, referring to Go Zom’s famous metaphor, “would be uninteresting.”

“You guys don’t use stools,” Mary countered, and laughed to take the edge off.

It was, Drin realized, a purely Trimusian thought. If the Ib beach hold represented the foot of the stool, then he and Mary were where the legs joined the stool.

For all its timeless magnificence, the complex wallowed in technology to a breathtaking extent—a Do’utian settler from eight macroyears ago would not have felt out of place. They passed through a magnetic suspension barrier on their way in and Drin shivered as the field-stabilized liquid barrier scraped anything loose on his body from him as he pushed through it into the delicately perfumed water of the complex. He had to pull Mary’s submarine through the barrier; it propelled itself by pushing water with electromagnetic fields, and the barrier interfered with that process.

The ramp from the sea door was covered by a transport carpet composed of microcilia that pushed him up and into the entrance chamber without his having to move a muscle. Mary’s eyes went wide when she found that the water of the sea door had seemed to solidify to let her walk from the submarine to the solid surface with wavelets lapping on either side of her. A smart nanite jell, Drin assumed.

Drin had grown up with all of this, but it hit him with waves of nostalgia whenever he returned from the open sea, or even the comparatively ascetic environment of Trimus City.

No one had come to greet them, but this was not unusual in Do’utian society.

“Smooth currents to Dag Doglaska’ib,” Drin greeted his uncle and host, knowing the system would relay the greeting. “We’ve come to talk to Gonikli’ibida; Monitor duty, I’m afraid. There’s been a questionable death.”

“Smooth currents, Commander Drinnil’ib,” a disembodied Do’utian voice said, as if the speaker were standing near Drin. “Ibgorni speaking for the house. Doglaska’ib receives your message, and bids welcome.”

It was as if the long one himself were speaking, Drin felt. Ibgorni’s mind had grown in Drin’s absence—perhaps more so than even he could take comfortably.

“Gonikli’ibida is in residence,” it continued, “but outside now. We offer you the yellow sector in the south dome. Does the Lieutenant wish to stay with you or have her own quarters?”

Mary looked at Drin, and he had a quick decision. Which would cause more gossip? To send Mary away halfway across the huge complex when everyone knew that they lived together in the field would look like he was being overly sensitive. Drin opened his beak just enough for Mary to see him give the OK sign.

“The Lieutenant,” Mary spoke, “will stay with Commander Drinnil’ib, facilities permitting.”

“The appropriate facilities will be in place by the time you reach the sector, Lieutenant. Commander, Borragil’ib has been informed of your presence and wishes smooth currents. He also intends to feed at midnight and asks if you would join him.”

“Tell him the honor will be mine.” Drin dipped his beak slightly as he said this.

“Borragil’ib?” Mary asked.

“The first son. Dag Doglaska’ib is very ancient, and while physically sound his mind explores uncharted seas these days, in intense concentration. Borragil’ib is of my generation, and is still intrigued by the organization of things.” Drin headed for the corridor to the south dome, its opening artfully disguised by holo dust. Halfway through he realized Mary wasn’t with him.

He turned and stuck his head back through the insubstantial but opaque curtain. “Shall we?”

“Uh, Drin, this is just going to take some getting used to.”

What was troubling her? Holo dust was just standard Do’utian interior decoration, Drin thought, the technology was twice as old as Trimus, at least. Then he realized—

“I’m sorry, Mary. I forgot you don’t see at audio frequencies. Don’t worry. It’s just well-managed dust.” It must have looked to her as if he were sticking himself through solid rock.

This time she shook her head, gave him a nervous little giggle. “You guys are so huge, so elemental, so natural; and things are so basic at Trimus City, we forget to think of you as having such a technological heritage. It doesn’t fit the image somehow.”

“Image? Mary, there are branches of us, as there are of you, that are minds with no use for organic bodies, or even individuality.” Drin shuddered, slapping his tail against the side of the hall. “They are out there, and I think they watch us now and then—like we watch the lungfish.”

“I think I can handle the holo dust,” Mary said, “it just surprised me a little.” She followed the rest of him through the curtain. “Lungfish?” she added, shaking her head.

Borragil’ib spotted a Stingsnake, grabbed its neck with one branch hand in a lightning whip of his tongue, stuffed the long, thick body into his mouth, and pulled his hands in after, until only the flailing head of the poisonous beast projected outside his beak. Then he severed it with a judicious nip.

Drin had to admire his cousin’s technique. The Stingsnake was the largest Do’utian sea predator brought to Trimus, and its bite on the tongue could fester. A human would get a painful puncture, but the air breathing vertebrate’s venom had no effect on them. Did we make our oceans too safe? Drin wondered. Perhaps we need a little something to fear out here—besides each other.

Smooth, slim and sleek Borragil’ib seemed to fear him, or rather feared the questions he came to ask. His cousin swam with a classic grace, nowhere near matching Drin in strength, but still seemed to slip through the water as fast on half the effort.

They talked to each other in the old sonic language, symbols related to each other in two dimensions rather than just by linear grammar. When Mary had asked about this, Drin had reminded her of English sentence diagrams. She had nodded. “Very well,” he’d said, “substitute symbols for the phrases, nouns, and verbs. Then add a few more lines. It’s complicated and not necessarily any faster, but it handles a lot of subtleties. It’s especially good for mathematics.”

What Borragil’ib’s images told him was that Gonikli’ibida did not want to talk to Drin, and the family did not want Drin to press the issue.

The family? Drin imaged the long one.

Borragil’ib imaged a black sphere, a symbol for the unknowable, and a warning not to press that issue.

Gonikli’s research into primitive weapons?

The symbol of challenge was associated with Drin’s inquiry and Gonikli’ibida’s reluctance, and this tied to a response-to-challenge symbol.

A description of Do’utian psychology, Drin wondered, or a threat?

Kleth and Human were difficult to describe in these chirps and whistles, but there were conventions. Drin shot his tongue at a passing fish, grabbed it, and stuffed it down his throat. Then he composed the symbol for human (the symbol for a monkeylike Do’utian vertebrate plus the symbol for thought) and modified it by talking-of-other’s-deeds-of-words, and related it to the dead Kleth (a now non-thinking thinking flying creature). Drin related those to the dead Kleth’s maybe dead mate, and tied the human and the dead Kleth to Gonikli’ibida with friendship bond symbols. Finally, a question symbol was tied to the human’s position symbol.

Quickly an image returned negating Gonikli’ibida’s connection with the death.

Drin sent one negating that image, and another asking simply, “Where is Richard Moon?”

Borragil’ib broached for a breath, dove deep, and returned with the smell of a house-snail trailing him. He showed Drin a picture negating Gonikli’ibida’s knowledge of the human’s position, and associating Drin’s questions with challenge again.

Drin questioned the need to defend Gonikli’ibida from questions.

Borragil’ib raised the image of honor challenge.

“No,” Drin replied in the definite, linear logic of English, “I do not challenge your honor.”

“You swim in Do’utian seas now, Commander. Seek your information elsewhere.”

“Your protests have now convinced me that Gonikli’ibida is somehow more connected with this than simply being a way to find Richard Moon. I am bound by duty to learn what that connection is.”

“There is none! She is an artist and wants to be alone to think. She does not know where Moon is. Leave it at that.”

“Very well,” Drin said, smelling challenge. People as thoroughly civilized as the Ib would not be involved in beachmaster duels. But they had political influence that, if anything, could be more deadly. It was time, Drin thought, even at his level, for him to dip his beak. Perhaps Mary or the staff back at Trimus City would have some ideas.

Death is a common denominator of Trimus; our philosophy was to not extend individual consciousness indefinitely by cybernetic means. Some still might go elsewhere for this, and so cease to be Trimusians. But death here does not come from physical aging—Do’utians do not die of old age, and the human and Kleth had engineered that from their genes long before their first contact—but from accidents, or from choice. Humans and Kleth enjoy risk, and so had a median life span of just over three centuries (503 turns for Kleth, 472 for humans), at the time of founding. Do’utians who don’t have accidents at sea simply get longer and stranger, usually refusing to communicate or eat after seven or eight centuries. We revere the cycle of life, but, as intelligent tool-makers, we do so on our own terms.

—Karen Olsen, “A History of Trimus”

The facilities that Ibgorni had contrived for Mary at the spur of the moment included a pool of warm water, tiny by Do’utian standards, but a convenience they easily understood. It was not quite as long as Drin, but in it, Mary could swim several body lengths, sound, and even spout after a fashion; the warm moist air from her lungs quickly turned to steam in a room temperature meant for Do’utian comfort. She was swimming vigorously when he arrived back at their room, perhaps a little bit overfull from a night of hunting and feeding that had, he thought, gone a way to quiet Borragil’ib’s itchy-tailed hostility.

In the hot pool, Mary had no need of the artificial skin she normally wore to protect and insulate her, and Drin examined her anatomy with his usual discrete fascination. Mary, several times, had told him that it did not bother her in the slightest to be examined in this manner, and that, truthfully, she liked the attention, and if he were curious about what she felt like that would be fine as well.

Drin’s curiosity did not reach that threshold of intimacy yet.

Raising his tail for leverage, Drin reared up, put his foreclaws on the sill of room’s long window and looked out at the stars. The window faced away from Ember, which was cut in half by the horizon at this latitude and further dimmed by Trimus’s thick atmosphere.

Do was visible, a fourth magnitude star in the middle of an asterism that Do’utians called Gi’ab. The constellations toward one’s home world looked the same, if a little smaller, Drin thought; the strangeness lay beyond. There was a splash, and a hot body attached itself to his lower right leg.

He sent his tongue down and lifted her up to his shoulder, where she was able to find a foothold.

“You must be very cold.”

“I can handle it for a while. It’s beautiful out there. Gonna take me a starship trip one of these years, if I don’t get myself killed first.”

“Earth?”

“Yeah, and Tau Ceti. My great greatgrandfather came from a region of Earth called the United States, and his great-grandfather came from a town in England named York. His name was Samuel Pearce, and we’re told his great great great-grandmother was raped by a Viking—a kind of human barbarian—in a war with Norway some six centuries before that.” Mary laughed. “Except, if she were like me, it might not have been rape. That’s as far as I can go back. You can’t see Sol from here, but I think Tau Ceti—it’s near the bright star by the south galactic pole.”

“Godro,” Drin named the south galactic pole maker, “in Do’utian, Beta Ceti in English.”

“Actually,” Mary chuckled, “that’s Greek and Latin, and to further confuse you, the star is also called Diphda, in Arabic.”

Drin grunted. “It’s Bogdo’ilda in Brogilla’a, the nation of our southern continent that started space travel.” So a chance star gave reason to contemplate the vastness, both of the cosmos and of history. “We both carry the memory of our ancestors toward eternity, to give their lives meaning.” Drin felt Mary shake. “A fearsome responsibility,” he added.

“I’m not afraid of that, Drin. But I think I’m about to admit I’m freezing. Help me down?”

He set her down, and she immediately sprinted for the hot pool and knifed in cleanly.

After a few minutes she got out and looked around. “Any towels?”

As if in answer, she was bathed in deep infrared from projectors so cleverly concealed that Drin hadn’t realized they were there. “Hey! OK, I’m dry!”

Drin slipped back down to the floor and considered Mary with his right eye, and thought about the various modes of bonding in his own species. The territorial jealousy of a beachmaster was legendary, but, away from the beach, such Do’utian men went about collective affairs with a formal dignity that often verged on admiration of each other. Unmated Do’utians who avoided the beach were the backbone of his species’ science and industry. In civilized times, formerly mated or mated females who avoided calving tended to dominate arts and politics—displacing their creative and nurturing drives, the theory went. They worked well with unmated males, and often rose to the second levels of leadership. The first levels were almost always mated males, however.

Where, Drin wondered, did Mary fit? Where did she want to fit?

The room shook, seemingly with the thought, and warm water sloshed from the pool. Mary looked up to the curved ceiling far above, suddenly tense and aroused. Subtle bulges in her body reminded Drin of how much of her tiny body was bone and muscle—incorporating any Earth land life into the Trimusian ecology had been fraught with problems due to the genetic heritage of evolution in high gravity. Here, Earth life ran with blinding speed, took incredible leaps, and, people said, could drag away burdens of many times their body weight.

Drin tried to imagine Mary dragging him away and allowed himself a low, rumbling chuckle, glad to be distracted from less easy currents of thought.

“Don’t worry about the temblor,” he said. “This is quake and volcano country, and we build for it. What they told me as a child was that you could take this whole complex and drop it a charter unit, the whole length of my body, without breaking it.”

Mary shook herself, some last drops of water flying from her hair and laughed nervously, “Glad to hear it. Drin, you seem to be thinking deep thoughts. About me?” She walked up to him and placed a hand on his beak.

Exchange of affection by bumping and touching was common to both species. In Do’utians, it was between anyone, but in particular women in the same harem, or on the same project—the feelings of security and trust created by mutual touching were particularly strong. In humans, Drin was fully aware, it led, in private situations, to a performance of their mating act, which in civilized times served to create greater-than-ordinary emotional bonds between the people that did it. They apparently enjoyed it.

Did Mary expect him to pleasure her? Humans mixed affection and reproduction. But the Do’utian mating act was utterly different in feeling and purpose. It was a two-step process and not at all fun. Quickening the ovaries was something a beachmaster did instinctively to maintain his harem —it released hormones in the cows that helped make them subservient.

The beachmaster’s reward was subservience, beak dipping, and staying. The act itself was very mechanical, not pleasurable, though for some, the feeling of power was. Later, taking and fertilizing the eggs was a compulsive, messy, and humiliating procedure that had to be done or the bearing female could die. The female was grateful, the male would typically feel the need to go on a long feeding swim. In primitive times, he would return to dominate, protect and feed his harem. Civilized Do’utians discovered in vitro fertilization a long time ago.

Drin needed to make some response to Mary—not doing so would be impolite. He opened his beak and laid the hand of the right branch of his tongue on her shoulder. Drin was quite happy to touch Mary and display his regard and affection for her. But he did not want to turn her into a subservient cow—that could be dangerous in a crisis.

Of course, she was human and that wouldn’t happen. But how would he feel when it didn’t? The idea didn’t work for him that way, not at all. But why was he so fascinated by the idea? Intellectual curiosity? Did he want to seem human to her, the way she seemed to try to be Do’utian with all the time she spent in the water? He found her unnaturally warm, smooth, dry flesh strange, fascinating. Would he ever be able to talk freely of these things with her? What instincts of hers were coming into play, and what curiosities?

She seemed cheerfully aware of the esthetics of her body. Mary smiled at him. “Drin, if I can feel beauty in a horse, in a swordfish, in a cat, or in you, then you feel beauty in me! I don’t have to look like a Do’utian. Don’t question it so much; enjoy it!”

Drin moved his hand down her arm, acknowledging. She covered her hand with his and guided it. This was between them, and harmed no one. Except that it took time.

“We need to go to work, Lieutenant,” he said.

Mary took a deep breath, and exhaled. “Right.” She touched her lips to his hand, dropped it and scampered to the pool side. Quickly, she got into the olive body suit she wore to work in the salt sea and on the frigid polar land.

Drin gratefully turned his mind to the problems at hand. “Mary, Gonikli’ibida apparently doesn’t want to be questioned. I was warned off, very strongly.”

Mary nodded. “While you were out, I did some information gathering. More gray area stuff, but I’m taking your position that the house computer is not a sentient being and the question of testifying against itself or breaking its confidences does not arise.”

Drin chuckled. “The only time the currents say anything about how someone passed from here to there is when they carry a body.”

“Huh?”

“Ibgornia let you have the data.”

“Oh. Well, Drin, there are currents of ice not far from here, and they carry a body. Could Gonikli’ibida’s reluctance be personal? Something between you and her?”

Mary was a good investigator, and for once, Drin thought, a little too good. This current led over a waterfall. “Possibly. We were close, once.”

“Drin..

Drin sighed from his blow hole, almost like deflating. So she knew. But what did that have to do with anything? “We left my sister, Bodil’ib, where she died. Eons hence, she will reach the sea.”

“How did she die?”

“The memory is painful. Is it relevant?”

“Would a Do’utian keep coming back? To pay respects? Or in times of great emotional stress? Have you?”

“Privately. She is gone, but she is still there—the suffering is frozen in her body. Mary, she went out alone in a snowstorm the day I left for Monitor training, and fell into a crevasse. They found her days later. Do’utians are built for the cold and it takes us a long time to die of it. They got some nourishment down to her and she seemed to rally for a while—she recognized Gonikli. But it took too long to get the equipment there.”

“I’m sorry Drin. But there’s more, isn’t there?”

Oh, yes, there was more. How much did he dare reveal to Mary? He remembered the strange, intense warmth of her body, and how that had said, “trust me, trust me.” She had saved his life more than once. Their ancestors had evolved in wildly different environments—but a common physics and logic of sentience had done its work, or they would not be here together.

“We are in conservative circles here; can you be very careful of who you tell?”

Mary nodded. “Drin, was there a bond between your sister and Gonikli’ibida that could last after death? Could Gonikli’ibida be out there, at the glacier now, looking for some way to deal with something? With you?”

“We were immature, Mary, playing games. New to our bodies, and curious. They wanted me to play beachmaster and they would play my cows. We didn’t understand what would happen, inside, as we played these roles. It just isn’t done with one’s sister, but we didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t know what it’ was; our stuffy parents kept too much in their beaks. We weren’t mature enough—there weren’t any eggs —but Bodil became very dependent on me. Then I left. Gonikli didn’t bond as strongly with me, but she felt Bodil was her senior co-mate; that bonding can be almost as strong.”

“Her first love. Drin, I can understand that. If she’s as disturbed about your questions as you say, maybe she went back to where—did you say Bodil? That’s a human name, too.”

Drin nodded, teetering on the brink of understanding. “Bodil’ib. My sister.”

Mary continued. “Maybe Gonikli’ibida went back to where Bodil died.”

Drin nodded. Gonikli might go there in time of crisis. But...

“But why would this be a crisis for her? We are only trying to find Richard Moon.”

“She was close to both Bi Tan and Richard Moon. Richard Moon didn’t say he saw Bi Tan die, he said someone he trusted had told him.”

Now that Mary had pushed him into the sea of understanding, what lay on the bottom was obvious. “You think Gonikli was the one who told Richard Moon that Bi Tan was dead? That would be unpleasant, but less than a crisis, unless she wasn’t being truthful. But a lie like that would kill both the Kleth, including her friend. None the less, it looks like she was involved—but how?”

“We’ll have to ask her, Drin.”

“Against Borragil’ib’s will?” Drin remembered images; images of challenge and images of duty. “Very well. We should go now. He has been away from the complex and may have other duties.”

Drin looked around and thought of family versus duty, and the possibility that he would not be welcome here again.

The wind made even Drin cold, and he found himself picking up his pace through the early morning gloom to generate more heat. He could smell his skin glands react to the cold; his outermost doci or so would, effectively, hibernate, but remain flexible. Mary had substituted big, wide-bottomed boots for her flippers, but otherwise wore her formfitting artificial skin with an extra power pack. Her sea mask doubled as a cold mask and she’d added a transparent, wind-impervious, hooded cape with a weighted hem. Her tiny form bent against a wind that seemed to Drin to be enough to blow her away like a Kleth.

They reached the glacier after a vigorous climb of almost an hour that left Drin at an almost comfortable temperature. It lay in a valley between two mountain ranges piled high by the spread of a polar rift to the north, and spilled into the sea-flooded caldera now occupied by Drin’s branch of the Ib, west of the dome complex. On its way to the sea, the glacier split into several huge crevasses. When it got there, it gave rise to many icebergs.

For Drin, the glacier aroused primordial feelings, terror of the heights, comfort in the smooth ice and horror in the knowledge that below the surface of this ice lay not food, but death.

Drin had not called Do Tor and Go Ton in on this yet, thinking that he and Mary had overreacted a bit around Yohin Bretz a Landend’s tourist sailing ship—to the point of embarrassment. And, he’d reminded himself, they were not now going toward a potentially armed and dangerous vessel, but a heartsick Do’utian woman who had seen one too many close friends die.

If they could find her and get her to tell her story, whatever it was, Drin was hopeful that he could smooth currents with Borragil’ib and be on his way.

The glacier had flowed several macrounits toward the bay since his sister’s death, the surface features remained very much the same—it was almost eight-squared charter units across with a hump on the west wall about two-thirds of the way toward the sea. East wall lower than the west. It was split by several large crevasses, from flowing faster in the center than at the sides. In one of these, through occasionally blinding flurries of fist-sized snowflakes, Drin found his sister.

Someone had been visiting Bodil —her body was encased in clear ice that had been kept clean of all but the most recent snow. Memories. It had been storming like this when they found her. She had broken her back in the fall, but that would have been repairable if they could only have gotten her out in time. He shook as he thought about it.

Drin had to stop there. The visitors must have taken a different route; the sides of the crevasse came too near the walls of the valley here for Drin to find an easy way. Mary went ahead.

“Mary,” Drin said at length. “There’s no sign of Gonikli, so we may as well go back.”

There was no answer.

“Mary?” Drin called and looked around. She had been standing at the lip of the crevasse near an avalanche site that looked like a possible way down not a minute ago. Drin looked around again. Her olive body suit should stand out fairly well against the white snow. Still no answer.

Fearing the worst from the wind, he eased himself closer to the edge of the huge crevasse and looked down at the wall. Ominously, it seemed to overhang a little. Far below, perhaps six times his body length, he saw a splotch of olive color. How could this happen? He wondered. Had she been so surprised that she had not even cried out? Had he been so preoccupied that he hadn’t heard? Had he felt a little shake? A quake? No, that had been his own feelings, hadn’t it?

This couldn’t be happening. Mary and Bodil in the same crevasse! Drin roared in anguish, then remembered his comset. There had to be some aircraft that could fight this storm. Best turn things over to Do Tor; Drin felt he was in no emotional shape to be much help in anything.

He stuck his head over the edge again. There had to be a way down. He looked at the green splotch with both eyes—it did seem to be Mary and she wasn’t moving. Now he realized how much a part of his life she had become. Familiar, expected, a certainty. Like his gun, like the Compact, like the Ib homestead, like—he remembered—his sister.

“No, no, no!” he roared at the unfeeling wind.

She had fallen about eight charter units from him, having followed a ledge that looked too narrow for a Do’utian. But he had four strong claws and the walls were snow and ice, not stone.

Drin reared up with his head pressed against the valley wall and placed a rear claw on the ledge, testing it with his weight. It held.

The snow on the wall had been densified by freeze-thaw cycles and compressed almost to ice by the wind. He slammed a foreclaw into the packed snow, claws extended, and pulled. It seemed solid enough. He risked moving his right rear leg, stretching about an eighth of a charter unit along the ledge until he found comfortable purchase. Then he swung his tail over to the ledge; it had nothing to grip with, but could exert a little upward pressure for balance. So, hanging by his foreclaws and the one rear leg, he moved his left rear leg to where his right one had been.

So far, so good. He made another foreclaw-hold and repeated the process. He was burning energy at a tremendous rate, but felt exhilarated—he could work at near maximum efficiency with the cold polar wind taking heat away as fast as he generated it.

Thus, with his massive bulk clinging to the wall like some kind of lizard, he managed to work his way sideways toward Mary.

Halfway to where she fell he set a foreclaw only to have a great swath of snow and rock pull free and go tumbling down over the edge, leaving his right foreclaw pawing nothing as he struggled with his other three limbs to stay on the wall. The snow under his left claw started to groan, shifting slightly. He began to lose his balance, tilting outward. Instinctively he shot his tongue uphill, found a rock and clung with both hands.

The wind stung his extended tongue. It would freeze in a few beats if he didn’t do something. He brought his right leg back toward his body and stabbed his claws into the snow just beside his head, and pulled.

If the snow here fell away too, he was done. But it held. He let go of the rock and pulled his tongue in. It burned the inside of his mouth with cold—but he could still feel. He tasted old ice, bitter with volcanic ash and dust. No permanent damage, he hoped. But he would have to go back.

No. Mary was down there.

Where was that polluting aircraft?

The wind blew some snow from the slide—it was loose, obviously. Experimentally, he shoved at the pile on the ledge with his tail. An eighth-squared of a cube of the stuff fell free over the ledge. Using his tail, he brushed the fallen snow from the ledge, and discovered the small avalanche had actually given him more room for his rear feet.

It took him a macrobeat to work his way through the small avalanche, but he managed it.

Ten macrobeats later, he was nearly over Mary. He tried his comset.

Nothing.

He pulled a in big lungful of freezing air, slowly so it wouldn’t freeze his blow hole, then yelled her name, throwing a recklessly large amount of volume into the lower register. Anything that was going to go in this area, he figured, had already gone.

An impact caught him in mid-bellow, not from above, but on his lower left leg, dislodging it from its precarious clawhold. A small shadow figure appeared momentarily then vanished into the blowing snow. What?

His attention had been on Mary and his upper claws were relaxed, and set in recently loosened snow anyway. Without the left rear leg, he started sliding down. Almost immediately, his rear legs were over the edge of the crevasse, flailing at air.

He dug at the snow with great swipes of his foreclaws now, essentially trying to swim back up the snow slide. For a moment it seemed to work.

Then there was a terrible moaning groan and the entire mass of snow under him seemed to flow, sending him into weightlessness over the edge of the giant crevasse. In one last act of sanity, he triggered his emergency beacon.

Then he screamed the death scream, instinctively warning any of his kind within hearing of mortal danger. Lungs still full, he glanced off the ice wall and bounced like a rubber ball, then exhaled in a great, painful gasp.

He hit it again and instinctively clawed the wall. The ice tore at the webbing between his toes, but he slowed, and slowed. He’d almost stopped when his left foreleg caught a crack, far too suddenly. He felt a bone snap, and let go in immediate reaction to the pain. But he was almost down to the floor, the slope was much less steep, and he stumbled more than fell.

He bounced once more and belly-flopped on the snow that over the ages had filled in the bottom of the huge crack. Pollution! How could he hurt so much? The nerves of his leg screamed in pain as he fought for objectivity.

Pulling air into his lung helped calm him. Somehow, aside from the leg, he was reasonably intact. The strained muscles in his back would feel abused for several turns, but he’d been through worse.

Drin gazed up at the edge of the crevasse through gaps in the blanket of blowing snow. If there was a way down, there was a way up. Walking three-legged was just barely possible for a Do’utian. Better to rear up, he decided, and stagger on the two hind legs, human fashion. But first, find Mary.

Every bruise and strain protested as he stiffened his tail for leverage and started to rise.

A roar like an aircraft fan buzz began echoing in the crevasse, building louder and louder. Wrong somehow—but the ice walls and the howling wind distorted everything. An aircraft? In this storm? Do Tor and Go Ton finally? It seemed so. Thank providence!

Then the first chunk of ice hit him. He had time to look up and see a giant vertical column of it slowly detach itself from the wall of the crevasse and topple over right on top of him, a huge solid slab heading right for his head. He tried to move and fell, collapsing on his broken leg, his beak digging into the ice. Then an ice slab landed on his head and he lost consciousness.

In inventing Trimus English, we gave the prefix “macro” the specific meaning of eight to the third power, and the prefix “mini” the specific meaning of eight to the minus third power. These were in addition to and consistent with their ordinary usage implying the very big and the very little. They, with prefixes like di, tri, etc. for squaring, cubing, and higher powers, were also direct literal translations of the base eight terms from my native language, for which I make no apologies. Math was never my specialty, and I was grateful not to have to relearn it!

—Go Zom’s notes on the Charter and Compact of Trimus.

When Drin put his memories back together he was surprised to find that he was still around to remember anything. It was pitch dark. He was colder then he’d ever been in his life. He couldn’t feel the end of his tail. His left foreleg was a tearing, rending, agony with each breath he tried to take.

“Mary?” he groaned, in reflex. There was no hope. There was no answer.

The situation was insulting. He was of a race that had moved worlds, that had made machines that answered their every whim, that had banished age and war. What was he doing helpless under a pile of snow? He tried to roar in anger. It came out as a kind of grunt.

Pollution, he wasn’t dead yet. The first thing he had to do was to get into his ventral pouch. He had some of the tools of civilization. His comset. A gun that could possibly blast a small hole through this covering if he had enough explosive rounds.

He wasn’t sealed in—he could breathe. He couldn’t see it, but thought there must be an air pocket above his blow hole. He tried sucking air in, then exhaled with his valvae marinae closed. This expanded his upper chest at the expense of the abdomen, and, with an awful creaking protest that filled the sonic spectrum with white noise, the block moved slightly up, and to the side. When he exhaled again, he could wiggle a little. Some water dripped into his blow hole; his breath must have melted it. This slight evidence of affecting his environment helped his morale greatly.

Cold at least was numbing his broken foreleg. After another macrobeat of huffing and puffing, Drin found he could half-wiggle and half-roll enough to slip his tongue out and reach his pouch. His outer skin was so numb and leathery that it didn’t feel like part of him anymore. That would be something for the doctors, he feared. In the meantime, he had his gun and his comset.

Now, where was all this snow and ice most thin? He closed his eyes to concentrate on the sonic image and tried various frequencies of voice, looking for the one that made the picture deepest and clearest. His prison seemed darkest off to his right; which meant the fewest reflections, which meant, he hoped, the thinnest.

Drin squirmed and wriggled until he could open his beak a couple of docis wide. Then he held the gun about a doci from the ice, and fired.

Ice chips stung the inside of his mouth. He probed the hole with a finger—it was deeper than he could reach. He fired twice more into the same hole, and no ice chips came back from the last shot. Struggling to reposition his beak, he repeated the procedure five more times until he had a rough hexagon of holes to the outside near the comer of his mouth.

The idea was that his hexagon of gun-drilled holes would define the weakened border of a plug that he could push out with his good right foreleg, if he could get it in position. To do that, he had to burrow forward, just a little.

The struggles had gained him a little more freedom of movement. He bit off a little ice, pressed his beak to the side, and bit some more. In about a Trimus hour, he was able to wiggle the upper part of his body sideways an eighth of a charter unit. Then he had to press himself, in excruciating pain, against his broken leg to create enough room to bring his right foreleg forward. He groaned in relief when he finally got his claw in the center of the hexagon of holes.

Drin rested. Then he pushed with every cuf of strength he could muster, holding his breath to stiffen his body as much as possible.

The ice broke and Drin found he’d punched a large hole in his prison. Not big enough for him to wiggle through, but perhaps he could enlarge it. He started tearing great hunks from its perimeter with his right claw.

“Drin?”

The faint, but clear voice froze him.

“Drin?”

“Mary?”

Drin struggled to get his right eye at the hole. Mary was standing, shaking almost violently, in the snow and wind just outside the hole. Her cape was gone, as was her mask. Her face was blotchy.

“Damn, it’s good to hear your voice,” she said. “Is it warm in there? My power’s used up.”

“The freezing point of water is about the best I can do—and there’s no room. I was buried thoroughly. What happened?”

“Got shot with a trank dart when I wasn’t looking, and fell. Dumb. That avalanche was no accident—it was set off with some kind of weapon. Well, we were looking for a possible murder suspect. Guess w-we found one.”

“Mary, I got pushed off myself. It might have been a human—maybe a primitivist working with someone here.” Gonikli? An artist friend of hers? Borragil’ib? Could his cousin be yet another proud Do’utian who had found a cause greater than honor? “Time to worry about that later. I have a field med kit in my pouch, with maybe an emergency wrap in it.”

“Gonna need more than that, Drin. I have to—get—warm.”

There was only one way to get her warm that he could think of, but it would incapacitate him further. So, he had to do some other things first. He grabbed his comset, set it on emergency relay, and stuck it out the hole he’d dug.

“Set this on a rock or something, flat side facing south,” he told her, “Then come in here. I’ll tty to open my beak wide enough so you can crawl in my mouth. Feet first if you can. Uh, Mary?”

“Drin?”

“If I die, stay inside. My body will keep you warm for many hours.” He said nothing of the hours of agony that it would take the cold to shut off the blood flow to his brain at the center of a shell of dead frozen flesh. He would have to endure that, for Mary’s sake. The longer he could stay alive, the longer she would.

“R-right.” Her hands shook terribly, but she took the comset and managed to wedge the unit in a crack of ice facing south. Then she started backing in through his hole. In the meantime, Drin found his medical kit and got it out of his pouch and into his mouth. That done, he grabbed Mary’s boots, opened his beak as wide as he could, and pulled her in. With her feet freezing his throat and her backpack poking the lining of the top of his mouth, he closed her in. She just lay there and shivered.

She wasn’t sealed in; he had to leave room for his tongue to hang out the left comer of his mouth—it was starting to freeze again!—and that left an air gap. He breathed for two, inhaling through his blow hole and exhaling the warmed air through his mouth over Mary, his tongue and his hands.

With Mary as secure as she could be, and to keep his hands warm, Drin resumed work on the hole. Another four holes outlined the vertices of another hexagon, contiguous to the first. Rather than pushing it out, and letting the wind in, he outlined a third. Then a fourth.

Despite the noise of the gun drilling through the ice, Mary seemed to have gone to sleep.

At least he hoped it was sleep. He could tell she was still alive, but not much more, and unconscious. To wake her, he knew would deprive her of badly needed recuperation time.

But not knowing was a torture.

The work was going slowly; it had taken him an hour to outline a hole less than a third of the size, he estimated, needed to let him out of his icy prison. And he could feel the cold slipping into him much faster than that.

He had another worry. In all the thrashing and wiggling he’d done he hadn’t managed to move his tail. Not at all. He couldn’t even feel its tip any more. Chaos! He could deal with that later. He loaded another clip and resumed firing.

The hole he’d outlined was almost half wide enough for him to crawl out, if he could crawl, when Mary started moving again. She was doing something with the med kit.

There were, he remembered, some surgical implements in there.

Mary patted the roof of his mouth and he opened it. She wiggled out and sat in the hole, wrapped in the emergency blanket, blocking the occasional cold gust. Her face had some ugly yellow splotches, but her mouth was curved up at the edges and her teeth were showing.

“A little frostbite, the med comp says. And a busted rib. I’ll live. Besides having had fish for dinner last night, how are you?”

How did she know what he’d had for dinner? Never mind. “My left leg is broken. And my tail is trapped. Mary, I may have to ask you to amputate it.”

“Drin!”

“I can ignore the pain and the damage can be repaired, if I live.” What worried him more was that, without his tail, or most of it, to counterbalance, he would have a very hard time moving, let alone climbing, on three legs.

“We’re going to make it, Drin. Don’t think anything else.” Mary took a couple of deep breaths, exhaling clouds that would not have been out of place for him. “OK. How far back?”

A sudden roar outside stopped their conversation, and a warm gust blew into the hole. Another avalanche, Drin thought, or a volcano?

Then it stopped and he recognized it. Some kind of flying vehicle.

Friend or foe? There were eight rounds left in his clip. If he had to defend them, there wouldn’t be enough to finish his drilling. If only Mary hadn’t lost her weapon in her fall. But that couldn’t be helped now. He would just have to make every shot count, then hope.

A bass Kleth voice rich with overtones ripped through the wind and snow.

“Over here!”

“Do Tor!” Mary yelled.

Drin let a breath out his blow hole in a great resonant honk, part for communication, part in relief.

Do Tor did not look like any Kleth Drin had ever seen before; he hopped into view in a heavy-looking black cape over a bright orange body suit, and wore a narrow peaked cap covering his crest. “They’re alive,” Do Tor yelled.

“Do Tor—” Mary’s voice was down to a shout as Do Tor closed the distance “—Drin’s left foreleg is broken and his tail is trapped.”

“Damn right it’s trapped,” another voice declared, human this time. “That rock’s got to weigh a hundred ton!”

Drin placed the voice quickly, making up for his lack of recognition of Do Tor. The human with the Kleth was Yohin Bretz a Landend, the erstwhile Thet City harbor pilot cum primitivist cruise ship captain. What was he doing here?

“They’ve got some big pneumatic jacks back at Gonikli’s place,” another human voice shouted. It took Drin a while to place it, and he groaned at the irony when he did. After chasing him a quarter of the way around the planet and getting hopelessly trapped, Richard Moon had come to him. Now, was the human writer back at the scene, or should he scratch another suspect?

“They’re heavy to get down here.” A Do’utian. Gonikli of course.

“Get rocket crane from Pahn No City.” Do Tor suggested.

Gonikli wailed and Drin knew why. It would take a day. They’d been here before. Crazily, it was less worrisome to him being the one trapped than being one of those who might try to rescue him.

“Cut me out,” he said.

“Fish man, you want to come out in two pieces or one?” Yohin yelled. “I can get you out in one.”

“Huh?” just about everyone else said.

“I got me ten four-line tackles back on the ship; each line’ll pull three ton. We anchor them to that crag and blast some anchor bolts in the rock. Ought to do’er. Your heavy weather flyer there can lift the gear if the rest of us stay here. Just tell my crew.”

Silence.

“What is a ‘ton’ in cufs?” Richard Moon finally asked.

“We’re fighting the wind, and the cold’s makin’ the lines hard. Best move when you can, Commander,” Yohin yelled.

Gonikli and Borragil’ib cleared away the rubble in front of Drin with beak shovels, and gave him a clear path out from under the rock. He had no idea of how his hind legs would respond after having been trapped all these hours. Incredibly, it was still light out. He felt like he’d been entombed in ice for much longer.

“All right, me hearties, pull!” Yohin yelled.

Gonikli and Borragil’ib pulled on the archaic tackles. The lines pulled taught. Something shifted.

“More! Dig in, mates, now!”

The pressure on Drin’s tail suddenly lifted and feeling returned there—so painfully he wished it hadn’t. He tried to push himself forward, and collapsed on his broken left foreleg with a groan.

“Come on, Commander,” Yohin shouted through the gale, “Hurry—it’s all we can give you.”

Drin tried to raise his forequarters up on his one good forelimb and slide, or squirm forward. He began to lose it again.

Mary darted under him, and pushed up and right. It was impossible. She couldn’t lift any part of him. He was far too massive. But he shifted as much of his weight to his right foreleg as he could and somehow she kept what was left off the ice. Almost without thinking, Drin pushed himself up, snapped his right foreleg ahead, dug his claw into the rubble before he had time to fall, and pulled. Something broke free, his left rear claw pulled clear and he thrust it forward, scraped a foothold in the ice, and shoved his head out of his prison. Mary tumbled out of the way as he came crashing down on his throat and chest and slid the rest of the way, pushing with his hind legs.

“Loosen up there, maties, he’s out! Easy now, easy,” Yohin shouted.

Clear of the rubble, Drin watched Mary scramble out before the hole they’d been inside collapsed with a thud and a spray of snow and ice shards. She waved at him, then ran for cover.

Cover was a huge tent inflated in front of him, dented only slightly by the wind, set beside a low, rugged-looking ducted fan aircraft, bristling with vector nozzles. Gonikli was beside him instantly, and stuck her beak under his left shoulder. Supported that way, they were able to stagger into a warmth that normally would have been very uncomfortable, but just then was very, very welcome.

No sooner was he on a heated pad, then Go Ton hovered over him like a fury, poking this and that needle into him. All feeling left his left foreleg, except for various tugs and pulls from Mary and Gonikli under Go Ton’s clucking supervision.

Richard Moon managed to bring him a Do’utian field ration cube that must have weighed as much as the human male that carried it. Drin took it and stuffed it down his gullet. Soon its sugars and enzymes found their way into his blood. Gradually, his head began to clear.

Everyone was standing around him, looking concerned, and waiting for him to say something. “OK. Thank you everyone.” His voice sounded weak and raspy, even to him. He coughed. “I think I’ll live. I was trying to reach Mary when something or someone—a human I think—toppled me into the crevasse. You saw the rest. But what happened while we were out? In light of our investigation, this is a rather interesting rescue party!”

Everyone started to speak, but Gonikli said, “Please” a little louder than everyone else.

“This is my fault. At least in part.” She rubbed the tent floor with her beak. “I ended my dear friend Bi Tan’s life because she was dying, and begged me to do it. She called me to her retreat—she was very private, avoiding almost everyone, when she was away from Zo Kim. She was unhappy with him and unhappy without him, and tended to pick fights like the one with Gorman over including his contacts with Lord Thet’s sailors in her manuscript and... I’m wandering.

“Bi Tan told me that Zo Kim was dead, and she wanted me to—help her go. She was shaking, jerking around, but she gave me a few more changes to our last chapter—about crude replicator manufacturing showing up in Thet City. She was sure that would upset people, and make them remember her. Then she begged me to bite her head off—she placed her head in my beak, told me I was the best friend she ever had, and to do it quickly because the pain was terrible.

“It was awful. But in a way I felt honored, that she would ask me to do it instead of another Kleth. But I’ll never forget the bitter taste.

“I went back to the writer’s colony and asked someone, it might have been Gorman, to take care of Bi Tan’s body. He and the others said they’d take care of it.

“I called Richard before the awards meeting and told him, so he could say something about her. When I found out that Zo Kim had died at the awards meeting, I didn’t know what to think. Everyone knew what I thought of Zo Kim. But, but Bi Tan was my friend. I would never have done that to her to get at Zo Kim—”

Drin felt a surge of sympathy—Gonikli was an innocent academic caught in a web of alien intrigue. Borragil’ib curved his tail around her. At last she stopped shaking and spoke.

“When Drin came to ask questions, I came out here, to talk to our ... to Bodil. You think I’m crazy, but it gives me a kind of peace to pretend she’s listening, still...”

Borragil’ib touched his tail to Gonikli’s again. She lowered her beak.

“Commander,” Borragil’ib said. “I didn’t know the full story and suspected some other motive on your part. My apologies.”

“That takes us to Richard,” Mary said, redirecting the subject. For me? Drin wondered. Did she sense his embarrassment and beak-dragging sadness at this?

Drin saw that she had some flesh-toned ointment over the spots on her face, and seemed perfectly normal otherwise. There was no way she could have what she had done, lifting almost a quarter of his weight... but he was here.

“Yes,” Richard Moon said. “I was surprised that no one had notified me about Zo Kim’s passing, but was prepared to make the sad announcement and present the award myself when Zo Kim came flying in, right on schedule! I was flabbergasted and horrified. I didn’t, myself, know that Bi Tan was dead, I’d just trusted what Gonikli had told me and had assumed Zo Kim was dead, too.”

“Did anyone,” Mary asked, very quietly and gently, “think of reporting this to the Monitors?”

“Yes, we did.” Gonikli looked puzzled. “Gorman took care of it before he left for Trimus City. He’d had words with Bi Tan when some of her critiques of his work from their group showed up in Zo Kim’s reviews, and he was, well, a little more cold blooded about it all. The rest of us were in a bit of a mess.”

“When Zo Kim died on stage,” Richard Moon added, “I knew I had to see Gonikli before you Monitors did. I found a way to go back to Hot Springs Island that didn’t expose me to any records.”

Wind, wood, sail and nothing else, Drin remembered. The face in the rigging.

“Aye,” Yohin chortled. “So ye did. People pay my agents the usual way, which makes the usual record, but ye volunteered for crew. And did good of it, too!”

“When,” Richard continued, “I didn’t find Gonikli on Hot Springs Island, I talked Yohin into coming up here.”

Something in the back of Drin’s mind was bothering him. Quite beyond Zo Kim and Bi Tan, there were two other felonious assaults to worry about, the victims being Mary and himself! What was the connection?

“Everyone?” he said, finally. “We are in the bottom of a crevasse surrounded by avalanche-prone mountains. Mary was shot by someone, who, incidentally, may have started the avalanche that buried me. Presumably that act flows from nobody in this tent, but just now that isn’t such a favorable current. I suggest we get back.”

“Stendt.” Do Tor said, ignoring Drin’s call for motion.

“Who?” Mary sounded surprised.

“Human Gorman Stendt. Quarrels with both Kleth. Present on Hot Springs Island at time. Didn’t tell monitors until Zo Kim not just dead, but humiliated, ruined, in front of everyone. Maybe he lied to Bi Tan about Zo Kim dying.”

Drin waved his beak in negation. “Stendt was with others at the colony when Bi Tan died, then he was at the awards ceremony in full view when Richard Moon got the call and Zo Kim flew in and died. Bi Tan carried no comset with her—someone who was there would have had to tell her the lie.”

“He’s here, too,” Yohin offered. “Least he came on my ship. Ye can ask him yourself.”

“But why would he try to kill Mary?” asked Gonikli, “Just because she was investigating? That would be too stupid for Gorman.”

“Whoever it was didn’t really try to kill me,” Mary said. “The dart knocked me out where I’d fall into the crevasse, but the fall wasn’t that much for a human, and it was on a snowy slope near the valley wall, an old avalanche site I think. The only thing I could think of is that he wanted Drin to come after me; and that’s what happened. Then, with both of us trapped down here, everyone else would come...

Do Tor and Go Ton weren’t waiting to hear the rest. They were getting in their flight suits again.

“Can we fix a crutch for Drin?” Mary asked. “We really should get out of here.”

Good idea, Mary, Drin thought. If not their antagonist, there was always Trimus’s unstable geology to worry about. But his inflatable splint was not going to hold any weight.

“Got an idea for that,” Yohin said. “Need to get outside first. Get some wet towels—soak ’em.”

Outside, Yohin wrapped the towels, one by one around the inflatable cast, where they quickly froze solid in the frigid wind, forming a rock hard composite casing around his lower leg. The inflated splint insulated the inner towels from his leg and distributed the pressures to its icy shell. Within minutes, Drin found he could put his weight on it and walk, in a sort of limping, peg leg manner.

The Kleth packed the tent into the aircraft and roared off into the teeth of the storm, hoping to spot their antagonist, or at least dissuade whoever it was from starting more avalanches.

Drin was in no shape to negotiate the mountain pass they’d taken to the glacier. To move, he had to swing his splinted leg forward, plant it, step with each of the other legs in succession so that at least two other legs were always firmly on the ground, then swing it forward again. They decided the quickest route back would be down the glacier to the sea. Borragil’ib arranged for another aircraft to meet the humans at the glacier foot. The Do’utians would swim home.

Borragil’ib led them toward the ramp he’d built to tend Bodil’s resting place. It was, of course, on the side of the crevasse opposite the one Drin and Mary had found themselves. Their procession was single file for Do’utians, and Drin’s hobbling gait slowed everyone down.

They passed Bodil’s body, now just a hump in the snow on the floor of the crevasse. Borragil’ib didn’t stop—a kindness to Drin. Drin reflected that Go Zom had observed in his commentaries that Do’utian memories are excellent, but that their manners were better.

Finally, they crawled out of the crevasse and started down the main glacier. The snow slowed them down even more than Drin’s leg. As they got closer to the water, it fell and fell. Drin was surrounded by a deep red fog—what light there was now came from Ember only—and that glowing dull red through layers of cloud. It was very, very dim. Drin’s audio imaging helped a bit, but the snow absorbed that too. He followed Borragil’ib’s tail with one eye, and Mary behind him with the other, all the time expecting the mountain to come crashing down on him again.

It was sheer chance that he happened to be looking in the right direction. It was training preparation and worry that had his gun loaded with knockout and in his mouth, rather than in his pouch. They’d just reached the rim of another open crevasse when the snow lifted momentarily, and Drin looked back to his left.

He saw the long tube, he saw the black beard, opened his mouth and fired.

“Everyone,” he shouted, “Commander Drinnil’ib. Break silence, I’ve just tranked a human. He was lying in ambush with some kind of weapon.”

Mary was on top of the assassin in a minute. “Drin, it’s Stendt! And I’ve found a launcher. It’s been fired!”

“Sheet!” Yohin exclaimed, barely audible. The heavy snow was swallowing everything. “Where are the bird men?”

“Do Tor, Go Ton? Come in,” Mary shouted. There was no answer. “If they’ve been hit, they’re nearby. Stendt didn’t come far so soon carrying this.”

“I understand,” Drin roared back against the wind. Pollution! Drin’s Monitor com was down in the crevasse. Mary had lost hers in her fall. “Borragil’ib,” he shouted in Do’utian, using a range of frequencies evolved to cut through polar storms, “can you call and get a fix on the aircraft?”

“Commander?”

“Emergency channel, and give the operator code five, seven, two, D, nine.”

“Nine, seven, two, B, nine?”

Drin tried to shout as clearly as possible. “Five—Seven—Two—Delta— Niner”

“Got it.” There was an interminable wait. Then Borragil’ib said, “The Kleth monitors are over the ridge, eight-squared charter units. Commander, they are down, but they managed a safe landing.”

“Mary, Do Tor, and Go Ton are safe.” Drin shouted. He looked up and saw a star on the west horizon just south of the flat ruddy dome of Ember. It was Aurum III, where these makers of harpoons and rocket tubes should have gone. The storm was lifting, but clouds of question remained.

Stendt had not been aiming his weapon at Drin, but at Gonikli’ibida.

“We didn’t,” Do Tor admitted, “recognize the rocket launcher for what it was until much too late.”

Drin gingerly adjusted his position on his pad so that he could see the holoscreen on the wall opposite Mary’s pool in his estate room. Do Tor shuddered in the wind shadow of their damaged aircraft, already dusted with blowing snow—Kleth needed to keep active at low temperature.

The Kleth monitor panned the damage with his comset’s tri-ocular video pickup. The digital holographic reconstruction was clear and sharp, probably a little bit better than the raw data, Drin reminded himself—like the untrained eye, cybernetic pattern recognition and reconstruction programs sometimes filled in detail that wasn’t there. But this one seemed straightforward enough. One of the blades of the port fan of their delta-shaped aircraft had been bent straight up, rim and all. The two adjacent blades were bent away like the skin of a steelfish filet.

“It must have taken great skill to land the aircraft on its nose and starboard fans alone. So you saw the launcher?”

“Oh, yes,” Go Ton said. “Looked like a telescope, or something optical. Then whoosh and bang! Do Tor bailed out and held the port wing up while I eased us down. Saved evidence.”

“Well done, but you look very cold,” Drin observed. “You could finish your report when you get in.” A splash and a light laugh reminded him that the other half of his team was now very warm. Mary had invited Richard Moon for a swim and some gentle fact finding.

The harem-instinctive part of Drin’s brain was putting out discomfort hormones at the sign of Mary being physical with someone else. Realizing this, with beak closed, Drin told himself more again and again that Mary was not in the “harem/mate” category, but more like “family/sister.” Getting a sister into someone else’s harem before her biology forgot that she was a sister was a major theme in Do’utian literature. Do’utians were less susceptible to mutations than humans, but exogamy still offered more possibilities. And for more of their history, obligations to the bridal family had been what tied beaches together into loose trading confederations, despite combat between their beachmasters. A sister in the harem was a traditional sign of weakness, but even in the best of families—Drin shuddered.

Bodil, with her ravenous intellect and passionate will, had attached herself to the long discredited idea that harem imprinting was really a cultural, not biological, thing which intelligent beings could choose to disregard. Curiosity had burned in her, and she had begged him for the experience. She’d seen nothing disgusting in doing what nature had evolved them for, had no fear of the minor pain involved, and no qualms about discarding any eggs.

Drin had been curious, too, but had been unwilling to shorten his tail to satisfy it. But Bodil and Gonikli had caught him alone, outdoors, in season, one day and teased him into “just acting it out.” They could always stop. But the hormones they triggered had washed through him and his mind had been a semiconscious observer to the tragedy.

He exhaled as if to discharge the memories—there was work to do now. He stared at the damaged aircraft on the wall screen, picking out details—there were dark things in the white composite hull here and there—-he forced it to take back his attention.

“It looks like pieces of the rocket are embedded in the hull.”

“Oh, yes,” Go Ton agreed. “Think the fan cut off guidance head and threw it into hull—see hole just above wing—before explosion.”

“Best get data to you now,” Do Tor suggested. “That rocket launcher is a puff in an updraft. It appears that Lord Thet has guided weapons now. Cybernetics and A.I. maybe.”

“Good enough,” Go Ton added, “to force us to kill many of them if we attempt to remove them.”

Drin nodded. So it had come to that, Drin thought. When this had started, Thet had a farcical primitivist city-state dictatorship run with sharp steel sticks and the kind of nihilistic charisma ancient humans often fell for. In some respects, they were a herd animal, and untrained minds were prone to follow those who spout pretty mist. Primitivists generally came from romantic young people who, knowing little and hostile to learning, fell back on their instincts. In this case; follow the alpha male.

Evolution had prepared Do’utians to be more self-assertive. But there were, Drin reminded himself, difficulties to indulging that mode of behavior as well.

“The Council will not be amused. But what is the connection to this case?” Drin asked.

“Drin,” Mary yelled from the pool. “The connection is that Stendt had one!”

“Oh, yes.” Go Ton agreed.

Drin thought, or tried to think. He was swimming in a whirlpool of data. “Very well. He needed a weapon like that, so he got it from them. And, because it was of Thet City manufacture it doesn’t show up in the Trimus permit files. This makes sense for Stendt, but...”

“Councilor Drinnil’ib,” Richard Moon spoke up. “Gonikli’ibida and Bi Tan had been working on a report about primitivist weapons manufacture—and Zo Kim’s criticism was scaring off any potential editors.”

I must be swimming through a swamp of pollution, Drin thought. “So Gonikli’ibda told you and Stendt that Bi Tan was dead in order to kill Zo Kim? Having the information come at him from two sources like that would probably convince him. But she knew that would kill Bi Tan, too.” Drin touched his beak to the carpet. The Gonikli he knew was incapable of such callousness.

“Big puzzle,” Do Tor agreed. “Who told Bi Tan that Zo Kim was dead? If no one could have done this, one terrible answer is that no one did. Must test at the hearing.”

The sound of the aircraft approaching cut through the gusts of polar wind picked up by Do Tor’s comset. “The replacement fan is finally here! We need to sign off now and help dismount it. We’ll have evidence of smart weapons back to you in an hour or so.”

Drin sent them off with a “smooth air” and turned an eye toward Mary. She was sitting in the shallow end of the warm pool with Richard Moon, whose yellow mane now lay wet and flat on his skull, making him seem thinner and more athletic. Now that he was firmly off the suspect list, Mary had, in effect, recruited him to help with the cybernetic tendrils of discovery that this case had grown. Their data trail now ran to Lord Thet’s city state. But not continuously.

“Drin,” Mary called. “Maybe if we all get our minds off the case for a while, something will happen— mmm, Richard—below the conscious level. Drin, why don’t you come over here? There’s something I’d like to share with you, and Richard’s willing.”

Drin hesitated. Mary was offering to balance books, he realized. Eight Trimus years ago, Mary had watched, and helped Drin help deliver eggs from two very gravid, very feral members of a Do’utian primitivist beach harem. This exposure of Do’utian intimacy, though accidental and involuntary on his part, had always embarrassed him. Mary, however, had called it beautiful and natural.

She was unafraid of limits, and enjoyed testing the boundaries of experience and convention—and in Richard Moon, had found a kindred human spirit. Despite himself, he was intensely curious. He said a soft command in old Do’utian to the cybernetic servant to isolate the eyes and ears of his walls, and moved, gingerly still with his left foreleg in a Do’utian walking cast, over to the human pool.

Mary and Richard Moon were facing each other, teeth bared, and periodically biting, or pretending to bite each other, usually each other’s mouths, but sometimes other parts of their bodies.

“Drin,” Mary said, laughing, as happy as Drin had ever seen her, “put your hands on my shoulders and hold me, so I don’t float away.”

He sent his tongue out and did as she requested. Her body tasted different, somehow. Richard Moon patted one of his hands in a gesture that meant “welcome” in any body language that Drin knew.

“Drin,” Mary murmured, “remember how I cradled and washed the eggs you took. I hope this feels as good and as special to you. Oh, Richard! Yes, yes!”

Something tense and warm seemed to flow from Mary into Drin as he held her while she accepted Richard Moon’s seed. However different it was for humans—Mary, for instance, would not produce eggs without a reproduction permit, and humans actually did this for pleasure rather than to survive a pain-driven biological necessity—the concept of sharing intimacy, of balancing what each had experienced with the other, appealed to Drin as did in general the idea of touching her intensely warm body and sharing good things with her.

He shut his eyes and memories of Bodil and Gonikli and that summer night before he left for his monitor training on the beach across the bay came roaring back. Terrible memories then, but now, somehow, rendered less terrible. Here on Trimus, he mused, we have chosen to remain biological beings, with all that implies. In a way, he pitied the life-descended machine intelligences that roamed the Galaxy like gods. Fate is not always kind, but at least we still know what we are, he told himself.

When Mary laughed and said he could go now, that elusive thought about machine intelligences had become a school in his mind, turning in unison this way and that. The dangers represented by the guidance system of the rocket that had downed Do Tor and Go Ton’s aircraft was clear to him.

They may have seen but the air side of this ice.

“Mary, forgive my multi-track mind. I feel a, a completeness with you and Richard Moon that is philosophically beautiful—but only for advanced minds of both our species.”

“Unfortunately,” Richard agreed, “you are right. Councilor, we will hold this among ourselves.”

“On my other track, I also realized that we are up against opponents that do not understand discretion nor value the restraints under which we live.”

“Restraints?” Mary laughed and Richard coughed. Drin had to puff a bit as well.

“Technological restraints,” he added.

“Do you think the people that gave Stendt the rocket launcher might have given him more such toys?”

“Smart toys,” Mary added. “We’ve deliberately held ourselves back from having artificial intelligences run everything—which is fine as long as you don’t have to outsmart one by yourself. But why would Lord Thet show off his cybernetic prowess just to aid one customer? And what is Stendt’s compact-cursed motivation?”

“He could be crazy,” Richard speculated. “Or maybe Bi Tan was getting too close to the truth.”

“Maybe.” Drin reached a decision. “It looks like a battle is going to be fought on technological grounds. So I’m going to hope they are as ignorant of Do’utian culture and history as they act. If Do Tor is right, we know who killed Zo Kim and how. But we need to know why, or at least part of it. Uncontrolled artificial intelligences are involved and in the hands of someone like Lord Thet they are not just a danger to Trimus but to the whole Galaxy! I think Stendt is the key, and if we put enough pressure on Stendt, he may tip his hand—before he understands what he is up against.”

“How?”

“Excuse me for a macrobeat or so. I must talk to someone privately.” If he could. If that someone could and would still listen.

But all Do’utian tradition said that the top was where to go, especially if questions hung on the next long like seaweed. Drin had to persuade the long one that Stendt was someone to oppose. But Drin was convinced now that Stendt was not only the key to the deaths of Bi Tan and Zo Kim, but to a conspiracy to put illegal smart armaments in the hands of a charter-trampling chauvinist dictator.

Even from the depths of whatever thoughts he was thinking, the long one should respond to that.

The main hall of the old dome was filled with the smells of sushi and the pleasant drinks of three species. Three raised platforms waited for the Do’utian elite: himself, Commander Drinnil’ib, at the left, Beachholder Doglaska’ib in the center, and Borragil’ib at the right.

When Drin had met Doglaska’ib in person, he’d again been impressed with how huge the long one had grown since Drin’s childhood. The conversation had been very short. A swiveled eye and a nod on the long-one’s part. Then a turn to indicate the interview was over. But the eye had been clear and the nod had been definite.

The ancient one was in excellent shape, and climbed briskly to his pad. Drin and Borragil’ib followed and waited for the long one to speak. Two centuries ago he had opened a family fish hunt with an amusing story. But that was two centuries ago. All he said here was, “Begin the review.”

A mind grows heavy with the burden of things past, Drin thought.

In the inevitable irony of such things, the one without the title, Borragil’ib, took charge and explained to the human and Kleth visitors how local review worked in Do’utian territory. Essentially, it eliminated worries of unsavory interrogation techniques, because all interrogation was done in front of the Master, his recording devices and everyone else. Anyone present could ask questions, but they had better be worthwhile, for if not, the humiliation could be as cold as the bottom of the Southern Rift.

Stendt was present, in dignified dress, sampling the sushi, and pretending affability—much good that it would do him. For all his apparent freedom, this suspect was in a prison of the watchful technological servants of Ibgorni, a house system that was, perhaps, more mentally alive than its master.

However, things were still unresolved. Stendt was in custody for what he had done to the monitors, and tried to do to Gonikli. There was still nothing to link him to the deaths of Zo Kim and Bi Tan, nor anything to trace the origin of the circuits of his “smart toys,” as Mary described his weapon.

And if what Go Ton suspected was true, something very horrible had happened, something that powerful people wanted to hide. The rocket launcher was part of it. Lord Thet’s colony had made it, and it was far from the primitive weapons he and Mary had seen eight squared turns ago.

After the preliminaries, Borragil’ib turned it over to Drin. Drin called for Gonikli’ibida.

“Mistress,” Drin began, “you, and not me, were the object of the Mr. Stendt’s murder attempts. I had passed him when I saw him on the trail. He was waiting for you.”

Gonikli nodded. She was miserable, beak hung low, tail limp.

“There must be something you know, that he might kill you to prevent from being known. So important that he would risk killing Mary and me to draw you to us. So take us through it, again.”

Gonikli did, saying what she had before.

“Please,” Go Ton spoke up. “What was the taste like? And the consistency.”

Gonikli shook her head. Mary’s mouth opened in shock. Drin tensed. Do Tor and Go Ton had hinted something about testing a hypothesis at the review. But they had not reviewed this line of questioning.

Borragil’ib rose to his feet and Drin caught a whiff of challenge, understandable given the obscenity of the idea. Drin swiveled an eye at Go Ton, who held herself in the Kleth posture of certainty and self-confidence. He willed himself not to respond and instead focused his attention on Gonikli. “Gonikli’ibida. Our apologies. The discussion must be frank. We need your answer.”

She looked up, involuntarily, as one would at a mate. It cut him to the core, the strength of that imprinting after so many years. He raised his beak. She would have to admit that she tasted the flesh of an intelligent being.

“It was bitter, maybe slightly salty.”

“I think her body was not prepared to die.” Go Ton announced softly.

Air rushed out from spouts and into mouths.

Gonikli’ibida moaned and waved her head from side to side. “No, she was dying.”

She smelled sincere, and frightened. But Drin remembered what Go Ton had said when he applied the bite of mercy to Zo Kim. It had tasted sweet. Kleth and Do’utian taste organs were different, but the chemicals were the same and the biochemistry was similar, all races got internal rewards for ingesting high energy compounds. “Sweet” like “b-flat” meant pretty much the same to all.

“This is nonsense!” roared Borragil’ib, “Gonikli’ibida is no murderer. Kleth, you are a guest in this hall! Enough of accusations.”

Drin thought furiously. If Do Tor was right, Gonikli had killed a perfectly healthy and unbereaved Bi Tan. The whiff of challenge sent from Borragil’ib had become the predominant odor in the room. He meant to defend his harem and his hall, or, Drin thought, defend his secrets under that guise. Gonikli could have killed for personal reasons, but she would not be involved in a plot involving uncontrolled artificial intelligence without her master’s knowledge. Which meant, if there were Do’utian involvement, he was involved.

And that would be one of several explanations for his hostile behavior toward Drin.

Only because Borragil’ib’s anger was directed at Go Ton, was Drin able to keep his head clear. The challenge scent was thick on the dais. Now Drin grasped the slippery eel of Do Tor and Go Ton’s reasoning. If Gonikli wasn’t lying—there was one other person who might be responsible.

“Please wait, Master Borragil’ib,” Drin said as softly and controlled as he could. “This may not mean what you think it means.”

Mary spun to look at Drin. Drin keyed the comset he’d left in his beak and whispered. “Mary, back to the wall. Watch Borragil’ib, and watch Stendt.” Then Go Ton’s head bobbed ever so slightly.

“Continue, Go Ton,” Drin intoned.

Borragil’ib remained on his claws.

Go Ton produced a syringe and injected herself. “I took general anesthetic. Now squeamish people look aside.” With Kleth quickness, Go Ton took a small surgical knife, deftly bared a small patch on her arm, and sliced a not so small piece of flesh from it. Just as quickly, she put a standard tension dressing on it.

Do Tor’s crest fell and his wings went a little out and back. But he said nothing. Go Ton was done before Stendt dropped his sushi. Drin glanced at Mary, who stared in open-mouthed shock.

As if what she had done was entirely normal, Go Ton approached Gonikli and held out the piece of herself. “Taste this.”

Gonikli curled her tail, looked at Drin, who wondered if anyone but Do’utians could read her horrified body language.

“You are already forgiven,” Drin said. “And the truth may save your reputation.”

Still she kept her beak locked shut, and rocked from side to side.

Then, to everyone’s amazement, Doglaska’ib himself rose wordlessly from his center pad and walked to Gonikli and Go Ton. He opened his beak and sent his hands to take the flesh from Go Ton and offer it to Gonikli. Trembling, she opened her beak and accepted it with a trembling hand.

“Is the taste the same?” Go Ton asked.

Gonikli nodded.

Then Go Ton did something Kleth do not do, save ones that have spent much time in the company of Do’utians and people. She stroked the distraught Do’utian woman’s beak with her spidery hand.

“I am sorry and humiliated for my race,” Go Ton said, in the perfect English that Kleth can manage for important occasions, “for what those of my race have done to you. You, and your friendship, were used in a way that is understandable only from the view of one driven insane by inner conflict. Bi Tan killed her mate by tricking you into killing her. Please accept my apology, and my affection. Your tail is longer than any of ours in this.”

Bi Tan killed Zo Kim by deliberately tricking Gonikli into ending her own life? Opportunity and means. But motive? What was the motive for such desperation?

“Stendt,” Mary said, softly. But Drin recognized the human body language—she was pure fury. “What, Gorman Stendt, was your role in this? You were involved, I think, because you told Zo Kim—and you told him at the conference before any word could come from the island.”

Stendt looked around, eyebrows raised. “Why ever would you think there was any such role?” Drin surmised that he had not expected Mary’s question. The room was silent, except that sharp ears might have heard Drin talking furiously on his comset, beak closed, to Monitor Central.

Drin finished his call. Mary was putting the pressure where it was needed. Now Drin would add a little more. “Stendt, you can answer Lieutenant Pearce now with dignity, or have it dragged out of you in what, I assure you, will be as humiliating an experience as the Trimus Council will permit!”

Stendt spread his arms. “All I did was show her an advance copy of her mate’s review of her book, and when she reacted I told her that’s how I felt about what they’d done to mine.” He snorted in disgust. “The little harpies didn’t even read the final version of my book, damn them!”

“Stendt!” Drin bellowed, on his legs, the scent of challenge pouring from his pores. An act, he told himself, or a catharsis to somehow make up for what he had done to Gonikli so many years ago by dispatching her current tormentor. “Truth! Or I shall ask everyone to leave but you and me!”

Mary took her cue, and walked toward one of the curtain doors, and motioned for Richard Moon to follow. That would leave Stendt the only human in the room. It was condescendingly chauvinist psychology, and Drin berated himself for it. But it would work on Stendt, he thought.

The suspect’s head snapped left and right. He waved his arms up and down, full of disappointment. He had to realize that he was alone now. Perhaps he smelled the Do’utian contempt.

“Truth?” he asked, in a voice still filled with challenge. “What do you know of truth? And where is this so-called truth?”

“We have Zo Kim’s effects, including his copy of the manuscript on weapons trade on which Bi Tan and Gonikli were working. Gonikli, did you keep Bi Tan’s copy? It can’t hurt her now.”

The Do’utian woman reached into her pouch and produced a standard data module.

“It is a terrible thing to remember her by, but it was the last thing she touched. I—I needed to have something. To touch.”

“A certified electronic copy of the review will do for evidence,” Drin said. “The copy she gave you will help us understand her feelings. It is, no doubt, filled with classic Zo Kim sarcasm. But, I gather my human colleague suspects, not as he wrote it.”

“So I made a few changes,” Stendt said, still calm, still sounding as if he were in control. “That harpy mate of hers already said it didn’t work for him and I just made that a little more clear, stronger. Improved the language, took out the weasel words and qualifiers. Hell, with the review as it was, their theories and her career, would never be taken seriously. She knew that. All I did was make it a little clearer, and suggest how she could end his career too. But she was already ready to do that, anyway. They didn’t get along. It would have happened anyway, don’t you see? With them living apart? All I did was to make a few changes—”

“It’s about the weapons, isn’t it?” Drin rumbled. “With Bi Tan, Zo Kim, and Gonikli’ibida all gone, that little secret would be safe until Lord Thet had himself a cybernetic war capability, wouldn’t it? Just how are you involved?”

Stendt shrugged.

Drin continued. “Zo Kim said he’d suspected for days. That might have been even before Bi Tan had herself killed—the only one that could have planted that suggestion was you. The whole thing was one complex, premeditated scheme. Two birds with one stone, was it? You used them and you used Gonikli. Was your human ego worth so much?”

“There’s more than my ego involved.”

“Gorman Stendt,” Borragil’ib asked, rising up from his pad on his limbs, claws bared. “Why have you troubled my family so?”

“I want an advocate,” Stendt said, and Drin recognized a mocking tone in the human voice.

“I,” the disembodied voice of Ibgorni answered, “am programmed to recognize the application of all Trimus and local Do’utian law in this and instruct you in its application. In this case, the law requires you to answer.”

“A human advocate, in private,” Stendt demanded.

“Privacy is for deceit,” Borragil’ib said. “Are you trying to conceal arms manufacturing by the human primitivists? And if so, why? Any refusal to answer will count against you.”

“Count against me? Because I’m human? Because I can’t bully people around with thirty tons of blubber?”

Stendt looked to Moon, then to Mary, for sympathy. Human help.

Drin saw only hardness in the looks Mary and Richard gave Gorman Stendt. Only a chauvinist, Drin thought, would look for sympathy from only his own kind while standing in the middle of the most conservative ethnic establishment on the planet of Trimus. If there was a defense to be made for ethnic enclaves, here was where to make it. If there were excuses for racial pride, here, if anywhere, were beings that would understand. If one wanted to plead local autonomy versus the state, here was where to make the plea.

Drin could not help but let a belch escape his blow hole in the ironic humor if it. Borragil’ib caught Drin’s eye and belched as well. The smell of challenge had faded to contempt. Mary glanced at Drin and winked. Go Ton and Do Tor exchanged a glance and a flap of wings as though, they too, had better things to do than sully their talons with this idiot.

Stendt’s agitation faded and his false affability returned. He shrugged and smiled. “Primitivist is a relative term. In some respects you are primitivists, too. And fools before your own biological chauvinism, posturing to each other in this archaic pile of stone.”

Drin’s beak opened slightly, hands on his gun. But Doglaska’ib remained impassive. Do’utian eyes rolled to him—this was a blatant challenge, but the long one seemed to utterly disregard it. Was he too far gone?

“I don’t get my missile guidance chips from Lord Thet,” Stendt declared.

Huh? Stay with the plan, Drin told himself. “Where do they come from?” he pressed.

In answer, the lights in the hall faded to black and stones in the dome above groaned. Dust fell.

Sonar chirps filled the room. Everyone was on their feet and claws. Everyone except Doglaska’ib. Well, thought Drin. He had meant to force Stendt’s hand, and here it was.

But the sophistication of this writer’s attack surprised Drin. Were they in time? Had they underestimated the capacity of Lord Thet’s resources? Why would Thet iet Stendt have this much—unless Thet had much more already?

Drin was nervous, but took his cue from the long one. Drin had warned Doglaska’ib, and the long one, presumably, had done something. If he had really understood the danger.

Stendt’s voice filled the darkened room with a dim glow, sinister to those who could “see” it fill space that way. “I don’t get them from Lord Thet—that idiot gets them from me.”

Both of Drin’s hearts surged. The school of fish solidified into an iceberg. A mock fatfish had turned to stab his tongue with poison fangs. The hunter was suddenly the hunted. Pollution! His own chauvinism may have turned out to be as bad as anyone else’s. How badly had he underestimated Stendt and overestimated Doglaska’ib’s ability to respond. What backup did he have? Drin fingered his comset.

A burst of electrical fire burst from one of the wall sensors.

Stendt laughed. “I control the computer now. I suggest you do not try to use any electromagnetic devices.”

“A product of your modeling computer,” Mary stated, her voice a brief glow in the gloom.

Drin shuddered. He hadn’t thought of artistic technology as real technology—it was, somehow, diminished, trivial. He hadn’t recognized the multi-media writer for the consummate technologist he was, operating so far beyond the limits of the Charter. But, in retrospect, that’s what he had to be to do what he did. So it was only a small step to have his system make smart weapons or even smart bugs—microbots to do his bidding. A saving grace was that if they could still, somehow, overcome Stendt, they would put Thet back in his place as well. But Stendt didn’t act like the loser in this, and Drin began to wonder if some of his worst fears might be realized.

In the silence, Drin could hear the wind outside. But it was not quite loud enough to illuminate the room. Then a brief whoosh and a momentary flash of sound suddenly filled the room. A broken ceiling panel lying on the floor in front of the dais, where no one had been standing.

“I suggest that nobody try to move. I can drop a hundred tons on anyone here.”

The sound flash had shown Gonikli moving slowly toward Stendt. He would kill her without a thought, Drin realized. Then they would both be dead, Gonikli and Bodil.

“Everyone, hold still,” Drin bellowed. “He doesn’t intend to kill us or he would have. Don’t provoke him.” Noise subsided. His voice revealed that Gonikli had halted. Thank providence.

Drin rolled an eye toward Stendt. “What do you want?”

“Good thought, Councilor. Now, I suggest you turn over to me all recording modules of the research that Gonikli and Bi Tan did right now. I have your main computer, you see. I also have the structure of your dome, and this whole complex in my hands.”

Drin glanced at the ceiling. It moaned, as if its vast panels were adjusting themselves to Gorman Stendt’s will. Drin’s faith in his heritage readjusted itself as well. Perhaps Doglaska’ib had decided to ignore Drin’s warning. The long one’s mind was not what it used to be. Or, despite his efforts, had the human’s bootleg microcircuits and software actually succeeded in taking over?

Drin raised himself. “You can’t destroy all the evidence by killing us,” he said, not sure if he believed his own words. “Copies of our files, and those of Bi Tan and Gonikli, are in Trimus City.”

“Then get on your comset and have them deleted, Councilor-Commander of Monitors.” He laughed. “I’ll be able to verify it from here—and your systems are too stupid to lie to me. Evidence? We’re beyond that concern. I just don’t want anyone else doing what I’ve done. As for killing, why kill what I can control?”

There was a collective grasp. “That kind of threat will get your mind reeducated,” Richard Moon said. “Give it up, Gorman. Save yourself while you can still take it back.”

He’d gone too far for that, Drin thought. The human had gone much to far to avoid reeducation. Drin smelled rage and swiveled an eye to Borragil’ib. “Hold it in, cousin,” he whispered. “A charge here could cause dozens to die.” Then Doglaska’ib’s mouth opened slightly, just enough for Drin to see an everything-is-all-right sign made by one of the long one’s hands. What? The long one still didn’t comprehend what was happening?

“There’s no going back now.” Stendt’s voice had lost the tense overtones, the edge Drin had come to recognize as the equivalent of the challenge scent. It was as if he were already contemplated the burdens of his ill assumed leadership.

“I’ll give it up when I’m tired of it,” the human continued. “If any of you have learned anything from my human histories, you’ve learned that we progress through the acts of great individuals. People with an integrated, holistic vision of the way things ought to be and the ability to seize the day.

“In the meantime, the thirty-century stagnation of Trimus is over. Its population, or at least its human population, will be allowed to evolve toward their natural destiny, without the constraints of the Charter. Why providence selected me, I do not know. But I am a consummate artist in nurturing simulated worlds—now I shall nurture a real one. What you have to understand is that I am in charge now. Here and eventually everywhere on Trimus.”

The lights came back on and dust curtains leapt into operation. Stendt looked around in confusion.

“Not exactly.” The voice of Ibgorni echoed from the dome. Cleaning robots whirred to remove the pieces of fallen ceiling.

“I’ve played along with you,” the Do’utian cybersystem continued. “Your toys are now, and have been, under my control, but it was useful to see what you would try to do with them. That last offense of yours will be sufficient to force appropriate measures by Trimus authorities. We will not have to concern ourselves with disciplining a human here, which would be best for all.”

Drin settled back down, spouting relief. The voice was Ibgorni, but the words, in their understated humor and confidence, were Doblaska’ib’s. The long one had simply found a traditional Do’utian way of handling the situation—a tradition of living with cybernetic servants that was as long as Stendt’s race had existed. One which their ancestors had not entirely given up when settling Trimus. A human might have called it fighting fire with fire. With no conviction and no punishment, there would be little public exposure of the Ib family, nor what Ibgorni had apparently become. Drin was relieved at that as well.

The scent of relief flooded the hall. Mary bounded up to the stage to nobody’s objection and flattened herself against Drin behind his left eye with her mouth near the tight hide that covered his high frequency ear.

“Drin, who’s really in charge here? Doglaska’ib? Or Ibgorni?”

He shook his head slightly. It was not a question he could answer. How deep was their connection—over the centuries, had Doglaska’ib’s ancient body and the cybernetic system become merely different vehicles for the same mind? With the body trotted out when ceremony demanded? How long would that continue?

Drin looked at Borragil’ib. Perhaps until that one had grown long enough. Or was challenged. Drinnil’ib, himself, was a possible challenger—though far down the line. He had a vision of a future in which he tired of being Councilor-Commander of the Monitors, and came home—to something like this. Would Mary fit into—this—if he did?

Could Doglaska’ib see that too?

And what connection, Drin asked himself, did the long one have with the others, out there? Perhaps Trimusians were being watched—allowed to be themselves, but within limits? Who monitors the monitors, and who monitors them?

Drin had a vision of himself as part of a philosophical food chain of paternalism. What was on top? Was there indeed a point to it all? And what if he someday decided that, at least for him, there no longer was any point?

Mary shoved him to get his attention.

“Excuse me, Mary. Lost in thought.”

“Drin, who’s in charge?..”

As if in answer to Mary’s question, Doglaska’ib’s biological voice echoed in the hall for the second time. “Human Gorman Stendt is remanded to the custody of the Trimusian authorities. His cybernetic devices here and elsewhere are deactivated. The review is over.”