Infinity's Shore

PART THREE

ONCE A LENGTHY EPISODE of colonization finally comes to an end, subduction recycling is among the more commonly used methods for clearing waste products on a life world. Where natural cycles of plate tectonics provide a powerful indrawing force, the planet’s own hot convection processes can melt and remix elements that had been fashioned into tools and civilized implements. Materials that might otherwise prove poisonous or intrusive to new-rising species are thus removed from the fallow environment, as a world eases into the necessary dormant phase.

What happens to these refined materials, after they have been drawn in, depends on mantle processes peculiar to each planet. Certain convection systems turn the molten substance into high-purity ores. Some become lubricated by water seeps, stimulating the release of great liquid magma spills. Yet another result can be sudden expulsions of volcanic dust, which briefly coat the planet and can later be traced in the refractory-metal enrichment of thin sedimentary layers.

Each of these outcomes can result in perturbations of the local biosphere, and occasional episodes of extinction. However, the resulting enrichment fecundity usually proves beneficial enough to compensate, encouraging development of new presapient species.…

from A Galactographic Tutorial for Ignorant Wolfling Terrans, a special publication of the Library Institute of the Five Galaxies, year 42 EC, in partial satisfaction of the debt obligation of 35 EC

Hannes

SUESSI FELT NOSTALGIC ABOUT BEING HUMAN. NOW and then, he even wished he were still a man.

Not that he was ungrateful for the boon the Old Ones had granted him, in that strange place called the Fractal System, where aloof beings transformed his aged, failing body into something more durable. Without their gift, he would be stone dead — as cold as the giant corpses surrounding him in this dark ossuary of ships.

The ancient vessels seemed peaceful, in dignified repose. It was tempting to contemplate resting, letting eons pass without further care or strife.

But Suessi was much too busy to spare time for being dead.

“Hannes,” a voice crackled directly to his auditory nerve.

“Two minutes, Hannes. then I think-k we’ll be ready to resume cut-t-ting.”

Shafts of brilliant illumination speared through the watery blackness, casting bright ovals toward one curved hull segment of the Terran starship Streaker. Distorted silhouettes crisscrossed the spotlight beams — the long undulating shadows of workers clad in pressurized armor, their movements slow, cautious.

This was a more dangerous realm than hard vacuum.

Suessi did not have a larynx anymore, or lungs to blow air past one if he had. Yet he retained a voice.

“Standing by, Karkaett,” he transmitted, then listened as his words were rendered into groaning saser pulses. “Please keep the alignment steady. Don’t overshoot.”

One shadow among many turned toward him. Though cased in hard sheathing, the dolphin’s tail performed a twist turn with clear body-language meaning.

Trust me … do you have any choice?

Suessi laughed — a shuddering of his titanium rib cage that replaced the old, ape-style method of syncopated gasps. It wasn’t as satisfying, but then, the Old Ones did not seem to have much use for laughter.

Karkaett guided his team through final preparations while Suessi monitored. Unlike some others in Streaker’s crew, the engineering staff had grown more seasoned and confident with each passing year. In time, they might no longer need the encouragement — the supervising crutch — of a member of the patron race. When that day came, Hannes would be content to die.

I’ve seen too much. Lost too many friends. Someday, we’ll be captured by one of the eatee factions pursuing us. Or else, we’ll finally get a chance to turn ourselves in to some great Institute, only to learn Earth was lost while we fled helter-skelter across the universe. Either way, I don’t want to be around to see it.

The Old Ones can keep their Ifni-cursed immortality.

Suessi admired the way his well-trained team worked, setting up a specially designed cutting machine with cautious deliberation. His audio pickups tracked low mutterings—keeneenk chants, designed to help cetacean minds concentrate on explicit thoughts and tasks that their ancestral brains were never meant to take on. Engineering thoughts — the kind that some dolphin philosophers called the most painful price of uplift.

These surroundings did not help — a mountainous graveyard of long-dead starcraft, a ghostly clutter, buried in the kind of ocean chasm that dolphins traditionally associated with their most cryptic cults and mysteries. The dense water seemed to amplify each rattle of a tool. Every whir of a harness arm resonated queerly in the dense liquid environment.

Anglic might be the language of engineers, but dolphins preferred Trinary for punctuation — for moments of resolution and action. Karkaett’s voice conveyed confidence in a burst phrase of cetacean haiku.

Through total darkness

Where the cycloid’s gyre comes never …

Behold — decisiveness!

The cutting tool lashed out, playing harsh fire toward the vessel that was their home and refuge … that had carried them through terrors unimaginable. Streaker’s hull — purchased by the Terragens Council from a third-hand ship dealer and converted for survey work — had been the pride of impoverished Earthclan, the first craft to set forth with a dolphin captain and mostly cetacean crew, on a mission to check the veracity of the billion-year-old Great Library of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies.

Now the captain was gone, along with a quarter of the crew. Their mission had turned into a calamity for both Earthclan and the Five Galaxies. As for Streaker’s hull — once so shiny, despite her age — it now lay coated by a mantle of material so black the abyssal waters seemed clear by comparison. A substance that drank photons and weighed the ship down.

Oh, the things we’ve put you through, dear thing.

This was but the latest trial for their poor ship.

Once, bizarre fields stroked her in a galactic tide pool called the Shallow Cluster, where they “struck it rich” by happening upon a vast derelict fleet containing mysteries untouched for a thousand eons. In other words, where everything first started going wrong.

• • •

Savage beams rocked her at the Morgran nexus point, where a deadly surprise ambush barely failed to snare Streaker and her unsuspecting crew.

Making repairs on poisonous Kithrup, they ducked out almost too late, escaping mobs of bickering warships only by disguising Streaker inside a hollowed-out Thennanin cruiser, making it to a transfer point, though at the cost of abandoning many friends.

Oakka, the green world, seemed an ideal goal after that — a sector headquarters for the Institute of Navigation. Who was better qualified to take over custody of their data? As Gillian Baskin explained at the time, it was their duty as Galactic citizens to turn the problem over to the great institutes — those august agencies whose impartial lords might take the awful burden away from Streaker’s tired crew. It seemed logical enough — and nearly spelled their doom. Betrayal by agents of that “neutral” agency showed how far civilization had fallen in turmoil. Gillian’s hunch saved the Earthling company — that and a daring cross-country raid by Emerson D’Anite, taking the conspirators’ base from behind.

Again, Streaker emerged chastened and worse for wear.

There was refuge for a while in the Fractal System, that vast maze where ancient beings gave them shelter. But eventually that only led to more betrayal, more lost friends, and a flight taking them ever farther from home.

Finally, when further escape seemed impossible, Gillian found a clue in the Library unit they had captured on Kithrup. A syndrome called the “Sooner’s Path.” Following that hint, she plotted a dangerous road that might lead to safety, though it meant passing through the licking flames of a giant star, bigger than Earth’s orbit, whose soot coated Streaker in layers almost too heavy to lift.

But she made it to Jijo.

This world looked lovely from orbit. Too bad we had only that one glimpse, before plunging to an abyssal graveyard of ships.

Under sonar guidance by dolphin technicians, their improvised cutter attacked Streaker’s hull. Water boiled into steam so violently that booming echoes filled this cave within a metal mountain. There were dangers to releasing so much energy in a confined space. Separated gases might recombine explosively. Or it could make their sanctuary detectable from space. Some suggested the risk was too great … that it would be better to abandon Streaker and instead try reactivating one of the ancient hulks surrounding them as a replacement.

There were teams investigating that possibility right now. But Gillian and Tsh’t decided to try this instead, asking Suessi’s crew to pull off one more resurrection.

The choice gladdened Hannes. He had poured too much into Streaker to give up now. There may be more of me in her battered shell than remains in this cyborg body.

Averting his sensors from the cutter’s actinic glow, he mused on the mound of cast-off ships surrounding this makeshift cavern. They seemed to speak to him, if only in his imagination.

We, too, have stories, they said. Each of us was launched with pride, flown with hope, rebuilt many times with skill, venerated by those we protected from the sleeting desolation of space, long before your own race began dreaming of the stars.

Suessi smiled. All that might have impressed him once — the idea of vessels millions of years old. But now he knew a truth about these ancient hulks.

You want old? he thought. I’ve seen old.

I’ve seen ships that make most stars seem young.

The cutter produced immense quantities of bubbles. It screeched, firing ionized bolts against the black layer, just centimeters away. But when they turned it off at list, the results of all that eager destructive force were disappointing.

“That-t’s all we removed?” Karkaett asked, incredulously, staring at a small patch of eroded carbon. “It’ll take years to cut it all away, at-t this rate!”

The engineer’s mate, Chuchki, so bulky she nearly burst from her exo-suit, commented in awed Trinary.

Mysteries cluster

Frantic, in Ifni’s shadow—

Where did the energy go!

Suessi wished he still had a head to shake, or shoulders to shrug. He made do instead by emitting a warbling sigh into the black water, like a beached pilot whale.

Not by Ifni’s name,

But her creative employer—

I wish to God I knew.

Gillian

IT ISN’T EASY FOR A HUMAN BEING TO PRETEND she’s an alien.

Especially if the alien is a Thennanin.

Shrouds of deceitful color surrounded Gillian, putting ersatz flesh around the lie, providing her with an appearance of leathery skin and a squat bipedal stance. On her head, a simulated crest rippled and flexed each time she nodded. Anyone standing more than two meters away would see a sturdy male warrior with armored derma and medallions from a hundred stellar campaigns — not a slim blond woman with fatigue-lined eyes, a physician forced by circumstances to command a little ship at war.

The disguise was pretty good by now. It ought to be. She had been perfecting it for well over a year.

“Gr-phmph pltith,” Gillian murmured.

When she first started pulling these charades, the Niss Machine used to translate her Anglic questions into Thennanin. But now Gillian figured she was probably as fluent in that Galactic dialect as any human alive. Probably even Tom.

It still sounds weird though. Kind of like a toddler making disgusting fart imitations for the fun of it.

At times, the hardest part was struggling not to break out laughing. That would not do, of course. Thennanin weren’t noted for their sense of humor.

She continued the ritual greeting.

“Fhishmishingul parfful, mph!”

Chill haze pervaded the dim chamber, emanating from a sunken area where a beige-colored cube squatted, creating its own wan illumination. Gillian could not help thinking of it as a magical box — a receptacle folded in many dimensions, containing far more than any vessel its size should rightfully hold.

She stood at a lipless balcony, masked to resemble the former owners of the box, awaiting a reply. The barredspiral symbol on its face seemed slippery to the eye, as if the emblem were slyly looking back at her with a soul far older than her own.

“Toftorph-ph parfful Fhishfingtumpti parff-ful.”

The voice was deeply resonant. If she had been a real Thennanin, those undertones would have stroked her ridge crest, provoking respectful attentiveness. Back home, the Branch Library of Earth spoke like a kindly human grandmother, infinitely experienced, patient, and wise.

“I am prepared to witness,” murmured a button in her ear, rendering the machine’s words in Anglic. “Then I will be available for consultation.”

That was the perpetual trade-off. Gillian could not simply demand information from the archive. She had to give as well.

Normally, that would pose no problem. Any Library unit assigned to a major ship of space was provided camera views of the control room and the vessel’s exterior, in order to keep a WOM record for posterity. In return, the archive offered rapid access to wisdom spanning almost two billion years of civilization, condensed from planet-scale archives of the Library Institute of the Civilization of Five Galaxies.

Only there’s a rub, Gillian thought.

Streaker was not a “major ship of space.” Her own WOM units were solid, cheap, unresponsive — the only kind that impoverished Earth could afford. This lavish cube was a far greater treasure, salvaged on Kithrup from a mighty war cruiser of a rich starfaring clan.

She wanted the cube to continue thinking it was on that cruiser, serving a Thennanin admiral. Hence this disguise.

“Your direct watcher pickups are still disabled,” she explained, using the same dialect. “However, I have brought more recent images, taken by portable recording devices. Please accept-and-receive this data now.”

She signaled the Niss Machine, her clever robotic assistant in the next room. At once there appeared next to the cube a series of vivid scenes. Pictures of the suboceanic trench that local Jijoans called the “Midden”—carefully edited to leave out certain things.

We’re playing a dangerous game, she thought, as flickering holosims showed huge mounds of ancient debris, discarded cities, and abandoned spacecraft. The idea was to pretend that the Thennanin dreadnought Krondor’s Fire was hiding for tactical reasons in this realm of dead machines … and to do this without showing Streaker’s own slender hull, or any sign of dolphins, or even revealing the specific name and locale of this planet.

If we make it home, or to a neutral Institute base, we’ll be legally bound to hand over this unit. Even under anonymous seal, it would be safest for it to know as little as we can get away with telling.

Anyway, the Library might not prove as cooperative to mere Earthlings. Better to keep it thinking it was dealing with its official lease-holders.

Ever since the disaster at Oakka, Gillian had made this her chief personal project, pulling off a hoax in order to pry data out of their prize. In many ways, the Library cube was more valuable than the relics Streaker had snatched from the Shallow Cluster.

In fact, the subterfuge had worked better than expected. Some of the information won so far might prove critically useful to the Terragens Council.

Assuming we ever make it home again …

Ever since Kithrup, when Streaker lost the best and brightest of her crew, that had always seemed a long shot, at best.

In one particular area of technology, twenty-second-century humans had already nearly equaled Galactic skill levels, even before contact.

Holographic imagery.

Special-effects wizards from Hollywood, Luanda, and Aristarchus were among the first to dive confidently into alien arts, undismayed by anything as trivial as a billion-year head start. Within mere decades Earthlings could say they had mastered a single narrow field as well as the best starfaring clans—

Virtuosity at lying with pictures.

For thousands of years, when we weren’t scratching for food we were telling each other fables. Prevaricating. Propagandizing. Casting illusions. Making movies.

Lacking science, our ancestors fell back on magic.

The persuasive telling of untruths.

Still it seemed a wonder to Gillian that her Thennanin disguise worked so well. Clearly the “intelligence” of this unit, while awesome, was of a completely different kind than hers, with its own limitations.

Or else maybe it simply doesn’t care.

From experience, Gillian knew the Library cube would accept almost anything as input, as long as the show consisted of credible scenes it had never witnessed before. So Jijo’s abyss flashed before it — this time the panoramas came over fiber cable from the western sea, sent by Kaa’s team of explorers, near the settled region called the Slope. Ancient buildings gaped — drowned, eyeless, and windowless — under the scrutiny of probing searchlight beams. If anything, this waste field was even greater than the one where Streaker took refuge. The accumulated mass of made-things collected by a planetary culture for a million years.

Finally, the cascade of images ceased.

There followed a brief pause while Gillian waited edgily. Then the beige box commented.

“The event stream remains disjointed from previous ones. Occurrences do not take place in causal-temporal order related to inertial movements of this vessel. Is this effect a result of the aforementioned battle damage?”

Gillian had heard the same complaint — the very same words, in fact — ever since she began this ruse, shortly after Tom brought the captured prize aboard Streaker … only days before he flew away to vanish from her life.

In response, she gave the same bluff as always.

“That is correct. Until repairs are completed, penalties for any discrepancies may be assessed to the Krondor’s Fire mission account. Now please prepare for consultation.”

This time there was no delay.

“Proceed with your request.”

Using a transmitter in her left hand, Gillian signaled to the Niss Machine, waiting in another room. The Tymbrimi spy entity at once began sending data requisitions, a rush of flickering light that no organic being could hope to follow. Soon the info flow went bidirectional — a torrential response that forced Gillian to avert her eyes. Perhaps, amid that flood, there might be some data helpful to Streaker’s crew, increasing their chances of survival.

Gillian’s heart beat faster. This moment had its own dangers. If a starship happened to be scanning nearby — perhaps one of Streaker’s pursuers — onboard cognizance detectors might pick up a high level of digital activity in this area.

But Jijo’s ocean provided a lot of cover, as did the surrounding mountain of discarded starships. Anyway, the risk seemed worthwhile.

If only so much of the information offered by the cube weren’t confusing! A lot of it was clearly meant for starfarers with far more experience and sophistication than the Streaker crew.

Worse, we’re running out of interesting things to show the Library. Without fresh input, it might withdraw. Refuse to cooperate at all.

That was one reason she decided yesterday to let the four native kids come into this misty chamber and visit the archive. Since Alvin and his friends didn’t yet know they were aboard an Earthling vessel, there wasn’t much they could give away, and the effect on the Library unit might prove worthwhile.

Sure enough, the cube seemed bemused by the unique sight of an urs and hoon, standing amicably together. And the existence of a living g’Kek was enough, all by itself, to satisfy the archive’s passive curiosity. Soon afterward, it willingly unleashed a flood of requested information about the varied types of discarded spaceships surrounding Streaker in this underwater trash heap, including parameters used by ancient Buyur control panels.

That was helpful. But we need more. A lot more.

I guess it won’t be long until I’m forced to pay with real secrets.

Gillian had some good ones she could use … if she dared. In her office, just a few doors down, lay a mummified cadaver well over a billion years old.

Herbie.

To get hold of that relic — and the coordinates where it came from — most of the fanatic, pseudo-religious alliances in the Five Galaxies had been hunting Streaker since before Kithrup.

Pondering the chill beige cube, she thought—

I’ll bet if I showed you one glimpse of ol’ Herb, you’d have a seizure and spill every datum you’ve got stored inside.

Funny thing is … nothing would make me happier in all the universe than if we’d never seen the damned thing.

As a girl, Gillian had dreamed of star travel, and someday doing bold, memorable things. Together, she and Tom had planned their careers — and marriage — with a single goal in mind. To put themselves at the very edge, standing between Earth and the enigmas of a dangerous cosmos.

Recalling that naive ambition, and how extravagantly it was fulfilled, Gillian very nearly laughed aloud. But with pressed lips she managed to keep the bitter, poignant irony bottled inside, without uttering a sound.

For the time being, she must maintain the dignified presence of a Thennanin admiral.

Thennanin did not appreciate irony. And they never laughed.

Ewasx

YOU MIGHT AS WELL GET USED TO IT, MY RINGS.

The piercing sensations you feel are My fibrils of control, creeping down our shared inner core, bypassing the slow, old-fashioned, waxy trails, attaching and penetrating your many toroid bodies, bringing them into new order.

Now begins the lesson, when I teach you to be docile servants of something greater than yourselves. No longer a stack of ill-wed components, always quarreling, paralyzed with indecision. No more endless voting over what beliefs shall be held by a fragile, tentative i.

That was the way of our crude ancestor stacks, meditating loose, confederated thoughts in the odor-rich marshes of Jophekka World. Overlooked by other star clans, we seemed unpromising material for uplift. But the great, sluglike Poa saw potential in our pensive precursors, and began upraising those unlikely mounds.

Alas, after a million years, the Poa grew frustrated with our languid traeki natures.

“Design new rings for our clients,” they beseeched the clever Oailie, “to boost, guide, and drive them onward.”

The Oailie did not fail, so great was their mastery of genetic arts.

WHAT WAS THEIR TRANSFORMING GIFT?

New, ambitious rings.

Master rings.

LIKE ME.

Alvin

THIS IS A TEST. I’M TRYING OUT A BURNISH-NEW WAY of writing.

If you call this “writing”—where I talk out loud and watch sentences appear in midair above a little box I’ve been given.

Oh, it’s uttergloss all right. Last night, Huck used her new autoscribe to fill a room with words and glyphs in Gal-Three, GalEight, and every obscure dialect she knew, ordering translations back and forth until it seemed she was crowded on all sides by glowing symbols.

Our hosts gave us the machines to help tell our life stories, especially how the Six Races live together on the Slope. In return, the spinning voice promised a reward. Later, we’ll get to ask questions of the big chilly box.

Huck went delirious over the offer. Free access to a memory unit of the Great Library of the Five Galaxies! Why, it’s like telling Cortes he could have a map to the Lost Cities of Gold, or when the legendary hoonish hero Yuqwourphmin found a password to control the robot factories of Kurturn. My own nicknamesake couldn’t have felt more awe, not even when the secrets of Vanamonde and the Mad Mind were revealed in all their fearsome glory.

Unlike Huck, though, I view the prospect with dark worry. Like a detective in some old-time Earth storybook, I gotta ask—where’s the catch?

Will they break their promise, once we’ve shared all we know?

Maybe they’ll fake the answers. (How could we tell?)

Or perhaps they’ll let us talk to the cube all we want, because they figure the knowledge won’t do us any good, since we’re never going home again.

On the other hand, let’s say it’s all open and sincere. Say we do get a chance to pose questions to the Library unit, that storehouse of wisdom collected by a billion-year-old civilization.

What on Jijo could we possibly have to say?

I’ve just spent a midura experimenting. Dictating text. Backing up and rewriting. The autoscribe sure is a lot more flexible than scratching away with a pencil and a ball of guarru gum for an eraser! Hand motions move chunks of text like solid objects. I don’t even have to speak aloud, but simply will the words, like that little tickle when you mutter under your breath so’s no one else can hear. I know it’s not true mind reading — the machine must be sensing muscle changes in my throat or something. I read about such things in The Black Jack Era and Luna City Hobo. But it’s unnerving anyway.

Like when I asked to see the little machine’s dictionary of Anglic synonyms! I always figured I had a good vocabulary, from memorizing the town’s copy of Roget’s Thesaurus! But it turns out that volume left out most of the Hindi and Arabic cognate grafts onto the English-Eurasian root-stock. This tiny box holds enough words to keep Huck and me humble … or me, at least.

My pals are in nearby rooms, reciting their own memoirs. I expect Huck will rattle off something fast-paced, lurid, and carelessly brilliant to satisfy our hosts. Ur-ronn will be meticulous and dry, while Pincer will get distracted telling breathless stories about sea monsters. I have a head start because my journal already holds the greater part of our personal story — how we four adventurers got to this place of weirdly curved corridors, far beneath the waves.

So I have time to worry about why the phuvnthus want to know about us.

It could just be curiosity. On the other hand, what if something we say here eventually winds up hurting our kinfolk, back on the Slope? I can hardly picture how. I mean, it’s not like we know any military secrets — except about the urrish cache that Uriel the Smith sent us underwater to retrieve. But the spinning voice already knows about that.

In my cheerier moments I envision the phuvnthus letting us take the treasure back, taking us home to Wuphon in their metal whale, so we seem to rise from the dead like the fabled crew of the Hukuph-tau … much to the surprise of Uriel, Urdonnol, and our parents, who must have given us up for lost.

Optimistic fantasies alternate with other scenes I can’t get out of my head, like something that happened right after the whale sub snatched Wuphon’s Dream out of its death plunge. I have this hazy picture of bug-eyed spiderthings stomping through the wreckage of our handmade vessel, jabbering weird ratchety speech, then jumping back in mortal terror at the sight of Ziz, the harmless little traeki five-stack given us by Tyug the Alchemist.

Streams of fire blasted poor Ziz to bits.

You got to wonder what anyone would go and do a mean thing like that for.

I might as well get to work.

How to begin my story?

Call me Alvin.…

No. Too hackneyed. How about this opening?

Alvin Hph-wayuo woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant …

Uh-uh. That’s hitting too close to home.

Maybe I should model my tale after 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Here we are, castaways being held as cordial prisoners in an underwater world. Despite being female, Huck would insist she’s the heroic Ned Land character. Urronn would be Professor Aronnax, of course, which leaves either Pincer or me to be the comic fall guy, Conseil.

So when are we going to finally meet Nemo?

Hmm. That’s a disadvantage of this kind of writing, so effortless and easily corrected. It encourages running off at the mouth, when good old pencil and paper meant you had to actually think in advance what you were going to sa—

Wait a minute. What was that?

There it goes again. A faint booming sound … only louder this time. Closer.

I don’t think I like it. Not at all.

…

Ifni! This time it set the floor quivering.

The rumble reminds me of Guenn Volcano back home, belchin’ and groanin’, making everybody in Wuphon wonder if it’s the long-awaited Big O—

Jeekee sac-rot! No fooling this time.

Those are explosions, getting close fast!

Now comes another noise, like a zookir screeching its head off ’cause it sat on a quill lizard.

Is that the sound a siren makes? I always wondered—

Gishtuphwayo! Now the lights go dim. The floor jitters—

What is Ifni-slucking going on!

Dwer

THE VIEW FROM THE HIGHEST DUNE WASN’T PROMISING.

The Danik scout craft was at least five or six leagues out to sea, a tiny dot, barely visible beyond a distinct line where the water’s hue changed from pale bluish green to almost black. The flying machine cruised back and forth, as if searching for something it had misplaced. Only rarely, when the wind shifted, did they catch the faint rumble of its engines, but every forty or so duras Dwer glimpsed something specklike tumble from the belly of the sleek boat, glinting in the morning sun before it struck the sea. Ten more duras would pass after the object sank — then the ocean’s surface bulged with a hummock of roiling foam, as if an immense monster suffered dying spasms far below.

“What’s Kunn doing?” Dwer asked. He turned to Rety, who shaded her eyes to watch the distant flier. “Do you have any idea?”

The girl started to shrug her shoulders, but yee, the little urrish male, sprawled there, snaking his slender neck to aim all three eyes toward the south. The robot rocked impatiently, bobbing up and down as if trying to signal the distant flier with its body.

“I don’t know, Dwer,” Rety replied. “I reckon it has somethin’ to do with the bird.”

“Bird,” he repeated blankly.

“You know. My metal bird. The one we saved from the mulc spider.”

“That bird?” Dwer nodded. “You were going to show it to the sages. How did the aliens get their hands—”

Rety cut in.

“The Daniks wanted to know where it came from. So Kunn asked me to guide him here, to pick up Jass, since he was the one who saw where the bird came to shore. I never figured that’d mean leavin’ me behind in the village.…” She bit her lip. “Jass must’ve led Kunn here. Kunn said somethin’ about ‘flushin’ prey.’ I guess he’s tryin’ to get more birds.”

“Or else whoever made your bird, and sent it ashore.”

“Or else that.” She nodded, clearly uncomfortable. Dwer chose not to press for details about her deal with the star humans.

As their journey south progressed, the number of marshy streams had multiplied, forcing Dwer to “carry” the robot several more times before he finally called a halt around dusk. There had been a brief confrontation when the combat machine tried intimidating him to continue. But its god weapons had been wrecked in the ambush at the sooner camp, and Dwer faced the robot’s snapping claws without flinching, helped by a strange detachment, as if his mind had somehow grown while enduring the machine’s throbbing fields. Hallucination or not, the feeling enabled him to call its bluff.

With grudging reluctance that seemed lifelike, the robot gave in. By a small fire, Dwer had shared with Rety the donkey jerky in his pouch. After a moment’s hesitation, Rety brought out her own contribution, two small lozenges sealed in wrappers that felt slick to the touch. She showed Dwer how to unwrap his, and guffawed at the look on his face when intense, strange flavors burst in his mouth. He laughed, too, almost inhaling the Danik candy the wrong way. Its lavish sweetness won a place on his List of Things I’m Glad I Did Before Dying.

Later, huddled with Rety on the banked coals, Dwer dreamed a succession of fantastic images far more potent than normal — perhaps an effect of “carrying” the robot, conducting its ground-hugging fields. Instead of crushing weight, he fantasized lightness, as if his body wafted, unencumbered. Incomprehensible panoramas flickered under closed eyelids … objects glimmering against dark backgrounds, or gassy shapes, glowing of their own accord. Once, a strange sense of recognition seized him, a timeless impression of loving familiarity.

The Egg, his sleeping consciousness had mused. Only the sacred stone looked strange — not an outsized pebble squatting in a mountain cleft, but something like a huge, dark sun, whose blackness outshone the glitter of normal stars.

Their journey resumed before dawn, and featured only two more water crossings before reaching the sea. There the robot picked them up and streaked eastward along the beach until it reached this field of dunes — a high point to scan the strange blue waters of the Rift.

At least Dwer thought it was the Rift — a great cleft splitting the continent. I wish I still had my telescope, he thought. With it he might glean some idea what the pilot of the scout ship was trying to accomplish.

Flushing out prey, Rety said.

If that was Kunn’s aim, the Danik star warrior could learn a thing or two about hunting technique. Dwer recalled one lesson old Fallon taught him years ago.

No matter how potent your weapon, or whatever game you’re after, it’s never a good idea to be both beater and shooter. If there’s just one of you, forget driving your quarry.

The solitary hunter masters patience, and silently learns the ways of his prey.

That approach had one drawback. It required empathy. And the better you learn to feel like your prey, the greater the chance you may someday stop calling it prey at all.

“Well, we settled one thing,” Rety commented, watching the robot semaphore its arms wildly at the highest point of the dune, like a small boy waving to parents who were too far away to hear. “You must’ve done a real job on its comm gear. Even the short range won’t work, on line-o’-sight.”

Dwer was duly impressed. Rety had learned a lot during her stint as an adopted alien.

“Do you think the pilot could spot us by eye, when he heads back toward the village to pick you up?” Dwer asked.

“Maybe … supposin’ he ever meant to do that. He may forget all about me when he finds what he wants, and just zip west to the Rothen station, to report.”

Dwer knew that Rety had already lost some favor with the sky humans. Her voice was bitter, for aboard that distant flying dot rode Jass, her tormentor while growing up in a savage tribe. She had arranged vengeance for the bully. But now Jass stood at the pilot’s elbow, currying favor while Rety was stuck down here.

Her worry was clear. What if her lifelong enemy won the reward she had struggled and connived for? Her ticket to the stars?

“Hmm. Well, then we better make sure he doesn’t miss us when he cruises by.”

Dwer wasn’t personally anxious to meet the star pilot who had blasted the poor urrish sooners so unmercifully from above. He fostered no illusion of gentle treatment at Kunn’s hands. But the scout boat offered life and hope for Rety. And perhaps by attracting the Danik’s attention he could somehow prevent the man’s quick return to the Gray Hills. Danel Ozawa had been killed in the brief fight with the robot, but Dwer might still buy time for Lena Strong and the urrish chief to work out an accord with Rety’s old band … beating a stealthy retreat to some place where star gods would never find them. A delaying action could be Dwer’s last worthwhile service.

“Let’s build a fire,” the girl suggested, gesturing toward the beach, littered with driftwood from past storms.

“I was just about to suggest that,” Dwer replied.

She chuckled.

“Yeah, right! Sure you were.”

Sara

AT FIRST THE ANCIENT TUNNEL SEEMED HORRID and gloomy. Sara kept imagining a dusty Buyur tube car coming to life, an angry phantom hurtling toward the little horse-drawn wagon, bent on punishing fools who disturbed its ghostly domain. Dread clung fast for a while, making each breath come short and sharp between rapid heartbeats.

But fear has one great enemy, more powerful than confidence or courage.

Tedium.

Chafed from sitting on the bench for miduras, Sara eventually let go of the dismal oppression with a long sigh. She slipped off the wagon to trot alongside — at first only to stretch her legs, but then for longer periods, maintaining a steady jog.

After a while, she even found it enjoyable.

I guess I’m just adapting to the times. There may be no place for intellectuals in the world to come.

Emerson joined her, grinning as he kept pace with long-legged strides. And soon the tunnel began to lose its power over some of the others, as well. The two wagon drivers from the cryptic Illias tribe — Kepha and Nuli — grew visibly less tense with each league they progressed toward home.

But where was that?

Sara pictured a map of the Slope, drawing a wide arc roughly south from the Gentt. It offered no clue where a horse clan might stay hidden all this time.

How about in some giant, empty magma chamber, beneath a volcano?

What a lovely thought. Some magical sanctuary of hidden grassy fields, safe from the glowering sky. An underground world, like in a pre-contact adventure tale featuring vast ageless caverns, mystic light sources, and preposterous monsters.

Of course no such place could form under natural laws.

But might the Buyur — or some prior Jijo tenant — have used the same forces that carved this tunnel to create a secret hideaway? A place to preserve treasures while the surface world was scraped clean of sapient-made things?

Sara chuckled at the thought. But she did not dismiss it.

Sometime later, she confronted Kurt.

“Well, I’m committed now. Tell me what’s so urgent that Emerson and I had to follow you all this way.”

But the exploser only shook his head, refusing to speak in front of Dedinger.

What’s the heretic going to do? Sara thought. Break his bonds and run back to tell the world?

The desert prophets captivity appeared secure. And yet it was disconcerting to see on Dedinger’s face an expression of serene confidence, as if present circumstances only justified his cause.

Times like these bring heretics swarming … like privacy wasps converging on a gossip. We shouldn’t be surprised to see fanatics thriving.

The Sacred Scrolls prescribed two ways for Jijo’s illegal colonists to ease their inherited burden of sin — by preserving the planet, and by following the Path of Redemption. Ever since the days of Drake and Ur-Chown, the sages had taught that both goals were compatible with commerce and the comforts of daily life. But some purists disagreed, insisting that the Six Races must choose.

We should not be here, proclaimed Lark’s faction. We sooners should use birth control to obey Galactic law, leaving this fallow world in peace. Only then will our sin be healed.

Others thought redemption should take higher priority.

Each clan should follow the example of glavers, preached Dedinger’s cult, and the Urunthai. Salvation and renewal come to those who remove mental impediments and rediscover their deep natures.

The first obstacle to eliminate — the anchor weighing down our souls — is knowledge.

Both groups called today’s High Sages true heretics, pandering to the masses with their wishy-washy moderation. When dread starships came, fresh converts thronged to purer faiths, preaching simple messages and strong medicine for fearful times.

Sara knew her own heresy would not attract disciples. It seemed ill matched to Jijo — a planet of felons destined for oblivion of one sort or another. And yet …

Everything depends on your point of view.

So taught a wise traeki sage.

we/i/you are oft fooled by the obvious.

Lark

AN URRISH COURIER CAME RUSHING OUT OF THE forest of tall, swaying greatboo.

Could this be my answer already?

Lark had dispatched a militiaman just a few miduras ago, with a message to Lester Cambel in the secret refuge of the High Sages.

But no. The rough-pelted runner had galloped up the long path from Festival Glade. In her rush, she would not even pause for Lark to tap the vein of a tethered simla, offering the parched urs a hospitable cup of steaming blood. Instead, the humans stared amazed as she plunged her fringed muzzle into a bucket of undiluted water, barely shuddering at the bitter taste.

Between gasping swallows, she told dire news.

As rumored, the second starship was titanic, squatting like a mountain, blocking the river so a swamp soon formed around the trapped Rothen cruiser, doubly imprisoning Ling’s comrades. Surviving witnesses reported seeing familiar outlines framed by the battleship’s brightly lit hatchway. Corrugated cones. Stacks of ring’s, luxuriously glistening.

Only a few onlookers, steeped in ancient legends, knew this was not a good sign, and they had little time to spread a warning before torrid beams sliced through the night, mowing down everything within a dozen arrowflights.

At dawn, brave observers peered from nearby peaks to see a swathe of shattered ground strewn with oily smudges and bloody debris. A defensive perimeter, stunned observers suggested, though such prudence seemed excessive for omnipotent star gods.

“What casualties?” asked Jeni Shen, sergeant of Lark’s militia contingent, a short, well-muscled woman and a friend of his brother, Dwer. They had all seen flickering lights in the distance, and heard sounds like thunder, but imagined nothing as horrible as the messenger related.

The urs told of hundreds dead … and that a High Sage of the Commons was among those slaughtered. Asx had been standing near a group of curious spectators and confused alien lovers, waiting to parley with the visitors. After the dust and flames settled, the traeki was nowhere to be seen.

The g’Kek doctor tending Uthen expressed the grief they all felt, rolling all four tentacle-like eyes and flailing the ground with his pusher leg. This personified the horror. Asx had been a popular sage, ready to mull over problems posed by any of the Six Races, from marriage counseling to dividing the assets of a bisected qheuen hive. Asx might “mull” for days, weeks, or a year before giving an answer — or several answers, laying out a range of options.

Before the courier departed, Lark’s status as a junior sage won him a brief look at the drawings in her dispatch pouch. He showed Ling a sketch of a massive oval ship of space, dwarfing the one that brought her to this world. Her face clouded. The mighty shape was unfamiliar and frightening.

Lark’s own messenger — a two-legged human — had plunged into the ranks of towering boo at daybreak, carrying a plea for Lester Cambel to send up Ling’s personal Library unit, so she might read the memory bars he and Uthen had found in the wrecked station.

Her offer, made the evening before, was limited to seeking data about plagues, especially the one now sweeping the qheuen community.

“If Ro-kenn truly was preparing genocide agents, he is a criminal by our own law.”

“Even a Rothen master?” Lark had asked skeptically.

“Even so. It is not disloyal for me to find out, or else prove it was not so.

“However,” she had added, “don’t expect me to help you make war against my crew mates or my patrons. Not that you could do much, now that their guard is raised. You surprised us once with tunnels and gunpowder, destroying a little research base. But you’ll find that harming a starship is beyond even your best-equipped zealots.”

That exchange took place before they learned about the second vessel. Before word came that the mighty Rothen cruiser was reduced to a captive toy next to a true colossus from space.

While they awaited Cambel’s answer, Lark sent his troopers sifting through the burned lakeshore thicket, gathering golden preservation beads. Galactic technology had been standardized for millions of years. So there just might be a workable reading unit amid all the pretty junk the magpie spider had collected. Anyway, it seemed worth a try.

While sorting through a pile of amber cocoons, he and Ling resumed their game of cautious question-and-evasion. Circumstances had changed — Lark no longer felt as stupid in her presence — still, it was the same old dance.

Starting off, Ling quizzed him about the Great Printing, the event that transformed Jijo’s squabbling coalition of sooner races, even more than the arrival of the Holy Egg. Lark answered truthfully without once mentioning the Biblos Archive. Instead he described the guilds of printing, photocopying, and especially papermaking, with its pounding pulp hammers and pungent drying screens, turning out fine pages under the sharp gaze of his father, the famed Nelo.

“A nonvolatile, randomly accessed, analog memory store that is completely invisible from space. No electricity or digital cognizance to detect from orbit.” She marveled. “Even when we saw books, we assumed they were hand-copied — hardly a culture-augmenting process. Imagine, a wolfling technology proved so effective … under special circumstances.”

Despite that admission, Lark wondered about the Danik attitude, which seemed all too ready to dismiss the accomplishments of their own human ancestors — except when an achievement could be attributed to Rothen intervention.

It was Lark’s turn to ask a question, and he chose to veer onto another track.

“You seemed as surprised as anybody, when the disguise creature crawled off of Ro-pol’s face.”

He referred to events just before the Battle of the Glade, when a dead Rothen was seen stripped of its charismatic, symbiotic mask. Ro-pol’s eyes, once warm and expressive, had bulged lifeless from a revealed visage that was sharply slanted, almost predatory, and distinctly less humanoid.

Ling had never seen a master so exposed. She reacted to Lark’s question cautiously.

“I am not of the Inner Circle.”

“What’s that?”

Ling inhaled deeply. “Rann and Kunn are privy to knowledge about the Rothen that most Daniks never learn. Rann has even been to one of the secret Rothen home sites. Most of us are never so blessed. When not on missions, we dwell with our families in the covered canyons of Poria Outpost, with just a hundred or so of our patrons. Even on Poria, the two races don’t mix daily.”

“Still, not to know something so basic about those who claim to be—”

“Oh, one hears rumors. Sometimes you see a Rothen whose face seems odd … as if part of it was, well, put on wrong. Maybe we cooperate with the deception by choosing at some level not to notice. Anyway, that’s not the real issue, is it?”

“What is the real issue?”

“You imply I should be horrified to learn they wear symbionts to look more humanoid. To appear more beautiful in our eyes. But why shouldn’t the Rothen use artificial aids, if it helps them serve as better guides, shepherding our race toward excellence?”

Lark muttered, “How about a little thing called honesty?”

“Do you tell your pet chimp or zookir everything? Don’t parents sometimes lie to children for their own good? What about lovers who strive to look nice for each other? Are they dishonest?

“Think, Lark. What are the odds against another race seeming as gloriously beautiful to human eyes as our patrons appear? Oh, part of their attraction surely dates back to early stages of uplift, on Old Earth, when they raised our apelike ancestors almost to full sapiency, before the Great Test began. It may be ingrained at a genetic level … the way dogs were culled in favor of craving the touch of man.

“Yet, we are still unfinished creatures. Still crudely emotional. Let me ask you, Lark. If your job were to uplift flighty, cantankerous beings, and you found that wearing a cosmetic symbiont would make your role as teacher easier, wouldn’t you do it?”

Before Lark could answer an emphatic no, she rushed ahead.

“Do not some members of your Six use rewq animals for similar ends? Those symbionts that lay their filmy bodies over your eyes, sucking a little blood in exchange for help translating emotions? Aren’t rewq a vital part of the complex interplay that is your Commons?”

“Hr-rm.” Lark throat-umbled like a doubtful hoon. “Rewq don’t help us lie. They are not themselves lies.”

Ling nodded. “Still, you never faced a task as hard as the Rothens’—to raise up creatures as brilliant, and disagreeable, as human beings. A race whose capability for future majesty also makes us capricious and dangerous, prone to false turns and deadly errors.”

Lark quashed an impulse to argue. She might only dig in, rationalizing herself into a corner and refusing to come out. At least now she admitted that one Rothen might do evil deeds — that Ro-kenn’s personal actions might be criminal.

And who knows? That may be all there is to it. The scheming of a rogue individual. Perhaps the race is just as wonderful as she says. Wouldn’t it be nice if humanity really had such patrons, and a manifest greatness waiting, beyond the next millennium?

Ling had seemed sincere when she claimed the Rothen ship commander would get to the bottom of things.

“It’s imperative to convince your sages they must release the hostages and Ro-pol’s body, along with those photograms’ your portraitist took. Blackmail won’t work against the Rothen — you must understand this. It’s not in their character to respond to threats. Yet the ‘evidence’ you’ve gathered could do harm in the long run.”

That was before the stunning news — that the Rothen ship was itself captured, encased in a prison of light.

Lark mused over one of the mulc spider’s golden eggs while Ling spoke for a while about the difficult but glorious destiny her masters planned for impulsive, brilliant humanity.

“You know,” he commented. “There’s something screwy about the logic of this whole situation.”

“What do you mean?”

Lark chewed his lip, like an urs wrestling with uncertainty. Then he decided — it was time to bring it all in the open.

“I mean, let’s put aside for now the added element of the new starship. The Rothen may have feuds you know nothing about. Or it may be a different gang of gene raiders, come to rob Jijo’s biosphere. For all we know, magistrates from the Galactic Migration Institute have brought Judgment Day as foretold in the Scrolls.

“For now, though, let’s review what led to the Battle of the Glade — the fight that made you my prisoner. It began when Bloor photo’d the dead Ro-pol without her mask. Ro-kenn went livid, ordering his robots to kill everyone who had seen.

“But didn’t you once assure me there was no need to delete local witnesses to your team’s visit? That your masters could handle it, even if oral and written legacies survive hundreds or thousands of years, describing a visit by human and Rothen gene raiders?”

“I did.”

“But you admit gene raiding is against Galactic law! I know you feel the Rothen are above such things. Still, they don’t want to be caught in the act.

“Let’s assume credible testimony, maybe even photos, finally reach Migration Institute inspectors next time they visit Jijo. Testimony about you and Rann and Kunn. Human gene raiders. Even I know the rule—‘police your own kind’—prevails in the Five Galaxies. Did Ro-kenn explain how the Rothen would prevent sanctions coming down on Earth?”

Ling wore a grim expression. “You’re saying he played us for fools. That he let me spread false assurances among the natives, while planning all along to strew germs and wipe out every witness.”

Obviously it was bitter for her to say it.

Ling seemed surprised when Lark shook his head.

“That’s what I thought at first, when qheuens fell sick. But what I now imagine is worse yet.”

That got her attention.

“What could be worse than mass murder? If the charge is proved, Ro-kenn will be hauled off to the home sites in dolor chains! He’ll be punished as no Rothen has been in ages.”

Lark shrugged. “Perhaps. But stop and think a bit.

“First, Ro-kenn wasn’t relying on disease alone to do the job.

“Oh, he probably had a whole library of bugs — infectious agents used in past wars in the Five Galaxies. No doubt starfaring qheuens long ago developed countermeasures against the germ raging through Uthen’s lymph pipes right now. I’m sure Ro-kenn’s concoctions will kill a lot more of us.”

Ling started to protest, but Lark forged ahead.

“Nevertheless, I know a thing or two about how pestilence works in natural ecosystems. It would be a complete fluke for even a string of diseases to wipe out every member of the Six. Random immunities would stymie the best-designed bugs. Furthermore, the sparser the population got, the harder it would be to reach and infect dispersed survivors.

“No, Ro-kenn needed something more. A breakdown of the Commons into total war! A war that could be exploited, pushed to the limits. A struggle so bitter that each race would pursue its victims to the farthest comers of Jijo, willingly helping to spread new parasites in order to slay their foes.”

He saw Ling struggle to find a way around his logic. But she had been present when Ro-kenn’s psi-recordings were played — sick dream images, meant to incite fatal grudges among the Six. Those present weren’t fooled because they were forewarned, but what if the messages had been broadcast as planned … amplified through the compelling wave forms of the Holy Egg?

“I will tell of this, back home,” she vowed in a low, faint voice. “He will be punished.”

“That’s gratifying,” Lark went on. “But I’m not finished. You see, even by combining plagues with war, Ro-kenn could never guarantee annihilation of all six races, or eliminate the off chance that credible testimony might be passed down the generations — perhaps stored in some cave — to finally reach Institute prosecutors. On the other hand, he could influence which race or sept would be left standing at the end, and which would perish first. There is one, in particular, whose fate he knows well how to manipulate. That one is Homo sapiens.

“The way I see it, Ro-kenn’s plan had several parts. First, he had to make sure Earthlings were hated. Second, he must weaken the other five races by releasing diseases that could then be blamed on humans. But the ultimate goal was to make sure humans went extinct on Jijo. He didn’t give a damn if others left a few survivors to tell the tale.”

Ling stared. “What good would that do? You said testimony might be passed down—”

“Yes, but with Earthlings on Jijo only a hated memory, all history will tell is that once upon a time a ship full of humans came down, stole genes, and tried to kill everybody. No one will bother emphasizing which humans did these things.

“In the future — perhaps only a few centuries, if someone plants an anonymous tip — Galactic judges would arrive and hear that people from Earth did these dreadful things. Earth will bear the full brunt of any sanctions, while the Rothen get off scot-free.”

Ling was silent for a long moment, working her way through his logic. Finally, she looked up with a broad grin.

“You had me worried a minute, but I found the defect in your reasoning!”

Lark tilted his head. “Do tell.”

“Your diabolical scenario just might make sense, but for two flaws—

“First—the Rothen are patrons of all humanity. Earth and her colonies, while presently governed by Darwinist fools on the Terragens Council, still represent the vast majority of our gene pool. The Rothen would never let harm come to our homeworld. Even in the current galactic crisis, they are acting behind the scenes to ensure Earth’s safety from the enemies besetting her.”

There it was again … a reference to dire events happening megaparsecs away. Lark yearned to follow that thread, but Ling continued with her argument.

“Second — let’s say Ro-kenn wanted all blame shifted to humans. Then why did he and Ro-pol emerge from the station and show themselves? By walking around, letting artists sketch them and scribes take down their words, weren’t they jeopardizing the Rothen to the same eyewitness accounts you say could damage Earth?”

Ling seemed ready to accept that her immediate boss might be criminal or insane, but with bulwarks of logic she defended her patron race. Lark had mixed feelings about demolishing such faith. He, too, had his heresies.

“I’m sorry, Ling, but my scenario still stands.

“Your first point only has validity if it is true that the Rothen are our patrons. I know that’s the central premise around which you were raised, but believing does not make it so. You admit your people, the Daniks, are small in number, live on an isolated outpost, and see just a few Rothen. Putting aside mythic fables about ancient visitors and Egyptian pyramids, all you really have is their word regarding a supposed relationship with our race. One that may simply be a hoax.

“As for your second point, just look back at the way events unfolded. Ro-kenn surely knew he was being sketched when he emerged that evening, using his charisma on the crowd and planting seeds of dissension. After living so long together, all six races are affected by each other’s standards of beauty, and the Rothen were indeed beautiful!

“Ro-kenn may even have known we had the ability to etch our drawings onto durable plates. Later, when he saw Bloor’s first set of photographic images, he hardly batted an eye. Oh, he pretended to dicker with the sages, but you and I could both tell he was unafraid of the ‘proof’ being used to blackmail him. He was only buying time till the ship returned. And it might have worked — if Bloor hadn’t uncovered and recorded Ro-pol’s corpse, bare and unmasked. That’s when Ro-kenn went hysterically murderous, ordering a massacre!”

“I know.” Ling shook her head. “It was madness. But you must understand. Disturbing the dead is very serious. It must have pushed him over the edge—”

“Over the edge, my left hind hoof! He knew exactly what he was doing. Think, Ling. Suppose someday Institute observers see photos showing humans, and a bunch of very humanlike beings nobody ever heard of, committing crimes on Jijo. Could such crude pictures ever really implicate the Rothen?

“Perhaps they might, if that’s what Rothen looked like. But till Bloor shot Ro-pol’s naked face, our crude images posed no threat to Rothen security. Because in a century or two those facial disguise symbionts won’t exist anymore, and no one alive will know that Rothen ever looked like that.”

“What are you talking about? Every Danik grows up seeing Rothen as they appear with symbionts on. Obviously there will be people around who know …”

Her voice faded. She stared at Lark, unblinking. “You can’t mean—”

“Why not? After long association with your people, I’m sure they’ve acquired the necessary means. Once humans are of no further use as front men for their schemes, your ‘patrons’ will simply use a wide spectrum of tailored viruses to wipe out every Danik, just as they planned to eliminate humans on Jijo.

“For that matter, once they’ve tested it on both our peoples, they’ll be in a good position to sell such a weapon to Earth’s enemies. After all, once our race goes extinct, who will protest our innocence? Who will bother to look for other suspects in a series of petty felonies that were committed, all over the Five Galaxies, by groups of bipeds looking a lot like—”

“Enough!” Ling shouted, standing suddenly, spilling gold cocoons from her lap. She backed away, hyperventilating.

Unrelenting, he stood and followed.

“I’ve thought about little else since we left the Glade. And it all makes sense. Even down to the way the Rothen won’t let your kind use neural taps.”

“I told you before. It’s forbidden because the taps might drive us mad!”

“Really? Why do the Rothen themselves have them? Because they’re more highly evolved?” Lark snorted. “Anyway, I hear that nowadays humans elsewhere use them effectively.”

“How do you know what humans elsewhere—”

Lark hurriedly cut her off.

“The truth is, the Rothen can’t risk letting their pet humans make direct mind-computer links, because someday one of you Daniks might bypass sanitized consoles, draw on the Great Library directly, and figure out how you’ve been pawns—”

Ling backed away another pace. “Please, Lark … I don’t want to do this anymore.”

He felt an impulse to stop, to take pity. But he quashed it. This had to come out, all of it.

“I must admit it’s quite a scam, using humans as front men for gene theft and other crimes. Even two centuries ago, when the Tabernacle departed, our race had a vile reputation as one of the lowest-ranking citizen tribes in the Five Galaxies. So-called wolflings, with no ancient clan to stand up for us. If anybody gets caught, we’ll make perfect patsies. The Rothen scheme is clever. The real question is, why would any humans let themselves be used that way?

“History may hold the answer, Ling. According to our texts, humans suffered from a major inferiority complex at the time of contact, when our primitive canoe-spacecraft stumbled onto a towering civilization of star gods. Your ancestors and mine chose different ways of dealing with the complex, each of them grasping at straws, seeking any excuse for hope.

“The Tabernacle colonists dreamed of escaping to some place out of sight of bureaucrats and mighty Galactic clans — a place to breed freely and fulfill the old romance of colonizing a frontier. In contrast, your Danik forebears rushed to embrace a tall tale they were told by a band of smooth talkers. A flattering fable that indulged their wounded pride, promising a grand destiny for certain chosen humans and their descendants … providing they did exactly as they were told. Even if it meant raising their children to be shills and sneak thieves in service to a pack of galactic gangsters.”

Tremors rocked Ling as she held up one hand, palm out, at the end of a rigid arm, as if trying physically to stave off any more words.

“I asked … you to stop,” she repeated, and seemed to have trouble breathing. Pain melted her face.

Now Lark did shut up. He had gone too far, even in the name of truth. Raggedly, trying to maintain some remnant of her dignity, Ling swiveled and strode off to the acrid lake that lay below a boulder field of tumbled Buyur ruins.

Does anybody like having their treasured worldview torn away? Lark mused, watching Ling hurl stones into the caustic pond. Most of us would reject all the proof in the cosmos before considering that our own beliefs might be wrong.

But the scientist in her won’t let her dismiss evidence so easily. She has to face facts, like them or not.

The habit of truth is hard to learn, and a mixed blessing. It leaves no refuge when a new truth comes along that hurts.

Lark knew his feelings were hardly a testament to clarity. Anger roiled, mixed with shame that he could not hold on to the purity of his own convictions. There was childish satisfaction from upsetting Ling’s former smug superiority … and chagrin at finding such a motive smoldering inside. Lark enjoyed being right, though it might be better, this time, if he turned out to be wrong.

Just when I had her respecting me as an equal, and maybe starting to like me, that’s when I have to go stomping through her life, smashing idols she was raised to worship, showing off the bloodstained hands of her gods.

You may win an argument, boy. You may even convince her. But could anyone fully forgive you for doing something like that?

He shook his head over how much he might have just thrown away, all for the torrid pleasure of harsh honesty.

Ewasx

DO NOT BE AFRAID, MY LESSER PARTS.

The sensations you feel may seem like coercive pain, but they convey a kind of love that will grow dear to you, with time. I am part of you now, one with you. I will never do anything to cause us harm, so long as this alliance serves a function.

Go ahead, stroke the wax if you wish, for the old ways of memory still have lesser uses (so long as they serve My purpose). Play over recent images so we may recall together events leading to our new union. Re-create the scene perceived by Asx, staring up in awe, watching the great Jophur warship, Polkjhy, swoop from the sky, taking the pirates captive, then landing in this tortured valley. Poor, loosely joined, scatterbrained Asx — did you/we not stare in tremulous fear?

Yes, I can stroke another driving motivation. One that kept you admirably unified, despite swirling dread. It was a cloying sense of duty. Duty to the not-self community of half beings you call the Commons.

As Asx, your stack planned to speak for the Commons. Asx expected to face star-traveling humans, along with creatures known as “Rothen.” But then Jophur forms were seen through our ship ports!

After some hesitation, did you not turn at last and try to flee?

How slow this stack was before the change! When knives of fire lanced forth from this mighty vessel, how did you react to the maelstrom of destruction? To hot ravening beams that tore through wood, stone, and flesh, but always spared this pile of aged rings? Had you then possessed the bright new running legs we now wear, you might have thrown yourselves into that roaring calamity. But Asx was slow, too slow even to shelter nearby comrades with its traeki bulk.

All died, except this stack.

ARE YOU NOT PROUD?

The next ray from the ship seized this multistriped cone, lifting it into the night air, sweeping the fatty rings toward doors that gaped to receive them.

Oh, how well Asx spoke then, despite the confusion! With surprising coherence for a stack without a master, tapping waxy streaks of eloquence, Asx pleaded, cajoled, and reasoned with the enigmatic creatures who peered from behind glaring lights.

Finally, these beings glided forward. The starship’s hold filled with Asx’s ventings of horrified dread.

How unified you were, My rings! The testimony of the wax is clear. At that moment, you were one as never before.

United in shared dismay to see those cousin toroids your ancestors sought to escape, many cycles ago.

We Jophur, the mighty and fulfilled.

Dwer

THE ROBOT PROVED USEFUL AT HEAPING DRIFTwood onto the seaside shoulder of a high dune overlooking the Rift. Without rest or pause, it dumped a load then scurried for more, in whatever direction Rety indicated with an outstretched arm. The Danik machine seemed willing to obey once more — so long as her orders aimed toward a reunion with Kunn.

Such single-minded devotion to its master reminded Dwer of Earth stories about dogs — tales his mother read aloud when he was small. It struck him odd that the Tabernacle colonists brought horses, donkeys, and chimps, but no canines.

Lark or Sara might know why.

That was Dwer’s habitual thought, encountering something he didn’t understand. Only now it brought a pang, knowing he might never see his brother and sister again.

Maybe Kunn won’t kill me outright. He might bring me home in chains, instead, before the Rothens wipe out the Six Races to cover their tracks.

That was the terrible fate the High Sages foresaw for Jijo’s fallen settlers, and Dwer figured they ought to know. He recalled Lena Strong musing about what means the aliens might use to perform their genocide. With gruesome relish, Lena kept topping herself during the long hike east from the Rimmer Range. Would the criminal star gods wash the Slope with fire, scouring it from the glaciers to the sea? Would they melt the ice caps and bring an end by drowning? Her morbid speculations were like a fifth companion as Dwer guided two husky women and a lesser sage past a thousand leagues of poison grass all the way to the Gray Hills, in a forlorn bid to safeguard a fragment of human civilization on Jijo.

Dwer had last glimpsed Jenin, Lena, and Danel during the brief fight near the huts of Rety’s home clan. This same robot cut poor Danel down with lethal rays, instants before its own weapons pod was destroyed.

Indeed, the battle drone was no dog to be tamed or befriended. Nor would it show gratitude for the times Dwer helped it cross rivers, anchoring its fields to ground through the conduit of his body.

Mudfoot was hardly any better a comrade. The lithe noor beast swiftly grew bored with wood-gathering chores, and scampered off instead to explore the tide line, digging furiously where bubbles revealed a buried hive of sand clamettes. Dwer looked forward to roasting some … until he saw that Mudfoot was cracking and devouring every one, setting none aside for the humans.

As useful as a noor, he thought, quashing stings of hunger as he hoisted another bundle of twisty driftwood slabs, digging his moccasins into the sandy slope.

Dwer tried to remain optimistic.

Maybe Kunn will feed me, before attaching the torture machines.

yee stood proudly atop the growing woodpile. The diminutive urrish male called directions in a piping voice, as if mere humans could never manage a proper fire without urrish supervision. Rety’s “husband” hissed disappointment over Dwer’s poor contribution — as if being wounded, starved, and dragged across half of Jijo in a robot’s claws did not excuse much. Dwer ignored yee’s reprimand, dumping his load then stepping over to the dune’s seaward verge, shading his eyes in search of Kunn’s alien scoutship.

He spied it far away, a silvery bead, cruising back and forth above the deep blue waters of the Rift. At intervals, something small and shiny would fall from the slender spacecraft. An explosive, Dwer supposed, for about twenty duras after each canister struck the water, the sea abruptly frothed white. Sometimes a sharp, almost musical tone reached shore.

According to Rety, Kunn was trying to force something — or somebody — out of hiding.

I hope you miss, Dwer thought … though the star pilot might be in a better mood toward prisoners if his hunt went well.

“I wonder what Jass has been tellin’ Kunn, all this time,” Rety worried aloud, joining Dwer at the crest. “What if they become pals?”

Dwer waited as the robot dropped another cargo of wood and went off for more. Then he replied.

“Have you changed your mind? We could still try to escape. Take out the robot. Avoid Kunn. Go our own way.”

Rety smiled with surprising warmth.

“Why, Dwer, is that a whatchamacallum? A proposal? What’ll we do? Make our own little sooner clan, here on the wind barrens? Y’know I already have one husban’ and I need his p’rmission to add another.”

Actually, he had envisioned trying to make it back to the Gray Hills, where Lena and Jenin could surely use a hand. Or else, if that way seemed too hard and Rety rigidly opposed returning to the tribe she hated, they might strike out west and reach the Vale in a month or two, if the foraging was good along the way.

Rety went on, with more edge in her voice.

“B’sides, I still have my eye set on an apart’mint on Poria Outpost. Like the one Besh an’ Ling showed me a picture of, with a bal-co-ny, an’ a bed made o’ cloud stuff. I figure it’ll be just a bit more comfy than scratchin’ out the rest of my days here with savages.”

Dwer shrugged. He hadn’t expected her to agree. As a “savage,” he had reasons of his own for going ahead with the bonfire to attract Kunn’s attention.

“Well, anyway, I don’t suppose the bot would let its guard down a second time.”

“It was lucky to survive doin’ it around you once.”

Dwer took a moment to realize she had just paid him a compliment. He cherished its uniqueness, knowing he might never hear another.

The moment of unaccustomed warmth was broken when something massive abruptly streaked by, so fast that its air wake shoved both humans to the ground. Dwer’s training as a tracker let him follow the blurry object … to the top of a nearby dune, which erupted in a gushing spray of sand.

It was the robot, he realized, digging with furious speed. In a matter of heartbeats it made a hole that it then dived within, aiming its remaining sensor lens south and west.

“Come on!” Dwer urged, grabbing his bow and quiver. Rety paused only to snatch up a wailing, hissing yee. Together they fled some distance downslope, where Dwer commenced digging with both hands.

Long ago, Fallon the Scout had taught him—If you don’t know what’s happening in a crisis, mimic a creature who does. If the robot felt a sudden need to hide, Dwer thought it wise to follow.

“Ifni!” Rety muttered. “Now what in hell’s he doin?”

She was still standing — staring across the Rift. Dwer yanked her into the hole beside him. Only when sand covered most of their bodies did he poke his head back out to look.

The Danik pilot clearly felt something was wrong. The little craft hurtled toward shore, diving as it came. Seeking cover, Dwer thought. Maybe it can dig underground, like the robot.

Dwer started turning, to spot whatever had Kunn in such a panic, but just then the boat abruptly veered, zigzagging frantically. From its tail bright fireballs arced, like sparks leaping off a burning log. They flared brightly and made the air waver in a peculiar way, blurring the escaping vessel’s outlines.

From behind Dwer, streaks of fierce light flashed overhead toward the fleeing boat. Most deflected through warped zones, veering off course, but one bypassed the glowing balls, striking target.

At the last moment, Kunn flipped his nimble ship around and fired back at his assailants, launching a return volley just as the unerring missile closed in.

Dwer shoved Rety’s head down and closed his eyes.

The detonations were less Jijo-shattering than he expected — a series of dull concussions, almost anticlimactic.

Looking up with sand-covered faces, they witnessed both winner and loser in the brief battle of god chariots.

Kunn’s boat had crashed beyond the dune field, plowing into a marshy fen. Smoke boiled from its shattered rear.

Circling above, the victor regarded its victim, glistening with a silvery tint that seemed less metallic than crystal. The newcomer was bigger and more powerful looking than the Danik scout.

Kunn never stood a chance.

Rety muttered, her voice barely audible.

“She said there’d turn out to be someone stronger.”

Dwer shook his head. “Who?”

“That smelly old urs! Leader o’ those four-legged sooners, back in the village pen. Said the Rothen might be a-feared of somebody bigger. So she was right.”

“urs smelly?” yee objected, “you wife should talk?”

Rety stroked the little male as yee stretched his neck, fluting a contented sigh.

The fallen scout boat rocked from a new explosion, this one brightly framing a rectangle in the ship’s side. That section fell and two bipeds followed, leaping into the bog, chased by smoke that boiled from the interior. Staggering through murky water, the men leaned on each other to reach a weedy islet, where they fell, exhausted.

The newcomer ship cruised a wary circle, losing altitude. As it turned, Dwer saw a stream of pale smoke pouring from a gash in its other side. A roughness to the engine sound grew steadily worse. Soon, the second cruiser settled down near the first.

Well, it looks like Kunn got in a lick of his own.

Dwer wondered—Now why should that make me feel glad?

Alvin

BONE-RATTLING CONCUSSIONS GREW MORE TERRIFYING with each dura, hammering our undersea prison refuge, sometimes receding for a while, then returning with new force, making it hard for a poor hoon to stand properly on the shuddering floor.

Crutches and a back brace didn’t help, nor the little autoscribe, fogging the room with my own projected words. Stumbling through them, I sought some solid object to hold, while the scribe kept adding to the mob of words, recording my frantic curses in Anglic and GalSeven. When I found a wall stanchion, I grabbed for dear life. The clamor of reverberating explosions sounded like a giant, bearing down with massive footsteps, nearer … ever nearer.…

Then, as I feared some popping seam would let in the dark, heavy waters of the Midden … it abruptly stopped.

Silence was almost as disorienting as the jeekee awful noise. My throat sac blatted uselessly while a hysterical Huphu clawed my shoulders, shredding scales into torglike ribbons.

Fortunately, hoon don’t have much talent for panic. Maybe our reactions are too slow, or else we lack imagination.

As I was gathering my wits, the door hatch opened and one of the little amphibian types rushed in, squeaking a few rapid phrases in simplified GalTwo.

A summons. The spinning voice wanted us for another powwow.

“Perhaps we should share knowledge,” it said when the four of us (plus Huphu) were assembled.

Huck and Pincer-Tip, able to look all ways at once, shared meaningful glances with Ur-ronn and me. We were pretty rattled by the recent booming and shaking. Even growing up next to a volcano had never prepared us for that!

The voice seemed to come from a space where abstract lines curled in tight patterns, but I knew that was an illusion. The shapes and sounds were projections, sent by some entity whose real body lay elsewhere, beyond the walls. I kept expecting Huphu to dash off and tear away a curtain, exposing a little man in an emerald carnival suit.

Do they think we’re rubes, to fall for such a trick?

“Knowledge?” Huck sneered, drawing three eyes back like coiled snakes. “You want to share some knowledge? Then tell us what’s going on! I thought this place was breaking up! Was it a quake? Are we being sucked into the Midden?”

“I assure you, that is not happening,” came the answer in smooth-toned GalSix. “The source of our mutual concern lies above, not below.”

“Exflosions,” Ur-ronn muttered, blowing through her snout fringe and stamping a hind hoof. “Those weren’t quakes, vut underwater detonations. Clean, sharf, and very close. I’d say soneone uf there doesn’t like you guys very nuch.”

Pincer hissed sharply and I stared at our urrish friend, but the spinning voice conceded.

“That is an astute guess.”

I couldn’t tell if it was impressed, or just sarcastic.

“And since our local guild of exflosers could hardly achieve such feats, this suggests you have other, fowerful foes, far greater than we feevle Six.”

“Again, a reasonable surmise. Such a bright young lady.”

“Hr-rm,” I added, in order not to be left out of the sardonic abuse. “We’re taught that the simplest hypothesis should always be tried first. So let me guess — you’re being hunted by the same folks who landed a while back in the Festival Glade. Those gene raiders Uriel got word about before we left. Is that it?”

“A goodly conjecture, and possibly even true … though it could as easily be someone else.”

“Someone else? What’re you say-ay-aying?” Pincer-Tip demanded, raising three legs and teetering dangerously on the remaining two. His chitin skin flared an anxious crimson shade. “That the eatees-tees-tees on the Glade might not be the only ones? That you’ve got whole passels of enemies?”

Abstract patterns tightened to a tornado of meshing lines as silence reigned. Little Huphu, who had seemed fascinated by the voice from the very start, now dug her claws in my shoulder, transfixed by the tight spiral form.

Huck demanded, in a hushed tone.

“How many enemies have you guys got?”

When the voice spoke again, all sardonic traces were gone. Its tone seemed deeply weary.

“Ah, dear children. It seems that half of the known sidereal universe has spent years pursuing us.”

Pincer clattered his claws and Huck let out a low, mournful sigh. My own dismal contemplation-umble roused Huphu from her trancelike fixation on the whirling display, and she chittered nervously.

Ur-ronn simply grunted, as if she had expected this, vindicating her native urrish cynicism. After all, when things seem unable to get any worse, isn’t that when they nearly always do? Ifni has a fertile, if nasty imagination. The goddess of fate keeps shaving new faces on her infinite-sided dice.

“Well, I guess this means — hrm-m — that we can toss out all those ideas about you phuvnthus being ancient Jijoans, or native creatures of the deep.”

“Or remnants of cast-off Buyur machines,” Huck went on. “Or sea monsters.”

“Yeah,” Pincer added, sounding disappointed. “Just another bunch of crazy Galactics-tic-tics.”

The swirling patterns seemed confused. “You would prefer sea monsters?”

“Forget it,” Huck said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

The patterns bent and swayed.

“I am afraid you may be right about that. Your small band of comrades has us terribly perplexed. So much that a few of us posed a sly scenario — that you were planted in our midst to sow confusion.”

“How do you mean?”

“Your values, beliefs, and evident mutual affection contribute to undermining assumptions we regarded as immutably anchored in the nature of reality.

“Mind you, this confusion is not wholly unpleasant. As a thinking entity, one of my prime motives might be called a lust for surprise. And those I work with are hardly less bemused by the unforeseen marvel of your fellowship.”

“Glad you find us entertaining,” Huck commented, as dryly sarcastic as the voice had been. “So you guys came here to hide, like our ancestors?”

“There are parallels. But our plan was never to stay. Only to make repairs, gather stores, and wait in concealment for a favorable window at the nearest transfer point.”

“So Uriel and the sages may be wrong about the ship that came to the Glade? Being a gang of gene raiders — that could just be a cover story. Are you the real cause of our troubles?”

“Trouble is synonymous with being a metabolizing entity. Or else why have you young adventurers sought it so avidly?

“But your complaint has merit. We thought we had eluded all pursuit. The ship that landed in the mountains may be coincidental, or attracted by a confluence of unlucky factors. In any event, had we known of your existence, we would have sought shelter somewhere off-planet instead, perhaps in a dead city on one of your moons, though such places are less convenient for effecting repairs.”

That part I had trouble believing. I’m just an ignorant savage, but from the classic scientific romances I grew up reading, I could picture working in some lunar ghost town like my nicknamesake, waking mighty engines that had slept for ages. What kind of starfaring beings would find darkness and salt water more “convenient” than clean vacuum?

We lapsed into moody silence, unable to stay outraged at folks who accept responsibility so readily. Anyway, weren’t they fellow refugees from Galactic persecution?

Or from justice, came another, worried thought.

“Can you tell us why everyone’s so mad at you?” I asked.

The spinning figure turned into a narrow, whirling funnel whose small end seemed diminished and very far away.

“Like you, we delved and probed into unvisited places, imagining ourselves bold explorers.…” the voice explained in tones of boundless sadness. “Until we had the misfortune to find the very thing we sought. Unexpected wonders beyond our dreams.

“Breaking no law, we planned only to share what we had found. But those pursuing us abandoned all pretense of legality. Like giants striving over possession of a gnat, they war lustily, battling each other for a chance to capture us! Alas, whoever wins our treasure will surely use it against multitudes.”

Again, we stared. Pincer unleashed awed whispers from all vents at once.

“Tr-tr-treasure-ure-ure …?”

Huck wheeled close to the spinning pattern. “Can you prove what you just said?”

“Not at this time. Not without putting your people in more danger than they already are.”

I recall wondering — what could be more dangerous than the genocide Uriel had spoken of, as one likely outcome of contact with gene raiders?

“Nevertheless,” the voice continued, “it may prove possible to improve our level of mutual confidence. Or even help each other in significant ways.”

Sara

SUPPOSE THE WORLD’S TWO MOST CAREFUL OBSERVERS witnessed the same event. They would never agree precisely on what had happened. Nor could they go back and check. Events may be recorded, but the past can’t be replayed.

And the future is even more nebulous — a territory we make up stories about, mapping strategies that never go as planned.

Sara’s beloved equations, derived from pre-contact works of ancient Earth, depicted time as a dimension, akin to the several axes of space. Galactic experts ridiculed this notion, calling the relativistic models of Einstein and others “naive.” Yet Sara knew the expressions contained truth. They had to. They were too beautiful not to be part of universal design.

That contradiction drew her from mathematics to questions of language — how speech constrains the mind, so that some ideas come easily, while others can’t even be expressed. Earthling tongues — Anglic, Rossic, and Nihanic — seemed especially prone to paradoxes, tautologies, and “proofs” that sound convincing but run counter to the real world.

But chaos had also crept into the Galactic dialects used by Jijo’s other exile races, even before Terran settlers came. To some Biblos linguists, this was evidence of devolution, starfaring sophistication giving way to savagery, and eventually to proto-sapient grunts. But last year another explanation occurred to Sara, based on pre-contact information theory. An insight so intriguing that she left Biblos to work on it.

Or was I just looking for an excuse to stay away?

After Joshu died of the pox — and her mother of a stroke — research in an obscure field seemed the perfect refuge. Perched in a lonely tree house, with just Prity and her books for company, Sara thought herself sealed off from the world’s intrusions.

But the universe has a way of crashing through walls.

Sara glanced at Emerson’s glistening dark skin and robust smile, warmed by feelings of affection and accomplishment. Aside from his muteness, the starman scarcely resembled the shattered wreck she had found in the mulc swamp near Dolo and nursed back from near death.

Maybe I should quit my intellectual pretensions and stick with what I’m good at. If the Six Races fell to fighting among themselves, there would be more need of nurses than theoreticians.

So her thoughts spun on, chaotically orbiting the thin glowing line down the center of the tunnel. A line that never altered as they trudged on. Its changelessness rebuked Sara for her private heresy, the strange, blasphemous belief that she held, perhaps alone among all Jijoans.

The quaint notion of progress.

Out of breath after another run, she climbed back aboard the wagon to find Prity chuffing nervously. Sara reached over to check the little chimp’s wound, but Prity wriggled free, clambering atop the bench seat, hissing through bared teeth as she peered ahead.

The drivers were in commotion, too. Kepha and Nuli inhaled with audible sighs. Sara took a deep breath and found her head awash with contrasts. The bucolic smell of meadows mixed with a sharp metallic tang … something utterly alien. She stood up with the backs of her knees braced against the seat.

Was that a hint of light, where the center stripe met its vanishing point?

Soon a pale glow was evident. Emerson flipped his rewq over his eyes, then off again.

“Uncle, wake up!” Jomah shook Kurt’s shoulder. “I think we’re there!”

But the glow remained vague for a long time. Dedinger muttered impatiently, and for once Sara agreed with him. Expectation of journey’s end made the tunnel’s remnant almost unendurable.

The horses sped without urging, as Kepha and Nuli rummaged beneath their seats and began passing out dark glasses. Only Emerson was exempted, since his rewq made artificial protection unnecessary. Sara turned the urrishmade spectacles in her hand.

I guess daylight will seem unbearably bright for a time, after we leave this hole. Still, any discomfort would be brief until their eyes readapted to the upper world. The precaution seemed excessive.

At last we’ll find out where the horse clan hid all these years. Eagerness blended with sadness, for no reality — not even some god wonder of the Galactics — could compare with the fanciful images found in pre-contact tales.

A mystic portal to some parallel reality? A kingdom floating in the clouds?

She sighed. It’s probably just some out-of-the-way mountain valley where neighboring villagers are too inbred and ignorant to know the difference between a donkey and a horse.

The ancient transitway began to rise. The stripe grew dim as illumination spread along the walls, like liquid trickling from some reservoir, far ahead. Soon the tunnel began taking on texture. Sara made out shapes. Jagged outlines.

Blinking dismay, she realized they were plunging toward sets of triple jaws, like a giant urrish mouth lined with teeth big enough to spear the wagon whole!

Sara took her cue from the Illias. Kepha and Nuli seemed unruffled by the serrated opening. Still, even when she saw the teeth were metal—corroded with flaking rust — Sara could hardly convince herself it was only a dead machine.

A huge Buyur thing.

She had never seen its like. Nearly all the great buildings and devices of the meticulous Buyur had been hauled to sea during their final years on Jijo, peeling whole cities and seeding mulc spiders to eat what remained.

So why didn’t the deconstructors carry this thing away?

Behind the massive jaws lay disks studded with shiny stones that Sara realized were diamonds as big as her head. The wagon track went from smooth to bumpy as Kepha maneuvered the team along a twisty trail through the great machine’s gullet, zigzagging around the huge disks.

At once Sara realized—

This is a deconstructor! It must have been demolishing the tunnel when it broke down.

I wonder why no one ever bothered to repair or haul it away.

Then Sara saw the reason.

Lava.

Tongues and streamlets of congealed basalt protruded through a dozen cracks, where they hardened in place half a million years ago. It was caught by an eruption.

Much later, teams of miners from some of the Six Races must have labored to clear a narrow path through the belly of the dead machine, chiseling out the last stretch separating the tunnel from the surface. Sara saw marks of crude pickaxes. And explosives must have been used, as well. That could explain the guild’s knowledge of this place.

Sara wanted to gauge Kurt’s reaction, but just then the glare brightened as the team rounded a final sharp bend, climbing a steep ramp toward a maelstrom of light.

Sara fumbled for her glasses as the world exploded with color.

Swirling colors that stabbed.

Colors that shrieked.

Colors that sang with melodies so forceful that her ears throbbed.

Colors that made her nose twitch and skin prickle with sensations just short of pain. A gasping moan lifted in unison from the passengers, as the wagon crested a short rise to reveal surroundings more foreign than the landscape of a dream.

Even with the dark glasses in place, each peak and valley shimmered more pigments than Sara could name.

In a daze, she sorted her impressions. To one side protruded the mammoth deconstructor, a snarl of slumped metal, drowned in ripples of frozen magma. Ripples that extended to the far horizon — layer after layer of radiant stone.

At last she knew the answer to her question.

Where on the Slope could a big secret remain hidden for a century or more?

Even Dedinger, prophet of the sharp-sand desert, moaned aloud at how obvious it was.

They were in the last place on Jijo anyone would go looking for people.

The very center of the Spectral Flow.