Infinity's Shore

PART FIVE

IT HAS BEEN NEARLY A MILLENNIUM SINCE A LARGE OUTBREAK OF TRAEKINESS WAS FOUND.

These flare-ups used to be frequent embarrassments, where stacks of hapless rings were found languishing without even a single master torus to guide them. But no word of such an occurrence has come within the memory of living wax.

The reaction of our Polkjhy ship to this discovery on Jijo was disgusted loathing.

HOWEVER, LET US NOW PAUSE and consider how the Great Jophur League might learn/benefit from this experiment. Never before have cousin rings dwelled in such intimacy with other races. Although polluted/contaminated, these traeki have also acquired waxy expertise about urs, hoon, and qheuen sapient life-forms — as well as human wolflings and g’Kek vermin.

MOREOVER, the very traits that we Jophur find repellent in traeki-natural rings — their lack of focus, self, or ambition — appear to enable them to achieve empathy with unitary beings! The other five races of Jijo trust these ring stacks. They confide secrets, share confidences, delegate some traekis with medical tasks and even powers of life continuation/cessation.

IMAGINE THIS POSSIBILITY. SUPPOSE WE ATTEMPT A RUSE.

INTENTIONALLY, we might create new traeki and arrange for them to “escape” the loving embrace of our noble clan. Genuinely believing they are in flight from “oppressive” master rings, these stacks would be induced to seek shelter among some of the races we call enemies.

Next suppose that, using this knack of vacuous empathy, they make friendships among our foes. As generations pass, they become trusted comrades.

At which point we arrange for agents to snatch — to harvest — some of these rogue traeki, converting them to Jophur exactly as we did when Asx was transformed into Ewasx, by applying the needed master rings.

Would this not give us quick expertise about our foes?

GRANTED, this Ewasx experiment has not been a complete success. The old traeki, Asx, managed to melt many waxy memories before completion of metamorphosis. The resulting partial amnesia has proved inconvenient.

Yet, this does not detract from the value of the scheme — to plant empathic spies in our enemies’ midst. Spies who are believable because they think they are true friends! Nevertheless, with the boon of master rings, we can reclaim lost brethren wherever and whenever we find them.

Makanee

THERE WERE TWO KINDS OF PUPILS IN THE WIDE, wet classroom.

One group signified hope — the other, despair.

One was illegal — the other, hapless.

The first type was innocent and eager.

The second had already seen and heard far too much.

# good fish …

# goodfish, goodfish …

# good-good FISH! #

Dr. Makanee never used to hear Primal Delphin spoken aboard the Streaker. Not when the keeneenk master, Creideiki, used to hold the crew rock steady by his unwavering example.

Nowadays, alas, one commonly picked up snatches of old-speech — the simple, emotive squealing used by unaltered Tursiops in Earth’s ancient seas. As ship physician, even Makanee sometimes found herself grunting a snatch phrase, when frustrations crowded in from all sides … and when no one was listening.

Makanee gazed across a broad chamber, half-filled with water, as students jostled near a big tank at the spinward end, avid to be fed. There were almost thirty neo-dolphins, plus a dozen six-armed, monkeylike figures, scrambling up the shelf-lined walls, or else diving to swim agilely with webbed hands. Just half the original group of Kiqui survived since they were snatched hastily from far-off Kithrup, but the remaining contingent seemed healthy and glad to frolic with their dolphin friends.

I’m still not sure we did the right thing, taking them along. Neo-dolphins are much too young to take on the responsibilities of patronhood.

A pair of teachers tried bringing order to the unruly mob. Makanee saw the younger instructor — her former head nurse, Peepoe—use a whirring harness arm to snatch living snacks from the tank and toss them to the waiting crowd of pupils. The one who uttered the Primal burst — a middle-aged dolphin with listless eyes — smacked his jaw around a blue thing with writhing tendrils that looked nothing like a fish. Still, the fin crooned happily while he munched.

# Goodfish … good-good-good! #

Makanee had known poor Jecajeca before Streaker launched from Earth — a former astrophotographer who loved his cameras and the glittering black of space. Now Jecajeca was another casualty of Streaker’s long retreat, fleeing ever farther from the warm oceans they called home.

This voyage was supposed to last six months, not two and a half years, with no end in sight. A young client race shouldn’t confront the challenges we have, almost alone.

Taken in that light, it seemed a wonder just a quarter of the crew had fallen to devolution psychosis.

Give it time, Makanee. You may yet travel that road yourself.

• • •

“Yes, they are tasty, Jecajeca,” Peepoe crooned, turning the reverted dolphin’s outburst into a lesson. “Can you tell me, in Anglic, where this new variety of ‘fish’ comes from?”

Eager grunts and squeaks came from the brighter half of the class, those with a future. But Peepoe stroked the older dolphin with sonar encouragement, and soon Jecajeca’s glazed eye cleared a bit. To please her, he concentrated.

“F-f-rom outside … Good s-s-sun … good wat-t-ter …”

Other students offered raspberry cheers, rewarding this short climb back toward what he once had been. But it was a slippery hill. Nor was there much a doctor could do. The cause lay in no organic fault.

Reversion is the ultimate sanctuary from worry.

Makanee approved of the decision of Lieutenant Tsh’t and Gillian Baskin, not to release the journal of Alvin the Hoon to the crew at large.

If there’s one thing the crew don’t need right now, it’s to hear of a religion preaching that it’s okay to devolve.

Peepoe finished feeding the reverted adults, while her partner took care of the children and Kiqui. On spying Makanee, she did an agile flip and swam across the chamber in two powerful fluke strokes, resurfacing amid a burst of spray.

“Yesss, Doctor? You want to see me?”

Who wouldn’t want to see Peepoe? Her skin shone with youthful luster, and her good spirits never flagged, not even when the crew had to flee Kithrup, abandoning so many friends.

“We need a qualified nurse for a mission. A long one, I’m afraid.”

Ratcheting clicks spread from Peepoe’s brow as she pondered.

“Kaa’s outpost. Is someone hurt-t?”

“I’m not sure. It may be food poisoning … or else kingree fever.”

Peepoe’s worried expression eased. “In that case, can’t Kaa take care of it himself? I have duties here.”

“Olachan can handle things while you are away.”

Peepoe shook her head, a human gesture by now so ingrained that even reverted fins used it. “There must be two teachers. We can’t mix the children and Kiqui with the hapless ones too much.”

Just five dolphin infants had been born to crew members so far, despite a growing number of signatures on the irksome Breeding Petition. But those five youngsters deserved careful guidance. And that counted double for the Kiqui — presentients who appeared ripe for uplift by some lucky Galactic clan who won the right to adopt them. That laid a heavy moral burden on the Streaker crew.

“I’ll keep a personal eye on the Kiqui … and we’ll free the kids’ parents from duty on a rotating basis, to join the crèche as teachers’ aidesss. That’s the best I can do, Peepoe.”

The younger dolphin acquiesced, but grumbled. “This’ll turn out to be a wild tuna chase. Knowing Kaa, he prob’ly forgot to clean the water filters.”

Everyone knew the pilot had a long-standing yearning for Peepoe. Dolphins could sonar-scan each other’s innards, so there was no concealing simple, persistent passions.

Poor Kaa. No wonder he lost his nickname.

“There is a second reason you’re going,” Makanee revealed in a low voice.

“I thought so. Does it have to do with gravitic signals and depth bombsss?”

“This hideout is jeopardized,” Makanee affirmed. “Gillian and Tsh’t plan to move Streaker soon.”

“You want me to help find another refuge? By scanning more of these huge junk piles, along the way?” Peepoe blew a sigh. “What else? Shall I compose a symphony, invent a star drive, and dicker treaties with the natives while I’m at it?”

Makanee chuttered. “By all accounts, the sunlit sea above is the most pleasant we’ve encountered since departing Calafia. Everyone will envy you.”

When Peepoe snorted dubiously, Makanee added in Trinary—

Legends told by whales

Call one trait admirable—

Adaptability!

This time, Peepoe laughed appreciatively. It was the sort of thing Captain Creideiki might have said, if he were still around.

Back in sick bay, Makanee finished treating her last patient and closed shop for the day. There had been the usual psychosomatic ailments, and inevitable accidental injuries from working outside in armored suits, bending and welding metal under a mountainous heap of discarded ships. At least the number of digestive complaints had gone down since teams with nets began harvesting native food. Jijo’s upper sea teemed with life, much of it wholesome, if properly supplemented. Tsh’t had even been preparing to allow liberty parties outside … before sensors picked up starships entering orbit.

Was it pursuit? More angry fleets chasing Streaker for her secrets? No one should have been able to trace Gillian’s sneaky path by a nearby supergiant whose sooty winds had disabled the robot guards of the Migration Institute.

But the idea wasn’t as original as we hoped. Others came earlier, including a rogue band of humans. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised if it occurs to our pursuers, as well.

Makanee’s chronometer beeped a reminder. The ship’s council — two dolphins, two humans, and a mad computer — was meeting once more to ponder how to thwart an implacable universe.

There was a sixth member who silently attended, offering fresh mixtures of opportunity and disaster at every turn. Without that member’s contributions, Streaker would have died or been captured long ago.

Or else, without her, we’d all be safe at home.

Either way, there was no escaping her participation.

Ifni, capricious goddess of chance.

Hannes

IT WAS HARD TO GET ANYTHING DONE. DR. BASKIN kept stripping away members of his engine-room gang, assigning them other tasks.

He groused. “It’s too soon to give up on Streaker, I tell you!”

“I’m not giving her up quite yet,” Gillian answered. “But with that carbonite coating weighing the hull down—”

“We’ve been able to analyze the stuff, at last. It seems the stellar wind blowing off Izmunuti wasn’t just atomic or molecular carbon, but a kind of star soot made up of tubes, coils, spheres, and such.”

Gillian nodded, as if she had expected this.

“Buckyballs. Or in GalTwo—” Pursed lips let out a clicking trill that meant container home for individual atoms. “I did some research in the captured Library cube. It seems an interlaced mesh of these microshapes can become superconducting, carrying away vast amounts of heat. You’re not going to peel it off easily with any of the tools we have.”

“There could be advantages to such stuff.”

“The Library says just a few clans have managed to synthesize the material. But what good is it, if it makes the hull heavy and seals our weapons ports so we can’t fight?”

Suessi argued that her alternative was hardly any better. True, a great heap of ancient starships surrounded them, and they had reactivated the engines of a few. But that was a far cry from finding a fit replacement for the Snark-class survey craft that had served this crew so well.

These are ships the Buyur didn’t think worth taking with them, when they evacuated this system!

Above all, how were dolphins supposed to operate a starship that had been built back when humans were learning to chip tools out of flint? Streaker was a marvel of clever compromises, redesigned so beings lacking legs or arms could move about and get their jobs done — either striding in six-legged walker units, or by swimming through broad flooded chambers.

Dolphins are crackerjack pilots and specialists. Someday lots of Galactic clans may hire one or two at a time, offering them special facilities as pampered professionals. But few races will ever want a ship like Streaker, with all the hassles involved.

Gillian was insistent.

“We’ve adapted before. Surely some of these old ships have designs we might use.”

Before the meeting broke up, he offered one last objection.

“You know, all this fiddling with other engines, as well as our own, may let a trace signal slip out, even through all the water above us.”

“I know, Hannes.” Her eyes were grim. “But speed is crucial now. Our pursuers already know roughly where we are. They may be otherwise occupied for the moment, but they’ll be coming soon. We must prepare to move Streaker to another hiding place, or else evacuate to a different ship altogether.”

So, with resignation, Suessi juggled staff assignments, stopped work on the hull, and augmented teams sent out to alien wrecks — a task that was both hazardous and fascinating at the same time. Many of the abandoned derelicts seemed more valuable than ships impoverished Earth had purchased through used vessel traders. Under other circumstances, this Midden pile might have been a terrific find.

“Under other circumstances,” he muttered. “We’d never have come here in the first place.”

Sooners

Emerson

WHAT A WONDERFUL PLACE!

Ever since glorious sunset, he had serenaded the stars and the growling volcano … then a crescent of, sparkling reflections on the face of the largest moon. Dead cities, abandoned in vacuum long ago.

Now Emerson turns east toward a new day. Immersed in warm fatigue, standing on heights protecting the narrow meadows of Xi, he confronts the raucous invasion of dawn.

Alone.

Even the horse-riding women keep inside their shelters at daybreak, a time when glancing beams from the swollen sun sweep all the colors abandoned by night, pushing them ahead like an overwhelming tide. A wave of speckled light. Bitter-sharp, like shards of broken glass.

His former self might have found it too painful to endure — that logical engineer who always knew what was real, and how to classify it. The clever Emerson, so good at fixing broken things. That one might have quailed before the onslaught. A befuddling tempest of hurtful rays.

But now that seems as nothing compared with his other agonies, since crashing on this world. In contrast to having part of his brain ripped out, for instance, the light storm could hardly even be called irritating. It feels more like the claws of fifty mewling kittens, setting his callused skin a-prickle with countless pinpoint scratches.

Emerson spreads his arms wide, opening himself to the enchanted land, whose colors slice through roadblocks in his mind, incinerating barriers, releasing from numb imprisonment a spasm of pent-up images.

Banded canyons shimmer under layer after lustrous layer of strange images. Explosions in space. Half-drowned worlds where bulbous islets glimmer like metal mush-rooms. A house made of ice that stretches all the way around a glowing red star, turning the sun’s wan glow into a hearth’s tamed fire.

These and countless other sights waver before him. Each clamors for attention, pretending to be a sincere reflection of the past. But most images are illusions, he knows.

A phalanx of armored damsels brandishes whips of forked lightning against fire-breathing dragons, whose wounds bleed rainbows across the desert floor. Though intrigued, he dismisses such scenes, collaborating with his rewq to edit out the irrelevant, the fantastic, the easy.

What does that leave?

A lot, it seems.

From one nearby lava field, crystal particles reflect tart sunbursts that his eye makes out as vast, distant explosions. All sense of scale vanishes as mighty ships die in furious battle before him. Squadrons rip each other. Fleet formations are scythed by moving folds of tortured space.

True!

He knows this to be a real memory. Unforgettable. Too exquisitely horrible to let go, this side of death.

So why was it lost?

Emerson labors to fashion words, using their rare power to lock the recollection back where it belongs.

I … saw … this … happen.

I … was … there.

He turns for more. Over in that direction, amid a simple boulder field, lay a galactic spiral, seen from above the swirling wheel. Viewed from a shallow place where few spatial tides ever churn. Mysteries lay in that place, undisturbed by waves of time.

Until someone finally came along, with more curiosity than sense, intruding on the tomblike stillness.

Someone …?

He chooses a better word.

… We …

Then, a better word, yet.

… Streaker!

A slight turn and he sees her, traced among the stony layers of a nearby mesa. A slender caterpillar shape, studded by the spiky flanges meant to anchor a ship to this universe … a universe hostile to everything Streaker stood for. He stares nostalgically at the vessel. Scarred and patched, often by his own hand, the hull’s beauty could only be seen by those who loved her.

… loved her …

Words have power to shift the mind. He scans the horizon, this time for a human face. One he adored, without hope of anything but friendship in return. But her image isn’t found in the dazzling landscape.

Emerson sighs. For now, it is enough to sort through his rediscoveries. A single correlation proves especially useful. If it hurts, then it must be a real memory.

What could that fact mean?

The question, all by itself, seems to make his skull crack with pain!

Could that be the intent? To prevent him from remembering?

Stabbing sensations assail him. That question is worse! It must never be asked!

Emerson clutches his head as the point is driven home with hammerlike blows.

Never; ever, ever …

Rocking back, he lets out a howl. He bays like a wounded animal, sending ululations over rocky outcrops. The sound plummets like a stunned bird … then catches itself just short of crashing.

In a steep, swooping turn, it comes streaking back … as laughter!

Emerson bellows.

He roars contempt.

He brays rebellious joy.

Through streaming tears, he asks the question and glories in the answer, knowing at last that he is no coward. His amnesia is no hysterical retreat. No quailing from traumas of the past.

What happened to his mind was no accident.

Hot lead seems to pour down his spine as programmed inhibitions fight back. Emerson’s heart pounds, threatening to burst his chest. Yet he scarcely notices, facing the truth head-on, with a kind of brutal elation.

Somebody … did … this.…

Before him, looming from the fractured mesa, comes an image of cold eyes. Pale and milky. Mysterious, ancient, deceitful. It might have been terrifying — to someone with anything left to lose.

Somebody … did … this … to … me!

With fists clenched and cheeks awash, Emerson sees the colors melt as his eyes fill with liquid pain. But that does not matter anymore.

Not what he sees.

Only what he knows.

The Stranger casts a single cry, merging with the timeless hills.

A shout of defiance.

Ewasx

THEY SHOW COURAGE.

You were right about that, My rings.

We Jophur had not expected anyone to approach so soon after the Polkjhy slashed an area of twenty korech around our landing site. But now a delegation comes, waving a pale banner.

At first, the symbolism confuses our Polkjhy communications staff. But this stack’s very own association rings relay the appropriate memory of a human tradition — that of using a white flag to signify truce.

WE INFORM THE CAPTAIN LEADER. That exalted stack appears pleased with our service. My rings, you are indeed well informed about vermin! These worthless-seeming toruses, left over from the former Asx, hold waxy expertise about human ways that could prove useful to the Obeyer Alliance, if a prophesied time of change truly has come upon the Five Galaxies.

The Great Library proved frustratingly sparse regarding the small clan from Earth. How ironic then, that we should find proficient knowledge in such a rude, benighted world as this Jijo. Knowledge that may help our goal of extinguishing the wolflings at long last.

What? You quiver at the prospect?

In joyful anticipation of service? In expectation that yet another enemy of our clan shall meet extinction?

No. Instead you shudder, filling our core with mutinous fumes!

My poor, polluted rings. Are you so infested with alien notions that you actually hold affection for noisome bipeds? And for vermin g’Kek survivors we are sworn to erase?

Perhaps the poison is too rife for you to be suitable, even with useful expertise.

The Oailie were right. Without master rings, all a stack can become is a pile of sentimental traeki.

Lark

THE TALL STAR LORD WAS NO LESS IMPOSING IN A homespun shirt and trousers than in his old black-and-silver uniform. Rann’s massive arms and wedgelike torso tempted one to imagine impossible things … like pitting him against a fully grown hoon in a wrestling match.

That might take some of the starch out of him, Lark pondered. There’s nothing fundamentally superior about the guy. Underlying Rann’s physique and smug demeanor was the same technology that had given Ling the beauty of a goddess. I might be just as strong — and live three hundred years — if I weren’t born in a forlorn wilderness.

Rann spoke Anglic in the sharp Danik accent, with burring undertones like his Rothen overlords.

“The favor you ask is both risky and impertinent. Can you offer one good reason why I should cooperate?”

Watched by militia guards, the star lord sat cross-legged in a cave overlooking Dooden Mesa, where camouflaged ramps blended with the surrounding forest under tarpaulins of cunning blur cloth. Beyond the g’Kek settlement, distant ridges seemed to ripple as vast stands of boo bent their giant stems before the wind. In the grotto’s immediate vicinity, steam rose from geothermal vents, concealing the captive from Galactic instruments — or so the sages hoped.

Before Rann lay a stack of data lozenges bearing the sigil of the Galactic Library, the same brown slabs Lark and Uthen found in the wrecked Danik station.

“I could give several reasons,” Lark growled. “Half the qheuens I know are sick or dying from some filthy bug you bastards released—”

Rann waved a dismissive hand.

“Your supposition. One that I deny.”

Lark’s throat strangled in anger. Despite every point of damning evidence, Rann obstinately rejected the possibility of Rothen-designed genocidal germs. “What you suggest is quite preposterous,” he said earlier. “It is contrary to our lords’ kindly natures.”

Lark’s first response was amazement. Kindly nature?

Wasn’t Rann present when Bloor, the unlucky portraitist, photographed a Rothen face without its mask, and Rokenn reacted by unleashing fiery death on everyone in sight?

It did Lark no good to recite the same point-by-point indictment he had laid out for Ling. The big man was too contemptuous of anything Jijoan to heed a logical argument.

Or else he was involved all along, and now sees denial as his best defense.

Ling sat miserably on a stalagmite stump, unable to meet her erstwhile leader in the eye. They had come seeking Rann’s help only after she failed to read the reclaimed archives with her own data plaque.

“All right,” Lark resumed. “If justice and mercy won’t persuade you, maybe threats will!”

Harsh laughter from the big man.

“How many hostages can you spare, young barbarian? You have just three of us to stave off fire from above. Your intimidation lacks conviction.”

Lark felt like a bush lemming confronting a ligger. Still, he leaned closer.

“Things have changed, Rann. Before, we hoped to trade you back to the Rothen ship for concessions. Now, that ship and your mates are sealed in a bubble. It’s the Jophur we’ll negotiate with. I suspect they’ll care less about visible wear and tear on your person, when we hand you over.”

Rann’s face was utterly blank. Lark found it an improvement.

Ling broke in.

“Please. This approach is pointless.” She stood and approached her Danik colleague. “Rann, we may have to spend the rest of our lives with these people, or share whatever fate the Jophur dish out. A cure may help square things with the Six. Their sages promise to absolve us, if we find a treatment soon.”

Rann’s silent grimace required no rewq interpretation. He did not savor the absolution of savages.

“Then there are the photograms,” Ling said. “You are of the Danik Inner Circle, so you may have seen the true Rothen face before. But I found it a shock. Clearly, those photographic images give Jijo’s natives some leverage. In loyalty to our mast … to the Rothen, you must consider that.”

“And who would they show their pictures to?” Rann chuckled. Then he glanced at Lark and his expression changed. “You would not actually—”

“Hand them over to the Jophur? Why bother? They can crack open your starship any time they wish, and dissect your masters down to their nucleic acids. Face it, Rann, the disguise is no good anymore. The Jophur have their mulch rings wrapped tightly around your overlords.”

“Around the beloved patrons of all humanity!”

Lark shrugged. “True or not, that changes nothing. If the Jophur choose, they can have the Rothen declared anathema across the Five Galaxies. The fines may be calamitous.”

“And what of your Six Races?” Rann answered hotly.

“Each of you are criminals, as well. You all face punishment — not just the humans and others living here, but the home branches of each species, elsewhere in space!”

“Ah.” Lark nodded. “But this we have always known. We grow up discussing the dour odds. The guilt. It colors our distinctly pleasant outlook on life.” He smiled sardonically. “But I wonder if an optimistic fellow like yourself, seeing himself part of a grand destiny, can be as resigned to losing all he knows and loves.”

At last, the Danik’s expression turned dark.

“Rann,” Ling urged. “We have to make common cause.”

He glared at her archly. “Without Ro-kenn’s approval?”

“They’ve taken him far away from here. Even Lark doesn’t know where. Anyway, I’m now convinced we must consider what’s best for humanity … for Earth … independent of the Rothen.”

“There cannot be one without the other!”

She shrugged. “Pragmatism, then. If we help these people, perhaps they can do the same for us.”

The big man snorted skepticism. But after several duras, he brushed the stack of data lozenges with his toe. “Well, I am curious. These aren’t from the station Library. I’d recognize the color glyphs. You already tried to gain access?”

Ling nodded.

“Then maybe I had better have a crack at it.”

He looked at Lark again.

“You know the risk, as soon as I turn my reader on?”

Lark nodded. Lester Cambel had already explained. In all probability, the digital cognizance given off by a tiny info unit would be masked by the geysers and micro-quakes forever popping under the Rimmers.

Yet, to be safe, every founding colony, from g’Keks and glavers to urs and humans, sent their sneakships down to the Midden. Not a single computer was kept. Our ancestors must have thought the danger very real.

“You needn’t lecture a sooner about risk,” he told the big man. “Our lives are the floating tumble of Ifni’s dice. We know it’s not a matter of winning.

“Our aim is to put off losing for as long as we can.”

They were brought meals by Jimi, one of the blessed who dwelled in the redemption sanctuary — a cheerful young man, nearly as large as Rann but with a far gentler manner. Jimi also delivered a note from Sage Cambel. The embassy to the Jophur had arrived at Festival Glade, hoping to contact the latest intruders.

The handwritten letter had a coda:

Any progress?

Lark grimaced. He had no way of telling what “progress” meant in this case, though he doubted much was being made.

Ling helped load beige slabs into Rann’s data plaque — returned for this purpose. Together, the Daniks puzzled over a maze of sparkling symbols.

Books from pre-Tabernacle days described what it was like to range the digital world — a realm of countless dimensions, capabilities, and correlations, where any simulation might take on palpable reality. Of course mere descriptions could not make up for lack of experience. But I’m not like some fabled islander, befuddled by Captain Cook’s rifle and compass. I have concepts, some math, a notion of what’s possible.

At least, he hoped so.

Then he worried — might the Daniks be putting on an act? Pretending to have difficulty while they stalled for time?

There wasn’t much left. Soon Uthen would die, then other chitinous friends. Worse, new rumors from the coast told of hoonish villagers snuffling and wheezing, their throat sacs cracking from some strange ailment.

Come on! he urged silently. What’s so hard about using a fancy computer index to look something up?

Rann threw down a data slab, cursing guttural phonemes of alien argot.

“It’s encrypted!”

“I thought so,” Ling said. “But I figured you, as a member of the Inner—”

“Even we of the circle are not told everything. Still, I know the outlines of a Rothen code, and this is different.” He frowned. “Yet familiar somehow.”

“Can you break it?” Lark asked, peering at a maze of floating symbols.

“Not using this crude reader. We’d need something bigger. A real computer.”

Ling straightened, looking knowingly at Lark. But she left the decision up to him.

Lark blew air through his cheeks.

“Hr-rm. I think that might be arranged.”

A mixed company of militia drilled under nearby trees, looking brave in their fog-striped war paint. Lark saw only a few burly qheuens, though — the five-clawed heavy armor of Jijoan military might.

As one of the few living Jijoans ever to fly aboard an alien aircraft and see their tools firsthand, Lark knew what a fluke the Battle of the Glade had been — where spears, arbalests, and rifles prevailed against star-roaming gods. That freak chance would not be repeated. Still, there were reasons to continue training. It keeps the volunteers busy, and helps prevent a rekindling of old-time feuds. Whatever happens — whether we submit with bowed heads to final judgment, or go down fighting — we can’t afford disunion.

Lester Cambel greeted them under a tent beside a bubbling hot spring.

“We’re taking a risk doing this,” the elderly sage said.

“What choice do we have?”

In Lester’s eyes, Lark read his answer.

We can let Uthen and countless qheuens die, if that’s the price it takes for others to live.

Lark hated being a sage. He loathed the way he was expected to think — contemplating trade-offs that left you damned, either way you turned.

Cambel sighed. “Might as well make the attempt. I doubt the artifact will even turn on.”

At a rough log table, Cambel’s human and urrish aides compared several gleaming objects with ancient illustrations. Rann stared in amazement at the articles, which had been carried here from the shore of a far-off caustic lake.

“But I thought you discarded all your digital—”

“We did. Our ancestors did. These items are leftovers. Relics of the Buyur.”

“Impossible. The Buyur withdrew half a million years ago!”

Lark told an abbreviated version of the story — about a crazy mulc spider with a collecting fetish. A creature fashioned for destruction, who spent millennia sealing treasures in cocoons of congealed time.

Laboring day and night, traeki alchemists had found a formula to dissolve the golden preservation shells, spilling the contents back into the real world. Lucky for us these experts happened to be in the area, Lark thought. The tiredlooking traekis stood just outside, venting yellow vapor from chem-synth rings.

Rann stroked one reclaimed object, a black trapezoid, evidently a larger cousin to his portable data plaque.

“The power crystals look negentropic and undamaged. Do you know if it still works?”

Lark shrugged. “You’re familiar with the type?”

“Galactic technology is fairly standard, though humans didn’t exist, as such, when this thing was made. It is a higher-level model than I’ve used, but …” The sky human sat down before the ancient artifact, pressing one of its jutting bulges.

The device abruptly burst forth streams of light that reached nearly to the canopy. The High Sage and his team scrambled back. Urrish smiths snorted, coiling their long necks while human techs made furtive gestures to ward off evil.

Even among Cambel’s personal acolytes — his bookweaned “experts”—our sophistication is thin enough to scratch with a fingernail.

“The Buyur mostly spoke Galactic Three,” Rann said. “But GalTwo is close to universal, so we’ll try it first.”

He switched to that syncopated code, uttering clicks, pops, and groans so rapidly that Lark was soon lost, unable to follow the arcane dialect of computer commands. The star lord’s hands also moved, darting among floating images. Ling joined the effort, reaching in to seize ersatz objects that had no meaning to Lark, tossing away any she deemed irrelevant, giving Rann working room. Soon the area was clear but for a set of floating dodecahedrons, with rippling symbols coursing each twelve-sided form.

“The Buyur were good programmers,” Rann commented, lapsing into GalSix. “Though their greatest passion went to biological inventions, they were not slackers in the digital arts.”

Lark glanced at Lester, who had gone to the far end of the table to lay a pyramidal stack of sensor stones, like a hill of gleaming opals. Tapping one foot nervously, the sage kept wary vigil, alert for any spark of warning fire.

Turning farther, Lark found the mountain cleft deserted. The militia company had departed.

No one with sense would remain while this is going on.

Rann muttered a curse.

“I had hoped the machine would recognize idiosyncrasies in the encryption, if it is a standard commercial cypher used widely in the Five Galaxies. Or there may be quirks specific to some race or alliance.

“Alas, the computer says it does not recognize the cryptographic approach used in these memory slabs. It calls the coding technique … innovative.”

Lark knew the term was considered mildly insulting among the great old star clans.

“Could it be a pattern developed since the Buyur left Jijo?”

Rann nodded. “Half an eon is a while, even by Galactic standards.”

Ling spoke, eagerly. “Perhaps it’s Terran.”

The big man stared at her, then nodded, switching to Anglic.

“That might explain the vague familiarity. But why would any Rothen use an Earther code? You know what they think of wolfling technology. Especially anything produced by those unbelieving Terragens—”

“Rann,” Ling cut in, her voice grown hushed. “These slabs may not have belonged to Ro-kenn or Ro-pol.”

“Who then? You deny ever seeing them before. Neither have I. That leaves …”

He blinked, then pounded a heavy fist on the wooden slats. “We must crack this thing! Ling, let us commence unleashing the unit’s entire power on finding the key.”

Lark stepped forward. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

“You seek disease cures for your fellow savages? Well, the Jophur ship squats on the ruins of our station, and our ship is held captive. This may be your only chance.”

Clearly, Rann had another reason for his sudden zeal. Still, everyone apparently wanted the same thing — for now.

Lester looked unhappy, but he gave permission with a nod, returning to his vigil over the sensor stones.

We’re doing it for you, Uthen, Lark thought.

Moments later, he had to retreat several more steps as space above the prehistoric computer grew crowded. In-numerable glyphs and signs collided like snowflakes in an arctic blizzard. The Buyur machine was applying prodigious force of digital intellect to solving a complex puzzle.

As Rann worked — hands darting in and out of the pirouetting flurry — he wore an expression of simmering rage. The kind of resentful anger that could only come from one source.

Betrayal.

A midura passed before the relic computer announced preliminary results. By then Lester Cambel was worn out. Perspiration stained his tunic and he wheezed each breath. But Lester would let no one else take over watching the sensor stones.

“It takes long training to sense the warning glows,” he explained. “Right now, if I relax my eyes in just the right way, I can barely make out a soft glow in a gap between two of the bottommost stones.”

Long training? Lark wondered as he peered into the fragile pyramid, quickly making out a faint iridescence, resembling the muted flame that licked the rim of a mulching pan when a dead traeki was boiled, rendering the fatting rings for return to Jijo’s cycle.

Cambel went on describing, as if Lark did not already see.

“Someday, if there’s time, we’ll teach you to perceive the passive resonance, Lark. In this case it is evoked by the Jophur battleship. Its great motors are now idling, forty leagues from here. Unfortunately, even that creates enough background noise to mask any new disturbance.”

“Such as?”

“Such as another set of gravitic repulsors … moving this way.”

Lark nodded grimly. Like a rich urrish trader with two husbands in her brood pouches, big starships carried smaller ships — scrappy and swift — to launch on deadly errands. That was the chief risk worrying Lester.

Lark considered going back to watch the two Daniks work, invoking software demons in quest of a mathematical key. But what good would he do staring at the unfathomable? Instead, he bent close to the stones, knowing each flicker to be an echo of titanic forces, like those that drove the sun.

For a time he sensed no more than that soft bluish flame. But then Lark began noticing another rhythm, matching the mute shimmer, beat by beat. The source throbbed near his rib cage, above his pounding heart.

He slid a hand into his tunic and grabbed his amulet — a fragment of the Holy Egg that hung from a leather thong. It was warm. The pulselike cadence seemed to build with each passing dura, causing his arm to vibrate painfully.

What could the Egg have in common with the engines of a Galactic cruiser? Except that both seem bent on troubling me till I die?

From far away, he heard Rann give an angry shout. The big Danik pounded the table, nearly toppling the fragile stones.

Cambel left to find out what Rann had learned. But Lark could not follow. He felt pinned by a rigor that spread from his fist on up his arm. It crossed his chest, then swarmed down his crouched legs.

“Uh-huhnnn…”

He tried to speak, but no words came. A kind of paralysis robbed him of the will to move.

Year after year he had striven to achieve what came easily to some pilgrims, when members of all Six Races sought communion with Jijo’s gift — the Egg, that enigmatic wonder. To some it gave a blessing — guidance patterns, profound and moving. Consolation for the predicament of exile.

But never to Lark. Never the sinner.

Until now.

But instead of transcendent peace, Lark tasted a bitter tang, like molten metal in his mouth. His eardrums scraped, as if some massive rock were being pushed through a tube much too narrow. Amid his confusion, gaps in the sensor array seemed like the vacuum abyss between planets. The gemstones were moons, brushing each other with ponderous grace.

Before his transfixed eyes, the silken flame grew a minuscule swelling, like a new shoot budding off a rosebush. The new bulge moved, detaching from its parent, creeping around the surface of one stone, crossing a gap, then moving gradually upward.

It was subtle. Without the heightened sensitivity of his seizure, Lark might not have noticed.

Something’s coming.

But he could only react with a cataleptic gurgle.

Behind Lark came more sounds of fury — Rann throwing a tantrum over some discovery. Figures moved around the outraged alien … Lester and the militia guards. No one paid Lark any mind.

Desperately, he sought the place where volition resides. The center of will. The part that commands a foot to step, an eye to shift, a voice to utter words. But his soul seemed captive to the discolored knob of fire, moving languidly this way.

Now that it had his attention, the flicker wasn’t about to let him go.

Is this your intent? he asked the Egg, half in prayer and half censure.

You alert me to danger … then won’t let me cry a warning?

Did another dura pass — or ten? — while the spark drifted around the next stone? With a soft crackle it crossed another gap. How many more must it traverse before reaching the top? What sky-filling shadow would pass above when that happened?

Suddenly, a huge silhouette did loom into Lark’s field of view. A giant, globelike shape, vast and blurry to his fixed, unfocused gaze.

The intruding object spoke to him.

“Uh … Sage Koolhan?… You all right, sir?”

Lark mutely urged the intruder closer. That’s it, Jimi. A bit more to the left…

With welcome abruptness, the flame vanished, eclipsed by the round face of Jimi the Blessed — Jimi the Simpleton — wearing a worried expression as he touched Lark’s sweat-soaked brow.

“Can I get ya somethin’, Sage? A drink o’ water mebbe?”

Freed of the hypnotic trap, Lark found volition at last … waiting in the same place he always kept it.

“Uhhhh …”

Stale air vented as he took gasping breath. Pain erupted up and down his crouched body, but he quashed it, forcing all his will into crafting two simple words.

“ … ever’body … out!”

EWasx

THEY ACT QUICKLY ON THEIR PROMISES, DO THEY not, my rings?

Do you see how soon the natives acquiesced to our demands?

You seem surprised that they moved so swiftly to appease us, but I expected it. What other decision was possible, now that their so-called sages understand the way things are?

Like you lesser rings, the purpose of other races is ultimately to obey.

• • •

HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT? you ask.

Yes, you have My permission to stroke old-fashioned wax drippings, tracing recent memory. But I shall also retell it in the more efficient Oailie way so that we may celebrate together an enterprise well concluded.

WE BEGIN with the arrival of emissaries — one from each of the savage tribes, entering this shattered valley on foot and wheel, shambling like animals over the jagged splinters that surround our proud Polkjhy.

Standing bravely beneath the overhanging curve of our gleaming hull, they took turns shouting at the nearest open hatch, making pretty speeches on behalf of their rustic Commons. With surprising eloquence, they cited relevant sections of Galactic law, accepting on behalf of their ancestors full responsibility for their presence on this world, and requesting courteously that we in turn explain our purpose coming here.

Are we official inspectors and judges from the Institute of Migration? they asked. And if not, what excuse have we for violating this world’s peace?

Audacity! Among the crew of the Polkjhy, it most upset our junior Priest-Stack, since now we seem obliged to justify ourselves to barbarians.

«Why Did We Not Simply Roast This Latest Embassy, Like The One Before It?»

To this, our gracious Captain-Leader replied:

«It Costs Us Little To Vent Informative Steam In The General Direction Of Half-Devolved Beings. And Do Not Forget That There Are Data Gleanings We Desire, As Well! Recall That The Scoundrel Entities Called Rothen Offered To Sell Us Valuable Knowledge, Before We Righteously Double-Crossed Them. Perhaps That Same Knowledge Might Be Wrung From The Locals At A Much Smaller Price, Saving Us The Time And Effort Of A Search.»

Did not the junior Priest-Stack then press its argument?

«Look Down At The Horrors! Abominations! They Comingle In The Shadow Of Our Great Ship — Urrish Forms Side By Side With Hoons? Poor Misguided Traeki Cousins Standing Close To Wolfling Humans? And There Among Them, Worst Of All … G’keks! What Can Be Gained By Talking With Miscegenists? Blast Them Now!»

• • •

AH, MY RINGS, would not things be simpler for us/Me, had the Captain-Leader given in, accepting the junior priest’s advice? Instead, our exalted commander bent toward the senior Priest-Stack for further consultation.

That august entity stretched upward, a tower of fifty glorious toruses, and declared—

«I/We Concede That It Is A Demeaning Task. But It Harms Us Little To Observe The Appropriate Forms And Rituals.

«So Let Us Leave The Chore To Ewasx. Let The Ewasx Stack Converse With These Devolved Savages. Let Ewasx Find Out What They Know About The Two Kinds Of Prey We Seek.»

So it was arranged. The job was assigned to this makeshift, hybrid stack. An appointment to be a lowly agent. To parley with half animals.

In this way, I/we learned the low esteem by which our Jophur peers regard us.

BUT NEVER MIND THAT NOW. Do you recall how we took on our apportioned task, with determined aplomb? By gravity plate, we dropped down to the demolished forest, where the six envoys waited. Our ring of association recognized two of them—Phwhoon-dau, stroking his white hoonish beard, and Vubben, wisest of the g’Kek. This pair shouted surprised gladness at first, believing they beheld a lost comrade—Asx.

Then, realizing their mistake, all six quailed, emitting varied noises of dismay. Especially the traeki in their midst — our/your replacement among the High Sages? — who seemed especially upset by our transformation. Oh, how that stack of aboriginal toruses trembled to perceive our Jophurication! Would its segmented union sunder on the spot? Without a master ring to bind and guide them, would the component rings tear their membranes and crawl their separate ways, returning to the feral habits of our ancestors?

Eventually the six representatives recovered enough to listen. In simple terms, I explained Polkjhy’s endeavor in this far-off system.

WE ARE NOT OF THE MIGRATION INSTITUTE, I/we told them, although we did invoke a clause of Galactic law to self-deputize and arrest the Rothen gene raiders. There will be few questions asked by an indifferent cosmos, if/ when we render judgment on them … or on criminal colonists.

To whom will savages appeal?

BUT THAT NEED NOT BE OUR AIM.

This I added, soothingly. There are worse villains to pursue than a hardscrabble pack of castaways, stranded on a forbidden reef, seeking redemption the only way they can.

OUR CHIEF QUEST is for a missing vessel crewed by Earthling dolphins. A ship sought by ten thousand fleets, across all Five Galaxies. A ship carrying secrets, and perhaps the key to a new age.

I told the emissaries that we might pay for data, if local inhabitants help shorten our search.

(Yes, My rings — the Captain-Leader also promised to pay those Rothen rascals, when their ship hailed ours in jump space, offering vital clues. But those impatient fools gave away too much in their eagerness. We made vague promises, dispatching them for more proof … then covertly followed, before a final deal was signed! Once they led us to this world, what further purpose did they serve? Rather than pay, we seized their ship.

(True, they might have had more data morsels to sell. But if the dolphin ship is in this system, we will find it soon enough.)

(Yes, My rings, our memory core appears to hold no waxy imprints of a “dolphin ship.” But others on Jijo might know something. Perhaps they kept data from their traeki sage. Anyway, can we trust memories inherited from Asx, who slyly remelted many core drippings?

(So we must query the Jijoan envoys, using threats and rewards.)

While the emissaries pondered the matter of the dolphin ship, I proceeded to our second requirement. Our goal of long-delayed justice!

YOU MAY FIND THIS ADDITIONAL REQUEST UNPLEASANT, OR DISLOYAL. BUT YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. YOU MUST BEND TO THE IMPLACABILITY OF OUR WILL. THE SACRIFICE WE DEMAND IS ESSENTIAL. DO NOT THINK OF SHIRKING!

The hoon sage boomed a deep umble, inflating his throat sac. “We are unclear on your meaning. What must we sacrifice?”

To this obvious attempt at dissembling, I replied derisively, adding rippling emphasis shadows across our upper rings.

YOU KNOW WHAT MUST BE GIVEN UP TO US. SOON WE WILL EXPECT A TOKEN PORTION. A DOWN PAYMENT TO SHOW US THAT YOU UNDERSTAND.

With that, I commanded our ring-of-manipulators to aim all our tendrils at the aged g’Kek.

Toward Vubben.

This time, their reactions showed comprehension. Some former Asx rings shared their revulsion, but I clamped down with electric jolts of discipline.

The intimidated barbarians retreated, taking with them the word of heaven.

We did not expect to hear from the agonized sooners for a day or two. Meanwhile, the Captain-Leader chose to send our second corvette east to help the other unit whose self-repairs go too slowly, stranded near a deepwater rift. (A candidate hiding place for the missing Earthling ship!)

Once, we feared that dolphins had shot down our boat, and Polkjhy itself must go on this errand. But our tactician stack calculated that the Rothen scout simply got in a lucky shot. It seems safe to dispatch a smaller vessel.

Then, just as our repair craft was about to launch, we picked up a signal from these very mountains! What else could it be, but the Jijoan envoys, responding to My/our demands!

The corvette was diverted north, toward this new emission.

And lo! Now comes in its report. A g’Kek settlement — a midget city of the demon wheels — hidden in the forest!

Oh, we would have found it anyway. Our mapping has only just begun.

Still, this gesture is encouraging. It shows the Six (who will soon be five) possess enough sapient ability to calculate odds, to perceive the inevitable and minimize their losses.

What, My rings? You are surprised? You expected greater solidarity from your vaunted Commons? More loyalty?

Then live and learn, My waxy pretties. This is just the beginning.

Lark

TEARS COVERED THE CHEEKS OF THE AGED HUMAN sage as he ran through the forest.

“It’s my fault.…” he murmured between gasping breaths. “All my fault … I never should’ve allowed it … so near the poor g’Kek.…”

Lark heard Cambel’s lament as they joined a stampede of refugees, swarming down narrow aisles between colossal shafts of boo. He had to catch Lester when the sage stumbled in grief over what they all had witnessed, only duras ago. Lark caught the eye of a hoonish militiaman with a huge sword slung down his back. The burly warrior swept Lester into his arms, gently hauling the stricken sage to safety.

For those fleeing beneath the boo, that word—safety—might never be the same. For two thousand years, the ramparts of Dooden Mesa offered protection to the oldest and weakest sooner race. Yet no defense could stand against the sky cruiser that swept over that sheltered valley, too soon after Lark’s shouted warning. Some refugees — those with enough nerve to glance back — would always carry the image of that awful ship, hovering like a predator over the graceful ramps, homes, and workshops.

It must have been drawn by the Buyur computer — by its “digital resonance.”

Once over the mountain, the aliens could not help noticing the g’Kek settlement in the valley below.

“… we were too near the poor g’Kek …”

Driven by a need for answers — and a lifelong curiosity about all things Galactic — Cambel had allowed Ling and Rann to drive the machine at full force, deciphering the mystery records. It was like waving a lure above this part of the Rimmers, calling down an ill wind.

Some of those running through the forest seemed less panicky. Fierce-eyed Jeni Shen kept Herd on her militia team, so Rann and Ling never had a chance to dodge left or right, slipping away through the boo. As if either Danik had any place to go. Their faces looked as dismayed as anybody’s.

Lark’s ears still rang from when the Jophur ship cast beams of aching brilliance, tearing apart the frail canopy of blur cloth, laying Dooden Mesa bare under a cruel sun. Teeming wheeled figures scurried futilely, like a colony of hive mites in a collapsed den.

The beams stopped, and something even more dreadful fell from the floating nemesis.

A golden haze. A flood of liquid light.

Lark’s nerve had failed him at that point, as he, too, plunged into the boo, fleeing a disaster he had helped wreak.

You aren’t alone, Lester. You have company in hell.

Dwer

MUDFOOT SEEMED CRAZIER THAN EVER.

Blinking past a cloud of buzzing gnats, Dwer watched the mad noor crouch over some helpless creature he had caught near the shore, gripping his prey in both forepaws, brandishing sharp teeth toward whatever doomed beast had unluckily strayed within reach. Mudfoot showed no interest in two sooty spaceships that lay crippled, just beyond the dune.

Why should he care? Dwer thought. Any Galactics who glimpse him will just shrug off another critter of Jijo. Enjoy your meal, Mudfoot. No squatting under hot sand for you!

Dwer’s hidey-hole was intensely uncomfortable. His legs felt cramped and grit eagerly sought every body crevice. Partial shade was offered by his tunic, propped up with two arrows and covered with sand. But he had to share that narrow shelter with Rety — an uncomfortable fit, to say the least. Worse, there was a kind of midge, no larger than a speck, that seemed to find human breath irresistible. One by one, the insectoids drifted upslope to the makeshift cavity where Dwer and Rety exposed their faces for air. The bugs fluttered toward their mouths, inevitably being drawn inside. Rety coughed, spat, and cursed in her Gray Hills dialect, despite Dwer’s pleas for silence.

She’s not trained for this, he thought, trying for patience. During his apprenticeship, Master Fallon used to leave him in a hunting blind for days on end, then sneak back to observe. For each sound Dwer made, Fallon added another midura, till Dwer learned the value of quiet.

“I wish he’d quit playin’ with his food,” Rety muttered, glaring downslope at Mudfoot. “Or else, bring some up for us.”

Dwer’s belly growled agreement. But he told her, “Don’t think about it. Try to sleep. We’ll see about sneaking away come nightfall.”

For once, she seemed willing to take his advice. Sometimes, Rety seemed at her best when things were at their worst.

At this rate, she’ll be a saint before it’s all over.

He glanced left, toward the swamp. Both alien ships lay grounded in a seaside bog, just two arrowflights away. It made the two humans easy targets if they budged. Nor had he any guarantee this would change at night.

I hear tell that star gods have lenses that pick out a warm body moving in the dark, and other kinds to track metal and tools.

Getting away from here might not be easy, or even possible.

There wasn’t much to say for the alternatives. It would have been one thing to surrender to Kunn. As a Danik adoptee, Rety might have swayed the human star pilot to spare Dwer’s life. Perhaps.

But the newcomers who shot down Kunn’s little scout … Dwer felt his hackles rise watching tapered stacks of glistening doughnuts inspect their damaged ship, accompanied by hovering robots.

Why be afraid? They look like traeki, and traeki are harmless, right?

Not when they come swooping from space, throwing lightning.

Dwer wished he had listened more closely to holy services as a child, instead of fidgeting when the Sacred Scrolls were read. Some excerpts had been inserted by the ringed ones, when their sneakship came — passages of warning. Not all stacks of fatty rings were friendly, it seemed. What was the name they used? Dwer tried to recall what word stood for a traeki that was no traeki, but he came up blank.

Sometimes he wished he could be more like his brother and sister — able to think deep thoughts, with vast stores of book learning to call upon. Lark or Sara would surely make better use of this time of forced inaction. They would be weighing alternatives, listing possibilities, formulating some plan.

But all I do is doze, thinking about food. Wishing I had some way to scratch.

He wasn’t yet desperate enough to walk toward that silver ship with hands raised. Anyway, the aliens and their helpers were still fussing over the smoke-stained hull, making repairs.

As he nodded in a drowsy torpor, he fought down one itch in particular, a prickly sensation inside his head. The feeling had grown ever since he first gave the Danik robot a “ride” across a river, using his body to anchor its ground-hugging fields. Each time he collapsed on the opposite bank, waking up had felt like rising from a pit. The effect grew stronger with every crossing.

At least I won’t have to do that again. The robot now cowered under a nearby dune, useless and impotent since Kunn’s ship was downed and its master taken.

Dwer’s sleep was uneasy, disturbed first by a litany of aching twinges, and later by disturbing dreams.

He had always dreamed. As a child, Dwer used to jerk upright in the dark, screaming till the entire household roused, from Nelo and Melina down to the lowest chimp and manservant, gathering round to comfort him back to sweet silence. He had no clear memory of what nightmares used to terrify him so, but Dwer still had sleep visions of startling vividness and clarity.

Never worth screaming over, though.

Unless you count One-of-a-Kind.

He recalled the old mulc spider of the acid mountain lake, who spoke words directly in his mind one fateful day, during his first solo scouting trip over the Rimmer Range.

— the mad spider, unlike any other, who tried all kinds of deceit to charm Dwer into its web, there to join its “collection.”

— the same spider who nearly caught Dwer that awful night when Rety and her “bird” were trapped in its maze of bitter vines … before that vine network exploded in a mortal inferno.

Restlessly, he envisioned living cables, the spider’s own body, snaking across a tangled labyrinth, creeping ever nearer, closing an unstoppable snare. From each twisting rope there dripped heavy caustic vapors, or liquors that would freeze your skin numb on contact.

Around Dwer, the sand burrow felt like a ropy spiral of nooses, drawing tight a snug embrace that was both cloying and loving, in a sick-sweet way.

No one else could ever appreciate you as much as I do, crooned the serenely patient call of One-of-a-Kind. We share a destiny, my precious, my treasure.

Dwer felt trapped, more by a languor of sleep than by the enveloping sand. He mumbled.

“Yer just … my …’magination.…”

A crooning, dreamlike laugh, and the mellifluous voice rejoined—

So you always used to claim, though you cautiously evaded my grasp, nonetheless. Until the night I almost had you.

“The night you died!” Dwer answered. The words were a mere rolling of his exhaled breath.

True. But do you honestly think that was an ending?

My kind is very old. I myself had lived half a million years, slowly etching and leaching the hard leavings of the Buyur. Across those ages, thinking long thoughts, would I not learn everything there is to know about mortality?

Dwer realized — all those times he helped the Danik robot cross a stream, conducting its throbbing fields, somehow must have changed him inside. Sensitized him. Or else driven him mad. Either way, it explained this awful dream.

His eyes opened a crack as he tried to waken, but fatigue lay over Dwer like a shroud, and all he managed was to peer through interleaved eyelashes at the swamp below.

Till now, he had always stared at the two alien ships — the larger shaped like a silvery cigar, and the smaller like a bronze arrowhead. But now Dwer regarded the background. The swamp itself, and not the shiny intruders.

They are just dross, my precious. Ignore those passing bits of “made stuff,” the brief fancies of ephemeral beings. The planet will absorb them, with some patient help from my kindred.

Distracted by the ships, he had missed the telltale signs.

A nearby squarish mound whose symmetry was almost hidden by rank vegetation. A series of depressions, like grooves filled with algae scum, always the same distance apart, one after another, extending into the distance.

It was an ancient Buyur site, of course. Perhaps a port or seaside resort, long ago demolished, with the remnants left for wind and rain to dissolve.

Aided by a wounded planet’s friend, came the voice, with renewed pride.

We who help erase the scars.

We who expedite time’s rub.

Over there. Between the shadows of his own eyelashes, Dwer made out slender shapes amid the marsh plants, like threads woven among the roots and fronds, snaking through the muddy shallows. Long, tubelike outlines, whose movement was glacially slow. But he could track the changes, with patience.

Oh, what patience you might have learned, if only you joined me! We would be one with Time now, my pet, my rare one.

It wasn’t just his growing vexation with the irksome dream voice — that he knew to be imagined, after all. Dawning realization finally lent Dwer the will to shake off sleep. He squeezed his eyelids shut hard enough to bring tears and flush away the stickiness. Alert now, he reopened them and stared again at the faint twisty patterns in the water. They were real.

“It’s a mulc swamp,” he muttered. “And it still lives.”

Rety stirred, commenting testily.

“So? One more reason to get out of this crakky place.”

But Dwer smiled. Emerging from the fretful nap, he found his thoughts now taking a sharp turn, veering away from a victim’s apprehension.

In the distance, he still heard the noor beast bark and growl while toying with his prey — a carnivore’s privilege under nature’s law. Before, Mudfoot’s behavior had irritated Dwer. But now he took it as an omen.

All his setbacks and injuries — and simple common sense — seemed to demand that he flee this deadly place, crawling on his belly, taking Rety with him to whatever hideout they could find in a deadly world.

But one idea had now crystallized, as clear as the nearby waters of the Rift.

I’m not running away, he decided. I don’t really know how to do that.

A hunter — that was what he had been born and trained to be.

Alvin

ALL RIGHT, SO THERE WE WERE, WATCHING FARAWAY events through the phuvnthus’ magical viewer, when the camera eye suddenly went jerky and we found ourselves staring into the grinning jaws of a giant noor! Hugely magnified, it was the vista a fen mouse might see — its last sight on its way to being a midday snack.

Huphu reacted with a sharp hiss. Her claws dug in my shoulder.

The spinning voice, our host, seemed as surprised as we. That whirling hologram-thing twisted like the neck of a confused urs, nodding as if it were consulting someone out of sight. I caught murmurs that might be hurried Anglic and GalSeven.

When the voice next spoke aloud, we heard the words twice, the second time delayed as it came back through the drone’s tiny pickups. The voice used accented GalSix, and talked to the strange noor. Three words, so high-pitched I barely understood.

“Brother,” the voice urged quickly. “Please stop.”

And the strange noor did stop, turning its head to examine the drone from one side to the other.

True, we hoons employ noor beasts as helpers on our boats, and those learn many words and simple commands. But that is on the Slope, where they get sour balls and sweet umbles as pay. How would a noor living east of the Rimmers learn Galactic Six?

The voice tried again, changing pitch and timbre, almost at the limit of my hearing range.

“Brother, will you speak to us, in the name of the Trickster?”

Huck and I shared an amazed glance. What was the voice trying to accomplish?

One of those half memories came back to me, from when our ill-fated Wuphon’s Dream crashed into the open-mawed phuvnthus whale ship. Me and my friends were thrown gasping across a metal deck, and soon after I stared through agonized haze as six-legged monsters tromped about, smashing our homemade instruments underfoot, waving lantern beams, exclaiming in a ratchety language I didn’t understand. The armored beings seemed cruel when they blasted poor little Ziz, the five-stack traeki. Then they appeared crazy upon spying Huphu. I recall them bending metal legs to crouch before my pet, buzzing and popping, as if trying to get her to speak.

And now here was more of the same! Did the voice hope to talk a wild noor into releasing the remote-controlled drone? Huck winked at me with two waving g’Kek eyes, a semaphore of amused contempt. Star gods or no, our hosts seemed prize fools to expect easy cooperation from a noor.

So we were more surprised than anyone — even Pincer and Ur-ronn — when the on-screen figure snapped its jaws, frowning in concentration. Then, through gritted teeth came a raspy squeak … answering in the same informal tongue.

“In th’ nam o’ th’ Trickst’er … who th’ hell’r you?”

My healing spine crackled painfully as I straightened, venting an umble of astonishment. Huck sighed and Pincer’s visor whirled faster than the agitated hologram. Only Huphu seemed oblivious. She licked herself complacently, as if she had not heard a blessed thing.

“What do you jeekee, Ifni-slucking turds think you’re doing!” Huck wailed. All four eyes tossed in agitation, showing she was more angry than afraid. Two hulking, six-legged phuvnthus escorted her, one on each side, carrying her by the rims of her wheels.

The rest of us were more cooperative, though reluctant. Pincer had to tilt his red chitin shell in order to pass through some doorways, following as a pair of little amphibian creatures led us back to the whale ship that brought us to this underwater sanctuary. Ur-ronn trotted behind Pincer, her long neck folded low to the ground, a pose of simmering dejection.

I hobbled on crutches behind Huck, staying out of reach of her pusher leg, which flailed and banged against corridor walls on either side.

“You promised to explain everything!” she cried out.

“You said we’d get to ask questions of the Library!”

Neither the phuvnthus nor the amphibians answered, but I recalled what the spinning voice had said before sending us away.

“We cannot justify any longer keeping four children under conditions that put you all in danger. This location may be bombed again, with greater fury. Also, you now know much too much for your own good.”

“What do we know?” Pincer had asked, in perplexity.

“That noors can talk-alk-alk?”

The hologram assented with a twisting nod. “And other things. We can’t keep you here, or send you home as we originally intended, since that might prove disastrous for ourselves and your families. Hence our decision to convey you to another place. A goal mentioned in your diaries, where you may be content for the necessary time.”

“Wait!” Huck had insisted. “I’ll bet you’re not even in charge. You’re prob’ly just a computer … a thing. I want to talk to someone else! Let us see your boss!”

I swear, the whirling pattern seemed both surprised and amused.

“Such astute young people. We had to revise many assumptions since meeting the four of you. As I am programmed to find incongruity pleasant, let me thank you for the experience, and sincerely wish you well.”

I noticed, the voice never answered Huck’s question.

Typical grown-up, I thought. Whether hoonish parents or alien contraptions … they’re all basically the same.

• • •

Huck settled down once we left the curved hallway and reentered the maze of reclaimed passages leading to the whale ship. The phuvnthus let her down, and she rolled along with the rest of us. My friend continued grumbling remarks about the phuvnthus’ physiology, habits, and ancestry, but I saw through her pose. Huck had that smug set to her eyestalks.

Clearly, she felt she had accomplished something sneaky and smart.

Once aboard the whale ship, we were given another room with a porthole. Apparently the phuvnthus weren’t worried about us memorizing landmarks. That worried me, at first.

Are they going to stash us in another salvaged wreck, under a different dross pile, in some far-off canyon of the Midden? In that case, who’ll come get us if they are destroyed?

The voice mentioned sending us to a “safe” place. Call me odd, but I hadn’t felt safe since stepping off dry land at Terminus Rock. What did the voice mean about it being a site where we already “wanted to go’?

The whale ship slid slowly at first through its tunnel exit, clearly a makeshift passage constructed out of the hulls of ancient starcraft, braced with rods and improvised girders. Ur-ronn said this fit what we already knew — the phuvnthus were recent arrivals on Jijo, possibly refugees, like our ancestors, but with one big difference.

They hope to leave again.

I envied them. Not for the obvious danger they felt, pursued by deadly foes, but for that one option they had, that we did not. To go. To fly off to the stars, even if the way led to certain doom. Was I naive to think freedom made it all worthwhile? To know I’d trade places with them, if I could?

Maybe that thought laid the seeds for my later realization. The moment when everything suddenly made sense. But hold that thought.

Before the whale ship emerged from the tunnel, we caught sight of figures moving in the darkness, where long shadows stretched away from moving points of sharp, starlike light. The patchiness of brilliance and pure darkness made it hard, at first, to make out very much. Then Pincer identified the shadowy shapes.

They were phuvnthus, the big six-legged creatures whose stomping gait seemed so ungainly indoors. Now, for the first time, we saw them in their element, swimming, with the mechanical legs tucked away or used as flexible work arms. The broad flaring at the back ends of their bodies now made sense — it was a great big flipper that propelled them gracefully through dark waters.

We had already speculated that they might not be purely mechanical beings. Ur-ronn thought the heavy metal carapace was worn like a suit of clothes, and the real creatures lay inside horizontal shells.

They wear them indoors because their true bodies lack legs, I thought, knowing also that the steel husks protected their identities. But why, if they were born swimmers, did they continue wearing the coverings outside?

We glimpsed light bursts of hurtful brilliance — underwater welding and cutting. Repairs, I thought. Were they in a battle, before fleeing to Jijo? My mind filled with images from those vivid space-opera books Mister Heinz used to disapprove of, preferring that we kids broaden our tastes with Keats and Basho. I yearned to get close and see the combat scars … but then the sub entered a narrow shaft, cutting off all sight of the phuvnthu vessel.

Soon, we emerged into the blackness of the Midden. A deep chill seemed to penetrate the glass disk, and we backed away … especially since the spotlights all turned off, leaving the outside world vacant, but for an occasional blue glimmer as some sea creature tried to lure a mate.

I lay down on the metal deck to rest my back, feeling the thrum of engines vibrate beneath me. It was like the rumbling song of some godlike hoon who never needed to pause or take a breath. I filled my air sac and began to umble counterpoint. Hoons think best when there is a steady background cadence — a tone to serve as a fulcrum for deliberation.

I had a lot to think about.

My friends eventually grew bored with staring at the bleak desolation outside. Soon they were all gathered around little Huphu, our noorish mascot, trying to get her to speak. Pincer urged me to come over and use bosun umbles to put her in a cooperative mood, but I declined. I’ve known Huphu since she was a pup, and there’s no way she’s been playing dumb all that time. Anyway, I had seen a difference in that strange noor on the beach, the one that spoke back to the spinning voice in fluent GalSix. Huphu never had that glint in her eyes…

… though as I reflected, I felt sure I’d seen the look before — in just a few noor who lounged on the piers in Wuphon, or worked the sails of visiting ships. Strange ones, a bit more aloof than normal. As silent as their brethren, they nevertheless seemed more watchful somehow. More evaluating. More amused by all the busy activity of the Six Races.

I never gave them much thought before, since a devilish attitude seems innate to all noor. But now perhaps I knew what made them different.

Though noor are often associated with hoons, they didn’t come to Jijo with us, the way chimps, lorniks, and zookirs came with human, qheuen, and g’Kek sooners. They were already here when we arrived and began building our first proud rafts. We always assumed they were native beasts, either natural or else some adjusted species, left behind by the Buyur as a practical joke on whoever might follow. Though we get useful work out of them, we hoon don’t fool ourselves that they are ours.

Eventually, Huck gave up the effort, leaving Pincer and Ur-ronn to continue coaxing our bored mascot. My g’Kek buddy rolled over beside me, resting quietly for a time. But she didn’t fool me for a kidura.

“So tell me,” I asked. “What’d you swipe?”

“What makes you think I took anything?” She feigned innocence.

“Hr-rrm. How ’bout the fakey way you thrashed around, back there in the hall — a tantrum like you used to throw when you were a leg skeeter, till our folks caught on. After we left the curvy hallway, you stopped all that, wearing a look as if you’d snatched the crown jewels under old Richelieu’s nose.”

Huck winced, a reflex coiling of eyestalks. Then she chuckled. “Well, you got me there, d’Artagnan. Come on. Have a look at what I got.”

With some effort, I raised up on my middle stretch of forearm while Huck rolled closer still. Excitement hummed along her spokes.

“Used my pusher legs. Kept banging ’em against the wall till I managed to snag one of these.”

Her tendril-like arm unfolded. There, held delicately between the tips, hung a narrow, rectangular strip of what looked like thick paper. I reached for it.

“Careful, it’s sticky on one side. I think a book called it adhesive tape. Got a bit crumpled when I yanked it off the wall. Had to pry some gummy bits apart. I’m afraid there’s not much of an impression left, but if you look closely …”

I peered at the strip — one of the coverings we had seen pressed on the walls, always at the same height, to the left of each doorway in the curved hall, surely masking label signs in some unknown language.

“You wouldn’t happen to’ve been looking when I ripped it off, were you?” Huck asked. “Did you see what it said underneath?”

“Hr-r. Wish I had. But I was too busy avoiding being kicked.”

“Well, never mind. Just look real carefully at this end. What d’you see there?”

I didn’t have Huck’s sensitivity of vision, but hoons do have good eyes. I peered at what seemed a circular pattern with a gap and sharp jog on the right side. “Is it a symbol?”

“That’s right. Now tell me — in what alphabet?”

I concentrated. Circles were basic ingredients in most standard Galactic codes. But this particular shape seemed unique.

“I’ll tell you my first impression, though it can’t be right.”

“Go on.”

“Hr-rm … it looks to me like an Anglic letter. A letter G, to be specific.”

Huck let a satisfied sigh escape her vent mouth. All four eyestalks waved, as if in a happy breeze.

“That was my impression, too.”

• • •

We clustered round the viewport when the hull began creaking and popping, indicating a rapid change of pressure. Soon the world outside began to brighten and we knew the sub must be on final approach. Beyond the glass, sunshine streamed through shallow water. We all felt a bit giddy, from changing air density, I guess. Pincer-Tip let out hissing shouts, glad to be back in a familiar world where he would be at home. (Though lacking the comforts of his clan rookery.) Soon water slid off the window in dripping sheets and we saw our destination.

Tilted obelisks and sprawling concrete skeletons, arrayed in great clusters along the shore.

Huck let out a warbling sigh.

Buyur ruins, I realized. These must be the scrublands south of the Rift, where some city sites were left to be torn down by wave and wind alone.

The voice read my journal and knew about our interest in coming here. If we must be quarantined, this would be the place.

The cluster of ancient sites had been Huck’s special goal, before we ever stepped aboard Wuphon’s Dream. Now she bounced on her rims, eager to get ashore and read the wall inscriptions that were said to be abundant in this place. Forgotten were her complaints over broken phuvnthu promises. This was a more longstanding dream.

One of the six-limbed amphibians entered, gesturing for us to move quickly. No doubt the phuvnthus were anxious to get us ashore before they could be spotted by their enemies. Huck rolled out after Pincer. Ur-ronn glanced at me, her long head and neck shaking in an urrish shrug. At least she must be looking forward to an end to all this water and humidity. The countryside ahead looked pleasantly dry.

But it was not to be.

This time I was the mutinous one.

“No!” I planted my feet, and my throat sac boomed.

“I ain’t movin’.”

My friends turned and stared. They must have seen hoonish obstinacy in the set of my limbs as I gripped the crutches. The amphibian fluttered and squeaked distress.

“Forget it,” I insisted. “We are not getting off!”

“Alvin, it’s all right-ight,” Pincer murmured. “They promised to leave us lots of food, and I can hunt along the shore—”

I shook my head.

“We are not going to be cast aside like this, exiled for our own Ifni-slucking safety, like a bunch of helpless kids. Sent away from where things are happening. Important things!”

“What’re you talking about?” asked Huck, rolling back into the cabin, while the amphibian fluttered and waved its four arms vainly. Finally, a pair of big phuvnthus came in, their long horizontal bodies metal-clad and slung between six stomping steel legs. But I refused to be intimidated. I pointed at the nearest, with its pair of huge, black, glassy eyes, one on each side of a tapered head.

“You call up the spinning voice and tell him. Tell him we can help. But if you people turn us away, putting us ashore here won’t do any good. It won’t shut us up, ’cause we’ll find a way back home, just as fast as we can. We’ll head for the Rift and signal friends on the other side. We’ll tell ’em the truth about you guys!”

Ur-ronn murmured, “What truth, Alvin?”

I let out a deep, rolling umble to accompany my words.

“That we know who these guys are.”

Sara

IN THE LODGE OF A HORSE CLAN YOU MIGHT EXPECT to see lariats, bridles, and saddle blankets hanging on the walls. Maybe a guitar or two. It seemed strange to find a piano here in Xi.

An instrument much like the one back home in Dolo Village, where Melina used to read to her children for hours on end, choosing obscure books no one else seemed eager to check out from the Biblos Archive — some crinkly pages wafting aromas from the Great Printing, two hundred years before. Especially books of written music Melina would prop on the precious piano Nelo had made for her as part of the marriage price.

Now, in the great hall of the Illias, Sara ran her hands along white and black keys, stroking fine tooth traces left by expert qheuen wood-carvers, picturing her mother as a little girl, raised in this narrow realm of horses and mind-scraping illusions. Leaving Xi must have been like going to another planet. Did she feel relief from claustrophobic confinement, passing through the Buyur tunnel for a new life in the snowy north? Or did Melina long in her heart for the hidden glades? For the visceral thrill of bareback? For the pastoral purity of life unconstrained by men?

Did she miss the colors that took each dream or nightmare, and spread its secret panorama before your daylight gaze?

Who taught you to play the piano, Mother? Sitting with you on this very bench, the way you used to sit beside me, trying to hide your disappointment in my awkward fingers?

A folio of sheet music lay atop the piano’s polished surface. Sara flipped through it, recalling ancient compositions that used to transfix her mother for duras at a stretch, rousing young Sara’s jealousy against those dots on a page. Dots Melina transformed into glorious harmonies.

Later, Sara realized how magical the melodies truly were. For they were repeatable. In a sense, written music was immortal. It could never die.

The typical Jijoan ensemble — a sextet including members from each sooner race — performed spontaneously. A composition was never quite the same from one presentation to the next. That trait appealed especially to blue qheuens and hoons, who, according to legend, had no freedom to innovate back in ordered Galactic society. They expressed puzzlement when human partners sometimes suggested recording a successful piece in traeki wax, or writing it down.

Whatever for? they asked. Each moment deserves its own song.

A Jijoan way of looking at things, Sara acknowledged.

She laid her hands on the keys and ran through some scales. Though out of practice, the exercise was like an old friend. No wonder Emerson also drew comfort from tunes recalling happier days.

Still, her mind churned as she switched to some simple favorites, starting with “Für Elise.”

According to Biblos anthropology texts, most ancient cultures on Earth used to play music that was impulsive, just like a Jijoan sextet. But shortly before they made their own way into space, humans also came up with written forms.

We sought order and memory. It must have seemed a refuge from the chaos that filled our dark lives.

Of course that was long ago, back when mathematics also had its great age of discovery on Earth. Is that a common thread? Did I choose math for the same reason Melina loved this instrument? Because it lends predictability amid life’s chaos?

A shadow fell across the wall. Sara drew back, half rising to meet the brown eyes of Foruni, aged leader of the horse-riding clan.

“Sorry to disturb you, dear.” The gray-headed matriarch motioned for Sara to sit. “But watching you, I could almost believe it was Melina back home with us, playing as she did, with such intensity.”

“I’m afraid I don’t look much like my mother. Nor do I play half as well.”

The old woman smiled. “A good parent wants her offspring to excel — to do what she could not. But a wise parent lets the child select which excellence. You chose realms of deep thought. I know she was very proud.”

Sara acknowledged the kindness with a nod, but took small comfort from aphorisms. If the choice really were mine, don’t you think I’d have been beautiful, like Melina? A dark woman of mystery, who amazed people with many graceful talents?

Mathematics chose me … it seized me with cool infinities and hints at universal truth. Yet whom do I touch with my equations? Who looks at my face and form with unreserved delight?

Melina died young, but surrounded by those who loved her. Who will weep over me, when I am gone?

The Illias leader must have misunderstood Sara’s frown.

“Do my words disturb you?” Foruni asked. “Do I sound like a heretic, for believing that generations can improve? Does it seem an odd belief for a secret tribe that hides itself even from a civilization of exiled refugees?”

Sara found it hard to answer.

Why were Melina’s children so odd, by Jijoan standards? Although Lark’s heresy seems opposite to mine, we share one thread — rejecting the Path of Redemption.

The books Mother read to us often spoke of hope, drawn from some act of rebellion.

To the Illias leader, she replied, “You and your urrish friends rescued horses, back when they seemed doomed. Your alliance foreshadowed that of Drake and Ur-Chown. You are a society of dedicated women, who carefully choose your male companions from the best Jijo has to offer. Living in splendid isolation, you see humanity at its best — seldom its more nasty side.

“No, it does not surprise me that the Illias are optimists at heart.”

Foruni nodded. “I am told that you, in your investigations of language theory, reached similar conclusions.”

Sara shrugged. “I’m no optimist. Not personally. But for a while, it seemed that I could see a pattern in the evolution of Jijo’s dialects, and in all the new literary activity taking place across the Slope. Not that it matters anymore, now that aliens have come to—”

The old woman cut in. “You don’t think we are destined to be like glavers, winning our second chance by passing through oblivion?”

“You mean what might have happened, if starships never came? I argued with Dedinger about this. If Jijo had been left alone, I felt there was the possibility of …”

Sara shook her head and changed the subject.

“Speaking of Dedinger, have you had any luck finding him?”

Foruni winced unhappily. “It’s been just a short while since he broke out of the pen where he was kept. We never imagined he would prove so resourceful, knowing how to saddle and steal a horse.”

“He had time to learn by observing.”

“I see that we were naive. It’s a long time since we kept prisoners in Xi.

“Unfortunately, the tracks do not lead back to the tunnel, where we might have trapped him in the narrow darkness. Instead, the wily ligger spawn struck out across the Spectral Flow.”

Sara tried picturing a man alone on horseback, crossing a vast desert of poison stone and cutting light. “Do you think he can make it?”

“You mean can we catch him before he dies out there?”

It was Foruni’s turn to shrug. “Fallon is not as spry as he was, but he departed a midura ago with some of our most able young riders. The fanatic should be back in care soon, and we’ll watch him more closely—”

Foruni stopped, midsentence, glancing down at her hand. An insect had landed, and was sniffing at a vein. Sara recognized a skeeter—a blood-sucking irritant familiar across the Slope. Skeeters were slow and easily smacked, but for some reason Foruni refrained. Instead, she let the vampire wasp leisurely insert a narrow tube and take its meal. When finished, it proceeded to perform a little dance, one filled with jerky, beckoning motions.

Sara stared, fascinated. Skeeters seldom survived landing on a human long enough to do this.

Come with me, it seemed to say with each swing of its tiny abdomen and tail. Come with me now.

Sara realized, it must be another remnant servant beast of the vanished Buyur. A useful messenger, if you knew how to use it.

Foruni sighed. “Alas, dear cousin, it’s time for you to go. You and Kurt and the others must hurry to where you’re needed most.”

Needed? Sara wondered. In times like these, what could a person like me possibly be needed for?

The journey south resumed, this time on horseback. They used the ancient Buyur transit tunnel at first, where the failed deconstructor left its demolition unfinished. But soon it lay cracked open for stretches, like the spent larval casing of a newly fledged qheuen, leaving a dusty cavity or else a pit filled with water. Thereafter they had to ride in the open, awash in the luminous tides of the Spectral Flow. The Illias provided hooded cloaks. Still, it felt as if the colors were probing the reflective garments for some gap to worm their way inside.

Kurt and Jomah rode ahead with Kepha, their guide. The elderly exploser leaned forward in his saddle, as if that might get them to their goal quicker. Then came Prity, on a donkey more suited for her small form.

Emerson seemed strangely subdued, though he smiled at Sara from time to time. He wore the rewq constantly, though from his ever-turning head, Sara gathered the filmy symbiont was doing more than just softening the colors. It must be adjusting, translating them. Sometimes, the starman stiffened in the saddle … though whether from pain, surprise, or exaltation, Sara could never be quite sure.

Taking up the rear was Ulgor, the urrish traitor. Wisely, she had not tried to break across the poison plain with her erstwhile ally, Dedinger. Guarded by two of her own kind from the Xi colony, Ulgor swung her head in growing eagerness as the party neared Mount Guenn. Urrish nostrils flared at scents of smoke and molten rock, as the volcano loomed to fill the southern sky.

Sara felt surprisingly good. The saddle was a tool her body had mastered. When the going grew steep and riders dismounted to lead the horses by hand, her legs were suffused with waves of comfortable warmth, with strength still in reserve.

So, a hermit math potato can manage to keep up, after all. Or is this euphoria an early sign of altitude sickness?

They were mounting one of countless knee hills along the sloping volcano, when suddenly all three urs bolted forward, hissing excitement and trailing clouds of pumice, forgetting their separate roles as they jostled toward the next outlook. Outlined against the sky, their long heads swept in unison, from left to right and back again.

Finally, winded from the climb, she and Emerson arrived to find a mighty caldera spread before them … one of many studding the immense volcano, which kept rising to the southeast for many more leagues.

Yet this crater had the urs transfixed. Steamy exhalations rose from vents that rimmed the craggy circle. Cautiously, Sara removed her sunglasses. The basalt here was of a coarser, less gemlike variety. They had entered a different realm.

“This was the site of the first forge,” Ulgor announced, her voice tinged with awe. She tilted her muzzle to the right, and Sara made out a tumble of stone blocks, too poorly shaped to have been laser-cut by the Buyur, and now long-abandoned. Such tumbled shelters were hand-hewn by the earliest urrish seeker smiths who dared to leave the plains pursuing lava-borne heat, hoping to learn how to cast the fiery substance of Jijoan bronze and steel. In its day, the venture was fiercely opposed by the Gray Queens, who portrayed it as sacrilege — as when humans much later performed the Great Printing.

In time, what had been profane became tradition.

“They must’ve found conditions better, on high,” Jomah commented, for the trail continued steadily upslope. An urrish guard nodded. “Vut it was fron this flace that early urs exflorers discovered the secret way across the Sfectral Flow. The Secret of Xi.”

Sara nodded. That explained why one group of urs conspired to thwart another — the powerful Urunthai — in their plan to make horses extinct when humanity was new on Jijo. The smiths of those days cared little for power games played by high aunties of the plains tribes. It did not matter to them how Earthlings smelled, or what beasts they rode, only that they possessed a treasure.

Those books the Earthlings printed. They have secrets of metallurgy. We must share, or be left behind.

So it was not a purely idealistic move — to establish a secret herd in Xi. There had been a price. Humans may be jijo’s master engineers, but we stayed out of smithing, and now I know why.

Even after growing up among them, Sara still found it fascinating how varied urs could be. Their range of personalities and motives — from fanatics to pragmatic smiths — was as broad as you’d find among human beings. One more reason why stereotypes aren’t just evil, but stupid.

Soon after they remounted, the trail followed a ridgeline offering spectacular views. The Spectral Flow lay to their left, an eerie realm, even dimmed to sepia shades by distance and dark glasses. The maze of speckled canyons spanned all the way to a band of blazing white — the Plain of Sharp Sand. Dedinger’s home, where the would-be prophet was forging a nation of die-hard zealots out of coarse desert folk. Sandmen who saw themselves as humanity’s vanguard on the Path of Redemption.

In the opposite direction, southwest through gaps in the many-times-folded mountain, Sara glimpsed another wonder. The vast ocean, where Jijo’s promised life renewal was fulfilled. Where Melina’s ashes went after mulching. And Joshu’s. Where the planet erased sin by absorbing and melting anything the universe sent it.

The Slope is so narrow, and Jijo is so large. Will star gods judge us harshly for living quiet careful lives in one corner of a forbidden world?

There was always hope the aliens might just finish their business and go away, leaving the Six Races to proceed along whatever path destiny laid out for them.

Yeah, she concluded. There are two chances that will happen — fat and slim.

The trek continued, more often dismounted than not, and the view grew more spectacular as they moved east, encompassing the southern Rimmer Range. Again, Sara noted skittishness among the urs. In spots the ground vented steaming vapors, making the horses dance and snort. Then she glimpsed a red glimmer, some distance below the trail — a meandering stream of lava, flowing several arrowflights downslope.

Perhaps it was fatigue, thin air, or the tricky terrain, but as Sara looked away from the fiery trail, her unshielded eyes crossed the mountains and were caught unready by a stray flash of light. Sensitized by her time in Xi, the sharp gleam made her cringe.

What is that?

The flash repeated at uneven intervals, almost as if the distant mountaintop were speaking to her.

Then Sara caught another, quite different flicker of motion.

Now that must be an illusion, she thought. It has to be … yet it’s so far from the Spectral Flow!

It seemed … she could almost swear … that she saw the widespread wings of some titanic bird, or dragon, wafting between—

It had been too long since she checked her footing. A stone unexpectedly turned and Sara tripped. Throwing her weight desperately the other way, she overcompensated, losing her balance completely.

Uttering a cry, Sara fell.

The gritty trail took much of the initial impact, but then she rolled over the edge, tumbling down a scree of pebbles and jagged basalt flakes. Despite her tough leather garments, each jab lanced her with fierce pain as she desperately covered her face and skull. A wailing sound accompanied her plunge. In a terrified daze Sara realized the screamer was not her, but Prity, shrieking dismay.

“Sara!” someone yelled. There were scrambling sounds of distant, hopeless pursuit.

In midtumble, between one jarring collision and the next, she glimpsed something between blood-streaked fingers — a fast-approaching rivulet winding across the shattered landscape. A liquid current that moved languidly, with great viscosity and even greater heat. It was the same color as her blood … and approaching fast.

Nelo

ARIANA FOO SPENT THE RETURN BOAT JOURNEY mulling over her sketches of the tiny space pod that had brought the Stranger to Jijo. Meanwhile, Nelo fumed over this foolish diversion. His workmen would surely not have kept to schedule. Some minor foul-up would give those louts an excuse to lie about like hoons at siesta time.

Commerce had lapsed during the crisis, and the warehouse tree was full, but Nelo was determined to keep producing paper. What would Dolo Village be without the groaning waterwheel, the thump of the pulping hammer, or the sweet aroma that wafted from fresh sheets drying in the sun?

While the helmsman umbled cheerfully, keeping a steady beat for the crew poling the little boat along, Nelo held out a hand, feeling for rain. There had been drops a little earlier, when disturbing thunder pealed to the south.

The marsh petered out as streamlets rejoined as a united river once more. Soon the young people would switch to oars and sweep onto the gentle lake behind Dolo Dam.

The helmsman’s umble tapered, slowing to a worried moan. Several of the crew leaned over, peering at the water. A boy shouted as his pole was ripped out of his hands. It does seem a bit fast, Nelo thought, as the last swamp plants fell behind and trees began to pass by rapidly.

“All hands to oars!” shouted the young hoon in command. Her back spines, still fresh from recent fledging, made uneasy frickles.

“Lock them down!”

Ariana met Nelo’s eyes with a question. He answered with a shrug.

The boat juttered, reminding him of the cataracts that lay many leagues downriver, past Tarek Town, an inconvenience he only had to endure once, accompanying his wife’s dross casket to sea.

But there are no rapids here! They were erased when the lake filled, centuries ago!

The boat veered, sending him crashing to the bilge. With stinging hands, Nelo climbed back to take a seat next to Ariana. The former High Sage clutched the bench, her precious folio of drawings zipped shut inside her jacket.

“Hold on!” screamed the young commander. In dazed bewilderment, Nelo clutched the plank as they plunged into a weird domain. A realm that should not be.

So Nelo thought, over and over, as they sped down a narrow channel. On either side, the normal shoreline was visible — where trees stopped and scummy water plants took over. But the boat was already well below that level, and dropping fast!

Spume crested the gunnels, drenching passengers and crew. The latter rowed furiously to the hoon lieutenant’s shrill commands. Lacking a male’s resonating sac, she still made her wishes known.

“Backwater-left … backwater-left, you noor-bitten ragmen!.. Steady … Now all ahead! Pull for it, you spineless croakers! For your lives, pull!”

Twin walls of stone rushed inward, threatening to crush the boat from both sides. Glistening with oily algae, they loomed like hammer and anvil as the crew rowed frantically for the narrow slot between, marked by a fog of stinging white spray. What lay beyond was a mystery Nelo only prayed he’d live to see.

Voices of hoons, qheuen, and humans rose in desperation as the boat struck one cliff a glancing blow, echoing like a door knocker on the gateway to hell. Somehow the hull survived to lunge down the funnel, drenched in spray.

We should be on the lake by now, Nelo complained, hissing through gritted teeth. Where did the lake go!

They shot like a javelin onto a cascade where water churned in utter confusion over scattered boulders, shifting suddenly as fresh debris barricades built up or gave way. It was an obstacle course to defy the best of pilots, but Nelo had no eyes for the ongoing struggle, which would merely decide whether he lived or died. His numbed gaze lifted beyond, staring past the surrounding mud plain that had been a lake bed, down whose center rushed the River Roney, no longer constrained. A river now free to roll on as it had before Earthlings came.

The dam … The dam …

A moan lifted from the pair of blue qheuens, lent for this journey by the local hive. A hive whose fisheries and murky lobster pens used to stretch luxuriously behind the dam wherein they made a prosperous home. Remnants of the pens and algae farms lay strewn about as the boat swept toward the maelstrom’s center.

Nelo blinked, unable to express his dismay, even with a moan.

The dam still stood along most of its length. But most wasn’t a word of much use to a dam. Nelo’s heart almost gave way when he saw the gap ripped at one end … the side near his beloved mill.

“Hold on!” the pilot cried redundantly, as they plunged for the opening. And the waterfall they all heard roaring violently just ahead.