The Uplift War

50 Government in Hiding

The messenger sat on a couch in the corner of the Council Room, holding a blanket around his shoulders while he sipped from a steaming cup of soup. Now and then the young chen shivered, but mostly he looked exhausted. His damp hair still lay in tangled mats from the icy swim that had brought him on the last leg of his dangerous journey.

It’s a wonder he made it here at all, Megan Oneagle thought, watching him. All the spies and recon teams we sent ashore, carrying the finest equipment — none ever returned. But this little chim makes it to us, sailing a tiny raft made of cut trees, with homespun canvas sails.

Carrying a message from my son.’

Megan wiped her eyes again, remembering the courier’s first words to her after swimming the last stretch of underground caves to their deep island redoubt.

“Captain Oneagle sends his felic — his felicitations, ma’am.”

He had drawn forth a packet — waterproofed in oli tree sap — and offered it to her, then collapsed into the arms of the medical techs.

A message from Robert, she thought in wonder. He is alive. He is free. He helps lead an army. She didn’t know whether to exult or shudder at the thought.

It was a thing to be proud of, for sure. Robert might be the sole adult human loose on the surface of Garth, right now. And if his “army” was little more than a ragged band of simian guerrillas, well, at least they had accomplished more than her own carefully hoarded remnants of the official planetary militia had.

If he had made her proud, Robert had also astonished her. Might there be more substance to the boy than she had thought before? Something brought out by adversity, perhaps?

There may be more of his father in him than I’d wanted to see.

Sam Tennace was a starship pilot who stopped at Garth every five years or so, one of Megan’s three spacer husbands. Each was home for only a few months at a stretch — almost never at the same time — then off again. Other ferns might not have been able to deal with such an arrangement, but what suited spacers also met her needs as a politician and career woman. Of the three, only Sam Tennace had given her a child.

And I never wanted my son to be a hero, she realized. As critical as I have been of him, I guess I never really wanted him to be like Sam at all.

For one thing, if Robert had not been so resourceful he might be safe now — interned on the islands with the rest of the human population, pursuing his playboy hobbies among his friends — instead of engaged in a desperate, useless struggle against an omnipotent enemy.

Well, she reassured herself. His letter probably exaggerates .

To her left, mutterings of amazement grew ever more pronounced as the government in exile pored over the message, printed on tree bark in homemade ink. “Son of a bitch!” she heard Colonel Millchamp curse. “So that’s how they always knew where we were, what we were up to, before we even got started!”

Megan moved closer to the table. “Please summarize, colonel.”

Millchamp looked up at her. The portly, red-faced militia officer shook several sheets until someone grabbed his arm and pried them out of his hand.

“Optical fibers!” he cried.

Megan shook her head. “I beg your pardon?”

“They doped them. Every string, telephone cable, communications pipe… almost every piece of electronics on the planet! They’re all tuned to resonate back on a probability band the damn birds can broadcast…” Colonel Millchamp’s voice choked on his anger. He swiveled and walked away.

Megan’s puzzlement must have shown.

“Perhaps I can explain, madam coordinator,” said John Kylie, a tall man with the sallow complexion of a lifetime spacer. Kylie’s peacetime profession was captain of an in-system civilian freighter. His merchant vessel had taken part in the mockery of a space battle, one of the few survivors — if that was the right term. Overpowered, battered, finally reduced to peppering Gubru fighting planetoids with its comm laser, the wreck of the Esperanza only made it back to Port Helenia because the enemy was leisurely in consolidating the Gimelhai system. Its skipper now served as Megan’s naval advisor.

Kylie’s expression was stricken. “Madam coordinator, do you remember that excellent deal we made, oh, twenty years ago, for a turnkey electronics and photonics factory? It was a state-of-the-art, midget-scale auto-fac — perfect for a small colony world such as ours.”

Megan nodded. “Your uncle was coordinator then. I believe your first merchant command was to finalize negotiations and bring the factory home to Garth.”

Kylie nodded. He looked crestfallen. “One of its main products is optical fibers. A few said the bargain we got from the Kwackoo was just too good to be true. But who could have imagined they might have something like this in mind? So far in the future? Just on the off chance that they might someday want to—”

Megan gasped. “The Kwackoo! They’re clients of—”

“Of the Gubru.” Kylie nodded. “The damn birds must have thought, even then, that something like this might someday happen.”

Megan recalled what Uthacalthing had tried to teach her, that the ways of the Galactics are long ways, and patient as the planets in their orbits.

Someone else cleared his throat. It was Major Pratha-chulthorn, the short, powerfully built Terragens Marines officer. He and his small detachment were the only professional soldiers left after the space battle and the hopeless gesture of defiance at the Port Helenia space-field. Millchamp and Kylie held reserve commissions.

“This is most grave, madam coordinator,” Prathachulthorn said. “Optical fibers made at that factory have been incorporated into almost every piece of military and civilian equipment manufactured on the planet. They are integrated into nearly every building. Can we have confidence in your son’sfindings?”

Megan nearly shrugged, but her politician’s instincts stopped her in time. How the hell would I know? she thought. The boy is a stranger to me. She glanced at the small chen who had nearly died bringing Robert’s message to her. She had never imagined Robert could inspire such dedication.

Megan wondered if she was jealous.

A woman Marine spoke next. “The report is co-signed by the Tymbrimi Athaclena,” Lieutenant Lydia McCue pointed out. The young officer pursed her lips. “That’s a second source of verification,” she suggested.

“With all respect, Lydia,” Major Prathachulthorn replied. “The tym is barely more than a child.”

“She’s Ambassador Uthacalthing’s daughter!” Kylie snapped. “And chim technicians helped perform the experiments as well.”

Prathachulthorn shook his head. “Then we have no truly qualified witnesses.”

Several councillors gasped. The sole neo-chimpanzee member, Dr. Suzinn Benirshke, blushed and looked down at the table. But Prathachulthorn didn’t even seem to realize he’d said anything insulting. The major wasn’t known to be strong on tact. Also, he’s a Marine, Megan reminded herself. The corps was the elite Terragens fighting service with the smallest number of dolphin and chim members. For that matter, the Marines recruited mostly males, a last bastion of oldtime sexism.

Commander Kylie sifted through the rough-cut pages of Robert Oneagle’s report. “Still you must agree, major, the scenario is plausible. It would explain our setbacks, and total failure to establish contact, either with the islands or the mainland.”

Major Prathachulthorn nodded after a moment. “Plausible, yes. Nevertheless, we should perform our own investigations before we commit ourselves to acting as if it is true.”

“What’s the matter, major?” Kylie asked. “You don’t like the idea of putting down your phase-burner rifle and picking up bows and arrows?”

Prathachulthorn’s reply was surprisingly mild. “Not at all, ser, so long as the enemy is similarly equipped. The problem lies in the fact that he is not.”

Silence reigned for long moments. No one seemed to have anything to say. The pause ended when Colonel Millchamp returned to the table. He slammed the flat of his hand down. “Either way, what’s the point in waiting?”

Megan frowned. “What do you mean, colonel?”

Millchamp growled. “I mean what good do our forces do down here?” he demanded. “We’re all going slowly stir-crazy. Meanwhile, at this very moment, Earth herself may be fighting for her life!”

“There’s no such thing as this very moment across interstellar space,” Commander Kylie commented. “Simultaneity is a myth. The concept is imbedded in Anglic and other Earth tongues, but—”

“Oh, revert the metaphysics!” Millchamp snapped. “What matters is that we can hurt Earth’s enemies!” He picked up the tree-bark leaves. “Thanks to the guerrillas, we know where the Gubru have placed many of their major planet-based yards. No matter what damned Library-spawned tricks the birds have got up their feathers, they can’t prevent us from launching our flicker-swivvers at them!”

“But—”

“We have three hidden away — there weren’t any used in the space battle, and the Gubru can’t know we have any of ’em. If those missiles are supposed to be good against the Tandu, damn their seven-chambered hearts, they’ll surely suffice for Gubru ground targets!”

“And what good will that do?” Lieutenant McCue asked mildly.

“We can bend a few Gubru beaks! Ambassador Uthacal-thing told us that symbols are important in Galactic warfare. Right now they can pretend that we hardly put up a fight at all. But a symbolic strike, one that hurt them, would tell the whole Five Galaxies that we won’t be pushed around!”

Megan Oneagle pinched the bridge of her nose. She spoke with eyes closed. “I have always found it odd that my Amerindian ancestors’ concept of ‘counting coup’ should have a place in a hypertechnological galaxy.” She looked up. “It may, indeed, come to that, if we can find no other way to be effective.

“But you’ll recall that Uthacalthing also advised patience.” She shook her head. “Please sit down, Colonel Millchamp. Everybody. I’m determined not to throw our strength away in a gesture, not until I know it’s the only thing left to do against the enemy.

“Remember, nearly every human on the planet is hostage on the islands, their lives dependent on doses t›f Gubru antidote. And on the mainland there are the poor chims, for all intents abandoned, alone.”

Along the conference the officers sat downcast. They’re frustrated, Megan thought. And I can’t blame them.

When war had loomed, when they had begun planning ways to resist an invasion, nobody had ever suggested a contingency like this. Perhaps a people more experienced in the sophistications of the Great Library — in the arcane art of war that the aeons-old Galactics knew — might have been better prepared. But the Gubru’s tactics had made a shambles of their modest defense plans.

She had not added her final reason for refusing to sanction a gesture. Humans were notoriously unsophisticated at the game of Galactic punctilio. A blow struck for honor might be bungled, instead giving the enemy excuse for even greater horrors.

Oh, the irony. If Uthacalthing was right, it was a little Earthship, halfway across the Five Galaxies from here, that had precipitated the crisis!

Earthlings certainly did have a knack for making trouble for themselves. They’d always had that talent.

Megan looked up as the small chen from the mainland, Robert’s messenger, approached the table, still wearing his blanket. His dark brown eyes were troubled.

“Yes, Petri?” she asked.

The chim bowed.

“Ma’am, th’ doctor wants me to go to bed now.”

She nodded. “That’s fine, Petri. I’m sure we’ll want to debrief you some more, later… ask you some more questions. But right now you should rest.”

Petri nodded. “Yes’m. Thank you, ma’am. But there was somethin’ else. Somethin’ I’d better tell you while I remember.”

“Yes? What is it?”

The chen looked uncomfortable. He glanced at the watching humans and back at Megan. “It’s personal, ma’am. Somethin’ Captain Oneagle asked me to memorize an’ tell you.”

Megan smiled. “Oh, very well. Will you all excuse me , for a moment, please?”

She walked with Petri over to the far end of the room.

There she sat down to bring her eyes level with the little chim. “Tell me what Robert said.”

Petri nodded. His eyes went unfocused. “Captain Oneagle said to tell you that th’ Tymbrimi Athaclena is actually doin’ most of the organizing for th’ army.”

Megan nodded. She had suspected as much. Robert might have found new resources, new depths, but he was not and never would be a born leader.

Petri went on. “Cap’n Oneagle told me to tell you that it was important that th’ Tymbrimi Athaclena have honorary patron status to our chims, legally.”

Again, Megan nodded. “Smart. We can vote it and send word back.”

But the little chim shook his head. “Uh, ma’am. We couldn’t wait for that. So, uh, I’m supposed to tell you that Captain Oneagle an’ th’ Tymbrimi Athaclena have sealed a … a consort bond … I think that’s what it’s called. I…”

His voice trailed off, for Megan had stood up.

Slowly, she turned to the wall and rested her forehead against the cool stone. That damn fool of a boy! part of her cursed.

It was the only thing they could do, another part answered.

So, now I’m a mother-in-law, the most ironic voice added.

There would certainly be no grandchildren from this union. That was not what interspecies consort marriages were for. But there were other implications.

Behind her, the council debated. Again and again they turned over the options, coming up dry as they had for months now.

Oh, if only Uthacalthing had made it here, Megan thought. We need his experience, his wry wisdom and humor. We could talk, like we used to. And maybe, he could explain to me these things that make a mother feel so lost.

She confessed to herself that she missed the Tymbrimi Ambassador. She missed him more than any of her three husbands and more even, God help her, than she missed her own strange son.

51 Uthacalthing

It was fascinating to watch Kault play with a ne’ squirrel, one of the native animals of these southern plains. He coaxed the small creature closer by holding out ripe nuts in his great Thennanin hands. He had been at it for over an hour while they waited out the hot noonday sun under the cover of a thick cluster of thorny bramble.

Uthacalthing wondered at the sight. The universe never seemed about to cease surprising him. Even bluff, oblivious, obvious Kault was a perpetual source of amazement.

Quivering nervously, the ne’ squirrel gathered its courage. It took two more hops toward the huge Thennanin and stretched out its paws. It plucked up one of the nuts.

Astonishing. How did Kault do it?

Uthacalthing rested in the muggy shade. He did not recognize the vegetation here in the uplands overlooking the estuary where his pinnace had come down, but he felt he was growing familiar with the scents, the rhythms, the gently throbbing pain of daily life that surged and flowed through and all around the deceptively quiet glade.

His corona brought him touches from tiny predators, now waiting out the hot part of the day, but soon to resume stalking even smaller prey. There were no large animals, of course, but Uthacalthing kenned a swarm of ground-hugging insectoids grubbing through the detritus nearby, seeking tidbits for their queen.

The tense little ne’ squirrel hovered between caution and gluttony as it approached once more to feed from Kault’s outstretched hand.

He should not be able to do that. Uthacalthing wondered why the squirrel trusted the Thennanin, so huge, so intimidating and powerful. Life here on Garth was nervous, paranoid in the wake of the Bururalli catastrophe — whose deathly pall still hung over these steppes far east and south of the Mountains of Mulun.

Kault could not be soothing the creature as a Tymbrimi might — by glyph-singing to it in gentle tones of empathy. A Thennanin had all the psi sense of a stone.

But Kault spoke to the creature in his own highly inflected dialect of Galactic. Uthacalthing listened.

“Know you — sight-sound-image — an essence of destiny, yours? Little one? Carry you — genes-essence-destiny — the fate of star-treaders, your descendants?”

The ne’ squirrel quivered, cheeks full. The native animal seemed mesmerized as Kault’s crest puffed up and deflated, as his breathing slits sighed with every moist exhalation. The Thennanin could not commune with the creature, not as Uthacalthing might. And yet, the squirrel somehow appeared to sense Kault’s love.

How ironic, Uthacalthing thought. Tymbrimi lived their lives awash in the everflowing music of life, and yet he did not personally identify with this small animal. It was one of hundreds of millions, after all. Why should he care about this particular individual?

Yet Kault loved the creature. Without empathy sense, without any direct being-to-being link, he cherished it entirely in abstract. He loved what the little thing represented, its potential.

Many humans still claim that one can have empathy without psi, Uthacalthing pondered. To “put one’s self into another’s shoes,” went the ancient metaphor. He had always thought it to be one of their quaint pre-Contact ideas, but now he wasn’t so certain. Perhaps Earthlings were sort of midway between Thennanin and Tymbrimi in this matter of how one empathized with others.

Kault’s people passionately believed in Uplift, in the potential of diverse life forms eventually to achieve sapiency. The long-lost Progenitors of Galactic culture had commanded this, billions of years ago, and the Thennanin Clan took the injunction very seriously. Their uncompromising fanaticism on this issue went beyond being admirable. At times — as during the present Galactic turmoil — it made them terribly dangerous.

But now, ironically, Uthacalthing was counting on that fanaticism. He hoped to lure it into action of his own design.

The ne’ squirrel snatched one last nut from Kault’s open hand and then decided it had enough. With a swish of its fan-shaped tail it scooted off into the undergrowth. Kault turned to look at Uthacalthing, his throat slits flapping as he breathed.

“I have studied genome reports gathered by the Earth-ling ecologists,” the Thennanin Consul said. “This planet had impressive potential, only a few millennia ago. It should never have been ceded to the Bururalli. The loss of Garth’s higher life forms was a terrible tragedy.”

“The Nahalli were punished for what their clients did, weren’t they?” Uthacalthing asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Aye. They were reverted to client status and put under foster care to a responsible elder patron clan. My own, in fact. It is a most sad case.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the Nahalli are actually quite a mature and elegant people. They simply did not understand the nuances required in uplifting pure carnivores and so failed horribly with their Bururalli clients. But the error was not theirs alone. The Galactic Uplift Institute must take part in the blame.”

Uthacalthing suppressed a human-style smile. Instead his corona spiraled out a faint glyph, invisible to Kault. “Would good news here on Garth help the Nahalli?” he asked.

“Certainly.” Kauh expressed the equivalent of a shrug with his flapping crest. “We Thennanin were not in any way associated with the Nahalli when the catastrophe occurred, of course, but that changed when they were demoted and given under our guidance. Now, by adoption, my clan shares responsibility for this wounded place. It is why a consul was sent here, to make certain the Earthlings do not do even more harm to this sorry world.”

“And have they?”

Kault’s eyes closed and opened again. “Have they what?”

“Have the Earthlings done a bad job, here?”

Kault’s crest flapped again. “No. Our peoples may be at war, theirs and mine, but I have found no new grievances here to tally against them. Their ecological management program was exemplary.

“However, I do plan to file a report concerning the activities of the Gubru.”

Uthacalthing believed he could interpret bitterness in Kault’s voice inflection*. They had already seen signs of the collapse of the environmental recovery effort. Two days ago they had passed a reclamation station, now abandoned, its sampling traps and test cages rusting. The gene-storage bins had gone rancid after refrigeration failed.

An agonized note had been left behind, telling of the choice of a neo-chimpanzee ecology aide — who had decided to abandon his post in order to help a sick human colleague. It would be a long journey to the coast for an antidote to the coercion gas.

Uthacalthing wondered if they ever made it. Clearly the facility had been thoroughly dosed. The nearest outpost of civilization was very far from here, even by hover car.

Obviously, the Gubru were content to leave the station unmanned. “If this pattern holds, it must be documented,” Kault said. “I am glad you allowed me to persuade you to lead us back toward inhabited regions, so we can collect more data on these crimes.”

This time Uthacalthing did smile at Kault’s choice of words. “Perhaps we will find something of interest,” he agreed.

They resumed their journey when the sun, Gimelhai, had slipped down somewhat from its burning zenith.

The plains southeast of the Mulun range stretched like the undulating wavetops of a gently rolling sea, frozen in place by the solidity of earth. Unlike the Vale of Sind and the open lands on the other side of the mountains, here there were no signs of plant and animal life forms introduced by Earth’s ecologists, only native Garth creatures.

And empty niches.

Uthacalthing felt the sparseness of species types as a gaping emptiness in the aura of this land. The metaphor that came to mind was that of a musical instrument missing half its strings.

Yes. Apt. Poetically appropriate. He hoped Athaclena was taking his advice and studying this Earthling way of viewing the worM.

Deep, on. the level of nahakieri, he had dreamt of his daughter last night. Dream-picted her with her corona reaching, kenning the threatening, frightening beauty of a visitation by tutsunucann. Trembling, Uthacalthing had awakened against his will, as if instinct had driven him to flee that glyph.

Through anything other than tutstmucann he might have learned more of Athaclena, of how she fared and what she did. But tutsunucann only shimmered — the essence of dreadful expectation. From that glimmer he knew only that she still lived. Nothing more.

That will have to do, for now.

Kault carried most of their supplies. The big Thennanin walked at an even pace, not too difficult to follow. Uthacalthing suppressed body changes that would have made the trek easier for a short while but cost him in the long run. He settled for a loosening in his gait, a wide flaring of his nostrils — making them flat but broad to let in more air yet keep out the ever-present dust.

Ahead, a series of small, tree-lined hummocks lay by a streambed, just off their path toward the distant ruddy mountains. Uthacalthing checked his compass and wondered if the hills should look familiar. He regretted the loss of his inertial guidance recorder in the crash. If only he could be sure…

There. He blinked. Had he imagined a faint blue flash?

“Kault.”

The Thennanin lumbered to a stop. “Mmm?” He turned around to face Uthacalthing. “Did you speak, colleague?”

“Kault, I think we should head that way. We can reach those hills in time to make camp and forage before dark.”

“Mmm. It is somewhat off our path.” Kault puffed for a moment. “Very well. I will defer to you in this.” Without delay he bent and began striding toward the three green-topped mounds.

It was about an hour before sunset when they arrived by the watercourse and began setting camp. While Kault erected their camouflaged shelter, Uthacalthing tested pulpy, reddish, oblong fruits plucked from the branches of nearby trees. His portable meter declared them nutritious. They had a sweet, tangy taste.

The seeds inside, though, were hard, obdurate, obviously evolved to withstand stomach acids, to pass through an animal’s digestive system and scatter on the ground with its feces. It was a common adaptation for fruit-bearing trees on many worlds.

Probably some large, omnivorous creature had once depended on the fruit as a food source and repaid the favor by spreading the seeds far and wide. If it climbed for its meals it probably had the rudiments of hands. Perhaps it even had Potential. The creatures might have someday become pre-sentient, entered into the cycle of Uplift, and eventually become a race of sophisticated people.

But all that ended with the Bururalli. And not only the large animals died. The tree’s fruit now fell too close to the parent. Few embryos could break out of tough seeds that had evolved to be etched away in the stomachs of the missing symbionts. Those saplings that did germinate languished in their parents’ shade.

There should have been a forest here instead of a tiny, scrabbling woody patch.

I wonder if this is the place, Uthacalthing thought. There were so few landmarks out on this rolling plain. He looked around, but there were no more tantalizing flashes of blue.

Kault sat in the entrance of their shelter and whistled low, atonal melodies through his breathing slits. Uthacalthing dropped an armload of fruit in front of the Thennanin and wandered down toward the gurgling water. The stream rolled over a bank of semi-clear stones, taking up the reddening hues of twilight.

That was where Uthacalthing found the artifact.

He bent and picked it up. Examined it.

Native chert, chipped and rubbed, flaked along sharp, glassy-edged lines, dull and round on one side where a hand could find a grip. …

Uthacalthing’s corona waved. Lurrunanu took form again, wafting among his silvery tendrils. The glyph rotated slowly as Uthacalthing turned the little stone axe in his hand. He contemplated the primitive tool, and lurrunanu regarded Kault, still whistling to himself higher up the hillside.

The’ glyph tensed and launched itself toward the hulking Thennanin.

Stone tools — among the hallmarks of pre-sentience, Uthacalthing thought. He had asked Athaclena to watch out for signs, for there were rumors… tales that told of sight-ings in the wild back country of Garth…

“Uthacalthing!”

He swiveled, shifting to hide the artifact behind his back as he faced the big Thennanin. “Yes, Kault?”

“I…” Kault appeared uncertain. “Metoh kanmi, b’twuil’ph… I…” Kault shook his head. His eyes closed and opened again. “I wonder if you have tested these fruits for my needs, as well as yours.”

Uthacalthing sighed. What does it take? Do Thennanin have any curiosity at all?

He let the crude artifact slip out of his hand, to drop into the river mud where he had found it. “Aye, my colleague. They are nutritious, so long as you remember to take your supplements.”

He walked back to join his companion for a fireless supper by the growing sparkle of the galaxies’ light.

52 Athaclena

Gorillas dropped over both sharp rims of the narrow canyon, lowering themselves on stripped forest vines. They slipped carefully past smoking crevices where recent explosions had torn the escarpment. Landslides were still a danger. Nevertheless, they hurried.

On their way down they passed through shimmering rainbows. The gorillas’ fur glistened under coatings of tiny water droplets.

A terrible growling accompanied their descent, echoing from the cliff faces and covering their labored breathing. It had hidden the noise of battle, smothering the bellow of death that had raged here only minutes before. Briefly, the dinsome waterfall had had competition but not for long.

Where its fremescent torrent had formerly fallen to crash upon glistening smooth stones, it now splattered and spumed against torn metal and polymers. Boulders’dislodged from the cliffsides had pounded the new debris at the foot of the falls. Now the water worked it flatter still.

Athaclena watched from atop the overlooking bluffs. “We do not want them to know how we managed this,” she said to Benjamin.

“The filament we bunched up under the falls was pretreated to decay. It’ll all wash away within a few hours, ser. When the enemy gets a relief party in here, they won’t know what ruse we used to trap this bunch.”

They watched the gorillas join a party of chim warriors poking through the wreckage of three Gubru hover tanks. Finally satisfied that all was clear, the chims slung their crossbows and began pulling out bits of salvage, directing the gorillas to lift this boulder or that shattered piece of armor plate out of the way.

The enemy patrol had come in fast, following the scent of hidden prey. Their instruments told them that someone had taken refuge behind the waterfall. And it was a perfectly logical place for such a hideaway — a barrier hard for their normal detectors to penetrate. Only their special resonance scanners had flared, betraying the Earthlings who had taken technology under there.

In order to take those hiding by surprise, the tanks had flown directly up the canyon, covered overhead by swarming battle drones of the highest quality, ready for combat.

Only they did not find much of a battle awaiting them. There were, in fact, no Earthlings at all behind the torrent. Only bundles of thin, spider-silk fiber.

And a trip wire.

And — planted all through the cliffsides — a few hundred kilos of homemade nitroglycerin.

Water spray had cleared away the dust, and swirling eddies had carried off myriad tiny pieces. Still the greater part of the Gubru strike force lay where it had been when explosions rocked the overhanging walls, filling the sky with a rain of dark volcanic stone. Athaclena watched a chim emerge from the wreckage. He hooted and held up a small, deadly Gubru missile. Soon a stream of alien munitions found its way into the packs of the waiting gorillas. The large pre-sentients began climbing out again through the multi-hued spray.

Athaclena scanned the narrow streaks of blue sky that could be seen through the forest canopy. In minutes the invader would have its fighters here. The colonial irregulars must be gone by then, or their fate would be the same as the poor chims who rose last week in the Vale of Sind.

A few refugees had made it to the mountains after that debacle. Fiben Bolger was not one of them. No messenger had come with Gailet Jones’s promised notes. For lack of information, Athaclena’s staff could only guess how long it would take for the Gubru to respond to this latest ambush.

“Pace, Benjamin.” Athaclena glanced meaningfully at her timepiece.

Her aide nodded. “I’ll go hurry ’em up, ser.” He sidled over next to their signaler. The young chimmie began waving flapping flags.

More gorillas and chims appeared at the cliff edge, scrambling up onto the wet, glistening grass. As the chim scavengers climbed out of the water-carved chasm, they grinned at Athaclena and hurried off, guiding their larger cousins toward secret paths through the forest.

Now she no longer needed to coax and persuade., For Athaclena had become an honorary Earthling. Even those who had earlier resented taking orders “from an Eatee” now obeyed her quickly, cheerfully.

It was ironic. In signing the articles that made them consorts, she and Robert had made it so that they now saw less of each other than ever. She no longer needed his authority as the sole free adult human, so he had set forth to raise havoc of his own elsewhere.

I wish I had studied such things better, she pondered. She was unsure just what was legally implied by signing such a document before witnesses. Interspecies “marriages” tended to be more for official convenience than anything else. Partners in a business enterprise might “marry,” even though they came from totally different genetic lines. A reptiloid Bi-Gle might enter into consort with a chitinous F’ruthian. One did not expect issue from such joinings. But it was generally expected that the partners appreciate each other’s company.

She felt funny about the whole thing. In a special sense, she now had a “husband.” And he was not here. So it was for Mathicluanna, all those long, lonely years, Athaclena thought, fingering the locket that hung from a chain around her throat. Uthacalthing’s message thread had joined her mother’s in there. Perhaps their laylacllapt’n spirits wound together in there, close as their bond had been in life.

Perhaps I begin to comprehend something I never understood about them, she wondered.

“Ser?… Uh, ma’am?”

Athaclena blinked and looked up. Benjamin was motioning to her from the trailhead, where one of the ubiquitous vine clusters came together around a small pool of pinkish water. A chimmie technician squatted by an opening in the crowded vines, adjusting a delicate instrument.

Athaclena approached. “You have word from Robert?”

“Yesser,” the chimmie said. “I definitely am detecting one of th’ trace chemicals he took along with him.”

“Which is it?” she asked tensely.

The chimmie grinned. “Th’ one with th’ left-handed adenine spiral. It’s the one we’d agreed would mean victory.”

Athaclena breathed a little easier. So, Robert’s party, too, had met with success. His group had gone to attack a small enemy observation post, north of Lome Pass, and must have engaged the enemy yesterday. Two minor successes in as many days. At this rate they might wear the Gubru down in, say, a million years or so.

“Reply that we, also, have met our goals.”

Benjamin smiled as he handed the signaler a vial of clear fluid, which was poured into the pool. Within hours the tagged molecules would be detectable many miles away. Tomorrow, probably, Robert’s signaler would report her message.

The method was slow. But she imagined the Gubru would have absolutely no inkling of it — for a while, at least.

“They’re finished with the salvage, general. We’d better scoot.”

She nodded. “Yes. Scoot we shall, Benjamin.”

In a minute they were running together up the verdant trail toward the pass and home.

A little while later, the trees behind them rattled and thunder shook the sky. Clamorous booms pealed, and for a time the waterfall’s roar fell away under a raptor’s scream of frustrated vengeance.

Too late, she cast contemptuously at the enemy fighters.

This time.

53 Robert

The enemy had started using better drones. This time the added expense saved them from annihilation.

The battered Gubru patrol retreated through dense jungle, blasting a ruined path on all sides for two hundred meters. Trees blew apart, and sinuous vines whipped like tortured worms. The hover tanks kept this up until they arrived at an area open enough for heavy lifters to land. There the remaining vehicles circled, facing outward, and kept up nearly continuous fire in all directions.

Robert watched as one party of chims ventured too close with their hand catapults and chemical grenades. They were caught in the exploding trees, cut down in a hail of wooden splinters, torn to shreds in the indisciminate scything.

Robert used hand signals to send the withdraw-and-disperse order rippling from squad to squad. No more could be done to this convoy, not with the full force of the Gubru military no doubt already on its way here. His bodyguards cradled their captured saber rifles and darted into the shadows ahead of him and to the flanks.

Robert hated the way the chims kept this web of protection around him, forbidding him to approach a skirmish site until all was safe. There was just no helping it though. They were right, dammit.

Clients were expected to protect their patrons as individuals — and the patron race, in turn, protected the client race as a species.

Athaclena seemed better able to handle this sort of thing. She was from a culture that had come into existence from the start assuming that this was the way things were. Also, he admitted, she doesn’t worry about machismo. One of his problems was that he seldom got to see or touch the enemy. And he so wanted to touch the Gubru.

“The withdrawal was executed successfully before the sky filled with alien battlecraft. His company of Earthling irregulars split up into small groups, to make their separate ways to dispersed encampments until they received the call to arms again over the forest vine network. Only Robert’s squad headed back toward the heights wherein their cave headquarters lay.

That required taking a wide detour, for they were far east in the Mulun range, and the enemy had set up outposts on several mountain peaks, easily supplied by air and defended with space-based weaponry. One of these stood along their most direct path home, so the chim scouts led Robert’s group down a jungle crevice, just north of Lome Pass.

The ropelike transfer vines lay everywhere. They were wonders, certainly, but they made for slow going down here below the heights. Robert had had plenty of time to think. Mostly he wondered what the Gubru were doing coming up here into the mountains at all.

Oh, he was glad they came, for it gave the Resistance a chance to strike at them. Otherwise, the irregulars might as well spit at the enemy, with their vast, overpowering weaponry.

But why were the Gubru bothering at all with the tiny guerrilla movement up in the Mulun when they had a firm grip on the rest of the planet? Was there some symbolic reason — something encrusted in Galactic tradition — that required they reduce every isolated pocket of resistance?

But even that would not explain the large civilian presence at those mountaintop outposts. The Gubru were pouring scientists into the Mulun. They were looking for something.

Robert recognized this area. He signaled for a halt.

“Let’s stop and look in on the gorillas,” he said.

His lieutenant, a bespectacled, -middle-aged chimmie named Elsie, frowned and looked at him dubiously. “The enemy’s gasbots sometimes dose an area without cause, sir. Just randomly. We chims will only be able to rest easy after you’re safe underground again.”

Robert was definitely not looking forward to the caverns, especially since Athaclena wouldn’t be back from her next mission for several days. He checked his compass and map.

“Come on, the refuge is only a few miles off our path. Anyway, if I know you chims from the Howletts Center, you must be keeping your precious gorillas in a place that’s even safer than the caves.”

He had her there, and Elsie clearly knew it. She put her fingers to her mouth and trilled a quick whistle, sending the scouts hurrying off in a new direction, to the southwest, darting through the upper parts of the trees.

In spite of the broken terrain, Robert made his way mostly along the ground. He couldn’t dash pellmell along narrow branches, not for mile after mile like the chims. Humans just weren’t specialized for that sort of thing.

They climbed another side canyon that was hardly more than a split in the side of a mammoth bulwark of stone. Down the narrow defile floated soft wisps of fog, made opalescent by multiple refractions of daylight. There were rainbows, and once, when the sun came out behind and above him, Robert looked down at a bank of drifting moisture and saw his own shadow surrounded by a triply colored halo, like those given saints in ancient iconography.

It was the glory … an unusually appropriate technical term for a perfect, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree reverse rainbow — much rarer than its more mundane cousins that would arch over any misty landscape, lifting the hearts of the blameless and the sinful alike.

If only I weren’t so damn rational, he thought. If I didn’t know exactly what it was, I might have taken it as a sign.

He sighed. The apparition faded even before he turned to move on.

There were times when Robert actually envied his ancestors, who had lived in dark ignorance before the twenty-first century and seemed to have spent most of their time making up weird, ornate explanations of the world to fill the yawning gap of their ignorance. Back then, one could believe in anything at all.

Simple, deliciously elegant explanations of human behavior — it apparently never mattered whether they were true or not, as long as they were incanted right. “Party lines” and wonderful conspiracy theories abounded. You could even believe in your own sainthood if you wanted. Nobody was there to show yo.u, with clear experimental proof, that there was no easy answer, no magic bullet, no philosopher’s stone, only simple, boring sanity.

How narrow the Golden Age looked in retrospect. No more than a century had intervened between the end of the Darkness and contact with Galactic society. For not quite a hundred years, war was unknown to Earth.

And now look at us, Robert thought. I wonder, does the Universe conspire against us? We finally grow up, make peace with ourselves… and emerge to find the stars already owned by crazies and monsters.

No, he corrected himself. Not all monsters. In fact, the majority of Galactic clans were quite decent folk. But moderate majorities were seldom allowed to live in peace by fanatics, either in Earth’s past or in the Five Galaxies today.

Perhaps golden ages simply aren’t meant to last.

Sound traveled oddly in these closed, rocky confines, amid the crisscross lacing of native vines. One moment it seemed as if he were climbing in a world gone entirely silent, as if the rolling wisps of shining haze were folds of cotton batting that enveloped and smothered all sound. The next instant, he might suddenly pick up a snatch of conversation — just a few words — and know that some strange trick of acoustics had carried back to him a whispered remark between two of his scouts, possibly hundreds of meters away.

He watched them, the chims. They still looked nervous, these irregular soldiers who had until a few months ago been farmers, miners, and backwoods ecological workers. But they were growing more confident day by day. Tougher and more determined.

And more feral, Robert also realized, seeing them flit into and out of view among the untamed trees. There was something fierce and wild in the way they moved, in the way their eyes darted as they leaped from branch to branch. One seldom seemed to need words to know what the other was doing. A grunt, a quick gesture, a grimace, these were often more than enough.

Other than their bows and quivers and handspun weapons pouches, the chims mostly traveled naked. The softening trappings of civilization, the shoes and factory-made fabrics, were all gone. And with them had departed some illusions.

Robert glanced down at himself — bare-shanked, clad in breechcloth, moccasins, and cloth knapsack, bitten, scratched and hardening every day. His nails were dirty. His hair had been getting in the way so he’d cut it off in front and tied it in back. His beard had long ago stopped itching.

Some of the Eatees think that humans need more uplifting — that we are ourselves little more than animals. Robert leaped for a vine and swung over a dark patch of evil-looking thorns, coming to land in an agile crouch upon a fallen log. It’s a fairly common belief among the Galactics. And who am I to say they’re wrong?

There was a scurry of movement up ahead. Rapid hand signals crossed the gaps between the trees. His nearby guards, those directly responsible for his safety, motioned for him to detour along the westward, upwind side of the canyon. After climbing a few score meters higher he learned why. Even in the dampness he caught the musty, oversweet smell of old coercion dust, of corroding metal, and of death.

Soon he reached a point where he could look across the little vale to a narrow scar — already healing under layers of new growth — which ended in a crumpled mass of once-sleek machinery, now seared and ruined.

There were soft chim whispers and hand signals among the scouts. They nervously approached and began picking through the debris while others fingered their weapons and watched the sky; Robert thought he saw jutting white bones amid the wreckage, already picked clean by the ever-hungry jungle. If he had tried to approach any closer, of course, the chims would have physically restrained him, so he waited until Elsie returned with a report.

“They were overloaded,” she said, fingering the small, black flight recorder. Emotion obviously made it hard for her to bring forth words. “They were tryin’ to carry too many humans to Port Helenia, the day just after th’ hostage gas was first used. Some were already sick, and it was their only transport.

“The flitter didn’t clear th’ peak, up there.” She gestured at the fog-shrouded heights to the south. “Must’ve hit th’ rocks a dozen times, to fall this far.

“Shall… shall we leave a couple chims, sir? A … a burial detail?”

Robert scuffed the ground. “No. Mark it. Map it. I’ll ask Athaclena if we should photograph it later, for evidence.

“Meanwhile, let Garth take what she needs from them. I…”

He turned away. The chims weren’t the only ones finding words hard right now. With a nod he set the party going again. As he clambered higher, Robert’s thoughts burned. There had to be a way to hurt the enemy worse than they had so far!

Days ago, on a dark, moonless night, he had watched while twelve selected chims sailed down onto a Gubru encampment, riding the winds on homemade, virtually invisible paper gliders. They had swooped in, dropped their nitro and gas bombs, and slipped away by starlight before the enemy even knew anything was happening.

There had been noise and smoke, uproar and squawking confusion, and no way at all to tell how effective the raid was. Nevertheless, he remembered how he had hated watching from the sidelines. He was a trained pilot, more qualified than any of these mountain chims for a mission like that!

But Athaclena had given firm instructions to which the neo-chimps all adhered. Robert’s ass was sacred.

It’s my own damn fault, he thought as he scrambled through a dense thicket. By making Athaclena his formal consort, he had given her that added status she had needed to run this small insurrection… and some degree of authority over him, as well. No longer could he do as he damn well pleased.

So, she was his wife now, in a fashion. Some marriage, he thought. While Athaclena kept adjusting her appearance to look more human, that only served to remind him of what she couldn’t do, frustrating Robert. No doubt that was one reason why interspecies consortions were rare!

I wonder what Megan thinks of the news … 7 wonder if our messenger ever got through.

“Hssst!”

He looked quickly to his right. Elsie stood balanced on a tree branch. She pointed upslope, to where an opening in the fog exposed a view of high clouds skimming like glass-bottomed boats on invisible pressure layers in the deep blue sky. Underneath the clouds could be seen the tree-fringed slope of a mountain. Narrow curls of smoke spiraled upward from shrouded places on its flanks.

“Mount Fossey,” Elsie said, concisely. And Robert knew, at once, why the chims felt this might be a safe place… safe enough even for their precious gorillas.

Only a few semi-active volcanoes lay along the rim of the Sea of Cilmar. Still, all through the Mulun there were places where the ground occasionally trembled. And at rare intervals lava poured forth. The range was still growing.

Mount Fossey hissed. Vapor condensed in shaggy, serpentine shapes above geothermal vents, where pools of hot water steamed and intermittently burst forth in frothing geysers. The ubiquitous transfer vines came together here from all directions, twisting into great cables as they snaked up the flanks of the semi-dormant volcano. Here they held market in shady, smoky pools, where trace elements that had percolated through narrow trails of hot stone finally entered the forest economy.

“I should’ve guessed.” Robert laughed. Of course the Gubru would be unlikely to detect anything here. A few unclothed anthropoids on these slopes would be nothing amid all this heat, spume, and chemical potpourris. If the invaders ever did come to check, the gorillas and their guardians could just melt into the surrounding jungle and return after the interlopers left.

“Whose idea was this?” he asked as they approached under the shade of a high forest canopy. The smell of sulfur grew stronger.

“Th’ gen’ral thought of it,” Elsie answered.

Figures. Robert didn’t feel resentful. Athaclena was bright, even for a Tymbrimi, and he knew he himself wasn’t much above human average, if that. “Why wasn’t I told about it?”

Elsie looked uncomfortable. “Um, you never asked, ser. You were busy with your experiments, findin’ out about the optical fibers and the enemy’s detection trick. And …”

Her voice trailed off.

“And?” he insisted.

She shrugged. “And we weren’t sure you wouldn’t ever get dosed with th’ gas, sooner or later. If that happened you’d have to report to town for antidote. You’d be asked questions — and maybe psi-scanned.”

Robert closed his eyes. Opened them. Nodded. “Okay. For a moment there I wondered if you trusted me.”

“Ser!”

“Never mind.” He waved. Athaclena’s decision had been proper, logical — once again. He wanted to think about it as little as possible.

“Let’s go see the gorillas.”

They sat about in small family groups and were easily distinguished at a distance — much larger, darker, and hairier than their neo-chimpanzee cousins. Their big, peaked faces — as black as obsidian — bore expressions of peaceful concentration as they ate their meals, or groomed each other, or worked at the main task that had been assigned them, weaving cloth for the war.

Shuttles flew across broad wooden looms, carrying homespun weft over warped strands, snicking and clicking to a rhythm matched by the great apes’ rumbling song. The ratcheting and the low, atonal grunting followed Robert as he and his party moved toward the center of the refuge.

Now and then a weaver would stop work, putting her shuttle aside to wave her hands in a flurry of motion, making conversation with a neighbor. Robert knew sign-talk well enough to follow some of the gossip, but the gorillas seemed to speak with a dialect that was quite different from that used by infant chims. It was simple speech, yes, but also elegant in its own way, with a gentle style that was all their own.

Clearly, these were not just big chims but a completely different race, another path taken. A separate route to sentience.

The gorilla groups each seemed to consist of a number of adult females, their young, a few juveniles, and one hulking silver-backed adult male. The patriarch’s fur was always gray along his spine and ribs. The top of his head was peaked and imposing. Uplift engineering had altered the neo-gorilla’s stance, but the bigger males still had to use at least one knuckle when they walked. Their huge chests and shoulders made them too top-heavy still to move bipedally.

In contrast, the lithe gorilla children moved easily on two legs. Their foreheads were rounded, smooth, without the severe sloping and bony brow ridges that would later give them such deceptively fierce countenances. Robert found it interesting how much alike infants of all three races looked — gorillas, chims, and humans. Only later in life did the dramatic’ differences of inheritance and destiny become fully apparent.

Neoteny, Robert thought. It was a classic, pre-Contact theory that had proven more valid than not — one proposing that part of the secret of sapiency was to remain as childlike as possible, for as long as possible. For instance, human beings retained the faces, the adaptability, and (when it was not snuffed out) the insatiable curiosity of young anthropoids, even well into adulthood.

Was this trait an accident? One which enabled pre-sentient Homo habilis to make the supposedly impossible leap — uplifting himself to starfaring intelligence by his own bootstraps? Or was it a gift from those mysterious beings some thought must have once meddled in human genes, the long-hypothesized missing patrons of humanity?

All that was conjecture, but one thing was clear. Other Earthly mammals largely lost all interest in learning and play after puberty. But humans, dolphins — and now, more and more with each generation, neo-chimpanzees — retained that fascination with the world with which they entered it.

Someday grown gorillas might also share this trait. Already these members of an altered tribe were brighter and remained curious longer than their fallow Earthly kin. Someday their descendants, too, might live out their life spans forever young.

If the Galactics ever allow it, that is.

Infant gorillas wandered about freely, poking their noses into everything. They were never slapped or chastised, only pushed gently aside when they got in the way, usually with a pat and a chuffed vocalization of affection. As he passed one group, Robert even caught a glimpse of a gray-flanked male mounting one of his females up in the bushes. Three youngsters crawled over the male’s broad back, prying at his massive arms. He ignored them, simply closing his eyes and hunkering down — doing his duty by his species.

More infants scurried through breaking foliage to tumble in front of Robert. From their mouths hung strips of some plastic material that they chewed into frayed tatters. Two of the children stared up at him in something like awe. But the last one, less shy than the others, waved its hands in eager, if sloppy signs. Robert smiled and picked the little fellow up.

Higher on the hillside, above the chain of fog-shrouded hot springs, Robert saw other brown shapes moving through the trees. “Younger males,” Elsie explained. “And bulls too old to hold a patriarchy. Back before the invasion, the planners at th’ Howletts Center were trying to decide whether to intervene in their family system. It’s their way, yes, but it’s so hard on the poor males — a couple years’ pleasure and glory, but at the cost of loneliness most of the rest of their lives.” She shook her head. “We hadn’t made up our minds before the Gubru came. Now maybe we’ll never get the chance.”

Robert refrained from commenting. He hated the restrictive treaties, but he still had trouble with what Elsie’s colleagues had been doing at the Howletts Center. It had been arrogance, to take the decision into their own hands. He could see no happy outcome to it.

As they approached the hot springs, he saw chims moving about seriously on various errands. Here one peered into the mouth of a huge gorilla easily six times her mass, probing with a dental tool. There another patiently taught sign language to a class of ten gorilla children.

“How many chims are here to take care of them?”

“Dr. de Shriver from the Center, about a dozen of the chim techs that used to work with her, plus about twenty guards and volunteers from nearby settlements. It depends on when we sometimes take Villas off to help in the war.”

“How do they feed them all?” Robert asked as they descended to the banks of one of the springs. Some of the chims from his party had arrived ahead of them and were already lounging by the humid bank, sipping at soup cups. A small nearby cave held a makeshift storage chamber where resident workers in aprons were ladling out more steaming mugs.

“It’s a problem.” Elsie nodded. “The gorillas have finicky digestions, and it’s hard to get them the right balance of foods. Even in th’ restored ranges in Africa, a big silver-back needs up to sixty pounds of vegetation, fruit, an’ insects a day. Natural gorillas have to move around a lot to get that kind of forage, an’ we can’t allow that.”

Robert lowered himself to the damp stones and released the gorilla infant, who scampered down to the poolside, still chewing his ragged strip of plastic. “It sounds like quite a quandary,” he said to Elsie.

“Yeah. Fortunately, Dr. Schultz solved the problem just last year. I’m glad he had that satisfaction before he died.”

Robert removed his moccasins. The water looked hot. He dipped a toe and pulled it back quickly. “Ouch! How did he do it?”

“Um, beg your pardon?”

“What was Schultz’s solution?”

“Microbiology, ser.” She looked up suddenly, her eyes bright. “Ah, here they come with soup for us, too!”

, Robert accepted a cup from a chimmie whose apron must have come from cloth woven on the gorillas’ looms. She walked with a limp. Robert wondered if she had been wounded in some of the fighting.

“Thank you,” he said, appreciating the aroma. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “Elsie, what d’you mean, microbiology?”

She sipped delicately. “Intestinal bacteria. Symbionts. We all have ’em. Tiny critters that live in our guts, an’ in our mouths. They’re harmless partners, mostly. Help us digest our food in exchange for a free ride.”

“Ah.” Of course Robert knew about bio-symbionts; any school kid did.

“Dr. Schultz managed to come up with a suite of bugs that helps the Villas eat — and enjoy — a whole lot of native Garth vegetation. They—”

She was interrupted by a high-pitched little cry, unlike anything an ape might produce. “Robert!” shrieked a piping voice.

He looked up. Robert grinned. “April. Little April Wu. How are you, Sunshine?”

The little girl was dressed like Sheena, the jungle girl. She rode on the left shoulder of an adolescent male gorilla whose black eyes were patiently gentle. April tipped forward and waved her hands in a quick series of signs. The gorilla let go of her legs and she climbed up to stand on his shoulder, holding his head for balance. Her guardian chuffed uncomplainingly.

“Catch me, Robert!”

Robert hurried to his feet. Before he could say anything to stop her, she sprang off, a sun-browned windmill that streamed blo›d hair. He caught her in a tangle of legs. For a moment, until he had a sure grip, his heart beat faster than it had in battle or in climbing mountains.

He had known the little girl was being kept with the gorillas for safety. To his chagrin he realized how busy he had been since recovering “from his injuries. Too busy to think of this child, the only other human free in the mountains. “Hi, Pumpkin,” he said to her. “How’re you doing these days? Are you taking good care of the Villas?”

She nodded seriously. “I’ve gotta take good care of th’Villas, Robert. We gotta be in charge, ’cause there’s just us.

Robert gave her a close hug. At that moment he suddenly felt terribly lonely. He had not realized how badly he missed human company. “Yup. It’s just you and me up here,” he said softly.

“You an’ me an’ Tymbimmie Athaclena,” she reminded him.

He met her eyes. “Nevertheless, you’re doing what Dr. de Shriver asks, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “Dr. de Shriver’s nice. She says maybe I might get to go see Mommy and Daddy, sometime soon.”

Robert winced. He would have to talk to de Shriver about deceiving the youngster. The chim in charge probably could not bear to tell the human child the truth, that she would be in their care for a long time to come. To send her to Port Helenia now would be to give away the secret of the gorillas, something even Athaclena was now determined to prevent.

“Take me down there, Robert.” April demanded with a sweet smile. She pointed to a flat rock where the infant gorilla now capered before some of Robert’s group. The chims laughed indulgently at the little male’s antics. The satisfied, slightly smug tone in their voices was one Robert found understandable. A very young client race would naturally feel this way toward one even younger. The chims were very proprietary and parental toward the gorillas.

Robert, in turn, felt a little like a father with an unpleasant task ahead of him, one who must somehow break it to his children that the puppy would not remain theirs for long.

He carried April across to the other bank and set her down. The water temperature was much more bearable here. No, it was wonderful. He kicked off his moccasins and wriggled his toes in the tingling warmth.

April and the baby gorilla flanked Robert, resting their elbows on his knees. Elsie sat by his side. It was a brief, peaceful scene. If a neo-dolphin were magically to appear in the water, spy-hopping into view with a wide grin, the tableau would have made a good family portrait.

“Hey, what’s that you’ve got in your mouth?” He moved his hand toward the little gorilla, who quickly shied back out of reach. It regarded him with wide, curious eyes.

“What’s he chewing on?” Robert asked Elsie.

“It looks like a strip of plastic. But… but what’s it doing here? There isn’t supposed to be anything here that was manufactured on Garth.”

“It’s not Garth-made,” someone said. They looked up. It was the chimmie who had served them their soup. She smiled and wiped her hands on her apron before bending over to pick up the gorilla infant. It gave up the material without fuss. “All the little ones chew these strips. They tested safe, and we’re absolutely positive nothing about it screams Terran!’ to Gubru detectors.”

Elsie and Robert exchanged a puzzled look. “How can you be so sure? What is the stuff?”

She teased the little ape, waving the strip before its face until it chirped and grabbed it, popping the well-masticated piece back into its mouth.

“Some of their parents brought shredded bits of it back from our first successful ambush, back at the Howletts Center. They said it ‘smelled good.’ Now the brats chew it all the time.”

She grinned down at Elsie and Robert. “It’s that super-plastic fiber from the Gubru fighting vehicles. You know, that material that stops bullets flat?”

Robert and Elsie stared.

“Hey, Kongie. How about that?” The chimmie cooed at the little gorilla. “You clever little thing, you. Say, if you like chewing armor plating, how about taking on something really tasty next? How about a city? Maybe something simple, like New York?”

The baby lowered the frayed, wet end long enough to yawn, a wide gaping of sharp, glistening teeth.

The chimmie smiled. “Yum! Y’know, I think little Kongie likes the idea.”

54 Fiben

“Hold still now,” Fiben told Gailet as he combed his fingers through her fur.

He needn’t have said anything. For although Gailet was turned away, presenting her back to him, he knew her face bore a momentary expression of beatific joy as he groomed her. When she looked like that — calm, relaxed, happy with the delight of a simple, tactile pleasure — her normally stern countenance took on a glow, one that utterly transformed her somewhat ordinary features.

It was only for a minute, unfortunately. A tiny, scurrying movement caught Fiben’s eye, and he pounced after it on instinct before it could vanish into her fine hair.

“Ow!” she cried when his fingernails bit a corner of skin, as well as a small squirming louse. Her chains rattled as she slapped his foot. “What are you doing!”

“Eating,” he muttered as he cracked the wriggling thing between his teeth. Even then, it didn’t quite stop struggling.

“You’re lying,” she said, in an unconvincing tone of voice.

“Shall I show it to you?”

She shuddered. “Never mind. Just go on with what you were doing.”

He spat out the dead louse, though for all their captors had been feeding them, he probably could use the protein. In all the thousands of times he had engaged in mutual grooming with other chims — friends, classmates, the Throop Family back on Cilmar Island — he had never before been so clearly reminded ofj›ne of the ritual’s original purposes, inherited from the jungle of long ago — that of ridding another chim of parasites. He hoped Gailet wouldn’t be too squeamish about doing the same for him. After sleeping on straw ticks for more than two weeks, he was starting to itch something awful.

His arms hurt. He had to stretch to reach Gailet, since they were chained to different parts of the stone room and could barely get close enough to do this.

“Well,” he said. “I’m almost finished, at least with those places you’re willing to uncover. I can’t believe the chimmie who said pink to me, a couple of months ago, is such a prude about nudity.”

Gailet only sniffed, not even deigning to answer. She had seemed glad enough to see him yesterday, when the renegade chims had brought him here from his former place of confinement. So many days of separate carceral isolation had made them as happy to see each other as long-lost siblings.

Now, though, it seemed she was back to finding fault with everything Fiben did. “Just a little more,” she urged. “Over to the left.”

“Gripe, gripe, gripe,” Fiben muttered under his breath. But he complied. Chims needed to touch and be touched, perhaps quite a bit more than their human patrons, who sometimes held hands in public but seldom more. Fiben found it nice to have someone to groom after all this time. Almost as pleasurable as having it done to you was doing it for somebody else.

Back in college he had read that humans once restricted most of their person-to-person touching to their sexual partners. Some dark-age parents had even refrained from hugging their kids! Those primitives hardly ever engaged in anything that could be likened to mutual grooming — completely nonsexual scratching, combing, massaging one another, just for the pleasure of contact, with no sex involved at all.

A brief Library search had verified this slanderous rumor, to his amazement. No historical anecdote had ever brought home to Fiben so well just how much agnosy and craziness poor human mels and ferns had endured. It made forgiveness a little easier when he also saw pictures of old-time zoos and circuses and trophies of “the hunt.”

Fiben was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of keys rattling. The old-style wooden door slid open. Someone knocked and then walked in.

It was the chimmie who brought them their evening meals. Since being moved here, Fiben had not learned her name, but her heart-shaped face was striking, and somehow familiar.

Her bright zipsuit was of the style worn by the band of Probationers that worked for the Gubru. The costume was bound by elastic bands at ankles and wrists, and a holo-projection armband picted outstretched birds’ talons a few centimeters into space.

“Someone’s comin’ to see both of you,” the female Probie said lowly, softly. “I thought you’d want to know. Have time to get ready.”

Gailet nodded coolly. “Thank you.” She hardly glanced at the chimmie. But Fiben, in spite of his situation, watched their jailer’s sway as she turned and walked away.

“Damn traitors!” Gailet muttered. She strained against her slender chain, rattling it. “Oh, there are times when I wish I were a chen. I’d … I’d …”

Fiben looked up at the ceiling and sighed.

Gailet strained to turn and look at him. “What! You’ve maybe got a comment?”

Fiben shrugged. “Sure. If you were a chen, you just might be able to bust out of that skinny little chain. But then, they wouldn’t have used something like that if you were a male chim, would they?”

He lifted his own arms as far as they would go, barely enough to bring them into her view. Heavy links rattled. The chafing hurt his bandaged right wrist, so he let his hands drop to the concrete floor.

“I’d guess there were other reasons she wishes she was male,” came a voice from the doorway. Fiben looked up and saw the Probationer called Irongrip, the leader of the renegades. The chirri smiled theatrically as he rolled one end of his waxed mustache, an affectation Fiben was getting quite sick of.

“Sorry. I couldn’t help but overhear that last part, folks.”

Gailet’s upper lip curled in contempt. “So you were listening. So what? All that means is you’re an eavesdropper, as well as a traitor.”

The powerfully built chim grinned. “Shall I go for voyeur, also? Why don’t I have you two chained together, hm? Ought to make for lots of amusement, you like each other so much.”

Gailet snorted. She pointedly moved away from Fiben, shuffling over to the far wall.

Fiben refused to give the fellow the pleasure of a response. He returned Irongrip’s gaze evenly.

“Actually,” the Probationer went on, in a musing tone, “it’s pretty understandable, a chimmie like you, wishing she was a chen. Especially with that white breeding card of yours. Why, a white card’s damn near wasted on a girl!

“What I find hard to figure,” Irongrip said to Fiben, “is why you two have been doin’ what you were doin’ — running around playing soldier for the man. It’s hard to figure. You with a blue card, her with a white — jeez, you two could do it any time she’s pink — with no pills, no asking her guardian, no by-your-leave from the Uplift Board. All th’ kids you ever want, whenever you want ’em.”

Gailet offered the chim a chilled stare. “You are disgusting.”

Irongrip colored. It was especially pronounced with his pale, shaved cheeks. “Why? Because I’m fascinated by what’s been deprived me? With what I can’t have?”

Fiben growled. “More like with what you can’t do.”

The blush deepened. Irongrip knew his feelings were betraying him. He bent over to bring his face almost even with Fiben’s. “Keep it up, college boy. Who knows what you’ll be able to do, once we’ve decided your fate.” He grinned.

Fiben wrinkled his nose. “Y’know, the color of a chen’s card isn’t everything. F’rinstance, even you’d probably get more girls if you just used a mouthwash once in a whi—”

He grunted and doubled over as a fist drove into his abdomen. You pay for your pleasures, Fiben reminded himself as his stomach convulsed and he fought for breath. Still, from the look on the traitor’s face he must have struck paydirt. Irongrip’s reaction spoke volumes.

Fiben looked up to see concern written in Gailet Jones’s eyes. The expression instantly turned to anger.

“Will you two stop it! You’re acting like children… like pre-sentient—”

Irongrip whirled and pointed at her. “What do you know about it? Hm? Are you some sort of expert? Are you a member of the goddam Uplift Board? Are you even a mother, yet?”

“I’m a student of Galactic Sociology,” Gailet said rather stiffly.

Irongrip laughed bittterly. “A title given to reward a clever monkey! You must have really done some beautiful tricks on the jungle gym to get a real-as-life, scale-model, sheepskin doctorate!”

He crouched near her. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, little miss? Let me spell it for you. We’re all goddam pre-sentients! Go ahead. Deny it. Tell me I’m wrong!”

It was Gailet’s turn to change color. She glanced at Fiben, and he knew she was remembering that afternoon at the college in Port Helenia, when they had climbed to the top of the bell tower and looked out over a campus empty of humans, filled only with chim students and chim faculty trying to act as if nothing had changed. She had to be remembering how bitter it had been, seeing that scene as a Galactic would.

“I’m a sapient being,” she muttered, obviously trying to put conviction into her voice.

“Yeah,” Irongrip sneered. “What you mean to say, though, is that you’re just a little closer than the rest of us… closer to what the Uplift Board defines as a target for us neo-chims. Closer to what they think we ought to be.

“Tell me, though. What if you took a space trip to Earth, and the captain took a wrong turn onto D-level hyperspace, and you arrived a couple hundred years from now? What do you think would happen to your precious white card then?”

Gailet locked away. “Sic transit gloria mundi.” Irongrip snapped his fingers. “You’d be a relic then, obsolete, a phase long bypassed in the relentless progress of Uplift.” He laughed, reaching oui and taking her chin in his hand to make her meet his eyes. “You’d be Probationer, honey.”

Fiben surged forward but was caught short by his chains. The jolting stop sent pain shooting up from his right wrist, but in his anger Fiben hardly noticed. He was too filled with wrath to be able to speak. Dimly, as he snarled at the other chen, he knew that the same held for Gailet. It was all the more infuriating because it was just one more proof that the bastard was right.

Irongrip met Fiben’s gaze for a long moment before letting go of Gailet. “A hundred years ago,” he went on, “I would’ve been somethin’ special. They would’ve forgiven, ignored, my own little ‘quirks and drawbacks.’ They’d have given me a white card, for my cunning and my strength.

“Time is what decides it, my good little chen and chimmie. It’s all what generation you’re born in.”

He stood up straight. “Or is it?” Irongrip smiled. “Maybe it also depends on who your patrons are, hm? If the standards change, if the target image of the ideal future Pans sapiens changes, well …” He spread his hands, letting the implication sink in.

Gailet was the first to find her voice.

“You… actually… expect… th’ Gubru …”

Irongrip shrugged. “Time’s are achangin’, my darlings. I may yet have more grandkids than either of you.”

Fiben found the key to drive out the incapacitating anger and unlock his own voice. He laughed. He guffawed. “Yeah?” he asked, grinning. “Well, first you’ll haveta fix your other problem, boyo. How’re you going to pass on your genes if you can’t even get it up to—”

This time it was Irongrip’s unshod foot that lashed out. Fiben was more prepared and rolled aside to take the kick at an angle. But more blows followed in a dull rain.

There were no more words, though, and a quick glance told Fiben that it was Irongrip’s turn to be tongue-tied. Low sounds emerged as his mouth opened and closed, flecked with foam. Finally, in frustration, the tall chim gave up kicking at Fiben. He swiveled and stomped out.

The chimmie with the keys watched him go. She stood by the door, looking uncertain what to do.

Fiben grunted as he rolled over onto his back.

“Uh.” He winced as he felt his ribs. None seemed to be broken. “At least Simon Legree wasn’t able to perform a proper exit line. I half expected him to say: ‘I’ll be back, just you wait!’ or somethin’ equally original.”

Gailet shook her head. “What do you gain by baiting him?”

He shrugged. “I got my reasons.”

Gingerly, he backed against the wall. The chimmie in the billowing zipsuit was watching him, but when their eyes met she quickly blinked and turned to leave, closing the door behind her.

Fiben lifted his head and inhaled deeply, through his nose, several times.

“Now what are you doing?” Gailet asked.

He shook his head. “Nothin. Just passin’ the time.”

When he looked again, Gailet had turned her back to him again. She seemed to be crying.

Small surprise, Fiben thought. It probably wasn’t as much fun for her, being a prisoner, as it had been leading a rebellion. For all the two of them knew, the Resistance was washed up, finished, kaput. And there wasn’t any reason to believe things had gone any better in the mountains. Athaclena and Robert and Benjamin might be dead or captured by now. Port Helenia was still ruled by birds and quislings.

“Don’t worry,” he said, trying to cheer her up. “You know what they say about the truest test of sapiency? You mean you haven’t heard of it? Why it’s just comin’ through when the chimps are down!”

Gailet wiped her eyes and turned her head to look at him. “Oh, shut up,” she said.

Okay, so it’s an old joke, Fiben admitted to himself. But it was worth a try .

Still, she motioned for him to turn around. “Come on. It’s your turn. Maybe…” She smiled weakly, as if uncertain whether or not to try a joke of her own. “Maybe I can find something to snack on, too.”

Fiben grinned. He shuffled about and stretched his chains until his back was as close to her as possible, not minding how it strained his various hurts. He felt her hands working to unknot his tangled, furry thatch and rolled his eyes upward.

“Ah, aahh,” he sighed.

A different jailer brought them their noon meal, a thin soup accompanied by two slices of bread. This male Probie possessed none of Irongrip’s fluency. In fact, he seemed to have trouble with even the simplest phrases and snarled when Fiben tried to draw him out. His left cheek twitched intermittently in a nervous tic, and Gailet whispered to Fiben that the feral glint in the chim’s eyes made her nervous.

Fiben tried to distract her. “Tell me about Earth,” he asked. “What’s it like?”

Gailet used a bread crust to sop up the last of her soup. “What’s to tell? Everybody knows about Earth.”

“Yeah. From video and from GoThere cube books, sure. But not from personal experience. You went as a child with your parents, didn’t you? That’s where you got your doctorate?”

She nodded. “University of Djakarta. ”

“And then what?”

Her gaze was distant. “Then I applied for a position at the Terragens Center for Galactic Studies, in La Paz.”

Fiben knew of the place. Many of Earth’s diplomats, emissaries, and agents took training there, learning how the ancient cultures of the Five Galaxies thought and acted. It was crucial if the leaders were to plan a way for the three races of Earth to make their way in a dangerous universe. Much of the fate of the wolfling clan depended on the graduates of the CGS.

“I’m impressed you even applied,” he said, meaning it. “Did they … I mean, did you pass?”

She nodded. “I … it was close. I qualified. Barely. If I’d scored just a little better, they said there’d have been no question.”

Obviously, the memory was painful. She seemed undecided, as if tempted to change the subject. Gailet shook her head. “Then I was told that they’d prefer it if I returned to Garth instead. I should take up a teaching position, they said. They made it plain I’d be more useful here.”

“They? Who’s this ‘they’ you’re talking about?”

Gailet nervously picked at the fur on the back of her arm. She noticed what she was doing and made both hands lay still on her lap. “The Uplift Board,” she said quietly.

“But… but what do they have to say about assigning teaching positions, or influencing career choices for that matter?”

She looked at him. “They have a lot to say, Fiben, if they think neo-chimp or neo-dolphin genetic progress is at stake. They can keep you from becoming a spacer, for instance, out of fear your precious plasm might get irradiated. Or they can prevent you from entering chemistry as a profession, out of fear of unpredicted mutations.”

She picked up a piece of straw and twirled it slowly. “Oh, we have a lot more rights than other young client races. I know that, I keep reminding myself.”

“But they decided your genes were needed on Garth,” Fiben guessed in low voice.

She nodded. “There’s a point system. If I’d really scored well on the CGS exam it would’ve been okay. A few chims do get in.

“But I was at the margin. Instead they presented me with that damned white card — like it was some sort of consolation prize, or maybe a wafer for some sacrament — and they sent me back to my native planet, back to poor old Garth.

“It seems my raison d’etre is the babies I’ll have. Everything else is incidental.”

She laughed, somewhat bitterly. “Hell, I’ve been breaking the law for months now, risking my life and womb in this rebellion. Even if we’d have won — fat chance — I could get a big fat medal from the TAASF, maybe even ticker tape parades, and it wouldn’t matter. When all the hooplah died down I’d still be thrown into prison by the Uplift Board!”

“Oh, Goodall,” Fiben sighed, sagging back against the cool stones. “But you haven’t, I mean you haven’t yet—”

“Haven t procreated yet? Good observation. One of the few advantages of being a female with a white card is that I can choose anyone blue or higher for the father, and pick my own timing, so long as I have three or more offspring before I’m thirty. I don’t even have to raise them myself!” Again came the sharp, bitter laugh. “Hell, half of the chim marriage groups on Garth would shave themselves bald for the right to adopt one of my kids.”

She makes her situation sound so awful, Fiben thought. And^yet there must be fewer than twenty other chims on the planet regarded as highly by the Board. To a member of a client race, it’s the highest honor.

Still, maybe he understood after all. She would have come home to Garth knowing one fact. That no matter how brilliant her career, how great her accomplishments, it would only make her ovaries all the more valuable … only make more frequent the painful, invasive visits to the Plasm Bank, and only bring on more pressure to carry as many as possible to term in her own womb.

Invitations to join group marriages or pair bonds would be automatic, easy. Too easy. There would be no way to know if a group wanted her for herself. Lone male suitors would seek her for the status fathering her child would bring.

And then there would be the jealousy. He could empathize with that. Chims weren’t often very subtle at hiding their feelings, especially envy. Quite a few would be downright mean about it.

“Irongrip was right,” Gailet said. “It’s got to be different for a chen. A white card would be fun fora male chim, I can see that. But for a chimmie? One with ambition to be something for herself?”

She looked away.

“I …” Fiben tried to think of something to say, but for a moment all he could do was sit there feeling thick-headed, stupid. Perhaps, someday, one of his great-to-the-nth grandchildren would be smart enough to know the right words, to know how to comfort someone too far gone into bitterness even to want comforting anymore.

That more fully uplifted neo-chim, a few score more generations down the chain of Uplift, might be bright enough. But Fiben knew he wasn’t. He was only an ape.

“Um.” He coughed. “I remember a time, back on Cilmar Island, it musta been before you returned to Garth. Let’s see, was it ten years ago? Ifni! I think I was just a freshman. …” He sighed. “Anyway, the whole island got all excited, that year, when Igor Patterson came to lecture and perform at the University.”

Gailet’s head lifted a little. “Igor Patterson? The drummer?”

Fiben nodded. “So you’ve heard of him?”

She smirked sarcastically. “Who hasn’t? He’s — ” Gailet spread her hands and let them drop, palms up. “He’s wonderful.”

That summed it up all right. For Igor Patterson was the best.

The thunder dance was only one aspect of the neo-chimpanzee’s love affair with rhythm. Percussion was a favorite musical form, from the quaint farmlands of Hermes to the sophisticated towers of Earth. Even in the early days — back when chims had been forced to carry keyboard displays on their chests in order to speak at all — even then the new race had loved the beat.

And yet, all of the great drummers on Earth and in the colonies were humans. Everyone until Igor Patterson.

He was the first. The first chim with the fine finger coordination, the delicacy of timing, the sheer chutzpah, to make it alongside the best. Listening to Patterson play “Clash Ceramic Lighting” wasn’t only to experience pleasure; for a chim it was to burst with pride. To many, his mere existence meant that chims weren’t just approaching what the Uplift Board wanted them to be, but what they wanted to be, as well.

“The Carter Foundation sent him on a tour of th’ colonies,” Fiben went on. “Partly it was as a goodwill trip for all the outlying chim communities. And of course it was also to spread the good luck around a bit.”

Gailet snorted at the obviousness of it. Of course Patterson had a white card. The chim members of the Uplift Board would have insisted, even if he weren’t also as wonderfully charming, intelligent, and handsome a specimen of neo-chimpanzee as anyone could ask to meet.

And Fiben thought he knew what else Gailet was thinking. For a male having a white card wouldn’t be much of a problem at all — just one long party. “I’ll bet,” she said. And Fiben imagined he detected a clear tone of envy.

“Yeah, well, you should’ve been there, when he showed up to give his concert. I was one of the lucky ones. My seat was way up in back, out of the way, and it happened that I had a real bad cold that night. That was damn fortunate.”

“WhatB^-GaiTet’s eyebrows came together. “What does that have to do with… Oh.” She frowned at him and her jaw tightened. “Oh. I see.”

“I’ll bet you do. The air conditioning was set on high, but I’m told the aroma was still overpowering. I had to sit shivering under the blowers. Damn near caught my death—”

“Will you get to the point?” Gailet’s lips were a thin line.

“Well, as no doubt you’ve guessed, nearly every green-or blue-card chimmie on the island who happened to be in estrus seemed to have a ticket to the concert. None of ’em used olfa-spray. They came, generally, with the complete okay of their group husbands, wearing flaming pink lipstick, just on the off chance—”

“I get the picture,” Gailett said. And for just an instant Fiben wondered if he saw her blink back a faint smile as she pictured the scene. If so, it was only a momentary flicker of her severe frown. “So what happened?”

Fiben stretched, yawning. “What would you expect to happen? A riot, of course.”

Her jaw dropped. “Really? At the University?”

“Sure as I’m sitting here.”

“But—”

“Oh, the first few minutes went all right. Man, old Igor could play as good as his rep, I’ll tell you. The crowd kept getting more and more excited. Even the backup band was feelin’ it. Then things kinda got out of hand.”

“But—”

“Remember old Professor Olvfing, from the Terragens Traditions Department? You know, the elderly chim who sports a monocle? Used to spend his spare time lobbying to get a chim monogamy bill before the legislature?”

“Yes, I knew him.” She nodded, her eyes wide open.

Fiben made a gesture with two hands.

“No! In public? Professor Olvfing?”

“With th’ dean of th’ College of frigging Nutrition, no less.”

Gailet let out a sharp sound. She turned aside, hand to her breast. She seemed to suffer a sudden bout of hiccups.

“Of course, Olvfing’s pair-bond wife forgave him later. It was that or’lose him to a ten-group that said they liked his style.”

Gailet slapped her chest, coughing. She turned further away from Fiben, shaking her head vigorously.

“Poor Igor Patterson,” Fiben continued. “He had problems of his own, of course. Some of th’ guys from the football team had been drafted as bouncers. When it started getting out of hand, they tried using fire extinguishers. That made things slippery, but it didn’t slow ’em down much.”

Gailet coughed louder. “Fiben …”

“It was too bad, really,” he mused aloud. “Igor was getting into a great blues riff, really pounding those skins, packin’ in a backbeat you couldn’t believe. I was groovin’ on it … until this forty-year-old chimmie, naked and slick as a dolphin, dropped straight onto him from th’ rafters.”

Gailet doubled over clutching her belly. She held up a hand, pleading for mercy. “Stop, please. …” she whimpered, weakly.

“Thank heavens it was the snare drum she fell through. Took her long enough gettin’ untangled for poor Igor to escape out the back way, just barely ahead of the mob.”

She toppled over sideways. For a moment Fiben felt concern, her face was so flushed and red. She hooted, slapping the floor, and tears streamed from her eyes. Gailet rolled over onto her back, rocking with peals of laughter.

Fiben shrugged. “And all that was just from playin’ the first number — Patterson’s special version of the bloody national anthem! What a pity. I never did get to hear his variation on Tnagadda Da Vita.’ ”

“Now that I think about it, though,” he sighed once more, “maybe it’s just as well.”

Power curfew came at 2000 hours, and no exception was made for prisons. A wind had risen before sunset and soon was rattling the shutters of their small window. It came in off the ocean, carrying a heavy salt smell. In the distance could be heard the faint rumblings of an early summer storm.

They slept curled in their blankets as close to each other as their chains allowed, head to head so they could hear each other breathing in the darkness. They slumbered inhaling the soft tang of stone and the mustiness of straw, and exhaled the soft mutterings of their dreams.

Gailet’s hands moved in tiny jerks, as if trying to follow the rhythms of some illusory escape. Her chains tinkled faintly.

Fiben lay motionless, but now and then he blinked, his eyes occasionally opening and closing without the light of consciousness in them. Sometimes a breath caught and held for a long moment before releasing, at last.

They did not notice the low humming sound that penetrated from the hallway outside, nor the light which speared into their cell through cracks in the wooden door. Feet shuffled and claws clicked on flagstones.

When keys rattled in the lock, Fiben jerked, rolled to one side, and sat up. He knuckled his eyes as the hinges creaked. Gailet lifted her head. She used her hand to block the sharp glare of two lamps, held high on poles.

Fiben sneezed, smelling lavender and feathers. When he and Gailet were hauled to their feet by several of the zipsuited chims, he recognized the gruff voice of their head captor, Irongrip.

“You two better behave yourselves. You’ve got important visitors.”

Fiben blinked, trying to adjust to the light. At last he made out a small crowd of feathered quadrupeds, large balls of white fluff bedecked in ribbons and sashes. Two of them held staffs from which the bright lanterns hung. The rest twittered around what looked like a short pole ending in a narrow platform. On that perch stood a most singular-looking bird.

It, too, was arrayed in bright ribbons. The large, bipedal Gubru shifted its weight from one leg to another, nervously. It might have been the way the light struck the alien’s plumage, but the coloration seemed richer, more luminous than the normal off-white shade. It reminded Fiben of something, as if he had seen this invader or one like it before, somewhere.

What the hell is the thing doing, moving around at night? Fiben wondered. I thought they hated to do that.

“Pay proper respect to honored elders, members of the high clan Gooksyu-Gubru!” Irongrip said, sharply, nudging Fiben.

“I’ll show th’ damn thing my respect.” Fiben made a rude sound in his throat and gathered phlegm.

“No!” Gailet cried. She grabbed his arm and whispered urgently. “Fiben, don’t! Please. Do this for me. Act exactly as I do!”

Her brown eyes were pleading. Fiben swallowed. “Aw hell, Gailet.” She turned back toward the Gubru and folded her arms across her chest. Fiben imitated her, even as she bowed low.

The Galactic peered at them, first with one large, unblinking eye, then another. It shuffled-te-one-end of the^ perch, forcing its holders to adjust their balance. Finally, it began chirping in a_series of sharp, clipped squawks.

From the quadrupeds there emerged a strange, swooping accompaniment, rising and falling, sounding something like “Zoooon.”

One of the Kwackoo servitors ambled forward. A bright, metallic disk hung from a chain around its neck. The vodor gave forth a low, jerky Anglic translation.

There it finished as abruptly as it had begun.

“Bow again!” Gailet urged in a whisper. He bent over with arms crossed, as she demonstrated. When Fiben looked up again, the small crowd of alien avians had swiveled and moved toward the doorway. The perch was lowered, but still the tall Gubru had to duck down, feathered arms splayed apart for balance, in order to pass through. Irongrip followed behind. The Probationer’s parting glare at them was one of pure loathing.

Fiben’s head rang. He had given up trying to follow the bird’s queer, formal dialect of Galactic Three after the first phrase. Even the Anglic translation had been well nigh impossible to understand.

The sharp lighting faded as the procession moved away down the hallway in a babble of clucking gabble. In the remaining dimness, Fiben and Gailet turned and looked at each other.

“Now who th’ hell was that?” he asked.

Gailet frowned. “It was a Suzerain. One of their three leaders. If I’m not wrong — and I could easily be — it was the Suzerain of Propriety.”

“That tells me a whole lot. Just what on Ifni’s roulette wheel is a Suzerain of Propriety?”

Gailet waved away his question. Her forehead was knotted in deep concentration. “Why did it come to us, instead of having us brought to it?” she wondered aloud, though obviously she wasn’t soliciting his opinion. “And why meet us at night? Did you notice it didn’t even stay to hear if we accepted its offer? It probably felt compelled, by propriety, to make it in person. But its aides can get our answer later.”

“Answer to what? What offer? Gailet, I couldn’t even follow—”

But she made a nervous waving motion with both hands. “Not now. I’ve got to think, Fiben. Give me a few minutes.” She walked back to the wall and sat-down^on the straw facing the blank stone. Fiben had a suspicion it would be considerably longer than she’d estimated before she was done.

You sure can choose ’em, he thought. You deserve what you get when you fall in love with a genius…

He blinked. Shook his head. Say what?

But movement in the hall distracted him from pursuing his own unexpected thought. A solitary chim entered, carrying an armload of straw and folded bolts of dark brown cloth. The load hid the short neochimp’s face. Only when she lowered it to the ground did Fiben see that it was the chimmie who had stared at him earlier, the one who seemed so strangely familiar.

“I brought you some fresh straw, and some more blankets. These nights are still pretty cool.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

She did not meet his eyes. She turned and walked back toward the door, moving with a lithe grace that was obvious, even under the billowing zipsuit. “Wait!” he said suddenly.

She stopped, still facing the door. Fiben walked toward her as far as the heavy chains would allow. “What’s your name?” he asked softly, not wanting to disturb Gailet in her corner.

Her shoulders were hunched. She still faced away from him. “I’m …” Her voice was very low. “S-some people call me Sylvie. …”

Even in swirling quickly through the doorway she moved like a dancer. There was a rattle of keys, and hurried footsteps could be heard receding down the hall outside.

Fiben stared at the blank door. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s grandson.”

He turned around and walked back to the wall where Gailet sat, muttering to herself, and leaned over to drape a blanket upon her shoulders. Then he returned to his own corner to collapse into a heap of sweet-smelling straw.

55 Uthacalthing

Scummy algae foamed in the shallows where a few small, stilt-legged native birds picked desultorily for insects. Bushy plants lay in clumps, outlining the surrounding steppes.

Footprints led from the banks of the small lake up into the nearby scrub-covered hillside. Just glancing at the muddy tracks, Uthacalthing could tell that the walker had stepped with a pigeon-toed gait. It seemed to use a three-legged stance.

He looked up quickly as a flash of blue caught the corner of his eye — the same glimmer that had led him to this place. He tried to focus on the faint twinkle, hut it was gone before he could track it.

He knelt to examine the impressions in the mud. A smile spread as he measured them with his hands. Such beautiful outlines! The third foot was off center from the other two and its print was much smaller than the others, almost as if some bipedal creature had crossed from lake to brush leaning on a blunt-headed staff.

Uthacalthing picked up a fallen branch, but he hesitated before brushing away the outlines.

Shall I leave them? he wondered. Is it really necessary to hide them?He shook his head.

No. As the humans say, do not change game plans in midstream.

The footprints disappeared as he swept the branch back and forth. Just as he was finishing, he heard heavy footsteps and the sound of breaking shrubs behind him. He turned as Kault rounded a bend in the narrow game trail to the small prairie lake. The glyph, lurrunanu, hovered and darted over the Thennanin’s big, crested head like some frustrated parasitic insect, buzzing about in search of a soft spot that never seemed to be there.

Uthacalthing’s corona ached like an overused muscle. He let lurrunanu bounce against Kault’s bluff stolidity for a minute longer before admitting defeat. He drew the defeated glyph back in and dropped the branch to the ground.

The Thennanin wasn’t looking at the terrain anyway. His concentration was on a small instrument resting in his broad palm. “I am growing suspicious, my friend,” Kault said as he drew even with the Tymbrimi.

Uthacalthing felt blood rush in the arteries at the back of his neck. At last? he wondered.

“Suspicious of what, my colleague?”

Kault folded an instrument and put it away in one of his many vest pouches. “There are signs …” His crest flapped. “I have been listening to the uncoded transmissions of the Gubru, and something odd seems to be going on.”

Uthacalthing sighed. No, Kault’s one-track mind was concentrating on a completely different subject. There was no use trying to draw him away from it with subtle clues.

“What are the invaders up to now?” he asked.

“Well, first of all, I am picking up much less excited military traffic. Suddenly they appear to be engaged in fewer of those small-scale fights up in the mountains than they were days and weeks ago. You’ll recall we were both wondering why they were expending so much effort to suppress what had to be a rather tiny partisan resistance.”

Actually, Uthacalthing had been pretty certain he knew the reason for the frantic flurry of activity on the part of the Gubru. From what the two of them had been able to piece together, it seemed the invaders were very anxious to find something up in the Mountains of Mulun. They had thrown soldiers and scientists into the rough range with apparent reckless energy, and appeared to have paid a heavy cost for the effort.

“Can you think of a reason why the fighting has ebbed?” he asked Kault.

“I am uncertain from what I can decipher. One possibility is that the Gubru have found and captured the thing they were so desperately looking for—”

Doubtful, Uthacalthing thought with conviction. It is hard to cage a ghost.

“Or they may have given up searching for it—”

More likely, Uthacalthing agreed. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the avians should realize they had been made fools of, and cease chasing wild gooses.

“Or, perhaps,” Kault concluded, “the Gubru have simply finished suppressing all opposition and liquidated whoever was opposing them.”

Uthacalthing prayed the last answer was not the correct one. It was among the risks he had taken, of course, in arranging to tease the enemy into such a frenzy. He could only hope that his daughter and Megan Oneagle’s son had not paid the ultimate price to further his own convoluted hoax on the malign birds.

“Hmm,” he commented. “Did you say there was something else puzzling you?”

“This,” Kault went on. “That after five twelves of planetary days, during which they have done nothing at all for the benefit of this world, suddenly the Gubru are making announcements, offering amnesty and employment to former members of the Ecological Recovery Service.”

“Yes? Well, maybe it just means they’ve completed their consolidation and can now spare a little attention to their responsibilties.”

Kault snorted. “Perhaps. But the Gubru are accountants. Credit counters. Humorless, selfish worriers. They are fanatically prim about those aspects of Galactic tradition that interest them, yet they hardly seem to care at all about preserving planets as nursery worlds, only about the near-term status of their clan.”

Although Uthacalthing agreed with that assessment, he considered Kault less than an,impartial observer. And the Thennanin was hardly the one to accuse others of being humorless.

Anyway, one thing was obvious. So long as Kault was distracted like this, thinking about the Gubru, it would be useless to try to draw his attention to subtle clues and footprints in the ground.

He could sense movement in the prairie all around him. The little carnivores and their prey were all seeking cover, settling into small niches and burrows to wait out midday, when the fierce heat of summer would beat down and it would cost too much energy either to give chase or to flee. In that respect, tall Galactics were no exception. “Come,” Uthacalthing said. “The sun is high. We must find a shady place to rest. I see some trees over on the other side of the water.”

Kault followed without comment. He appeared to be indifferent about minor deviations in their path, so long as the distant mountains grew perceptibly closer each day. The white-topped peaks were now more than just a faint line against the horizon. It might take weeks to reach them, and indeterminably longer to find a way through unknown passes to the Sind. But Thennanin were patient when it suited their purposes.

There were no blue glimmerings as Uthacalthing found them shelter under a too-tight cluster of stunted trees, though he kept his eye “peeled” anyway. Still, with his corona he thought he kenned a touch of feral joy from some mind hiding out there on the steppe, something large, clever, and familiar.

“I am, indeed, considered to be something of an expert on Terrans,” Kault said a little later as they made conversation under the gnarled branches. Small insects buzzed near the Thennanin’s breathing slits, only to be blown away every time they approached. “That, plus my ecological expertise, won me my assignment to this planet.”

“Don’t forget your sense of humor,” Uthacalthing added, with a smile.

“Yes,” Kault’s crest puffed in the Thennanin equivalent of a nod. “At home I was thought quite the devil. Just the sort to deal with wolflings and Tymbrimi pixies.” He finished with a rapid, low set of raspy breaths. It was obviously a conscious affectation, for Thennanin did not have a laughter reflex as such. No matter, Uthacalthing thought. As Thennanin humor goes, it was pretty good.

“Have you had much first-hand experience with Earth-lings?”

“Oh, yes,” Kault said. “I have been to Earth. I have had the delight of walking her rain forests and seeing the strange, diverse lifeforms there. I have met neo-dolphins and whales. While my people believe humans themselves should never have been declared fully uplifted — they would profit much from a few more millennia of polishing under proper guidance — can admit that their world is beautiful and their clients promising.”

One reason the Thennanin were in this current war was in hopes of picking up all three Earthling species for their clan by forced adoption — “for the Terrans’ own good,” of course. Though, to be fair, it was also clear that there were disagreements over this among the Thennanin themselves. Kault’s party, for instance, preferred a ten-thousand-year campaign of persuasion, to try to win the Earthlings over to adoption voluntarily, with “love.”

Obviously, Kault’s party did not dominate the present government.

“And of course, I met a few Earthlings in the course of a term working for the Galactic Institute of Migration, during an expedition to negotiate with the Fah’fah’n*fah.”

Uthacalthing’s corona erupted in a whirl of silvery tendrils, an open show of surprise. He knew his stunned expression was readable even to Kault, and did not care. “You… you have been to meet the hydrogen breathers?” He did not even know the trick of pronouncing the hyper-alien name, not part of any sanctioned Galactic tongue.

Kault had surprised him once again!

“The Fah’fah’n*fah.” Again Kault’s breathing slits pulsed in mimicry of laughter. This time, it sounded much more realistic. “The negotiations were held in the Poul-Kren sub-quadrant, not far from what the Earthlings call the Orion sector.”

“That’s very close to Terra’s Canaan colonies.”

“Yes. That is one reason why they were invited to take part. Even though these infrequent meetings between the civilizations of oxygen breathers and hydrogen breathers are among the most critical and delicate in any era, it was thought appropriate to bring a few Terrans along, to show them some of the subtleties of high-level diplomacy.”

It must have been his state of confused surprise, but at that moment Uthacalthing thought he actually caught a kenning from Kault … a trace of something deep and troubling to the Thennanin. He is not telling me all of it, Uthacalthing realized. There were other reasons Earthlings were involved.

For billions of years, uneasy peace had been maintained between two parallel, completely separate cultures. It was almost as if the Five Galaxies were actually Ten, for there were at least as many stable worlds with hydrogen atmospheres as planets like Garth and Earth and Tymbrim. The two strands of life, each supporting vast numbers of species and lifeforms, had almost nothing in common. The Fah’fah’n*fah wanted nothing of rock, and their worlds were too vast and cold and heavy for the Galactics ever to covet.

Also, they seemed even to operate on different levels or rates of time. The hydrogen breathers preferred the slow routes, through D-Level hyperspace and even normal space between the stars — the realm where relativity ruled — leaving the quicker lanes among the stars to the fast-living heirs of the fabled Progenitors. ^

Sometimes there were conflicts. Entire systems and clans died. There were no rules to such wars.

Sometimes there was trade, metals for gases, or machinery in exchange for strange things not found even in the records of the Great Library.

There were periods when whole spiral arms would be abandoned by one civilization or the other. The Galactic Institute of Migration organized these huge movements for the oxygen breathers, every hundred million years or so. The official reason was to allow great tracts of stars to “go fallow” for an era, to give their planets time to develop new pre-sentient life. Still, the other purpose was widely known… to put space between hydrogen and oxygen life where it seemed impossible to ignore each other any longer.

And now Kault was telling him that there had been a recent negotiation right in the Poul-Kren sector? And humans had been there?

Why have I never heard of this before? he wondered.

He wanted to follow this thread, but had no opportunity. Kault was obviously unwilling to pursue it, and returned to the earlier topic of conversation.

“I still believe there is something anomalous about the Gubru transmissions, Uthacalthing. From their broadcasts itis clear that they are combing both Port Helenia and theislands, seeking out the Earthlings’ ecology and uplift experts.”

Uthacalthing decided that his curiosity could wait — a hard decision for a Tymbrimi. “Well, as I suggested earlier, perhaps the Gubru have decided to do their duty by Garth, at last.”

Kault gurgled in a tone Uthacalthing knew denoted doubt. “Even if that were so, they would require ecologists, but why Uplift specialists? I intuit that something curious is still going on,” Kault concluded. “The Gubru have been extremely agitated for several megaseconds.”

Even without their small receiver, or any news over the airwaves at all, Uthacalthing would still have known that much. It was implicit in the intermittent blue light he had been following since weeks ago. The flickering glow meant that the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache had to have been breached. The bait he had left inside the cairn, along with numerous other hints and clues, could only lead a sapient being to one conclusion.

It was apparent his jest on the Gubru had proved very expensive for them.

Still, all good things come to an end. By now even the Gubru must have figured out that it was all just a Tymbrimi trick. The avians weren’t exactly stupid. They had to discover sooner or later that there really weren’t any such things as “Garthlings.”

The sages say that it can be a mistake to push a joke too far. Am I making that error trying to pull the same jest on Kault?

Ah, but in this case the procedure was so totally different! Fooling Kault was turning into a much slower, more difficult, more personal task.

Anyway, what else have I to do, to pass the time?

“Do tell me more about your suspicions,” Uthacalthing said aloud to his companion. “I am very, very interested.”

56 Galactics

Against all expectation, the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution was actually scoring points. Its plumage had barely even begun to show the royal hues of candidacy, and it had started out far, far behind its peers in the competition. Nevertheless, when it danced the other Suzerains were forced to watch closely and pay heed to its well-parsed arguments.

“This effort was misguided, costly, unwise,” it chirpedand whirled in delicate rhythm. “We have spent treasure,time, and honor

seeking,

chasing,

hunting

achimera!”

The new chief bureaucrat did have a few advantages. It had been trained by its predecessor — the impressive deceased Suzerain of Cost and Caution. Also, to this conclave it had brought an equally impressive, indicting array of facts. Data cubes lay scattered across the floor. The presentation by the head civil servant had, in fact, been quite devastating.

“There is no way, no possibility, no chance that thisworld could have hidden upon it a presentient survivor ofthe Bururalli! It was a hoax, a ruse, a fiendish wolfling-and-Tymbrimi plot to get us to

waste,

squander,

throw away

our wealth!”

To the Suzerain of Propriety this was most humiliating. In fact, it was not much short of catastrophic.

During the hiatus, while a new bureaucratic candidate was being chosen, the priest and the admiral had reigned supreme, with no one to hold them in check. They had well known that it was not wise to act so, without the voice of a third peer to restrain them, but what being always acted wisely when opportunity beckoned seductively?

The admiral had gone on personal search and destroy missions in pursuit of the mountain partisans, seeking gloss to add to its personal honor. For its part, the priest had ordered expensive new works built and had rushed the delivery of a new planetary Branch Library.

It had been a lovely interregnum of two-way consensus. The Suzerain of Beam and Talon approved every purchase, and the Suzerain of Propriety blessed every foray of the Talon Soldiers. Expedition after expedition was sent into the mountains as closely guarded scientists eagerly sought out a prize beyond price.

Mistakes were made. The wolflings proved diabolical in their ambushes and animal elusiveness. And yet, there would never have been any carping about cost had they actually found what they were looking for. It all would have been worth it, if only…

But we were tricked, fooled, made fools of, the priest thought bitterly. The treasure had been a lie. And now the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution was rubbing it in for all it was worth. The bureaucrat danced a brilliant dance of chastisement of excess. Already it had dominated several points of consensus — for instance, that there would be no more useless chases into the mountains, not until a cheaper way was found to eliminate the resistance fighters.

The plumage of the Suzerain of Beam and Talon drooped miserably. The priest knew how much this must gall the admiral. But they were both held hypnotized by the righteous correctness of the Dance of Chastisement. Two could not outvote one when that one was so clearly in the right.

Now the bureaucrat had launched into a new cadence, leading into a new dance. It proposed that the new construction projects be abandoned. They had nothing to do with defending the Gubru hold upon this world. They had been begun on the assumption that these “Garthling” creatures would be found. Now it was simply pointless to continuebuilding a hyperspace shunt and a ceremonial mound!

The dance was powerful, convincing, backed up with charts and statistics and tables of figures. The Suzerain of Propriety realized that something would have to be done and done soon, or this upstart would end the day in the foremost position. It was unthinkable that such a sudden reverse of order should happen just as their bodies were starting to give them twinges preliminary to Molt!

Even leaving out the question of molt order, there was also the message from the Roost Masters to consider. The queens and princes back home were desperate in their queries. Had the Three on Garth come up with a bold new policy yet? Calculations showed that it would be important to have something original and imaginative soon, or else the initiative would pass forever to some other clan.

It was intimidating to have the fate of the race riding in one’s slipstream.

And for all of its obvious finesse and fine preening, one thing was readily apparent about the new chief bureaucrat. The new Suzerain of Cost and Caution lacked the depth, the clarity of vision of its dead predecessor. The Suzerain of Propriety knew that no grand policy was going to come out of picayune, short sighted credit-pinching.

Something had to be done, and done now! The priest took up a posture of presentiment, spreading its brightly feathered arms in display. Politely, perhaps even indulgently, the bureaucrat cut short its own dance and lowered its beak, yielding time.

The Suzerain of Propriety started slowly, shuffling in small steps upon its perch. Purposely, the priest adopted a cadence used earlier by its adversary.

“Although there may be no Garthlings, there remains achance, opportunity, opening, for us to use the ceremonialsite we have

planned,

built,

dedicated

at such cost.

“There is a plan, scheme, concept, which may still yet

win

glory,

honor,

propriety

for our clan.

“At the center, focus, essence of this plan, we shall

examine,

inspect,

investigate

the clients of wolflings.”

Across the chamber the Suzerain of Beam and Talon looked up. A hopeful light appeared in the dejected admiral’s eye, and the priest knew that it could win a temporary victory, or at least a delay.

Much, much would depend in the days ahead upon finding out whether this bold new idea would work.

57 Athaclena

“You see?” he called down to her. “It moved during the night!”

Athaclena had to shade her eyes as she looked up at her human friend — perched on a tree branch more than thirty feet above the forest floor. He pulled on a leafy green cable that stretched down to him at a forty-five-degree angle from its even higher anchor.

“Are you certain that is the same vine you snipped last night?” she called.

“It sure is! I climbed up and poured a liter of chromium-rich water — the very stuff this particular vine specializes in — into the crotch of that branch, way up there above me. Now you can see this vine has reanchored itself to that exact spot!”

Athaclena nodded. She felt a fringe of truth around his words. “I see it, Robert. And now I believe it.”

She had to smile. Sometimes Robert acted so much like a young Tymbrimi male — so quick, impulsive, puckish. It was a little disconcerting, in a way. Aliens were supposed to behave in strange and inscrutable ways, not just like… well, boys.

But Robert is not an alien, she reminded herself. He is my consort. And anyway, she had been living among Terrans for so long, she wondered if she had started to think like one.

When — if — I ever get home, will I disconcert all around me, frightening and amazing them with metaphors? With bizarre wolfling attitudes? Does that prospect attract me?

A lull had settled over the war. The Gubru had stopped sending vulnerable expeditions into the mountains. Their outposts were quiescent. Even the ceaseless droning of gasbots had been absent from the high valleys for more than a week, te the great relief of the chim farmers and villagers.

With some time on their hands, she and Robert had decided to have themselves just one day off while they had a chance, to try to get to know each other better. After all, who knew when the fighting would resume? Would there ever be another opportunity?

They both needed distraction anyway. There had still been no reply from Robert’s mother, and the fate of Ambassador Uthacalthing remained unclear, in spite of the glimpse she had been given of her father’s design. All she could do was try to perform her part as well as possible, and hope he was still alive and able to do his.

“All right,” she called up to Robert. “I accept it. The vines can be trained, after a fashion. Now come down! Your perch looks precarious.”

But Robert only smiled. “I’ll come down, in my own way. You know me, Clennie. I can’t resist an opportunity like this.”

Athaclena tensed. There it was again, that whimsy at the edges of his emotional aura. It wasn’t unlike syulff-kuonn, the coronal kenning surrounding a young Tymbrimi who was savoring an anticipated jest.

Robert gave the vine a hearty tug. He inhaled, expanding his ribcage to a degree no Tymbrimi could have equaled, then thumped his chest hollowly, rapidly, and gave out a long, ululating yodel. It echoed down the forest corridors.

Athaclena sighed. Oh, yes. He must pay respects to their wolfling deity, Tarzan With the vine clutched in both hands, Robert vaulted from the branch. He sailed, legs outstretched together, in a smooth arc down and across the forest meadow, barely clearing the low shrubs. He whooped aloud.

Of course it was just the sort of thing humans would have invented during those dark centuries between the advent of intelligence and their discovery of science. None of the Library-raised Galactic races, not even the Tymbrimi, would ever have thought up such a mode of transportation.

The pendulum swing carried Robert upward again, toward a thick mass of leaves and branchlets halfway up the side of a forest giant. Robert’s warbling cry cut off suddenly as he crashed through the foliage with a splintering sound and disappeared.

The silence was punctuated only by a faint, steady rain of minor debris. Athaclena hesitated, then called out. “Robert?”

There was neither reply nor movement up there in that high thicket. “Robert! Are you all right? Answer me!” The Anglic words felt thick in her mouth.

She tried to locate him with her corona, the little strands above her ears strained forward. He was in there, all right… and in some degree of pain, she could tell.

She ran across the meadow, leaping over low obstacles as the gheer transforrriation set in — her nostrils automatically widening to accept more air as her heart rate tripled. By the time she reached the tree, her finger- and toenails had already begun to harden. She kicked off her soft shoes and began climbing at once, quickly finding holds in the rough bark as she shimmied up the giant bole to the first branch.

The ubiquitous vines clustered here, snaking at an angle toward the leafy morass that had swallowed Robert. She tested one of the ropy cables, then used it to shimmy up to the next level.

Athaclena knew she should pace herself. For all of her Tymbrimi speed and adaptability, her musculature wasn’t as strong as a human’s, and coronal-radiation didn’t dissipate heat as well as Terran sweat glands. Still, she could not taper off from full, emergency speed.

It felt dim and close within the leafy blind where Robert had crashed. Athaclena blinked and sniffed as she entered the darkness. The odors reminded her that this was a wild world, and she was no wolfling to be at home in a ferine jungle. Athaclena had to retract her tendrils so they wouldn’t get tangled in the thicket. That was why she was taken by surprise when something reached out from the shadows to grab her tightly.

Hormones rushed. She gasped and coiled around to strike out at her assailant. Just in time she recognized Robert’s aura, his human male odor very near, and his strong arms holding her close. Athaclena experienced a momentary wave of dizziness as the gheer reaction braked hard.

It was in that stunned state, while still immobilized by change-rigor, that her surprise was redoubled. For that was when Robert began touching her mouth with his. At first his actions seemed meaningless, insane. But then, as her corona unwound, she started picking up feelings again… and all at once she remembered scenes from human video dramas — scenes involving mating and sexual play.

The storm of emotions that swept over Athaclena was so powerfully contradictory that she remained frozen for a while longer. Also, part of it might have been the relaxed power in his arms. Only when Robert finally let go of her did Athaclena back away from him quickly, wedging herself against the bole of the giant tree, gasping.

“An… An-thwillathbielna! Naha… You… you blenchuql How dare you… Cleth-tnub…” She ran out of breath and had to stop her polyglot cursing, panting slowly. It didn’t seem to be penetrating Robert’s mild expression of good cheer anyway.

“Uh, I didn’t catch all that, Athaclena. My GalSeven is still pretty bad, though I’ve been working on it. Tell me, what’s a … a blenchuq?”

Athaclena made a gesture, a twist of the head that was the Tymbrimi equivalent to an irritated shrug. “Never mind that! Tell me at once. Are you badly hurt? And if not, why did you do what you just did?

“Third, tell me why I should not punish you for tricking and assaulting me like that!”

Robert’s eyes widened. “Oh, don’t take it all so seriously, Clennie. I appreciate the way you came charging to my rescue. I was still a bit dazed, I guess, and got carried away being happy to see you.”

Athaclena’s nostrils flared. Her tendrils waved, preparing she knew not what caustic glyph. Robert clearly sensed this. He held up a hand. “All right, all right. In order — I’m not badly hurt, only a bit scraped. Actually, it was fun.”

He erased his smile on seeing her expression. “’Uh, as for question number two — I greeted you that way because it’s a common human courtship ritual that I was strongly motivated to perform with you, even though I admit you might not have understood it.”

Now Athaclena frowned. Her tendrils curled in confusion.

“And finally,” Robert sighed. “I can’t think of a single reason why you shouldn’t punish me for my presumption. It’s your privilege, as it’d be the right of any human female to break my arm for handling her without permission. I don’t doubt you could do it, too.

“All I can say in my defense is that a broken arm is sometimes an occupational hazard to a young human mel. Half the time a courtship can hardly get started unless a fellow pulls something impulsive. If he’s read the signs right, the fem likes it and doesn’t give him a black eye. If he’s wrong, he pays.”

Athaclena watched Robert’s expression turn thoughtful. “You know,” he went on. “I’d never quite parsed it out that way before. It’s true, though. Maybe humans are crazy cleth th-tnubs, at that.”

Athaclena blinked. The tension had begun to leak away, dripping from the tips of her corona as her body returned to normal. The change nodes under her skin pulsed, reabsorb-ing the gheer flux.

Like little mice, she remembered, but she shuddered a little less this time.

In fact, she found herself smiling. Robert’s strange confession had put matters — almost laughably — on a logical plane. “Amazing,” she said. “As usual, there are parallels in Tymbrimi methodology. Our own males must take chances as well.”

She paused then, frowning. “But stylistically this technique of yours is so crude! The error rate must be tremendous, since you are without coronae to sense what the female is feeling. Beyond your crude empathy sense, you have only hints and coquetry and body cues to go on. I’m surprised you manage to reproduce at all without killing each other off well beforehand!”

Robert’s face darkened slightly, and she knew he was blushing. “Oh, I exaggerated a bit, I suppose.”

Athaclena couldn’t help but smile once more, not only a subtlety of the mouth, but an actual, full widening of the separation between her eyes.

“That much, Robert, I had already guessed.”

The human’s features reddened even more. He looked down at his hands and there was silence. Athaclena felt a stirring within her own deepself, and she kenned the simple sense-glyph kiniwullun . , . the parable-boy caught doing what boys inevitably do. Sitting there, his open aura of abashed sincerity seemed to cover over his fix-eyed, big-nosed alien-ness and make him more familiar to her than most of her peers had been back in school.

At last Athaclena slipped down from the dusty corner where she had wedged herself in self-defense.

“All right, Robert,” she sighed. “I will let you explain to me why you were ‘strongly motivated’ to attempt this classical human mating ritual with a member of another species — me. I suppose it is because we have signed an agreement to be consorts? Did you feel honor bound to consummate it, in order to satisfy human tradition?”

He shrugged, looking away. “No, I can’t use that as an excuse. I know interspecies marriages are for business. It’s just, well — I think it was just because you’re pretty and bright, and I’m lonely, and… and maybe I’m just a bit in love with you.”

Her heart beat faster. This time it was not the gheer chemicals responsible. Her tendrils lifted of their own accord, but no glyph emerged. Instead, she found they were reaching toward him along subtle, strong lines, like the fields of a dipole.

“I think, I think I understand, Robert. I want you to know that I …”

It was hard to think of what to say. She wasn’t sure herself just what she was thinking at that moment. Athaclena shook her head. “Robert?” she said softly. “Will you do me a favor?”

“Anything, Clennie. Anything in the world.” His eyes were wide open.

“Good. Then, taking care not to get carried away, perhaps you might go on to explain and demonstrate what you were doing, when you touched me just then… the various physical aspects involved. Only this time, more slowly please?”

The next day they strolled slowly on their way back to the caves.

She and Robert dawdled, stopping to contemplate how the sunlight came down in little glades, or standing by small pools of colored liquid, wondering aloud which trace chemical was stockpiled here or there by the ubiquitous trade vines, and not really caring about the answer. Sometimes they just held hands while they listened to the quiet sounds of Garth Planet’s forest life.

At intervals they sat and experimented, gently, with the sensations brought on by touching.

Athaclena was surprised to find that most of the needed nerve pathways were already in place. No deep auto-suggestion was required — just a subtle shifting of a few capillaries and pressure receptors — in order to make the experiment feasible. Apparently, the Tymbrimi might have once engaged in a courtship ritual such as kissing. At least they had the capability.

When she resumed her old form she just might keep some of these adaptations to her lips, throat, and ears. The breeze felt good on them as she and Robert walked. It was like a rather nice empathy glyph tingling at the tips of her corona. And kissing, that warm pressure, stirred intense, if primitive feelings in her.

Of course none of it would have been possible if humans and Tymbrimi weren’t already so very similar. Many charming, stupid theories had circulated among unsophisticated people of both races to explain the coincidence — for instance, proposing that they might once have had a common ancestor.

The idea was ridiculous, of course. Still, she knew that her case was not the first. Close association over several centuries had led to quite a few cases of cross-species dalliance, some even openly avowed. Her discoveries must have been made many times before.

She just hadn’t been aware, having considered such tales rather seamy while growing up. Athaclena realized her friends back on Tymbrim must have thought her pretty much of a prude. And here she was, behaving in a way that would have shocked most of them!

She still wasn’t sure she wanted anyone back home — assuming she ever made it there again — to think her consor-tion with Robert was anything but businesslike. Uthacalthing would probably laugh.

No matter, she told herself firmly. I must live for today. The experiment helped to pass the time. It did have its pleasant aspects. And Robert was an enthusiastic teacher.

Of course she was going to have to set limits. She was willing to adjust the distribution of fatty tissues in her breasts, for instance, and it was fun to play with the sensations made possible by new nerve endings. But where it came to fundamentals she would have to be adamant. She wasn’t about to : go changing any really basic mechanisms… not for any human being!

On the return trip they stopped to inspect a few rebel ioutposts and talk with small bands of chim fighters. Moralewas high. The veterans of three months’ hard battles askedwhen their leaders would find a way to lure more Gubru upinto the mountains within reach. Athaclena and Robert laughed Iand promised to do what they could about the lack of targetpractice.

Still, they found themselves hard pressed for ideas. Afterall, how does one invite back a guest whose beak one hasrepeatedly bloodied? Perhaps it was time to try taking the war !to the enemy, instead.

The problem was lack of good intelligence about matters !down in the Sind and Port Helenia. A few survivors of theurban uprising had wandered in and reported that their orga- Inization was a shambles. Nobody had seen either GailetJones or Fiben Bolger since that ill-fated day. Contact with a ifew individuals in town was restored, but on a patchy, piece- meal basis.

They had considered sending in new spies. There seemed i to be an opportunity offered by the Gubru public announcements, offering lucrative employment to ecological and uplift experts. But by now the avians must certainly have tuned their interrogation apparatus and developed a fair chim lie detector. In any event, Robert and Athaclena decided against taking the risk. For now, at least.

They were walking homeward up a narrow, seldom-visited valley, when they encountered a slope with a southern exposure, covered with a low-lying expanse of peculiar vegetation. They stood quietly for a time, looking over the green field of flat, inverted bowls.

“I never did cook you a meal of baked plate ivy root,” Robert commented at last, dryly.

Athaclena sniffed, appreciating his irony. The place where the accident had occurred was far from here. And yet, this bumpy hillside brought back vivid memories of that horrible afternoon when their “adventures” all began.

“Are the plants sick? Is- there something wrong with them?” She gestured at the field of plates, overlapping closely like the scales of some slumbering dragon. The upper layers did not look glassy smooth and fat, like those she recalled. The topmost caps in this colony seemed much less thick and sturdy.

“Hm.” Robert bent to examine the Nearest. “Summer’s on its way out, soon. All this heat is already drying the uppermost plates. By mid-autumn, when the east winds come blowing down the Mulun range, the caps will be as thin and light as wafers. Did I ever tell you they were seed pod carriers? The wind will catch them, and they’ll blow away into the sky like a cloud of butterflies.”

“Oh, yes. I remember you did mention it.” Athaclena nodded thoughtfully. “But did not you also say that—”

She was interrupted by a sharp call.

“General! Captain Oneagle!”

A group of chims hurried into view, puffing along the narrow forest trail. Two were members of their escort squad, but the third was Benjamin! He looked exhausted. Obviously he had run all the way from the caves to meet them.

Athaclena felt Robert grow tense with sudden worry. But with the advantage of her corona, she already knew that Ben was not bringing dire news. There was no emergency, no enemy attack.

And yet, her chim aide clearly was confused and distraught. “What is it, Benjamin?” she asked.

He mopped his brow with a homespun handkerchief. Then he reached into another pocket and drew out a small black cube. “Sers, our courier, young Petri, has finally returned.”

Robert stepped forward. “Did he reach the refuge?”

Benjamin nodded. “He got there, all right, and he’s brought a message from th’ Council. This is it here.” He held out the cube.

, “A message from Megan?” Robert sounded breathless ashe looked down at the recording.

“Yesser. Petri says she’s well, and sends her best.”

“But — but that’s great!” Robert whooped. “We’re in contact again! We aren’t alone anymore!”

“Yesser. That’s true enough. In fact…” Athaclena watched Benjamin struggle to find the right words. “In fact, Petri brought more than a message. There are five people waitingfor you, back at the caves.”

Both Robert and Athaclena blinked. “Five humans?”

Benjamin nodded, but with a look that implied he wasn’t exactly sure that term was the most applicable. “Terragens Marines, ser.”

“Oh,” Robert said. Athaclena merely maintained her silence, kenning more closely than she was listening.

Benjamin nodded. “Professionals, ser. Five humans. I swear, it’s incredible how it feels after all this time without — I mean, with only th’ two of you until now. It’s made the chims pretty hyper right at the moment. I think it might be best if you both came on back as quick as possible.”

Robert and Athaclena spoke almost at once.

“Of course.”

“Yes, let’s go at once.”

Almost imperceptibly, the closeness between Athaclena and Robert altered. They had been holding hands when Benjamin ran up. Now they did not renew that grasp. It seemed inappropriate as they marched along the narrow trail. A new unknown factor had slipped in between them. They did not have to look at each other to know what the other was thinking.

For better or for worse, things had changed.

58 Robert

Major Prathachulthorn pored over the readouts that lay like blown leaves spread across the plotting table. The chaos was only apparent, Robert realized as he watched the small, dark man work, for Prathachulthorn never needed to search for anything. Whatever it was he wanted, somehow he found it with barely a flick of his shadowed eyes and a quick grasp of his callused hands.

At intervals the Marine officer glanced over to a holo-tank and muttered subvocally into his throat microphone. Data whirled in the tank, shifting and turning in subtle rearrangements at his command.

Robert waited, standing at ease in front of the table of rough-cut logs. It was the fourth time Prathachulthorn had summoned him to answer tersely phrased questions. Each time Robert grew more awed by the man’s obvious precision and skill.

Clearly, Major Prathachulthorn was a professional. In only a day he and his small staff had started to bring order to the partisans’ makeshift tactical programs, rearranging data, sifting out patterns and insights the amateur insurgents had never even imagined.

Prathachulthorn was everything their movement had needed. He was exactly what they had been praying for.

No question about it. Robert hated the man’s guts. Now he was trying to figure out exactly why.

I mean, besides the fact that he’s making, me stand here in silence until he’s good and ready. Robert recognized that for a simple way of reinforcing the message of who was boss. Knowing that helped him take it with good grace, mostly.

The major looked every inch the compleat Terragens commando, even though his sole military adornment was an insignia of rank at his left shoulder. Not even in full dress uniform would Robert ever look as much a soldier as Prathachulthorn did right now, draped in ill-fitting cloth woven by gorillas under a sulfrous volcano.

The Earthman spent some time drumming his fingers on the table. The repetitious thumping reminded Robert of the headache he’d been trying to fight off with biofeedback for an hour or more. For some reason the technique wasn’t working this time. He felt closed in, claustrophobic, short of breath. And seemed to be getting worse.

At last Prathachulthorn looked up. To Robert’s surprise the man’s first remark could be taken as something distantly akin to a compliment.

“Well, Captain Oneagle,” Prathachulthorn said. “I confess to having feared things would be much, much worse than I find them here.’

“I’m relieved to hear it, sir.”

Prathachulthorn’s eyes narrowed, as if he suspected an ever-so-thin veneer of sarcasm in Robert’s voice. “To be precise,” he went on, “I feared I would discover that you had lied in your report to the Council in Exile, and that I would have to shoot you.”

Robert suppressed an impulse to swallow and managed to maintain an impassive expression. “I’m glad that did not turn out to be necessary, sir.”

“So am I. I’m sure your mother would have been irritated, for one thing. As it is, and bearing in mind that yours was a strictly amateur enterprise, I’m willing to credit you with a good effort here.”

Major Prathachulthorn shook his head. “No, that’s unfairly restrained. Let me put it this way. There is much I’d have done otherwise, had I been here. But in light of how poorly the official forces have fared, you and your chims have performed very well indeed.”

Robert felt a hollowness in his chest begin to relax. “I’m sure the chims will be glad to hear it, sir. I’d like to point out, though, that I was not sole leader here. The Tymbrimi Athaclena carried a good part of that burden.”

Major Prathachulthorn’s expression turned sour. Robert wasn’t sure if it was because Athaclena was a Galactic, or because Robert, as a militia officer, should have retained all authority himself.

“Ah, yes. The ‘General.’ ” His indulgent smile was patronizing, at the very least. He nodded. “I will mention her assistance in my report. Ambassador Uthacalthing’s daughter is clearly a resourceful young alien. I hope she is willing to continue helping us, in some capacity.”

“The chims worship her, sir,” Robert pointed out.

Major Prathachulthorn nodded. As he looked over toward the wall, his voice took on a thoughtful tone. “The Tymbrimi mystique, I know. Sometimes I wonder if the media knows what the hell it’s doing, creating such ideas. Allies or no allies, our people have got to understand that Earthclan will always be fundamentally alone. We’ll never be able to fully trust anything Galactic. “-

Then, as if he felt he might have said too much, Prathachulthorn shook his head and changed the subject. “Now about future operations against the enemy—”

“We’ve been thinking about that, sir. Their mysterious surge of activity in the mountains seems to have ended, though for how long we don’t know. Still, there are some ideas we’ve been batting around. Things we might use against them when and if they come back.”

“Good.” Prathachulthorn nodded. “But you must understand that in the future we’ll have to coordinate all actions in the Mulun with other planetary forces. Irregulars are simply incapable of hurting the enemy where his real assets are. That was demonstrated when the city chim insurrectionists were wiped out trying to attack the space batteries near Port Helenia.”

Robert saw Prathachulthorn’s point. “Yessir. Although since then we have captured some munitions which could be useful.”

“A few missiles, yes. They might be handy, if we can figure out how to use them. And especially if we have the right information about where to point them.

“We have altogether too little data,” the major went on. “I want to gather more and report back to the Council. After that, our task will be to prepare to support any action they choose to undertake.”

Robert finally asked the question that he had put off since returning to find Prathachulthorn and his small group of human officers here, turning the cave refuge upside down, poking into everything, taking over. “What will be done with our organization, sir? Athaclena and I, we’ve given a number of chims working officer status. But except for me nobody here has a real colonial commission.”

Prathachulthorn pursed his lips. “Well, you’re the simplest case, captain. Clearly you deserve a rest. You can escort Ambassador Uthacalthing’s daughter back to the Refuge with our next report, along with my recommendation for a promotion and a medal. I know the Coordinator would like that. You can fill them in on how you made your fine discovery about the Gubru resonance tracking technique.”

From his tone of voice, the major made it quite clear what he would think of Robert if he took up the offer. “On the other hand, I’d be pleased to have you join my staff, with a brevet marine status of first lieutenant in addition to your colonial commission. We could use your experience.”

“Thank you, sir. I think I’ll remain here, if it’s all right with you.”

“Fine. Then we’ll assign someone else to escort—”

“I’m sure Athaclena will want to stay as well,” Robert hurriedly added.

“Hmm. Well, yes. I am certain she could be helpful for a while. Tell you what, captain. I’ll put the matter to the Council in my next letter. But we must be sure of one thing. Her status is no longer military. The chims are to cease referring to her as a command officer. Is that clear?”

“Yessir, quite clear.” Robert only wondered how one enforced that sort of order on civilian neo-chimpanzees, who tended to call anybody and anything whatever they pleased.

“Good. Now, as for those formerly under your command … I do happen to have brought with me a few blank colonial commissions which we can assign to chims who have shown notable initiative. I have no doubt you’ll recommend names.”

Robert nodded. “I will, sir’.”

He recalled that one other member of their “army” besides himself had already been in the militia. The thought of Fiben — certainly dead for a long time, now — made him suddenly even more depressed. These caves! They’re driving me nuts. It’s getting harder and harder to bear the time I must spend down here.

Major Prathachulthorn was a disciplined soldier and had spent months in the Council’s underground refuge. But Robert had no such firmness of character. I’ve got to get out!

“Sir,” he said quickly. “I’d like to ask your permission to leave base camp for a few days, to run an errand down near Lome Pass … at the ruins of the Howletts Center.”

Prathachulthorn frowned. “The place where those gorillas were illegally gene-meddled?”

“The place where we won our first victory,” he reminded the commando, “and where we made the Gubru accept parole.”

“Hmph,” the major grunted. “What do you expect to find there?”

Robert suppressed an impulse to shrug. In his suddenly worsening claustrophobia, in his need for any excuse to get away, he pulled forth an idea that had until then only been a glimmer at the back of his mind.

“A possible weapon, sir. It’s a concept for something that might help a lot, if it worked.”

That piqued Prathachulthorn’s interest. “What is this weapon?”

“I’d rather not be specific right now, sir. Not until I’ve had a chance to verify a few things. I’ll only be gone three or four days at the most. I promise.”

“Hmm. Well.” Prathachulthorn’s lips pursed. “It will take that long just to put these data systems into shape. You’ll only get underfoot till that’s done. Afterwards, though, I’ll be needing you. We’ve got to prepare a report to the Council.”

“Yessir, I’ll hurry back.”

“Very well, then. Take Lieutenant McCue with you. I want one of my own men to see the countryside. Show McCue how you accomplished your little coup, introduce her to the leaders of the more important chim partisan bands in that area, then return without delay. Dismissed.”

Robert came to attention. I think I know now why I hate him, Robert realized as he saluted, performed an about-face, and walked out through the hanging blanket that served as a door to the subterranean office.

Ever since he had returned to the caves to find Prathachulthorn and his aides moving around like owners, patronizing the chims and judging everything they had all done together, Robert had been unable to stop feeling like a child who had, until that moment, been allowed to play a wonderful dramatic role, a really fun game. But now the child had to bear paternal pats on the head — strokes that burned, even if intended in praise.

It was an embarrassing analogy, and yet he knew that in a sense it was true after all.

Robert blew a silent sigh and hurried away from the office and dark armory he had shared with Athaclena, but which.now had been completely taken over by grownups.

Only when he was finally back under the tall forest canopy did Robert feel he could breathe freely again. The trees’ familiar scents seemed to cleanse his lungs of the dank cave odors. The scouts who flitted ahead of him and alongside were those he knew, quick, loyal, feral-looking with their crossbows and sooty faces. My chims, he thought, feeling a little guilty that it came to hjm in those words. But the feeling of proprietorship was there anyway. It was like the “old days” — before yesterday — when he had felt important and needed.

The illusion broke apart, though, the next time Lieutenant McCue spoke.

“These mountain forests are very beautiful,” she said. “I wish I’d taken the time to come up here before the war broke out.” The Earthling officer stopped by the side of the trail to touch a blue-veined flower, but it folded away from her fingers and retreated backward into the thicket. “I’ve read about these things, but this is my first chance to see them for myself.”

Robert grunted noncommittally. He would be polite and answer any direct question, but he wasn’t interested in conversation, especially with Major Prathachulthorn’s second in command.

Lydia McCue was an athletic young woman, with dark, well-cut features. Her movements, lithe like a commando’s — or an assassin’s — were by that same nature also quite graceful. Dressed in homespun kilt and blouse, she might have been taken for a peasant dancer, if it weren’t for the self-winding arbalest she cradled in the crook of one arm like a child. In hip pouches were enough darts to pincushion half the Gubru within a hundred kilometers. The knives sheathed at her wrists and ankles were for more than show.

She seemed to have very little trouble keeping up with his rapid pace through the criss-cross jungle mesh of vines. That was just as well, for he wasn’t about to slow down. At the back, of his mind Robert knew he was being unfair. She was probably a nice enough person in her own way, for a professional soldier. But for some reason everything likable about her seemed to irritate him all the more.

Robert wished Athaclena had consented to come along. But she had insisted on remaining in her glade near the caves, experimenting with tame vines and crafting strange, ornate glyphs that were far too subtle to be kenned by his own weak powers. Robert had felt hurt and stormed off, almost outracing his escorts for the first few kilometers.

“So much life.” The Earth woman kept pace beside him and inhaled the rich odors. “This is a peaceful place.”

You’re wrong on both counts, Robert thought, with a trace of contempt for her dull, human insensitivity to the truth about Garth, a truth he could feel all around him. Through Athaclena’s tutoring he now could reach out — albeit tentatively, awkwardly — and trace the life-waves that fluxed through the quiet forest.

“This is an unhappy land,” he replied simply. He did not elaborate, even when she gave him a puzzled look. His primitive empathy sense withdrew from her confusion.

For a while they moved in silence. The morning aged. Once the scouts whistled, and they took cover under thick branches as great cruisers lumbered overhead. When the way was clear Robert took to the trail again without a word.

At last, Lydia McCue spoke again. “This place we’re heading for,” she asked, “this Howletts Center. Would you please tell me about it?”

It was a simple request. He could not refuse, since Prathachulthorn had sent her along to be shown things. But Robert avoided her black eyes as he spoke. He tried to be matter-of-fact, but emotion kept creeping into his voice. Under her low prompting Robert told Lydia McCue about the sad, misguided, but brilliant work of the renegade scientists. His mother had known nothing of the Howletts Center, of course. It was only by accident that he himself had learned of it a year or so before the invasion, and he had decided to keep silent.

Of course the daring experiment was over now. It would take more than a miracle to save the neo-gorillas from sterilization, now that the secret was known, to people like Major Prathachulthorn.

Prathachulthorn might hate Galactic Civilization with a passion that bordered on fanaticism, but he knew how essential it was that Terrans not break their solemn pacts with the great Institutes. Right now, Earth’s only hope lay in the ancient codes of the Progenitors. To keep the protection of those codes, weak clans had to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.

Lydia McCue listened attentively. She had high cheekbones and eyes that were sultry in their darkness. It pained Robert to look at them, though. Those eyes seemed somehow to be set too close together, too immobile. He kept his attention on the crooked path ahead of him.

And yet, with a soft voice the young Marine officer drew him out. Robert found himself talking about Fiben Bolger, about their narrow escape together from the gas-bombing of the Mendoza Freehold, and of his friend’s first journey down into the Sind.

And the second, from which he never returned.

They crested a ridge topped with eerie spine-stones and came to an opening overlooking a narrow vale, just west of Lome Pass. He gestured to the tumbled outlines of several burned structures. “The Howletts Center,” he said, flatly.

“This is where you forced the Gubru to acknowledge chim combatants, isn’t it? And made them give parole?” Lydia McCue asked. Robert realized he was hearing respect in her voice, and turned briefly to stare at her. She returned his look with a smile. Robert felt his face grow warm.

He swung back quickly, pointing to the hillside nearest the center and rapidly describing how the trap had been laid and sprung, skipping only his own trapeze leap to take out the Gubru sentry. His part had been unimportant, anyway. The chims were the crucial ones that morning. He wanted the Earthling soldiers to know that.

He was finishing his story when Elsie approached. The chimmie saluted him, something that had never seemed necessary before the Marines arrived.

“I don t know about actually goin’ down there, ser,” she said, earnestly. “The enemy’s already shown an interest in those ruins. They may have come back.”

Robert shook his head. “When Benjamin paroled the enemy survivors, one condition they accepted was to stay out of this valley, and not even keep its approaches under surveillance, from then on. Has there been any sign of them breaking their word?”

Elsie shook her head. “No, but — ” Her lips pressed together, as if she felt she ought to forbear comment on the wisdom of trusting the pledges of Eatees.

Robert smiled. “Well, then. Come on. If we hurry we can be in and back out by nightfall.”

Elsie shrugged. She made a quick set of hand gestures. Several chims darted out of the spine-stones and down into the forest. After a moment there came an all-clear whistle. The rest of the party crossed the gap at a brisk run.

“They are very good,” Lydia McCue told him softly after they were back under the trees again.

Robert nodded, recognizing that she had not qualified her remark by adding, “for amateurs,” as Prathachulthorn would have done. He was grateful for that, and wished she wasn’t being so nice.

Soon they were picking their way toward tumbled ruins, carefully searching for signs that anyone else had been there since the battle, months ago. There did not seem to be any, but that did not diminish the intense vigilance of the chims.

Robert tried to kenn, to use the Net to probe for intruders, but his own jumbled feelings kept getting in the way. He wished Athaclena were here.

The wreckage of the Howletts Center was even more comp\ete ttvan \\ad been apparent from the hillside. The fire-blackened buildings had collapsed further under wild jungle vegetation now growing rampant over former lawns. The Gubru vehicles, long ago stripped of anything useful, lay in tangles of thick grass as tall as his waist.

No, clearly nobody’s been here, he thought. Robert kicked through the wreckage. Nothing remained of interest. Why did I insist on coming? he wondered. He knew his hunch — whether it panned out or not — had actually been little more than an excuse to escape from the caves — to get away from Prathachulthorn.

To get away from uncomfortable glimpses of himself.

Perhaps one reason he had chosen to come to this place was because it was here that he had had his own brief moment of hand-to-hand contact with the enemy.

Or maybe he had hoped to recreate the feelings of only a few days ago, traveling unfettered and unjudged. He had hoped to come here with different female company than the woman who now followed him, eyes darting left and right, putting everything under professional scrutiny.

Robert turned away from his brooding thoughts and walked toward the ruined alien hover tanks. He sank to one knee, brushing aside the tall, rank grass.

Gubru machinery, the exposed guts of the armored vehicles, gears, impellers, gravities…

A fine yellow patina overlay many of the parts. In some places the shining plastimesh had discolored, thinned, and even broken through. Robert pulled on a small chunk which came off, crumbling, in his hands.

Well I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher. I was right. My hunch was right.

“What is it?” Lieutenant McCue asked over his shoulder.

He shook his head. “I’m not sure, yet. But something seems to be eating through a lot of these parts.”

“May I see?”

Robert handed her the piece of corroded ceramet.

“This is why you wanted to come here? You suspected this?”

He saw no point in telling her all the complex reasons, the personal ones. “That was a large part of it. I thought, maybe, there might be a weapon in it. They burned all the records and facilities when they evacuated the center. But they couldn’t eradicate all the microbes developed in Dr. Schultz’s lab.”

He didn’t add that he had a vial of gorilla saliva in his pack. If he had not found the Gubru armor in this state, on arriving here, he had planned to perform his own experiments.

“Hm.” Lydia McCue crumbled the material in her hand. She got down and crawled under the machine to examine which parts had been affected. Finally she emerged and sat next to Robert.

“It could prove useful. But there would still be the problem of a delivery system. We don’t dare venture out of the mountains to spray the tittle bugs over Gubru equipment in Port Helenia.

“Also, bio-sabotage weapons are very short term in their effectiveness. They have to be used all at once and by surprise, since countermeasures are usually swift and effective. After a few weeks, the bugs would be neutralized — chemically, with coatings, or by cloning another beastie to eat ours.

“Still,” she turned another piece over and looked up to smile at Robert. “This is great. What you did here before, and now this… These are the right ways to fight guerrilla war! I like it. We’ll find a way to use it.”

Her smile was so open and friendly that Robert couldn’t help responding. And in that shared moment he felt a stirring that he had been trying to suppress all day.

Damn, she’s attractive, he realized, miserably. His body was sending him signals more powerful than it ever had in the company of Athaclena. And he barely knew this woman! He didn’t love her. He wasn’t bound up with her, as he was with his Tymbrimi consort.

And yet his mouth was dry and his heart beat faster as she looked at him, this narrow-eyed, thin-nosed, tall-browed, female human…

“We’d better be heading home,” he said quickly. “Go ahead and take some samples, lieutenant. We’ll test them back at base.”

He ignored her long look as he stood up and signaled to Elsie. Soon, with specimens stowed away in their packs, they were climbing once more toward the spine-stones. The watchful guards showed obvious relief as they shouldered their rifles and leaped back into the trees.

Robert followed his escort with little attention to the path. He was trying not to think of the other member of his own race walking beside him, so he frowned and kept himself banked in behind a brumous cloud of his own thoughts.

59 Fiben

Fiben and Gailet sat near each other under the unblinking regard of masked Gubru technicians, who focused their instruments on the two chims with dispassionate, clinical precision. Multi-lensed globes and flat-plate phrased arrays floated on all sides, peering down at them. The testing chamber was a jungle of glistening tubes and shiny-faced machinery, all antiseptic and sterile.

Still, the place reeked of alien bird. Fiben’s nose wrinkled, and once again he disciplined himself to avoid thinking unfriendly thoughts about the Gubru. Certainly several of the imposing machines must be psi detectors. And while it was doubtful they could actually “read his mind,” the Galactics certainly would be able to trace his surface attitudes.

Fiben reached for something else to think about. He leaned to his left and spoke to Gailet.

“Um, I talked to Sylvie before they came for us this morning. She told me she hasn’t been back to the Ape’s Grape since that night I first came to Port Helenia.”

Gailet turned to look at Fiben. Her expression was tense, disapproving.

“So? Games like that striptease of hers may be obsolete now, but I’m sure the Gubru are finding other ways to use her unique talents.”

“She’s refused to do anything like that since then, Gailet. Honestly. I can’t see why you’re so hostile toward her.”

“And I find it hard to understand how you can be so friendly with one of our jailers!” Gailet snapped. “She’s a probationer and a collaborator!”

Fiben shook his head. “Actually, Sylvie’s not really a probie at all, nor even a gray or yellow. She has a green repro-card. She joined them because—”

*’l don’t give a damn what her reasons were! Oh, I can imagine what sort of sob story she’s told you, you big dope, while she batted her eyelashes and softened you up for—”

From one of the nearby machines came a low, atonal voice. “Young neo-chimpanzee sophonts… be still. Be still, young clients…” it soothed.

Gailet swiveled to face forward, her jaw set.

Fiben blinked. I wish I understood her better, he thought. Half the time he had no idea what would set Gailet off.

It was Gailet’s moodiness that had started him talking with Sylvie in the first place, simply for company. He wanted to explain that to Gailet, but decided it would do no good. Better to wait. She would come out of this funk. She always did.

Only an hour ago they had been laughing, jostling each other while they fumbled with a complicated mechanical puzzle. For a few minutes they had been able to forget the staring mechanical and alien eyes while they worked as a team, sorting and resorting the pieces and arranging them together. When they stood back at last and looked on the completed tower they had made, they both knew that they had surprised the note-takers. In that moment of satisfaction, Gailet’s hand had slipped, innocently and affectionately, into his.

Imprisonment was like that. Part of the time, Fiben actually felt as if he were profiting from the experience. It was the first time in his life, for instance, that he’d ever really had time to just sit and think. Their captors now let them have books, and he was catching up on quite a few volumes he’d always wanted to read. Conversations with Gailet had opened up the arcane world of alienology. He, in turn, had spoken to her of the great work being done here on Garth, delicately nudging a ruined ecosystem back toward health.

But then, all too common, had been die long, darker intervals, when the hours dragged on and on. A pall hung over them at such times. The walls seemed to close in, and conversation always came back to the War] to memories of their failed insurrection, to lost friends and gloomy speculations over the fate of Earth itself.

At such times, Fiben thought he might trade all hope of a long life for just an hour to run free under trees and clean sky.

So even this new routine of testing by the Gubru had come as a relief for both of them. At least it was a distraction.

Without warning, the machines suddenly pulled away, opening an avenue in front of their bench. “We are finished, finished… You have done well, done well, you have… Now follow the globe, follow it, toward transportation.”

As Fiben and Gailet stood up, a brown, octahedral projection took form in front of them. Without looking at each other they followed the hologram past the silent, brooding avian technicians, out of the testing chamber, and down a long hallway.

Service robots swept past them with the soft whisper of well-tuned machinery. Once a Kwackoo technician darted out of an office door, favored them with a startled look, then ducked back inside. At last Fiben and Gailet passed through a hissing portal and emerged into bright sunshine. Fiben had to shade his eyes. The day was fair, but with a bite that seemed to say that brief summer was now well on its way out. The chims he could see in the streets, beyond the Gubru compound, were wearing light sweaters and sneakers, another sure sign that autumn was near.

None of the chims looked their way. The distance was too great for Fiben to tell anything of their mood, or to hope that somebody might recognize him or Gailet.

“We won’t be riding the same car back,” whispered Gailet. And she motioned down a long parapet toward the landing ramp below. Sure enough, the tan military van that had brought them had been replaced by a large, roofless hover barge. An ornate pedestal stood in the open deck behind the pilot’s station. Kwackoo servitors adjusted a sunshade to keep the fierce light of Gimelhai off their master’s beak and crest.

The large Gubru was recognizable. Its thick, faintly luminous plumage looked shaggier than the last time they had seen it, in the furtive darkness of their suburban prison. The effect was to make it seem even more different than the run-of-the-mill Gubru functionaries they had seen. In some places the allochroous feathers had begun to appear frayed, tattered. The avian aristocrat wore a striped collar. It paced impatiently atop its perch.

“Well, well,” Fiben muttered. “If it ain’t our old friend, the Somethin’ of Good Housekeeping.”

Gailet snorted in something just short of a small laugh. “It’s called the Suzerain of Propriety,” she reminded him. “The striped tore means it’s the leader of the priestly caste. Now just you remember to behave yourself. Try not to scratch too much, and watch what I do.”

“I’ll imitate yer very steps precisely, mistress.”

Gailet ignored his sarcasm and followed the brown guidance hologram down the long ramp toward the brightly colored barge. Fiben kept pace just a little behind her.

The guide projection vanished as they reached the landing. A Kwackoo, with its feathery ruff tinted a garish shade of pink, offered them both a very shallow bow. “You are honored — honored… that our patron — noble patron does deign to show you — you half-formed ones… the favor of your destiny.”

The Kwackoo spoke without the assistance of a vodor. That in itself was no small miracle, given the creature’s highly specialized speech organs. In fact, it spoke the Anglic words fairly clearly, if with a breathless quality which made the alien sound nervous, expectant.

It wasn’t likely the Suzerain of Propriety was the easiest boss in the Universe to work for. Fiben imitated Gailet’s bow and kept silent as she replied. “We are honored by the attention that your master, the high patron of a great clan, condescends to offer us,” she said in slow, carefully enunciated Galactic Seven. “Nevertheless, we retain, in our own patrons’ names, the right to disapprove its actions.”

Even Fiben gasped. The assembled Kwackoo cooed in anger, fluffing up threateningly.

Three high, chirped notes cut their outrage off abruptly. The lead Kwackoo swiveled quickly and bowed to the Suzerain, who had scuttled to the end of its perch closest to the two chims. The Gubru’s beak gaped as it bent to regard Gailet, first with one eye, then the other. Fiben found himself sweating rivulets.

Finally, the alien straightened and squawked a pronouncement in its own highly clipped, inflected version of Galactic Three. Only Fiben saw the tremor of relief that passed down Gailet’s tense spine. He could not follow the Suzerain’s stilted prose, but a vodor nearby commenced translating promptly.

“Well said — said well… spoken well for captured, client-class soldiers of foe-clan Terra… Come, then — come and see… come and see and hear a bargain you will certainly not disapprove — not even in your patrons’ names.” Gailet and Fiben glanced at each other. Then, as one, they bowed.

The late morning air was clear, and the faint ozone smell probably did not foretell rain. Such ancient cues were useless in the presence of high technology anyway.

The barge cruised south past the closed pleasure piers of Port Helenia and out across the bay. It was Fiben’s first chance to see how the harbor had changed since the aliens had arrived.

The fishing fleet had been crippled for one thing. Only one in four trawlers did not lie beached or in dry dock. The main commercial port was almost dead as well. A clump of dispirited-looking seafaring vessels listed at their moorings, clearly untouched for months. Fiben watched one of the still working fishing trawlers heave into view around the point of the bay, probably returning early with a fortuitous catch — or with a mechanical failure the chim crew felt unable to deal with at sea. The tub-bottomed boat rose and fell as it rode the standing swell where sea met bay. The crew had to struggle since the passage was narrower than it had been in days of peace. Half of the strait was now blocked by a towering, curving cliff face — a great fortress of alien cerametal.

The Gubru battleship seemed to shimmer in a faint -haze. Water droplets condensed at the fringes of its ward-screens, rainbows sparkled, and a mist fell over the struggling trawler as it forced its way past the northern tongue of land at last. Fiben could not make out the faces of the chim crew as the Suzerain’s barge swept overhead, but he saw several long-armed forms slump in relief as the boat reached calm waters at last.

From Point Borealis the upper arm of the bayshore swept several kilometers north and east toward Port Helenia itself. Except for a small navigation beacon, those rough heights were unoccupied. The branches of ridgetop pines riffled gently in the sea breezes.

Southward, however, across the narrow strait, things were quite different. Beyond the grounded battleship, the terrain had been transformed. Forest growth had been removed, the contours of the bluffs altered. Dust rose from a site just out of view beyond the headland. A swarm of hovers and heavy lifters could be seen buzzing to and fro in that direction.

Much farther to the south, toward the spaceport, new domes had been erected as part of the Gubru defensive network — the facilities the urban guerrillas had only mildly inconvenienced in their abortive insurrection. But the barge did not seem to be heading that way. Rather they turned toward the new construction on the narrow, hilly slopes between Aspinal Bay and the Sea of Cilmar.

Fiben knew it was hopeless asking their hosts what was going on. The Kwackoo technicians and servitors were polite, but it was a severe sort of courtesy, probably on orders. And they were not forthcoming with much information.

Gailet joined him at the railing and took his elbow. “Look,” she whispered in a hushed voice.

Together they stared as the barge rose over the bluffs.

A hilltop had been shorn flat near the ocean shoreline. Buildings Fiben recognized as proton power plants lay clustered around its base, feeding cables upward, along its flanks. At the top, a hemispherical structure lay face upward, glimmering and open like a marble bowl in the sunshine.

“What is it? A force field projector? Some kind of weapon?”

Fiben nodded, shook his head, and finally shrugged. “Beats me. It doesn’t look military. But whatever it does sure must take a lot of juice. Look at all those power plants. Goodall!”

A shadow slipped over them — not with the fluffy, ragged coolness of a cloud passing before the sun, but with the sudden, sharp chill of something solid and huge rumbling over their heads. Fiben shivered, only partly from the drop in temperature. He and Gailet couldn’t help crouching as they looked up at the giant lifter-carrier that cruised only a hundred meters higher. Their avian hosts, on the other hand, appeared unruffled. The Suzerain stood on its perch, placidly ignoring the thrumming fields that made the chims tremble.

They don’t like surprise, Fiben thought. But they are pretty tough when they know what’s happening.

Their transport began a long, slow, lazy circuit around the perimeter of the construction site. Fiben was pondering the white, upturned bowl below when the Kwackoo with the pink ruff approached and inclined its head ever so slightly.

“The Great One deigns — does offer favor… and will suggest commonality — complementarity … of goals and aims.”

Across the barge, the Suzerain of Propriety could be seen perched regally on its pedestal. Fiben wished he could read expressions on a Gubru face. What’s the old bird got in mind? he wondered. Fiben wasn’t entirely sure he really wanted to know.

Gailet returned the shallow bow of the Kwackoo. “Please tell your honored patron we will humbly attend his offer.”

The Suzerain’s Galactic Three was stilted and formal, embellished with mincing, courtly dance steps. The vodor translation did not help Fiben much. He found himself watching Gailet, rather than the alien, as he tried to follow what the hell they were talking about.

“… allowable revision to Ritual of Choice of Uplift Advisor . . , modification made during time of stress, by foremost client representatives… if performed truly in best interests of their patron race…” Gaflet seemed visibly shaken, looking up at the Gubru. Her lips pressed together in a tight line, and her intertwined fingers were white with tension. When the Suzerain stopped chirping, the vodor continued on for a moment, then silence closed in around them, leaving only the whistle of passing air and the faint droning of the hover’s engines.

Gailet swallowed. She bowed and seemed to have difficulty finding her voice.

You can do it, Fiben urged silently. Speechlock could strike any chim, especially under pressure like this, but he knew he dared not do anything to help her.

Gailet coughed, swallowed again, and managed to bring forth words.

“Hon-honored elder, we … we cannot speak for our patrons, or even for all the chims on Garth. What you ask is … is …”

The Suzerain spoke again, as if her reply had been complete. Or perhaps it simply was not considered impolite for a patron-class being to interrupt a client.

“You have no need — need not … to answer now,” the vodor pronounced as the Gubru chirped and bobbed on its perch. “Study — learn — consider… the materials you will be given. This opportunity will be to your advantage.”

The chirping ceased again, followed by the buzzing vodor.

The Suzerian seemed to dismiss them then, simply by closing its eyes.

As if at some signal invisible to Fiben, the pilot of the hover barge banked away from the frenzied activity atop the ravaged hilltop and sent the craft streaking back across the bay, northward, toward Port Helenia. Soon the battleship in the harbor — gigantic and imperturbable — fell behind them in its wreath of mist and rainbows.

Fiben and Gailet followed a Kwackoo to seats at the back of the barge. “What was all that about?” Fiben whispered to her. “What was the damn thing sayin’ about some sort of ceremony? What does it want us to do?”

“Sh!” Gailet motioned for him to be silent. “I’ll explain later, Fiben. Right now, please, let me think.”

Gailet settled into a corner, wrapping her arms around her knees. Absently, she scratched the fur on her left leg. Her eyes were unfocused, and when Fiben made a gesture, as if to offer to groom her, she did not even respond. She only looked off toward the horizon, as if her mind were very far away.

Back in their cell they found that many changes had been made. “I guess we passed,all those tests,” Fiben said, staring at their transformed quarters.

The chains had been taken away soon after the Suzerain’s first visit, that dark night weeks ago. After that occasion the straw on the floor had been replaced by mattresses, and they had been allowed books.

Now, though, that was made to seem Spartan, indeed. Plush carpeting had been laid down, and an expensive holo-tapestry covered most of one wall. There were such amenities as beds and chairs and a desk, and even a music deck.

“Bribes,” Fiben muttered as he sorted through some of the record cubes. “Hot damn, we’ve got something they want. Maybe the Resistance isn’t over. Maybe Athaclena and Robert are stinging them, and they want us to—”

“This hasn’t got anything to do with your general, Fiben,” Gailet said in a very low voice, barely above a whisper. “Or not much, at least. It’s a whole lot bigger than that.” Her expression was tense. All the way back, she had been silent and nervous. At times Fiben imagined he could hear wheels turning in her head.

Gailet motioned for him to follow her to the new holo wall. At the moment it was set to depict a three-dimensional scene of abstract shapes and patterns — a seemingly endless vista of glossy cubes, spheres, and pyramids stretching into the infinite distance. She sat cross-legged and twiddled with the controls. “This is an expensive unit,” she said, a little louder than necessary. “Let’s have some fun and find out what it can do.”

As Fiben sat down beside her, the Euclidean shapes blurred and vanished. The controller clicked under Gailet’s hand, and a new scene suddenly leaped into place. The wall now seemed to open onto a vast, sandy beach. Clouds filled the sky out to a lowering, gray horizon, pregnant with storms. Breakers rolled less than twenty meters away, so realistic that Fiben’s nostrils flared as he tried to catch the salt scent.

Gailet concentrated on the controls. “This may be the ticket,” he heard her mumble. The almost perfect beachscape flickered, and in its place there suddenly loomed a wall of leafy green — a jungle scene, so near and real that Fiben almost felt he could leap through and escape into its green mists, as if this were one of those mythical “teleportation devices” one read of in romantic fiction, and not just a high-quality holo-tapestry.

He contemplated the scene Gailet had chosen. Fiben could tell at once that it wasn’t a jungle of Garth. The creeper-entwined rain forest was a vibrant, lively, noisy scene, filled with color and variety. Birds cawed and howler monkeys shrieked.

Earth, then, he thought, and wondered if the Galaxy would ever let him fulfill his dream of someday seeing the homewor\d. Not bloody likely, the way things are.

His attention drew back as Gailet spoke. “Just let me adjust this here, to make it more realistic.” The sound level rose. Jungle noise burst forth to surround them. What is she trying to do? he wondered.

’ Suddenly he noticed something. As Gailet twiddled with the volume level, her left hand moved in a crude but eloquent gesture. Fiben blinked. It was a sign in baby talk, the hand language all infant chims used until the age of four, when speech finally became useful.

Grownups listening, she said.

Jungle sounds seemed to fill the room, reverberating from the other walls. “There,” she said in a low voice. “Now they can’t listen in on us. We can talk frankly.”

“But — ” Fiben started to object, then he saw the gesture again. Grownups listening…

Once more his respect for Gailet’s cleverness grew. Of course she knew this simple method would not stop snoopers from picking up their every word. But the Gubru and their agents might imagine the chims foolish enough to think it would! If the two of them acted as if they believed they were safe from eavesdropping…

Such a tangled web we weave, Fiben thought. This was real spy stuff. Fun, in a way.

It was also, he knew, dangerous as hell.

“The Suzerain of Propriety has a problem,” Gailet told him aloud. Her hands lay still on her lap.

“It told you that? But if the Gubru are in trouble, why—”

“I didn’t say the Gubru — although I think that’s true, as well. I was talking about the Suzerain of Propriety itself. It’s having troubles with its peers. The priest seriously overcom-mitted itself in a certain matter, some time back, and now it seems there’s hell to pay over it.”

Fiben just sat there, amazed that the lofty alien lord had deigned to tell an earthworm of a Terran client such things. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea. Such confidences were likely to be unhealthy. “What were these overcommitments?” he asked.

“Well, for one thing,” Gailet went on, scratching her kneecap, “some months ago it insisted that many parties of Talon Soldiers and scientists be sent up into the mountains.”

“What for?”

Gailet’s face took on an expression of severe control. “They were sent searching for … for Garthlings.”

“For what?” Fiben blinked. He started to laugh. Then he cut short when he saw the warning flicker in her eyes. The hand scratching her knee curled and turned in a motion that signified caution.

“For Garthlings,” she repeated.

Of all the superstitious nonsense, Fiben thought. Ignorant, yellow-card chims use Garthling fables to frighten their children. It was rich to think of the sophisticated Gubru falling for such tall tales.

Gailet did not seem to find the idea amusing, though.

“You can imagine why the Suzerain would be excited, Fiben, once it had reason to believe Garthlings might exist. Imagine what a fantastic coup it would be for any clan who claimed adoption rights on a pre-sentient race that had survived the Bururalli Holocaust. Immediate takeover of Earth’s tenancy rights here would be the very least of the consequences.”

Fiben saw her point. “But… but what in the world made it think in the first place, that—”

“It seems our Tymbrimi Ambassador, Uthacalthing, was largely responsible for the Suzerain’s fixation, Fiben. You remember that day of the chancery explosion, when you tried to break into the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache?”

Fiben opened his mouth. He closed it again. He tried to think. What kind of game was Gailet playing now?

The Suzerain of Propriety obviously knew that he, Fiben, was the chim who had been sighted ducking through the smoke and stench of fried Gubru clerical workers on the day of the explosion at the one-time Tymbrimi Embassy. It knew Fiben was the one who had played a frustrated game of tag with the cache guardian, and who later escaped over a cliff face under the very beaks of a squad of Talon Soldiers.

Did it know because Gailet had told it? If so,’ had she also told the Suzerain about the secret message Fiben had found in the back of the cache and delivered to Athaclena?

He could not ask her these things. The warning look in her eyes kept him silent. I hope she knows what she’s doing, he prayed fervently. Fiben felt clammy under his arms. He brushed a bead of sweaf from his eyebrow. “Go on,” he said in a dry voice.

“Your visit invalidated diplomatic immunity and gave the Gubru the excuse they were looking for, to break into the cache. Then the Gubru had what they thought was a real stroke of luck. The cache autodestruct partially failed. There was evidence inside, Fiben, evidence pertaining to private investigations into the Garthling question by the Tymbrimi Ambassador.”

“By Uthacalthing? But …” And then it hit Fiben. He stared at Gailet, goggle-eyed. Then he doubled over, coughing as he fought not to laugh out loud. Hilarity was like a head of steam in his chest, a force in its own right, barely contained. A sudden, brief spell of speechlock was actually a blessing, as it kept Gailet from having to shush him. He coughed some more and slapped his chest. “Excuse me,” he said in a small voice.

“The Gubru now believe that the evidence was contrived, a clever ruse,” she went on.

No kidding, Fiben thought silently.

“In addition to faked data, Uthacalthing also arranged to have the Planetary Library stripped of its Uplift files, making it seem to the Suzerain as if something was being hidden. It cost the Gubru a lot to find out that Uthacalthing had tricked them. A research-class Planetary Library was shipped in, for instance. And they lost quite a few scientists and soldiers up in the mountains before they figured it out.”

“Lost them?” Fiben sat forward. “Lost how?”

“Chim irregulars,” Gailet answered tersely. And again there was that warning look. Come on, Gailet, he thought. I’m not an idiot. Fiben knew better than to refer in any way to Robert or Athaclena. He shied away from even thinking about them.

Still, he couldn’t quite suppress a smile. So that was why the Kwackoo had been so polite! If chims were waging intelligent war, and by the official rules at that, then all chims had to be treated with some minimal degree of respect.

“The mountain chims survived that first day! They must’ve stung the invaders, and kept stingin’ “em!” He knew he was free to vent a bit of exultation. It would only be keeping in character.

Gailet’s smile was -thin. This news must have given rise to mixed feelings. After all, her own part of the insurrection had gone very much worse.

So, Fiben thought, Uthacalthing s elaborate ruse persuaded the Gubru that there was something on the planet at least as important as the colony’s value as hostage. Garthlings! Imagine that. They went up into the mountains chasing a myth. And somehow the general found a way to hurt them as soon as they came within reach.

Oh, I’m sorry for all those things I thought about her old man. What a great jape, Uthacalthing!

But now the invaders are wise to it. I wonder if…

Fiben glanced up and saw that Gailet was watching him intently, as if gauging his very thoughts. At last Fiben understood one of the reasons why she could not be completely open and frank with him.

We have to make a decision, he realized. Should we try to lie to the Gubru?

He and Gailet might make the attempt, try to prop up Uthacalthing’s practical joke for just a while longer. They might succeed in convincing the Suzerain just one more time to go off hunting mythical Garthlings. It would be worth the effort if it drew even one more party of Gubru within reach of the mountain fighters.

But did either he or Gailet have anywhere near enough sophistication to pull off such a ruse? What would it take? He could just picture it. Oh yes, massa, there is Garthlin’s after all, yes boss. You can believe brer chim, yassa.

Or, alternatively, they could try reverse psychology. D-o-o-on’t throw me in dat briar patch… !

Neither approach at all resembled the way Uthacalthing had done it, of course. The tricky Tymbrimi had played a game of subtle, colubrine misdirection. Fiben did not even toy with the idea of trying to operate on so sophisticated a plane.

And anyway, if he and Gailet were caught trying to lie to the Gubru, it could very well disqualify the two of them from whatever special status the Suzerain of Propriety seemed to be offering this afternoon. Fiben had no idea what the creature wanted of them, but it just might mean a chance to find out what the invaders were building out there by the Sea of Cilmar. That could be vital information.

No, it just wasn’t worth the risk, Fiben decided.

Now he faced another problem, how to communicate these thoughts to Gailet.

“Even the most sophisticated sophont race can make mistakes,” he said slowly, enunciating carefully. “Especially when they are on a strange world.” Pretending to look for a flea, he shaped the baby talk sign for Game finished now?

Obviously Gailet agreed. She nodded firmly. “The mistake, is over now. They’re sure Garthlings are a myth. The Gubru are convinced it was just a Tymbrimi trap. Anyway, I get ah impression the other Suzerains — the ones that share command with the high priest — won’t allow any more pointless forays into the mountains, where they can be potshotted by guerrillas.”

Fiben’s head jerked up. His heart pounded for a few, quick moments. Then it came to him what Gailet had meant… how the last word she had spoken was intended to be spelled. Homonyms were one of many awkward drawbacks modern Anglic had inherited from old-style English, Chinese, and Japanese. While Galactic languages had been carefully designed to maximize information content and eliminate ambiguity, wolfling tongues had evolved rough and wild, with lots of idiosyncrasies, such as words with identical sounds but different meanings.

Fiben found his fists had clenched. He forced himself to relax. Guerrillas, not gorillas. She doesn’t know about the clandestine Uplift project in the mountains, Fiben reassured himself. She has no idea how ironic her remark sounded.

One more reason, though, to end Uthacalthing’s “joke” once and for all. The Tymbrimi could not have been any more aware of the Howletts Center than his daughter. Had he known about the secret work there, Uthacalthing would certainly have chosen a different ruse, not one meant to send the Gubru into those very same mountains.

The Gubru must not go back into the Mulun, Fiben realized. It’s only luck they haven’t already discovered the ’rillas.

“Stupid birds,” he muttered, playing to Gailet’s line. “Imagine them falling for a dumb, wolfling folk tale. After Garthlings, what’ll they go after next? Peter Pan?”

Superficially, Gailet’s expression was reproving. “You must try to be more respectful, Fiben.” Underneath, though, he felt a strong current of approval. They might not have the same reasons, but they were in agreement this far. Uthacalthing’s joke was over.

“What they’re going after next, Fiben, is us.”

He blinked. “Us?”

She nodded. “I’m guessing the war isn’t going very well for the Gubru. Certainly they haven’t found the dolphin ship that everyone’s chasing, over on the other side of the Galaxy. And taking Garth hostage doesn’t seem to have budged Earth or the Tymbrimi. I’d bet it only stiffened the resistance, and gained Terra some sympathy among former neutrals.”

Fiben frowned. It had been so long since he had thought about the larger scope — about the turmoil raging all across the Five Galaxies — about the Streaker — about the siege of Terra. Just how much did Gailet know, and how much was mere speculation?

In the nearby weather wall, a big black bird with a huge, gaily colored bill was depicted landing in a rustle very close to the carpet where Fiben and Gailet sat. It stepped forward and seemed to regard Fiben, first with one eye, then the other. The Toucan reminded him of the Suzerain of Propriety. Fiben shivered.

“Anyway,” Gailet went on, “the enterprise here on Garth seems to be a drain on their resources that the Gubru can’t afford too well, especially if peace does return to Galactic society, and the Institute for Civilized Warfare makes them give the planet back in only a few decades or so. I figure they re looking real hard for some way to make a profit out of all this.”

Fiben had an inspiration. “All that construction by South Point is part of that, right? It’s part of the Suzerain’s plan to save his hash.”

Gailet’s lips pursed. “Colorfully put. Have you figured out what it is they’re building?”

The multicolored bird on the branch cawed sharply and seemed to be laughing at Fiben. But when he glanced sharply that way it had already returned to the serious business of picking through the imaginary detritus on the forest floor. Fiben looked back at Gailet. “You tell me,” he said.

“I’m not sure I can remember well enough to translate what the Suzerain said. I was pretty nervous, you’ll remember.” Her eyes closed for a moment. “Would — would a hyperspace shunt mean anything to you?”

The bird in the wall took off in an explosion of feathers and leaves as Fiben leaped to his feet, backing more than a meter away. He stared down at Gailet in disbelief.

“A what? But that’s… that’s crazy! Build a shunt on the surface of a planet? It’s just not—”

Then he stopped, remembering the great marble bowl, the mammoth power plants. Fiben’s lips quivered and his hands came together, pulling on opposite thumbs. In this way, Fiben reminded himself that he was officially almost the equal of a man — that he. should be able to think like one when facing such incredible improbability. “What …” He whispered, licked his lips, and concentrated on the words. “What’s it for?”

“I’m not so clear on that,” Gailet said. He could barely hear her over the squawking from the make-believe forest. Her finger traced a hand sign on the carpet, one which stood for confusion. “I think it was originally intended for some ceremony, if they were ever able to find and claim Garthlings.

Now, the Suzerain needs something to salvage out of their investment, probably another use for the shunt.

“If I understood the Gubru leader, Fiben, it wants to use the shunt for us.”

Fiben sat down again. For a long moment they did not look at each other. There were only the amplified jungle sounds, the colors of a luminescent fog flowing in between the leaves of a holographic rain forest, and the inaudible murmur of their own uncertain fear. The facsimile of a bright bird watched them for a little while longer from a replicant branch high overhead. When the ghostly fog turned to insubstantial rain, however, it finally spread fictitious wings and flew away.

60 Uthacalthing

The Thennanin was obdurate. There did not seem to be any way to get through to him.

Kault seemed almost a stereotype, a caricature of his race — bluff, open, honorable to a fault, and so trusting that it threatened to drive Uthacalthing into fits of frustration. The glyph, teev’nus, was incapable of expressing Uthacalthing’s bafflement. Over the last few days, something stronger had begun taking shape in the tendrils of his corona — something pungent and reminiscent of human metaphor.

Uthacalthing realized he was starting to get “pissed off.”

Just what would it take to raise Kault’s suspicions? Uthacalthing wondered if he should pretend to talk in his sleep, muttering dire hints and confessions. Would that raise an inkling under the Thennanin’s thick skull? Or maybe he should abandon all subtlety and write out the entire scenario, leaving the unfolded pages in the open for Kault to find!

Individuals can vary widely within a species, Uthacalthing knew. And Kault was an anomaly, even for a Thennanin. It would probably never occur to the fellow to spy on his Tymbrimi companion. Uthacalthing found it hard to understand how Kault could have made it this far in the diplomatic corps of any race.

Fortunately, the darker aspects of the Thennanin nature were not also exaggerated in him. Members of Kault’s faction, it seemed, weren’t quite as smugly sanctimonious or utterly convinced of their own righteousness as those currently in charge of clan policy. More the pity, then, that one side effect of Uthacalthing’s planned jest, if it ever succeeded, would be to weaken that moderate wing even more.

Regrettable. But it would take a miracle to ever bring Kault’s group into power anyway, Uthacalthing reminded himself.

Anyway, the way things were heading, he was going to be spared the moral quandary of worrying about the consequences of his practical joke. At the moment it was getting exactly nowhere. So far this had been a most frustrating journey. The only compensation was that this was not, after all, a Gubru detention camp.

They were in the low, rolling countryside leading inexorably upward toward the southern slopes of the Mountains of Mulun. The variety-starved ecosystem of the plains was giving way gradually to somewhat less monotonous scenery — scrub trees and eroded terraces whose reddish and tan sedimentary layers glittered with the morning light, winking as if in secret knowledge of long departed days.

As the wanderers’ trek brought them ever closer to the mountains, Uthacalthing kept adjusting their path, guided by a certain blue twinkle on the horizon — a glimmer so faint that his eyes could barely make it out at times. He knew for a fact that Kault’s visual apparatus could not detect the spark at all. It had been planned that way.

Faithfully following the intermittent glow, Uthacalthing had led the way and kept a careful watch for the telltale clues. Every time he spotted one, Uthacalthing went through the motions, dutifully rubbing out traces in the dirt, surreptitiously throwing away stone tools, making furtive notes and hiding them quickly when his fellow refugee appeared around the bend.

By now anyone else would be positively seething with curiosity. But not Kault. No, not Kault.

Just this morning it had been the Thennanin’s turn to lead. Their route took them along the edge of a mud flat, still damp from the recent onset of autumn rains. There, crossing their path in plain sight, had been a trail of footprints no more than a few hours old, obviously laid by something shuffling on two legs and a knuckle. But Kault just strode on past, sniffing the air with those great breathing slits of his, commenting in his booming voice on how fresh the day felt!

Uthacalthing consoled himself that this part of his scheme had always been a long shot anyway. Maybe his plan just wasn’t meant to come about.

Perhaps I am simply not clever enough. Perhaps both Kault’s race and my own assigned their dullest types to duty on this back-of-the-arm planet.

Even among humans, there were those who certainly would have been able to come up with something better. One of those legendary agents of the Terragens Council, for instance.

Of course there were no agents or other, more imaginative Tymbrimi here on Garth when the crisis hit. He had been forced to come up with the best plan he could.

Uthacalthing wondered about the other half of his jest. It was clear the Gubru had fallen for his ruse. But how deeply? How much trouble and expense had it cost them? More importantly from the point of view of a Galactic diplomat, how badly had they been embarrassed?

If the Gubru had proved as dense and slow as Kault…

But no, the Gubru are reliable, Uthacalthing reassured himself. The Gubru, at least, are quite proficient at deceit and hypocrisy. It made them easier enemies than the Thennanin.

He shaded his eyes, contemplating how the morning had aged. The air was getting warm. There was a swishing sound, the crackle of breaking foliage. Kault strode into view a few meters back, grumbling a low marching tune and using a long stick to brush shrubs out of his path. Uthacalthing wondered. If our peoples are officially at war, why is it so hard for Kault to notice that I am obviously hiding something from him?

“Hmmmph,” the big Thennanian grunted as he approached. “Colleague, why have we stopped?”

The words were in Anglic. Recently they had made a game of using a different language every day, for practice. Uthacalthing gestured skyward. “It is almost midday, Kault. Gimelhai is getting fierce. We had better find a place to get out of the sun.”

Kault’s leathery ridge crest puffed. “Get out of the sun? But we are not in … oh. Aha. Ha. Ha. A wolfling figure of speech. Very droll. Yes, Uthacalthing. When Gimelhai reaches zenith, it might indeed feel somewhat as if we were roasting in its outer shell. Let us find shelter.”

A small stand of brushy trees stood atop a hillock, not far away. This time Kault led, swinging his homemade staff to clear a path through the tall, grassy growth.

By now they were well practiced at the routine. Kault did the heavy work of delving a comfortable niche, down to where the soil was cool. Uthacalthing’s nimble hands tied the Thennanin’s cape into place as a sunshade. They rested against their packs and waited out the hot middle part of the day.

While Uthacalthing dozed, Kault spent the time entering data in his lap datawell. He picked up twigs, berries, bits of dirt, rubbed them between his large, powerful fingers, and held the dust up to his scent-slits before examining it with his small collection of instruments salvaged from the crashed yacht.

The Thennanin’s diligence was all the more frustrating to Uthacalthing, since Kault’s serious investigations of the local ecosystem had somehow missed every single clue Uthacalthing had thrown his way. Perhaps it is because they were thrown at him. Uthacalthing pondered. The Thennanin were a systematic folk. Possibly, Kault’s worldview prevented him from seeing that which did not fit into the pattern that his careful studies revealed.

An interesting thought. Uthacalthing’s corona fashioned a glyph of appreciated surprise as, all at once, he saw that the Thennanin approach might not be as cumbersome as he had thought. He had assumed that it was stupidity that made Kault impervious to his fabricated clues, but…

But after all, the clues really are lies. My confederate out in the bush lays out hints for me to “find” ana “hide.” When Kault ignores them, could it be because his obstinate worldview is actually superior? In reality, he has proven almost impossible to fool!

True or not, it was an interesting idea. Syrtunu riffled and tried to lift off, but Uthacalthing’s corona lay limp, too lazy to abet the glyph.

Instead, his thoughts drifted to Athaclena.

He knew his daughter still lived. To try to learn more would invite detection by the enemy’s psi devices. Still, there was something in those traces — trembling undertones down in the nahakieri levels of feeling — which told Uthacalthing that he would have much new to learn about Athaclena, should they ever meet again in this world.

“In the end, there is a limit to the guidance of parents,” a soft voice seemed to say to him as he drifted in half-slumber. “Beyond that, a child’s destiny is her own.”

And what of the strangers who enter her life? Uthacalthing asked the glimmering figure of his long-dead wife, whose shape seemed to hover before him, beyond his closed eyelids.

“Husband, what of them? They, too, will shape her. And she them. But our own time ebbs.”

Her face was so clear… This was a dream such as humans were known to have, but which was rarer among Tymbrimi. It was visual, and meaning was conveyed in words rather than glyphs. A flux of emotion made his fingertips tremble.

Mathicluanna’s eyes separated, and her smile reminded him of that day in the capital when their coronae had first touched… stopping him, stunned and still in the middle of a crowded street. Half-blinded by a glyph without any name, he had hunted the trace of her down alleyways, across bridges, and past dark cafes, seeking with growing desperation until, at last, he found her waiting for him on a bench not twelve sistaars from where he had first sensed her.

“You see?” she asked in the dream voice of that long ago girl. “We are shaped. We change. But what we once were, that, too, remains always.”

Uthacalthing stirred. His wife’s image rippled, then vanished in wavelets of rolling light. Syullf-tha was the glyph that hovered in the space where she had been… standing for the joy of a puzzle not yet solved.

He sighed and sat up, rubbing his eyes.

For some reason Uthacalthing thought that the bright daylight might disperse the glyph. But syullf-tha was more than a mere dream by now. Without any volition on his part, it rose and moved slowly away from Uthacalthing toward his companion, the big Thennanin.

Kault sat with his back to Uthacalthing, still absorbed in his studies, completely unaware as syullf-tha transformed, changed subtly into syulff-kuonn. It settled slowly over Kault’s ridge crest, descended, settled in, and disappeared. Uthacalthing stared, amazed, as Kault grunted and looked up. The Thennanin’s breath-slits wheezed as he put down his instruments and turned to face Uthacalthing.

“There is something very strange here, colleague. Something I am at a loss to explain.”

Uthacalthing moistened his lips before answering. “Do tell me what concerns you, esteemed ambassador.”

Kault’s voice was a low rumble. “There appears to be a creature… one that has been foraging in these berry patches not long ago. I have seen traces of its eating for some days now, Uthacalthing. It is large… very large for a creature of Garth.”

Uthacalthing was still getting used to the idea that syulff-kuonn had penetrated where so many subtler and more powerful glyphs had failed. “Indeed? Is this of significance?”

Kault paused, as if uncertain whether to say more. The Thennanin finally sighed. “My friend, it is most odd. But I must tell you that there should be no animal, since the Bururalli Holocaust, able to reach so high into these bushes. And its manner of foraging is quite extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary in what way?”

Kault’s crest inflated in short puffs, indicating confusion. “I ask that you do not laugh at me, colleague.”

“Laugh at you? Never!” Uthacalthing lied.

“Then I shall tell you. By now I am convinced that this creature has hands, Uthacalthing. I am sure of it.”

“Hm,” Uthacalthing commented noncommittally.

The Thennanin’s voice dropped even lower. “There is a mystery here, colleague. There is something very odd going on here on Garth.”

Uthacalthing suppressed his corona. He extinguished all facial expression. Now he understood why it had been syulff-kuonn — the glyph of anticipation of a practical joke fulfilled — that penetrated where none had succeeded before.

The joke was on me!

Uthacalthing looked beyond the fringe of their sunshade, where the bright afternoon had begun to color from an overcast spilling over the mountains.

Out there in the bush his confederate had been laying “clues” for weeks, ever since the Tymbrimi yacht came down where Uthacalthing had intended it to, at the edge of the marshlands far southeast of the mountains. Little Jo-Jo — the throwback chim who could not even speak except with his hands — moved just ahead of Uthacalthing, naked as an animal, laying tantalizing footprints, chipping stone tools to leave in their path, maintaining tenuous contact with Uthacalthing through the blue Warder Globe.

It had all been part of a convoluted plan to lead the Thennanin inexorably to the conclusion that pre-sentient life existed on Garth, but Kault had seen none of the clues! None of the specially contrived hints!

No, what Kault had finally noticed was Jo-Jo himself. . . the traces the little chim left as he foraged and lived off the land!

Uthacalthing realized that syulff-kuonn was exactly right. The joke on himself was rich, indeed.

He thought he could almost hear Mathicluanna’s voice once again. “You never know…” she seemed to say.

“Amazing,” he told the Thennanin. “That is simply amazing.”

61 Athaclena

Every now and then she worried that she was getting too used to the changes. The rearranged nerve endings, the redistributed fatty tissues, the funny protrusion of her now-so-humanoid nose — these were things now so accustomed that she sometimes wondered if she would ever be able to return to standard Tymbrimi morphology.

The thought frightened Athaclena.

Until now there had been good reasons for maintaining these humaniform alterations. While she was leading an army of half-uplifted wolfling clients, looking more like a human female had been more than good politics. It had been a sort of bond between her and the chims and gorillas.

And with Robert, she remembered.

Athaclena wondered. Would the two of them ever again experiment, as they once had, with the half-forbidden sweetness of interspecies dalliance? Right now it seemed so very unlikely. Their consortship was reduced to a pair of signatures on a piece of tree bark, a useful bit of politics. Nothing else was the same as before.

She looked down. In the murky water before her, Athaclena saw her own reflection. “Neither fish nor fowl,” she whispered in Anglic, not remembering where she had read or heard the phrase, but knowing its metaphorical meaning. Any young Tymbrimi male who saw her in her present form would surely break down laughing. And as for Robert, well, less than a month ago she had felt very close to him. His growing attraction toward her — the raw, wolfling hunger of it — had flattered and pleased her in a daring sort of way.

Now, though, he is among his own kind again. And I am alone.

Athaclena shook her head and resolved to drive out such thoughts. She picked up a flask and scattered her reflection by pouring a quarter liter of pale liquid into the pool. Plumes of mud stirred near the bank, obscuring the fine web of tendrils that laced through the pond from overhanging vines.

This was the last of a chain of small basins, a few kilometers from the caves. As Athaclena worked she concentrated and kept careful notes, for she knew she was no trained scientist and would have to make up for that with meticulous-ness. Still, her simple experiments had already begun to bear promising results. If her assistants returned from the next valley in time with the data she had sent for, she might have something of importance to show Major Prathachulthorn.

I may look like a freak, but I am still Tymbrimi! I shall prove my usefulness, even if the Earthmen do not think of me as a warrior.

So intense was her concentration, so quiet the still forest, that sudden words were like thunderclaps.

“So this is where you are, Clennie! I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Athaclena spun about, almost spilling a vial of umber-colored fluid. The vines all around her suddenly felt like a net woven just to catch her. Her pulse pounded for the fraction of a second it took to recognize Robert, looking down at her from the arching root of a giant near-oak.

He wore moccassins, a soft leather jerkin, and hose. The bow and quiver across his back made him look like the hero of one of those old-time wolfling romances Athaclena’s mother used to read to her when she was a child. It took longer to regain her composure than she would have preferred. “Robert. You startled me.” He blushed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to.” That wasn’t strictly true, she knew. Robert’s psi shield was better than before, and he obviously was proud of being able to approach undetected. A simple but clear version of kiniwullun flickered like a pixie over Robert’s head. If she squinted, she might almost imagine a young Tymbrimi male standing there…

Athaclena shuddered. She had already decided she could not afford this. “Come and sit down, Robert. Tell me what you have been doing.”

Holding onto a nearby vine, he swung lightly onto the leaf-strewn loam and stepped over to where her experiment case lay open beside the dark pool. Robert slipped off his bow and quiver and sat down, cross-legged.

“I’ve been looking around for some way to be useful.” He shrugged. “Prathachulthorn’s finished pumping me for information. Now he wants me to serve as sort of a glorified chim morale officer.” His voice rose a quarter octave as he mimicked the Terragens Marine’s South Asian accent. “We must keep the little fellows’ chins up, Oneagle. Make them feel they’re important to the Resistance!”

Athaclena nodded, understanding Robert’s unspoken meaning. In spite of the partisans’ past successes, Pratha-chulthorn obviously considered the chims superfluous — at best useful in diversions or as grunt soldiery. Liaison to childlike clients would seem an appropriate cubbyhole to assign the undertrained, presumably spoiled young son of the Planetary Coordinator.

“I thought Prathachulthorn liked your idea of using digestion bacteria against the Gubru,” Athaclena said.

Robert sniffed. He picked up a twig and twirled it deftly from finger to finger. “Oh, he admitted it was intriguing (hat the gorillas’ gut critters dissolved Gubru armor. He agreed to assign Benjamin and some of the chim techs to my project.”

Athaclena tried to trace the murky pattern of his feelings. “Did not Lieutenant McCue help you persuade him?”

Robert looked away at the mention of the young Earth-ling woman. His shield went up at the same time, confirming some of Athaclena’s suspicions.

“Lydia helped, yeah. But Prathachulthorn says it’d be next to impossible to deliver enough bacteria to important Gubru installations before they detect it and neutralize it. I still get the impression Prathachulthorn thinks it a side issue, maybe slightly useful to his main plan.”

“Do you have any idea what he has in mind?”

“He smiles and says he’s going to bloody the birds’ beaks. There’s been intelligence of some major facility the Gubru are building, south of Port Helenia, and that may make a good target. But he won’t go into any more detail than that. After all, strategy and tactics are for professionals, don’t y’know.”

“Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about Prathachulthorn. I brought something to show you.” Robert shrugged out of his pack and reached inside to pull out an object wrapped in cloth. He unfolded the coverings. “Look familiar at all?”

At first sight it appeared to be a pile of wrinkled rags with knotted strings hanging off the edges. On closer examination, the thing on Robert’s lap reminded Athaclena of a shriveled fungus of some sort. Robert grabbed the largest knot, where most of the thin fibers came together in a clump, and extended the strings until the filmy fabric unfolded entirely in the gentle breeze.

“It … it looks familiar, Robert. I would say it was a small parachute, but it is obviously natural … as if it came from some sort of plant.” She shook her head.

“Pretty close. Try to think back a few months, Clennie, to a certain rather traumatic day… one I don’t think either of us will ever forget.”

His words were opaque, but flickerings of empathy drew her memories forth. “This?” Athaclena fingered the soft, almost translucent material. “This is from the plate ivy?”

“That’s right.” Robert nodded. “In springtime the upper layers are glossy, rubbery, and so stiff you can flip them and ride them as sleds—”

“If you are coordinated,” Athaclena teased.

“Um, yeah. But by the time autumn rolls around, the upper plates have withered back until they’re like this.” He waved the floppy, parachute-like plate by its fibrous shrouds, catching the wind. “In a few more weeks they’ll be even lighter.”

Athaclena shook her head. “I recall you explained the reason. It is for propagation, is it not?”

“Correct. This little spore pod here” — he opened his hand to show a small capsule where the lines met — “gets carried aloft by the parachute into the late autumn winds. The sky fills with the things, making air travel hazardous for some time. They cause a real mess down in the city.

“Fortunately, I guess, the ancient creatures that used to pollinate the plate ivy went extinct during the Bururalli fiasco, and nearly all of the pods are sterile. If they weren’t, I guess half the Sind would be covered with plate ivy by now. Whatever used to eat it is long dead as well.”

“Fascinating.” Athaclena followed a tremor in Robert’s aura. “You have plans for these things, do you not?”

He folded the spore carrier away again. “Yeah. An idea at least. Though I don’t imagine Prathachulthorn will listen to me. He’s got me too well categorized, thanks to my mother.”

Of course Megan Oneagle was partly responsible for the Earthling officer’s assessment and dismissal of her son. How can a mother so misunderstand her own child? Athaclena wondered. Humans might have come a long way since their dark centuries, but she still pitied the k’chu-non, the poor wolflings. They still had much to learn about themselves.

“Prathachulthorn might not listen to you directly, Robert. But Lieutenant McCue has his respect. She will certainly hear you out and convey your idea to the major.”

Robert shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Why not?” Athaclena asked. “This young Earthwoman likes you, I can tell. In fact, I was quite certain I detected in her aura—”

“You shouldn’t do that, Clennie,” Robert snapped. “You shouldn’t nose around in people’s feelings that way. “It’s… it’s none of your business.”

She looked down. “Perhaps you are right. But you are my friend and consort, Robert. When you are tense and frustrated, it is bad for both of us, no?”

“I guess so.” He did not meet her gaze.

“Are you sexually attracted to this Lydia McCue, then?” Athaclena asked. “Do you feel affection for her?”

“I don’t see why you have to ask—”

“Because I cannot kenn you, Robert!” Athaclena interrupted, partly out of irritation. “You are no longer open to me. If you are having such feelings you should share them with me! Perhaps I can help you.”

Now he looked at her, his face flushed. “Help me?”

“Of course. You are my consort and friend. If you desire this woman of your own species, should I not be your collaborator? Should I not help you achieve happiness?”

Robert only blinked. But in his tight shield Athaclena now found cracks. She felt her tendrils wafting over her ears, tracing the edges of those loose places, forming a delicate new glyph. “Were you feeling guilty over these feelings, Robert? Did you think they were somehow being disloyal to me?” Athaclena laughed. “But interspecies consorts may have lovers and spouses of their own race. You knew that!

“So what would you have of me, Robert? I certainly cannot give you children! If I could, can you imagine what mongrels they would be?”

This time Robert smiled. He looked away. In the space between them her glyph took stronger form.

“And as for recreational sex, you know that I am not equipped to leave you anything but frustrated, you overen-dowed/underendowed, wrong-shaped ape-man! Why should I not take joy in it, if you find one with whom you might share such things?”

“It’s… it’s not as easy as that, Clennie. I…”

She held up a hand and smiled, at once beseeching him to be quiet and to let go. “I am here, Robert,” she said, softly.

The young man’s confusion was like an uncertain quantum potential, hesitating between two states. His eyes darted as he glanced upward and tried to focus on the nonthing she had made. Then he remembered what he had learned and looked away again, allowing kenning to open him to the glyph, her gift.

La’thsthoon hovered and danced, beckoning to him. Robert exhaled. His eyes opened in surprise as his own aura unlocked without his conscious will. Uncurling like a flower. Something — a twin to la’thsthoon — emerged, resonating, amplifying against Athaclena’s corona.

Two wisps of nothing, one human, one Tymbrimi, touched, darted apart playfully, and came together again.

“Do not fear that you will lose what you have with me, Robert,” Athaclena whispered. “After all, will any human lover be able to do this with you?”

At that, he smiled. They shared laughter. Overhead, mirrored la’thsthoon manifested intimacy performed in pairs.

Only later, after Robert had departed again, did Athaclena loosen the deep shield she had locked around her own innermost feelings. Only when he was gone did she let herself acknowledge her envy.

He goes to her now.

What Athaclena had done was right, by any standard she knew. She had done the proper thing.

And yet, it was so unfair!

I am a freak. I was one before I ever came to this planet. Now I am not even anything recognizable any longer.

Robert might have an Earthly lover, but in that area Athaclena was all alone. She could seek no such solace with one of her own kind.

To touch me, to hold me, to mingle his tendrils and his body with mine, to make me feel aflame…

With some surprise, Athaclena noticed that this was the first time she had ever felt this thing… this longing to be with a man of her own race — not a friend, or classmate, but a lover — perhaps a mate.

Mathicluanna and Uthacalthing had told her it would happen someday — that every girl has her own pace. Now, however, the feeling was only bitter. It enhanced her loneliness. A part of her blamed Robert for the limitations of his species. If only he could have changed his body, as well. If only he could have met her halfway!

But she was the Tymbrimi, one of the “masters of adaptability. ” How far that malleability had gone was made evident when Athaclena felt wetness on her cheeks. Miserably, she wiped away salty tears, the first in her life.

That was how her assistants found her hours later, when they returned from the errands she had sent them on — sitting by the edge of a small, muddy pool, while autumn winds blew through the treetops and sent gravid clouds hurrying eastward toward the gray mountains.

62 Galactics

The Suzerain of Cost and Caution was worried. All signs pointed to a molting, and the direction things appeared to be going was not to its liking.

Across the pavilion, the Suzerain of Beam and Talon paced in front of its aides, looking more erect and stately than ever. Beneath the shaggy outer feathers there was a faint reddish sheen to the military commander’s underplumage. Not a single Gubru present could help but notice even a trace of that color. Soon, perhaps within only a twelve-day, the process would have progressed beyond the point of no return.

The occupation force would have a new queen.

The Suzerain of Cost and Caution contemplated the unfairness of it all as it preened its own feathers. They, too, were starting to dry out, but there were still no discernible signs of a final color.

First it had been elevated to the status of candidate and chief bureaucrat after the death of its predecessor. It had dreamed of such a destiny, but not to be plunged into the midst of an already mature Triumvirate! Its peers were already well on the way toward sexuality by that time. It had been forced to try to catch up.

At first that had seemed to matter little. To the surprise of all, it had won many points from the start. Discovering the foolishness the other two had been up to during the interregnum had enabled the Suzerain of Cost and Caution to make great leaps forward.

Then a new equilibrium was reached. The admiral and the priest had proven brilliant and imaginative in the defense of their political positions.

But the molting was supposed to be decided by correctness of policy! The prize was supposed to go to the leader whose wisdom had proven most sage. It was the way!

And yet, the bureaucrat knew that these matters were as often decided by happenstance, or by quirks of metabolism.

Or by alliance of two against the third, it reminded itself. The Suzerain of Cost and Caution wondered if it had been wise to support the military against Propriety, these last few weeks, giving the admiral by now an almost unassailable advantage.

But there had been no choice! The priest had to be opposed, for the Suzerain of Propriety appeared to have lost all control!

First had come that nonsense about “Garthlings.” If the bureaucrat’s predecessor had lived, perhaps the extravagance might have been kept down. As it was, however, vast amounts had been squandered… bringing in a new Planetary Branch Library, sending expeditions into the dangerous mountains, building a hyperspace shunt for a Ceremony of Adoption — before there was any confirmation that anything existed to adopt!

Then there was the matter of ecological management. The Suzerain of Propriety insisted that it was essential to restore the Earthlings’ program on Garth to at least a minimal level. But the Suzerain of Beam and Talon had adamantly refused to allow any humans to leave the islands. So, at great cost, help was sent for off-planet. A shipload of Linten gardeners, neutrals in the present crisis, were on the way. And the Great Egg only knew how they were to pay for them!

Now that the hyperspace shunt was nearing completion, both the Suzerain of Propriety and the Suzerain of Beam and Talon were ready to admit that the rumors of “Garthlings” were just a Tymbrimi trick. But would they allow construction to be stopped?

No. Each, it seemed, had its reasons for wanting completion. If the bureaucrat had agreed it would have made a consensus, a step toward the policy so much desired by the Roost Masters. But how could it agree with such nonsense!

The Suzerain of Cost and Caution chirped in frustration. The Suzerain of Propriety was late for yet another colloquy.

Its passion for rectitude did not extend, it seemed, to courtesy to its peers.

By this point, theoretically, the initial competitiveness among the candidates should have begun transforming into respect, and then affection, and finally true mating. But here they were, on the verge of a Molt, still dancing a dance of mutual loathing.

The Suzerain of Cost and Caution was not happy about how things were turning out, but at least there would be one satisfaction if things went on in the direction they seemed headed — when Propriety was brought down from its haughty perch at last.

One of the chief bureaucrats’ aides approached, and the Suzerain took its proffered message slab. After picting its contents, it stood in thought.

Outside there was a commotion … no doubt the third peer arriving at last. But for a moment the Suzerain of Cost and Caution still considered the message it had received from its spies.

Soon, yes soon. Very soon we will penetrate secret plans, plans which may not be good policy. Then perhaps we shall see a change, a change in sexuality… soon.

63 Fiben

His head ached.

Back when he had been a student at the University he had also been forced to study hour after hour, days at a stretch, cramming for tests. Fiben had never thought of himself as a scholar, and sometimes examinations used to make him sick in anticipation.

But at least back then there were also extracurricular activities, trips home, breathing spells, when a chen could cut loose and have some fun!

And back at the University Fiben had liked some of his professors. Right at this moment, though, he had had just about as much as he could take of Gailet Jones.

“So you think Galactic Sociology’s stuffy and tedious?” Gailet accused him after he threw down the books in disgust and stalked off to pace in the farthest corner of the room. “Well, I’m sorry Planetary Ecology isn’t the subject, instead,” she said. “Then, maybe, you’d be the teacher and I’d be the student.”

Fiben snorted. “Thanks for allowing for the possibility. I was beginning to think you already knew everything.”

“That’s not fair!” Gailet put aside the heavy book on her lap. “You know the ceremony’s only weeks away. At that point you and I may be called upon to act as spokesmen for our entire race! Shouldn’t we try to be as prepared as possible beforehand?”

“And you’re so certain you know what knowledge will be relevant? What’s to say that Planetary Ecology won’t be crucial then, hm?”

Gailet shrugged. “It might very well be.”

“Or mechanics, or space piloting, or … or beer-swilling, or sexual aptitude, for Goodall’s sake!”

“In that case, our race will be fortunate you were selected as one of its representatives, won’t it?” Gailet snapped back. There was a long, tense silence as they glared at each other. Finally, Gailet lifted a hand. “Fiben. I’m sorry. I know this is frustrating for you. But I didn’t ask to be put in this position either, you know.”

No. But that doesn’t matter, he thought. You were designed for it. Neo-chimpdom couldn’t hope for a chimmie better suited to be rational, collected, and oh, so cool when the time comes.

“As for Galactic Sociology, Fiben, you know there are several reasons why it’s the essential topic.”

There it was again, that look in Gailet’s eyes. Fiben knew it meant that there were levels and levels in her words.

Superficially, she meant that the two chim representatives would have to know the right protocols, and pass certain stringent tests, during the Rituals of Acceptance, or the qfficials of the Institute of Uplift would declare the ceremonies null and void.

The Suzerain of Propriety had made it abundantly clear that the outcome would be most unpleasant if that happened.

But there was another reason Gailet wanted him to know as much as possible. Sometime soon we pass the point of no return… when we can no longer change our minds about cooperating with the Suzerain. Gailet and I cannot discuss it openly, not with the Gubru probably listening in all the time. We’ll have to act in consensus, and to her that means I’ve got to be educated.

Or was it simply that Gailet did not want to bear the burden of their decision all by herself, when the time came?

Certainly Fiben knew a lot more about Galactic civilization than before his capture. Perhaps more than he had ever wanted to know. The intricacies of a three-billion-year-old culture made up of a thousand diverse, bickering patron-client clan lines, held together loosely by a network of ancient institutes and traditions, made Fiben’s head swim. Half the time he would come away cynically disgusted — convinced that the Galactics were little more than powerful spoiled brats, combining the worst qualities of the old nation-states of Earth before Mankind’s maturity.

But then something would crystallize, and Gailet would make clear to him some tradition or principle that displayed uncanny subtlety and hard-won wisdom, developed over hundreds of millions of years.

It was getting to the point where he didn’t even know what to think anymore. “I gotta get some air,” he told her. “I’m going for a walk.” He stepped over to the coatrack and grabbed his parka. “See you in an hour or so.”

He rapped on the door. It slid open. He stepped through and closed it behind him without looking back.

“Need an escort, Fiben?”

The chimmie, Sylvie, .picked up a datawell and scribbled an entry. She wore a simple, ankle-length dress with long sleeves. To look at her now, it was hard to imagine her up on the dance mound at the Ape’s Grape, driving crowds of chens to the verge of mob violence. Her smile was hesitant, almost timid. And it occurred to Fiben that there was something unaccountably nervous about her tonight.

“What if I said no?” he asked. Before Sylvie could look alarmed he grinned. “Just kidding. Sure, Sylvie. Give me Rover Twelve. He’s a friendly old globe, and he doesn’t spook the natives too much.”

“Watch robot RVG-12. Logged as escort to Fiben Bolger for release outside,” she said into the datawell. A door opened down the hallway behind her, and out floated a remote vigilance globe, a simple version of a battle robot, whose sole mission was to accompany a prisoner and see that he did not escape.

“Have a nice walk, Fiben.”

He winked at Sylvie and affected an airy burr. “Now, lass, what other kind is there, for a prisoner?”

The last one, Fiben answered himself. The one leading to the gallows. But he waved gaily. “C’mon, Rover.” The front door hissed as it slid back to let him emerge into a blustery autumn afternoon.

Much had changed since their capture. The conditions of their imprisonment grew gentler as he and Gailet seemed to become more important to the Suzerain of Propriety’s inscrutable plan. I still hate this place, Fiben thought as he descended concrete steps and made his way through an unkempt garden toward the outer gate. Sophisticated surveillance robots rotated slowly at the corners of the high wall. Near the portal, Fiben came upon the chim guards.

Irongrip was not present, fortunately, but the other Probationers on duty were hardly friendlier. For although the Gubru still paid their wages, it seemed their masters had recently deserted their cause. There had been no overturning of the Uplift program on Garth, no sudden reversal of the eugenics pyramid. The Suzerain tried to find fault in the way neo-chimps are being uplifted, Fiben knew. But it must’ve failed. Otherwise, why would it be grooming a blue card and a white card, like me and Gailet, for their ceremony?

In fact, the use of Probationers as auxiliaries had sort of backfired on the invaders. The chim population resented it.

No words passed between Fiben and the zipsuited guards. The ritual was well understood. He ignored them, and they dawdled just as long as they dared without giving him an excuse to complain. Once, when the claviger delayed too long with the keys, Fiben had simply turned around and marched back inside. He did not even have to say a word to Sylvie. Next watch, those guards were gone. Fiben never saw them again.

This time, just on impulse, Fiben broke tradition and spoke. “Nice weather, ain’t it?”

The taller of the two Probationers looked up in surprise. Something about the zipsuited chen suddenly struck Fiben as eerily familiar, although he was certain he had never met him before. “What, are you kidding?” The guard glanced up at rumbling cumulonimbus clouds. A cold front was moving in, and rain could not be far off.

“Yeah,” Fiben grinned. “I’m kidding. Actually, it’s too sunny for my tastes.”

The guard gave Fiben a sour look and stepped aside. The gate squeaked open, and Fiben slipped out onto a back street lined by ivy-decked walls. Neither he nor Gailet had ever seen any of their neighbors. Presumably local chims kept a low profile around Irongrip’s crew and the watchful alien robots.

He whistled as he walked toward the bay, trying to ignore the hovering watch globe following just a meter above and behind him. The first time he had been allowed out this way, Fiben avoided the populated areas of Port Helenia, sticking to back alleys and the now almost abandoned industrial zone. Nowadays he still kept away from the main shopping and business areas, where crowds would gather and stare, but he no longer felt he had to avoid people completely.

— Early on he had seen other chims accompanied by watch globes. At first he thought they were prisoners like himself. Chens and chimmies in work clothes stepped aside and gave the guarded chims wide berth, as they did him.

Then he noticed the differences. Those other escorted chims wore fine clothes and walked with a haughty bearing. Their watch globes’ eye facets and weaponry faced outward, rather than upon the ones they guarded. Quislings, Fiben realized. He was pleased to see the faces many chim citizens cast at these high-level collaborators when their backs were turned — looks of sullen, ill-concealed disdain.

After that, in his quarters, he had stenciled the proud letters P-R-I-S-O-N-E-R on the back of his parka. From then on, the stares that followed him were less cold. They were curious, perhaps even respectful.

The globe was not programmed to let him speak to people. Once, when a chimmie dropped a folded piece of paper in his path, Fiben tested the machine’s tolerance by bending over to pick it up …

He awoke sometime later in the globe’s grasp, on his way back to prison. It was several days before he was allowed out again.

No matter. It had been worth it. Word of the episode spread. Now, chens and chimmies nodded as he passed storefronts and long ration lines. Some even signed little messages of encouragement in hand talk.

They haven’t twisted us, Fiben thought proudly. A few traitors hardly mattered. What counted was the behavior of a people, as a whole. Fiben.remembered reading how, during the most horrible of Earth’s old, pre-Contact world wars, the citizens of the little nation of Denmark resisted every effort of the Nazi conquerors to dehumanize them. Instead they behaved with startling unity and decency. It was a story well worth emulating.

We’ll hold out, he replied in sign language. Terra remembers, and will come for us.

He clung to the hope, no matter how hard it became. As he learned the subtleties of Galactic law from Gailet, he came to realize that even if peace broke out all across the spiral arms, it might not be enough to eject the invaders. There were tricks a clan as ancient as the Gubru knew, ways to invalidate a weaker clan’s lease on a planet like Garth. It was apparent one faction of the avian enemy wanted to end Earth’s tenancy here and take it over for themselves.

Fiben knew that the Suzerain of Propriety had searched in vain for evidence the Earthlings were mishandling the ecological recovery on Garth. Now, after the way the occupation forces had bollixed decades of hard work, they dared not raise that issue.

The Suzerain had also spent months hunting for elusive “Garthlings.” If the mysterious pre-sentients had proven real, a claim on them would have justified every dime spent here. Finally, they saw through Uthacalthing’s practical joke, but that did not end their efforts.

All along, ever since the invasion, the Gubru had tried to find fault with the way neo-chimpanzees were being uplifted. And just because they seemed to have accepted the status of advanced chims like Gailet, that did not mean they had given up completely.

There was this business of the damned Ceremony of Acceptance — whose implications still escaped Fiben no matter how hard Gailet tried to make them clear to him.

He hardly noticed the chims on the streets as his feet kicked windblown leaves and snatches of Gailet’s explanations came back to him.

“… client species pass through phases, each marked by ceremonies sanctioned by the Galactic Uplift Institute… These ceremonies are expensive, and can be blocked by political maneuvering… For the Gubru to offer to pay for and support a ceremony for the clients ofwolfling humans is more than unprecedented… And the Suzerain also offers to commit all its folk to a new policy ending hostilities with Earth…

“… Of course, there is a catch…”

Oh, Fiben could well imagine there would be a catch!

He shook his head, as if to drive all the words out of it. There was something unnatural about Gailet. Uplift was all very well and good, and she might be a peerless example of neo-chimpdom, but it just wasn’t natural to think and talk so much without giving the brain some off-time to air out!

He came at last to a place by the docks where fishing boats lay tied up against the coming storm. Seabirds chirped and dove, trying to catch a last meal in the time remaining before the water became too choppy. One of them ventured too close to Fiben and was rewarded with a warning shock from “Rover,” the watch robot. The bird — no more a biological cousin to the avian invaders than Fiben was — squawked in anger and took off toward the west.

Fiben took a seat on the end of the pier. From his pocket he removed half a sandwich he had put there earlier in the day. He munched quietly, watching the clouds and the water. For the moment, at least, he was able to stop thinking, stop worrying. And no words echoed in his head.

Right then all it would have taken to make him happy would have been a banana and a beer, and freedom.

An hour or so later, “Rover” began buzzing insistently. The watch robot maneuvered to a position interposing itself between him and the water, bobbing insistently.

With a sign Fiben got up and dusted himself off. He walked back along the dock and soon was headed past drifts of leaves toward his urban prison. Very few chims were still about on the windy streets.

The guard with the oddly familiar face frowned at him when Fiben arrived at the gate, but there was no delay passing him through. It’s always been easier gettiri into jail than gettin’ out, Fiben thought.

Sylvie was still on duty at her desk. “Did you have a nice walk, Fiben?”

“Hm. You ought to come along sometime. We could stop at the Park and I’d show you my Cheetah imitation.” He gave her an amiable wink.

“I’ve already seen it, remember? Pretty unimpressive, as I recall.” But Sylvie’s tone did not match her banter. She seemed tense. “Go on in, Fiben. I’ll put Rover away.”

“Yeah, well.” The door hissed open. “Good night, Sylvie.”

Gailet was seated on a plush throw rug in front of the weather wall — now tuned to show a scene of steamy savannah heat. She looked up from the book on her lap and took off her reading glasses. “Hello. Feeling better?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Sorry about earlier. I guess I just had a bad case of cabin fever. I’ll knuckle down and get back to work now.”

“No need. We’re done for today.” She patted the rug. “Why don’t you come over and give me back a scratch? Then I’ll reciprocate.”

Fiben did not have to be asked twice. One thing he had to grant Gailet, she was a truly fine grooming partner. He shrugged out of his parka and came over to sit behind her. She laid one hand idly on his knee while he began combing his fingers through her hair. Soon her eyes were closed. Her. breath came in soft, low sighs.

It was frustrating trying to define the relationship he had with Gailet. They were not lovers. For most chimmies, that was only possible or practical during certain parts of their bodily cycles, anyway. And Gailet had made it clear that hers was a very private sense of sexuality, more like a human female’s. Fiben understood this and had put no pressure on her.

Trouble was, he just could not get her out of his mind.

He reminded himself not to confuse his sex drive with other things. I may be obsessed with her, but I’m not crazy. Lovemaking with this chimmie would require a level of bonding he wasn’t sure he was ready to think about.

As he worked his way through the fur at the back of Gailet’s neck he encountered knots of tension. “Say, you’re really tight! What’s the matter? Have th’ damn Gu—”

The fingers on his knee dug in sharply, though Gailet did not move otherwise. Fiben thought quickly and changed what he had been about to say.

“… g-guards been making moves on you? Have those Probationers been getting fresh?”

“And what if they had? What would you do about it, march out there and defend my honor?” She laughed. But he felt her relief, expressed through her body. Something was going on. He had never seen Gailet so worked up.

As he scratched her back, his fingers encountered an object embedded in the fur… something round, thin, disk-like. “I think there’s a knot of hair, back there,” Gailet said quickly as he started to pull it free. “Be careful, Fiben.”

“Uh, okay.” He bent over. “Um, you’re right. It’s a knot all right. I’m gonna have to work this out with my teeth.”

Her back trembled and her aroma was sweaty as he brought his face close. Just as I thought. A message capsule! As his eye came even with it, a tiny holographic projector came alight. The beam entered his iris and automatically adjusted to focus on his retina.

There were just a few, simple lines of text. What he read, however, made him blink in surprise. It was a document written in his own name!

STATEMENT OF WHY I AM DOING THIS: RECORDED BY LUTENANT FIBEN BOLGER, NEOCHIMPANZEE.

ALTHOUGH IVE BEEN WELL TREATED SINCE BEING CAPTURED, AND I APPRECIATE THE KIND ATTENTION IVE BEEN GIVEN, IM AFRAID I JUST HAVE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE. THERES STILL A WAR GOING ON, AND ITS MY DUTY TO ESCAPE IF I CAN.

IN TRYING TO ESCAPE I DONT MEAN ANY INSULT TO THE SUZERAIN OF PROPRIETY OR THE CLAN OF THE GUBRU. ITS JUST THAT IM LOYAL TO THE HUMANS AND MY CLAN. THAT MAKES THIS SOMETHING I JUST HAVE TO DO.

Below the text was an area that pulsed redly, as if expectantly. Fiben blinked. He pulled back a little and the message disappeared.

Of course he knew about records such as this. All he had to do was look at the red spot, and earnestly will it, and the disk would record his assent, along with his retinal pattern.

The document would be at least as binding as a signature on some piece of paper.

Escape! The very thought made Fiben’s heart race faster. But… how?

He had not failed to notice that the record mentioned only his name. If Gailet had intended to go with him, she surely would have included herself.

And even if it were possible, would it be the right thing to do? He had apparently been chosen by the Suzerain of Propriety to be Gailet’s partner in an enterprise as complex and potentially hazardous as any in the history of their race. How could Fiben desert her at a time like this?

He brought his eye close and read the message again, thinking furiously.

When did Gailet ever have a chance to write this? Was she in contact with elements of the Resistance somehow?

Also, something about the text struck Fiben as wrong. It wasn’t just the misspellings and less than erudite grammar. Just at a glance, Fiben could think of several improvements the statement badly needed if it was to do any good at all.

Of course. Someone other than Gailet must have written it, and she was just passing it on for him to read!

“Sylvie came in a while ago,” Gailet said. “We groomed each other. She had trouble with the same knot.”

Sylvie! So. No wonder the chimmie had been so nervous, earlier.

Fiben considered carefully, trying to reassemble a puzzle. Sylvie must have planted the disk on Gailet… No, she must have worn it herself, let Gailet read it, and then transferred it to Gailet’s fur with her permission.

“Maybe I was wrong about Sylvie,” Gailet continued. “She strikes me as a rather nice chimmie after all. I’m not sure how dependable she is, but my guess is she’s pretty solid, down deep.”

What was Gailet telling him now? That this wasn’t her idea at all but Sylvie’s? Gailet would have had to consider the other chimmie’s proposition without being able to speak aloud at all. She would not even be able to give Fiben any advice. Not out in the open, at least.

“It’s a tough knot,” Fiben said, leaving a patch of wet fur as he sat back. “I’ll try again in a minute.”

“That’s all right. Take your time. I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

He combed through another area, near her right shoulder, but Fiben’s thoughts were far from there.

Come on, think, he chided himself.

But it was all so damn murky! The Suzerain’s fancy test equipment must have been on the fritz when the technicians selected him as an “advanced” neo-chimp. At that moment Fiben felt far from being anyone’s sterling example of a sapient being.

Okay, he concentrated. So I’m being offered a chance to escape. First off, is it valid?

For one thing, Sylvie could be a plant. Her offer could be a trap.

But that didn’t make any sense! For one thing, Fiben had never given his parole, never agreed not to run away, if he ever got the chance. In fact, as a Terragens officer it was his duty to do so, especially if he could do it politely, satisfying Galactic punctilio.

Actually, accepting the ofFer might be considered the correct answer. If this’were yet another Gubru test, his proper response might be to say yes. It could satisfy the inscrutable ETs… show them he understood a client’s duties.

Then again, the offer might be for real. Fiben remembered Sylvie’s agitation earlier. She had been very friendly toward him the last few weeks, in ways a chen would hate to think were just playacting.

Okay. But if it’s for real, how does she plan to pull it off?

There was only one way to find out, and that was by asking her. Certainly, any escape would have to involve fooling the surveillance system. Perhaps there was a way to do that, but Sylvie would only be able to use it one time. Once he and Gailet started asking open questions aloud, the decision would already have to be made.

So what I’m really deciding is whether to tell Sylvie, “Okay, let’s hear your plan.” If I say yes, I had better be ready to go.

Veah, but go where?

There was only one answer, of course. Up to the mountains, to report to Athaclena and Robert all he had learned. That meant getting out of Port Helenia, as well as this jail.

“The Soro tell a story,” Gailet said in a low voice. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed almost relaxed as he rubbed her shoulder. “They tell about a certain Paha warrior, back when the Paha were still being uplifted. Would you like to hear it?”

Puzzled Fiben nodded. “Sure, tell me about it, Gailet.”

“Okay. Well, you’ve surely heard of the Paha. They’re tough fighters, loyal to their Soro patrons. Back then they were coming along nicely in the tests given by the Uplift Institute. So one day the Soro decide to give ’em some responsibility. Sent a group of them to guard an emissary to the Seven Spin Clans.”

“Seven Spin… Uh, they’re a machine civilization, right?”

“Yes. But they aren’t outlaws. They’re one of the few machine cultures who’ve joined Galactic society as honorary members. They keep mostly out of the way by sticking to high-density spiral arm areas, useless to both oxygen and hydrogen- breathers.”

What’s she getting at? Fiben wondered.

“Anyway, the Soro Ambassador is dickering with the high muckity mucks of the Seven Spinners when this Paha scout detects something out at the edge of the local system and goes to investigate.

“Well, as luck would have it, he comes upon the scene to find one of the Seven Spinners’ cargo vessels under attack by rogue machines.”

“Berserkers? Planet busters?”

Gailet shuddered. “You read too much science fiction, Fiben. No, just outlaw robots looking for loot. Anyway, when our Paha scout gets no answer to his calls for instructions, he decides to take some initiative. He dives right in, guns blazing.”

“Let me guess, he saved the cargo ship.”

She nodded. “Sent the rogues flying. The Seven Spinners were grateful, too. The reward turned a questionable business deal into a profit for the Soro.”

“So he was a hero.”

Gailet shook her head. “No. He went home in disgrace, for acting on his own without guidance.”

“Crazy Eatees,” Fiben muttered.

“No, Fiben.” She touched his knee. “It’s an important point. Encouraging initiative in a new client race is fine, but during sensitive Galactic-level negotiations? Do you trust a bright child with a fusion power plant?”

Fiben understood what Gailet was driving at. The two of them were being oifered a deal that sounded very sweet for Earth — on the surface, at least. The Suzerain of Propriety was offering to finance a major Ceremony of Acceptance for neo-chimps. The Gubru would end their policy of obstructing humanity’s patron status and cease all hostilities against Terra. All the Suzerain seemed to want in exchange was for Fiben and Gailet to tell the Five Galaxies, by hyperspacial shunt, what great guys the Gubru were.

It sounded like a face-saving gesture for the Suzerain of Propriety, and a major coup for Earthkind.

But, Fiben wondered, did he and Gailet have the right to make such a decision? Might there be ramifications beyond what they could figure out for themselves? Potentially deadly ramifications?

The Suzerain of Propriety had told them that there were reasons why they weren’t allowed to consult with human leaders, out on the island detention camps. Its rivalry with the other Suzerains was reaching a critical phase, and they might not approve of how much it was planning on giving away. The Suzerain of Propriety needed surprise in order to outmaneuver them and present a fait accompli.

Something struck Fiben as odd about that logic. But then, aliens were alien by definition. He couldn’t imagine any Terran-based society operating in such a way.

So was Gailet telling him that they should pull out of the ceremony? Fine! As far as Fiben was concerned, she could decide. After all, they only had to say no … respectfully, of course.

Gailet said. “The story doesn’t end there.”

“There’s more?”

“Oh, yes. A few years later the Seven Spin Clans came forward with evidence that the Paha warrior really had made every effort to call back for instructions before beginning his intervention, but subspace conditions had prevented any*mes-sage from getting through.”

“So that made all the difference to the Soro! In one case he was taking responsibility he didn’t merit. In the other he was only doing the best he could!

“The scout was exonerated, posthumously, and his heirs were granted advanced Uplift rights.”

There was a long silence. Neither of them spoke as Fiben thought carefully. Suddenly it was all clear to him.

It’s the effort that counts. That’s what she means. It’d be unforgivable to cooperate with the Suzerain without at least trying to consult with our patrons. I might fail, probably will fail, but I must try.

“Let’s take a look at that knot again.” He bent over, brought his eye close to the message capsule. Again the lines of text appeared, along with the pulsing red spot. Fiben looked right at the expectant blob and thought hard.

I agree to this.

The patch changed color at once, signifying his assent. Now what? Fiben wondered as he sat back.

His answer came a moment later, when the door opened quietly. Sylvie entered, wearing the same ankle-length dress as before. She sat down in front of them.

“Surveillance is off. I’m feeding the cameras a tape loop. It ought to work for at least an hour before their computer gets suspicious.”

Fiben plucked the disk out of Gailet’s fur and she held out her hand for it. “Give me a minute,” Gailet whispered, and hurried over to her personal datawell to drop the capsule inside. “No offense, Sylvie, but the wording needs improvement. Fiben can initial my changes.”

“I’m not offended. I knew you’d have to fix it up. I just wanted it to be clear enough for you two to understand what I was offering.”

It was all happening so fast. And yet Fiben felt the adrenaline already starting to sing in his veins. “So I’m going?”

“We’re going,” Sylvie corrected. “You and me. I’ve got supplies stashed, disguises, and a route out of town.”

“Are you with the underground, then?”

She shook her head. “I’d like to join, of course, but this is strictly my own show. I … I’m doing this for a price.”

“What is it you want?”

Sylvie shook her head, indicating she would wait for Gailet to return. “If you two agree to take the chance, I’ll go back outside and call in the night guard. I picked him out carefully and worked hard to get Irongrip to assign him duty tonight.”

“What’s so special about that guy?”

“Maybe you noticed, that Probationer looks a lot like you, Fiben, and he’s got a similar build. Close enough to fool the spy-comps in the dark for a while, I’d guess.”

So that was why that chen at the gate had looked so familiar! Fiben speculated concisely. “Drug him. Leave him with Gailet while I sneak out in his clothes, using his pass.”

“There’s a lot mo’re to it, believe me.” Sylvie looked nervous, exhausted. “But you get the general idea. He and I both go off shift in twenty minutes. So it’s got to be before then.”

Gailet returned. She handed the pellet to Fiben. He held it up to one eye and read the revised text carefully, not because he planned to criticize Gailet’s work, but so he would be able to recite it word for word if he ever did make it back to Athaclena and Robert.

Gailet had entirely rewritten the message.

STATEMENT OF INTENT: RECORDED BY FIBEN BOLGER, A-CHIM-AB-HUMAN, CLIENT CITIZEN OF THE TERRAGENS FEDERATION AND RESERVE LIEUTENANT, GARTH COLONIAL DEFENSE FORCE.

I ACKNOWLEDGE THE COURTESY I HAVE BEEN SHOWN DURING MY IMPRISONMENT, AND AM COGNIZANT OF THE KIND ATTENTION GIVEN ME BY THE EXALTED AND RESPECTED SUZERAINS OF THE GREAT CLAN OF THE GUBRU. NEVERTHELESS, I FIND THAT MY DUTY AS A COMBATANT IN THE PRESENT WAR BETWEEN MY LINE AND THAT OF THE GUBRU COMPELS ME TO RESPECTFULLY REFUSE FURTHER CONFINEMENT, HOWEVER COURTEOUS.

IN ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE, I IN NO WAY SPURN THE HONOR GRANTED ME BY THE EXALTED SUZERAIN, IN CONSIDERING ME FOR THE STATUS OF RACE-REPRESENTATIVE. BY CONTINUING HONORABLE RESISTANCE TO THE GUBRU OCCUPATION OF GARTH, I HOPE THAT I AM BEHAVING AS SUCH A CLIENT-SOPHONT SHOULD, IN PROPER OBEDIENCE TO THE WILL OF MY PATRONS.

I ACT NOW IN THE TRADITIONS OF GALACTIC SOCIETY., AS BEST I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO UNDERSTAND THEM.

Yeah. Fiben had learned enough under Gailet’s tutelage to see how much better this version was. He registered his assent again, and once more the recording spot changed color. Fiben handed the disk back to Gailet.

What matters is that we try, he told himself, knowing how forlorn this venture certainly was.

“Now.” Gailet turned to Sylvie. “What is this fee you spoke of? What is it you want?”

Sylvie bit her lip. She faced Gailet, but pointed at Fiben. “Him,” she said quickly. “I want you to share him with me.”

“What?” Fiben started to get up, but Gailet shushed him with a quick gesture. “Explain,” she asked Sylvie.

Sylvie shrugged. “I wasn’t sure what kind of marriage arrangement the two of you had.”

“We don’t have any!” Fiben said, hotly. “And what business—”

“Shut up, Fiben,” Gailet told him evenly. “That’s right, Sylvie. We have no agreement, group or monogamous. So what’s this all about? What is it you want from him?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Sylvie glanced over at Fiben. “Whatever his Uplift rating was before, he’s now effectively a white card. Look at his amazing war record, and the way he foiled the Eatees against all odds, not once but twice, in Port Helenia. Any of those’d be enough to advance him from blue status.

“And now the Suzerain’s invited him to be a race-representative. That kind of attention sticks. It’ll hold whoever wins the war, you know that, Dr. Jones.”

Sylvie summarized. “He’s a white card. I’m a green. I also happen to like his style. It’s that simple.”

Me? A Goodall-damned whitie? Fiben burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. It was just dawning on him what Sylvie was driving at.

“Whoever wins,” Sylvie went on, quietly ignoring him. “Whether it’s Earth or the Gubru, I want my child to ride the crest of Uplift and be protected by the Board. My child is going to have a destiny. I’ll have grandchildren, and a piece of tomorrow.”

Sylvie obviously felt passionately about this. But Fiben was in no mood to be sympathetic. Of all the metaphysical claptrap! he thought. And she wasn’t even telling this to him. Sylvie was talking to Gailet, appealing to her! “Hey, don’t I have anything to say about this?” he protested.

“Of course not, silly,” Gailet replied, shaking her head. “You’re a chen. A male chim will screw a goat, or a leaf, if nothing better is available.”

An exaggeration, but a stereotype based on enough truth to make Fiben blush. “But—”

“Sylvie’s attractive and approaching pink. What do you expect you’ll do once you get free, if all of us have agreed in advance that your duty and pleasure coincide?” Gailet shifted. “No, this is not your decision. Now for the last time be quiet, Fiben.”

Gailet turned back to ask Sylvie a new question, but at that moment Fiben could not even hear the words. The roaring in his ears drowned out every other sound. All he could think of at that moment was the drummer, poor Igor Patterson. No. Oh, Goodall, protect me!

“… males work that way.”

“Yes, of course. But I figure you have a bond with him, whether it’s formal or not. Theory is fine, but anyone can tell he’s got an honor-streak a mile thick. He might prove obstinate unless he knew it was all right with you.”

Is this how females think of us chens, down deep? Fiben pondered. He remembered secondary school “health” classes, when the young male chims would be taken off to attend lectures about procreative rights and see films about VD. Like the other boy-chims, he used to wonder what the chimmies were learning at those times. Do the schools teach them this cold-blooded type of logic? Or do they learn it the hard way? From us?

“I do not own him.” Gailet shrugged. “If you are right, nobody will ever have that sort of claim on him… nobody but the Uplift Board, poor fellow.” She frowned. “All I demand of you is that you get him to the mountains safely. He doesn’t touch you till then, understood? You get your fee when he’s safe with the guerrillas.”

A male human would not put up with this, Fiben pondered bitterly. But then, male humans weren’t unfinished, client-level creatures who would “screw a goat, or a leaf, if nothing better was available,” were they?

Sylvie nodded in agreement. She extended her hand. Gailet took it. They shared a long look, then separated.

Sylvie stood up. “I’ll knock before I come in. It’ll be about ten minutes.” When she looked at Fiben her expression was satisfied, as if she had done very well in a business arrangement. “Be ready to leave by then,” she said, and turned to go.

When she had left, Fiben finally found Iris voice. “You assume too much with all your glib theories, Gailet. What the hell makes you so sure—”

“I’m not sure of anything!” she snapped back. And the confused, hurt look on her face stunned Fiben more than anything else that had happened that evening.

Gailet passed a hand in front of her eyes. “I’m sorry, Fiben. Just do as you think best. Only please don’t get offended. None of us can really afford pride right now. Anyway, Sylvie’s not asking all that much, on the scale of things, is she?”

Fiben read the suppressed tension in Gailet’s eyes, and his outrage leaked away. It was replaced by concern for her. “Are… are you sure you’ll be okay?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. The Suzerain’ll probably find me another partner. I’ll do my best to delay things as long as I can.”

Fiben bit his lip. “We’ll get word back to you from the humans, I promise.”

Her expression told him that she held out little hope. But she smiled. “You do that, Fiben.” She reached up and touched the side of his face gently. “You know,” she whispered. “I really will miss you.”

The moment passed. She withdrew her hand and her expression was serious once more. “Now you’d better gather whatever you want to take with you. Meanwhile, there are a few things I suggest you ought to tell your general. You’ll try to remember, Fiben?”

“Yeah, sure.” But for one instant he mourned, wondering if he would ever again see the gentleness that had shone so briefly in her eyes. All business once more, she followed him around the room as he gathered food and clothing. She was still talking a few minutes later when there came a knock on the door.

64 Gailet

In the darkness, after they had left, she sat on her mattress with a blanket oyer her head, hugging her knees and rocking slowly to the tempo of her loneliness.

Her darkness was not entirely solitary. Far better if it had been, in fact. Gailet sensed the sleeping chen near her, wrapped in Fiben’s bedclothes, softly exhaling faint fumes from the drug that had rendered him unconscious. The Probie guard would not awaken for many hours yet. Gailet figured this quiet time probably would not last as long as his slumber.

No, she was not quite alone. But Gailet Jones had never felt quite so cut off, so isolated.

Poor Fiben, she thought. Maybe Sylvie’s right about him. Certainly he is one of the best chens I’ll ever meet. And yet… She shook her head. And yet, he only saw part of the way through this plot. And I could not even tell him the rest. Not without revealing what I knew to hidden listeners.

She wasn’t sure whether Sylvie was sincere or not. Gailet never had been much good at judging people. But I’ll bet gametes to zygotes Sylvie never fooled the Gubru surveillance.

Gailet sniffed at the very idea — that one little chimmie could have bollixed the Eatees’ monitors in such a way that they would not have instantly noticed it. No, this was all far too easy. It was arranged.

By whom? Why?

Did it really matter?

We never had any choice, of course. Fiben had to accept the offer.

Gailet wondered if she would ever see him again. If this were just another sapiency test ordered by the Suzerain of Propriety, then Fiben might very well be back tomorrow, credited with one more “appropriate response”… appropriate for an especially advanced neo-chimpanzee, at the vanguard of his client-level race.

She shuddered. Until tonight she had never considered j the implications, but Sylvie had made it all too clear. Even if j they were brought together again, it would never be the } same for her and Fiben. If her white card had been a barrier between them before, his would almost certainly be a yawning chasm.

Anyway, Gailet had begun to suspect that this wasn’t just another test, arranged by the Suzerain of Propriety. And if not, then some faction of the Gubru had to be responsible for tonight’s escapade. Perhaps one of the other Suzerains, or …

Gailet shook her head again. She did not know enough even to guess. There wasn’t sufficient data. Or maybe she was just too blind/stupid to see the pattern.

A play was unfolding all around them, and at every stage it seemed there was no choice which way to turn. Fiben had to go tonight, whether the offer of escape was a trap or not. She had to stay and wrestle with vagaries beyond her grasp. That was her written fate.

This sensation of being manipulated, with no real power over her own destiny, was a familiar one to Gailet, even if Fiben was only beginning to get used to it. For Gailet it had been a lifelong companion.

Some of the old-time religions of Earth had included the concept of predetermination — a belief that all events were foreordained since the very first act of creation, and that so-called free will was nothing more than an illusion.

Soon after Contact, two centuries ago, human philosophers had asked the first Galactics they met what they thought of this and many other ideas. Quite often the alien sages had responded patronizingly. “These are questions that can only be posed in an illogical wolfling language,” had been a typical response. “There are no paradoxes,” they had assured.

And no mysteries left to be solved … or at least none that could ever be approached by the likes of Earthlings.

“ Predestination was not all that hard for the Galactics to understand actually. Most thought the wolfling clan predestined for a sad, brief story.

And yet, Gailet found herself suddenly recalling a time, back when she was living on Earth, when she had met a certain neo-dolphin — an elderly, retired poet — who told her stories about occasions when he had swum in the slipstreams of great whales, listening for hours on end to their moaning songs of ancient cetacean gods. She had been flattered and fascinated when the aged ’fin composed a poem especially for her.

Where does a ball alight,

Falling through the bright midair?

Hit it with your snout!

Gailet figured the haiku had to be even more pungent in Trinary, the hybrid language neo-dolphins generally used for their poetry. She did not know Trinary, of course, but even in Anglic the little allegory had stuck with her.

Thinking about it, Gailet gradually came to realize that she was smiling.

Hit it with your snout, indeed!

The sleeping form next to her snored softly. Gailet tapped her tongue against her front teeth and pretended to be listening to the rhythm of drums.

She was still sitting there, thinking, some hours later when the door slid open with a loud bang and light spilled in from the hall. Several four-legged avian forms marched in. Kwackoo. At the head of the procession Gailet recognized the pastel-tinted down of the Servitor of the Suzerain of Propriety. She stood up, but her shallow bow received no answer.

The Kwackoo stared at her. Then it motioned down at the form under the blankets. “Your companion does not rise. This is unseemly.”

Obviously, with no Gubru around, the Servitor did not feel obligated to be courteous. Gailet looked up at the ceiling. “Perhaps he is indisposed.”

“Does he require medical assistance?”

“I imagine he’ll recover without it.”

The Kwackoo’s three-toed feet shuffled in irritation. “I shall be frank. We wish to inspect your companion, to ascertain his identity.”

She raised an eyebrow, even though she knew the gesture was wasted on this creature. “And who do you think he might be? Grandpa Bonzo? Don’t you Kwackoo keep track of your prisoners?”

The avian’s agitation increased. “This confinement area was placed under the authority of neo-chimpanzee auxiliaries. If there was a failure, it is due to their animal incompetence. Their unsapient negligence.”

Gailet laughed. “Bullshit.”

The Kwackoo stopped its dance of irritation and listened to its portable translator. When it only stared at her, Gailef shook her head. “You can’t palm this off on us, Kwackoo. You and I both know putting chim Probationers in charge here was just a sham. If there’s been a security breach, it was inside your own camp.”

The Servitor’s beak opened a few degrees. Its tongue flicked, a gesture Gailet by now knew signified pure hatred. The alien gestured, and two globuform robots whined forward. Gently but firmly they used gravitic fields to pick up the sleeping neo-chimp without even disturbing the blankets, and backed away with him toward the door. Since the Kwackoo had not bothered to look under the covers, obviously it already knew what it would find there.

“There will be an investigation,” it promised. Then it swiveled to depart. In minutes, Gailet knew, they would be reading Fiben’s “goodbye note,” which had been left attached to the snoring guard. Gailet tried to help Fiben with one more delay.

“Fine,” she said. “In the meantime, I have a request… No, make that a demand, that I wish to make.”

The Servitor had been stepping toward the door, ahead of its entourage of fluttering Kwackoo. At Gailet’s words, however, it stopped, causing a mini traffic jam. There was a babble of angry cooing as its followers brushed against each other and flicked their tongues at Gailet. The pink-crested leader turned back and faced her.

“You are not able to make demands.”

“I make this one in the name of Galactic tradition,” Gailet insisted. “Do not force me to send my petition directly to its eminence, the Suzerain of Propriety.”

There was a long pause, during which the Kwackoo seemed to contemplate the risks involved. At last it asked. “What is your foolish demand?”

Now though, Gailet remained silent, waiting.

Finally, with obvious ill grace, the Servitor bowed, a bending so minuscule as to be barely detectable. Gailet returned the gesture, to the same degree.

“I want to go to the Library,” she said in perfect GalSeven. “In fact, under my rights as a Galactic citizen, I insist on it.”

65 Fiben

Exiting in the drugged guard’s clothes had turned out to be almost absurdly simple, once Sylvie taught him a simple code phrase to speak to the robots hovering over the gate. The sole chim on duty had been mumbling around a sandwich and waved the two of them through with barely a glance.

“Where are you taking me?” Fiben asked once the dark, vine-covered wall of the prison was behind them.

“To the docks,” Sylvie answered over her shoulder. She maintained a quick pace down the damp, leaf-blown sidewalks, leading him past blocks of dark, empty, human-style dwellings. Then, further on, they passed through a chim neighborhood, consisting mostly of large, rambling, group-marriage houses, brightly painted, with doorlike windows and sturdy trellises for kids to climb. Now and then, as they hurried by, Fiben caught glimpses of silhouettes cast against tightly drawn curtains.

“Why the docks?”

“Because that’s where the boats are!” Sylvie replied tersely. Her eyes darted to and fro. She twisted the chronometer ring on her left hand and kept looking back over her shoulder, as if worried they might be followed.

That she seemed nervous was natural. Still, Fiben had reached his limit. He grabbed her arm and made her stop.

“Listen, Sylvie. I appreciate everything you’ve done so far. But now don’t you think it’s time for you to let me in on the plan?”

She sighed. “Yeah, I suppose so.” Her anxious grin reminded him of that night at the Ape’s Grape. What he had imagined then to be animal lust that evening must have been something like this instead, fear suppressed under a well-laid veneer of bravado.

“Except for the gates in the fence, the only way out of the city is by boat. My plan is for us to sneak aboard one of the fishing vessels. The night fishers generally put to sea at” — she glanced at her finger watch — “oh, in about an hour.”

Fiben nodded. “Then what?”

“Then we slip overboard as the boat passes out of Aspinal Bay. We’ll swim to North Point Park. From there it’ll be a hard march north, along the beach, but we should be able to make hilly country by daybreak.”

Fiben nodded. It sounded like a good plan. He liked the fact that there were several points along the way where they could change their minds if problems or opportunities presented themselves. For instance, they might try for the south point of the bay, instead. Certainly the enemy would not expect two fugitives to head straight toward their new hypershunt installation! There would be a lot of construction equipment parked there. The idea of stealing one of the Gubru’s own ships appealed to Fiben. If he ever pulled something like that off, maybe he’d actually merit a white card after all!

He shook aside that thought quickly, for it made him think of Gailet. Damn it, he missed her already.

“Sounds pretty well thought out, Sylvie.”

She smiled guardedly. “Thanks, Fiben. Uh, can we go now?”

He gestured for her to lead on. Soon they were winding their way past shuttered shops and food stands. The clouds overhead were low and ominous, and the night smelled of the coming storm. A southwesterly wind blew in stiff but erratic gusts, pushing leaves and bits of paper around their ankles as they walked.

When it started to drizzle, Sylvie raised the hood of her parka, but Fiben left his own down. He did not mind wet hair half as much as having his sight and hearing obstructed now.

Off toward the sea he saw a flickering in the sky, accompanied by distant, gray growling. Hell, Fiben thought. What am I thinking! He grabbed his companion’s arm again. “Nobody’s going to go to sea in this kind of weather, Sylvie.”

“The captain of this boat will, Fiben.” She shook her head. “I really shouldn’t tell you this, but he’s… he’s a smuggler. Was even before the war. His craft has foul weather integrity and can partially submerge.”

Fiben blinked. “What’s he smuggling, nowadays?” Sylvie looked left and right. “Chims, some of the times. To and from Cilmar Island.”

“Cilmar! Would he take us there?” Sylvie frowned. “I promised Gailet I’d get you to the mountains, Fiben. And anyway, I’m not sure I’d trust this captain that far.”

But Fiben’s head was awhirl. Half the humans on the planet were interned on Cilmar Island! Why settle for Robert and Athaclena, who were, after all, barely more than children, when he might be able to bring Gailet’s questions before the experts at the University!

“Let’s play it by ear,” he said noncommittally. But he was already determined to evaluate this smuggler captain for himself. Perhaps under the cover of this storm it might turn out to be possible! Fiben thought about it as they resumed their journey.

Soon they were near the docks — in fact, not far from the spot where Fiben had spent part of the afternoon watching the gulls. The rain now fell in sudden, unpredictable sheets. Each time it blew away again the air was left startlingly clear, enhancing every odor — from decaying fish to the beery stink of a fisherman’s tavern across the way, where a few lights still shone and low, sad music leaked into the night.

Fiben’s nostrils flared. He sniffed, trying to trace something that seemed to fade in and out with the fickle rain. Likewise, Fiben’s senses fed his imagination, laying out possibilities for his consideration.

His companion led him around a corner and Fiben saw three piers. Several dark, bulky shadows lay moored next to each. One of those, no doubt, was the smugglers’ boat. Fiben stopped Sylvie, again with a hand on her arm. “We’d better hurry,” she urged.

“Wouldn’t do to be too early,” he replied. “It’s going to be cramped and smelly in that boat. Come on back here. There’s something we may not have a chance to do for some time.”

She gave him a puzzled expression as he drew her back around the corner, into the shadows. When he put his arms around her, she stiffened, then relaxed and tilted her face up.

Fiben kissed her. Sylvie answered in kind.

When he started using his lips to nibble from her left ear across the line of her jaw and down her neck, Sylvie sighed. “Oh, Fiben. If only we had time. If only you knew how much …”

“Shh,” he told her as he let go. With a flourish he took off his parka and laid it on the ground. “What… ?” she began. But he drew her down to sit on the jacket. He settled down behind her.

Her tension eased a bit when he began combing his fingers through her hair, grooming her.

“Whoosh,” Sylvie said. “For a moment I thought—”

“Who me? You should know me better than that, darlin’. I’m the kind who likes to build up slowly. None of this rush-rush stuff. We can take our time.”

She turned her head to smile up at him. “I’m glad. I won’t be pink for a week, anyway. Though, I mean, we don’t really have to wait that long. It’s just—”

Her words cut short suddenly as Fiben’s left arm tightened hard around her throat. In a flash he reached into her parka and clicked open her pocket knife. Sylvie’s eyes bulged as he pressed the sharp blade close against her carotid artery.

“One word,” he whispered directly into her left ear. “One sound and you feed the gulls tonight. Do you understand?”

She nodded, jerkily. He could feel her pulse pound, the vibration carrying up the knife blade. Fiben’s own heart was not beating much slower. “Mouth your words,” he told her hoarsely. “I’ll lip read. Now tell me, where are tracers planted?”

Sylvie blinked. Aloud, she said, “What — ” That was all. Her voice stopped as he instantly increased pressure.

“Try again,” he whispered.

This time she formed the words silently.

“What… are… you talking about, Fiben?”

His own voice was a barely audible murmur in her ear. “They’re waiting for us out there, aren’t they, darlin’? And I don’t mean fairy tale chim smugglers. I’m talking Gubru, sweets. You’re leading me right into their fine feathered clutches.”

Sylvie stiffened. “Fiben … I … no! No, Fiben.”

“I smell bird!” he hissed. “They’re out there, all right. And as soon as I picked up that scent it all suddenly made perfect sense!”

Sylvie remained silent. Her eyes were eloquent enough by themselves.

“Oh, Gailet must think I’m a prize sap. Now that I think on it, of course the escape must’ve been arranged! In fact, the date must’ve been set for some time. You all probably didn’t count on this storm tying up the fishing fleet. That tale about a smuggler captain was a resourceful ad lib to push back my suspicions. Did you think of it yourself, Sylvie?”

“Fiben—”

“Shut up. Oh, it was appealing, all right, to imagine some chims were smart enough to be pulling runs to Cilmar and back, right under the enemy’s beak! Vanity almost won, Sylvie. But I was once a scout pilot, remember? I started thinking about how hard that’d be to pull off, even in weather like this!”

He sniffed the air, and there it was again, that distinct musty odor.

Now that he thought about it, he realized that none of the tests he and Gailet had been put through, during the last several weeks, had dealt with the sense of smell. Of course not. Galactics think it’s mostly a relic for animals.

Moisture fell onto his hand, even though it was not raining just then. Sylvie’s tears dripped. She shook her head.

“You… won’t … be harmed, Fiben. The Suz — Suzerain just wants to ask you some questions. Then you’ll be let go! It … It promised!”

So this was just another test, after all. Fiben felt like laughing at himself for ever believing escape was possible. I guess I’ll see Gailet again sooner than I thought.

He was beginning to feel ashamed of the way he had terrorized Sylvie. After all, this had all been just a “game” anyway. Simply one more examination. It wouldn’t do to take anything too seriously under such conditions. She was only doing her job.

He started to relax, easing his grip on her throat, when suddenly part of what Sylvie had said struck Fiben.

“The Suzerain said it’d let me go?” he whispered. “You mean it’ll send me back to jail, don’t you?”

She shook her head vigorously. “N-no!” she mouthed.

“It’ll drop us off in the mountains. I meant that part of my deal with you and Gailet! The Suzerain promised, if you answer its questions—”

“Wait a minute,” Fiben snapped. “You aren’t talking about the Suzerain of Propriety, are you?”

She shook her head.

Fiben felt suddenly lightheaded. “Which… Which Suzerain is waiting for us out there?”

Sylvie sniffed. “The Suzerain of Cost and … of Cost and Caution,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes in the dreadful realization of what this meant. This was no “game” or test, after all. Oh, Goodall, he thought. Now he had to think to save his own neck!

If it had been the Suzerain of Beam and Talon, Fiben would have been ready to throw in the towel right then and there. For then all of the resources of the Gubru military machine would have been arrayed against him. As it was, the chances were slim enough. But Fiben was starting to get ideas.

Accountants. Insurance agents. Bureaucrats. Those made up the army of the Suzerain of Cost and Caution. Maybe, Fiben thought. Just maybe.

Before doing anything, though, he had to deal with Sylvie. He couldn’t just tie her up and leave her. And he simply wasn’t a bloody-minded killer. That led to only one option. He had to win her cooperation, and quickly.

He might tell her of his certainty that the Suzerain of Cost and Caution wasn’t quite the stickler for truth the Suzerain of Propriety was. When it was its word against hers, why should the bird keep any promise to release them?

In fact, tonight’s raid on its peer might even be illegal, by the invaders’ standards, in which case it would be stupid to let two chims who knew about it run around free. Knowing the Gubru, Fiben figured the Suzerain of Cost and Caution would probably let them go, all right — straight out an airlock into deep space.

Would she believe me, though, if I told her?

He couldn’t chance that. Fiben thought he knew another way to get Sylvie’s undivided attention. “I want you to listen to me carefully,” he told her. “I am not going out to meet your Suzerain. I am not going out there for one simple reason. If I walk out there, knowing what I now know, you and I can kiss my white card goodbye.”

Her eyes locked onto his. A tremor ran down her spine.

“You see, darlin’. I have to behave like a superlative example to chimpdom in order to qualify for that encomium. And what kind of superchimp goes and walks right into somethin’ he already knows is a trap? Hmm?

“No, Sylvie. We’ll probably still get caught anyway. But we’ve gotta be caught tryin’ our very best to escape or it just won’t count! Do you see what I mean?”

She blinked a few times, and finally nodded.

“Hey,” he whispered amiably. “Cheer up! You should be glad I saw through this stunt. It just means our kid’ll be all the more clever a little bastard. He’ll probably find a way to blow up his kindergarten.”

Sylvie blinked. Hesitantly, she smiled. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I guess that’s right.”

Fiben let his knife hand drop away and released Sylvie’s throat. He stood up. This was the moment of truth. All she probably had to do was let out a shout and the followers of the Suzerain of Cost and Caution would be on them in moments.

Instead, though, she pulled off her ring watch and handed it to Fiben. The tracer.

He nodded and offered her his hand to help her rise. She stumbled at first, still trembling from reaction. But he kept his arm around her as he led her back one block and a little south.

Now, if only this idea works, he thought.

The dovecote was where he remembered it, behind an ill-kempt group house in the neighborhood bordering the harbor. Everyone was asleep apparently. But Fiben nevertheless kept quiet as possible as he cut a few wires and crept into the coop.

It was dank and smelled uncomfortably of bird. The pigeons’ soft cooing reminded Fiben of Kwackoo.

“Come on, kids,” he whispered to them. “You’re gonna help me fool your cousins, tonight.”

He had recalled this place from one of his walks. The proximity was more than convenient, it was probably essential. He and Sylvie dared not leave the harbor area until they had disposed of the tracer.

The pigeons edged away from him. While Sylvie kept watch, Fiben cornered and seized a fat, strong-looking bird. With a piece of string he bound the ring watch to its foot. “Nice night for a long flight, don’t ya think?” he whispered, and threw the pigeon into the air. He repeated the process with his own watch, for good measure.

He left the door open. If the birds returned early, the Gubru might follow the tracer signal here. But their typically noisy arrival would send the whole flock flapping off again, starting another wild goose chase.

Fiben congratulated himself on his cleverness as he and Sylvie ran eastward, away from the harbor. Soon they were in a dilapidated industrial area. Fiben knew where he was. He had been here before, leading the placid horse, Tycho, on his first foray into town after the invasion. Sometime before they reached the wall, he signaled for a stop. He had to catch his breath, though Sylvie seemed hardly winded at all.

Well, she’s a dancer, of course, he thought.

“Okay, now we strip,” he told her.

To her credit, Sylvie did not even bat an eye. The logic was inescapable. Her watch might not have been the only tracer planted on their person. She hurried through the disrobing and was finished before him. When everything lay in a pile, Fiben spared her a brief, appreciative whistle. Sylvie blushed. “Now what?” she asked.

“Now we go for the fence,” he answered.

“The fence? But Fiben—”

“C’mon. I’ve wanted to look at the thing close up for some time anyway.”

It was only a few hundred yards farther before they reached the broad strip of ground the aliens had leveled all the way around Port Helenia. Sylvie shivered as they approached the tall barrier, which glistened damply under the light of bright watch globes placed at wide intervals along its length.

“Fiben,” Sylvie said as he stepped out onto the strip. “We can’t go out there.”

“Why not?” he asked. Still, he stopped and turned to look back at her. “Do you know anyone who has?”

She shook her head. “Why would anybody? It’s obviously crazy! Those watch globes …”

“Yeah,” Fiben said contemplatively. “I was just wondering how many of ’em it took to line a fence around the whole city. Ten thousand? Twenty? Thirty?”

He was remembering the guardian drones that had lined the much smaller and much more sensitive perimeter around the former Tymbrimi Embassy, that day when the chancery building exploded and Fiben had had his lesson in ET humor. Those devices had turned out to be pretty unimpressive compared with “Rover,” or the typical battle robot the Gubru Talon Soldiers took into battle.

I wonder about these, he thought, and took another step forward.

“Fiben!” Sylvie sounded close to panic. “Let’s try the gate. We can tell the guards … we can tell them we were robbed. We were hicks from the farms, visiting town, and somebody stole our clothes and ID cards. If we act dumb enough, maybe they’ll just let us through!”

Yeah, sure. Fiben stepped closer still. Now he stood no more than half a dozen meters from the barrier. He saw that it comprised a series of narrow slats connected by wire at the top and bottom. He had chosen a point between two of the glowing globes, as far from each as possible. Still, as he approached he felt a powerful sensation that they were watching him.

The certainty filled Fiben with resignation. By now, of course, Gubru soldiery were on their way here. They would arrive any minute now. His best course was to turn around. To run. Now!

He glanced back at Sylvie. She stood where he had left her. It was easy to tell that she would rather be almost anywhere else in the world than here. He wasn’t at all sure why she had remained.

Fiben grabbed his left wrist with his right hand. His pulse was fast and thready and his mouth felt dry as sand. Trembling, he made an effort of will and took another step toward the fence.

An almost palpable dread seemed to close in all around him, as he had felt when he heard poor Simon Levin’s death wail, during that useless, futile battle out in space. He felt a dark foreboding of imminent doom. Mortality pressed in — a sense of the futility of life.

Fiben turned around, slowly, to look at Sylvie.

He grinned.

“Cheap chickenshit birds!” he grunted. “They aren’t watch globes at all! They’re stupid psi radiatorsl”

Sylvie blinked. Her mouth opened. Closed. “Are you sure?” she asked unbelievingly.

“Come on out and see,” he urged. “Right there you’ll suddenly be sure you’re being watched. Then you’ll think every Talon Soldier in space is coming after you!”

Sylvie swallowed. She clenched her fists and moved out onto the empty strip. Step by step, Fiben watched her. He had to give Sylvie credit. A lesser chimmie would have cut and run, screaming, long before she reached his position.

Beads of perspiration popped out on her brow, joining the intermittent raindrops.

Part of him, distant from the adrenaline roar, appreciated her naked form. It helped to distract his mind. So, she really has nursed. The faint stretch marks of childbearing and lactation were often faked by some dummies, in order to make themselves look more attractive, but in this case it was clear that Sylvie had borne a child. I wonder what her story is.

When she stood next to him, eyes closed tightly, she whispered. “What… what’s happening to me right now?”

Fiben listened to his own feelings. He thought of Gailet and her long mourning for her friend and protector, the giant chim Max. He thought of the chims he had seen blown apart by the enemy’s overpowering weaponry.

He remembered Simon.

“You feel like your best friend in all the world just died,” he told her gently, and took her hand. Her answering grip was hard, but across her face there swept a look of relief.

“Psi emitters. That’s… that’s all?” She opened her eyes. “Why… why those cheap, chickenshit birds!”

Fiben guffawed. Sylvie slowly smiled. With her free hand she covered her mouth.

They laughed, standing there in the rain in the midst of a riverbed of sorrow. They laughed, and when their tears finally slowed they walked together the rest of the way to the fence, still holding hands.

“Now when I say push, push!”

“I’m ready, Fiben.” Sylvie crouched beneath him, feet set, shoulder braced against one of the tall slats, arms gripping the part of the wall next to it.

Standing over her, Fiben took a similar stance and planted his feet in the mud. He took several deep breaths.

“Okay, push!”

Together they heaved. The slats were already a few centimeters apart. As he and Sylvie strained, he could feel the space begin to widen. Evolution is never wasted, Fiben thought as he heaved with all his might.

A million years ago humans were going through all the pangs of self-uplift, evolving what the Galactics said could only be given — sapiency — the ability to think and to covet the stars.

Meanwhile, though, Fiben’s ancestors had not been idle. We were getting strong! Fiben concentrated on that thought while sweat popped out on his brow and the plastisheath slats groaned. He grunted and could feel Sylvie’s own desperate struggle as her back quivered against his leg.

“Ah!” Sylvie lost her footing in the mud and her legs flew out, throwing her backward hard. Recoil spun Fiben about, and the springy slats bounced back, tossing him on top of her.

For a minute or two they just lay there, breathing in shuddering gasps. Finally though, Sylvie spoke.

“Please, honey… not tonight. I gotta headache.”

Fiben laughed. He rolled off of her and onto his back, coughing. They needed humor. It was their best defense against the constant hammering of the psi globes. Panic was -incipient, ever creeping on the verge of their minds. Laughter kept it at bay.

They helped each other up and inspected what they had accomplished. The gap was noticeably larger, perhaps ten centimeters, now. But it was still far from wide enough. And Fiben knew they were running out of time. They would need at least three hours to have any hope of reaching the foothills before daybreak.

At least if they made it through they would have the storm on their side. Another sheet of rain swept across them as he and Sylvie settled in again, bracing themselves. The lightning had drawn closer over the last half hour. Thunder rolled, shaking trees and rattling shutters.

It’s a mixed blessing, Fiben thought. For while it no doubt hampered Gubru scanners, the rain also made it hard to get a good grip on the slippery fence material. The mud was a curse.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Sure, if you can manage to keep that thing of yours out of my face,” Sylvie said, looking up at him. “It’s distracting, you know.”

“It’s what you told Gailet you wanted to share, honey. Besides, you’ve seen it all before, back at the Thunder Mound.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “But it didn’t look quite the same.”

“Oh, shut up and push,” Fiben growled. Together they heaved again, putting all their strength into the effort.

Give! Give way! He heard Sylvie gasp, and his own muscles threatened to cramp as the fence material creaked, budged ever so slightly, and creaked again.

This time it was Fiben who slipped, letting the springy material bounce back. Once more they collapsed together in the mud, panting.

The rain was steady now, Fiben wiped a rivulet out of his eyes and looked at the gap again. Maybe twelve centimeters . Ifni! That’s not anywhere near enough.

He could feel the captivating power of the psi globes broadcasting their gloom into his skull. The message was sapping his strength, he knew, pushing him and Sylvie toward resignation. He felt terribly heavy as he slowly stood up and leaned against the obdurate fence.

Hell, we tried. We’ll get credit for that much. Almost made it, too. If only…

“No!” he shouted suddenly. “No! I won’t let you!” He hurled himself at the gap, tried to pry his body through, wriggled and writhed against the recalcitrant opening. Lightning struck, somewhere in the dark realm just beyond, illuminating an open countryside of fields and forests and, beyond them, the beckoning foothills of the Mulun range.

Thunder pealed, setting the fence rocking. The slats squeezed Fiben between them, .and he howled in agony. When they let go he fell, half-numbed with pain, to the ground near Sylvie. But he was on his feet again in an instant. Another electric ladder lit the glowering clouds. He screamed back at the sky. He beat the ground. Mud and pebbles flew up as he threw handful into the air. More thunder drove the stones back, pelting them into his face.

There was no longer any such thing as speech. No words. The part of him that knew such things reeled in shock, and in reaction other older, sturdier portions took control.

Now there was only the storm. The wind and rain. The lightning and thunder. He beat his breast, lips curled back, baring his teeth to the stinging rain. The storm sang to Fiben, reverberating in the ground and the throbbing air. He answered with a howl.

This music was no prissy, human thing. It was not poetical, like the whale dream phantoms of the dolphins. No, this was music he could feel clear down to his bones. It rocked him. It rolled him. It lifted Fiben like a rag doll and tossed him down into the mud. He came back up, spitting and hooting.

He could feel Sylvie’s gaze upon him. She was slapping the ground, watching him, wide-eyed, excited. That only made him beat his breast harder and shriek louder. He knew he was not drooping now! Throwing pebbles into the air he cried defiance to the storm, calling out for the lightning to come and get him!

Obligingly, it came. Brilliance filled space, charging it, sending his hair bristling outward, sparking. The soundless bellow blew him backward, like a giant’s hand come down to slap him straight against the wall.

Fiben screamed as he struck the slats. Before he blacked out, he distinctly smelled the aroma of burning fur.

66 Gailet

In the darkness, with the sound of rain pelting against the roof tiles, she suddenly opened her eyes. Alone, she stood up with the blanket wrapped around her and went to the window.

’ Outside, a storm blew across Port Helenia, announcing the full arrival of autumn. The caliginous clouds rumbled angrily, threateningly.

There was no view to the east, but Gailet let her cheek rest against the cool glass and faced that way anyway.

The room was comfortably warm. Nevertheless, she closed her eyes and shivered against a sudden chill.

67 Fiben

Eyes… eyes… eyes were everywhere. They whirled and danced, glowing in the darkness, taunting him.

An elephant appeared — crashing through the jungle, trumpeting with red irises aflame. He tried to flee but it caught him, picked him up in its trunk, and carried him off bouncing, jouncing him, cracking his ribs.

He wanted to tell the beast to go ahead and eat him already, or ^rample him… only to get it over with! After a while, though, he grew used to it. The pain dulled to a throbbing ache, and the journey settled into a steady rhythm. …

The first thing he realized, on awakening, was that the rain was somehow missing his face.

He lay on his back, on what felt like grass. All around him the sounds of the storm rolled on, scarcely diminished. He could feel the wet showers on his legs and torso. And yet, none of the raindrops fell onto his nose or mouth.

Fiben opened his eyes to look and see why… and, incidentally, to find out how he happened to be alive.

A silhouette blocked out the dim underglow of the clouds. A lightning stroke, not far away, briefly illuminated a face above his own. Sylvie looked down in concern, holding his head in her lap.

Fiben tried to speak. “Where…” but the word came out as a croak. Most of his voice seemed to be gone. Fiben dimly recalled an episode of screaming, howling at the sky… That had to be why his throat hurt so.

“We’re outside,” Sylvie said, just loud enough to be heard over the rain. Fiben blinked. Outside?

Wincing, he lifted his head just enough to look around.

Against the stormy backdrop it was hard to see anything at all. But he was able to make out the dim shapes of trees and low, rolling hills. He turned to his left. The outline of Port Helenia was unmistakable, especially the curving trail of tiny lights that followed the course of the Gubru fence.

“But… but how did we get here?”

“I carried you,” she said matter-of-factly. “You weren’t in much shape for walking after you tore down that wall.”

“Tore down…?”

She nodded. There appeared to be a shining light in Sylvie’s eyes. “I thought I’d seen thunder dances before, Fiben Bolger. But that was one to beat all others on record. I swear it. If I live to ninety, and have a hundred respectful grandchildren, I don’t imagine I’ll ever be able to tell it so I’ll be believed.”

Dimly, it sort of came back to him now. He recalled the anger, the outrage over having come so close, and yet so far from freedom. It shamed him to remember giving in that way to frustration, to the animal within him.

Some white card. Fiben snorted, knowing how stupid the Suzerain of Propriety had to be to have chosen a chim like him for such a role.

“I must’ve lost my grip for a while.”

Sylvie touched his left shoulder. He winced and looked down to see a nasty burn there. Oddly, it did not seem to hurt as badly as a score of lesser aches and bruises.

“You taunted the storm, Fiben,” she said in a hushed voice. “You dared it to come down after you. And when it came… you made it do your bidding.”

Fiben closed his eyes. Oh, Goodatt. Of all the siUy, superstitious nonsense.

And yet, there was a part of him, deep down, that felt warmly satisfied. It was as if that portion actually believed that there had been cause and effect, that he had done exactly what Sylvie described!

Fiben shuddered. “Help me sit up, okay?”

There was a disorienting moment or two as the horizon tilted and vision swam. At last, though, when she had him seated so the world no longer wavered all around him, he gestured for her to help him stand.

“You should rest, Fiben.”

“When we reach the Mulun,” he told her. “Dawn can’t be far off. And the storm won’t last forever. Come on, I’ll lean on you.”

She took his good arm over her shoulder, bracing him. Somehow, they managed to get him onto his feet.

“Y’know,” he said. “You’re a strong lil” chimmie. Hmph. Carried me all the way up here, did you?”

She nodded, looking up at him with that same light. Fiben smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Pretty damn okay.”

Together they started out, limping toward the glowering dark hummocks to the east.